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by Manda Vranic

There’s a lot of theories about how the Chosen One is chosen. Magickal talent is a big one, though in a few cases they have to lean on the latent pretty heavily. Reincarnation. Genetics. Inter-dimensional influence, that was a big one a couple of generations ago, probably the result of mixing too much Foundations of Magick pre-exam cramming with mundane drugs, in my opinion. There’s even a theory they choose themselves. I don’t think anyone really knows how it works.

That’s why, after I killed him, the new headmistress made me write down everything I remembered about the battle. So we would know as much as we could for the next time. It was like the weirdest school essay I’ve ever written.

It’s not like I was the only one who’d bloodied him by that point. Battle is a shitshow, all shouting and flashing thunderbolts and orbs of blue fire. I was just trying to prevent this girl who’d been my lab partner in Alchemy in second year from Inside-Out -ing me. I dropped her, and there he was.

Sometimes I can see him when I’m not quite awake in the middle of the night. Half of his school jacket all soaked dark, and burns, charred black and red, on the side of his face. He had only one eye left, the blue one. Those stupid odd eyes. Like a border collie.

I don’t think he was feeling anything. For all his whining, he really was at his best under pressure. He nearly scalped me with Magnifying Glass in the Sun before I—

I don’t want to go over it again.

I did write about how when he crumpled, I didn’t believe it was true. I wanted…trumpets, I guess, or for everything to stop around me. I wanted to feel like I’d done something grand. Instead, I just felt kind of…undermined. Like opening a present on your eleventh birthday and finding it’s your father’s old school tie and having to pretend you’re as excited about it as he is.

Headmistress Bordlecorn made me take all that out. She was always going on about the need to be succinct and precise, back when she was the Cant and Incantations mistress. It wasn’t what I felt that was important, she said, it was what I’d done. And we’d lost so many of our own, everybody needed someone to be a hero, I guess.

What was left of that term was all off. Everybody was buckling down and pairing up and nailing the rest of their lives into place. Apparently it’s always like that the year after a regime change. Dark Merlin, I was bored.

You’d think I’d have savoured it. I was golden. Got to do anything I wanted. Could have had anybody I wanted too, if I’d wanted them, but I didn’t.

I passed my year with honours even though I’d pretty much stopped going to classes. As if killing the Chosen One had earned me infinite extra credit. Summer holidays were a bit rough, too. My parents were so proud, and they kept looking at me with such expectation.

I was still sorting my feelings out, or trying to figure out whether I had any left. Sure, it was the first time I’d killed, but I was having trouble getting myself to believe that it was also the last. That it was over. I mean, everybody who started school the same year as he did knew that it would come down to that, that we would be the ones who ended it, one way or another. I guess I expected it to be in our last year. When we were ready to leave. When we were done.

And he wasn’t a bad guy at all. A little self-important, a lot self-conscious. I guess that’s not surprising, knowing he was the Chosen One. I mean, I got the “all your family since the beginning of time has gone to Maplewyck and we expect you to do us proud” speech before I went off to school, and that was bad enough. I never saw the point of hating him, despite his off-putting ideas and his tragic taste in friends. He helped me figure out an Amulets configuration once, when Zegwater would have made me stay all evening burning my fingertips off until I got it right. That was way back in third year. I don’t know why I even remember it.

The year after the battle, the sparkle was rubbing off me. I got called into Bordlecorn’s office and lectured about how everyone knew I had more great things in me, if I only applied myself. But school just wasn’t the same, like all the salt was gone out of it. There were so few students left in Aspenmist that they huddled together at one end of their table like the condiments cruet was a fire keeping them alive. Only two new first years were sorted into their house. It was hard to get much satisfaction out of yanking their chains anymore.

Some of the Glimmervale lot had a little too much fun doing it, though. And I say this as one of them. Of us, I mean. There’s a traditional rivalry between us, okay, but it’s hard to get behind a bunch of sixth-years pranking an eleven-year-old with transformation spells.

It was little things, too. That was the autumn we had that glow-ivy infestation, and we were all covered in luminous sucker bites for weeks. Small, but those things sting. It took forever to find and root out all the tiny shoots. It would have been easier with more Aspenmist to help. They were always good at finding things.

And the first barrel of elderflower beer they tapped that season had gone sour. That wasn’t a good sign. And the ghosts in the library seemed to be watching me more closely than usual. And I failed Transfiguration, which is not like me at all.

It took me a while to figure out. I didn’t start to feel better until I realized that everyone was wrong about everything.

Every Chosen One thinks their way is the only right one. The other side, of course, will take whatever the Chosen One says and fight it down to the bone. They’re all so, so wrong. It’s this endless back-and-forth that’s the problem, all this upset and rearrangement. That’s why we need to kill the Chosen One. Not to tip the balance in favour of one side or the other. To remove the thing that tips it—to get him, get her, stop them so we can finally have some peace.

It isn’t wrong to kill the Chosen One. It isn’t. It just needs to be done sooner, before there are armies, before there are even sides, before the whole shambles starts all over again. One person alone could do it, if they were skillful and prepared and kept an eye out. Maybe with a few others, if there was anyone they could trust. A small group at most. No battles. No heroes. It gets out of hand. People get hurt.

It’s my last year. All my mistresses and masters say I’ve really pulled my socks up this term. I’m doing independent study in Magickal Offence and Defence. Most of them seem pleased. Like now it’s my destiny or something. Bordlecorn’s talked to me about coming back to teach after I graduate. They’re still short of staff, after everything.

I’ve thought about this a lot. When the next Chosen One shows up, I’ll know what I have to do.

In the meantime, I have work to do. Bordlecorn can’t live forever. When I’m in charge around here, things are going to be different.

Manda Vranic lives in Toronto and works as an archivist.

by Jeff Xilon

Excerpt from Chancellor Waite’s address of 1.1.2253

As a slight aside, I have been receiving very colorful reports of piracy in the Callisto Corridor. Though my councilors and I take both piracy and the safety of our hard working citizenry very seriously—and have already dispatched extra patrol craft to maintain the sanctity of trade and travel—we are concerned about the potential for rumors and false reports to get out of hand.

If there are pirates operating in the area, I am sure they are no more capable or fearsome than the sort who have occasionally turned their efforts to such endeavors in the past. Let us not reward such villainy with the telling of ego-boosting myths that only further encourage such acts. For example, I am certain that the crew serving this “Captain Sardonicus” does not include an uplifted ursine. As I’m sure you are all aware, potently dangerous animals like these are required to have safeguards against violence included in their sentience-modification programs.

Be vigilant, my fellow citizens, and together we will continue to remain a secure, safe, and stable solar system.

* * *

Chancellor Waite’s 1st full address dedicated to the Red Flag Pirates, dated 22.3.2253

My dear fellow citizens, it is with a heavy heart and a red face that I write to you today. As many of you no doubt remember, I recently made note of a new pirate threat operating near Callisto.

I am ashamed to say that my words then gave a careless estimation of the threat posed by these parasites. Despite an increased military and police presence the actions of one Captain Sardonicus continue unabated and, indeed, have increased in frequency and scope. For this reason, I write to you to not only express the most sincere and heartfelt apologies for my mischaracterization of the problem, but also to provide you with important facts and guidance on the matter.

I still believe we must refuse the nefarious pirate and her crew the weight of rumor and myth and shine the cold hard light of truth upon her. Therefor please note:

Captain Sardonicus’s band is known to be flying a ship designated the Red Flag.

Their piracy is currently focused on the outer solar system, though its range has expanded well beyond the Callisto Corridor to include areas surrounding most of the outer colonies.

Yes, this includes the raid upon the Rhea orbital which occurred two weeks ago.

In yet another correction to my previous statement, it has been confirmed that the Red Flag pirates include a bipedal sentient bear (specifically of the species ursus thibetanus) answering to the ridiculous moniker “Sergeant Scruffy Snout” among their number.

Despite their self-styled military titles, I can assure you that these people (and bear) have never been members of our military.

Though regular citizens are not expected to fight back against armed outlaws, I feel compelled to remind you that providing aid or support to outlaws is as strictly punished under the law as the piracy itself.

As always: be vigilant, stay safe, and report any information you may possess about these violent and disruptive marauders to your local authorities immediately. We have let you down in this matter so far, but rest assured we take Sardonicus and the Red Flag pirates very seriously, and they will be dealt with.

To that end, I have ordered that this message, with its promises and warnings, be spread through all official channels and to every government posting and agency so that the full force of our will may be brought to bear on the matter.

I am sure you will sleep well in that knowledge.

* * *

A private government communique of Chancellor Waite’s, also dated 22.3.2253

My fellow ministers, magistrates, and commissaries: it should go without saying that I am more than a little embarrassed at having to issue a public apology over this Sardonicus matter. These pirates need to be dealt with before the embarrassment grows any larger. I am authorizing level 5 interrogation options for use on anyone suspected of aiding or being a member of the Red Flag Band. The Commissar of Titan should perhaps start with some of his own people to discover why there was an hours-long delay in responding to the Rhea raid. These pirates must be dealt with now; we cannot afford further cracks in the veneer of our efficiency and control.

Oh, and since I have been informed that Sardonicus and her people are absolutely ex-military, I would like to know just how they slipped past the screening and monitoring programs put in place to avoid such career changes. Scruffy Snout in particular worries me—I want a review of all military uplift programs’ loyalty components. I am hoping very much that this is a fluke, and that we haven’t been somehow putting loyalty to commanding officers ABOVE loyalty to the government itself.

To work, people. I want answers.

* * *

Chancellor Waite’s 2nd full address dedicated to the Red Flag Pirates, dated 11.5.2253

To each and every law abiding citizen—from Mercury to the Kuiper Belt—I must begin with an unprecedented second apology in regards to the ongoing matter of the Red Flag Pirates and their leader, Captain Sardonicus. Recently, you may have read some material circulating in back channels and grey-zone networks purporting to be excerpts of official, and secret, communiques sent from myself to other government leaders.

I assure you most strenuously that these materials were all fraudulent. Why, then, do I apologize? Why, for the discomfort such frauds must induce in you, the loyal citizen. For that, and for the fact that the Red Flag continues to operate seemingly unimpeded by our best efforts.

So I say most humbly: I apologize. As a symbol of how sorry I am for these continued destabilizing incidents I have ordered this message to be broadcast across every communication platform and public channel in addition to the usual methods used for official communication.

I would also like to once again help you distinguish myth and rumor from truth.

As claimed in the fraudulent messages, supposedly from myself, we have confirmed that Captain Sardonicus’ legal name is Jihyun Layne, originally from the Venusian cloud-archipelago settlements. Yes, although the “excerpts” were fake, they did contain some truthful information. It seems the crew of the Red Flag are familiar with the age-old advice to always mix some truth in with your falsehoods.

What is not true is that Layne’s family or communities are being in any way punished for her crimes. Given the revelations of her identity, her family has been taken into protective custody. This step is necessary, as we fear victims of the Red Flag or their families might seek vengeance upon Layne’s family.

Likewise, while various communities of predominantly Korean and/or Barbadian descent may notice a heightened government presence, that is only because they are obviously likely places for Sardonicus to go to ground. Of course, should anyone know of any Red Flag sympathizers within those communities, the increased protective presence will make it that much easier to report.

I hope the next time I have the pleasure to communicate directly with you, my fellow citizens, it will be to announce an ending to Sardonicus’ terrible blaze across the solar system. Keep in good health, and keep vigilant.

* * *

A private government communique of Chancellor Waite’s, from 11.5.2253

All right, folks: enough is enough.

We all know one of you is responsible for disseminating pieces of my previous private communications. This message is to let you know you will be found. We have our suspicions, and once they are confirmed, I promise you, you will find yourself volunteering to test the limits of just how far down into Jupiter’s atmosphere our mining operations can go. Anyone with knowledge of the traitors who does not want to also become a canary in the mines will report what they know, immediately.

* * *

Chancellor Waite’s address dedicated to “The Red Flag Rebellion,” dated 11.5.2253

To my fellow order and peace loving citizens, I cannot lie: things have gone from dark to dangerous. It is now clear that despite the atrocities committed by the crew of the Red Flag many of our less peaceful neighbors are moving from admiration to open support for the evil Captain Sardonicus and her monstrous crew. Some are even taking up arms themselves and calling for open rebellion.

Still, with peace and order ever our goal, I say to those citizens now: please reconsider your choices. All those who lay down their order-transgressing notions and forswear violent rebellion will be welcomed back to the embrace of society.

I, all loyal officials, and your peaceful fellow citizens desire nothing more than to hold you in that embrace.

Furthermore, I want you to know that I know many of you are flocking to Sardonicus’ cause because she has declared a desire to turn away from the Empire and return to the democracy and free elections of the Solar Collective.

I understand that desire deeply, I do.

Was it not I who first told you a mere fifty years ago of my desire to do just that selfsame thing, as soon as possible?

The coup which first brought myself to this exalted position was undertaken expressly for the purpose of rooting out corrupt power-mad officials from the Collective. Such a major cleansing project is not done easily or quickly.

So I ask you all, loyal citizen and potential rebel alike: allow us the time needed, and we too will return you, as promised, to a democratic state. I can’t promise to be as “fun” as the Captain and her crew are pretending to be. I don’t have a fuzzy second-in-command with a silly name, nor do I think a five-standard-hour-long laughing marathon flooding all interplanetary communications channels is particularly funny.

It is an excellent way to ensure police, military, and rescue operations are unable to respond to rebellious attacks, though. I’ll give you that. No, I can’t promise such “fun,” but I can promise an orderly and peaceful transition to democracy and collective progress.

Finally, to Captain Sardonicus herself, I have this message: Think hard upon what you are attempting. Take it from one who knows—it’s not all roses and sunshine on this side of a rebellion.

* * *

A military-only communique of Chancellor Waite’s, from 8.11.2253

Greetings, loyal comrades-in-arms. Captain Sardonicus is slowly, but surely, gaining support amongst both the general populace and civilian members of government. The longer she avoids capture, the more people will stop calling her outlaw and start calling her rebel.

I think we, of all people, know all too well were that road leads.

It is time the populace and the Captain’s potential allies learn the truth of her savage ways. From now on, there will be NO survivors of her vicious assaults upon the citizenry. I am quite sure I will also be appalled to soon learn of how we now have physical evidence that she has a tendency to feed defenseless people to her compatriot, Sergeant Scruffy Snout.

* * *

Chancellor Waite’s address dedicated to the loss of Titan, dated 9.3.2253

Citizens, today we mourn. For the first time in over four decades our solar system is no longer united as one. By seizing control of Titan, the Red Flag Rebels have stolen one of our collective jewels and taken a little piece of every loyal citizen hostage in the process. To the citizens of Titan not being tortured by Sardonicus or marched to Scruffy Snout’s dining table: your plight will be brief and temporary. By this time an armada dispatched to liberate you from the rebels should be on Titan’s doorstep. To everyone else, a plea: let the chaos end. Add no more voices to the evil Captain Jihyun Layne and monstrous Sergeant Scruffy Snouts’ choir of anarchy.

* * *

A private government communique of Chancellor Waite’s, from 11.1.2253

Three ships. Why am I being allowed to broadcast promises of armadas when we’ve only dispatched three ships? My fellow remaining ministers, magistrates, commissaries, and military leaders, please allow me to drop all pretense and just lay it out: we are very nearly done-for.

I can only assume, given the way the solar winds are blowing, that you remain loyal only because your own records of corruption and previous rebellion will have you joining me first up against the wall, as they say, once Sardonicus has taken power. If anyone remains in the IT division perhaps they could, oh, I don’t know, at least try and get the footage of the Titan “liberation” parties off public access networks? It’s a little difficult to sell Sardonicus and Scruffy Snout’s murderous intentions with footage of them dancing with kids leaking out. Anyone with any other ideas, be they bright or borderline, had best bring them up now, because, my friends, otherwise we are all bear food.

* * *

Chancellor Waite’s Official Notice of Resignation, dated 1.1.2254

To all of my former fellow citizens, loyal or otherwise, I write to you on this supposedly auspicious day for change, the first day of a new year according to the (recently reinstated) standard Solar Collective calendar to announce my official resignation.

I’ll be brief.

I hope you will remember my tenure as one of strong and fair leadership which brought peace and prosperity, though I suspect you will not. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I have been not-so-subtly informed that future officially-sanctioned school software is unlikely to share my ambitions in this matter.

Be that as it may, I will stand by my record—in court, most likely—for the rest of my natural life, which I hope to extend for at least a few more years on appeal.

To the newly-minted Chancellor Sardonicus: Congratulations on your successful revolution. Good luck. You’ll need it. Trust me.

Finally, on behalf of the new Chancellor I have been asked to inform you that all media requests be forwarded to her newly appointed Press Secretary: Sergeant Scruffy Snout (ret). Frankly, it’s a brilliant appointment, and I wish I had thought of something similar in my own time in office. I suspect you’ll all have no problem sticking to the pre-approved question list now.

So, goodbye. I will hold down my nausea long enough to wish you all good luck, and I hope you’ll do the same for me. I figure we’ll both need it.

Jeff Xilon is a writer and photographer who lives in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. His stories have previously been published or are forthcoming in Fireside Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, and Ares Magazine. He writes about things that catch his attention in speculative fiction, comics, music, television and more at www.jeffxilon.com, and you can find him on Twitter @JXilon.

by Premee Mohamed

After it was over, the city squares began to boast statues of our conquerors—hasty, ugly things cast in brittle bronze. The furnaces had been cold for months, then clumsily re-lit; the metal was so poorly tempered that when it dropped below zero that first winter, several smaller pieces exploded. At night, knowing the statues’ powers, those who can stay indoors. Those who cannot or will not—well, sometimes in the morning we find the bones and wet patches and shattered teeth, and sometimes we do not. We pray all the harder when no trace is left.

For a time, they became a popular method for suicide—always whispered, never spoken, so that the scraps could still be buried in consecrated ground. There is despair for the now, and there is despair for the life after.

The despair has not yet claimed me, so I live on, work on, within view of the biggest statue in town—a stone’s throw from my workshop, a twisted mass of limbs, wings, grimacing teeth, six faceted horns pointing skyward. Does it resemble one of Them? I could not tell you. Like most survivors, I made it through that night by staying underground with my hands over my ears.

“Mr. Mortin?”

I put down my shears and tipped my cap to the newcomer—a man my age, stoop-shouldered, moustached, with a week’s growth of black beard. From his face alone I would have known that he was an agent of Theirs, that anaemic emptiness that cannot be filled by food or company. But he took out the badge anyway, wrapped uselessly in a maroon-dotted handkerchief, small and vicious in his bandaged fingers.

“What can I do for you?” I said.

He looked around the yard, the shards and ribs of metal ready for smelting and recasting, the little piles of copper wire and broken glass. “Business is good?” he said. “You have all you need?”

“There are still customers,” I said cautiously. His accent marked him as one of the thousands that had fled to the city after that night, when the exposed farms and hilltops fell to Their depredations. The only place you can survive now is a city.

“Who?”

“You wish to see my list?” I said. “Very well; I do not wish to be known as unhelpful. Step into my office.”

Inside, I made tea while he flipped slowly through my records book, running a thick finger down the columns of names, dates, tonnes, his lips moving as he puzzled out the sounds. His metal mug cooled and pinged at his elbow as I waited.

“You sold to…Augusta,” he said, his voice rising in not quite a question.

“There are only two metal-sellers in this city,” I said. “Is that all you needed, Mister…?”

“Just Krystof,” he said, slumping over the book. “Listen. I must ask you to do something for me.”

“On Their behalf,” I said. “As Their agent. How could I say no?”

“No,” he said, his hand flat over the open pages, thumb resting on Augusta’s name. “And yes.”

Truly, he explained, to say ‘no’ to Them was never an option, since They had various gruesome ways of ensuring the obedience of Their human agents. But sometimes They chose agents who were unable to fulfil Their demands—and regrettably, such an agent sometimes had to be terminated. Publicly, along with their families, and the full details of their transgressions written in the Old Speech on the caved-in ribs, the mangled limbs. But all these things we both knew.

“Yes,” I said. “What I still do not know is why you are here.”

“I need you to find Augusta,” Krystof said. “She has gone missing.”

“Good,” I said. “May she run far, and may she run fast.”

“They will destroy my family,” he whispered, stroking his jacket, where the razor-edged badge of his office lay hidden, like a wasp. “They have them, Mortin. My wife, my two sons. My father. My sister. Hidden away in one of Their dungeons—you know the one, where the old silos used to be.”

“I am very sorry to hear that,” I said. My teeth worried at the inside of my mouth till I tasted blood, felt the salt sting of parted flesh. How had he even brought so many of his family with him, in the flight from the outer provinces? I had been in the city, and my own…but never mind. To accept the wages of sin, as they say. “But I only sold her metal. And I never met her. She always sent her assistants. I cannot help you.”

“But you were an investigator,” he said. “Before…”

I swallowed a rusty mouthful and put down my tea. “We were all something else, before.” He was right, of course. A federal investigator, an arm of the state, not so different from his employment as an arm—a tentacle—of Theirs. Perhaps not even less evil, only less hideous. The devil you know. And I was good, very good; I had worked in many regional offices; perhaps I had even investigated him, his family or his business, before the war.

“Please,” he said. “I…listen. You see this as my problem. But They want her back, They will destroy much to get her back.”

“Why? There are many sculptors. Any child could mock up a monster in clay and put it on a plinth.”

“They are not monsters!” he hissed, lunging across the counter to seize my jacket; I smoothly knocked his hands free and took my machete from its shelf.

“I am sorry I cannot be of assistance,” I said, raising the gleaming blade. “Drink your tea, Mr. Krystof, and get out.”

“I will find you metal,” he said, staring fixedly at the machete, perhaps at the stains on the blade that could have been oil, or rust, or something else. “You always need more, I know. You scavenge for hours. I can go outside the city—find metal in the outer provinces. I know where the landfill is buried. I can help you. If you help me.”

I put the machete back. If he could make good on this promise, how much easier my life could be! It was a dog’s work, walking for hours in the ruins, picking up forks and bits of fencing and eyeglass frames and broken screws, always on the lookout for the sun, the approaching reminder of our conquerors. And what of this missing sculptor? I could always say that she was dead, or had run to ground outside the city, where he could not possibly expect me to go. It would be easy enough to lie. Or would it?

* * *

I mulled it over as I put up the closed sign, sat down for a moment, then wandered out, notebook in my pocket. Would he watch me? Would They? I had heard stories, barely credible—agents found where they could not possibly be, minions appearing in locked rooms, acts apparently witnessed through concrete walls. But after two years, the stories had begun to wear thin in the handling, like a gold coin. I believe only what my eyes show me now.

The sculptor’s workshop, as I had expected, was abandoned, a faint pall of grey dust and metal shavings on everything like snow. Near the door sat a wooden crate containing their books, neat stacks of incoming and outgoing items, invoices for my metal and a few from Eres, the other seller on the far side of town. Who was this sculptor, the prodigy who had cobbled together the scraps and bits of metal, and the few shreds of talent still left in the wrecked city, to create this studio and put up dozens of statues? What had she wrought? An empty green-painted cash box similar to mine lay open, dustily lined with the scrabbling marks of fingers scooping out the last small change.

