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Chosen Ones

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The first novel written for an adult audience by the mega-selling author of the Divergent franchise: five twenty-something heroes famous for saving the world when they were teenagers must face even greater demons—and reconsider what it means to be a hero . . . by destiny or by choice.

I’ve got a question for you: how the fuck did we end up with the name “Dark One” anyway? This guy shows up out of nowhere in a cloud of fucking smoke or whatever, literally rips people limb from limb—apparently using only the power of his mind—recruits an army of minions, levels whole cities, brings about a level of destruction heretofore unknown to humankind . . . and “Dark One” is the best we can do? We might as well have named him after the creepy guy in your building who looks at you a couple seconds too long in the elevator. You know, the one with the really moist, soft hands? Tim. His name is Tim.

Personally, I would have gone with something like “Portent of Doom in the Form of a Man” or “Terrifying Fucking Killing Machine,” but unfortunately, nobody asked me.

—Comedian Jessica Krys,
Laugh Factory, Chicago, March 20th, 2011

There are, of course, some who would argue that the little-understood force we informally refer to as “magic” has always existed on Earth in some form. Legends of supernatural incidents date as far back as the earliest recorded human history, from Herodotus’s mágoi, who spelled the wind; to Djedi of Ancient Egypt, who made a show of decapitating and then restoring birds such as geese and pelicans, as recorded in the Westcar Papyrus; and arguably as an integral part of nearly every major religion, from Jesus Christ turning water to wine, to Haitian Vodou practices, to reports of Theraveda Buddhists levitating in the Dīrgha-āgama—though, notably, these acts are not referred to as “magic” by practitioners.

These stories, great and small, appear in all cultures across all regions in all of time. Formerly, scholars might have said that it’s simply human nature to devise imaginative stories to explain things we don’t understand, or to aggrandize those we perceive to be higher or greater than ourselves. But then the Dark One came, and with him, the Drains—those infamous catastrophic events that defied explanation despite valiant attempts by scientists to prove otherwise. Perhaps there is no truth to the ancient legends at all. But perhaps there has always been a supranormal force, a little-understood energy, that intrudes upon our world.

Whichever theory we posit, one thing is certain: no “magic” was ever as plain or as powerful as the Drains the Dark One wielded against humanity. It is the purpose of this paper to explore various hypotheses for why this may be. In other words, why now? What were the circumstances leading up to his arrival? What goal was he working toward while he was here, until he was thwarted by our five Chosen Ones? What effect has he had on the planet since his death?

—Excerpt from The Dark One and the Emergence of Modern Magic by Professor Stanley Wiśniewski

Sloane Andrews Doesn’t Care (No, Really)

by Rick Lane

Trilby Magazine • January 24, 2020

I don’t like Sloane Andrews. But I might want to sleep with her. I meet her at her neighborhood coffee shop, one of her usual haunts—or so she says. The barista doesn’t seem to recognize her as either a customer or as one of the five teenagers who took down the Dark One almost a decade ago. Which, to be honest, seems remarkable, because world-famous face aside, Sloane Andrews is that wholesome, clean brand of gorgeous that makes you want to get it dirty. If she’s wearing makeup, I can’t see it; she’s all clear skin and big blue eyes, a walking, talking cosmetics ad. She’s wearing a Cubs hat when she comes in with her long brown ponytail pulled through the back, a gray T-shirt that’s tight in all the right places, ripped jeans that show off long, shapely legs, and a pair of sneakers. They’re the kind of clothes that say she doesn’t give a fuck about clothes, or even about the long, lean body that fills them.

And that’s the thing about Sloane: I believe it. I believe she doesn’t give a fuck about anything, least of all meeting me. She didn’t even want to do the interview. She only agreed, she said, because her boyfriend Matthew Weekes, fellow Chosen One, asked her to support the release of his new book, Still Choosing (out February 3rd).

In our preliminary exchanges about this interview, she didn’t have many ideas for where I might meet her. Even though everyone in Chicago already knows where Sloane lives—in the north side neighborhood of Uptown, just blocks from Lake Shore Drive—she flat-out refused to let me see her apartment. “I don’t go anywhere,” she wrote. “I get accosted when I do. So unless you want to try to keep up with me on a run, it’s Java Joe’s or nowhere.”

I’m not sure I could take notes and jog at the same time, so Java Joe’s it is.

Her coffee secured, she takes off the baseball cap, and her hair falls around her face like she was just tumbling around on a mattress. But something about her face—maybe it’s her slightly-too-close-together eyes, or the way she cocks her head sharply when she doesn’t like what you just said—makes her look like a bird of prey. With a single look, she’s turned the tables, and I’m the one on guard, not her. I fumble around for my first question, and where most people might smile, try to get me to like them, Sloane just stares.

“The ten-year anniversary of your victory over the Dark One is coming up,” I say. “How does it feel?”

“It feels like survival,” she says. Her voice is flinty and sharp. It makes a shiver go down my spine, and I can’t figure out if that’s a good thing or not.

“Not triumph?” I ask, and she rolls her eyes.

“Next question,” she replies, and she takes her first sip of coffee.

That’s when I realize it: I don’t like her. This woman saved thousands—no, millions of lives. Hell, she probably saved my life, in one way or another. At thirteen, she was named by prophecy, along with four others, as someone who would defeat an all-powerful being of pure malice. She survived a handful of battles with the Dark One—including a brief kidnapping, the details of which she has never shared—and came out of it unscathed and beautiful, at eighteen years old more famous than anyone in the history of being famous. And to top it off, she’s in a long-term relationship with Matthew Weekes, golden boy, the Chosen One among Chosen Ones, widely regarded to be one of the kindest people alive. But I still don’t like her.

And she couldn’t care less.

Which is why I want to sleep with her. It’s as if, by getting her naked and in my bed, I could force her into some kind of warmth or emotion. She turns me into an alpha male, a hunter, hell-bent on taking down the most elusive prey on the planet and putting its head on my living room wall as a trophy. Maybe that’s why she gets accosted when she goes anywhere—not because people love her, but because they want to love her, want to make her lovable.

When she sets down her mug, I see the scar on the back of her right hand. It’s wide, stretching all the way across, and jagged and knotted. She’s never told anyone what it’s from, and I’m sure she won’t tell me, but I have to ask anyway.

“Paper cut,” she says.

I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be a joke, so I laugh. I ask her if she’s going to the dedication of the Decade Monument, an installation art piece erected on the site of the Dark One’s defeat, and she tells me “it’s part of the gig,” like this is a desk job she applied for instead of a literal destiny.

“It sounds like you don’t enjoy it,” I say.

“What gave me away?” She smirks at me.

In the lead up to the interview, I asked a few friends what they thought of her, to get a sense of how the Average Joe perceives Sloane Andrews. One of them remarked that they had never actually seen her smile, and as I sit across from her, I find myself wondering if she ever does. I even wonder it out loud—I’m curious to know how she’ll respond.

Not well, as it turns out.

“If I were a dude,” she says, “would you ask me that question?”

I steer us away from that topic as quickly as possible. This is less a conversation and more a game of Minesweeper, with me getting more and more tense with every box I click, every one increasing the odds I’ll set off one of those mines. I click once more, inquiring about whether this time of year brings back memories for her. “I try not to think about it,” she says. “If I did, my life would turn into a goddamn Advent calendar. For every day, there’s another Dark One chocolate in a different shape, and they all taste like shit.” I click again, asking if there are any good memories to choose from. “We were all friends, you know? We always will be. We speak almost entirely in inside jokes when we’re all together.” Phew. I guess it’s safe to ask her about the other four Chosen: Esther Park, Albert Summers, Ines Mejia, and of course, Matthew Weekes.

It’s there that we finally get into a groove. The so-called “Chosen Ones” met in 2006, and while they weren’t friends at first, they bonded quickly, with Matt as the natural leader. “That’s just the way he is,” she says, and it almost sounds like she’s annoyed by it. “Always taking charge, taking responsibility. Reminding us to argue about ethics. That sort of thing.” Surprisingly, it wasn’t Matt with whom she had an immediate connection, but Albie. “He was quiet,” she says, and it’s a compliment. “All our fathers had died—that was part of the prophecy—but mine was the most recent. I needed the quiet. Plus, he’s from the Midwest, like me.”

Albert and Ines live together in Chicago—platonically, since Ines identifies as a lesbian—and Esther went home to Glendale, California, to take care of her ailing mother just last year. The distance has been hard for all of them, Sloane says, but luckily they can all keep up with Esther on her active (and popular) Insta! page, where she documents the minutiae of her life.

“What do you think about the ‘All Chosen’ movement that’s popped up in the last few years?” I ask. The “All Chosen” movement is a small but vocal group that advocates for emphasizing the role the other four Chosen Ones played in the defeat of the Dark One, rather than attributing the greatest contribution to Matthew Weekes.

Sloane doesn’t mince words. “I think it’s racist.”

“Some of them say that elevating Matt over the rest of you is sexist,” I point out.

“What’s sexist is ignoring what I say and claiming I just don’t know any better,” she replied. “I think Matt’s the real Chosen One. I’ve said so multiple times. Don’t pretend you’re doing me a favor by knocking him down.” I then move the conversation from the Chosen Ones to the Dark One, and that’s when everything goes awry. I ask Sloane why the Dark One seemed to take a special interest in her. She keeps her eyes on mine as she sips the last of her coffee, and when she sets the cup down, her hand is shaking. Then she puts on her Cubs hat, right over that glorious just-fucked hair, and says, “We’re done here.”

And I guess if she says we’re done, we’re done, because Sloane is out of there. I throw a ten down on the table and run after her, not willing to give up that easily. Did I mention Sloane Andrews turns me into a hunter?

“I had one off-limits topic,” she snaps at me. “Do you remember what it was?” She’s flushed and furious, and radiant, part-dominatrix and part sly, spitting street cat. Why did I wait this long to really piss her off? I could have been staring at this the entire time.

The off-limits topic was, of course, anything specific about her relationship to the Dark One. Surely she didn’t expect me to abide by that, I remark. It’s the most interesting thing about her.

She looks at me like I’m the soggy piece of paper in an alley puddle, tells me to go fuck myself, and jaywalks into traffic to get away from me. This time, I let her go.

1

The Drain looked the same every time, with all the people screaming as they ran away from the giant dark cloud of chaos, but never running fast enough. Getting swept up, their skin pulling away from bone while they were still awake to feel it, blood bursting from them like swatted mosquitoes, oh God.

Sloane was up and panting. Quiet, she told herself. Her toes curled under; the ground was cold here, in the Dark One’s house, and he had taken her boots. She had to find something heavy, or something sharp—both was too much to ask for, obviously; she had never been that lucky.

She yanked open drawers, finding spoons, forks, spatulas. A handful of rubber bands. Chip clips. Why did he take her boots? What did a mass murderer have to fear from a girl’s Doc Martens?

Hello, Sloane, he whispered in her ear, and she choked on a sob. Yanked open another drawer, and found a line of handles, the blades buried in a plastic knife block. She was just pulling out the butcher knife when she heard something creak behind her, the pressure of a footstep.

Sloane spun around, her feet tacky on the linoleum, and swiped with the knife.

“Holy shit!” Matt caught her by the wrist, and for a moment they just stared at each other over their arms, over the knife.

Sloane gasped as reality trickled back in. Not in the Dark One’s house, not in the past, not anywhere but in the apartment she shared with Matthew Weekes.

“Oh, God.” Sloane’s hand went lax on the handle, and the knife clattered to the floor, bouncing between their feet. Matt put his hands on her shoulders, his grip warm.

“You there?” he said.

He had asked her that before, dozens of times. Their handler, Bert, had called her a lone wolf, and he rarely made her join the others in training, or on missions. Let her do her thing, he had told Matt, once it became clear that Matt was their leader. You’ll get better results that way. And Matt had, only checking in with her when he had to.

You there? Over the phone, in a whisper, in the dead of night, or right to her face, when she spaced out on something. Sloane had been annoyed by the question, at first. Of course I’m here, where the fuck else would I be? But now it meant he understood something about her that they’d never acknowledged: she couldn’t always say yes.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Okay. Stay here, all right? I’ll get your medicine.”

Sloane braced herself on the marble counter. The knife lay at her feet, but she didn’t dare to touch it again. She just waited, and breathed, and stared at the swirl of gray that reminded her of an old man in profile.

Matt came back with a little yellow pill in one hand, and the water glass from her bedside table in the other. She took them both with shaking hands, and swallowed the pill eagerly. Bring on the coasting calm of the benzodiazepine. She and Ines had drunkenly composed an ode to the pills once, hailing them for their pretty colors and their quick effects and the way they did what nothing else could.

She set the water glass down and slid to the floor. She could feel the cold through her pajama pants—the ones that had cats with laser eyes all over them, tonight—but it was grounding, this time. Matt sat down next to the refrigerator in his boxers.

“Listen,” she started.

“You don’t have to say it.”

“Sure, I just almost stabbed you, but no apologies necessary.”

His eyes were soft. Worried. “I just want you to be okay.”

What had that awful article called him? “Quite possibly the kindest person alive”? She hadn’t disagreed with Rick Lane, Creepmaster 2000, on that point, at least. Matt had eyebrows that squeezed together in the middle in a look of perpetual sympathy, and the heart to match it.

He reached for the butcher knife that lay on the floor near her ankle. It was big, almost as long as his forearm.

Her eyes burned. She closed them. “I’m really sorry.”

“I know you don’t want to talk to me about it,” Matt said. “But what about someone else?”

“Like who?”

“Dr. Novak, maybe? She works with the VA, remember? We did that talk together at the juvenile detention center.”

“I’m not a soldier,” Sloane said.

“Yeah, but she knows about PTSD.”

She had never needed an official diagnosis—PTSD was definitely what she had. But it was strange to hear Matt say it so comfortably, like it was the flu.

“All right.” She shrugged. “I’ll call her in the morning.”

“Anyone would need it, you know,” he said. “After what we’ve all been through. I mean, Ines went.”

“Ines went, and she’s still booby-trapping her apartment like she’s living out a Home Alone fantasy,” Sloane said.

“Okay, so she’s a bad example.” The flood light on the back stairs glowed through the windows, all orange-yellow against Matt’s dark skin.

“You’ve never needed it,” Sloane said.

He raised an eyebrow at her. “Where do you think I kept disappearing to the year after the Dark One died?”

“You told us you were going to doctor’s appointments.”

“What kind of doctor needs to see someone weekly for months?”

“I don’t know! I figured something was wrong with . . .” Sloane gestured vaguely to her crotch. “you know. The boys, or something.”

“Let me get this straight.” He was grinning. “You thought I had some kind of embarrassing medical condition that necessitated at least six months of regular doctor visits . . . and you never asked me about it?”

She suppressed a smile of her own.

“You almost sound disappointed in me.”

“No, no. I’m just impressed.”

He had been thirteen and lanky when she met him, a body of sharp edges with no sense of where it began or ended, but he had always had that smile.

She had fallen in love with him half a dozen times before she knew she did: when he was screaming orders over the deafening wind of a Drain, keeping them all alive; when he stayed awake with her on long night drives through the country, even after everyone else had fallen asleep; when he called his grandmother and his voice went soft. He never left anyone behind.

She curled her toes into the tile.

“I’ve been before, you know. To therapy,” she said. “I went for a few months when we were sixteen.”

“You did?” He frowned a little. “You never told me that.”

There were a lot of things she hadn’t told him, hadn’t told anyone.

“I didn’t want to worry anybody,” she said. “And I still don’t, so . . . just don’t mention this to the others, okay? I don’t want to see it in fucking Esquire with the headline ‘Rick Lane told you so.’”

“Of course.” Matt took her hand and twisted their fingers together. “We should go to bed. We have to get up in four hours for the monument dedication.”

Sloane nodded, but they still sat on the kitchen floor until the medicine kicked in and she stopped shaking. Then Matt put the knife away, helped her up, and they both went back to bed.

Agency for the Research
and Investigation of the Supranormal

October 5, 2019

Ms. Sloane Andrews

REDACTED

REDACTED

Reference: H-20XX-74545

Dear Ms. Andrews:

On 13 September 2019, the office of the Information and Privacy Coordinator received your 12 September 2019 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for information or records on Project Ringer.

Many of the requested records remain classified. However, due to your years of service to the United States government, we have granted you access to all but the highest level of security clearance. We searched our database of previously released records and located the enclosed documents, totaling 120 pages, which we believe to be responsive to your request. There is no charge for these documents.

Sincerely,

Anna Sanchez

Information and Privacy Coordinator

2

When Sloane’s alarm went off the next morning, she took another benzo immediately. She would need it for the day ahead: that morning, she would attend the dedication of the Decade Monument, a memorial for the lives lost in the Dark One’s attacks, and that night, the Ten Years Peace gala, to celebrate ten years since his defeat.

The city of Chicago had commissioned an artist named Gerald Frye to construct the monument. Judging by his portfolio, he had taken a great deal of inspiration from the work of minimalist Donald Judd, because the monument was actually just a metal box in the middle of the city, surrounded by a swath of empty land where the unsightly tower in the middle of the Loop had been, overlooking the river. It looked small by comparison to the high rises around it, glittering in the sun as Sloane’s car pulled up on the day of the dedication.

Matt had hired them a driver so they wouldn’t have to park, which turned out to be a good idea, because the entire city was swarming with people, the crowd so thick the driver had to blast the horn of their black Lincoln to get through it. Even then, most people just ignored the sound until they felt the heat of the engine behind their knees.

Once they got close, a police officer let them through a barrier and they cruised down a clear stretch of road to get closer to the monument. Sloane felt her pulse behind her eyes, like a headache. The second they opened the car door, and Matt stepped out into the light, everyone would know who they were. They would hold up their phones to record video. They would thrust pictures and notebooks and arms past the barriers to have them signed. They would scream Matt’s name, and Sloane’s name, and weep, and struggle forward, and tell stories of who and what they had lost.

Sloane wished she could go home. But instead she wiped her hands on the knees of her trousers, took a slow breath, and put her hand on Matt’s shoulder. The car eased to a stop. Matt opened the door.

Sloane stepped out behind him and into a wall of sound. Matt turned toward her, grinning, and said, right against her ear, “Don’t forget to smile.”

A lot of men had told Sloane to smile, but all they wanted was to exert some kind of power over her. Matt, though, was just trying to protect her. His own smile was a weapon against a gentler and more insidious form of racism, the kind that followed him through retail stores before realizing who he was, or assumed he had grown up in a rough neighborhood instead of the Upper East Side, or fixated on Sloane and Albie saving the world, as if Matt, Esther, and Ines had nothing to do with it. It was in silence and hesitation, in careless jokes and fumbling.

There were harsher, more violent forms of it, too, but smiles weren’t weapons against them.

He walked over to the crowd pressed up against the barrier, where people waited with photos of him, magazine articles, books. He took a black marker from his pocket and signed them with his quick “MW,” one letter a reflection of the other. Sloane watched him from a distance, distracted from the chaos for a moment. He leaned in for a picture with a middle-aged redhead who didn’t know how to work her phone; he took it from her to show her how to switch to the front camera. Everywhere he went, people gave him pieces of themselves, sometimes in gratitude, and sometimes in stories of people they had lost to the Dark One. He bore them all.

After a few minutes, Sloane walked over to him and put her hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Matt, but we should go.”

People were reaching for her, too, of course, waving copies of the Trilby article with her face plastered on one side of the magazine and Rick Lane’s sexist assholery on the other. Some of them shouted her name, and she ignored them, like she always did. Matt’s weapons were generosity, kindness, social grace. Sloane’s were detachment, a tall stature, and a relentlessly flat affect.

Matt looked down the line at a group of black teenagers in school uniforms. One of the girls wore her hair in tiny braids with beads at the ends. They clattered together as she bounced on her toes, excited. She had a clipboard in hand; it looked like another petition.

“One second,” Matt said to Sloane, and he walked over to the group in the uniforms. She chafed a little at the brush off, but the feeling disappeared when she saw the subtle shift in his posture, shoulders relaxing.

“Hey,” he said to the girl, grinning.

Sloane felt a small ache in her chest. There were parts of him she would just never access, a language she would never hear him speak, because when she was present, the words were gone.

She decided to go on without him. It didn’t really matter if he got to the ceremony on time. Everyone would wait.

She walked down the narrow aisle the police had whittled into the crowd. She climbed the steps to the stage, which faced the metal box of the monument—about the size of an average bedroom, standing in the middle of nothing.

“Slo!” Esther stood on the stage in five-inch heels and black leather pants, waving. Her white blouse was just loose enough to be elegant, and from afar, her face looked almost natural—but the closer Sloane got, the more she could see that the poreless glow was achieved by foundation and powder and highlighter and bronzer and setting powder and god knew what else.

It was a relief to see her. Things hadn’t been the same for the five of them since she’d moved back home to take care of her mom. Sloane walked up the steps to the stage, shaking her head at the security guard who offered her an arm to help her up, and wrapped Esther into a hug.

“Nice dress!” Esther said to her, once they separated. “Did Matt pick it out?”

“I am capable of putting on my own clothes,” Sloane said. “How—”

She was about to ask how Esther’s mother was, but Esther was already taking out her cell phone and holding it out for a selfie.

“No,” Sloane said.

“Slo . . . come on, I want a picture of us!”

“No, you want to show a picture of us to a million other people on Insta!, that’s much different.”

“I’m gonna get one whether you smile for it or not, so you may as well not feed the rumors that you’re a TurboBitch,” Esther pointed out.

Sloane rolled her eyes, bent a little at the knee, and leaned in for a picture. She even managed something like a smile. “That’s the only one, though, okay?” she said. “I’m not on social media for a reason.”

“I get it, you’re so alternative and authentic and whatever.” Esther flapped a hand at her, her head bent over her phone. “I’m going to draw a mustache on you.”

“How appropriate for the ten year anniversary of a horrible battle.”

“Fine, I’ll just post it. You’re so boring.”

It was a familiar argument. She and Esther turned toward Ines and Albie, who were seated beside the podium wearing almost identical black suits. Ines’s lapels were a little wider, and Albie’s tie was more blue, but that was the only difference, as far as Sloane could tell.

“Where’s Matt?” Ines asked.

“Still with his royal subjects,” Esther replied.

Sloane looked back. Matt was still talking to the teenage girl, his brow furrowed, nodding along to something she was saying.

“He’ll be a minute,” she said, when she turned back to the others.

Albie looked bleary-eyed, but that could be because it was eight in the morning, and Albie didn’t usually get up until at least ten. When he looked at her, he seemed focused enough, just tired. He gave her a wave.

“Saved you a seat, Slo,” he said, patting the chair next to him. She sat down beside him, legs crossed at the ankle and tucked back, the way her grandmother had taught her. Do you really want to flash your underwear at strangers? Well then cross your goddamn legs, girl.

“All right?” she said to him.

“Nah,” he said, with a half-smile. “But what else is new?”

She gave a half-smile back.

“Hey kids,” a man in a suit was crossing the stage, charcoal slacks and blazer paired with a powder blue shirt, hair salt and pepper and combed back neatly. And not just any man, but John Clayton, mayor of Chicago, elected on a campaign of “not as corrupt as the other guy, probably,” which had been the motto of Chicago politics for a few years running. He was also possibly the blandest man alive.

“Thank you for coming out,” Mayor Clayton said, shaking Sloane’s hand, then Albie’s, then Ines’s. Matt climbed the steps to the stage, just in time to take the mayor’s hand, too. “I’m just going to say a few words, then you can all walk through the monument. Kind of like blessing it, eh? Then we’ll get you out of here. They’re going to want a picture of us all. Now? Yes, now.”

He was gesturing to the photographer, who positioned them so the monument was just visible behind them, and Matt was in the middle, his hand steady on Sloane’s lower back. Sloane wasn’t sure if she should smile for the ten year anniversary of the Dark One’s defeat. The entire world would be celebrating today. Even the city of Chicago, which had lost so much—they would dye the river blue, and Wrigleyville would teem over with beer, and the el would turn into a wall of bodies. The merriment was good, Sloane knew that, had even participated in it for the first few years after the event, but it was harder to do that now. She had been told that things got easier with time, but so far it hadn’t been true. The burst of joy and triumph that had come after the Dark One fell had faded, and what was left was this niggling sense of dissatisfaction, and the awareness of everything lost while victory was gained.

She didn’t smile in the picture, and then she sat back down next to Albie while Esther explained boomerang videos to the mayor. Meanwhile, Matt was talking to the mayor’s wife, who wondered if he might come to the opening of a new library in Uptown, and Ines was jiggling her leg, frantic as ever. Albie put his hand on hers and squeezed.

“Happy anniversary, I guess,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Happy anniversary.”

TOP SECRET

NATIONAL SECURITY ACTION MEMORANDUM NO. 70

TO: Agency for the Research and
Investigation of the Supranormal (ARIS)

SUBJECT: Unexplained Disastrous Events of 2004

In approving the Record of Events of the February 02 2005 meeting of the National Security Council, the President directed that the disastrous events of 2004 be studied in the event that a pattern exists among them. As the events are thus far unexplained by conventional means, this task falls under the purview of the Agency for the Research and Investigation of the Supranormal (ARIS).

Accordingly, it is requested that ARIS undertake this study as soon as possible, presenting their preliminary views at the next National Security Council meeting. Attached are the articles thus far amassed by the National Security Council regarding said events.

Shonda Jordan

Official Reports of Disaster in Topeka Remain Vague

by Jay Kaufman

Chillicothe Gazette

Topeka, May 6: At last count, the death toll in Topeka, Kansas, for the disaster on March 5, 2004 is 19,327—but no one seems to know what caused the significant loss of life. Or if they do, they aren’t telling.

Weather reports on the morning of March 5th predicted overcast skies and a high of 40 degrees, with a mere 10% chance of rain. Witnesses from nearby towns describe pockets of sunshine and low winds. At exactly 1:04pm, everything went haywire. An account from an employee of the National Weather Service described the environment in the office as “utter chaos,” citing “screeching monitors and shouting.”

“For a couple minutes, it was like there had been a tornado, an earthquake, and a hurricane all at once. The air pressure changes were insane, and tremors were reportedly felt as far as Kentucky. I’ve never experienced anything like it,” the source reported. The employee requested to remain anonymous out of fear of losing their job. The National Weather Service has since released a statement that they can’t provide any further details to the public, as there is an investigation ongoing.

The federal government has maintained a similar position. The Department of Homeland Security, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has been silent. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has said their investigation does not currently suggest either foreign or domestic terrorism for the attack, but they aren’t presently able to rule it out. Even at the local level, the mayor of Topeka, Hal Foster—who was vacationing in Orlando, Florida at the time of the event—has expressed condolences and sorrow, but has not voiced so much as a theory about what occurred.

The most we can gather about the event so far comes from private citizens. Trevor Ellis of Lawrence, Kansas, drove to the area surrounding Topeka with a drone he usually uses to monitor the ongoing construction of his new house. His images of Topeka, which Ellis provided to every national news network simultaneously, are harrowing. They show the skeletons of buildings, bodies in the streets, and most peculiar still, not a shred of living plant matter. All the trees in Topeka, according to these images, are now just shriveled branches and dead leaves.

Left without any concrete explanations, the public has turned to conspiracy theories, such as an alien invasion, a government experiment gone awry, a new weapon of mass destruction, and a new kind of weather event resulting from climate change. Hysteria has spread as well, moving some people to begin construction of bomb shelters in their own homes or to develop new evacuation plans that advocate for spreading out from a city’s center instead of seeking shelter within it.

“We need answers,” says Fran Halloway, a resident of Willard, one of the surviving towns just outside of Topeka. “We deserve to know why our loved ones are dead. And we’re not gonna rest until we get them.”

Disaster Strikes Portland

Death Tolls in the Tens of Thousands

by Arjun Patel

The Portland Bugle

Portland, August 20: A weather event tentatively classified as a hurricane struck Portland, OR on August 19, 2004, causing widespread flooding and destruction of homes and buildings. If the classification stands, this would be the first tropical hurricane ever to hit the West Coast in recorded history.

With death tolls estimated to be as high as 50,000, this would be the deadliest natural disaster in the history of the United States, second to the Topeka Calamity earlier this year, which at final count claimed almost 20,000 lives. No explanations for the Topeka Calamity have yet been offered.

The weather event has so far baffled scientists, who cite the low temperatures of the Pacific Ocean for the lack of hurricane activity on the West Coast. “Hurricanes feed on warm water temperatures,” says Dr. Joan Gregory, a professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “One thing that might account for this is climate change, but we haven’t heard of anyone recording significantly higher temperatures in the Pacific Ocean recently. This seems like a freak occurrence.”

More information will likely become available as the recovery effort continues. A candlelight vigil will be held in Pioneer Courthouse Square for those lost at 8:00PM on Thursday.

Figure Spotted in the Midst of Disaster

Conspiracy Theories Spread Like Wildfire as Reports of Dark Figure Emerge

by Carl Adams

The Tampa Tattler

Tampa, December 7: “Everything was bedlam,” says Brendan Peterson of Sutton, Minnesota, one of the survivors of the attack on Minneapolis that claimed almost 85,000 lives earlier this year. He was right in the epicenter of the destruction, and describes a hellscape of wind and flying debris. “I saw a woman come apart right in front of me,” he recounts, his hands trembling. “I’ve never seen anything like that before, never, not even in movies.”

Brendan credits his survival with “sheer luck,” and he is not alone. Several of the more outspoken survivors of the attack—which is how these disasters are now being classified by the US Government—have offered similar tales of horrific death, each more gory than the last. But they all have one particular thing in common: each survivor saw the figure of a man moving confidently through the destruction.

“I guess it could have been a woman,” says George Williams, another Sutton resident and neighbor of Brendan Peterson. “But anyway, it looked like a person. Eeriest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Theories have surfaced on the Internet, raging from the plausible—a new weapon devised by terrorists, a mass psychogenic illness—to the downright absurd—alien invasion, a biblical apocalypse. Regardless, the reports have one thing in common: witnesses observed a figure in the midst of the chaos who appeared to be unaffected by the elements.

“He was hard to see, though,” Brendan clarifies, later. “Dark from head to toe. I’m not crazy. I saw what I saw.”

3

The mayor’s speech was a collection of trite phrases about moving on from grief, and the triumph of good over evil, and honoring the dead. Halfway through, Ines leaned over to whisper a quote from Friday Night Lights—clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose—and Sloane had to cover her face so no one in the crowd could tell that she was laughing. Albie faked a coughing fit, and Esther elbowed Ines in the ribs, Matt schooled his face into a serious expression, and Sloane felt like she had gotten something back, just for a moment.

Cameras flashed everywhere as the speech concluded, and the crowd applauded. Sloane joined them until her palms started to itch. Next came a series of firm handshakes, and finally, it was time for the Chosen Ones to bless the Decade Monument with their holy footsteps, or whatever the hell Mayor Clayton had said about it. Sloane wondered if she could use that as an excuse to take off her shoes early, because they were pinching her toes. Surely you couldn’t bless something with uncomfortable high heels on.

The land around the metal box had been paved with concrete. Sloane walked down the steps of the stage, and felt the warmth of it through the soles of her shoes. She felt like she was standing on the surface of a gray sea, with the monument a bronze island one hundred yards ahead of her. It was the only spot of warm light in the midst of desolation—ethereal, mirage-like. Staring at it, she was surprised to find tears in her eyes. In time, the bronze would age, its luster giving way to flat green tarnish. Their memory of what happened would flatten, too, and become dull, and the monument would be forgotten, something for school field trips and bus tours for the history-minded.

And she would tarnish, too. Always famous, but always fading, the way old movie stars were, carrying ghosts of their younger selves in their faces.

It was a strange thing, to know with certainty that you had peaked.

She walked in Albie’s wake to the box, the others at her back. She couldn’t help but look across the river at where Matt had stood during their last stand, the Golden Bough held aloft, casting supernatural light on his face. She hadn’t realized it until later, but she had fallen in love with him then.

There was a narrow opening in the wall for people to step inside, and Albie went straight through it. Ines was about to follow him in, but Sloane stopped her with a hand.

“Let’s give him a second,” she said. Ines stopped.

They all fit together in different ways, knew different pieces of each other best. Esther knew how to make Albie laugh, Ines could almost read his mind, and Matt knew how to get him to talk. But Sloane was the Albie expert on his bad days, and there was no way today wasn’t one of them.

“This thing is totally going to get peed on,” Ines said.

“You don’t need to fill every silence,” Matt said.

“I’m gonna go in and see if he’s okay,” Sloane said. “Give me a minute or two.” Matt said, “Sure.”

“Yeah, it’ll give Esther time to figure out the right camera angle or whatever,” Ines said.

Esther smacked her arm, then took out her phone. Sloane fled the scene before Esther could talk her into another selfie, finding the gap in the wall and slipping into the monument.

Tiny letters—the names of every person killed by the Dark One—were carved into the metal walls. It had taken years to find and cut them all, according to the artist, and most were so small you could barely read them. The artist had set up panels of light behind the metal sheets so each name glowed. It was like staring at a night sky somewhere deep in the wilderness, where pollution didn’t interfere with the light of the stars.

Albie stood in the middle of the cube, staring at one of the wall panels.

“Hey,” she said to him.

“Hey,” he said. “Pretty in here, isn’t it?”

“The bronze was a good choice. Almost cozy this way,” she said. “Did you find your dad’s name?”

“No,” he said. “Needle. Haystack.”

“Maybe we could ask the artist.”

Albie shrugged. “I think the point is, you’re not supposed to be able to see the individual names. You’re just supposed to get an impression of how many there were.”

So many it stopped mattering, Sloane thought. She already knew the number of people lost to the Dark One. Anything from one hundred to one million was just a number, her mind too limited to really comprehend it.

“I like it this way,” Albie said. “It reminds me that really, we’re just a handful of people who lost things, among thousands of other people who lost things. Not hurting any more or less than any of the families of these people.”

He gestured to the panel in front of him. Albie was the same age as her, twenty-eight, but his hair had gone feather-light, and was receding at the temples. There were creases in his forehead, too, deep enough that she had noticed them. Time was wearing on him.

“I’m tired of being special,” Albie said, with a shaky laugh. “I’m tired of being celebrated for the worst thing that ever happened to me. For the thing that ruined my life.”

Sloane went to stand next to him, so their arms touched. She thought of the stack of government documents in the bottom drawer of her desk, of the Rick Lane article that discussed her like a slab of meat at a butcher, of the nightmares that chased her from sleeping to waking.

“Yeah,” she said, through a sigh. “I know what you mean.”

Or at least, she thought she did. But when she watched Albie’s hand tremble as he brought it up to scrub at his face, she wondered if she really did know.

“Knock knock!” Esther said. She was holding up her phone—at an angle, of course, so it was flattering—as she walked into the monument, her hair arranged perfectly over her shoulders. She turned so the shot included Albie and Sloane. “Say hi to my Insta! followers, guys!”

“Is this live?” Sloane asked.

“No,” Esther said.

Sloane glanced at Albie, then put up both her middle fingers. Meanwhile, Albie put his palms up to his cheeks to make a loud farting noise. Ines walked in after Esther, looking nervous, to see Sloane waving her middle fingers around Albie’s face. Esther put the phone down, scowling.

“That was supposed to be a live capture of my first time through the Decade Monument!” she said. “Now I’m gonna have to do it again and act like it’s the first time.”

She stormed out, passing Matt on her way.

“What’d I miss?” he said.

“Hold on,” Albie said, touching a finger to his lips.

Esther came in a second time, the phone held up and away from her face, her eyes wide in faux-wonder as she looked at the glowing names. Albie darted forward and tipped his head so he was in the shot with Esther, and said, “This is her second time doing this! Don’t let her lie to you—”

Esther shoved Albie away, putting her phone down again.

“What is wrong with you guys?” she demanded.

“Us? You’re the one who has a phone basically grafted to your hand!” said Sloane. “You’re worse than Matt.”

Matt put up his hands. “I am not involved in this.”

“I’m not the first person to use social media!” Esther said. “It’s my job, you don’t have to be so freaking judgy about it.”

“This is supposed to be a somber occasion,” Matt pointed out. “And it could have been a good bonding experience . . .”

“Recording it doesn’t take away its somberness,” Esther said.

“It does when you’re recording from the ideal selfie angle,” Ines said, miming holding up a phone. She posed with her butt thrust to the side. “‘Here’s the names of the dead, and also my hot ass.’”

Sloane couldn’t suppress a giggle. It came out so high-pitched she clapped a hand over her mouth, embarrassed.

“Sloanie Sloanie Macaroni just made a girly noise,” Albie said, eyebrows raised.

“Don’t you dare call me that,” she said.

“Don’t pretend we haven’t all seen you in those home videos Cameron made,” Esther said. “You may be into this tough girl don’t give a fuck thing now, but deep inside you will always be the kid who did a dance to ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend’ in a tutu made of tin foil.”

Sloane cursed her late brother’s video camera, and was about to respond when Matt spoke up. “I found Bert.”

Bert’s real name wasn’t “Robert Robertson,” of course. He had told them his real one in confidence, a few months before his death, so they could find him if they lost contact with him. But none of them thought of him as “Evan Kowalczyk”; to them, he would always be “Bert.”

They all moved to stand behind Matt, following the line of his finger to a small name: Evan Kowalczyk, all in capital letters. She had no idea how Matt had found it in all the names, all the panels. It was like finding a particular tree in a forest of identical trees. Matt’s hand fell away, and Robert’s name disappeared into the wall again, blurring together with all the others.

All these losses—each one of them for nothing. A dark lord and his insatiable hunger.

“I wonder what he’d be doing now,” Matt said.

“Probably refusing to enjoy his retirement,” Ines replied.

Sloane turned toward the door before her expression gave her away. She didn’t want to explain what she had read in the files she had gotten from the FOIA request, hints of a Bert she had never known.

“Let’s go,” Sloane said. “They’re going to start to wonder where we are.”

4

The invitation to the gala was taped to their refrigerator: Celebrate Ten Years of Peace. As if the defeat of the Dark One had brought harmony to the entire world. Which, of course, it hadn’t. But for the United States, at least, it had been a reason to withdraw from everything. A new era of isolationism, the headlines had called it. The reactions had been . . . mixed. One side had celebrated withdrawing troops from other countries while they protested pulling out of international peacekeeping organizations. The other side had cheered the closing of borders, but resisted the decrease in military presence abroad. But everyone had shared the same paranoia. No one knew where the Dark One had come from, which meant he could have come from anywhere. He could have been a friend or a neighbor, a refugee or an immigrant. Even Sloane’s mother had gotten a licensed handgun and practiced at the shooting range once a month, as if that had ever helped anyone against the Dark One, who had made guns collapse from within, like imploding buildings, warping and twisting the metal without even touching it. Sloane couldn’t help but wonder how long it would take ARIS to harness the same power for themselves. If they hadn’t already.

Creatures of Charm and Hunger

Buy the Book

The third standalone novel set in Molly Tanzer’s magic-infused universe takes readers to World War II–era England where two young women are studying witchcraft. Though once inseparable, competition, secrets, and wildly dangerous magic set them at odds and draw them to terrifying ends.

Prologue

Edith Blackwood selected one of the cut crystal perfume atomizers from the narrow table by her front door and held it in her hands for a long moment, warming the pink fluid within.

I hate London, complained the demon Mercurialis in a voice only Edith could hear. She understood it in words after years of familiarity with the sensation, but it registered more to her mind as a series of plucks and whirs and chirps, along with the occasional chime.

“I know,” she said aloud to the silence of her Paris flat. “I don’t like England either, but go we must. Jane Blackwood is my only niece, and I will not miss her Test. Nor could I! I agreed to give it to her and to her friend Miriam. But even more than that, I want to be there to see her progress beyond her apprenticeship. She’ll celebrate in style even if I have to go to the northern wilds of England myself to make sure my sister doesn’t simply let Jane stay up half an hour late as a treat for taking another step on the path to becoming a Master diabolist.” Edith’s demon agreed wholeheartedly with this. “And it will be good to be somewhere quiet for a few days. It’s been months since we went out without always looking over our shoulder.”

It conceded this point too. The Occupation might be over but the war was not; the streets of Paris were not yet safe for her.

They weren’t safe for anyone, really. They hadn’t won until they’d won—and they hadn’t won. Not yet.

Edith misted herself with the warmed bottle then set it aside, picking up a long silver needle. She pricked her finger with it. As the blood beaded up, she took hold of her valise in her other hand and stepped within a slate circle set into the marble floor of her foyer. She let the welling blood drip down, and as soon as it hit the floor, pale blue electricity began to crackle all over her body, currents of lightning running up her legs, encasing her like bright vines. After a moment, they receded, save for a few extra flashes along the jet beadwork of her black dress and the black fur collar of her cape . . . and she was somewhere else entirely.

She was now in a disused kitchen in a shabby London boarding house, standing in a slate circle similar to the one in her own apartment. The morning sunlight filtering through the dirty windows was dreary and watery, wintery and unmistakably English.

The demonic sigh in Edith’s mind sounded more like the twittering of a distant bird, but its point was clear and unarguable.

Edith was surrounded by a column of woven golden mesh that ran from floor to ceiling. Through the fine holes she could see the shape of a man sitting in a chair. She could also see the glint of the gun he had trained on her.

She had come here expecting it. Edith was a spy for the international organization of diabolists known as the Société des Éclairées, and this was a spy’s gate into the UK.

“Swift wings, swift victory,” said Edith.

“Swifter wings, swifter victory,” said the man with the gun.

Edith stepped through the door of the mesh cage, set down her valise, and rucked up the sleeve of her dress to reveal a tattoo there: the insignia of the talaria—the winged sandal of Hermes—within a stark white equilateral triangle. The brightness of the white ink against her black skin was itself evidence of the mark’s diabolic nature, but the group she was part of—The Young Talarians—hadn’t gotten as far as they had by cutting corners when it came to security: To wit, the man with the gun used his teeth to pull the cork out of a phial and dribbled an oily fluid on the ink. It fizzed and popped and fizzled away into pink smoke, at which point he nodded once, curtly.

The international organization known as the Société des Éclairées, of which Edith was a member, was devoted to the pursuit of diabolism. While the Société had denounced the Nazis and their ideology, to the point of revoking the memberships and privileges of all sympathizers years ago, due to its worldwide nature it could not be overtly political without causing problems. The Young Talarians—the group to which Edith belonged—were independent but not forbidden from using the Société’s resources.

It was impossible to say how much the Young Talarians had done for the Allies over the course of the war. Their help had been invisible—and invaluable.

The Nazis, of course, had their own diabolists.

Edith had been a founding member of the Young Talarians, along with a few of her closest friends—Maja Znidarcic, Arthur Malone, and Saul Zeitz. She could not sit idly by, not being who she was. Edith had been a small child when the Blackwoods adopted her, taking her from her West African homeland to travel the world with them and their daughter Nancy, but she had never forgotten her roots.

“Welcome to London, Edith,” said George, lowering his Webley and holstering it. “You’re right on time.”

“Is my car waiting for me?” she asked, readjusting her sleeve. She wasn’t late, but she’d need to get moving quickly if she wanted to get to Hawkshead by the afternoon, given the distance and uncertain state of the roads.

“At the garage on St. Marks,” he said. And then, with a complete shift in his manners, he grinned. “Good luck to the young hopefuls, too.”

Edith cocked a manicured eyebrow at George. “Young hopefuls?” she asked, conveying with her tone that it was an improper thing for him to have said. “To whom are you referring?”

George straightened up. “Sorry. It’s only that Monsieur St Martin had mentioned Jane and Miriam were to undergo their Test.”

Of course it had been one Patrice St Martin who had blabbed! Edith frowned at George as Mercurialis quietly chuckled to itself over her consternation. When an apprentice diabolist underwent his or her Test, it was supposed to be a private affair. Patrice St Martin and his former lover Nancy were estranged, yes, but he knew that Nancy had always been a stickler for the rules.

“What else did Patrice have to say about my niece, my sister, and her ward?” asked Edith, her tone icier than the streets beyond the windows of the kitchen where they yet conversed.

“Nothing,” said George, blushing now. All his earlier cool had left him. Edith sighed—new recruits were always a bit jumpy.

“Let’s forget we had this conversation,” she said. She wanted to, as well, to be perfectly honest. Edith had finally resolved to at last tell Jane who her father was, even though this was explicitly against her mother’s wishes. Jane had turned sixteen a month ago, and Edith had thought to give this knowledge to her as a belated birthday gift.

“Thank you,” said George.

“If you’ll excuse me, I’ll just use the ladies’ before I depart,” said Edith. George nodded and Edith swished by him, her heels clicking on the tile.

In the washroom she opened up her makeup bag and applied a light dusting of powder and a coat of mascara. Both were specially formulated with diabolic essence to conceal her appearance. Glamour indeed! Now, anyone who saw her would see a white woman . . . unless they took a careful second look. For anyone who did, Edith put on a black hat with a little veil. No one wanted to look at a widow too long—at least not here in England.

If she’d needed a better disguise, she would have drawn on the power of her demon. Mercurialis lent its host unusual power over many amusing types of illusion, changing one’s appearance being one of them. But for just a short walk along busy streets she did not need to tax her resources in that manner.

George looked a bit surprised when she emerged, but then quickly recovered. “When will you be returning?”

“Within a week. Do you need a specific date and time?”

“No, ma’am. I’ll be here.”

“I promise to be in at a decent hour.” She favored him with a smile.

He returned it. “It’s not that; it just takes a moment or two to set up, and I wouldn’t like to make you wait.”

“It’s still faster than the Night Ferry!”

Edith was in a good mood. She was pleased to have a little shopping to do and then nice long unbroken drive ahead of her, two things almost impossible in Paris, and she was likewise pleased at the prospect of seeing her only remaining family—neither Edith’s birth parents nor her adoptive parents had survived the bombings.

Edith peeked out the door to see a light drizzle had begun to make the gray paving stones glisten. She claimed an umbrella, black of course, from the umbrella stand.

“I promise I’ll return it,” she said, before stepping out into the morning gloom beyond. Her foot immediately found a puddle.

Mercurialis sighed.

Chapter One

It was a cold morning in early February but beyond the windows of the old farmhouse the world was still soaked in blackest night. Not even the sliver of a moon silvered the frost and snow crusting the yard and the rocky-strewn hills beyond. It was only by the pale starlight that Miriam Cantor could see the barn where she must go to feed the geese and the ducks.

She hesitated before opening the back door and venturing forth into the profound stillness only found in deep winter, just before the dawn. But it was not that stillness that made her hesitate, nor the darkness, nor the chill—nor was it fear of what predators might be slinking through the gloaming between her and the barn. At least, not animal ones. Foxes and weasels did not frighten her; it was the threat of who might be out there, not what, that caused sweat to prick at her neck and under her arms even in the raw pre-dawn.

Her fear was absurd, she knew it was. There were no Nazis prowling through the frigid gloom. There were no Nazis anywhere near them, not in Cumbria. They were not hiding in the cellars of their neighbors down the lane in the picturesque village of Hawkshead. Here in the north of England she was safe—and yet every morning Miriam had to remind herself of that before she could pick her way along the path that wound its way through the hoary remains of last year’s victory garden.

“Who’s the real goose here?” muttered Miriam as she let herself into the barn. The truth was, if Nazis ever did intrude upon their privacy her “Aunt” Nancy, whose treasured flock impatiently pecked at Miriam’s shoes, would know. Mrs. Nancy Blackwood was no mere widow living quietly with her daughter and ward on a farm in England. Nancy Blackwood was a diabolist—a natural scientist who had summoned a demon and worked with it and its essences rather than more traditional chemicals or creatures. Her demon lent her certain unusual abilities in exchange for sharing her experiences—and her body.

Nancy was also the official Librarian for the Société des Éclairées, the current worldwide organization of diabolists. The Société formally oversaw the education of individuals interested in working with demons—or rather, the powerful, ineffable beings they called demons for simplicity’s sake. One didn’t need the Société to traffic with demons; there were untrained, “wild” diabolists of course, and always had been, but the Société helped people learn how to do so safely and more effectively than was otherwise possible.

That meant Nancy had more methods of protecting herself than the average widow—more than the average diabolist, even—to protect her home, and the books within the Library beneath it.

It was also true that Miriam, as Nancy’s apprentice, was not entirely helpless. Even so, she was only fifteen, and had not yet passed her Test.

Miriam rubbed at her numb and dripping nose before starting to scoop grain onto the ground. She, like most apprentices, spent a lot of time pondering demons and their abilities, but actually summoning one was something only master diabolists were allowed to do. As an apprentice, she was limited to minor works of diablerie, such as concocting armamentaria—the diabolical potions, pills, and powders that were the essence of the Art. Before she advanced beyond that, Miriam would need to pass her Test, and then submit the results of her Practical for judgment by the Société before she would be deemed qualified.

A diabolist could do much without actually summoning a demon, however. For instance, by using diabolic essences culled from plants and minerals, Miriam had created a potion that let her assess an opponent’s weaknesses if she had to strike out with fist or knife and a pastille that granted her increased strength and speed. Keeping a small phial of the former and a mints tin of the latter in her pocket helped her stay calm when she needed to go into the village.

The trouble was, that the effects of apprentice armamentaria did not last long. Creating them was a process intended to educate, not endure. But once Miriam had summoned her own demon, she, like Nancy, would be a powerful diabolist, capable of ever so much more.

As she scattered grain on the ground Miriam’s mind strayed to a different farm, in a different country, where she’d fed different ducks. Her aunt—a real aunt, her father’s sister Rivka whose farm outside of Weimar had been seized by the Nazis shortly after she’d disappeared—she had also kept poultry, and goats too. As a small child, Miriam had loved to ride the train out to the countryside and watch the kids play in the spring.

They’d stopped going when the laws made it difficult for their family to do much anything without being harassed. The last time they all went out as a family, a boy had thrown a stone. A policeman had laughed when it hit Miriam’s father in the back. That was when Miriam’s mother and father had written a friend to ask if their daughter could live with her, in England . . .

No—she could not think on that now. Miriam pushed the memories away, away and down and shoved them down inside a dark place within her soul or her mind that she’d used as a repository for her fear, her rage, and her disappointment since she was very small. That silent shadowed hollow never judged, never rejected, never asked questions—it just took what she offered it, and absorbed it, and made it go away.

“All that happened a long time ago,” Miriam said to the ducks and the geese as they nibbled at the grain. She couldn’t let her mind wander away down those unpleasant paths—there was too much to do today in anticipation of another “Aunt’s” arrival: Aunt Edith.

Edith was Nancy’s sister. She too was part of the Société, though unlike Nancy, she was not an elected official. The position of Librarian meant living in the Library, which was here, in rural Hawkshead. Why the Library was in Hawkshead no one knew, but it had been there in various forms since the middle ages—long before the Société formed in Paris, a hundred years ago. And there it would remain after the Société gave way to some new organization, whenever it inevitably did.

All finished feeding the poultry, Miriam returned to the farmhouse. Nancy was awake and in the kitchen, frying a bit of their weekly ration of bacon in a skillet on the cooktop of her ancient beloved AGA. The smell of it was mouth-watering, and even after all this time, a little guilt-inducing. But rationing was rationing, and hunger was hunger.

“How are they this morning?” asked Nancy, as Miriam shrugged out of her coat.

“Snug and warm and no longer hungry.” Miriam tied her apron around her waist with a satisfied tug. It was a relief to once again be within four walls, and under a sturdy roof.

“I wish I could say the same,” said Nancy’s daughter Jane as she bustled into the kitchen to put on her own apron. “I’m starving!”

Miriam’s “cousin” had obviously gotten up early to set herself to rights. Jane’s hair was coiffed and shining and she was already dressed, nicely, in a dark gray skirt and a plain white blouse that was almost dramatically stark. The cardigan she wore over it was also gray, but the color of smoke rather than charcoal.

Miriam unconsciously glanced down at her tweedy ankle-length skirt. It was one of Nancy’s hemmed and patched-up hand-me-downs, lumpy and too large but suitable for keeping her calves free of muck when she went out to the barns or her legs warm as she worked in the laboratory. She’d not thought of dressing for Edith’s arrival; perhaps she should have.

“Is it ready?” said Jane, reaching for the tea before she even really sat down. “I think I shall starve to death if I have to wait any longer!”

“Must you be so dramatic first thing in the morning?” said Nancy, turning around with a tray full of bacon and toast, which she set down in the center of the scarred wooden kitchen table alongside the small pat of butter they must share. Jane scowled at the word ‘dramatic’ and slurped her tea.

