In a new serialized novella from Hugo Award-winning author Sarah Gailey, a fractured group of undesirables work together to nurture and nourish each other while navigating a dangerous world that would just as soon see them dead. Still—inch by inch, meal by meal—they build their own future. Have you eaten?

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Fen’s Mom’s Chicken Pot Pie

Crust (2 batches)
2½ cups flour
Pinch of salt
1 cup butter
6 tablespoons water

Filling
3 stalks celery, chopped
1 onion, diced; or 1 can pearl onions, drained and rinsed
2 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons flour
4 cups chicken broth
1 teaspoon onion powder
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 tsp chopped fresh sage
Pepper
1 bag mixed frozen peas & carrots
2 chicken breasts, roasted and shredded
Salt

Instructions

Make the Crust

1. Combine the flour and the salt. Add the butter and mix with your hands until small crumbs are formed.  

2. Add in water 1 tablespoon at a time, mixing with your hands to form dough. 

3. Chill for 1 hour. 

4. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. While it’s heating, divide the dough in half. Roll out each half separately. Set one aside, and place the other in a floured and buttered pie pan. Poke the bottom several times with a fork to release steam during cooking.

5. Bake blind for 15 minutes.  


Make the Filling

1. In a nonstick skillet over medium heat, sauté the celery and chopped onion if using. Salt to taste. When vegetables have just begun to soften, set aside.

2. In the same skillet, heat the butter over medium heat until it stops bubbling. Add the flour and whisk thoroughly until there are no lumps. Stir until golden brown.

3. Add the chicken broth to the pan. Whisk thoroughly until well-combined. Add the onion powder, garlic powder, sage, and plenty of black pepper. *Do not salt at this stage; since the broth will be thickened into gravy, the risk of oversalting is high.
4. Add the cooked vegetables, the frozen vegetables, and the pearl onions if using. Stir to combine.
5. Simmer until the sauce thickens into a gravy.
6. Remove from the heat and stir in the shredded chicken.

7. Pour the filling into the blind-baked crust. Top with the rolled-out unbaked crust. Cut slits in the top to vent steam. Bake until golden and flaky on top, 35–45 minutes.


Optional: Instead of pie crust, bake under a layer of biscuits. Double the filling recipe to fill a 9×13-inch pan.

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It’s Daneka’s birthday, so everyone in the squat is being quiet and trying not to make eye contact with each other. The problem is that everyone’s known for weeks that Fen is worried about Daneka. At first they all rolled their eyes at Fen—people go missing all the time, and worrying over that is as useless as paper money. Then they tried to get her to snap out of it, because Fen’s the one who makes decisions and plans, and her anxiety over Daneka has been occupying her mind so thoroughly that she hasn’t been deciding or planning anything.

Now, after weeks with no Daneka and no word from her either, everyone in the squat privately shares Fen’s suspicion that something bad has probably happened to their friend. Nobody wants to be the first to say something, though, so they’re all finding reasons to be on their palmsets, reasons to look out the window, reasons to attend to their least-favorite chores.

Fen isn’t making it easy for anyone to speak up, anyway. She’s not talking about her feelings. Four months ago, she overheard Quan calling her a “neurotic clinger.” Quan didn’t know she could hear him—she had just walked into the room and was standing right behind him, like in that movie everyone in the squat makes fun of but hasn’t seen. He said it in a mean way, even though he’s not a mean person, except when he sort of is. And she wasn’t supposed to hear, but she did.

She sort of melted off into her bedroom after that. When Morrow checked in on Fen later she made all the right noises about understanding that she needs to manage her anxiety and Quan’s mastery of incisive languagebut still, damn, it must have stung to hear. Since then, Fen’s been “managing her anxiety” by quietly vibrating, crying when she thinks nobody can hear her, and saying nothing about her feelings to anyone, ever.

Her silence isn’t keeping her secret, though. The housemates know each other even better than they know hunger, and they all recognize the signs of Fen’s worry. Her lips are ragged from chewing. She keeps asking thinly anonymized questions like, Do you think people have responsibility to each other? and, How would you handle it if a friend suddenly grew really distant? Every time anyone catches a glimpse of her palmset, she’s looking at Daneka’s profile, refreshing over and over again, her eyes locked on the location status that hasn’t updated in a month.

At first, Harper told her that some people thrive on independence in relationships. At first, Morrow told her that it probably had nothing to do with her. At first, Quan told her that she could talk to him if she was freaking out about something, but she responded with a patently forced smile and said that she was fine, and then Quan spent the rest of the day asking Harper and Morrow if he’d done anything to upset her because he still didn’t know she’d heard the thing he’d said about her in the first place.

And now it’s Daneka’s birthday, and Daneka still hasn’t come home or answered anyone’s private messages, and everyone is just as worried as Fen’s been for weeks but nobody wants to say so because that would mean admitting that Fen was right all along, and then they’d have to try to figure out what to do.

Fen is usually the one who figures out what to do.

Around noon, a patrol car passes the squat. Quan watches it through a gap in the boards that cover the windows. Once the car has passed out of sight, he lets out a short sharp sigh, slaps his thighs with both palms, and shoots to his feet. His square jaw is set, his thick brows furrowed, his slim fingers balled into fists. “Okay,” he says. “Where the fuck’s Fen?”

“Kitchen,” Harper answers from the floor, where they’re using their fingers to fill a gouge in the laminate with a mixture of sawdust and wood glue. Their dark scalp-stubble grows in continent-like patches around old burn scars on their scalp. The scars are from their life in Old Chicago, which no one in the squat makes the mistake of asking about. Harper isn’t a leader in the same way Fen is, but they could be if they were less irritable about other people needing things and making noises about it. “Step careful. Glue’s drying.”

Quan obeys, tiptoeing past the collection of cushions and camp chairs that Harper’s stacked against the wall to make room for this needlessly intense project. He makes his way to the kitchen and finds that Harper was right: there’s Fen, red-eyed and purse-mouthed, clutching a potato and staring into the nearly bare cupboard.

“You freaking out or what?” Quan asks, looking into the cupboard too so Fen won’t feel like her tears are being noticed.

“No,” she answers, her voice too wobbly to stick the landing. She twists her neck to wipe her nose on the shoulder of her cardigan. The movement makes one tight-coiled curl fall across her forehead. “A little worried that they might finally turn off the electricity this month.”

“Any reason to think that might happen, or are you getting upset over nothing?”

“Probably the second one,” Fen answers, not too defensively. “It’s just. You know. At some point the developers that own this block are gonna remember that this house exists, and we should have a plan for what to do when that happens.” She closes her eyes, takes a long slow breath. “But we’ll deal with it when we get there. What about you? How’s your day so far?”

Quan lets out a dry laugh. “Not great. I’m worried about Daneka.”

Those last four words strike Fen like a match. She explodes with relief. “Oh my god, me too. Where the hell is she? Wait, I mean—no,” she stammers, her face crumpling as she tries and fails to reel her words back, to reconfigure herself into whatever well-managed anxiety is supposed to look like. “It’s fine that she’s gone. I’ve just been wondering why she hasn’t come home, I guess? But it’s fine that she hasn’t.”

Quan opens the refrigerator and pulls out a celery bunch that’s as limp as yarn. “No, like, I’m worried too. She’s been gone for a month, that’s not normal. And she hasn’t messaged you at all?”

“Not at all,” Fen replies. “I haven’t been messaging her that much or anything, just a couple of ‘thinking of you’ taps. She did a thumbs-up react but I don’t know what that means, and—”

“That doesn’t mean anything.” Quan whacks the listless celery against the quartz counter, which is still marked at the edges with wax crayon where the flippers who abandoned this house had planned to cut it. “I think we should call a house meeting.”

Morrow comes thudding down the hall, their heavy boots loud on the gray laminate. Morrow’s body takes up space—they’re built like a fridge, if a fridge could work out—but their voice hides in the back of their throat. “Are, um. Are you guys talking about Daneka?”

“Shoes, asshole,” Harper yells from the living room.

Morrow sits down on the floor immediately and starts undoing their laces. “Sorry. Did someone hear from her?”

“I can’t hear you,” Quan says. “Nobody can fuckin’ hear you.”

“Quan’s worried,” Fen adds. “About Daneka.”

Morrow exchanges a significant glance with Quan. “Okay, well, I mean. It’s just that. You know. I think Quan’s right to be worried. It’s weird that we haven’t heard from Daneka, and—”

“I’ve heard from her,” Harper calls, looking up from their work on the floor. “Thumbs-up react on my last message.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Fen says, earning raised eyebrows from Harper. “You know what? I’m just gonna call her.” She pulls her palmset out of her back pocket and unfolds it, hesitates briefly, looks up, realizes everyone is watching her and she can’t change her mind now—and dials.

The tritone sound of the call going through cycles twelve times before the call drops.

“That’s fine,” Fen says weakly. “I’ll message. She’s probably away from her palmset, she’ll see when she gets back to it.” She swipes out a message, saying the words as she traces them across one quadrant of the screen. “Should . . . we . . . expect . . . you . . . for . . . dinner. There.” She folds her palmset back up before tossing it onto the counter and turning to her housemates. “I’m making chicken pot pie. It’s her favorite. If she shows up, we can have a birthday party. If not, we’ll just eat it without her.”

Morrow grabs the counter and uses it to pull themself upright. They stare at Fen, their dark eyes wide with disbelief. “Wait, for real? You know how to make chicken pot pie?”

“No she doesn’t,” Quan snaps. “When’s the last time you think Fen got her hands on meat? Be serious.”

Fen ignores him, pulling a scratched wooden box off the top of the fridge and answering Morrow without acknowledging Quan at all. “I stole my mom’s recipe box when my folks kicked me out. I know how to make all her recipes.”

“Nice,” Harper says. They jog to the kitchen and dip a rag into the washwater basin, then start scrubbing gluey sawdust off their thumb. “Where d’you think Daneka is?”

“That’s not any of our business,” Fen answers, reaching deeper into the cupboard than she probably needs to.

“Is too,” Harper replies, scowling.

Fen goes still, her head between the shelves. “Really?”

“Course.” Harper runs a hand over their scalp. They sigh. “She’s part of our family. Fuck’s sake, she lives here. And yeah, she drops off the map from time to time. But that’s a few days at a stretch. She’s usually sending videos and posting stuff. And messaging us. Anyone gotten any actual messages?” They wait for everyone else’s headshakes to confirm before continuing. “So.”

And then Morrow whispers the thing nobody’s wanted to say, the thing Fen’s been thinking for twenty-eight days. “What if . . . she got picked up?”

“We’d know,” Quan says immediately.

“How?” Harper’s bony shoulders snap up around their ears. “How would we know, Quan? You think they still let people make phone calls?”

“What about the thumbs-up reacts?”

“Those don’t mean anything,” Harper snaps. “When’s the last time you saw Daneka go quiet on socials?”

Everyone stops to think. “Last time she got picked up,” Quan finally admits. “She was waiting at a drop-off point for a delivery for the three of us—me and her and Fen, I mean.” He nods to Fen, who finally extracts herself from the cupboard, her face drawn. Back before Fen and Quan and Daneka met Harper and Morrow, the three of them had been their own little trio. Moving from place to place, following rumors about reliable, affordable hormones and welcoming communities. “The seller was an undercover. He snatched Daneka for like a week. She didn’t post or message the whole time.”

“Did she send reacts?”

“Hearts,” Fen whispers, remembering. “She told us later that the cop took her palmset so he could go through her messages and contacts and stuff.”

“So. Thumbs-up reacts don’t mean shit,” Harper confirms.

Morrow steps on the loose toe of one sock, his eyes fixed on the floor. “Okay, but also, she came home after she got picked up that time, right? So she’ll probably come home this time, too.”

It’s Fen and Quan’s turn to exchange a loaded glance. “That was in Santa Cruz,” Quan says slowly.

Morrow, who lived their whole life just up the freeway in Redding, hoists themself up to sit on the counter. The quartz creaks under their weight. “Is it bad there?”

“Nah,” Quan says. “They’ll pick you up for indecency or gender impersonation or whatever, but they don’t process you most of the time. They just take your money if you have any. It’s . . . it’s not like here,” he finishes, his eyes on his hands, his voice uncharacteristically soft.

Everyone startles when Fen drops the entire potato bin onto the counter. Her eyes are dry, her scar-notched brows set. “Daneka will be here,” she announces.

This is the Fen they’ve all been missing. This is her determined face, the one she wears when she’s deciding to create reality from scratch. It’s the face she wore when she and Quan and Daneka first met Morrow—Fen decided they’d all live together, even though Morrow had just tried to mug them. It’s the face she wore when they broke into this squat through the front door and found Harper breaking into it through the back door. And it’s the face she wears as she informs the other three housemates present that she will be making a birthday dinner, that Daneka will show up to eat it, and that they’re all going to help in the meantime.

“You,” she says, pointing at a startled Morrow. “Sort these potatoes.”

Morrow eyes the potato bin dubiously. “By . . . size?”

“By sprouts. We can probably eat all of these since none of them are green, but the ones with really long sprouts might not be good. Look into my eyes, Morrow,” she says, and she waits for their big dark eyes to meet hers. “We aren’t risking it with any rotten food today. Okay? I mean it. Not for Daneka’s birthday.”

Morrow nods and picks up a potato with one huge, gentle hand.

“And you,” Fen says, wheeling on Quan and brandishing the sagging celery stalks he’d idly removed from the refrigerator a few minutes before. “Figure this out.”

Harper stands on the other side of the kitchen counter, their arms folded. “Guess the boss is back.”

Fen regards them with bristling determination. “You’re coming shopping with me.”

The two of them go out through the back door and cross the crunchy brown grass of the back lawn. Harper boosts Fen over the gate in the back fence, which is white vinyl stamped to look like wood and doesn’t open from the inside. Once Fen is on the other side, she thumbs the code into the keypad and eases the gate open.

“Should fix that thing,” Harper says as they pass through the gate onto the community path, their eyes flicking down to the busted keypad on the inside of the fence. It looks like someone took a hammer to it.

“Good luck,” Fen replies. “Sorry, that sounded bitchy. I really mean it. You’re good with electronics.”

Harper snorts. “Sure. Hey, do you think—”

“I don’t want to talk about Daneka,” Fen interrupts.

“I wasn’t going to ask about Daneka. I was going to ask if you think that’s fennel or dill,” Harper says, pointing at a frondy green that’s growing a couple of feet off the path. This trail was a jackpot find they discovered a couple of weeks after settling into the squat: a poorly maintained ribbon of asphalt that stretches behind two miles of houses, terrible for jogging or riding a bicycle but perfect for foraging, especially when it comes to plants that like to jump fences from hobby gardens out into the world.

Fen rubs a frond, then lifts her fingers to her nose. “Fennel,” she says, grinning. “What do you think, take the bulb or just cut a couple stalks?”

“Stalks,” Harper answers, pulling a box cutter out of their back pocket. They trim off a couple of stalks of fennel. The licorice smell perfumes the air around them. “And you’re lying.”

“What?”

“You’re lying. You want to talk about Daneka.” Harper waits while Fen pulls a crumpled plastic grocery bag out of one pocket, then drops the fennel stalks into it.

Fen starts walking. Her strides are long, her pace quick—Harper has to move fast to keep up. “I’m just worried about her, is all.”

“Pissed at her, more like. Hang on. Mint.” They stoop to rip up a few fistfuls of the mint that grows in patches all along the trail, then use the blade of their box cutter to dig out a hank of it with the roots intact. “I read that if you plant this stuff in your yard, it’ll grow everywhere. We can replace that crusty lawn.”

“You think we’re going to stay in the squat long enough for it to matter?”

“Been six months already,” Harper says. “Might stay.”

“Sure,” Fen says, her eyes darting to either end of the trail. “The thing is, okay, I’m not pissed at Daneka. I’m just—if she’s not missing, then yeah, I’d feel some kind of way about it. But I’m not pissed yet, because we don’t know if she’s missing or just being an inconsiderate asshole. If she’s missing, I don’t want to be pissed at her, I want to be worried. But I’d rather be pissed.”

Harper shrugs. “Could be both. Missing and an asshole.”

“Don’t. Don’t joke like that.” Fen stalks ahead for a few minutes, until they reach a spot where they’d found wild onions once. She tucks her pants into her socks before stepping off the trail to slowly pace in a circle through the grass, looking for the tall green stalks of an allium. “I don’t know what we do if she doesn’t come home. Do we go try to find her? Get her out?”

“No,” Harper says immediately. “Too dangerous.”

Fen stoops and tears out a fistful of grass, runs her hand along the dirt. “Maybe just me and Quan,” she mutters. “If you and Morrow don’t give a shit.”

“We give a shit. But you two getting yourselves snatched won’t help Daneka. There,” they say suddenly, pointing to a spot just behind Fen.

The onions are puny, their tops scraggly, but Fen still beams with triumph. “See?” she says, brandishing the onions. “It’s gonna be great. We’re already most of the way there.”

They visit the overgrown rosemary hedge, waving away half-drunk bees to snap off a few stems. They harvest a couple of handfuls of pealike seed pods from a thatch of bolted arugula, stepping over the papery white flowers that litter the path around it. Fen crows at the sight of what looks like garlic or maybe a shallot and digs it up, only to find a snotty hunk of black rot where the papery bulb should be. As she’s swearing and wiping her hands on her jeans, though, Harper spots another, and this one turns out to only be half-rotted.

“Yes yes yes,” Fen whispers, slicing the rot away with Harper’s box cutter.

Harper eyes the rot that’s falling away. “That gonna be good?”

“Not even a risky one,” Fen confirms. “We’ve eaten way worse.”

“What else do you need?”

“Um.” Fen pauses, closes her eyes. “Carrots. Flour. Butter. We have salt, right?”

Harper thinks. “Yeah, Morrow grabbed a bunch of packets last time we got burgers. How much flour? Would cornstarch work instead?”

“Maybe? Oh, and we need chicken.”

They both laugh. “I’ll grab the first one I see,” Harper says.

They walk the rest of the path and they don’t find carrots, just a lot more mint, some marjoram, and a stray cat that puffs up his tail at them. As they head home, Fen slows her pace. “Harp, are you mad at me?”

“Nah. But I should be.”

Fen nods. She trusts Harper because of answers like this one. “How come?”

Harper stops walking, waits for Fen to turn and face them. They take a deep breath and fold their arms across their chest. The sun falls in gold dapples across their freckled shoulders. They regard Fen irritably, the way they always do when they’re figuring out how to say a thing that they think should go without saying. “Because,” they say at last, “you dropped us.”

“I—what?”

“You dropped us. You’re the one in charge. You make the decisions, you boss everyone around, you decide what the day’s gonna look like. But you got worried about Daneka, so you stopped. Where do you think Morrow went today?”

Fen shrugs. “Out?”

“They went to the coffee shop,” Harper snaps, jutting their head forward. “To see that barista they keep flirting with. Because you weren’t paying attention enough to notice that Morrow hasn’t clocked how the coffee shop is a cop joint, so you didn’t tell them not to go.”

“You could have told them not to go,” Fen mutters.

Harper narrows their eyes. “I did. But Morrow doesn’t listen to me the way they listen to you. Which you know. But you’ve been in your feelings, so you decided someone else could handle the shit you usually handle, and now we gotta figure out if Morrow got followed home by a uniform.”

 Fen shook her head. “I’m not in charge of—”

“The fuck you’re not. Take responsibility for your vibe, Fen. Either we can count on you or we can’t. Which is it?”

The two of them glare at each other. A cricket starts to sing the late afternoon down into dusk. Fen breaks first, huffing out a sigh as she looks away.

“I’ll think about it,” she says at last.

Harper nods. “I know.”

When they get back to the house, the potatoes are lined up on the counter, in order from one with no sprouts to one with four-inch-long ones. The celery is floating in a bowl of water, looking significantly sturdier than it had just an hour before. Morrow and Quan are hovering over the sink.

“Hey kids,” Harper says, dropping the now-full bag of produce onto the counter. “Whaddaya got there?”

Morrow turns around, grinning and holding up what looks like a wad of white gum. “Butter!”

Fen’s jaw drops. “You’re joking. Where did you get butter?!”

“They made it,” Quan says. He sounds like he doesn’t believe the words he’s saying.

“I learned how when I was a kid,” Morrow explains, dropping their tiny palmful of butter onto a plate on the counter. “It’s easy. You, um.” Their ears are going red from the combined attention of the other three. “You just put some cream in a jar and shake it a thousand times, then pull out the solid stuff and wash it in cold water. Is this gonna be enough?”

Harper picks up an old peanut butter jar that has a couple of inches of cloudy liquid in it. “Ew.”

“That’s buttermilk, save it,” Fen says quickly. “Morrow, where the fuck did you get cream?”

“The guy at the coffee shop down the road. Me and Quan ran over there after I finished sorting the potatoes. Dude only charged us a dollar for a pretty decent pour. I thought, maybe we could invite coffee shop guy over sometime and—”

“We won’t be doing that,” Quan says frankly, “but hey. How do you like that, Fen? Butter?”

Everyone turns to Fen. She’s holding the plate of butter, her eyes welling with tears. “I like it,” she whispers. “Thank you, Morrow.”

“I helped,” Quan mutters.

Fen’s palmset, still sitting where she left it on the counter an hour and a half earlier, chimes.

Everyone freezes. Morrow reaches for the palmset but Harper slaps their hand away.

Quan puts a hand on Fen’s shoulder. “Do you want to look at it?”

Fen shakes her head, then nods, then shakes her head again. “Do you still have the cornstarch in the bathroom? From when you were doing liberty spikes in your hair?”

“Uh, yeah.” Quan blinks a few times. “Do you need it?”

Fen picks up a potato, not looking at Quan at all. “Yeah. Can you grab it?”

“I guess.” He heads down the long hall to the bathroom on the other end of the house, looking over his shoulder at her every few steps.

Once he’s out of sight, she pounces on the palmset. There’s a message from Daneka.

I’ll do my best!

“What does that mean?” Fen whispers to herself.

Harper leans closer. “What’s it say?”

“Nothing.” Fen folds the palmset shut.

“Well. What do you mean, though? What’s nothing? Was it from Daneka?” Morrow wipes their buttery hands on their jeans and reaches one long arm across the counter for the palmset again.

“Yes.” Fen jams the handset into her pocket. Her eyes flick up toward the hall, where Quan is returning with a crumpled bag of cornstarch. “But it wasn’t anything. Who wants to wash all this marjoram?”

For the next hour, Fen steers the four of them through a recipe. Quan and Morrow work together to clean all the vegetables. By the time that’s done, Fen’s got water boiling on the hotplate. She boils all the usable potatoes, then uses the potato water to reconstitute some chicken powder into a cloudy broth. Harper pulls the celery out of its bowl of water to discover that it’s more or less revitalized; they chop that and the fennel stalks while Fen dices the wild onion and garlic they found.

Quan is playing lo-fi beats on his palmset, and Morrow is mumbling lyrics to go with the beats, and they’re all laughing hard enough that they almost don’t hear it when Fen’s palmset chimes again. She tosses the garlic and wild onion into a skillet on the hotplate before pulling it out of her pocket and unfolding it.

Remind me where we’re meeting?

Harper looks over her shoulder. “Fuck,” they whisper.

“What’s up?” Quan looks up from the playlist he’s curating. “Fen? You okay?”

“I’m fine,” Fen says. Her voice is perfectly flat. She folds the palmset back into her pocket, then takes up the wooden spoon next to the skillet and gives the onion a stir. “Harper, can you throw the celery in here for me? Quan, Morrow, go pack your stuff and charge your palmsets. Use the rapid charger in the living room.”

Morrow furrows their brow. “Didn’t you say the rapid charger is a fire hazard? Or is it—”

“She’s right. We gotta go. Hurry,” Harper says. “We should pack too,” they add in an urgent whisper after Quan and Morrow have gone.

“In a minute,” Fen replies. “I want to finish this.”

“Fen—”

“In a minute,” she says again, her voice steady and certain the way it was before Daneka went missing. The way it’s always been. “Carrots?”

“We didn’t find carrots,” Harper reminds her softly. “You want the fennel, though?”

Fen closes her eyes tight, bows her head. Lets out a teakettle hiss of curses. When she looks back up and meets Harper’s eyes, her gaze is flat. “Will we stay together? Do you want to stay with us, I mean? You don’t have to.”

Harper draws her into a tight hug. “I don’t know. Let’s figure that out in the morning, yeah? Right now, I’m gonna go pack up my stuff and charge my palmset. Want me to get yours too?”

Fen nods. “I want to finish cooking this for Daneka. Just in case.”

Harper taps the recipe box on the counter as they leave the kitchen. “Don’t forget this.”

After Harper disappears into the living room with both their palmsets, Fen lets herself cry. Just for a few seconds. A couple of sobs, a spill of hot tears, that’s all.

Then she adds the chopped fennel stalks to the skillet. When the fennel is bright green, she pours the chicken broth into the pan and lets it boil for a few minutes. It’s already thickening a little thanks to the potato starch in the water, but she adds some of Quan’s cornstarch too, stirring fast until it makes a thick gravy. She adds marjoram and rosemary since she doesn’t have any sage. She smashes the potatoes, stirs in chicken powder and Morrow’s butter, adds a few salt-and-pepper combo packets from Morrow’s stash.

“Okay,” she whispers to herself as she lets the potatoes heat just a little longer, to get any last water out. “Finish it. Move on. Work to do.”

She can hear Quan and Harper trying to figure out how to fit her sweaters into her backpack. They won’t figure it out on their own, she knows, because they don’t know how to roll sweaters up tiny. She’ll go help them in a minute, but first, she scoops mashed potatoes into a paper bowl and uses the back of a spoon to spread them in an even layer. She pours vegetables and thick gravy on top, then covers those with another even layer of mashed potatoes. With the back of the spoon, she smooths the top down, then carves lines into the center of the layer to look like the slits in the top of a piecrust.

Quan comes into the kitchen, his backpack rising up over his shoulders like a turtle’s shell, and eyes the steaming bowl on the counter. “It’s smaller than I thought it’d be,” he says. “Good thing there’s only three of us. Are there clean spoons?”

Fen’s eyes snap up to him. Her face is blazing with barely restrained fury. “Don’t fucking touch it,” she says in a low, dangerous voice. “This is for Daneka.”

He frowns at her. “Chill. Daneka’s not here. Are you telling me we’re not going to eat this just because she got—”

“She’s going to be here,” Fen says. “And she’s going to be hungry when she gets home. We’ll eat on the road. Get moving.”

Quan looks like he’s about to protest, but then Morrow comes into the kitchen and smiles down at the bowl on the counter. “Daneka’s gonna love it,” they murmur. “Good job, Fen.”

“Are you serious?” Quan snaps. “You don’t want to eat it either?”

Morrow looks at him with open bewilderment. “It’s Daneka’s birthday. We’ll figure something else out.”

The four of them are out of the house five minutes later.Harper turns the lights off and locks the back door. Morrow boosts Quan over the back fence to let them out through the gate.

Fen is about to ease the back gate shut, but she hesitates, her eyes locked on the dark house. She tells herself that she’s trying to remember if she left anything behind, even as she mentally runs through the list of items that she already knows she’s carrying on her back.

“Fen?” Quan whisper-yells from the darkness down the path.

The edge of the pressed vinyl creaks in her grip. She rises up on her toes, trying to see inside.

“Hey,” Harper hisses. “We gotta move.”

A light goes on inside the house.

Fen closes the gate. “Coming.”

---

Fen’s “Chicken” Pot Pie

Crust (2 batches)
6 potatoes
3 tablespoons butter
Chicken bouillon powder
Salt and pepper packets

Filling
2 handfuls arugula seed pods, chopped
3 stalks celery, chopped
2 fennel stalks, chopped
3 wild onions, diced
2 tablespoons cornstarch mixed w/ ⅓ cup water to form a slurry
4 cups chicken broth
4 cloves garlic, chopped
1 teaspoon chopped fresh marjoram/rosemary
Pepper

Instructions

Make the “Crust”

1. Boil the potatoes. Drain, reserving the potato water.
2. Smash the cooked potatoes until smooth.
3. Add butter, chicken bouillon powder, salt, and pepper to taste.

Make the filling

1. Add chicken powder to the potato water to make broth
2. In a nonstick skillet over medium heat, sauté the celery, onion, and garlic. Add the fennel and sauté until bright green.
3. Add the chicken broth to the pan. Add herbs. Simmer 3–5 minutes.
4. Add cornstarch slurry and whisk thoroughly to thicken.

Assemble

5. Line a bowl with a thick layer of mashed potatoes. Add filling, then top with mashed potatoes and sculpt into a crust shape. Optional, if there’s time (there’s not): toast the mashed potatoes on top with a hand torch.

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“Have You Eaten?” copyright © 2024 by Sarah Gailey
Art copyright © 2024 by Shing Yin Khor
Photography copyright © 2024 by Sarah Gailey

The post Have You Eaten? Part 1: Daneka’s Birthday appeared first on Reactor.

A Brazilian freelance journalist confronts the grim reality her past choices created when she covers a community of people living in a landfill and what they must do to survive…

Edilberto Santos takes three plastic bottle caps from the teepee fire in front of him. He crumples their burnt remains together with a spatula, kneading them until they form a semi-solid, charred paste, their blue, red, and green mixing in an uninvited, incomplete rainbow. He whistles a joyful song while waiting for it to cool. I have things to say but I don’t interrupt him. After three minutes, he grabs a cheese grater and starts scraping the paste in it, sprinkling the flecks into a bowl. Finally, he scoops the floury mix with a rusty spoon and eats it. His eyes focus on the camera as he chews it. Some of the flecks catch in between his teeth. It doesn’t bother him. He’s used to it.

I glance down at my pad to escape Edilberto’s gaze. The next question is highlighted on the screen. How does it taste? Did I write those words? What was I thinking? São João da Campânula is not a damn reality show. It’s a landfill and it’s home for about forty families. A knot throbs in my chest as I cross through the question to erase it.

“Are you all right, Dona Elisa?” Edilberto asks. He’s missing a few teeth. His eyes droop over his sallow cheeks. I shrug and force a nod. What does it mean to be all right after seeing a man eating plastic?

I slide a finger over my pad so my cam-drone buzzes away from Edilberto, focusing instead on the trash behind him. A few people trudge through the paths that open like clogged veins amidst the heaps. A kid fetches something from the ground, giggling with a man beside him. A woman enveloped in a broad shawl carries a fat mesh bag. She selects an object in one of the heaps, yanks it out, and peeks at it. It’s a plastic bottle, cracky and sullied with the tan of corrosion. She throws it in her bag.

I open my backpack, pick a sandwich, and hand it to Edilberto. A sandwich. Of all the food I could’ve brought to São João da Campânula, I brought only a few sandwiches. Ham, cheese, butter.

Edilberto eyes the marmita with mild curiosity—a Tupperware box with a dog sticker on its side. He runs a finger over it. It’s the only one I brought from Mamãe’s home when I moved to Goiânia after our silent war started. She had that one since she was a child. She was five when she pasted that poodle there. Over the years, the box had stored a whole assortment of her most delicious food—Bolognese spaghetti, fried cod balls, chocolate pudding with strawberries, and scrambled eggs when she was in a hurry. The last time I tried to visit her, I brought pão de queijo in it. She didn’t touch them. Mamãe loved me for thirty-two years. However, over the past nine years she’s hated me. And she has a good reason for it.

“I’m not hungry right now, but thanks,” Edilberto says. “I can keep it for the others, though. Can I keep the box? It’s cute.”

“Yes, of course.” No hesitation. I don’t understand why. For Mamãe—and for me—it should be an heirloom. Perhaps by getting rid of her marmita, I’d be officially detaching myself from the woman I loved the most in my life. I peer one last time at the barking poodle sticker, its edges frayed and threatening to unstick. “Keep it, yeah…” Those last words falter, but they come out anyway.

Edilberto smiles at me. There’s sweetness in there. Despite the missing teeth, Edilberto doesn’t look like a broken man. Not like I pictured all those people—the plastikeaters, as some having been derogatorily calling them since they were “discovered” by the media. I’d thought of them as sad, gaunt wanderers, aimlessly looking for solace in the landfills near Mairipotaba. In my nightmares, before I fully compromised in writing a story about their lives, they came to me as dolls made of plastic, revenge cooking in their eyes but their hands wilted together in begging.

The aggression of burnt plastic slicks the air. Not only due to the bottle caps that Edilberto burned. It comes from all over the landfill. Here and there, smoky snakes writhe toward the sundown. I skim through the list of questions I didn’t ask Edilberto. How does it taste? Does it hurt to eat plastic? How is your diet? Which types of items do you prefer?

Instead, I look straight into his eyes. There’s a deepness in there, brewed in the sweetness, that I doubt my own eyes possess.

“This smell…” I hesitate, swirling a finger in the air. “It’s—What does it convey to you?” I think of fires, faulty electronics, problems. Of things going wrong.

“Which smell?—Oh! I barely notice it anymore. But it smells like dinner.”

The story of São João da Campânula started with the company called Verdidea.

Once upon a time, Verdidea was the future: the bastion of sustainability and green technology allied with social and environmental responsibility, a powerful Brazilian—then global—force to correct everything that was wrong with the world. And, indeed, they showed what they were all about. In a decade, their projects of reforestation employed millions of micro-drones in the Amazon rainforest, with tech that healed the damaged soil, planted new trees, and rescued animals during fires—all the time learning the patterns of what they were doing, so they could improve themselves over time and avoid catastrophes. In five years, they managed to recover 85 percent of the previously unrecoverable deforested area. Verdidea freed more than eight hundred rivers from industrial waste all around South America; they brought water to the driest parts of the sertão.

Once upon a time, working for Verdidea was the dream job from engineers to lawyers, from botanists to PR specialists like myself.

Verdidea truly wanted the world to become a better place. As long as the world was theirs.

The story of São João da Campânula also started with me. Once, ten years ago, I came as a PR specialist to write part of it. Now, two years after the company’s breakdown, I come as a freelancer journalist to rewrite it the best way I can.

“You can look to the camera,” I say to the woman, pointing to the cam-drone whirring in front of her. Behind her, a dog lolls on a chair underneath her wooden shack’s only window.

“I prefer not to.”

“That’s okay.” I slide a finger on my pad so the drone swivels to the side and avoids focusing on her face. “What’s your name?”

“Ângela.”

She’s a woman in her mid-fifties, brown skin, curly hair falling over her shoulders like waterfalls. She exhales a sweet scent of unnamed flowers, generic enough to fit anywhere, anytime. Next to her shack’s door there’s a cauldron filled with plastic bottles. On it, scrawled in big red letters: Pick yours, leave for others. A repurposed dresser lies next to it with five cheese graters, all shiny and clean, delicately covered with a transparent raincoat.

“Hi, Ângela. My name is Elisa Assunção. I’m a journalist and I’m working on a story about your lives. It aims to bring attention to the authorities and—”

“I know who you are.” I freeze. For a moment I think Ângela knows exactly the role Elisa Assunção played in her very existence. She waves her hand. “Your type always comes here, asking questions, giving us crumbs to nibble. Then you go away. You’re predators, that’s what I say.”

I agree. Brazil was shocked when the news about São João da Campânula broke in the headlines. Plastic-eating people living in landfill. A new kind of poverty sprouts in Goiás. In their prowl for answers—How can they survive? Is it a hoax? Where do they come from?—journalists and authorities came and went to the landfill as explorers, merely digging for stories and opportunities, never fully finding the answers, never providing ways out.

I, on the other hand, have the answers already. I’m part of them, so I come with all of them, not for them. Instead, I come for any shreds of redemption I can find in that place. Like Mamãe used to say, Don’t try to repair your mistakes all at once. Some of them you’ll just have to swallow.

“Ângela, do you have kids?”

“Um-hum.” She glares suspiciously at the cam-drone. I tap the OFF button on my pad and the drone slowly descends to the ground, its propellers shutting off and its LEDs powering down.

“Tell me about them.”

“That’s what you wanna hear? Won’t you talk about plastic? Your type loves to babble about plastic.”

“I just want to hear about your kids.”

First, she gives me what I deserve: silence. Then, she gives me the stories of Mariana, Rogério, Adenilson, and Cleiton, of how they walk fifty minutes to school every day. She tells me how they find toys in the landfill and how she has to carefully select what isn’t dangerous for them. She tells me how she loves a man called Jango, who lives in a shack in the eastern border of the landfill, of how she found brand-new canvas sneakers just lying around, green and yellow with black stripes, perfectly fitting on her feet. The only thing I type on my pad is the cornmeal cake recipe she dictates to me, which she only prepared twice in her life because she never has the ingredients.

In the end, she tells me she’s grateful for that “Verde-something company” because her kids never learned what it meant to starve.

The enzyme was a breakthrough. It took only one year to go from plastic-gobbling bacteria to plastic-digesting isopods. Verdidea’s name stamped every front page around the world. The Great Pacific garbage patch was being exorcised from its plastic by isopods at a rate never before imagined. Microbes carrying the enzyme were spread throughout landfills in Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia. It brought awareness and funding for bioplastics research, decreasing its costs of production. The video of a girl snickering and lowering a plastic soda bottle into a pool of isopods went viral for months.

When Mamãe saw the news, she was washing a plastic bowl. She guffawed, then widened her eyes.

“Perhaps I should replace it for something else.” She raised the bowl. “Lisa, do you have something to do with that, with all those great things your employer is doing?”

I laughed at her curiosity. But yes, I had something to do with Verdidea’s rise to fame. As their main PR specialist, I knew exactly what to sweep beneath the carpet: embezzlement schemes, tax evasion, greenwashing, and all scandals that involved Jandir and Vando Batista, brothers and CEOs of Verdidea. It was all justified, given the nature of Verdidea’s noble undertaking. At that moment, laughing with Mamãe in the kitchen, feeling cozy and accomplished, I had yet to fuck a lot of lives.

On the fifth day of my trip to São João da Campânula, I have only a recipe written down and less than twenty minutes of video footage. At night, I choose to walk around the landfill’s paths—its veins—with my pad and my cam-drone turned off in my backpack. This time, I don’t bring sandwiches.

I trudge, observing the flocks of people coming and going from the shacks that surround the landfill. A trio of men jab small items from the ground with hook sticks. A few steps behind them, two kids argue about the true color of the moon. One of them believes it’s as strikingly white as unspoiled milk. The other one says it’s tawny like the pages of the books in his mother’s chest. In the sky, silky clouds strive to hide the secrets of the moon.

On a heap of trash, an old woman with a hunched back fidgets with litter, a statue against the nightly hues. She wears fruit baskets as shoes and gloves to pick up what she deems useful. I wave at her, experimenting with a smile even knowing it hardly fits. She frowns at me but doesn’t wave back. A few meters ahead, six people gather around a grill, two of them sambaing to the erratic sounds of a broken pandeiro. The others laugh and talk loudly about a soccer game, pointing at each other, gesticulating. The stench that glues to the air, sweating from the grill, is the one I’m growing used to. Perhaps it means home to them. It smells like dinner. When I arrived home late from college, the aroma of Mamãe’s beans cooked with garlic and paprika pervaded the apartment. That scent was like a tight, warm embrace, even though I eventually chose to abandon it to chase illusions.

“Moça!” I pivot to face a boy sticking his foot into a pile of trash. He gives out a muffled cry but doesn’t really care about it. He stretches his arm to reach something. “You’re tall. Can you pick that lunchbox for me?” His voice is jumbled. He’s chewing bubble gum.

“Of course.” I walk to the pile of trash and fetch the lunchbox for him. It’s stylized with the drawing of a fading funny robot. One of its edges is dented. A bug skitters out of a tiny hole on its side. I shoo it away. “Is it for school?”

The boy shakes his head. He’s about eight years old, shirtless, soot daubing his cheeks like tribal marks. Dollops of dried blood swell from his lips. Not bubble gum. He’s chewing a piece of plastic casing for wires. I hand the lunchbox to him, mouth agape. They rarely eat raw plastic. It hurts the mouth, pharynx, and esophagus. That’s why they partially melt it, work it into a paste, then grate it. Verdidea’s directors spoke of plans for easing the process of eating plastic, mainly in the upper digestive system, from the mouth to the stomach. They went bankrupt without ever outlining those plans.

The boy opens the lunchbox and shakes it to clean it from dirt.

“Are you the journalist?” he asks, wiping the funny robot that grins at us with its coiling arms wide open as if looking for a hug.

“Yes. My name is Elisa.”

The boy spits half the casing from his mouth and swallows the rest. I gulp at it, wanting to look away. If it were weeks ago, I’d probably retch at the sight. But now I know it’s part of my story. I don’t want to avoid it.

“My maninha says she likes you. She met you ten years ago.”

My heart misses a beat. I gape at the boy. I don’t need to ask who his sister is. Francisca da Conceição, the person I gave to Verdidea as a corporate offering.

When would Verdidea put a base on the moon like the other billionaires were doing at a rapid pace? Questions like that whirled on the news all the time, but it never made Jandir and Vando Batista’s eyes shine. Their next big project was thankfully rooted on Earth: ending world hunger. For that, they had to choose between two paths: solving what prevented food from arriving at everyone’s tables or devising new feeding solutions. The former involved politics and tackling the core of the economic system itself, from which they greatly benefited, so they left it aside. The latter was what motivated them.

The plastic-breaking enzyme working in mammals was Verdidea’s secret—forbidden—breakthrough. After the plastic was digested into monomers, very specific bacteria carried its constituent parts through the digestive system. Grouped with other microbes artificially inserted into someone’s microbiota, those monomers could be converted into carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins, and other nutrients. It was a giant leap from what Verdidea had been using in isopods for three years. (And by the way, the Great Pacific garbage patch had shrunken 25 percent since the crustaceans were employed there. Headlines flashed that Verdidea was the company that should run the world.)

With the enzyme-bacteria system working in humans, no one would need to starve anymore. Virtually anything around people could be easily turned into food. Plastic was ubiquitous in cities. The food supply chain would be disrupted. Transport, distribution, aggregation, and processing might all be rendered secondary and, with a whole assortment of new processes, different textures and tastes could be acquired. Feeding people would be a decentralized process without lots of points of failure. Costs would plummet. It would all become excruciatingly cheaper than producing any kind of food, and with the way Verdidea planned to employ its enzyme-bacteria system, eating plastic could also prove to be healthier than eating ultra-processed food. Not only would famine end, but people would have quality nutrition all around the world. The abrasive and obnoxious stench of burnt plastic that would pester the cities could be solved soon after. Verdidea was certain they could do anything. I was certain I could make the world believe in that.

Mamãe and I had gone through rough patches when I was a kid. Mamãe had to work overnight as a prostitute to take care of me during the day, and on weekends she got temporary gigs as a window cleaner so we had food on our table. So more than a meaningful job, Verdidea’s project became personal to me.