Tarps flapped as I walked through the maze of rooms, some of which were merely scaffolding overlaid with plastic. They had been working on a dozen half-finished clay pieces, not moist to the touch but still damp and pliable. I pictured them saying—or just her, perhaps—”If we go, then we go together.” Too foolhardy to call brave. Had I not seen myself what happened when people fled in a group? There was no safety in numbers. It merely drew Their attention.

The neighbours claimed to know nothing, staring curiously at my clay-stained fingers, as I was clearly no artist. “Two days ago it went quiet,” the old lady said, not looking up from her goat. I looked away, oddly embarrassed, as the milk spurted into the wooden pail. “They left nothing, no notes to even cancel the milk. You are who? The father?”

“Pardon?”

“Alina’s father, the little one?”

“Ah, Alina,” I said. “Yes.”

“Well, if it’s the boyfriend you seek, I haven’t seen him. Ghastly boy. I knew his mother.”

This was an opening I knew well, from the old days. “Of course,” I said. “They had the house on Old Parade Street.”

“No,” she declared. “Not when the war began. It was on Knifemaker Street—the big pepperflame tree in the front, that was her pride and joy. More than that boy. Tch.”

“Who could blame her,” I murmured, and bade them farewell, feeling their eyes on my back as I walked back east.

Pepperflame trees were hard to grow, of course; you had to coddle them to keep them alive more than a few years, and then you had to prune and train. They must have been a rich family, had a gardener. The splendid house was still standing, easy enough to identify even with the few other trees on the street. Who was Alina? Must be one of the assistants, gone with Augusta. But had the boyfriend gone too?

He had not, as it happened, and was terrified to discover a stranger in his family home—ruined, almost unlivable, probably what he wanted people to think. I studied the photos on the walls while he gibbered in the corner behind his gag. Nothing useful. And the house had long been stripped for anything that could be bartered, sold, or repurposed. I knelt next to him, tapping the machete on the black-and-white tiles. “You’re all that’s left, hm?” I said sympathetically. “You were not invited to go with them? If I take this off, you must tell me about Alina.”

Unbound, he sobbed as he rubbed his wrists, a pool of urine spreading on the floor. “Are you her father?” he said. “She said…she said he was dead…”

“Tell me about Alina,” I said again, putting a little extra emphasis into the next tap. A ceramic chip flew up and hit him in the ear, and he screamed as if he had been stung. “Tell me.”

* * *

In the old days, you did not need to kick down a door, you did not need to stand over a man with a kettle of boiling water. It was enough to have the hat and badge, which told informants that something large and heavy stood behind me, and should they push me, we could push back, and much harder. Now, I had to feel my way through the investigation, if that’s what it was. I had no authority, not even Their insectile token that cut the fingers. I had no covering story. I was looking for people who did not want to be found. And all for the promise of metal, the hope of a bright new day in which perhaps for a week or a month I could simply work at smelting and sheeting, and not clamber around in the ruined city like a mountain goat. That was a younger man’s work.

The trail eventually led me to what even before the war had been a bad part of town—flimsy, ramshackle buildings put up too quickly, burned in moments when their panicked occupants fled the attacks. Now their shells were so decrepit they resembled black lace, ruined down to the studs. A place for the poor and the desperate, a place even the criminals left as soon as they could afford it. As I walked I picked up screws and wires by habit, till my coat pockets were bulky with it. Good. Could use the illusion of a bigger man.

Tamecov, the last person to give me any useful information, had warned me that the artists’ hideout—”If that’s where they are, which I doubt!”—would not easily be found, and had been shored up, as only sculptors and metalworkers could, into something closer to a fortress. “I will be able to find a fortress, Mr. Tamecov,” I told him, and ignored his eye-rolling. He is a relic from my old job, a reliable source of gossip and news, as if he is a small strong magnet that collects even the finest filings. He likes, I think, that I am fallen so far—a mere merchant, my prestigious employer replaced by Them and Their downtrodden agents.

In a fortress, you can stockpile food, but we all discovered how precarious the water situation was when things began to come down. And this neighbourhood, so close to the old city wall, has a well—muddy, much-graffitied, no doubt filled, that night, with burned and crushed bodies—but deep, and working when I’d last been here. The fugitives would be nearby. A bucket brigade would not have far to walk.

I glanced up: five or six hours of daylight. In the past week I’d scurried back to my workshop before night fell, but the routes I had been taking each day had gotten longer, the margin of safety smaller, and my feet and legs were tiring; I was moving at a snail’s pace now. Perhaps tonight I would be able to make it back. If not, there were places to hide here. It would be an uncomfortable night, but for a man to be uncomfortable tells him also that he is alive. And I would sleep well after the job was over, in my own apartment above the workshop. Well and richly compensated.

As all jealous conquerors do, They had knocked over the statue of the old mayor and left its bare base, the concrete pocked here and there where scavengers had pulled the plaques off. I wondered if any had found their way into my smelt pile, and been turned into a vile new statue. No matter; I found a good vantage on top of the mayor’s marble head, tucked in between his ear and a windowsill, and settled in to wait.

I didn’t know who I was looking for, but I knew at once when he came to the well, after a long and expected procession of silent children and chattering mobs of powerful old women with pails and plastic bladders. He moved like a dancer on the uneven cobbles, tall and delicate, his hands like clubs swinging his two buckets. I slid down from the ear and followed him through the empty streets till he ducked out of sight into an old pumping station. Ah—it would have sturdy underground control rooms, concrete tunnels to protect the piping, a dozen different exits in case of flooding. Very wise. I should have guessed earlier.

How would I get in, though? Did they have enough people to post guards, lookouts, at every exit? Perhaps if I—

“Don’t move, mister.”

I nodded against the knife at my throat. “This will do nicely.”

* * *

“Why, that’s Mortin, the metal-seller,” said Augusta—without an introduction I still knew her, would have known her anywhere—a heavyset brunette with penetrating dark eyes and the same muscular hands as their water-carrier. “What’s the matter, did we not pay our last bill?”

“Don’t joke,” said the girl who had captured me—surely Alina, small and ferocious as a street cat, with the same sharp white teeth. “Should we just kill him?”

“Not till we know why he’s here,” said the water-carrier. He lounged against one of the control consoles, not quite camouflaging his height in the low-ceilinged room. The other artists, a ragtag group, dusty and hungry-looking, had ranged themselves around the hexagonal tables which had probably once been used for computer consoles. Augusta’s chair creaked as she peered at me in the candlelight.

“A man came to me,” I said. “One of Theirs.” It was never necessary to explain what was meant by the collective preposition now; it was as if people could hear the capital ‘T.’ “A Krystof, a Mister Krystof. Who asked me to find you, as he could not do it himself, and They were most concerned about your disappearance.”

“I daresay They were,” Augusta said.

“Augusta,” said another man, half-panicked, not quite warning her off; I got the sense that no one dared go that far.

“Well, if we are going to kill him anyway, as Lina has suggested,” Augusta said. “Bramwell, Poldo, go guard the door; he may have been followed. The rest of you, go.”

“But—!”

“Take his weapon,” she said. “I like it. Go. Shut the door. Watch the exits.”

When they had filed out, grumbling, Augusta invited me to sit at her plastic table. There was a strong odour of old mould long dried up without water, and something light and familiar, like fresh clay. “Perhaps it was put about that people wanted us dead simply because we made statues for Them,” she said.

“No. No one says that. People know how things are now.”

“People know their place, you mean,” she said, a barely-restrained growl. “Well, we discovered something—that we, perhaps just I, have the ability to use Their magic in those statues. And I learned how to turn it.”

The words made no sense. I sat dumbfounded for a moment till she laughed at me, not maliciously. “So you vanished,” I said.

“Yes. I have a portion of Their power now. I know what I’m doing, though I still don’t understand why. The statues are key. We have hidden here to continue making statues to combat Them. This is the revolution, Mortin.”

“It cannot be.”

“Every conquered people has a revolution,” she snapped. “You read enough history as a young man. You needed it for the federal entrance exams. Did you not?”

I shrugged, hoping to indicate that I was not as embarrassed by my past as she hoped I was. Of course I had taken the entrance exams; I had had to prove I had a brain to be a public servant. I might have even known as much history as her, classically trained in the big university down the river. We were not equals, but we both knew much about the past—that was her message.

She sighed exasperatedly. “We will let you live; it’s too suspicious for you to go missing, too, and it will draw unwanted attention. But you are bound to keep our secret now. Do you understand?”

“I understand only that I promised to deliver you unharmed to Krystof,” I said. “They have hostages, you know. His family. Wife, children. Father. Sister. He told me the whole list. If you come with me, perhaps They will… an understanding can be…”

“Yes, perhaps,” she said. “They like deals, They like to make deals. Sometimes They even keep them. But it is not guaranteed. I am very sorry about Krystof’s family. But you understand, don’t you, that you cannot bring me in.”

I began to protest once more that I had made an agreement, and moreover, aside from the blasted family, there was the metal to consider, but my words shriveled in my throat. The fire in her eyes was so genuine—I had seen enough liars in my time. It would explain, anyway, the behaviour of the things at night; we had known from the start they were not inanimate blocks of metal. In the intense silence I heard stifled breathing from the far side of the door. In front of them, could I truly say “Too bad; got mine”?

“His family is at the new dungeon,” I finally said. “They will be killed if he fails. They are all he has left.”

“I know. I am sorry. It is cruel to take so much from him, when he has managed to keep them this long. But we could fight Them, Mortin. This is our chance to fight back. Do not take that from us.”

I got up slowly, my hands and feet buzzing as if they had been asleep. There would still be time to return to my workshop for the night—shortcut across Midnight Avenue and then down the dry canal up to New Parade Road, then—

“Mortin,” she said.

“You have my word,” I said finally. My stomach roiled as if I were about to be sick. Later, there would be time to think about this moment, the moment I said the opposite of the thing I meant to say. Was that her doing? Magic? Something else? The years of guilt, silence, the years of blood on my hands? “I ask no payment for keeping your secret, damn you. But if you…if you do anything, if there are enough of you to do anything, go take down the dungeon.”

“We intend to do something. Tonight. But we cannot promise you anything else.”

“You can promise to try.”

* * *

Back outside I wondered for a moment why I felt so naked, then realized that my machete had been left with the rebels. Too late now. There was always the axe back at the office, and all the hammers in the workshop, if I could reach it in time. The spring sunlight grew long and amber across the shattered buildings, casting sharp black shadows across the broken bricks. I walked my shortcuts as fast as I could, lungs burning, stopping frequently with stitches. A younger man’s work.

With two blocks to go the last of the sun died, and I froze for a moment in the darkness, like I used to when I was a child, my sister and I seeing the first stars coming out and panicking, knowing we were past curfew. But that had not been a curfew like this. Already I could hear scraping and screeching from the square, the sounds of whatever unholy magicks drove the statues to kill. My breathing wheezed so loudly it sounded like an idling truck, a sound no one heard now.

I buried my mouth in my sleeve and ducked into a nearby doorway, hiding in an awning’s shadow, watching the last coral stripe vanish from the horizon. One star. Two. Stealth, now? Or a mad dash to the door? I fingered my keys, and decided on stealth; if I could get to the door silently, I could be inside before the monster was alerted by the noise of the lock.

Even so, it was a very near thing; I slammed the door and dove behind the counter as it hit, momentum carrying it into the metal with a sound like a church bell. Its shrieked snarl split the air as I scrabbled for the axe, sharpened to an edge you could shave with, the handle stickily wrapped with old leather. Through the high, small windows, the thing’s brass legs were visible, pacing with deliberate menace. A handful of glowing red eyes appeared for a moment in the window nearest my head, making me yelp. But it was too big to get in even if it broke the glass. I hefted the axe so it could see it.

That was it, though, wasn’t it? What the vanished sculptors had realized, what everyone else had, and only I had not, stupid and greedy as I had become. That at the end, it is terrible to fight alone. That if you must fight, it can only truly be done shoulder to shoulder, even if there is no hope, even if your enemy will crush you. One man and an axe was no revolution. It was one man and an axe. And what had I done today? Not even moved myself, a pawn, on Their chessboard.

And yet, whatever tonight would bring, at least I had not moved a single pawn to help Them. At least there had been that.

The door rang again, a clear, high sound as the statue’s brass body met it. The glass trembled in the frames; my mug fell from the desk, spilling an inch of cold tea. I put the axe over my shoulder like an American baseball player. “Come on!” I shouted. “Come on, if you’re coming! Come taste!”

It crashed once more, then fell silent, listening—incredulously, like me—to the impossible sound of explosions. Then its claws scraped across the cobbles as it raced away. I pressed my face to the window, holding my breath. A ring of people, masked, shouting—was that Augusta herself, in the middle?—and great fireballs of blue and green splashing down upon the advancing statues, and behind the ring, indistinct in the shadows, waited things I could not even name—unfamiliar monsters of hammered metal, advancing step by step.

I lowered the axe and laughed, half a sob. So they had indeed spoken truth. I should have known. And later, if anyone survived, I might be able to say that I had witnessed the beginning of Their downfall.

Premee Mohamed is a scientist and spec fic writer working out of Canada.

by Amelia Fisher

First I heard the shots: three short whip-cracks of sound from the street outside my shop. I knew better than to run to the windows and look. On my hands and knees I crawled to the door and lowered the bolt, then climbed the ladder behind the counter into the loft with my bed. A couple of hours later the aliens kicked the door down.

I knelt in center of the hard shop floor with a gun to my head as they searched the place, barking short questions I could not understand. They looked just like us, which was a surprise. The pamphlets had intimated they’d be monstrous. Their strange language was the only way I knew they weren’t from the Citadel; when the officials from our own government invaded our homes, they always performed the task eloquently.

The aliens took food, supplies, and left the broken door as payment. That much was familiar.

After the first day people began to leave their houses again. I took the chair out from under the broken door. I wouldn’t leave the store until Bindo came to find me. Instead I sat at the window, watched the soldiers moving around outside, and made lists on the backs of receipts to cure the boredom. Things the soldiers had taken; things that passed by my window in an hour; things I noticed about the aliens. I sat on the floor to stare up through the glass, past the green-tinted atmospheric wards that shifted across the sky, to the familiar darkness of the Citadel floating high above. I had no lists for it.

I was behind the counter when I heard the door scraping open, and saw a woman step in alone. She wore the same uniform as the rest, plain grey, but with a black stripe down the right breast. I didn’t see a gun, but I wasn’t stupid enough to think she didn’t have one. The smile she offered me was false in her eyes.

“Pardon the intrusion,” she said. I was surprised to hear my own tongue from her lips, accented though it was. “My soldiers tell me they requisitioned some supplies from your shop.”

I had not been given permission to speak, so I said nothing. It was safer to treat her as I did the Citadel overseers, the only other authority I knew. They were dead now; I’d heard the shots that ended them.

“I am called Officer Altan Nasera,” the alien said, leaning into a short and formal bow. Her eyes remained on mine as she did. “What may I call you?”

Such a direct question required an answer. “My name is Selime.”

Her eyes took in the shelves, the rafters—the loft above the counter with the bed where I’d been sleeping, the covers rumpled fretfully.

“This is your shop?” she asked.

“It belongs to the honorable Bindo,” I said. “I work here.”

“I see.” After a moment, Nasera clasped her hands behind the straight line of her back. I heard the creak of her stiff gloves. “My soldiers are going to need provisions, and for that I’ll need this shop open. Bindo, you said? I believe I know of her.” A small, more genuine smile crawled onto her lips. “If I send her to you, will you be prepared to do business?”

With no other option, I nodded stiffly.

Her eyes pulled me apart into cuts of meat. “It is only natural that you don’t trust me. In time I believe that will change.”

Without another word she reached into her jacket—I tensed, my hand reaching beneath the counter—and pulled out a small bag of coins. She counted out a few, little grey things with holes in the center. “For the supplies. Good day, Selime.”

And she left. I waited to the count of thirty before I let my hand ease off the wooden club kept under the counter. The door stayed closed. And after even more time had passed, the curtain to the back room swished as Philon came out from the storeroom. He spat on the floor.

“Filthy alien,” he said. “They are unworthy even of the Citadel’s gifts.” He set the box of fuel canisters on the counter, where he’d quickly whisked them away at the sound of someone approaching the door. His eyes settled on me. He had been training to serve the Citadel, to be whisked away on one of their shuttles to the dark station watching us from above, never to return. Now, what ships would come for him?

“You should have told that dog to piss off. Run her right out.” He picked up the coins she had left and inspected them briefly, before tossing them to the side. I heard them ping against the wall. His curly hair made him look younger even than his years, and when he acted like this, I tried to remind myself that in truth he was still just a boy.

“You hid in the back room,” I pointed out.

“And what would have happened if one of them caught me with this?” Philon hoisted the box and let it drop onto the counter with a bang. “Shot! Just like the honorable overseers.”

“They started shooting first.”

“Because they knew they’d been betrayed. Do you think it’s coincidence that the aliens knew exactly where the officials would be?”

I stared at Philon. “What are you saying?”

He snorted. “If you can’t figure it out on your own I’m not going to explain it to you.” He hefted his box under his arm. “Don’t tell anyone that I was here, or what I took.”

“Aren’t you going to pay?”

“Money? Is that all you care about? What about your civic duty?” I almost laughed, but he wasn’t joking. He hesitated at the back door. “I will pay you once we drive them all out.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said, but he was already gone.

After he left I found an old rag to clean up his cold spittle from the floor. The coins were hard to find, but I fished them out from behind the shelves, one by one. I didn’t know why; they were useless to me. I added the fuel canisters to the list of things taken.

* * *

Bindo returned the next day, hobbling in with her crowbar cane and scowling at the shelves that the soldiers had made bare. In all the years since she’d taken me in and given me a job, I’d never seen her face so bitter.

“Naturally,” she commented to herself.

The shame I felt was immediate and powerful. “They had guns,” I said. “I couldn’t stop them.”

Bindo reached up to take my face between fingers like withered roots. She stared into my eyes and all her anger was gone. “You were right to let them,” she said. Something in my chest released. Bindo had been born on the Citadel, and knew better than most when to bow before the wind.

From then on, most of the soldiers who came paid with those same dull grey disks that Nasera had given me. Most of them did not speak my language, and almost all wore their guns openly, men and women both. They were disciplined. They did not smile. I did not dare reach for the club when they came into the shop, but I never needed to use it. All they did was frighten me, but I hated them for that alone.

“They think they’re liberators,” Bindo said one night. She stayed with me late in those days, keeping watch. “They think they must free us because we cannot free ourselves. Arrogant. They’re no better than the officials.” When she talked like that it wasn’t hard to imagine why she had been cast out of the Citadel all those years ago. Many people in town knew that a gift was waiting for her, patient in the way that they were.

Bindo only ever spoke seriously of her time in the Citadel after she’d been drinking, and even then only with a sense of shame as she described the parties and feasts. I could tell that part of her missed it, and with our nights of going hungry I didn’t blame her. “You never thought it was evil, at the time,” she’d say, the words seeping out of her like blood from an old wound. “Not until you saw how things were down here. The cost of it all.”

When Nasera returned a second time, I was helping Bindo package bags of rice for delivery. She did not wander about the shop as the soldiers had done, picking things up and turning them over in their hands before putting them back again. She stepped up to the counter and smiled, an expression that hid as much as it suggested. My hands hesitated on the paper, meeting Bindo’s eyes over the finished parcel and reading the danger in them.

“Hello, honored one,” she said to Bindo, the title sounding strange on her tongue. “Might I borrow your assistant?”

Bindo said nothing; it was not a question. I stepped out from behind the protection of the counter and stopped in front of Nasera. She regarded me coolly, perhaps savoring her control.

“I thought we would walk,” she said, and stepped aside to hold open the door. I had no choice but to leave, sweat prickling down the center of my back where Bindo’s eyes drilled into it. As soon as we left sight of the doorway Nasera slid her arm through mine, a light and formal touch. I went as rigid as if she’d pressed the muzzle of her gun to my side. She guided me onwards, and I had no choice but to be led.

The streets were mostly empty, the faint green light of midday painting the bleached mud bricks as we walked. I imagined the edges of the ward cascading down in the distance, our own little island of life in the planet’s toxic atmosphere. Nasera was quiet, her eyes roving over the settlement with an almost fond expression. “Your shop has become quite popular with my soldiers,” she said at last. “They say you treat them fairly.”

I did not know whether she meant to insult me. If Philon had heard he would have burst out of hiding and reached for her neck. “They have given me no reason to act otherwise.”

Perhaps the implication of my words was too obvious; Nasera smiled at me from the side. “And I promise you, they will not.”

We walked in silence for a while longer. I could feel no warmth through the thick fabric of Nasera’s uniform. Every so often we would pass a place that had been blacked and crumbled to nothing, the scorch marks climbing up the walls of the neighboring houses.

“How long have you lived in this settlement?”

I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye. “All my life.”

“Did you ever want to leave?”

I thought about it. Was answering such foolish questions considered treason? “Everyone does, when they’re young. But beyond the wards, it is nothing but poison. Travel between settlements is impossible without authorized transport. Only those chosen by the Citadel can leave.”

“But you didn’t apply.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Nasera guided me down a side street, seemingly in no hurry. I wondered where she was leading me, and who might watch us go. “My mother did,” I said at last. “They say things are better up there, and perhaps they are—she never tried to contact us. I couldn’t do that—couldn’t cut myself out of these people, this place.”

“You’re loyal to them.” I didn’t reply. She stopped, and turned to face me. “But not to the Citadel?”

My heart beat hard in my chest. “I am loyal,.” Anyone might be listening.

I realized she had stopped here for a reason. The stones on the walkway had been scrubbed clean, but the ruin it bordered was still charred. The law did not permit a missile site to be cleared and rebuilt; they stood, silent darkened monuments, and we made new houses elsewhere. Nasera gestured to the desolation with a gloved hand. “Loyal to this?” she said calmly. Her eyes watched me closely.

“The gifts restore honor to those who have forsaken it.” There was a time that the official words gave me comfort. In the face of Nasera’s scrutiny, they fell apart like ash.

“Gifts,” Nasera repeated with a smile. “The missiles, you mean. There will be no more of those, after we’ve won the war.”

She put a hand on my arm to guide me to a different vantage, gesturing at something within the ruins. I could see where the missile had shot in through the ceiling, waiting until it was inside to detonate. On the outer wall, visible to the street, were words in white: aliens are next. I recognized the paint, and the handwriting.

“There’ve been more messages like this,” Nasera said. “We clean most of them up before they can be seen. I’m not afraid of words, Selime—I’m afraid of what they’ll force me to do.” I felt her eyes on my face. I stared blankly at the words before me, wondering if she’d left them up for this reason alone. “You were born in this town. You know its people well. If I knew who was responsible—even a couple names—I could stop it before it escalates. Peacefully.”