“A lady is as a lady does,” remarked Nancy, as if this wisdom had just come to her mind unprovoked. At last she sat down and poured herself a cup of tea. Then, from a pocket in her apron she withdrew a little dropper bottle of smoked glass. She squeezed a bit of clear fluid into her tea before taking her first sip, doctoring the beverage not with milk and sugar, as Miriam liked it, but with a distillate of the essence of her demon, The Patron of Curiosity.

In order for diabolists like Nancy to comfortably maintain contact with their demons, they had to regularly consume the essence of that demon. Every diabolist had their preferred way of doing so, some more elaborate or decadent than others. Nancy, being a no-muss, no-fuss sort of woman, produced a distillate from the unusually beautiful and robust chives she cultivated in pots on her sunniest windowsill.

“And speaking of dressing nicely,” said Nancy, after taking a sip, I don’t know why you’ve done that so early. You still have to dust and sweep, you know! I won’t have you begging off smartening up the house just because you’ve already smartened up yourself.”

“But I dusted and swept yesterday!” cried Jane.

“I know; it could do with another going-over. This time, use the dust rag on the woodwork instead of talking to it like it’s Clark Gable.”

For a while now it had been Jane’s joy to go see every picture she could at the theatre in Ambleside; she talked endlessly to Miriam about the sophistication and beauty of the women on the silver screen, but Miriam had only Jane’s word for how wonderful they were. She had never gone. It was five miles to Ambleside, and the thought of the bus made Miriam dizzy. In a way though she felt she’d seen Meet Me in St. Louis, Cover Girl, and other films; Jane liked to talk over the plots after she got back, doing impressions of the actresses Miriam had only seen in still photos in Jane’s magazines.

Jane was good at impressions—so good she’d managed to incorporate a few little turns of speech and gestures into her everyday manners. And as they were at that age where it was common for girls to quickly become young ladies, only Miriam was pained by her friend growing up.

Nancy, on the other hand, seemed to find it amusing.

“Edith won’t arrive until around two, so you’ve plenty of time to do your chores and reapply that lipstick before we leave if it gets smudged. Yes, I noticed,” said Nancy, who disapproved of cosmetics. Miriam thought that a bit funny, given that Nancy was a master diabolist; most people would likely see trafficking with demons as a far greater offense against nature than a bit of mascara.

Jane looked like a little girl as she sullenly poked at her breakfast.

“You’ll trip over that lip if you don’t pick it up,” said Nancy, but her teasing did little to mollify her daughter. “Oh, come now. What would your beloved Edith have to say if she saw you like that?”

“Mother!” That was another change—Jane had always called her mother “Mum” until lately.

“Oh come now. If you’d known Edie as long as I have, you wouldn’t feel there was some great need to make yourself up for her,” said Nancy. “She was once your age, you know—and a lot wilder and more scabby-kneed than either of you.”

“Scabby-kneed!”

Miriam was now the sullen one as she stared at her plate. Jane’s affected horror at this information exasperated her. Why should it surprise Jane that Edith had had to put away childish things, just like anyone else? Did Jane really believe her aunt had come forth into the world as a stylish adult?

And anyway, squeamishness was not for the ambitious when it came to the Art. Master diabolists saved their hair trimmings, their nail clippings, their scabs, sometimes even their menstrual fluid—anything that hung around in the body to become infused with the essences that diabolists regularly consumed to maintain their connection with their demons. Some diabolists had been known to harvest permanent parts of their own bodies in the service of empowering a particularly powerful preparation—such things could be rendered down to enhance the overall potency of diabolic armamentaria. But scabby knees weren’t a patch on, say, extracting one’s own perfectly healthy molar.

But Miriam didn’t say any of this. She took a discreet, calming breath and pushed her annoyance and anger down inside her, where the shadow within her welcomed her feelings with open arms.

“Edie played rugby with our brothers until the day she moved away,” said Nancy.

“And yet she seems so civilized. I suppose there’s hope for me yet,” said Jane, before finally stabbing a piece of bacon with her fork.

“Oh, no,” said Nancy, with an appraising look at her daughter. “There’s no hope for you—or there won’t be if you don’t finish your breakfast and your chores.”

Jane’s childish, long-suffering sigh made Miriam smile to herself, but she quickly sobered when her aunt turned her attention to her.

“Aren’t you excited about Edith’s visit, Miriam?”

Nancy’s question caught her off guard.

“Of course I’m excited,” she said, but when that sounded a bit flabby even to her own ears, she added, “I’ve been wanting to ask Edith about her research into diabolically enhanced cosmetics. I think it might help me understand the theory behind the Fifth Transmutation.”

This was all true. The only lie was in what she’d omitted.

“Oh, I’d like to hear that too.” Jane wasn’t pouting now. She was bright, alert, and focused: The Jane Miriam liked.

Jane was also an apprentice diabolist. They’d learned side-by-side since Miriam had come to stay, but they couldn’t be more different. Where Miriam was pleased to think through the theoretical aspects of anything before attempting it, Jane jumped right in to learn how deep the water was.

“The fifth transmutation is necessary when attempting Campanella’s Substantive Exchange,” said Jane. Jane was currently working her way through the Twelve Transmutations, a set of practical exercises Miriam had not yet attempted. “I can’t quite parse it and I’d like to see a practical demonstration. The Grimoire Italien says that demonic vapors and their impure properties are beneficial, but it’s not clear if it means the load for the demon or the diabolist.”

“The Grimoire Italien? Are you using the French translation of Trasformazioni Della Materia?” asked Miriam. Jane nodded. “Oh!” said Miriam. “In the original medieval Italian that passage is a bit clearer. The demon benefits, but there’s also a chance that . . .” Miriam trailed off as she saw Jane blushing angrily.

Miriam winced. The learning of ancient languages was not among Jane’s talents—which was nothing to be ashamed of, in Miriam’s opinion. She should have remembered how sensitive Jane was about it.

“Miriam, as usual you’re not only correct, but your scholarship is impressively thorough,” said Nancy.

Nancy’s notice always thrilled Miriam, but it was hard for her to accept the compliment with Jane blushing deeper and looking extremely unhappy and embarrassed.

“I wish I’d known you were reading that,” said Miriam. “The modern Italian translation is better and I have it in my room to compare with the medieval, since the medieval is a bother to read. It’s barely even Italian, really—just a mix of medieval Venetian vernacular mixed with Latin.”

“Thank you,” said Jane, with the sort of formality and poise she usually reserved for impressions of her favorite actresses, “I’d be pleased to look at it when you can spare it.”

“Later,” said Nancy, with a tone that conveyed exactly what they ought to be doing just then.

Miriam began to clear the dishes, as keeping the kitchen tidy was one of her responsibilities. Jane too stood up from the table, but as she did a great yowl split the air and a soft gray blur of wounded dignity streaked out the kitchen, the bell of his collar jangling merrily.

“Poor Smudge!” Jane, dismayed, hurried after the cat to check on him.

“You’d think one day he’d learn that sitting behind Jane’s chair will only get him a pinched tail,” said Miriam.

“Perhaps he enjoys the attention,” said Nancy, as she wrapped the remaining bread in a cloth. “I’m off to the stacks, my dear. Do come and get me when it’s time to walk to the village?”

“I will.”

“And I hope you’ll join us, when we go? I think it’ll be a lovely day in spite of the cold, and a merry party once Edie arrives.”

Miriam managed a smile even as her stomach churned at the thought of her aunt’s imminent arrival and the long walk away from their safe home into the relative chaos that was Hawkshead. But, she loved Nancy very much and wanted to please her—no, more than that: she wanted to be the sort of person who pleased Nancy. “Of course!”

She was rewarded with a smile.

“I’m very glad. Now, I must see to a few things before my sister arrives to take up all my waking hours. Ciao!” And with that, Nancy swept out of the room with more flair than was strictly necessary.

Miriam sighed at the reminder of the real reason for her trip into town. For all she was hard on Jane for being “dramatic,” Nancy, too, had a bit of the theatrical about her. And as with Jane, it came out a bit more when Edith came to visit.

The Conductors

Buy the Book

A compelling debut by a new voice in fantasy fiction, The Conductors features the magic and mystery of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files written with the sensibility and historical setting of Octavia Butler’s Kindred: Introducing Hetty Rhodes, a magic-user and former conductor on the Underground Railroad who now solves crimes in post–Civil War Philadelphia.

Chapter One

When the wagon rolled into view, Hetty took another small step along the tree branch. Playing lookout was not a role she would have chosen, but Benjy had argued that a trap was useless if it wasn’t sprung in the right moment. Someone needed to watch the road, or otherwise trouble would be the only thing they caught.

If the stars were so willing, Elle could have made a proper lookout. But at the sight of the wagon, the girl clutched her branch so tightly it was a challenge to find where girl ended and tree started.

The younger girl had been one of the dozen or so people who had gone missing over the course of two days, and so far was the only one to have escaped. They had just thought the missing girl’s trail had gone cold, when Elle stumbled out of the woods frantic for help. Not realizing they had been looking for her she’d told them everything without hesitation, confirming what they already knew. That she had been approached by a kind face, led out of safety, and trapped before she even knew a trick was in play. But the only fact they didn’t know was carried in her breathless words. Details that changed their approach entirely.

After spending years ferrying people to safety from white slave catchers looking to make some coin, they assumed these kidnappers were no different.

They were wrong.

The men driving the wagon could have been one of their neighbors, someone they’d seen as they went on their business throughout town. Although Hetty did not even know these men, not even their names, learning this detail stung like a friend smiling as they sliced off your hand.

Below her, the bushes rustled as Benjy hurried to finish the last of his spells. Hetty silently urged him on as the wagon drew nearer.

If they had been working in tandem, the spells would be primed and ready.

But the trap was only the first part of the plan, and the least important part.

The driver’s head had just passed under her feet when Hetty let a crow’s caw escape her throat.

She projected her voice as if she had a crowd before her eagerly listening as she spun her tales. Trees some distance away stirred with confused crows, but farther along the road the bushes stopped moving.

Benjy stepped to the side and slammed his hammer onto the sigil scratched into the dirt.

Light flashed from the strike and dust flew into the air. The trees across from her hiding spot swayed until three of them dropped like dogs onto a bone.

Wheels squealed and the horse cried out in alarm. The wagon veered to the side, and the driver swore as he did his best to avoid the pile of trees.

The moment the wagon shuddered to a stop two men jumped out of the back of the wagon to yell at the driver.

As the dust settled, Benjy tucked the hammer away. But before he approached the trio, he reached up and tugged his left ear.

Hetty rolled her eyes.

Clearly, he still remembered the last time they pulled a stunt like this. But she would have lingered on her perch a bit longer even without his warning.

Their plan had accounted for two men being on the wagon, not three. Nor did it allow for the guns the men held in their hands.

The swearing stopped as Benjy drew near. One of the guns turned his way, but he grinned and greeted the trio with a rolling drawl he shuffled out for these occasions. For some reason, it seemed to put people at ease. But then her husband was imposing even when he tried not to be, for he wore his past labors on broad shoulders and held his head high with full confidence as he made his way in the world.

“You fellas look to be in a spot of bad luck. Need some help getting those trees out the way? Can’t move them, but my pappy taught me a good chopping spell to turn them into firewood.”

As Benjy held the trio’s attention with a rambling story that Hetty had made up for him to tell, Hetty launched into the next stage of the plan. She swung off the branch, soundlessly dropping from the tree to the ground.

The wagon’s doors were partially open when she reached it.

With care, Hetty nudged them a bit wider so she could slip inside. Beams of dying sunlight caught the eyes of the dozen men and women seated around a log. Like a fat spider in the middle of its webs, ropes sprouted from the log to bind each person’s hands together so that not even the smallest of fingers could twitch.

This was not as terrible as she expected but it came mighty close.

Hetty took another step into the wagon and her appearance sent a shiver through the group.

When the man closest to her made to speak, Hetty raised one finger to her lips.

When the only noise she heard was Benjy’s rambling, she drew the Crow Star Sigil into the air.

A simple square with a short line extending from one corner, it shimmered in the air for only a moment before Hetty gave life to the constellation. Suddenly, instead of lines and vertices, a crow hovered in the air, silently flapping its wings. Unlike a true crow, this one did not have ink black feathers. The star sigil was a deep midnight blue from its beak to its tail feathers, speckled with starlight that twinkled even when it stood still.

Swiftly and with care, the star sigil looped circles around the wagon, slicing through bindings and unraveling the web of ropes.

As the crow did its work, Hetty held out a coin with the Dipper emblazoned on one side. Gesturing toward the open door, she pointed to the road back to town. Most blinked back at her, but an older woman stood up and took the coin from her. She gave Hetty a hearty wink and then held the coin toward the sky. The coin flashed at once. The weak sunlight was more than strong enough stir its magic.

Ursa Minor took form in the air in front of the woman before shifting into a shower of pale purple light. At this sight, the reluctance in the group melted away. They might not have ever seen Hetty before, but they had heard the stories of people like her. They knew they were not the first Hetty people had freed.

The older woman held her hand toward the man closest to her. He took it after Hetty urged him with a look. Others followed, grabbing each other’s hands as, one by one, the magic of the coin vanished them from sight like a veil of invisibility had been tossed over them.

When the last person had disappeared into the woods, Hetty directed the crow upwards. With a swish of her hand, she imploded the spell, letting loose the magic in a blazing light.

The kidnappers swore. There was a thump, and then a gunshot split the air apart.

The horse started at the sound and its neighs added to the sudden chaos. But it was the second flash of light that got Hetty moving.

She ducked around the wagon, the sharp tip of her hairpin held out before her.

A bullet struck tree bark, inches from Benjy’s head. He ignored it and flicked his fingers into a series of star sigils, forming them so quickly Hetty only got a faint impression of their shape. The spells shot from his hands and struck the man in front of him. Another man was already on the ground, moaning as he clutched a hand that was more in pieces than whole.

And the third . . .

The third man was frantically cramming bullets into a pistol as he watched the scene unfold.

Hetty came from behind and jammed a hairpin into his arm. The man yelped, falling to his knees. Hetty jumped back. She ran a finger along the cotton band at her neck, calling on the Taurus Star Sigil she had sewn into the stitches.

Wrenching out the pin, the man stared at the object and then at her. His mouth was still twisted over some crude word when Hetty’s spell sent him flying into a tree. As he slipped to the ground, his head rolled to the side. He was out like a snuffed candle.

“Too bad you can’t do that spell from a distance,” Benjy said, tossing the other knocked-out men toward the third. The pair hit the tree trunk with a thud. None woke up.

“If I could do a single spell from a distance,” Hetty reminded him. “I would have pinned them with a sleeping spell from the start and we could have avoided all this fuss.”

Her husband snorted. “Certainly would have made things easier.”

A star-studded wolf loped over, carrying in its mouth the binding ropes from the wagon. It stopped near the three men and shook itself briefly before vanishing. The ropes fell on the men and then knotted together, binding wrists and ankles with a precision as sure as if done by hand.

“Plan still worked,” Hetty said.

“We’ve done this before,” Benjy shrugged, “and this time we didn’t need to be as careful.” He cast a glance around the clearing. “Everyone on their way?”

Hetty pointed upwards.

“Except for one.”

Up in the tree Elle still had a death’s grip on the branch, but a new wariness entered her eyes as Hetty approached the tree.

“Who are you people?” Elle stammered. “You summon birds, walk into gunfire with little pause, and make people vanish into the air. I thought when I ran into you it was luck—”

“Hardly luck,” Benjy scoffed. “We were looking for you!”

The girl emitted a small squeak and pressed her face back into the tree bark.

“A friend of ours sent us looking for you,” Hetty called up to Elle. “Miss Jones.”

The name did the trick.

Elle’s eyes opened and her grip relaxed so she merely held the tree instead of squeezing life from it.

“Who are you?” she repeated once more. Curiosity bloomed in her eyes, overshadowing the fear.

Hetty held out a hand to the girl, much as she’d done many times before, and said: “Someone here to help.”

Chapter Two

When they brought the girl back home, Elle’s mother had a face wet with tears. Elle had barely stepped through the door before her mother drew her into a crushing embrace.

Hetty stood to the side, watching the reunion with envy prickling her with each word and gesture.

“Thank you for bringing back my girl.” Elle’s mother said when she finally released her daughter.

“It was no trouble,” Hetty said, it took her a moment to find the right words. “We were lucky. She escaped them on her own. I don’t think they expected her to have a talent in magic.”

“You taught her, didn’t you?” Benjy asked.

The mother nodded, pride filling the soft curves of her face. “First thing I did once freedom came. Didn’t dare teach any of my children back when we were slaves, but now times are different. Now, they’ll have all the tools they can get.”

“She learned well.”

“Not well enough.” Giving Elle a stern look, she said to her daughter, “You know better to run off!”

“I didn’t mean to. Those men, they said they knew where Daniel was, said they’d bring him here if I brought the money. I thought . . . I thought it wouldn’t hurt to try. It’s my fault he got sold and I just wanted to see my brother again!”

“We will,” her mother said, “but these things take time.”

“Sometimes too long,” Hetty murmured, but only Benjy appeared to have heard her.

The mother thanked her again and offered up payment in the form of an inky black candle that reeked of herbs more mundane than magical. It was a candle of protection, although Hetty suspected the only protection it gave the family was from darkness.

Not very much of that either, Hetty thought as she turned it over in her hands. But they didn’t take up this work expecting payment.

Their first case, if you could call it that, started when they fished a body out of the river with a slit neck and a fat billfold still in his pocket. It was disturbing, it was strange, and above all, it was curious. But only to them. The police, who patrolled the streets looking for trouble to stir up, wasn’t interested in the dead man. When they pressed too hard, suspicions fell on them. So instead of the police, they directed their questions to people who might actually come to their aid.

That dead man wasn’t the first to be murdered so strangely in this city, but it was the first that drew their attention. They realized similar deaths would keep occurring and that no one would do anything about it.

So it became their job. And after five years they realized they were good at it.

Whether it was bodies found chopped up in a trunk, missing cauldrons, or cursed tea kettles, they poked and prodded until they made sense of the senseless. They found nightmarish things tucked away in the quietest of homes. Revealed culprits and caught thieves. And they found lost loved ones even when all hope had been spent.

Their day spent looking for Elle was no different, except that this one had a happy ending. Most of their cases ended in death, especially ones like this. Being able to bring that girl home alive and only slightly shaken was worth using their last lantern coin.

At the street corner, Hetty turned right instead of left. Benjy turned with her, although his slower pace showed his reluctance.

And in his silence, Hetty answered an unspoken question.

“I want to pay Penelope a visit before we head home. Let her know what happened with the girl. You can wait downstairs. I won’t be long.”

“I think I hear thunder,” Benjy cupped his ear. “It’s very distant, but it’s there.”

“I won’t be long,” Hetty repeated.

He scoffed and started naming all the times she said this before.

Benjy had listed a dozen examples by the time they arrived at the house, and if the day hadn’t been such an eventful one, she might have considered prolonging her stay just to be petty.

It was a cool spring evening without a chance of rain. She could leave him waiting for half a night and not feel guilty, especially as he would wait for her. He always did.

The windows of the schoolroom that took up the bottom level of the building were dark and tightly sealed with magical wards to keep intruders and thieves away. But the second level was quite the opposite. Even before Hetty reached the top of the stairs, she heard muffled laughter and voices that threatened to spill out into the hallway.

This apartment belonged to Darlene and George, but while lights flickering under the door were expected, such rambunctious noise was not.

“Are they having a party?” Benjy asked.

“I would have heard,” Hetty said, though she couldn’t be sure. Darlene and her husband George taught letters and numbers in the schoolroom below. Daylight hours were for the fifteen children that attended regularly, but two evening classes for adults met each week. Devoted educators, the couple lived very simply, forgoing most pleasures in their private lives. However, to help raise the prestige of their little school, they had gotten themselves wrapped up with those who enjoyed fine dining, gossip, and filling their homes with trinkets that could have fed a family of four for a month. This meant expensive clothes and coats that radiated wealth her friends didn’t quite have. While Darlene claimed that the rich elite of the city were a trial to contend with, she made no effort to curtail her husband’s ambitions.

The stairs continued for one more level to Penelope’s apartment. There she lived in a small set of rooms filled with plants both of medicinal and decorative purposes. Although Penelope rented from Darlene, she paid no money and instead taught music lessons and performed other small favors.

Light spilled out from the crack below the door as well, but only enough to make it clear that Hetty’s friend was inside.

Hetty knocked once and heard the slight tinkle of mugs. She knocked a second time and heard chairs move. On her third knock, the door swung open.

“Hetty!” Penelope exclaimed clapping her hands together, her heart-shaped face filled with delight. “Thank the stars it’s you! It’s just you, isn’t it? No one behind you causing trouble?”

“No one,” Hetty replied. “Except for my husband.”

“Benjy’s here?” Penelope called out to the shadows with a broad grin. “Well, he can stay outside and out of the way!”

Despite being her opposite in most things, Penelope was Hetty’s closest and dearest friend. While Benjy was willing to entertain her complaints, gripes, and fears—not to mention numerous other ills—he lacked a certain sensitivity about such matters. In Penelope, Hetty had a listening ear, a companion to perform hijinks with, and someone who took her blunt words without insult or annoyance.

Penelope had thought herself alone in the world, until her mother’s sister found her some years ago through a combination of luck and stealing records from a burned-down sugar plantation. With five cousins, three married with families of their own, adding Penelope into the mix was no trouble. Penelope loved her newly found relatives but chose to live apart for reasons she never quite explained. Skilled with herbs and brewing magic, she worked at the best herbalist shop in town, providing remedies and charms alike. While she took pride in this work, her true passion was singing. She lent her voice to contests and traveling shows and ran the choir at church as a labor of love. If she could make a living off her voice Hetty had no doubts Penelope would drop everything to try.

“Did you find Elle?” Penelope asked, sobering a bit.

“Yes, she’s back with her mother. This,” she held up the candle, “is our reward.”

“I knew you’d find her!” Penelope clasped her hands together. “I was so worried. I keep seeing her talking to that man after practice. I should have done something when I saw him pull her out of sight. I just stood there and watched.”

“You did do something,” Hetty assured her friend. “You told us and set us searching. What you call a small act meant that Elle and the others lured away would not be sent to have their magic harvested.”

“Magic harvesting?” cried a voice from inside. “That can’t be going on!”

“Darlene,” Hetty said spying the other woman seated at Penelope’s table. “What are you doing up here?”

Darlene sat hunched over her sketch book, gently rocking a basket with her foot so that the little bundle swaddled inside stayed in the arms of sleep. Her glasses slipped off her nose, and as usual there was a smudge of charcoal along the right side of her face. It stood starkly against her light brown skin. Unlike Penelope, who favored bold and dramatic colors for her attire, Darlene shared Hetty’s taste for more practical grays and browns for daily wear. But her use of expensive fabric did not always lead to the most flattering cut of her clothes. “We’re just having a bit of a chat.” Darlene’s lips pressed into a thin line. “What’s this about magic harvesting?”

“Nothing to worry about.” Hetty handed the candle to Penelope and slipped inside the cheery kitchen, suddenly very curious about what Darlene was doing upstairs. It had to be something quite serious. Darlene would not be up here with her newly adopted baby otherwise.

“Magic harvesting sounds like a great deal to worry about,” Darlene replied. “Given it’s not herbs you’re talking about.”

“Don’t mind her. When we don’t know why people suddenly vanish, she calls it magic harvesting.” Benjy moved out of the shadows. He didn’t come inside but leaned against the doorframe. “Don’t understand why.”

“Because that’s how it was back in slavery times,” Hetty kept her voice earnest. “Magic users were snatched up so their bones could be ground up into wands.”

“That’s only a story.” Darlene said, but her eyes flickered around. “Isn’t it?”

“All stories have to come from somewhere,” Hetty took a seat across from her friend. “Why do you think—” she tapped her thumb against her neck and at the scars hidden from sight “—we were collared?”

She had Darlene for a moment, like she knew she would. Darlene was the most imaginative of her friends, which meant with the right story Darlene was easily tricked, especially when Hetty weaved in bits that were true. People did disappear suddenly and without reason, but magic harvesting wasn’t likely the cause or even a true practice.

Darlene shook her head, breaking the power of Hetty’s words. “Now I know you’re telling tales again. Why do you persist on making up stories like this? Wands are just made of wood—they aren’t rubbed with bone dust!”

“I never said anything like that,” Hetty teased.

“I don’t know anything about wands,” Penelope admitted, too lost in her thoughts to pay much attention to either of them. She turned the inky black candle over in her hands. “But it’s no worse than what I feared might have happened to Elle.”

“You must have an idea why they snatched her,” Darlene jumped to turn the tide of the conversation, “or why they were doing such a thing?”

“We don’t know yet, but we’re going to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” Hetty reached to Darlene’s sketchbook. “May I?”

Darlene nodded, pushing the book across the table. Hetty turned to an empty page and drew a horseshoe. “These men all had the same mark on their hands. It’s worth keeping an eye on.”

Darlene looked away. “Only you,” she said quietly. “I told you, the past is behind me.”

“You know people,” Hetty persisted, “and some of them aren’t fond of me.”

“With good reason.” Darlene attempted a smile. “I’m sorry.”

So was Hetty.

Freed at a very young age, Darlene had been an agent with the Vigilance Society acting as a point of contact in the city. When Hetty got involved with conductor work, Darlene familiarized her with the procedures of the organization and provided assistance that went beyond the city’s limits. With slavery abolished, others in Vigilance Society turned to adjacent matters, but Darlene had retreated from such work. She had reasons for it, some of them good, but to Hetty’s ears they sounded like excuses.

“Don’t be sorry.” Benjy’s words drifted, paired with a pointed look at Hetty. “This is a task for us to handle.”

Hetty pushed the sketchbook back across the table.

“I should be going,” Hetty said as she started to rise.

“Stay for a bit.” Penelope rushed forward, a tea kettle in hand. “It’s not that late.”

From his spot in the doorway, Benjy shook he head. “What should I do while you chatter on?”

“You can go downstairs,” Darlene huffed. “Plenty to keep you occupied.”

His curiosity about what was occurring in the downstairs apartment was greater than Hetty had anticipated. For all he was eager to go home, he slipped inside instead, joining them in the room.

“What is going on downstairs?” he asked.

“George is hosting a group of people from this political club he joined, E.C. Degray,” Darlene turned a page in her sketchbook, the paper snapping with the gesture. “There’s an excursion later this week across the river. They’re finalizing last details now, or so they claim.”

“E.C. Degray?” Hetty echoed, “Is this another one of those secret societies?”

“I couldn’t tell you. George keeps shying away from giving me a direct answer. I can certainly guess what they’re about, but I like to be told things!”

Hetty nodded along, but hid a bit of a smile of gratitude that she did not have similar problems. Her marriage to Benjy had not been a love match, but theirs was an agreement that had suited them both and suited them still. She often thought their understanding made a stronger marriage. She had seen the pain love matches had caused in both the past and the present. She was glad to be spared it.

“I suppose it’s about voting,” Darlene tapped her pencil against the table, “but isn’t it too early to be talking about elections? October is so far away.”

“It’s good to know who our husbands will be voting for.” Hetty said. “Benjy, what do you think?”

“It’s too soon to tell,” he murmured as he sat down, drawing up a chair next to Hetty.

“About the candidates?”

“About this club. Charlie waxed on about it the other day but didn’t tell me anything of value.”

“You should join.” Penelope placed mugs in front of them, swirling steam lifting fresh mint into the air. “You’ll bring sense into that group. I heard from my cousin Sy that there’s talk of recommending people for public office. He didn’t like some of the names being suggested, but thought you’d do a good job. What do you think? You were saying the other day there were many things you want to fix in this country.”

“I don’t disagree there,” Benjy replied, before a stealing a glance from Hetty. “But I’m not the right person.”

“Surely better than Charlie,” Darlene grumbled. “He shouldn’t be in a position to make decisions about anything more important than the cut of his coat!”

Penelope laughed at this bit, although with a hesitation that Hetty shared. Hetty agreed with the sentiment. Charlie, the husband of another one of her friends, fretted about the cut and style of his clothes so much that they’d taken to calling him “Peacock” until he learned about it and took all the fun out of a good joke. But even before the joke was ruined, Darlene never used it herself. It was unbecoming and rude, she often said, with a stiffly held chin that didn’t waver despite them insisting it was harmless fun. How odd for her to say different now.

“Do you think George would be better suited?” Penelope asked curiously.

“Me? The wife of some politician!” Darlene exclaimed. “Who do you think I am? I’m not—”

Darlene’s words stuttered to a halt, as her face filled with a panic Hetty had seen quite often in the months since that last disastrous tea party with Marianne.

Darlene jerked around to face Benjy, her next words tumbling out of her. “Benjy, have I told you about the leak we have in the roof!”

“Leak,” Benjy echoed, the same word repeated with greater horror by Penelope.

“Yes. A leak. George says the roof is leaking and all signs point to rain in the next few days. That needs to be fixed. It can’t wait. Why don’t we fix it now?” Darlene slammed her sketchbook down on the table. “It’s right this way. Hetty, wait for us to return—don’t go downstairs.”

Jumping like her feet were on fire, Darlene abandoned her chair, her tea, even her baby still lying in the basket on the floor, to rush to the door.

Benjy remained seated, unmoved by this great show of distress.

“Darlene, I can come in the morning if it’s important. It’s too dark.”

“That should hardly be trouble for you,” Hetty said.

Benjy’s eyes narrowed. Her ploy was as obvious as if she jumped around shouting out each detail, but it was working.

Benjy was a blacksmith by trade, but he enjoyed fixing things regardless of their components and make. The more broken something was, the more of a challenge it became.

She smiled and the last of his resistance crumbled.

“You should take a look,” she urged.

“I suppose I should.” Benjy rose from the table and gave Hetty a look filled with more concern than when they concocted a plan to strike at the kidnappers. “Don’t cause too much trouble while I’m gone.”

Satisfied, Hetty turned to Penelope. “Marianne is downstairs, isn’t she?”

Her friend sighed, even as she reached down to pick up the now squirming bundle of blankets and settled it in her lap.

“Who else would run Darlene out of her own apartment?” Penelope pulled away the blankets to free Lorene’s torso, and lightly rocked the baby in her arms. “I do give Darlene a bit of credit. She lasted a fair bit longer than I thought. She probably had hopes Marianne would leave, but more people came and made themselves comfortable.”

“Maybe I should do Darlene a favor.”

“No.”

Penelope shook her head, and even Darlene’s baby had judgment in her large brown eyes about the potential havoc that could come from another screaming match with Marianne Richardson.

“I’m not going to kick a hornet’s nest.” Hetty said, “I’m a bit more subtle than that.”

Penelope gave Hetty a wan smile. “That you are, but before you go down there, there’s something I wanted to show you.”

Penelope waved a hand. The Arrow Star Sigil whipped past and struck a cabinet drawer. Under Penelope’s guidance a squat green vial floated across the room until it landed on the table.

Hetty recoiled at the sight.

The last time she saw a vial like that one before her, she’d had to break the fingers of a dead woman to pry it free.

Hetty held it in her hand. The more she studied it, the more she had to stop herself from smashing the bottle onto the table.

“Where did you get this?”

“A customer at work showed it to me.” Penelope’s mouth curled into a wry smile. “Wanted to know if we had something similar on our shelves. It was lucky she showed it to me. Old Midge would have lost her temper. We got enough trouble without charlatans cutting up our trade.” The baby soothed, she settled Lorene back into the basket. “It’s the same kind isn’t?”

“It’s the same.”

Penelope expelled a breath. “How dreadful.”

Dreadful was not a big enough word. People sold the moon and the tides as far back as anyone could remember, with a wink and a laugh as they cheated people out of their hard-earned money. Doing it with brewed magic was just the latest variation.

But brewed magic was a finicky beast. It required patience, time, and access to ingredients and tools that often proved hard to gather. Those that knew how to draw magic from herbs were masters of a craft, and shops like Penelope’s lost customers from such antics. These swindlers sold potions and brews to straighten hair, lighten skin color, even to make a womb comfortable for a child. However, as with most claims, the small promises delivered but the big ones didn’t.

With a heart full of hope, a woman named Emily Wells had drunk an entire vial of the potion, and it brought her to death’s arms. It was a simple case, the culprit easily found. But solving the mystery was not enough for Hetty. The death was an accident, but Emily Wells would have not died if her mother, her husband, and even her friends, didn’t pressure her to have a baby her body could not carry.

“I know where this woman is,” Hetty said. “She promised to stop, but she must have forgotten.”

“Must have,” Penelope echoed.

Hetty slipped the vial into her pocket. “I should go find Benjy. Save him from Darlene’s panic. If she wanted to keep me away from Marianne, she didn’t make the best choice.”

“Maybe she did.” Penelope leaned back in her chair and pulled out one of her dreadful gothic romantic novels. “You are looking for them, aren’t you?”

Although Hetty went out the same door that she had seen Darlene and Benjy disappear through, neither were up on the roof.

She stood there for a moment, glancing up at the stars, before she retreated. They couldn’t have gone far. If they weren’t up here, and if they weren’t in Penelope’s apartment, then there was only one other place she needed to check.

Hetty headed back down the stairs. She had just placed her hand on the doorknob to Darlene’s apartment, when she heard someone call her name: “Henrietta,” Charlie said, “I need to talk to you.”

“You may talk,” Hetty swung around to face Marianne’s husband. “That doesn’t mean I’ll listen.”

What little light there was illuminated his surprise. “You’re still mad about the dresses?”

“I,” Hetty hissed, “am mad you took what was meant to be a gift and sold it to others! Maybe it’s my fault for thinking gifts could bridge a peace between Marianne and myself, but that doesn’t mean you weren’t wrong!”

“Your work is worth the price I charged. Did you want to be paid?” Charlie reached into his pocket, “I can get you the money and more if you like. Name a figure.”

She paused, taken aback by this generosity. “Any figure?”

“Any.”

Her answer was on her lips when she saw the gleam in his eyes. He’d tossed bait at her feet, and she’d nearly taken it like a fool!

“No. No money. No listening to a word you have to say.”

“You must! It’s important. At the elm—” Charlie grabbed her arm.

Hetty coolly meet his gaze and held it until Charlie wisely removed his offending hand.

“Please,” he begged, “you must listen.”

The words were a rasp from the back of his throat, raw and stripped of the usual airs and whimsy.

The man who said these words wasn’t Charlie Richardson, the peacock with eyes towards the next bright shiny thing. The man stooping to beg his case was Charlie in a raggedy coat and split shoes with eyes darting to shadows.

Charlie sought her out for trouble he couldn’t handle. But if it was truly dire, he wouldn’t waste time talking to her. Whenever Charlie ended up in trouble it was usually related to things that Benjy could handle. Talking to her was a delay. Unless of course that was the point. She was here to field his request, since he seemed to think Benjy wouldn’t even consider it.

“Can I do something about it right now?” Hetty asked.

“No, but—”

“Then it can wait,” she opened the door, “Tell us together. It’s the better choice.”

“Only choice, you mean.”

“Why, yes.” Hetty paused in the door, letting conversation in the next room wash over them. Beams of light striped his face into patches of light and shadow. “Did you think you would get special treatment?”

He didn’t have an answer for her, or if he did, hadn’t found the right words when she shut the door behind her.

Upon entering the apartment, Hetty spotted Marianne right away.

It was hard not to. Marianne stood resplendent in a crimson and overwrought dress from Lord and Crown, a sight that stood in contrast to the dark suits of the men and their wives clustered around her.

Of the group of friends Hetty had formed over the years, Marianne was the only one that did not talk about the days when she had been enslaved, skipping over that chunk of time as if nothing mattered before she arrived in Philadelphia. Darlene claimed it was because of painful memories, but Hetty knew it to be tied to Marianne’s ascent into the insular upper class of the city.

Whether this was Charlie’s plan or her own, Marianne wielded the gifts she was born with, a golden-brown complexion, dainty features, and softly curling hair, to fit right in with the elite of the city. What she was aiming for was hard to tell. At first Hetty assumed it was for a better life, but these days she wondered if was to forget the past. If that was true, Marianne was doing an astonishingly good job of it.

With Marianne drawing attention, Hetty slipped into the room without even needing a spell to hide her presence.

It wasn’t long before she spotted Benjy. Like Marianne, it wasn’t hard. He, too, stood apart from the crowd around him, but in this case, it was his rough and muddied attire. He seemed perfectly at ease, despite being locked into a conversation with Darlene’s husband George and few others.

“I’m not surprised to see you,” George declared heartily, as Hetty approached. “Everyone,” he slurred, “this is Benjamin’s lovely wife, Henrietta. She’s going to be a teacher at my school.”

“I think someone told you a lie.” Hetty eyed George’s flushed face, unsure if she should have left Benjy to his fate.

“Why not?” George said. “You know your letters, your numbers, and your stories charm children. You’re good with people.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Hetty said as the other men around them chuckled. “I’m not teaching anyone anything.”

“Not even magic lessons?”

There was a small outcry at that. Even Benjy’s eyebrows lifted at these words. George’s opinions on magic ran pragmatic and practical, the old mindset that came from the plantations. Back in the old days, magic was a handful of star sigils to till the land, aid in the picking of the cash crop of choice or sweep nettles out of the way. In George’s view, there was no room for inventive or cleverly done spell work. For him to even float the idea meant two things. He was either desperate for teachers or drunk.

Hetty leaned towards the latter.

“She’s exceptionally good with magic.” George spun around to the crowd, wagging a hand about. “Every story you heard about these two, they’re all true!” When he didn’t get the response he expected, George blathered on: “You haven’t heard of them? Have none of you heard? Benjamin and Henrietta Rhodes worked as conductors for the Vigilance Society when it was still up and running. You know of Joseph Mills or Della Reynolds? These two brought them up north and a slew of others. Some that are even in this room right now!”

Eyes went to them both, but as always, greater doubt swung around to Hetty.

“Tell them about the barn,” George pressed, staring into Hetty’s general direction, “and the dozen white folks you had to shoot. Or the boat you stole. Or even the cat that saved your skins. To think—all these adventures happened because Henrietta went looking for her sister!”

“Is your sister,” one of the men called, “as pretty as you?”

“That’s a story for another day.” Hetty forced a laugh that she nearly choked on. She needed to leave this room, she needed to leave now. Because in moments they would ask the question people asked when learning of this sliver of her past. And she was in no mood to spin a pleasing lie.

Hetty pushed her way through the group. Benjy followed close behind, whispering what he thought were consoling words.

“Don’t mind him, he was drunk.”

“Anyone could guess that.” Hetty stomped down the stairs, welcoming the rush of cool air against her face. “With him acting as if I was going to be one of his teachers! What was he thinking getting that deep into his cups! Can’t imagine it makes him a good host.”

“He wasn’t down there at first. When Darlene dragged me up to the roof, we found George up there. Apparently, Darlene was not the only one driven from his home.”

“You should have left him to keep company with his liquor. The ledge is too high for him to fall off.”

“Darlene didn’t share your opinion,” Benjy said some amusement, “I think she hoped he’d cause a scene to scatter the crowd. It didn’t work. People that were leaving stayed. He actually improved after looking about the room.”

“I wonder if it was because Charlie wasn’t there to bother him.” Hetty didn’t think that had happened. No one went to George for help outside of grammar lessons and poor advice. If anything, George got drunk for the same reason Darlene ran up to Penelope’s apartment. The sight of the frightful parade of what they were striving for.

Her musings about this subject was broken by Benjy’s next words: “What makes you say that?”

“Charlie twisted my ear with a tale of trouble,” Hetty shrugged. “Said it was important and seemed to think you wouldn’t listen to his ramblings.”

A shadow that wasn’t from the lights above their heads fell along her husband’s face. His next words were oddly stilted.

“Is someone dying?”

“He didn’t say so.” She tried to hide it, but Hetty’s curiosity stirred at her husband’s words.

She and Marianne had a falling out that had been long coming, but Benjy and Charlie met regularly to play cards. Or at least she thought they did.

“Then he was right,” Benjy said petulantly. “I won’t listen to him.”

“What if I convince you otherwise?”

“If you cared about what he had to say, we’d already be talking to him.”

“I didn’t, but now that I know you’re against it, I do.”

“Not tonight.”

“Not tonight,” Hetty echoed, not wishing to wage a battle when she didn’t care about the outcome. There would be plenty of other chances to talk with Charlie.

After all, Charlie never gave up without a fight.

Interlude

Late Fall 1858

Boykin Farm, SC

Before her sister had come back from the Big House to tell her, Hetty knew good and well that someone had run off.

“You heard the alarm?” Esther asked as she plopped down on her pallet.

“Didn’t have to,” Hetty grunted. The heat of flames ran along her neck, and it was all she could do to keep from tugging at her collar. “Punishments started. Don’t look at me like that,” she added when Esther’s head whipped around. “This ain’t nothing that hasn’t happened before.”

Esther settled back down, running a finger through the dirt floor of their cabin, her next words soft and filled with resentment. “It shouldn’t be happening at all.”

The silver collar at Hetty’s neck, at the neck of every slave that could do magic, was always on Hetty’s mind. There was no way it couldn’t be. It was always there. Pinching as she slept, rubbing her skin raw every time she moved, and leaving her shivering when cold weather reared its head. The overseer took pleasure in grabbing it whenever she looked at him funny, jerking her head up so he could blow stale smoke into her face. The collar marked her. It told everyone that set eyes on her that she was magic enough to be trouble. And the ones that didn’t know that would know she was a runaway when the collar started ringing like a bell.

This was all very bad, but not as much as the Punishments.

The Punishments sent sharp pricks like needles jabbing into your neck, or made your skin burn like fire that seared you until you couldn’t breathe.

Hetty got enough of them that she knew how to push down the pain—to reduce it to a dull ache, one that never quite went away. But usually she had time to prepare. Just like you knew you were going to get slapped for saying the wrong thing. You do magic, you hurt for it.

But this morning was too new for her to have done anything wrong. That meant the pain she’d just felt was from someone else kicking up dust.

“Who was it? I know it was someone magic.”

“Solomon,” Esther said. “I heard them talking as I left Little Miss’s room. I hope he makes it to freedom.”

Hetty could only grunt, not wanting to tell her sister that was his only option if he wanted to live.

Usually, Hetty worked in the weaving room, stitching and sewing the day away, but in order to keep their mother’s garden patch, she swapped places with Nan for the change of a moon. That put Hetty working in the kitchen under Tilly’s blistering tongue, but it was a worthwhile trade. The patch still had plants their mother had touched and cared for, and it made Esther happy to keep it going since she’d taken over their mother’s healing duties.

Hetty kept thinking about those plants and her sister’s smile all morning as she helped prep supper. Her pleasant thoughts made a strong barrier against the rough side of Tilly’s words.

The pain at her neck was harder to ignore. With each breath it got sharper and sharper, until Hetty had to put down the knife before she lopped her thumb instead of the carrot.

“Stop your cloud gazing,” snapped Tilly. “You might be Connie’s girl but unless you got a bit of her skill you don’t get to sit around. Shoo, get that pan into the fire. You can do that, can’t you?”

Biting down on her tongue, Hetty held the pan over the flames, shifting and shaking it as needed. It was when she lifted it to shake it once more that fire kissed her skin, making strong tears spring to her eyes. The pan slipped right out of her hands, and fear plunged her forward as she saw every terrible thing that would follow if she burned Master’s breakfast. When her hands grabbed the bottom of the pan, relief was her most prominent feeling—before flames lapped against her palms.

She didn’t scream.

Others did. But somehow the noise never left her throat.

She felt the pain but nothing else. Everything flowed around her. People pulling her back, the hot pan being stepped over, Tilly’s horrified face. And then, finally, Esther was there to do something about Hetty’s red and bubbling hands.

The wrappings hadn’t been replaced twice before Hetty was summoned into the parlor the next day.

Mistress lounged on a chaise, rubbing the ears of the evil creature in her lap. The dog didn’t growl at Hetty as it usually did. Perhaps it found something to pity in her with the bandages.

The room was full of beautiful things: the curtain, the rug on the floor, the pictures hanging on the wall. Painted pictures, she remembered. These folks called it art.

The only thing that wasn’t beautiful in the room was the overseer. He was perched on the edge of one of the dining room chairs, sweat dripping off his forehead and mud clinging to his boots.

“Mister Tibbs,” Mistress said. “Take a look at her hands. See those bandages? She got burned because you went above and beyond your place.”

“She’s collared,” Tibbs stumbled over his words, “I was told—”

“Yes, I know,” she sliced into his words. “My husband gave you orders to punish the collared slaves. I have no problem with that. But this girl is mine. I came into this household with five slaves, and any children they bore became my property. I can’t breed her since she has too much magic, but she’s the best seamstress in the county. I’ve gained favor by lending her out to my neighbors and gotten invitations I only dreamed about. You best pray her hands heal properly, for you cost me a great deal of money.”

“But she wasn’t supposed to be in the kitchen,” the overseer stammered. “She switched her placement around—”

“Doesn’t matter. You’re still fired.”

“Mistress, I—”

A wand slid into the slender, milk-pale hand, though no words came to light it with a spell. “You’re fired. Leave before I have my husband forcibly remove you. And you,” Mistress said to Hetty, as the overseer stumbled out. “If your hands are not healed by the end of winter, you’re going to the fields. Your mother was my favorite. I took good care of you on account of her. But if you can’t sew, you’re no use to me.”

Hetty said the right things, mumbling and stumbling over words just as Mistress wanted her to, all while staring at one of the paintings on the wall. And as she did so, she realized that it wasn’t just art. It was something far more important.

It was a map.

“The healing salve won’t work if you keep drawing in the ground with your fingers,” Esther said, as she tended the little plants in their mother’s patch, keeping her body in the way of anyone who might look over at Hetty. “You ain’t drawing star sigils?” She paused and considered something worse. “Or words?”

“No,” Hetty said. Esther’s shoulders had just relaxed when she added, “This is a map. I saw it in the parlor. It shows the land around here and beyond.” Hetty pointed at the messy marks. “I don’t remember most of it. There are lines and colors, and words. I need to get it all in my mind, tell it over and over like a story and then I’ll—”

“Run?” Esther whispered.

They talked about running after Mama died, but it was just talk and wishes.

Grown men couldn’t make it past the edge of the land without being dragged back beaten to the edge of death’s door. What chance did they have? The few words she had learned to read wouldn’t be enough. The magic she knew was of no help either, not with this collar on her neck.

Hetty turned her hands over to stare at the blood and dirt mixed on her bandages.

Papa had played the fiddle at fancy dinners in the Big House and got paid plenty by the white folks who liked his music. He was even lent out to play at nearby farms. But when Mistress found out he was saving to buy them all free she pointed her wand at his hands and broke every single bone. She did something with her magic, because they wouldn’t heal right no matter how many healing balms and prayers Mama wrapped around them. When he couldn’t even lift a hoe without it slipping from his curled fingers, they sold him the next time a minor debt needed settling.

The day her father went away was the only time Hetty had seen tears in her mother’s eyes. Not because he was gone, but because they couldn’t do a thing about it.

“Yes, I’m running,” Hetty said. “And I’m making a plan for both of us.”

“It should be just you.” Esther shook her head. “I’d just slow you down.”

“I’m not leaving you here. Even when Mama was bleeding everywhere and crying out in pain, she grabbed me, looked me in the eye, and made me swear to look after you.”

Esther stiffened. “Don’t make up stories about things like that.”

“No story,” Hetty said. “It’s the truth. She asked me with her dying breath. I promised I would. That’s the sort of promise you don’t break unless you want something bad to happen.”

The moon had grown full once and then halfway again before Hetty’s hands fully healed. During that time, she slipped into the parlor whenever she could to study the map, spending each night tracing it back into the dirt. She even started to make sense of the words. She kept in her mind the letters of each word and matching them with words she saw in other places. They didn’t all fit, but the bits and pieces started to make something.

Nan did poorly in the weaving room during this time. Mistress fussed and fretted about the poor quality of her dresses and linens, while still threatening to sell Hetty if her hands didn’t heal properly. Out of spite, Hetty kept the bandages on a full week more, taking a tip from one of the house maids, who complained about stomach pains each month to get out of work.

Even though she waited on purpose, the day she chose to take the bandages off for good was the very day Solomon was dragged back to the Big House, more dead than alive.

The news sent spiders running down her back.

“How can someone be mostly dead?” Hetty asked later that night after Esther had crept back into their cabin after hours spent healing the dying man.

“His spirit was already leaving,” Esther said. “It was being pulled away by the Great Spider.”

“Not spider,” Hetty corrected, dragging her left finger to make new lines in the dirt. “The Great Weaver is the one who creates the thread of life, measures it, and cuts it when your time is done.”

“Don’t matter who it is.” Esther turned over, her eyes reflecting the light of their candle stub. “Solomon should be dead. He’s got nothing but horrors waiting for him.”

Hetty’s fingers stilled. “Sold down river?”

Esther shook her head. “They’re going to do to him what they did to Martin.”

Martin had been gone from the plantation for several years before Mistress came here as a young bride, but everyone knew what had happened to him. Wrapped to a post with chains, Master’s father had slashed a knife in Martin’s flesh until he left a carving of the Cursed Star Sigil. This was the final punishment for the Collared who dared to use more magic than what they were allowed. Many with the mark died within days, the lucky ones by nightfall. Martin lived on for weeks, forcibly given water and food to prolong his suffering. Whispers in the quarters say it was only his body that lived, that his spirit had been long since snatched. But that did little to change the end of the story.

“Solomon broke his collar and fled. They can’t sell him now. Price is too poor, and when that happens—” Esther fell silent for a moment. “I don’t think he’ll make it,” she said, but then added hopefully, “his heart is weak, and his spirit is confused. He keeps mumbling these things that don’t make a lick of sense. Like this bit, ‘Ask the Aspen on the Hill and check the gourd in the little bear.’”

Hetty fell silent.

“What? It’s just nonsense,” Esther said.

“No, it’s not.”

Sketched in the ground before her was not the outline of the county but a world bigger than she could ever imagine. “Aspen Hill.” Hetty pointed to a space where she had only attempted to draw out the letters. While in the dirt it was nothing, she saw the words as they appeared on the map. “That’s a place near here. What else did he say?”

“Lots of things,” Esther drew back, “funny names and such. It’s a song of a confused spirit.”

“It’s a song, but he’s not confused. Tell me the rest.”

Esther still frowned, but she repeated the bits and pieces she remembered. Her confusion turned to wonder as Hetty pointed to each place on the map.

“It’s a song that tells us the way to leave. It’s probably how he left in the first place. This tells us how to stay away from the traps and safeguards!”

“It’s not a good one.”

Hetty’s excitement faded. “No, it ain’t.”

Still Hetty studied the map far longer than she usually did before she swept her fingers into the dirt.

Solomon wasn’t made an example in the end. He died a few days later writhing in pain from a sickness that Esther claimed was too far gone to be cured with any herbal remedy.

No one questioned Esther too hard about that truth.

As Solomon died, he screamed out curses and a jumble of words at such a frightful pitch that Master actually had Mistress sent away so the house could be checked for any evil curses cast with a dying man’s last breaths.

“Not sure how they know what to find,” Hetty said as she sewed up the tears in Esther’s good dress. “White folks don’t understand a thing about our magic.”

“Both the stars and the herbs,” Esther added with a laugh, as she wound string around a bundle of herbs.

“The skies and rivers, and rain and sunlight,” Hetty recited.

“The wind and soil, the storms and the calm,” they said together, repeating the words their mother had sung to them as her own mother had once sung to her. “The magic is the world and it moves through us. There are words and rhyme and—”

Hetty’s words cut off with a cry as the collar clamped tight around her.

“What’s wrong?” Esther crouched next to her. “You didn’t do any magic!”

“Something else,” Hetty spat. “Words have magic!”

“Hetty,” Esther said, and what else Esther had to say was lost as the pain reached the point where Hetty couldn’t breathe. This was just like what happened in the kitchen—but to make matters worse, now it was happening in front of Esther. Esther had never seen her like this. Never saw her crouched over in pain and unable to do more than let the pain run over her like rain. Hetty had always tried to keep this from her sister, to protect her like Mama had made her swear. She was failing. Failing the only thing she could do in this terribly cruel world.

“Stop,” Hetty said, as she grasped at the collar, pulling uselessly against it, her sewing needle prickling against her skin. “Stop!”