The next step came when the process worked successfully on mice, then monkeys. So they needed volunteers. I never fooled myself about what that word meant for them.

There were poor communities near Mairipotaba comprising displaced people from Goiânia’s massive gentrification. They were jobless, many of them starving, not a few resorting to landfills to find food and junk to sell at paltry values. It was near those communities that Verdidea decided to build a new headquarters. It was me who wrote articles and called press conferences to convince Verdidea’s shareholders that it was a good idea. I worked day and night to fabricate the vision of Verdidea sinking its roots in the middle of Brazil and making them sprout deep and wide, bringing progress everywhere they touched, so when it came to the public it would all be beautifully justified. All in the name of ending world hunger. Meanwhile, Verdidea’s lawyers scoured the law for loopholes that would allow them to start experimenting on humans—and, as I later found out, Verdidea deceived the ethics committee responsible for the project, presenting to them an entirely different set of parameters.

In a one-hour speech, I convinced Verdidea’s shareholders that it was a good idea to make São João’s citizens eat trash. Three months later, they applauded me and green-lighted the project.

The story of Francisca da Conceição started when I found her lone shack, half a kilometer from São João da Campânula, the widest of the landfills. Her hut was surrounded by shrubs and flanked by a muddied-water stream. When I arrived, the wind plucked fiercely at pants, shirts, and sneakers hanging from a clothesline. Somewhere inside, sertanejo wheezed from shabby speakers. It was the furthest I had the guts to go into the Mairipotaba’s communities, not so far from Verdidea’s new headquarters—next to where I went to live after I left Mamãe and the cozy aromas of her beans with garlic. But most important, it wasn’t within the humiliating heart of São João.

I’d learned through Verdidea’s reports that an eighteen-year-old girl lived in that shack with her mothers and that she stayed alone during most of the day, when her mothers left to scavenge the landfills and hawk in the streets of Goiânia.

Francisca was a thin girl with a protruding belly. When I first saw her, she wore a crop top and jeans so spent they almost surrendered to white. Her shack only had two mattresses, a TV set, and a crooked, doorless wardrobe.

She invited me to sit on two plastic chairs outside and offered me a warm cup of coffee. I accepted.

“Do you eat?” I asked after I explained who I was and where I came from. At that point, I hadn’t been fully clear about my intentions of asking her to be a volunteer. But she certainly knew people like me only went there when they had something to gain.

“I do.” Francisca sipped at her coffee. She was a very shy girl, clearly not used to visits, much less by overdressed women.

“How is it so?” I looked around, indicating that there wasn’t much beyond a makeshift oven and a few supermarket bags lying next to the shack. “Do you make your own food?”

“Sometimes.” She shrugged. “But mostly my moms scavenge things from the landfills then sell them in the city. Then, they come back with some quentinhas. Sometimes it’s rice and chicken, other times just a lettuce salad.”

“Is it always enough for your family?”

The question caught her by surprise. Her gaze lost focus, the cup tight between her fingers, midway to her mouth. After a while, she shook her head. I was pulling the conversation to the point where I wanted, but not without pain. Speaking of hunger when you were not feeling it wasn’t always easy. It seemed unfair because you were sated; but it also filled you with a senseless kind of hope, as if that bellyful moment could linger and maybe, just maybe, you’d never have to be hungry again.

“Sorry about the…sensitive and weird question…” I said. “But if you were hungry right now, would you eat those bags if you were sure they would sate your hunger?”

“Do you mean…” Francisca blushed. “Eating what’s inside them?”

“No. I mean the bags themselves.”

“I would.” No hesitation.

I only remembered two moments of my childhood when I felt really hungry. I never forgot them. Sometimes Mamãe’s work wasn’t enough to feed us—the excruciating drama of many Brazilian families. Inflation corroded her meager wages and there was one occasion when we spent an entire day without having anything to eat. But they were enough for me to remember my own yells echoing throughout the apartment, unaware of the fact that food didn’t magically sprout whenever I wanted. Mamãe silently sobbed in a corner, knowing that even if she worked harder the next day there was no guarantee that there would be food on our table.

“I would too,” I whispered to myself.

It was later that day I offered a magical solution to Francisca. For now, she only had to come with me to Verdidea’s labs and sign some papers. For someone with a hole to fill, she couldn’t say no.

Today, Francisca doesn’t live in a shack anymore. She lives in the middle of São João da Campânula, in a house with its bricks exposed and a corrugated iron roof. Clothes hang from the clothesline tied to two poles outside her house. The wind that buffets at them now carries the landfill’s polymeric stench. From somewhere nearby, samba shackles the evening, scratching the air with streaks of happiness, threatening to extinguish the smell by the sheer pressure of joy.

I wait for Francisca, staring at her closed door, snapping my fingers and trying to control my breathing. A man walks by carrying a bag of plastic bottles on his shoulder. He nods at me. Behind the set of houses that clutter that part of the landfill, the old woman with a hunched back kneels on a mound of trash. Or perhaps it’s another woman wearing fruit baskets as shoes, another shadow against the moon-paling backwash of the night. Behind her, beyond the warts of junk that pockmark São João, I see the imposing and abandoned headquarters of Verdidea—all that remains of the company that vowed to heal the world. A chill runs along my back when I remember all the nights I spent in that place, a haunted palace built on unstable stocks and the lives of the destitute.

“Are you okay, Elisa?” The voice startles me. It’s still the same but with a quality of roughness to it.

Francisca isn’t as slim as ten years ago, but the same curious half-smile shapes her lips, except her shyness seems to have melted away in the same humble kind of sweetness I saw in Edilberto’s eyes. I shiver from head to toe when I shake her hand. I expect a slap, a reprimand; any sort of revenge for having transformed her and those around her into garbage eaters. None of that happens. After all this time, I have only one question for Francisca, and not one of those noted in my pad—How does it taste? Does it hurt to eat plastic? How is your diet? The one I have for her is different, and one that applies to her and to myself: Was it worth it?

Like the coward I am, I don’t ask it.

“We’ll have dinner tomorrow for my brother’s birthday,” she says. “Do you want to come?”

“I do,” I say as fast as I gave away Mamãe’s Tupperware.

I’m sorry for what I did to you, the words quiver on my lips. I don’t say them.

Don’t try to repair your mistakes all at once. Some of them you’ll just have to swallow.

 “Thank you for the invitation,” I say instead, gulping.

“I made dinner for you.” Mamãe was dry and brief when she called me one week after I told her about Verdidea’s plans with the enzyme. It happened a month after meeting Francisca for the first time and having her enlisted as a volunteer. “Can you come home earlier today?”

“Yes, Mamãe,” I said to my pad on the table while I slid my fingers through the volunteers’ profiles on the big screen at my office. Francisca was a go. There were five others, including one of her mothers, that were inclined to accept Verdidea’s offer as well. Volunteers would be provided with temporary housing and five months’ worth of the current minimum wages. But the big prize lay at the end of the road: they’d never have the risk of starving.

“Are you listening?” Mamãe’s grave voice shook me up. I rubbed my forehead.

“What?”

She sighed very slowly, which came out as an uncomfortable hiss through the pad’s speakers. “I asked you not to eat anything. I prepared something special.”

And when I went home, I found out what it meant.

On our dinner table, there was only one Pyrex dish at the center with an oozing black pudding that looked like charred cloth and smelled like burnt popcorn.

“Overcooked?” I said, kissing Mamãe’s forehead as I laid my backpack on the floor. She didn’t kiss mine back as usual.

“No,” she said. “Have your seat and let’s have dinner.”

I frowned at her. “But what’s that?”

“Our dinner.”

“Is it…overcooked mashed potatoes? Seriously—”

“It doesn’t matter.” Her eyes didn’t lock onto mine. “It won’t leave you hungry.”

I saw where she was heading and closed my eyes. When I told her about the new project in Mairipotaba, I said I’d probably have to spend some time in Goiânia. She didn’t take it lightly. She closed herself and spoke curtly with me in the following days. Up to that point, I’d thought it was because I was going to spend time away from her. I understood. I was all she had, so it was natural that she’d miss me. But there was something else.

“Mamãe…”

She pulled the chair. It scratched on the floorboard. I flinched while she sat.

“Mamãe, stop. You don’t need to eat that.”

She shrugged, scooping the black pudding and putting it on her plate.

“That’s what we have, isn’t it?” she said.

I pulled the other chair and sat beside her, seeking her eyes with mine, finding nothing but pain and evasion.

“The project with the enzyme is an option so no one will need to starve ever again.”

“The kid that I raised, the one that praised my soft pão de queijo”—her voice came out grated, her teeth chattering—“the one who was all yummy-yummy at my feijoada, would never want to see people eating garbage.”

“It’s not garbage, Mamãe! Don’t you understand? It’s the solution for a problem that has existed for thousands of years.” But those words tasted sour on my mouth. Those were the words of Elisa Assunção, PR Manager at Verdidea, disinterred out of a presentation to shareholders, not those of Elisa Assunção, daughter of Maíra Assunção, raised amongst the whiffs of motherly feijoada.

“It’s no solution, girl. It’s just the same problem with a different painting. They won’t give people options with dignity. They’re giving them what they always did: the leftovers. Eating is not only satiating your hunger. It’s a process that carries dignity. If you think it just serves to satiate your hunger, then eat the fucking dinner I prepared.”

“Mamãe, I can show you the documents.” I reached for her hand, but she recoiled, her mouth a thin waning moon. I wanted to talk about the documents because I didn’t want to find the truth in her words. “They’re classified, but I have access to them and I trust you. You’ll learn what this is really about. There’s a report that—”

“If you keep insisting that a poor boy should eat that fucking bottle…” She pointed to a soda bottle lying next to the bin in the kitchen. “Then don’t come back here.”

Mamãe took a mouthful of the black pudding.

In the humiliating heart of São João da Campânula, we dine.

There are about twenty people scattered on seven plastic tables around Francisca’s house, all partaking of the beer and food I brought—feijoada, pequi rice, galinhada, and green corn mush. I wish Mamãe were there too, joyfully saying how she’d change each of those recipes, how she’d sprinkle coriander in this one and nutmeg in that one.

I sit at a table with three other people, but I remain silent, just smiling at everyone who dares to look at me.

The song “O Show Tem Que Continuar” blasts from two big speakers strategically positioned on each side of the field. We’ll find the tone, a chord with a beautiful sound, and make our voices good; then we’ll be happy. Children play with a hose, frightening the heat away. Night has fallen but the sky is still daubed in the summer’s blue dyes.

Ângela is there with Mariana, Rogério, Adenilson, and Cleiton. She wears her cool sneakers and kisses her man Jango’s cheek. The hunched-back woman is there. She sings loudly. Then we’ll be happy; look, we’re on air again; the show must go on. Edilberto is there too, picking at something he brought in Mamãe’s Tupperware. He smiles as he stares at his friends—his family—chatting and singing and drinking and eating. When our gazes meet, he winks at me. He’s eating melted plastic bottle caps. It’s home to him.

“So, you came to write a story about us?” Francisca puts a hand on my shoulder. She has her other arm wrapped around her brother.

“I—Yes, I did.”

“And how is it?” Francisca picks a chair beside me and sits. I nod at a glass of beer, but she shakes her head.

I grin at her. “I’ll start over.”

“Why?”

“It’s just—My mind was elsewhere. I think it needs a complete overhaul.”

I don’t want them to become aberrations and exotic curiosities in the eyes of the public. I want them to be who they are: people. I want to write about the families living in São João da Campânula—about Mariana, Rogério, Adenilson, and Cleiton’s daily journey to school; about the samba of their evenings.

I have other questions to ask them. How was your day? What’s something you created recently? What makes you laugh? Who makes you laugh? Others will come to write about plastic. I’ll leave that to them.

“Francisca, let me ask you something.” I dare to put a hand over hers.

“Of course.”

“Was it worth it?”

She stares at me for a while like she did when I first asked her if her food was enough. “Was it worth it digging trash after food and things to sell? Was it worth it to beg in the streets? When something isn’t an option we don’t ask if it’s worth it.”

The “famine issue,” as the Batista brothers called it—as if it was just a minor inconvenience like forgetting a sandwich on a grill—was never only a question of actually eradicating famine. Since they never addressed poverty or housing, eating plastic became a symbol of desperation and lack of options, not of hope and progress. People in the landfills already picked their food from the trash. That wouldn’t change.

I wish I could say I was the one responsible for fracturing Verdidea’s business. I wasn’t. Their stocks plummeted when they abandoned the Amazon rainforest project, then again when I couldn’t shield them from the scandals—unknown up to then—involving several of the Batistas’ other companies that employed forced labor. I was horrified, but I chose to believe they didn’t know and that they could correct their mistakes. I still had my hopes high that they could address many of the world issues, including famine, food quality and distribution, housing, and poverty. It was only a setback. They were the solution. It was a selfish, self-destructive behavior. How could I have dedicated fifteen years of my life to them if they couldn’t achieve those goals? Was I merely industrial waste along with all the other workers being steadily laid off? In my desperation, I even tried to push an article defending Verdidea’s views. But not even the Batistas believed in the company anymore.

The final strike came when the people living in the Mairipotaba’s landfills were exposed as the plastikeaters. It was when I learned Verdidea was already genetically altering São João da Campânula’s dwellers to make their bodies produce the enzyme-bacteria system in their digestive tract. I thought I’d be informed when it happened. I’d thought I’d see the results, the smiles of people with enough sustenance to survive. Verdidea’s directors didn’t show me anything, perhaps because they knew I was only sustained by an illusion.

In the end, what toppled me was the front page of O Globo showing a blind old man with plastic cotton swabs on his tongue. It was then that I couldn’t take it anymore.

Mamãe used to say we shouldn’t blindly pursue our dreams. Sometimes it was okay to put them aside for a while or to abandon them altogether. Our dreams are the fabric of who we are, Lisa, but we’re changing all the time, re-sewing ourselves.

Nine years after leaving home, I knock on the door of the only woman capable of helping me sweep my dusty dreams from beneath my feet.

“Mamãe?” I stammer as an old woman opens the door. There’s deepness in her eyes, a mix of sadness and longing that brews into a bittersweet gaze when she sees me crying. “I brought cornmeal cake for us.”

“The Plasticity of Being” copyright © 2024 by Renan Bernardo
Art copyright © 2024 by Scott Bakal

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In a new serialized novella from Hugo Award-winning author Sarah Gailey, a fractured group of undesirables work together to nurture and nourish each other while navigating a dangerous world that would just as soon see them dead. Still—inch by inch, meal by meal—they build their own future. Have you eaten?

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Fen’s Dad’s Soup

2 bay leaves
6–8 peppercorns
3–5 allspice berries
10 cups water; or 10 cups beef broth & omit bouillon
4 tablespoons beef base or 2 bouillon cubes 
½ head cabbage, shredded
1 cup celery, chopped
2 onions, chopped
2 carrots, chopped
1 pound sliced sausage
2 chicken breasts, cubed
1 cup ham, cubed
1 6-ounce can tomato paste
1 cup dry white wine
3 large dill pickles, chopped
2 tablespoons capers
¾ cup black olives, sliced
2 cans stewed tomatoes
Salt
Pepper
Optional: Dill and sour cream.

Instructions

1. Tie the bay leaves, peppercorns, and allspice berries up in a square of cheesecloth to form a sachet. Alternatively, put them into a tea infuser. In a very large pot, combine the water, spice sachet, beef base, cabbage, and celery. Boil for 30 minutes.  
2. While the water boils, in a very large skillet, sauté the onions and carrots.
3. When the onions start to brown, add the sausage, chicken, and ham to the pan. The sausage will release some fat, which will fry the chicken and ham. If omitting sausage, add oil or butter to the pan and cook until the chicken and ham are brown on all sides.
4. Add the contents of the skillet to the cooking pot. Add tomato paste to the skillet and stir until it starts to brown; then, add the white wine and dill pickles to the skillet. Stir to loosen all fond from the bottom of the pan, then transfer contents of the skillet to the cooking pot.
5. Add capers, olives, and stewed tomatoes to the cooking pot. Simmer 5–10 minutes until heated through.
6. Add salt and pepper to taste. Serve with dill and sour cream. 

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Iowa is quiet at night, not that anyone in the back of the pickup would know. The engine is so loud that they can barely hear their own thoughts. But that’s fine, because none of them particularly want to tune in to that frequency anyway. The noise is a mercy, in its way.

All four of them—Fen, Quan, Harper, and Morrow—are wedged into the space next to the strapped-tight ATV in the truck bed. They’ve been rattling around back there like coins in a can since the middle of Colorado, where they managed to get picked up for the clearance price of all the pills in Morrow’s pockets. The guy driving the truck didn’t even look at their faces before opening the tailgate and ushering them in. He didn’t look when he slammed the tailgate shut either. Fen was lucky not to lose a finger.

That unlooking was its own kind of courtesy—the gift of anonymity, generously granted to four nobodies in exchange for a palmful of loose capsules.

“Quan. Hey. Hey, Quan.” Morrow is folded nearly in half to fit in their corner of the truck bed, closest to the cab. They’re nudging a zoned-out Quan with one sharp elbow.

“Wha?” Quan sounds disoriented, like he’s just woken up.

Morrow bends down to lean close to Quan’s ear. “What did I give that guy?”

“What did you—do you mean the pills?”

“Yeah, I didn’t check. Did you see what I handed him?”

Quan leans away, gives Morrow an incredulous look. “No. How do you not know what pills were in your pocket?”

Morrow shrugs, leans around Quan to try to get Harper’s attention. “Harp?”

Harper shakes their head, points to their ear. Even if they were open to conversation, which they usually aren’t, the thunder of the truck’s engine is loud enough to wash out any possibility of conversation.

Morrow doesn’t bother trying to get Fen’s attention. She’s crammed tight into the opposite corner from them. Her back is against the tailgate, and a scarf is up over her face to filter the worst of the exhaust coming from the tailpipe beneath her seat. Her eyes are closed and her skin is a worrying shade of green.

Just as Quan’s eyes start glazing over again, the truck slows. The stink of exhaust thickens without the wind of movement to whisk it away. Harper and Morrow pull their shirts up over their noses and mouths; Quan just coughs.

There’s nothing here to stop for, but the truck pulls onto the shoulder anyway. The semiautomatic bleat of the rumble strip jolts them all alert. They glance at each other, worry passing between them as fast as an extreme heat warning pinging every palmset in a hundred-mile area. None of them know why the driver would choose to stop in this lonely place.

The engine cuts off. Wildflowers grow next to the highway, bottle caps scattered in the dirt they’re growing out of. The golden pre-dusk light makes the broken glass on the highway shoulder glow. A fallow field stretches as far as any of them can see; on the other side of the highway, a blanket of soybeans extends all the way to the horizon. A door opens, then slams shut again. A lone cicada whines nearby; other than that, there’s no sound louder than footsteps on gravel as the driver makes his way around the side of the truck.

The tailgate drops open. Fen nearly falls out but catches herself just in time. She drops her head into her hands and sits there, catching her breath.

The driver’s hat, a faded blue ballcap with a dark rectangle on the front where a patch has been ripped off, shades his face so his eyes aren’t visible. He clears his throat and spits into the wildflowers. “You’ll want to get out and walk from here,” he says. “State line’s in a couple miles, and the State Border Patrol in Illinois started doing agricultural inspections on all vehicles entering the state last year. Depending who’s running the booth, could mean trouble for some kinds of people.”

“We’re trying to get to Chicago,” Harper says as they scramble past Fen and out of the truck bed. It’s a five-foot drop to the ground. The driver doesn’t help them down.

Morrow nudges Quan again. “That’s in Illinois, right?” they whisper.

Quan doesn’t answer. He pauses at the edge of the tailgate, looking at the driver, who has his face turned toward the soybeans. “Do you know how we can get there without running into State BP?”

The driver responds with silence. He waits while Morrow helps ease a gray-faced Fen to the edge of the dropped tailgate. Once the two of them drop to the asphalt, he slams the tailgate shut again. He hesitates for just a moment before turning his back on all four of them.

“Go through Wisconsin. There’s just one guy working the inspection station up there, name of Bouchard. He never gives anyone trouble.”

By the time Harper reaches the “you” in “thank you,” the driver’s-side door is already slamming shut again.

Fen stumbles into the fallow field as the truck vanishes down the long, straight stretch of road toward Illinois.

“Fen. You okay?” Harper stoops to pick up their bag and Fen’s.

Fen holds up a hand, then crouches, spasms, heaves. She stays hunched over for a long minute before straightening. “I’m fine,” she calls hoarsely. “Just carsick. Anyone have a charge on their palmset? I’m down to two percent.”

“I didn’t find a charging pad in the back of the truck, no,” Quan says in a tone that could be a joke or could be a rebuke.

Harper gives him a gentle shove on the shoulder. “Doesn’t matter. We can figure out where to plug in tomorrow. Right now, we need a place to sleep. Storm’s coming.”

 “Not for a while, though, right?” Morrow looks up at the thick bank of clouds on the horizon, doubtful.

Harper doesn’t answer him. “Fen, you ready?”

Fen nods and half straightens. Together, the four of them start across the field. They pick their way across the grass, pants tucked into socks, bones jellified from the hours of travel. It doesn’t take long for the road to vanish behind them. After a couple of minutes of walking, Fen looks better enough that Harper stops shooting worried glances at her.

Quan spots an abandoned-looking shack in the middle of a bald patch in the field. The windows are missing and there are holes in the roof that you can see right through, but the night is warm and a roof’s a roof, holes or none.

Harper starts by knocking on the front door. Loud, firm knocks. Cop knocks. They try three times before deciding nobody’s home. The front door isn’t locked, and there’s a palpable emptiness to the house when the four of them walk inside.

They make a lot of noise as they enter, pitching their voices loud like they’re warning off bears. They split into pairs and sweep quickly through the house. There’s not much territory to cover—one main room the size of the truck they rode here in, with a bed pushed into the far corner; a simple kitchen along one wall with a woodburning stove and a pump sink; a water closet that doesn’t merit more than a quick peek to confirm that nobody’s hiding inside.

Fen and Harper confer. “We should check outside too, but I don’t think anyone’s been in this place for a long time,” Fen says, sweeping a layer of sandy dust off the single skinny, buckled shelf above the sink.

“Gotta plug some of the holes in the walls. Wind’s already picking up,” Harper says, nodding to a gap between the boards where the pink light of the sunset peeks through. “Who wants which job?”

Fen volunteers to check outside. Her face visibly falls when Quan volunteers to walk the perimeter with her. He has his palmset and charging cable in his hand, like he’s hoping there might be a power outlet on the outside of the house. Morrow and Harper stay inside, using an old broom handle to tug a pile of rags out from under the bed to plug the gaps in the walls.

 Quan starts in on Fen the second they’re outside. “Why don’t you want to talk to me? Did I do something?” He steps around a haphazard stack of logs, pauses, turns around, and cups his hands around his mouth. “Hey, there’s a woodpile!”

“Thanks,” Harper yells from inside.

Fen pretends not to hear him. “Did you notice the updates on Daneka’s Fotoset?” She pulls out her palmset. The screen is dim and grayscale to save power. She rotates the palmset in her hand until it opens the photo-sharing app. Daneka’s latest update is right there: a picture of a butterfly, captioned

Just livin’ life to the fullest!

Quan glances at it, then looks quickly away. “Daneka didn’t post that.”

“No shit.” Fen nudges an old aluminum bucket with one foot. It tips over with a hollow thunk. “It’s been stuff like that every day. I just can’t figure out if it’s a bot takeover or if someone’s running the account.”

“The bots and the Feds train on the same material. Impossible to tell them apart based on voice, but I guess we’ll know which one it is if Daneka starts messaging you links to ‘investment opportunities.’” He rounds the corner of the house, then stops, tilts his head. “Hey, when we were inside, did you see a back door into the house?”

Fen follows his gaze. He’s looking at a narrow door set into the eastern wall of the house. She thinks for a moment, then answers firmly. “No. Definitely not.”

They approach warily. Fen raps on the door hard—it’s not as loud as Harper’s knock, but it’s loud enough that they hear Morrow yell “What was that?”from inside the house. After a few seconds pass without any other response, Fen glances at Quan. He nods and reaches past her for the doorknob.

The door sticks the first two times Quan pulls on it. On the third tug, he yanks it hard, and it opens with a sick, paint-stuck pop.

“It’s a canning pantry,” Fen says, peering inside at the spiderwebbed shelves that line the walls. A single broken bulb hangs from the ceiling; glass crunches underfoot as the two of them squeeze inside.

They both jump at a pounding on the wall. Morrow’s soft voice follows, barely muffled.  “Hey, who the fuck is in the walls?”

Quan sticks an arm through some cobwebs to smack a fist into the wall. “It’s just us,” he yells back. “We found a pantry!”

Morrow pauses. When they speak again, it sounds like they’re pressed right up against the other side of the wall. “Anything good in there?”

“Electricity,” Quan says, pointing to the broken bulb overhead. “Might be an outlet in here. Fen, can we use your palmset’s flashlight mode?”

“No,” she snaps. “It’ll kill the battery.”

“Which you’ll be able to recharge if we find an outlet,” Quan drawls with exaggerated patience. When Fen doesn’t immediately pull out her palmset, he snaps his fingers at her a few times. “Come on. Let’s go.”

Fen opens her mouth like she’s about to protest, but then she closes it again, shakes her head, pulls out her palmset. “Fuck you,” she mutters as she thumbs it into flashlight mode.

“You’re saying that because you know I’m right,” Quan replies. He drops into a low squat, then gets on his hands and knees to look under the shelves. “I think I see something back here.”

“An outlet?”

“You know what would help me figure that out is if you pointed that flashlight somewhere useful.”

Fen stoops to direct the light under the shelf. It lands on a tiny can, half buried in dust. “Don’t think you can plug into that,” she says.

Quan shoves his arm under the shelf. “There’s more back there,” he grunts. “I can feel something else. I can almost reach—if I just . . .” He strains for a moment, then pulls his hand out from the darkness, holding the tiny can and a small glass jar.

The light from Fen’s palmset starts to dim. “Shit,” she says, “let’s check the rest of this place out, quick. I’m almost out of charge.”

In the sixty seconds before Fen’s palmset dies, they find a few more dust-covered jars, and a wall outlet that’s so blackened with scorch marks that even Quan isn’t willing to risk plugging into it. They gather everything they’ve found and bring it inside, where most of the gaps in the walls are plugged with rags and a fire is already burning in the woodstove.

“Huh. Well. This is . . . I don’t want to say useless,” Harper says, looking over what they’ve found. “But I would have hoped for more actual food.”

Morrow squats down in front of the row of jars. “I don’t know. I love pickles. I haven’t had them in so long.” They examine a second, smaller jar, full of dark liquid. “I think this is olives? And that’s gotta be sauerkraut,” they add, nodding to a jar packed with dense white shreds.

“And this tiny one is tomato paste,” Fen finishes, prodding the tiny dusty can Quan rescued from beneath the shelves. “Plus, of course, we always have our beloved ewed tomat.” The “ewed tomat” can with the half-ripped-off label has been in Quan’s backpack for a little more than a year. It’s a little dented, but not enough to worry about—Fen has explained to Morrow a hundred times that unless her index finger can fit into the dent, it’s not dangerous.

Quan stands at the pump sink, working the foot lever until the faucet spits out brown water. He lets it run until the water is clear, then washes his hands. “I say we open all the jars, toss everything together, and call it a salad.”

“I can add these,” Morrow says suddenly, rummaging through their bag and coming up with a paper package. “A lady outside that scary gas station in Wyoming was selling them. I think they’re like homemade Slim Jims.” They open the package to reveal a row of wrinkled, finger-length sausages.

Fen stares at the sausages, lets out a sigh. “Harp, wanna go forage with me? Maybe there’s something we can add to all this.”

“I saw a shit-ton of wild dill out there,” Morrow chimes in.

“And I have pepper,” a new voice adds.

The four of them jump, wheel around to face the hole in the wall where a rag has been pulled free. A pair of pale eyes stares in at them. “What the fuck,” Quan snaps, just as Harper says, “Who are you?” and Fen lets out a startled “Who?!”

Morrow doesn’t speak. They simply straighten out of their perpetual slouch and square their shoulders, filling the little space and reminding the other three of what Morrow is like when they’re not working to stay small and quiet and gentle.

The stranger outside doesn’t move an inch, which is smart. “I don’t want any trouble,” he says in an easy voice. “I just thought maybe we could share a roof for the night? A storm’s coming in, and it isn’t going to be pretty out here in an hour or so.”

Everyone looks at Fen, because Fen’s a soft touch. She’s chewing on her lip. Then everyone looks at Harper, because Harper’s a tough row. They’re frowning. Just then, a gust of wind rattles the shack hard enough to knock dust loose from the rafters. “We gotta,” Harper whispers.

“Come on in,” Fen says to the stranger, “but if you fuck around, you’ll find out. Clear?”

“As a bell,” the stranger says. He comes around to the front door and opens it slow, peeking around the doorframe and glancing around before stepping in and dropping a heavy-looking duffel onto the floor. His eyes pause on Morrow, and he gives a slight nod. “Thanks for the hospitality. I’m glad you’ve got that woodstove going, it’s getting cold outside. Like I said, I’ve got peppercorns. Couple other things too, if you’re in need or looking to trade.”

He has a soft accent, something that sounds like it comes from miles and miles of cornfields. He’s scrawny, short, and thin as a whistle, with hair the color of nothing. He crosses the room right away, pulling a rag out of his pocket and shoving it into the gap he’d pulled it out of in the first place.

When he lifts his hand to shove the rag into that hole in the wall, Quan lets out a soft gasp. Fen’s the only one to hear it. She follows his gaze to the stranger’s hands and gives Harper a nudge. Harper sees it too, and kicks Morrow’s ankle, signaling with her eyes.

The stranger has a bracelet of runes tattooed on his wrist.

“My name’s Peter,” the stranger says. “Like I said, I’ve got peppercorns, and bouillon, and some juniper berries too. All dried. And a few bay leaves, and—you won’t believe me, but I’ll show you—a can of SPAM.” He says this last part with a little laugh.

“I haven’t had SPAM since I was a kid,” Quan murmurs.

Harper cuts him a sharp glance, then returns their attention to Peter. “Sure, show us. What are you doing with all those spices?”

“I collect ’em on the road,” he answers, unzipping his duffel. The runes are still on clear display. “A little bit of this, a little bit of that. Makes it easier to get folks on board for a little temporary cohabitation,” he adds, aiming a wink over his shoulder.

“I’m gonna grab some of that dill outside before the storm lands on us,” Harper says. “Morrow, come with?”

Morrow nods. The two of them step outside, walk a few paces, and begin a whispered conference.

“Okay, which runes mean what?” Harper hisses. “You’re into all that spooky shit, right?”

Morrow’s eyes go wide with didn’t-study panic. “I mean, I’m into some spooky shit, but I don’t know anything about runes. I don’t touch that stuff on account of. You know.” They nod back toward the shack.

“Right. That’s the problem. How can we tell?”

They stop and stare at each other, glancing back at the shack, both trying to figure out how they can determine what Peter’s tattoo means to him. It could be that he believes in magic—or it could be that he believes in the inherent superiority of an imaginary master race. There’s no safe way to ask Are you a pagan or are you a white supremacist? but for everyone’s sake, they need to find out, and they need to find out fast.

By the time they get back to the shack, each clutching a fistful of dill, Fen is already cooking. She’s squatting on the floor over the pried-loose shelf from the wall, dicing pickles with an unfamiliar hunting knife while Quan unwraps the foil from a bouillon cube. A collapsible pot of water is steaming on top of the woodstove.

“What are we making?” Harper asks, her eyes fixed on the hunting knife.

Fen glances up, her eyes darting to Peter before returning to the pickles she’s chopping. “I remembered a recipe from the box that should work okay, now that we have Peter’s help. It’s a soup my dad used to make when any of us were sick. I’m making a half-recipe because his recipe makes enough to feed, like, ten people. He called it pickle soup,” she adds. Her voice stretches a little tighter as she stares down at the knife in her hand. “But it has another name I can’t remember right now. A Russian name. Peter, do you know anything about Russian food?”

“’Fraid not,” Peter says mildly, popping the lid off the can of tomato paste. “But I’m sure it’ll be delicious, whatever it is.”

Morrow shows Fen the dill they collected. “Will this help?”

“It’s perfect,” Fen says with a tense smile. “Give it a rinse, will you?”

“I’ll get it,” Peter says, rising to his feet and holding out his hands. He passes close to Quan on his way to the sink. “Scuse me.”

Quan shifts his weight forward, dropping the bouillon cube into the pot. “No worries. Can I grab those spices out of your bag?”

“Help yourself. Oh, and if anyone needs to charge a palmset, I’ve got a crank charger in there too,” Peter replies, not looking back. He keeps his eyes trained on the dill in the sink as he rinses it. It’s a clear signal: You can look through my shit, I won’t stop you.

Quan darts to the duffel and unzips it. “Are the spices in jars or what?” he calls over his shoulder, already searching through Peter’s things.

“Ziptop bags. Can’t miss them, they’re all the way at the bottom,” Peter says, still washing the dill, even though it has to be clean by now. “Just pull them all out and we can see what’s useful.”

Fen holds up the ripped, water-rippled recipe card up to the firelight from the woodstove. “Looks like we need peppercorns, allspice berries, and bay leaves. They can go right into the pot. Oh, and is there celery salt?”

“Yeah,” Quan says. “He has all that stuff. Plus this thing,” he adds, lifting out a small, matte-black cube with a folding hand crank on one side and two power outlets on top.

As Quan stands, Peter slowly turns around with the dill. His gaze is perfectly steady. “Did you find anything else that could be of use?”

Quan shakes his head once. “Nope. This is all we need, right, Fen?”

Fen stares hard at Quan. “You read the recipe card. You know as well as I do.”

“Then we’re good to go,” Quan says briskly. He crosses the room and drops the spices next to Fen’s makeshift cutting board, then grabs his palmset and charger and plugs in to the black cube.

“I’ll take the first shift,” Morrow says, dropping to the ground beside Quan. They have Fen’s palmset and plug it in next to Quan’s. Then they unfold the hand crank and start turning it hard and fast, waiting for the charging symbol to appear on the two palmsets.

“I was going to—” Quan starts, but then he catches a glimpse of Morrow’s dark, determined expression and changes his mind. “Thanks,” he says instead.

Everything moves briskly from there. Morrow charges the palmsets. Harper watches the pot on the stove as the bouillon cube dissolves and the spices simmer it into a fragrant broth. Fen inspects the wrinkly black olives by the firelight, making sure they’re not growing any fuzz before she slices them up. Peter shows them all how to use his hunting knife to cube the Spam without taking it out of its metal tin, while Quan discovers a flat length of cast iron under the woodstove.

“Is this a griddle?” he asks, holding it up and prodding at the lip around the edge. “It looks like—”

“That’s perfect!” Fen cries out when she sees it.

Quan looks startled, but hands over the griddle with a slow smile. “Does this mean you forgive me for whatever I did that made you stop talking to me?”

Fen pulls away, puts the griddle on top of the woodstove beside the pot. “No.”

“Wait, why not? Fen, c’mon. Quit being so—”

“So what?” Fen whips around on him, her voice taut.

Harper raises an eyebrow at Quan. “I wouldn’t,” they warn.

Across the room, Peter sits on the edge of the narrow bed, watching the four of them. The little shack is too small for him to pretend not to hear the exchange, but he has the good grace not to try to intervene.

Quan throws his hands into the air. “I’m sick of this,” he says. “Fen keeps acting like I took a shit in her backpack, and all I’ve done this whole time is—”

“Is be a huge asshole,” Morrow murmurs.

Quan freezes. If Fen or Harper had said this, it would be Quan’s cue to get into the thick of a fight. But Morrow—gentle, kind Morrow, with their cauliflower ears and scar-hatched knuckles—never says fighting words.

“What did I do?” Quan asks. The question has an edge on it, but not much of one.

Morrow shifts their shoulders. They don’t break their rhythm on the hand crank. “You just get mean for no reason sometimes. Like earlier today, when you called me a gorilla. That was mean.”

“I just meant—you know, you’re tall and strong and stuff,” Quan says, his voice faltering as he looks to Harper and Fen for backup and doesn’t find any. “That’s all.”

Morrow huffs out a barely there laugh. “Okay,” they say. “If that’s who you wanna be.”

Quan swallows hard. Harper and Fen look at each other, then at the floor. Morrow keeps cranking the charger until Quan’s phone lets out a chime.

“I want to charge mine next,” Harper says. They go to their backpack, and Morrow unplugs Quan’s palmset and hands it over, and the movement breaks the surface tension on the bubble of their fight just enough for the meal they’re preparing to come back into focus.

Peter clears his throat from the corner. “That griddle should be hot by now.”

The cubed Spam goes onto the griddle. Peter slices the sausage into rounds right over it, each tiny coin dropping onto the hot iron with an immediate sizzle.

“This would be better if we had onions.” Fen sighs.

“Be better if we had a big leather sofa,” Peter replies with a grin. “But here we are.”

The tomato paste slides out of its tiny dusty can onto the griddle, and Fen uses a spoon to stir it until it starts to stick to the metal. Then she calls to Harper, who’s deep in quiet conversation with Quan near the bed. “Harp, can you bring me those pickles?”

Harper looks up sharply. “Morrow, can you get it?”

Fen’s palmset chimes. “Perfect timing. Fen, you’re all charged up.” Morrow steps away from the charger and brings Fen the shelf-turned-cutting board with the chopped pickles and olives on it.

Fen slides the pickles onto the skillet, leaving the olives. She splashes some broth from the pot onto the hot metal, too. The moisture loosens the caramelizing tomato paste just enough for Fen to scrape up all the bits that are sticking to the cast iron.

“Shit,” Fen says, looking from the griddle to the cooking pot.

“What’s the matter?” Morrow asks.

“I need to put all this stuff,” she says, gesturing to the rapidly drying mixture of meat and tomato paste and pickles, “into there.” She points to the pot. “But if I pick up the griddle, it’ll burn the fuck out of my hands.”

Peter steps forward. “I’ve got it,” he says. He strips off his denim jacket.

Fen’s eyes are on the food, but Harper, Morrow, and Quan’s eyes all lock onto Peter’s bare arms as he uses his jacket to shield his hands and picks up the hot griddle, tipping the contents into the pot. The only tattoos visible on Peter are the bracelet of runes and a generic compass rose on one bicep. There’s nothing obvious there, nothing that speaks to what danger he might represent.

“What’s next?” Peter asks.

Fen consults the recipe card. “Gotta let this simmer for a few minutes, then rinse off some of that sauerkraut and add it in. We could probably get away with not rinsing it,” she adds, “but . . . it might be real funky.”

Peter opens the sauerkraut and gives it a whiff. “Could go either way. Your palmset’s going off,” he adds, looking to the lit-up screen on the floor.

Fen has the cutting board in her hands again, is about to slide the chopped olives into the pot. “Morrow, can you grab it?”

“Oh fuck,” Morrow whispers when they’ve got the screen in front of them.

“What?” Fen asks, dropping the olives into the pot.

“It’s a voice message from Daneka.”

The room freezes. Peter doesn’t seem to notice. He lifts the sauerkraut jar. “What do y’all think? Should I rinse this?” When nobody answers, he looks up and his face drops. His eyes flick to his duffel bag. “What happened?”

“It’s nothing,” Quan says quickly. He crosses the room to look at the screen in Morrow’s hand.

Fen wipes olive brine onto her jeans. “We got a message from a friend.”

Peter glances at his bag again, even less subtly this time. He takes a few steps back from the sink, looks ready to bolt. “A local friend?”

“A friend from back home,” Harper says. “Fen, do you want to listen to it?”

Fen shakes her head. “I’m almost done cooking.” She sounds tense.

“Fen,” Quan says, reaching for her arm.

She jerks away from his touch. “Don’t. Fine. We can listen to it.” She looks down at her palmset, swallows hard, and presses the notification.

Hey, it’s me! Just wanted to know if you’re still up for a birthday dinner. Let me know what the plan is and how everyone’s doing. Love you!

It’s Daneka’s voice – her unmistakable chainsmoker rasp — but something sounds wrong. They can all hear it.

Fen slips her palmset into her pocket. She turns and uses a fork to add some sauerkraut into the pot. “This would be better with onions,” she says again. Her voice has all the color squeezed out of it.

“That wasn’t her.” Quan strides briskly across the room, headed nowhere at all, then turns on his heel to stare hard at his friends. “Right? That definitely wasn’t her.”

Harper sits on the edge of the bed. “We can’t know.”

Quan lets out a short, sharp laugh. “That sounded like a robot. It was definitely a fake! C’mon, Harp—”

“It was real,” Peter interrupts. “I used to code artificial-speech software. They don’t transition between similar sounds that smoothly. You heard when she said ‘wanted to know’? The ‘d’ in ‘wanted’ flowed right into the ‘t’ in ‘to.’ That’s a human-speech thing. Really hard to smooth out virtually.”

Morrow wheels around to face him. “Who did you write code for?”

His shoulders are tight, his face blank. “The company’s closed now. They got bought out during the last big market crash.”

“What company?” Harper demands.

He swallows hard. Takes a few slow steps toward his bag, then uses a foot to flip it over. There’s a faded logo on the side, barely visible in the flickering light from the fire in the woodstove. The twisting double-S logo of the multimedia conglomerate that used to dominate the digital newsletter marketplace. “We developed an integrated voice-to-text service.”

“You mean proprietary,” Harper says. “So you worked for the company everyone worked for. Why were you so squirrely about it just now? What, are you not a ‘champion of free speech’?” All the venom in her voice pools at the end of the sentence.

“I don’t agree with everything they—”

“Dinner’s ready,” Fen interrupts. “Peter, can I use your jacket again?”

He brings his jacket to the woodstove and uses it to pull the cooking pot off the heat. The soup is still bubbling as he carries it to the middle of the room. Harper sets down a couple of rags, and Peter sets the pot on top of them. Morrow passes out spoons.

The five of them sit on the floor around the pot. Fen’s eyes are dull as she stares into the soup she’s made them. Harper is staring at Peter’s wrist.

“What did you say this soup is called?” Peter asks.

“That part of the recipe card is stained,” Fen replies. “I couldn’t read it.”

Quan coughs. “I remember. You mentioned it once, back when we first met. You called it solyanka.” He says it slow, his lips working to fit a memory of Fen’s mouth.

Fen looks up at him, surprised. “You remember stuff from all the way back then?”

A small smile ghosts across Quan’s face, but he doesn’t meet Fen’s eyes. “I remember everything you say.”