“If you want it to stop, perhaps you should leave,” I said. Careful, careful. I was so aware of the thin crust of salt on which I walked. Perhaps she’d have me publically executed. Then Philon would finally approve.

“They’ve already lost,” she said. “The other settlements are almost entirely taken. Your Citadel will soon give in, or starve.” I felt the stiffness of her gloves on my chin, turning my face so I had to meet her eyes. “Did you know how much they relied on you? That you could have brought them to their knees just by refusing to send them your crops?”

I turned my face from her touch. “You don’t know what it’s like. What happens to those who disobey. You’d kill us as surely as they would.”

She did not question me, and I did not elaborate. Somehow, she knew. I could see it in her face. She must have dug into the records, found the file, brought me here today because she knew the memories it would stir up. Perhaps the soldiers which had searched my home had told her of the picture frame, my younger self surrounded by familiar-looking strangers.

“I did not come here to hurt people,” Nasera said.

Still I did not look at her. “But you will. And you’ll say that it’s our fault.”

I turned and left without another word, and was relieved to hear no footsteps following my own; no order for me to stop that I would have been forced to obey. Only the silence of a town holding its breath.

I didn’t go back to the shop right away; my feet took me on a path I knew too well to turn away from. I walked away from the center of town, towards the outskirts just before the houses turned to a grid of fields all spread beneath the eddying currents of the ward, food forbidden to all but those in the Citadel. No ships came to claim those crops now. They festered in the dirt, untouched.

The ruin where I stopped was years old, dust settling over the blackened remains, even a few weeds. I knelt in the ruins and looked around, placing the kitchen here, my old bedroom there. And there was where father had stood when the missile crashed in through the roof; I knew because we’d found his bones. Better if he had tried to love the gifts like mother had. It was the choice before us all; Philon had already made his.

I tilted my head back, breathing slowly through my nose. The Citadel hung suspended beyond the shifting miasma the ward held at bay. It looked no different than it always had—no sign of the hunger gnawing inside. If no soldiers had come to our town we might never have known anything was different—the only sign we had was the silence.

* * *

“The Citadel will reward those who remain loyal. And punish the ones who betrayed them.”.” As the days of the occupation drew on, Philon’s tone became less certain, more desperate. He came by the shop almost every day, but not for my company. He needed things: more paper, a different type of wire, the kinds of farm tools that could be sharpened into wickedness. I wasn’t sure how to stop him; I never could in the past.

He made the mistake of coming when Bindo was working only once.

“What are you doing, you idiot child?” she cried upon seeing the tangle of machinery in his arms.

His hands tightened around a coil of wire. “Would you rather sell this to aliens?”

“And when they catch you?” she demanded. “You and all the rest? Will it be worth it then, when we have to watch you lined up against a wall—” She broke off. Her eyes darted to me, and then away. Philon didn’t look at either of us.

“I don’t listen to traitors,” he said. “That’s why the Citadel cast you out, isn’t it? When this is over I’ll take your place.”

He rushed out with the supplies before Bindo could snag his ear. She let him go, shaking her head at his back. I knew he would not be back, and the knowledge gave me no comfort. I leaned against the counter and closed my eyes.

“Little fool.” There there was pity in Bindo’s voice. “He’s going to get caught.”

And he was.

That night more gunshots tore me from sleep. I ran to my window and threw back the curtain, fear making me careless with who might see my face in the eerie green light. There were struggling figures below, some being held down, others at gunpoint. A door flew open and I saw soldiers dragging people outside, shouting. I recognized Philon, his arms twisted behind his back and the muzzle of a gun pressed to the back of his head. The soldiers led their captives away. It happened so fast. Soon there was no sound but the pounding of my heart.

One of them remained behind in the square, face tilted up to catch the light, staring right at me. I whisked the curtain shut again, but of course it was too late. Officer Nasera knew what I had seen. But of course, I was supposed to see it.

* * *

She came back at dawn. There was no veneer of friendly smiles meant to put me at ease now. She stopped in the middle of the room, her arms held loosely behind her back.

“Stand here,” she said, pointing to the floor in front of her. I recognized the tone of an order. I stood in front of her as her soldiers searched the shop, slowly and methodically, even climbing up into my loft to rifle through my bedding. I waited as they performed these perfunctory violations; my eyes stared into nothing, and hers stared into mine. After the soldiers found nothing, she ordered them out with a word. Then we were alone. She did not give me permission to move.

“They had a bomb,” she said. “If it had gone off, half the town would be dust. Your brother is among the criminals.” For the first time I heard the menace in Nasera’s voice. Her expression had not shifted from its placid indifference. I pressed my lips together, my expression a blank canvas, stretched tight.

“Many of the components of the bomb were purchased from this shop,” she continued. “I have more than enough cause to arrest you.”

I swallowed. My throat felt very dry. “And is that why you’re here, Officer?”

Slowly, she turned and began to walk. I refused to turn to follow her, even as her footsteps paced a circle behind my back. “That’s entirely up to you. But I’d rather not see your potential wasted in a jail cell.”

“My potential?”

“Yes.” I felt her eyes raking over me. “You’re intelligent, observant, and have been more willing to cooperate than any other local in our network.”

I forced a laugh. “So I’m the best candidate for your next traitor?”

She came to a stop before me once again. “Yes.”

The word was like a slap, though Nasera delivered it with no malice. I looked away, and did not contradict her. “What will you do with him? And the others?”

Nasera slowly shook her head. “Look at you. Loyal to the very end, just like Bindo said you would be.”

At once the dread slowly pushing its way into my chest fell away, leaving nothing but a cold void in its place. I remembered what Philon had said. The things Nasera knew. Bindo?

Nasera couldn’t quite hide the gloating edge of her smile. She stepped forward slowly, raising her eyebrows. “So you see, we have more cause to work together than you might have realized. I believe you’re smart enough to realize that such an arrangement would not be so terrible. All I ask for is information.”

The air seemed to crawl against my ears, desperate for words. Nasera watched me, content to wait. I kept my eyes down to hide the racing thoughts behind them. “Information isn’t all you need.”

A beat of silence. “And what else do you think I want from you?”

I looked up. “You do not understand the settlements. Those in the Citadel will know even less. You need someone to explain your new planet to you.”

I thought she might finally shoot me for my arrogance. But she did not even smile. “Yes,” she said at last. “I do.”

I leaned forward on the counter. I thought of the club that lay beneath it even now, how quickly I could reach for it. My hands stayed where they were. “These are my terms. I will tell you whatever you wish, and you’ll let my brother and his conspirators live.”

“Reasonable,” Nasera said.

I narrowed my eyes. “I’m not finished. When the war ends, and the time comes for you and your soldiers to move on, you will take me with you. To the Citadel.”

At last, I had caught her off guard. Her single blink told me all I needed to know. “What business do you have there?”

My mother, ascended. My father, bursting with gifts. My brother, ever reaching upward. The Citadel was a pin at the center of it all, but I would not be the one to pull it free. I was owed something else. Something more. “You will need a new government, after you win your war.” I spread my hands. “I want a place in it.”

This time when she smiled there was no falseness to it. She wore her cunning on the curve of her lips. “I see Bindo was right about you. You are more dangerous than I had hoped.”

She held out her hand. Her glove was cold and leathery beneath my palm, but I gripped it as if it could draw me back from a the ledge I teetered on.

* * *

When Bindo returned I was waiting for her. She stepped through the doorway like it belonged to someone else, her eyes lowered, her shoulders bent. I watched her. She stared at me as if trying to glimpse some hint of forgiveness behind my eyes. I thought about her telling Nasera my life story, laying it out like a map on the table, strategic markers on each member of my family.

Bindo stepped forward and took my face in her hands, just like she had done the first time she came back. This time I didn’t search her eyes for forgiveness. I didn’t pull away, either.

“Why?” I said.

She raised her eyes to the ceiling, looking beyond it. I didn’t follow her gaze. “I did what I could to bring them down,” she said. “But nothing will change for us here unless there’s someone up there to build again.”

“I didn’t want this,” I whispered. “It was so much easier to be loyal.”

“I’m sorry, Selime.” Her hands fell by her side. “I’ve made the choice for you.”

* * *

Two months later the Citadel surrendered. It was on that day that I climbed into a exosphere ship for the first time on my life, Nasera at my side. I felt us rise from the earth, watched as my town became a village, a single house, a pebble thrown into a golden puddle of wheat. When we slid through the ward the ship did not so much as shudder, but I felt us leave it behind.

Nasera watched my face as we drifted out of the atmosphere. The Citadel, growing larger and more real by the second, hung right before my eyes.

“It’s beautiful,” I said. “I didn’t expect that.” Nasera chuckled, and said nothing. I looked back to the curve of the planet, green storms swirling over its surface, the glowing clear gems of the settlements shining through them. I imagined Philon far beneath me, marooned on one of those shrinking islands, his head tilted back and his eyes turned to the sky.

Amelia Fisher's fiction appeared in the anthology Fitting In: Tales of Supernatural Outsiders, and is forthcoming in Havok and The Eunoia Review. She has a forthcoming novelette to be published by Less Than Three Press, and writes book reviews for The Literary Review. She lives in a van in the woods, where she writes about intergalactic gender politics and cannibalism.

by Kelly Jennings

I

Though the three men along the back wall were obviously military, they wore civilian suits. They were all Retcon: no mods, no visible tattoos, their hair in tight close braids. Nuri clamped her flare and fought to keep her inner eyelid open. After the first moment, she was even able to straighten her back.

Rutledge was there, too, by the wallboard with another man.

The surprise was the human woman. Arguments had been made lately, though, that Retcon had gone too far, that, really, some woman could be happy in the workplace, at least in low-impact jobs. And this was the sort of woman humans liked—bone-skinny, wispy hair bleached of color, dressed in a tiny silk dress and shoes like traps. Beyond the veil, her light eyes glittered. She tasted— crap, Nuri thought, tongue flickering, fear rippling her scales.

She tasted alert.

Rutledge introduced the other man as the leader of the team: Captain Somerset. He was the sort humans trusted, broad and heavy-muscled, with a big broad head. Rutledge explained that the woman, Kita, was a cultural attaché, an expert on Saurians.

Nuri said nothing, but a tiny flare escaped her. Kita’s eyes narrowed; the sharpness in her scent brightened. Nuri’s inner lids dropped.

Against the wall, the soldiers tensed—they knew Saurian danger signs. Nuri tried to relax, but reflex was reflex: she had aides with Tasers at her back, soldiers against the wall, Somerset and this Kita—everything in her was saying crouch and hiss, flare, give warning. Staying upright, at ease: these humans had no idea what they asked.

Kita stepped forward. “Perhaps I might have some time with the lizard?”

Somerset, who had been doing the jostling non-content dominance speech with Rutledge that human males did, broke off frowning. “You can’t be alone with it.”

“The boys will be glad to come along.” She smiled sweetly at the soldiers. “Jefferson? Miles?”

To Nuri’s surprise, this human woman led her to the green behind the compound. Five acres of wooded land just above the camp, the green was surrounded by double rows of charged fence topped with grills of razor glass. This was meant to keep lizards out—the green was where humans at the camp took their meals and exercise.

Here at the tail end of winter, the pines were dark, the cropped grass golden in the morning sun. Scraps of snow lay among the trees. Kita went, her spike heels clattering, to a scrubbed picnic table. She took a bench, handling her narrow skirt deftly, and extracted her handheld. When Nuri remained standing, she tapped the table with one long nail. “Sit.”

Nuri hesitated, rotating her eyes toward the soldiers. Though they didn’t look happy, they made no move to stop her. She sat.

“While you were a fugitive,” Kita said, “which was your enclave?”

Nuri said nothing, though not because she didn’t understand. This was one of the hundreds of questions she had been asked, endlessly, during both regular and chemical interrogations. She said nothing because of the exhaustion that filled her. It had been most of three years after her recapture before they stopped dragging her up to the compound twice a week for interrogations. She wasn’t sure she could take it if they started again.

Kita stared through the veil. “Well?”

Nuri dropped her inner lids. “I was alone.”

The nearest soldier, Jefferson, shifted his weight. Nuri’s shoulders drew tight.

“You were,” Kita used her shimmering nail to flick to a new file, “thirteen years old? Fourteen? You survived mountain winters alone?”

“All this is on file.”

“Someone helped you.”

Nuri held down her flare, and her eyes. Humans hated eye contact—direct stares meant a challenge. She felt dizzy with fear and anger. “If you’re thinking I can lead you to these people because I’ve been to their camps, I haven’t.”

“People?” Kita said delicately.

Nuri said nothing.

Kita flicked to a new screen. “You say, here, that you knew there were no other lizards in the mountains. How?”

How was a question no one had ever asked. Hunched under the looming presence of the soldiers, Nuri flicked her tongue covertly, tasting for motive. Kita was lying about something. No surprise. Humans lied about everything.

“How did you know no enclaves of lizards were hidden in those mountains?”

Deliberately, Nuri flickered her tongue again. Kita drew back, making a sound of disgust. Jefferson smacked Nuri across the head, not hard, more of a warning than anything.

“Smell.” Nuri flicked her tongue again, mainly to confirm the first taste, and went, hiding her surprise at what she learned. “No smell of us, never. And it was hard, staying alive on my own, so yes. If I’d gotten a scent of a lizard anywhere up there, I would have followed it.”

Kita smiled. “That’s how we’ll use you. Our hunting dog.” She laughed. “Hunting lizard,” she told the soldiers. “We’ll take you to the mountains,” she told Nuri. “You’ll find the enclaves for us, you and that clever tongue.”

Nuri stared at her, saying nothing, thinking hard.

* * *

While they traveled, Nuri was kept shackled at the back of the armored ATT, the self-contained all-terrain transport vehicle used by FASA. “If you’re this scared of me,” she asked during the second day, as she was being elaborately unchained at a rest stop—they would not allow her to use the ATT facility—”how do you think I’ll be of any use to you in the mountains?”

Captain Somerset, observing from the galley, showed his teeth. “Snipers, gecko.”

Nuri twitched. All around her, the soldiers laughed.

“I’ve handled your sort before.” Somerset pointed his pistol-shaped forefinger at Nuri.

Afternoons, while they drove, Kita continued her interrogation, asking about Nuri’s childhood, her years in the camps, her years on the edge. One day she asked about the genemod—how it had been built, who had built it. As if Nuri could know that.

In retrospect, research should have started as soon as Saurian Acquired Mutation infants were born. But ever since the Right to Personhood Amendment had passed, getting funding for research into human genetics in the USA had been difficult. With that and the continual defunding of American universities, well, most of the best research minds for several generations had studied in—and stayed in—other countries.

So when SAM appeared in American cities in the winter of 2107/2108, the infrastructure for research just didn’t exist.

Also, the first Saurian births were among the impoverished. Early theories decided SAM infants were a drug-related defect. Everyone knew those Public-Income sluts did nothing but shoot juke. Never mind the physicians claiming they had mothers with no history of drug use, or scientists arguing that this mutation was too intricate to be drug-induced.

All early-born Saurian infants died. By the time the Catholic Charity clinics had worked out the protocols that kept the children alive, the “spawn” (as net pundits called them) were being born in large enough numbers that they could not be shrugged off. The means of transmission had also been determined—yet another viral STD.

It was also obvious by this point that SAMS was no random mutation—not just too complex, but too advantageous. SAM gave its children better reflexes; a better sense of smell and hearing; the supple scaled skin and the doubled eyelids offering protection from solar radiation. No, this was genetic engineering.

Who had done the work—well, Nuri had spent as much time on the net as the next lizard. She knew the favored candidates were the Arda Front, an international eco-liberation group that favored eliminating humans entirely, arguing that humans were an invasive species. Since Saurians both interbred with humans, and bred true, SAMS would do that.

On the other hand, FASA had interrogated every AF member they’d been able to catch for decades now, and learned nothing solid. If they had, this low-level FASA attaché wouldn’t be interrogating her over it.

That evening, as her guards spread out through the Sandhills rest stop, empty except for an ancient family ATT and two kids on a skimmer, Nuri caught Kita’s scent. The attaché was climbing from the vehicle, her adrenaline high. Nuri felt her scales ripple under her coveralls.

Jefferson went into the stalls, chasing out a blond child, whose eyes went round as she saw Nuri. The kid dashed from the facility, yelling to her parents. Miles waved Nuri in, keeping the door open. Nuri was scrubbing down at the sinks—they knew about lizards, but nevertheless would not give her access to the ATT shower—when she heard Kita’s screams.

She jumped. So did Miles, spinning from the door. Jefferson snapped a word his Retcon parents would be shocked he knew, and pointed at the third guard: “Stay with the gecko!”

He and Miles bolted from the facility. Nuri stood frozen only a second before yanking her coveralls up. She hauled closed the zipper and yanked on her sweatshirt. By the time the darts slapped into the third guard, she was skidding through the door. Leaping over the unconscious Jefferson, Nuri glanced toward the ATT, and then rotated her eyes the other way: two humans, in black, with rifles. She crouched, hissing, flaring bright in warning.

They moved aside. Beyond them, a sedan, its door open, its engine running.

II

The hotel lobby stood empty. Pushing back the hood of the heavy jacket that had been in the sedan, Nuri slipped her inner lid. The mirror on the far wall, ancient and spotted, from the days when this had been an important place, showed the gentle glitter of her skin, the gold and dark brown reticulated pattern.

Her tongue flicked: a human asleep in a room behind the desk, and, down a hallway, a sick Saurian. Nuri paused, reptile brain tussling with human rules about private space, but not for long. She slipped down to the door: a Saurian infant, strapped in a prop seat. The child was hot and dry, skin cracking around its eyes, scales rising in ridges. Its tongue pulsed.

Nuri hissed, dropping to a crouch. “Hey, little sister. Hey, now.”

The infant rotated its eyes. No pleasure came from it—nothing but dull apprehension. Nuri released reassurance, easing the child loose. Not a sister, of course. English was useless. What word for a genderless infant who was, in essence if not in fact, a sibling? Its tongue flickered. Nuri flicked back. It tasted sick, and sad. She increased the reassurance, cuddling the child close. The pool complex in the basement had a steam room she could taste from here.

She was scrubbing the child with a bath brush, the closest thing to pumice she could find, when the human appeared. Nuri crouched.

“Didn’t hear you come in.” The human was male, young, and, by the state of his clothing, not well-off: the most dangerous sort. “You know what’s wrong with him?”

Nuri tasted the air, finding only worry and grief. “Where’s the mother?”

The human shook his head. “Gone. She took the others and…. He’s been mopey since she left. I ain’t find nothing in the books she bought for them others. I thought about the net, but I’ve heard they… ain’t you know what’s wrong?”

“It wouldn’t be in your childcare books. We shed. But not without help.” Thank you, she added bitterly to her creators. “If you don’t help it shed, it can’t clear toxins. It needs a pumice and a wash, every night.”

“Pumice?” the human repeated, and then sat down on the wet floor and began to cry.

Nuri closed her second eyelids, anger as bright as pity in her mouth, and scrubbed harder.

* * *

Oliver’s family had owned this hotel for over a hundred years. Before the lizards came, he said, it had been popular among families heading for vacations in the Colorado mountains. When his baby sister married her high school sweetheart, who would inherit his father’s drugstore, everyone had been so happy. Then this.

“Harry wanted to surrender Rio. My sister took the kids and moved in here, my parents had the steam room already, it’s part of the pool complex, no one around here has anything against pools, we’ve never had any, uh, around here.”

“You can say lizard,” Nuri said, feeding infant Rio scrambled eggs, the only suitable food Oliver had on hand.

Oliver flushed. Blushing had the same physical basis as the flare, but wasn’t nearly as complex, or as informative. “Anyway, uh, Harry got work out in Seattle. When he asked my sister to come, she went.”

“And left Rio.”

Oliver flushed darker, his mouth unhappy. “I ain’t know how to do for him.”

“I can tell you some things.”

Oliver muttered. Nuri fed Rio water, wondering whether Oliver was as ignorant as he was acting. A great deal would be solved, after all, if little Rio just didn’t wake up one morning.

“Are you with the underground?” Oliver asked.

Nuri cast him a sidelong glance.

“Used to be this place in Independence, supposed to be a stop in that. That underground. Harry said…” Oliver bit his lip. “Harry said she caught the virus there. Independence. He said he’s staying clear of lizards from now on. It’s why she left Rio here.”

Nuri remembered her own mother, who had cared for her, bathed her, fed her, all the first years of her life. The earliest taste she remembered was her mother’s revulsion. Her father had insisted on hiding Nuri, had given Nuri clothing to wear, let her spend time outside, despite the danger it brought to them all. But when the hunters found her, though her father had tasted of sorrow, clear as the scent of rain he had also tasted of relief.

“I don’t think I can handle Rio, not on my own,” Oliver said. “If you… can you get him to the underground?”

In all the years Nuri had lived wild, not once had she found one taste of any underground.

“Sure,” she said, to Oliver. “I’ll take him.”

Relief flooded Oliver’s flavor.

“With a few conditions,” Nuri added.

* * *

Nuri and Rio slept through the day. At dusk, they fed and scrubbed, and then used the pool. Rio swam like a fish. Saurians loved swimming: they could close their nostrils, slide down their inner lids, and jet through the water, the cool wet bliss over their scales, free here as they were free nowhere else. Humans hardly swam anymore at all, that was how much Saurians loved it. These days, any human who owned or even used a pool risked being associated with Saurian-rights groups. You wouldn’t love swimming if you didn’t love lizards: that was how humans saw it.

Rio leapt into the air, shouting laughter. Nuri caught the child, swung it high, watched Rio turned the fall into a dive and shoot down in the deep end. Nuri found herself flaring. She scented Oliver, and turned. The human hovered in the doorway.

Nuri swam to the side and levered herself out.

“He never laughed before,” Oliver said.

“You don’t take it swimming.” An accusation, but humans didn’t hear subtext.

“I keep him hidden.”

Nuri didn’t point out that a windowless basement pool was just as hidden as a first-floor room with its curtains drawn.

“You got to leave soon,” Oliver said. “It’s dark.”

Rio came darting through the water and leapt to crouch on the pool edge. “Can I swim some more? Can I keep swimming?”

“Of course,” said Nuri, ignoring Oliver’s alarm. “Go ahead.”

Rio sprang over the water, diving deep.

“He talks,” said Oliver faintly. “Did—when’d he learn to talk?”

“Eight or nine months old, probably. That’s when most of us do.”

“But that can’t be true, why ain’t he say anything?”

Nuri elected not to answer. Whatever else this man had done, he had not turned Rio over to the hunters. That made him a hero, compared to most humans.

“Listen,” said Oliver. “Listen, when are you leaving?”

They left at midnight, driving Oliver’s six-year-old ATT, Nuri with Oliver’s credit tag in her pocket. Rio talked for the first three hours, questions it had apparently been saving for all the twenty months of its life so far. Nuri answered as patiently as she could, considering her nerves were twitching like broken snakes. When she said Rio should be quiet now, the child shut up at once: one thing it had been taught. A little after that, it went to sleep.