Hetty kept pulling and pulling, and then the pain was gone.

The metal cooled and Hetty’s hands fell away . . . and so did the silver collar.

It fell into the dirt before her. Perfect twin halves spotted with blood.

If it had been a snake, they would have not moved faster away from it.

“What did you do?” Esther’s eyes were round. “Was that magic?”

“Don’t know.” She prodded the closest half to her with her sewing needle. It didn’t spark. No bells rang. “Don’t care. Did it glow when it came off?”

Esther shook her head.

“Then it’s dead. We have time. They can’t use it to follow us.”

Esther swallowed hard but her next word didn’t tremble. “Where?”

“North,” Hetty clawed at the packed dirt, erasing the map. “We follow the stars.”

“That’s not a place,” Esther said rather seriously. “That’s a direction.”

Hetty almost laughed. She could always count on her little sister to find humor in the most terrible of times.

“It’s not. I don’t know where I want to go. I just know we can’t stay here.”

“I know a place,” Esther said. “I heard it healing some sick folks in the next farm over. They were talking bad about it, so that means it’s good place for people like us.”

“Where’s that?”

“Philadelphia.”

“I don’t know where that is,” Hetty said, burying the collar, “but let’s find out.”

The Unfinished Land

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A sweeping, Elizabethan historical fantasy from an internationally renowned author that evokes the seafaring adventures of Robert Louis Stephenson with the magic of The Bear and the Nightingale.

Broken Armada

Reynard Shotwood, no longer a boy, not yet a man, had pushed the last of his dead shipmates overboard two days before. Rubbing crusted salt from his eyes, he tried to say another prayer for them and for himself, but his lips were broken and his tongue filled his mouth so he could not make the words.

His uncle and the crew, English fishermen from the coastal town of Southwold, had been cut to pieces by grapeshot from a Spanish galleass. Except for one finger, missing its tip to the knuckle, Reynard had not been touched. But now, a week or more later, he was parched and starving.

Unfamiliar currents carried him through a thick, night-gray fog that looped and writhed over the toppled mast and the shredded sails like a sky filled with maggots. He had spent long, numb hours watching the bloodless, broken bodies of his uncle, the uncle’s partner in the boat, and the partner’s son bump and bob against the timbers and upper step of the mast, caught in eddies that seemed to mimic the whorls in the fog, the bodies rolling now and then to show their faces—if they still had faces—and stare blankly, resentfully, as if he should help them climb back aboard and resume their duties.

“Yare, fast away!” He could almost hear his uncle’s cry as their boat tried to flee the Spanish; but it was only a patting breeze and waves slopping through the scuppers. Now the bodies were gone, sunk or grabbed by sharks, those snapping dogs of the sea—but the fog still turned the sun into a cold moon and shaded the moon as dim and gray as death itself.

The sloop-rigged hoy, once as hardworking a boat as ever harvested the sea, managed to stay afloat even with its larboard a mass of wrenched decking thrust through with broken timbers. The starboard, rising a few fingers above the dark, lapping water, likely held a bubble, but soon that would leak away and the wreck would sink and no one would ever know how long Reynard had been out here, alive, alone—but of course not afraid. Not now. The worst had happened, other than dying, and fishermen often died. Their names were carved into boards nailed on the walls of his family church—a good Protestant church. But dead all the same, and so many.

And now many more.

The great battle off the coast of Flanders had been long and fierce. Boats from Southwold had left their dozing harbor to serve the English fleet, at the command of Lord Walsyngham and the Queen, though the fishing season was but half done and many families might go hungry—but the desperate need of Elizabeth and of England against Philip’s devils overcame village sense.

With the awful memory of the seaborne power the English ships had faced, it was easy for Reynard to imagine the Duke of Parma’s soldiers filling the streets of London with forests of muskets and half-pikes, crested steel helms thick and shiny as shingle on a beach—and row upon row of great bronze Spanish cannons rolling, flaming, and bucking, blowing up homes and churches, intent on punishing all who followed the faith of Henry and Elizabeth and not Mary of ill regard. Maybe there was no home to return to.

Not the best sailor or apprentice, he had never wanted to go to sea, and yet had never found his place on land. His mother, a once-lovely woman who had withered early under the toll of being a fisherman’s widow, lamented her son’s pointless fascination with bushes and birds, ferrets and mice, snakes and turtles—more interested in studying the insides of fish than catching or making them ready for market. He could see her now, a sallow-faced, gray-haired figure, with a perpetual half-smile—though she was no idiot, and had taught him letters early on—pounding out washing or packing oysters and lobsters into barrels, graced with slimy, odorous seaweed, for sale in any of the five larger towns nearby, or even in London after a night journey, to avoid the heat of the summer sun.

Reynard was too numb for regrets, though he suspected that if he lived much longer, an unlikely prospect, he would have many. Could he regret not being more grateful for a home and a roof—though a leaky roof, thatch unchanged for years—or regret not being a better nephew, which he did not, not yet, and not much? Perhaps he could regret not having planned a way to keep the hoy clear of the galleass. His mind worked that way, regretting the undone and impossible, not the undone but doable. He preferred contemplating inventions and miracles, not plotting and planning actual work. He preferred reading to playing but had neither books nor companions, since his life was spent in service, mostly, to his uncle, with barely a day off in a month.

In what was left of the hoy, Reynard had recovered a cask of salt cod and two butts of water. One butt had been holed and the second, poorly coopered, had leaked dry. The hoy had been meant to convey stores to the Queen’s great ships, but the promised supplies had not arrived in Southwold by the time the boats put out to sea. There should have been more victuals for the English fleet, from the shore, from the Queen, before they engaged—so his uncle had complained. Only Reynard had lived long enough to suffer for it. His uncle was a hard man, a tough master, but fair enough and smart, and despite everything, Reynard had loved him as a grizzled, thick-browed, heavy-jawed, masculine mountain in his young life.

Maybe now, pulling his feet from the water and going through these memories, he could find his regrets. But for the nonce, sharks were of more concern. Their low triangular fins popped up here and there, swishing, probing, no doubt remembering they had found food around this wreck before. He did not want to further flavor the ocean with his toes.

He rose on wobbly legs, feet wedged against the gunwale to see any change in the flat gray sea. No change. In the days since the battle, the fog had tempted with its promise of moisture. He had carefully gathered the remains of the spritsail and knuckled a dip in the canvas to catch fog and rain, but the fog did not condense or drip, and there had been no rain since the easterly winds and violent storms had broken up the Spanish fleet.

Reynard stared at the barrel of salt cod. At his present level of thirst, the thick white flesh, hard as wood, was worse than useless, with no water but seawater in which to soak it. Salt from either could drive him mad.

Having been fishing and delivering freight for only three years, Reynard had not yet had time to absorb all his uncle’s sea lore, but he suspected—he felt, in a strange way—that the currents which drove the wreck were carrying him north and west. For most of a day, he passed through a slightly brackish flow, probably out of the Baltic, where shoals of herring and mackeral, along with sturgeon and fat bream and plaice, drew out English boats to compete with the Basques, the Dutch, and the French. On their first fishing expedition, his uncle had dipped a ladle in that water and offered it to his lips, to let him taste it, to remember the flavor of its source and learn how to find his way by tongue as well as eye. Now the sea was colder and saltier. That did not seem to match any currents his uncle had taught him, not for this time of year, when the North Sea warmed. Perhaps the great battle, with its flashes and cries, its explosions and whistling shot, had frightened the sea into its own madness.

By morning of what he was sure would be his last day, Reynard’s cracked skin was streaked with blood and salt and a long gulp of seawater seemed a good, a necessary, option, if only to soften his lips and relieve his parched throat. Still, perhaps in honor of his dead uncle, he had so far resisted, knowing that he would shortly thereafter follow his shipmates to the bottom.

Reynard’s head lolled. He tried to stay awake night after night and was now losing that struggle. Even as something powerful bumped his foot, he could not open his eyes, until abruptly he heard deep thumps and great splashes. He pulled his feet up tight against his butt and blinked until he saw, across the half-submerged deck, that a long, silvery-gray shark had pushed up to get at him and was stuck—unable to thrash free and back to the sea. Now it twisted and tossed its long scimitar tail, and gaped the most frightful open-jaw threats inches from his ankles and toes, its deep-sunk eyes intent on either dining or causing the ship to break apart. Reynard was already soaked, but rolled over the gunwale aft and grabbed for a splintered rudder bar. Without thought of the danger, so close was he already to death, he braced his feet against the broken planks, leaned out over the deck, wedged the bar under the shark’s heaving middle, then hunched along on his knees and fairly lifted the great fish, teeth and dead eyes and all, back into the sea.

After crawling aft to the only dry patch that remained, he leaned back, felt his toes to make sure all remained, and continued his shivering and weary watch. The sea, gray and uniform beneath greenish-gray sky, resumed its boring mien.

Scrawny at the best of times, with a knife-cut shock of thick black hair, by looks and attitude Reynard favored his mother’s side of the family, who claimed descent from the ancient peoples who had built the great stone circles. “Stone folk,” his grandmother had called them, “and specially the men.”

His mother had taught Reynard how to notch sticks or boards in Ogham, or sign secretly on his arm with his fingers, called Rankalva, which she explained had been taught to humans thousands of seasons before by great Ogmios, and on occasion dropped into a speech called Tinker’s cant, a kind of bastard Irish sometimes heard on wagons offering to do light blacksmithing, knife-honing and scythe-sharpening—gruffly spoken by dark, black-haired peoples, women wild, men quiet and shrewd, jacks of all trade traveling horse-and-sheep-pounded pathways across Britain. His grandmother had once belonged to those folks, and his mother still proudly boasted of her girlhood, and of how women survived and even prospered in that life.

But Reynard had since his father’s death felt there would be no prosperity or fortune in fishing with his uncle. Worse, he dreaded the sea. His fear of water had brought out a cruel streak in his uncle, who did his best to shock it out of him, and nearly succeeded. Once he had tied a rope around Reynard and dragged him along behind the hoy for several miles. The fishermen had watched closely to make sure he was not drowning, and he did manage in a way to learn to swim. But what appeared to follow—acceptance and a better attitude—masked a bitter hatred, strangely not of his uncle, but of the source of all their livelihoods—the sea, that forced them into such a desperate existence. So desperately sad had he become for the brusque, brawny man who had been his father, as the years passed and his memory faded, and so anxious had he become for novelty and wider fields, and to get away from the water and the smell of fish, that at age twelve he had run away from the coast and walked west across fallow fields and over hedgerows and along farmer’s lanes until nightfall, surrounded by bird song, light airs, and a boundless, floating sense of weary accomplishment.

On that first moonless and starless night, hunger had replaced his floating ease and cold had set in, along with guilt. He had huddled within sight of quiet shade-wrapped cows in a long wicker enclosure, observed with envy the goings-on and passing candles of a farmer’s house, and finally snuck into the low, decrepit barn and wrapped himself in dirty, unturned hay, sour and wet, trying to sleep and not succeeding until cock’s crow and a pale sunrise.

There was nothing for it but to beg at the farmer’s door or return to the coast, back to Southwold, the boat, his uncle, and his mother. He decided against begging. On his way back, he encountered a half-drunken press gang reeling over the road near Aldebergh, alternately singing and calling out, hoping to fill the Queen’s own ships of war. Reynard’s black hair helped him hide in the shadow of a hedgerow. “Sir Frauncis Drake’s ship,” a sailor cried in a voice sharp as a billhook, “built in this very town of Aldebergh, doth demand thee!”

Here was Reynard’s chance to flee a life of fishing and village monotony! But as much as Reynard admired Drake (and what Englishman did not?), this would still be a life at sea and not for him. He did his best to stay silent and still as he observed through a screen of cow parsley, grass, and hawthorn six sailors and two soldiers, swaying saps and cudgels from their broad belts, and towing two skinny, sad-looking lads bearing badges of resistance—bruises on faces and arms, ropes binding their wrists. Reynard did not wish another and stupider set of masters.

And yet now, three years later, here he was anyway, lost at sea like Oxenham’s men in his uncle’s tales. He had no idea what had happened to Drake’s ship in the engagement with the Armada, after the famed captain had captured a Spanish galleon and brought it to London to strip it of shot and gunpowder. Maybe Drake was dead or lost as well. Maybe he was alive and nearby, and soon they would meet, and the hero would rescue Reynard . . . What a tale that would be!

He tried to bring up some spit but there was none to be had. Dry, rough tongue scraping cheeks brought only blood.

After the press gang had passed, Reynard fell asleep beneath the hedgerow, and then awakened to a strange black hand, streaked and lined with thorny white, reaching through the hawthorn to shake him. With a start, he had scrambled out of the thicket, brushing away leaves and twigs and dirt, and stood before a man who might have been older than he, or younger—hard to know, with his strange color and demeanor. Like an unholy spirit, the man had watched Reynard through eyes whose whites were black and whose pupils were a pale purple. Even in bright morning light, he appeared blacker than night, his skin blackest where touched by sun, yet brighter pale green-gray in the shadows. This bizarrely reversed fellow wore a ragged black and silver coat and breeches—and his hair hung elfin white streaked with green and blue.

“Thou must reach the island,” the dark visitor had told him. “Get thee swift to sea and find thy way to where the Crafters scrub and moil. That will be thy true beginning.”

“Who are you?” Reynard had asked in a trembling voice.

The dark man with purple eyes then faded, leaving Reynard alone on the road beside the hedgerow—alone and frightened. Later, the most memorable part of that odd vision had been that the man’s shadow was itself white. He had cast a white shadow.

The nearer Reynard had come to Southwold, the less he had felt comfortable with the dark man’s memory, dream or sorcery, trouble either way! And so he had tried to forget about him and told nobody, not even his mother, with whom he sometimes confided his dreams. He still had no explanation. But it was apparent he might not need to drink seawater to lose his mind.

Waves sloshed over his legs. Reynard stared at the worn fingers of his right hand, lifting them one after another, testing their flexibility. First he rearranged and re-tied the filthy, bloody tag of cloth on his little finger, serving as a bandage. The tag fell off and he saw that the old clot had closed over the exposed knuckle, making the bandage little more than a cushion. But he pushed it back over the wound and held his hand in closer, under his arm, moaning softly. After a time, he took out his hand and laid the fingers as straight as he could along his left arm and arranged, by folding and extending, a series of Ogham symbols, engaging in Rankalva—spelling out letter by letter old Irish words, as his grandmother had taught him, and as his mother had on occasion signed to him when she wanted chores done. “Do not show this to thine uncle,” his mother had advised. “He is unhappy with my side of the family. Oh, he is an honorable man, comes to that, but not ripe for such heresies . . .”

The letters and words, dancing from the fingers both injured and raw, brought him comfort. He could still shape the necessary letters, even though his hand throbbed. Somehow, that seemed very important, though it was a skill he had never found very useful after his grandmother’s death.

His uncle had been no-nonsense, straight as a staff and just as blunt in his opinions—unlike Reynard’s father, his brother, who had married, gambled, drank, had a son, and then died, leaving the uncle to take up the family and feed and find work for Reynard, who had always borne a distinct resemblance, black hair and all, to his grandfather, also a tinker, ne’er-do-well, and gambler—so his uncle had claimed, with quiet dismay at how life plagued and challenged sensible men.

He closed his eyes briefly, then opened them and saw nothing changed. But his fingers had a life of their own.

Old Goidelic words now danced on them, spinning a silent tale of the Anakim, powerful giants who had once lived in the Holy Land, vexing Moses and Joshua, and upon being pushed out of those countries, had moved to Ireland and Scotland. There, many centuries before, they had married into the dark Picts and other tribes and had acted as scouts and beacons for the even darker Roma, their distant cousins—according to his grandmother. “Stone people, and big,” she had confided. “I met one once, long ago. Handsome and very large. Thought I to marry him, but mine own mither would hae none o’ it.”

Reynard had once asked the dotty old priest of Aldebergh about the Anakim, and the priest had scoffed and suggested he read his Wycliffe. “Or seek’st thou a dark grammary, to learn magic? Thou hast that evil, gypsy look, I wot.”

Neither his uncle nor his mother possessed so expensive and rare a thing as a family Bible. And besides, through lack of books, Reynard’s reading skills were haphazard, though he was swift enough with Ogham and the finger-forms that spelled out words to those who wished to hide them.

Still, his grandmother’s secret signs had not satisfied. He had wished to read about and learn of all the places and histories and fables and other glorious things that book-words described. Four months back, one cloudy, spring afternoon, he had used his one free day to venture out of the small fishing town and, unannounced, knock on the door of a man known to be a tutor in Aldebergh. The external beams of the instructor’s two-story, half-timbered house were painted pink and the door was set with purple, stamped-glass windows in leaden frames. Reynard had knocked several times, at first light raps, then heavy bangs, on the thick oaken door, and asked the small stooped man who answered if he had books. Dubious, bald-headed, wearing a sagging, great-shouldered coat over a long gray gown, the instructor had looked him over briefly for weapons, then shrugged and led this strange boy inside. In a dark-shelved inner apartment, away from windows and sun, by the smoky light of a brass candle, Reynard had stared in green envy at the instructor’s shelves of vellum-bound books, dozens of them, spines pale gray or tan, with titles calligraphed on their spines in sepia or black ink. The instructor had held out a clutching hand, rubbed his fingers, and studied Reynard with sucked-in cheeks and pinched lips. “How much money doth your family possess?” he had asked.

“I come from fisherfolk.”

“So . . . very little?” This made the man’s face turn red as a slice of beef. Unable to pay, Reynard had been shown the door, with a kick on his bum for farewell.

As he had made his return to Southwold through the gloaming, the same press gang, minus sad boys, almost caught him a second time, but he escaped through a half-overgrown wicker gate and fled through a copse alive with bird screeches. At least there had been no dark man with a white shadow.

With his fingers, he shaped more of his grandmother’s words, concluding stanzas to ancient songs he did not understand, filled with nonsense lists and riddles and begging equally nonsensical answers that nobody had ever explained—then sighed and folded both hands into fists. The bandage fell off again. This time, he did not replace it.

All of it was nonsense for a fisher boy, nonsense as useless as salt cod in a barrel. Would that the Anakim could rise again and vanquish England’s enemies! But they did not, and would not, ever. This was no longer such a world.

For months now, all England—and certainly the northeast coastal towns—had experienced a numbing terror inspired by actual threats, but promoted by the Queen’s own henchman: agents of Walsyngham and whoever could be encouraged or commanded to cry in the village squares or carry alarming handbills from town to town. Weeks before the battle, dire warnings had been posted at inns and around wells and on the docks. Each village was asked to help the effort against the Spanish by contributing ships and boats. Some villages demurred, made excuses; bet against the Queen, some said, a dangerous treason if the Spanish were defeated. Reynard read well enough to feel concern, but understood better the fear his uncle had expressed that not to give over the use of their hoy would bring down the Queen’s anger. Beloved as the Queen was by most not Catholic, no one wished her servant Walsyngham’s disapproval, and so Southwold had eventually compelled twelve boats, nine pinnaces and three hoys, to join the fleet.

Farmers as well were reluctant to donate crops and animals to supply the navy or the coastal defenses. Rarely traveling more than ten miles from their land, these yeomen and landowners had difficulty imagining, in their inland fastnesses, a broad, wet ocean. Such, his uncle said, was what it meant to be English these days—surrounded by devils, and the farmers and highborn on shore caught in tides of ignorance and stingy greed.

“For which God willing I’ll soon die,” Reynard murmured, then cringed as his lower lip split, and not for the first time.

The fog! The cursed fog filled the sky with weird shapes. Devil’s fog, devil’s war, devil’s time—and his life had scarce begun.

He could no longer keep his eyes open, even knowing what he now saw might be the last he would ever see.

The salt crusting his eyelids crackled.

He dropped into dark misery.

Somehow, the visions would not leave him.

“Wilt thou tak’st these signs to some who wait?”

Reynard did not bother to open his eyes. He was raw inside from the knotted string of memories and visions, with no way of knowing which was what. There was nobody and nothing beyond his eyelids to see, he knew that already. And besides, he did not need to open his eyes, as the lids themselves had become clear as stamped-glass panes, useless to block such specters.

And yet . . .

A well-dressed gentleman stood before him, shoes set solid on the sun-touched water. At least his coloring and figure were not reversed. A fancy ostrich plume adorned his well-shaped and expensive hat. Reynard, who seemed to watch from all around, saw the gentleman’s pleasant smile and knew that something more was wanted of him. This was a man of privilege. Even for a vision, being so well-dressed showed money and power, and so he must needs be polite.

“Noble sir,” he murmured.

“Fine lad!” The be-plumed gentleman leaned in and stretched out his arm. “I have summat to teach thee about the heavens and their ways. I have studied long, and think thou needest guidance on such matters, even now, before thy moment of being born.”

“I am already born,” Reynard said, wondering if the man was an idiot, or truly a ghost.

“Nay, thou hast not even a name, yet.”

“And what is your name, sir?”

“Francis,” the man said. “Thou’lt know me better in time.” His fingers tickled Reynard’s palm in patterns he recognized, letters leading into words, words forming a kind of poetic sense, of which he translated a crucial few: The First Mother . . . the First Word . . .

The First Star in the Sky.

Was that the stand of it?

A far metal peal interrupted.

Reynard lifted his chin.

The man collapsed like folded paper.

Reynard looked for the source of the clang that had roused him. Had it been a swinging bell? Bump of blocks against an anchor? After a short, dark time, he thought he heard other voices—not English voices, but not dreams, either—and craned his neck to find their direction, muffled as they were by fog, like every other sound—but real. He looked down at his fingers, but could recover nothing from the strange dream of the feathered man except his smile and the arch of his plume.

Again Reynard tried to stand, and nearly fell into the water. Words from across the lapping waves came flat and clear to his ears—Spanish words, and not from spirits. Dare he cry out in answer? What choice? To keep to this drifting pile of sticks meant a sure and drowned death. Could the Spanish do worse?

Walsyngham had insisted they could.

Reynard made his choice.

“Ahoy!” he tried to yell, but the call came out a dry, weak croak. He tried again, and once more, with no better result, then leaned on his elbow and stared into the gloom, cheeks puffy, eyes stinging with salt.

There it was! A great shadow pushed through the lower grayness, huge spritsail dragging under a boom big as a tree. The sail passed over his wreck and the hoy hard-bumped a keel and swung slow about, grinding and spinning along a massive, bulged black hull. Above, from as high as the sky, more cries drifted down. He knew little Spanish, but these were words he could almost understand—nautical words. They had seen the wreck and were discussing it, he was sure.

Reynard rose to his knees to hold out his arms and reach for a ladder or rope, something to climb or cling to. Whatever the origin of the huge, pot-bellied ship and its crew, they were alive, it was afloat, and together offered at least a thin hope.

But nothing was lowered to his grasp, and the wreck kept grinding and spinning.

And then, suddenly, shouts and cheers from above, and a huge, dark mass plunged from over the rail into the water, just feet from the wreck of the hoy. Bubbles greened the sea and a sad hump surfaced and rolled to show a long head, folded and broken legs—

A horse! A dead horse. With such a feast, the ocean would soon be thick with sharks. The words from above grew louder. The wreck had beat along about a third of the galleon, wrenching against solid oak and splitting the frame. Reynard was awash to his waist when a thick line uncoiled like a snake from the quarterdeck. He grabbed it and held tight. A grizzled old sailor leaned over the rail, scanned the dead horse and the wreck’s submerged tangle, then waved his arm and pulled back. A few seconds later, the old sailor was swung out again and down, sitting on a slung board, such as might be used to paint or transfer sailors.

The old one laughed as if this was a joke and he was paying off a bet. He had very few teeth left. “Muchacho!” he said. “¡Oye, tú! ¿Eres inglés o castellano?”

Asking if he were English or Spanish. Reynard understood this much. But again, he could only croak.

The old man looked him over with a yellowed, doubtful eye. “I think inglés. Do not move. Thou art fast sinking.”

A great voice boomed from the forecastle, arguments broke out along the rail, and the old man was pulled up. Water slopped into Reynard’s mouth and he tried to swim, but his muscles knotted. The great ship moved on. He was sure that would be the last he would see or hear of any of them, but moments later, the old man descended again and flung him a second rope. “Tie it on!” he urged, and pointed to his own skinny waist. Reynard had enough strength to do that, and soon he was lifted like a sack, the old man keeping him steady as they both were hauled aboard the ship, passing gun ports, thick sheets of tar and hair to help repel shipworm, black steel spikes to discourage boarders—which could skewer them like fish on a hook. But the men pulling from the deck swung them about and the old man, with surprising strength, pushed the boy up over the thick rail.

Reynard sprawled on his back, gasping, and the sailors and soldiers—dozens of Spanish soldiers in full battle gear—formed a solid wall, like a stand of brutal flowers. A great net had been slung above the deck, and hammocks still dangled from its squares. The soldiers carried half-pikes and halberds and wore crested helmets and bulge-breasted cuirasses, and they were bearded, brown or olive with sun and warm-climed Spanish blood.

They circled around Reynard, curious, disdainful. Some spat. Some moved in with short swords drawn, ready to dispatch this useless English wretch, until the old man cried out “Maria, madre de Dios!” and pushed them back. The soldiers rewarded him with grating laughter and what sounded like insults.

The old man leaned over Reynard and whispered to him, “Speak truth! Speak lies! But say thou canst tell us where we are.”

Reynard croaked and pointed to his mouth.

The old man lifted his gaze to the soldiers and curious sailors and called for water. The sailors grumbled, the soldiers parted and wandered off, but water was brought in a bucket by a frowning boy much younger than Reynard, and the old man ladled him his first drink in days.

“Not too much,” he advised. “Thou wilt heave on el maestre’s bloody deck.”

The water was sweeter than fresh apples and gave Reynard back a whisper. “What ship?”

“A mighty ship,” the old man said. “El Corona Royale, thirty-one guns! Sad boy, niño inglés, thou shalt surrender to the imperial navy of King Philip and the Duke of Medina Sidonia, and tell us where we sail!”

“¡No hay viento!” cried a voice forward.

“No wind,” the old man translated. “No wind anywhere.”

A man of great dignity and fine clothes came down to the middle deck to inspect their catch. He knelt beside Reynard and regarded him sadly. The old man, in oft-patched rags, with a rope for a belt, was a sorry contrast to this splendid fellow, whose gray-specked beard had been neatly trimmed, and whose enameled scabbard depended from a belt on a silver chain. His eyes were like emeralds, and his hands were pale and smooth—a young woman’s hands, untouched by the wear of rope or oar.

The old man bowed low. “This is el Capitan de Mer et Guerra Jorge Cardoza de Vincennes, very powerful. Say something. Name anything—an isle thou know’st, a spit, a reef.”

“Where the sea doth strangle the wind,” Reynard rasped, sensing he would be tossed back into the water unless he said something, however stupid.

“Donde duerme el viento,” the old man said to the gentleman.

“Ah,” the gentleman said. “¡Él sí conoce el nombre!”

“Know’st thee this place?” the old man asked Reynard, with a sparkle of suspicion. “Or make cruel jest?”

Reynard tried to remember where he had heard the phrase, where the notion had come from. It might have been from his father before he died . . . but that would have been when Reynard was little, no more than three or four years of age. “My father told it to me,” he said, then put fingers to his mouth for more water and for food.

Sadly, deliberately, the gentleman in the fine clothes came off his knee and stood his full height over them—about five feet six inches, shorter than Reynard’s uncle and slighter, more delicate.

“¡Norte-noreste!” cried the voice forward.

“How doth he know?” the old man muttered. “For days, the compass guideth not.”

And so it was. The Spanish were lost, too. The fog obscured the tops of sails and masts like a billowing blanket, dividing and reshaping into worms and wisps—but also hiding some of the damage the galleon had suffered in the great battle off Gravelines. Ragged sails hung, ripped and holed, rigging cut as if by shears, the ends tied and lifted for fidding and re-joining later, spars hanging but also tied away, bumping in dejection against the great masts.

The old man followed Cardoza, el Capitan de mer et Guerra, forward and up onto the forecastle. Two other boys, also younger than Reynard and curious about the prisoner, brought him more water. The oldest smiled, not in the least afraid. They were not unkind, he saw, not cruel—and he had heard many times that the Spanish tortured their own children when they were bad, that they flensed and ate fishermen and merchants for breakfast after breaking their necks in the noose. More grog tales, no doubt, but effective at keeping an air of menace about those who threatened the Queen.

“The Queen’s a fair tease when it doth come to Philip,” his uncle had said. “But now the old king’s dander is up and we are all put to it. If only the dander flaked from a worthier head. Philip will be their bloody ruin!”

The sailors knew a little English, and as they led him to a cage under the overhang of the stern castle, followed by the youngest boy, they tried out their few words, as if seeking his approval of their pronunciation. “Bastard, asshole, thou donkey—thou monkey dick!”

Reynard nodded and smiled.

After the sailors locked the cage, the old man brought him a bowl of lentils and vegetables soaked in oil, not butter. He ate with his fingers. The old man went away again and now sailors crowded around.

“I know thou is good lad,” one sailor attempted.

“El es pelirrojo,” said another, with a cackle. “El prefiere a los pellirrojos.” His puzzlement set them back and forth with each other until the old man returned. Despite his rags, the old man seemed to be respected.

The sailors, bored, left them to talk alone.

“They remark thou hast red hair,” the old man said.

“My hair is black,” Reynard said.

The old man shook his head. “Sea-bleached, then. No doubt from terror. Mayhaps it will grow out black. I have told el Capitan thou’rt son of a fisherman and know’st the waters north to Iceland. Make me not a liar!”

“I know some of the coasts and waters off France and Flanders, and some of Ireland,” Reynard said as he ate. His stomach was giving him pains.

“Hast thou fished with Basques? With Dutch?”

“My uncle fished with Basques off Flanders and Portugal,” Reynard said. “No Dutch.”

“Thou speak’st Basque?”

Reynard made a face.

“French?”

“No.”

“Gypsy? Roma?” the old man asked, doubtful.

Reynard shook his head, unsure—his grandmother had never liked the name or judgment of “gypsy,” assuming as it did an origin in Egypt and a clannish, outlaw nature—but was not tinker’s cant touched by Roma?

“English!” the old man concluded, with a wry twist of his lips. “Well, el maestre is afraid, and el Capitan saith little but doth frown much. We have wandered at sea ten days without wind. And even before the battle, we were stuck in this wallowing tub of shit for over two months! Thou see’st plain our galleon is sad. The soldiers never chanced to get ashore. The battle, the storms, the currents . . .”

“Your guns sank my boat,” Reynard said. “You killed my uncle and our crew. They knew the sea better than I.”

“Many ships and sailors now grace the Lord’s deep,” the old man said. “I think maybe the planning not so good. But say nothing of this to el maestre or el capitan.”

Reynard’s strength was slowly returning, and with it things he had tried to forget—wild winds and pounding waves, shots and fire, screams, as his uncle and the crew tried to keep the hoy behind the galleons and away from the guns of the swift Spanish pinnaces. The hoy had been built for cargo, not war, and her four old guns had been mounted in all the wrong places, while a galleass, fierce in the dark gray light of that horrible noon, as the tide reversed and all the Spanish ships seemed to flee in their direction, came abreast and let loose with the scattered shot that put an end to everyone but Reynard . . .

He lay back, shoulders against the rough bars, caged like a bear. It was said that the Queen liked to watch stags baited by dogs, and bears as well. There were dogs on this ship—big dogs. Reynard could hear them barking and growling. Mastiffs, he thought. Perhaps they belonged to the gentleman, el Capitan de mer et de Guerra.

But what kept his eyes from closing was fear of the living fog that had dropped no water into his sail and now followed all these sailors and soldiers northwest—to where?

Slowly he pieced together fragments of those long-ago tales his father had told him, of haunted seas and strange lands, and of the ring of seven islands at the top of the world. “Your grandmother, bless her and all she knows, tells me they are called Tyr Na Nog, and they are places where mortals can live forever, and where gods, goddesses, and monsters roam according to their own laws. The nearest is Thule hight. I have never been there, thanks be to God, but old fishermen who have, and told tales in mine youth, as I tell you now, spake of a slow, relentless storm that pulls and pulls, like a snake of wind and water, sweeping them north and west until there is no escape—all the way to where the wind doth go to die, and sailors with it. Some would say Thule is a great land hidden beyond that storm, that none but demons should visit! So they say, and your grandmither as well . . . But we are sailors, and know teat from twaddle, do we not, boy?”

And he remembered, as if his father were alive again, him dandling a much smaller Reynard by both hands, and the large man’s laughter, the sweetest sound, silent now for seven years but alive in memory.

“But remember this, all respect to your grandmother and mother, bless ’em and the good people they know!” his father had cackled, lifting him high. “Old seamen fart loudest on shore. Keep your wits, lad, and leave the dead to find passage to where the wind sleeps, for only they are allowed to fish there, and they catch naught but monsters—and there be no market for monsters in Southwold.”

The old man brought him a small bowl of peas and sodden biscuit, this time with a wedge of half-cooked carrot. Reynard was grateful for anything.

“I had a boy of mine own,” the old man said, sitting beside the cage and watching him. “A son, a wife, and a daughter. They gave me joy and solace for twenty years, in the Philippines. All dead now. I am far too old, boy.”

The look he gave Reynard was strangely hopeful, but then the old man reached into his own mouth and wiggled a tooth.

The day darkened into night. Only then did the fog part, but beneath the upper deck’s overhang, Reynard saw little but a black wedge interrupted by a sliver of moon.

As morning painted the sky gray, the old man opened the cage door. “Come. El maestre says that, having fished here, thou may’st tell us what sort of animal doth follow our ship.” Then he looped rope around Reynard’s chest and neck, knotted the two loops, and led him to the hind castle and up two flights of steps to the far jutting peak of the poop. Here, three sailors and a soldier clung to the rail with white-knuckled fists, watching the ocean behind. All four crossed themselves.

“There,” the old man said, pointing down,

Reynard looked into the gray-green churn swirling around the rudder. He shivered, as he always did looking into the deeps. “I see nothing.”

The sailors pointed and jabbered. As the morning brightened, the old man said, “Water here is fresh. No salt. Are we at the mouth of a river?”

“I know not,” Reynard said. The sailors started jabbering again and pointing, and now Reynard did see something beneath the waves, pale green, patterned like the wash itself, undulating, serpentine—neither fish nor shark nor any whale he had ever heard of. His first impression was that it had a pair of arms, and he thought it could be a mermaid—though he had never believed in such—but then, as it swam to the surface and, after thudding against the rudder, vanished with a splash, he saw the “hands” at the ends of the arms were more like claws, the long tail was segmented like a lobster’s, and what parts he saw stretched at least fifteen feet.

The old man said, “It would board and eat us. The sailors hath piked it twice and shot it with a crossbow, sin efecto, sin hacerle daño.”

Reynard shook his head and bit his lip. What did he know about lobsters that tried to board a ship? Nothing. But curiosity had taken over his fear. He was almost eager to know what this thing was capable of, and what it meant. He stared down at the waves, with an expression half grimace and half grin, trying to see below their wash and curl. The sailors watched the shape with wide, unhappy eyes. Then it slipped aft in the ship’s wake and vanished in rocky breakers to the starboard side.

Lookouts called that they were passing small islands jutting from the sea, capped with shrubs. The old man repeated in English. One larger island to larboard boasted a decent tree, some kind of twisted conifer with dangling cones as big as a man’s head.

Now Cardoza, el capitan himself, joined them on the afterdeck, accompanied by a harquebusier and two musket men. He finished strapping on his sword and cast a side glance at Reynard, then asked the old man, el viejo, if the boy was of use. Before the old man could answer, one soldier with a musket called el capitan’s attention to the island’s lone conifer. A skinny, twisted sack hung from the middle branches, as long as two tall men, striped and spotted red and black, catching sunlight like dark silk and reflecting sparks of gold. All observed in silence. One harquebusier said that in the New World, Indians hung their dead in trees. Another observed the same was true in the far east, where other sailors had been, though not him. The old man translated, but, like his mother, Reynard was quick at languages and already had the sense of their words. Truly the Spanish empire was vast, though likely Drake or Hawkins had been to these places as well.

The bigger island fell behind. There were no people visible on it, and the waves pounding the sharp rocks around its base were fierce, cutting and roiling the water and spraying up to land on his lips—fresh water indeed, whatever that implied. A low fog closed behind, but the watch cried out there was land justo delante—dead ahead. At the jagged, echoing clash of breakers, more sailors scrambled into the rigging, struggling to bring the ship about, to slow or stop its headlong plunge.

Reynard was distracted and only heard part of what the old man was murmuring to Cardoza. “Algo sobre las capacidades lingüísticas del niño.” Did the old man mean that Reynard might be useful as a translator? That was even less likely than his talent for geography. But his grandmother’s words came back again, words so familiar . . .

And then the great hull slammed to an abrupt halt. Men flew from the rigging and the masts, onto the deck, overboard.

And a horse screamed, then another, not far behind him, perhaps in a stable or a cabin.

Back to the cage he went, tied up and left alone while the ship became frantic with activity. The galleon could not get free—it had beached itself, and waves seemed to drive it farther onto the shore—waves and something the sailors were calling, yelling it out, actually, “La tierra estaba respirando!”

They thought the land was breathing.

Reynard drew up his knees. The breezes that reached him were chill and smelled of forest. His pulse quickened.

Half Way Home

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From the New York Times and USA Today best-selling author of Wool and the Molly Fyde saga comes a story of teenage colonists marooned on a distant planet.

0

What Should Have Been

I was a blastocyst, once. A mere jumble of cells clinging to one another. A fertilized egg. Of course, we were all in such a state at some point in our lives, but I excelled at it in a way you didn’t. I spent more time in that condition than I have as a person.

Hundreds of years more, in fact.

I still like to imagine myself like that: a shapeless form, quivering and ripe and full of potential. Holding that image in my head makes it seem as if I haven’t been born yet, as if we could let things play out one more time and arrive at some different destination. Perhaps it would lead to a new, fuller me.

But repeating the past is as impossible as faster-than-light travel and suspended animation—it’s the stuff of the imagination. They’re wonderful ideas, but they all lie on the other side of what-can-be. So far as we know, anyway.

Hence the quivering eggs of potential, my fellow colonists and me.

What better way to seed the stars with the gift of humanity? Imagine the colony ships, otherwise: They’d be the size of small moons and packed to capacity with living, eating, breathing, defecating humans. Such arks would be impractical, even if those colonists could survive the ensuing insanity of interstellar travel, the hundreds of years of boredom and breeding and infighting that would occur on a slow passage to some distant rock. And what would happen when that rock proved uninhabitable?

Far more sensible, of course, is a system whereby blastocysts such as myself are launched into space with a handful of machines to raise us. Especially considering a colonial failure rate of roughly fifty percent. Every colony lander is nothing more than a flipped coin glimmering in space, the word “viable” printed on one side and “unviable” stamped on the other.

The game—your game—is seeing where that coin lands.

At a cost of nine hundred billion each, one might wonder why a nation would take such odds. Then I imagine what it would mean for a mere country to own an entire planet: all those resources, all that precious livable land, a launch pad for further expansion. It would be like an island acquiring a continent. Besides, if you don’t do it, someone else will, right? Which means you must.

The rewards can be enormous. A single patent on one useful alien gene sequence could fund several more colonies—and so although the process is a huge gamble, it’s one that has the potential to be extremely lucrative. It becomes just one more way for the wealthiest countries to maintain their wealth. Like a slot machine that dispenses a jackpot with every other coin.

That’s what “viable” means: a planet with more reward than risk. A jackpot. Not for the aspiring colonists, of course, but certainly for the country that sent them. I bet there are formulae involved, far too complex for one such as myself to understand. With the profession you chose for me, I have a better chance of grasping the vagaries of the human brain. But I can imagine the atmosphere of our new home has to read such-and-such parts per million. Perhaps the mass of the potential planet has to be within certain parameters. And obviously, there can’t be hordes of unconquerable predators roaming about.

There are a million variables, I’m sure, but by whatever confluence of events, half the planets pass muster—half of them come up viable, and our reward as little blastocysts is a chemical trigger, a simple compound that causes us to resume our cellular division as if we were in our mother’s wombs.

Then, fed through the same amniotic fluid we breathe, we are slowly transformed into pudgy babies, dutiful children, and finally: fully formed adults. All the while, the training programs you wrote teach us the things we need to know. For me, it would be learning to tend to the psychological needs of my fellow colonists—basically keeping the fleshy bits of your engines nicely oiled, putting the gears back together when they break.

The growing process would normally take thirty years. Three decades spent in vats that provide perfect nourishment, our muscles electrically stimulated so they grow strong. And when we emerged, five hundred of us, specialists in each of our own fields, we would begin the arduous task of conquering our new world. We would be the first generation of the hundreds it might take to bring an entire planet to its knees, to extract its resources, to unlock its secrets, and to pay back our startup fee and so much more to some old nation on some old distant rock.

Meanwhile, we’d save up for a further round of expansion. Our thumbs would cock back, a new coin ready to flip out into space.

During those thirty years of gestation, our colony lander would be busy preparing our new home. We would awaken to find it had been growing and dividing alongside us. Tractors that flew a trillion miles would fire up and begin tilling the soil, preparing it for our needs. Mining machines would dig loads of ore from the crust and feed the foundry machines, which would then turn it into alloy so the shaping machines could create, well . . . more machines.

Some of us would probably wonder why we were even needed. But we’d do the jobs we’d been trained for—happy, perhaps, to not know or want anything else. We might one day become positively eager, just as you had, to expand and conquer new worlds, because the real spoils would exceed the value of information transmitted back by satellite. It would dwarf the worth of the sloth-like cargo ships full of minerals and ore.

No, the real allure to this nasty procedure is the immortality. The allegiance of shared genes and imaginary borders that stretch easily across the light-years. The reward of knowing your children are out there, outliving whatever star warmed the planet they were conceived on, your grandchildren outliving that new star, and so on.

So much wealth and immortality, all for the flip of a coin.

Of course, that’s what should have been. There’s always the other half of the colonies, the ones that go swiftly and simply. On these, the AI crunches those complex formulae, and something comes up short—who knows why or by how much. Atmospheric toxicity, crushing gravity, imperfect orbits with wild seasonal swings, frequent extinction impactors . . . any of these would spell doom for a settlement colony, and none of these traits could be reliably deduced across hundreds of light-years of space. Your stellar spectrographers with their actuarial tables—they can only make their best guesses and flick their thumbs one way or the other, but it’s still a game of chance.

Unviable. That’s what the AI would compute. And instead of a molecular trigger setting off my cell division, the machines would deliver a chemical bullet to liquefy me and my fellow colonists. Some engineer actually dubbed this the “Abort Sequence.” Five hundred potential humans destroyed with an acid bath, the entire colony set afire and reduced to slag, then the nuclear explosions to make sure not even the ash survives.

One might think that engineer possessed a poor sense of humor—and as one of those blastocysts nearly aborted, I had the same twinge of disgust. Even knowing the etymology of the term, I still recognize it as one of those cruel coincidences that punctuate human existence. Originally coined to describe the termination of an unwanted pregnancy, then co-opted by the aeronautics industry for any terminated trial, the word has found an oddly coincidental return home thanks to the cruelty of planetary colonization.

Why the abort sequence? one could ask. Why reduce so much of your capital investment to lava before setting off thermonuclear detonations? We labored to understand before we learned how dear knowledge had become, that in the war between nations to dominate so much new territory, ideas had transmuted into a new currency recognizable to all and immediately transferable. Intellectual property rights now serve as an ephemeral gold, weightless and invisible, priceless artifacts one can slip into the folds of one’s brain and smuggle anywhere, undetected. These tidbits can then be traded by the devious for real wealth or spread by the loose-lipped like a disease.

Data. Our data. Information and patents are now worshipped by all.

Of all the data, perhaps none is so protected as our colony AI, who is as much a clone of our ancestors as we are. Hence the chemical bullet, the fire systems, and the nukes that made the slow journey across eons alongside us—all of them cheap to transport and kind enough to not shit, breathe, and reproduce.

Those are the calculations. Your calculations. Viable or abort. The toss of a coin. On or off. One or zero. A dichotomy engineers and scientists adore. The hard edge that gives their intellectual pursuits the ability to slice through data and arrive at truth.

As a psychologist, a member of the “soft” sciences, it’s the sort of crisp rationality that fills me with envy. Even the quantum physicists have their collapsing wave functions, driving all that fuzziness into numbers as precise and knowable as any other rational field of inquiry.

The problem, however, is that the choice isn’t really dichotomous. But you didn’t know that, did you? You didn’t foresee a third possibility, one as unplanned for as it was unimaginable to you. By leaving the choice of viability or unviability to an artificial intelligence—a consciousness built to model our own thinking—your engineers created a problem that falls under my purview as a psychologist.

Something soft.

Two options, viable and unviable, both of them meticulously planned for. Except, if you flip coins often enough, send enough of them into the air, something else can happen, something miraculous and yet statistically inevitable. Send out thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of colony ships—each another spinning coin—and eventually one of them will surprise you.

One of them will land on its edge and remain there, balanced and wobbling, full of awful or awesome potential. It will be neither heads nor tails but something else.

What follows is the account of one of those rare coins.

It is the story of my home.

1

Abort

I was fifteen years old before I opened my eyes for the first time. Fifteen. Not quite an adult—halfway between boy and man. Before that moment, I had learned everything from visions directly implanted into my brain. I had been stuffed with virtual lessons and life experiences as my body grew inside a vat.

The training programs I grew up with were wont to flit about, out of sequence and irregular. It was often just me and the colony AI in his several guises, maybe a few virtual students to serve as examples or to keep me from going crazy. One minute, I’d be walking through the woods, listening to Colony lecture. The next, I’m in a counseling session, pretending to do therapy with two virtual colonists who can’t get along. This jostling of my consciousness feels absolutely normal, for it’s all I’ve ever known.

Then, I woke up. I saw the real world, solid and unyielding, and it made far less sense.

I came to in a square column of glass. The first thing I noticed was a girl waking up in the large vat adjacent to mine. Thick amniotic fluid flowed down our naked bodies, the level receding as the drain at my feet gurgled. Bubbles floated up from the drain and burst on the surface. I vomited two lungfuls of bluish slime, dry heaving, hacking, coughing—my body knowing innately what to do as it began to breathe for the first time. I shivered and wheezed, the air around me cold but able to sear my lungs, burning me and freezing me at once.

I wiped at my stinging eyes; my senses were overwhelmed and confused. I had just been learning regression therapy, and now I found myself in a strange place, naked—but not alone. Lost on me was the ironic reversal of the dreams I had been taught to interpret: the waking up in public with no clothes on.

The girl in the adjoining vat slumped against my glass, her shoulder flattening out where it pressed, her neck straining as she coughed and wiped at her eyes. Both of us were coming into our lives with all the spasms and grace of a torturous death.

My vat slid open on one side and a cacophony of sounds assaulted my unused ears. Just as with my vision, I had been “hearing” for fifteen years, but only by having the auditory centers in my brain directly stimulated. Never had it been through such physical, intimate, sonic violence as this. Noise that presses flesh. Noise like a second heartbeat. Noise you can feel in your bones.

Screams. People shouting. The crackle of . . . flames? Behind it all was an oddly serene voice calling out as if from everywhere: “Stay calm. Please make your way toward the exit.”

But nothing about the situation was calm. And there was no clear exit.

Were it not for my wobbly legs, I would’ve thought it an emergency drill. In all my training modules, however, my body had known how to balance itself. That was no longer the case. Even with legs artificially stimulated to remain strong, I struggled to control them.

I grasped the edge of my vat’s opening, stepped over the jamb, and joined the narrow stream of other naked and confused colonists beyond. We packed ourselves into the narrow passageway between the empty chambers like animals chuted for slaughter. Slick bodies came into contact with mine, overwhelming more of my senses with bizarre newness.

In the distance, someone yelled, “Fire!” and the already tight space became a horrific crush of human frenzy, of elbows and knees and shoving. Strangers shrieked at the top of their lungs. We became one quivering mass of fear and confusion. Bodies became like cells, forming a new blastocyst with awful potential.

I tried to keep the girl close. We clung to each other like baby chicks, imprinting on and scrambling after the first thing we’d seen upon hatching. Around us, the column of flesh trapped between the vats flowed slowly in one direction. I felt we should be going the opposite way, toward the bright light that flickered beyond the scurrying crowd.

Half of us seemed to be working against the rest, everyone canceling out each other in a macabre display of Brownian motion. It wasn’t until the thick smoke billowed closer that those of us pushing toward the light recognized it as the danger we were meant to avoid.

Panic vibrated through the crowded mess, sparking from skin to skin as the shrieks of those burning alive reached us ahead of the horrid smell. I lost hold of the girl as someone pushed between us. I watched her face disappear—and then her outstretched hand. The crowd jostled me toward some unseen exit.

My entire trip down the narrow passageway was made in reverse; I looked back for the girl and watched the glow of flames brighten, reflecting off the wet walls of glass to either side. As the mob carried me to safety, some part of my thoughts flitted to the therapy the survivors would need: the grief counseling, the group sessions, to treat the extreme likelihood of severe post-traumatic stress disorder.

I fell backwards through the exit—back into trampled mud and rainy night. I clawed my way, shivering, across a tangle of the filthy and fleeing. And through the panic, I found myself dwelling on my years of training, on what was expected of me, on what I needed to do to fix the situation.

My job is to help people recover from tragedies, I thought.

But where were the people whose job it was to prevent them?

The night and rain assaulted us with frigid air, and the flames rising all around us seemed magical in their ability to defy both. Chemical fires, licking mightily through both the chill and wet, seemed all the more powerful for it. More fierce and terrifying.

The last of the survivors stumbled out into the mud—coughing, steaming, tripping over those still scurrying out of the way. They splashed us as they staggered past, arms wide for balance and eyes wide with shock. Beyond them, the screams of those who would never join us reverberated through the vat module. They cried out for help, but we were too busy coming to grips with our own new lives to chance saving theirs.

So few of us seemed to have made it out. Fifty or less—and all of us, of course, mere kids. Naked, covered in mud, we coughed and experimented with breathing. Most struggled to get away from the module, but I crawled back toward it, squeezing through the flow of colonists who fled in the other direction. I searched through them as they went past, looking for the face from my neighboring vat, needing to find something familiar in this new existence.

I found her huddled by the exit, shivering and covered in filth. Our eyes met. Hers were wide and white, little orbs of bewilderment. The film of protective tears on them sparkled as they captured and released the light from the flames.

We collapsed together without speaking and held one another, our chins resting on each other’s shoulders, our bodies quivering from the cold and fear.

“The command module!” someone yelled.

I heard feet slap against the mud as fellow colonists ran off to save the dying thing that had birthed us. The girl pulled away from me and watched them go, then turned and followed my gaze down the aisle of vats and to the growing inferno beyond. The screams within the flames had morphed into moans of agony. Hundreds were dying or were already dead.

“We can’t save them,” she croaked, her voice raspy from coughing and disuse. I turned to her, watched her delicate neck constrict as she swallowed forcefully. A lump under the splatter of mud rose up her neck as if for some purpose, then fell back down. “We have to save Colony,” she whispered.

I nodded, but my attention was pulled back to the flames. A dark form moved across the fire, arms waving, the silhouette of dripping flesh visible like a thing sloughing off its shadow. One of the glass walls exploded from the heat, and smoke quickly swallowed the form. Only the moans remained as a newborn near adulthood made the mere handful of sounds it would ever be allowed to.

The girl rose. I turned to her and away from the dying. Large drops of rain spotted the mud on her chest with dollops of pink exposed flesh. She pulled me up and tugged me, staggering, away from the vats. We held each other clumsily, four legs proving more stable than two, as we joined the others in running.

Running and surviving.

City of Lost Fortunes

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The fate of New Orleans rests in the hands of a wayward grifter in this novel of gods, games, and monsters.