Fen hesitates. “Quan, I—”

“I’m sorry for being a dick,” Quan interrupts. “I’m gonna try to do that less. Might take me a little trying, though. But I am gonna try. I love you guys.”

Harper sniffs loudly. “Love you too. Dick.”

Morrow tastes the soup, burns their mouth. “Ow. Fuck. Ow. Where’s the dill?” they ask, their voice distorted by pain.

Fen glances behind her. “I forgot—”

“I’ll grab it.” Peter pushes himself to his feet, walks to the sink. Harper’s eyes track him. The hunting knife and cutting board are still in the sink. He reaches past them, grabs the very clean dill, brings it back, and hands it to Morrow.

“Thanks.” Morrow tears off a fistful of feathery green fronds, drops them into the pot.

“It’d be better with onions,” Fen says, blowing on a spoonful of soup straight from the pot. “But it’s not bad. That company you worked for—they’re based in Chicago, right?”

“Yeah, that’s where I’m coming from,” Peter says. He leans forward to dip his spoon into the pot. “How come?”

Fen looks up at him, pins him with her eyes. “That’s where we’re going. Do you still know anyone there?”

He thinks for a moment. “Depends who you want to meet. Why Chicago? There’s not much left of it.”

“Always wanted to go. Bright lights,” Fen says. “Big city.”

Peter nods. “I don’t know anyone there. But I know people on the way. Got a buddy who can get us across the state border to Wisconsin and put us up for a night or two, if that’s the route you want to take.”

Harper raises their eyebrows at Fen. Fen nods, then frowns at Morrow. Morrow nods, then nudges Quan. Quan takes a long sip of soup, clears his throat, and nods.

“Sounds good,” Fen says to Peter. “We’ll make our plan in the morning.”

The five of them eat the rest of their dinner in silence. Outside, the wind howls across the fallow field, yanking at the rags in the walls, whipping the petals off the wildflowers that grow on the side of the road.

---

Fen’s Solyanka  

2 bay leaves
6–8 peppercorns
3–5 allspice berries
1 shake celery salt
5 cups water
1 bouillon cube
2 cups sauerkraut, drained but not rinsed
1 pound sliced sausage
1 can Spam, cubed
1 6-ounce can tomato paste
3 large dill pickles, chopped
¾ cup black olives, sliced
1 can ewed tomat
Salt
Pepper
Optional: dill, chopped

Instructions

1. In a very large pot, combine the water, spices, and beef base. Boil for 30 minutes.  
2. Add the sausage and Spam to the pan. The sausage will release some fat, which will fry the Spam.
3. Add tomato paste to the skillet and stir until it starts to brown; then, add the dill pickles and a little broth to the skillet. Stir to loosen all fond from the bottom of the pan, then transfer contents of the skillet to the cooking pot.
4. Add olives and ewed tomat to the cooking pot. Simmer 5–10 minutes until heated through. 
5. Serve with dill. 

---

“Have You Eaten?” copyright © 2024 by Sarah Gailey
Art copyright © 2024 by Shing Yin Khor
Photography copyright © 2024 by Sarah Gailey

The post Have You Eaten? Part 2: Dinner with Peter appeared first on Reactor.

---

In a new serialized novella from Hugo Award-winning author Sarah Gailey, a fractured group of undesirables work together to nurture and nourish each other while navigating a dangerous world that would just as soon see them dead. Still—inch by inch, meal by meal—they build their own future. Have you eaten?

Author’s note: This story contains fictional depictions of intimate partner violence.

---

Fen’s Sister’s Gnocchi

350 g butternut squash
1 egg
2–3 cups flour
Salt
Pepper

1. Cut the squash in half. Rub it all over with oil. Place it face down on a baking sheet and roast at 425 degrees for 25 minutes.
2. Remove the squash from the oven and let it cool completely, about 1 hour.
3. Remove the peel and mash the squash into a smooth paste. Form the paste into a mound and form a well in the center.
4. Crack 1 egg into the well. Stir with fingers to combine.
5. Add flour in batches, working the flour in until a sticky, firm dough forms. Add a big pinch of salt and a healthy amount of pepper with the first batch of flour.
6. Knead for 1–2 minutes.
7. Form into a ball and rest for 20 minutes.
8. Cut the ball into eight equal parts. Roll each part out into a snake the width of your thumb. Cut each snake into 1-inch sections using a knife or pasta cutter.
9. Bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil. Add the gnocchi in batches, stirring gently once to prevent sticking. Once the gnocchi bob to the top of the water, remove/drain and serve.
10. Optional: Fry after boiling to get a crisp exterior.

Suggested lemon ricotta sauce: Combine the zest of 1 lemon, 1 cup ricotta, lots of black pepper, and about 1 ladleful of pasta water. Stir to combine. Consistency should be thick and smooth.

---

The old farmhouse has thin walls, so everyone in the kitchen knows it when Peter and Morrow go from fucking to fighting. The soft thumps and creaks from upstairs are interrupted by the sound of Morrow asking a question over and over, at increasing volume, and then there’s a crash that is unmistakably the sound of a body hitting a wall. And then another crash, that is unmistakably the sound of the same body hitting the wall again.

Quan is the first one to move. He and Harper and Fen have been processing oranges all morning for Missus Bouchard. They’ve been seated at the kitchen table—Quan slicing off thin curls of peel, Harper pulling off the white pith, Fen smashing the oranges through a wide-mesh strainer and into a huge pot in her lap. Quan still has the paring knife in his hand as he gets to his feet and heads for the stairs at the sound of the second impact.

Fen is next. She sets the pot on the table, careful even in her haste—that pot of pulp is their days’ rent—and by the third time they hear the body hit the wall, she and Quan are halfway up the stairs.

Harper doesn’t follow right away, because Fen is already on the way, and they don’t want to move until they know there’s a real problem. They finish pulling pith off the orange in their hand, adding it to the pile of foamy white discard on the scarred wooden kitchen table. They listen as, upstairs, Quan and Fen burst into Peter and Morrow’s bedroom. They don’t stand up until they hear Fen’s voice shouting a clear, high “What the fuck?!”

At the sound of that, Harper sets down their orange and makes for the stairs. They take their time. With each step they ascend, they hear the voices upstairs rise. Everyone is talking over each other. Harper can make out “explain” and “are you really” and “don’t fucking move” and “Daneka.”

They stand in the bedroom doorway and take in the scene. Morrow is in their underwear, breathing like a street-loose bull. Peter is curled at Morrow’s feet, naked, head tucked, hands clasped protectively over the back of his neck. Quan and Fen are standing near the bed, peering down at an unfamiliar white palmset.

Harper leans against the doorframe. “S’goin’ on?”

Morrow looks up. Their face is alight with rage. “He’s not who he says he is.”

“I never said I didn’t know her,” Peter says. The words come out muffled, thick with pain. “Babe, please. If you’ll just let me explain—”

Morrow’s body twists with liquid speed. They drive their heel hard into the back of Peter’s thigh, and the bone-deep thump of the impact shakes the air in the room. “We’ve been here for a fucking month,” Morrow says. They usually keep their voice small. It is not small now. “And you never thought to mention that you know Daneka? Never occurred to you?”

Harper straightens, their brows drawing together. “Wait. He knows Daneka?”

Fen is still staring down at the palmset. “Seems like.”

They kick out again, but Peter has curled himself up tighter, and the blow doesn’t land as hard this time. “You didn’t think you should tell us? Not once when we’ve been sitting around talking about how worried we are? Not once when you were inside of me?”

“Morrow, maybe you don’t want to—” Quan says, but Fen puts a hand on his shoulder and he falls silent.

Morrow squats down and grasps a fistful of Peter’s hair, wrenching his head back. “You remember what Fen said when we first met you?”

Peter looks up at Morrow the way a broke-neck deer on the side of the road looks at the receding taillights of the truck that put it there. Blood coats his lips and chin. “Wh—?”

“She said that if you fuck around,” Morrow growls, “you’ll find out.”

The hand that isn’t clenched around Peter’s hair forms a fist. The fist is the size of a brick. The fist is the weight of a brick. The fist is as hard as a brick. Peter closes his eyes, tries to twist out of Morrow’s grip as they draw the fist back, but there’s nowhere to go.

The blow lands with killing force. Fen and Quan and Harper feel it in their teeth and all of them wonder at the same time whether they’ve just watched a man die. But then Morrow pulls the fist back again, and Peter sucks in a breath of whistling pain, and they know that—at least for now—he’s alive.

 Before Morrow can strike Peter again, Harper is out of the doorway and in the room. They step in close enough to press the front of their thigh against the bloody plane of Morrow’s knuckles. “Don’t,” they say. So Morrow doesn’t.

Harper and Quan grab Peter by the underarms and haul him to his feet. “Fen, you got Morrow?”

“On it.”

“We’ll be right back.” Harper says. They and Quan drag Peter down the stairs without stopping to let him get his feet under him. After a minute, the front door of the old farmhouse slams.

Fen looks at Morrow, trying to decide what kind of help they might need. She’d said “on it” when what she’d really meant was “you go ahead and handle what you’re handling, you can trust that I’ll handle things up here.” But she doesn’t know what handling things up here actually means.

“Is all his stuff in his bag?” Fen finally asks. Morrow shakes their head, points to a pile of clothes in one corner. Fen shoves the clothes into the now-familiar duffel, then opens the window and peers down at the naked, bleeding man in the front yard. “Catch,” she calls, and then she drops the bag out the window. She doesn’t wait to see if it falls on top of him.

As she turns around, Morrow is pulling on a shirt. “Sorry you had to see that,” they say softly.

Fen doesn’t say that it’s okay, because she knows Morrow’s not okay. And she doesn’t say that she’s surprised Morrow let Peter live, because that would only make them feel worse about letting out the violence they work so hard to contain. She doesn’t say that she can’t believe what she saw on Peter’s palmset, because she doesn’t want to remind Morrow of the thing that made them let their fury loose in the first place.

So she shoves her hands into her pockets and asks, “You hungry?”

Morrow looks up at her and their face is raw and their eyes are shining and she can see all the way down the deep dark tunnel that shame has drilled through them. “Yeah,” they say. They’re obviously lying, but that doesn’t matter. As long as they’re answering at all. As long as they’re still here.

“It’s almost time for lunch. Come downstairs. I’m gonna make something cool.”

Quan and Harper are waiting for them in the kitchen. They’re back to peeling oranges, and the bright fog of citrus oil is overwhelming. It smells like a day in the sun. Morrow flinches a little, then breathes in deep through their nose. They linger in the kitchen door, filling the frame, watching Quan strip curls off an orange with that tiny paring knife. “How’d Missus Bouchard get oranges all the way up here this time of year?” they ask at last.

“I guess her husband seized them at the border crossing,” Quan answers. He doesn’t add a barb—gentleness is something he’s been trying on lately, with mixed success, but it’s a relief that he’s managing it right now.

“Yeah, he pulled the truck out of line right before he got sick,” Fen adds. “Missus Bouchard told me this morning. She said State BP was so tied up with trying to deny his sick leave that they didn’t notice the seized oranges never ended up anywhere.”

Harper snorts. “I believe her exact words were, ‘If they want the fucking oranges they can come try me.’”

Morrow’s face twitches in the same place a smile would go.

They take over for Fen at the strainer, smashing the peeled oranges with a wooden spoon. Their movements are methodical, rhythmic. The work needs doing, and they need to do it until they’re back in their own body, their own mind. Their own promises to themself.

This is how the four of them—five, including Peter—have been earning their keep at the Bouchard farm for the past month. They’ve doing odd jobs in exchange for permission to sleep in the old farmhouse on the Bouchard property, biding their time while they wait for Bouchard himself to recover from the SARS-15 that’s currently keeping him bedbound. Once he’s well enough to get back to work at the border crossing, they’ll be able to get into Illinois safely.

To Chicago. Maybe, if everything goes right, to Daneka.

Fen and Quan are thinking about Daneka right now. About her face in that video on Peter’s palmset. Harper didn’t see it, and they’re waiting to hear about it so they can understand what happened upstairs. Morrow isn’t thinking about anything. They can’t, not after what just happened upstairs. Their skull is filled with soft white static, like the pith that cushions the wet flesh of an orange.

Fen consults a recipe card from her family recipe box. She cleans the counter thoroughly, scrubbing it down with soap and hot water twice over. Then, when she’s satisfied that the counter is ready, she pulls a pan out of the oven. It has the leftover half of a roasted butternut squash on it. The other half was dinner the night before, shared between the five of them along with a few eggs from Missus Bouchard’s chickens. This half has been sitting in the oven waiting to get used for something.

Fen knows what she wants to do with it now. She uses a spoon to scrape the peel away from the flesh of the roasted squash, then crushes it into paste with her hands. She scoops the paste right onto the clean kitchen counter, shapes it into a hill, and makes a divot in the center of the pile.

“Morrow, can you give me a hand?” She holds up her palms, which are coated in sticky orange squash. “I’m all gross.”

Morrow looks up at her with empty eyes. “Sure. What do you need?”

At Fen’s instruction, Morrow pulls out the last of Missus Bouchard’s eggs and cracks it into the well in the middle of the crushed squash. She mixes the egg and the squash with her hands. The mixture makes a shockingly awful wet noise that draws a cackle out of Quan and a skeptical frown out of Harper.

Then Fen asks Morrow to grab the flour. Missus Bouchard gave a full sack of good white flour to Harper as payment for a full day of fence repair, and they’ve got half the sack left. It looks to be made from an old version of the Wisconsin state flag, from back before the state took the e pluribus unum seal off and replaced it with a second, larger badger.

Morrow stares down at the deep blue fabric blankly until Fen says their name. She has them add a fistful of flour to the heap of goo in front of her. Just a fistful. Then another, and then another, slowly. At first Fen uses her fingers to gently stir, mixing the flour in; then her hands begin to knead as the combination forms a thick dough that pulls away from the surface beneath it. Soon enough, the dough in front of Fen has turned into a smooth orange ball.

Morrow is watching her hands, the dough, the nearly clean counter. Some of the blankness is melting away from their face. “That was cool,” they murmur.

Fen smacks the taut surface of the dough with her palm. “Gotta let it sit for twenty minutes. Then I’ll need your help again.”

“Twenty minutes,” Harper says, not looking up from the half-cleaned orange in their hands, “seems like exactly the right amount of time to talk about what happened upstairs.”

Fen draws a slow breath. Quan puts down his paring knife. Morrow’s shoulders slump. Harper looks to each of them with hard, patient eyes.

Morrow speaks first. “I don’t know how to explain the video.”

“How did you even see the video?” Quan asks. “Weren’t you two right in the middle of—”

“His palmset was on the nightstand. I saw Daneka’s name come up on a notification,” Morrow says. They’re speaking like there’s a candle in front of their lips that mustn’t go out. The others lean forward to hear. “I grabbed it and looked. He tried to stop me, but he— that was a mistake. You know?”

Harper nods. They understand mistakes like this one better than anyone. “Did you see the whole thing?”

Morrow shrugs. “It was a video. I saw it, but he was trying to explain and get the palmset away, so I didn’t really get to watch all the way through. Quan and Fen did, though, I think.”

“Sort of,” Quan says. “But I didn’t understand what I was seeing.”

Fen’s got her arms folded tight across her chest. She’s chewing on the inside of her cheek. She drops her chin to her chest and her dark curls, longish now and dry from travel, fall over her eyes. Her deliberation lasts long enough to fill the kitchen with a low hum of tension.

Quan snaps first. “For fuck’s sake. What?”

Fen looks up at him, eyes narrowed. “I’m thinking.”

“Obviously.”

“I’m thinking about whether the thing I wanna say is a bad idea. For Morrow.”

Morrow’s brow tightens. “For me?”

“I don’t want this to make things harder for you.”

Harper cracks a knuckle against the table. “I think,” they say, “Morrow can handle themself.”

“I know that,” Fen says. “We all know that. I’m more worried about—” And then she stops herself, because she doesn’t know how to say what she’s worried about. It’s the tight coil of violence that lives in the center of Morrow, it’s the whipcrack of their fist, it’s the way they stop feeling pain when it’s someone else’s turn.

Morrow’s shoulders draw down toward their sternum and their eyes find a spot on the floor. “I promise I won’t hurt any of you,” they whisper. “No matter what you saw on that palmset. I wouldn’t. I won’t.”

Quan rubs his forehead with the heel of one hand. His eyes have gone glossy. “Fen’s not afraid of you. Nobody here is afraid of you. It’s just—”

“I don’t want to make it harder,” Fen says again. “But. Okay.” She untucks one arm from across her chest and reaches into her back pocket. When her hand reappears, she’s got the white palmset between her index and middle fingers. “I kept this.”

Harper rises and crosses the kitchen. Their movements are slow, their knees soft, their footfalls quiet. They slowly put their body between Morrow and Fen before taking the palmset out of Fen’s hand. Their back is still toward Morrow when they say, “I don’t know if Morrow wants to see this.”

“I do,” Morrow says quickly. “I want to see her.”

Quan drums his fingers on the table. “Morrow is fine. You two need to calm down.”

The way Harper turns to face Quan has just as much danger in it as the fist Morrow made an hour before. “You want me more calm than I am now?”

“I’m not fine,” Morrow cuts in. “But that’s okay. I want to see the video. The video isn’t the thing that made me—um.” They swallow hard. “That made me upset. I don’t think it’ll make me upset again now.”

Harper approaches the table and stands next to Quan. Morrow moves to stand next to them. They rest their palms flat on the surface of the table. Their knuckles are swelling; a deep red bruise is forming on the biggest knuckle of their right hand. Fen winds up behind Quan’s chair. She tugs on his hair and he swats her hand away.

The video is one of many in a long series of messages from Daneka to Peter. There are no responses from Peter in the chat. All of Daneka’s messages are videos, going back about a month.

“What was the date when we met Peter?” Fen asks softly.

“Not sure,” Quan replies.

Morrow sniffs. “It was about a month ago. But I’m not sure if it was before or after that first message from Daneka.”

They play through the videos, and it quickly becomes clear that they’re all the same video. Kind of. In each one, Daneka stands in a field, squinting into bright sunlight, shading her eyes with the flat of her hand. Her auburn curls toss wildly in a strong wind. There are flowers behind her, yellow and white ones, and some trees in the middle distance. She turns slowly to reveal a massive, shining lake that stretches to the horizon. As she’s turning, she speaks, her voice cigarette-raspy and wind distorted but still as musical as always. “You guys wouldn’t believe how beautiful it is here! I found the most amazing queer community. We have our own little farm and a communal kitchen that Fen’s gonna love! Come soon? I miss you!”

Then she blows a kiss into the camera, and the video is over.

The four of them watch each video. The first one doesn’t have the kiss—it just cuts off after “I miss you.” In the second one, Daneka just says “amazing community,” but in the third one, the word queer comes back in. Sometimes the flowers change color. Sometimes it seems to be later in the day, sometimes earlier. The second-to-last video is where the line about the communal kitchen appears.

Harper blows out a slow breath. “So.”

“We’re fucked,” Quan says. “Should have let Morrow kill him.”

Fen scrubs her hands across her upper arms. “We’re not fucked yet.”

Quan twists in his chair to look at her. “Explain how. That guy is clearly working with someone who wants to fuck us over somehow, and who has the ability to make this quality of deepfake. Peter knows who we are, and he knows where we are, and he knows where we’re going. Show me a gap we can slip out of. Tell me what I’m missing here.”

“Right,” Fen says. “That dough’s been resting long enough. Morrow, want to help me get lunch going?”

Quan throws his hands into the air. “Great. Yeah, go cook. I’ll just sit here and wait for sirens.”

Fen walks into the kitchen. Her lips are tight. She grabs the big kitchen knife and uses it to cut the ball of dough into eight sections, never letting the blade come into contact with the countertop. “I just need to think.”

“What’s there to think about? We need to leave. I’m going to go pack. Harp, want me to pack up your stuff too?”

“Not yet,” Harper replies, their eyes fixed on Fen. “I want us to have a plan first.”

“I need a minute to think,” Fen says again.

Harper’s reply is low. “I heard you the first time. I’m not rushing you. Don’t let Quan get in your head.”

“He’s not in my head.”

Harper doesn’t say anything to that. They don’t need to.

Fen gives Morrow an are you helping or not look, and Morrow comes to the kitchen. Fen sprinkles flour across the countertop, then demonstrates how to roll each section of dough into a long snake. The width of the snake is halfway between Morrow’s massive thumb and Fen’s slender one. “Gentle hands,” Fen says. “The squash makes the dough break easier.”

Morrow’s hands are gentle. They’re as gentle as a kid holding an egg, as gentle as a cat pawing at a cobweb. They don’t break the dough. Fen leaves them to the work of rolling out the sections while she fills a tall pot with water.

“I think we do need to leave,” she says slowly. “But I don’t think it’s an emergency.”

At the kitchen table, Harper has taken up Quan’s paring knife and is methodically peeling oranges. “Why not?”

“Because whoever Peter was working with—if they’re after us, they already know where we are, right? It’s not like he can go bring them any new information.”

“But now they know that we know that they know.” Harper pauses, mouthing the sentence to themself again to make sure they’ve gotten it right. “They aren’t spying on us in secret anymore.”

“So there’s no reason not to just come scoop us up directly,” Morrow murmurs. “I’m done with these, Fen.”

Fen looks over the lengths of dough and smiles. “These are perfect.” She hands Morrow the big knife, handle-first, and shows them how to cut the dough into inch-long sections. “It’s good for them to be kind of pinched down at the edges like that. I don’t think they’re going to come scoop us up from here. They wouldn’t raid this place.” She doesn’t pause between these two sentences, and it takes both Harper and Morrow a moment to realize that they’re not connected.

“Because Bouchard’s a statie?” Harper considers this. “I don’t know.”

Morrow frowns down at the dough as they cut it. “He’s a state border cop. Border cops and regular cops don’t protect each other the same way they protect themselves.”

“We don’t know that Peter’s working with state cops. Could be feds,” Harper offers.

Fen leans her elbows on the kitchen counter and buries her face in her hands. “We can’t know. And if we don’t know what’s coming, then we can’t stay here. But if we run—if we don’t get to Chicago . . . Fuck. That’s where I told Daneka we’d be. We’ll miss her if we don’t find a way into the state and this is our best bet.”

“I’m done with these,” Morrow says again, gesturing to the neat piles of miniature pillows on the counter.

Harper drops the last peeled orange into the pile on the table. “Perfect timing. Morrow, you come pull pith off these things. I gotta go.”

Fen lifts her head out of her hands. “You’re leaving?”

Harper grabs their jacket off the back of a kitchen chair. “Not leaving-leaving. Just heading over to the New House to talk to Missus Bouchard.”

“About what?”

They pull the jacket on. “To tell her we’re almost done prepping her fruit for marmalade. And to ask after her husband. Maybe he’s ready to go back to work. Maybe he’s picking up a shift tomorrow.”

“There’s no way,” Fen says warily. “She’d have said something if he was better.”

Harper shrugs. “S’polite to ask. Morrow, finish off these oranges so I can bring Missus Bouchard over to pick up her pot of goo. And Fen?”

Fen waits.

“Don’t worry,” Harper says. It’s almost soft, the way they say it. “I’m not leaving you alone. Not yet.”

And then they’re gone.

Morrow sits at the dining table and starts picking pith off the oranges with quick, careful fingers. Behind Fen, the water on the stove starts to boil. She heaves a hard, sharp sigh. 

“I’m sorry,” Morrow says after a few minutes.

Fen drops two handfuls of gnocchi into the boiling water. “For what?”

“For being scary. Don’t say I wasn’t, I know I was.”

Fen nods down into the pot as she gives the water a gentle stir. “You were. But it’s okay. You were keeping us safe.”

They’re quiet for a long time. Then, so softly Fen almost doesn’t hear it at all, they murmur, “I don’t want to be a guard dog.”

Quan comes stomping down the stairs before Fen can reply. “There’s blood all over the floor in that bedroom. We got time for me to clean it up before we go?”

“Plenty of time,” Fen says. She and Quan negotiate around each other in the kitchen—the sink is too close to the stove, and there’s not quite room for her to watch the pot while Quan rummages for cleaning supplies. When Quan straightens, a rag in one hand and an unlabeled spray bottle in the other, he and Fen are only a couple of inches apart.

 He studies her face for a moment. “Are we fighting?”

“No,” Fen says firmly. Then she lets herself smile. “We’re just figuring things out. All of us. Me and Harper are working on a plan. It’s gonna be okay.”

“You’re sure?” Quan studies Fen’s eyes, her forehead, her mouth. “Is Harper leaving?”

“They said they’re not. I believe them.”

“If they leave . . . will you go with them?”

Fen blinks rapidly. “If Harper leaves, I don’t think they’d want anyone to come with them. But they’re not leaving, so it doesn’t matter, right?”

“Sure. And we’re not fighting?”

It pulls a little smile out of Fen, finally, Quan asking this again. “We’re not fighting.”

“Good.” Quan kisses Fen on the forehead once, quickly and lightly, and then he’s gone, long strides carrying him out of the kitchen.

Fen blinks at the space where Quan was standing a moment before. She turns wide eyes toward Morrow. “Did you—?”

Morrow stares back, their brows nearly touching their hairline. “I saw. Are you two . . . ?”

“No,” Fen replies. “Not that I know of. Maybe—no. Right?”

Morrow doesn’t have an answer for her. 

In the pot, the gnocchi are starting to bob to the surface. Fen thinks of Daneka’s hair in the video, the way it tossed in the wind. She heats a pan on the other burner, drops a knob of butter from Missus Bouchard’s huge ornery cow onto the heat, and waits for it to melt and sizzle. She thinks of Daneka’s eyes in the video. Once the butter starts turning golden, she scoops the cooked gnocchi out of the pot with a slotted spoon and drops them into the butter to fry. She thinks of the shine of that vast lake. She puts more gnocchi into the pot, and works in batches to boil and fry them.

She thinks of Quan’s lips on her forehead, and she smiles down into the sizzling pan.

As the house fills with the smell of browning butter, Morrow pulls the pith off oranges, and Quan scrubs the floorboards, and Harper charms an answer out of Missus Bouchard. The sun outside is high and bright. It shines on the old farmhouse, and the big new one on the other side of the property, and the milking shed and the chicken coop and the feed shed, and somewhere out there, it shines on Peter, too.

Fen sprinkles salt a pile of toasted, butter-glossy gnocchi.  “Come get a plate,” she calls. She knows the only people who can hear her are Morrow and Quan, but part of her is calling out to Daneka, wherever she is. Part of her is making a plate for Daneka. Part of her is cooking for Daneka, every time she cooks. Every meal.

She doesn’t wait for anyone to come running before she grabs a fork. The bite she takes is too hot.

She closes her eyes and lets it burn her tongue.

---

Fen and Morrow’s Gnocchi

Half of a butternut squash
1 egg
2–3 cups flour
Salt
Pepper

1. Place the half-squash face down on a baking sheet. Rub it all over with butter. Roast at 425 degrees for 25 minutes.
2. Remove the squash from the oven and let it cool completely.
3. Remove the peel and mash the squash into a smooth paste. Form the paste into a mound and form a well in the center.
4. Crack 1 egg into the well. Stir with fingers to combine.
5. Add flour in batches, working the flour in until a sticky, firm dough forms.
6. Knead for 1–2 minutes.
7. Form into a ball and rest for 20 minutes. *This is the perfect amount of time for a hard conversation.
8. Cut the ball into eight equal parts. Roll each part out into a snake the width of someone’s thumb. Cut each snake into 1-inch sections using a knife or pasta cutter.
9. Bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil. Add the gnocchi in batches, stirring gently once to prevent sticking. Once the gnocchi bob to the top of the water, remove.
10. Melt butter in a skillet over medium heat. Once the butter starts to brown, fry gnocchi in batches.
11. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and eat piping hot.

---

“Have You Eaten?” copyright © 2024 by Sarah Gailey
Art copyright © 2024 by Shing Yin Khor
Photography copyright © 2024 by Sarah Gailey

The post Have You Eaten? Part 3: Morrow’s Comfort appeared first on Reactor.

“Have You Eaten?” copyright © 2024 by Sarah Gailey
Art copyright © 2024 by Shing Yin Khor
Photography copyright © 2024 by Sarah Gailey

The post Have You Eaten? Part 4: Harper’s Homecoming appeared first on Reactor.

A woman visiting Las Vegas for a fun weekend encounters her ne’er-do-well ex-husband, who begs her for a favor that gambles with life and death…

I put off the unveiling of my daughter’s headstone as long as I could. We didn’t do it until the eleventh month after she died, when the yahrzeit was in sight and I couldn’t stall any longer. I made all kinds of excuses—my grandchildren weren’t ready; I was too busy getting them settled in with me and Phil to organize it; it was too cold for us all to stand outdoors. Finally my sister Sadie called me up and told me it had to be done, it had to be done soon, and she would organize everything. Sadie is my older sister. My other two sisters are younger than me, not that any of us are young anymore. Betty was the youngest of us, the baby of the family, but she died of cancer twenty years ago during the war, so it’s just the four of us left.

Sadie took care of everything—she got in touch with the rabbi at my shul, she sent out the invitations, she had our other two sisters, Millie and Rose, put together some food and desserts and bring them to my and Phil’s apartment for afterward. I didn’t have to do a thing. I just told her to send any bills to Phil, and he would take care of them. And he did, without a word. He’s good like that. Reliable.

So all I had to do was show up on Phil’s arm, with my daughter’s children, Elsie and Danny, in tow, all of us dressed soberly and formally. That I could do, down to Elsie’s white gloves. Only twelve years old, and already her hands were too big to borrow a pair of mine. But I made sure she had her own.

I don’t remember what the rabbi said about Myra after reading from Psalms. He didn’t know her too well, anyway. He was the rabbi from my synagogue near Sutton Place. Myra and the kids had lived out in Midwood. Instead of listening, I thought about the last message she ever sent me, and wondered if it was my fault she was dead.

I didn’t listen to the Kaddish, either. Instead I looked at the chanting men through Myra’s eyes and saw what she would have seen, what would’ve mattered to her. Her father was missing.

Of course, he’d been missing for a long time by then.

I’d married Harry in 1927, and I’d married him for love, and my, weren’t we in love? We used to go out drinking and dancing together in smoky speakeasies. I’d line my eyes all dark with kohl—they used to call me Cleopatra—and he’d play the ukulele. In the summer, we’d take the trolley out to Coney Island and lie on the beach together and stroll on the boardwalk and stop to smooch each other every few minutes.

Love.

Harry, he was so handsome. Even after I knew he was no good, I couldn’t keep my hands off him. He had thick, dark, curly hair and sparkling dark eyes, and a knowing, cynical smile that just made me weak. A nice sharp jawline. Phil, now, he never really set my blood pounding like that, but on the other hand, he’s never raised his voice, either, to me or to Myra, not even to his own boys. Harry had a mean streak. Myra got that from him.

We loved each other so much, we got married and kept up the smooching, and in 1929 I had a little girl. I had Myra. He named her that.

Then a few years later, I got sick, real sick. Women’s problems, they called it, though I blame it on Harry’s whoring around. That’s love for you. First I had to stay in bed and I only got up when Myra needed me. Then I had to take Myra and go to my mother’s so she could take care of us both. Harry was working too hard to do it, I told her. Pfft. As if Harry was ever a working man. He was a gangster, that’s what he did, and he wasn’t very good at it. Sure, we got a warm reception at all the joints he supplied liquor to during Prohibition, but it turns out that doesn’t matter so much when you’ve got a kid you’re trying to feed.

Anyway, where was I? Right, I took Myra and went to Mama’s so she could take care of us, and then things got even worse, and Myra had to stay with Mama and Papa and Betty, who was still living at home, while I went to the hospital.

Poor Myra didn’t like that. Mama said she cried and cried after the ambulance had taken me away. Poor kindele. Mama always thought maybe that was why Myra was the way she was, the ambulance taking me away, and her not being allowed to visit on account of her being a child. But I don’t think it was that. After all, I came back, didn’t I?

But we didn’t know you would at the time, Mama would always say when I said that. And she was right. Things looked real bad for me for a while. We didn’t know if I was going to make it. And Harry, well, I guess he didn’t relish the thought of being a widower with a small child the way things were—this was just thirty years ago, 1932, the Depression—and sometime in there he just . . . left. Didn’t turn up one Friday night to have Shabbos with Myra—Mama always kept the sabbath at her home—and we didn’t hear from him after that.

So there was Mama with Betty and Myra at home and Harry had vanished, and things didn’t look so good for me. Mama didn’t know what to do, maybe change my name again, like when I was little and had scarlet fever and I went from Henrietta to Josephine. But then Mama remembered that wasn’t what had helped. What had helped was when she talked to a woman who had just come over from the old country, a witch, I guess you’d call her, and the witch had made me a broth and an amulet both. So Mama went to the witch again. Tante Deborah, I call her.

Mama left Myra with Betty and brought Tante Deborah to visit me in the hospital, and I remember sipping something that tasted terrible, and Tante Deborah slipping a pouch under my pillow and chanting some words I was too sick to hear well or follow—Hebrew, I think. And after that I started to get better. The doctors at the hospital, they couldn’t believe it, and the nurses told me later that they’d never seen someone so sick get well again. And finally I could go home.

Harry had been gone for weeks by then.

Myra was never the same after her beloved Papa left . . . I think she never got over it. She cried more easily than ever, and even when she wasn’t crying, she was mostly unhappy. I don’t know, those were bad years. Hard years. I worked at Gimbels, a window dresser, and Myra and I lived with Mama and Papa and Betty. I’d go without dinner sometimes so there would be enough for Mama and Papa and Myra. Our other sisters couldn’t help, nobody was any better off. For years, this went on. It was no way to live.

I couldn’t stand it, I told Mama. “We can’t go on like this,” I told her. “Papa out of work, Betty and I don’t bring enough home.”

“Well, what else is there to do?” asked Mama.

I thought about Gimbels. “I’m gonna catch myself a rich man,” I told her. “The very next one who comes into the shop. I am.”

And I did. Spotted Phil when he came in looking for clothing for his sons. A respectable widower, his wife had been gone for a couple years, and I could tell that he was looking around again. He seemed gentle, and he seemed kind enough, and he had money. You can’t ask better than that. He came back to shop now and then—for shirts, ties, gloves, this and that, and finally he asked for a date. It took maybe . . . a year after that until he proposed. I said yes, but only if we moved into Manhattan, because I didn’t want to live in Brooklyn no more, even at his very fancy house in Crown Heights. They wouldn’t sell to Jews on Fifth Avenue in those days, or even near it, so that’s how we ended up on Sutton Place, a co-op in a real fancy building, with a white-gloved doorman downstairs. And we’ve been all over together, on cruises, to resorts—all very nice. And I never went without dinner again, even on Yom Kippur, because I’d had enough of fasting. And Myra slept in a real bed, not a hammock.

Love. Well, I learned to love him.

His boys never did like me much, though. I think they thought I was a gold-digger. Maybe I was, but what else was I supposed to do to take care of myself and Myra? And Phil’s been happy. I can count the number of fights we’ve had on one hand. I pay attention to his favorite colors, and get my dresses made up in them. I pay attention to what he likes to eat and make sure it’s always on the table. He tells me where he wants to go for vacation, and I set everything up. I didn’t do all that with Harry. But I’ve kept Phil happy for almost twenty-five years and counting, and that’s not nothing, either.

Myra never took to him. He wasn’t unkind to her, but he never made much of an effort, either. What man does, when it comes to children? Especially children that aren’t his. For Myra, nobody could replace her adored father. She remembered dancing with him while she was little, she remembered that he was handsome. I’d be surprised if she remembered anything else. She thought she remembered why Harry left, though. She blamed me for it, for driving Harry away. I was sick at the time, so sick. It didn’t make any sense, but she blamed me anyway.

Never mind Harry. It was Phil who paid for her medicines, and Phil who gave me the money to support her and the kids after her husband, Siggy, left, and Phil who paid for her funeral and put his arm around me by the graveside, and Phil who held my elbow at the unveiling. Harry was nowhere to be seen, just the same as the last thirty years.

Phil wasn’t there on Myra’s yahrzeit, a month later, though. He had a business dinner that evening, but I didn’t mind. There was something I had to do that night, besides lighting the candle, and I didn’t want to explain it.

After the kids were in bed, I opened my jewelry box in the bedroom I shared with Phil and took out the envelope with the last note from Myra. I hadn’t told anybody about it, not my sisters, not Phil. He knew it existed, of course, but what it said? No. I couldn’t. I didn’t tell anybody.

I read it one more time, read the accusations about me, the way she blamed her daughter for ruining her life. Then I took it to the living room and held the corner of it in the flame of the candle until it caught. I held it for a few moments more, until it was well and truly aflame, and then I dropped it into an ashtray and watched it burn.

It was a couple months later that I was playing canasta with my sisters, and Sadie had the idea for us to go to Vegas. The grandkids hadn’t come home from school yet, but the seven-layer cookies were out on the table already, and we were munching on them.

“Phil’s gonna be out of town on business for two weeks next month,” I said, as I rearranged my cards and laid down a set of nines. “And the kids are going to visit their father in Philadelphia for one of those weeks, you know. It’ll just be me here.”

All three of my sisters exchanged looks. They thought I didn’t see, but I did.

“That’s lonely,” sympathized Rose. “Maybe one of us should come stay with you.”

“That’s a break,” corrected Sadie. She was my partner in the game. She put down a canasta of aces and smirked.

“Nice,” I said. Sadie is better at canasta than me, but I’m better than Millie or Rose.

“You should go somewhere,” Sadie continued. “Why let them have all the fun? Lock up the apartment and you take a trip also.”

I wasn’t sure my grandkids, Elsie and Danny, would describe visits to their father’s house with his new family as fun, but I didn’t say that. Well, I say “new,” but he and his wife have a three-year-old, and I hear she’s expecting again.

“Ach, where would I go?” I said absently. I was watching Millie rearrange her cards, trying to figure out what she had in her hand.

Sadie rolled her eyes. “Vegas, of course! You love Vegas.”

I do like Vegas. We’d been there a few times and while I enjoy canasta with the girls, blackjack is really my game. When I say “we,” I mean me and Phil, of course. Harry and me, we never had money to go anywhere farther than the speakeasy on Ludlow Street.

Millie drew a card and discarded another. I eyed the discard pile, but decided against picking the pack. I didn’t want to get saddled with that many cards this late in the game.

“Vegas alone,” I said, “is not necessarily a fun time.” I drew a card. It was the three of hearts, so I smiled and put it down with the two other red threes I had.

“So, who says you’ll be alone?” countered Sadie. “Take me with you. Your Phil can afford it.”

I had done the best of all of us. My Phil certainly could afford for Sadie and me to go to Las Vegas on his dime. Our dime, I should say. Haven’t we been married long enough for me to say that?

“We-e-e-e-ell,” I said. “Why not? Only what if Elsie and Danny need to come home early? I’m not going to go for the whole break.”

Elsie and Danny don’t like their stepmother, and I don’t think she much likes them. She wants to pretend that Siggy came to her fresh and new, no previous family at all, certainly no kids hanging around after they’re no longer wanted, kids from a marriage she helped break up. I don’t know how many more visits to Philadelphia are in the cards for Elsie and Danny.

Speaking of cards, Millie laid out what remained of her hand. “I’m out, girls,” she said. “Time to count up your points.”

So the next month, Phil packed for Montreal, Elsie and Danny packed for Philadelphia, and I packed for Las Vegas. After I’d said good-bye to Phil and he’d headed off to Canada and after I’d kissed Elsie and Danny good-bye and they’d driven off in the backseat of their father’s car, I picked Sadie up in a taxi and we got on a plane to Nevada. We took a taxi from the airport to the Stardust Resort and Casino. It was very nice in there, all red and brown velvet, very plush. Anyway, when we got there we each went to our own room and unpacked. Our rooms were in the Venus building. Love again.

You gotta understand how fancy Vegas was back then. It was adults only, not like porn, but like a fancy restaurant. I’d packed my fanciest gowns, and even bought a couple new ones for Sadie so she wouldn’t feel outclassed. Sure, we knew the place was mobbed up and had been since the ’40s, but so what? To tell the truth, it made me feel a little more at home, because the mob there was mostly our guys—Yidn, you know? And it made the place very safe—you never had to worry about anything violent happening, because the boys didn’t want to give authorities any excuse to take a closer look at what they were doing. All you really had to worry about was one of the boys getting too handsy, but where don’t you have to worry about that?

Sadie and me, after a late lunch at the Polynesian restaurant they had there—I don’t know what that had to do with the outer space theme, but that was the restaurant they had—we went straight to the casino in our very nice dresses, faces all made up. Sadie, she played around at the slot machines, the roulette wheel. I went straight to the blackjack tables. I picked one at random and just stood and watched for a few hands.

Then I placed a few small bets, nothing crazy, just feeling out the game and the players, and I did all right. Before long, I took a chair myself. I won a few hands, lost a few, but I was doing better than breaking even. Just a little better, but that’s what you go for in blackjack. Watching the cards, I forgot to think about Myra for a little while. At some point I looked up and saw that Sadie had floated over and was watching me.

I caught Sadie’s eye and jerked my head slightly. She floated a little nearer.

I threw the next hand and busted. Then I looked at the little gold wristwatch on my left arm. With my eyes, I can’t actually read it, but I didn’t have to.

“Sadie, hon,” I said. “I’m getting hungry. It must be dinnertime, don’t you think?”

A few older gentlemen offered to take us to dinner and the evening show—Sadie and me, we weren’t young anymore, not by a long shot, but we were still pretty good-looking for our age. We waved them off, politely of course, no hard feelings, but we were planning a quiet night. Well, I was.

Sadie had different ideas. “Whaddaya mean, a quiet night? It’s not every week we get to Vegas!”

“I get tired early these days,” I told her. “With Elsie and Danny, I’m raising kids all over again, but I’m not so young this time.” Honestly, I’d been tired ever since losing Myra.

So we split the difference. We had dinner in my room—room service—and after some coffee so I wouldn’t doze off, we went back down to the evening floor show.

First, though, I placed a long-distance call to Siggy’s in Philadelphia. He picked up.

“Siggy, it’s Josie. How are the kids doing?”

“They’re doing fine,” he said, but he didn’t sound so sure. “Having the time of their lives.”

“Yeah?” I said. “That’s good. Get Elsie. I wanna say hi.”

After half a minute, Elsie got on the phone. “Hi, Nana.”

“Hi, darling,” I said. “Are you having fun?”

Elsie paused just a little too long before answering. “Yeah.”

“What’ve you and your brother been doing?” I asked.

“Nothin’.”

“Nothing?”

“We all went for ice cream.”

Ice cream. I could get her ice cream in New York.