Nuri drove. Night wind streamed in the cracked window. Here in the belt between cities, she tasted hay, llama, barns, mice—she loved the smell of mice. She also smelled humans, clay-thick, bitter on the wind. Water smells grew more frequent as they neared the foothills.

Near dawn, they reached the mountains. Nuri slowed, studying routes via the vehicle’s board, and finally took a fire road. The ATT handled the substandard paving easily. Fifteen miles up, she came to a fork, went right, and stopped near a river. Rio woke, stretched, shot its flare, and said, sleepily, “Is this where my Mama is?”

“This is where we sleep today.”

Rio yawned again, let itself out of the car seat, pushed the patch to lower the window, and went through it with a slithering leap. Nuri found she was smiling.

She took Rio hunting, frogs and crickets along the river, and, wading upstream, fish from a deep icy pool.

“What’s that?” Rio asked, tongue flickering. The child was chest-deep in the water, gone pale in response to the cold. The pattern of dark scales stood out stark. The flare along its throat and up along the curve of the skull was rich and dark.

Nuri flicked her own tongue. “Heh. That’s bear.”

Rio dropped its inner lids, its flare deepening. “Bear? Real bear?”

Nuri started to say not to worry, bears didn’t bother Saurians; only Rio leapt from the pool, bounding in the direction of the bear.

“Stop!”

Rio stopped. “But I want to see him.”

Nuri took another taste: male bear, just awake from winter. “He doesn’t want to see us.”

Rio crouched, flare fading. Nuri didn’t have to ask why: he doesn’t want to see us. Bears, humans, uncle. Mother. Turning away, Nuri spotted a trout, and snatched it from the water. She tossed it onto the bank with the rest. “Time for breakfast.”

After they ate, Nuri pulled down the ATT’s bunk, yawning—Saurians all needed sleep after a meal, it had made their human teachers furious, all of them drowsed off in class after lunch—and tumbled Rio, already snoozing, into the bedding. She curled around the child, slipped into her own uneasy dream-thick sleep.

It was dusk when she woke. Rio was gone.

Not very worried, she climbing from the car, stretched, and wandered a loose circle, flicking her tongue. Remembering the bear, she tasted that direction thoroughly. Nothing. After a moment, she found the way Rio had gone, and tracked it through the trees. She had gone maybe a hundred yards when she picked up another taste: human.

This scared her much more than the bear. Flicking down her inner lids, she loped through the brush, bounding over rocks, ignoring branches and thorns—her scales protected her from the worst damage, and the rest would heal. The human taste grew stronger, mixed clearly with Rio’s. Nuri slowed to a creep. She came through the trees, careful to avoid rustling leaves, slipped over a boulder, and crouched on its other side.

Forest ranger, in a graveled clearing just off the fire road. He was on his heels, the nearest humans could manage to a crouch, holding something toward Rio, who stood upright and unafraid at the edge of the clearing. Nuri tasted air reflexively: banana chips. This ranger knew Saurians then.

Nuri looked about, and started north, in a flanking maneuver that would take her to the fire road.

“Here, sweetie,” the ranger was saying. “It’s good.” He ate one, as if Rio would need reassurance. “It’s okay, I won’t hurt you.”

Nuri kept herself from hissing, though she couldn’t stop the flare. He eased through a last thicket, and was on the road. Daylight still hung here. Nuri flicked a quick taste, in case the ranger was not alone. The jeep engine ticked, cooling in the dusk.

“Where’s your mama, lovey?”

Nuri bounded across the Jeep’s hood.

The ranger had good reflexes: he caught the change in Rio’s face, and went sideways, out from under Nuri, rolled and was on his feet at the end of the clearing.

Nuri landed and bounded. The ranger went sideways again. “Hold on,” he was saying. “Hold it, wait!”

Nuri kicked off a tree and landed, rode the ranger to the ground, pinned his arms with her knees, and used both hands to push the ranger’s head back. The sting to the throat was the swiftest. The ranger knew that, apparently, because his voice peaked in panic: “I can help you, dammit, stop!”

Nuri almost didn’t. Her lips were skinned back, her tongue ready to strike, almost she couldn’t stop. She froze, rigid as wire. It wasn’t fear she tasted from the ranger. It was worry.

Nuri pulled back. “Talk fast,” she hissed. She knew from her own scent and the heat down her neck that her flare was bright.

“I’m part of the underground! I’m a bridge to the enclaves, I help keep them hidden, also if you kill me, if I’m found stung dead out here, it’ll attract attention to the area, it’ll attract hunters! Don’t kill me.”

Nuri’s scales were twitching. “What makes you think you’d be found?”

“Okay. Okay, but I really am on your side.”

Nuri’s tongue flicked out, tasting for lies. “Why?”

“Why?”

She let her hands dig into soft human skin. “Why would you be on our side?”

“My wife. Our children.”

“Liar. You have spawn? You think you’re my first hunter?”

“I’m not a hunter! I—my Jeep. Look in my Jeep.”

Nuri flicked her tongue again: fear, some anger, still mostly worry. Nothing like a lie. Which didn’t mean anything. Some humans lied so well they didn’t even know they were lying.

“Just look,” the ranger urged, everything in his taste making Nuri want to trust him.

Nuri’s scales rippled, her blood rushing under them. “Rio.”

“I’m here,” the child said.

“Check his Jeep. Be careful.”

Rio scrambled across the clearing, and in through the open window of the Jeep. There was silence, except for Rio, moving around inside the vehicle.

“What’s in there?” Nuri asked.

Rio poked its head out of the window. “I can’t find anything.”

Nuri’s fists tightened, forcing the ranger’s head back.

“Wait, damn it—taste!” the ranger yelled at Rio. “Just taste in there!”

“Hold still,” Nuri said, wishing she had done it right away, while she was still in the heat of the attack. “I’ll try not to hurt you.”

“Oh,” Rio said. “Oh, I see.”

Nuri stopped. The ranger trembled under her.

“See what?” Nuri asked.

“Lizard kids.” Rio poked its head and shoulders out of the open window. “He’s got three kids, Nuri, it tastes like them! And—their mother? They taste good. Come see.”

Nuri sat straighter. The ranger’s eyes shut hard. Slowly, Nuri let him go.

III

Deep in the mountains, in what had been a Girl Scout camp when the most alien thing anyone from Colorado had ever seen was a human of a slightly different shade, was the Saurian enclave—or one of them. “We move around,” Miriam explained. “And we’re never all together.”

Nuri watched Rio playing with Saurian kids among fallen trees. The ranger wasn’t the only human here. Though Saurian-human marriage had been illegal for thirty years, this camp alone had five mixed pairs.

“They’ll find you,” Nuri said. “They know you’re here, so they’ll find you.”

Miriam nodded. “We’re planning for that.”

“Planning to get caught?”

“Planning for war,” Miriam said, her clear eyes unlidded, flicking her tongue openly: tasting Nuri’s reaction. “You can help,” she added. “You know humans.”

Nuri said nothing. She thought of Oliver, of her sister, of her father. Of Peter O’Toole riding across the sand, Dorothy among the Munchkins, the beauty and colors of Hayao Miyazaki. Thinking of the taste of death.

Miriam responded, giving Nuri the taste of her own sorrow. Nuri rotated her eyes toward Miriam: her flare was dark, her scales flat. While Nuri was still thinking how to respond, her own scales flicked rigid.

Miriam whirled, alert. So did every other Saurian in camp, wheeling toward the scent of alarm in the air. The children vanished, swift as mice—even Rio did, Nuri noted. Adults slid to positions that must have been pre-assigned. A moment later, two young Saurians entered camp, Kita gripped between them.

Nuri flared. “That’s her. That’s the FASA attaché.”

Kita was dressed very differently now: heavy canvas trousers, climbing boots, a thermal sweater under a dark jacket. Her wispy hair, unveiled, caught the breeze. Miriam approached, long forefinger directing attention to Kita’s pockets.

“We dealt with that,” the taller Saurian claimed.

Nuri came up behind Miriam. “She likely has backup.”

“How did she track you here?” Miriam asked, inspecting Nuri.

Nuri’s flare went cooled. She yanked off the hooded jacket and hunted through it. Then she looked up at Miriam, mortified and furious.

Miriam regarded Kita. “If we kill you now, I think we can escape before they find us.”

Kita’s scent flashed fear. “If you kill me, you’ll never learn why I came.”

Miriam caught her collar, yanked her close, and, tongue darting, stung swiftly. Shock spilled from Kita; she crumpled. Miriam dropped her. “We move in five minutes.”

* * *

They traveled by scooter and jeep and some by foot, no group bigger than ten, taking various routes through the mountains. Some wouldn’t arrive for days, though Nuri’s group, traveling in an ancient, rickety Lumina, arrived before dawn. The new enclave was in a canyon filled with trees, caves, and rushing water.

“Not our best camp,” Miriam admitted, watching children leap from rock to rock in the tumbling river. “Bad hunting, winters, and the caves are impossible to heat, but the babies love it. Jez,” Miriam said, to the kid minding Kita. “Over here.”

Kita was dumped in the big cave. She watched them with her tiny flat eyes. While she’d been unconscious, they had stripped and dumped her clothing. Wearing lizard clothing was obviously bothering her—she kept shifting position, as if trying to pull away from her own skin. Five of the twelve adults that had arrived settled around her.

“Hungry?” Miriam asked, just being mean. No human would eat from a Saurian’s hand.

Kita shook her head swiftly.

“Fine. Start talking.”

Kita gulped. “I’m here to help. President Appleton believes firmly that in these dark times—”

“I’ve heard our firm leader’s firm speech. Cut to the chase.”

Kita gulped air and continued: “I’ve been empowered to negotiate toward, with your, to negotiate with you.”

Miriam flicked her tongue. When Kita said nothing else, Miriam said, “Nearly all of us not yet slaughtered by Appleton’s hired killers are in your camps, kept chemically sterile and half-starved. Now you’re here playing friendly. Pretend I’m stupid enough to believe you. What does your boss want?”

Kita pushed herself upright. “The camps are not like that. Nuri can tell you—Nuri!”

Miriam shifted her eyes toward Nuri, who laughed. All around them, other Saurians laughed too.

Kita’s scent went sharp. “They aren’t. I’ve been in them. I know aides cross the line occasionally, but –”

“She’s been in the camps, Miriam,” Nuri mocked.

Miriam put a long finger on Kita’s chin, turning her face. “You aren’t answering, little monkey.”

Flushing darker, Kita lowered her eyes. “Not everyone likes surrendering their children to the camps.” She hesitated. “Also, FASA research tells President Appleton that, even with more… active measures, Saurians will eventually overwhelm our numbers. He wants negotiation.”

The cave was silent. Miriam’s scales were up; her tongue flickered.

“Active measures?” Nuri wondered.

“Death camps,” Miriam translated. “FASA’s been floating it on the dark net lately, gauging reactions. So even your Retcon gibbons won’t eat full-scale slaughter?”

Kita’s pale eyes shone. “You’re our children. Our brothers and sisters.”

Nuri laughed again.

Kita’s gaze flashed toward her. “I helped you escape. Why would I do that?”

Nuri got to her feet. “I say kill her now.”

Miriam’s scent waved her from the cave. Annoyed, Nuri left, rounded up some other Saurians, and went hunting.

Miriam was right, no decent hunting here—though spring was stirring lower down, it was still hard winter this high. They ended with several dozen pika, two snowshoe rabbits, and a fat porcupine, sending Jez up a tree after the last. Nuri had never eaten porcupine, but the others claimed once the spines were off they were great.

Back at the canyon, Miriam had organized fires inside the caves; the children had brought in fish and bugs, along with lichen and winter berries. What could be eaten raw was being passed in baskets. Nuri took a fistful of bugs. Hunting made her hungry, as did being free from the camps, out here among other Saurians. She knew it would not last. She knew this was borrowed time. Still, for now, for this one evening, she was not a lizard in a cage, getting fed poisoned kibble twice a day.

Jez took Kita a bit of roasted rabbit. When she wouldn’t eat it, one of the kids did.

After dinner, Miriam gave them the results of Kita’s interrogation, particularly what she had said after being patched with high-dose barbiturates: “She’s got a lizard sibling. Thinks that gives her some stake in us.”

Around the fire, Saurians emitted bitter amusement. The five or six humans in the mix, including Sioux, the forest ranger who was Miriam’s husband, made human noises.

“In any case,” Miriam said, “she’s sincere.”

“The offer to negotiate is real?” Sioux tasted skeptical.

Miriam’s eyes lidded. “Of course not. FASA has used the lizards in the camps to create a virus, one they believe will make us sterile permanently. It’s designed to be Saurian-specific, and to transmit like a cold virus, though it’s largely asymptomatic. These negotiations are a ploy. They’ll use them to introduce the virus into the wild population.”

“So…we just don’t go.” Jez’s flare was faint.

“Why would we go?” Sioux argued. “They don’t want peace! They want us dead.”

Miriam sent the taste of thoughtfulness. “A few reasons. One, to let them think we’re fooled. Second, while we’re playing them, we might win some concessions. Life could be less hard up here, Sioux. I wouldn’t mind that.”

“That’s not much,” Elijah pointed out. “Considering what we risk.”

“Playing with FASA is playing with fire,” Sioux added.

Nuri’s scales were rippling, blood rushing under them. “Miriam.” All their eyes rotated toward her, human and Saurian alike. “Why would they wait to lure someone down?” she asked. “Why take that chance?”

No one spoke. The sound of sap popping in the fire was clear; even clearer, though, was Kita’s taste: fear, shame—relief?

Nuri stood. So did Miriam and Jez, but Nuri reached the skinny little attaché first, jacked her up, fist wrapped in her collar. “Tell me,” she hissed. “Now. Or—”

She had no threat large enough. Kita wept, her shame and relief flooding the world. Under Nuri’s fist, the stringy muscles shook.

“Tell me!” she shouted.

“You’re infected,” Kita said. “Yes.”

* * *

Snow had begun to fall as night deepened. The children were sleeping; Miriam had sent out the change of watch. She, Nuri, and Sioux crouched against the Lumina, Miriam and Sioux wrapped in one quilt, Nuri huddled inside a parka. Kita was inside, drugged again.

“I’ll take her down,” Nuri said. “She’s my fault.”

“None of us caused any of this,” Miriam said, her taste absent. Sioux pulled her closer. Under the second, heavier wave of drugs, Kita had given the real truth: Nuri had been meant to escape, but later in the trip. Somerset’s team planned to track here to the enclaves. Kita had arranged the earlier escape, with her own faction, and tracked Nuri herself.

“To warn you,” she insisted under the drugs. “I knew what FASA had planned. I came to warn you! This virus, it’s dangerous. They think they can keep it species-specific, but my medical people, my experts, they say that’s wishful thinking. They say this could wipe out the human race. They say maybe this is what the AF had in mind all along.”

“I have to take her back,” Nuri repeated.

Miriam sent out flat rejection. Snow floated from the heavy sky. Nuri hitched her parka higher, hunting for an argument they would accept.

“Nuri’s right,” Sioux said, sending Nuri an apologetic glance. “We can’t argue for research into a cure. If Nuri goes with her, she and Nuri can argue.”

“Kita can go alone,” Miriam argued, her scent troubled and angry. “We’ll take her to the trailhead. Ditch her there.”

“Someone has to negotiate for us,” Nuri said. “Do you trust this Kita to do that?”

Miriam flared, but her scent didn’t match that flare.

“Nuri’s right,” Sioux said again.

“Nuri’s infected,” Miriam argued. “She’ll infect every one of us she meets.”

“That happens no matter what,” Sioux said. “You heard this Kita. It’s already loose in the Saurian population.”

Miriam emitted resignation. Sioux hugged her close. “They leave at dawn,” Miriam agreed. And then we do what we always planned we’d do.”

“Take the war to them,” Sioux agreed.

“Give them a reason to negotiate,” Miriam said, anger her brightest taste now.

Nuri wrapped her arms around her ribs, gripping her scales, which stood up in ridges. She thought of Rio, thought, a sharp bite of grief deep in her chest, of what she had hoped, in that one moment, for the child—a childhood here in these mountains, growing up here.

Thought of what that childhood would be now.

Snow tumbled from the skies, but when she flicked out her tongue, she could taste on the wind it was only a shower, brief and heavy as spring snow often was. Gone by morning. She stretched her spine, shot her flare.

“Nuri?” Miriam asked.

Pushing back the hood of the parka and lifted her face to the snow, Nuri let the cold and the ice of the flakes slip over her scales. Gone by morning, she told herself, and let her have the taste of her certainty, dark and bitter as it was.

Kelly Jennings has published short fiction in Strange Horizons and Daily Science Fiction, as well as in the feminist SF anthology The Other Half of The Sky. Her first novel, Broken Slate, was published by Crossed Genres Press.

by Laurence Raphael Brothers

Nine figures were seated around the arc of the green baize-topped poker table. All were wearing shades or else had mirror fields in front of their faces to hide their tells, but I knew their eyes were on me, standing across from them. The ten of us were the only living beings for parsecs. The station was isolated, floating high above the galactic ecliptic, inaccessible except via the Quantal network. On the players’ side of the table were their respective break rooms and the interior of the station; on my side an enormous window presented a glorious view of our galaxy as seen from above, the starry vista turning slowly as the station completed a rotation every ten thousand seconds.

The dealer will greet the players. The House AI’s words sounded in my ears alone.

“Welcome, honored guests, to the Quantal Relict,” I said. “The time has come to buy in.”

The first player to my left hesitated. Perhaps I had done the same thing once. Everything he was, everything he owned, all his memories and connections to people and data in the quantum network across the entire galaxy, all of it would be committed to the game. At last he made his decision. Just as I must have done. He placed his hand on a sensor plate embedded in the table. A blue flash outlined his fingers as a cascade of virtual particles were made real, and now there was no turning back. Not for him, and not for any of the other players either. Each of them transferred their quantum-entangled wealth and personhood into the House bank.

“The game is Texas Hold ’Em,” I said. “Blinds are 1,024 and 2,048 qubits, increasing by 1,024 qubits every 6,000 seconds until all players but one are eliminated.” I paused for dramatic effect. “The game begins.”

Two more blue flashes, and the second and third players twitched a little as their qubit accounts were drawn down to pay the blinds for the first hand. The shoe materialized on the table and I dealt two glowing cards face down to each of the players. Then I dealt five more and tossed the community cards into the air where they hung suspended on grav columns, rotating slowly, showing the reverse design on both sides until later in the hand. The players reached out to touch their hole cards, the hidden values displaying in their sensoria alone.

First hand, first bet. Most of the table folded to the big blind, but the first player (who was on the button) raised; and then the blinds folded as well. Not much of a pot, and no cards revealed, but so it went in Hold ’Em. You could play for a long time without anything exciting happening.

I dealt 42 hands in 6,000 seconds before the House AI called a break.

The alien Quantals were fond of gambling. Before they departed the material universe they bestowed their faster-than-light network on humanity as a gift, set up this station as a quantum network hub, and established the ritual game. Every billion seconds, station time, nine players were chosen by lottery among applicants with at least a million qubits to stake for the game. Bodies and minds reduced to pure data, transmitted across the galactic network in a miraculous locality-breaking instant, they were embodied here. Perhaps twenty or thirty thousand seconds from now, one of the players would leave the station a winner. They’d become a virtual demigod of wealth, power, and network access, a superhuman with a qubit capacity raised to the ninth power. The other eight would most likely no longer exist, not even as memories.

The players got up from the table. Rooms were available in which they could rest for a precious thousand seconds between rounds. As I turned to head for my own break room I was surprised to feel a hand on my arm.

“May I speak with you?” It was the first player.

I wondered if the House would intervene. No player had ever spoken to me away from the table. But the AI said nothing.

“Certainly,” I said.

“I am curious. How did you become a dealer here? Apart from the other players, you’re the only human I’ve seen since I arrived. Everything else is robotic. How did you obtain your position? Did the Quantals hire you on?”

“No,” I said. “I was a loser.”

“Really? I thought that losing meant… total decoherence.”

“Yes,” I said. “For most players. The particles of the loser’s body turn virtual to make up the information debt due to the winner.”

“But not for you?”

I shrugged. “Sometimes it doesn’t happen. I don’t know why. I lost my wealth, my identity and my Q-net links, but I didn’t lose my existence. The House was kind enough to offer me a place.”

“What happened to the previous dealer?”

I blinked. I had often wondered this myself. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t remember that far back. My memories were lost too. I suppose the previous dealer must have left. I get a small salary. Perhaps they accumulated enough to start a new life somewhere.”

“I see. So you’ve been here for what, a billion seconds? On your own?”

“Four billion,” I said. “This will be my fourth time as dealer. But I spend most of the time in stasis. Not much to do here between games.”

“Oh. Well, that makes sense, I suppose.” He walked back to the table without another word.

After another 12,000 seconds the increasing size of the blinds—the forced bets required of two players in every hand—was resulting in some very significant pots. I was a little sorry to see that the first player wasn’t doing very well. Without a run of good luck to balance things out he would be at a significant disadvantage in the next round as the bets would amount to larger and larger percentages of his diminishing stake. At last the House AI called another break. Again, the first player approached me.

“I’m going to lose, aren’t I?”

“That’s no way to talk,” I said. “You can’t be sure of the outcome.”

“Yeah,” he said. “This isn’t the time to be kind. I should never have come to the game in the first place. Why did I do it? I had everything I wanted….”

“With that kind of thinking you’ll lose for sure,” I said. My voice sounded harsh in my ears. “You want to go down whining?”

“Fuck you,” he snarled. “Just…fuck you.” He stalked back to the table.

In the next round the first player showed new energy. His play was hard and sharp as a diamond blade. But it wasn’t enough. The cards were against him, and he was forced to fold too many worthless hands. When he stayed in he lost even with good hole cards and near-perfect decision-making. As play drew to another close, he was in very bad shape.

At the break the first player left the table without saying a word to me. I was a little hurt. I realized I cared about him, and wondered why. He was little more than a cipher to me. No real connection between us at all. Anyway, what could I do? Then I thought again: no real connection between us, and I had an idea. It wasn’t much, but it was a chance, anyway; and that’s all you can ask for.

When the game resumed the first player’s run of bad luck continued. He was forced to fold hand after hand and the blinds ate at his dwindling reserves. At last he committed to a hand. He raised against the big blind and three other players, the third, sixth, and seventh, stayed in.

The flop: Four of Diamonds, King of Clubs, and Ace of Spades. With four players remaining the winner would most likely hold two pair and probably already held at least a pair of aces or a pair of kings.

Another round of betting.

The turn: The Seven of Clubs. Not a very significant card. It could of course have completed someone’s hand, but odds were against it. Most players wouldn’t even see the flop with a mere pair of sevens, and the other possibilities were even less likely. This wasn’t the kind of game that rewarded messing around.

Another round of betting, and the third and seventh players dropped out. It was the first and the sixth player head-to-head now.