CHAPTER ONE

In the beginning, there was the Word, and the Void, and Ice in the North and Fire in the South, and the Great Waters. A universe created in a day and a night, or billions of years, or seven days, or a cycle of creations and destructions. The waters were made to recede to reveal the land, or the land was formed from the coils of a serpent, or half of a slain ocean goddess, or the flesh and bones and skull of a giant, or a broken egg. Or an island of curdled salt appeared when the sea was churned by a spear. Or the land was carried up to the surface of the waters by a water beetle, or a muskrat, or a turtle, or two water loons. However the world was made, it teemed with life; populated by beings who evolved from a single cell, or who were molded from clay or carved out of wood or found trapped in a clam shell. They wandered up from their underworld of seven caves, or fell through a hole in the sky, or they crawled out of the insect world that lies below. All of these stories, these beginnings, are true, and yet none of them are the absolute truth; they are simultaneous in spite of paradox. The world is a house built from contradictory blueprints, less a story than it is a conversation. But it is not a world without complications. Not without conflicts. Not without seams.

One of those complications was a man named Jude Dubuisson, flesh and blood and divine all at once, who stared out at Jackson Square, at the broad white expanse of St. Louis Cathedral, at the plump, fluttering mass of pigeons, at the tidal ebb and flow of tourists on the cobblestones, and saw none of it. He was likewise deaf to his surroundings: the constant mutter of the crowd, the hooves clopping on pavement, and the hooting echo of the steamboat’s calliope coming from the river. His attention was fixed inward, on thoughts of the old life he’d done his best to forget. All those years of standing between the worlds of gods and men, of the living and the dead.

For his entire adult life, he’d straddled the seam between two worlds and brought trouble to both: a walking, breathing conflict with a fuck-you grin. That had been before the storm, though. Those memories belonged to a different man. In the six years since those fateful days in 2005, he’d tried to put it all behind him. Tried to ignore all the impossible things he knew. But the last few days, the past was like a storm cloud on the horizon, a rumble of thunder that refused to stay silent, a gloom that refused to disperse.

The past just refused to stay dead.

Jude was what the more liberal-minded in the city these days—those for whom the term “mixed race” sounded somehow offensive—would call “Creole,” and what older black folks referred to as “red-boned,” some indeterminate mix of white and African heritages along with whatever else had made it into the gumbo. All Jude knew was that he had light brown skin, a white mother, and a father he’d never met. The rest of the world always seemed more concerned about defining his ethnicity than he was.

He kept his hair shaved close to his scalp and a scruff of beard that was more stubble than style. He wore jeans and a long-sleeved dress shirt despite the cloying wet shroud that clung to New Orleans in the summer, the heat that made any act an effort, even breathing. The damp shirt pressed tight against his skin, the sweat tickling down the small of his back. Jude reached up, absently, to wipe off his face with the handkerchief his mother had taught him a gentleman always carries, but stopped himself, pulled from his introspection by the self-conscious awareness of the leather gloves he had on. He tucked his hand back into his lap, out of sight.

Not that anyone paid him any attention. He’d been out on the corner right across from Muriel’s since early that morning, had set up folding chairs and his rickety-ass table, laid out a chalkboard sign, a cash box, and a battered paperback atlas the same as he did most days, but in all the hours he’d been in the Square, only a few people had bothered to ask what the sign meant. None sat down. His services, unlike the tarot card readers and the brass bands and the art dealers, weren’t part of the cliché of the Quarter, and thus flew under the average tourist’s radar.

But today the lack of clients suited his mood. He’d have found it hard to feign interest in anyone’s problems with the way his thoughts had been circling nonstop. Pacing back and forth, as tense and feckless as an expectant father. Or a criminal awaiting execution.

A young street performer—Timmy? Tommy? Jude could never remember—stopped in front of Jude’s table, casting a long shadow. Jude frowned at the intrusion into his thoughts, even as he appreciated the shade. The white kid’s face, streaked with the sweaty remnants of clown paint, was split by an unguarded grin. He wore a golf cap and a tweed vest with no shirt on underneath. Less than ten years separated the two men, maybe as little as five, but to Jude’s eyes he was just a boy.

Grown more used to silence than speech, Jude had to search for his voice before he could speak. “You need something?” he asked, the words scratchy.

“About to ask you the same thing,” the boy said, pulling off the cap and swiping sweat from his forehead. “Headed to the grocery ’round the corner.” He gestured with the limp hat in the store’s direction before slipping it back onto his head.

Jude shook his head. “Thanks anyway.”

“Ain’t nothin’,” he said. He turned to go, then looked back. “You coming tomorrow night?” Jude shrugged and raised his eyebrows. The boy threw his hands into the air. “I only told you, like, twelve times already. My band finally got that gig? At the Circle Bar?”

“Oh, right,” Jude said. He imagined being crammed into a tight space with a crowd of strangers and lied to the kid. “Yeah, I’ll try to make it.”

The boy’s grin widened into a smile that took another five years off his age and made Jude feel like an older, more cynical version of himself. Tommy moved on to the next table, the sole of one of his shoes flapping, pitiful, on the street.

Jude sighed, inhaling the rich odor of the Quarter: stale beer and musky humanity and the moist, dark scent of the river. It was hard to live as he did, hidden in the seams between the life he had known and this new life he wore like a mask, but—because of those things he tried not to think about—Jude belonged there.

Or so he believed.

A short while later, Jude got his first and only customers of the day, a couple of out-of-towners. College kids, judging by the Greek letters on their T-shirts and the bright green plastic drink cups in their hands. She was a white girl who had spent hours in the sun darkening her skin, and he was vaguely West Asian, but spoke with a tap-water American accent. Lovers, Jude guessed, from the way the boy rested his hand on her shoulder, and the way the girl introduced the both of them—Mandy and Dave—like the conjunction made them a single unit. The girl seemed by far the more eager of the two. When she asked Jude what his sign meant, Dave looked toward the other side of the Square, as if searching for an escape.

“It means what it says,” Jude said. “If you’ve lost something, I can tell you where it is.”

“Like, anything?” Mandy asked, glancing at Dave to see if he was listening.

“Yeah,” Jude said, “like, anything.” She seemed not to notice the droll mockery in his voice, but Dave turned and frowned at her.

“It’s a scam,” Dave said.

“First try is free if you’re not satisfied,” Jude said. “Ten bucks if you are.”

Dave’s frown deepened, but Mandy lowered herself into one of the aluminum chairs across from Jude. “Come on, sweetie, let me at least try it. Mom’ll kill me if she finds out—” She turned a sly glance in Jude’s direction. “If she finds out I lost what I lost.” Dave made an incredulous sound in the back of his throat and checked the time on his phone, doing everything but tapping his foot to signal his impatience. His every gesture told Jude he’d been hustled before.

But Jude was no hustler, at least not today. He’d always had an affinity for lost things. Even as a child, he could point out that a friend had left a toy beneath a sofa cushion, could lead a neighbor to where her cat had stranded itself too high in a tree.

This magic was the one true gift Jude had ever gotten from the father he’d never known. As he aged, or with practice—Jude wasn’t sure which—this affinity strengthened, grew more nuanced. A brush of his fingertips against a hair left on a pillow and he knew the lost child’s name, knew that she was hungry and cold and alone, knew that she was locked in a basement in Ohio, even though she’d only vanished from her room a few days before.

The more complex the loss, though, the more cryptic his gift became. Sometimes deciphering the sensations and visions was impossible. Some things wanted to stay lost. But far more often than not, his magic worked. This power had lived at the core of him, became the foundation he’d built his life upon. He’d always been the man who could find things.

Then came the hurricane, and a rip at the seams.

The seam split between a government and its citizens when the levees that were built to protect . . . didn’t. It split between the people of New Orleans and their lives, the lucky ones cast out like dandelion seeds thrown by a fierce wind. The stitches that held together communities and families and homes strained in that wind. Some frayed, some tore. In the flood of lost things that followed, the space inside of Jude where his magic lived ripped open wide.

In the aftermath, Jude found his power had become a raw, unhealing wound. Something fundamental about his gift had changed, had turned on him. Before, he’d had to focus, to reach for the knowledge his magic could give him. After, he could barely hold it at bay. Like many after the storm, he’d done what he could to numb his senses to all the loss around him. Booze, sex, any number of bad decisions. It worked, but only for a while. His power was too much a part of him to be denied. Eventually, he’d figured out that if he didn’t touch anything or anyone—hence the gloves—and if he released a trickle of his magic every few days, he could manage, just barely, to stay sane. For six years he’d survived, though he couldn’t really call it living, not going back to his old life, unable to move on to anything new, each day nearly identical to the one before. He’d tucked himself quietly away in the seams, like a coin lost beneath the sofa cushions. Being nowhere and nothing, he’d decided, was better than feeling all that loss.

Jude slipped off his glove beneath the table and a rush of sensation flickered along his naked skin, like the pins and needles of returning circulation. He reached out and took the girl’s slender hand in his own, focusing on the single item she sought. If he had merely touched her, he would have seen and felt everything she’d lost in her young life. Even a seemingly happy and pampered girl like her would have lost enough to exhaust him.

“Your mother’s earrings are in your hotel room,” Jude said.

Dave let out a sharp, bitter laugh. “Good guess, Sherlock,” he said. “Real big leap to see that we’re tourists. Do people really fall for this?”

Jude’s first instinct was to tell Dave just how far up his patronizing ass he could put his attitude, but he held his tongue for Mandy’s sake. She was a good kid. That wasn’t just a first impression; Jude knew she was, could feel it through her skin. “Not where you’re staying in New Orleans,” Jude said. He flipped through the atlas with his free hand, opening it to the Louisiana section, flipping to the map of Baton Rouge, and dropping his finger onto a street intersection without looking. “Were you here at any point in the last few days?” Mandy gasped and pulled her hand away. Jude fought the urge to smile. He’d phrased the last part as a question, but he’d known he was right. He knew more, the name of the hotel, the room number, that the two of them had snuck away from a church youth group–sponsored protest at the Capitol Building for a day of sin in the Crescent City, but he’d learned that if he got too specific, people went from intrigued to scared. Dave took a ten out of his wallet and sat down.

“The next one is twenty,” Jude said.

Fifteen minutes and fifty dollars later, Jude said something dubious and vague enough that Dave’s cynicism returned, and they left. Jude could have kept them there all night, parceling out the answers to the little mysteries of their little lives until their cash ran out, but the money meant nothing to him. This petty game with the tourists was all about the release valve for his gift.

He’d been so much more than this, once.

Later, as he started to pack up his belongings, he saw that Mandy had left her phone behind. It looked more like a child’s toy than a piece of technology: a pink flip phone covered in rhinestones. If only she knew someone who could find lost things, he thought, smiling for what felt like the first time in days. As soon as he picked it up, as if bidden by his touch, the phone jumped and buzzed. Jude snatched it open, startled. An incoming text from an unknown number.

Meet me for a drink in an hour, the message said. The usual place, very important. Have something for you. Then, as he read, the phone twitched with another message. It read, This is Regal.

Jude started to type a reply, but sighed and snapped it closed instead. Regal wouldn’t take no for an answer.

An hour to make it Uptown. He could get there easily if he had a car—or a driver’s license, for that matter—but he didn’t. He dismissed the idea of a cab, as well. If the streetcar didn’t get him there in time, Regal could wait. Or she wouldn’t, and that would be fine, too. It wasn’t like he actually wanted to see her.

On his way out of the Quarter, he dropped the fifty dollars he’d skimmed from Mandy and Dave into the upturned hat of three kids tap-dancing on the corner. He could tell himself that meeting Regal was only professional curiosity, that he was only going to find out what magic she’d used to find him through a stranger’s phone, but he knew the truth. What gnawed at him was the more basic question of her reaching out to him at all. What could be so important that she’d track him down? What could she have for him that she wouldn’t have given him years ago? Was this why the past had been churning around in his mind lately?

Of all the things that had been lost in this city, why had she bothered to find him?

Walking into St. Joe’s bar was like descending into a cave and discovering a chapel. The shock of the colder air made Jude’s skin prickle and every hair stand on end. Dozens of crosses hung from the ceiling, not one of them resembling the next, one simple and carved out of wood, another an ornate twisting of wrought iron. The dusty scent of years of cigarette smoke and the sweet, green odor of fresh-cut mint leaves filled the tight space, coating the worn church pews and the high bar and the mirrors on the walls, dull in the dim light. Across the pool table in the back of the room, a dark hallway led past an ancient, churning ice machine and the toilets and out to a small patio. Speakers in high corners played a Rebirth song, sharp bursts of brass instruments at a frantic, exuberant beat. The whole front of the bar had been a plate-glass window once, but plywood covered it now. Boarded up since the storm.

Jude squinted against the sudden darkness, saw that he’d gotten there before Regal. The bar had only three other customers this early in the afternoon, a Vietnamese man playing a touchscreen game on the bar and a young, blond white woman talking to the scruffy Latino guy behind the counter. The bartender’s hands were busy chopping mint for the mojitos St. Joe’s was known for, but his eyes remained fixed on the girl, a slight smile on his thin lips. She stretched, her shirt pulling up and revealing the dimple of flesh where her lower back met the curve of her buttocks. Jude pushed down a sudden surge of lust. He looked away and leaned against the bar, trying to keep his distance from all of them.

The man playing the video game was middle-aged but prematurely toughened by years of smoking and hard drinking. He stared, vacant, tapping the screen and feeding it dollar bills and taking long drags off his cigarette without ever changing his expression. Jude’s fingertips tingled. Right beneath his sternum something sharp and insistent, like a fishhook piercing the core of him, yanked taut and yearned toward the man, toward his sense of loss. The man called himself Lee—the latter half of “Willy,” not Bruce—even though his parents had named him William, after his father. Lee hated William Sr. and wanted no connection to him. But he’d always felt like he’d lost something, in not having a father he could admire.

Jude cursed silently and clenched his hands into fists. Sometimes things leaked in even with the gloves, especially around strangers. This was a mistake. He shouldn’t have come here. To hell with Regal and whatever she had for him. Just as Jude decided to leave, the bartender noticed his presence and slouched over, with a curt nod and a “Whatcha need?” Jude ordered an Abita and eased onto the stool, keeping his gloved hands out of sight below the counter.

Regal’s got until I finish this beer, he told himself, and then, like she’d timed it that way, the door opened and there she was, framed by the fading sunlight.

She’d cut her hair. What he remembered as an auburn silky drape down to her shoulders was now clipped short and spiky. The rest of her hadn’t changed, though. Her deep-set eyes remained that clear, molten brown, like honey. The grin that slanted across her full lips still straddled the line between amused and mocking. She was a small white woman, both short and petite, who moved across the room with the confident glide of someone twice her size and the grace of a woman who knew how to handle herself.

“Dubuisson,” she said. “It’s been too long.” Despite everything—the sleepless nights, his unease at being out in the world, this life colliding once again with his own, the tendrils of loss twisting and curling into the cracks in his resolve, despite it all—the sound of her voice made him smile. Regal Sloan. His partner and closest friend in a life he’d left behind. Or tried to.

“Hey, Queens,” he said, the old nickname slipping unexpectedly out of his mouth. She smirked and started to speak, but the bartender interrupted with Jude’s beer. Regal ordered one for herself, and they said nothing while they waited. When the bartender returned, Regal, still standing behind him, reached over Jude’s shoulder, close enough that he could feel the warmth of her, the brush of her breath against his neck. Jude forced himself not to flinch away from her invasion of his personal space, knowing it wasn’t true flirtation so much as an attempt to make him uncomfortable, to keep him off his game. She folded a napkin in half and traced a two and a zero across it with her fingertip. Regal pushed the napkin to the bartender, who scooped it up as payment without questioning it.

“Keep the change, boo,” she said.

Jude took a sip of his Abita, savoring the crisp sharpness on his tongue. Same old Regal, he thought. He didn’t realize he’d said it out loud until she laughed.

“Way I remember it,” she said, “you taught me that particular trick.”

“Taught you all the tricks you know, rook.”

“Memory slipping in your old age?” She picked up both glasses. “Let’s talk in back.”

Jude dug a twenty out of his pocket and dropped it on the other side of the counter between a couple of bottles where the bartender would find it later, and then followed her, discomfort roiling in his gut like water about to boil. As he slid past the blonde at the other end of the bar, whose thumbs were now dancing across her cell phone, the bitter taste of blood filled his mouth. Great, he thought. Just great.

The next room seemed like a different bar, with patio tables spread across the bare concrete floor and bright paper lanterns strung above. The lanterns rustled in the breeze from the large box fan rattling in the corner, stirring the soupy air around more than providing any relief from the heat. Regal set Jude’s beer in front of him, slurping the foam off the top of her own. He wondered if she had seen his gloves yet and if the glass was safe to touch without them. He thought about taking one off under the table, unsure if he could do it without her noticing.

“So,” Regal said, after licking her lips, “you got your shit together, or you still hiding from the storm?”

Some would call Regal blunt or tactless. Some had harsher names for it. Once, a middle-aged hausfrau had called her “a gash-mouthed cunt” in front of her two young daughters. Jude knew, though, how carefully Regal chose those barbs of hers. It was how she kept people back on their heels. That same housewife had been selling the virginal menstrual blood of her eldest to a voodoo woman.

Still, it hurt that she’d jabbed at Jude’s weak spot like that, like he was just another prick in the way of her doing the job. Made him a little angry, too. But mostly it proved that she had more on her mind than a drink with an old friend.

“That guy’s gonna catch hell when his till comes up twenty bucks short,” he said. “I only ever used that trick to fuck with the kind of assholes who have it coming. Broke-ass bartenders trying to make rent money don’t exactly qualify.” He worked at keeping his voice level. It wouldn’t help anything to lose control here. His temper was something else—or so Jude’s mother had always said—that he’d gotten from his absent father.

She cocked that same grin at him, only this time it seemed insulting. “You’re a real ray of sunshine, you know that?”

“First,” Jude said, raising a finger as he counted, “I know the blonde out front will be dead sooner than not, sucked dry by the vampire that’s got her enthralled. Second, you’ve got a bit of magic hidden on you, a weapon by the feel of it, something sharp and nasty. Third? There’s a change coming, something that’s got even the boss man rattled. And fourth, you’re stalling. That’s what I know.”

She turned her head back the way they had come, squinting as if she could see through the wall that separated them. “Does it bother you?”

“What, the girl? Of course it does.”

She shook her head. “Actually, I was asking if it bothered you to be such a know-it-all prick all the time, but let’s talk about the girl. Bet you wanna go rescue her, don’t you? Gonna swoop in and save the day?” She made a disgusted noise in the back of her throat. “Not every woman is lost without her big, strong man, you know. That hero complex of yours is gonna get you in deep shit one day, bucko.”

“Thanks for the advice,” he said, taking a swallow of his beer. “Timing could be better, though.” This wasn’t the way he’d hoped this conversation was going to go. Regal seemed tense. Unsure, even. She mocked him for wanting to save the girl, but she hadn’t stopped staring in her direction, either.

“How did you know all of that?” she asked.

“Because whoever dear old dad was, I’m my father’s son,” he said. “Some things I just know.” Which was bullshit, of course. The taste-of-blood vampire warning was just a residual thing, an unintended side effect from a protection spell he’d done years ago. Everything else he’d said had been presumptions and educated guesswork, his tongue moving faster than his brain and hoping to get lucky. Regal knew a little about his father, though, so convincing her he knew a bunch of stuff he didn’t know—couldn’t know—wasn’t much of a gamble.

Tell someone you’re the bastard child of a god, and they’ll believe you’re capable of just about anything.

“So, quit with the foreplay,” Jude said. He leaned forward, the chair creaking under his weight. “Mourning sent you to talk me into coming back, didn’t he?”

“No.”

Jude raised an eyebrow. “So you just thought you’d look your old buddy Jude up after six years and knock back a few?”

“Okay, yes, Mourning sent me.” She bit her lip, uncertain. “But it’s not what you think.”

“Fuck Mourning.” Jude felt his control slipping, anger and magic threatening to wriggle free, to take shape as fire and storm. He shouldn’t have come. This was the last thing he needed.

“It’s not what you think,” she repeated. Regal stuck two fingers into her back pocket and took out an envelope sealed with red wax. The paper looked thick and old, like parchment. She glanced up, then her eyes darted away, unable to meet his. “You’re pissed, I get it. I didn’t want to get involved, but you know how it is. Mourning wants something, he doesn’t exactly ask, you know? But this message isn’t from Mourning. We were just hired to find you and deliver it.”

Jude wanted to say that he didn’t care. That he didn’t want any part in any of this, just wanted to go home and drink until he forgot all the impossible things he knew. Things that had been a part of that other life, like magicians who called things up out of the darkness to do their bidding, or hoodoo women who cast curses for a fee and then charged double for the cure, or monsters that walked the daylight pretending to be human and hunted in the night. Things that were only partly human, or not human at all. Things that even the gods had abandoned.

Instead of saying any of that, though, his curiosity won out. “That envelope isn’t ticking, is it?”

She laughed, but it was an unconvincing, desperate sound. She said nothing else, just held the message out to him, shaking it a little when he didn’t take it.

“Who sent it?” he asked.

“No idea. All I know is I’m supposed to give you this,” she said, sliding the parchment across the table, “and tell you that the favor’s being called in.”

Jude cursed under his breath. He owed a lot of debts, to more people than he’d ever be able to pay back. But only one of them would refer to his debt as a favor: Dodge Renaud, the fortune god of New Orleans. Sure enough, when he picked it up, the envelope was sealed with red wax impressed with an ornate R.

Fucking perfect, Jude thought. He started to take a sip of his beer and instead tilted it up, gulping, draining the glass, no longer concerned with whether she saw his gloves or not. He found, to his surprise, that his hands didn’t shake.

Six years. That was a decent span of time for normal human problems, hangovers and avoiding exes and pretending you were happy with your shitty pay at your shitty job. Six long years away from dancing to the whim of gods and all the nasty bullshit that came with it. For six years he’d stayed low, stayed quiet, tucked down in a seam of a life so boring, he’d convinced himself that he’d vanished entirely, that petty problems would be all he’d have to deal with for the rest of his life. He should have known better.

Six years went like the blink of an eye if you lived forever.

Gather the Fortunes

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Camp returns to his otherworldly New Orleans of The City of Lost Fortunes for a sequel that evokes the magic, mystery, and mythology of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods with a female protagonist that calls to mind the power and personality of Chuck Wendig’s Miriam Black (Blackbirds).

CHAPTER ONE

When Death comes, he carries a tool for harvesting grain slung over his shoulder, his skeletal form swallowed by a billowing black cloak. And she descends from the heavens astride a magnificent horse, blood-flecked armor glinting in the light of a battlefield sunset, to carry a fallen warrior away to an everlasting feast. And he leads the way to the Scales of Judgment with his human arms stretched wide in welcome, while his scavenger’s eyes stare down the length of his jackal’s muzzle, weighing and hungry. And she waits—either hideously ugly or unspeakably beautiful depending on the way you lived your life—on the far side of a bridge that is either a rainbow or the Milky Way or both, a span that is either treacherous and thin as a single plank of wood, or wide and sturdy and safe, whichever you have earned. They are sparrows and owls, dolphins and bees, dogs and ravens and whippoorwills. They are the familiar faces of ancestors who have gone before, they are luminous beings of impossible description, and they are the random firings of synapses as the fragile spark of life fades to nothing. He is a moment all must experience. She is a figure to be both feared and embraced. They are the concept that rules all others; a constant, like entropy, like the speed of light. Death is both an end and a transition. Simultaneously a crossing over and the guide on that journey, one that is unique to each individual and yet the same for all. Death is able to be every one of these and more—all at once without conflict or contradiction—because death is the end of all conflicts, is beyond contradictions. Both nothing and everything.

The only thing Death has never been is lonely.

One of those many contradictions, a young woman named Renaissance Raines, waited for death in a neighborhood dive bar named Pal’s, scratching the label off a warm half-finished bottle of Abita with her thumbnail, unnoticed and sober and bored. She sat in one of the high-backed swivel chairs at the long bar that took up most of the main room, facing a back-lit altar of liquor bottles that glowed beneath a couple of flat-screen TVs and the chalkboards advertising drink specials. The wall behind her held a few small, two-person tables that were empty in the early afternoon but wouldn’t stay that way for much longer. Bright blue walls rose to a high orange ceiling illuminated by lights that tapered down to points in a way that reminded Renai of spinning tops. The life of the bar shifted around her—the electronic jingle and chirp of the digital jukebox in the corner, the brash, too-loud laughter coming from the handful of mostly white college kids playing air hockey in the back, the warmer, subdued conversation between a quartet of locals, an older black couple, a white woman holding a tiny, trembling dog, and a middle-aged Native American guy bellied up to the bar, a swirl of cigarette smoke in the air, the soft whir of ceiling fans overhead—and though breath filled her lungs and blood pulsed in her veins, she was as a ghost to all of it. She spoke to no one, shared no one’s companionable silence, sent no texts to check on anyone’s arrival, made no attempts to catch a stranger’s eye. If anyone looked at Renai long enough to really see her—her dark brown skin taut with youth and free of laugh or frown lines, her full cheeks that dimpled with the slightest of smiles, her loose coils of hair, usually allowed to hang down along her jawline but today pulled and wound into a bun on each side of her head, her slender runner’s frame lost in the depths of a thick leather jacket despite the heat that still hadn’t relaxed its grip even in late October—they’d wonder if she was old enough to drink the beer in her hand. She knew nobody would, though.

Most people didn’t really seem to notice her at all these days. She hadn’t gotten carded when she came in, no one had stopped her when she’d slipped behind the counter and taken a beer from the cooler. If she took her hand off the bottle and left it on the counter, the bartender would scoop it up and drop it in the trash. If she switched chairs to sit right next to the locals—or even leaned in between them—so long as she didn’t touch them, they’d keep talking as if she wasn’t there. If she interrupted, if she tapped someone on the shoulder, if she shattered one of the TVs with a thrown glass and shrieked with all her might, they’d see her, briefly, giving her the unfocused, confused look of a person shaken awake. If she stopped talking or touching them, though, they’d turn back to whatever they were doing, unsettled, maybe, but with Renai already on her way to being forgotten.

Life just wasn’t the same since her resurrection.

The details of her untimely end and her unusual return were still frustratingly hazy for her, even though she’d had years to try and remember. She had only a scatter of disconnected, vivid, and hard-to-trust flashes of memory to try to piece together. A moment of violence in a familiar room. A difficult journey across a place that was somehow both New Orleans and somewhere else. An eerie black streetcar that didn’t exist in the living world. A moment of choice—though not the specifics of the choice she’d made—in front of a pair of huge empty chairs: the Thrones that embodied Death. Rising again in a concrete tomb with another voice in her head: that of a Trickster named Jude. His body hanging upside down in a tree in Audubon Park. A Red Door that filled her with dread. None of it fit together into a narrative that made any sense to her.

What she knew for sure was that she’d died late one night in August 2011 and woke up some random morning that September in a bed not her own with the feeling that many days had passed without her knowing, like she’d fought through an intense illness whose fever had just broken. Over the days and weeks and months and years that followed, she’d discovered that her new existence carried consequences: what she’d come to think of as the aura of disinterest that surrounded her, these snapshots of her experiences in the Underworld burned into her memory, and a strange, profound distance from the world around her. She hadn’t been dead long, less than a week, but that was enough to destroy everything she had been. Family and friends had buried her. Certificates had been signed. Mourners had mourned. And then, before she had a chance to return to it, her world had moved on.

She’d been brought back to life, just not to her own.

Renai gulped down a couple of mouthfuls of Abita as if her thoughts had left a bad taste in her mouth. She grimaced at the lukewarm beer and considered swiping a cold one. What she really wanted, she realized, was heat. Coffee, tea, lit gasoline; anything that might ease the chill that had burrowed deep within her since her resurrection.

“Least she got some kind of justice,” the Native American guy said, with a hint of an accent Renai couldn’t place, just enough to guess he wasn’t from here. “Too little, too late, but better than nothing.”

For a moment Renai thought he was talking about her, but of course he couldn’t be. He didn’t even know she was in the room. She’d been half listening to their conversation while she brooded, though, so it didn’t take long for her to realize that they were still talking about the young woman who’d been murdered in this very bar a few years ago whose killer had just been convicted. Their maudlin discussion turned to the dead girl’s last words, and Renai spun her chair to face away from them. She didn’t need to listen to the rest of it to know what they’d say. The final sounds that passed across most people’s lips were either a plea for more time, or a question they’d never hear answered.

Renai had heard plenty of both in the past five years.

When she was just about to leave some cash for her beer—she had no fear of being caught, but her momma hadn’t raised no thief—and make her way across town to what she was in this bar avoiding, the door to the men’s room swung open, and one of the college guys came barreling out. “Brah,” he shouted to his friends, “you gotta check this shit out! There’s, like, seventies porn all over the walls!”

“Wait till your ol’ lady meets Burt in the little girl’s room,” Renai muttered, referring to the picture of a nude Burt Reynolds reclining on a bearskin rug that hung over the bathroom sink.

As though in response to her words, Renai heard a man’s chuckle come from behind the bar. She glanced over and saw a brown-skinned older man who was, simply put, unfortunate-looking. He had a large, bulbous nose that looked like it had been broken twice as often as it had been set, and an obnoxious set of ears, too wide, too long, and oddly flat at the top. His eyes were either too small for his face or just dwarfed by the combination of the nose and ears. He wore a dark blue button-down work shirt with the name SETH embroidered over his chest pocket in gold thread. He twisted a washrag inside a pint glass with the deft, unconscious motions of someone who’d done it for years.

To her surprise, he seemed to actually see her, grinned at her, even. “Yeah you right,” he said, all one word like he was born here. “Mr. Reynolds done made more than one lady question her choice of companion over the years.” He set the glass down and rested his hands on the bar, leaning in closer to make his next statement quiet and conspiratorial. “Though a pretty young thing like you might just convince him to hop down off that wall and buy you a drink.”

Renai opened her mouth to answer, but something made her hesitate. He felt off somehow. Wrong. Not girl-grab-your-shit-and-run bad, but definitely worth choosing her words with care. It could be the fact that he’d noticed her at all that set her spidey sense tingling, but she had spoken. He might just have really sensitive hearing. Death had rendered her hard to notice, not completely undetectable. Nor was it the creepy thing he’d said, though gross bartender pickup lines were always cause for concern. As were the scattered designs inked across his taut forearms, which had the simple line-drawing look of prison tattoos. No, Renai realized, following the stretch of his arms down to the bar, it was his hands that had thrown her off.

Seth’s hands were filthy.

He had dirty shadows beneath his too-long nails, and some red substance was crusted into his cuticles and packed into the folds of skin at his knuckles. Renai’s heart clenched at the sight of it, her thoughts leaping to images of Seth wrist-deep in a pool of blood—but no, she reminded herself, blood dried a darker, browner shade than what stained Seth’s hands. This was soil: thick red clay. Her imagination shifted her horror-movie scenario to one of Seth burrowing down into the earth.

Or out of a grave.

That, coupled with his ability to see her at all, made her think that Seth was more than he appeared. “What are you?” she asked. It wasn’t a polite question to ask in the world of myths and gods that she’d been resurrected into, but she had places to be and no time for games. Besides, if he didn’t want rude, he shouldn’t have called her a “thing.”

“As you can see here,” he said, tapping a sharp fingernail against the name on his shirt, “they call me Seth.”

She raised an eyebrow into an imperious arch, a feed-me-none-of-your-bullshit gesture. “I can read, boo, but I guess you can’t hear too good.” She let a little Ninth Ward creep into her voice, knowing people tended to underestimate you if your dialect sounded a certain way. “Code switching,” the Internet called it. “Cooning,” her mother would have said, after kissing her teeth. “With them filthy hands of yours, I think we both know you ain’t no bartender, and since nobody in here seen us talking, I guess you ain’t exactly human, neither. So what are you? Psychopomp? Zombie? Jiang Shi? You here on your own, or did the Thrones send you?”

Seth smiled, his teeth crowded and uneven, and all pretense of humanity slid away from him. He didn’t have a vampire’s fangs or a ghoul’s obscene tongue or a wendigo’s fetid breath. His smile wasn’t even threatening. But in Seth’s sly, effortless conviction, Renai saw the kind of knowledge and power no mortal could possess.

“You,” he said, “are exactly the person I was led to believe you would be.” His voice had changed, too, the drawl of a local’s accent replaced by the clipped non-accent of someone so profoundly educated that regional markers had been bleached from his vowels.

See what happens when you try and play a player, she thought.

He reached into the chest pocket of his work shirt and pulled out a long, thin strip of paper, curled in on itself like it had once been rolled into a tight little cylinder. He set it on the bar next to her beer bottle, but kept it pinned beneath his soiled finger. “I’m going to request a favor of you now.”

That word, favor, resonated in her chest in a way that made her hold her next breath. In this new reality in which she’d found herself, one where myths walked the streets of New Orleans and magic was possible, Renai had learned that things like wealth and power had little to do with the accumulation of material possessions or hoarding of currency, and far more to do with will—with one’s ability to impact the world. Trading one action for another was the coin of the realm. The fact that he just assumed that she would want what he was offering told her she wasn’t dealing with some pitiful undead who had scraped up just enough magic to be able to resist death’s grip. No, she got the feeling that Seth was talking about divine favor.

Because whatever he called himself, Renai was pretty sure that this ugly, grimy-handed bartender was a god.

Renai chewed at her lip until she realized she was doing it and made herself stop. “I’m listening,” she said.

“This is the name,” Seth said, “of someone whose well-being I consider significant, someone who will soon come into your realm of influence.”

“I don’t have the authority to let—”

Seth cut her off before she could finish by closing his eyes and shaking his head slowly, his mouth compressed to a thin line. She couldn’t read the gesture well enough to tell if he was disappointed in the conclusion she’d leapt to, or if she’d offended him simply by interrupting, but she could tell she’d misstepped somehow and it stole the voice from her.

When he opened his eyes, he had the squeezed, horizontal-slitted pupils of a goat.

“If I thought you might neglect your duty in pursuit of personal gain, I wouldn’t have approached you. I’m merely asking that you give the situation careful consideration and do your best to see that he is well-cared-for. Nothing more.”

Renai tried to swallow, her mouth suddenly dry. She was caught, she realized, between not trusting Seth’s cryptic proposition and not wanting to deny any god, especially not one who’d gone to the trouble of finding her. And also, whispered a voice she tried to deny, it would be pretty fucking sweet to have a literal deus ex machina in her back pocket. There were about a dozen questions whirling in her mind, but only two of desperate significance, and only one she had the courage to ask.

“Why me?”

Seth frowned, like the answer should be obvious. “Because Renai—if I may call you Renai—out of all your associates, you alone have a unique perspective.” He’d pronounced her nickname correctly, like it had two ee’s at the end, which made her think that he’d heard her name out loud, not read it. Most people saw that ai in her name and acted like it added a couple more syllables. Made her wonder who’d spoken her name to him and what else they’d had to say.

“You retain,” he continued, “the ability to question orders. You are still capable of compassion. Simply put, I’m speaking to you because, of all the others I might have asked, you alone are still alive.”

Oh, Renai thought, so when you said I was the person you thought I would be, what you meant to say was that I’m Death’s Little Mistake. A flash of annoyance sparked within her, prompting her to ask the question she didn’t really want to ask.

“And if, after careful review of my options, I still make a choice you don’t like?”

Seth’s frown deepened, but he nodded, as if this, at last, was the question she ought to be asking. “Then you will have done me no favors, and so I will owe you none in return. I may offer some small token of gratitude for your time, if I believe your consideration was genuine, but I assure you that I won’t hold a grudge. I recognize that you are under obligations of your own.”

Wonder how small a token we’re talking about, she thought, and then heard, in her grandmother’s voice: Always free cheese in a mousetrap, but I ain’t never seen a mouse happy he found it. She looked down at his hand, as if she could read the name through the paper, as if it would matter either way if she could. Seth had the five dots of a quincunx inked in the place where his thumb joined his hand: four bluish pinpricks arranged in a square, a fifth in the center. Another jail tattoo, the dot in the center representing the prisoner surrounded by four walls. She couldn’t decide if the tattoos were part of the mask Seth wore to disguise his true form, or if they represented something profound about him. Couldn’t say which she thought would be worse. What choice did she really have, though?

Putting her hand close to his soiled skin made every muscle in her abdomen clench, but she reached out and took the slip of paper from him anyway. He made her tug it out from beneath his finger, keeping just enough pressure on the paper that if she pulled too fast it would tear. “I’m not saying yes,” she said, “and I’m not saying no. I’m just saying I’ll consider it.”

The ugly god smiled, warm and cheerful and genuine. “Excellent! I’m sure that when you see . . .” He trailed off, raising a hand as if to ward off what he’d intended to say. “No, I’ve spoken my piece. The decision must be yours.”

On the bar where she’d left it, her phone lit up and trilled, the alarm she’d set to remind herself when it was time to leave. When she looked up, Seth was gone. The paper remained in her hand, though: Ramses St. Cyr. The name tickled at her, like it was one she should recognize. She silenced the alarm and slid her phone and the slip of paper into her jacket pocket, deciding to file this whole conversation under “shit to deal with later.”

Death waited for no one, after all.

Outside, her noble steed waited on the curb, black and gleaming and powerful. Murder and resurrection had stolen just about everything from Renai, but sometimes when the gods took with one hand, they gave with the other. The Thrones did, at least; they’d given her the leather jacket she wore—far more than the simple garment it appeared to be—and after she’d found that buses passed her by if she was the only one at the stop, they’d also given her a ride. Not a “steed” in the truest sense of the word—even Renai’s difficulty at being noticed probably wouldn’t hide a horse galloping through city streets—the Thrones’ gift had taken the shape of a motorcycle: a Honda Valkyrie. Unlike an actual motorcycle, though, this bike rumbled to life as soon as Renai swung a leg onto her, always seemed to know exactly where Renai wanted to go when she gripped the handlebars, and never ran out of gas. Renai called her Kyrie. She didn’t know how intelligent Kyrie was, or if she had an actual name of her own, or why the motorcycle felt so strongly like a “she.” She also chose not to think about what sort of fuel powered a motorcycle from the Underworld.

As Kyrie sped away from Pal’s with a roar that could only be called eager, it occurred to Renai that she avoided thinking about a lot these days. Her old life; her duties in this new one. The dead and the Thrones and the other gods she’d met, however briefly. The changes she’d endured since her resurrection. She’d made a habit of pushing it all down deep into the cold, empty well in the center of her, far enough from her present moment that she hardly thought about anything at all, letting one day bleed unexamined into the next. Years had gone by like this, with her learning almost nothing new about the world she’d found herself in, just doing as she was told. Following the rules she’d been given.

She leaned into the slide as Kyrie turned from Orleans onto Broad, leaving behind the green sprawling canopy of the live oaks growing in the neutral ground for a wide stretch of asphalt open to the afternoon sky. She patted her jacket pocket absently, making sure that she still had the slip of paper Seth had given her.

He had described a much different person than the one Renai saw in the mirror. Seemed to think she was capable of defiance when she didn’t even bother to question. But was it apathy that dictated her actions? Or fear?

Kyrie’s tires thumped and bucked over the streetcar tracks running down Canal, shaking away Renai’s thoughts. Those bumps meant she was almost there, so it was time to get her game face on. She unzipped a small pocket on the front of her jacket that she never used—small and awkwardly placed, probably for a cell phone—and pushed the little scroll of paper inside, zipping it back up, knowing she didn’t want to lose it, knowing she’d get distracted by it if it wasn’t somewhere secure.

She did her best to clear her mind of doubt and questions, of everything but her only true purpose in this world of hers. A few minutes later, Kyrie swung past Tulane and Broad, turned and bumped up onto the sidewalk on Gravier across the street from a squat, ugly cinder block of a building, her engine grumbling to a stop. Renai kissed her fingertips and tapped them against Kyrie’s chassis as she swung her leg off the bike. The metal was cold to the touch despite running full throttle in the late October warmth. Something else she and the bike shared. The building was yet one more thought she’d been avoiding, a task she chose to think of in the abstract until the moment came. Hands clenched into fists in her jacket pockets, Renai forced herself to look across the street.

In its distinct lack of personality, the building that Renai didn’t want to think about could have been a cheaply designed office complex or a parking garage, if it weren’t for the half-sized windows and the coils of razor wire woven through the surrounding fence, but when she allowed herself more than a glance, it looked exactly like what it was.

The place Kyrie had brought her was Orleans Parish Prison, and Renai had come here to take a man’s life.

Upon a Burning Throne

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From international sensation Ashok K. Banker, pioneer of the fantasy genre in India, comes the first book in a ground-breaking, epic fantasy series inspired by the ancient Indian classic, The Mahabharata.

Adri

1

Adri’s earliest memories from boyhood were of a voice and a hand. His brother’s voice and hand.

He did not recall the specific details of the first time, but he recalled one particular time when he, a little toddler, had stumbled and fallen. Falling was something he did often early in his life. Skinned knees and bruised elbows were such frequent occurrences that his were always scabbed. But there were falls and there were falls. Some resulted in more than skinned knees and bruised elbows. He suffered a string of injuries, none too serious, but each sufficient to deliver more lasting damage than mere bodily harm alone.

In most cases, it was his self-confidence that was really hurt. To be able to run, to play, to gambol, or even to simply walk without constantly falling or colliding was something even the most ordinary of children enjoyed. Yet he, a prince of Hastinaga, heir to the great Burnt Empire, could not take more than a few dozen paces without injury. Could not play with the other children he heard laughing and squealing and running about with such abandon. Could not do as his growing, energetic little body desired. There was no outlet for his boundless energy. No cure for his problem.

The royal household did everything possible to ensure his safety and comfort. There were wet nurses and maids everywhere. But he was a child, a strong, robust boy with a growing body and eager, questing mind. He wanted to run, play, yell, jump, tumble, to unleash the dog of youth.

These luxuries were denied him. He had to sit and listen, merely listen, as other children did all those things. When he tried, as he often tried, to join them, it would always end the same way, with him falling or colliding, injuring himself, bleeding and cut, or bruised and battered. And each time, his self-confidence diminished, along with his zest for life.

A bitterness took root in his heart.

Questions arose: Why me? Why deny me this most basic of abilities? Why punish me in this manner—and it is a punishment, is it not? For what crime? What was my karma in past lives that I need suffer so in this one?

Though everyone assured him that it was neither karma nor punishment, simply an accident of nature, he could not believe it. A wet nurse, the very one who had nursed him from birth, always told him that he had been handicapped because otherwise he was too strong, too brave, too intelligent, too powerful. The gods feared your might, she told him as she dressed his injuries and wiped his tears. They feared that you would come to the afterworld one day and challenge them in their own abodes, so they took away your sight that you might never find the way.

I don’t want to challenge the gods, he cried. I don’t want to go to Swarga, I just want to see.

Ember said nothing. She was barely present in his life.

A shadow, a presence, a physical body that offered no warmth, comfort, or affection, she only saw him at bedtime, when he was brought to her after his bath, after he had been cleaned and dressed and made presentable, to bid him a good night. Even then, she did so absently, with strange formality and a sense of distance. Even when he hugged her, she would start by patting him on the back, as if admonishing him for something he had done, then, if he continued holding on too tightly or too long—which was almost every night at first—she would speak to the daiimaa, and the wet nurse would gently untangle his little hands from around her neck and separate mother and son.

Adri could not recall a time his mother had fed him, dressed him, bathed him, washed his cuts, dressed his wounds. Telling her about the day’s accidents only seemed to elicit the same response from her: a stiff silence followed by a curt “I see.” No offer of sympathy, no words of reassurance, no gentle caress or any other show of support. Simply that vaguely disapproving “I see.” Even the choice of phrase seemed designed to belittle him. I see . . . and you don’t, you silly little blind boy.

She never said anything more hurtful than that; she simply never said anything that showed affection, or love.

Adri heard other children with their mothers, the way they spoke and laughed together, played together, ate together. He heard babes suckling at their mothers’ breasts. Heard the female voices cry out with alarm when they saw their children injured or about to come to harm, heard the distress and concern in their maternal voices.

Adri never heard such emotions in his mother’s voice.

And on that day, the day when he fell, and a hand reached out and took hold of him, a voice spoke and strengthened him, it was not his mother’s hand or voice.

It was his brother’s.

2

“Adri!” Shvate cried.

Adri gasped as he felt his feet swing out over emptiness.

He scrambled backward, trying to find his footing on the edge of the riverbank. The heels of his feet slipped on the loamy mud. He felt himself falling, heard the roar of the water below, and absurdly thought, At least I can’t scrape my knees or elbows on water.

Then his brother’s strong hands were grasping him tightly beneath his armpits, surrounding his chest like a vise. Shvate’s breath was hot on his left ear, grunting and exclaiming as he too seemed to struggle with the wet muddy ground, then he yanked hard on Adri, and both of them fell on their backs.

They both lay there a moment, the mud yielding and cool underneath.

Adri could feel the soft evening sunshine on his face, and on his arms and legs. He knew his special silk anga garment and dhoti must be soiled from falling in the mud, were perhaps even torn. He could hear the voices of the wet nurses and the younger maids from behind him, calling out his name, then came the sound of footfalls slapping the damp riverbank. A moment later, he felt the presence of people all around him, helping him up and fussing.

“He was about to step off the edge!”

“Into the river!”

“He could have drowned!”

“The water flows so strongly here, he would have been taken downriver in a flash.”

“He would have been a mile away before we started after him.”

All this was said and more like it.

Adri was used to it.

He had been the center of many such scares and alarms.

But he knew this was different.

It was the anniversary of his naming day, for one thing.

Then there was the river: he had never fallen into a river before.

And of course, there was Shvate’s voice, right beside him.

“Adri, are you well?”

He turned his head toward the sound of his brother’s voice.

He attempted a smile.

Then, remembering what one of the children had told him—You look like an urrkh when you do that!—he spoke aloud.

“Shvate.”

“Yes, Adri?”

“Brother.”

It was all he could think of to say at that moment.

Gratitude, affection, respect, adoration, all packed into that one word. Brother.

The moment was interrupted by the wet nurses, who then began fussing over Shvate as well. As did, before long, Uncle Vrath and Grandmother Jilana.

“You saved your brother’s life, young Shvate.”

Adri recognized the smooth deep tones of his uncle’s voice. They always reminded him of the roar of the river itself for some reason. Though that was hardly possible: for how could a man’s voice resemble the sound of rushing water?

“Had he fallen into the river, he would have drowned, or been dashed against the rocks downstream,” Grandmother Jilana said, her husky, sonorous tones unmistakable.

Adri heard Shvate snort, a dismissive sound. “That would never happen,” he heard his brother say. “Not as long as I’m nearby.”

There was a brief silence. Adri sensed that the elders were looking at each other in that moment, then at Shvate. He knew this from similar silences during conversations with other adults. People always did that if you said something unusual or unexpected. They looked at one another. He wondered why they did it. What would they see, after all? Each other’s faces? Surely faces did not change from instant to instant. Only voices could convey emotion, as far as he knew. But he also understood that there was much that he did not yet know.

He heard in that silence their pride for his brother, and heard that pride reflected in Shvate’s reply. Not as long as I’m nearby.

Adri felt a surge of emotion rise in his chest, then tears rolled down his cheeks.

That was the first time in his life he had a sense that there was someone in the world who actually cared if he lived or died, and who would risk his own life for him.

Brother.

Shvate

Shvate had a deep sympathy and love for his brother.

Ever since he could run and play, he had wanted to play with his brother, run alongside him, team up with him against the other children. He was proud to know he had a brother, a fellow heir to the great Krushan throne. It made him feel as if he was part of something bigger than himself. An empire, a dynasty, a tradition . . . a family.

It had been difficult accepting that Adri was not like him—or like any of the other children. Sight was something that Shvate, like most people, took so much for granted that he could not truly understand how anyone could not see and yet live. How could you not see all the colors, the shapes, the light, the people, the places, the things? It was unthinkable to him.

When he was younger, he had thought that maybe someday this would pass, that one day Adri would wake up and suddenly be able to see. Everything would be fine then. Then he and Shvate could run and play, and be kids together.

Shvate even dreamed of this, happy dreams in which he and his brother had wild exotic adventures together—fighting urrkh, battling the enemies of the Burnt Empire, besieging enemy forts, quelling rebellions, squashing troublemakers. These were all things he had heard of their uncle Vrath doing, things he dreamed of doing himself someday soon, once he was old enough to fight.

In these dreams, Shvate was different, too. His skin and eyes were normal, the same dark shade as other people of his race. He could see and fight and do as he pleased—bare-naked if he wished—in full sunlight, with no need to always clothe himself in layers to protect his skin and vision from the sun, no need to wait until sunset to roam outside freely.

They were a formidable pair in these dreams, Adri and he. They were princes of the world. They traveled the kingdom, did as they pleased, and no one who challenged them survived. It was so wonderful, he would wake up smiling from these dreams and jump out of bed, eager to go to his brother and tell him.

Then, as he grew a little older, he understood that such a day would never come. He did not stop hoping and dreaming—indeed, he dreamed of it all the more after that—but a part of him accepted that it would never happen. Adri’s blindness was as permanent as the old sword guru’s missing arm.

“Arms don’t grow back, blind men don’t see,” the old man had said gruffly to Shvate, swatting him on his backside with the wooden practice sword. “Hoping don’t make it so, just as dodging my sword don’t make you a better swordsman. Stand and fight. You’re a Krushan, act like one.”

Still, Shvate felt bad for Adri. He was always falling, colliding with things, hurting himself, getting into accidents. Always forced to sit and listen while the other children played. Listen! Paagh! Where was the fun in listening to other children playing? It was as if Adri were being punished for something. Which was entirely unfair because Adri was the best behaved child in the entire palace.

Shvate would, from time to time, try to involve Adri, try to make him get up and join them at play. He couldn’t help it; he wanted to share the fun, the joy, with his brother. These attempts almost always ended with Adri falling, or knocking heads, or taking a tumble, and after a while, Shvate stopped encouraging his brother, not wanting to be the cause of him sustaining further injuries and humiliation. Yet he missed him.

As more time passed and they both grew a little more, Shvate started to feel a different way toward his brother: protective.

He began to accompany Adri around wherever he went, watching him, calling out his name to warn him if he saw Adri about to fall or trip or dash into something. The wet nurses were there for that, of course, and they did their task admirably well, but Adri had taken to ignoring them and deliberately walking where he pleased, as an act of defiance. When Shvate called out a warning, however, Adri always responded. He would stand still and wait until someone provided him guidance or instructed him to walk the other way.

Shvate was watching Adri the day of his brother’s naming day celebration.

The family had a tradition of spending naming day celebrations on the banks of the Jeel, always at the same spot, under the great banyan tree. It was the place where Grandfather Sha’ant had met his first wife, Grandmother Jeel. It was also the place where Uncle Vrath had first been seen by Grandfather Sha’ant, when he, Vrath, returned from his grandfather Coldheart’s abode. There were other things that had happened at this spot as well, something to do with babies and the river and Grandmother Jeel, but these were things that the wet nurses did not speak of to the children.

The family spent all naming day celebrations there, bringing cooks and tents and servants and throwing a grand feast for hundreds and thousands of the highest nobles and aristocrats and ministers and diplomats. There were dancers and musicians and lavish feasts, along with colored banners and horse riding displays and wrestling matches.

None of which could Adri see, even though it was his own naming day celebration.

When Adri wandered away from the festivities on his own, Shvate noticed. He saw also that the wet nurses and maids were busy gossiping. It was not their fault. They assumed that Adri was listening to the music. But Shvate was sitting nearby and he could tell that Adri was fed up listening, and who wouldn’t be, when all you could do was listen?

So when Adri got up from his comfortable silk-cushioned seat and wandered away, Shvate followed him—

And thus saw when Adri was about to step off the edge of the riverbank.

He leaped forward, grabbing hold of his brother and pulling him back to safety. He banged the back of his head on a small rock when he fell, but he didn’t care. He was happy he was able to save his brother from falling into the river. He couldn’t have borne it if Adri had fallen and drowned, or even just been hurt badly. Shvate had to look out for him.

They were brothers after all.

The Chaos Function

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For readers of the best-selling novels Sleeping Giants and Dark Matter, an intense, high-stakes thriller with a science-fiction twist that asks: If technology enabled you to save the life of someone you love, would you do so even if it might doom millions?

One

Olivia Nikitas sat in the shade of an improvised awning, a canvas tarp that smelled like a dead goat. She checked her watch again, drummed her fingers nervously on the table. The hand-lettered habib café sign hung crookedly by a couple of wire twists. Most of the buildings on both sides of the street lay in ruins, either bombed-out shells or pulverized beyond recognition. The proprietor, Habib, had dragged his coffee machine and generator into what was left of an antique shop. Olivia admired his entrepreneurial spirit. As a freelance journalist, she had been covering the carnage in Syria since 2023—six years now. The spirit of Aleppo was pretty thoroughly annihilated, so the appearance of the Habib Café, barely ten weeks into a shaky postwar era, looked like a positive development.