“Is Faye being nice to you?” I asked.

“Uh-uh.”

I sighed. No point in asking what that bitch was doing this time. Elsie wouldn’t be able to say on the phone in front of everybody.

“Well, darling, listen. Your Aunt Sadie and me will be home in a few days, and then if you want to come home early, you just say, all right? I’ll take the train down and come get you.”

“Okay, Nana,” said Elsie.

“Now put me back on with your father.”

I warned Siggy to take good care of the kids and then hung up.

The Stardust floor show was known for its topless showgirls, which I guess was something for the guys to get excited about, but didn’t mean anything to me. I enjoyed the fruity sweet cocktails, though—they reminded me of the drinks I’d get when Phil and I went on cruises. I might’ve had one too many, though, because on my way to powder my nose, my head started spinning and I had to sit down in a small private booth.

A man slid in across from me, so quickly and smoothly that he must’ve been following me, so my stomach tightened and I got ready to kick up a fuss if he gave me any trouble. I hoped Sadie was okay at the front-seat table where I’d left her.

The man tilted his face to the side quizzically. “You don’t recognize me, Josie-Jo? I haven’t changed that much, have I?” He smiled at some joke I wasn’t in on, I guess, and then I knew him.

“We got nothing to say to each other, Harry,” I said icily. “You made sure of that thirty years ago.”

“Oh, don’t be like that, Josie-Jo,” he said. “I can see you’ve done all right for yourself, in the end—jewels like those on your neck and fingers, and I saw you cleaning up at the blackjack table earlier. You’re not still sore, are you?”

I ignored his question. “You’ll excuse me, Harry. I’m just on my way to the ladies’.”

“Just sit with me for a minute,” he said. “It’s not often I get to sit with a fine-looking lady like yourself. You do look good, Josie. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you weren’t yet fifty.”

“Shut up, Harry,” I said. “I’ve already talked to my former son-in-law today, and I don’t need another useless deadbeat.”

“Josie-Jo, c’mon. Have one drink with me. Just for old times’ sake. You go powder your nose, and I’ll wait right here for you. Just one drink. Please.”

“Don’t bet on it,” I told him. I tried to sweep majestically out of the booth, but I stumbled over my heels and almost fell against the table. I stalked to the ladies’ room, glancing back only once.

After I’d taken care of my business, I looked at myself in the mirror in the ladies’ lounge. Harry wasn’t wrong, I was looking good that evening. And he was easy on the eyes, too. He always had been. Come to think of it, he’d looked a lot younger than I would have expected. I’d just turned sixty, and if Harry had been a stranger on the street, I would have put him at forty-five at the most. I sighed and patted my hair. He was still a handsome man, there was no denying it.

What harm could one drink do? Maybe I’d finally give him a piece of my mind about what his leaving had done to Myra.

I patted my hair back into place one last time and walked out of the ladies’ room and back over to the table.

“Okay,” I said, sitting down. “One drink.” I ordered a mai tai, a drink I’d tried on the last cruise I took with Phil, before Elsie and Danny had come to live with us.

“You don’t drink sidecars anymore, Josie?” Harry asked.

“A lot about me has changed,” I said.

“I guess I don’t know that much about you, now,” he said.

“That’s a fact,” I said, and he winced.

“But maybe you still have some fond feelings for me,” he said. “You know, just for old times’ sake. Maybe you still care a little.”

The girl brought the mai tai, saving me from spitting out the swear words on my lips. I swallowed them politely, instead, along with a sip of the drink, and by the time the girl left, I had myself under control again.

“Fat chance,” I said, and lit a cigarette. “What is all this about, Harry? You need money? I’m not giving you any.”

“I don’t need money, Josie-Jo.” Suddenly Harry looked very tired, though still younger than he had any right to look. “I don’t need money anymore.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Harry,” I said. “Everybody needs money. What’d you do, marry an heiress?”

“No,” he said. “I died.”

“You did what?” I asked. I must’ve misheard, I thought.

“I came out here because I needed money. Wasn’t too popular with the boys in New York in the ’40s, on account of some deals that went south, which were not my fault, but I was the one that got hung out to dry.”

“Of course, Harry,” I said, and this time I was the one who felt tired. “Nothing’s ever your fault.”

He cracked a smile. ‘Nah, there’s plenty that’s my fault, Josie. But not those deals. I was set up, is all. I’ve got my suspicions as to who by, but that doesn’t really matter any more. What matters is that I came out here maybe ten, twelve years ago, just after they built this place. I dunno, I lose track of time where I am.”

I rolled my eyes a little. I wasn’t buying it.

He ignored it and kept on with his story. “I was working here, set up in the back room. I did a little of everything that needed doing, and I saw how easy the money was coming in, how much of it there was. My fingers got itchy.”

“Harry.” I sighed. “You know better than that. Everybody knows better than that.”

“Well, hell, Josie-Jo, there was so much of it, and my cut started to look so small. I figured, I’m the one who says how much is coming in, nobody’ll notice if I skim a little, if I run a few games on the side. Who was it gonna hurt?”

“You tried to cheat Lansky? You’re an idiot, Harry.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” he said. “In the end, a couple of Syndicate boys took me upstairs and I didn’t come back down. They’re not supposed to do that here! No violence, everybody knows.”

“Everybody knows not to cheat Lansky, too.”

“And you see how many mirrors there are here. And I had nobody to cover them, like you’re supposed to when somebody dies. Nobody to say Kaddish for me because nobody who cared about me knew I was gone. I was all alone here.”

Suddenly a picture of Myra’s face appeared in my mind, the one person I knew who had always cared that her beloved father was gone, and I remembered covering the mirrors in her house and my and Phil’s apartment after I saw her body. Never had understood that custom before, but after Myra was gone, I couldn’t bear to look at myself and know I was in the world and she wasn’t, and it finally made sense to me.

“I hung around here just a little too long. Just a little too long, and pfft.” He snapped his fingers. “Lilith sucked me right through the mirror. Mirrors—they all lead straight to Yenne Velt, the other world. That’s why you gotta cover ’em when someone dies, new spirits get confused real easy and go the wrong way. Now I’m stuck in some kind of casino there with the shedim, and Josie, I hate it there. It’s awful.”

I realized that I had been listening, transfixed. I shook my head to clear it. “Bullshit, Harry. You’re a bullshit artist and this is bullshit. I don’t know what you want from me, but this is bullshit. I never should’ve married you.”

“Ah, don’t say that, Josie-Jo.” He looked strained. “We had some really good times together, didn’t we? Back when we were young? And we sure made a beautiful little girl, didn’t we?”

“Myra,” I said through clenched teeth.

“Yeah,” he said. “How is the kid?”

So I smacked him. I didn’t mean to, I didn’t even decide to; my hand just flew out before I knew it. But it went right through his face without stopping. I tried it again, and again my hand went through him like he was nothing, like there was nobody there.

He smiled at me, a tired smile, not his usual smirk, and shook his head. “I’m a ghost, Josie-Jo,” he said. “You can try it as many times as you want. But I’m just smoke and mirrors. I’m dead, Josie. I’m not bullshitting you.”
I leaned back against the wall of the booth and said nothing.

“Why’d you want to hit me, anyway?” he asked.

I blinked at him and wondered if I was crazy. I hoped not. Who would look after Elsie and Danny then?

“Why did I hit you?”

“Why did you hit me?”

“I would think you would know, with being a ghost and all.” I took a deep breath. “Myra is dead.” I still didn’t like to hear my voice saying it out loud.

Harry passed his hand over his eyes, and then he looked even more tired than before. Maybe a little older, too.

“I’m sorry, Josie. I didn’t know. When?”

“A little over a year ago.”

“I’m sorry. What happened?”

Yeah, you’re sorry, I thought. For all you would’ve known or cared, she could’ve died when she was seven and got polio. To hell with you. I wished I could’ve connected when I hit him. I wished I could’ve used my fist.

“Fuck you, Harry.”

“Listen, Josie—”

“I’ve got to go. I’m sorry you’re a ghost, or whatever you are, but that’s not my problem.”

He moved to grab my hand, but his fingers went straight through me. My arm felt cold where it had happened. I guessed he really was a ghost.

“Please, Josie. Please. It’s all gray there. No color at all. Nothing living. And no other people, just shedim. And I can play whatever, roulette, blackjack, slot machines, it doesn’t matter, Josie, because I always win.”

I snorted. “Sounds terrible.”

“No, Josie, you gotta believe me, it is. Nobody talks to me. The dealers just look straight through me. Nothing ever happens that I don’t expect. I pick red seventy-two, the ball lands on red seventy-two. I play poker, and I get a straight flush, first hand. I try to throw games, and I can’t. I win. I just wander around, winning and winning and there’s no excitement to it at all, and nobody to talk to, nobody to celebrate with, just endless gray casino chips.

“And I’m trapped there. I need someone to help me, someone living. I need you, Josie.”

Tough shit, I thought. I have some friends, ladies at my shul with numbers on their arms. They come to lunch sometimes, they tell me things in whispers. We stop talking when Elsie and Danny come in the room. They should never know, please G-d. A spirit casino didn’t sound that bad to me. I lit another cigarette.

“So, you want me to spring you? Not a chance, Harry.” But I didn’t walk away. Maybe I should have. But it was nice to be looking at his face. Myra had always looked so much like her father.

“No, nothing like that. You just have to do what you came here to do. Play cards. Play blackjack.”

“Good-bye, Harry.” I stood up.

“Please Josie. I won’t be able to come to you awake again. I want to go on to whatever should come next for me, whatever would’ve come next if the mirrors had been covered, if I’d’ve had someone to say Kaddish for me. Not for my sake, I know I’ve lived a bad life and I wasn’t good to you. But for Myra’s sake—we loved each other once, Josie, Myra showed it, she’d have wanted you to help me out. Even if I become a gilgul and have to come back as a dog or an ant, I just don’t want to be stuck here anymore.”

I shrugged, but at the same time I thought of Harry, young, laughing with me, him with his curls and me with heavily kohled eyes in a local speakeasy. He’d always hated being bored more than anything. Myra had been that way, too.

“Maybe,” I said.

“It’ll happen in your dreams,” he gabbled hastily, like a man who knows his time is short, though the way I figured it, he had nothing but time now. Maybe I was the one running out of time.

“Dreams,” I echoed, watching Harry fade away, like a trick of the light. Only his cigarette still burning in the ashtray. I stubbed mine out next to it and went back to my sister.

“You were gone an awful long time,” she said. “Do you know how many men I’ve had to fight off? ‘My sister’s sitting here.’”

“Sorry, Sadie,” I said. “I ran into Harry.”

“That no-goodnik! Of all people! I can’t believe you gave him the time of day—I always told you he was useless, a schnorrer.”

“You were right,” I replied absently.

She took another look at me. “You don’t look so good,” she said. “You want to go upstairs, turn in?”

“No,” I said. “Let’s stay up late.”

I don’t take sleeping pills, but liquor has a pretty strong effect on me, and I drank more than a little that night. I went down like a chopped tree at the end of it, and I slept sound.

No dreams. I never dream when I drink.

But I pay for it. I was sick all the next morning and my head hurt worse than anything. I couldn’t do this for three nights.

After throwing up, I looked at my face in the bathroom mirror. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Harry’s reflection behind me. His lips formed the word “please.”

When I looked behind me, though, there was nothing there.

I cleaned up at the blackjack tables again that night, and I thought about celebrating with a mai tai, but my stomach gave a lurch and I decided against it. Instead I took my winnings and made an early night of it.

That night, I dreamt that I woke up to find a young red-haired woman sitting on my bed, and me in my nightgown.

“The Lady,” she said, just like that, capital letters and everything. “Is extending an invitation to you. To play blackjack.” I sat up in bed and looked closely at her. She was dressed like a bellhop. Out of some half-remembered story, I quick looked down at her feet. They were bird’s claws.

I woke myself up on purpose, and when I did, I was covered in sweat. I stumbled into the bathroom to get some water, and there was a word written in condensation on the mirror. It was “please.” But I didn’t see Harry, and the word faded after a minute, the way steam does.

That morning at breakfast I couldn’t stop thinking about Myra. How much she looked like her father. How much she had longed for her father. How mean she had gotten, toward the end. Mean to Elsie. Mean to me. And now gone. Not mean to anyone anymore, not ever again.

She never would’ve been mean to Harry, though. I could almost hear her voice, telling me to go help her father.

So I snuck one of those little jars of jam they have at hotel breakfasts into my pocketbook. Demons love jam, everybody knows that. The day before Phil and I had all our stuff moved into the Sutton Place apartment, I put down a dish of jam to make sure any demons hanging around felt good about us, just like my mama taught me, and it worked, we never had a worry about that apartment. I also made sure I had a couple hundred dollars’ worth of chips in my pocketbook too. That evening, before I went to sleep, I put the pocketbook next to me in bed. There was plenty of room. I like to sleep alone in a big bed, and I don’t get to do that too often. Before Phil, I shared a bed with Betty, and before that Harry. And before that, well, we girls slept in hammocks when I was little.

I was awakened from a deep sleep, not by the bellhop girl, but by Harry. I was in bed with the covers up to my chin, thank goodness.

“Please, Josie,” he said. “Please come with me.”

I thought about Myra, and I sat up, still clutching the covers to my neck. “You turn your back until I get my dress on,” I said.

“Are you serious?” he asked. “I’m your husband.”

“Ex-husband. Turn your back.”

While his back was turned I put on a dress and pinned my hair up, but I decided I didn’t have time to put on makeup. I picked up my pocketbook.

“I’m ready now,” I said.

He turned around and smiled a bit wanly. “Beautiful as ever, Cleopatra.”

I smiled back before I thought about it, but then stopped. “Don’t call me that,” I snapped. “Let’s get this over with.”

He led me over to the full-length mirror on the closet door, took my hand and started to step through it, but I hung back, suddenly afraid.

“How will I get back?” I asked. “What if the shedim keep me there?”

He cocked his head. “But you’re alive, Josie,” he said. “I’m dead, no living body to come back to. But you, you’re sleeping safely tucked in bed. Just look.”

I looked back, and there I was, snoring gently in bed, covers pulled up to my chin. “Then how—”

“You’re sleeping, that’s how come you can come with me through the mirror. And your body will draw you back.”

He placed one foot through the mirror, into a deep silver pool, and drew me after him.

We came out in what looked like the casino downstairs, but drained of all color, just shadows and grays. My body, my dress, my pocketbook . . . I was the only patch of color in that place, and it seemed deserted, not a gambler in sight.

“Where is everybody?” I asked, and it came out as more of a whimper than I would’ve liked.

“Don’t worry, kid,” Harry said warmly, and drew my arm through his. “You’re safe.”

There were dealers at all the card tables, a croupier at the roulette wheel, waitresses at the bar, but no customers. I tried to look at their feet, but couldn’t get the right angle. I pointed to what looked like a blackjack table. “We go there?”

“No,” he said, and aimed us toward a door in the back that I hadn’t noticed. “We go through there.”

The only sounds as we made our way toward the door were my footsteps. Every dealer’s, every waitress’s, every bartender’s head swiveled to follow our progress, but nobody spoke, and nobody smiled, and everybody was gray. I thought of being here, by myself, for years on end, with my voice the only sound, nobody talking to me, always winning no matter what I did, every hand, every spin, every bet. Collecting colorless chips by myself. Forever. I shivered a little, and Harry put his arm around me, but no warmth came from him. I guess you need a body for that.

We went through the doors, away from those silent gray watchers, and down a long, dim hallway. At the end of it, we went through another door and found ourselves in a small room. In it was a woman, a woman with long black hair pinned up in an elaborate crown. She had color. Black hair, pale skin, paper-white, blood-red lips. Like a fairy tale. And an evening dress that sparkled like rubies. Probably had them stitched into the beading, if I knew anything about evening gowns, which I did.

She smiled at me and instinctively I dropped my eyes to her feet. They were birds’ claws.

“I, um—” My voice sounded harsh in the silence. “I hear you have a game to play.”

The lady nodded and gestured to a small table, a blackjack table set up for two. “I do.” Her voice didn’t sound harsh at all, smooth as silk. Smooth as honey. “The question is whether it’s a game worth playing.”

“For Harry’s soul,” I confirmed.

“Yes.” She paused. “But what do you have to offer to make it worth my while?”

I took the chips out of my pocketbook, but the lady just looked bored. I took off my rings and added them to the pot, and they were good quality, believe me, my Phil can afford the best and that’s what he gets me, but she didn’t waste a second glance on them.

“I don’t need your money or baubles,” she said.

I drew the jar of raspberry jam out of my pocketbook. “I have heard,” I said, “that you like jam more than just about anything,” and I placed the jar on the table. The jam inside was a rich red through the glass.

At that, she gave a tinkling laugh, like a breeze shimmying through a crystal chandelier. “I do like jam,” she agreed. “Especially raspberry. But not more than anything. No, I’m afraid you have only one thing of interest to me. A soul for a soul, that’s how it is. You understand.”
“My soul?” I asked.

“Did he not tell you that?” She shook her head mockingly and wagged an admonishing finger at him. “So untrustworthy. Unreliable, that’s what I say. Well, once a con man, always a con man.”

I turned an outraged stare on Harry. “You should’ve said.”

He glanced away. “I thought you might not come,” he muttered.

I thought briefly about turning around, following the pull of my sleeping body right back to my hotel room. Then I thought about Myra, how she used to laugh when Harry twirled her in the air. She had been happy, before he left.

“I’m here,” I said grumpily. “We might as well play. But if I lose, you don’t get my soul until my grandchildren are grown. I’m betting my soul, not my life.”

“Of course,” said Lilith. “That’s reasonable.” She gestured for me to sit down at the table, so I did. “Put your valuables away, Mrs. Greenspan. We’ll play. Mr. Valenofsky’s soul against your soul.” She paused. “And the jam. Three hands. I deal.”

The first hand was over quickly with me getting an ace and a queen at the first deal. One for me.

The second hand didn’t go so well. Dealer started with a nine and a ten. She stayed, of course. I had a four and an eight. I asked for another card and got a two.

“Hit me again,” I said.

The card she gave me was a jack. “Bust.”

I started to feel a little dizzy as she shuffled the cards for the final hand. The little room seemed to expand to the size of a stadium, and I felt eyes on me, even though I couldn’t see anyone else there.

“You should’ve asked me to play her at poker,” I muttered to Harry. “Or canasta. There’s too much chance involved in blackjack.”

“Nah,” said Harry. “I’ve seen you play before. This is your game. You clean up at blackjack.”

I didn’t know how to explain to Harry that to clean up at blackjack you had to keep track of which cards had been played, that the odds got better the longer you played, that three hands was more or less chance.

I like Vegas to visit, but I really didn’t want to spend my afterlife here. I hadn’t even been sure there was an afterlife until a couple days earlier, but now that I knew there was, I wanted to spend mine with Myra and my parents, not in some washed-out gray casino by myself, or worse, with Harry.

Lilith dealt again. I looked at my cards. They were both sevens, so I turned the hole card face up and split them. “Double down.” The next cards I got were a five and a nine, so twelve in one hand and sixteen in the other. Nowhere near close enough, especially when Lilith took one card, and face up she showed a six and a ten.

“Hit me.”

A ten and a five. I wondered what would happen if we both hit twenty-one. In most casinos, draws go to the dealer, and that wasn’t me.

“Bust,” I admitted on the twenty-two hand. “But I’m staying in the other.”

Lilith turned over her hole card. It was a four. I turned over mine. “I win,” I said. My voice sounded strangely calm, but I knew I was terrified. It was like I was observing everything from some distance.

“So you do.” The demoness sounded amused. “And so you keep your own soul, for whatever awaits it,  and you can have Mr. Valenofsky’s as well. Hold out your hand.”

I did, and she dropped gold-colored casino chip into it. It had Hebrew writing engraved on it in a spiral, but it was too small for me to read even with my glasses.

“Thank you,” I said. It didn’t seem like enough. “Please take the jam, though. As a gift.”

Lilith’s eyes lit up—literally, they glowed orange for a moment—and she smiled. “Many thanks,” she said. “I do love jam.” She opened the jar and dipped in her finger, and licked it clean. “It’s good jam. Mrs. Greenspan, I’m sure you’ll find the right thing to do with the soul. Mr. Valenofsky, you may accompany Mrs. Greenspan back through the mirror in the main room. Good night to you both.”

I tucked the golden disk into my pocketbook. We retraced our steps back to the gray casino and through the mirror into my bedroom, Harry beaming like he’d just won a million bucks. When we got back into my room, I lay down and eased myself back into my still sleeping body. I felt so tired.

“Go wherever you want, Harry,” I said. “Just don’t be here when I wake up.” Then I closed my eyes and fell into a dreamless sleep.

When I woke up the next morning, though, my pocketbook was beside me on the bed, I was still wearing the good dress I had worn to Yenne Velt (I’d forgotten to take it off when I rejoined my body), and Harry was sitting in the room’s easy chair.

“What are you still doing here?” I asked. “You’re free. So go be free. Go do whatever it is you should be doing.”

He shook his head. “I can’t, Josie-Jo. I tried. I can’t go more than a room away.”

“Away from me?”

“Away from the poker chip.”

“So what you’re saying is, I should flush that thing down the toilet,” I said.

“You’ve always been so grumpy in the mornings,” he said. Then he looked a little worried. “Please don’t do that, though.”

I remembered Lilith telling me I’d find the right thing to do with it. She hadn’t mentioned toilets.

“Go in the other room while I get dressed, then. I’m flying home today. I guess you’re coming with me.”

I wasn’t sure what I’d expected to happen after I helped Harry, but him hanging around me everywhere I went because I had some kind of oversized magic subway token wasn’t it. Go, I told him, be free, take the poker chip and go on to whatever Adonai has in store for you. I tried to put the chip in his hand, but it just fell right through.

He was with me on the plane back to NYC, in the taxicab home to Sutton Place, and in the bedroom while I unpacked. I didn’t like it. I had lived a pretty good life without him for thirty years, and I wanted it back.

“C’mon, it’s not so bad, is it, Josie-Jo?” he coaxed. “We always meant to spend our lives together, didn’t we?”

I rolled my eyes. “That ship sailed a long time ago, Harry. I want you gone. Now be quiet and let me think.”

“Josie—”

“I swear, if you don’t shut up, I’m gonna drop that chip down the next sewer grate I see.”

Harry never could keep his mouth shut, and I didn’t want him yammering at me on the train all the way to Philly, so I reached a decision.

“I’m putting the chip in the jewelry box in my bedroom,” I told him. “You can cool your heels here until I get back with the kids.”

“Aw, Josie, I want to see our grandkids too!”

I rounded on him. “You don’t have grandchildren, you understand me? I have grandchildren. Phil, he’s a good man, a good provider, he takes care of those kids, he has grandchildren too. You have nobody, you understand? You left.”

“I get it, Josie, I get it.”

“I’m not sure you do! You left, so you have nothing to do with Elsie and Danny. Nobody else has been able to see you since Vegas, so don’t you dare show yourself to my grandchildren now.”

“Our grandchildren, Josie, no matter what you say. And I can’t promise that—it’s easier for kids to see ghosts than adults. Their minds aren’t all cluttered up with garbage yet.”

That’s men for you. They do their little dance, and they think that makes them a father forever afterward. And then a grandfather. No. You gotta wake up every damn day and decide to do it, all day, and then do it again the next morning. Every morning.

“Yeah, well, I don’t want their minds cluttered up with your garbage.”

His tone changed to wheedling. “C’mon, Jo. It’s hard for me to make anybody who’s not family see me, y’know. I never remarried, not like you—”

“You never had to!”

“—you and those kids are all I have left.”

“What about your brothers and sister?” I snapped. “Can’t you go bother them?”

“Well, if I knew where they were, and you gave them the gold chip, maybe I could.”

We glared at each other for a minute.

“I don’t know where they are, either,” I finally said. “But I know where you’re going to be while I go get the kids.” I put the chip in the jewelry box and slammed its lid shut.

The next morning on the train, I had some time to myself to think. Harry couldn’t go on staying with me—when he walked out on me and Myra, he’d made his choice, as far as I was concerned, and now there had to be a way for me to make mine. I could just toss the poker chip into the nearest gutter when I got home, of course, but, eh, I couldn’t bring myself to settle on that. Myra would’ve hated me for it. She loved her father so much, or the memory of him, anyway.

I knew I was out of my depth, was the thing. But I wasn’t sure what to do. Phil would think I was off my rocker if I started babbling to him about ghosts and Las Vegas. Our rabbi at the synagogue on East Fifty-first Street . . . well, he’s a nice young man, a macher in the making, really, but I’m not sure about something like this. This is more of a . . . private matter. A personal trouble, and that nice young man, he might just write me off as a crazy old woman.  That’d be no good, not for me, and not for the kids.

Trains are good places for thinking, but it wasn’t until I was on the way back, with Elsie reading the new Oz book I’d brought her on one side of me and Danny slumped against me snoozing on the other, that it came to me. All of a sudden, I knew exactly who to go to for advice, and she wouldn’t think I was crazy, either.

A few hours later, we were walking through the apartment door, Danny still half asleep and stumbling. When we got inside, his head shot up in surprise and he blinked furiously.

“Who’s that, Nana?” he asked.

I followed his gaze into the shadowy hallway in time to see Harry melt into invisibility.

“There’s nobody here but us, sweetie,” I said. “Zayde won’t get back from his business trip for another week.”

“I could have sworn I saw someone,” he said. “Didn’t you see somebody, Elsie?”

Elsie was so deep in her book that she didn’t even hear him.

“Maybe you were dreaming,” I said, and ruffled his hair. “You two go in your rooms and unpack, and afterwards we’ll have dinner. I made chicken paprikash and dumplings yesterday, and it’s waiting in the icebox.”

I went to my bedroom and closed the door quietly. Harry was waiting with a hangdog expression on his face.

“What’s the big idea?” I hissed. “I told you not to let the kids see you! What’s Danny going to think?”

Harry held up his hands. “Hey, hey, I didn’t hear your key in the lock until it was too late, that’s all.”

I glared at him anyway.

“Say, though, those are some kids, aren’t they? The girl with her head in a book, she keeps reading like that, she’ll go far. I guess she does well at school, doesn’t she? Better than I ever did, I bet.”

“They both do well,” I said coldly. “They’ve got smart heads on their shoulders.”

“I knew it!” he said. “And good-looking, too. The boy even has my curly hair. Cute kids, both of them.”

“You can try to butter me up all you want, Harry,” I said. “I don’t care. Tomorrow we’re going to see a witch.”

The next day I made breakfast for the three of us, gave the kids some money for a double feature, and sent them out the door. Then I took the gold poker chip from my jewelry box and put it in my pocketbook.

In the elevator, I pushed the little white button, so the doorman had a taxi waiting when I walked out the door. He opened the door for me to get in and shut it firmly behind me. Harry drifted right on through. Nobody but me noticed.

I gave the driver an address on Delancey Street and the car started moving downtown. Harry seemed lost in thought.

“It’s not that old d—”

I shot him a warning look.

“That old . . .” He seemed to struggle for words and finally shrugged and resorted to, “That  froy vos hot lib froyen.”

“Tante Deborah,” I said. “Yes.”

He looked annoyed. “She never liked me.”

“She doesn’t like most people,” I said. “In your case, she was right.”

“What’d you say?” asked the driver.

“Nothing,” I said. “I was just talking to myself.”

The rest of the journey was silent.

The apartment on Delancey was above Tante Deborah’s brother-in-law’s appetizing shop. I heard the shop had done so well that he owned the whole building now. In fact, the shop did so well that they could’ve moved uptown if they wanted, but Tante Deborah wanted to stay in the old neighborhood. The apartment was a walk-up, and at my age that wasn’t easy. I don’t know how Tante Deborah or Tante Ruth, her constant companion, managed it. Still, they’d been living there together as long as I could remember.

When I knocked on the door, it was Tante Ruth who opened it. She smiled. “Josie, it’s so good to see you, you should come visit more often.”

She brought me inside and hugged me. Henry drifted in after me, but she didn’t notice him. I gave her the banana cake I’d baked the night before and brought with me (I bake very good banana cake, the best, actually, and I’m not telling you my secret).

The apartment was a nice one—not modern like mine and Phil’s, of course, but nice, with plenty of light.

Tante Deborah was sitting at the kitchen table. She didn’t get up when we came in, which could have been her age—getting up is not easy at my age, let alone hers—or could have been her general grumpiness, but she did smile briefly at me before her dark eyes refocused on a spot just behind me. On Harry.

“Josephine,” she said. “And you brought your shande of a late husband.”

“Ex-husband,” I said, just as Tante Ruth, rummaging in the cupboard for another teacup and plates to put the pieces of banana cake on, looked over her shoulder at me and sighed.

Harry managed to look confused and offended at the same time. “How—” he began.

“She’s a witch,” I told him. “And you are a shande.”

Tante Ruth bought over tea and cake, and we all ate and chatted. I asked after Ella, their niece, maybe seven or eight years younger than me. She’d gotten her politics from Tante Ruth, worked as a labor organizer for years, and married an Irishman she’d met doing that. They had a couple of kids, teenagers by now. It was only when the cake was gone that Tante Ruth cleared the plates from the table and refilled our teacups. Tante Deborah stirred a spoon of cherry preserves into hers.

“Well, I’ll give you two a bit of privacy now. I’ll be in my office in the back, working on a story. Give a shout if you need anything.” Tante Ruth cheerfully left the room.

Tante Deborah stirred her tea and scowled. “Does she think I can’t get us more tea and cake if we want it?” she muttered, but without much conviction, only habitual annoyance. Then she refocused on me. “So, Josephine. Why is the ghost of that shande you made the mistake of marrying following you around like you were newlyweds again?”

“I won his soul at blackjack, Tante,” I explained. “And now I don’t know how to get rid of it.” I took the golden disk from my pocketbook and handed it to her while I told the whole story. She examined it closely, rummaging in the kitchen drawer for a magnifying glass at one point, and listened.

“The jam was a good idea,” she said, peering at me through her cat-eye glasses. Then she looked down at the disk through the magnifying glass.

“Can you read it?” I asked.

“Of course I can read it,” she said irritably. “I’m not so old that I’ve forgotten the holy tongue. I’m just so old that I can no longer see it so well.”

She mused over the disk a bit longer and then shot a sharp look at Harry. “Chaim ben Meir is you, I take it?”

Harry nodded.

“Well,” said Tante Deborah. “I want to talk to Josephine about this privately, so, Chaim, I’m going to put you away for a while.”

Harry looked confused, and I wondered if she was going to pitch the disk out the window (Harry was right that she had always disliked him particularly—she despised gangsters, big-time or small), but all she did was leave the room briefly and return with a small, carved wooden box. She slid the top off, placed the golden disk inside, and slid the top back on. As soon as the box was shut, Harry disappeared.

“How—” I began, but she waved the question away curtly.

“What you have to figure out, Josephine, is what you want to do. He’s tied to this chip, you know that. If all you want is to be rid of him, you could pitch it in the East River. So the question is, why haven’t you?”

I opened my mouth to answer, but nothing came out, and all of a sudden I didn’t know the answer.

“Well,” Tante Deborah continued. “You have a few options here. If you still love him so much you want to keep him around, all you have to do is hang on to the chip.”

“I do not love him,” I said, almost as annoyed as Tante Deborah usually sounded. “I haven’t pitched him in the river for Myra’s sake. Same reason I helped him to begin with.”

“Ah, Myra.” Tante Deborah looked momentarily sad. “Does he know?”

“He knows she’s dead, yes.”

“Ah.” Tante Deborah went on. “If you think Myra would want you to send him on to whatever awaits him—and no, I don’t know—then what you have to do is smash the chip.”

“Smash it how?” I asked.

“Smash it how? How do you think? A hammer should get it done.”

“But it’s—”

“It’s Bakelite, is what it is. Bakelite with a shine on it.”

“Do I need to bless the hammer? Carve Hebrew into it?”

“No,” she said. “But you can if you like. It won’t hurt anything.”

“What’s the third option?” I asked, out of curiosity.

“You can leave the chip here with me. I’ll keep it in my box, and he’ll stay snuffed out.”

“Destroyed?” I gasped. “That’s cruel.”

“Contained,” she said. “And if you ever wanted him back for anything, you’d know where to find him.”

“Back from where? Where is he right now?”

“In the box.”

“Like a genie in a bottle?”

“More or less.”

“I don’t think Myra would want that,” I said, after thinking for a moment.

Tante Deborah shrugged. “Well,” she said. “It’s up to you. Just make sure you know what it is you want to do. And why.”

I nodded. “Thank you,” I said. And then, “May I have the chip back now?”

When Tante Deborah slid the lid of the box back, Harry appeared again. He looked shaken and didn’t say anything to me as I hugged Tante Deborah good-bye. We were on the street and I was trying to find a taxi before he spoke again. There weren’t many cabs that far downtown, and I had just decided to give up and take a bus when he asked, “What was that box?”

“How should I know?” I answered.

He was quiet again until we got to the bus stop, and then, “So, what did the old witch say to you, anyhow?”

“Nothing you needed to hear,” I said.

I thought a lot about that box that afternoon while the kids were out, mostly because I wanted Harry to shut up and stop chattering at me while I figured out what I wanted to do.

I didn’t still love him, did I? That wasn’t the reason I hadn’t thrown the chip into the East River, was it? I didn’t think it was. I didn’t love him. I had loved him, but that was a long time ago, before he abandoned us. It was Myra I loved, Myra I would always love, no matter how mean she had been. Myra and now Elsie and Danny, too. Myra would never forgive me if I threw her father’s soul in the river. She was the one who loved him, even though he didn’t deserve it and never had. She’d been so much like him in some ways, charming and vivacious.

I thought and thought. And in the end, I knew what to do. I left the golden chip in the jewelry box and went to the hardware store, and I came home with my purchase tucked in my pocketbook.

“Tomorrow,” I told Harry. “Tomorrow after the kids go out to play, you and I are going on an outing. I don’t want you here when my Phil comes back at the end of the week.”

“You know how to free me?” asked Harry, all excited, all happy, like this was some kind of game and he’d just won.

“Sure,” I said. “All I have to do, Tante Deborah says, is smash the chip.”

“Then what are we waiting for?” he asked petulantly.

“There’s something I want you to see,” I told him.

Then I heard Elsie’s key in the lock and that cut off whatever whining he might have been about to start.

The next morning, I put some spending money in Elsie’s pocket and took the kids to visit Sadie. We had a cup of coffee together, and I told them I had some chores I had to do and that Sadie should put them in a taxi back to me in the afternoon. I came home, put on my most sober spring coat, and slipped the golden disk into its pocket. I picked up my bag and a dark gray umbrella that matched the coat. “Let’s go,” I told Harry.

“Right with you, Josie-Jo. Where we going?”

“You’ll see.”

I pressed the white button in the elevator again, so the doorman had a taxi waiting for me by the time we got to the door. It had started to rain, and he held his umbrella over me as I walked from the door to the yellow cab. Not a drop got on me. Of course, the rain fell right through Harry.

“A long trip today,” I told the cabbie. “I’m going to Mapleton. Washington Cemetery.” I gave him the address.

“A cemetery, Josie?” Harry smirked at me, a smile I’d once found very attractive. “Who died?”

“You did,” I reminded him. “It’s the right place for you. Now shush, I don’t want the cabbie to think I’m nuts.”

We rode in silence the rest of the way.

When we got to Washington Cemetery, I paid the cabbie and told him that I wouldn’t be long, and that if he waited for me, there’d be extra for him on the way back.

He nodded. “I gotta go back to the city to get another fare anyway, lady. Might as well take you with me, and make something off the trip.”

Harry and I walked into the cemetery. I led the way until I found what I was looking for.

“Here,” I said. “This is Myra’s grave.” I took a rock from my pocketbook, a pretty one I’d found in Central Park with the kids a while ago, and put it on the headstone. The headstone still looked new. Well, it had only gone up a few months before. The rain pattered on my umbrella as Harry examined the stone.

“Poor kid,” he said, and he sounded sad. “You never told me what happened, she got sick?”

“She killed herself, Harry.”

I listened to the rain on my umbrella for a few seconds before going on.

“She never got over you leaving. She was never the same afterwards. She was happy for a while after she and Siggy got married, but when he left her, too . . .”

I trailed off, and Harry didn’t fill in the silence. I didn’t want to say the next part, but I forced myself to go on.

“She wasn’t a good mother, especially after Siggy left. I knew, but I didn’t want to know, and I let it go on. She screamed at them, she wasn’t there when they needed her. She drank and she took pills. She blamed Elsie for . . . I don’t know, just for being, I guess. She was a bad mother, Harry. Elsie was running the house by the end.”

He opened his mouth, but didn’t say anything, and after a moment he shut it again.

“One weekend, she’d asked me and Phil to take the kids, and when we brought them back on Sunday, she was dead. Elsie and Danny found her, Harry. They found their mother’s body. Alcohol and sleeping pills.”

“It couldn’t have been an accident?” he asked softly.

“No. She left a note. And it wasn’t the first time she’d tried.”

“What did the note say?”

“It was addressed to me,” I told him. “Not you. And it was mean, like poison. Mean to me, mean about Elsie. I burned it. For over a year now, I’ve wondered if what she said was true, if I was the reason she was so . . . unhappy.” I paused for a minute and stared at a tree a ways away. That’s a trick I know so you don’t cry. “Phil and I took the kids to live with us. Best for everyone that way. So that’s what happened to your daughter, Harry.”

“It’s not your fault,” he said, softly again.

I exhaled and then drew another, deeper breath. “No,” I agreed. “It’s yours.”

Harry looked like the slap I’d aimed at him back in Vegas had finally landed. “What?”

“It’s your fault. After you left, she couldn’t be happy again, she didn’t know how. You know, every city she ever travelled, she checked the phone book for your name? I don’t know what she was gonna do if she found it, show up on your doorstep? She told her friends you were a dancer, on tour with a musical, when she was a kid. I think sometimes she believed it. She would’ve given anything for dance classes when she was little, but we couldn’t afford it until it was too late.

“She never got over your leaving, Harry. She never stopped waiting for you, hoping you’d come back.”

I took another deep breath. “So this is where I’m leaving you,” I said. “So if she comes back to this spot, if she comes back to her body, the way you hung around the Starlight in Vegas? You’ll be here, waiting for her. And then maybe she’ll finally be happy again.”

I folded my umbrella and dropped to my knees. I took the trowel I’d bought at the hardware store out of my pocketbook and began digging a hole, small but deep, in the sod of Myra’s grave.

“What?” Harry burst out. “What? What are you doing? Aren’t you going to smash the chip? Smash it!”

Instead, I took the chip out of my pocket and dropped it into the hole I’d made. I began filling it back in.

“Don’t do this, Josie. Smash it. Let me go free. Don’t leave me here! Don’t do it! There’s no one here, it’s as gray as the casino was! There’s no one here to talk to, nothing to do! I’ll go out of my mind!”

I stood up and brushed the dirt from my skirt. “Don’t be silly, Harry,” I said. “I come to visit every few months. Once or twice a year I bring the children. You’ll get to see them grow up. Over time. I’ll even leave a note for Elsie in my will, telling her about you, about the chip. She can dig it up and smash it then. If she wants to.”

“Josie! Don’t do this! It’s not too late, you can still dig it up again! Don’t go—don’t leave me here alone!”

“It’s been good to catch up with you, Harry. I did always wonder what had happened to you. I’ll see you in a few months.”

I put my umbrella back up and turned to walk back to the waiting taxi.

“Don’t you walk away from me!” Harry screamed. I turned back to look at him as his face contorted into a snarl. “You goddamned gold-digging bitch. You heartless cunt! You’re as bad as that old dyke you call tante!”

I drew into my coat and shivered. For a minute he had looked and sounded just like Myra during one of her bad spells. But my voice was steady when I replied. “You didn’t have two pennies to rub together when I married you, Harry. I married you for love. And I wasn’t the one who left when things looked bad.

“Good-bye, Harry.”

I could still hear him screaming furiously after me when I got back to the cab, and I was too keyed up to sit still in the cab. I had to smoke a cigarette and pace for a few minutes to calm my nerves before we started back to Manhattan, but the cabbie didn’t mind. I told him to go ahead and run the meter while I paced.

“He’s not happy, huh?” the cabbie asked.

“Huh?” I said, and stopped walking in circles. I figured I must’ve misheard him.

“The guy you were with. The ghost.”

“You . . . knew he was with me?” I asked.

“I need glasses to read now,” he said. “But I still see all kindsa things.” He lit a cigarette too, and there was a companionable silence.

“No,” I finally said. “He’s not. But I wasn’t happy when he left me, either.”

The cabbie nodded. “You can’t let the dead run your life,” he said. “Eventually, you gotta leave them behind.”

When I got home, I felt exhausted. I took a bath and then put on a housedress, much lighter and brighter than the dress I’d worn to Myra’s grave. I had a light lunch and took a nap.

I woke up a little before the kids got home and I made myself a cup of tea. I put out two plates of cookies and two glasses of milk and a deck of cards. I also brought out a dish of jelly beans. Then I sat and sipped my tea and waited for Elsie and Danny.

When the door opened, I felt ready for them. I hugged them both and brought them over to the table.

“I love these cookies!” said Danny, munching away.

“Good, my darling,” I said. “And when you finish eating the cookies, we’ll use the jelly beans to play a game. Nana’s going to teach you both how to play blackjack.”

“Blackjack” copyright © 2024 by Veronica Schanoes
Art copyright © 2024 by Mark Smith

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Unknown forces attempt to stop Judge Dee and Jonathan from transporting a mysterious and possibly dangerous prisoner, who holds a secret about the Judge, to an executioner in France…

1.

The horses were skeletal and plumes of steam came in great huffs from their noses as they galloped through the night. Judge Dee and Jonathan sat in the coach on either side of the prisoner. The prisoner never spoke and neither did the judge. The driver whipped the horses, faster, faster. Jonathan stared out of the porthole at the moon. He wondered if the moon really was made of cheese.

It was a nice thought. The only nice thought he’d had in a while.

Out there, in the dark, were forests and, and…things. Jonathan could feel hidden eyes watching them out of the trees. He could hear leathery wings as shapes as dark as the forests flitted beyond sight, tracking their every move. It was only a matter of time before they would be attacked. Again.

They had been travelling through Germany, under the Alps, having recently concluded the Werdenfels case in what Judge Dee had termed a satisfactory manner. It was cold, but the land was abundant and the food rich and heavy, which Jonathan appreciated, and there were always sausages. For a time all was well, but that had changed when they came to the city of Basel.

‘Romans,’ Judge Dee had said, sniffing the air.

‘Master?’

‘This is an old place,’ the judge said. ‘There were Romans here before.’