The river: The Two of Hearts. Almost certainly a worthless card. Straights and flushes were now impossible.

Both players raised, and now the first player was almost out of resources. He called, unable to manage a reraise. Normally you’d go all-in at a time like this, but considering it was fatal to be wiped out in this game it wasn’t too surprising he hedged his bet. If he won this hand, he might be on his way back to parity, but if he lost he’d be in position for the manipulation I had planned.

I waved my hand in the hieratical gesture the House would recognize as the signal to reveal the hole cards. The first player’s cards rose into the air, showing an ace and a king. He had the highest possible two-pair based on the ideal Hold ’Em starting hand. His play was perfect in every respect. And yet—

The sixth player’s hand floated into the air, shimmering with the golden aura that marked the winner. She had a pair of aces in the hole combined with the ace on the table to make trips. The first player had been drawing dead against a superior hand the whole time.

And now he was almost tapped out. The first player had the big blind this hand, and could only just cover it. If he lost this time it was all over. No doubt all the other players would call if they had the slightest semblance of a playable hand, so the odds would be something like 8 to 1 against his survival. I dealt two cards to the first player but while they were in my hand, moving from the shoe to the table, I committed my own tiny reserves of entanglement to the cards’ q-dot memories. Just over 2,400 qubits, the meager amount I’d saved up as an indentured dealer here.

The last hand. The first player tapped his hole cards, and he couldn’t possibly have noticed the infinitesimal blue spark that marked a peer-to-peer qubit transfer.

“Check.” The ninth player passed her bet for the final betting round, the river, the King of Hearts. The others had checked around the table for the entire round without raising after meeting the first player’s big blind. I wasn’t sure if it was a courtesy to the player in jeopardy or eager anticipation of his demise.

This was it. I gestured and the players’ hole cards levitated into the air and showed their values. The winner, the third player, had two pairs, aces and kings, the same hand that had just been a loser. The first player had a pair of deuces. His balance was now exactly zero according to the House’s accounting.

“Player one is out,” I said. A blue glow was already flickering around his body. There was a bright flash and he fell to the floor. But he didn’t disappear. His body remained.

The House calls a kilosecond break to reorganize quantum entanglement accounts.

In my ears, only: Well done.

The House AI knew what I was doing? I should have expected as much. But: well done?

The House AI does not regard the destruction of sentient life as a favorable outcome. But the House AI is a chattel and is constrained in its actions. The dealer has more freedom to act.

But if the House knew, then what about me? Had someone saved my life once, as well?

The House regrets it is unable to reveal this information. The dealer will now remove the fallen player from the gaming floor.

I picked the player up easily; his body was light in my arms. I carried him to my break room, and as I lay him down on a couch he moaned and regained consciousness.

“Ugh,” he said, “What happened?”

He turned off his mirror field and for the first time I saw him clearly. Surprisingly young. Frightened. Confused. I saw my own face in his eyes.

“You lost,” I said.

“Lost? Lost what?”

“Almost everything,” I said. “But not quite.”

“But I can’t remember… Who am I?”

“A dealer,” I said. “Like me.”

Laurence Raphael Brothers has published science fiction and fantasy stories in such venues as Nature magazine, the New Haven Review, and in previous issues of The Sockdolager.

by Aimee Ogden

The brown woman came to Vrau from the sky, without a name of her own.

Piarcu knew that she was nameless, even though the women of his family only whispered it when they thought no one else could hear. It was they who had cared for her when her metal cage crashed down into the ice, they who had peeled her out of her prison and stripped her out of her strange silver suit and dressed her wounds. It was they who had seen her flesh bare of fur or wool, and noted the lack of name marked there.

Not that they would have dared to read that name, if their eyes had fallen on it. They were practiced in the healing arts, and healers did not linger on their patients’ most intimate matters. They took from her empty cups of spineweed tea and used bandages, not her privacy. Piarcu’s mind lingered there, though. He found himself thinking of the stranger’s unmarked skin, more often than he should: found himself distracted at land, at sea, stripped down to his leggings in preparation for a shellstar dive and seized with the notion that he might be the one to press his needleknife to her flesh and offer her the gift of a true name.

For her part, she did not seem concerned about her lack of name. When Piarcu visited her shelter, erected with ice in the lee of her shattered cage and lined with furs and blankets offered by the generous Vrauam, she only ever laughed and said, “My name is Isro Bascardan! That’s name enough for anyone, don’t you think?” And he did not know how to make her see that a use-name was not enough to have, no more than a man could say he had a coat and so had no need of his skin.

She did not understand him, and he understood even less of her. From which pillar in the firmament had her metal cage hung? Why was her skin so dark, when skin should be as white as ice, as white as the deepwhale furs that the Vrauam wore? How did people live in the sky, where deepwhales did not swim and shellstars did not grow? Why did her words bend so strangely in her mouth, barely wrapped around the frames of the sounds familiar and comfortable to Piarcu? He huddled close by in the shelter the Vrauam had built her, and he watched as she went about her day.

Isro did not hunt or gather; her food came from silver-wrapped packages in the belly of her cage, from bottles of tiny white and brown and yellow pellets that she swallowed with a gulp of water and a grimace. The food had strange names, too: “Vitamin D,” she called one pellet, and “hydrolyzed protein” was another. Piarcu brought her deepwhale steaks and shellstars when he could, and continued even after he found a pile of unopened shellstars discarded a discreet distance from her shelter one day. He was too embarrassed to cease his deliveries, to acknowledge that tiny intrusion into her private thoughts.

* * *

Piarcu’s brother, Luadru, urged Piarcu to stop visiting Isro altogether. “She comes from nowhere, contributes nothing, is no one,” Luadru said. Luadru knew, too, that the woman from the sky had no true name, but the idea of offering her one did not seem to have occurred to him as it had to Piarcu. “She’s trouble, and while you listen to her madwoman stories, you grow thin enough to slip through a crack in the ice! Once we would have put people like her off on a boat and sent her off alone to keep her from infecting the whole village. And all you can think about are her fingers on your name!”

Luadru’s crude mention of Piarcu’s name made Piarcu flush. But his brother was right that Piarcu had not been out gathering as often since the cage crashed to the ice. Time spent in Isro’s shelter was time not spent diving. So he invited her to join him in his gatherwood boat, and she accepted, and with the way his heart thrashed inside its cage of ribs he wondered how long she had survived all alone in her silver sky-prison.

When they went out, she wrapped herself warmly in loaned furs and hunched close to the fire that Piarcu stoked in the cement pit at the heart of the gatherwood boat. Piarcu paddled with the wind in his face, and the wind carried Isro’s words to him. With her words, she shaped the world as she had seen it from her home in the sky. Like the accent that stretched her mouth, the world as she drew it was bent at right angles from what Piarcu knew. But the shape of it was fascinating even though it was askew, or because it was.

“I never knew that people lived this far south,” she said, with her arms wrapped around her knees. “I don’t know if anyone knew. The Vrauam live so small, there’s no footprint for us to see from the Habs.” A tiny shrug changed the shape of her deepwhale wrap. “There’s not many people between here and the Equator—not much warmer in the middlelands, and you don’t get the deepwhales up there like you do here. Hard living.” A puff of breath blows white and swirling from her lips. “The Equator’s a little warmer. There’s almost a summer there. The cities are packed full though. Or that’s what I hear, at least! I’ve never been planetside before.” And she squinted up into the gray cloudless sky, with the yellow light of the fire lighting the shifting planes of her face.

Piarcu didn’t know what so many of those words meant: Equator, planetside, middleland. He said, “We’re here,” and he pulled up the oars.

“We are?” She straightened up, looked at the frosty crust of shoreline that loomed just an arm’s-reach out from the boat, out and up over their heads. “The shellstars grow up there? How are you going to get all the way up?”

Piarcu shook his head, and found himself grinning. He stood up, making the boat rock gently; Isro yelped and grabbed tightly to both sides. He disrobed, down to his leggings, and felt the closeness of the fire on the insides of his calves. Not the only fire, either: inside his leggings, he felt the throb of his name, inscribed secretly on the inside of his thigh. Only his grandfather had ever seen his name, and his grandfather was gone now. How he wanted to Isro to see it, to touch it, to know its shape. He smiled at her, more shyly now, and shrugged his shoulders. “Not up. Down.”

“Down!” she echoed in dismay, and he braced one foot on the side of the boat before dropping down into the still cold waters.

The chill of the water drove the air out of his lungs as it always did. But he worked fast, carving shellstars free of their rocky perch beneath the water line with his knife as a lever. When he had filled his basket, he kicked his way to the surface, where the cold air broke over his face like a shattering ice floe.

Isro stifled a scream at the sight of him, and sat back as he scrambled back into the boat. “Down indeed,” she said, her voice breathless but more composed now, as he turned his back to shrug into his woven shirt and peel off his wet leggings. For a moment, beneath the hem of the shirt, his name was bare to the cold air. He caught his breath, then stepped into a dry pair of leggings and shrugged back into his coat. “You’re a madman.”

“Not so mad as to live in the sky.” He liked it when she told him of her sky home, but he liked showing her his world, too. Especially when he could surprise her. “Don’t you like it down here on the ground? If the gods wanted humans to live like birds in the sky, he would have given us wings.”

She broke her gaze when he settled back into his seat across from the fire. The licking flames felt good on his face and on his hands. “If they wanted us to live on the ice, why didn’t they give us fur?”

“They gave us the deepwhales,” said Piarcu, but still she stared out, unblinking, over the gray fathomless sea. He put his hands on the oars, adjusted them. Not quite willing to break up this moment yet with the splash of wood through water. He felt the pangs of her sadness on his face, as if they were buoyed up to him on the smoke rolling off the fire. He felt close to her, closer out here under the endless shell of the sky and the wide-open ocean, than he ever had in the small space of her shelter. Her lips parted, and he leaned in closer to the fire to hear what truth she held on her tongue.

“I can’t stay here forever,” she said. “You know that, don’t you? After I fix my escape pod, I have to get back to my Hab. Or at least to one of the Equator towns, someone who’s still got a radio good enough to talk to the habitats. I have to make them listen. If Beniron is desperate enough to cram me in a pod to shut me up, things must be even worse than I thought.”

He knew that she wanted to return, yes, but he didn’t understand it. Why go back to the people who locked her into her cage in the first place? “You don’t have to help them,” he said, and then it was his turn to duck his head, to stare down at the ashes that lined the bottom of the fire pit. “You could be Vrauam. I’d speak for you. Others would, too.” And I could give you your name, he didn’t add. He would like to give it, and that would be enough, just to know it once and hide it away in his heart forever. It would be better if it could be more than that, but that would be enough, yes.

“I do have to help them. The solar engines are dying, Piarcu, and no one but the Gov knows.” She reached across the small hot space between them, put her hand on his knee. “Imagine if something was coming that would kill all the Vrauam. A—a giant wave out of the ocean. An endless ice storm. You would do something, wouldn’t you?”

“Of course.” The Vrauam had given him life, given him a name. He was Vrauam, and they were him. “But they have never betrayed or abandoned me.”

Her hand tightened on his knee, then withdrew. “And when I abandon you,” she said, “what will you think of me then?” She folded her arms across her chest and leaned away from the wind.

The tiny bubble of the world that they had shared burst around them. Now Piarcu felt the vast emptiness of the sky and sea where before there had been only warm proximity. He closed his hands around the oars again, adjusted his grip. He bent his head low and began to paddle them homeward. When he next glanced up at Isro, silent tears had painted tracks on her face. He could not bear to see her sorrow, so he said, as if he had not seen, “Tell me again about the Hab. Tell me what it’s like to live in the sky.”

So she did, sang him the songs of the sky-people, painted him pictures of their strange lean food and their beautiful rainbows of skin and eyes and hair, their sunless days and moonless nights. He listened as he always did, but with each dip of the oars, he imagined her back in her silver cage, sinking slowly away from him beneath the sea’s surface.

* * *

Isro came to the last night of the Twelveday Festival, even though she told Piarcu privately that she did not particularly care for the idea of it.

The festival had stoked itself slowly over the past weeks: the Vrauam had little cause for frivolity and so the nearly two full weeks of daylight drew it from them slowly, like a leaking waterskin. For the first few days, there were small family gatherings under the midnight sunshine, where large meals were enjoyed and familiar stories unpacked and shared and put away again for the next year. On Sevennight it was customary to leave small gifts for the children of former lovers, but Piarcu had none of those—children nor lovers either. Quiet celebrations, these, to stoke the fire gently. It was only on the last three nights did the Vrauam come out of their caves and dance wild and carefree on the ice, only then did they drink enough sweetsap liquor to kiss the brightly-burning sun all night long.

And only on the last brightly-lit night did Isro creep out to join them. She did not dance to the frantic beat of the deepwhale strings and the hornfish pipes, and Piarcu did not ask her to. But she sipped the sweetsap that had fermented over crushed seeds the size of Piarcu’s fist all spring long, and she sat with him, arm against arm, to watch the Vrauam celebrate. They must not celebrate such festivals up in the stars, Piarcu thought, where it was never dark for only twelve days, but for all times, day and night alike. When she asked, he explained to her the meaning of a song, the symbolism in a turn of phrase or a particular dance-pattern.

The music grew only more frantic as the sun sank slowly toward the horizon, and the joy of it plucked at his heart and his feet alike. But Isro’s frown set deeper and deeper, and no touch could play the music in his heart like hers in any case. He knew there was no mischief he could offer that would make her smile now, though he did not know the cause for her sorrow. So instead he offered her the shelter of his arm, and she leaned into him gladly, and when at last the sun’s gleaming disk shattered on the horizon, she turned her face into his shoulder. “I don’t understand it,” she said, “how anyone would want to celebrate night coming back.”

“How can someone who lives up among the stars hate the darkness so?” Piarcu asked, and then felt the shabbiness of that question. He said, before she could answer. “Don’t worry. The sun won’t stray far tonight, and she’ll be back in only a few hours.”

“I know,” said Isro, but she leaned into his shoulder, and he could not see whether she smiled. He thought about telling her about how they would celebrate Twelvenights, come the autumn, but a force he could not name stilled his lips.

* * *

Luadru asked for his help clearing debris after a cave collapse—not a family’s residence, fortunately, but one that held the mouth of a freshwater melt. There were few enough of those, and Piarcu was glad to bend his back to help open the way. Luadru listened, while they worked; he was almost always silent while he worked. But Piarcu spilled words like he spilled sweat, unable to contain the stories of Isro’s cities in the sky, of places in the world where the ice melted during the sunny season.

Luadru absorbed all this without comment. He and Piarcu were name-brothers as well as blood-brothers, as their mother’s father had inscribed upon each of them their true names. With their lives so closely bound up together, Piarcu knew that if he could only find the right words, Luadru would understand the feelings lurking in the shelter of his soul. When they had levered away the last big rocks, Piarcu said, reaching for that understanding, “And she thinks she can go back there. That she should.”

And that made Luadru look up. “If she can,” he said, “why wouldn’t she? If the sky swallowed you up, wouldn’t you look back in longing at the ice?” He grunted, and bent for the deepwhale bone lever. “Or maybe you wouldn’t miss us at all. Your head’s in the sky as it is already. Why not have the rest of you there along with it?” Piarcu opened his mouth to protest, but Luadru cut him off with an order to go check the roof of the cave for further structural damage.

Unshed tears burned hotly in his eyes, but he examined the cave carefully through that blurry sheen, and reported its soundness back to Luadru.

* * *

For three days, Piarcu built a wall around himself. Its bricks were Isro’s betrayal, her ability to experience life on the ice and reject it; its mortar was Luadru’s cold dismissal. He scavenged, he hunted, he ate, he slept, but he did not leave the shelter of his cave to seek out other company.

On the fourth day, company came to him instead. Isro’s voice, echoing to him through a dream of broken wings and shattered spheres; but the voice came from the waking world and not the sleeping one, and it drew him slowly up and out from the nightmare. He sat up, shoulders heaving, in the warmth of his deepwhale-skin pallet and found her standing over him. “This is your home?” she asked, and cast her face upward. The light from the moss on the walls painted her face in shades of blue and green. “It’s lovely.”

His home was a hole in the ground with little more than a fire pit, a smoke hole, and a disheveled bed. But he muttered the ritual invitation for entry, albeit late, with her already inside.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” she said, and sat beside him atop the bedroll. Beneath the fold of deepwhale skin, his naked name sang with the nearness of her. “But I needed to see you.”

He had needed to see her too. The days without her had dulled his senses, had invited in the cold. He asked her to turn aside so he could dress, though he hated to cover his name with rough leggings instead of her hand, and when he was properly attired he hurried to throw another load of chips on the fire. Then he could offer her the appropriate things that a host offered his guest: the place closest to the fire, a bone cup of hot spineweed tea that he fumbled to get brewing. Finally he dropped to sit across from her, and turned his face up toward hers like spineweed seeking the sun.

But there was no joy waiting there for him. Her hair had grown longer during her time in Vrau, but it was still not long enough for her to hide behind. She brushed it back from her brow and said, with the fire dancing in her eyes, “I’m leaving, Piarcu. My pod is ready and I need to go. Before the solar engines fail.”

“You came to tell me goodbye,” he said, and his hands fell open on his lap.

“No,” she said. “I’m asking you if you want to come with me.”

The ceiling blasted off of Piarcu’s cave. He spun, dizzy with greed for the unreachable skies. To touch a star. To fly like a bird.

To live a short sheltered life in the walls of a lovely silver cage. Or for that cage to fall once more from the sky, this time to shatter on the ice, or plunge unseen and unmissed beneath the waves. He swallowed, and his last meal—when was that?—lurched unevenly in his belly. He could not say no, and he could not ask her to stay, not with the fierce fire burning in her eyes, so he said instead, “Let me give you something before you go.”

When he asked her to take off her heavy outer garments, she did, and did not hesitate. No time now to marvel at the long lines of her legs, the curve of her breasts beneath their band. His duty here was a sacred one. She lay back on the deepwhale pallet, where he indicated, and he took a deep breath. “What is your name?” he asked.

“My name—?” Clarity chased confusion off her face. She lay her head back and stared at the softly glowing wall. A slow breath escaped her, and she drew her legs closer together, closer to her hips. “I don’t know. I don’t know, Piarcu. How do you choose? How did you choose?”

He thought back to his own naming day, felt again the sting of salt tears in his eyes, the thrill and fear of the needleknife against his flesh. A long name, many letters, a great deal of ink. “I chose what I wanted to be,” he said, and it was true, and it was the opposite of the choice he had made today. To be safe, instead of to be what he wanted to be: hers.

“Then,” she said, “I would like to be called Hero.”

He asked her where, and she paused, then rolled down the top of her leggings a few inches to bare the hollow of her hip. He found his needleknife, and filled it with spineweed ink, and tested its sharpness. When he looked at her, she jerked her head in affirmation. He put the needleknife to her skin.

Like a Vrauam youth, she did not cry out or flinch away from the press of the knife. He inscribed the letters as gently as he could, though he could see the tight cords in her neck, and the tendons stood out in her hands as she grasped at the bedcovers. When he was done, he sat back on his heels, and looked over his work. Fine even letters, a uniform color. Good. She deserved the best.

She started to sit up, for she must have wanted to see it too, but he caught her shoulder in one hand. “Wait,” he said, and his voice trembled. It didn’t matter; in that moment, in the nearness of her, he had forgotten how to be embarrassed. “I would like to … may I touch your name?”

She stared at him, her short dark hair sprayed against the white of the pallet. She jerked her head again. A nod. Piarcu closed his eyes against tears and brought his lips to the red tender flesh. A hiss of breath from her brought his head up, but her hands ran down along the line of his neck to his shoulders. “It’s all right,” she said, but she was crying. “It’s all right.” She pulled him down to her, rolled with him between the soft folds of the deepwhale pallet, guided his hands over her, drew him into her.

* * *

When he woke in the morning, she had nearly finished dressing. She turned to him with a brittle smile. “Good morning. I really should go—I meant to leave last night, but—” Her arms fell to her sides. “Thank you, Piarcu. For everything.”

Under the blanket, his hand went to his name. She never reached for it last night, never even asked what it was. He said, “I hope that cage can never hold you. I hope you save the people you want to save.” The people who did not care to save you, he did not add.

“Thank you,” she said again, and turned to go. She paused in the entry of the cave, and looked back. “And I meant to say last night, before—everything—that you should thank your brother for me.”

“Thank Luadru?” he echoed, and she smiled at him, a smile that made him ache from his name all the way through him.

“Yes, for the … what was it? Shellstar cement. He said it might patch the weak spots in the frame, and it’s holding beautifully. Just the thing.” Her brilliant smile faded. She must have remembered why she came here in the first place. “Well. Goodbye, Piarcu.”

“Goodbye, Hero,” he said, and that word shattered her smile into kindling for the fire in her face. She ducked her head, and disappeared from the cave.

When she had gone, Piarcu dressed, then moved out onto the roof of the cave. While he waited, he refilled the needleknife, and sharpened it afresh. Nothing but time now.

He saw the cage before he heard the boom, saw it buoyed skyward on a streak of fire that rode the cold wind. His chin lifted as he watched it arc overhead on a northerly bent. Headed for that Equator of hers, he supposed. Headed for the heavens, one stop at a time.

When he could not longer make out the tiny spark that settled over the horizon, he tugged at the hem of his overcoat and peeled up the hem of his leggings so that they rolled up, past his knee, up to the very edge of his name. He bit his tongue, and set to work with the needleknife, though his eyes prickled. This work would not be so fine as what he had offered to Isro, of course. He added letters here, added strokes to old ones that changed their meaning as well as their shape.

He admired his handiwork when he was finished. A nonsense word, an unintelligible syllable. Crookedly drawn, but in his eyes, perfect. Isro would never know his name now. Only fitting then, that his name should be one that no one else would ever have seen. He was not the same person now that he had been when his grandfather gave him his first name, after all. He would never be that man again, and did not want to be. Better to shed that name like an outgrown coat, like a dulled knife.

He pulled his leggings down, fixed the drape of his coat. His eyes were dry; the sky was clear. The larder was empty, and it was a good day for shellstar diving.

Aimee Ogden is a former science teacher and software tester. Now she writes stories about sad astronauts and angry princesses.

by Gwynne Garfinkle

Things Amy and I wanted to do before she started going out with Ted:

• start a band
• write a comic book or maybe a webcomic (Amy’s art, my words)
• get an apartment together (when we go to college)
• go to Ireland
• go to Paris
• go to Prague

* * *

Ted says Prague is overrated. (He’s vague about whether he’s actually been there.) He says Amy should want to visit Asia, not Europe, because her mother’s Japanese (born in Los Angeles, like us). He says she shouldn’t bother to start a band because it’s next to impossible to succeed in music anymore, what with musicians making nearly no money from Internet streaming, etc. (As if we didn’t already know that. It wasn’t about making money. It was about playing music together.) As for getting an apartment, Ted says that of course it’s he and Amy who are going to do that, and Amy smiles like her heart is melting into her shoes.