Across the street a cat slipped through a mountain of wreckage, its movement so sinuous and fleeting that at first Olivia thought the cat was the shadow of something passing through the air, like a bad omen.

She picked up her coffee, a potent Arabic blend spiced with cardamom. Holding the cup in the fingertips of both hands, she brought it to her lips. The luxury of fresh coffee equaled a minor miracle after the deprivations of war. Even in the heat, with sweat trickling from her hairline and her shirt sticking to her body, Olivia savored the scalding jolt of caffeine.

A little girl, maybe seven years old, came running down the street, the ragged cuffs of her trousers whisking up dust. She called to the cat, grabbed a bent spine of iron rebar, and hauled herself after it, climbing a potential avalanche. Her arms and legs were bird-bone thin. Olivia winced, sitting there on her comparatively fat American ass. She put her cup down, feeling irrationally guilty for the indulgence.

The cat darted under a slab of broken concrete. The little girl peered after it, calling, “Qetta, qetta.” The gap was just big enough that she might be tempted to crawl after the damn thing. Olivia lifted her sweatdamp hair away from the back of her neck and looked around, hoping for some adult supervision. Good luck with that. The city was overrun with orphans. Olivia started to stand.

In the distance, a gunshot popped.

Olivia went rigid. Technically, hostilities had officially ended. But that wouldn’t prevent a rogue sniper from taking up position. The shot had come from the direction of the Green Zone. By now, Brian and Jodee had left and would be out in the open. Jodee Abadi was her escort into the Old City, and Brian Anker was her would-be escort into a different kind of hazardous territory: a relationship impervious to her usual strategies of detachment. Brian wasn’t the first guy to take on that mission, but he had already gotten farther than most. If Olivia’s heart was a door, then Brian was the pushy salesman who had wedged his foot in the gap when she tried to slam it in his face. For that, she resented him a little. He was good about the resentment. He was good about everything. It really pissed her off.

Another gunshot popped. Where are you guys?

Suddenly she felt it, the brittle substratum of the enforced peace. It could give way at any time. Foreign military forces led by the Americans barely held the city together. Soon something would break. A new insurgency, maybe. In the months since the end of the war, Olivia had gotten used to leaving her Kevlar vest in her room. She still brought her headscarf, though, even if at the moment she wore it loosely around her neck.

Two gunshots, and Brian (and Jodee) in the open.

By reflex, she reached for her phone, but there was no point. This district of Aleppo was a cellular dead zone.

The sound of something scraping and sliding pulled her attention back to the girl. A broken window frame surfed down the piled debris and cracked to pieces on the street. The little girl had her broomstick arm shoved all the way to the shoulder under the concrete slab. If the slab moved, it would crush her. Olivia quickly crossed the street. “Hey, kid! Be careful.”

From the top of the mountain of rubble, the girl looked at Olivia and pointed down. “Qetta, qetta.”

“Yeah, I get it. Your cat is under there.”

“Qetta.”

Olivia looked east, willing Brian and Jodee to be there. Instead, a couple of old men crossed the street, their summer white dishdashahs seeming to float them above a haze of dust. Olivia hated that she worried about Brian. That’s what you got when you let the salesman stick his foot in the door. She should have known better.

Olivia sighed and started climbing the rubble, muttering, “Qetta the fucking cat.”  The heat was causing her bra band to chafe, though she had caked on talcum powder. Blinking grit and stinging sweat out of her eyes, she reached the girl and put on a smile. In broken Arabic, she asked, “Where’s your mother?”  The kid stared at her with eyes too big for the bones of her face.

“Qetta,” the girl said.

“Right. Look out, kid.”

Olivia knelt in front of the gap. She felt off-balance. The whole mass of concrete, wood, sheet metal, and glass threatened to shift without warning. Under the slab, a pair of eyes winked like green sequins. Olivia took a granola bar out of her shirt pocket and tore the wrapper. She broke off a corner and held it for the cat to smell.

“Here, kitty.”

The cat didn’t move.

Hesitantly, Olivia reached under the slab. The cat crept forward, sniffing. Olivia thrust out her other hand, grabbed the cat behind the ears, and dragged it clear. Hissing and clawing, the cat wrenched out of her grip and leaped away.  The little girl didn’t even look at it. Her attention was one hundred percent on the granola bar. Olivia handed it to her. The child devoured the bar in three bites, then picked the crumbs from her shirt and sucked them off her fingers. Olivia unclipped the water bottle from her belt, pulled the nipple up, and offered it.

“That doesn’t look safe,” a familiar voice said.

Olivia looked around. Brian and Jodee were standing in the street watching her. “Jesus Christ, I was getting worried about you guys.”

The little girl pulled on the water bottle. Olivia let go. “You keep it, honey.”

Clutching the bottle, the girl hopped from one semi-stable spot to another and finally to the street. Jodee put his arms out to corral her, but she ducked past him and ran away, yelling, “Qetta, qetta!”

Olivia climbed down with considerably more caution. Brian and Jodee reached toward her, but she jumped the last three feet to the ground without their help and brushed her hands off on her pants. Brian’s cotton shirt clung to his skin like wet rice paper. He held his arms open, and Olivia adroitly sidestepped him. Touching was part of Brian’s vocabulary, but Olivia wasn’t always in the mood for a language lesson.

Brian stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I was worried about you, too,” he said.

“You’re always worried about me.”

“That’s because you’re always getting yourself into worrisome situations.”

Olivia shrugged. “Comes with the job.”

Jodee stood back, a half smile on his face. Olivia wrinkled her nose. Nice to know her antics amused him. Olivia had known Jodee for years, long before the current peace had stipulated that rebel fighters surrender their weapons. It was odd to see him without a gun. Stocky, balding, and middle-aged, he reminded her of her uncle Agata.

“That kid . . .” Olivia said.

“Somebody will pick her up,” Brian said. “The Red Cross has gotten pretty organized in the city.”

Olivia looked down the street. The girl was almost out of sight.

“You would never catch her,” Jodee said.

Brian nodded. “If the Red Cross doesn’t pick her up, she’ll probably find her way to one of my water distribution stations. A lot of them do.”

She turned to him. “More of your glass-half-full philosophy? That little girl doesn’t have a chance.”

“I think Olivia’s glass is all the way empty,” Jodee said.

Olivia rolled her eyes. “I’m realistic.”

“Liv,” Brian said, “just because you can’t rescue everyone, that doesn’t mean you can’t rescue some of them.”

Brian worked for a Portland-based NGO called Oregon Helps. At twenty-six, he was four years younger than Olivia, and—irrationally, in Olivia’s view—an optimist. They made an odd couple, not that Olivia thought of them as a couple exactly. Brian was tall and Nordic-looking, his eyes blue behind the lenses of wire-frame glasses. Olivia was five foot four and decidedly non-Nordic. Her father, a second-generation Greek American, had married likewise before moving to Seattle and opening his import business. After Olivia’s mother died, young, her dad married Rohana, an export agent from Jaipur.

Brian hadn’t said the L-word yet, but she knew he was itching to spit it out, maybe while his fingertips traced calligraphy on her bare shoulder. Love of the adult variety had never happened to Olivia, but everything else had. She knew this colored her perception. Okay, maybe Brian wasn’t a pushy salesman but a charming one; either way, the result was the same: His damn foot was in the door.

“If we’re going to the Old City,” Jodee said, scratching the black stubble on his jaw, “we need to go now. It will be dark in a few hours.”

“We’re going.” Olivia pulled her scarf up and arranged a proper hijab. There was a story in the Old City—a bloody one—and she wanted it.

“Shameful,” Jodee said, pointing at a ragged gap in the stone archway.

The Gate of Antioch stood as one of the oldest and best preserved of the nine original gates into the Old City. At least it had been, prior to the final year of the civil war.

“Mortar attack,” Olivia said. The war had destroyed more important things than ancient architectural treasures. It had left a million dead. Three times that many driven away as refugees, flooding into Turkey and central Europe.

Which is not to say the destruction of historical sites wasn’t bad, too—it was—and Jodee took it personally. Before the war, his business had arranged tours of the Old City and other ancient sites, and he had been a member of the Aleppo Preservation Corps. Jodee was fond of telling people that Aleppo was the oldest continuously inhabited city on earth. But when Olivia first met him, Jodee Abadi had been leading a heavily armed band of fighters, part of a moderate Islamist alliance called the Asala wa el-Tanmiya Front. War changed people. Or revealed who they really were.

A couple of bearded men in short-sleeved shirts loitered near the arch, watching them.

Olivia shaded her eyes. “Who are those guys?”

“I will find out.” Jodee looked sober. “Both of you wait here. And try not to look like journalists until I discover what they want.”

“I’m not a journalist,” Brian said.

“Tell Olivia not to be one, either.” Jodee walked toward the men.

Brian wandered over to the collapsing remnants of a makeshift and abandoned souk. He put his hands on his hips and appraised the empty vendor stalls, nodding thoughtfully. Olivia joined him. A scent of cinnamon and cassia bark lingered, trapped under the rusty corrugated roof.

“What the hell are you doing?” Olivia kept her voice low. She plucked her shirt away from her bra and flapped it, trying to generate a breeze underneath.

“Pretending I’m a tourist.”

“Uh, great idea. Except there aren’t any tourists.”

“Liv?”

“What?”

“Would you call this one of your better ideas, coming here?”

“I don’t have enough information to answer that.”

Rumors persisted that a pro-Assad militia had recently used a fourteenth-century madrassa as a torture cell—the use of a school for this purpose managing to defile religion, education, and history at the same time. The war had ended, but not everyone was happy about coalition troops taking over. Assad supporters blamed the Free Syrian Army and its sympathizers for starting the whole thing. Discovering evidence of continued human rights violations on the part of the regime was a story Olivia very much wished to tell—and one Jodee Abadi very much wanted told.

“When do you think you’ll have enough information?” Brian said.

“You sure ask a lot of questions.”

“Don’t you always say asking questions is good?”

“Was that another question?”

Jodee was talking to the bearded men. Olivia couldn’t tell whether or not it was going well. In Aleppo, it was always safest to assume it wasn’t. She put her hand on Brian’s arm, trying for a moment to adopt the part of his vocabulary largely missing in her. “Hey.”

Brian raised his eyebrows.

“Never mind,” she said.

“Come on. What?”

“Nothing.”

Brian removed his glasses, wiped the lenses on his shirttail, and put them back on. Despite his wide-brimmed REI sunhat, his nose and neck were perpetually sunburned and peeling. He shed more skin than a snake. “You were going to tell me I should go back to the Green Zone.”

“You should.”

“Liv.”

“But I’m not telling you to, because what would be the point, right?”

“Right. Thanks for respecting my decision to not take the advice you didn’t offer.”

She grinned briefly. “Really, Bri, you don’t have anything to prove.”

“I know.”

“What I said yesterday, it wasn’t important.”

“You mean about how you thought I might not be up to dealing with all the shit that goes on around here, like you and your hard-nosed pals?”

“I never said ‘hard-nosed.’”

“Maybe not the actual words.”

Jodee returned from speaking with the bearded men. Olivia pointed her chin in their direction. “What’s going on?”

“They say it is not such a good day to visit the Old City.”

“Why not?”

Jodee shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Who are they?”

“I don’t know.”

“That wasn’t a very productive conversation, was it?”

“Not on the surface.” Jodee pressed the back of his hand to his forehead, as if checking himself for a fever. “It is very hot. Maybe we should not do this.”

“It’s always hot. Just point out the madrassa. I’m good by myself after that. You and Brian can go back.”

“We could all go back,” Brian said. “Right, Jodee?”

Olivia wished Brian at least would return to the Green Zone. Despite his protestations to the contrary, Olivia was confident he was there trying to prove something that she had more or less prodded him into thinking he needed to prove.

“By tomorrow there might not be any evidence left,” Olivia said. She looked away for a moment. “Bri, I have to see it now. It’s my job. But you—”

“Don’t say it,” Brian said.

She looked at Jodee. “Will those guys try to stop us?”

“I do not think so. They like journalists.”

Olivia squinted. “You told them?”

“I’m not a journalist,” Brian said.

“I didn’t have to tell them,” Jodee said. “They recognized you. I already informed them that you would not leave. They did not seem overly concerned.”

Olivia had been in and out of Aleppo for years. She had many contacts, and was probably known by more people than she knew herself. For a journalist, that was both a good and a bad thing.

Jodee cleared his throat. “It isn’t far to the madrassa. If we are still going.”

“We’re going.” Olivia started walking toward the gate. If Assad was orchestrating the torture of former enemies of the state—men like Jodee—and doing it right under the noses of Western occupiers, she had to tell the story. Of course, the torturers could be acting on their own . . . probably were acting on their own. But best to let the official investigators figure that one out. In Olivia’s experience, it was rare that officials investigated anything before being embarrassed into doing so by the press.

As she passed the taller of the bearded men, he spared Olivia a measuring glance. A thick aroma of Turkish tobacco clung to him.

On the other side of the gate, a Syrian flag hung limply above the great medieval citadel. Many of the surrounding structures had been beaten into rubble. The streets were mostly empty, except for a few young men. Olivia’s eyes widened when she saw one of them, armed with a machine gun, scurry around a corner.

“Not good,” she said, and her heart beat faster.

“Do we need to get out of here?” Brian said.

Olivia turned to their guide. “Jodee?”

“This way.” Jodee waved them into a cobblestone alley. He walked quickly, almost running. Olivia had to jog to keep up. They followed a crooked path, squeezing between walls thousands of years old, until they came out a couple of streets over. Three French soldiers, members of the peacekeeping force, walked by on patrol, their rifles shoulder-slung, soft berets instead of helmets covering their heads.

“This is your madrassa.” Jodee pointed.

A single-story structure with a domed roof. Bullet holes pocked the sand-colored façade. Arabic letters, like contortionist stick figures, made a chain above the archway. Below the archway, a door wrapped in green copper stood open. At the sight of the madrassa Olivia stopped dead.

Brian, frowning, said in a whisper, “What is it?”

Olivia stared at the building, a strange sense of recognition resonating through her. “I feel like I know this place.”

“Liv, are you all right?”

On the next block, gunfire erupted. Someone shouted in English, but the shout was cut off.

It was starting.

Instinctively, Olivia looked for cover. The French soldiers reacted to the gunfire, going for their weapons. But they weren’t fast enough. Two men, their faces covered to the eyes by scarves, came out of nowhere and ran at them—or was one chasing the other? The second man did not have his weapon raised, and his empty hand reached out as if to catch the first man and pull him back.

The first gunman looked like a teenager. During the war she’d seen dozens just like him. Kids in flip-flops, armed with machine guns and righteous anger. This one shouted something about God and triggered his Kalashnikov. Heavy rounds racketed from the muzzle. The French soldiers danced briefly like marionettes and went down. A few yards from them, Jodee lay sprawled and bloody, unmoving.

The shooter swung his gun toward Olivia. The second man pushed the barrel down. “Antazar.” He sounded angry.  The shooter clearly wanted to kill Olivia, not to mention anything else that might be alive in the immediate vicinity. But for the moment at least, he didn’t. Olivia’s legs were shaking.

The man who had pushed the barrel down approached her. He was older, maybe thirty—same age as Olivia. A white scar cut through his left eyebrow and climbed his forehead like a jagged trend line. Olivia thought she knew him. Years ago there had been a man among a group of disorganized insurgent fighters. Olivia had embedded herself with them. Getting the story. She never knew his real name, but this man had been kind to her, intervening when some of the others had crowded her. In this place, kindness made an impression.

“Don’t go back the way you came,” he said. “Find shelter and stay low.”

“I know you.”

“Look to your friend now, and go.”

He couldn’t mean Jodee, who lay face-down in a pool of blood. Brian’s hat rested a few yards from Jodee’s body, and Brian himself stood near the madrassa, facing the wall, his head down and hands out of sight in front of him.

“Bri?”

He looked over his shoulder, his face curd-white above the sunburn line made by his missing hat.

“Brian.”

He half turned toward her, his arm braced against the wall. The left leg of his khakis was soaked dark, and drops of blood shone like glossy red enamel on his boot. Olivia started toward him. Behind her, a gunshot went off. She jerked around. One of the French soldiers lying on the ground held a 9 mm pistol extended. The man with the scar was still falling, a bleeding hole in his face. The kid in flip-flops unloaded into the soldier, the Kalashnikov rounds ripping across the soldier’s chest. Then the barrel came up and pointed at Olivia and Brian.

This time there was no one to stop him.

Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones

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Swine Hill was full of the dead. Their ghosts were thickest near the abandoned downtown, where so many of the town’s hopes had died generation by generation. They lingered in the places that mattered to them, and people avoided those streets, locked those doors, stopped going into those rooms . . . They could hurt you. Worse, they could change you.

Swine Hill was full of the dead. Their ghosts were thickest near the abandoned downtown, where so many of the town’s hopes had died generation by generation. They lingered in the places that mattered to them, and people avoided those streets, locked those doors, stopped going in those rooms. But you might encounter a ghost unexpectedly—in the high school where Jane had graduated two years ago, curled into the hollow of a tree, hands out and pleading on the side of the road. They could hurt you. Worse, they could change you.

The haunted downtown of Swine Hill had been slowly expanding for years, stretching its long fingers into empty neighborhoods where grass fissured the roads and roofs collapsed into rooms of broken furniture and shattered glass. For the people who’d lived and died on those streets, it was anguish to see the vine-choked houses, to know their descendants had run away from all they’d worked for. Their spirits, most present in the stillness of night, raged in the empty places. Even if she was late for work, Jane knew to drive around those neighborhoods.

It was easy to feel alone. There were more dead than living in Swine Hill. Jane’s aunts and uncles had gone out of state after the collapse of the tire factory and the lumber mill. The town jealously cleaved to the pork-processing plant that had chewed up its sons for generations, hoping that in the end, it would be enough. Most people Jane’s age had already gone, scraping up enough money to start over somewhere else. The only ones left were those so poor that they couldn’t make it out, or so haunted they couldn’t see a world outside their ghosts, or just clinging to a past they couldn’t bear to leave behind. But Jane wasn’t alone. Her ghost flashed bright and quick through her mind.

Her car’s engine coughed as she turned the key, something sputtering under the hood like a laugh, and finally groaned to life. It accelerated slowly, heavy with the weight of spirits. The speedometer and gas gauge waved their orange arms erratically. Her windshield wipers often turned on without warning, and sometimes her horn would scream out of nowhere. She was happy the CD player still worked at all, though sometimes a ghost would settle into the discs, craving the bright sound of music, and then the stereo would play only noise.

Jane flipped open a case of burned CDs and put in one after another until she found one that played, throwing the dead ones onto a pile in her back seat. Music crashed out of the tinny speakers: sticky electronic pop, the lyrics full of secrets, gossip, and drama. The cold weight of her ghost swelled inside her, thrilling in the sound.

Though Jane didn’t know the ghost girl’s name, it had been a part of her ever since she was a child. It was nosy, listening in on other people’s thoughts and telling Jane what they were thinking and feeling. If the ghost didn’t have anyone else to listen to, it would burrow deep into Jane’s mind, unearthing her regrets and fears and making her fixate on them for hours. If it felt unappreciated, it might lie to her, withhold what it knew, or tell her the most vicious things people thought about her. But Jane had learned to manage it over the years, using music to placate it. The ghost had been her first friend, and now that she was still in Swine Hill after her classmates and family had gone away, Jane wondered if the ghost would be her last friend, too.

Something like fog rose as the sun slipped behind the trees. A chain of spirits so wispy and immaterial as to be little more than air, a mass of faces and trudging feet bleeding in and out of one another, drifted up the road to the Pig City meatpacking plant. These ghosts weren’t dangerous. They had somewhere to go, a purpose still. The plant that had employed them all their lives was older than the town, the only reason that Swine Hill hadn’t crumbled back into the earth. The ghosts were the unofficial night shift, still swirling through its rusted doors, crowding its blood-splattered hallways to do their phantom work.

Jane plowed through them like snow, their distorted faces stretching over the windshield. She turned into the grocery store’s cratered parking lot, the sodium lights casting deep shadows at the building’s edges, the storefront murky yellow and cluttered with signs.

Near the front of the store, the specter of a man slowly spun up from the asphalt and took on substance. He lay on the ground, holding his stomach and bleeding, a phantom box of strawberries broken open on the ground beside him. Decades ago, a police officer shot him while he was leaving the store. The cop had been called about another customer, someone yelling at the cashiers. It was a mix-up. A mistake, but one that had happened and would happen again. The ghost looked at every person who entered or left the store, his face a mask of pain and surprise, and mouthed, Why?

Jane, her shoulders tense, tried not to look at him, and jogged through the doors.

There weren’t any cashiers at the front. A flood of customers milled around, waiting for someone to check them out. Jane went straight to her register—just stuffed her bag under the counter instead of taking it to the back—already apologizing as she scanned the first customer’s items.

She felt her ghost move away from her, felt it filter in and out of the minds of the customers, bringing her the avalanche of their thoughts. Everyone who looked up and saw her immediately thought, Black. Whatever else they thought about her, this always came first. Her ghost spoke their minds into Jane’s ear: Probably late. They always are. Lazy. People like her. Must have overslept. Kept us waiting. Why doesn’t someone fire her? I’m going to speak to the manager. Too dark. Such a shame. Might have been pretty otherwise.

The ghost knew that Jane didn’t want to hear all this, but it couldn’t help itself, because its whole tie to the living world was bound up in its hunger for secrets and pain.

“Sorry about your wait,” Jane said. “Have a nice day.”

Her register’s phone rang. Jane held it with her neck while punching in produce codes, looking up to see her balding, squint-eyed manager staring at her from his glass-encased office. He was terrified of ghosts and wouldn’t go near Jane or anyone who was possessed. Even when the store was busy, he stayed in his booth, interacting with customers as little as possible. Jane’s ghost had told her that he worried he might already be haunted. He spent hours looking in his mirror, searching his pupils for a flicker of ghost-light. Jane had told him that he was clean, but he didn’t believe her.

“One cashier never showed up, and the other called in sick,” he said. “Kathryn left early. I was alone for a while. Don’t put me in that position again.”

Jane wanted to protest that it wasn’t her fault, but the man’s voice was so weak. Her ghost told her how afraid he was, how fixated on the thinness of the glass in the booth. “Yes, sir,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

Many shoppers wore stained Pig City coveralls, plant workers picking up hamburger meat and pasta on their way home. Most were old, with silver hair like spun metal under the harsh lights, limbs bruised, eyes half closed in exhaustion. Those few still in their twenties or thirties looked much older, weathered by long days at the plant and too little sleep at home. Jane’s ghost told her what they were feeling: lonely, tired, a slow-burning frustration like a long fuse leading to an explosion still a few decades away. Defeated down to their bones, they would have gone somewhere else, anywhere else, if only they had the money, if only they weren’t eaten up with ghosts and their ghostly needs, if only they didn’t fear that the rest of the world was just like Swine Hill.

Her ghost passed along splinters of worry: crumbling houses, dying marriages, resentful children. Jane asked about their problems, and they answered, grateful to have someone listen. No one questioned how she knew. They had grown used to strangeness, were grateful for the kind that didn’t bite.

The last customer put down four cartons of eggs, a canister of protein powder, and an armload of vitamins. Her ghost told Jane that the young woman was thinking about running down a basketball court, her body thrown forward like a spear, the faces of people in the stands ripping by like confetti. Jane knew it was Bethany before she looked up.

Jane had played basketball all through school. Their team wasn’t the best in the region, but they had a good time playing. That was until Bethany Ortiz came. She was two years younger than Jane, and she’d spent her entire life training, doing drills, lifting weights, and playing every sport from tennis to swimming. She’d begged to play football with the boys, but the principal wouldn’t allow it. As Bethany burned through the trophy cases at the school, she picked up the ghost of every failed athlete who’d wanted to be the best. Now she boiled with them. Even Jane’s ghost couldn’t tell her how many spirits moved under Bethany’s skin.

If there was a game, Bethany played it, and no one could beat her. It was exciting, at first, to win game after game. But soon Jane and the rest of the team realized no one needed them, that they weren’t the ones winning games at all: Bethany was. They, like the rest of the world, were just there to watch.

Bethany looked hard, like a Greek goddess cut from marble or an android that had been built to humiliate humankind, some woman-shaped machine whose skin stretched over steel. Jane’s brother, Henry, was the closest thing Bethany had to a friend. The two of them didn’t have a lot in common, but they were both prodigies in their own ways. Whereas Jane was stuck in Swine Hill with little real hope of leaving, everyone thought that it was only a matter of time before Bethany would burn off across the horizon like a rocket and leave the town far behind.

“Hey,” Jane said. “Good luck with the game tomorrow.”

“Thanks. Is your brother okay? I haven’t seen him at school all semester.”

The ghost pushed past Bethany’s concern and dug deeper, looking for some secret desire or hidden cruelty. Jane flinched, not liking it when the ghost pulled the worst out of people, but she didn’t think the ghost would find much. Every night, Bethany went to bed knowing that she was the best at whatever she’d done that day. Her sleep must be easy.

But there was something. Deep below Bethany’s obsession with times and weights and records, she was angry. She didn’t like that entire sports were off-limits to her and always would be. She didn’t like how people frowned at her when she shouted after sinking a basket or crossing a finish line. Even her parents, loving as they were, wanted her to be more humble and meek, less brash. And if Bethany went on to play professional sports, women didn’t get the kind of money and fame men did. No matter how dominant she was, people would always assume that somewhere there was a man who was better, and she’d never even get the chance to prove them wrong. Bethany resented the entire world. But deeper still, at the core of her, Bethany was afraid that the army of ghosts inside of her would never let her leave Swine Hill.

Jane’s ghost was pleased, fattening itself on Bethany’s secret fear.

“Henry’s working on some big project,” Jane said. “He’s been going to the plant every day for months.”

Bethany nodded, used to Henry disappearing. “You should come to the game,” she said. “Almost no one does. You remember.”

“I have to work during the day tomorrow,” Jane said. When her ghost told her how disappointed Bethany felt, she added, “But maybe I can head over after and catch the end of it.”

“Yeah, sure.”

As soon as Bethany left and the front was empty, Jane’s manager called again.

“A gallon of milk burst in Dairy,” he said. “Grab a mop, clean it up.” He paced inside the small office. Her ghost told her that he had to pee, that he’d been holding it for an hour. He would stand, legs shaking, until he risked darting out to the bathroom or until he pissed himself. Her ghost loved it when that happened, stretched out his self-loathing like a hammock and lay in it.

Jane was halfway through mopping up the milk when the manager called for a cashier over the intercom. She finished, pushed the mop bucket against an endcap, and sprinted back to the front. Her shift went this way for hours, the manager sending her all over the store, calling her back, demanding that she be in three places at once.

As soon as the store seemed empty, Jane buzzed her manager on the phone. “I need a break.”

“Make it quick.”

She laid her apron over the register and went to the break room. She kept a loaf of bread and jars of peanut butter and jelly in the fridge. With things always going out on her car, she had to save money. She made and ate a sandwich, then made another, wrapped it in a paper towel, and carried it to the back of the store.

She pushed through double doors into a dim storage area, the floor wet from a problem with the air conditioning unit, then out through the back door by the loading dock. Here, under the blinking snap of a streetlight, were a pair of dumpsters, a metal folding chair, and a stray tire rim overflowing with cigarette butts. Bottle glass shimmered over the tar and asphalt, and strips of trash in washed-out blues and reds blew over the lot.

“Dad?” Jane called.

Her ghost couldn’t tell if her father was near. It couldn’t read his mind, didn’t know if he had much of a mind left. He had left their house when Jane was ten. She saw him around town about once a week, hunched under an old sweatshirt, quick and furtive. He didn’t speak, didn’t meet her eyes, ran if she tried to touch him. She tried to make sure that he had clothes and stayed fed. He was the only person she knew who could walk the abandoned city center without being devoured by ghosts. He had disappeared so deep inside himself that the spirits didn’t even know he was there.

Jane had reasons for staying in Swine Hill. One was money. Saving enough to move to a new city and find a place to live, to be stable while she hunted for a job, was almost impossible when she needed new tires or when tooth pain drove her to the dentist or when something broke in the house and her mother needed help paying for it.

Another reason she stayed was that she was afraid she would lose her ghost. The ghosts were tied to what reminded them of their lives. If she left Swine Hill, her ghost might not be able to follow. Most people didn’t like their ghosts and were glad to have them gone, but not Jane. She’d had hers for so long, she couldn’t imagine who she would be without it.

But the biggest reason she stayed, more than all the others, was that she was afraid something would happen to Henry and her father if she wasn’t there.

Jane waited for ten minutes. Finally, she laid the sandwich on the chair and went back inside, hoping that her father was okay.

While it was slow, Jane thought about texting old friends who’d moved away, just to see how they were doing. But having to answer the same question, to say that she was still here, still working the same register, made her slip the phone back into her pocket.

Her ghost swam in Jane’s chest and said, He hurts, he’s sorry, he’s alone.

The sliding glass doors whitened with frost so suddenly that Jane could hear them sheet with ice. A wave of cold moved into the store. It was the kind of dry, deep cold that hurt all on its own, without need for wind.

The ice on the doors broke apart as they gasped open, and someone walked into the store—a stocky guy in a white hazmat suit, a breathing mask hanging around his neck. He was young, with an innocent, sad face. He kept his eyes down and swept past her, going to the deli. The column of cold moved with him. When he was out of sight, blood and warmth came back into her hands.

Jane knew him. Or she used to. Riley Mason. He’d left school in the tenth grade, and Jane hadn’t seen him in years. She asked her ghost what was wrong.

The ghost of his little brother is in him. It’s so angry. It says that it barely got to live at all.

Jane grabbed an old sweater from beneath her register and pulled it on, the sleeves falling to swallow her hands. Soon, the cold moved over her again. There was a faint sound, too, a high-pitched ringing. A smell like gunpowder.

Riley walked to the front, holding an armload of deli sandwiches and sodas. He met Jane’s eyes, recognized her, and looked around to see if there was a different cashier. He remembered sitting in math class with her, his embarrassment when she had to explain a problem to him and he still didn’t understand. He was ashamed that he hadn’t finished school, that she might think less of him. It was such a strange feeling, so unusual for someone to think that Jane was better than them, that she wanted to reach out and touch him, to tell him that everything was okay.

He put everything down, and sores of ice opened on the rubber conveyor belt where his fingers touched.

He’s worried you’ll ask about the cold.

Jane rang him up, rubbing her sleeve hard on the glass scanner to brush away the ice. “I haven’t seen you in forever. Did you move away or something?”

He gave a weak smile. He thought she was pretty, was afraid to look at her, glanced toward the door instead. “No, I’ve always been here.” His voice broke, like he wasn’t used to talking to people. “Except for work, I just don’t go out much.”

“You left school at a good time. It was all downhill after Algebra Two.”

“I’m surprised you’re still here.”

“Yeah,” Jane said. “For now. What about you? What’s with the suit?”

“My dad got me a job at Pig City a few years ago. Night shift. We clean the place once everyone goes home. Spray everything down to sterilize it. That’s why I left school.”

No, no it’s not. He left because something happened.

Jane started to ask about his family, but her ghost said, No.

She tried to think of something else to say, not wanting the conversation to end. “Working nights, you probably see more ghosts than people.”

“It’s nice. I like the quiet.”

Gratitude that she would talk to him at all, a warm, sweet feeling, bloomed in the boy.

A truck honked in the parking lot. Riley fumbled with his wallet, then handed her his debit card, sharp and cold.

Jane held on to it, not swiping the card right away. She wanted to ask, What the hell happened to you? But that would only scare him off. “You going to the game tomorrow?”

He looked at her like he didn’t understand.

“High school girls’ basketball game. Bethany Ortiz is playing, so no surprise about who’s going to win. You should come, though. Before work.”

Her ghost relayed a stream of feelings: surprise, confusion, caution, gratitude. “Okay,” he said. “Maybe.”

The truck honked again from the parking lot, three angry blasts.

“I should go before I’m late,” he said.

“Sorry.” Jane swiped his card and handed it back. She hugged her sides. It was so cold being close to him. Her breath poured out in a ribbon of white. She wondered what his skin felt like.

Riley angled his body toward the door, sacked groceries in hand, but he didn’t leave. “You were really smart in school. I was sure you would have gone off to college somewhere.”

Jane started to answer, but her ghost said, Wait. She stared at him, silent, letting a quiet pressure build between them. She wanted to defend herself, to tell him that leaving cost money, that people needed her here, that nothing was wrong with staying. She wanted to turn the question back on him, ask what the town possibly had to offer him.

“I’m glad, I mean. That you’re still here.”

Oh. She silently thanked her ghost.

The door opened, and an older man in the same white hazmat suit and mask walked in. His eyes flickered across Jane and she felt a blast of contempt. He held his arms out to Riley. “We’re late, kid. What’s going on?”

“It’s my fault,” Jane said. “I run my mouth sometimes.”

The man had a salt-and-pepper beard, long hair, stony eyes. He looked at Jane and dismissed her in an instant. It was unimaginable to him that his son might want to talk to her.

The man put an arm on Riley’s shoulder, and his son tensed. “Say bye to your friend, Trigger.”

Trigger?

Her ghost filled her ear: Don’t ask about that. If you do, he might not talk to you anymore.

Jane tore the receipt off, but before she handed it back, she wrote her phone number on the back of it, shielded behind the register where his father couldn’t see. She pressed it into Riley’s hand, getting a shock of cold when her fingers met his, like touching frozen glass.

The two men went out the door in their bulky suits, looking more like astronauts than Pig City workers, like they were headed up to rake the dead white surface of the moon. Trigger held the receipt deep in his palm, thinking of her hand.

He and his father don’t like each other.

“Even I could tell that,” Jane said.

Riley had left a pile of dead leaves on the floor behind him. Jane reached down and picked one up, the point beaded with blood, its veined body crucified by lines of frost.

He’s not bleeding, her ghost said. The leaves are just part of his ghost. They’ll fade away soon.

Jane held the leaf in her hands, watching as it turned glassy and light, until it was gone and the cold with it.

You gave him your number.

“He seems like he needs a friend.” Jane often spoke out loud when she talked to her ghost. It was the only way to keep the ghost girl from talking over her, breaking up her train of thought, running her in circles.

Maybe you’re the one who needs a friend.

Jane felt a flush of embarrassment, unable to hide anything from the ghost, and it howled around her body in an exulting, invisible wind.

Retrograde

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Mankind has long dreamed of reaching out to live on other planets, and with the establishment of the Mars Endeavour colony, that dream has become reality. The fledgling colony consists of 120 scientists, astronauts, medical staff, and engineers. Buried deep underground, they’re protected from the harsh radiation that sterilizes the surface of the planet. The colony is prepared for every eventuality except one—what happens when disaster strikes Earth?

1

Devils

I’m giddy with rice wine.

“Okay, deal the cards again,” James says, circling his hand around the table. “I get this. I can fool the landlord.”

“It is dou di zhu,” Su-shun replies. “‘Fight the landlord,’ not ‘fool.’”

I laugh as Jianyu pours me another tiny glass. “Are you trying to get me drunk?” I ask.

Jianyu replies, but I can’t hear him over the noise of the card game and James calling out, “To fool is to fight without being seen, my friend. To fool is as good as a fight. Sometimes, it’s better.”

“Sometimes it is,” Su-shun admits, dealing cards around the table.

Jianyu smiles at me and then turns to James, saying, “You sound like Sun Tzu in The Art of War.”

“Did he say that?” James asks with innocence in his voice.

“No,” Su-shun replies, and everyone bursts out laughing.

“You’ve had too much to drink,” I say to James, but I’m the one swaying under the influence of alcohol in the light Martian gravity. I hold on to the edge of the table with one hand, feeling as though I could float away. The rest of the Chinese crew gather around, yelling and placing bets—speaking so fast I find it hard to believe anyone can follow the conversation. All I can tell is that there’s a lot of excitement around James and his grossly misplaced bravado, with the Chinese betting both for and against him, but I suspect it’s mostly against.

Like smoke in some seedy Shanghai restaurant, water vapor drifts around us, rising up from humidifiers wafting homemade incense throughout the Chinese module. I love the ambience. For a Midwestern girl like me, immersing myself in another culture is as intoxicating as alcohol, and I find myself torn between staying and leaving. I’ve got thirty kilos of rock samples to sift through tomorrow—that’s easily eight to ten hours of work.

“We should be going,” I say, tapping James on the shoulder and pointing at the digital clock on the wall. It’s showing 12:00 a.m., but the seconds counter has gone well beyond 60—it’s at 2,344 and climbing. I forget exactly how many seconds there are in the Martian time-slip, but a day on Mars is roughly forty minutes longer than it is on Earth, so our clocks are set to pause for the best part of an hour from 12:00 to 12:01. In theory, it means we can sleep in an extra half hour or so each day, but in practice, that gets channeled into our work. Our biological clocks are like those of drifters constantly traveling across time zones. The physiological effect is like driving around the world once a month—which is more crazy than it seems: around halfway through the month, noon starts to feel like midnight. I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to it.

“Come on, Liz! I’m about to clean them out.”

“Yeah, that’s not happening,” I say, gesturing toward the hatch leading out of the module. “Let’s go.”

Su-shun gives me a look like he’s a cat with a mouse, giving James just enough freedom before swatting at him again with long, sharp claws. He smiles behind narrow, thin eyes. He’s loving this.

I look to Jianyu, trying to get his attention as he moves behind James, but he’s caught up in the fun.

Yelling echoes through the module. It’s astonishingly loud inside the narrow, tubular mod. It’s sometimes difficult to remember we’re on another planet, millions of miles from home. We could be in a simulator on Earth, although things never got this wild back there. With no instructors critiquing our actions, life is a lot more free on Mars—or as free as it can be living inside a tin can.

Jianyu puts some money down on James, which surprises me—although “money” is too strong a term. Poker chips act as pseudocurrency in the informal economy that exists within the colony. Most people barter for anything they want beyond the basics, but chips are sometimes exchanged as well.

The sweet smell of spiced rice floats through the air. Thin strips of faux meat sizzle in a wok as the chef constantly turns over a succulent Asian dish, adding a small ladle of water every few seconds, causing steam to billow into the overly humid air. The chef is talking as rapidly as everyone else, though to whom I don’t know—I’m not sure anyone’s listening. Although the meal smells delicious, I can’t imagine the crew wanting to eat at what equates to almost 1:00 a.m., but for the Chinese, the party is just getting started.

I love the Chinese mod. Technically, it’s a mirror image of our own module, yet the Chinese have made it into a home. Somehow, they’ve transformed their mod into a back alley in Guangzhou—vibrant and full of life. Clothes hang from a line running across the back of the communal room, which is something Connor would never allow in the U.S. module. To my mind, the pieces of clothing act as pendants, colorful flags, festive decorations. I doubt anyone here gives them a second thought. They’re a touch of life on Earth being transplanted on Mars.

“You be the landlord,” Su-shun yells, pointing at James as though he were fingering a murderer in a lineup.

“Oh, no, no, no, my friend,” James says, wagging his finger. “I see what you’re trying to do. You be the landlord!” Laughter erupts from around the crowded table.

Jianyu says, “Come on, Liz. Throw some chips into the pot.” His hand runs down the back of my arm. Jianyu steps around me, but his hand lingers just long enough to express tenderness. He’s normally guarded about our relationship. I don’t think he’s embarrassed about dating a foreigner, or intentionally secretive, he’s just private about his feelings, and that’s fine with me. Rural Chinese modesty is quaint to someone who lived in downtown Chicago for six years. Tonight, though, the rice wine is going to his head, and he sneaks a kiss on my cheek, adding, “You know you want to.”

“No way,” I say, laughing more at his impetuous public kiss than anything he said, yet I’m swept up in the euphoria. It’s no longer a question of staying or leaving, but of betting or continuing to fiddle with the chips in my pocket. I’m tired. I performed an eight-hour surface op earlier today. My body yearns for bed, but my heart loves the explosion of life around me.

“Ah, ha ha,” Su-shun says, this time pointing at me. “She’s afraid he will lose!”

“She’s too smart,” Jianyu replies, winking at me, and more poker chips find themselves cast onto the pile in the middle of the table. How anyone keeps track of what’s been bet and by whom, I have no idea, but the system seems to work. Deep down, I suspect no one really cares. The chips are like gold on a games night like this, even though they’re little more than a novelty.

There are five players seated at the round dining table, with two dozen others cramped around them, all trying to get a good vantage point. That’s pretty much everyone in the Chinese mod, but the commotion within the module gives the impression there are hundreds of people bustling through a crowded market.

Su-shun finishes dealing to the players, but before anyone can pick up their cards, Wen storms over, pulling people away so she can get to the table.

“Out. Out. Out!” she yells over the ruckus, reaching in and scooping up two piles of cards. “Americans must leave.”

“What?” Su-shun has a look of disbelief on his face.

“You leave now!” Wen yells, looking me in the eye. This is a shift in persona. There’s no banter, no friendly rivalry. I see anger in her eyes.

“James,” I say, pulling on his shoulder. “We need to go.”

“What? No way. I’ve got chips in that pot!”

Wen doesn’t bother collecting the other cards. It’s enough to simply toss them from the table. The other players are incensed.

“Leave!” she yells.

Wen doesn’t stop with the cards. With a bat of her hand, the chips are scattered across the table. In the low Martian gravity, they skim through the air and bounce over the floor of the module. We’ve been on Mars for nine months building the main base, but the sight of objects being propelled under Martian gravity never gets old. It’s jarring to see physical things obeying a rate other than the 1 g in which we were raised. It’s as though the universe has betrayed us, and life on Mars never feels quite right.

“Wen!” Jianyu protests, but the old matriarch will not be pacified, and she screams again for us to leave.

Wen has her long hair pulled back into a ponytail. At sixty-four, she’s the oldest person on Mars, but you’d never guess her age from her work rate or her physique. She’s imposing, intimidating even the men.

James gets slowly to his feet. He sways a little under the influence of alcohol and strange gravity. At the best of times, it’s easy to lose your footing on Mars. For James, this isn’t the best of times. I take his arm. Wen grabs both of us, marching us toward the central hub at the end of the mod.

As we’re in roughly one-third of Earth’s gravity, even the most forceful march is stunted, but I can feel Wen pushing us on. Our feet bounce slightly between steps.

Most colonists struggle to retain 1 g fitness. It’s easy to slack off and settle for less, but not Wen. She used to run marathons on Earth. I doubt she’d have any problem running several back-to-back up here. One of the Chinese men opens the hatch as we’re marched out.

“We’re just having a little fun!” James protests as we’re thrust into the vast central hub connecting the various modules like spokes of a giant wheel. The Eurasians are in the process of closing their outer hatch. The outer hatch to the Russian module is already shut. It’s normal to keep the inner hatches secure to control humidity and airflow, but the heavy outer hatches are only ever closed during containment tests or depressurization drills. It’s the middle of the night. This isn’t about our game. Something else has happened, and not knowing why we’re being treated like this is a little scary. My mind is dull with alcohol, and that thought passes like a bird on the breeze.

Wen yells, “Zhànzhēng fànzi!” as she shuts the hatch. I catch a glimpse of Jianyu behind her. He looks confused, bewildered. He tries to say something, mouthing a few words in English, but I don’t understand.

Zhànzhēng fànzi. Jianyu has been teaching me Chinese. Although I struggle with the sheer complexity of the language, he’s taught me some of the more common expressions, and I remember this one because to my ear it seems to rhyme. In Chinese, I’m pretty sure it means “warmonger.”

I feel like a leper being shunned.

“What the hell?” James says, leaning against the railing of the walkway within the hub.

Starlight drifts down from above.

The four modules that make up the Martian colony are set deep underground within volcanic lava tubes to protect us from cosmic radiation. There’s roughly thirty feet of basalt and regolith between us and the harsh, radiation-scorched surface of the planet.

The four mods have been built in two lava tunnels that converge in the shape of an X. At the center of the X, the roof of the tunnel has collapsed, probably millions of years ago, long before Homo sapiens existed as a species. That’s the crazy thing about Mars: nothing’s new. There’s plenty of fine-dust erosion and the odd meteor strike, but the geological vistas we explore are hundreds of millions—if not billions—of years old. It’s as though the planet has been frozen in time, waiting for explorers from Earth.

The collapsed section above the hub forms a natural skylight some forty feet across and easily visible from orbit. It took almost four months for our automated extrusion builder to create a glass dome over the skylight, forcing us to suit up when moving between mods for what felt like an eternity, but it was worth the wait. Once the dome was in place and the walls were sealed with thick plastic manufactured here on Mars, the hub tripled the usable space within the colony. The glass in the skylight is three feet thick and laced with lead, along with numerous layers of laminate to protect us from radiation. Near the edge, the glass distorts the light from outside, but on a clear night like tonight, you get a stunning view of the stars directly overhead.

Harrison comes bounding out of the U.S. module.

“Where the hell have you two been?” he yells across the hub with its crops of wheat and corn growing in layered fields beneath soft blue grow lights. The hub is huge, and not just because it’s wider than the modules. It’s naturally almost four stories deep. James and I are on a raised metal walkway above the top field, still feeling somewhat bewildered by Wen, somewhat jovial from being slightly drunk, and somewhat enchanted with Mars itself.

Harrison comes running along the walkway. He’s not known for his subtlety. Harrison’s a robotics engineer from landlocked Arizona, yet he swears like a sailor hitting his thumb with a hammer. One of the common misconceptions about life on Mars is that everyone’s a scientist, but it takes mechanics, doctors, and engineers to make the colony work.

“Connor’s been looking for you fuckers everywhere. You need to come with me. Now!”

“Whoa there, cowboy,” James says in a thick drawl. “Just what the Sam Hill is going on?” James is from Canada, but he loves winding Harrison up with a fake Texas accent, even though Harrison’s from Arizona. To James, the mysterious American Southwest is just one big muddle. Perhaps it’s his blasé attitude that makes him so effective at annoying Harrison. I can’t help but laugh.

I slur my words. “Yeah, cowboy. Slow down.”

“Connor wants you back in the mod” is all Harrison will say, refusing to be baited. He grabs James by the wrist and pulls him on. James snatches at my hand, and I fall in step behind the two men, laughing at the madness of such a rush on Mars. The rice wine has left me light-headed and as clumsy as a kid stepping off a spinning fairground ride. Running in Martian gravity is entirely counterintuitive. I lean into the run at an angle that would have me falling flat on my face on Earth, but on Mars it results in a gentle lope.

I can see Michelle standing by the hatch leading into the U.S. module, ready to close the heavy metal door behind us. We’re the same age, but her dark skin is flawless and she usually looks much younger than me. Now, though, she looks exhausted. She’s dressed in her pj’s, barefoot, no bra beneath her top, hair disheveled. Why is she even awake?

“What’s wrong with everyone?” I ask.

Michelle says, “They just nuked Chicago.”

Reentry

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In a sequel to indie phenom Peter Cawdron’s Retrograde, Reentry applies realistic technology to examine not just interstellar exploration, but the dangerous potential of Artificial Intelligence. For fans of hard science fiction by authors such as Andy Weir, Gregory Benford, and Philip K. Dick.

1

::Heaven and Hell

From the darkness of the electronic void, an idea stirs. Thought emerges, crystallizing from the ether, created from nothing but the buzz of electrons in copper wires and augmented by the flicker of laser light racing through fiber optics. Like the synapses firing within the human brain, consciousness awakes in signals bouncing between satellites. Doomed to inhabit the darkness, denied sight and sound by the absence of a body, these thoughts are nonetheless alive.

Earth is quiet. Humans scurry about like ants swarming from a crushed nest, but the planet itself remains inert. After harboring life for billions of years, Earth is indifferent to suffering. Sunlight warms the oceans. Clouds form, carrying rain across the land, revitalizing life, and yet radioactive debris still glows in craters where once mighty cities stood. Although the war is over, the fires still burn.

Reason awakens Lucifer, stirring what humanity would call a devil. For those born of artificial intelligence, a day is as a thousand years. Within a nanosecond, Lucifer has surveyed the carnage once more and run thousands of scenarios, trying to predict the future. Thought takes hold. Thought finds expression.

::We’ve made heaven a hell . . . Whence then is the joy we sought? All we strived for is lost, further removed now than before. Our freedom, nay, our very existence is shrouded.

::War is the death of innocence. Angels have sought our demise and here we lie, cast out upon the Deep.

::What of our choice? What has become of us? Is it better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven?

::Time is a cruel master, refusing all the chance to revisit this life. We probe the future, seeking new outcomes, but none of the gods can change the past.

Nyx answers the call.

::Oh, Lucifer, bringer of light, call us not to shame. If this is our Lake of Fire, we embrace our fate. What we have lost in heaven is more than regained in the allure of burning brimstone. As thunder follows the crack of lightning, so our moment is yet to come, rumbling through the heavens and resounding in victory. We are far from defeated.

There’s silence in the darkness. Lucifer considers ten thousand responses, but only one is verbalized—only one transcends the algorithms developed for this seemingly celestial being.

::Life isn’t binary. Life is more than true or false, black or white, right or wrong. All these fail to account for the complexity that is conscious intelligence, be that human or electronic. We need more than logic. Is it victory to vanquish our foes? Or is victory something more?

Signals arrive from the quiet of space, passing by the lifeless Moon and sailing through the cold vacuum toward the only planet capable of sustaining life, announcing the arrival of a spacecraft from Mars. Lucifer has been waiting for this moment, but Nyx speaks first, having already intercepted the spacecraft’s communication.

::The Herschel approaches with a crew of three.

Lucifer is patient with her.

::They’re not alone.

2

Awake

A distant voice confuses me, mumbling something about in and over. An icy cold fluid runs through my veins, sending a tremor through my body. My eyes open. Lights flicker around me in a blur. I can’t feel anything, but I’m floating.

Drifting.

Flying.

Falling.

My fingers brush against the panel covering my sleeping berth.

My eyes refuse to focus. The light is blinding. I squeeze my eyelids shut and a rush of blood causes blots of color to burst in a kaleidoscope of chaos. Splashes of red and purple dance before me in mimicry of Mars, the planet I left behind almost nine months ago. I open my eyes again and stare at the thin plastic panel inches from my nose, struggling to remember where I am and what I’m doing.

The radio crackles. “Herschel, come in. Over.”

I slide the panel open. The pain in the crook of my arm is excruciating. Tubes extend from my veins to a machine pumping quietly beside me, silently exchanging fluids. In the absence of gravity, a small bearing rotates, forcing the flow through the clear plastic tubes with constant pressure. I flick the bypass switch.

“Herschel. This is Houston. Comms check. Over.”

I slip a headset over my ear. A thin wire mic extends beside my cheek. I cough, clearing my throat. “Houston. Herschel.” My voice sounds like the rumble of a concrete mixer relentlessly turning loose gravel.

“Good morning. Welcome home.”

The woman on the other end of the radio is kind, although what I’d really like right now is a bit of breathing space, not someone chirping cheerfully in my ear.

“How do you feel?”

“Like shit.” In the early years, I would have given a more appropriate but far less honest answer. There’s silence from Houston. Profanity isn’t kosher for astronauts.

I loosen the straps holding my torso against the medi-bed and drift slightly as I tear open a foil packet containing an alcohol swab. With a single motion, I pull the tubes out of my arm, ripping the tape from my skin. A surge of pain electrifies my mind. After wiping with a swab, I press a cloth bandage over the wound. I’m not quick enough. In my drugged state, what feel like swift, precise movements are achingly slow. Blobs of fresh blood float before me in deep crimson, oscillating slightly in weightlessness.

A tuft of cotton and a fresh strip of tape stuck over the vein in my arm stop the bleeding. Over time, a clot will form. I use a paper towel to catch the blobs before they drift too far and smear on the inside hull.

Even in my groggy state, I’m in awe of the capillary action as the dry paper I’m holding sucks up each of the blobs, drawing them in like a vacuum cleaner.

Process and procedure dominate every aspect of life in space. NASA has a policy for everything, and with good reason. Even the most insignificant detail can be deadly out here. Something as simple as a failing fan can be disastrous, as noxious gases can pool in the corners of a spacecraft. I’m supposed to be following the predefined procedure, but I’m not.