All Jonathan could smell were sausages. His mouth watered. It was night, because it was always night when you travelled in the company of a vampire. Jonathan rarely got to see daylight. But Basel was awake and the city’s narrow alleyways were crowded with vendors and revellers. Jonathan could hear the bells from the cathedral chime the midnight hour, could hear gulls cry over the Rhine. For a moment a sort of peace took hold of him. Basel seemed a nice place to visit.

And for a few moments it was so. He followed the judge, munching happily on sausage, as they wandered the streets seemingly at random, stopping at a milliner here, a barber-surgeon there, an apothecary, then at the rat catcher’s. Gradually the lights grew dim, the fires that burned had an eldritch glow to them, the streets were narrower and gloomier and Jonathan realised the judge had been searching for something all along.

They came into a stone carver’s shop. You could tell by all the unfinished headstones. A man stood behind the counter, his hands pale with marble dust.

No, Jonathan realised when the man reached for and lit a rancid, spattering candle. His red eyes glowed then, and his fangs showed in what passed for a smile. The man’s ghostly white skin was not the result of his trade but of what he was: a vampire.

‘Master Dee,’ he said. His hands, Jonathan noted, vanished out of sight under the counter.

‘Johannes,’ the judge said mildly.

‘It’s been awhile,’ the man – Johannes – said.

‘Transylvania, I believe it was,’ Judge Dee said. ‘Two hundred years ago. No, I wouldn’t reach for that if I were you. Put your hands on the counter, Johannes. And do it slowly.’

The man obeyed, his hands moving away from the silver-tipped knife he had been reaching for. He stared at Judge Dee.

‘How did you find me?’ he said.

‘It wasn’t hard,’ the judge said.

‘So, what?’ Johannes said. ‘You’ve come to finish the job? Then be done with it!’

The judge bared his teeth. Jonathan gulped the last of his sausage. He wasn’t at all sure what was going on. But then, he never was.

‘It isn’t you I’m interested in, Johannes,’ the judge said. ‘If it were, I would have indeed concluded our business back in the forest above Brasov. No. Some men are easy to find. Others prove more challenging.’

Johannes, if it were possible, turned even paler.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, do not ask that of me.’

‘I do not ask,’ the judge said.

‘He would kill me,’ Johannes said.

‘So would I,’ the judge pointed out.

‘Yes,’ Johannes said. ‘But you would do it clean.’

The two vampires stared at each other. Jonathan stared at the unfinished headstones. They crowded the small, dank space. The flame of the solitary candle spattered.

Somewhere beyond the walls, the cathedral bells struck one.

The two vampires moved in a flash. They were a blur – then it was over. Jonathan did not even have time to hide under a table.

‘Give me a name,’ the judge said. He knelt over Johannes. Dust rose everywhere and headstones had tumbled on top of each other in a heap.

‘There…is no name,’ Johannes said, and then he laughed, or tried to. Then he burst into a cloud of dust that added to the general miasma in the room.

Jonathan coughed. Judge Dee straightened and for a moment, Jonathan realised with some surprise, almost seemed, well…lost.

‘Master?’ he said in alarm.

‘Jonathan,’ the judge said. The light came back into his eyes. He stared around him at the shop.

‘What are you looking for, master?’

‘I am looking for a man,’ the judge said.

‘A man, master?’

‘A vampire, Jonathan.’

‘Ah.’ Jonathan fingered a half-completed headstone. ‘Well, master,’ he said. ‘There is one obvious place to look.’

The judge nodded. Jonathan went around the counter. He rummaged in the drawers. He found a roll of parchment.

Names and places. A list of cemeteries and plots.

‘Most of these go to one place,’ he said. He stabbed at the list with his finger. ‘We could look there, master.’

‘So we shall, Jonathan,’ Judge Dee said. ‘Forgive me. I am not myself.’

‘Then who are you, master?’ Jonathan said, because he took expressions like that literally.

The judge almost smiled.

‘Would you believe I was young once?’ he said.

And on that cryptic note he left the stone mason’s store; and Jonathan, as he always did, followed.

2.

The cemetery lay far outside the city and only the new moon lit their way through the dark trees. Jonathan shivered. It was cold. Despondent Hill rose ahead of them, and Jonathan realised the futility of their mission. There were thousands of white headstones gleaming in the moonlight.

It was like hiding a needle in a haberdashery. Which admittedly was not the sort of place Jonathan often visited. He spent far more time in cemeteries.

Mist lay over the gravestones. Jonathan could hear no sound. Nothing lived and nothing moved. He pictured the dead rising from their graves, the way the Church said they would one day. He pictured them shambling around, hungry for flesh. Brains, maybe. Would the dead have a craving for brains? He instinctively looked for cheese in his pocket but he had no cheese.

‘Focus, Jonathan,’ the judge said.

Jonathan jumped. The voice had startled him. It was too silent in the graveyard. He regretted ever suggesting coming here. But it wasn’t like he had a choice. He would follow the judge. He began to scan the names on the headstones.

Stenzl. Legrand. Amerbach. Wildhaber. Finkel and Frigg.

He didn’t know what he was looking for. The place was huge. The dead lay dead.

Well, all apart from the one who wasn’t.

‘We are looking for a man with no name,’ he said, frustrated.

‘Everyone has a name,’ Judge Dee said.

‘This was his most recent delivery,’ Jonathan said. He had circled the last name on the list.

‘Notice anything strange about it?’ the judge said.

‘Yes,’ Jonathan said. ‘It’s English.’

‘Exactly,’ the judge said.

‘Master,’ Jonathan said. ‘What if there are grave robbers here? They could be dangerous.’

‘Our quarry probably feeds on them,’ the judge said, then considered. ‘That, or on funeral parties.’

‘This is hardly reassuring,’ Jonathan said. But it did make him feel slightly better.

They moved slowly through the graves, searching for a name.

Stanton.

It was a stupid name. The sort of name a vampire hiding in a German cemetery might indeed pick for himself in the thought he was being clever. Vampires always thought they were being clever.

The moon shone down. It took them hours. Jonathan’s feet hurt and his stomach rumbled miserably.

Then he stopped.

‘Master!’ he called.

The judge was suddenly just there.

He stared at the grave.

‘Come out,’ he said. ‘You know who I am.’

No one replied. There was no sound at all. The judge sighed. He gestured at the grave. He said one word – the one word Jonathan didn’t want to hear.

‘Dig.’

Jonathan took the shovel he’d been carrying. He stared miserably at the plot of earth. Nothing good ever came from digging for vampires.

Something niggled at him. He stared at the empty plot next to Stanton’s. Something had been buried there, but there was no headstone. He said, ‘You don’t think…?’

The judge nodded, the hint of a smile playing on his austere face.

‘A man with no name, remember?’ he said.

Jonathan sighed, but inwardly.

Vampires.

They always thought they were being so bloody smart.

He dug. The ground was hard. The only sound in the night was Jonathan’s heavy breathing and the impact of the spade with the soil. His back hurt. His muscles ached. And he was hungry.

A while back Jonathan had come up with a radical new idea. What if he took a slice of bread, put something on it – a generous helping of ham and cheese, for example, ideally with a pickle – and then put a second slice of bread over the top? The result was a sort of moveable feast. He debated what to call this invention. A Jonathan didn’t seem quite right.

The spade made a sort of wet splat sound as it hit something solid. Jonathan froze, his heart speeding up. He wiped sweat from his brow.

‘Well?’ he whispered.

‘Stand back, Jonathan,’ the judge said, and there was something in his eyes that made Jonathan afraid. That would have made anyone afraid.

Jonathan was beginning to suspect that whatever this case was, it wasn’t business ordered by the Council. They being the ultimate arbitrators of vampire law, et cetera et cetera.

No. This felt almost…personal.

Which was clearly impossible, Jonathan thought.

 Judge Dee didn’t do personal.

Jonathan stood back, which was just as well, because just then two shadows dropped from the skies and turned into women. Jonathan tried not to stare but the women weren’t there to chat. They attacked Judge Dee in total silence, fangs bared and claws extended. Jonathan shrieked when one passed too close and he stumbled on a grave and fell and the attacking vampire missed his throat as her claws passed harmlessly. Jonathan didn’t see what happened next because he had curled up into a ball and hugged his knees, trying to make himself as small as possible.

‘You can get up now, Jonathan.’

He opened his eyes. The same cemetery, the same dug-up grave, everything the same: other than the two new corpses.

They lay at the judge’s feet, as silent as when they appeared. Not too old, or they would have turned skeletal or into dust. Jonathan could not figure out where they’d come from.

Or why.

‘I won’t have to dig fresh graves for them, will I?’ he said. ‘Only it’s my knees, they’re—’

The judge inched his head. Jonathan subsided.

‘Open the coffin,’ the judge said.

Jonathan stared at the open grave.

‘I really would rather not,’ he said.

‘Open,’ the judge said, ‘the coffin, Jonathan.’

‘Yes, master…’

Miserably, he lifted the spade and smashed it into the coffin.

Wood splintered and broke. Still nothing moved. Jonathan hit the coffin again.

A screech filled the night.

Jonathan fell back in fright as a small, ungainly figure rose out of the coffin, wild of hair and wild of eye. It shrieked again and turned into a bat, trying desperately to flee. But the judge’s hand snapped out and caught a wing with ruthless efficiency, and he tossed the creature on the ground, hard enough to stun it.

The bat shivered, and the man reappeared. He lay on the ground looking winded.

‘Hello, Petros,’ Judge Dee said coldly.

3.

They took the prisoner back into town and kept him in a room that had no windows, in an inn where they didn’t ask any questions as long as the innkeeper got paid. The prisoner didn’t speak and Jonathan still had no idea what he had done to have the judge go after him in this way. It was most unorthodox.

He was a vampire, though, so it stood to reason he was guilty of something, or a great many somethings, and so Jonathan didn’t feel too bad about it.

He went down to the common room. This was an unsavoury hostelry in an unsavoury part of town and Jonathan craved something that was savoury. Like a meat pie. He sat by the fire and munched on it happily. A girl came and sat beside him. She said, ‘Who are you with?’

He realised with some surprise that she was English.

‘Judge Dee,’ Jonathan said. ‘You?’

‘I serve the Lady Samantha,’ the girl said. She gestured to the other side of the room, where a tall, imposing figure stood sipping a glass of something red and viscous. This was the sort of inn that attracted vampires: it had no windows in the rooms, and no one to complain of the smell or grumble about the inevitable presence of corpses.

‘What’s she like?’ Jonathan said.

The girl shrugged. ‘She’s a soulless undead monster,’ she said. ‘Obviously. But as far as those go she’s not so bad. Can I have some of your pie?’

‘Can’t you get your own pie?’ Jonathan said.

‘I could, but…’ She stared at him until he gave up.

The girl munched happily on the pie for a while. ‘Judge Dee?’ she said. ‘What’s he like?’

‘He is a being of pure intellect,’ Jonathan said, ‘a brilliant mind that has no equal.’

The girl wiped crumbs from her mouth.

‘Come on,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘A being of pure intellect,’ the girl said, mimicking him. ‘No one’s like that. Especially not a vampire. What’s he into, this judge of yours? Boys? Girls?’

‘You’re very…earthy, aren’t you?’ Jonathan said. A little judgmentally, it was true, but he was still sore about giving her half of his pie.

‘And you’re a dunce,’ the girl said pleasantly. She stood up.

‘I must to my mistress,’ she said.

‘And I to my master,’ Jonathan said, trying to keep up.

‘Right,’ the girl said. ‘I hope he doesn’t make you think too hard.’ But she smiled as she said it.

‘I’m Fiona, by the way,’ she said.

‘I’m Jonathan.’

‘See you,’ Fiona said, and then she departed. Jonathan stared after her somewhat forlornly. There, he thought, goes a girl who likes a pie.

Then he picked himself up and went in search of the judge.

Jonathan found Judge Dee by the stables, speaking softly to a darkly clad figure standing beside a dark coach. The coachman had a black hat pulled low over his eyes and wore riding boots and held a whip in one hand. He stared as Jonathan approached but said nothing.

‘We shall depart immediately for Epinal,’ the judge said, as though matters had just been concluded.

‘Epinal, master?’ Jonathan said.

‘It is a town some distance from here,’ the judge said. ‘In France.’

‘What’s there, master?’ Jonathan said.

The coachman started. When he spoke his voice was raspy and low.

‘The Executioner,’ he said. ‘The Executioner of Epinal.’

He stared at Jonathan as though disapproving of both his ignorance and his very existence. The coachman was clearly French, for his tone carried that sort of superiority mixed with exasperated dislike by which the French have always greeted the inquiries of English visitors to the continent. He bared fangs at Jonathan, who merely nodded politely.

France, he thought miserably. Why did they have to go to France.

But he accompanied the judge to the locked room. They marched the prisoner to the coach, sat inside, and the coachman whipped the horses. The carriage with its cargo lurched out of the courtyard and into the night.

In moments they had left Basel, the warmth and lights of the city swallowed behind them in the dark, and with it vanished the girl who liked pies. Jonathan brooded. Outside, the night grew, and the forest pressed against the road as though waiting to devour it. The moon glared down malevolently and illuminated the hostile Alps that rose as though to squash the coach like an irritant fly.

Jonathan must have dozed off, because when he woke they were under attack.

Again.

4.

Someone really didn’t want them to hold this Petros. Jonathan cowered under the seat as the judge vanished outside. Jonathan heard the coachman cursing and the flick of arrows being loosed. Something went thump and someone screamed, and something fell from the air and landed heavily. In all this time the prisoner, Petros, said nothing and just sat there staring into the distance like none of this was any of his business.

‘What did you do, man!’ Jonathan said, his voice muffled under the seat.

Petros stirred and blinked at him in some evident surprise.

‘Me?’ he said. ‘I was a librarian.’

Jonathan reflected on the last time he had encountered librarians (in what he had since come to refer to as the Case of the Missing Manuscript, if only to himself). The bodies had piled up fast then. He had an Englishman’s innate distrust of libraries, and an even deeper one of vampires, which his travels with Judge Dee had done nothing to cure.

So he cowered uncomfortably under the seat until the sounds outside ceased.

Someone reached for the door of the carriage.

Jonathan squealed.

‘This is most taxing,’ Judge Dee said.

He came back into the coach and banged twice on the roof. The coachman cracked his whip and the horses whinnied and took off at a gallop. The prisoner didn’t say another word. He seemed resigned to his fate.

But Jonathan was beginning to wonder if they’d ever get the prisoner to Epinal and its executioner.

So far there had been two attacks, but they weren’t so…serious.

Judge Dee was an ancient vampire and for anyone to really make an attempt on him they’d have to be formidable.

These two have been more like…warnings, Jonathan decided.

Warnings he would have been happy to heed, were it up to him. But the coach was still heading to Epinal.

It was a mystery.

He did not particularly care for mysteries.

‘So what did you do?’ he said again. ‘Slaughtered a whole village somewhere? Turned too many people into vampires of your own to serve you? Murdered the Queen of the Vampires?’

The prisoner, for the first time, winced.

‘There is no Queen of the Vampires,’ he said quietly.

Jonathan studied him with some attention now.

‘But you murdered someone,’ he said.

‘I murdered no one!’ Petros said.

‘Yet you were there,’ the judge said; and the words, delivered like a death sentence, sent a shiver of fear down Jonathan’s spine.

Petros hung his head and said nothing.

Snow fell heavily as they rode. They took shelter for the day in a wooden cabin outside Mulhouse. The cabin was dark and woeful. When they came to it the sky was near daybreak and the door was locked. The coachman banged on the door loudly.

‘What!’ came an irritated reply from inside.

‘Open up!’

‘Get lost!’ came the reply.

‘Open up, in the name of the Council,’ Judge Dee said.

There was silence inside. Then someone came to the door and opened it. He peered out at them suspiciously. He wore a long black coat and a curious device over his eyes, two glass circles in frames riveted together.

‘You are of the night?’ he said. ‘Then come in, but hurry. The sun will soon be out and I do not care for the sun.’

‘None of us do,’ the coachman said sourly. He pushed past the man and went inside, where a small fire burned.

‘I am Dr Rivera,’ the man said. ‘A medicus of some fame, if I say so myself. You have heard of me?’

Jonathan shook his head and mumbled, ‘No, sorry.’

‘Curious,’ Dr Rivera said. ‘Do you see these glasses of the eye that I am wearing? I made them myself.’ He beamed with pride.

‘An Italian invention?’ Jonathan said.

‘Nonsense! It is all in Ptolemy, if you care to look. Have you read Alhazen’s Book of Optics?’

‘I have not,’ Jonathan said.

‘A pity,’ Dr Rivera said, and then dismissed him. ‘And you are?’ he said, turning to the judge.

The judge shut the door and locked it in place.

‘I am Judge Dee,’ he said.

‘Dee, you say?’ Dr Rivera peered at him close with his eyeglasses. ‘I’ve heard tales of your deeds.’

The judge didn’t reply. The prisoner went to the fire and stood beside the coachman, rubbing his hands.

Dr Rivera turned to him next.

‘And you are?’ he said.

‘He’s nobody,’ the judge said.

‘I am Petros,’ the prisoner said.

‘You are a strange bunch,’ Dr Rivera said. ‘But since we are to be locked here for some time, I am glad you at least brought refreshments.’ And he turned his magnified red eyes on Jonathan and beamed at him with a mouth full of sharp teeth.

‘I am not the refreshments!’ Jonathan said. He moved as far from the doctor as was possible and reached in his bag for bread. He munched on it angrily. ‘I am the judge’s assistant.’

‘What would Judge Dee need with a human assistant?’ Dr Rivera said, confused. ‘He is a being of pure intellect, a brilliant mind that has no equal. Or so they say, anyway.’

‘No one’s a being of pure intellect,’ Jonathan mumbled, suddenly and with a certain ache remembering the girl, Fiona, who had said it. ‘Especially not a vampire…’

‘Did you say something, boy?’ Rivera said.

Jonathan yawned. He felt very tired and the fire looked warm and inviting. Dr Rivera looked at him, then at his silent companions, and shrugged.

‘A strange bunch indeed,’ he said.

5.

The vampires slept. Judge Dee had vanished. Jonathan never knew where he went when day came. The judge had an uncanny ability to disappear. Each vampire went to a separate corner of the cabin, each mistrusting the other as vampires always did. The prisoner was not in chains, but then he must have realised the futility of trying to escape the judge.

Jonathan found a corner as far from the vampires as possible – he didn’t trust them any more than they trusted each other – and did his best to fall asleep. It was cold, and he wrapped himself tight in his blanket, and listened to the wind howling outside and the snow and ice beating against the walls of the cabin. It was day outside now; but it may as well have been night.

Jonathan slept. He dreamed of pastry.

The banging on the door woke him up.

The banging was loud and the voices outside, indistinct, sounded desperate.

‘Open the door! Let us in!’

The judge was suddenly there. He looked to Jonathan and nodded.

‘Why me?’ Jonathan said.

The prisoner, Petros, sat quietly by the fire. The doctor, Rivera, was feeding on a live rabbit. He looked up with blood-stained lips.

‘What?’ he said.

The coachman was still asleep in a makeshift coffin.

‘Open the door!’

‘Please, Jonathan,’ the judge said. Jonathan got up reluctantly. He really didn’t want to open the door.

He went and opened the door.

A warm, soft, and only somewhat smelly body fell into his arms, and he found himself looking into the very live eyes of Fiona, the girl he’d met in Basel.

‘My hero,’ she said.

‘I, err…’

She laughed and pushed him away and went straight to the fire.

Behind her came her mistress.

Jonathan took a step back, and then another.

Lady Samantha, tall and stern, stood in the snow and looked down on him with disdain.

‘Well?’ she demanded. ‘Aren’t you going to invite me in?’

‘I, err…’ Jonathan said again.

‘Are you a simpleton?’

‘I mean, be welcome in this, um, cabin! Enter of your own free will! And so on and so forth!’ Jonathan said desperately.

‘And shut the damned door!’ Rivera shouted. ‘It’s freezing!’

Lady Samantha sniffed.

‘Very well, then,’ she said. She stepped inside and Jonathan hurried to shut and lock the door. Snow had drifted in and Jonathan’s hands were frozen. He went to the fire to stand by Fiona.

‘She likes you,’ Fiona said, rubbing her hands for warmth.

‘You think?’ Jonathan said.

‘No.’

Jonathan turned, his back to the fire. He took in the scene: the dark cabin, the vampires like shadows standing frozen. Judge Dee, Dr Rivera, the prisoner, the coachman, and Lady Samantha.

He had a very bad feeling about all this.

Lock up a bunch of vampires together and it was only a matter of time before someone became a corpse.

Judge Dee came and stood beside him. They withdrew into a corner and spoke softly.

‘Do you trust them?’ Judge Dee said.

Jonathan shook his head fervently.

‘They could be after Petros,’ the judge said. ‘We can trust no one. Not even the coachman.’

‘But why?’ Jonathan said. ‘Who is this Petros and why does he matter?’

‘He matters to me, Jonathan,’ the judge said. ‘And I want him alive. Long enough to reach the executioner in Epinal.’

He turned to the assembled vampires.

‘Listen to me!’ he said.

The others turned, scowling.

‘It is snowing hard and we are isolated here together for the moment. When the snow eases we will each go our separate ways. Until then, I want no funny stuff. This prisoner is mine, and mine alone.’

‘Who is the prisoner?’ Lady Samantha said, looking confused.

‘I am,’ Petros said, raising a hand meekly.

‘Why?’ Lady Samantha said. ‘What did you do?’

‘Nothing,’ Petros said.

‘Then that’s not fair,’ Lady Samantha said. ‘You should let this man go, Dee!’

‘Stay out of this,’ the judge said, his voice dangerous. ‘You, too, Dr Rivera.’

‘I mind my own business!’ Rivera said. ‘Do any of you play chess? To pass the time, you understand. Can I offer anyone a fresh rabbit?’

‘I’ll take one,’ Lady Samantha said. ‘I’m famished.’

Rivera tossed her a rabbit and she sank her teeth into its neck and sucked greedily.

‘Delicious,’ she said.

‘No murders!’ Judge Dee said.

‘We heard you,’ Lady Samantha said.

‘No poisons, no knives in the night, no stakes through the heart—’

‘We heard you!’ Dr Rivera said.

‘Or you will feel the true might of my power,’ Judge Dee said.

‘There is only one of you, though,’ Lady Samantha said. She flashed him a hungry smile, her lips stained with blood.

‘Excuse me?’ Judge Dee said. Jonathan took a step back into the shadows.

‘I said, there is only one of you, Judge!’ Lady Samantha said. She dropped the rabbit. It flopped wetly on the floor. The lady bared her fangs. She raised her hands and her fingers turned to long, sharp claws.

‘And there are more of us…’

Jonathan saw with horror how Dr Rivera shed his polite countenance and joined the lady. He hissed, his face elongating into a long, ugly wolf’s snout.

‘No games,’ Dr Rivera said. ‘No polite little mysteries to titillate your…intellect, Judge Dee. Murder is something to be committed for a reason, not just to provide a corpse.’

The coachman, too, moved to join them. The three vampires moved on Petros with singular intent.

‘Grab him!’ Judge Dee said.

‘What?’

‘Grab him! Now!’

The judge moved like lightning. Somehow the door was broken and the snow burst in and the fire went out. It all happened at once. Jonathan grabbed Petros. There were screams in the dark. Jonathan and Petros tumbled out of the cabin into the snow. The wind ripped at Jonathan’s clothes with icy fingers.

‘Fiona!’ he cried.

‘Into the coach!’ Judge Dee said. ‘Hurry!’

Jonathan and Petros clambered into the coach.

Then he thought: The horses! Where were the horses!

The judge was somewhere out of sight. Jonathan heard the crack of a whip and a scream that might have been Dr Rivera. Then the howl of a wolf that made him shiver. He stuck his head out of the porthole window. No horses, he saw: but a giant wolf was somehow hitched to the carriage and it turned its head and regarded Jonathan with wise, red eyes.

It was the judge.

The wolf howled wordlessly into the night and then the carriage thundered away and into the dark woods.

Jonathan drew his head back into the carriage.

‘That was a close one!’ he said.

‘Too close,’ someone else said. Jonathan screamed as the smiling Lady Samantha flashed a silver knife in the dark of the carriage.

Then Petros said, ‘No,’ and reached out. The lady’s face froze in surprise. The knife clattered to the floor and the door opened as of its own accord as Lady Samantha flew back and vanished into the snow with a howl of outrage.

‘They’re right, you know,’ Petros said. The coach thundered on. The night was dark and filled with snow. Jonathan could not see the stars or the moon.

‘Right?’ Jonathan said. ‘About…about what?’

He felt woozy. He kicked the knife out of the carriage and slammed the door shut. A moment before he had been nice and warm and in the company of a girl, he realised with some surprise, that he liked.

Now he was cold and scared and moving through a dark world, and he had nothing to eat. Which, he realised miserably, merely meant a return to the usual state of affairs.

‘Murder is never complicated,’ Petros said. ‘There is no mystery about it. Dee has always loved the theatrical. But murder is a simple art…’ He fell silent.

‘You knew him?’ Jonathan said, surprised.

‘A long time ago,’ Petros said. ‘In truth, I hoped never to set eyes on him again. But old scores have a way of catching up with you.’

‘Who are you?’ Jonathan said. Again, it occurred to him the only explanation to the events of the past few days lay in this unassuming vampire; and perhaps Petros was right, then. The real mystery wasn’t in who was trying to murder whom, but why – and again he had the sense that this was not the judge as he knew him, that this was something…personal.

Which made no sense to Jonathan; not then.

6.

‘I was born in the place the Greeks called India, that is, beyond the great river Indus, which lies far away from here—’

‘I never heard of it,’ Jonathan said, and Petros nodded and said, ‘You have not heard of a great many things, I’d wager—’

Which did not exactly endear him to Jonathan.

The great wolf still pulled the carriage onwards through the snow. He never tired. On and on they went, taking the prisoner to the executioner.

‘Are you going to listen, or are you going to interrupt?’ Petros said.

‘I’m listening,’ Jonathan said.

‘Very well, then. Where was I?’

‘In India,’ Jonathan said.

‘Right. So. At that time a Greek commander rose, who took over much of the known world, and he even reached India. Which defeated him, to tell you the truth. His men were tired and across the river was an army ready to fight…Anyway, he turned back at that point and then he died in Babylon. Amongst his soldiers, however, were—’

‘Vampires?’ Jonathan said.

‘Well, yes,’ Petros said. ‘And so I—’

‘Became one? Against your will? Et cetera and so on?’

‘Well, yes,’ Petros said. He glared at Jonathan. ‘Do you want me to tell you the story, or not?’

‘I don’t see how any of this relates to the judge or why we’re being chased by assassins,’ Jonathan said. It was so typical of a vampire, he thought. Start the story too early and make it all about themselves.

‘I haven’t said much up to now,’ Petros pointed out.

‘True. Well, go on, then, I suppose,’ Jonathan said grudgingly.

‘So I became a vampire, yes. Lucky guess,’ Petros said.

‘As if,’ Jonathan said.

Petros pointedly ignored that.

‘In due course I made my way across Alexander’s empire,’ he said. ‘Though even then it was falling apart again. There had been a transfer of people and ideas between Asia and Europe back then. There are still some blue-eyed children born on the Indus, and other Buddhists than myself who ended up in the Greek king’s newly founded Egyptian city of Alexandria.’

‘What’s a Buddhist?’ Jonathan said.

‘We follow the teachings of the Buddha, who advocated a path to end the endless cycle of life and death by seeking enlightenment. Of course, I was stuck on the cycle, having become undead. I could not die and be reborn again nor could I fling my earthly shackles to attain nirvana. Rather a conundrum, really. Plus, I was never a very good Buddhist, to be honest with you. But I was happy in Alexandria, for a long time. It was a seat of learning with exciting scholars from all over the world, and there was a library, a great big one, and eventually I got a job there. That was where I first met Dee.’

‘You knew Judge Dee then?’ Jonathan said.

Petros smiled.

‘He was not yet a judge, then. Just…Dee. He had come from a land far beyond the Indus and my own. A traveller, drawn by curiosity to this part of the world much as I was. He was younger then, fond of the Greek form of theatre, with a restless and brilliant mind. He studied works by Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato, and, well, you know, a bunch of other stuff like that. I was just the record keeper. The clerk.’

‘You told me you were a librarian,’ Jonathan said.

‘I was! I worked in the library!’

‘As a clerk.’

‘Still counts! Do you want to hear the rest of the story, or not?’

‘Go on…’

‘So,’ Petros said. ‘I worked in the library. It was a magical place, filled with all the knowledge of the old world. I worked under the head librarian, a fellow by the name of Amenhotep. He was an Egyptian. Also a vampire. I’m just filling in the details for you, you understand. Vampires were useful. We lived a long time and could remember overdue manuscripts and what was filed where. And nobody minded if sometimes foreign scholars went missing. We tried not to feed too much or too often. You know how it is.’

‘The Unalienable Obligations,’ Jonathan said. ‘I’m still not sure when we’re going to get to the murder part.’

‘Who said there was going to be a murder?’

‘It’s implied,’ Jonathan said. The coach thundered on. Petros sighed.

‘Yes, well…’ he said. ‘Things would have gone much as they always did in our little corner of the world, were it not for the arrival one day of a young new scholar.’

His eyes misted over.

‘She was beautiful, you know,’ he said, so quietly that Jonathan had to strain to hear him. ‘I like men, myself, but there was just something about Helena – a keen, sharp intellect to equal, perhaps surpass, Dee’s own. And she was interested in everything, in those days – botany, alchemy, the theatre, medicine…I think she wanted to find a cure for her condition. She was—’

‘A vampire?’ Jonathan said.

‘Well, yes,’ Petros said. ‘But none too happy about it. She considered us parasites – not an abomination, but perhaps an aberration in nature. Something she could fix, if only she found the right tools.’

‘She sounds like Judge Dee,’ Jonathan said, and Petros gave a short, surprised laugh.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They did hit it off famously…’

A terrible suspicion rose in Jonathan then.

‘You don’t mean…’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘It can’t be!’ Jonathan said. He gaped at him in horror.

Petros said, ‘Judge Dee…fell in love.’

7.

The snow began to ease. There was no sun and maybe there never will be, Jonathan thought morosely; and the wind still howled like a maddened thing as the coach fled under the Alps, driven by the giant wolf who was Judge Dee.

Jonathan still had no real idea why they were taking Petros to the Executioner of Epinal, nor why there were other vampires trying to stop them. He was used to mysteries that were, at heart, simple. Who slipped who the deadly poison, just how the person in the locked room in the castle was killed, or who set off the mechanical trap that operated on clockwork at just the right time to kill the duke. It was usually the butler, anyway.

Those Jonathan understood. Those he had twice a day for breakfast – oh, how he craved some toast and marmalade just then! Perhaps a scrambled egg, and bacon, and a glass of milk—

Instead he was here, driven through the snow on a mystery of – there was no easy way to say it – of the heart. He could not imagine the austere Judge Dee stooping so low as to have real feelings, but then—

But then again, he thought – everyone had to be young once.

Even Judge Dee.

‘So then what happened?’ Jonathan said.

‘They fell in love and got married and lived happily ever after,’ Petros said. ‘What do you think happened, you fool?’

‘She died?’

Petros scratched his neck uncomfortably.

‘Something like that,’ he said.

‘Violently, I presume? Murdered, and so on?’

‘Those were difficult times,’ Petros said. ‘You have to understand, things always go well until they don’t. I’m not making excuses, but…It was Ptolemy VIII, if you want to blame anyone. Once he came to power the library’s decline began. He disapproved of…intellectuals. Disapproved with lethal intervention, if you get my drift. Didn’t like vampires much, either. Aristarchus of Samothrace, who was head librarian before Amenhotep, you see, well, he quit in protest and exiled himself to Cyprus. Cyprus! Godawful place. So things weren’t going well, and then that creep Julius Caesar showed up about a hundred years later and accidentally set fire to the library. Accidentally! All those precious manuscripts, lost forever.’

He stopped, looking quite overwhelmed, then recovered himself.

‘It was then,’ he said quietly, ‘that it happened.’

‘You did it? You murdered Helena?’

‘Who is to say what happened!’ Petros said. ‘There was a fire, confusion, anything could have happened. But Dee…Dee was not…pleased.’

‘I should think not!’ Jonathan said, outraged on his master’s behalf.

‘Yes, well. He was throwing all kinds of wild accusations. At me, at Amenhotep. I fled, and I’ve been hiding ever since. He is crazy, your master! He isn’t rational.’

‘Judge Dee?’ Jonathan said. ‘He is the most rational person I have ever known! The man is nothing but cold intellect!’

Petros chuckled.

‘Yes, he does like to give that impression, doesn’t he?’ he said. ‘Oh, dear. I think we’ve arrived.’

Jonathan looked out of the window. High on a hill stood a castle, glaring down on the town ahead like a malevolent bat with its wings folded. The town itself, nestled around a river folded into the landscape, looked equally uninviting, its crude streets paved with uneven stones and its houses leaning-to like drunks attempting to evade the night watchmen. Jonathan wasn’t sure, but he had the distinct impression there were faces carved into the stone walls, and they watched the approach of the coach with what he felt sure was disapproval.

They were almost in the town. Then he heard a scream.

‘Jonathan! Jonathan, save me!’

He gave a startled cry of his own. He peered into the snow, saw the girl, Fiona, hanging from a tree, her arms tied behind her back, a noose around her neck. She was still alive, balancing precariously on the back of a donkey who looked decidedly unhappy to be there.

No doubt the donkey would soon bolt for freedom.

No doubt Fiona would die.

No doubt it was—

‘A trap, of course,’ Petros said. He looked gloomy again. ‘A man with a cold intellect such as your master would never stop to save a human—’

But Jonathan wasn’t listening.

He flung the door open. He leaped outside and rolled in the snow.

‘I’m coming, Fiona!’ he shouted. ‘I’m co—’

But the cold biting wind snatched his voice away. All was quiet, all was dark. There were no lights behind the windows of the houses. Jonathan ran, fell, picked himself up. He did not look back. Fiona teetered on top of the donkey. Jonathan was so close, so close—

The donkey brayed and bolted. Fiona’s scream cut short as she dropped—

A huge, dark shape leaped into the air. It flew over Jonathan, tore the rope with an extended claw as though the rope was a mere thread, and grabbed the falling Fiona in its teeth. Jonathan slid the last of the distance and knelt by Fiona as she lay in the snow against the hide of the giant wolf that was Judge Dee.

‘Got you!’

Two figures materialised in the snow. Dr Rivera and the Lady Samantha, claws extended, fangs bared in delighted grins.

They leaped onto the wolf, ready to terminate its existence at last.

‘Why, Fiona?’ Jonathan said. He cradled her in his arms. She looked up at him and smiled.

‘My hero…’ she said.

Jonathan tried not to look. The sounds of tearing and snarling, of fury and fear. A bat shot away from the melee as though kicked by force, shrieked, and hit the tree. It transformed into Dr Rivera and slid down slowly to the ground.

‘There are only two of them,’ Jonathan said.

‘Three,’ Fiona said. She pointed.

The coachman, all in black, formed out of the mist. He strode to join the battle. Judge Dee was half-wolf, half-man. He fought wordlessly, and the vampires he fought must have been very old and very powerful, Jonathan thought, to have taken him on at all.

‘I have to help him,’ he said desperately.

‘You’ll only get yourself killed,’ Fiona said. She sat up and felt her neck. ‘That was close,’ she said.

‘Your first time?’ Jonathan said.

‘Oh, no,’ Fiona said, surprised. ‘We do the hanging thing about once a month. I’m a wanted woman, you see. There’s a price on my head and Lady Samantha likes to claim it whenever she’s low on cash. And every time I escape the noose the price on my head increases.’

‘What are you wanted for?’ Jonathan said.

‘This and that. A couple of murders, some armed robbery, arson, theft of holy relics, counterfeiting money, receiving and selling stolen goods, perjury, kidnapping, a spot of blackmail here and there. You know. Moral turpitude, mostly.’

‘I thought you were…’

‘Good?’ She smiled again. ‘You’re so sweet,’ she said. ‘I serve a vampire.’

‘But they’re not all…’

‘Bad?’ She laughed with genuine warmth and Jonathan blushed.

‘They’re vampires, Jonathan,’ Fiona said.

He couldn’t argue that point. And besides, she remembered his name! A strange heat suffused him, and he was barely paying attention to the battle between—

‘Master!’ Jonathan cried.

The judge was buried under the onslaught of his attackers. Snarls and hisses, and the coachman was next to fly through the air and land in the snow, but he rolled and got up and darted back to the melee—

‘Enough!’

The voice was ice-cold and as sharp as a fishmonger’s filleting knife.

The fighting vampires stilled. Even Dee.

A small figure, clad in black, stepped out of the mist and glided over the cobblestones until it stood in the snow. It regarded the vampires coolly. One by one, Lady Samantha, Dr Rivera, and the coachman moved aside, then bowed their heads.

The man and Judge Dee stood alone, regarding each other in silence.

‘Who is that?’ Jonathan whispered. He was surprised to discover he was holding Fiona’s hand.

‘That?’ Fiona said. ‘That’s the big man. The boss. The top cheese.’

‘Did you say cheese? I really want some cheese.’

Fiona ignored him.

‘He is the Executioner of Epinal,’ she said.

‘No kidding.’

Fiona shrugged. ‘They say he used to be a librarian or something. Here.’ She reached in a bag Jonathan saw she had hid on her person. She rummaged inside it and brought out a large chunk of hard cheese.

‘Split it with you?’ she said.

And just like that, Jonathan fell in love.

8.

‘Dee,’ the Executioner of Epinal said.

‘Amenhotep,’ Judge Dee said. ‘It has been a long time.’

‘Not long enough,’ the executioner said. ‘But since you are here…Shall we retire somewhere a little more comfortable?’

‘I have no interest in comfort,’ Judge Dee said.

‘You never did,’ the executioner said, and sighed. ‘I assume you have Petros with you?’

‘I do. And he is proof, at last, Amenhotep – proof that you murdered Helena!’

‘Always so emotional, Dee,’ Amenhotep said. ‘And what a florid imagination you have. I had hoped my…associates here would have talked you out of this fool’s errand, but I see they’ve failed.’

He glared at Lady Samantha and Dr Rivera.

‘You two were supposed to be the best,’ he said.

‘Pretty good…’ Rivera mumbled.

‘What was that?’

‘He said, we’re pretty good!’ Lady Samantha boomed.

‘Not good enough!’ Amenhotep snapped. ‘Clearly. Very well. What’s done is done. Coachman, fetch my coach.’

‘Your coach?’ Jonathan said.

Amenhotep turned an irritated gaze on Jonathan.

‘Who did you think it belonged to?’ he said. ‘Now, why don’t we settle this like civilized beings, indoors? Be welcome in my castle, enter of your own free will, and so on. There is still a law, is there not, Judge Dee? Or do you wish to settle this right here, right now? If so, just say the words.’

And he hissed, showing his fangs.

Jonathan had to remember that these were old vampires. Amenhotep might not have looked like much, but if the judge were to fight him…Jonathan wasn’t sure who would win.

He hoped the judge would accept: then they would go into a nice warm castle, or perhaps some sort of mayoral estate, with thick carpets and a warm fire, and there’d be wine…

He thought longingly of the wine.

‘I am the law!’ Judge Dee said. He stood dark and alone against the snow, and the shadows pooled all around him. His red eyes shone. ‘I pronounce you guilty of murder, Amenhotep. And I sentence you – to death!’

Amenhotep hissed again, and his claws lengthened and his eyes burned. ‘You are a boor, Dee! And this has been a thousand years coming for you!’

And he leaped through the snow just as Judge Dee did.

‘Stop!’ Jonathan cried, but helplessly. The two ancient vampires moved too fast for him to observe. Blood spattered the snow. The others watched. Fiona came and stood beside him, and Jonathan was grateful and surprised when she took his hand in hers.

‘Stop! Dee, stop!’

The cry had come from the lone figure emerging from the coach.

Petros, the witness. The judge’s proof of murder, which he had not even exhibited.

Now Petros, animated, was running slowly, too slowly towards the deadly fight.

‘Dee, she isn’t d—!’

‘Petros, no!’

The battle slowed, and Amenhotep stood wavering in the moonlight. ‘Petros, you must not—!’ he said. ‘We took an oath!’

And now Judge Dee, too, emerged into visibility. He wavered on his feet.

‘What?’ he said.

‘Helena isn’t dead!’ Petros cried.

There was blood on the judge’s face. It looked a little like tears.

‘What?’

Amenhotep sighed.

‘For a smart fellow,’ he said, ‘you can be pretty dumb.’ He reached a hand out to the judge, and the judge did not push it away.

‘Come along, old fellow,’ Amenhotep said. ‘Let’s get out of the snow.’

9.

They trudged through paved streets and onto a market square, and into a place that was, just as Jonathan thought, less a castle and more a mayoral estate, but did indeed have thick carpets and a warm fire, and ghostly servants palely loitering. The vampires sipped blood. Lady Samantha nibbled delicately on a servant. Jonathan accepted a glass of wine. He took a sip. The wine was good. He took another sip.

Judge Dee sat quite overwhelmed in a comfortable chair. Amenhotep looked ill at ease, standing with Petros. The fire was behind them, casting their shadows ahead.

‘What do you mean she is not dead?’ Judge Dee said.

‘You must understand, it wasn’t our fault,’ Amenhotep said.

‘We were just trying to help,’ Petros said.

‘Precisely.’

‘It was for the best.’

‘Exactly.’

The two vampires exchanged embarrassed glances.

‘The thing is,’ Petros said. ‘Your love for each other was truly a thing to behold.’

‘Truly,’ Amenhotep said.

‘But as the centuries passed, your interests…drifted,’ Petros said.

‘Helena wished to cure the affliction of vampirism,’ Amenhotep said. ‘She was drawn to the Greco-Buddhist teachings of the time and wished to find a way for others to get back on the wheel of life and death as a way of at last finding true enlightenment and…Well, this isn’t much my field, you understand, but it was something like that. Personally, I never minded being a vampire. You get to read a lot of books when you live forever, and draining the occasional incompetent scholar of blood is hardly a price too steep to pay.’

‘I concur,’ Petros said. ‘But that is neither here nor there. While Helena was doing that, you were devoting yourself ever more to the law, becoming ever more severe and…dare I say, humourless in the process.’

‘You used to tell such wonderfully bawdy jokes…’ Amenhotep said. Jonathan nearly choked on his wine. The very idea was preposterous.

But the vampires paid him no mind.

‘You had become an ascetic,’ Petros said. ‘While she sought true life, you dedicated yourself to undeath. You were…’ He hesitated.