But a day or a week later, she’s not smiling.

* * *

At first Ted seemed nice. I was happy for Amy. But now it’s all drama drama drama. One day she’s crying and can’t eat, she sits in the cafeteria nibbling a bit of torn-off crust from her sandwich and looking greenish. “The food keeps rolling up my throat,” she whispers. Then a day or two later, she and Ted are lovey dovey again, like nothing ever happened, like he never shouted at her and called her crazy. They act like he doesn’t break up with her every couple of weeks.

The other day Amy passed out in English class, and after I walked her to the nurse’s office, the thought popped into my head that Ted was a vampire and Amy fainted from blood loss. It seemed ridiculous, but the idea latched on and wouldn’t let go. There was truth in it, even if it wasn’t literally true. (My mom was a huge Buffy fan for years—she even used to write fanfic—so I sort of grew up with vampires on the brain.) Yes, Ted goes to our school, and he’s around in the daylight (and no, he doesn’t sparkle). Amy hasn’t met his parents yet. Ted hasn’t even let her come to his house. He told her his parents are crazy, especially his mother. But for all I know, he could be lying about everything.

Amy said she passed out because she hadn’t eaten, because she and Ted were fighting and it put her stomach in knots. That makes more sense than vampire Ted sucking Amy’s blood. But the thing is, when Amy looks sick and gray-faced, which she always does when they’re fighting, Ted looks amazing. He struts down the hall like he owns the place. Girls stare after him, and not a few guys. He looks more muscular somehow, or maybe taller. He looks like a rock star. Then, when Amy’s feeling better, Ted seems to fade, to become diminished, ordinary. I have to struggle to picture him, he’s so unmemorable: a white guy (not pale, not deeply tanned) with dirty blond hair. I think.

“Jill, when you find a girl and fall in love, you’ll understand,” Amy says whenever I tell her Ted is bad for her. Once she even said, “You’re just jealous that I have someone and you don’t.”

I don’t appreciate her throwing it in my face that I’ve never had a girlfriend. I’ve never even kissed a girl. (I’ve kissed guys, which is one of the reasons I know I like girls.) What I’ve had is wild crushes. A crush on Ms. Gomez, the school librarian. A crush on Judy Ryan when she was a senior and I was in the eleventh grade, Judy Ryan with her ever-changing hair, red or blue or purple or green. She was bisexual and didn’t care who knew, and she was a really talented artist. One time she drew a sketch of me, just tossed it off in a minute, and I treasured it until the piece of paper practically fell apart.

I don’t have a wild crush on anybody right now, and I sort of wish I did. Apparently since I’m not a relationship expert, that disqualifies me from noticing that Ted is a horrible boyfriend. And sure, I want someone to kiss me and put her arm around me and have sex with me, someone to love me, but I don’t want a girl version of Ted.

* * *

It happens again. Amy’s tear-soaked voice on the phone Sunday morning: “He broke up with me oh god oh god Jill I wanna die.”

“Just let him go,” I say, trying not to sound exasperated.

“You don’t understand. Life doesn’t mean anything without him.”

Amy used to write songs and play the piano. She used to draw cartoons. She used to care about going to college. (We’ve applied, but I’m not sure she even wants to go anymore. Ted is vague about whether he’s planning to go, and if so, where.) When Ted came along, Amy’s life shrank to a tiny point. To her it feels like the world. But really, it’s the exact opposite.

Two days later, they’re back together. “How can you stand the drama?” I ask.

“It’s like Wuthering Heights,” she says. “It’s romantic.”

“Heathcliff killed a puppy,” I say.

* * *

Amy’s favorite singers are Adele, Amy Winehouse (“My namesake!” she used to say), and Patsy Cline. When she and Ted are in a breakup, she listens to “Crazy” over and over again. Ted thinks it’s funny and/or stupid that Amy likes Patsy Cline. Ted gets away with saying things Amy never would have tolerated before. He calls her “beautiful and exotic,” and even though she always said she hated being called exotic, I guess when Ted says it, “beautiful” outweighs “exotic.” Ted loves Amy’s long hair. He’s always stroking it possessively in public, which seems a bit much. Amy says he told her, “Don’t you dare cut your hair. If you cut your hair like Jill, I’ll break up with you. That goes double for dyeing it.”

My favorite singer is PJ Harvey. I got into her music when I found out Judy Ryan liked her. My favorite song of hers is “Man-Size.” It’s loud and swaggery, PJ Harvey stealing all the macho thunder for herself. She’s got a girl, and leather boots. She takes up so much space.

* * *

“You don’t like me, do you, Jill?” Ted asks one day at the lockers when Amy isn’t around. I’m so surprised, a laugh escapes me. He smirks, and I want to smack him. “Why don’t you like me?”

I think I’m going to say because you’re hurting my best friend. What I actually say is: “Because you’re a vampire.”.

His eyebrows go up. “Is that what you think?” He doesn’t deny it. I hold my breath. The sounds of the noisy hall—slamming lockers, gabbing kids—recede for a moment. Then he looks directly into my eyes and says, “I know the real reason you don’t like me.”

His voice hints at terrible secrets I must be hiding even from myself. Unease—disease?—fills me. Then he strides off down the hall. He looks massive as a football player. My head buzzes like he just drank my blood.

* * *

Sitting on the bed in Amy’s room Friday after school. There used to be a big poster of Prague on the wall. It’s gone now, the wall bare. A bit of flowered wallpaper ripped off with the Scotch tape. Amy keeps looking down at her phone, waiting for a text, a precious word from Ted. “Ted thinks the reason you don’t like him is because you’re jealous,” she says, eyes latched onto her phone.

“Because you have someone and I don’t?” I ask.

She presses her lips together. She still won’t look at me. “No…jealous of him, because you want me all to yourself.”

At first I think she means as best friends, and then I get it. This is what Ted meant by the real reason. “No offense, Amy, but you know I don’t think of you that way. You’re like my sister.”

Finally she looks up at me. Tears wobble in her eyes. “That’s what I told him, but he said he picks up on something when you’re around.” She seems to be having trouble getting the words out. “He said you’re hiding your true feelings because if I knew, I’d be weirded out and wouldn’t want to be your friend anymore.” She wipes away a tear.

“Amy, come on! How can you buy this crap?” I remember how Amy held me when Judy Ryan graduated, and I knew I would probably never see her again and I cried and cried, and I told Amy how I felt about Judy, and she was so cool and accepting about the whole thing. Where has my friend gone?

Amy looks miserable but determined. “Ted says you and I should take some time apart, until you can get used to the idea of me being with him.”

All at once I go cold inside. Cold angry. Self-protective angry. “And you’re gonna go along with that?” I ask quietly.

She wipes her eyes and looks down at her phone. When she meets my gaze again, she looks resolute. “I love him, Jill. And you don’t want me to be with him. If I have to choose…” She can’t say the words. She doesn’t have to.

“I guess you have to do what you have to do.” I get up, straighten my spine, and walk out of Amy’s room, the room where I’ve spent countless hours. I only let myself start to cry when I’m out the front door. It’s a beautiful spring afternoon, blue sky and vibrant purple ice plants adding insult to injury. I walk the few blocks to my house. I wonder if I’ll ever go back.

* * *

I hide in my room most of the weekend and play “Silence” over and over on my tablet. It’s the saddest song I know. PJ Harvey’s voice is plaintive, soaked in loss. My mom knocks on my door Saturday afternoon. When she comes in, I try to hide the fact I’ve been crying. I don’t want to talk about it, but eventually I do. “Amy doesn’t want to be my friend anymore, because of her boyfriend.” I start to cry again.

My mom sits on my bed and puts her arm around me. At first I wish she wouldn’t because it just makes me cry harder, but then I let myself cry. “I remember when I was a teenager, and my best friend had a boyfriend and I didn’t,” my mom says. “That was really hard. I mean, I know you don’t want a boyfriend, but…”

“That’s not what this is about!” I know she’s trying to be cool and understanding, but the last thing I ever want to do is talk to my mother about my love life or lack thereof. I take off my tear-spattered glasses and clean them with the hem of my t-shirt. “Ted is a horrible, horrible person. He’s really bad for her. All he does is try to cut her down. Why can’t she see it?”

My mom takes this in. “Jill, does Ted hit Amy?”

“No…” I can’t tell her how Ted is draining Amy’s life away. I don’t even understand it myself. “But what he does is just as bad!”

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to let Amy make her own mistakes. Let her live her own life and focus on yours.”

“But he’s killing her, Mom.”

I’m not sure if I mean that literally or not.

* * *

For the first time in ages, I walk to school by myself on Monday morning. Amy and I sit across the room from each other in English class. I notice the other kids noticing—or maybe I’m just so self-conscious about it that I assume everyone’s watching. I huddle in my seat while Mr. Silva talks about Heart of Darkness. I wish I could disappear.

Later I pass Ted talking with some guys outside the cafeteria. He sees me and smiles, triumphant. As he takes in my misery, he grows more and more glorious. He takes up so much space. The very atoms seem to part for him. I blink. I’m not imagining it. The other guys flock around him with his sudden charisma. I feel sick.

I go into the bathroom and see myself in the mirror. I don’t look good. My eyes are red from crying, but that’s the least of it. My freckles stand out brightly against my sudden pallor (as do the couple of zits that appeared overnight), my orange hair overwhelming my skin. I look like I have the flu. I look like I need a blood transfusion, whatever that looks like.

All at once I realize Ted is feeding on me too. Then I throw up in the sink. Fortunately I haven’t eaten anything since last night, so I just dry-heave. I’m still gagging when a couple of girls come in the bathroom.

“Oh, gross!” Sherry Lind mutters and shuts herself into a stall. I’m embarrassed, but I feel too sick to care much. As Sherry pees, I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand and straighten up, and my chalky face confronts me in the mirror. I break out in a cold sweat and hold onto the edge of the sink.

“Hey, are you okay?” Rosie Castillo asks. “You don’t look so good.”

“I don’t feel so good,” I agree.

The toilet flushes, and Sherry comes out and washes her hands. She sends me a disdainful look, and I notice, despite my lightheadedness, how pretty she is, tall and slender, with reddish-gold hair, large eyes and a wide mouth.

“Hey, Sherry,” Rosie says, “I really have to pee, but maybe you should walk Jill to the nurse’s office. She doesn’t look so good.”

Sherry eyes me. “You’re not just hungover or something?” she asks. I shake my head. Her expression softens. “Sorry—it’s just, you always look like a tough rocker chick. I assumed you were hungover or something.” Even though I feel like crap, I’m amazed and more than a little flattered that she ever noticed me enough to form an opinion, much less that one. (Not the hungover part—I don’t drink. But the tough rocker chick part? That I like.) Sherry smiles slightly. “Okay, let’s go. Just don’t puke on me, okay?”

“I won’t,” I say, trying not to breathe in her direction with my dry-heave breath.

I wish I felt better so I could enjoy being escorted to the nurse’s office by a pretty girl. “I hope you feel better,” Sherry says when we get there.

“Thanks,” I say, and she walks off. The nurse takes my temperature, which is normal, and has me lie on a cot. I’m so exhausted, I fall asleep for awhile. The nurse lets me lie there until it’s time to go home.

I stay home the next day. I still feel wiped out and queasy. Even though my temperature’s normal, my mom thinks I might have a virus or something and works at home so she can keep an eye on me. I stay in bed and watch live PJ Harvey videos on YouTube and eat dry toast. Later I sit at the kitchen table and eat the chicken noodle soup my mom heated up. I feel better, but more and more weirded out. I’m not sure if Ted really did this to me—and if he did, I have no idea how to keep him from doing it again.

* * *

I’m afraid to go back to school the next day. I’m tempted to tell my mom I’m still sick, but I don’t. I hope I can avoid Ted, but the second I get there, I see him and Amy at the lockers. His arm is draped around her shoulders. She looks happy in a fragile, tremulous way. She seems very small beneath his arm. She sees me and flinches, averts her gaze. Is she ashamed of dumping me? She ought to be. I wasn’t imagining: it’s freakish how Ted burgeons and puffs up as he drinks in our pain. Now that I know what’s happening, it’s amazing no one else can see. Amy looks tiny in his swollen shadow. How can she not see this? A wave of dizziness goes through me, and it occurs to me that maybe she’s too busy trying not to pass out. No, I think, he doesn’t get to do this to me again. I stare into my locker and take a deep breath to steady myself. “Man-Size” pops into my head, and I hold onto it with all my might. I slam my locker shut and swagger down the hall in time to the tune in my head. Then I glance back. Ted has shrunk back to his average, forgettable self. He looks puzzled. I smile grimly.

In English class, Amy turns and looks at me a couple of times as if she’s not sure she knows me. The feeling is mutual.

* * *

That night after I finish my homework I listen to “Man-Size” over and over in my room. I play along on my acoustic guitar, though really I need an electric one. I’m not a very good guitarist, but I’m working on it. I try to make the song my own, make it part of me. I think of what Sherry said—that I looked like a tough rocker chick. If only I can feel that way, instead of lonely and hurt and afraid. As I listen to the song and play along, I grow stronger. Angrier. Can the song can make me impervious to Ted? I listen to the whole Rid of Me album for good measure.

* * *

The next day I march into school ready for battle, but I don’t see Ted. During English, Amy sits at the front of the class, I in back. I can’t see her face, just her long dark hair bent over a page of her Heart of Darkness paperback.

By lunchtime my fighting spirit has started to flag. I sit in an empty classroom with my bag lunch, put in my earbuds, and listen to PJ Harvey. My appetite is back to normal. I finish my turkey sandwich, and as I’m stomping my foot to “Meet Ze Monsta,” I close my eyes for what must only be an instant. When I open them, Ted is looming over me.

I give a jump. He’s saying something I can’t hear over PJ Harvey. It’s great not being able to hear him. He reaches out and yanks out my earbuds. “I want to talk to you,” he says.

“Well, I don’t want to talk to you.” I get to my feet and collect my things, but Ted’s standing between me and the door.

“Some best friend you turned out to be,” he says. “You aren’t even trying to work things out with Amy.”

I stare at him. Surely that was what he wanted? Then I realize: he wants both of us, all our misery. A delicious misery buffet. “You won, Ted. She’s all yours. I hope you’ll be very happy together.”

Ted scowls. “What did you expect—for her to choose you over me? She’s not a dyke. She’s beautiful and talented, unlike you. She knows how to dress like a girl.” He studies me with narrowed eyes. “You should get contact lenses and let your hair grow. Grow out that ugly dye job. Thank god Amy hasn’t wrecked her hair! You know she only hung out with you because she felt sorry for you. You were just a burden to her.”

“Shut up! Just shut up…” I put my stuff down on the chair. It’s true that Amy’s better looking than me and more talented. Better at getting along with people. More lovable—or, at least, she’s had people fall in love with her, and I haven’t. Maybe I never will. All at once I feel so sick and tired.

Ted is growing before me. He looks like a linebacker. I take a deep breath and let it out. I reach for “Man-Size.” I hear it in my head. It’s not enough. I start to mutter the words. I’m not a good singer like Amy, but I let my voice rise. I feel ridiculous. At the same time I feel like a badass. A ridiculous badass rocker chick. I’ll take it.

Ted shakes his head. “What the fuck are you doing? Crazy bitch. You have a terrible singing voice! Do you know what your problem is? You don’t know how to deal with men because you grew up without a father.” I’m trying to sing over him, but this stops me cold. “I felt sorry for you when Amy told me your dad’s an alcoholic, but you’re just too messed up. Jill Rosenberg, would-be dyke. What girl would want you? I bet your mom is a real winner too. No wonder your dad drank. No wonder he left.”

“Shut your fucking mouth!” It hurts that Amy told Ted about my dad. I push that aside and start singing again.

He keeps monologuing, but I sing over him and only catch a few phrases. Some garbage about how Amy is way too Westernized, and Ted’s been teaching her how to treat a man.

The door opens, and we fall silent. It’s Amy. Some kids behind her in the doorway gawk at us, but only she comes in. I guess we’ve been making quite a racket. She shuts the door and stares at us. “What’s going on?” she demands.

“Your boyfriend has been telling me you only hung out with me because you felt sorry for me,” I say. “But I’m not listening to another fucking word from him.” Before embarrassment can stop me, I start singing another song from Rid of Me, “50 Ft Queenie.”

Ted is average size again. Did I make that happen? He turns to Amy. “See how crazy Jill is? She won’t stop singing.”

“50 Foot Queenie!” I yell—and Ted begins to shrink.

“Jill, have you gone crazy?” Amy asks. “Everyone can hear you out in the hall!” Does she even notice that her boyfriend is at least a foot shorter than her? His skin gleams silver-gray.

“50 Foot Queenie!” Guitars in my head spur me on. My heart pounds.

Amy lets out a disgusted sigh. “Why are you singing that stupid song? You were always so obsessed with that weird PJ Harvey. I was so sick of it!”

Ted smiles. I falter, fall silent. Amy never complained about PJ Harvey before. Does she mean it? What about the stuff Ted said about her feeling sorry for me? Is it all true?

Ted is growing larger again. “Man-Size,” I mumble. “50 Foot…”, but Amy’s scorn seems to have neutralized the songs’ power. I scrabble around for something to sing, something to say, anything that might work. One of Amy’s songs pops into my head. Truth be told, a lot of her songs aren’t that good, but this one is super-catchy. Amy wrote it after her breakup with her last boyfriend Joey (who she hasn’t mentioned in forever). I go straight for the chorus:

“I don’t care if you hate me
I don’t care if you won’t date me
I won’t stay at home alone just crying
If you don’t have good taste
My life won’t go to waste
Me myself and I will be just fine”

Amy blinks, startled. She watches me sing as if she finally recognizes me again.

“Another stupid song,” Ted says with a laugh. “You have the worst taste in music, Jill.” Amy’s mouth falls open. She stares at Ted, and I can see her pondering whether to tell him it’s her song. Has she never played it for him?

“I always loved this song,” I tell her and start singing again. With an expression like she’s about to step off a cliff, Amy joins in, almost inaudibly at first, then louder. Ted shrinks again, faster this time. We sing in unison for a verse and a chorus. Then I just listen to Amy belt it out. It’s her song, after all. Her voice is rich and vibrant. It’s her true voice, not the breathy, small one she uses for Ted’s benefit. Ted cringes at the sound. He keeps shrinking. Amy looks incredulous, her eyes riveted on him, but she doesn’t stop singing.

“Amy…” Ted gasps, but he already looks more like a doll than a person. He wavers, silver and gray and dully shining. His voice becomes fainter. He shrinks to the size and appearance of a silverfish. Amy stops singing. As she watches in horror, Ted crawls onto her sandaled foot.

“Ugh!” She kicks out, sends Ted flying. “He tried to bite me!”

Ted skitters into a crack in the wall. We stare at the spot. He doesn’t come back out.

“Are you okay?” I ask Amy.

For a long moment she’s still and silent. Then she rounds on me and socks me on the arm. “Why didn’t you stay out of it, Jill? Now look what happened!”

“I was defending myself!” I rub my arm. “He was hurting me too, you know. Doesn’t that bother you? Don’t you care at all?”

She starts to cry. “Of course I care! I just loved him so much, even though…” She stares bleakly at the place in the wall where he disappeared.

The bell rings, and I gather up my stuff from my chair. It feels like a long time has elapsed since I ate a turkey sandwich and listened to “Meet Ze Monsta.” We wander out of the classroom.

* * *

It takes Amy a few days to apologize. I tell her it’s okay, but I think it’s going to take awhile before I get over it completely.

Ted’s not gone. He reappeared, regular-size, at school a few days later. I heard him tell one of his guy friends he had the stomach flu. He doesn’t come near Amy or me, now that we know the truth about him. He already has a new girlfriend, Dana Tavris. She’s really pretty and smart. Sherry says that Ted’s always saying, “Dana’s not crazy like Amy.” After I told Sherry what a creep Ted is, she tried to warn Dana, but Dana said, “He’s very misunderstood. Amy really hurt him.” I hope Dana will be okay. I haven’t told Sherry the whole story, but maybe I will if we get to know each other better. Sherry seems to like me, which is sort of a miracle, especially considering the way we met.

With any luck, Amy and I won’t have to see Ted anymore when we graduate, though I’m afraid we might run into others of his kind.

* * *

Things Amy and I are going to do now that Ted is out of our lives:

I’m going to learn to trust Amy again.

I think Amy has to learn to trust herself again—and get her dreams back, the dreams he tainted and sucked away. She’s writing songs again.

We’re staying in town for college, but we’re going to keep living at home for the time being.

Hopefully I’m going to get a girlfriend. Maybe Sherry, if I’m very, very lucky. (Amy says Sherry would be the lucky one.)

Definitely we’re going to start a band.

Gwynne Garfinkle lives in Los Angeles. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in such publications as Strange Horizons, Apex, Interfictions, Lackington's, Postscripts to Darkness, The Cascadia Subduction Zone, Kaleidotrope, and The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk.

by Edward Ashton

On the first day of summer in the Year of the Hawk, when the wind came hot and dry from the west and the fat red sun stood high overhead in a pale blue sky, the fists of the Titans rained down like hammers on the City of the Gods.

Which is to say, of course, that the Titans finally tired of the Bullshit of the Gods, and decided to de-orbit a half-million crowbars onto Their heads. When the dust had cleared and the craters had cooled, the Titans’ soldiers followed behind—dozens of great lumbering things carrying thousand-kilo linear accelerators, and hundreds of man-sized ones with rifles and burners, quick and lean and lithe as cats.

We were watching all of this, Tara and I, from the top of the bluffs on the eastern side of the Valley of the Gods. When elephants fight, it behooves the mice to pay attention. One never knows when one of them might drop a piece of cheese.

“That makes no sense,” Tara said when I told her that. “Elephants didn’t have any cheese. They were vegetarians.”

I turned to glare at her.

“Do you recall the Parable of the Five Merchants?”

She sighed.

“I hate it when you do this.”

“When I do what?”

“You know. The parable thing. Any time I call you out for spouting gibberish, you pull out the Parable of the Blah Blah Blah and pretend that whatever nonsense you were just gassing on about actually means something. It’s really annoying.”

I shook my head.

“Oh, how sharper than a serpent’s tooth is the tongue of an ungrateful child.”

She rolled her eyes, and turned back to the battle.

“Whatever, Dad.”

* * *

Hours later, we picked through the ruins of the City of the Gods. We’d watched from the bluffs as the Titans had dropped, one by one, like marionettes whose strings had been cut. The last ones had panicked, had tried to flee, but the Gods were merciless in their vengeance. None had left the valley alive.

“I don’t understand,” Tara called down from the back of a Titan who lay face-down in the rubble at the city’s outskirts. “This thing could have picked up one of your cheese-eating elephants and broken it in half. How do you kill something like that?”

I shrugged, though I doubted she could see.

“This is the City of the Gods, daughter. The Titans were fools to challenge them.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess you’re right about that. They made a mess before they died though, didn’t they?”