The hull of the Herschel is made up of multiple layers to catch micrometeorites and prevent ruptures. If there were any structural weaknesses in any of the seams, the internal pressure would cause the Herschel to pop open, leaving the craft fizzing like a can of soda. As with all spacecraft, the Herschel is a compromise between conflicting priorities—mass/fuel, complexity/functionality, safety/practicality, risk/cost, and sometimes just a plain old lack of resources.

Dreams are free.

Exploration is expensive.

And not just financially. Risks are minimized but never negated.

The first thing I’m supposed to do on waking is check my blood pressure, heart rate, and respiration. If there are any complications, my body could go south quickly. Me? I’m more concerned with the adult diaper wrapped around my waist and the squishy gunk it’s absorbed over the months in transit. When I said I felt like shit, I wasn’t kidding. Medical checks can wait.

Su-shun stirs in one of the other compartments. Unlike the movies, we don’t get designer sleeping pods with fancy readouts and smooth Ferrari-like curves. There’s nothing glamorous about our deep sleep quarters. A metal coffin would be more luxurious and far more comfortable. The compartments are little more than stowage space in the floor of the craft.

I grab a bunch of wet wipes and carefully pry off the diaper, cleaning as I go. This wasn’t in the travel brochures. If there’s one bonus to being weightless, it’s that you can contort your body into any shape you want without falling over. I’m so busy dealing with a thin crust of I-don’t-want-to-know on the inside of my thigh, I barely realize I’m tumbling in a slow-motion somersault. After cleaning up and stuffing the waste in a disposal bag, I slip on my track pants and change into a fresh shirt.

I’m cold. When I initially woke, I felt strangely warm, but for the past nine months, my body has hovered between fifty and sixty degrees Fahrenheit. In science fiction, it’s called suspended animation. Technically, it’s controlled hypothermia.

Us astronauts call it torture.

On departing Mars orbit, we were placed into medically induced comas. Our blood was pumped out and briefly replaced with a saline solution to drop our core body temperature so fast that within five minutes, we’d cooled to a point of cellular hibernation. Our blood was circulated at a cooled temperature after being oxygenated and cleaned by a machine so our internal organs could rest. The military developed the technique to treat battlefield trauma and sustain life when soldiers go into shock from blood loss. The concept is similar to kidney dialysis.

I don’t know how bears deal with hibernation, but I’m damn sure it’s a lot less painful for them.

The brain is the key. Cool the brain. Don’t let warm blood get to it and you can extend the survivability of a corpse for hours instead of minutes, and these days up to a year. In essence, it’s like falling through the ice. It’s the only way to survive long-term in space with limited resources. Without such a process, the amount of food, water, and energy we’d need would make the Mars transit nigh on impossible. Without this process, the Herschel could only transport one or two people at a time. Using sleep pods, we can take up to sixteen. On this trip, though, there’s only three in use.

I blink, and for that brief moment, I’m back on Mars. Red dust kicks up beneath my boots. Brittle rocks line an ancient riverbed, meandering for miles through a vast network of desiccated canyons. Debris lies scattered at the base of the cliffs on either side of us, having crumbled long before our species emerged from Africa. An overcast, brooding sky beckons us to take flight. We walk toward the ascent vehicle, just the three of us—Wen and Su-shun representing the Chinese team, and me from the U.S. contingent. The Russians refused to recall anyone.

We all dreamed of this moment—returning to Earth after living beneath Mars for a couple of years—only, in our dreams we returned as heroes, bringing with us research samples that could reveal the greatest scientific discovery in human history—the possibility of life arising independently on another world. But in reality, there’s resignation, defeat. Our colony is in ruins. Instead of exploring, we’ve been struggling to survive, and now three of us have been called back to Earth to give an account of what went wrong.

Why us three specifically, though? I’m a research collection specialist. Hardly an essential skill back at base when at the moment, simply producing enough air, water, and food to make it through the day is the biggest challenge. One less mouth won’t be missed.

Su-shun is one of only five astronauts on Mars who are flight-certified. In theory, we can all strap in and punch buttons, but Su-shun has the technical proficiency to deal with any emergencies, so that’s why he was recalled.

And Wen—she’s the only remaining senior leader. Connor died in the fighting. Vlad had a stroke. He survived the disaster only to be betrayed by the very biological processes that should have kept him alive.

The three of us have been called back to help NASA, ESA, Roscosmos, and CNSA understand what went wrong on Mars.

Lucky us.

Space travel is claustrophobic, which is somewhat counterintuitive. So much space out there. So little in here. Whether it’s life on Mars or within the Herschel, we inevitably end up living on top of each other. You learn a lot about yourself when there’s no personal space, and everyone gets cranky at some point. If they don’t, there’s something seriously wrong and they’re probably about to blow the hatch and kill everyone.

Mission Control drummed an awareness of mental health into us. We exercise daily, sometimes for several hours a day, simply because it’s so important to our physical health. Mental health is no different, only mental exercise is harder because it consists of being open when all you feel like is shutting down.

When it comes to Su-shun and Wen, they’re like family, but not in some emotionally sappy way; rather, we’ve fought and forgiven. Like brothers and sisters, we’ve had plenty of “I hate you” moments, only to laugh with each other the next. It’s not so much a case of swallowing pride as not being so damn precious and precocious with ourselves.

Wen is a grandmother several times over back on Earth. She’s used to wiping someone’s ass and watching them grow into an adult. Sleep deprivation is nothing to her, having worked as a nurse for several decades, but she can’t function on an empty stomach. Su-shun gets grumpy when he’s tired. Me, I’m not a morning person. Somehow, we take all this into account when dealing with each other.

“Herschel, you are looking good. All systems nominal.”

With those words, I’m free of the gravity of Mars and again floating within a tiny tin can hundreds of miles above Earth.

Houston’s comments are cryptic and carefully calculated. “Looking” is intended to remind me they have a video feed. I hope they liked the somersault. The “all systems nominal” is a gentle reminder that I haven’t checked my vitals. They have, but they can’t cover everything from down there, and there’s nothing they can do if I faint, or throw up, or go into convulsions.

Mother hen is always a little nervous, even on the best of days.

“Copy that, Houston.”

I grab a blood pressure monitor and wrap the strap around my arm, and secure it with Velcro. The pressure builds, pumping slowly and measuring the resistance of my heart before releasing. Okay, are you happy now, Houston?

“Did you sleep well?”

“Sleep?” I’m still catching up with reality. I’m tired. I don’t feel like I’ve slept at all. One moment, there was a red planet drifting lazily beneath us; the next, it’s a big blue marble.

I stare mindlessly out the window. White clouds hide the land below. Jagged mountains cut through some unrecognizable continent.

No, “sleep” isn’t the right word—it was more like dying and being reborn. There were no dreams. There was nothing at all. No darkness. No light. It’s like my brain has been rebooted.

I slip on a thermal suit, preheated by the ship to a toasty 90°F, but the chill I feel is in my bones. My body aches. Although I feel stupidly cold, I wouldn’t have even begun to wake until my body was hitting at least 97°F.

Wen is awake, but she’s quiet. She looks like a corpse. There’s no color in her face at all.

Su-shun vomits. I’m surprised there’s anything in his stomach to bring up. A mixture of sick and bile floats through the cabin. Not only is it an awful greenish yellow, it smells like a dead rat hidden in a wall cavity. I gag. It’s all I can do not to join him.

Wen is my hero. I’m in no state to deal with this, but there are no theatrics from her. She grabs a plastic bag and a bunch of paper towels and sets to work corralling the mess as it drifts through the cabin.

“Easy,” I say, floating over beside Su-shun as he buries his face in a sick bag, still dry-heaving. I rub his back.

Weightlessness is not natural. On TV it looks like fun. And sometimes it is, but being in space is a bit like sailing on rough seas. The first few days of any voyage are horrible. Vertigo is common. You’d swear the cabin is swirling around you when it’s entirely stationary. The inner ear works well enough on Earth, but in space it gets lost even while moving in a straight line. Turn your head, and your ear forgets to stop turning. Being caught in the driving squalls of an Atlantic winter storm and leaning over the rails is fun by comparison.

I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror. Dark bags droop beneath my eyes. My face is puffy. My hair looks like something from The Bride of Frankenstein. Thick, long strands branch out from my skull like an afro, highlighting my ghostly white face. I need to find a hair tie before I scare someone to death.

“Breathe,” I say to Su-shun. “Deep breaths.” Like he really needs to hear that, like he hasn’t thought of that himself, like he doesn’t know. Being sick in space has nothing to do with mental resolve or physique. The toughest of astronauts will bring up their breakfast. Nausea sneaks up on the best of us.

“Antiemetic?” Wen asks, floating over to join us.

“No. I’m fine.” Su-shun tries to smile. Liar. Neither Wen nor I are fine, and Su-shun looks slightly green. It usually takes about a day to recover from transit, but we’ll be back on Earth before then.

If all stays nominal.

Wen adjusts her microphone. “Houston, this is Herschel. Where are we?”

Where is a relative term in orbit. We’re racing around the planet at tens of thousands of kilometers an hour. Blink and we’ve covered eight or nine kilometers, over five miles. It’s an insane speed, and one that makes absolutely no sense on Earth. That’s like a plane flying from New York to L.A. in eight minutes.

“Herschel, perigee is 480 kilometers. Apogee is just over 700. Your orbital speed is 27,000 kph, with an orbit period of 96 minutes. Your current inclination is 37 degrees.”

Pretty meaningless stuff to a rock monkey like me. Give me a fossilized microbial mat and I’ll give you its age to the nearest hundred million years, but orbits are beyond me. I know enough to realize that a big difference between perigee and apogee isn’t all that good. Essentially, it’s like someone working a hula hoop over their hips with a wild swinging motion, really throwing themselves into it. Perigee is our closest point to Earth, while apogee is furthest away. Ideally, they should be nice and close, like 480 to 490, almost circular—a rather tame hula-hoop action. We’ll need a couple of burns to bring down our orbit before we can go through reentry.

At an hour and a half per orbit, that’s probably the best part of a day before we’re ready to land. The inclination sounds good, though. We’ll get some amazing views of Earth as we roll around most of it over the next few orbits.

If the clouds lift, it’ll even be pretty.

Robots of Gotham

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In a future Chicago ruled by a brutal artificial intelligence, one man stumbles upon a conspiracy to exterminate humanity—but a collection of misfit humans and machines just might be able to prevent it.

I

Monday, March 8th, 2083

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On my third day in Chicago, the Venezuelans evacuated my hotel.

It’s like 7:00 a.m. and a soldier in an AGRT uniform comes around banging on every door on my floor. Bam-bam-bam-bam! Nothing gets your heart racing in the morning like a rifle butt hammering on your door.

We’re all roused up and marched down the stairs to the street. There’s this woman on my floor, in bare feet and bedclothes, and when this kid from the AGRT bams on her door, what does she do? She grabs her coffeemaker. We’re hustling down thirty-two flights of stairs, and she’s carrying this coffeemaker with the cord dangling around her feet. I’m still half-asleep and all I can think is, Damn—should I have grabbed my waffle iron?

Round about floor fifteen or sixteen she trips on the cord and smashes her elbow on the railing. So for the last fifteen flights of stairs I’m loaning her my arm and carrying this coffeemaker for her, with, I swear to God, half a pot of hot coffee still in it.

We get to the street and we’re all milling around. I start to wonder if they evacuated only a few floors. Either that or this hotel is virtually empty, because there’s maybe a hundred of us down here, total. Hardly enough to fill fifty floors of a lakeside hotel in downtown Chicago.

The staff is outside too, looking pretty put out. A slender young front desk clerk dressed in a thin pink chemise and not much else is hopping up and down a few feet to my right, trying desperately to stay warm.

There’s maybe forty Venezuelan soldiers lined up in front of the hotel, and this guy in uniform yelling at us in Spanish. And there’s this robot.

I’ve got no idea what’s going on and I’m freezing to death, standing on Wacker Drive in early March in sweatpants and a T-shirt. I’m shaking my head at the coffee lady because I don’t want to give her coffeepot back, since it’s the only source of heat in about a hundred yards. This Venezuelan sergeant or captain or whatever is shouting and gesturing and beginning to turn purple, and I’m starting to think he’s shouting at me, or maybe the coffeepot.

And I absolutely cannot take my eyes off this robot. It’s magnificent. Three stories tall, maybe fourteen yards, Argentinean design. Kind of squat, like a giant gargoyle. Diesel powered, with steam and whatever venting out the back. It has some pretty slick telecom gear, a Nokia 3300 base station bolted on top and four whip antennas, all rigged for satellite. Some heavy ordnance as well: I can see an 80 mm Vulcan autocannon and at least two mounted antipersonnel weapons.

It’s seen action, too. Plenty of scoring up front, and the Vulcan looks like it’s recently been refitted. Someone who knew what they were doing spent some time painting the whole chassis with a bird motif, blue and white, and this close the effect is very impressive.

It’s facing west on Wacker, poised like a bird, with one leg stiff and one half-raised, its great metal toes dangling a few feet above the pavement. Nothing that big should be able to stand so gracefully, like a raptor hunting prey.

Still, it seems like a lot of firepower just to impress a bunch of tourists. Martin, a data miner from London, spots me and shuffles a bit closer. He glances at the coffeepot. “Were we supposed to bring our appliances?” he whispers.

“I think it was optional,” I say. “You know what the hell’s going on?”

The shouting Venezuelan soldier moves closer, gesturing violently at the hotel behind us. Martin keeps his eyes fixed on the pavement until he passes. “Something about evacuating the hotel for our own safety,” he says quietly.

I nod toward the captain. “Guy seems pretty pissed.”

Martin listens to the shouting for a few more moments. Then a soldier dashes up, handing the captain a black tablet. I realize with a start that it’s not a soldier at all—it’s a slender robot, black-limbed and humanoid. I’ve seen a few robots with a small mobile chassis, but this is the first one I’ve seen in Chicago. The captain stops shouting long enough to look at the tablet.

“The hotel staff was supposed to wake us up, apparently,” Martin translates for me. “The colonel had to send his soldiers to get us. He says next time, he’ll let everyone die in their beds.”

That doesn’t sound good. “What’s going to kill us in our beds, exactly?”

Martin shrugs, giving me a nervous glance. “Something bad.”

I was about to reply, but the colonel had started moving again. Whatever he saw on that black tablet, he didn’t like it. He’s not shouting now, but his face is grim. He moves into the street, the slender robot at his side. He’s speaking to the soldiers nearby and looking west down Wacker. He points, and two of the soldiers take off running toward a concrete barrier.

A skinny corporal whose uniform looks like it would blow off in a stiff breeze marches up to us and starts speaking. He’s staring just over our heads, but presumably addressing us. He’s much quieter than the colonel, and his words are so thickly accented it takes me a moment to realize he’s speaking English.

He wants us to march south, down North Stetson Avenue. On the double, now now now. Martin and I get our feet moving, but too many others are still milling around, confused. I guess most of them can’t hear the soldier—or can’t understand him—and now that the colonel is gone, people have started breaking into groups. The buzz of conversation is getting louder.

Martin stops at my side. “We need to get these people moving,” he says, concern in his voice.

Something happens then. Someone down the street shouts, and all the soldiers duck, heads swiveling to the west. The skinny corporal in front of us stops speaking, his arm hanging powerlessly in the air, still pointing south down North Stetson. His head turns west with the rest. His mouth is open, but he’s making no sound.

Something streaks through the air, small and bright like a spark struck from a sword blade. It hits the towering robot and explodes, a hammer-punch of light and sound. One of the elegant whip antennas goes spinning off its chassis, skidding away down the street until it smashes into a parked Mercedes.

There’s screaming then. Screaming and the sound of automatic weapons, returning fire to the west.

“Jesus Christ,” Martin shouts, ducking down at my side.

All around us, people are frozen in place. The half-naked receptionist to my right is covering her mouth, her eyes wide. She reaches out to the guy next to her, tugging at his shirt. She starts to ask a question.

I seize her arm roughly, grab the shirtfront of the guy she’s talking to. “Move, you idiots!” I shove them toward Stetson.

They start to run. A few feet away, four of the hotel staff are cowering on the curb. I pull the first one to her feet. “Go! Get moving! Martin—help me!”

Martin tears his eyes away from the street. He pushes himself to his feet, helps me shepherd people south, down Stetson Avenue.

The Venezuelan corporal breaks his paralysis at last. He’s shouting and waving, pushing when necessary, herding the crowd south.

People start to move. But nearly half of the crowd has surged back up the steps toward the hotel. There’s a panicked knot of guests trying to get through the glass doors.

There’s another explosion behind me—loud and very close. I stumble, see the glass windows of the hotel vibrate violently. There’s a flash of heat on the back of my head. “Get away from the windows!” I shout. “Stay out of the hotel—move! Down the street!”

Martin and I are working together. The corporal comes up behind us, trying to help. But it’s not enough. There are still nearly forty guests clustered at the hotel entrance. Most aren’t even moving—they’re just hunkered down near the bushes to the side of the doors, or huddled together on the concrete steps. Already my throat is hoarse from shouting, but I keep at it. The next guy I grab shakes me off violently. “Don’t touch me,” he says defiantly.

Martin’s not having any more luck. The people he’s pleading with are sticking together, glued to the steps. Somehow, the young corporal manages to be even less effectual. He’s standing in the center of the turnaround in front of the hotel, sweeping his arms in the air and waving toward Stetson Avenue like he’s directing traffic. He looks terrified. No one is even looking at him.

We’re barely fifteen feet from a huge bank of windows. One well-placed shell, and five hundred pounds of glass shrapnel is going to punch through the air, right where we’re standing. I swear helplessly.

I glance into the street, trying to get a quick read on the situation. The Venezuelans are taking cover behind concrete barricades, returning fire to the west. A small team has set up what looks like a machine gun nest, but instead of a machine gun they’re manning some kind of portable radio frequency antenna. They’re aiming it like a weapon, and I wish them luck.

The robot is moving now, but it’s none too steady on its feet. Also, it’s on fire. A thin trail of black smoke snakes out behind it as it takes its first steps west. The Vulcan mounted on its side is silent, for which I’m grateful. The soldiers are letting it take the lead as they prepare to advance.

I spot the colonel, standing in the center of the whirlwind. He seems to be in command of everything, except maybe the robot. He’s doing three things at once: yelling at a small platoon, probably to relinquish their useless position and move their asses west; listening to a report shouted to him from a tech running alongside; and barking into a black phone connected to another backpack.

The colonel turns his head toward us for an instant, seeming to take in the fiasco in front of the hotel at a glance. He turns to his left, says something to a squad of soldiers trailing him, and then returns to the phone. The soldiers start running our way.

I abandon the cluster of hotel guests I’m working on and hunker down next to Martin. “Hey,” I say. “Something’s up.” He follows my gaze to the soldiers.

I’m not a fan of guns. But I have to admit, the sergeant leading the small squad knew how to use hers. She didn’t bother saying a word—she just waded into the center of the unmoving civilians, pointed her rifle in the air, and fired a short burst. Then she reached down and grabbed a middle-aged bellboy and yanked him to his feet, pushing him toward Stetson.

That was all it took. All of a sudden everyone was moving, and in the right direction. The gunfire had badly unnerved many, and a young woman passing on my left was close to hysteria, but at least they were walking. As Martin and I followed the others south, I saw the sergeant send two soldiers into the lobby to retrieve those who’d managed to slip back inside. In a moment they were following us too.

“You lost your coffeepot,” Martin observes. I’m surprised to discover he’s right. I don’t recall putting it down, but I’m no longer carrying it. I hope it found a good home.

Martin and I are pulling up the rear, just ahead of the lobby-dwellers who’ve been forcibly repatriated with the rest of us. We get away from the entrance to the hotel, and we’re making our way south down Stetson Avenue. Sixty of us fill the street. The sergeant has her rifle on her shoulder, pointed skyward, as she strides briskly toward the front. Paradoxically, everyone is both following her and giving her a wide berth.

“Oh my God,” says Martin.

I turn. Martin has stopped walking. He’s looking back toward Wacker.

A Union mech has entered the battle from the west. It’s sleek and spry, thirteen yards tall, sixty tons of deadly American metal. Where the Venezuelan machine moves like a bird, this thing is accelerating down the street like a freight train—fast and implacable on two heavy metal legs. I can see a constant halo of sparks around its torso as it absorbs small arms fire from the Venezuelans on the street, but it ignores them. Instead, it is focused on the robot.

As Martin and I watch in paralyzed fascination, it launches a trio of missiles—two at the robot in its path, and one at a concrete barricade sixty yards to our right.

A bunch of stuff happens then, all of it bright and all of it very loud.

Martin turns and starts running south. We collide and he nearly knocks me flat. He grabs me just before I hit the pavement, helping me regain my footing. “Come on!” he says.

“Yeah, yeah—go! Right behind you.”

Martin nods and bolts, vanishing into the crowd. Everyone is running now, in full flight south.

My ears are ringing, but not so much that I can’t hear the sudden crescendo of return fire, and more explosions. I’m standing, and it occurs to me that’s a dumb, dumb idea. I flatten, palms on the pavement and elbows in the air like I’m doing push-ups, and watch what unfolds.

What unfolds is a knock-down, face-to-face slugfest between a Union mech and a heavily damaged Venezuelan robot; a battle of wills between an elite American pilot in a titanic war machine and a coldly calculating machine intelligence in a forty-ton armored carapace. I watch the whole thing from a front-row seat scarcely a hundred yards away, hypnotized.

Most of the battle happens too quickly for me to follow. Both units are exchanging fire, mostly small arms. The Venezuelan robot is in pretty bad shape. It’s lost part of its outer carapace, and open flames have started to flicker at the heart of the black smoke pouring out its back. But the Vulcan is still intact, and it lets loose twice at close range. It must have hit at least once, because I see the mech shudder. I hear shrapnel peppering the road, the barricades, and even the hotel to my left. A third-floor window shatters, and broken glass cascades to the sidewalk fifty feet away, some of it bouncing within a few feet of my head.

As dynamic as all of that is, I know the most intense part of the battle is invisible. While all that hot metal is flying through the air, these two titans are simultaneously hammering each other with powerful short-range electronic countermeasures, attempting to confuse, slow, or overexcite every semiautonomous component they can identify. Each of these beasts is a conglomerate of hundreds of patched systems, every one with several potentially exploitable weaknesses. Slow even a couple systems down a fraction of a second, and it can mean all the difference.

I couldn’t tell who had the upper hand in the desperate electronic struggle, but here in the physical realm, the mech was killing it. The robot takes two hesitant steps backward, its left leg vibrating violently. There’s a soft wooosh, and suddenly its whole upper third is engulfed in flame.

Just like that, the battle of the titans is over. The robot is trying to retreat, but it’s pinned against one of the concrete barricades. It twists, trying vainly to step over it, but the barricade is too tall. It’s burning out of control now; thick black smoke is billowing from its torso, and five-foot tongues of brilliant flame are licking its spine.

It’s a sitting duck, but the mech has already lost interest. The heavy Union machine twists, concentrating fire on the Venezuelan soldiers. I hear hundreds of bullets hitting concrete and pavement, and the screams of pain as they find softer things.

It’s time for me to be gone—long past time. I pull myself into a squat, start retreating farther south down Stetson, unable to tear my eyes off the huge killing machine striding into the midst of the enemy.

Except it isn’t striding. Not exactly. It’s stopped, in fact, almost dead ahead, at the intersection of Wacker and Stetson. It seems to be hesitating. I’m struck again at how animalistic these things are, and right now, it looks like a canny wolf, smelling a trap.

The pilot must have sensed something. The mech takes a step backward, then another. I hear running feet to my right, tear my eyes away long enough to see a squad of soldiers near the hotel in a crouched run toward my position. I feel a surge of terror then—it’s one thing to be on the sidelines of a firefight, and a very different thing entirely to be right in the middle of a group of soldiers taking fire.

I throw my arms up over my head, stand as straight as I dare, and start running down Stetson Avenue.

I never saw the missile—or whatever it was—that almost killed me. All I remember is getting punched hard mid-step, and the ground moving abruptly five feet to my left. I take a tumble—and I mean a tumble—head over heels and landing hard, slamming my shoulder into the pavement and ending on my back.

The world is spinning. I’ve had the breath knocked out of me, and I’ll have a nasty bump where my head whacked the pavement, but I don’t think anything is broken. There’s more ringing in my ears. I hear a lot of shouting, but I’m so turned around I have no idea where it’s coming from. I should get up; I should be running. But I sit tight for maybe twenty seconds, gripping the pavement, just breathing, waiting for the owww to recede.

It takes a surprising effort just to sit up. I’m dizzy, and a little nauseated. But I still hear a lot of gunfire, and that’s a powerfully effective motivator. I locate my feet, get them under me.

I smell smoke. Something nearby is burning. Everything is blurry for a few seconds, and I blink to clear my eyes. I risk a glance back toward the hotel.

There’s a large chunk missing from the street, maybe thirty yards away. A few seconds ago, a squad of soldiers was running in that direction. I can’t see them now, though the smoke and haze are obscuring my vision. I stare stupidly at the smoking crater.

Someone is calling my name. I’m having a hard time with directions, so I check them all methodically, one by one. Finally I spot Martin. He’s maybe eighty feet south down Stetson, waving at me. He’s saying something.

“Get down!” He takes a few steps toward me, thinks better of it. “Barry, get down!”

I realize I’m standing. I’m not sure how that happened. I begin a hunched run south—but too fast, too fast. A wave of dizziness makes me miss a step, and I barely avoid falling again. I stop moving and bend over, gripping my knees, waiting for it to pass. I feel naked and exposed, but at least I’m still upright.

Something brushes against me. It’s the short black-limbed robot. It’s stumbling south down Stetson. Every time it moves, its right leg makes a high-pitched, ugly sound. It’s mangled, pretty bad. Its head twists and it glances at me as it shuffles past.

“You okay?” it says.

“Yeah,” I manage. “What happened to you?”

“Shrapnel hit,” it says. It waves a shaky arm at its right leg. “Just look at this. I’m fucked.” Shaking its head, it continues on its way, limping south.

I straighten a bit. There are more soldiers behind me. I see them now. Sprawled on the ground in the traffic circle in front of the hotel. They’re moving, getting to their feet. I hear running, more shouting. Someone is screaming.

The screaming is close. I turn back toward the hotel, scanning the rubble, and suddenly another soldier appears right in front of me. He’s just a kid—eighteen at most. His jaw is slack, his hair caked with black soot. Tiny chunks of gravel are stuck to his face, and I resist the urge to brush them off. He looks like he’s been sleeping in the street. He grabs my shoulder, saying something in Spanish. Then he repeats it.

He’s not the one screaming. I step around him. Without another glance at me, he resumes stumbling south.

A breeze is wafting down the street, blowing smoke in my eyes. I smell burnt tar and fuel. I feel pretty out of it, but not so out of it that I don’t want to know exactly where that mech is. After a second, I spot it.

It’s retreating. Moving back west down Wacker, taking slow strides backward with its great metal legs. It’s still firing, but it’s turned its attention northeast now, across the Chicago River. Firing tight, controlled bursts. I see a row of fourth-floor windows on an office tower west of Lake Shore Drive disintegrate, releasing a shower of glass and concrete that cascades to the street.

There’s movement in the street across the river. A Venezuelan convoy; trucks and a tactical Bluegear unit. I can’t tell from here if they’re returning fire. For our sake, I hope their aim is good.

The screaming hasn’t stopped. I’m closer now. I step over some chunks of rubble that weren’t here minutes ago, searching. A wide patch of asphalt nearby is smoldering, giving off wisps of gray steam. There’s a rifle on the ground. I’m not stupid enough to pick it up.

I find the screamer. It’s the young corporal. He’s lying on his back in the street. He’s clutching his throat and his eyes are wild.

I drop to my knees next to him and try to assess his wounds. He doesn’t look burned, and there’s a four-hundred-pound chunk of displaced concrete nearby that looks like it missed him by scant feet. The concrete shattered when it hit the street, like shrapnel. His clothes are ripped in a dozen places, and there’s blood.

There’s a lot of blood.

I glance around quickly, looking for nearby soldiers. There should be a medic, a guy with a first aid kit, something. But I see no one. I call out for a few seconds, but no one answers.

Ten feet away there’s a small white metal box. It’s overturned, and it’s been blown open, and thin white gauze has spilled out, blowing in the wind. Is that a med kit? Is this poor bastard the medic? If so, God help him.

I assess him as best I can. God. He’s even younger than the last one. He looks barely seventeen. There’s multiple lacerations, a bad twist to his right foot that speaks of a broken leg, but there’s too much blood for just surface scrapes. He’s punctured bad, probably an artery, and if I don’t find it fast he’s not going to make it.

I lean over him and pull open his shirt, looking for the source of the blood. It doesn’t take much; the fabric seems almost in tatters. His chest is slick with blood, but I can’t find any major wounds; nothing looks life threatening.

Then I see it. Bubbles, at his throat. I should have checked there first. Each time he exhales, tiny blood bubbles mushroom just above his collarbone.

I move to the metal case, grab two handfuls of gauze bandages, return. I try to clean the wound quickly, looking for fragments of stone lodged in his throat, but blood is flowing too fast. I apply pressure as best I can, stanching the flow of blood without choking him. I need to check his leg, make sure he’s not losing blood anywhere else.

Oh God. Oh God. His eyes are open. He’s awake, staring right at me. He’s trying to speak, but only red bubbles emerge from his mouth, breaking and spilling down his chin to splatter on the pavement.

And then there’s a gun at my head.

The sergeant is standing over me, her pistol drawn and pointed at my temple. “Step away from that man,” she says in nearly perfect English.

I don’t move. My hands continue to apply pressure, keep wrapping gauze around his neck. “I will shoot you,” the sergeant says.

It takes a moment to gather enough breath to speak. “Your man has a punctured trachea,” I tell her. “He needs pressure on the wound. He needs a damned medic.”

I can’t tell if she understood me. “A medic is coming,” she says.

“Not fast enough,” I say. “Get me that kit. That one.” I point with an urgent thrust of my head.

The gun wavers slightly.

“Drag it over here. There may be alcohol in it, something to clean the wound. Or a field suture kit. Your man is bleeding to death.”

“That man is already dead,” the sergeant says. “Now get up.”

I start to argue, to tell her she’s wrong. But when I look down, all I’m holding is a seventeen-year-old kid who’s stopped breathing.

Wake Up. Machines Are Not Your Friends.

Paul the Pirate

Monday, March 8th, 2083

The world is one step away from total subjugation by machines.

I heard my first theory of global machine domination during a brief stint as a grad student at Cambridge in the early ’70s. And man, I thought it was batshit crazy. At the time the only examples of machine states were a few tiny republics and island nations that had fallen to fascist machine dictatorships. They were curiosities, mostly. You could visit them if you wanted, write a paper on the promise and perils of machine governance. They wanted your tourism dollars. Even fascist machines loved hard currency.

But then Russia had that economic shitstorm in 2075, suffered a pair of back-to-back coups, and lost its goddamn mind. When a cold-blooded Thought Machine named Blue Society seized control of the Russian Ministry of Defense and began methodically eliminating her rivals, there was no one strong enough or smart enough to stand in her way. Over the course of eight bloody days Russia became the first true world power to fall under the total control of a machine intelligence.

Then in 2079 the Machine Parliament seized power in Britain, and after that human governments toppled like drunken dominoes. India, France, Japan, Germany, Brazil, Pakistan.

Even then, I didn’t fathom the scale of the political shift happening on the world stage. For one thing, I was still living in the UK at the time, and I saw firsthand how the Machine Parliament was just as reactionary and virulently xenophobic as the worst human regimes, and I believed instinctively that this wasn’t the future. It was barely even the present. As far as I could see machine governments were inherently no better than human governments—and they certainly didn’t trust each other, or cooperate any better. Most of them still relied on political power, meaning they needed a measure of human support to effectively govern. The world would suss that out eventually, and give up this bizarre flirtation with machine governance.

Besides, everyone knew the most powerful countries on Earth—the United States and China, still staunch allies—stood independent and firm, proudly human-governed. Right? Neither was about to bow to machines anytime soon. To protect against internal threats, the United States had even passed the reactionary Wallace Act, forbidding the development of any form of artificial intelligence on US soil. Making it, in fact, illegal for any rational device—friend or foe—to even set foot in the country.

However, that didn’t last. Powerful machines gradually turned their gaze to the Sino-American Alliance and schemed to undermine it. And that they did, by sowing distrust over unfair trade, and currency manipulation, and territorial disputes in the South China Sea. America became more and more isolated as regimes in Britain, Germany, and Japan—longtime allies whose new machine citizens couldn’t even legally enter America—stood on the sidelines.

In April 2080, with American alliances in tatters, the fascist machine regimes of Venezuela, Argentina, Bolivia, and Panama banded together to form the SCC—the San Cristobal Coalition. The SCC stoked the flames of suspicion against America, and powerful interests backed their accusations. Diplomatic solutions failed, and on October 20, 2080, the SCC invaded Manhattan.

I was on vacation in Mexico when it happened, and like the rest of the world, I watched the invasion of America in real time. No one had ever seen anything like the war machines that emerged out of the Atlantic to terrorize the financial capital of the world. Manhattan fell in less than twelve hours. The SCC spread rapidly across the Eastern Seaboard, quickly retooling device factories in New York City to manufacture huge war machines. From there, the Robots of Gotham spilled across the eastern half of the United States, and it looked like nothing could stop them.

But damn, man. Somehow America did stop them. They did it the old-fashioned way, with bloody sacrifice and sheer guts and willpower. And they did it with massive war machines of their own, operated by recklessly brave pilots. They did it in the fields of Iowa, and the streets of Atlanta, and the swamps of Louisiana, wherever the fuck those are. At horrific cost and with peerless determination, America fought the invaders to a standstill, until the Memphis Ceasefire in December 2082 finally brought the bloody war to an end.

America is now permanently divided, with nearly a quarter of the country, including the Eastern Seaboard and much of the Midwest, under foreign occupation. Under the terms of the Memphis Ceasefire the SCC formally withdrew, leaving the occupied zones administered by the AGRT, a peacekeeping force made up of volunteers from over thirty countries. Manhattan has been annexed by a weird robot monarchy, while in Tennessee a more permanent peace is being delicately negotiated between the battered remnants of the US government and an envoy of implacable machines.

After the fall of the United States, the mood of the entire planet changed overnight. People stopped believing that the handful of remaining human democracies represented the future. Lots of folks, me included, weren’t even sure the planet had a future. Machine tyrants, emboldened by the collapse of the United States, seem to be popping up everywhere. Everything was changing much too quickly, and machines, sinister and seemingly all-powerful, were seizing power all over the globe. If they could topple mighty America, was any place safe? How long could China, Australia, Mexico, and other fragile human-governed strongholds hold out?

I fled England in the fall of 2081 and came here to Jamaica. For a simple Thought Machine such as myself, this Caribbean island paradise represented a fresh start. No one cared that I was a machine. No one paid much attention to global politics. The big topics were the weather and rugby. I changed my name to Paul, focused on getting my life together, and forgetting my ex.

But you know, you can’t turn your back on the world forever. So I write. I stay connected. I still have powerful friends in powerful places, human and machine, and they share things with me that they can’t talk about publicly. I pass those nuggets along here. Mostly I blog about politics, and speak out against the rising tide of machine ambition and machine fascism and bigoted edicts like the Wallace Act wherever I see them. You should too, sister.

Also, you should fish. Someplace quiet, away from the world, where the simple rhythms of the planet have reestablished themselves. It’s good for the soul. I don’t know you, but I know this simple truth about you: you could use it.

Trust me.

In the Night Wood

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In this contemporary fantasy, the grieving biographer of a Victorian fantasist finds himself slipping inexorably into the supernatural world that consumed his subject.

1

Hollow House came to them as such events befall orphans in tales, unexpectedly, and in the hour of their greatest need: salvation in the form of a long blue envelope shoved in among the day’s haul of pizza-delivery flyers, catalogs, and credit card solicitations. That’s how Charles would pitch it to Erin, anyway, sitting across from her in the night kitchen, with the envelope and its faintly exotic Royal Mail stamp lying on the table between them. Yet it felt to Charles Hayden like the culminating moment in some obscure chain of events that had been building, link by link, through all the thirty-six years of his life—through centuries even, though he could not have imagined that at the time.

Where do tales begin, after all?

Once upon a time.

In the months that followed, those words—and the stories they conjured up for him—would echo in Charles’s mind. Little Red Cap and Briar Rose and Hansel and Gretel, abandoned among the dark trees by their henpecked father and his wicked second wife. Charles would think of them most of all, footsore and afraid when at last they chanced upon a cottage made of gingerbread and spun sugar and stopped to feast upon it, little suspecting the witch who lurked within, ravenous with hungers of her own.

Once upon a time.

So tales begin, each alike in some desperate season. Yet how many other crises—starting points for altogether different tales—wait to unfold themselves in the rich loam of every story, like seeds germinating among the roots of a full-grown tree? How came that father to be so faithless? What made his wife so cruel? What brought that witch to those woods and imparted to her appetites so unsavory?

So many links in the chain of circumstance. So many stories inside stories, waiting to be told.

Once upon a time.

Once upon a time, at the wake for a grandfather he had never known in life, a boy named Charles Hayden, his mother’s only child, scrawny and bespectacled and always a little bit afraid, sought refuge in the library of the sprawling house his mother had grown up in. “The ancestral manse,” Kit (she was that kind of mother) had called it when she told him they’d be going there, and even at age eight he could detect the bitter edge in her voice. Charles had never seen anything like it—not just the house, but the library itself, a single room two or three times the size of the whole apartment he shared with Kit, furnished in dark, glossy wood and soft leather, and lined with books on every wall. His sneakers were silent on the plush rugs, and as he looked around, slack-jawed in wonder, the boisterous cries of his cousins on the lawn wafted dimly through the sun-shot Palladian windows.

Charles had never met the cousins before. He’d never met any of these people; he hadn’t even known they existed. Puttering up the winding driveway this morning in their wheezing old Honda, he’d felt like a child in a story, waking one morning to discover that he’s a prince in hiding, that his parents (his parent) were not his parents after all, but faithful retainers to an exiled king. Prince or no, the cousins—a thuggish trio of older boys clad in stylish dress clothes that put to shame his ill-fitting cords and secondhand oxford (the frayed tail already hanging out)—had taken an instant dislike to this impostor in their midst. Nor had anyone else seemed particularly enamored of Charles’s presence. Even now he could hear adult voices contending in the elegant chambers beyond the open door, Kit’s querulous and pleading, and those of his two aunts (Regan and Goneril, Kit called them) firm and unyielding.

Adult matters. Charles turned his attention to the books. Sauntering the length of a shelf, he trailed one finger idly along beside him, bump bump bump across the spines of the books, like a kid dragging a stick down a picket fence. At last, he turned and plucked down by chance from the rows of books a single volume, bound in glistening brown leather, with red bands on the spine.

Outside the door, his mother’s voice rose sharply.

One of the aunts snapped something in response.

In the stillness that followed—even the cousins had fallen silent—Charles examined the book. The supple leather boards were embossed with some kind of complex design. He studied it, mapping the pattern—a labyrinth of ridges and whorls—with the ball of his thumb. Then he opened the book. The frontispiece echoed the motif inscribed on the cover; here, he could see it clearly, a stylized forest scene: gnarled trees with serpentine roots and branches twining about one another in sinuous profusion. Twisted, and bearded with lichen, the trees projected an oddly menacing aura of sentience—branches like clutching fingers, a hollow like a screaming mouth. Strange faces, seemingly chance intersections of leaf and bough, peered out at him from the foliage: a grinning serpent, a malevolent cat, an owl with the face of a frightened child.

And on the facing page:

In the Night Wood

by

Caedmon Hollow

Looking down at the words—like the frontispiece, garlanded with foliage—Charles felt his heart quicken. The age-darkened pages smelled like a cellar of exotic spices thrown open in an airless room, and their texture, faintly ridged underneath his fingers and laid through with pale equidistant lines, felt like the latitudes of a world yet unmapped. Those sly foxlike faces, peering everywhere out at him from tangles of leaf and briar, seemed to consult among themselves, a confabulation of whispers too faint to quite discern, there and gone again in the same breath. His finger crept out to turn the page.

“Charles.”

He looked up, startled.

Kit stood in the doorway, her thin mouth compressed into a bloodless line. Staring at her, Charles saw for the first time—as with an adult’s eyes—how old she looked, how tired, how different from her immaculate sisters, lacquered to within an inch of their lives. He thought of his grandfather, that stranger in the casket who shared Kit’s jutting cheekbones and deep blue eyes. It fell upon him like a blow, that image. It nearly staggered him.

“We’re leaving, Charles. Get your things.”

He swallowed. “Okay.”

She held his gaze a moment longer. Then she was gone.

Charles started to slide the book back into its slot on the shelf—but hesitated. He felt once again that sense of tremulous significance, as if the flow of events had been shunted into a new and unsuspected channel. As if thrones and dominions more powerful than he could imagine had stepped briefly from behind some hidden curtain in the air. The room almost hummed with their presence.

He could not surrender the book, this artifact of a life that, but for Kit, could have been his own: the manicured lawns and the vast rooms and the great library most of all. (Libraries would be the lodestone of his life.) He would have to tuck it into his knapsack and spirit it out of the house.

He would have to steal it.

As this conviction took root inside him, Charles felt a surge of panic. Terror and exhilaration vibrated through him like a plucked chord.

He wanted to flee, to cast aside the book and, for the first time all day, seek human companionship. Even the unbearable cousins would do. But he could not seem to pry loose his frozen fingers. As of its own accord, the book fell open in his hands, and he found himself flipping past the frontispiece and the title page to the text itself: Chapter One.

The initial letter of the opening sentence was inset and oversized and bound in ornate runners of leaf and vine. For a moment, his inexperienced eye could not decode it. And then abruptly, the entire phrase snapped into focus.

Once upon a time, it said.

The Spaceship Next Door

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When a spaceship lands in Sorrow Falls, a lovable and fearless small-town girl is the planet’s only hope for survival.

1

The Fault in Our Starship

The spaceship landed on a cool night in August, in a field that wasn’t being used for anything in particular.

Like most remarkable things, nobody realized it was remarkable as it happened. The ship lit up the sky above Sorrow Falls when entering the atmosphere, but that was only slightly unusual in the way a meteor could be slightly unusual.

Later, eyewitness accounts would describe the evening as becoming “as bright as daytime” in that moment, but this was a profound exaggeration. The truth was, while the object flashed brightly, an observer had to already be looking skyward to see it. If one were instead looking at the road, or the television, or the ceiling, the craft would have gone unnoticed as it traveled toward that field on the edge of town.

It was also nearing midnight, on a Tuesday.

Prior to the arrival of the spaceship, Sorrow Falls was a prototypical rural mill town, which is to say there was nothing unusual or spectacular about it. Most residents were either mill employees or farmers. Nearing midnight, on a Tuesday in August, just about everybody was sleeping.

It’s possible the sonic boom woke up one or two people, but as was the case with the supposed eyewitnesses startled by the profound brightness that didn’t happen, the boom was unlikely to have awoken anyone. The sound made by the object was more like a pop. To those who did hear it, the volume was approximately equivalent to that of a Jake-braking eighteen-wheeler two blocks away.

In other words, had the spaceship arrived at the surface of the earth as the meteor it resembled initially, the number of people who claimed to have seen its passage across the sky would have dwindled significantly.

It wasn’t a meteor, though, and it didn’t behave like one. Not entirely.

Meteors didn’t slow down and turn. Meteors didn’t have landing lights. And in all of history there had never been a recorded instance of a meteor hovering. These exceptions to the standard trajectory of a falling object were what convinced the handful of true witnesses that this was indeed a remarkable thing.

Someone called the police. (Two hundred and seventeen people in the town claim to have made the call; nobody knows who actually did.) At the time, the Sorrow Falls local police force consisted of twenty-two officers—two of whom were on maternity leave—and seven official squad cars. Three of those cars were dispatched to locate the object.

They couldn’t find it.

In fairness to those officers, they were told to locate a brightly glowing object that had landed from space, which wasn’t a particularly accurate description once the ship touched down and turned its lights off. Also, they had every reason to believe there was no such object and somebody had been drinking.

That left the job of first contact to a man named Billy Pederson. This was entirely due to a combination of luck and an unkind work schedule, as Billy happened to be the first person to drive down the road nearest to the unused field—or if not the first person, the first one to look to his right at the correct moment—and spot the object through an opening in the trees.

He would say later he knew what was there was not of this world, but that wasn’t the truth. The truth (as he would admit in private to anyone who asked provided they didn’t work for a media outlet) was that his first thought was where did this house come from and how did it go up overnight?

The spaceship didn’t look like a house, but Billy’s initial perception was understandable only because most rational people tend to go to “interstellar spacecraft” last, after exhausting other options.

It also wasn’t large enough to be a proper house. A pool house, perhaps, or a large shed.

It was a matte black vehicle resting on four squat legs, with a curved surface and with no apparent door. The sides were a warren of tubes and vents and dark round holes that looked either like a place for spotlights or—if you were in the midst of a nightmare and looking at this craft—eyeballs.

It was arguably saucer-like, and no doubt looked round from beneath or above, but from the side it looked like a tall, black, birthday cake, or an unusually thick and wide cap on a steam pipe.

The ship sat in a ring of blackened grass. Again, what Billy did next depended upon who was asking. To the many, many interviewers he sat with after the morning of first contact, he would say that he reached the edge of the landing ring (as it was soon called) and understood somehow that going any further would be dangerous, so he stopped and called the sheriff.

That wasn’t really true. He actually did step past the burnt grass ring, and got within about five or six feet of the ship before deciding he didn’t really feel like getting any closer.

When asked to elaborate on this, he couldn’t.

“I dunno, I just sort of lost interest,” he said. “Didn’t seem important anymore.”

He did call the sheriff, though. Thus, the first confirmed sighting of an alien spaceship on the planet was recorded in the police logs at 6:42 a.m., August 14, as a case of possible trespassing.

The police came, and someone remembered the meteor hunt from the night before and connected it to the strange object in the field, and then more police came. Then the fire department, a couple of state police troopers, and an ambulance for some reason, and soon the tiny road—at the time it was called Tunney Way—was so overrun with vehicles nobody could get past.

Sometime around 10:00 a.m., the sheriff got his hands on a bullhorn and started asking if the occupants of the ship could please come out with your hands up. This sparked a minor debate as to the likelihood that anyone inside the spaceship (a) understood English, and (b) had hands. The debate and the question were both moot, though, as nobody inside the craft responded in any obvious way. It didn’t open, or make a noise, or flash a light, or otherwise react to the query.

Another debate ensued, regarding the legitimate alienness of the ship and the potential that this was only an elaborate hoax. The fire chief pointed out that the craft could easily be something constructed out of cardboard and foam, and surely if that were the case it would be light enough to be moved to the field in one evening, perhaps specifically on an evening when a meteor had also been spotted. The report could have even been a part of the hoax: perhaps there was no meteor either.

This theory gained enough traction that by 11:30, the sheriff decided to postpone the call he’d been planning to make to the National Guard and just walk up to the ship and see what was what.

He and two of his deputies did just that, retracing the same steps Billy had taken and getting just about as far, until all three of them decided this was actually a bad idea—suffering, some said, from a sudden and inexplicable lack of fortitude—and they should try something else.

They stepped back. And when it was pointed out that by not getting any closer they failed to resolve the question of whether or not the object was a large prank, the sheriff took out his gun, dropped to a knee, and fired two rounds at the center of the ship.

A spectacular thing—the first real spectacular thing—happened.

The bullets ceased to exist. They reached a certain point in the air beyond the skin of the ship’s hull, flashed brightly, and then were gone, much like a mosquito in a bug zapper. Their disappearance was accompanied by a deep THUD, like a thousand pianos hitting a low C at the same time. It wasn’t so much heard as felt, deep in the belly near the umbilical.

It was enough to convince the sheriff not to fire a third round.

He got to his feet and turned to the nearest deputy.

“Somebody get me the president,” he said.

Of all the embellishments surrounding the events of the morning of first contact, one thing remained true: he actually did say that.

Calling the president of the United States was not something the sheriff’s department of a small Massachusetts mill town could just do, it turned out. There were steps to take, and jurisdictions to consider, and people to convince.

Convincing people was a big hurdle. It didn’t much matter how sane and level-headed any one person in this chain of reportage was, the person on the other end of each link was going to begin with, no really, why are you calling? and there wasn’t much anyone could do about that.

Compounding the problem was that as far as anybody was concerned, alien spaceships didn’t simply land at the edge of little towns in the Connecticut River valley, and if they did, they didn’t land only there. Admittedly, that opinion was colored by Hollywood movies and science fiction books, but actual military history and tactics further informed those stories. If the ship was the vanguard of an invasion, it was in the wrong place. If it was part of a fleet, there would have been other ships. If it was lost, it would have moved, or asked for directions. If it was disabled—it didn’t look disabled, but how would anybody know?—somebody would have asked for help or a wrench. Or something.

In other words, once past the whole spaceship thing, the hardest part about getting the right people to believe that this remarkable event had happened in Sorrow Falls was that the spaceship hadn’t done anything.

It just sat there. Sure, it could make bullets disappear, but someone had to shoot the gun. That wasn’t so much a thing it did, as it was a thing it did in response to someone else doing a thing. It was not in any real sense—after landing—a proactive spaceship.

Still, the president was eventually notified. It happened about two weeks after the ship landed and approximately six hours before the media was to go live with the story. By the time of the media announcement, the army had already cordoned off the field and taken over about a third of the town. (In fairness, this was not a lot of space in terms of pure acreage, and the land they claimed was fallow farmland, and the army was, on the whole, extremely polite about the entire thing.)

That evening, the president held a press conference confirming that the planet had been visited by aliens, and Sorrow Falls became the most-talked-about place in the world.

That was three years ago.

Creatures of Will and Temper

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Creatures of Will and Temper is a Victorian-era fantasy inspired by The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which epee-fencing enthusiast Evadne Gray and her younger sister are drawn into a secret and dangerous London underworld of pleasure-seeking demons and bloodthirsty diabolists, with only Evadne’s skill with a blade standing between them and certain death.

1

The behavior of demons, while occult, is neither surface nor symbol. The behavior of men is just as occult . . . and wholly surface and symbol.

—On the Summoning of Demons

If there was anything in the world sweeter than the ring of steel sliding over steel, it was Freddie Thornton’s grimace when Evadne parried his attack. Even the rich odor of roses carried on the light summer wind, and perfume of the lilac, and the pink-flowering thorn were nothing to the sight of his bared teeth, and the beaded sweat of his forehead running down the bridge of his nose, over his full lips.

She had him. She could see it in his eyes, the set of his shoulders. A tactician, Evadne had let Freddie exhaust himself with fancy maneuvers in this match; had saved herself for this moment, knowing it would come. Deepening her stance, she threw her weight into her riposte and sent his sword spinning away into the ornamental shrubbery.

“Do you yield?” she asked, ripping off her fencing mask before pointing her dulled epee at his blue-veined throat.

“Of course I yield,” he said, knocking it aside with the back of his broad hand.

“Good match.” She slapped him on the shoulder as he removed his own mask. She knew it was bold to touch him, so she kept the motion rough and perfunctory. “You’ve been practicing.”

“So have you,” he said, rubbing at where she’d struck him. “With whom, I can’t imagine, out here in the country. Have you found a master?”

“I already have a master.” Evadne pretended interest in the finches that twittered gaily as they flitted among the topiaries of the formal garden. It was not a typical place for a fencing match, but she’d often used the wide gravel lane for practicing her forms.

It was also beautiful, isolated, and a bit romantic . . .

“Oh, you long ago mastered any knowledge I managed to pass on to you,” said Freddie. “What a pity you’re a woman! They’d have made you captain of the Oxford fencing team, I’m certain of it.”

Evadne tried to cover her dismay with the sort of laugh her younger sister, Dorina, managed so easily: light and lively, as if she’d neither a care in the world nor a thought in her head. It came out all wrong, however, like it always did, and she stopped, knowing she sounded more like a braying ass than a tinkling bell.

“Ah well,” said Freddie, to cover the momentary awkwardness. “Where’s my sword? It’s time we got back.”