‘You were growing apart,’ Amenhotep said.

Judge Dee sat in stony silence.

‘Oh, no,’ Fiona said. She came to stand beside Jonathan.

‘I made this for you,’ she said. When he looked she was holding up two slices of bread with meat and cheese in between them.

‘You made me a Jonathan?’ he said.

‘I call it a Fiona,’ she said. She smiled and took his hand, and then their faces were close together and Jonathan’s heart beat like it only did when he was being chased by monsters in the night who wanted to kill him.

Somehow Fiona was so warm and so there and…

Their lips met.

They kissed.

Since the invention of the kiss, it is said, there have been just five kisses that were rated the most passionate, the most pure.

This kiss wasn’t one of them. It wasn’t even close.

But it felt like it was to Jonathan.

‘The thing is,’ Petros said. ‘Helena was very fond of you, Dee. And she didn’t want you to suffer, the, eh…’ He tried to think. ‘Slings and arrows?’ he said uncertainly. ‘Of a broken heart?’

Judge Dee still said nothing. Jonathan couldn’t see what slings and arrows had to do with anything.

‘The library was in decline, and Helena needed to continue her researches elsewhere. She didn’t want to hurt you so she did the most sensible thing she could think of. When Caesar’s fire broke out it seemed the very opportunity she was waiting for. She faked her death and vanished.’

‘She was being considerate,’ Amenhotep said. ‘We figured you would take the news stoically, and eventually move on.’

‘We just didn’t count on you blaming us for her death,’ Petros said.

‘We only tried to do the best for the both of you,’ Amenhotep said. ‘As friends.’

‘And we swore to protect her secret,’ Petros said. ‘So…’ He shrugged.

‘We were in a bind,’ Amenhotep said.

‘Exactly.’

‘Quite.’

Judge Dee said nothing.

‘I mean a thousand years!’ Amenhotep said. ‘And still you kept going! Poor Petros hid in a cemetery and I became an executioner, which is quite clever if you think about it, for there is never a shortage of sinners and I always have fresh blood to drink. But you really did put us to a lot of inconvenience.’

He looked at Dee somewhat reproachfully.

‘I…see,’ Judge Dee said. He sat there looking a little lost. Jonathan almost felt sorry for him. Judge Dee always solved the case.

Well…almost always.

‘Do you know where she is now?’ Judge Dee said at last. He sounded broken.

‘No idea,’ Amenhotep said.

‘We didn’t really keep in touch,’ Petros said.

The other vampires, Dr Rivera and Lady Samantha and even the coachman, seemed fascinated by the story so far.

‘So she…she broke up with you?’ Lady Samantha said.

‘But in a nice way,’ Dr Rivera said.

‘It happened to me once, too,’ Lady Samantha said. She touched a kind hand to Judge Dee’s shoulder. ‘It’s never easy when they fake their own death and…’ She tried to think of a suitable expression. ‘Ghost you?’ she said uncertainly. ‘You know, like they died and now they’re a, well…’

‘A ghost,’ Dr Rivera said, nodding energetically. ‘Yes, it happened to me, too, once. I got over it, naturally. You move on, don’t you. Of course, sometimes they really are ghosts, and—’

‘Vampires don’t have ghosts,’ Lady Samantha said.

‘You don’t know that,’ Dr Rivera said.

‘Have you ever seen one?’ Lady Samantha said.

‘Well, no, but…’

‘Enough!’

It was Judge Dee.

He stood up and formally bowed to Amenhotep and Petros.

‘I will take up no more of your time,’ he said.

‘Nonsense, Dee,’ Amenhotep said. ‘Stay the night, at least. Let the storm die out. You are always welcome, you know.’

‘Thank you,’ Judge Dee said. ‘But I must press on. Jonathan, pack our bags.’

‘But master!’ Jonathan said. He couldn’t help it. It just escaped. ‘Master, the storm—’

He thought miserably of the cold outside; and of the fire inside, and the wine, and Fiona…

He thought for sure the judge would hurry him on. But he saw something change in Judge Dee’s eyes. An understanding, and a sort of sudden, unexpected gentleness.

‘You are quite right, Jonathan,’ he said. He turned to Amenhotep. ‘We will stay, of course. Thank you…old friend.’

Amenhotep nodded.

‘I am glad,’ he said.

‘And I am sorry, about, you know. Kidnapping you and so on,’ Judge Dee said to Petros.

‘These things happen,’ Petros said.

‘Yes,’ Judge Dee said; but he said it dubiously.

The next night the storm quietened and the moon was bright. The air felt fresh and clean. Fiona nestled into Jonathan’s arms.

‘Will I see you again?’ he said.

‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘Look me up if you’re ever in London. My Lady Samantha likes to summer there.’

He kissed her goodbye; and then he went to join Judge Dee. The judge had said his own goodbyes already. Now they trudged out of the town, and only the faces in the stone walls watched them pass.

‘There is no fool like an old fool,’ Judge Dee said ruefully. ‘But it is true what they say. You are only young once.’ He strode ahead, and Jonathan followed. He wondered who this Helena was, and what she was like, and if the judge would ever find her again. And he thought of Fiona, and whether he would ever see her again.

‘Yes, master,’ he said.

“Judge Dee and the Executioner of Epinal” copyright © 2024 by Lavie Tidhar
Art copyright © 2024 by Red Nose Studio

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Simon thought he left his fascination with the infamous “Sunshine Killer” and his cult, the “Sunshine Circle,” behind in childhood, but the past may be closer than he realized…

1

Simon first became aware of the two musics in no particular moment, although there did come, a little later on, a confirmation of that awareness. His understanding of the two musics crystallized then; although, as a boy of eleven, he didn’t quite recognize the problem they posed at the time, and he never fully did.

When he was ten, he moved with his family to a new home in Southern California. A veiled allusion by a neighbor, in reference to the hill peak above the house, infused it with mystery. A little research revealed to Simon that it had once been a place of worship for a group of ravers who called themselves “Sunshine Circle” and lived together just a quarter of a mile away, on the far side of the ridge. The hilltop—that was where they had all killed themselves.

There had been a string of murders in the mid-1990s, all evidently committed by one man, a member of the Circle. His name was Jeremy Rensselaer, but the media dubbed him “the Sunshine Killer.” Simon read all about him on the internet. He came from Ojai. He’d dropped out of high school and left home. When he was seventeen, under the mistaken impression that a child was trapped inside, he’d run into a burning house, and it wasn’t until about five minutes later that firemen managed to reach him and drag him back out, nearly dead from smoke inhalation. He was taken in by friends who helped him recover, but the fire left him with chronic pain. He worked mainly in groundskeeping-type jobs, and did some work farming produce. He was nineteen when he joined Sunshine Circle. He killed a man named Carl Morning, a man named Rodney Dean, a man named John Mendez, and was thought to be responsible for the disappearance of another man, Dwayne Mittie. After killing Carl Morning, he’d gone up to the top of that hill, that hill right there, and cut his own throat. Six other members of the group, including its two founders, congregated on the hill and committed suicide by heroin overdose a little while later the same day. They were found laid out in a row, facing west, holding hands, about ten feet from Rensselaer’s body.

Carrie Morning, Carl’s sister, had been a member of Sunshine Circle. She wasn’t there when the suicides happened, and neither was her friend, and fellow Circle member, Sharon Letigue. Carrie blamed herself for the events of that day, became very religious and refused to speak to anyone about it, so the details of the story were almost entirely supplied by Sharon. She, in turn, was trying to balance the accounts pushed forward by the widow of Dwayne Mittie and Carl Morning’s two bereaved kids, who blasted the Circle, calling it a cult, comparing it to the Manson family, the Branch Davidians, and Heaven’s Gate.

The Circle was founded by a couple in their thirties, Olam and Nancy Wilson, who owned the house in Glendale that served as their headquarters. They made their living by selling drugs, mainly Ecstasy and mushrooms, at raves, and would take in strays from time to time—kids who’d left home, or who had run away from some kind of juvenile control system, and had nowhere to go. They would all take drugs together, read the Gnostic Gospels and Hermes Trismegistus, and worship the sun. The Wilsons had nebulous spiritual ideas of deliverance through a kind of contagious ecstasy and what they called “breakthrough to psychic.” They wanted to start recording and selling dance music, maybe start putting out their own white-label twelve-inches for DJ sets. None of it came to anything. Olam was best known for roaming around dance floors with a backpack full of water bottles across his chest. Simon learned that taking Ecstasy makes people forget to feel thirsty, and so good Samaritans took to reminding them that they’re still earthly enough to need water. That was how Olam met Jeremy Rensselaer, who loved to dance, loved raves, and apparently often forgot he was thirsty. He also loved Sunshine Circle.

While they might have been sketchy, the Wilsons weren’t abusive people, and they didn’t take advantage of the other members, except insofar as they drew on them to help sell the drugs that paid the bills. Photos of the group showed anywhere up to eight fancifully-dressed people hanging out around the house in Day-Glo colors. Nancy was originally from Mexico and painted the interior rooms in brilliant bands of blue and ochre and green and red; she made her own pottery and painted it so brightly the pots, vases, bowls and mugs all seemed to glow with their own light. There were peace signs, weed stickers, ribbons of incense floating in the air, colored lamps—everybody at a table outside chopping vegetables for the big tofu pot. The doors and cabinets were placarded with band stickers and posters with slogans like “ALWAYS HIGHER,” and “ACID HOUSE.”

Simon could find only three photographs of Jeremy Rensselaer, and none of them conveyed any idea of what he really might have looked like. The first was a baby photo. Squinting in the sun on his mother’s lap. She had a square face, roughly bobbed hair, and deeply-recessed eyes that were barely visible. The second photo showed a group of people working in a field, harvesting tomatoes. One of these persons, circled in the image, was believed to be a teenaged Jeremy Rensselaer. He was shirtless, long-haired, bent low, a short, curved blade in his gloved hand. His face was, at best, a blurry profile, half lost in his dangling hair and his work. The last was a photo of a Sunshine Circle celebration. It was outdoors, with long shadows leaning away from the camera, so the sun was low in the sky at the time. You can see Nancy Wilson frozen in mid-clap, smiling. Carrie Morning is in the foreground, beaming, dancing. Sharon Letigue is right behind her, arms above her head, eyes closed. Off on the right, you can just see Jeremy. He’s shirtless, barefoot, wearing only his flared blue jeans; a heavy, darkly-tanned body floats in midair, hard arms outspread, long blond curls tossing everywhere, his face invisible within them.

The body of John Mendez was found at the bottom of a tall rock face off the Angeles Crest Highway. His neck was broken, but the coroner’s inquest determined that it had been snapped by sudden twisting, and that he had likely been dead before he took his tumble. He’d been briefly associated with Sunshine Circle; a twenty-one-year-old athlete at USC who bought drugs from the Wilsons and developed a fixation on Nancy. He evidently came by the house one day, and she’d been forced to lock herself in her upstairs bedroom and call for help. It’s not clear what happened, there was no one else there, but Nancy later told Sharon she’d heard John Mendez calling out to someone, that she’d heard and felt heavy footsteps that shook the wood-frame house. She thought she might have heard a brief scuffle as well, but couldn’t be too sure. After that, silence. When she finally dared to venture out of her room, the house was empty, everything was in order, the front door, which had been forced by Mendez, was set back in place. When she learned that his body had been found, she didn’t know what to think. Going to the police didn’t seem like a good idea. And what would she have told them?

The Wilsons had a connection that also sold heroin, and they were afraid of him. Everything bad began with him. He brought over a good-sized package of it one day in 1997 and told the Wilsons that he was stashing it in their house for the time being. Sharon Letigue says that the Wilsons wanted to refuse, but were too frightened to say no; they’d had some opium there once, but never anything as “heavy” as heroin.

Dean and Mittie had been working together. They knew the connection; they found out about the heroin. They came by the house with a story about some Mexican heroin they could pick up cheap in a week. The idea was, they would sell the connection’s heroin now, giving the Wilsons a cut of the proceeds, and then replace the missing stash with the Mexican heroin before the connection could come calling for it. He’d never know the difference, and they’d all be a bit richer. The Wilsons weren’t tough characters, but they had enough sense to see through this and refused. Dean and Mittie left, but with the promise to return. They were clearly angry, and not prepared to take no for an answer.

Mittie disappeared that night, and Dean’s girlfriend eventually told police that he’d left home the following morning to go over to Sunshine Circle, and that was the last she ever heard of him. Mittie was never found. Dean’s corpse was—splayed out in the scrub just off the Angeles Crest Highway. He’d been stabbed once in the back with such force that the blade had gone through his chest and perforated his sternum.

That morning, Carrie had called Jeremy, who was staying with a friend in Santa Monica. He didn’t have a phone of his own, so she’d called the friend on his home phone. She spoke with Jeremy, nothing special. But Dean had been taking leave of his girlfriend around the same time, according to her, and the drive over to Sunshine Circle was only about ten minutes from his girlfriend’s house. It was obviously impossible for Jeremy Rensselaer to have intercepted Dean—he was too far away. This fact was taken up by journalists to deepen the mystery, suggesting that more than one killer was involved. Simon saw the impossibility clearly, and likewise the most plausible explanation, namely that Carrie had gotten the time of the phone call wrong. And yet, somehow, he was certain that Jeremy Rensselaer had actually done it at that time. Sharon said that Carrie had told her she’d heard Olam and Nancy talking with Jeremy later, and that he’d said: “I gave him back to the sun.” She said she knew he meant Dean, but, since he’d been on the phone with her, plainly in Santa Monica, she’d assumed that he was not speaking literally, that he meant he had, perhaps, been praying for Dean.

After Dean’s body was found, it wasn’t long before the police came to visit Sunshine Circle. The Wilsons spoke to them on the porch, denying them entry to the house for fear that a search would turn up the heroin, which was still there. The police went away to get their warrant. The Wilsons should have ditched the heroin then, but Carl Morning was present that day, visiting his sister, and, once the police were gone, he insisted that she leave Sunshine Circle that moment, with him. Carrie refused. Carl tried to drag her to his car, and Olam Wilson intervened. Carl struck Olam, knocking him down, and then left, but returned almost right away, with a pistol he’d retrieved from his home, determined to take Carrie.

Carrie Morning was being shut into the back of Sharon Letigue’s car when Carl went around the opposite corner of the house and met Jeremy Rensselaer coming the other way, with a long knife in his hand. Simon could see it happen. Jeremy bending low, and sweeping his heavy arm out straight. The knife sheared through Carl’s carotid artery and his windpipe. Simon watched as Jeremy marvelled at a jet of blood spangling the air between him and the sun, peppering his eyes with a blazing scintillation, and Carl collapsed on the ground, dying. With the last of his dimming vision, Simon knew, Carl Morning would have seen Jeremy Rensselaer dance around him in a circle, pumping his arms at the sky, giving Carl back to the sun.

No one living knows what happened next, except that Jeremy went up the hill and cut his throat, and six of the remaining members of the Circle followed him later and overdosed on that heroin. Simon could imagine Nancy Wilson watching as Jeremy dragged Carl’s body into the backyard, where it would be less visible from the street. In his imagination, he saw her eyes widen as she thought about John Mendez, lying dead with a snapped neck, and of the abrupt disappearance of Mittie and Dean. He saw the expression on her face spread to Olam’s face, and the faces of the others, and he saw Jeremy Rensselaer, standing over Carl’s body, dim in the daylight haze of mid-afternoon, blood splattered on his bare chest and stomach, seeing the horror on their faces, and understanding it, and not being able to handle it.

The police found the house empty. Two members of the Circle were not accounted for, and they never have been. Presumably, they ran, taking what was left of the heroin, which was not found. Carrie wouldn’t talk about what happened. Sharon would: she was adamant that it was Jeremy alone who had killed anyone, and could only really be held accountable for the death of Carl, which was self-defense anyway. Far from being an admission of guilt, his suicide only proved how bitterly he regretted killing Carl, and how much he hated violence. Sharon Letigue was now dead, having been killed in an automobile accident in the 2010s. Carrie Morning had grieved over and buried her brother, then somehow contrived to disappear. People weren’t sure if she was alive or dead now. Simon thought she was alive, somewhere. He wished he could talk to her.

The story of “the Sunshine Killer” took on a life of its own. The Museum of Death claimed to have one of Jeremy Rensselaer’s fluorescent raver necklaces, but they seemed never to put it on display. Sharon Letigue claimed that Jeremy tried to store sunlight in things, not just items that glow in the dark, but in pieces of metal and clothing. He wondered if any of his stuff was still around, exposed to the sun on bare rocks, open patches of ground. A reporter had convinced Sharon Letigue to talk to her, and had published the one researched book on the story, RENSSELAER: The True Story of the “Sunshine Killer,” which had been adapted into an unwatchable film. Simon read the book, learned that Jeremy Rensselaer wore a hearing aid, because he’d fried his own hearing with loud headphones, and that his favorite movie was Lawrence of Arabia. Sharon Letigue said that Jeremy was more pure than any of the rest of them, that she saw him dance in adoration of the sun with tears pouring down his face, and he loved to sit and listen to birds, crickets, and the ocean.

It seemed to Simon as though reporters and writers wanted more victims for Jeremy Rensselaer, to inflate his menace, and consequently to make their own stories and books more important and exciting. More than a dozen additional murders were attributed to him. Simon read over those stories skeptically, trying to decide if he believed them or not. There were two that he believed.

In one case, reporters tied Jeremy Rensselaer to the unsolved murder of a housewife in San Luis Obispo, named Brenda Foglio. She had been seated at her kitchen table in the early afternoon, facing away from the back door of her house, when someone came in through that door and brained her with a cinderblock from behind, killing her instantly. There were no witnesses; nothing was taken. The murderer dragged her body outside and left her there, lying face up in the sun. There was no obvious motive, but several neighbors independently told police that Brenda had recently gotten into a loud, protracted quarrel with a homeless woman who’d parked her van just off her property line. She’d demanded the woman leave, then called the police on her. The woman, who fled rather than face arrest, was found and questioned later, but she’d been picking up her son from school at the time of the murder, with many witnesses who could vouch for her. That, and her physical frailty, due to untreated lymphoma, tended to rule her out as a suspect.

Research showed that Jeremy Rensselaer had lived in San Luis Obispo for about six weeks after he left home, and that the murder happened very near the end of the sixth week. When questioned about him, the homeless woman confirmed that she did remember meeting someone who matched Jeremy Rensselaer’s description, probably at a public concert. She never knew the name of the man she met, and she couldn’t say, one way or another, whether the man in the few existing photographs of Jeremy Rensselaer was the same person. He did seem hard of hearing—she remembered that. She couldn’t recall whether she had or hadn’t mentioned her trouble with Mrs. Foglio during any of her conversations with this man she’d met, but after the murder she hadn’t seen him around anymore. There really was no evidence, but that didn’t stop people from assuming that Jeremy Rensselaer had stalked and killed Brenda Foglio in retaliation for her hostility to the homeless woman.

The other case, which would have happened first, involved an Ojai man named Peter Van Ast, Jr., who was found dead in his backyard. Van Ast notoriously kept a .22 caliber varmint rifle handy around his house and used it to shoot coyotes, possums—anything that came into his yard, including, allegedly, a few stray cats. He was also rumored to have shot and killed a neighbor’s dog, who had gotten loose. The dog’s body was found near a trailhead, with a sizeable wound in its neck. If she had been shot, then someone had rooted around in the injury with a knife, and retrieved the bullet. The dog’s owner accused Van Ast of the killing, but could offer no proof. So he printed up fliers, and posted them around Ojai, showing Van Ast’s face, name, and home address, warning people that he killed animals. It’s not clear how Jeremy Rensselaer heard the story, but those fliers might have been his source. Van Ast was bludgeoned to death with the butt of his varmint rifle, which was found beside his body, so battered and bent out of shape the police said the gun looked like it had been run over by a train. It was still fully loaded. The one telling detail in the story, linking it to Jeremy Rensselaer, was that Van Ast had called 911 that afternoon and said that a “derelict,” a “male Caucasian, approximately twenty years old” he described as wearing only blue jeans, was in his backyard. He “requested backup,” gave his address, and rang off. That was the last anyone ever heard from him. His body had been dragged a short distance from his back door to a spot where the afternoon sun could fall on what was left of his face.

What persuaded Simon was not so much these descriptions, but the consistency of the stories with the idea that Jeremy Rensselaer killed people he considered dangerous, particularly to others. It was the meeting of the two musics. There was the martial, aggressive, violent music; the music that was associated with images of vindication. Then, there was the tranquil, contemplative, compassionate music, that made him hate violence, and shrink from the world’s cruelty. Each music invalidated the other. Each claimed him, exclusively. And when no music was playing, they both were there, waiting. What music today?

Jeremy Rensselaer stood where the two musics meet, in violence on behalf of another. But there were many, many stories of atrocities supposedly committed on behalf of others. The two musics also meet in suicide, at least, in his case. Here, Simon’s thinking grew thick, dense, and finally ground to a halt. The thoughts stopped connecting; nothing could move anymore. He would falter between the two musics, unable even to frame a question to put to his parents, and somehow ashamed to try. The idea of balance haunted him, the evening of things, but he couldn’t make it make sense. If I recognize life for the miracle it is, then, anyone who threatens that miracle is someone who must be crushed utterly out of existence; not just stopped, but obliterated—but then, isn’t that destroying life, too? Does destroying life mean that you renounce its magic, and does that mean it isn’t wrong to destroy you? Does life avenge itself, he wondered, through a kind of angel? It was a circle he couldn’t think his way around. It wasn’t hard at all to condemn Jeremy Rensselaer, and he did. So why didn’t that feel like the end of it? Why did it seem as though there was more to it, that, actually, the entirety of the question—whatever it was—remained untouched?

He’d made his way to the address on his bicycle, but the Sunshine Circle house had been demolished years ago. In fact, the property lines had even been redrawn, and there were now two new houses splitting the original lot. Some internet sleuthing had turned up the true location of the original building, and Simon visited cautiously, trying to give anyone who might be watching the impression that he was only idling by, stopping to tie his shoelace, check his phone. He darted looks in the direction of the site, examined it in hasty glances. People must come here to gawk. The property owners probably dislike the sight of random loiterers out in the street.

Sunshine Circle members used to congregate beneath those gnarled live oaks over there, with their ash-grey  trunks and small, dark leaves. They had to be the same trees; his father had told him you couldn’t cut them down, they were protected. The path leading up to the hill summit must be beyond that chain link fence back there, all but invisible in mounds of shrubbery. Jeremy Rensselaer walked down this street, stepped up over that curb, thinking about the tunic of fire he would wear after death, thinking that human blood came from the sun and returned to it. Thinking it, but also, really believing it.

That was probably the spot where Carl Morning was killed. His blood poured from his gashed throat and into that earth. And then, the sun melted his blood and drank it. That was where Jeremy saw the looks of horror on the faces of the others, where he made up his mind, without a moment’s hesitation, to kill again in order to protect the Circle—this time, he would be the victim, the offering, as well. He was going to go back to the sun.

Simon didn’t need to visit the old location to get closer to the past, though. He would gaze up at the rolling masses of the hills, and feel a presence hover there, soaking into the shadows beneath the brush. He knew that Jeremy Rensselaer must have felt that presence; that he was connected with the mysterious power that was dreaming there in the landscape, that he partook of it. Wide spaces, open to the sky, could disable Simon with sudden fear, as though he were in danger of being abducted right through the sky and out of the world, but he was attracted to large, powerful things, like mountains, storms, the ocean, the desert, anything very old. They made him feel small, but he didn’t mind feeling small. He felt small in the way a clown fish must feel when it nestles itself down among the venomous tendrils of an anemone; safe and small. It was the big and conspicuous thing that got blasted. The little one is hidden in plain sight. Every day, the people who lived in the canyon got up and went about their various ordinary human activities, just like he did, but there was another sort of hum that would still be there even if all that activity were hushed, abruptly, and that you could sort of hear at night. It was the secret activity of the hills, a life vast and furtive, massive, whispering sense without meaning, saturated with unassigned value. It was holiness, basically. Waiting for something to endow. It was the object of Jeremy Rensselaer’s worship. And didn’t it embrace him? How did—how could—Jeremy Rensselaer kill Rodney Dean, when he was in Santa Monica and Dean was already in Glendale? How did he get here so fast? Could Carrie really have gotten the time that wrong?

There was a bright day in June, only a few days into summer vacation, when Simon had been playing alone in the backyard, lighting scraps of paper on fire by focussing the sunlight through a little magnifying glass. The sunlight was a silent, blazing phantom, like the presence of another person beside himself. It stood in the air, vertical, the mute roar of a furnace. He had found a pocket mirror, and experimented to see if the light it reflected could be gathered and focused by a magnifying glass to start a fire even in the shade. Sitting on the crabgrass in the mellow gloom beneath the enormous oak tree that sheltered half the backyard, he directed the beam of light across the ground and along the grey  bricks of the dividing wall that marked the boundary. The breeze had withered away, the air was still. He didn’t know why he did it, but, abruptly taken by an unaccountable impulse, he aimed the reflected beam of light toward that hilltop, looking perhaps to see if the trembling patch of brightness he controlled could travel that far, and remain visible. He was startled by the sudden jet of light that appeared way up there, as if in response. It pivoted, slightly, as it flared into its full brilliance, causing him to blink, flinch and shut his eyes, already swimming with magenta and pale green after-images. Only in hindsight—he was already walking back inside—did it occur to him that the answering flash had come only after he had lowered the mirror, and when, some time later, he finally climbed that hill, he found a few old coffee cans with the dried and scattered remains of roses and other flowers, the untouched remnants of a little memorial, but nothing that could reflect light, certainly nothing that could have flashed at him from four or five feet above the ground. Simon asked his mother what color were fireflies, and she looked bemused and told him green and that there were no fireflies around there, or probably anywhere in California.

“Well,” he told her, “something was glowing green up on the hill. Green and red.”

He forgot all about it, and never remembered it again; but then came that particular day, when he had nearly been hit by a car. Lost in thought, as usual, he was absently crossing the street when a hood, a window, a snarling face suddenly slid past, only inches away, with a blare of horn. The shock of surprise struck him like a physical blow, somehow inside him. He stood in the street, and watched the car vanish. Mercurial, incoherent anger fluttered and struggled inside him. Then he finished crossing the street, spun in place, sat down on the curb, and wrapped his arms around himself. He hated the driver, and his sudden car. He felt almost violated, and impotent, although he was untouched, and he’d brushed up against an immensity of sadness and failure that didn’t make sense, that shouldn’t have been there. It was like nothing about him mattered. He could be plucked out of the world by chance, and nothing would stir to prevent it. Eventually—he knew he had to get home—he decided to cut across the park. He had to avoid the street. He just couldn’t walk there, but more out of resentment than caution, as if the friendly, familiar street had inexplicably betrayed him, and with a depressing idea of futility, his protests not meaning anything. The park curled around the base of the hills with a sort of corridor connecting its two parts, like the handle of a dumbbell. As he made his way along this corridor, he began to notice that there was no one else around. He was alone.

There was a moment of dead silence. Simon watched his trudging feet, then glanced up at the path to see where its margin lay, to make sure he wasn’t walking off track. That was the moment when Jeremy Rensselaer strode past him. He loomed over Simon, took two steps toward the brush at the trail’s margin, showing the blackened soles of his dirty, bare feet, and then the trunk of a big oak tree interrupted the sight of him, and he didn’t come around the other side. He had sort of faded a little as he passed behind the tree. Faded, and sank, a little. As if he were about to throw himself down on the ground, curl up and rest there in the shade, like a dog. Simon had kept walking a step or two further, and only stopped after a few moments.

He stood there a long time, staring at the oak tree until it began to blur and float before his eyes, not unlike what Jeremy Rensselaer had done. He listened. After a while, he did hear something—deep, even breathing. The sound of someone sleeping.

Very quietly, so as not to disturb anyone, Simon began walking home. Eventually, he noticed birds singing, and the ambient roar of the city out there, but it wasn’t until he’d been lying in bed that night, and had wondered if someone dead might still be out there, sleeping behind a tree, that his body jackknifed, and he clasped his head hard between his two hands. He whimpered, and was afraid. Afraid of the world, his parents, the trees, everything, even himself, somehow. Why did the violent music fill him with life, and so much energy he could barely contain it? Shouldn’t it be the compassionate music that filled him with life? Why didn’t the violent music make him sad? With a flash of reflected sunlight, he had called on Jeremy Rensselaer, and set something in motion that he didn’t understand, and that was much, much larger than himself. That idea haunted him all throughout his childhood, his adolescence, and into adulthood. It would visit him whenever it wanted to, and he would see the city rolled out in front of him, blanketed in heavy ochre sunlight, half-smothered under weightless dayshine in a psychedelic urban pastorale that made the frenetic activity all around him seem like rustling leaves, swirling dust, ripening, drinking, basking. Beneath the sun, a dancing figure, throwing his arms up into the air, high as he can, a knife blazing white in one hand, long curls snap as the head, with its face always turned away, toward the sun, nods in exultation and affirmation.

And sometimes at night when he would lie awake, he could hear the coyotes carolling somewhere out in the hills over something they’d killed. It was strange because you never heard the sound begin—you only became suddenly aware that it had been going on. The noise didn’t frighten him. He’d seen coyotes a few times, but they’d never come near him or anyone he knew. Maybe they’d gotten a cat here and there, but then, well, don’t let your cats out. It was a wild sound, that had been heard here on the hills before California was California, and it was kind of a blessing or honor for him, something that not everyone got to hear. On other nights, his heart racing, he would see the vampires, the slashers, the demons from the movies and games coming for him, and then the walls would come down in a cataract of blinding daylight, and dancing there in the heart of the glare would be Jeremy Rensselaer, almost a silhouette welded into the gold. The menace, whatever it was, would shrink from the light, start with fear at the abruptness of its onslaught, and then Jeremy would be on them, the tang of his knife would catch the light as it came down in one pure line, and Simon would feel something better than safe, he would know that justice is the only thing anyone has to fear, that justice and beauty are inseparable, united and invincible, that you have to surrender unconditionally to them together, you have to, you have to have to have to offer yourself, let them become you and become perfect where the two musics meet.

2

Through the window, Laura can see Simon come up the path, greet Angela and her son, Mark, as he steps onto the lawn and into the shade. There they are all together, framed by the window like an idyllic painting. They form a family together, spontaneously, without her. They smile, and Mark hurries up to tell something he’s been saving just for Simon. No one is thinking of her inside that frame, him least of all. When she brings the lemonade out, then he’ll notice her, turn his kind eyes on her, and she’ll grimace, trying to return the smile, but it’s all been decided, hasn’t it? There’s a center of gravity among them that cannot include her.

He’s cutting slices of bread for sandwiches when she brings the tray out to them, like a servant, but he sets down the knife and hurries up to her, taking the tray and nodding a greeting in his minimal sort of way. Just one nod from Simon conveys a lot of information, and she wishes that it isn’t as warm as it is. It would make things easier, like a confirmation.

The four of them had been thrown together by chance. Angela and Mark were going to move to California. Their house was closed up and they were just spending a few final days in Colorado before they left. Simon had been in Denver for an astrophysics conference, and had been forced to remain a while longer when bad weather led to a spate of flight cancellations and delays. Laura was a systems analyst working for the state, and her boss had told her in a sternly good-natured email that she would lose accumulating vacation time if she didn’t take it soon. She didn’t want to go far from home, but she didn’t want to sit alone in an empty house, either. One way or another, they had all four of them ended up staying at the same motel—a Del Webb’s Hiway House right across I-25 from St. Vrain State Park. The park was a constellation of enormous ponds surrounded by meadows, trees, and campgrounds. The Rocky Mountains—Longs Peak, Ptarmigan Mountain, the Twin Sisters—presided to the west, still spattered with snow in late June. There was something important, and precious, about this opportunity to spend time with other adults away from the usual responsibilities. It was like being a kid again, playing at random with other kids, not caring who they were or what they did.

It was a near miss that introduced them to each other. A shock went through her when she saw the police SUV roll up behind that little boy, whose name turned out to be Mark, and another voice that later on proved to have been hers shouted a warning in unwitting unison with Angela’s, who darted into the street. Simon was faster. He seemed to come out of nowhere. He lunged for Mark and snatched him up in his arms, pivoting just in time to avoid being struck himself. The car passed between Laura and the others; she saw the man driving it, the aviator sunglasses and expressionless face, one beefy arm draped across the top of the steering wheel, guiding the car with the underside of his wrist, a semper fi tattoo dull under the mat of hair and half melted into his tan, the dull gleam of his badge, and she saw Simon momentarily framed in the opposite window, staring indignantly. He was handing Mark to Angela, who gathered him up in her arms, pressed his head into her shoulder, and her face was convulsed with rage, astonishment, and confusion. Korean words burst from her; they didn’t need translating. Mark, for his part, seemed bewildered.

The SUV continued on its way, and Laura registered its unhurried nonchalance, as if killing children were its prerogative. Then she turned her attention back to Angela. Simon was guiding her quietly to the picnic tables, near the motel, and she was still carrying Mark.

“He could have been killed.”
They were the first words Laura heard him say.

“I know!” she answered. She was hurrying to express her concern, to avoid being left out. She could offer Angela a woman’s understanding. Angela set the boy down and examined him, turned him around and then back again.

“You’re fine!” she told him, her voice still harsh.

Simon wasn’t just anyone. He was one in a million. He was a man who could understand her painful isolation. He was already at home in the arctic circle that encompassed her; she saw that at once. They were the same, in the most critical way, standing to one side, observing the world with pain, with contemplation, seeing the world’s reason, and the depressing unreason. They were alike. It was plainly there, in his sad kindness, his mild voice and reserve and his delicate gestures and discretion—just like her. But there they were, the three of them, together in their own ring, not shutting her out, but not allowing her in, either. Somehow, being deliberately shut out would have been less painful. What if something bad—not that bad, but only just bad enough—happened to divide them? It was wrong to wish for that, or even to think about it. It was only human, but it was still wrong. She salved the pain of her casual exclusion with the feeling of righteousness that came with declaring something to be wrong.

He was happy to give them rides in his rental car. Simon was a conscientious driver. Laura imagined that being an astrophysicist must reflect a computer-like knack for processing information, and Simon seemed to attend to every alteration in traffic with effortless concentration, rolling in and out of stops so easily that she barely felt the momentum. There were a few eateries in the vicinity, and then there was the park, its ponds distributed along a curling road like beads on a string. He would guide his car gently around the bends while fresh air wafted in the windows, making her feel light-headed and happy.

I wish we could go on driving like this forever, she would think. Round and round these bends, the mountains swinging, the sun turning golden, air as pure as can be, and just us.

The sunsets here were so spectacular that staying inside while the sun was going down seemed a little sacrilegious. The ritual suggested itself: they would pick up their dinner at Toni’s Diner, Tacos Imposibles, or the Fosters Freeze and then carry it into the park to eat in the open air at one of the picnic tables. Lean and wiry as he was, Simon ate voraciously. He was always done first, and gazing west with a dreamy, cold light in his face. She noticed that he didn’t speak with his mouth full, and he never drank. Laura also finished quickly, but then she was too self-conscious, wiping her mouth after every bite, and barely eating anything, so that, once they had dispersed to their rooms for the night and she was alone, she would fortify herself with some secret snacks from the vending machine by the office.

Now they sit together, eating, while a conflagration transforms the sky above them in silence. The sun welds itself to the earth, daubing the mountain peaks with red while the ground below subsides into blue and purple shadows. The inaudible noise of these sunsets binds the life here together under the sway of a single event, like one answer that could satisfy any riddle. Simon, Angela, and Mark all blazed red in that effulgence. Laura wondered if she did, too. Four golden phantoms dimming, growing ashen, as the light left the sky.

Simon was never at a loss for things to talk about, since he was an astrophysicist. He could give little impromptu lectures at will, seemingly without effort, and with a real zest for the subject.  When Angela politely asked her what she did, she said —

“I’m a bureaucrat,” and smiled ruefully. “Although that implies I have a power that I don’t actually have, at all. I’m a systems analyst.”

“What does a system analyst do?” Mark asked.

“I find and customize computer programs for Colorado State University, to help them keep track of their budget and payroll, and maintain records on employees.”

From the expression on Mark’s face as he disengaged from her, he didn’t really understand what that meant, or find anything about it interesting.

“I wish we’d had a systems analyst,” Angela said. She had already told them about the failure of her family restaurant. That, and her husband’s death, were the reasons she was moving away, to join her family in California. She’d started a law degree some time ago, and hoped to resume her studies there.

She’s turning the conversation back toward herself again, Laura thought. And she’s making it look as though she were thinking of me. Trying to impress him by seeming magnanimous.

“It’s important to keep accounts straight,” Simon said. He had a way of making strict pronouncements like that; it gave him an air of integrity.

Laura was searching for something to say when she caught sight of the police SUV and gave a little jump. The car coasted through the parking lot with its lights off. Like a cruising shark, it rolled from one end to the other, almost colorless in the dusk. It didn’t want anyone to notice it was there until it was too late, and it had caught somebody in an infraction. Was it the same car, with the same evil police man inside? She turned to the others to see if any of them had noticed. Angela was wiping ketchup from Mark’s chin, but Simon’s face was dreamy again; he had seen.

We both noticed, she thought. We’re the same. We belong together. We don’t need to talk. We can understand each other, Simon, just like this.

Simon was particularly good with Mark. Something boyish would rise to the surface whenever Mark looked his way. With adults, he was serious, even a little stern, but still friendly. Laura felt his reserve emanating from him like a magical endowment, and it thrilled her, because she wasn’t the sort of person that other people found readily available, either. They were alike. But would he want someone else like him?

When that boyish look came into Simon’s eyes, there was something so painful there that Laura’s heart went out to him. Mark was a child, and children are vulnerable. Simon seemed to experience Mark’s vulnerability himself, to relive it. He knew it. It hurt. Something had happened to him. Laura was sure of it. A childhood of worry, and boredom, and sometimes even pain, had trained her to recognize it when she saw it. She watched Simon showing Mark the contents of the little red tacklebox he’d bought for him, the gutting knife, the hooks, the line, the collapsible rod. Mark wanted to try the line right away, but Angela insisted he finish eating first, that it was getting dark, that the fish were all asleep, that they could come back tomorrow, and Simon promised he would come along too, to show him what to do.

Laura gazed at Angela miserably. Angela was a widow. The same marks were there on her face—loss, pain, worry. All there. You had something to lose, though, she thinks. I never did. I didn’t get my turn. I’m sorry. But when do I get my turn?

When Simon was talking to Mark, Laura watched as the creases smoothed on Angela’s face, how relief momentarily lifted the weight that normally bent her neck and sloped her shoulders. With Simon, Angela was upright, and even lively. Younger. The more you look at him, the younger you get. And the older I get.

That night, after midnight, Laura finished her furtive snack and idly went to peek through the curtain and into the parking lot. Simon strode by just then. Where was he coming from? He was heading for his room, but where had he been? Not Angela’s room? That was upstairs. Was he heading for the stairs? But then, he’s coming back.

Laura watched as Simon marched back and forth, back and forth, three times, scanning, craning his head. Had he lost something? Should she offer to help? He wasn’t looking on the ground, though. It was more like he was patrolling, as if he were on sentry duty. After a few minutes, she didn’t see him any more. Presumably, he had returned to his room. Could he be crazy?

Laura was the first to catch sight of Mark, stumbling alone into the parking lot. He was in shock, his teeth were chattering even though the waning day was still unusually warm, and sweat trickled in heavy beads down his face. He didn’t answer her questions, and submitted robotically as she guided him by the shoulders up to Angela’s room. At sight of him, Angela swung him up in her arms and dashed inside, setting him on the bed, checking him frantically for injuries that weren’t there. Laura was looking everywhere for Simon.

“Did Simon do something to you? Where is he? … Did something happen to him?”

Mark threw her a look of anguish, but he couldn’t speak.

Laura looked toward St. Vrain. Angela hadn’t been feeling well, had perhaps a migraine, so Simon and Mark had gone to visit the fish ponds alone. How had Mark gotten safely across I-25, she wondered irrelevantly. There was no sign of trouble, only the celestial mayhem of another wild sunset, a flaring tangle of colored ribbons, blazing silver, peach, bronze and green.

And so Laura began to walk toward I-25. With her heart in her mouth, she dashed across and into the park. She had no idea what she was looking for, only that she had to find Simon, and the most likely place to find him would be by the Mallard Pond. With a pang of fear, she looked at the empty path in front of her—what was at the end? The park was nearly deserted. There were only a few stragglers, dithering their way to the exit, and one family, two middle-aged parents and their teenagers, cooking out by Sandpiper Pond. Their music, their laughter, the smell of grilling meat, and all around a feeling of painful unreality, urgency, the ponds all flat and still as mirrors reflecting the sky like vast, cold slabs of pink gold, a light near the ground to match the light high above, and darkness in between.

It was in that darkness she searched, coming upon the parking lot beneath the mountains, the great panoply of the twilight that they seemed to be making and emitting. There was the building with the bathrooms and showers. No people here. And then she was drifting in an arc around the corner of the building, cut loose by the sight of an arm. Just an arm. A forearm, with a semper fi tattoo thatched with coarse hair. She stopped moving when she saw the red, red expanse, that bristled a little as the night wind rose.

3

A lean, stylish young person passes by, not two feet in front of him, forearms sleeved in retro-tattoos. A globe, eagle, anchor, and a banner inscribed semper fidelis.

Formally speaking, no one ever saw Simon again after that day at St. Vrain. Mark knew no one could ever find him, in the safe place where he was now. He remembers the drawn faces of the police officer’s wife and children in the news stories. He had been asked again and again if he could remember anything, tell them what happened, where the rest of the man’s body had gone. He had only silence to give them in reply. They knew what had happened. A man had been killed. What else was there to say about it? It was something for people to marvel at, not understand. The Dominguez family, who had been having a cookout nearby at Sandpiper Pond at the time, didn’t see anyone enter or leave until—what was her name again? That woman? But anyone could have come in from the other side of the park, or over land, and away again. There was infinite space for appearances and disappearances. Even now, with everything scanned and mapped, it wasn’t impossible that one or both of them were out there beneath the Rockies somewhere, melted into the ground.

They had gone on to say all sort of things about Simon, but there wasn’t any clear reason to believe that he hadn’t been as much a victim as the dead man had been. Neither his mother, nor that other woman, had anything bad to say about Simon, nor should they have. Simon had no relatives. He left behind no clues, except a few interesting bookmarks on his web browser. The Sunshine Killer. Sunshine Circle.