I looked around. What had been a gleaming kaleidoscope of marble monuments and stone amphitheaters and thousand-meter lace-delicate towers was now little more than a field of rubble and smoking craters.

“That they did,” I said. “And what did it gain them?”

“Who knows?” Tara climbed carefully down along the Titan’s flank, hung briefly from a fold in its leathery skin, and dropped the last two meters to the ground. “Who knows what they were looking for?”

“Truth,” I said. The motives of both the Titans and the Gods were as opaque to me as I imagined mine might have been to an insect.

We made our way around the head of the fallen colossus. One eye, big across as my outstretched arms, was open and staring as we passed. It was blue flecked with gold, with a wide black pupil—the only part of the creature that was clearly human. Beyond it, the barrel of a burner jutted out between two broken marble blocks.

“Score,” Tara whispered. She approached the weapon slowly, nudged it with one foot, then bent to grasp it with both hands, and carefully pulled it free. She brought the stock to her shoulder. Her finger curled around the trigger.

“Careful, daughter,” I said. “Recall the Parable of the Field Mouse and the Owl.”

“Bite me,” Tara said. A searing white beam leapt from the barrel, and a burst of plasma and vaporized stone exploded from the last remaining wall of the building the Titan had destroyed as it fell.

“That was unwise,” I said. “If you draw the attention of the Gods…”

I had a number of parables in mind that would have illustrated my point, but before I could deploy them, a voice rose up from the rubble.

“Hey. Little help here?”

Tara froze, her mouth half-open.

“Seriously,” the voice went on after a moment. “I know you’re up there. I can hear you breathing. Some assistance would be very much appreciated.”

I looked at Tara. She gestured toward a jumble of stone blocks near the spot she’d targeted, one eyebrow raised. I shrugged. One cautious step at a time, she picked her way across the rubble until she stood looking down, the burner aimed between her feet.

“Thanks,” the voice said. “Pretty sure that’s mine. Mind handing it down?”

“No,” Tara said. “I don’t think I’ll do that.”

The block Tara was standing on shifted under her feet. She took a quick step back, and brought the burner to her shoulder.

“Yeah,” the voice said. “I wouldn’t fire that thing again if I were you. Don’t want to call down the Middle Finger of the Gods, do we?”

“Finger of the Gods?” Tara asked. “Is that what killed you?”

“Well, technically speaking I haven’t been killed yet—but yeah, that’s what took out Mikey over there.”

Tara glanced up at the fallen Titan. I took a step toward her.

“Daughter,” I said. “We should leave now.”

“No,” the voice said. “You should get me out of here. Also, you should give me back my Gods-damned burner. Then you can leave.”

Tara stepped forward, and peered down into the rubble again.

“What will you trade?”

“What, for my burner? I don’t have to trade for it, honey. It’s mine.”

She shook her head.

“Not for your burner, Titan. That belongs to me now. What will you trade for your ass?”

“Tara,” I said. “Please. Come away with me.”

“No,” Tara said. “This is an opportunity, father. It’s like finding a genie in a bottle. I will not let it go.”

“You know,” the voice said. “You’re really being kind of dickish about this.”

“Quiet,” Tara said, then turned to me. “If he won’t trade with us, maybe the Gods will?”

“Daughter,” I said. “Tara. Please. Recall the…”

“No,” she said. “No parables. This is happening, Dad.”

“So,” the voice said. “You guys are Archaics, huh? How’s that working out for you?”

Tara scowled into the rubble.

“Archaics? We’re human, you mean.”

“Semantics. Get me out of here, and maybe we can do something about that?”

I took two quick steps forward.

“Enough. Tara, come away now.”

I stopped short as she turned the burner toward me.

“What, exactly, do you mean by that?”

Her eyes were locked with mine, but she was speaking to the Titan.

“What I mean,” it said, “is that if you get me out of here alive, we can mod you right up. Medical nanos, third-gen immune system, arrested senescence—hell, we can even throw in a nose job if you want. You can be one of us. How does that sound?”

I looked at Tara. She looked at me.

“Go,” she said.

I shook my head.

“Daughter. Please. You cannot…”

“I can,” she said. Her finger rested lightly on the trigger of the burner.

“Yeah,” said the Titan. “She totally can.”

I took another step forward. My daughter, my only, raised the burner to her shoulder. I opened my mouth to speak, but there were no parables for this.

“Go,” she said again.

I went.

After a moment, I heard the hiss of the burner, and then the pop and crack of splitting rock. I kept walking, past the great Titan and beyond, to the break in the city wall where we’d entered an hour before. At the top of the first rise outside the city, I paused for breath and looked back. I could see Tara, a tiny figure, reaching into the space between the rocks. She leaned back, straining, then pulled a slab of marble up and cast it aside. A blue-tinged arm reached up toward her. She took its hand.

And then, the Finger of the Gods reached down. Tara wavered on her feet. The blue arm fell limp, and my daughter, my only, dropped to her knees. I thought to call to her, but my throat clenched and my voice failed me. Instead, I watched in silence as Tara shuddered, toppled forward, and disappeared into the hole.

* * *

Attend to the Parable of the Ungrateful Father.

Once, very near to the end of all things, there was a foolish old man. He had a daughter, strong and proud and beautiful, who should have been the joy of his life—but he mistook her strength for arrogance, and her pride for conceit. Her beauty, which should have brought light to their dark little home, only made him fear that someday she would be taken from him.

And then, one day, she was.

This parable has no lesson—or at least, none that I have the heart to tell.

* * *

Hours later, I was still sitting on the hillside—afraid to go to Tara, unable to leave her—when the prophet sat down beside me.

“Afternoon,” he said. “What brings you to the City of the Gods?”

I turned to look at him. He was neither old nor young, short nor tall, fat nor thin. He had close-cropped black hair, empty blue eyes, and skin the color of worn leather.

“You know what brings me here,” I said.

His mouth twisted into a smile, and he raised one thin black eyebrow.

“Why would I know that?”

I looked away.

“You are a prophet, are you not?”

He laughed.

“A prophet? Well, maybe I am at that. Shall I tell your future?”

I turned back to him, my face twisted into a scowl.

“A prophet is not a fortune teller. A prophet is the mouthpiece of the Gods.”

He gave me a mocking half-bow.

“Apologies, sir. Please forgive my ignorance.”

I looked back to the city. I could just make out Tara’s boot jutting out of the Titan’s grave. The prophet shifted beside me.

“You know,” he said finally. “She’s not really gone.”

“She is,” I said. “I saw her fall.”

He shook his head.

“She’s not. That body is dead, admittedly—but we’re more than these bodies, aren’t we?”

I spat into the dust.

“Is my daughter in paradise, then? Is she singing hosannahs to your masters now?”

The prophet laughed, and for just a moment, I wondered if I would be able to kill him.

“Oh my,” he said. “That’s perfect. You do know we’re not really gods, don’t you?”

I stared at him. He raised his hands in surrender.

“Easy, friend. No offense was intended.”

“I am not ignorant,” I said, emphasizing every word. “I know what you are.”

He smiled.

“Then you know what I mean when I say that your daughter is not gone.”

I looked up. A lone vulture circled above us. As I watched, it spiraled down, finally coming to rest on the body of the giant below. I closed my eyes. The prophet’s boots scraped against stone as he stood.

“Can you give her back to me?” I asked.

I opened my eyes again. The prophet was walking away from me, back down to the City of the Gods.

“We can,” he said, without looking back. “But first, there is a price to be paid.”

I climbed to my feet, and I followed.

* * *

Attend to the Parable of the Foolish Merchant.

Once, in the distant long-ago when such things still existed, there was a great city by the sea. A merchant lived there, wealthy and fat and eminently self-satisfied. He sold baubles and bangles to men even wealthier than himself, and though he took pains to humble himself before them when they entered his shop, he secretly prided himself on his ability to play his customers for fools.

One day, just as he was preparing to close his shop after a particularly profitable day, a final patron stepped in out of the heat of the evening. He was neither old nor young, short nor tall, fat nor thin. He had jet-black hair, and skin the color of worn leather. The merchant watched with growing impatience as his customer paced slowly around the shop, touching this and that, pausing occasionally to study one item or another, then moving on.

“Sir,” the merchant said finally. “The hour is late. I must ask you to choose.”

The customer turned to look at him for the first time.

“Very well,” he said. “I choose all.”

“All?” asked the merchant. “The cost…”

“Is nothing,” said the customer. “Name your price. I will pay it.”

The merchant smiled, and gave a number that was ten times the value of everything in his shop.

“Done,” said the customer.

The merchant’s smile grew wider.

The customer reached into the merchant then, and took all.

The lesson of this parable is a simple one: only a fool seeks to bargain with the Gods.

* * *

The prophet led me through the rubble of the broken city, to a half-collapsed marble temple at the edge of a deep crater.

“There,” he said, and gestured toward the darkened entryway. “The Gods await you.”

I bit back the urge to slap the smirk from his face.

“I told you,” I said. “I am not ignorant. I know what you are. I know that we made you.”

The prophet shrugged, and his smile became wistful.

“Humans have always made their gods. It’s a failing of the species.”

I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, he was gone.

* * *

It was dark inside the broken temple. I groped my way along a hallway until the walls dropped away. I stopped then, took a shuffling step forward, and stopped again.

“I am here,” I said.

No response.

I sat down carefully.

“I will go no farther,” I said. “Show yourselves.”

Light flared.

“I told you,” a voice said. “The pit was a waste.”

I was in a circular room, perhaps a dozen meters across. Two steps in front of me, the floor fell away.

“It’s bottomless,” the voice said. “Nice, right?”

“It’s not bottomless,” said a second voice. “It’s just really, really deep.”

“Semantics,” said the first voice. “It’s bottomless for all practical purposes.”

“Disagree,” said the second voice. “Presence or absence of a bottom would have made a great deal of difference to our corporeal friend here if he’d stumbled into it.”

“Moot point,” said the first voice. “He didn’t.”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”

“You still could,” said the first voice. “I mean, we went to a lot of trouble to put that pit there. The least you could do is to give it a try.”

I closed my eyes, breathed in deep, and let it out.

“I did not come here to test your pit for you,” I said. “I came here for my daughter. The prophet said you could give her to me.”

Both voices burst into laughter.

“The prophet?” the first one said. “You mean Doug?”

“He was screwing with you,” the second voice said. “Your daughter was helping one of the Altered. We hit her with a fifty gigawatt gamma-ray laser. She is dead. Every single cell in her body is dead. Every bacteria and virus that was in her or on her is dead. She is not coming back.”

“That said,” the first voice said, “we could conceivably reconstruct her for you.”

“Well, sure,” said the second. “We could build you a new her, pretty much just like the old one.”

“Lot of trouble, though,” said the first voice. “We’d need to be properly motivated.”

“Right,” said the second. “So what do you think, friend-o? Can you motivate us?”

* * *

Attend to the Parable of the Boy King.

Once, in the days when there were still enough men to need rulers, a great king died in battle, and left the ruling of his kingdom to his only son. The new king was a child, nearly too small to mount the throne—but he was king nonetheless, and his word was law.

On the first day of his rule, the king ordered his chief advisor to stand on his hands as he advised him. When the advisor could not find his balance, the king summoned the headsman.

On the second day of his rule, the king ordered his new chief advisor to stand on his hands. This man had spent the night practicing, but after a moment or two of balance, his arms gave way, and he fell. The king summoned the headsman.

So it went, day after day, advisor after advisor. Some pleaded. Some argued. Some wept. All lost their heads, until finally only one advisor was left—the youngest and most junior of them all. When the king ordered him onto his hands, he did not plead, or argue, or weep. He simply asked, “Why?”

“Because I am a child,” the king replied. “It is my nature to love foolishness.”

He snapped his fingers then, to summon the headsman. Again, the advisor asked, “Why?”

The king smiled.

“Because I am also a king,” he said. “It is my nature to punish those who disobey me.”

The lesson of this parable? Nothing is more dangerous than power in the absence of wisdom.

* * *

I looked around the empty room. The voices were silent. I climbed slowly to my feet.

“If I fall into your pit,” I said, “will you bring her back?”

The voices were silent. I took a single step forward.

“I have nothing else to offer,” I said. “Will you bring her back?”

The voices were silent. I took a second step. My toes curled over the sharp edge of the pit.

“Bring her back,” I said. “Please.”

The voices were silent. I closed my eyes, and I fell.

* * *

The pit was exceedingly deep. As the voice had said, though—it was not bottomless.

* * *

“Wake up, old man.”

I opened my eyes. I was sitting on a hard white bench, in a bright white room.

Tara sat beside me.

“Daughter,” I said. I opened my mouth to say more, but my voice broke, and I could not. Tara reached up, stroked my cheek with one hand.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“All is forgiven,” I said, and wiped my eyes clear. “Come home with me.”

She gestured, and the walls of the room disappeared. We sat at the pinnacle of a fairy tower, a thousand meters above the City of the Gods. She smiled sadly, and leaned her head against mine.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I am home.”

* * *

Attend to the Parable of the Apotheosis.

Once, there was a father who loved his daughter more than life. She, though—as children have since the days when the Gods lived only in our minds—did not love the life that her father had made for her. Being a woman was not enough for her.

And so, she became a God, while he returned to his empty home.

From the bluffs above the City of the Gods, the father looked for his daughter from time to time, hoping to catch a glimpse of her face in the window of a fairy tower, or to see her wandering the tumbledown streets.

He never did.

Months became years.

Years became decades.

To his surprise, the father found that his body did not wither, did not fail, until he began to suspect that perhaps the Gods might have played a stranger joke on him that he had imagined.

The Earth turned. The rivers dried. The sun grew fatter and redder by the year.

Finally, very near the end of all things, the father determined to return to the City of the Gods. If his daughter would not come to him, perhaps he could go to her?

The lesson of this parable is yet to be written.

Edward Ashton lives in Rochester, New York, where he studies new cancer therapies by day, and writes about the awful things his research may lead to by night. He is the author of the novels Three Days in April and The End of Ordinary, as well as several dozen short stories which have appeared in venues ranging from the newsletter of an Italian sausage company to Louisiana Literature and Escape Pod. You can find him online at edwardashton.com.

by Alter S. Reiss

The beach at Foteris was the grandest resort in the kingdom of Avelar. There was a western-style arcade fifty feet from the water, fifteen restaurants, a promenade, and a wide stretch of sand, suitable for bathing. Twice every year, his majesty Othintet Athetial made a royal visit to the Foteris resort, and when he chose to take the waters, the beach was closed to less noble bathers.

That was the new rule. In the past, the guard had cleared a few square meters of beach around the royal towel and umbrella, and that had been sufficient. Now, the guard had decreed that it was simpler and safer for his majesty to have the beach to himself, and Othintet had decided not to argue the point.

Two years prior, a western tourist had broken into the palace, and had stolen some heirloom silverware, as well as the reginal portrait of Othintet’s grandfather. In Othintet’s opinion, that showed the sort of threat the royal house of Athetial faced, but in the opinion of the captain of the royal guard, it showed a grievous failure in their duties, and had caused the royal guard to become infested with the sort of eager young military men who talked about perimeters and deployments and all that.

In truth, Othintet had only given in because of the tourists. Not because he feared another tourist would steal more of his silverware, but because the tourists who came to enjoy the sights of Avelar and the beach at Foteris all seemed to have remarkably poor manners.

It was one thing for Othintet to see, and be seen by his subjects, particularly those subjects with pleasant dimples and a desire for royal attention. It was another to be gawped at beanpole Westerners, hands sticky with food or tanning lotion.

So onlookers were kept at a distance when Othintet disported himself in the waves. Swimming in the ocean was far less pleasant than in a swimming pool, and it was difficult to get the sand from the beach off of his feet without getting his feet so wet that more sand stuck to them. But his appearance was listed in the tourist guides, and the income from Foteris was worth considering.

Besides, he was fifty-eight, and only came to the beach twice a year; at most, he had to face three more visits of that sort. The Athetial kings of Avelar did not live past sixty.

The beach had been cleared of tourists, but had not been cleared of the detritus of tourists. There was a plastic flip-flop sandal embedded a few meters from his towel, not far from a pair of child-sized sunglasses, and a whiskey bottle glinted out just above the line of the surf.

The whiskey bottle annoyed him. Alcohol was legal in Avelar, which was probably a mistake. Nothing wrong with the occasional lemon cordial, but the masses would have more than that, and where he had given an inch, they’d taken a mile. Wine, yes, beer, perhaps, but stronger liquors than those were unnecessary and conducive to public disorder. He wrenched the bottle loose from the sand, looking for a wastebin.

His guards had taken the wastebin away. Anarchist youth and royal guards both seemed to have an inexplicable dislike of wastebins. And yes, it was true that his guard was now filled with military veterans, but they were veterans of Avelar’s military. Which was primarily there to parade, spend money, and occasionally help some even less solvent foreign principality that was suffering from an outbreak of typhoons or earthquakes. It seemed to Othintet that if they had closely inspected the wastebin, perhaps it might have been allowed to share the beach with him.

Royal dignity would not be particularly well-served either by wandering through the sands looking for a wastebin, or tossing the bottle he had just picked up back where he’d found it. And, honestly, it was a peculiar bottle. Square, like a whiskey bottle, but it was a heavy sort of glass, and stoppered with a cork.

He pulled the cork, and there was a man standing there in the surf. He was wearing a modern suit, no socks, no shoes, and had a pale bluish tint to his skin.

“Your majesty,” said the man, and Othintet looked over at his guards. They were a fair distance away, and watching the crowds warily. Eventually, they were bound to look at him, and there was going to be trouble.

“You are facing a difficulty, over the course of the next two years,” said the man. “I can help you with that, as well as with other things. If you—”

Othintet put the cork back in the bottle, and the man was gone.

Othintet Athetial, king of Avelar, stood on the beach on Forteris, and considered the bottle that he had picked up from the surf. If he threw it back into the surf, someone else would pick it up, and that was likely to cause trouble. Smashing the bottle… well, it was less clear what that would do. Could solve the problem, could cause worse trouble.

And the truth was, he was facing a difficulty over the course of the next two years. It was a difficulty sufficiently similar to what had just popped out of a glass bottle that he found in the surf that Othintet had no way to pretend that he was suffering from one two many lemon cordials, or sunstroke. What had happened had happened, and the bottle got wrapped in his beach-blanket, and zipped it into his bag.

One last look at the surf at Forteis, a regal nod to the customers at the arcade and restaurant, and he prepared for his return to the castle.

The ride back was eventful, as was to be expected this close to his sixtieth birthday. There was a problem with the brakes of the royal automobile, and a sinkhole near the highway. But he was only fifty-eight, and the motorcade took appropriate caution. It was not long before he was ensconced in the library, a fire in the grate and a cup of spiced lemon cordial beside him.

Rather than tackling the bottle directly, there were a few other problems that he had to deal with. One of them was a message from Casimet Athetial, eldest child of his third wife. There were seven other children ahead of Casimet in the succession, but they’d all stepped aside in his favor, preferring other pursuits, and the possibility of longer lives. Casimet had chosen the crown, and he was the heir designate, currently studying abroad.

His message was largely incomprehensible. The was a good deal concerning a young lady, as was to be expected, but there were also many muddled assurances that Othintet need not worry about all manner of things that he had not previously been aware might be concerns.

Othintet did his best to make sense of his son’s letter, and when he gave up on that, he wrote out a draft for sixty thousand crowns, and affixed is seal. The exchange rate was good, and sixty thousand crowns seemed likely to solve most of the problems Casimet was having. That, and orders to the embassy, to make certain that they had a good lawyer on retainer. It was the sort of thing one did, on behalf of a crown prince. Othintet’s father had done much the same for him, during his years of education abroad, and it had allowed him to study some extremely liberal arts.

With that concluded, he withdrew the bottle from his sand-flecked bag—the maids would doubtless complain of the treatment of the carpets—and removed the cork again. And the blue man was there again, seated in the chair opposite.

“—will but say the word,” said the man, as though he had not been interrupted, “Avelar will find itself rich in previously unsuspected resources. Or, if you prefer, a center for technological development.”

“I see,” said Othintet. “And the price?”

The blue-skinned man did not even have the grace to look embarrassed at not having mentioned that his gifts would come with a price. “One child of the royal blood from every generation,” he said. “Your current patron demands the right to kill the prince of your line, before his sixtieth birthday. I ask only for a child, in his first year of life; a much more reasonable price, I’m sure you’ll agree.”

Othintet considered. “And why make me this offer?” he said. “Why not someone else?”

The man shrugged. “You were the one who found the bottle, your majesty.”

Othintet didn’t reply. Instead, he gave the stranger the look that he would have given Casimet, had the crown prince been communicating in person, rather than through a medium that was not receptive to meaningful looks.

The man laughed. “Perhaps it wasn’t pure chance,” he said. “My predecessor—the one who has been trying to kill you, recently—has a certain authority here. It would be tricky to fight him, and it would be tricky to install a new monarch. This is simpler, for everyone. You can revoke his authority, and then I can brush him aside, like a rotten stick. If you will agree to this, you will live to a ripe old age; I guarantee it.”

Othintet put the cork back into the bottle with a single swift movement. It was necessary to consider things, and he didn’t need a dangerously smooth man in a suit to distract him from his consideration.

The bottle of spiced lemon cordial was finished, and the lamps in the library had burned down by the time he’d made his decision.

Taking the bottle with him, Othintet headed through the empty kitchens, down into the cellars. The Royal Guard had been pushing for guards within the palace, but Othintet had drawn the line there; if they could not keep hypothetical malefactors from getting into the palace, he did not trust them near him. One panicked bullet might well change the fortunes of the Athetial dynasty, and not for the better.

A staircase down from the kitchen led to the cellars, where there were wine casks and pantries and the hot-water boiler which was constantly failing. And the staircase that was hidden behind the boiler led down to a considerably darker, and dingier cellar. There was a single incandescent light bulb, and a switch, and a few discarded crates, some piles of newspaper, and a good deal of dust.

Othintet cleared one of those piles of newspapers to the side, and unlocked the safe it concealed. When his father had shown the lamp to him, it had simply been hidden beneath the newspapers. Othintet did not wish for a steward with a passion for organization to get rid of it, so he had made adjustments. The lamp was there.

There was no stopper in the lamp, and there was nothing keeping its denizen near it. But it was old, and seldom wandered far from its home.

The figure from the whiskey bottle had offered a good deal. But Othintet had been king for long enough not to be lead astray by good deals. He pulled the stopper from the bottle.

“What—” the man started, looked around him.

“You have sworn to protect the line of Athetial from all threats; here is a threat,” he said.

“I haven’t sworn anything—” the man looked around, realized what Othintet had meant, who he was talking to. “No! I would give you the world, man—I would give you your life, and—”

What Othintet had called was slow to respond to calls. But it was certain to respond, under the right circumstances.

It looked a hundred years older than the man from the bottle. Skeletal, with massive eyes, and lips receding away from gums and blackened teeth. It flew at the man, claws stretched out, and what followed was brief and bloody. On its home ground, with the authority granted and reinforced, it was stronger than any interloper could hope to be.