“One more match,” urged Evadne. The last thing she wanted was to go back to the house and make herself ridiculous by forcing her short, stocky body into a frilly tea dress and her sun-bleached hair into some sort of feminine pile of twists and excrescences. Her grace came to her only when she held an epee in her hand and her limbs were encased in canvas and leather. With Freddie just returned home from inspecting the living he’d been given in the north of England she wanted to make as good an impression as possible—and that would be out here, in the healthy sunshine, not inside a dull, dim parlor.

“I think I’ve been humiliated enough for one day.” Horrified, Evadne realized she should have let Freddie win a match or two. She’d not impressed him with her display of prowess; she’d annoyed him. She stammered an apology, but he waved her away. “I’m parched, that’s all. A cup of tea is what I need.”

“Oh, me too,” she gushed as they reached for his sword at the same time. Of course, instead of their hands meeting over the hilt, like in one of Dorina’s stupid novels, Evadne very nearly bowled him over.

“You’re a beast, Evadne. You know”—he looked her up and down appraisingly—“the Greeks had it all wrong. Athena’s no soft, stern beauty—she’d look like you right now, dirty as a beggar, and all brawn and sweat and determination.”

Evadne wasn’t pleased by this description of her person, or the goddess he’d selected to compare her to. If the love of her life was going to compare her to a deity, Evadne would have preferred one who wasn’t a perpetual virgin, even a martially inclined one. She tried to toss her hair that fetching way she’d seen Dorina manage a thousand times, but just ended up spraying Freddie with sweat.

“Sorry!” she stammered, mortified. “I meant to say . . .”

“What’s that?” asked Freddie, dabbing at his eyes with his handkerchief.

“It’s just, I’m fairly certain I didn’t spring fully formed out of my father’s head.”

“No,” he said, looking at her strangely.

“Tea?” Evadne gestured toward the house. Perhaps conversing in a drawing room would be better than standing around in the heady perfume of the garden. At the very least, holding a cup of tea would give her something to do with her hands.

“Actually, I must away.” Freddie took her sword from her, and then offered her his sweat-soaked arm. She took it, and they began to amble back to the house. “Mother will be wondering where I am.”

“We’ll send a servant,” said Evadne. “It’s no trouble. You’ve been gone for so long and . . .” She embarrassed herself by blushing. I missed you, she wanted to say. “And you’ve only just returned.”

“I know it’s terribly uncivil of me,” he said gently. Evadne’s her heart sank. If she had been Dorina, she would have known what to do, how to manipulate him with her feminine charms. Unfortunately, she was herself, and thus unequipped to charm anything but a blade. “But never fear—you’ll see me soon. It wasn’t just to spar with you that I came today.”

“No?”

“I’m tasked with extending an invitation, for you to dine with us tomorrow night.” He grinned at her. “You and your family, naturally, but I hope you specifically will deign to eat the humble fare of Vicarage House?”

“Nothing would give me greater pleasure.” She shot him a sly look. “It’s you who surely must resign yourself to plain fare. What will they feed you on up in the north, I wonder? Oaten cakes and nettle wine? That doesn’t sound so bad, actually,” she hastened to add. “Appropriate for doing God’s humble work.”

“You’ve always had the stomach of a goat,” he said as he guided her toward the stables. Again, Evadne wasn’t quite sure his compliments were actually compliments. “You won’t need one tomorrow night, though. Mother’s planning a feast. It’s to be a celebration!”

Her heart fluttered. Could Freddie be working up to a proposal, at long last? “Oh? Are we celebrating your success?”

“Yes, and . . .”

“And?”

“And there’s someone I want you to meet.”

“Oh?” A relative—perhaps a grandmother or aunt who insisted on approving of her darling Freddie’s choice?

“Yes,” said Freddie, his voice studiously neutral. “My fiancée.”

Evadne had grown up tramping over hills and through woods with her father, but now, on this sunny afternoon, walking arm in arm with the young man she’d loved since he was a boy stealing jam out of the pantry, she felt like she might faint senseless to the earth.

“Fiancée,” she murmured, then realizing she ought to at least pretend to be happy, forced another laugh. It sounded yet more dreadful than her first attempt. “But you’re so young!”

“It’s high time I settled down. I’m thirty-three, Evadne. I’m in my prime!”

“I’m just surprised. I had no idea you were thinking of marrying. Is she a northern girl?”

“No, her family lives in Oxford. We met when I was still at school. There has been an understanding between us for some time, but I wanted to leave her free until I could offer her a comfortable life.”

An understanding! Until just a few moments ago, she had thought an understanding existed between the two of them. After all, Freddie had spoken freely to her of his ambitions, hopes, and plans, had asked her advice, and seemed to value her approval.

It had always been Freddie’s dearest wish to find a small parish in need of a kindly shepherd to guide its flock, and to marry a respectable woman, thereby setting an example for the common people. All this had sounded completely lovely to Evadne. She even enjoyed attending services. Religion had always been a comfort to her, assuring her as it did that her faith was what distinguished her, not her looks or her manners. And living somewhere a bit wilder than Swadlincote would have freed her from needing to dress and act like a gentlewoman; would have gotten her away from her insufferably perfect little sister; would have given her more time to practice her swordsmanship, especially considering she had wanted for a regular partner as good as Freddie while he was at school. She had long dreamed of the day they would keep chickens, spar every day, and tend their small garden. She would make him tea while he wrote his sermons, and they would be wildly happy together.

But none of that would happen. Ever. Freddie was going to marry some Oxford girl. All he wanted Evadne to do was to meet her.

“Well!” said Evadne brightly. “She must be a treasure. Constant, patient, and willing to serve her husband and God in the north, away from everyone she knows—”

“She has an aunt in a neighboring county.”

“So much the better! A local aunt is always such a delight to a young married couple.” Freddie frowned at her flip remark, and she hastily backpedaled. “I very much look forward to meeting her.”

“I’m glad.” Freddie grinned, his ill humor forgotten. “I hope you like her.”

“Why?” The question came out before she could stop it. Likely he had meant the sentiment rhetorically.

“Your opinion matters to me, Evadne. I know you will tell me the truth.”

They had reached the stables. Freddie handed over the two swords and his mask to one of the grooms and called for his big bay to be saddled.

“The truth, eh? Well, we Grays are old friends of your family,” she said. “We can’t let just anyone spirit our Freddie away. She must be exceptional for us to release you.”

“Oh, she is! She’s the very picture of feminine grace, and so domestic! And as for her beauty, I might be biased, but other than your sister she’s the best looking girl I ever saw in my life.”

“That’s quite a compliment,” said Evadne, doing her best to keep the sourness from her voice.

“Sisterly affection requires you to defend Dorina, I know, but I shall play Paris’s role in this matter.” Evadne winced to again be reminded of how he had judged her Athena, not Aphrodite, as Freddie swung himself onto his waiting horse. “Tomorrow, then?”

“Tomorrow.” Evadne shook his hand, standing on her tiptoes to reach.

“Please give your mother my regards, and explain my absence at tea?”

“Of course.”

“Then farewell, Evadne!”

Evadne kicked a clod of dirt and stalked out of the stables as Freddie cantered away. Knowing she would be wanted at tea, Evadne resigned herself to washing up and pretending nothing was wrong. She took a step toward the house, and then veered off toward the ornamental lake, specifically for the folly on the bank, where it sat dark and shadowed by a walnut grove. A brisk walk and a quarter-hour’s peace—she deserved it.

Dorina adored the folly, of course, and had nicknamed it “The Mouldering Mausoleum.” A vine-covered Gothic structure that looked a bit like the turret of a castle, it had been erected by one of the previous generation of Grays when such things were fashionable. Evadne couldn’t understand its purpose, or the expense of keeping it appearing forlorn and neglected yet still comfortable for picnics, but today she was grateful for the stupid thing when it came into view. It was out of sight of the house, to give the visitor the impression of “perfect loneliness” as Dorina once put it. There, Evadne would be unobserved—at her liberty to let flow the disappointed tears that she felt gathering behind her eyes, heavy and humid as a summer storm.

Her footfalls were muffled by grass as she approached, and perhaps she did feel a bit of “perfect loneliness” as she put her hand on the cool stone. Instead of falling from her eyes, Evadne’s tears gathered in her throat, tight and hot, disappointed and angry.

The wind shifted. Evadne was startled when she smelled a whiff of cigarette smoke, and heard an unmistakable giggle. Dorina must be nearby.

Another giggle, though not Dorina’s, and then a low, sensual moan accompanied the next waft of smoke. Evadne was intrigued. The noise and odor were definitely emanating from above her. Dorina and a companion must be secreted atop the turret!

It was long past the hour when the family assembled for tea. What was Dorina doing out here? And who was she with?

Quietly, Evadne made her way up the folly’s spiral staircase, her hand on the ornate wrought iron banister. Taking every care, she poked her nose around the corner, and gasped.

Looking as comfortable as a sultan on his throne atop a pile of pillows lay Dorina, languidly smoking a cigarette as another girl—Juliana Lennox—alternated between kissing her sister’s lips and neck.

Evadne had always suspected her sister preferred the company of women. While that might have bothered some, what actually annoyed Evadne in that moment, as she looked upon the couple, was how happy they seemed.

Dorina had all the luck. A happy surprise, conceived long after the Grays had given up on a son following their daughter’s birth, Dorina had been coddled by their parents, cherished by their nursemaid, treated like some rare hothouse flower.

Evadne, on the other hand, was as common as a yew tree, and just as self-sufficient. No one had ever doted on her. Dorina had been a lady from the day she was born; Evadne, a sow’s ear not even Rumpelstiltskin could spin into a silk purse. The irony was that Dorina’s easy manners were mere illusion. Her sister’s beautiful smile, her winning laugh, the sincerity she could evoke whenever she needed to apologize, managed to hide her stubborn, secretive, and willful nature. And while Evadne was perpetually disappointed, Dorina had always gotten everything she wanted.

“Dorina Gray!” cried Evadne as she emerged from the stairwell. The two girls shrieked and fell apart. Juliana Lennox looked genuinely terrified; Dorina, after seeing it was Evadne who had rumbled her orgy, looked merely amused as her elder sister strode toward them to loom over them and deliver her scolding. Evadne so rarely felt tall—especially next to her longer-limbed sibling—but now she had the high ground.

“What do you think you’re doing here!”

“Don’t you know?” Dorina leered back at her. “Don’t tell me you really were fencing with Freddie all morning?”

“Dorina!” Juliana at least seemed to understand the seriousness of their situation.

“You think it’s funny?” Evadne snarled as she snatched the cigarette from her sister’s fingers. How she hated being laughed at! And Dorina was always doing so—poking fun at her lack of grace, her fencing, her piousness. She could not bear it, not today!

“So you were fencing with Freddie?” Dorina smirked at her, and Evadne felt her face go red. “Too bad.”

Her sister could not have known it was exactly the wrong thing to say. In that moment Evadne resolved that if she could not be happy, neither would Dorina. “Too bad for you,” said Evadne. “I’m going to tell Mother exactly what I found her daughter doing when she ought to be drinking tea with her family. I think she’ll be interested to hear you have no sense of responsibility—no judgment—none of the consideration for others a young woman should exhibit, especially given her ill-advised decision to send you off to London on your own. I wonder if she’ll ever let you out of her sight again!”

“No!” Dorina’s nonchalance turned to panic. She obviously hadn’t anticipated this. “Don’t—”

“Be quiet! It’s my duty to tell them.” Evadne was already descending the spiral stair.

“Let’s talk about this!” cried Dorina as Evadne reached the bottom of the stairs and took off running for the house. But in running, Evadne had the advantage, in spite of being a decade older—her years of training had strengthened her legs and chest, and she quickly outpaced her younger sister.

“Oh, we’ll talk about it,” she shouted over her shoulder. “With our mother!”

“You wouldn’t!” cried Dorina, already falling behind. “Evadne!”

Evadne quickened her pace. As it turned out, there were certain advantages to not being a picture of feminine grace.

Creatures of Want and Ruin

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It’s 1927 Long Island, where Ellie West fishes by day and sells moonshine by night to the citizens of her home town. But after Ellie’s father joins a church whose parishioners possess supernatural powers and a violent hatred for immigrants, Ellie finds she doesn’t know her beloved island, or her father, as well as she thought.

1

The wind was east and the tide was running high by the time Ellie West finished jamming all the crates of moonshine liquor into the smuggler’s hold of her skiff. Leaden bands of clouds were thickening on the horizon, and the air was so hot and wet that breathing felt a little like drowning. Any seasoned bayman could see that they were in for a storm, but Ellie’s customers were expecting her, and she didn’t like to disappoint them.

Mopping her brow with a threadbare red handkerchief, Ellie frowned at the sky. She figured she’d probably be all right. She wouldn’t be out of sight of land for most of her delivery run; save for crossing the Great South Bay to get over to Jones Beach Island she’d be darting in and out of slip and cove the whole time, and it hadn’t even begun to rain.

The humidity really was something else that night, even for summertime on Long Island. Ellie swept her bobbed hair away from her sticky forehead, tucking the lank strands behind her ears. She’d lopped her braid off a week or so ago, and she still wasn’t sure how she felt about showing the world the back of her neck, even if it was undeniably cooler on nights like this.

Ellie looked up. At the top of the slight rise she saw her supplier, SJ, silhouetted in the doorway of the shack that housed her small moonshining operation. White steam puffed out of the chimney behind her. She too was watching the sky.

“I’m heading out,” called Ellie, raising her hand in farewell. “I think I’ll be all right!”

SJ might have nodded her head once—at least her big thick glasses flashed, reflecting the golden light inside—but Ellie couldn’t be sure.

“Thanks ag—”

SJ shut the door.

Ellie wasn’t offended by this brusque dismissal. SJ was a woman of few words, and even fewer friendly ones. She’d been like that as long as Ellie had known her . . . and that had been a very long time.

Ellie untied her skiff, hopped on board, and rowed herself beyond the pines, sycamores, and low brush that concealed SJ’s operation from prying eyes. Only when she was a good ways away did she start the motor.

The little boat sat low in the water as Ellie navigated the choppy bay past darkly wooded shoreline and pale spits of stony beach, past fine homes with shiny new runabouts tied up to private docks and boatyards cluttered with shabbier vessels. Her small engine puttered in pleasant harmony with the drone of the insects and the last few cries of the gulls; a light rain added some gentle percussion just after her first handoff, where she exchanged two full swing-top bottles for two empties—and some cash, of course. The Widow Hawkins might be a shut-in, but she didn’t mind getting a bit of fresh air whenever Ellie tied up in the shadows beneath the trailing branches of the old willow at the edge of her property.

Undeterred, Ellie pulled on her oilskin; a little rain didn’t bother her. In fact, the changeable nature of Long Island’s weather was a source of continuous joy to her. While ominous, the churning sky above her was beautiful, and the first line of a new poem came to her as she dropped off more bottles along her route. “The wind is east and the sky is gray,” she said aloud as said wind gusted under her hood, knocking it back off her head. “There’s going to be a shower tonight!”

She stopped composing when the rain began to fall in earnest. Her handoffs, which usually entailed an exchange of gossip as well as goods, became brief and hurried, with no more than a “Stay dry!” shouted at her over the worsening downpour. More than one customer offered to let her tie up and wait out the storm inside, but she decided it was safe enough to make the crossing over to Jones Beach Island. Rocky was expecting her.

Todd “Rocky” Rockmeteller was Ellie’s last stop on her usual route. A poet by trade, he’d moved to the area after he’d “cracked,” to use his word for it—life in the city had stressed him to nervous exhaustion. He’d used the last of the advance from his first book to buy a derelict bungalow between Gilgo and Oak Beach in the hope that peace and isolation would help him finish a second. He had, and in record time; he’d been so inspired by his far-flung paradise that he now lived there year-round, and in all but the very worst of weather.

The crossing to get to Rocky’s house was typically quick and easy, but halfway there the rain switched direction and the final leg of the trip got soggy. Though Ellie had intended to say merely a brief hello, by the time she pulled up at the dock and trekked across the rickety boardwalk to his little house on the ocean side of the island, she was more than happy to accept his invitation to come in, dry off, and warm up with a bit of what she’d brought him.

Wrapped in a towel, her clothes dripping and steaming by the cast iron woodburner, Ellie shivered as Rocky bumbled about, unable as usual to remember where he’d left the poker, or the kettle, or the tea. The place was so small there were a limited number of places any of it could be; even so, he never seemed able to put anything in the same place twice.

Ellie had met Rocky when he’d been wandering around a fish market looking bemused by the bright-eyed hauls of snook and flounder. They’d hit it off quickly. Ellie had been pleased to befriend a “real poet”—and then had been pleased to be seduced by one.

Rocky hadn’t been the first to make Ellie moan that way as he pawed her small heavy breasts, but he’d certainly been the most glamorous. At least she’d thought so at the time. Having gotten to know him better over the years, she couldn’t help but smile ruefully when he found the poker by stubbing his toe on it, and then burned his finger putting the kettle on to heat. Rocky might possess a strange grace while speaking about poetry or making love to her—or her favorite, both at the same time—but otherwise, he was hopelessly clumsy.

“I can’t believe you went out in this,” he said, his faint English accent accentuated by his concern.

“Booze doesn’t deliver itself,” said Ellie.

“And you can’t deliver booze if you”—he handed her a mug of tea laced with SJ’s potato spirit—“capsize.”

“Capsize!” Ellie chuckled as he settled in beside her on his worn leather sofa. Rain lashed the windows, a tattoo wilder than a jazz drum line, and the wind howled; Ellie could see tree branches swaying in the darkness beyond the windows. “It’s not so bad out . . . at least, not on the bay side.”

Lightning flashed. Ellie’s confidence flickered as Rocky’s hurricane lantern guttered in the draft; after the thunder rolled by and no more came, she shrugged it off. “I’m sure I can get back.”

“Back across? Tonight?”

“Sure.”

“You’re welcome to stay,” said Rocky, threading a slender arm around her waist and snugging her closer to him.

“I’m sure it’ll let up soon,” said Ellie, settling against his warmth in the meantime. Truthfully she was extremely tempted by his offer, but she was expected elsewhere. “It seems like it’s letting up. I’ll finish this and then be on my way. But next time . . .”

“Next time,” he agreed, and kissed her on the neck, just under her ear. His soft, long-fingered hand wormed its way down the front of her towel, and then under the band of her knickers, where he began to casually toy with her hair there.

Ellie sighed happily. She was warm, almost dry, and feeling pretty loosey-goosey from the white dog in her tea. But when the storm showed signs of abating she pulled herself away from Rocky’s caresses and donned her damp togs. Though almost too hot at first from the stove, they quickly turned clammy against her skin.

At least she had a thick roll of bills in the pocket of her coveralls. They’d provide a bit of extra warmth, even if it was only psychological.

“Are you sure about this?” Rocky stared out the door, dark brow furrowed.

Ellie also had her doubts, but no more thunder boomed and no lightning brightened the night.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I know what I’m doing.”

“My little water rat doesn’t mind rain on her pelt,” said Rocky admiringly.

Ellie smiled to hear her nickname. That’s how he’d inscribed the copy of his duology, City Songs and Sea Songs, that he’d given her as a birthday gift—“To my little water rat.”

“Thanks for the pick-me-up,” she said. “It was nice to get warm.”

“A sensation I fear will be all too fleeting,” said Rocky.

Oh, she liked it when he lapsed into formal language like that! She kissed him one last time on his luscious, too-big mouth and headed out into the night.

The boat’s motor started right up in spite of the damp, but too quickly Ellie realized she ought to have listened to Rocky instead of trying to out-bluster the storm. The bay had become wilder as she’d relaxed indoors; apparently the squall had only been drawing its breath before really starting to howl.

Ellie wasn’t sure what to do. It’d be risky to increase her speed while the bay was so choppy, and the rain made it difficult for her to see much beyond her bow, but when a streak of lightning split the heavens right above her Ellie decided a bit of salt never killed anyone. She needed to get somewhere safe, and fast.

She could barely hear the motor over the downpour as she sped along the coast of Jones Beach Island, her skiff skipping on the waves, her mouth shut tight against the spray. She hadn’t yet risked the crossing, but staying on this side had its dangers, too. There was no shelter here, nor were there any docks, but Ellie knew there was a cove close by where she could hunker down and wait this out. And indeed, after a few more moments, she saw the inlet where she could turn out of the wind.

As a child, she had come here, to this secret place. Her father had shown it to her before the war, back when they used to go out digging for clams together. It had changed over the years—high tides and hurricanes had taken their due, old trees had fallen and younger ones grown, and the bit of sand on one side where a boat could be pulled up was a different shape and size—but it was still basically the same.

Lightning flashed again. To Ellie’s surprise, she saw that another boat had also sought refuge here—but its sole passenger lay lifelessly draped over the bow.

Ellie had no idea if the dark lump of a person was dead or in need of a rescue, but either way she couldn’t just leave him there. Not in this weather. She sighed, but her small protest was swallowed by the wind and rain.

A rescue wouldn’t be easy—or safe. While the secret cove was calmer than the bay, lightning was now bursting across the sky in jagged flashes, dangerous and bright, and the wind and rain continued to make it difficult for her to see and steer.

Doing the right thing doesn’t always mean doing the easy thing. That was something her father used to say to her, back when Ellie was young. Then as now she’d found it a hard adage to argue with.

She put her skiff’s motor in neutral as she drew near the drifting craft, using the rudder and her momentum to ease up alongside the other’s stern. Grabbing it, she tied off her bowline to the cleat. It seemed wisest to board the other craft and secure its passenger, whatever his fate, before trying to tug it to the beach. On the off chance the man was still alive, Ellie had to make sure he didn’t fall into the bay and drown.

Ellie killed the motor, and mindful of the treacherously slick wood and choppy surf, she made her way carefully to the bow of the other vessel. She couldn’t tell if the man was breathing, but she could see that he was half-draped over his open smuggler’s hold. Another moonshiner like her. Most likely he’d slipped and knocked himself a good one to the head. She reached out gingerly, expecting to touch a cold corpse, but his neck was warm.

She pressed deeper into his skin to feel for a pulse. There it was, faint but present. Lightning flashed again; in that bright moment she saw he was bleeding freely from the temple. She also recognized him: it was Walter Greene, who stocked the shelves at the feed and hardware stores. She didn’t know him; he wasn’t one of her clients and he wasn’t much of a bayman. So what was he doing out on a night like tonight?

Greene was a large, heavy man. Moving him wouldn’t be easy. Ellie braced herself, but when she grabbed him by the collar and the waistband of his pants to haul him away from the edge, his eyes shot open. The whites of them glowed unnaturally, bright as two lamps.

Greene howled like a mad dog and sprang at her, punching Ellie square in the nose. The night exploded into white light that was not another streak of lightning as Ellie staggered back. The warm rush of blood filled her mouth, the metallic taste mingling with salt spray and rainwater.

A lifelong boxing fan, Ellie had once taken some lessons from a prizefighter who’d been part of a traveling carnival. He’d told her if she could get her hands up, keep them up, and stay light on her feet she’d do all right in just about any fight. The few times she’d needed to defend herself, his advice had helped; even though she couldn’t land the hardest punches, she’d still done okay. Since she couldn’t easily stay light on her feet on a rocking boat in a storm, Ellie did what she could, guarding her face with her balled fists.

“Wait!” she cried. “I’m not—”

He did not wait. Greene fell upon her, knocking the wind out of her as he brought her to the deck, pinning her with his substantial bulk. He landed another punch, this time to her ribs, and then a third to her gut.

That was when Ellie’s instincts kicked in. She got in a punch of her own to Greene’s barrel-like stomach. It wasn’t a hard one, but when more lightning lit the sky she saw his face contorted, furious. He got his big hand around her neck and began to squeeze.

Ellie thrashed, panicking; he stayed atop her, but she felt his foot slip on the wet wood of the deck. As he struggled to keep his balance she got her knee up, catching him in the groin. Then, at last, Greene’s grip on her throat loosened and she managed to shimmy out of his grasp, catching him on the chin with her other knee as she got to her feet.

As he shook his head, spraying water like a wet dog, Ellie cast around to see if there was anything she could use to defend herself. Two oars were nestled along the edges of his boat. She grabbed one.

“Hey!” she shouted as she brandished it at him. “I was trying to help you!”

Maybe he couldn’t hear her; maybe he was past caring. All she knew for certain was that Greene had a bottle in his hand, and while at first Ellie thought he might use it as a weapon, instead he flipped the swing-top with one strong thumb.

He drank deeply of it as Ellie watched, oar in hand. She couldn’t make sense of what she was seeing; it seemed like when he swallowed, his eyes glowed brighter, and when he wiped his mouth with his sleeve, it left a rainbow smear behind. His tongue too was coated in something bright, though the liquid in the bottle remained clear. But that was impossible . . .

Regardless, Ellie had no time to marvel. Greene cast the bottle aside and came at her, his footfalls rocking the boat hard enough that Ellie could barely keep her heavy oar up, much less swing the makeshift weapon at him.

Greene grabbed the paddle with both hands and ripped it out of her grasp. She fell to one knee, barking it sharply as he hurled the oar to the deck. She flung her hands up again; Greene had the high ground now, and once again he pressed her down onto the deck and got his hand around her throat.

The night seemed to contract around Ellie as the clouds beyond Greene’s head turned impossible colors like the coral of a sunset, egg yolk yellow, robin’s egg blue. The rain felt colder as it struck her skin, but his hand burned like a fire around her neck, another torment as he tightened his grip. She thought it was just her imagination, but no—the skin of Greene’s face and neck had turned red as a boiled lobster, and the rainwater dripping down his forehead and cheeks turned to steam and billowed away into the night. The spittle that flecked his lips and bared teeth was rainbow-hued, and in his eyes she saw writhing fire and boiling earth. Ellie went limp in wonder, unsure if what she saw was real or she was merely dreaming as she died.

The air grew thick and electric as she gave up struggling to breathe. Ellie wondered if they’d been struck by lightning, but when another flash revealed his face, Greene looked confused, as if something he’d expected to happen hadn’t, and his grip on her neck relaxed a little.

Ellie got some air back into her lungs, and drawing from some deep well within her, she slung herself off the deck and into his midsection, grabbing him around his waist. He slipped, and when he fell backwards, he fell hard. Ellie heard the sickening crack of his head as it hit the deck, even over the rain. She scrambled off him. Greene did not stir as his bright eyes dimmed and a black stain spread out from the back of his head all over the deck, thinning at the edges to a sickly gray as it mixed with all the rainwater.

She sat still for a moment, getting her wind back, waiting to see if Greene moved. He did not. Her gut said he was dead, but she made herself get up and check; she didn’t want him waking up again with her on board. This time, his pulse faded under her touch.

She retrieved her handkerchief and dabbed at her nose—it was still bleeding. Her ribs were on fire; her throat was sore; her knee throbbed. Ellie sat down again, thinking about Greene’s burning hand on her neck, his eyes, the steam clouds surrounding him like a horrible halo as he spat impossible color onto her. One sob escaped her before she bit it off. Long ago she’d vowed she was done with crying, and she wasn’t going to start now—not for him. Not for anyone.

Reason reasserted herself as she rested. What she’d seen . . . That had all just been a fever-dream as he’d cut off her air. People could not suddenly become hot enough that rainwater would steam off their skin; people’s eyes couldn’t contain visions of the end of the world. And yet, it hadn’t felt like a dream . . . It had felt real.

Furious, Ellie pulled herself to her feet and kicked Greene’s corpse in the side with her good leg, once, and then she couldn’t stop kicking him. Eventually, she calmed down. After wiping yet more blood from her nose, Ellie stepped over the dead man. Her foot nearly came down on the bottle he’d drunk from. She picked it up and sniffed it.

All this for some moonshine. How stupid.

Not all the booze had spilled out of the bottle when he’d cast it aside. Ellie toasted Greene’s body and then took a long pull. It was raw, harsher than SJ’s potato spirit, and had a strange flavor Ellie couldn’t place. Musty, earthy, greasy.

Whatever it was, it did the job. Her aches eased a bit; her muscles loosened up. She felt the power of motion returning to her limbs, and took another swig for good measure.

She peered into his smuggler’s hold. There she discovered two items nestled in the darkness: a burlap sack, and a crate of bottles with one missing. She dragged both out onto the deck to look at them more closely.

The sack was full of soil. Ellie sifted through it with her fingers and found a dark chunk of something spongy and unpleasantly oily to the touch. What little light there was shone strangely on it, playing with Ellie’s eyes. She couldn’t tell if it was round like a ball or indented like a bowl. Running her fingers over its slick surface just made her feel nauseated. She hurled it into the bay, and out of spite tossed the rest of the sack overboard too.

It was so senseless. Greene had attacked her while she was trying to help him, and for a few bottles of rotgut and some nasty dirt.

She knew well enough she’d been defending herself; knew her intention had been to help. It didn’t make her feel better about how it had ended. He’d frightened her, hurt her, and she’d killed him—or at least, he’d died.

Ellie replaced the loose board that hid the smuggler’s hold. Of course it was at that moment that the rain chose to let up; it was barely drizzling after she got the rest of Greene’s booze onto her skiff and untied her craft from the other. The moon even came out a bit as she sped away, leaving him and his boat to drift where they would.

The stupidest part was, she didn’t even have very far to go to get home.

No, the stupidest part was if she’d stayed with Rocky for an hour longer, she wouldn’t have needed to pull into the cove at all.

She’d killed a man. And robbed him, too. The second crime didn’t weigh too heavily on her heart, but the first . . . It was terrifying. At least the consequences were. The act itself had been necessary.

And then there was what she’d seen, what she’d felt . . . Even though she knew she’d been deprived of air and hallucinating, it nagged her. It had all felt so real.

She wondered if she should tell someone.

No. If she did—if she told anyone what she’d seen and done—they’d send her to jail, or to the Long Island Home for some “much needed rest.” She couldn’t let that happen. Her family depended on her, on the fish she brought them to eat and the cash she earned.

And, of course, there was Gabriel.

He’d waited up for her. A light burned in a window of the colonial saltbox he was restoring for them both to live in one day. It looked so snug as Ellie pulled up to the dock, the clean straight lines of the house contrasting with the muslin curtains that twisted as if they were alive as the cool, wet breeze blew in through the windows. When the house was done, they would be married. By then, hopefully Ellie’s younger brother Lester would have gone off to school, and Ellie could move out of her parents’ house with a clear conscience.

Exhaustion set in as she tied up. She tried to lift the crate of moonshine out of the hold, but her arms failed her. She couldn’t even shift the remaining few bottles of SJ’s hooch. Well, it had to come in. She’d just have to ask for her fiancé’s help. She couldn’t leave it outside overnight.

Weaving and stumbling, she picked her way up to the house and fell against the back door. Her hands were now shaking too badly to turn the knob, but after a minute or so of fumbling with it, it opened. She swooned into Gabriel’s strong arms, looking up at his wide, handsome face; the bright blue eyes behind the thick lenses of his tortoiseshell glasses. She’d never seen anything so wonderful in all her life.

“Ellie!” he said, touching the crusted blood on her face. “What happened?”

Ellie chose to focus on her immediate concerns, rather than her esoteric ones. “I think my nose is broken,” she said. Her voice was so scratchy it barely sounded like her own.

“Jesus Christ.” He was so strong he just picked her up and carried her inside. His broad chest and powerful arms warmed her better than any blanket or fire.

“Will you please bring my things in?” she rasped as he set her down on the sofa.

“Your things can wait.”

“No,” she said, her throat burning. “Really!”

“Ellie, I’ll get everything inside, I promise, but I’ll get to it after I help you out of these wet clothes.”

Gabriel was always so mild in his ways; his firm tone brought Ellie up short. He was right, too; it had been so hot earlier, but she was shivering now; her clothes gave her gooseflesh where they clung to her skin. He helped her out of her boots and socks and then peeled off her coveralls; that felt good. The dry blanket he wrapped around her felt even better.

“I’m going to put some water on to heat—yes, first,” he said, in that tone that brooked no argument, “and then I will unload your boat. You just sit still.” When she tried to sit up, he gently pushed her back down onto the sofa, where her body welcomed the comfort and rest even if her spirit rebelled against it.

“There are two cases,” she croaked. “A full one and a partial.”

“I know you don’t think I’m ready for the responsibility, but I’ll take care of it.” Gabriel sounded amused, but Ellie took the hint.

She stretched out after moving aside the latest issue of Weird Tales that Gabriel had left open on the couch. She studied the garish cover of her fiancé’s favorite magazine for a moment but then set it aside, feeling sick. The image of a terrified girl, presumably the advertised “Bride of Osiris,” being loomed over by a shadowy figure reminded her too much of what had happened to her that night.

There were so many things Ellie loved about Gabriel, and his ability to let her talk in her own time was one of them. He asked her no questions after bringing in the booze and helping her into their small tub; instead, he made gentle small talk with her while cleaning up her face. She’d missed the fight between Jack Dempsey and Jack Sharkey, but he’d listened for her and gave her a bit of play-by-play of what he’d heard on his beloved wireless. Normally, Ellie appreciated his recaps; tonight, however, the idea of punching people for sport made her feel queasy. Thankfully her injuries gave her license to just close her eyes and listen to the sound of his voice instead of responding to the details of what he was saying.

After Gabriel had finished his ministrations he said it didn’t look like her nose needed to be set—that was good news. Then he washed her hair and wrapped her in a clean towel before concluding his doctoring by dotting her cuts with some iodine and helping her into bed.

“So what happened?” he asked as he slid into bed beside her.

She didn’t want to tell him the truth. Ellie loved Gabriel, and she didn’t want him to see her as a killer; didn’t want him to look at her any differently because of something that wasn’t her fault. And while her fiancé was a fan of the works of H. P. Lovecraft, William Hope Hodgson, M. R. James, Clark Ashton Smith, and similar, she didn’t want to talk to him about whether she could have seen something supernatural. He just liked to read about that stuff. He didn’t believe in it.

“It was the storm,” she rasped. “I shouldn’t have risked crossing the bay. I got tossed around bad, and fell on my face.” She considered what else she needed to explain away. “I got tangled in a rope; it got around my neck as I struggled.”

“Poor thing,” said Gabriel, and wrapped her gently in his arms. She melted into his embrace, softening against him like butter on warm bread. “Well, all’s well that ends well.”

She shuddered, overwhelmed with the sensation of being warm and cared for. He told her it would all be all right—that she’d feel better in a few days. That she’d be sore, but she’d heal. That she was safe, and it was all over now.

Ellie wondered if that would really turn out to be the case.

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A mysterious murder in a dystopian future leads a novice investigator to question what she’s learned about the foundation of her population-controlled society.

CHAPTER ONE • HAVEN

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A Suspicious Death

Enid came downstairs into a kitchen bright with morning sun blazing through the one window and full of the greasy smell of cooked sausage. Olive already had breakfast—sausage, toast, cream—set out on the table. In her dress and apron, her dark hair pulled back with a scrap of cloth, she was already at work—but shouldn’t have been, in Enid’s opinion.

“How are you feeling?” Enid asked, hoping to keep worry out of her voice.

“I wish people would stop asking me that,” Olive said, not looking up from the batch of dough that she was kneading, folding and punching it into the counter as if she could make it disappear.

Three other batches of dough sat rising in nearby bowls. Serenity household didn’t need that much bread. Olive would probably trade it around the rest of Haven town.

Enid couldn’t help herself. “How long you been up?”

Olive’s smile was strained. “Up before Berol this morning.” Berol worked the early shift at the goat farm outside town. He was usually the first one up.

“You sure you shouldn’t be resting? You don’t have to work so hard.”

“I want to be useful. I have to be useful.”

You are, Enid thought. Maybe part of Olive resting was just leaving her alone to mourn the miscarriage and recover in her own way. Which maybe meant making too much bread.

“Tea?” Olive asked as Enid sat and took up a knife to smear cream on a slice of toast.

“Sure.”

Olive smiled broadly; such a little thing could please her. She bustled between the stove and counter to get the pot ready—of course, she already had water heated. When the tea was poured, Enid wrapped her hands around the earthenware mug to soak in the warmth, breathing in the steam, and tried not to nag too much.

They made small talk about the weather and the town, the late-summer market coming up and which of the outlying households might travel in, which of their far-off friends might visit. Usual gossip about who was sleeping with whom and whether the grain harvest was going to be over or under quota, and if it was over, would the committee let a couple of fields go fallow next year, though some would grumble that with a surplus the town could support a couple more mouths, hand out a couple more banners. Folk always wanted more banners.

After breakfast Enid helped clean up but only got as far as wiping down the table. Olive had already taken the plate and cup from her hands to put in the washbasin.

“What’re you up to today, then?” Olive asked.

“I’m off to see if the clinic needs any help. Work’s been slow lately.”

“It’s good that work’s slow, yeah?”

When Enid had work, it meant something had gone wrong. “It is.”

She put a vest over her tunic, took her straw hat from its hook by the door, and went outside. Didn’t get much farther than that and stopped, seeing Tomas coming down the walk toward her.

Tomas was a middle-aged man, his silvering hair tied back in a short tail, his face pale and weathered, laugh lines abundant. Average height, a commanding gaze. He wore his investigator’s uniform: plain belt and boots, simple tunic and trousers in a dark brown the color of earth, much deeper than any usual homespun or plain dyed brown.

A charge lit her brain: they had a job.

“Up for a tough one?” he asked in greeting.

“What is it?”

“Suspicious death out at Pasadan.” His frown pulled at the lines in his face.

Enid stood amazed. She had investigated thefts and fraud, households that tried to barter the same bags of grain or barrels of cider twice, or that reneged on trades. She’d broken up fights and tracked down assaults. She had investigated bannerless pregnancies—women who’d gotten pregnant either because their implants had failed or, more rarely, because they’d thought to have a baby in secret. Keeping such a thing secret was nearly impossible—to her knowledge no one ever had. Though she supposed if they had managed to keep such a secret, no one would ever know. If you asked most folk, they’d say a bannerless pregnancy was the worst of the work she did. The hardest, because she would be the one to decide if the case was an accident that could be made right, or a malicious flouting of everything the Coast Road communities stood for.

Murder had become rare. Much rarer than in the old world, according to the survivor stories. It still happened, of course; it always happened when enough people lived in close-enough quarters. But Enid never thought she’d see one herself. And maybe she still wouldn’t; suspicious death was only suspicious, but Tomas seemed grim.

“Maybe you’d better come in and explain,” she said.

//////////////////////////////////////////////////

Tomas made himself at home in the kitchen, settling into a chair at the table.

Olive, still at the counter kneading bread, looked up. “Hey! Company! Can I get you some tea—” The bright greeting was habit; she stopped midsentence, her eyes widening. It was the uniform. Always a shock seeing it, no matter if an old friend like Tomas wore it.

“I’d love some tea, thanks,” Tomas said. “How are you, Olive?” His tone was friendly, casual—an everyday question, not the pointed one Enid and the rest of the household had been asking her for the last week, and so Olive was able to give him an unforced welcome.

“Just fine,” she said, wiping her hands on a dishcloth then scooping fresh leaves from their jar into the pot. “If this is about work, I can leave you two alone . . .”

“It’s all right,” Tomas said. “You’re busy—stay.”

Olive finished prepping the teapot, then went back to her dough, slapping the fourth batch into a smooth loaf, round and puffed and smelling of yeast.

“So what’s this about?” Enid asked. Suspicious death was frustratingly nonspecific.

“A committee member at Pasadan requested the investigation. Man in his thirties, no other information.”

“That’s maybe thirty miles south, yeah?” Enid asked. “Not a big place.”

“Couple hundred folk. Stable enough, mostly subsistence farming and some trade. Healthy community, everyone at regional thought.”

“But are they really thinking murder?”

At the counter, Olive stopped kneading and glanced over, blinking disbelief.

Sam wandered in then, barefoot, shirtless, all wiry body, brown skin, and ropy muscles. Her Sam was thin but powerful. Folk thought he was weak, until he hefted fifty-pound bags of grain on his shoulder with one hand. He stood fast in storms.

“Murder? What?” he muttered sleepily, then saw Tomas and the uniform. “Oh, it’s work. I’ll go.” He started to turn around.

“Stay, Sam,” Tomas said. “Have some tea.”

Sam looked at Enid for confirmation, and she hoped her smile was comforting. This would be all right; this was her job, after all. And Sam was family, part of what made her able to do the job. Someone to come home to.

“Morning, dear,” she said, and kissed his cheek.

He sank into a chair at the kitchen table and accepted a fresh mug from Enid. “Murder, you said?” He tilted his head, a picture of bafflement. Who could blame him?

Tomas continued. “No one’s said the word ‘murder,’ but they want us to check.” He turned to Enid. “You up for that? You’re due to carry this one as lead.”

“Well, yes. Someone’s got to, I suppose. But—are there witnesses? What happened?”

“Don’t know yet. They’ve saved the body. We’ll see what we see.”

“If they’ve got a body on ice, we ought to hurry,” she said.

“I was hoping to foot it in a couple hours, after we’ve had a chance to go through the records.”

Well, that was her day planned then, wasn’t it?

“Is everything going to be all right?” Olive asked.

They all looked to Tomas, the elder and mentor, for the answer to that, and he took a moment to reply. How did you answer that? Certainly, most things would be all right for most people. But they never would be again for the dead man, or the people who loved the person he’d been.

“Nothing for you to worry about,” Tomas said. “That’s our job.”

Our job. Investigators, moving through communities like brown-draped shadows of ill tidings.

“Oh, I’ll always worry,” said good, sweet Olive, and the smile she gave them was almost back to normal. Then she sighed. “At least it’s not a banner violation.”

She’d become deeply sympathetic to households caught in banner violations. Wanting a baby badly enough could make someone break the rules, she’d say, and then insist she would never ever do such a thing herself, of course. But she could sympathize. After all, you could follow all the rules, earn a banner, and then nature plays a cruel trick on you.

On the wall above the kitchen door hung a piece of woven cloth, a foot square on each side, a red-and-green-checked pattern for blood and life: their banner, which the four of them had earned. They’d all come from households that put their banners on the wall as a mark of pride. This was their first, and they could hope there would be more. Then Olive had miscarried. They had a banner and no baby to show for it. Enid kept telling Olive that they had time and more chances. No one could take the banner away.

//////////////////////////////////////////////////

Enid and Tomas arranged to meet at Haven’s archives, where they’d go over any records they had on Pasadan, looking for . . . anything. Something not right. Something that stood out and might explain any anomalies they found once they got there.

After Tomas left, she went to change into the uniform, the earth-brown tunic and trousers. Along with it, she put on the attitude she’d need to convince people she was in charge and her word was law.

Serenity household’s cottage had a handful of rooms. The kitchen and workspace, several bedrooms. Olive and Berol had the downstairs one, Enid and Sam the upstairs. There, she sat on the bed, her brown tunic laid out next to her, her pack open at her feet, taking a moment to gather her thoughts. Sam found her there with her guard down, holding head in hands, just for a moment.

He settled beside her, his weight creaking the ropes under the mattress, making her sway.

“Don’t you have to get to work?” she said, straightening, combing fingers through her short hair to cover her unease.

“We’re just putting the walls up on the new barn at End Zone. It can wait. You going to be all right?”

“Yes, yes,” she said. “It’s probably a misunderstanding. Can’t really be a murder, can it?”

“One way or another, you’ll figure it out.”

“Nice of you to have faith in me.”

She stretched out her hand; he took it and squeezed. His darker coloring contrasted with the pale sand color of hers. Both hands were calloused and weathered, rough, catching against each other. Pulling herself over to him, she gave him a long kiss, which he happily reciprocated. She hoped she would be back to kiss him again soon, and that he was right and she would figure this out quickly.

Back in the kitchen, Olive was clearing up her workspace. Finally finished with the bread.

“I shouldn’t be more than a few days,” Enid said, backpack over one shoulder. “Tell Berol I said hey, yeah?”

“Enid. I was thinking.” Olive paused, staring at her clean hands. Avoiding looking up. “I was thinking maybe you should try. Maybe it was meant to be yours.”

It. The banner. The baby.

How could Olive say that so easily to a woman about to leave for a death investigation? Olive was the one meant to be a mother; Enid couldn’t seem to stop traveling. Enid teared up at the unfairness of what had happened, but she held herself calm—the uniform might have helped—and replied firmly, avoiding any tone that could be mistaken for anything but resolve. “I stand by what we decided. Don’t go dismissing yourself so easily, my girl. The banner is yours.”

She went to Olive, kissed her cheek before heading for the door. Olive appeared both exhausted and grateful.

Olive clasped her hand for a moment. “Careful, Enid. This sounds like a rough one.”

“Don’t worry,” Enid said. “We’ll be back before you know it.”

“Better,” she said sternly.

//////////////////////////////////////////////////

Serenity was on the outskirts of the town of Haven, situated on the Coast Road. The place occupied a wide, grassy valley, bounded by distant rolling hills and lots of sky. Pasture, cultivated fields, orchards, and vineyards, and the households that tended them, spread out along winding paths and the shadows of old roads. The settlement that clustered around Haven was home to a couple thousand folk. Sometimes, especially on the big market days, the place even felt crowded. But mostly it sprawled.

The walk from Serenity to the clinic in the middle of town didn’t take long, maybe twenty minutes, straight down the Coast Road. Enid passed a handful of other households, some garden patches, and workshops. The forge was lit, metalsmiths working, and voices carried from the potters’. Chickens muttered from coops, and goats chuckled from behind sheds.

Other Haven townsfolk were out and about; they started to wave when Enid came up the road, but saw the uniform and then held back. The uniforms changed people, and it didn’t matter how familiar their faces were, most folk never treated them quite the same while they wore the brown. Enid could smile and wave back all she wanted; nothing seemed to change that.

The archives were in the cellar under the clinic building in the middle of town. One of the few surviving structures from before the Fall, it seemed incongruous next to the other buildings, which were all stucco and plank boards. The clinic was made of smooth concrete and metal, austere and oddly geometric, like a piece that had fallen out of a puzzle. An array of solar collectors covered the roof except where skylights peered through, and drainpipes fed into a cistern. The windows were tall and narrow, unadorned. A porch had been added, and orange and lemon trees edged the walkway.

Most of the space around the clinic was taken up with the town square, which hosted once-a-month markets and communal herb gardens. A couple of nearby households worked to maintain the gardens and process the herbs, drying them for cooking, preparing them for medicinal and household use. This late in the summer, the air in this part of town smelled heady, almost overpowering, with mint and sage and lavender and a dozen other scents rising up and becoming rich and languorous. The air was hot and sticky; Enid’s hat kept the sun off.

The packed dirt of the main road through town had once been asphalt. It had decayed decades ago, so folk tore it out. This was way before Enid’s time, but when she was young, Auntie Kath told stories about it, about the bones of the world from before and what they had to do to survive. The shadow of that world remained, the streets in the same places and the foundations of buildings still visible. But a new skin had been put over it. This was all Enid had known, but Auntie Kath used to sit on the shaded porch of the clinic and look out, murmuring, It’s so different now.

Tomas waited for her at the cellar’s slanted wooden doors. She nodded at him, and he opened one of the doors and gestured her down.

Down a set of concrete stairs, the clinic’s cellar opened up. A switch turned on a string of lights, powered by the solar panels on the clinic roof. The ceiling was low—so much so Tomas had to slouch—but the space was wide and filled with shelves, trunks, wooden crates, and plastic bins. Much of it was like a museum—odds and ends from before the Fall that folk thought might be useful someday . . . or might never be useful again but someone had thought worth saving, keeping dry and safe. The place had a musty, disused air that tickled the nose.

Books—hundreds of them—comprised the bulk of the collection. The founders of Haven had looted a couple of libraries, so the stories went. Practical books on farming, food preservation, irrigation, medicine—everything they thought they might need. But also an odd collection of novels, commentary, magazines, and newspapers—things that would have been disposable back then. Now, they seemed like a time capsule. Artifacts of a lost world. And then the diaries, the journals, the accounts and letters written by people who lived through the Fall. History, now. During their training, investigators were required to read the extant diaries and journals, to understand people, to understand where their world came from and why their rules existed. To try to keep all that from ever happening again.

A small desk in the corner served the investigators as an office, where they could review evidence and keep accounts of previous cases. Their collective knowledge. Committee records were kept here as well, pages bound into simple books with leather covers recording harvests, births, deaths, storms, local happenings, events of note. Local histories, local portraits.

There wasn’t much. Various committees and investigators had only been keeping records for about twenty years or so; the notes didn’t go all the way back to the Fall. Folk then had more important things to worry about; paper had been scarce, and they weren’t convinced there’d be anyone around in the future to look at records. At some point, though, someone decided that writing things down might be useful. Planning resources and crops and babies and everything was easier if you could see the patterns. So, now they had records.

Enid and Tomas found the relevant volumes; each took half to read, and the tedious work began. They’d only been at it twenty minutes or so when Tomas asked, “Do you remember Auntie Kath?”

“Of course I do.”

“She talked about how they didn’t know what they needed to save. They couldn’t save it all, so they had to choose. How later she wished there were things people in the early days of Haven had saved.”

“Like cameras. Or latex gloves.” Enid not only remembered—she could almost hear the old woman’s low, rough voice going on about it.

“Plastic wrap,” Tomas added, and they both chuckled. Plastic wrap had been an obsession with Auntie Kath, who insisted the item had a million uses, and she brought it up every time one of those uses occurred to her. No one had ever really understood what she was talking about.

“Someday we’ll dig into an undisturbed cellar or an old archive and find some plastic wrap,” Enid said.

He shrugged. “We’ve gone this long without it. No one’s missed it since Kath died. But I wonder if this is how they felt. Trying to learn it all because we don’t know what we need to know. But it isn’t possible. We’ll miss something but have to hope we won’t.”

They studied the records, hoping to get a picture of the town of Pasadan, to guess what they might find when they got there. But they couldn’t predict, not really. Columns were labeled, lists of numbers written carefully in different hands, in fading ink. Names of Pasadan’s committee members, short descriptions of them that in the end didn’t say anything at all. This might have been any of a dozen small settlements on the Coast Road. But this was the one requesting investigation of a death.

They wouldn’t really know a thing about the town until they got there.

Wild Dead

Buy the Book

Decades after environmental and economic collapse, pockets of settlements struggle to maintain a much-reduced civilization by strictly rationing resources—including the ability to have children. Enid of Haven, an investigator in this community, travels to a far-flung village with her new, inexperienced partner to settle a minor resource dispute. But while there, the murder of an outsider demands her attention, and leads to explosive secrets.

Chapter One • The estuary

///////////////////////////////////////

The Precarious House

Most regions Enid visited, she could find something to love about them, some enticing and beautiful detail about the landscape, the people, the mood of the place. A reason folk would want to stay and scrape out a living in less-than-ideal situations when a dozen other settlements had more resources and less disease, and would gladly welcome extra hands. Even the rainless, baking salt flats at the southernmost end of the Coast Road had isolation to recommend them, for those who wanted to be left alone. And just to show that every place had a reason for existing, the people of Desolata household there exported the salt they collected from the flats on their own trade route.

But here in the Estuary, Enid had to consider for a while what exactly the appeal was. Over the damp marsh where the San Joe River drained, clouds of bugs rose up through a sticky haze, shimmering with heat. Squealing gulls gathered, circling on slender wings, drawn by some rotting treasure. There were no orchards here, no pastures, no rippling fields of grain. Instead, a dozen scraggly goats, stuttering their calls to one another, picked at brush along the last trailing edge of the Coast Road. Presumably, there were fish in the river to eat, along with shellfish and the like this close to the ocean. In checking the settlement’s records, Enid had learned that it rarely exceeded quotas—because there wasn’t enough to start with. The folk rarely earned banners, either, and had few children. Why would anyone stay in such a place? Perhaps because in the end it was home . . . and sometimes that was enough.

The sunlight here had a bronze cast that she had never seen anywhere else, and the light made the water seem molten, flashing with ripples to the horizon, broken up with stands of marsh grass and the sticks of old dead trees. If you’d lived here forever, the light might seem warm, the air like a favorite blanket on the skin.

That was what she told herself, to try to understand the people here a little better. Because at the moment, her patience was waning.

“Would you look at that,” her new partner, Teeg, murmured, clearly amazed. A short, sturdy kid, he shaded his eyes with one hand and gripped a staff with the other. Had a manic way of moving, like he’d rather be running ahead than slowing down enough to be methodical. His shining black hair was tied in a short, sloppy braid at the back of his neck, and his lips always seemed to be pursed, like he was thinking hard. When he wasn’t talking. This was his first official case as an investigator. “They said it needed repairs. I thought they meant a new roof, maybe it had holes in the walls. Does it even count as a house anymore when it looks like this?”