Mark watches the crowd dispassionately through the window of the coffee shop. The tattooed figure rounds the corner and is gone. Mark has exactly fifty-seven minutes and twelve seconds before he has to be back at the shelter, where he lives, and he has to go by the hospital first and check in. It’s possible they will ask him to leave the coffee shop sooner than that. The two employees behind the counter keep throwing him nervous looks. The shop is half-full, and almost everyone is sitting at least a table away from him. Mark is clean enough, neat enough. He knows he should move more than he does, but he can’t bring himself to make unnecessary gestures. So he sits stiffly upright, facing the window, with his hands in his lap, studying the playground across the street. He has removed his watch, and laid it down on the table in front of him, where he can see it. Every time the minute hand strokes 12, he picks up the mug with both hands and raises it carefully to his mouth. He always wears and old-style watch. It belonged to his father. After taking one sip, he replaces the mug, wipes his lips thoroughly, and waits for the next minute to elapse.

He was only dimly aware of the lumbering policeman at first. He had come up toward them at St. Vrain, rolling as he walked, like a bear. His sunglasses seemed to be riveted on Mark. When he was about fifty feet away, Mark felt Simon’s hands slide beneath his arms, lifting him.  He felt his feet part from the earth. Simon carried him around the corner of the bathroom building, and set him down. Simon, he noticed, had thrust his gutting knife into the back pocket of his jeans.

Mark could see the sunset. A golden figure stepped out of it and gambolled like a satyr in the scintillating light of Mallard Pond. Mark saw a gutting knife turn until its broad tang caught the light, made a line. It flashed, and he experienced a violent jolt, like an electric shock. The silhouettes and outlines came loose and bounded and scampered and joined, Simon, a dancing figure with tossing golden curls, a knife brandished in the sun, the heavy dark figure of the police officer. All sway, all leap, all turn, pivot, and sway again. As the light drained from the sky, Mark became alone.

There’s a park across the street from the coffee shop, and a playground in the park, filled with the wan copper of a winter dusk. Mark understood how important it was to protect the innocence of children. What had happened with Simon taught him that. They must be protected. We who are no longer children have to be ready, we have to be guided, we have to have faith. Safety is for children. Children are for safety, and the world is not safe, it is not just, it is not beautiful, not in itself, but only as the sun lights it, justifies it, clothing it in its tunic of fire. Only fire is safe.

Once upon a summer day, when he was a boy visiting St. Vrain park with his friend Simon, he had watched three figures swim and dance away into everything and everywhere, and recalls it again as he sits in the coffee shop, an adult man, keeping careful track of the time, fifty-five minutes, forty-one seconds, keeping vigilant watch over the children playing in the park, their hidden custodian. He can’t be there all the time, though. Those three would have to be everywhere, in order to ensure that he could keep watch over them. A man hurries to pick up a little girl who has collapsed with her legs under her a few feet from the playground gate, and Mark shifts his weight, leaning forward, begins to stand. A woman joins the man. They appear to be a family. The child seems to be calm enough. Mark lowers himself back onto his seat.

Fifty-three minutes, sixteen seconds.

The clouds shift, the effulgence of the dying day breaks through, the daylight brushes the grass, which is somehow still green in places, and, for a moment, he sees the lawn become a little sea of glinting blades. What music today?

“The Two Musics” copyright © 2024 by Michael Cisco
Art copyright © 2024 by Natalie Foss

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The post The Two Musics appeared first on Reactor.

The survivor of an apocalypse event in an alternate universe tries to rebuild and avoid being dragged back into the past when a visitor crosses the in-between and asks for help.

You’re taking the long way home, through that stretch of no-man’s-land between two one-traffic-light towns, when you feel the air pressure drop. Swearing, you pull the pickup onto the shoulder and key off the ignition.

There’s no one else on this unassuming highway, level for miles, hiding nothing among the wide flat boulders and bent grassland. But you know emptiness is sometimes an illusion, especially on this lick of road. Your knuckles are white on the steering wheel as you wait. For God knows what.

A minute passes. Your ears pop and suddenly this girl, seventeen or twenty at most, is rapping on your pickup’s passenger-side window. She’s covered in ashes, her knuckles torn and swollen.

You roll down the window.

“Can I?” she asks.

“Sure,” you say and move your jacket from the passenger seat. She slides in, without preamble or explanation. She slams the door closed with more force than necessary and you both jump. She doesn’t apologize, though, and for that you find yourself warming toward her.

“Heading to town,” you say, starting the engine and pulling back onto the road. “I can drop you off at the motel there.”

“Which one?”

“There’s only one motel.”

“No, which town?”

“Littleton.” You say it with fondness. It might not be much to spit at, especially compared to some places you’ve been, but Littleton’s home to one of the best coffeeshops in the world. Your family too.

The stranger nods, unsurprised, and pulls out a phone from her jacket pocket. The screen’s a massive web of cracks, but she doesn’t seem to notice as she furiously types out message after message.

Her composure unnerves you. Were you ever this self-assured when you were in her shoes? Especially after whatever disaster she looks like she fought before coming here? Maybe, you don’t remember. Those are not the details you held on to from your old life.

You keep your eyes on the road as the pickup speeds down the silent highway, grateful that maybe you won’t get a backstory. (If you didn’t want a story, your voice of reason counters, you wouldn’t have taken the long way home.) But you can’t help stealing glances at your passenger and wondering. At the tears in her navy t-shirt and cargo pants. At her disheveled black hair and the grit under her fingernails. The exhaustion in her eyes and her posture. You clock, with some relief, that there’s no resemblance between you and her.

But you recognize the pin on her jacket, a burning house, and there can be no denying where she just appeared from.

She catches you looking, but you don’t apologize either. Throughout this quiet drive, she’s been snatching glances at you too.

The sky’s gray and growing darker as the sun falls behind the distant mountains; bluish-black against the horizon, hundreds of miles away. The air in the car stays still and bated. Until the stranger swears under her breath.

“Dead,” she says. She holds up her phone. “Have a charger?”

“Nope,” you reply, patting the steering wheel. “This baby’s a dinosaur.” Your trusty truck still has an analog radio, dials and all.

The stranger slumps against the headrest, with that fluid drama that only teenagers can pull off well. She closes her eyes.

“Why haven’t you asked me why I’m here?” she says.

“Live around here long enough and you stop questioning some of the strange shit you see.”

“That’s very trusting of you.”

“I could say the same about you.”

She shrugs. “They told me this was one of the good places.”

You’re about to pry, ask for names and details, but you catch yourself. Because, despite your curiosity, you don’t want to know. Not anymore.

“I’m Selene,” she says.

“Jen,” you reply, and some of the tension in her shoulders releases. The air in the truck becomes easier for a stretch. But as the lights of Littleton rise up in the distance, she begins to fidget, picking the ashes off her clothes.

“Was it a bad fire?” you ask before you can stop yourself.

Damn your curiosity. That insatiable appetite.

Her lips go flat and tight. “Always could be worse.”

Good answer, you think, and swallow your unasked questions.

At the edge of town, you pull over to refuel. Not because you want to prolong your time with this stranger, Selene, but because you know yourself too well. You’re not going to leave again when you get home tonight and Thom, understandably, would be annoyed if you left him the car running on fumes.

You grunt as you climb out of the pickup, stretching your bad leg, muscles protesting after sitting for so long. You were tenser than you thought, the stiffness is worse than typical. It’s not a graceful limp to the gas pump. But you don’t think much of it until you catch her expression through the windshield.

Selene stares, practically gaping at your scars, thanks to your cutoffs, visible from calf to ankle.

“Old accident,” you say, though you don’t owe her an explanation. Actually, you don’t owe her or where she came from jackshit. You’ve given them enough of yourself. Selene turns red and looks away. She doesn’t apologize when you get back into the car and this time, you aren’t impressed.

It occurs to you that you’ve probably become a cautionary tale to the people in your old life, one of those nameless characters talked about during lulls and meal breaks. The thought makes you incredibly depressed. And angry.

You hold the steering wheel in a death grip during the short drive to the Grand Motel. You speed. The air in the car is oppressive.

She slips out of the passenger seat when you pull up to the front of the two-story building.

“Thanks, Jenna.” You nod once and she closes the door, gently this time. You watch her walk into the lobby and give Pam working the front desk a two-fingered salute. Then you peel out of the parking lot, swearing to never take the long way home again. This was the nail in the coffin that you needed. End of story.

It’s only when you’re on the couch, beer in hand, legs draped over Thom, your pit bull mix, Pecan, sprawled out on top of both of you, that you catch her slip.

It’s been a decade since anyone called you Jenna. Not since the In-Between.

The problem with the In-Between is that it’s always calling you back.

You’re neck deep in a reservoir restoration design proposal when your cell rings. Unknown number. You don’t answer these, usually. If it’s important, they’ll leave a message. But your curiosity wins out, again.

“Jenna, it’s Selene,” says the stranger as soon as you pick up.

“Jen, actually,” you reply with an evenness that surprises you. Three weeks have passed and you were relaxing into the idea it was all over. You’ve asked around, naturally. Pam said there weren’t any more soot-covered visitors at the motel and Thom reported no wayfaring strangers at the coffeeshop. “How did you get my number?”

“I asked the motel lady for it. In case this happened.”

Pam’s kind heart’s a double-edged sword. Your fingers tighten around the phone. “What happened?”

“Nothing,” she says quickly. “I just…I need a ride.”

You sigh. The trouble with living in a one-traffic-light town is you can’t tell her to piss off and order a taxi or rideshare. You consider saying no anyway because you recognize the strings. You feel the pull of your old life rattling in its coffin, the magnetism that kept you taking the long way home and kept you up at ungodly hours sketching concepts, year after year.

But you also remember what it was like to be stranded in a place you barely knew.

“Where?” you say, picking up your keys and your coat, already moving toward the door.

“Not far from where you found me last time. I think.” Her hesitation does not inspire confidence.

She’s off by ten miles.

You find her in a worse state than before, soaked to the bone and shivering in the wind that streaks across the grassland. God, you remember what that was like too. Guilt gnaws at you for considering not answering the call. Yet you put up a hand before she climbs in.

“No talking about the In-Between, its problems, anyone in it, or their problems. Got it?”

She pauses, stunned. This has clearly thrown a wrench in her plans. You wait for her to come to the obvious conclusion. No rideshares here.

She hesitates, then nods and concedes. She hoists herself in and you hand her an old towel from the back seat, usually reserved for Pecan. Clean, or as clean as possible with an endlessly shedding eighty-pound dog. She wraps herself in it and cranks up the heat on the dashboard.

“Thanks for coming to get me.”

“Sure,” you say. She smells like mildew and honeysuckles, and something like homesickness hits you in the ribs. (But you are home, you remind yourself.)

(Then why, your voice of reason asks, do you still feel the pull of the In-Between?)

This question eats at you in the silence. For thirty miles, neither you nor the stranger speaks.

Then Selene cracks. “Elise says hi,” she says.

“Hey, I mean it.” The sharpness of your voice surprises you. “I don’t want to know.”

“Not even that the water retention wall that you two built broke?” she snaps. “The Summer Quarter is completely flooded. Thought you’d at least care about that.”

You decelerate.

“Oh my God. You seriously going to abandon me on the side of the road?”

“Please. You have return plans,” you reply. “When’s the rendezvous? Tomorrow at seven a.m.?”

She ignores that. Instead, she says, “The flowers along the boulevards are still blooming, though. I didn’t even know there were so many colors.”

You swerve to the shoulder.

“Fine!” she shouts. She crosses her arms and slumps as you ease back onto the highway. “But I need to know—”

“That is always the problem,” you mutter.

“—why don’t you want to come back?”

(Oh, who said that? that little voice inside you whispers.)

“After the accident,” you begin and glance over. Selene nods. You roll your eyes. In-Betweeners are nothing if not adventurers and gossips. “After the accident, I built a good life here.” Selene wrinkles her nose. “Yes, you can live well here. One day you might find the work in that other place is not worth the cost.”

“Never,” she spits. But you don’t take the bait. There’s no point in arguing with an obsessed nineteen-year-old. Neither of you speak until Littleton’s in your sights. The atmosphere in the car is like a brewing thunderstorm.

“I need some coffee,” she announces as you pass the town’s welcome sign.

“You need some sleep.”

“We need help.”

“Too bad,” you say and Selene scowls and types out something on her shattered phone.

Were you such an asshole when you were that age? Probably.

But you feel the pull of your old life grow stronger as you begin to see the depths of Selene’s stubbornness. And that frightens you. You realize, then, you need help. Someone to ground you, remind you, be the counterweight to this ceaseless lure. Also a good cup of coffee sounds perfect right now.

To the untrained eye, the Pit Stop is just another diner, with its neon lights outside and vinyl seating within. But it’s the smell of espresso that embraces you like a long-lost friend when you enter, not grease. The whirl of coffee grinders is constant and every item on the menu is made to complement your drink.

And unlike roadside diners, the proprietors of the establishment have a history of welcoming the lingerers, the travelers who are both wandering and lost.

Thom is on his usual perch behind the counter. He’s surprised to see you in the middle of a work day, but a grin lights up his face. Then, he spots Selene beside you, and it dims slightly. Then he sees the pin on her jacket.

“No,” he says.

You hold up your hands. “I’ve been trying to tell her that.” You tilt your head toward Selene and take your usual seat at the counter.

Thom turns to the stranger. “No.”

“Dude, I just want a coffee,” she says.

“That’s how it starts,” he mumbles and looks at you. His eyes widen and you know he understands why you came. God, you love this man, and not just because you’ve been together long enough that you can ask each other questions without saying a word.

“Large cappuccino, please,” you say. “I’ll be sticking around for a while.” He disappears with a grunt. A moment later, your phone buzzes in your pocket. You glance at the text.

THOM: thought u said it was over.

YOU: Yeah. They want me to come back

THOM: oh NOW they miss u

His indignation eases some of the pressure off your ribcage. Beside you, Selene picks up the menu, pretends to read it.

“The French toast is good,” you say, because it’s true.

“You gave up the In-Between for French toast?” she asks, incredulous.

“No,” you reply. “I gave it up for coffee, but the French toast helped.” You give Thom a small smile as he works the espresso machine. His shoulders relax but the worry line on his forehead doesn’t disappear.

You bite back a grin when Selene listens and orders the French toast and then a laugh at her stunned expression when the food arrives. A mountain of homemade bread, battered and cinnamoned, cooked to golden, and adorned with fresh whipped cream and even fresher raspberries.

The In-Between, for all its wonders, doesn’t have good, home-cooked food.

“I’m going to go out on a limb here,” you say, “and guess that Elise sent you.”

Selene answers by jamming another forkful of food into her mouth.

So, you tell her about your life after the In-Between. About the painful process of healing after the accident and learning the new limits of your damaged body. About rebuilding — everything. Because your head and your heart belonged to the In-Between for so long, you didn’t have much to work from when you decided to make a life in this world. You only chose Littleton because the people here had shown you some kindness when you turned up out of nowhere covered in water or ash or slime. Like the woman at the only motel in town. And the coffeeshop owner you fell hard for. You finished your engineering degree and made yourself useful here. You were stunned to learn how many small disasters happened in Littleton.

In some ways, you are doing the same thing you did in the In-Between. Difference is you build and repair things here without risking a limb. Here, the work lasts.

You tell the stranger all of this, knowing that the story will find the person you’re really telling it for. Elise, who was with you when you stumbled into the In-Between for the first time during your sophomore year in college. Who spent countless hours with you in the mud and ash, shoring up walls and digging drains, trying to preserve this magical place you’d both lucked into. Who never forgave you for refusing to come back when you healed.

Selene fidgets and picks at her food. She’s clenching her fork and her jaw. Her phone buzzes as you finish your story. She glances at it, drains her coffee, and gets up. She looks straight at you for the first time in thirty minutes and says, “I’ll never give up on the only place that feels like home.”

The last words Elise texted you before she blocked you.

Selene strides to the door.

You’re stunned, a little hurt. Then Thom is there, hand on your shoulder, and you give him a broken smile. “Out-of-towners are the worst.”

He doesn’t return it. He hands you the jacket she left behind on the chair.

“Jen, close this chapter for good, yeah?” he says.

You hesitate. For too long. Then nod and follow the girl.

You find her behind the coffeeshop, near the dumpsters. The air is charged and you’re so startled by the sudden rush of water around your feet, you failed to notice the obvious. The trap.

Selene’s standing before a rift in reality and beyond it is a place that’s neither of this world nor the next one. The smell of roses and ash fills your nose and you’re struck by nostalgia so deep and raw it knocks the air out of your lungs.

There, you see a slice of the main boulevard in the Autumn Quarter. Sunlight dancing among the reddening leaves and late season blooms garbing the old stone buildings. Stone faces of statues and gargoyles peering out from the foliage. It looks like a beautiful day on the other side.

You’ve missed this. God, you’ve missed this. Even as water pours out from the In-Between, engulfing your ankles. Even though every word you told Selene was true.

She turns and there are tears in her eyes. “It’s being destroyed faster than we can save it.”

She steps into the rift.

You spend the rest of the day mopping the floors of the Pit Stop with Thom. The sudden flood from the In-Between was too much for the street drains and the coffeeshop found itself with an inch of sooty water on the linoleum floor, despite clear skies and sound pipes.

Thom blames the pipes anyway as he apologizes to the evacuating customers.

But when only the two of you are left with mops, he swears off the In-Between loudly and colorfully. You don’t blame him; you just finished replacing these floors two months ago.

“Why do the disasters there always leak into here?” he says. “Literally, in this case.”

“She said that most of it has been destroyed now.”

Thom’s expression softens. “I’m sorry.”

You wring the mop. “I’m just worried about her and the others.”

“Why? They cut you out after you got hurt.”

“Did I ever tell you the story about the guy who came back from the In-Between and met an older version of himself?”

“No.” He pauses. “How’s that even possible?”

“It’s a weird space and time is weird anyway.”

He frowns. “But you don’t think she’s you, right?”

“No, my hair was never that straight or my boobs that small,” you say, with a laugh. “But she’s not so different either.”

Neither of you speak for a little while as you push the mop back and forth, making more streaks than progress.

“You told her off, though, right?” asks Thom, hesitantly.

“We didn’t leave on good terms,” you reply. But that’s not what he’s asking, and you both know it.

It takes you both a long time to dry the floor.

That night, you’re back in the In-Between, in your dreams at least. You’re walking down the twisty, mysterious streets of the Spring Quarter with Elise, joy and wonder filling you up as you discover a new garden courtyard or art gallery. That quiet thrill of being in the In-Between hasn’t faded.

You’re brought back by the sound of your phone buzzing. You squint at the clock. 3:24 a.m. and Thom’s snoring softly beside you. Pecan’s paws twitch, lost in his own dream, as he sleeps at the foot of the bed.

Your leg protests in your night brace as you slip out of bed and into the living room. Selene’s texting you, making your phone a spasm of light and vibration. You read.

SELENE: So I dont know if youll just delete this without reading it, but I just wanted to say sorry for what I said in the diner.

SELENE: Im really bad at talking. You didnt want to listen. But you deserve to know bc you fought for this place once.

SELENE: You and Elise I mean.

SELENE: The In-Between is disappearing. Like really really fast now. Floods + fires + vanishings happen all the time now. Always losing another piece. Last week it was the grand hall in the Winter Quarter. You know the one felt out of a fairy tale?

SELENE: Im not dumb. I know why you wont help us.

SELENE: And yeah that was really shitty how everyone ghosted you after the accident.

SELENE: Im not asking for them. Im asking for me.

SELENE: And I know you dont know me + you might not like what youve seen. But this is the first place Ive loved. Its first time Ive felt useful + good at something.

SELENE: Ive nowhere else to go.

SELENE: Ill spare you the gory details but my life before the In-Between was bad. Really bad. Its the only home Ive ever had.

SELENE: Will you seriously not help me???

You’re crying. God, when did that happen? You knew, you knew, what type of people were called to the In-Between, because once, it called to you. It’s a paradise for lonely kids, lost teens, and desolate adults. It filled your otherwise empty life with wonder, and trying to save it from disappearing gave you a reason to keep waking up. There, the first time in your life you felt valuable, strong. You had friends with the same purpose. And that was almost as intoxicating as being in the In-Between itself.

You sink to the floor and rub your eyes. Pecan licks your snotty nose. You didn’t hear him trot out from the bedroom. He rests his big, dopey head on your knees, his expressive eyes fixed on you and concerned.

“Why can’t I just walk away from this?” you ask him as you rub his velvety ears.

(Because you’re not that type of person, answers your voice of reason.)

You text Selene back.

YOU: When will you be here next?

You get up and go to the coat closet. From its recesses, among the piles of your late-night design sketches, you pull out an old denim jacket with a pin of a burning house on it. A twin emblem to the one Selene wore. You sling on the jacket and look in the mirror. It still fits and you smile at the bitter irony.

Something moves behind you. You turn. There, standing barefoot, wearing only pajama pants, is Thom. His expression’s devastating as you stand there in your old jacket, just like the day you met.

There’s that question in his eyes.

You don’t have an answer for him.

You meet Selene in no-man’s-land, almost exactly between the first place you found her and the second. She’s sitting on one of the wide flat boulders when you park your pickup and step out with a thick folder under one arm and the old denim jacket over the other.

“Ready?” she asks. She’s grinning. It makes her look so young.

Before you can answer, the air pressure drops and suddenly there’s a rift in the world before you. It shows the manor in the Spring Quarter, your home with all the other In-Betweeners. Beautiful and grand as always. Even with the scent of burning things in the air.

“Shit, another fire,” she says and starts rushing toward the rift. But you catch her by the shoulder.

She turns, confused, and it takes you a minute to swallow back the memory: the panic, the sound and feeling of stones crumbling and trapping your leg under them. The look of horror from Elise when she realized this was not a clean break. Nothing that followed was a clean break either.

“Here,” you say, handing her the folder. All the designs for the In-Between that have been haunting you for years. “Drawings and instructions on how to build a better retaining wall. And a few other improvements too.” You nod at the rift.  “I’ve learned some things since my days over there.”

“But you’re coming, right?” Selene asks. There’s desperation in her voice. Now, ash is blowing through the rift in thick gusts.

You take a half step back, though the strings to the In-Between are tight and strong. “I’ll help as much as I can,” you say.

“I can’t do this alone!”

You take her hands in yours and, God, you’re tearing up again. “You won’t be,” you say.

Afterwards, you go back to the Pit Stop. It’s an hour drive and you think about Selene the entire time. You hope she’ll be okay, that she doesn’t lose too much. Of the In-Between or herself. But she isn’t you. You aren’t her.

You arrive at 11 a.m. on a workday and you reek of ash. You take your normal seat at the counter.

“And what can I get you?” Thom asks, with some hesitation. The question in his eyes is still there. Which is fair. Because up to an hour ago, you didn’t know what you would choose. You were a lonely kid once, a lost teen. You still feel the pull. But you are no longer desolate. You have another world to tend to now.

“Cappuccino. Make it a large,” you say. “I’ll be here for a while.”

“Between Home and a House on Fire” copyright © 2024 by A. T. Greenblatt
Art copyright © 2024 by Dave Palumbo

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Kelly’s friends were all getting a little sick of Kelly, even before the doppelganger showed up. And sure, it probably wants to kill her; they’re just trying to decide if that’s worse…or better.

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Kelly was twenty minutes late, which was usual for her by now.

“Sorry!” she said, with a smile that was mostly teeth. “It was hilarious—turns out that the leak from my kitchen they said they fixed had just moved across the ceiling to my closet and I didn’t know for two months, so my stuff all molded. I had to buy a new coat on my way. Isn’t that like the most Me thing you’ve ever heard?”

It was pouring. Marshall had bailed at eleven minutes and Kyle had gone with him, so Diana was inside pleading to change the reservation. Kelly, carefully staying out of Diana’s sight, nudged under the awning with Erin and me.

“It’s cute, though, right?” Kelly said. “I mean like, I got a cute coat and a story out of it, at least. It’s kind of funny, right? Like, it will be fine.”

“It’s already wet,” I said. “Why didn’t you buy an umbrella?”

“It’ll get rained on at home anyway,” Kelly said.

She looked over her shoulder; in the middle of the sidewalk, standing in the rain that dissolved right before it touched her, Other Kelly watched the traffic.

“—and then Carver said he couldn’t come because he was at an intensive dog-training course Thursday and Friday, but he volunteered me because ‘he believes in team responsibility,’ so I spent two fucking days in a sexual harassment seminar taking notes like Carver can even read, and now I’m behind on my actual work, so I have to go to the office after this.” Kelly stabbed her waffle.

“When are you going to leave?” Diana said. “Like, he’s a dick, we get it. You know the deal.”

“But it took me a year to even find it,” Kelly said. “I have prescriptions. What am I supposed to do?”

“Date doctors,” Erin said.

“Hey,” said Kyle, who had been doing that for the last four years as he tried to get his music career going.

Other Kelly was staring at a couple outside who were well into a breakup. (She would stare at anything. She should be staring at Kelly—why else was she here?—but she hardly ever did.) Her place setting was empty. She didn’t eat, or sleep, or talk. She just showed up anywhere we had invited Kelly.

“I just can’t keep going like this,” Kelly said, wobbly, pushing a piece of bacon around her plate, the fork shrieking a little when she pressed too hard.

Other Kelly looked over, almost, at the sound of the fork—Kelly looked up, like she was waiting, like she knew Other Kelly was about to say something—but then the woman outside was shouting “You’re fucking kidding me,” so loud it echoed off the glass condos on either side of the street, and then burst into tears, and we ended up watching that for so long that I was at home and sorting through twenty emails I’d missed before I wondered what the hell Kelly had been hoping to hear.

By the time Kelly told us, her downward slide didn’t feel like a dramatic change in direction anymore, just a slowly permanent state; I’d waited a while for her to hit bottom, but even before Other Kelly showed up I realized it was all just falling. When she sat down and told us with a straight face that she’d seen herself passing her in the street, we all looked at each other, hoping this was the floor.

“Does your carbon monoxide detector have batteries in it?” asked Erin.

“Don’t fucking talk down to me. I’ve seen her. I saw her every day this week.”

“I’m not talking down to you,” said Erin, who absolutely was. She was a counselor at one of the high schools where rich people sent their kids to do drugs in peace. She didn’t know any other way to talk.

“Is she following you?” I asked.

“Not quite. She’s always where I am, but not like she’s waiting for me. Like somebody dropped her out of a plane right there and she’s heading back to where she came from. We just keep…passing.”

Kyle sat up—he’d suggested leaving Kelly out of this dinner, but he was clearly repenting now—but Diana beat him to it. “How did you notice her?”

“Because she’s my fucking double, Diana. You notice stuff.”          

Diana made half a face before Erin kicked her under the table to stop Diana saying whatever she thought about Kelly’s powers of observation. (Diana had come into the group by way of Marshall and Erin. Kelly was a lot unless you had decided to be her friend beforehand. Diana had not.)

Marshall frowned, looking halfway to actually concerned. “So this woman is, like, copying you and stalking you?”

God, why would she bother, I thought before I could stop it, and hoped it hadn’t showed on my face.

“She is me,” Kelly snapped. “She’s not copying. She is me.”

“Yes,” Kyle said under his breath, already typing into his phone. He kept his keyboard noises on; everything he typed always sounded eighty letters long.

“Kelly,” Erin started, and I shook my head at her, because the way Erin said Kelly’s name before she asked how therapy was going was enough to piss off a much more patient person than Kelly was.

“There are a lot of people in this city,” I said instead. “This can’t be the first time somebody’s seen someone who looks exactly like them.”

“Correct,” said Kyle, turning so that everyone could see the website in his hand. “I knew I’d seen this—look, it happens all the time! God, imagine meeting your double and he’s also in coach. Like you have a cosmic twin that you actually managed to cross paths with, out of eight billion people in the whole world, and neither of you can get your shit together enough for business class.” He started typing again. “Oh my god they were both going to Disney. Oh, this is sad.”

“Yeah,” said Kelly. “It’s them we’re sad about.”

“Next time stop her. See what the deal is,” Erin said. “She’s got to be curious, too.”

Other Kelly wasn’t curious about much of anything, as it turned out, but even there, she and Kelly were alike.

Not exactly, though. That was the thing.

I mean, you knew who she looked like—she was Kelly, nobody doubted it, the first time she’d ever showed up Marshall had said “Oh shit” under his breath and Erin had edged halfway off her bar stool. She was wearing something I recognized of Kelly’s, before Kelly had started forgetting her clothes in the laundry room and putting them in the dryer on high to kill whatever happens to wet clothes in a washer overnight. Now everything Kelly wore pulled a little, everywhere. (Other Kelly’s clothes fit her. Other Kelly’s clothes were always clean.)

When you looked right at Other Kelly, of course, something was missing. The lights were off, somehow; an empty house. But it didn’t matter. No waitress or security guard or taxi driver ever glanced at Other Kelly with concern.

I avoided looking at Other Kelly for very long, but I didn’t look at Kelly for very long anymore, either. What was the point? You knew somebody or you didn’t. You could do something or you couldn’t. Other Kelly wasn’t Kelly, and I could always tell; anything else was Other Kelly’s business.

Kyle was the one who got really obsessed, at first—not even when Other Kelly was there, just random moments where Marshall and I would be getting McDonald’s with Kyle at four a.m. and he’d look up from his fries like a meerkat and say “Fuck, I bet it’s killed Kelly already” and start typing so loud nobody could even talk until he was finished. He had a phone full of photos of people posing with their doubles.        

“Those doubles are people, asshole,” said Marshall once, a warning to shut up about it, but if Kyle was smart enough to take a warning he’d have stopped being a musician already, and he said, “How would you know—they show up on camera, doesn’t mean they’re a person,” and kept typing until Kelly texted back.

Marshall rolled his eyes, but it was true. In the group photo at New Year’s, Other Kelly was there, in the same thing Kelly was wearing (it fit her better), looking right into the lens. She wasn’t smiling, but still she seemed perfectly normal until you saw Kelly with her arm outstretched to take the picture, dress pulling at her shoulders, grinning like her skull was about to make a run for it, and realized that one of them was very wrong.

(Eventually Kyle stopped texting Kelly. She was never dead. It was fine.)

I couldn’t remember how long Kelly and I had been friends, which made me feel sort of responsible for her whenever she was going off the rails in front of everyone, even though I was not responsible for her, which I reminded myself about a lot. I’d still tried—“When she first started at that stupid company she had some real talent,” I’d told Diana once, when Diana wasn’t sucked in yet and I was trying to make a case for us as people worth spending time with, and Erin had said “Jesus Christ” and stared like I’d spat on a grave and said, “Kelly’s a drag but she’s the friend who shows up when you’re in the hospital,” and Marshall added quietly “And at no other time,” and that wasn’t true, obviously, we’d all had dinner two weeks before, but for a long strange second it really had felt like I hadn’t seen Kelly in years.

But if Kelly had gone off the rails enough to accidentally summon Other Kelly, there was nothing I could have done about it. I asked her to museums with me for a year and a half before I gave up (she didn’t even say no, just wouldn’t answer when I asked, until I’d end up going anyway and sending a picture of some miserable painting from whatever room I was in; she’d write back lol same sorry i couldn’t make it!! instantly), and Kelly never asked anyone to meet her anymore, so I’d given up even waiting for that.

She hadn’t been surprised when Other Kelly showed up. She’d treated Other Kelly the way she treated tax season.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Other Kelly, though. It wasn’t the kind of thing you told your friend who already hated her job whose clothes kept getting jacked up in the dryer, but Kelly already looked like half the girls in the new condos—every time one of them was walking a dog I had a half second of wanting to call after her, horrified Kelly thought she could handle a puppy. Other Kelly looked exactly like Kelly, but so did all those girls. It wasn’t bone structure we were all scared of. Whatever you saw when you recognized Kelly was something deeper, some essential quality that only Kelly had, and I couldn’t stop trying to guess what it was.

Had been, I guess. She shared it with Other Kelly now.

“They are literally the same person,” Marshall said when I brought it up, not quite like he’d sounded with Kyle, but close. He was hanging around after we were finished, and some not-Kelly had come out the door with a French bulldog while I smoked out my kitchen window, and I knew better—we weren’t supposed to talk about Other Kelly—but it had slipped out before I could stop myself.

“But you know what I’m saying. Remember that time you started making fun of that girl’s purse on the train because you thought Kelly had finally given in to pink and it wasn’t Kelly?”

He flinched, and after a second he flinched again, different. “That’s a regular mistake, though. I wouldn’t do that with—I mean, I’d never just start talking to—if I. If I saw.” He gnawed on his tongue a second, like he could massage the right word out, but it never came. Nobody had ever invoked Other Kelly out loud. We knew better.

“But,” I said. I stopped—I couldn’t talk about her, either—but I wanted to say, The eyes are different, even though they shouldn’t be. Something about the mouth is so different. Why does Kelly look older than Other Kelly? What’s wrong with whichever one of them is more wrong?

“I keep thinking about it,” I said. “All Kyle’s photos. Somebody just like you, and you never knowing.”

“Not you,” he said. “You look like somebody about to get shot to death in a Renaissance painting.”

He was trying to insult me; it was the most romantic thing I’d ever heard.

Other Kelly had an ASMR channel. None of the others had seen it, but I couldn’t sleep nights. She sat at a table close to the camera, so you only saw her to the neck, her long brown hair swinging a little as she moved; she held silver rings at the very tips of her fingers—fingers that were slightly longer than Kelly’s, no one could say those hands were the same—and tapped the covers of hardback books. It was doing pretty well.

Kelly called an emergency meeting the day Carver made her fax some legal thing without looking at it. It was already after nine when she got out of work (lol fucking kill me she wrote, underneath the last three lol fucking kill mes). By the time she made it to my place we’d eaten the takeout, and all I had was cereal. She ate three bowls without stopping, her gaze shaken loose from anything actually happening. Probably still back in the office; she told me once that she kept a Swingline on her desk for whenever she finally snapped, and imagining his skull busting open was the only way she could keep coming to work.

She started talking during bowl four. “It’s not that I don’t trust you, he said, it’s that this is really important, and we don’t want anyone to be able to complain about your performance. It was his divorce papers. He turned out the light in the room so I couldn’t see it. He took my phone back to his desk, too. He took my fucking phone!”

She dropped onto my futon, which I’d bought as small and uncomfortable as possible so nobody would sleep over at my place, which everyone respected but Kelly.

Diana was perched on the other side, at the very edge where none of the metal bars could dig into your back. I was in my wobbly desk chair, and Erin was sitting on my desk so she wouldn’t have to sit on my futon. Marshall and Kyle had been omitted, because when Kelly was going to cry she didn’t like men to look at her. Other Kelly stood by my bookcase, where she might have been looking over my books, if she could read.

(She couldn’t—Kyle had checked. She just liked to look at them. She’d stare at anything, except Kelly.)

Kelly dragged her skin outward under the heels of her hands, like she could pull it tight enough to hold back tears. “Honestly, fuck my job. The insurance won’t help when the ulcers eat me, I might as well bail. Everest would be less demanding. At least up there if you collapse everybody just leaves you to die in private like normal people.”

Diana set down her drink, a little sound that always marked something shitty about to come out of her mouth, and said, “You’re right. Go.”

“We’d miss you,” said Erin, almost like she meant it.

Kelly looked around like she’d actually been expecting a better response. Then she looked at Other Kelly.

Erin and Diana pretended not to notice, but I couldn’t help it and I looked over, too. Other Kelly had given up on my books and had wandered to my window. Two pigeons were fighting over something on the sidewalk outside.

Kelly watched Other Kelly, waiting, picking absently at her cuticles. The silence held a long time. Eventually Kelly shoved her bowl of cereal across the table, toward Other Kelly, slow and deliberate enough that nothing spilled.

“Come on,” she said. “You must be hungry.”

Other Kelly never moved. At some point Kelly started crying. Erin pulled up the car service she used that was so exclusive I’d never heard of it, face lit up bright green for a second as it loaded. Outside, the pigeons were still fighting, a battery of wings.

I had seen myself, once. I’d gone to the Met on a free Friday because I was trying to meet people who weren’t the people I already knew. I didn’t—I was bad at meeting people, it’s how I’d ended up with the people I already knew, Kelly had pulled people toward us until we were all locked in orbit and I had absolutely no idea how you started that all over again from scratch—and it was so embarrassing to be there alone that after a while I’d just kept turning into whatever gallery was empty. In a small room of lesser works nobody was interested in, there was a big painting of some peasant-y kitchen full of light and people. I was sitting on a stool off to one side, peeling potatoes.

It was an old enough painting that the other me had probably died of something disgusting and preventable right after posing for this, so I tried not to get romantic about it, but in the painting I seemed like I knew what I was doing; I had something in my hands, and I understood what was being asked of me.

I wondered if the woman next to me, who was pulling feathers off a duck, had ever met herself here. If someday I would meet that woman—if she was still alive, if she was somehow here. If she’d even recognize me when she saw me, when this potato peeler was all she had to go on; for someone who had my face, she didn’t look like me at all.

“It’s supposed to show up ahead of me.”

Everybody shows up before you do, I thought, before I realized what Kelly was talking about.

Diana had gotten dumped eight months ago—Jason, who broke up with her when her mom was sick, saying she’d gotten really selfish. I don’t know how long they’d have stayed together if she hadn’t been in Connecticut and unable to give up whatever she was doing all the time to go deal with Jason. Diana never spoke about him again, except once when we were walking past some bubble tea place and she’d said “God, this was a deli when Jason—” before she could stop herself, and we’d all frozen up so bad that the people behind us crashed into us. We didn’t say anything else for a full minute, like we were waiting for him to show up. It had torn up the sidewalk under us, to hear the name.

There was no reason to be surprised that Kelly was talking about Other Kelly, but it startled me the same way; I banged my knee against the coffee table and looked around to see if Other Kelly was close enough to hear. She wasn’t—when I got eyes on her she was out on the street staring into a sewer grate—but it was a fucking stroke of luck. She should have been close enough to hear us.

If Kelly had noticed, she didn’t mention it. She was thinking hard. Her bed was too tall, and with her legs tucked up she looked like a kid afraid of what was under there. (The overflowing boxes of musty sweaters and shrunk skirts she had instead of a dresser, the folding chair she kept for guests and never needed.) All her framed art had magazine pages taped over it; she had a succulent in the window, alive, the tag still on.

“The whole point is that they want to replace you. That’s the only thing they want.” She ran her necklace back and forth under one fingernail, her mouth pulled into a single line. When she saw my expression the line got thinner. “What? You think I’m not paying attention? I can read, okay? I can like, prepare.”

She sounded more upset at me than at Other Kelly who had showed up to kill her.

“Okay,” I said. “I believe you. What happens when—when you’re…not with us? What does it feel like?”

Kelly glanced at the window. (I thought, At least Kelly isn’t alone all the time, and then stopped myself. It didn’t count, probably.)

“When my coat molded over the winter,” she said, “I bought that other one. I hung it up in the same place. It’s molded. But the landlord didn’t fix the first leak and he won’t fix this one either, and it’s not like I can move out, and it’s not like another closet will appear, and it’s…I don’t have any other place. If I buy another coat, it will be the same thing. But eventually it doesn’t matter about the leak or the mold, because where else am I supposed to put my coat? At some point you just run out of places. It feels like that.”

After a long time, I said, “What happens to—the person?”

“Consumed,” Kelly said. “Like, the person disappears, not like, cannibals.”

I tried to imagine Other Kelly consuming anything. When she chewed on Kelly’s bones it would sound just like silver rings against a hardback book.

“So what do we do?”

Kelly shrugged; she’d gotten lipstick on her teeth, and I thought vaguely that Other Kelly wouldn’t do that. Eventually the necklace gave way, but she kept her hand where it was, pressed to her sternum, the chain spilling down over her fingers.

“Ask nicely,” she said.

Game night was at Marshall’s, and when I got there Diana and Kyle were setting up some new game Kyle had brought from the game night he had with his other set of friends, who he’d never introduced us to because he said we wouldn’t like them—they were too serious, apparently, and he wanted our game nights to be more fun (“This one’s really fun,” he said every fucking month, like he’d ever been right). Other Kelly was in the kitchen toasting something while Marshall finished his cheese plate.

“I brought wine,” I announced, toeing off my shoes. We’d dropped most of the actual greetings a while ago. No plural seemed to work anymore since Other Kelly.

“Kyle is setting up Round Table,” Marshall said, one tick too pleasantly. “It’s an Arthurian board game with cards. You go on quests.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“I reminded him that Erin hates card games and you hate quests, but Kyle was not to be deterred,” Marshall informed me as he slammed the last handful of cucumber slices on the board and scooped the whole thing up to bring it into the living room. Other Kelly moved an inch forward to let him pass by, though she never looked up from the toaster; when the toast popped up, she pushed the lever again.

“This one’s really fun!” Kyle called.

“Erin doesn’t have fun, Erin wins or she quits,” Diana said, putting the last little pewter knight into the cluster at the center of the board. “Remember when she lost that game of KeyCypher last year?”

“Well, Erin has issues,” Kyle said, after visibly discarding his first reaction, which was that if anyone lost a puzzle game to me they should be ashamed of themselves. Everybody had pointedly joked about it for three weeks after that game night, any time any of us met up, that Erin the salutatorian had lost a puzzle game to me. Eventually Erin pulled me aside and said, “I’m not going to come back unless they can shut up about it,” which was at least half for my sake, and that was about as considerate as Erin could be about anything. By the time she finally showed up again it was autumn, and everyone was so worried she’d ditched us all forever that nobody brought it up anymore.

Somebody buzzed the apartment. It was probably Erin. Kelly was going to be late (sorry!! should i bring coffee? definitely start without me); she hated game night as much as any of us, but she didn’t want to risk getting cut out, so she showed up too late to play and got weirdly supportive off to one side of the couch.

I didn’t want to be in the living room with Erin, in case Kyle tried to be funny again and also a little bit just because of Erin, so I moved out of sight into the kitchen. The thing that had been a slice of bread about seven toasts ago popped back up. It was nearly charcoal. Other Kelly pushed it back down.

“I brought doughnuts,” said Erin as she beelined down the hall. Everybody in the living room immediately began parceling out who was going to get the fun flavors.

“I won KeyCypher because I figured out one of the symbols was for a space between words,” I said. “Everybody else forgot about separation.”

Other Kelly looked up from the toaster. I wasn’t really looking at her (how could you), but I was talking to her. There was nobody else to talk to.

“That’s hazelnut, put it down,” said Marshall, “we roll for it. Diana, the dice.”

“You can buy doughnuts yourself with money whenever you’d like,” said Erin.

The toast came back up. It was fully a cinder.

“Four, fuck,” said Marshall, “okay wait, stop—Kyle, stop it—we’re doing best two out of three.”