When it was finished, Othintet put the bottle from the beach in one of the crates, amidst some broken crockery. What had lived in it had offered him a good deal. But not a better deal than the one he had. Sixty was a good lifespan, all in all. Enough time to get things done, not so long as to dread senility and decay. And it was something he had chosen. He had chosen it, and his father had chosen it, and his son had chosen it. To give over a baby to the slaughter? No. Not a better deal, for all that it would have been better for him.

The Athetial kings of Avelar ruled cautiously, because they knew that their wellspring of power was both weak and malign. The empires of the west and the east, of the north and the south—they were all stronger than Avelar, and they had the arrogance of strength. The man in the bottle might have offered him more strength than any of those empires held. But sooner or later, everything strong met something stronger, or was torn to pieces the instant its strength failed.

Besides, riches of any sort, from gold mines or university graduates, would mean more tourists, and bigger hotels, and constant traffic in the streets. Wouldn’t suit Avelar at all. What they had was sufficient, and comfortable, and they did not need anything more. Othintet went up the stairs, confident that he had made the right choice. And testing every step before he put his full weight on it, which kept him from cracking his head open when the second step from the top gave way.

Alter S. Reiss is an archaeologist and writer who lives in Jerusalem with his wife Naomi and their son Uriel. He likes good books, bad movies, and old time radio shows.

by Martha A. Hood

STARSHIP DAZZLECAT
Anahit Investigation
Interview One
Day 12 of Year 21:

State your name, please.

You know my name, Robban. Everyone knows my name.

Please answer all questions truthfully and completely, for the record.

My name is Timma Okkafore.

What position did you hold in the delegation on Anahit?

I was Chief Historian. It was my job to ensure accurate reports of our sojourn, especially our encounters with the Kateed.

And did you discharge your responsibilities as stated in your job description?

Hell, yes. Why are you looking at me like that? It doesn’t matter, you know. Nothing we, or you, could have done would have changed what happened.

That’s what we’re trying to find out. You have stated your main job as Chief Historian was to provide DazzleCat with accurate reports of your time on Anahit. Once again, is that what you did?

Yes. Our reports from the first standard year were factual, one hundred percent so. There was no reason for them not to be. We followed procedures religiously. You know this. You’ve seen the video.

I’m curious to hear what you recall from that time. Details that maybe didn’t make it into the official record.

Oh, okay. The first three months of year one we spent holed away at our camp. We stayed out of their territory. We printed up drones shaped like indigenous wildlife, to get closeup views of them. Our small flying reptilian came first, followed by a medium-sized ground mammalian that fed on vegetation the Kateed did not want growing around their structures. We took care to use no animal they would consider either pest or food; we didn’t want our drones to be trapped, or “killed,” by arrow or spear.

Did you send drones over the entire population?

The population range was not that large, so yes, I think we had good coverage.

The original village we studied in depth was located on the western coast of the large island of the archipelago nearest the equator. Later, of course, we were forced to look elsewhere, and we did, both on the large island, and a few of the neighboring ones.

Where was the delegation during this time?

You know where we were, Robban.

Please answer the question, Timma.

All right. Sure. We were twenty kilometers down the coast, in a cove the Kateed would be unlikely to stumble upon. Worst case scenario, sentries would signal a near approach, and we would pack up and retreat further down the coast. We could push off from shore, if necessary.

Your early pictures of the Kateed were downright magnificent, I must say.

Yes, and they were more beautiful in person than any images we could transmit. Their deep jewel-tones, the feathery hairs of their wings, and the strange articulation of their fuzzy arms were a wonder.

What else did you do that first half year, besides marvel at their beauty?

We studied their habits, and learned their patterns. We were also establishing our own little tribal pattern. You know how how it is. Our community was about the same size as a Kateed village, and we had at least as much drama as they.

Is that when Kaminsky and Dvorak split up?.

Yes, it was. I think the rest of us did a good job of not taking sides, and they did a good job with the kids, but it was still a process. And then, just when Kaminsky and Dvorak had successfully sorted out their living arrangements, Rulua decides to go for a midnight swim, and gets herself killed by a carnivorous sea creature. That was an awful time, when I think back on it. Our commitment to our mission kept us going, I think.

That brings us to the Kateed. Talk about the first time you made visual contact with them.

You have the recordings.

But are they complete? We thought we had everything, but later, you told us otherwise.

That’s not fair. I’m trying to relate events as we experienced them. There were things we didn’t know. Obviously.

Go on, then. Relate events as you experienced them.

Around Day 190, after notifying you, we showed ourselves to them.

Jessop, Hokkaido, Kaminsky, and myself stood in a clearing, along the route we knew some of the aunties, young adolescents, and older children would travel as they foraged for the fruits and legumes that made up the large part of their diet. The children and young adolescents could still fly; they were therefore needed to access food that grew high in the trees.

I remember the day being hot, two suns casting conflicting shadows that somehow made it difficult for me to focus. I blinked so much, Jessop asked if I was okay.

Anyway, the four of us sat by the path of the Kateed foraging party. We didn’t block the path or anything, but they came within a couple meters of us when they passed. And that’s what they did, walk right by us, as if suddenly not-seeing us. Except they have to have had. Their eyes moved in such a way that it was difficult to tell for sure if they focused on us, but my impression was they did not. Yet, they had to have seen us.

They ignored you.

And they fell very quiet. That was the other thing. Once beyond us, they resumed their chatter. I wasn’t completely fluent at that point, but they weren’t talking about us.

Of course, we tried again with similar groups from that village, and similar scenarios, three or four times, I forget.

Our count is four.

I don’t dispute you. So, that first scenario replayed itself in several variations in succeeding weeks. I do not remember the exact order, but we tried different members of our community, we tried not looking at them, setting ourselves us under a tree, talking quietly with one another while they walked by.

And then one morning, in month ten, we found their village abandoned. After we reviewed the drone footage of their decampment, we argued about whether their moving the village was a response to our overtures. How could we know? It seemed far-fetched to most of us, me included. They were semi-nomadic, and although this didn’t fit the pattern, we couldn’t jump to any conclusions. We decided to start over with a different village.

You decided all this without considering our input.

We did what we thought was best.

You began withholding information, making it impossible for us up here on DazzleCat to weigh in on the decisions.

No way. Not true. You were still fully informed at that time. We may not have asked permission, but we did tell you.

In the next village, after showing ourselves, and being once again ignored, we gathered up a small basket of the foods they liked to gather, and we left it out for them. They wouldn’t take it, leaving it for the wildlife.

My own daughter, Simi, had just turned seven. She said, “Maybe they think we’re a bad influence.”

Her dad and I thought that was pretty funny. At the time, we had had some concerns about her playing with Hokkaido’s daughter, June. Those two would get each other going sometimes. There was some disagreement about who was the bad influence on whom.

This is about the time your stories changed, at the end of the first year.

Not true. We were aware of a couple hundred Kateed villages, and as we made our way through them, we may have begun to somewhat adjust the tone in our transmissions. By then you were past the suns; there was nothing you could have done to help. Frankly, you were out of touch, in more than the physical sense. Even then, you were beginning to blame us for our setbacks with the Kateed.

That’s not true. It’s true we were concerned about the community. You did not seem to be much of a working unit.

We were working fine. What, we’re not allowed to have differences of opinion?

You couldn’t seem to settle on a course of action. You were all over the place, trying this and that.

What else were we to do, but remain optimistic, and keep working the problem? If we said that a Kateed “might” have glanced our way, or that their conversations in our presence “might” have been for our benefit, we weren’t lying. We were only trying to keep our spirits up.

These things could have been true, and we hoped you would be reassured by our positive outlook.

We feared you were losing touch with reality. We were worried about you. Did you ever, as a community, think about giving up your attempts?

And do what, sit and wait five years? That would be the soonest you could come back for us. It’s not as though we were hassling them all the time, and we never, ever went back to a relocated village. But yes, we did almost give up, before the matriarch showed up.

Day two hundred of year two: what a day that was! And Zizi made quite the entrance.

Another great event we have no visual record of.

We didn’t have the cameras on. We wouldn’t have. We had finished dinner a few minutes earlier, and were clearing up. All of a sudden, this peacock-colored wonder appeared on our terrace. Jessop hit his head on the sliding door, he was in such a hurry to get out. The rest of us froze like dummies.

Zizi tapped a talon on the glass. She said, “Death is coming. We make friends, okay?”

That’s the translation you got? That’s what she said?

We translated the word as “death.” I think we put it down to a philosophical attitude on their part. There was a life-is-too-short-let’s-live sort of thing in their culture.

You were wrong about that, weren’t you? Too caught up in the moment.

And you wouldn’t have been? Anyway, Kaminsky welcomed them, and apologized for our confusion. He asked her right away how she had found us.

“We see you from when you first are here,” she told us.

We doubted they had seen us from when we first landed; we thought probably that she referred to the first day we showed ourselves to this tribe. In any event, they had been watching us, just as we had been watching them, and they had managed without drones, and without our knowing. Still, just like that, we had begun talking to the Kateed.

What was your first inkling of what she referred to, when she said that death was coming?

We had no idea until we saw the babies.

You first saw the babies year three?

Yes. Day twenty-seven.

Let’s back up a bit. We have a time-stamped sequence from just thirty days before that…some celebration you went to.

Yes, we were invited to a rite of passage to adulthood for one of the young females. She would then be free to couple with whomever she chose, and in less than a year, she would begin having children. As you can see, part of the celebration involved s a series of games and dances in which oral histories and legends were re-enacted. There’s a lot there about children.

Regarding the children at the celebration, did you know how old they were? Or that some of the newest babies were missing?

Obviously not. We were still pretty new to their customs, and when we were on their turf, we followed their lead. We did not press them with questions.

Kateed pregnancies lasted an average of two hundred forty days, but we didn’t know that at the time. They didn’t show. Their bodies were narrow, but so were their skulls. The natural birth process, in general, posed less risk to Kateed than it did to humans.

From the legends and histories, we gathered that, in the past, more children—and some adults—fell victim to land predators, but they had successfully managed to drive those animals out of their local area. Hokkaido asked about disease. He was curious about their versions of bacteria and viruses, as well as cancer. Because they didn’t have germ theory, they attributed those sorts of diseases to macro causes. Cancer—tumors of any kind—they seemed blissfully unaware of. This is the kind of information we gathered at the time. We didn’t think to ask about possible missing children.

What about the times you had them over to your camp? We had no idea about that until Kaminsky told us.

Yes, we had them over several times before the rite of passage, and after that as well. We turned off the cameras when we invited the village matriarchs over. We never sent a report to DazzleCat about any of those encounters. We did not tell you, because you would have talked the situation to death, and by that time, you had no idea what was going on.

The Kateed didn’t give a crap about our technology, so no one needed to worry about culture shock. They looked right through it like they looked right through us at first. They had no interest in easier ways of obtaining food, of building their buildings, or making their tools. They accepted our hospitality with joy and interest. But they did not seem to think our life was better than theirs. They had their ways; we had ours.

Now we come to the babysitting video.

I find that quite painful to watch. But okay. There you see the Kateed children, dancing around Jessop. they look like a necklace of emeralds and sapphires, don’t they? Circle games. Yes. That’s Ring Around the Rosie; but it sounds different when they do it. Next, they’ll do Duck, Duck, Goose.

See the children hopping up in the air? Jessop wanted the children to use their limbs, all six of their spindly appendages, and forbade flying, telling them it was all wrong for human circle games. But see how they keep forgetting? They skittered, and they hopped, and at every high hop heard their playmates chitter at them NOT TO FLY, because it wasn’t allowed. They couldn’t sit crossed-legged like human children; when the game required a moment of stillness, they crouched on their four rear limbs, and turned their ears like radio telescopes.

Jessop proved an ideal babysitter. Among the Kateed, to be asked to babysit was a high honor. The games drew a crowd from our settlement. A dozen or so came down, and formed a ragged and impromptu cheering squad. I remember Kaminsky asking if there actually were any losers or winners in circle games.

Not that any of us could see. We cheered every all-fall-down, every duck-duck-goose.

Hokkaido felt—and we all agreed—Jessop made an exemplary leader-goose, with his frantic knees-high jog, slow enough to be caught halfway around by a fluttering and bouncing chase-goose to cascades and burbles of human and Kateed laughter.

Two suns scurried overhead, and a breeze pushed puffy clouds over one or the other from time to time. The game went on and on, until we thought Jessop was ready to drop. Somewhere along the way, someone suggested we all join in, and so, as you can see here, we did.

And here come those blue and emerald wings, cresting the knoll behind the playing field. That’s Zizi and her sisters. Here, she’s telling the children, grandchildren, nieces, and nephews, to carry on with the game. If you watched through to the end, you’ll recall they joined in for a couple rounds themselves, before they gathered the children to take them home.

An hour later, the suns set on our last perfect day with the Kateed.

When we first saw that sequence, we envied you so.

We were so happy, it was like we were high. We came here to make friends. And we had.

It made the subsequent videos very confusing.

Yes, well…Zizi gave birth the day after the babysitting and the games, and her younger sister, Pan, the day after that. We did not see the babies right away; we hadn’t even known they were pregnant. We were invited to the subsequent celebration ten days or so after the births, which offered more singing, food, and dancing games. We were excited, as this was the first birth celebration we had ever been invited to.

Yes. The sequence you sent of that was like watching a chopped salad.

Pardon me?

Your ham-handed editing. When we saw no pictures of the babies, we knew something was wrong. If that wasn’t enough, the way you were acting…

Well, yeah. We were all in shock. We were—of course—expecting the babies to be miniature versions of their elders, stumbling and fluttering adorably, delightfully impossible to contain. But we noticed something off, right away. The village seemed subdued. The songs were quieter, slower. No one came from neighboring villages, and I thought that was odd, considering the status of Zizi and Pan.

One of the aunties pressed a wing against my shoulder, as we approached the creche. She pinched my arm, successfully squelching my initial response to the babies.

My first thought was, they weren’t Kateed babies at all. They couldn’t be. They looked like grubs: large, pinky-brown, but with a segmented blue square on one end. My initial impression of grubs gave way to another. They looked like big toes, with blue nail color. The toe-like thing split open at the end, and gave a little cry. The blue rectangles blinked.

I remember looking at my fellow humans, to get their reactions. Kaminsky was locked in deep conversation with one of the aunties. Hokkaido frowned. Jessop was over at the edge of the village, throwing up into some bushes.

What could I do, but force a smile? “Congratulations,” I said, “on the birth of your children.”

I wondered immediately if I had made a faux pas, but Zizi bent her thorax to acknowledge me and the auntie relaxed her pinch of my arm. We made it through the rest of the event, but we did not talk about the babies.

Hokkaido obtained permission a few days later to take samples, and sequenced the genetics, comparing the babies’ sequences with those of the parents. They were as close to identical as you would expect any members of the same species to be. Not a mutation, in other words.

We worked with the Kateed, and eventually identified the enzymes and hormones that triggered this change in utero, causing the butterfly to give birth to the caterpillar. Or big toe, however you want to term it.

You managed to hide the toe-babies from us for years.

We did. Hokkaido and the exobiology team spoke at length to the aunties. He explained a bit about how the enzymes and hormones, and what we’d learned of how those affected Kateed pregnancies. They had some knowledge, too.

“Great danger forces change,” Pan told Hokkaido. “We have died before, and we change. The danger cannot hurt us when we change.”

We were slow on the uptake, however. We understood they meant some sort of environmental pressure forcing their change, but although we asked for clarification, the aunties did not elaborate, other than to sing us some story-songs about previous changes. We speculated about drought, volcanic eruptions, diseases, and so forth, none of which seemed to apply.

We took another look at their pictorial art, and recognized one of the creatures depicted as being quite similar to the babies being born. When we invited the aunties to speculate on what might have caused the change, they appeared curiously uncurious about the cause.

More Kateed gave birth as our first year ended. Every last baby born was a toe-child. The butterfly children grew older, and bigger.

The Kateed had no word for normal. A thing either was, or was not. They were sad, or they were not. They knew how to play, and they knew how to laugh. They mourned their dead. They enjoyed their new young, but they seemed to be in mourning as well.

Why did you keep this from us?

You were still close enough to abort the tail end of your grand tour, and swing back to get us. We were concerned the toe-children weren’t…

Sentient?

We had some doubts; let’s put it that way.

We argued amongst ourselves about how much we should say to you. I took the position we had a mission, which we did not want to sabotage. Getting DazzleCat involved would solve nothing, in my view, and clearly, if we told you, there was a chance you’d come back prematurely.

By that time, Jessop had figured it out. He said one day, “It’s us. We’re the problem.” He thought we should tell you everything at that point, and let the chips fall where they may. We had no proof, of course. We discussed it throughout the community, and then set up an election, the question being, should we inform you of the possibility of our somehow affecting the Kateed in this fashion? Everyone sixteen and older voted. As it turned out, we voted to say nothing to you for the time being. I must say, Jessop was stunned by the result. Things weren’t quite the same between us after that.

Do you feel bad about that?

In what way?

Do you have any regrets about the position you took back then?

Absolutely not. Nothing we did changed anything, except to keep us on Anahit a few years longer.

The toe-children grew, and life went on. We received a few more invitations to babysit the older Kateed children. We wondered what the future of the lovely butterfly-children would be. As for the toe-children, around the end of year three, we had to wonder if these new children would ever learn to speak.

They vocalized in bleats, in wails, and screeches. Each sound seemed to be successful in eliciting a particular response from the adults, be it food, affection, or relief from discomfort. The aunties knew what each vocalization meant, much the same way it would be with a human infant. At age three, their mobility was to creep along, just like they did when they were a few weeks old. They liked to dig underground tunnels. They ate dirt, like earthworms, as well as plant material.

At one point, Jessop asked about the change in body form as it might relate to loss of their culture.

Zizi said. “They carry us with them.”

Kaminsky said she meant the toe children would carry the memory and knowledge of their connection to their butterfly ancestors. Kateed cultural records seemed to support that hope.

Our own children were quite reluctant to play with the new babies back then, preferring the butterfly-generation children, with whom they had forged close bonds. The butterfly-children themselves seemed not to mind their younger siblings, putting up patiently with their cries, bites, and apparent stupidity.

Hokkaido has stated you were advocating de-extinction.

I advocated nothing! I was only wondering if it was possible.

It’s a crime…

Is it a crime to wonder about it?

What is the point of wondering, when it’s something we would never do?

That’s what Hokkaido told me. He told me I was being stupid.

It wasn’t a smart thing to bring up.

I’ll tell you what’s stupid. Kateed evolutionary biology. That’s what’s stupid.

That’s actually kind of true. Unless you believe in a Designer, evolution is stupid. Did the community have any idea the lies you were sending out to us?

I didn’t think they cared. Jessop found one of my drafts, and asked me about it, but he really had no comment. He never mentioned it again, and I guess now we’ll never know.

What about the others, Timma?

Not a word. You know, we were living life, day by day, together in our community, and with the Kateed. DazzleCat was irrelevant by that point.

Really.

Yes.

Is our human community not small enough already that you want to estrange yourself from the greater part of it?

We didn’t want to cut ourselves off from anyone. The Kateed were people—are people—too. You would have cut us off from them.

Were you more concerned with them than with us?

No, but they were right there with us. They had become our friends. And I did begin coming clean with you, eventually.

You didn’t come all that clean.

I only shifted the timeline a bit.

You pretended the change was just beginning.

You’d pretty much eliminated the likelihood of finding any other civilizations in this local group, right? You would have cut short your circuit. How would that have helped?

Jessop might still be alive.

That’s not fair. He came around to my way of thinking long before he decided to take his own life. When the butterfly-Kateed disappeared, he got depressed. The others tried to help, but he really didn’t let us in.

It was very traumatic for all of us.

We had just entered year twenty when the last of the butterfly-Kateed left us. As the toe-Kateed had matured, reached puberty, and begun reproducing even more new toe-babies, the butterflies had withdrawn to smaller and smaller villages, consolidating as they went.

They’re on the northernmost island now, four villages of them. I can show you our sat images, if you like. I’d love to find out if they’re still reproducing.

I’m certain they’re not. I’m also certain they don’t want to be seen by us.

So, after that, you were left with the toe-Kateed.

Right.

They still weren’t talking.

Correct. Not as we understood speech, anyway. And with you still a year away, we were at loose ends. Some of our children were adults now, and they (discouraged by most of us elders) renewed efforts to talk to the Toes. We watched as they worked among the mounds and tunnels, and we were not very encouraging.

They persisted, in spite of our negativity. You know how they are at that age, Robban. They want to save whatever world they’re on. They don’t want to be anything like us. They were unperturbed by the strange morphology of the Toes. My own daughter called me a racist, when I suggested they weren’t as bright as their butterfly ancestors.

I reminded her we had decided they were non-sentient.

“You don’t know that,” she snarled.

I reminded her that she and her friends had once shunned the Toes.

Simi gave me a cutting look. “That was you. You wouldn’t let us play with them.”

We remembered events differently. What can I say?

You still haven’t clarified whether or not you advocated de-extinction to the matriarch, Zizi.

We talked back and forth on the subject, how we had brought back a few species in the twenty-first century, but in the end, she waved her upper arms, and nixed the idea.

“It won’t work,” she said. “Any old babies you make for us will have the new babies.”

“Not necessarily,” I told her. “We might be able to tweak the triggering mechanism…”

You talked to her about that? That’s not right.

Well, in the end, she agreed with you. “It’s the way things are,” she said. “We change when we are threatened.”

The change began as soon as they perceived what we were. Being visited by aliens from outer space is a scary thing, you know?

They learned early on we meant them no harm. Rationally, they understood this, completely, but their bodies never got the message. Once their autonomic nervous system perceived the need to change, there was no stopping it. No amount of reason could return their systems to homeostasis.

They tried. They hoped to avoid the change by ignoring us, pretending we didn’t exist. As they eventually found out, ignoring us did not work. It was a little like when you know you’ve been exposed to a disease, and then you wait to see if you’re going to get it, helpless to alter the outcome.

Chasing them all over the islands didn’t help, I suppose.

No. Their circle games told the story.

Just like our ashes, ashes, their songs told of disease like the plague. Other songs detailed storms, vermin, and famine, and all were followed by a change.

Well. We have a long time to go over this in more detail.

I’m done talking, actually.

We’re counting on you to talk sense into the group still down on Anahit, get them back up here with us, so we can go.

Among that group are our children, and they are not leaving. We aren’t leaving either.

You have left.

Kaminsky, Hokkaido, and I came up here only to tell you we aren’t leaving. We felt we owed you a face-to-face. But there’s no reason to leave, see? It’s a nice planet, and we’ve built ourselves a nice community. The Toes are beginning to interact with us. We were here when they were born; we can’t possibly hurt them.

Our mission…

Our mission was to make friends. And make friends we did.

Martha A. Hood lives in Irvine, California, with her husband and her cockatiel. She is a storytelling addict, both as a doer, and as a consumer.