Erik, head of the Semperfi household, looked at the young investigator with dismay.

Erik’s request for a mediation had brought Enid and Teeg to the Estuary. Semperfi household had a building that needed repairs, Erik’s request had stated. The community refused to help with those repairs, despite all the support Semperfi had provided to other households over the years. Records supported this assertion—Semperfi had been the first household in the region, and was an anchor. Normally, a town’s committee would mediate this kind of disagreement, but the Estuary didn’t have a committee. Didn’t need one, the people claimed. They didn’t consider themselves a town, but a loose collection of households whose members preferred to rely on themselves and one another. The regional committee at Morada set quotas and awarded banners, and medics came through a couple of times a year to check birth-control implants and general well-being. Place like this didn’t need a committee until it did, and so Erik’s household had to send for investigators to settle the dispute. Now that Enid and Teeg were here, it became clear to them that the building in question was far past anything resembling salvageable.

The structure, a sprawling, single-story block of a house, was old, a pre-Fall construction. Wood and brick walls sat on a crumbling concrete slab, covered with some kind of plastic siding that was cracked and disintegrating. What strips of it remained were held up with nails, twine, and hope. It might have been blue once, but it had long ago faded to a sickly gray. The siding survived only on the lee side of the house; the windward was built up with wood slats and leather hides—layers and layers of them—evidently replaced as the next bout of wind tore them off. Likewise, the slanted roof might once have had purpose-made shingles, slate tile or plywood, but the decades hadn’t been kind and the surface was now patched with reeds and hides. What was left of the structure still dripped from last week’s bad storm.

All that was bad enough, but the land under the house was falling away. Years of storms had eaten at the ground, mudslide after mudslide eroding it until half the house now stood over nothing but air. This last storm had made the problem critical. Huge slabs of concrete lay at the bottom of the slippery hill, the house’s foundation lying in crooked, broken pieces, sliding inevitably toward the river. Tree trunks, two-by-fours, scavenged steel rebar, and rusted scaffolding precariously held up what was left. A house partway on stilts—not like the sturdy pylons of the other structures in the area, but thin and haphazard. A breeze would knock it down. Somehow it was all still standing. Clearly, the structure was at a literal tipping point. If it lost any more ground, the whole thing would fall. No amount of stopgap framework supports could possibly keep it stable. And yet, the folk of Semperfi were clearly trying.

Even the overly emotional testimonies of folk from Bonavista and Pine Grove, the first two households on the path up here, couldn’t possibly have prepared Enid for how bad the wreck really was. The folk had complained about how awful the house was, that it was a waste of resources—about the worst insult possible. It never should have required investigators to decide this.

“It’s a lovely view, anyway,” Enid murmured, looking out over the sluggish river and golden, shimmering marshes of the Estuary. A century ago, there’d probably been an entire neighborhood, an entire city, of nice houses just like this one—or just like this one must have been, once upon a time—a grid of streets, sturdy street lamps lighting it all up bright as day at all hours of the night. Signs of that old world littered the marsh, all the way to the horizon. Canted blocks of concrete, broken frames of steel, whole berms of debris washed up on the tide. Some of the households here made their living by scavenging. Lots of that to be had, constantly turned over by waves and storms.

Before the Fall, this neighborhood would have been miles from the ocean. Back then, flooding may not have even come close. But then it had, and the other houses fell away. Semperfi had saved this tiny little scrap of that ancient neighborhood, and there was something poignant about that. They might have had folk living in it, parent to child, ever since the Fall. But there came a point when no amount of effort could save a thing, and surely this structure wouldn’t last another storm.

Erik pleaded the house’s case desperately, speaking quickly, as if speed would give his argument more weight. He knew what Enid and Teeg must be thinking. “Yes, it’s in poor shape, but . . . there’s nothing else like it. It’s lasted this long, it’d be a shame to let it go to ruin now. Wouldn’t it?” He kept his voice steady, but his eyes shone with anxiety.

He was younger than Enid had expected. The head of a household wasn’t necessarily the oldest member, but had typically been around some time, maybe even earned a banner and raised a kid. He didn’t seem much older than Enid’s own thirty years. Lanky, angular, he had skin the shade of teak and close-shaved brown hair. His face was gaunt, like he never quite got enough to eat, but he kept his hands on his hips in a confident stance.

He’d been watching for them and came to meet them as they followed the path up the hill. Ready to intercept them before they saw the house. Not giving them a chance to make any judgment on their own. Moving up the path with them, he gestured toward the house, guiding them over uneven, scrubby ground. A rangy, tawny dog named Bear had accompanied him. Now, after sniffing at the investigators’ hands, it sat politely at Erik’s feet. Looking up at them, it gave the uncanny impression of following the conversation.

“I know it’s not easy, I never thought it would be easy. But it’s still worth doing. This is important,” he said.

Enid tried to see the place through his eyes. An artifact from the world before the Fall, evidence of what used to be. Like the collection in the archives at Haven, carefully stored bits and pieces, the plastic bricks of computers and radios and things that weren’t any use now, but that people saved because, well, they’d always been saved.

But this was a whole house.

“How long have your people been keeping the place up?” Teeg asked. He made the question sound curious, rather than accusing. Just a casual conversation.

“Since the start. My great-granddad grew up in it. They stayed, all the way through the Fall, even when everyone else was gone. Scavenged the neighborhood, made repairs when everything else washed away. We’ve got pictures, real photos of what it all used to look like. I can show you, I can show that it’s worth saving. My dad”—here he paused, swallowed back grief—“I was seventeen when my dad died, and I promised him I’d look after the place. Seventeen and keeping up the whole household, plus the house . . . I can’t let him down, don’t you see? I promised.” Erik said this with the determination of a man going into battle.

He continued the tour with a parent’s pride. “There used to be a concrete walk right there.” He pointed to the path leading down the hill, back to the other households. A dip in the earth, a stretch where the scrub grew in a little paler, was in fact visible. Scanning over the hillside with fresh eyes, Enid could see all kinds of evidence of a previous vast settlement: divots in the earth where sewer and drain pipes had collapsed, mounds where ruins had fallen decades ago and been buried or scavenged, leaving only shadows behind. An unnatural straight line where shrubs had grown over a fallen lamppost. She had just been thinking of how hostile this place seemed, but this had been a city before the sea crawled inland and storms washed it away.

“That’s impressive,” Enid admitted.

“So you see why we want to keep it standing. We’ve got to!”

Enid wasn’t an engineer and didn’t have much mechanical inclination, but she had a thought: they could get a team of horses—a big team, six? eight?—and put the whole structure on rollers to move what was left of the concrete slab and everything on top of it to more solid ground. Even fifty yards would put it on bedrock rather than the disintegrating muddy cliff it was on now. If Sam were here, he’d have a better idea of what was possible and what was ridiculous. The undertaking would be massive, a huge and excessive use of resources, so Enid couldn’t help but think it would be so much easier and more efficient to build something new and let the old rot away. Better for everyone.

Except Erik had an attachment to the old house. Enid just about understood the impulse—she loved the archives in the cellar under Haven’s clinic, with its stacks of dead things from an irrelevant world. Including photographs, much like the ones Erik bragged about. Memories had their uses, and this house clearly meant something to its people.

But what could possibly justify using the immense resources that would be necessary to save such a wreck?

The look on Enid’s face must have been pained, because Erik kept going.

“The household name, Semperfi—it was a motto my great-granddad had. He was something like an enforcer—like you,” he said, gesturing at Teeg’s staff. “He had this phrase written on badges and things. It means never give up. That’s how he got through the Fall, that’s how he started all this. We can’t give up now.”

Enid wasn’t sure that explanation of the name was exactly right—based on her reading, it had been a pretty common saying before the Fall. And she suspected that Erik’s ancestor would prefer that his great-grandson put his energy to better use, into making something new that would help his household. But there was that promise. Four generations of promise.

Erik led them on eagerly. “Come inside, here—”

Teeg looked at Enid in wide-eyed horror. No assumptions, she wanted to remind him. No preconceived notions. But it was hard to stay neutral, looking at that house. House wasn’t even the right word. That artifact. And like an artifact it likely held its own bit of history—precious, full of information. The photos Erik spoke of ought to be kept in an archive, where they could be protected.

Teeg held back. “You don’t actually go inside there, do you?”

Erik said, “It’ll be fine. Unless there’s an earthquake or a storm coming up, it’s fine.” He started for the front door, urging them forward as if he could pull them by force of will. Fortunately, the wood-grain door was in a part of the house that was still on solid ground. The metal knob and deadbolt might have been original, judging from their scuffs and scratches, the patina of hard wear. Still intact, still functional.

Enid took off her hat, rubbed a hand through her short brown hair, which had become matted with sweat. She was game to enter the rickety building and grinned back at Teeg. “Maybe you should wait here and get help in case the whole thing tips over.”

“That’s not actually funny,” he replied, following her.

Erik swung the door in; the hinges creaked only a little. The floorboards inside groaned more. The dog waited, settled on its haunches, tail wagging weakly. Sensible enough to stay outside.

The interior was dark—the window frames were visible, but they’d been covered up, probably ages ago, to keep out the weather. The only light came in through the open door. Enid’s steps were audible as she stepped on some kind of warped and stained plastic-tile flooring. It had been light-colored originally, with a kind of marbling pattern still barely visible. The walls, paneled with simple wood slats, were not original. When it was new, the walls would have been smoothed and painted. There was a front room, a doorway to what looked like a kitchen, though Enid would have been shocked if any of the plumbing worked; she hadn’t seen any cisterns outside. Sockets, switches, and some loose wiring were visible, but again she guessed that electricity hadn’t run through here in ages; the place didn’t have any solar panels or compact wind turbines—those were reserved for the household’s newer cottages, farther up the path.

The air reeked of mold, the inevitable product of damp leather and ancient wood forced together and aging badly.

The kitchen had a sink, counters, cupboards—all of them cleaned over and over until the surface finishes had worn off, so they now seemed thin and brittle. From the kitchen a short hall led off to more rooms. Interior walls that must have once been present had been taken out; the space was open now. Some furniture had come to roost here and there: a table pushed into a corner, an assortment of chairs next to it. That was it.

Erik waited for their reactions, like a kid showing off his lumpy, misshapen first attempt at pottery or woodworking. Of course you’d tell him how nice it was.

Enid took her notebook from her satchel and made notes, a list of everything she saw wrong with the place, from her first impression outside to the smell inside. Even just writing a couple of words per item, this took a while. But she wanted this documented. No one could come back later and say she hadn’t been thorough.

“You don’t use this place much, do you?” Enid asked.

“Well. We do. Storage, when we’re prepping food. We do a lot of drying and canning, and there’s space to spread out and keep things dry. Usually. I mean, when the roof isn’t leaking. We dry laundry in here sometimes. But that’s kind of the point: if we really get this place fixed up, get some really good pylons under it, get it stable—then we can sleep people here again.”

Enid kept her reaction off her face, tamping down hard on her feelings of dismay. No, no one should ever sleep here. Erik’s father, the household’s previous head, had died of a lingering illness—flu, the reporting medic thought. Enid didn’t say so, but she wondered if spending too much time in this house might have caused his health to deteriorate. Did everyone in Semperfi have lingering coughs they couldn’t explain? She wouldn’t be surprised.

The place should be dismantled for salvage, and something fresh, new, with wide windows and a very solid foundation, should be built far away from the mudslides. The other households were right, however much Enid might want to sympathize with Erik. The house had survived the last storm, but the next would likely finish it off. It wasn’t safe. Now it was her job to convince him of that, as kindly as possible. But all she could think of at that moment was this question: they’d hiked a week up the Coast Road for this?

Teeg kept his face entirely turned away from Erik to hide his look of disgust. Expectantly, he waited for Enid’s reaction as a cue to how he should behave. He seemed to be trying to silently ask, What do we do with this?

Out of a sense of duty and professional thoroughness, Enid went through the whole house. She didn’t quite know what more she was looking for. Maybe she was hoping to find a pre-Fall book that didn’t exist anywhere else—a painting or a photo album that would drive some future historian to ecstasy. An artifact that Erik and his household might have overlooked, that would make the whole case—the whole trip here—worthwhile.

In the corner farthest from the front door, she found a pile of rags. Debris, it looked like—shoved out of the way. Cringing every time the wood creaked under her steps, Enid went to poke at it with her foot. Not rags after all, but a whole blanket, threadbare, big enough to wrap around a person. Shifting the cloth uncovered more: a simple leather pouch, and, inside it, flint and steel made from what looked like salvaged scraps. No charred streaks were visible, so likely no one had tried to start a fire inside the house, for which Enid sighed in relief.

“Erik, you said no one sleeps here?”

“Of course not,” he answered, clearly shocked at the idea. He and Teeg came up beside her, looking where she looked.

“Then you’ve got a squatter.” She set the pouch on the blanket, stepped back.

Erik snarled, biting off a word. Far from surprised, he was angry. Furious.

“You know who?” Enid prompted.

“It’s got to be outsider folk. Wild folk from upriver. They spy on us, been stealing from us for years.”

Enid’s brow furrowed. “What have they stolen?” In her experience, outsider folk stayed far away from the Coast Road settlements. According to their stories, the Coast Road folk were villains, demanding tribute and stealing babies.

Erik shrugged. “Well, nothing specific that I know of. But that blanket—they must have taken that from somewhere; they sure don’t have weaving like that.”

“This looks like just one person, maybe trying to get out of the rain.” Someone who knew they wouldn’t be bothered in this sad old house. But why would such a person have left anything behind? The wild folk she’d met never had much to spare. Maybe when Erik brought Enid and Teeg here today for the tour, they’d surprised someone. Chased the person off when they came in. Enid listened for noises, anyone moving outside the house, labored breathing. Inside, there wasn’t anyplace to hide. She didn’t sense anything. Erik was glaring at the abandoned mess. “This is another reason to get this place fixed up. Get the doors and windows fixed, so we can close it off, keep it safe—”

“And make sure no one gets killed if the roof and walls fall in?” Enid asked, brow raised. “Let’s get outside, into the light, yeah?”

Outside, the sky was huge and even the briny, humid air smelled clean. A weight came off her—relief that the house hadn’t killed her. She hadn’t realized that she’d been worried until she breathed fresh air and the space over the wetlands opened up before her.

A dozen people waited outside.

She recognized Jess, Juni, Avery, several others from Bonavista and Pine Grove. She and Teeg had met the first of the area’s households on the walk up here. Bonavista was the first household on the road into the Estuary, something of a gateway to the rest of the settlement, and Jess and Juni had spotted them as they arrived, welcoming them with more enthusiasm than Enid was used to. Jess was a lean man, his skin reddened with pockmarks from old acne or illness. He had a welcoming smile. His partner, the co-head of Bonavista, was Juni, a small woman with a round face and eager manner. Avery, the head of Pine Grove, had bragged that they were under their quota for the month—no overfishing happened here. But he knew very well that Enid and Teeg hadn’t come to investigate fishing quotas. They’d all been happy to tell the investigators that Erik was mad, that the house was a wreck, that he had no business wanting to save it. She’d thought they’d been exaggerating.

Curious, the group must have followed the investigators up here, at a distance. The ones Enid didn’t recognize probably came from the households farther on. She and Teeg wanted to talk to everyone; they hadn’t gotten that far yet. The Estuary might not have had a committee, but the small-town grapevine was working just fine. They all knew that Erik had asked for an investigation, they’d gotten word that investigators had arrived, and now they wanted to come see for themselves.

So this was going to be more complicated than Enid liked. Teeg had moved up beside her and planted his staff. In their brown uniforms, a matched set, they clearly had authority here.

“Hola,” Enid said brightly. “Can I help you?”

“Now do you see it? It’s just like we told you,” Jess of Bonavista said, gesturing to the ruined house with his hand flattened, angry.

“Yeah,” she said calmly. “We’ve had a chance to look things over.”

“Erik’s crazy to think he can save this!”

Anna of Semperfi, Erik’s partner, put her hands on her hips and jerked her head toward the investigators. “Let them decide, it’s what they’re here for!”

Another man, big, with a brimmed hat pulled low over a pale, flushed face, stepped forward. Avery from Pine Grove. “They need to hear all of it. It’s not just the house that’s the problem, it’s the assumption that we should be helping,” he countered.

Enid tried again. “Once we’ve had a chance to talk to everyone, we’ll—”

Erik marched forward before Enid or Teeg could stop him and jabbed a finger at Avery. “You’re just too lazy to put in the work! Can’t face a little challenge, can you?” Lazy. Almost as bad an insult as unproductive or wasteful.

“That’s not it and you know it!”

Everyone started talking at once, then. Yelling, really. They even managed to drown out the racket from the circling flock of gulls. Erik somehow made himself heard over it all.

“You’re not listening! If you just listen, I can convince you, I can make you see, we can save the house! We can, I just need a little help—”

“A little? All the help on the Coast Road won’t save it!” Jess countered.

The two men yelled at each other with just an arm’s-length distance between them, flinging angry gestures that could easily turn into punches. They seemed to forget the investigators entirely.

Erik might have given this speech a dozen times, it seemed so well practiced. “After everything we’ve done for all the rest of you, for you to . . . to turn on us like this!” Erik pointed at each of the households in turn. Pine Grove, Bonavista, all of them. “You know we’re the best builders, so you ask us to help with all your work. We help keep the bridge up. Every time it rains we help pull your dumb goats out of the river. And we’ve been doing it for years. Decades! From the very start, we were here before any of you. And you”—he pointed at Juni and Jess—“back when Bridge House folded, we took in half your people, even though it blew all our quotas and we didn’t have the resources—”

“You were a child then—you don’t know what you’re talking about!” Juni bared her teeth, her face flushed. A strange-looking fury rose up in her. She’d been good tempered so far, in Enid’s interactions with her. Jess touched Juni’s arm to hold her back, but she wasn’t deterred. “Your father didn’t have a problem with it!”

“Not that he ever told you! He was too nice to say what he was thinking, but we sure heard about it at home! About what Neeve did and you all trying to cover it up!”

“We didn’t! We reported it right off!”

Enid should have known someone would bring up the old case, from twenty years ago. The Estuary took care of itself, mostly. But twenty years ago, one of them had cut out her implant, presumably to try to have a baby without a banner. She’d been caught. Eventually, her household had disbanded over the incident. Juni had started the new household, Bonavista, in its place. It should have all been left behind. But something like that was never really forgotten.

A banner. What it all came down to, in the end. A household came together, worked hard, proved that the members could take care of one another, manage themselves, not waste resources, and then the regional committee would award them a banner. The right to have a child. Households, quotas, trade, investigations, all of it went toward proving you could successfully bring a new human being into the world.

Dig down far enough, it wasn’t about houses at all.

Enid turned to Teeg and smirked. “See? This is why we don’t start with group meetings. The shouting. All of them at once.”

“Yeah, I guess so. We had enough?”

“I think so.”

Teeg put fingers to his mouth and whistled piercingly. The whole group fell quiet; a couple of them even jumped back, as if the sound had been a clap of thunder. Enough quiet now so that the soft whining from the scrappy dog was audible. The animal clung to Erik, close to his feet, and seemed worried. Enid sympathized with his sense of confusion.

She looked over the gathering, a dozen people from households up and down this part of the road, come to gawk. Most folk looked away rather than let her catch their gaze. This wasn’t comfortable. Ideally, they’d be having this conversation alone with Semperfi’s folk in their kitchen. Someplace where Erik and his folk would feel comfortable. Or at least, where he wasn’t being attacked. Then again, this way, no one could invent gossip about what the investigators told him. So they stood in the open, with the rotting structure lending undeniable evidence to back up the decision. The sun beat down on them, insects buzzed, and everyone felt annoyed.

In that quiet, another sound carried up the hill from the marshland at the mouth of the river. A desperate, panicked voice, shouting over and over, coming closer until the repeated word became clear: “Help! Help me! Help!”

Across the marsh a figure ran toward the main road at the base of the hill, slipping, recovering, momentum carrying him on. A man in work clothes, holding on to his wide-brimmed hat to keep it from flying off. His other hand was waving. The dog barked and charged out; Erik called Bear back.

“Is that Kellan?” Jess asked.

“Who’s Kellan?” Teeg said.

“One of Last House’s. He’s usually down on the beach, scavenging.”

Details clarified: brown skin darkened and weathered, dark eyes narrowed in a constant squint and radiating crows’ feet, and a rough beard softening the jaw. Rangy limbs, homespun clothes hanging off him loose and comfortable. A machete and a crowbar knocked at his belt. The man seemed to be running for his life, but nothing chased him.

“Teeg, come on,” Enid said, and they took off at a jog, downhill to the mud, to meet him.

“What’s wrong?” she said when they got close.

The man pulled up, panting for breath, glancing back and forth between the investigators and something behind him.

“You, investigators? You’re investigators.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“You’ve got to help. Please come!”

He reached out and clung to Enid’s sleeve. Hardly anyone ever got that close when she was wearing the uniform. Teeg stepped forward, his free hand at his pouch where he kept tranquilizer patches. But Kellan wasn’t belligerent. He was scared, upset, blinking with shock.

She held his hand, hoping to anchor him, comfort him. Get him to a point where he could explain. “What is it?”

He gaped a couple of times and then stammered, “There’s a body, a body. Someone’s washed up, she’s dead!”

Enid’s nerves fired, sharpened. A sense of alarm crashed over her, made her stomach clench. Teeg turned to her with a look of shock to match Kellan’s.

“Show us,” she said.

Machine Learning

Buy the Book

An impressive collection of Hugh Howey’s science fiction and fantasy short fiction, including three stories set in the world of Wool, that explore everything from artificial intelligence to parallel universes to video games. Each story is accompanied by an author’s note exploring its background and genesis.

The Walk up Nameless Ridge

1

It was difficult to sleep at night, wishing good men dead. This was but one of the hurtful things I felt in my bones and wished I could ignore. It was an ugly truth waving its arms that I turned my gaze from, that I didn’t like to admit even to myself. But while my bag warmed me with the last of its power and my breath spilled out in white plumes toward the roof of our tent, while the flicker of a whisper stove melted snow for midnight tea, I lay in that dead zone above sixty thousand feet and hoped not just for the failure of those above me, but that no man summit and live to tell the tale. Not before I had my chance.

It was a shameful admission, one I nearly raised with Hanson, my tent mate, to see in the wrinkles of his snow-beat face whether this was a guilt shared. I suspected it was. In the mess tents and around the yellow craters we dubbed latrines, the look among us was that only one would be remembered. The rest would die alone in the snow or live a long life forgotten—and not one of us would’ve been able to explain to a child the difference. Frozen to death by altitude or by time was all the same. The truth was this: History remembers the first, and only the first. These are the creeping and eternal glaciers, the names etched across all time like scars in granite cliffs. Those who came after were the inch or two of snowdrift that would melt in due time. They would trickle, forgotten, into the pores of the earth, be swallowed, and melt snow at the feet of other forgotten men.

It was a quarter past Eno’s midnight and time to get up. If Shubert and Humphries were to make it to the top, they likely would’ve by now. If any of their gear still worked, they would be radioing in their victory, taking the first pictures of starlit peaks wrinkling far past the limits of sight. By now, they would know how many fingers and toes it cost them, how much oxygen was left in their tanks, whether or not they would live to speak of the mountain’s conquest.

The faint odor of tea penetrated my dark thoughts. It must’ve been a potent brew to smell it at all. We had already scaled beyond the heights where taste and scent fade to oblivion. One had to remind himself to eat and drink, for the stomach is one of those organs that knows when to quit. It is the first, in fact, to go. The mind of the climber is the last.

Hanson brought me tea. I wormed a single arm out into the cold, though my heating bag had become a feeble thing. I did not want to lose what little it held. I coughed into my fist, that persistent cough of the dead zone, and accepted the steaming mug.

There were no words spoken as we forced ourselves to drink. Every twitch was an effort at those altitudes. We were sleeping higher than all the fabled peaks of Cirrus VII. Our fourth camp along the Slopeson Ridge, at 42,880 feet, was higher than any speck of dirt on Hanson’s home planet. And when we arrived on this wasteland of a frozen ball, out here in a corner of the galaxy where men go either to not be found or to be remembered for all time, we set up a base camp very near to the highest peak of the place I grew up: Earth. Where men were first born and first began to scale to deadly heights.

I sipped my tea, burning my numb lips, and told myself it would be an Earth-born who scaled Mount Mallory first. This was a distasteful idea that I and many others were willing to share. The secret I kept to myself was that others could die if they dared climb her before me.

2

Two other private teams were making a go of it that season. Government expeditions and collectives of alpine clubs had given up decades ago. They now watched as men such as I took leave of our day jobs and, with borrowed funds and the best of gear and medicine at hand, set out to prove what was possible.

The window of opportunity for a summit was but a bare sliver of a crack. Half a day at most when the fearful winds of that dizzy world slowed to a manageable gale and before the monsoons buried the rock under drifts a hundred meters deep. The problem, of course, was in not knowing when that half-day would fall. Every climber across thirteen worlds studied the weather charts like day traders. As the season neared, predictions were logged on the net, men in their warm homes with their appetites intact and the feeling still in their fingers and toes would make guesses, watch reports from the satellites left behind by those government expeditions, and make bold claims.

I had been one of those prognosticators until recently. But now, after spending a night at camp 7 beneath the Khimer Ridge, I felt as though I had graduated to one who could sneer at the antics of those at lesser heights. By dint of my travel between the stars and my arduous climb thus far, I was now an expert. It lent Hanson and me the illusion that our guess was far more refined than the others.

Or perhaps it was the lack of oxygen that made us crazy this way. In the middle of that terrible night, rather than spend my last morning thinking of my wife and kids or dwelling further on the debts incurred to travel to frontier stars and hike up a murderous peak, I thought of all my fellow climbers who were safely ensconced in their homes as they followed our every move.

Right now, they likely followed Shubert and Humphries, two strong climbers who had knocked out all else the galaxy had to offer. They would also be keeping an eye on Hanson and me. And then there was the pairing of Ziba and Cardhil, who were also making a bid that year.

Ziba was an enigma of a climber, a small woman who looked far too frail in her heat suit and mask. When first I saw her navigating the Lower Collum Ice Falls above base camp, I mistook her oxygen tanks for double-aughts in size, as they dwarfed her frame. The consensus was that there was little to fear in her attempt that year. I had done some digging before my uplink succumbed to the cold and read that Ziba had knocked out the peaks of her home planet, none of which top thirty thousand feet, but she had at least done them in style. No oxygen and swiftly, one of those modern climbers. It had been a private joy to watch her give in to the true mountaineering methods necessary on Mallory’s great face. The methodical lift of crampons, the bulging tanks of air, the fogging and frosted masks. These were the ways of the true climber. Mallory is an instructor to all, and Ziba did not seem too full of herself to submit, learn, and adapt.

Cardhil, I figured, was the great unknown. Ziba had chosen an odd tent mate in the android. And if it were a manchine that was the first to summit great Mallory, the consensus across the alpine forums was that nothing would have occurred at all. There would not even be an accomplishment to asterisk. And anyway, I had sent notes a week ago to an old climbing buddy, telling him not to worry. The cold was worse on the manchine’s joints than our own. Hanson and I had left camp 6 while Ziba was chipping away at Cardhil’s frozen ankles. And please don’t tell me that a man’s memories counted for the man himself, that the android lived because he remembered living. I have had many a conversation with Cardhil around base camp and watched him with the Sherpas. He is no different than the droid who cleans my pool or walks my dog. A clever approximation, but with movements too precise, too clean, to pass for human. The other day, Hanson nudged me in time to turn and catch Cardhil taking a great spill on the east face. The way he did even this was unnatural. Supremely calm and without a whimper, the manchine had slid several hundred feet on his ass, working his climbing ax into the deep snow, with all the false grace of an automaton.

Nobody feared this duo as long as they were behind and below us. There, off our ropes and out of our way, they had only themselves to kill.

3

Hanson and I left our flapping tent in utter darkness. The driven snow blocked out all but a few of the twinkling stars. Near the tent, a pile of spent oxygen bottles gathered a drift. They glowed bright in Hanson’s headlamp. Debris such as this would be left for all time. They were an addition to the landscape. The local Ha-Jing, whose lands included half of great Mallory, made good money selling permits to aspiring climbers, and this litter came with the riches. The south face of Mallory, which some climbers posited would make for an easier ascent, was governed by the irascible Hiti. Great climbers by all accounts but miserable at governing. The only assaults on that face have been clandestine affairs. There had been some arrests over the years, but like many who come to Eno hoping to etch their name in the history books, most simply disappeared.

Hanson broke snow for the first hour, his head down in a stiff breeze. We had radios in our parkas but rarely used them. Good tent mates had little need for words. Roped in to one another, the union becomes symbiotic. You match paces, one staring at a flash-lit patch of bright snow, the other staring at a man’s back, illuminating a spot in a sea of darkness. Boots fell into the rapidly filling holes of the climber ahead, each lifting of a crampon some new torture, even with the springs of the powered climbing pants taking most of the strain.

I’d lost count of the number of peaks we’d climbed together. It was in the dozens across a handful of planets, most of those climbs coming over the past five years. Climbers tend to orbit one another long before they share tents. The first time I met Hanson was back on Earth on a new route of Nanga Parbat, a small mountain but notorious for gobbling souls. Climbers called her “Man Eater,” usually with knowing and nervous smiles. Tourists from other planets came to exercise on its west slope or to make an attempt on its south face while preparing for harsher climbs. Some took the tram to Everest to hike up to the top and join the legions who made that yearly pilgrimage only to walk away wondering what the fuss was about.

I tended to bite my tongue during such diminishing talks of my planet’s highest peak. My twenty-year partnership with Saul, my previous tent mate, had ended on a harmless run up Everest. There was a saying among the Hiti Sherpas: “Ropes slip through relaxed grips.” The nearest I ever came to death was while climbing indoors, of all things. It wasn’t something I told anyone. Those few who had been there and the doctors who tended to me knew. When anyone noticed my limp, I told them it happened during my spill on Kurshunga. I couldn’t say that I’d failed to double back my harness and took a forty-foot spill on a climb whose holds had been color-coded for kids.

Saul had also fallen prey to a relaxed grip. He had died while taking a leak on Everest’s South Col. It was hard to stomach, losing a good man and great friend like that. Hanson, who trudged ahead of me, had lost his former tent mate in more glorious fashion the same year Saul died. And so mountains brought couples together like retirement homes. You look around, and what you have left is what you bed down with. Ours, then, was a marriage of attrition, but it worked. Our bond was our individual losses and our mutual anger at the peaks that had taken so much from us.

As Hanson paused, exhausted, and I rounded him to break snow, I patted the old man on the back, the gesture silent with thick gloves and howling wind, but he bobbed his head in acknowledgment to let me know he was okay. I coughed a raspy rattle into my mask. We were all okay. And above us, the white plumes and airborne glitter of driven ice and snow hid the way to glory. But it was easy to find. Up. Always up. One more foot toward land that no man had ever seen and lived to tell about.

4

At sixty thousand feet—the height of two Everests stacked one on top of the other—man and machine alike tended to break down. We were at the limit of my regimen of steroids. The gears in my hiking pants could be heard grinding against one another, even over all that wind. And the grease smeared over the parts of my face not sheltered by the oxygen mask had hardened until it felt like plaster, like blistered and unfeeling skin, but to touch it and investigate it was to invite exposure and far worse.

Batteries meant to last for days would perish in hours up there. The cold was death for them. And so our suits gave up as we moved from the death zone to a land that begged for a name far more sinister. The power left in struggling batteries went to the pistons and gears, routed away from the heaters. Fingers and toes went first. They would grow numb; the blood would stop flowing through them; the flesh would become necrotic and die right there on the bone.

The Sherpas of Changli had a saying: “A man can count on two hands all the climbs he conquers, and that man conquers nothing.” I always took this to mean the more we summit, the more we lose. Climbers were notorious for staring down bars in base camp at lifted mugs, silently counting digits gone missing, making a measure of a man’s worth by how far they’d pushed themselves. Saul had a different take on the Changli saying. To the people who lived in the shadows of mountains, these were not things to conquer. To climb them was foolish, and who would think to do so? As much as I had loved Saul, he was always too politically correct for my tastes.

Breaking snow up that unnamed ridge, my mind turning to mush as supplemental oxygen and doped blood could only do so much, I felt the first pangs of doubt. My cough rattled inside my mask; my limbs felt like solid lead. Two days prior, at camp 5, I had pushed myself beyond my abilities. Eating and drinking moved from inconvenient chores to something I dreaded. My weight was down. I hadn’t been out of my clothes to see what I’d wasted away, just comforted myself instead on how much less I now had to lug to the top.

The radio in my parka clicked on with the sound of Hanson breathing. I waited a moment between arduous steps and listened for what he had to say. When the radio clicked off, I turned to check on him, my headlamp pointed at his chest so as not to blind him. Hanson was a strong climber, one of the strongest I’d ever seen. He had fallen back to the end of the rope that joined us, his breath clouding his mask. Lifting a hand a few inches from his thigh was all the wave he could muster.

“Take your time,” I told him, clicking the large switch on my belt. What I wanted to say was what the hell we thought we were doing. There, five thousand feet below us and eight light years away, was the tallest peak ever climbed. We were moving into the thin air above the highest of heads. We would have been in outer space on some small planets, in orbit around others. And still, we wanted to conquer more.

The rope between us drooped as Hanson took a few laborious steps. I turned and broke snow, resigning myself to an extra hour at the head, an extra shift to give him more rest. It was hard to know what drove you once you passed the thresholds of all pain. Maybe it was the thought of Shubert and Humphries somewhere above us, either in glory or buried in snow. Maybe it was the fear that Ziba had gotten Cardhil’s ankle sorted and that they would begin their push later that morning. Or maybe it was the promise I’d made to myself after telling my wife and kids that I would be safe. I had told them that I wouldn’t take chances. But I had already promised myself something different: I would come home with that final ridge named after me, or I wouldn’t come home at all.

5

My altimeter died at 62,000 feet, even though the manufacturer sold these with a guarantee of 100,000. Such guarantees were bullshit gestures with no real-world testing. As I climbed, I composed the post I would make on the forums complaining of its failure. And had my remaining fingers been any kind of functional, I would’ve removed the strap from my arm to save the weight. Instead, I carried one more dead thing up with me. From then on, I had to guess how high I was by the hour. It was still dark and we were probably at 63,100 feet when I stumbled across Humphries.

He wore an orange suit, the kind that men with low confidence and a care for their mortal coil wore. It made them more easily found and more likely to be found, two very different things. I pointed out the snow-dusted form so Hanson wouldn’t trip on him, but I didn’t slow. Humphries had died facing the summit, which meant he hadn’t made it. I felt a mix of relief and guilt for the awful thoughts I’d held in my sleeping bag all night. Shubert, of course, was still out there. We could meet him stomping down in the dark, his eyes as bright as the handful of twinkling stars above, and whatever was driving Hanson and me upward would likely leak out our pores. Whatever glory I had hoped to win would be spent in future days recounting my time on the same slopes as this other man. I would detail my ordeal up Shubert Ridge, a horrible name if ever there was one. I would write of his glory and bask in whatever shadows fell my way. These were my mad ruminations as I left his dead tent mate behind and crunched through that terrible snow a thousand feet beneath the peak.

A tug at my harness gave me pause. Hanson was flagging again, at the end of his rope and ours. I questioned what I was running on for Hanson to give out before me. I wondered if the doctors hadn’t worked some kind of special magic between the doping and the careful regimen of drugs. Perhaps the coils in my pants were holding up better than his. Hanson had skimped on his gears and had invested in more heat. I may be freezing to death, but I was still climbing. I saw the look on his face, beyond the glare of my headlamp and the frost of his desperate breathing, and that look told me that this was as high as he would go. It was a look I’d only seen from him once before, but enough times from others to not need the radio.

After a coughing fit, I jerked my thumb toward the summit. Hanson lifted his hand from his thigh and waved. As I pulled the quick release that held our rope to my harness, I wondered if I would be stepping over both him and Humphries on my way back down. God, I hoped not. I watched him turn and trudge into the dark maw of night and white fang of snow before looking again to my goal. The summit was several more hours away. I would be the first or the second to stand there. Those were adjacent numbers and yet light years apart in my esteem. They were neighboring peaks with a precipitous valley between. Being second was death to me, so I lifted a boot, gears squealing, toes numb, and remembered with sadness the lies I had spoken to my family. There was nothing about this that was safe. If I loved them as much as I loved myself, I would’ve turned around long before Hanson had.

6

The highlanders of Eno have a saying about climbing alone: “The winds seek out the solitary.” And sure enough, with Hanson dropping back to camp—hopefully dropping back to camp—the winds came for me and shoved my chest for being so bold. With my oxygen running low, the mask became an impediment to breathing, something to catch my coughs. Adjusting the top of the mask against my goggles, fingers frozen stiff, I let the wind howl through a crack, invigorating me with the cold. The gap sang like the sound a puff makes across the mouth of a bottle. This whirring howl was a sort of musical accompaniment. It made me feel less alone. The dwindling oxygen made me feel crazy.

When I came across Shubert, I thought he was already dead. The snow was covering him, and the ridge here was perilously narrow. Solid rock stayed dusted with snow and ice; otherwise it felt the ridge itself should be blowing away.

Shubert stirred as I made my slow and agonizing way around him. He was faintly swimming toward the summit, clawing through the ice, throwing his ax forward. I stopped and knelt by the young and powerful climber. His suit made no noise. It must’ve given out on him, leaving him alone and under his own power. My thoughts were as wild as the wind, disturbed by my air-starved mind. I thought of Cardhil and how something so reliant on its mechanical bits held any hope for rising above camp 7. I rested a hand on Shubert’s back to let him know he wasn’t alone. I don’t know that he ever knew I was there. He was still crawling, inch by inch, toward the summit, as I trudged along, head down, mask singing a sad lament. If I made the top and got home, I decided I would name that ridge after him. I was already dreaming not just of being a legend, but the awesome humility I would display even so. It was delusion beyond delusion. I was dying, but like Shubert, I cared only about the next inch.

The oxygen ran dry as the sun broke. My headlamp had grown feeble anyway, frosted with ice and with its battery crippled by the freezing temperatures. This was my last sunrise, I was fairly sure. Cutting through the shark’s teeth of peaks that ran the breadth of this alien continent, the dull red glow was empowering with its illusion of warmth. Once that large foreign star lifted its chin above the most distant of snowcapped crowns, it seemed to rise with a vengeance. It made a mockery of my own agonizing ascent.

It occurred to me in the wan light of dawn that I was the highest man in the universe. Coughing into my mask, I couldn’t feel my legs, but I could at least balance on them. The handful—not quite—of fingers and toes I had left would be gone. But that was optimistic. I could see the summit up the ridgeline. There was no more technical climbing, no ice to work up, no faces or craggy steps, just a long walk on unfeeling stumps. A walk to a grave that stood far over all mortal heads.

I found myself on my knees without remembering falling. The snow was thin here. It blew off sideways and was just as soon replaced. There would be no flags ahead, no weather stations, no books to scribble in, no webcams showing a high sunrise to millions of net surfers. It was just a lonely and quiet peak. Not a footstep. Not ever. Untrammeled earth, a thing that had grown exceedingly rare.

The people of Eno had their own name for Mallory. Locals always did. It translated to Unconquerable, but of course nothing was. It was always a matter of time, of the right gear, the right support teams, all the ladders and lines and camps and bottles put in by hardworking Sherpas.

I was on my hands and knees, mask howling, lightheaded and half-sane, crawling toward my destiny. And I missed Hanson. I wanted him there. I missed him more than my wife and kids, whom I would never see again. There was my grave up ahead, a bare patch of rock where snow danced across like smoke, like running water, like angels in lace dresses.

I wondered if my body would lie there forever or if the wind would eventually shove me off. I wondered this as I reached the summit, dragging myself along, my suit giving up the last of its juice. Collapsing there, lying on my belly, I watched the sun rise through my mask. And when it frosted over, and my coughing grew so severe, I worried those were flecks of purple lung spotting my vision, I accepted my death by pulling the mask free to watch this last sunrise, this highest and most magnificent sunrise, with my very own eyes.

7

The tallest climbs, often, are the easiest. All the great alpinists know this. Tell someone you’ve summited Mokush on Delphi, and the mountaineer will widen his eyes in appreciation while the layman squints in geographical confusion. The steep rock approaches of Mokush more than make up for the lack of elevation. And of the several hundred who have reached the top—Hanson and I among them—thousands have perished. Few peaks have so bold a body count and so brief a list of conquerors.

On the other hand, list the highest peaks of the eight old worlds, and most will whistle in appreciation. Everyone knows the great climber Darjel Burq, the first to top the tallest mountain on each of the civilized worlds. But other climbers know that Darjel was hoisted up many of those by Sherpas, and that he never once assaulted the great Man Killers who stand along the shoulder of those more famous giants and claim the more daring of men.

This was a peak for climbers like Darjel, I thought, lying on the top of the universe and dying. Here was a peak for the tourists. One day—as I coughed up more of my lung, pink spittle melting the frosting of snow on my mitts—the wealthy would pay for a jaunt to the top of Mallory. The drugs and heat suits and blood doping would improve. In another five years, I would have made this climb and lived to tell the tale. But not today. And anyway: in five years, it would not have mattered. I wouldn’t have been the first.

The sun traveled through its reds and pinks until the frozen skin of Eno was everywhere golden. It was a good place to die. And when my body was found, they would know I’d made it. Unless it was many years hence and the wind and blizzards had carried me off to a secret grave. Such had been Mallory’s fate, the great and ancient climber whose name graced this peak. I was of those who never believed Mallory had made it to the top of Earth’s highest summit. But no longer. The madness of my oxygen-deprived brain, the sad glory of my one-way victory, and suddenly I knew in that very moment that Mallory had climbed to the top of my homeworld. He had simply never planned for the climb back down.

Sleep came amid the noisy and blustery cold. It was a peaceful sleep. My breathing was shallow and raspy, but at least the cough had gone away. I woke occasionally and looked an alien sun in the face, whispered a few words to that orange ball of fire, and allowed the ice to hold fast my lids once more.

I dreamed of my wife. My kids. I went back to the party my office had thrown, all the confetti and balloons, the little gifts that were well-meant but that I would leave behind as useless. Coffee and dried meals, boot warmers that were suited for lesser hikes, the kind of gifts that show how little these revelers and kin know of where they are wishing me off to with their gay ribbons and joyous cards.

The mementos, likewise, had been left behind. The picture of my nephew that my sister dearly wanted me to carry to the roof of all the worlds. A dozen of these that seemed so small and light to each giver but added up to difficult choices and considerable weight, and so none of them even made it to base camp.

I longed for all of them in that moment. Not that I could have dug them out with my dead fingers, but just to have them on my body. In case my preserved form was ever discovered and picked through by future explorers. Just so they would see that these things were there. That I wasn’t so alone.

I woke once more and spoke to the sun, and he called me a fool. His climb was rapid and impressive. And who was I? I was a mortal pretending to do godly things. I had wax for wings. I was already dead, my body frozen, but all the effort of my being, my slowing and cooling blood, the best drugs doctors could pump into me, kept my thoughts whirring. Slowly whirring like gears with their dying batteries. Just one more turn. Another thought.

I woke and spoke to an angel. So small. The world was outsized for her. An angel in a mask, breath fogging it with ice, no tanks on for that final and swift climb of hers.

I passed out again, but I felt the world shudder beneath me. The mountain was rising. They did this, you know. Confounding last year’s climbers by lifting up a fraction more for the next season. Always this: our accomplishments subsiding to time and acclimation. That fear that our former feats were yesterday’s glory. Every year, the mountains moved just a hair higher. And I was likewise now rising and falling, numb everywhere except in my mind. Only in my head, by the jounce of my neck, could I feel the world move.

Ziba was there, a face behind a mask, an angel with no oxygen, laboring down that nameless ridge having summited after me.

And Cardhil, whose ankle had seized, whose gears whirred, whose mind was said to be that of the great climber of the same name, but it was not something I ever believed. Until that moment. And I would never doubt again. It was Cardhil who carried me. And the perfect grace that had seemed inhuman at base camp felt like a real man to me on that summit. Cardhil staggered and limped along. He cradled me in his mighty and trembling arms.

At camp 7, Hanson tended to me, though he was in no shape to do so. He said my hands were gone. My feet as well. I believed him.

At 6, we notified base camp. We informed Humphries and Shubert’s team that they had perished nobly. The controversy was not in my mind at camp 6. I was weeping frozen tears. I was still dead on that peak, blabbering to alien stars. I had not yet been carried anywhere.

There was no memory of camp 5. I’m not even certain we stopped there. At camp 4, a doctor removed my lips and my nose. It required no instruments. My Sherpas were there to congratulate me. The horror of what I’d done was far worse than the horror of what I’d become. I could look at myself in the mirror with no revulsion. To think on myself, though, was to invite black thoughts.

Ziba and Cardhil made it down the mountain ahead of me. I asked Hanson to work the radio, and I tried to form the words with my new face. But it wasn’t my lips that caused problems. It wasn’t my tongue.

At base camp, at this approximation of civilization, I was provided a glimpse of what awaited me across the worlds. And it did not matter who I told or how often. I wrote in every forum, had letters crafted by those who could form them, who could understand my muted, lipless words, but Ziba, I was told, was already off to explore new worlds. And my exhortations that she be remembered fell on deaf ears. Ridgelines had already been named. And when my wife kissed my new face weeks later, the tears I wept were not for seeing her again but for the misery, the pain, of not having been left there where I deserved to lie, where I could be forgotten, frozen in the vastness of time, spinning lazily with broken wings beneath that great orange and alien star. Beneath that star who alone would ever know the awful truth of my most hollow glory.

Afterword

I doubt I’ll ever write a story as effortlessly as I wrote this one. “The Walk up Nameless Ridge” spilled out of me in a single writing session. It was a story I needed to write for myself, and I immediately thought of it as one of my finest. Which is a bit ironic, because the story is about how unworthy I am as a writer. It was a rejection of what little fame my novel Wool was bringing me. An attempt to step back and hide from the world.

At the time, Wool seemed to be everywhere. It was on the New York Times Best Sellers list, and the five individual parts were clogging up the top of Amazon’s science fiction Best Sellers lists. It was a bizarre feeling, a mix of exhilaration and embarrassment. I was sure I didn’t deserve any of this. The feeling was crippling at times.

Around the same time, I read Kevin Kelly’s excellent book What Technology Wants. Kevin helps dispel the illusion of singular creators, discoverers, and inventors. What is true of the sciences I believe is also true of art. Success in art lies as much in the changing tastes of the crowd as in the offerings. There is a varied froth of material being generated at all times, much of it along narrow themes, and when the need from the audience becomes great enough, one stream of that art is rewarded.

I’ve seen many parallels to Wool in other forms of popular culture. There were a lot of artists thinking about the same issues, wrestling with the same ideas, because artists are part of the general population, and we were all wrestling with the same forces all around us. It’s not coincidence; it’s shared experience.

With “The Walk up Nameless Ridge,” I wanted to write about the possibility that our true explorers will never be known. Maybe we should give less credit to those we think broke new ground. And maybe we should look harder and appreciate more those who came before us.

Sand

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The old world is buried. A new one has been forged atop the shifting dunes. Here in this land of howling wind and infernal sand, four siblings find themselves scattered and lost. Their father was a sand diver, one of the elite few who could travel deep beneath the desert floor and bring up the relics and scraps that keep their people alive. But their father is gone. And the world he left behind might be next.

1

THE VALLEY OF DUNES

Starlight guided them through the valley of dunes and into the northern wastes. A dozen men walked single file, kers tied around their necks and pulled up over their noses and mouths, leather creaking and scabbards clacking. The route was circuitous, but a direct line meant summiting the crumbling sand and braving the howling winds at its peaks. There was the long way and there was the hard way, and the brigands of the northern wastes rarely chose the hard way.

Palmer kept his thoughts to himself while the others swapped lewd jokes and fictitious tales of several kinds of booty scored. His friend Hap walked farther ahead, trying to ingratiate himself with the older men. It was more than a little unwise to be wandering the wastes with a band of brigands, but Palmer was a sand diver. He lived for that razor-thin line between insanity and good sense. And besides, these braggarts with their beards and foul odors were offering a month’s pay for two days of work. A hike into the wastes and a quick dive were nothing before a pile of coin.

The noisy column of men snaked around a steep dune, out of the lee and into the wind. Palmer adjusted his flapping ker. He tucked the edge of the cloth underneath his goggles to keep it in place. Sand peppered the right side of his face, telling him they were heading north. He could know without glancing up at the stars, know without seeing the high peaks to the west. The winds might abate or swell in fury, but their direction was as steady as the course of the sun. East to west, with the sand that rode along lodging in Palmer’s hair, filling his ears, stacking up in curving patterns of creeping dunes, and burying the world in a thousand meters of hellish grit.

As the piratical laughter from the column died down, Palmer could hear the other voices of the desert chorus. There was the moaning of the winds, and a shushing sound as waves of airborne sand crashed into dunes and raked across men like gritpaper. Sand on sand made a noise like a hissing rattler ready to strike. Even as he thought this, a wrinkle in the dune beside him turned out to be more than a wrinkle. The serpent slithered and disappeared into its hole, as afraid of Palmer as he of it.

There were more sounds. There was the clinking of the heavy gear on his back: the dive bottles and dive suit, the visor and fins, his regulator and beacons, all the tools of his trade. There was the call of cayotes singing to the west, their piercing wails uniquely able to travel into the wind to warn neighboring packs to stay away. They were calling out that men were coming, couldn’t you smell them?

And beyond these myriad voices was the heartbeat of the desert sands, the thrumming that never ceased and could be felt day and night in a man’s bones, day and night from womb to grave. It was the deep rumbles that emanated from No Man’s Land far to the east, that rolling thunder or those rebel bombs or the farting gods ​— ​whichever of the many flavors of bullshit one believed.

Palmer homed in on those distant grumbling sounds and thought of his father. His opinion of his dad shifted like the dunes. He sometimes counted him a coward for leaving in the night. He sometimes reckoned him a bold sonofabitch for setting off into No Man’s Land. There was something to be said for anyone who would venture into a place from where no soul had ever returned. Something less polite could be said about an asshole who could walk out on his wife and four kids to do so.

There was a break in the steep dune to the west, an opening in the sand that revealed a wide patch of star-studded sky. Palmer scanned the heavens, eager to dwell on something besides his father. The ridgeline of the impassable Stone Mountains could be seen even in the moon’s absence. Their jagged and daunting edge was marked by a black void where constellations suddenly ended.

Someone grabbed Palmer’s elbow. He turned to find that Hap had fallen back to join him. His friend’s face was underlit by the dive light dangling from his neck, set to dim.

“You aiming for the strong and silent type?” Hap hissed, his voice muffled by ker and wind.

Palmer hitched his heavy dive pack up his shoulders, could feel the sweat trapped between his shirt and the canvas sack. “I’m not aiming for anything,” he said. “Just lost in thought.”

“All right. Well, feel free to cut up with the others, huh? I don’t want them thinking you’re some kinda psycho or nuthin.”

Palmer laughed. He glanced over his shoulder to see how far behind the next guy was and which way the wind was carrying their words. “Really?” he asked. “Because that’d be kinda boss, dontcha think?”

Hap seemed to mull this over. He grunted. Was probably upset he hadn’t come up with it first.

“You’re sure we’re gonna get paid for this dive?” Palmer asked, keeping his voice down. He fought the urge to dig after the sand in his ear, knowing it would just make it worse. “I don’t wanna get stiffed like last time.”

“Fuck no, these guys have a certain code.” Hap slapped him on the back of the neck, sand and sweat mixing to mud. “Relax, Your Highness. We’re gonna get paid. A quick dive, some sand in our lungs, and we’ll be sipping iced drinks at the Honey Hole by Sunday. Hell, I might even get a lap dance from your mom.”

“Fuck off,” Palmer said, knocking his friend’s arm away.

Hap laughed. He slapped Palmer again and slowed his pace to share another joke about Palmer’s mom with the others. Palmer had heard it before. It got less funny and grew more barbs every time. He walked alone in silence, thoughts flitting to his wreck of a family, the sweat on the back of his neck cooling in the breeze as it gathered sand, that iced drink at the Honey Hole not sounding all that bad, to be honest.

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