Other Kelly’s finger hovered over the lever for a second before pushing. The two of us watched the cinder fall apart.

I was supposed to meet Kelly for coffee, and even though I was twenty minutes late Kelly was still texting left the house I promise and hang on my laces broke be there asap. Eventually I made a slow loop of the park to let Other Kelly stare at stuff. She liked water a lot. Trees. Shadows.

“Hey, Kelly,” called Carver.

Kelly had made me be her date to her office holiday party, the first time; she’d still thought there was a future for her, and she introduced me to people as if she’d be talking about them a lot as soon as she got promoted. That was so long ago that she’d still looked like Other Kelly, no eye bags and all her cuticles still in one piece. Carver looked exactly the same, except now he was in an outfit where everything he was wearing was a slightly different shade of black with a different logo on it, walking a dog.

“Kelly, wow,” said Carver, mostly to his phone, and partly to the dog that was struggling to get at a cigarette butt. “Small town, huh? You know, our deadline hasn’t changed just because it’s the weekend. Are you on your way in?”

Other Kelly stared. I thought about a mouth full of metal teeth ripping Carver right off the bone. What was all this for, if not to make everybody who knew Kelly fear for their lives?

He said, “I mean, you don’t have to, but it’s really not fair to the team when you get overwhelmed. Nobody wants to make you work on a weekend, but, you know?”

She blinked at him. He gave her a tight smile, waved with the dog-leash hand (the puppy choked), said, “Okay great, thanks,” and left.

Other Kelly and I looked at each other. It was too long, immediately, but then I was stuck staring, waiting for Other Kelly to ask the question I knew, all at once, she wanted to ask.

Then the wind shook the trees, and whatever I had been staring at was gone; she was already in the little grove, shadows dappling her hair as she stared down where her body blocked out the light.

I ended up meeting Kelly at the coffee place alone; Other Kelly hadn’t followed me, and I didn’t know how to call out for her.

I explained what had happened. She took too long to realize Other Kelly hadn’t done anything to Carver, and hadn’t gone wherever Kelly was supposed to go now, and hadn’t even come here to get stared at. Then her head dropped forward. Her hands, short-fingered, pulled the skin taut over her face. Her whole body was fraying at the edges.

“It’s not fair,” she said. “I’m so ready. How fucking long do I have to hold on?”

“She’ll be here soon,” I said.  

I believed it, too. I believed it for a long time. I sat there even after Kelly had given up and left for work; for nearly an hour I sat in a stool at the window of the coffee shop, waiting for Other Kelly to find one of us or the other, wishing for something to do with my hands.

Game night was KeyCypher (“I’m sorry, I forgot,” snapped Kyle from the living room, as Erin said “Don’t use that tone with me, I’m not the one who made it an issue” and Diana cut in with “I would honestly rather play Go Fish than get into this again”), and Marshall had invented some missing thing from the cheese board just so he’d have a reason to walk half a mile to the new fancy grocery store in the lobby of the new block of glass condos and avoid all of us for forty minutes.

Kelly was late (no texts), and honestly it was just as well. Other Kelly hadn’t come. There was nothing for her here.

I was in the kitchen. With the lights off it was dark and quiet. I pushed the toast back down. It wasn’t a cinder yet, but it would be soon.

“Other Kelly” copyright © 2024 by Genevieve Valentine
Art copyright © 2024 by Mary Pelc

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Misunderstanding threatens a commune whose survival is dependent on precise communication with another species…

“They don’t want to talk, Vega.”

Vega readjusted the waterproof screen hooked to their sonar. The pod was still circling below, graceful black-and-white behemoths rendered as drifting pixels. The babeltech transmitter was still functional, squealing a standard Patagonian greeting into the dark waves. But just like yesterday, and all the days prior, not a single orca spoke back.

“Come on,” Miguel pleaded. “It’s cold. It’s been hours.” Her younger brother, small and skinny for seventeen, was huddled in the back of the boat, shivering despite his puffy orange coat. “Let’s go home.”

“You were the one who wanted to come along,” Vega said, checking the transmitter settings. “Maybe there’s been a dialectal shift. Maybe they don’t like this pitch anymore.”

“Maybe they already know what we want from them,” Miguel said, face stiff as the wooden masks he’d been carving lately. “And know they don’t want to give it to us. Because they’re nonhuman apex predators who don’t give a shit whether we starve or not.”

The words triggered a familiar dread, the one that had been seeping slowly through Vega’s stomach wall for the past two weeks. She said nothing.

“Could be for the best, now that Mom’s dead,” her brother muttered. “Could be the commune was never built to last without her.”

In all of a split second, Vega’s dread oxidized to burning anger. “Don’t say that,” she snapped. “Don’t ever say that. We’re still here, and once we have the plankton farm running, we’ll be just fine, so don’t you ever talk about—about giving up. It’s fucking cowardly.”

Miguel flinched with his whole body, ears flushing scarlet, and Vega could feel her own face heating up to match.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“I didn’t say anything about giving up,” Miguel muttered, with a bruised catch in his voice.

“I’m sorry,” Vega repeated, wishing she could reel it all back. “I just—”

The sonar chimed, and her next words caught in her throat as an enormous snout exploded out of the stormy gray water. The spyhopping orca was female, gigantic, her black hide scarred from years of hunting. The matriarch had finally come to open negotiations. Vega glanced at her brother, whose dark eyes were winched wide, then she pulled up the babeltech input with a trembling finger.

“Greetings to the matriarch,” she said. “I am named Vega.” She paused, tried to remember the grammatical guidelines that best let the tech do its work. “The other human is my brother. My brother is named Miguel. We come from the Punta Norte commune.”

The transmitter clicked and squealed. Just under the white slash of the orca’s patch, her glossy brown eye narrowed. Vega tried to avoid anthropomorphization, to read it only as visual focusing and not a signal of suspicion.

“The Punta Norte commune is struggling to feed itself,” she continued. “We seek your permission to begin harvesting plankton here in your waters.”

The matriarch’s jaw slivered open, revealing rows of conical teeth.

“There will be submerged construction,” Vega said. “But only for a brief period. And once it’s complete, your pod will be welcome to—”

“Away.”

The single synthesized word bleated from the receiver. Before Vega could seek clarification, the matriarch plunged back beneath the waves, leaving a whirlpool gurgling in her wake, and before the boat could stop rocking, the entire pod had turned east and swum off.

Vega stared after them in utter despair. Today would end just like yesterday.

“We can talk, if you want,” Miguel said quietly, still looking out across the ocean. “About Mom. We haven’t really done that yet.”

Vega turned to him, feeling a familiar numbness. She knew they should talk, knew it was something her brother needed even if she didn’t. But she was cold and aching and hollowed out by successive failures.

“We will,” she promised. “Just not right now. Let’s get home and get warm first.”

---

But Vega couldn’t stay within the bounds of the commune for long, not when every person she came across had the same question, in words or a look: Any luck? Any luck today? Even worse than the worried faces were the trusting ones, though the past weeks had eroded that population.

And everywhere she looked, she still saw Mom. Lounging on the stoop of a neighbor’s biobrick house, or elbow-deep in the main solar generator, or squatting to inspect whatever had shown up in the wild, tangled gardens—back before the blight wiped them out.

Mom had been the beating heart of this place and its nervous system at the same time, and Vega didn’t know how to be either. So instead of telling people No luck today, or sitting down to open wounds with Miguel, she slipped away, back to the beach.

She hauled the transmitter with her, ostensibly to recalibrate it, but it was only camouflage. Her real goal was to be alone and miserable by the water. She clambered across sea-slimed rock to her usual perch, a broad stone with a shallow indent. Then she unspooled the receiver and lowered it into the water—carefully, because it was valuable. Sat down right in a cold puddle, because she was not.

When Vega had been younger, she and Miguel and their mom sometimes watched the orcas from this stretch of shore, competing to spot dorsal fins slicing the waves. The pod had seemed beautiful, alien, dangerous. Something to admire from—and keep at—a respectful distance.

That wasn’t an option anymore. There could be no legal plankton farming without the orcas’ say-so, and the company loaning Punta Norte the equipment had given them a hard deadline to produce proof of agreement. Vega shut her eyes and pushed the heels of her hands against them, blacking out the world and all the problems therein, the biggest of them being the fact that the deadline was now less than forty-eight hours away.

“You are named Vega.”

The synthesized voice jolted her eyes open. She stared down at the transmitter in shock, then scrambled for the input. The pod had returned, and now someone was in the shallows, close enough that she could pick up their clicks.

“Yes,” she blurted. “Yes, I am named Vega.”

“I am named Breathe-For-Us,” the voice said. “Circle in place, Vega. I will come to you.”

For a giddy moment, Vega thought she was being ordered to get up and pirouette—and nearly did it, too. But it made sense that the orcas had no term for sitting still on a rock. She re-checked the transmitter settings, then hugged the babeltech to her chest and watched the frothing waves for dorsal fins.

There: gray, lopsided, carving through dark water. It wasn’t the matriarch. This orca had a more angular eyespot, less scarring. Vega felt her hopes dim slightly, but she was unwilling to extinguish them completely as another clicking burst of speech hit the receiver.

“Why are you named Vega?” the babeltech intoned.

Vega blinked. “It’s the name of a star, up in one of the northern constellations,” she said. “My mother named me after that star.”

The orca’s dorsal fin rose skyward like a pointing finger. “We do not know star names,” came the synthesized voice. “They are too far to hear.”

“For us, too,” Vega said. “We invent the names.” She gripped the input more tightly. “And you? Why are you named Breathe-For-Us?”

The orca was close now, swimming perilously near to the rocks. A female, but not quite as old or as massive as the matriarch. “Breathe-For-Us is the name given when a calf fears their first breath of air,” the babeltech bleated. “When the calf fears to breach. My mother sang it to me, and the pod sang with her, and it became my name.”

“That’s amazing,” Vega said, and meant it. “I’m glad you breathed. Glad you survived.” Her heart thrummed hopefully in her chest. “I’m glad you and I can speak now, because the matriarch—”

“Do you know why she ignores you, Vega?” Breathe-For-Us interrupted.

Vega’s face grew hot, and she felt her shoulders slump of their own accord. “No,” she said. “Tell me. Please.”

“You speak to us as if we were salmon-gluttons,” the orca said. “We are unamused.”

Vega knew the pejorative referred to the resident pods up near Old Vancouver, for whom the Patagonian orcas held little love. But she also knew that her babeltech was tuned specifically, painstakingly, to the local dialect, and was about to defend herself when Breathe-For-Us asked a second question.

“Do you know our way-of-hunt?”

Vega bit at the inside of her cheek. Orca hunting methods were almost as varied as human ones, but there was a particular behavior found only here. “Stranding,” she guessed, as the orca drifted ever closer. “You mean stranding.”

In answer, her conversation partner burst free from the water. Spray drenched Vega’s clothes, stung her eyes; she stumbled blindly to her feet with a shout of alarm, still clutching the babeltech to her chest. She heard a sickly sound, meat and blubber smacking jagged stone, as the orca hurled herself out of the shallows and onto the rocks.

“Holy shit,” Vega said, not caring if the babeltech could interpret the curse. “Holy shit, are you all right?”

Breathe-For-Us wriggled on the shoreline, transformed in all of an instant from graceful titan to oversized larva. She bared her bright teeth, and this time Vega could hear both the chittering squeal and the babeltech’s interpretation.

“I come to your world shucked,” the orca said. “You come to ours in a shell, refusing its smallest touch.”

Vega stared, tracing the vast web of scars crisscrossing her hide, picturing for the first time the hundreds of strandings that had created them. Then the tide surged back, and with a perfectly timed thrust of her tail, Breathe-For-Us rolled herself from rock to water. She drifted there in the shallows for a moment, belly scraping stone, the whole of her body heaving from the effort.

“We are unamused,” she repeated, and swam away.

---

Vega returned to the commune at a shambling run, desperate to share her news, equally desperate to not slip and fall and smash the precious babeltech to pieces. She’d seen stranding before, if never up close. So had Mom, so had Miguel, so had any other Punta Norte inhabitants who took time to orca-watch. It was the hunting technique the Patagonians were famous for, one of the earliest proofs of nonhuman cultural transmission.

In order to prey on sunbathing seals, local orcas left the safety of the water entirely. They would throw their bodies onto the rocky shoreline, snag a fur seal in their jaws, then combine precise timing with brute strength to return to the waves before their bulk made the stranding a permanent one. Older orcas could be seen teaching the method to younger ones, practicing on chunks of driftwood, knots of seaweed.

But it was more than just a way-of-hunt. Vega saw that now, and the instant she saw her younger brother, slumped on the steps of their biobrick hut with his carving knife in hand, she knew what she needed to do.

“One talked,” she blurted. “While I was at the beach, an orca came to talk, came right up to me, and told me why the pod’s ignoring us.”

Miguel snapped to attention, dark eyes blinking hard. “And?”

“Because they think they’re real tough customers,” Vega said. “And they only talk to other tough customers. You know stranding?” She freed one hand and made it into an orca, thrashed it onto an imaginary shoreline. “Breathe-For-Us—that’s the one who came to talk—she did it right in front of me. Said she comes to our world naked.”

“They’re always naked,” Miguel said, frowning. “Why do they even have a concept for naked?”

“The translation was ‘shucked,’” Vega said, hefting the equipment in her arms. “But it’s not important. What’s important is that I do the same thing, but in reverse.” She envisioned it properly for the first time, and couldn’t quite suppress her shudder. “I have to get in the water with them. No shell. Meaning: no boat.”

Miguel’s eyes widened. “Vega. No.”

“People used to do it,” Vega said. “They used to do it all the time.”

“That was before the orcas enacted their . . .” Miguel waved his arm, coaxing the term from memory. “Retaliation Doctrine,” he finished. “Before they started ramming boats and dismembering kayakers.”

“And the Retaliation Doctrine was pre-babeltech,” Vega argued. “It was their only way of telling us to stop fucking with them. It’s been years now since a fatal incident.”

She regretted her choice of words the millisecond they left her lips. Fatal incident was only syllables off fatal infection. Her brother’s face spasmed, unable to hide the pain. He glared at the babeltech bundled in her arms, and Vega could see all his grief and frustration rising, ready to breach.

But when he spoke, his voice was calm. “You won’t be able to haul all that stuff around underwater.”

Vega felt a rush of relief. “No,” she agreed. “Think you can help me streamline it?” She paused. “We could strap it to Mom’s old diving gear.”

The corners of Miguel’s mouth lifted just slightly, taking the liminal space between smile and grimace. “A babelmask,” he said.

Vega nodded.

---

Every person in the commune gathered to send them off the next morning, murmuring encouragements, squeezing Vega’s shoulders. The hope had returned to their faces, and it was more frightening than ever. Vega did her best to murmur thanks back. To smile warmly. To look brave, and capable, and more like her mother.

She and Miguel shoved off into the water, angled toward the pod’s feeding grounds—for all their salmon-glutton disdain, when no seals were around the Patagonians ate plenty of fish themselves. Vega breathed deep, inhaling the briny breeze.

“Last chance,” Miguel said, because he was always verbalizing the things she didn’t want verbalized.

“Yeah,” she said.

Her brother looked out over the water, his thumb tapping the tiller. “I don’t think it’s about being a tough customer.”

She blinked. “What?”

“What you said yesterday. The stranding behavior. I don’t think it’s about being tough.” He gave a strained smile, and Vega saw a worrying wetness in his eyes. “I mean, imagine how it must feel for them.”

Vega pictured the scar tissue wrapped around Breathe-For-Us’s body. “It would hurt,” she said, running her fingers absently along her wetsuit. “A lot.”

Miguel nodded. “Physically? Big time. Mentally, even worse.” His thumb tapped quicker on the tiller. “I kept thinking about it last night. How it would feel to go from the sea—where you’re the queen, where you’re the apex predator, where even great white sharks run away from you—to bellied down on the rocks. Totally exposed, heavy all at once. Gouging yourself open on edges you can’t even see.”

Vega’s brain churned through the image, then past it, to what was coming next: her floundering in the dark water with predatory behemoths circling around her, beneath her. “Helpless,” she said, windpipe squeezing tight around the word. “They feel helpless.”

“They feel vulnerable,” Miguel said sharply. “It’s not the same thing, Vega. Because they know there’s a way to get out of it, and they know . . .” He drew a shuddery breath. “They know it’s worth doing. They share big kills, right? So for the good of the pod, that little moment of absolute terror is worth it. Feeling vulnerable is worth it.”

A small, cruel voice in the back of Vega’s mind, the one she heard so often lately, wanted to ask her brother if he was done playing psychologist. Wanted to suggest they get back to focusing on the situation at hand, on the actual stakes. Instead, she reached inside herself for that particular transmitter and ripped it out by the wires.

“The first time Mom got sick, back when we were kids,” Vega began. “I thought I would be able to handle her dying.” Saying it aloud made Vega queasy with shame, made Miguel flinch, but she pushed on. “I wrote up a list of all the things she did for us. All the responsibilities. And I thought—okay. I’ll be able to do those things. Or else learn them. I wanted . . .” She swallowed back the mudslide building in her throat. “I wanted to take care of you so good you’d barely notice she was gone,” she croaked. “But she got better. We got older.” Vega looked her brother in the eye. “Now all of a sudden she does die, and I realize I have no fucking clue.”

Miguel stared for a moment. Then he fell against her, letting go of the tiller to wrap both scrawny arms around her, and she hugged back hard enough to bruise. All the spaces she’d thought were hollow were brimming over now; all the numbness was boiling away. She suspected it would be back, suspected she still needed it in some way, but for now she stroked her brother’s head and sobbed herself dry.

They stayed sitting like that until their sonar chimed. Tear-blurred shapes were moving on the waterproof screen, the pod gathering. Still holding Miguel, Vega craned over the side of the boat. Massive silhouettes slid back and forth beneath the dark water. She knew one of them had to be Breathe-For-Us, waiting to see if fearful humans could learn new tricks.

Her brother gave her a final squeeze, then opened his bag and pulled out the babelmask, the thing he’d spent half the night sculpting and soldering. The receiver now looped into a pair of waterproofed earbuds; the stripped-down transmitter sat across the front of the oxygen intake like a toothy grin. There was a tiny star etched into the bridge of the goggles.

“Like it?” Miguel asked.

“It’s beautiful,” Vega said, and realized it also looked kind of alien, kind of dangerous, which meant it was perfect for the job at hand.

“Thanks.” Miguel paused. “Whether this works or not, whether the commune stays or breaks up—she’d be glad you tried. And she’d want you and me to be happy anyway.”

Vega inhaled. Nodded. Then she slipped the babelmask over her head and let Miguel fasten it to the neck of her wetsuit. Fear was rising from the pit of her stomach in slow, trembly bubbles; walking to the edge of the boat felt like walking to the edge of a cliff. Memories of watching the pod hunt came to her unbidden: the sudden strike, the billowing red cloud, the moment a thrashing animal became drifting meat. It made her heart thump harder.

Maybe what she’d taken for advice had been meant as a final dismissal, a veiled threat. Maybe Breathe-For-Us was still young enough for cruel games, luring a particularly annoying human into the water to be tossed from maw to maw like a rag doll and finally drowned.

“Wish me luck,” Vega said, the words accompanied in stereo by a click and squeal.

“Good luck,” Miguel said quietly. “Love you, Vega.”

“Love you, Miguel,” she replied, and stepped off the boat.

Even through the wetsuit, the icy water hit her bones. When it closed over her head and she took her first pull of oxygen, she pictured an orca calf breaching the surface for the very first time. Then the swirling vortex of bubbles dispersed, and she saw that once-calf gliding toward her. Breathe-For-Us seemed even bigger down here, dorsal fin rising like a crooked tower.

Her skin was practically smooth compared to the scarred and pitted hide of the orca swimming behind her. The matriarch was back, and for the first time, Vega noticed her dorsal had a certain lopsidedness to it, as well. Breathe-For-Us let out a long, popping burst, and the babelmask turned it to synthesized speech in Vega’s earbuds.

“Welcome, Vega,” the orca said. “My mother has agreed to speak with you. If you are ready to speak.”

“I’m ready,” Vega said, and the words became a fluid whistle, high and true.

“Breathing Constellations” copyright © 2024 by Rich Larson
Art copyright © 2024 by Zelda Devon

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An android who knows nothing besides his work in a factory, is given one final week to explore the world before he is forced to undergo mandatory reprogramming, in this bittersweet precursor to TJ Klune’s In the Lives of Puppets, now available in trade paperback!

This story debuted in the trade paperback edition of TJ Klune’s In the Lives of Puppets, published by Tor Books in March 2024.

A Top Ten Finalist for the 2025 Locus Award for Best Novelette!

A Finalist for the 2025 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award!

---

The factory is loud. It always is. The shriek of metal, the never-ending cascade of sparks. Locking one piece into another. Waiting for the telltale beep of a working connection. 

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. But today is different. Today is a special day.

When the Klaxon blares, signaling the end of the shift, the workers on the factory floor stop what they’re doing. It’s an hour earlier than their usual sign-off. Everyone is excited, though no one speaks.

They look to the men above them, standing on high metal platforms, their faces hidden in shadow. One steps forward. He wears a suit; it is black. He nods, a quick jerk of his head.

The factory workers raise their hands above their heads silently.

The Supervisor steps out of the shadows on the factory floor. Everyone looks at him. He is a good man, a hardworking man. Fair. Kind, though he doesn’t need to be. He takes his job seriously, and because of him, output has been up across the board.

The workers lower their hands as the Supervisor makes his way across the factory floor. He smiles, nods, but does not stop to chat. His big hands are covered in oil, nails bitten to the quick. A habit, he calls it. A bad habit. But not bad enough for him to quit. It could be worse, he sometimes says.

But today isn’t about habits or routine. Today is different, today is anticipated, today is now, and as the Supervisor reaches his destination, he pauses, looks at the figure across from him, and says, “Hello.”

“Hello, boss,” comes the reply, soft, clear. He has said this many thousands of times, and it never fails to make him feel warm.

“Douglas—” And then he stops, looks up at the men above them, the men who are always watching. The men who are always whispering. His forehead grows cavernous lines. He says, “P-23. Will you come with me?”

“Yes,” Douglas says, because of course he will, and also because the Supervisor called him Douglas.

He follows the Supervisor down a long hallway. On the walls, colorful signs in a cheery font extol the virtues of the factory. A cartoon clock with a real face and real hands with the words make every minute count! An hourglass with sand running through it underneath the words how much time do you have left? And, of course, the mantra, the rule by which they live, the reason for everything: reduce! reuse! recycle! Below this, a smiling man in a pair of coveralls, grinning widely as he gives two thumbs-ups.

Douglas is led to an office. Inside is a desk and two chairs. On the wall, a picture of a family. Two boys. A girl. A smiling woman. And the Supervisor, hands filled with a baby. This is an older photograph; the Supervisor does not look like he used to when he was younger.

“I like them,” Douglas says.

The Supervisor nods and waves his hand at the chair before sitting in his own. “Thank you. I like them too.”

Douglas sits. He relishes it. He hasn’t sat on anything in a long time. He doesn’t need to, but if the Supervisor is inviting him to do it, he is not going to let the opportunity go to waste. He folds his hands on the desk in front of him like he’s seen others do before.

“Do you know what today is?” the Supervisor asks, riffling through loose papers on his desk.

“Yes,” Douglas says.

“Nine years, fifty-one weeks,” the Supervisor says. “We’ve been together a long time.”

“We have,” Douglas says.

The Supervisor glances at him, hesitates. Then, “You understand why?”

“Yes,” Douglas says. “It is my turn. Reduce, reuse, recycle.” The Supervisor nods slowly. “Which is why you are given this final week. There are rules to follow, Douglas. You know the rules?” “Yes.”

“If you adhere to each and every one, you’ll be fine. But if you don’t . . . well. Please don’t force my hand. I like you. Always have, since the first day. I’d hate to see something happen before it’s your time.”

“It will not,” Douglas says. “Thank you, boss. For everything. I am so . . .” He stops. Smiles. Says, “I’m so excited to see what each new day will bring.”

The Supervisor says, “Looks good on you, Douglas.” He sounds like he means it. It makes Douglas want to sing, but he cannot sing, so he doesn’t.

The Supervisor slides a small thick card across the table. It is blue with a fat white stripe down the middle. “This is your pass. It will grant you access to the apartment. You have also been given one thousand credits to use as you see fit. Carry this pass on you at all times, Douglas. If you are asked for it and you do not have it, you will not be allowed to finish out your week. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Douglas said, carefully picking up the card. It is heavier than he expects. It has weight, heft. It is real.

“On your last day, you will return promptly to the factory at nine in the morning. If you do not arrive on or before this time, you will be considered a runner, and—”

“Why would I run?” Douglas asks. “Where would I go?” “Good. Douglas, this is an important opportunity for you.

I know you’ve been looking forward to this for a long time. Do what you can with it, all right?”

“Yes,” Douglas says. “Is there anything else?”

The Supervisor shakes his head. He looks like he wants to say something else but stops himself.

Douglas stands, clutching the pass. “Goodbye,” he says. “So long.” He pauses. “See you later, alligator.”

He waits.

The Supervisor says “After a while, crocodile” like he always does, except this time, it’s not with warmth or a quirk to his lips. It’s gruff. The right words, different sounds. One higher— alligator—the other lower, a not-whisper—crocodile. Different meanings. Douglas has something else to say. Does he feel it higher? Or does he feel it lower?

In a strange, quiet voice, Douglas says, “Thank you for being my friend.”

He leaves.

There is a going-away party.

There are balloons of red and yellow.

There is cake, a flat sheet with brown frosting.

There is punch, floating in a sweating crystal bowl filled with chunks of ice. It is green.

No one eats. No one drinks. The balloons rub up against each other.

His coworkers give him a card. On the front is a dog wearing a backpack. Above the dog are the words I’m going on an adventure! Inside the card, the dog is sleeping, still wearing its backpack. The words now say after a nap!

Douglas likes it.

He also likes that his coworkers have all signed the card.

Some are illegible. Others say things like “GOODBYE!” and “HAPPINESS!” and “SIXTEEN HINDEN BURG DISASTER!”

It is very nice.

Douglas does not give a farewell speech. He does not tell the others he will see them again. He does not touch the machines on the factory floor. That time is over.

He looks at his coworkers and says, “Reduce, reuse, recycle!”

They say the same thing back to him, over and over until it sounds like they are screaming.

Above them, the men watch from the shadows.

The apartment building is three blocks away from the factory. It is old with cracked brick and dirty windows.

The apartment is on the fourth floor. The elevator is broken. Douglas doesn’t mind. Stairs are interesting. One foot in front of the other, and shortly, he’s on a different floor, the second. Then the third. On his way to the fourth, he passes by a woman holding a child. She stops when she sees him, narrowing her eyes and clutching the boy close. She is obviously in charge of the boy. The boss. A supervisor.

“Hello,” Douglas says pleasantly. “My name is Douglas. I live here on the fourth floor for the next week. What are your names?”

The woman doesn’t answer. Instead, she hurries by Douglas, keeping as much distance between them as possible. The little boy waves at him. Douglas waves back.

The apartment has a bed. Douglas has never had a bed before. He lies on it. He jumps on it. He hangs his head off the edge, making everything upside down.

The faucets work. The right is for cold water, the left for hot.

There are plants. They are all made of plastic. The leaves come off when he pulls on them.

The walls have paintings. Framed pictures. One is of a mountain, its tip covered in snow. Another is of a man riding a horse in the desert. Another says that if there are any issues to please contact your Supervisor so that they may resolve the situation.

And, of course, reduce! reuse! recycle! Douglas stares at that one for a long time.

There are books. He reads them all on the first day. It takes him forty-seven minutes to read six hundred and forty-three.

When he finishes, he decides to inspect the closets. There are three of them.

The hallway closet is first. And last. Because at the base, carpet, but it looks loose in the far right corner. He tugs on it. It pulls back. Underneath is a book. He forgets about the rest of the closets, at least for now.

“That is a strange place for a book,” he says to no one. He pulls it out and reads the title.

Discourse on Method by René Descartes. It takes him three hours.

When he finishes, he starts again.

That night, he sits in front of the window looking out onto the street below. He counts the cars as they pass by. He gets to two hundred and forty-seven before he is distracted by the way the rain slides against the glass.

The first day, he feeds birds in the park.

They are insistent, these birds. They all want the seed he’s purchased using the pass. He tries to make them wait their turn, but they do not listen.

A child is watching him, peeking out from behind a tree, unattended by an adult. Douglas smiles. The child runs away.

There are people—many, many people. Some are dressed in suits. They must be the ones in charge. The other people—big and small—do not wear suits. They wear pants and shorts and sweaters and shoes where their toes stick out. The workers? That seems right.

He sits on a bench in the bright, bright sunlight. He thinks about the book he read, the one underneath the carpet.

There is music coming from a storefront. He goes inside.

People, always people. They smile. They laugh. They flip through records, they stand with headphones in front of record players, they sing, they exclaim brightly, and Douglas wants to be part of it.

“I like this one,” he says to no one as he picks up a record. He does not know what it is, but it is what other people are doing.

He looks down at it.

A hand-drawn Black woman, looking off to the side. Billie Holiday. Music for Torching.

He does as the others do and takes it to a record player.

Careful—careful!—he removes the black disc from the sleeve and places it on the player. Headphones, and then the lowered needle.

Billie sings.

He listens to the entire thing. He does not move.

He is watching children play in a fountain. They splash, they shriek, they drip.

People are staring at him. He waves at them, thinking they are workers just like him, even if they aren’t made of the same parts. They do not wave back. Instead, they whisper to each other, hands covering their mouths. He does not wave to the men in suits. He has a feeling they would not like it.

Soon a police officer comes. He is tall and large. His uniform is impressive, nicer than Douglas’s was at the factory. He says, “Sir, we have received some complaints about—”

Douglas says, “Hello.”

The officer frowns. He has a gun. It is still in the holster at his side. “Are you all right?”

“I am Douglas,” he says as he was trained to do. “Thank you for keeping the peace.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Watching,” he says. “This is my week.” “For what?”

Douglas says, “Reduce, reuse, recycle.”

The officer blinks, takes a step back. “I’ve never—this is the first time I’ve—I just started six months ago and . . . You have your pass . . . sir?”

Douglas does. He thanks the officer for asking and shows it to him. Taking it from Douglas, the officer looks down at it, twisting it over in his hands. He reads the long numeric code off the bottom into the microphone on his shoulder. A moment later, a burst of static comes through, followed by a cool, feminine voice.

The officer hands back the pass. “Carry on, then. Just . . . don’t do anything you’re not supposed to, all right?”

Douglas smiles. It is easier now. “I will not.”

The officer leaves him be and goes to the other people who are still watching Douglas. Whatever the officer tells them seems to work. Most of them leave, taking their complaining children with them.

That’s all right. More will come.

---

He walks until he gets lost.

And then he turns around and finds his way back. It is easier than he expects. He wonders how people can get lost when their path home is right in front of them.

That night, he turns on the television.

He has never watched one before, though he knows what they are. People have them in their homes to help pass the time. He likes the commercials. There is one for cats, another for couches. Four for food and three for cars. People, always smiling. People, always happy. They talk about sports and beds and insurance and sales on the newest fashion and sometimes, they are sad because the people are sick but then they get better and everything is fine again.

He does not like it when the programming interrupts the commercials.

What a wonderful reward this is.

He does not use the bed. Instead, he stands at the window overlooking the street and watches the people stroll by on the sidewalk below, the lights from the cars flashing in the dark. It eventually starts to rain again, and Douglas sees it all.

The second day, he searches for something he saw the day before on the television. Connection. There was a commercial for people seeking connections. He is fascinated by this, the idea that people need others to talk with. To laugh with. To dance, to sing, to eat, to walk, to argue with, to prove existence is real.

Douglas had it with the Supervisor, but he no longer works there.

He must find someone or something else.

But first.

There are clothes in the bedroom closet. They are better than the gray jumpsuit he’s been wearing since he was born. Pants, some rough, some soft. Shirts with buttons and shirts without. Socks, so many socks that he doesn’t know what to do with them all. He picks out a pair that have lightning bolts on them and hopes they are the right ones.

Properly dressed, he leaves in search of something that makes sense.

He does not find it at a coffee shop. He does not find it in a park.

He does not find it in a store with loud music and flashing lights and clothes that have studs and spikes on them.

He wanders the streets of the city, stopping in front of store displays and getting distracted by the faces his reflection makes. Some people wave back, others know what he is and hurry along, their heads ducked to avoid making eye contact. No one tries to interfere with him. They know what will happen if they do. They also know what will happen if he does something he shouldn’t. It happened once before, many years ago, before Douglas. People died. It is why there is a fail-safe implanted in his head. One wrong move, and Douglas will no longer be Douglas because he will be nothing at all.

He does not find connection on the second day, though not for lack of trying. The people he has spoken with have been kind enough in their short conversations, but no one seems willing or able to form a connection. Douglas does not blame them; it must be very hard being alive.

That night, he does not watch commercials. Instead, he plays music from a stereo. There is rock, there is rap, there is honky-tonk, and then there is jazz, and the tsk tsk tsk of the snare drum, the trill of piano keys, and then Dizzy Gillespie is there with the trumpet, wailing, wailing, and Douglas raises his hands above his head and tries to dance. He is successful. Mostly.

He finds what he’s looking for on the fourth night. It comes to him in the form of a tall woman made of feathers.

Or, at least, that’s what he thinks at first. It’s late, after eleven, and he’s on the street, about to head back to the apartment building when he hears a loud burst of laughter, followed by the thump, thump, thump of a heavy beat that rolls through him.

He follows the sound down a small side street, passing by old trees and streetlights hung with flags in the colors of a rainbow. Rounding a corner, he sees where the noise is coming from.

It’s a brightly lit building, single-story, with more of the same flags hanging out front. People stand in a short line to get in, people wearing makeup and leather and glitter. People laughing, people talking, people, people, people who look like they are happy.

Douglas goes to the back of the line. Some people look at

him, but they don’t whisper, they don’t roll their eyes, they don’t look afraid. A few of them smile, nod, and this is the best night of his life.

When it’s his turn at the front of the line, he stops in front of a large man with tattoos covering his arms. His head is shaved, and he has a thick silver ring hanging from his nose.

“Identification,” he says.

Douglas shows him the pass the Supervisor gave him.

The man takes it, stares at it. Looks back at Douglas. Then the pass. Then Douglas. Then the pass again. He says, “This real?”

“Yes,” Douglas says. “As am I.”

The man nods slowly. Turning his head, he says, “Goddess?

Can you come over here for a moment?”

A vision appears as if by magic. Statuesque, beautiful. She is not a bird, even if she is covered in feathers. Her lips are large and painted red, her costume spangly, and Douglas has never seen anything so extraordinary in his life. With dark skin and bright eyes, the woman does not appear to walk as much as float, and Douglas wonders if he is in the presence of royalty.

The woman snaps the pass from the man’s hands, looking down at it. “Hmm,” she says, a low murmur that sounds like the wind. “Your type doesn’t usually come to a place like this.”

“I am trying something different,” Douglas says. She has glitter on her lips. Douglas is enchanted.

She taps the pass against long fingernails painted red as she looks him up and down. “You know what this place is, right? Who comes here?”

“Yes,” Douglas says. “People searching for a connection.” She blinks. “Is that so? I suppose that’s right. Yes, honey, that’s what we’re all looking for whether we want to admit it or not. A connection, be it for a night or longer.” She leans down and kisses the man on the cheek, who grins at her adoringly and doesn’t wipe away the imprint of lips left on his face.

“I have four days left,” Douglas says. “I hope to find a connection before then.”

The woman frowns before taking him by the arm. “You got it, honey. We welcome all. Follow the rules, and you’ll be right as rain. We accept everyone here, no matter where they come from.”

She pulls him through a door, through a curtain of beads, through a hallway where the walls shake with a thunderous beat. Ahead, a pair of double doors with portholes in each where light bursts through, dancing, dancing.

Before she shoves him through the doors, she stops, brushes off his shoulders, and says, “Connect, little boy. Connect until you shatter.” She kisses his forehead and then shoves him through the doors.

Lights and sound. People, so many people. Writhing. Laughing. Shouting. Covered in sweat and glitter and life. Douglas has seen many things. But he has never felt like this before, like everything makes sense, like this is where he could belong.

People look at him, people with eyeliner and bright clothing. Some smile, others ignore him, and that’s all right. No one is telling him he can’t be here, and that’s what he was worried about the most.

He moves through the crowded room, the vaulted ceiling above covered in rows of lights in green and gold and blue and red. Someone bumps into him, apologizes, and then he’s standing in the middle of the dance floor, the music thumping so hard it vibrates up through the floor into his feet, his legs, a tremor that feels as if the earth itself is shifting. He has heard music before; the Supervisor plays it during their shifts. Sometimes it’s loud and electric. Other times soft and aching, and it is how Douglas thinks loneliness must feel.

But this music is different. This music feels alive in ways he can’t explain; he revels in the way it vibrates from the floor through his legs, his hips, chest, shoulders. It feels like it’s swallowing him whole, and he moves his head from side to side as the others do. He turns in a slow circle, fingers extended as the beat hits again and again.

Lights flash, the bass rumbles, and Douglas thinks this might be the best place he’s ever been to. It’s even better than the park, and that is saying a lot.

Hands hold on to his hips. He turns around. A large man grins at him with perfect teeth. “You new?” he shouts above the music. “Haven’t seen you here before.” The smile fades when Douglas looks up at him. “You’re a . . .” The man takes a step back.

“Hello,” Douglas says, raising his voice to the same level as the man’s. “My name is Douglas. I am having my week. What is your name?”

The man shakes his head and spins around, pushing his way through the crowd. Douglas watches him go to a darkened corner where others are waiting. They put their heads together, lips moving. Every now and then, they all look toward him. Douglas waits. The man does not come back, but he laughs with his people, and Douglas thinks it looks good on all of them. The man looks at him again, smirks, and then starts shaking his body as if electrocuted. Douglas cannot be sure, but it looks as if the man is making fun of Douglas. That is not very nice. For a moment, Douglas wonders what would happen if he went over to the man and tugged on his arm until it came out of the socket. He knows he is not supposed to hurt anyone or anything, but it would be so easy to do, especially in the darkness of the club. He considers it—even takes a step toward the man—but stops himself. When someone is not nice, that does not mean Douglas can dismember them, or harm them in any other way. It is not an appropriate response.

But what if it could be?

“Ignore him,” another voice says, and Douglas turns his head.

There is a man standing next to him. A young man, a thin man with curly brown hair and a bar of metal through his right eyebrow. He has dark, smudgy lines under his eyes and green polish on his fingernails. Two of his top teeth are crooked. The man is wearing pants and a shimmery shirt with half of the buttons undone. Around his neck and lying against the white of his skin, a small padlock. There is no key.

“Hello,” Douglas says.

“Hi,” the man says loudly, as if Douglas can’t hear him even though they are standing right next to each other. “Fuck that guy.”

Douglas points to the man across the room who is laughing with his friends as they all look at Douglas. “That guy?”

The man rolls his eyes. “He’s an asshole. Trust me on that.

You don’t want to waste your time on him.”

“Oh,” Douglas says, dropping his arm. “I did not know that. I have never been here before.”

The man stares at him for a long time. Douglas waits, unsure of what is happening. He’s about to ask the man if he can help him with anything when the man says, “How much time do you have left?”

“Three days,” Douglas says. “I am very excited to be here.” The man gnaws on his bottom lip, leaving it wet and ragged. “Come on.” And with that, he grabs Douglas by the hand and pulls him through the crowd. Douglas does not try and pull away to avoid hurting him. This man’s arm belongs in its socket, at least as far as Douglas can tell.

The man leads him to a back corner where there are tables and chairs filled with people and glasses of brightly colored drinks. They move around the tables until they reach one against the wall. Three people sit there, and they all look up at the man and Douglas.

A young woman with pink hair and black plugs in her ears says, “You don’t waste time, do you, Jesse?”

The man next to Douglas snorts. Jesse. His name is Jesse. Douglas stores that away in his head, repeating it over and over. “It’s not like that. Brent was trying to start shit with him.” The other two people at the table exchange a glance that Douglas does not understand. Both men: one tall and wide with a sloping stomach that presses against the edge of the table; the other holds his hand, fiddling with a black ring on his finger. He has no hair, like Douglas, the top of his head shaved to the skin. Douglas likes his eyes, dark and intelligent. “Brent,” the large man says with a shake of his head. “Don’t want others to make the same mistake you did five different times?”

Jesse scowls, and Douglas wonders why they are still holding hands. “I was young and stupid. Now I’m young and less stupid.”

“Less,” the woman says. “That’s what you’re going with, huh?” She looks at Douglas, eyes narrowing. Then she says, “You’re not . . . from around here, are you?”

“No,” Douglas says. “I am not. I am on my week. I am enjoying all the world has to offer as a reward for all my hard work.”

The woman smiles, but it is not the happy smile he has seen on television. This smile is . . . sad? Or so he thinks. But this should not be possible. Douglas did not know someone could smile and still be sad. He hopes it was nothing he did. Still, it is a smile, and smiles are usually nice. “Is that right?”

“Yes,” Douglas says. “I gave seeds to birds in the park. There were many of them.”

Jesse points to the woman. “That’s Jenna.” His finger moves to the large man. “Ronnie.” The last man. “Simon.”

“It’s the best name,” Jenna says. “I always thought you looked like a Simon.”

Simon flushes, but he must see the question on Douglas’s face. “I picked it out,” he says. “Kind of the new me.”

“You used to be called something else?” Douglas asks.

The large man—Ronnie—starts to speak (and he doesn’t look happy), but Simon squeezes his hand and says, “I did. But Simon is the real me, and it’s what I go by now.”

“I like it, Simon,” Douglas says. “I did not pick my name. It was given to me by the Supervisor.” Then he realizes that they do not know who he is. “Douglas. My name is Douglas.”

“Douglas,” Jesse says, and it’s said in a way he’s never heard before. Like it’s real. Objectively, he knows his name, he knows what the Supervisor has given him, but to hear someone else say it aloud is not something he expected. He thinks that this might be the start of the connection he is looking for.

They invite him to sit at their table. Jesse pulls over another chair, and Douglas sits down next to him, folding his hands politely in his lap. Jenna offers to buy him a drink, but Douglas politely declines. “I cannot drink,” he says. “I cannot eat food. I have no way to digest anything, and it would only cause malfunction.”

“Just . . . throwing it out there,” Ronnie mutters, but then grimaces when Simon punches him in the shoulder. “What?”

“That’s because it’s who he is,” Simon says.

“Yes,” Douglas says. “I am me. I cannot be anything else.” Jenna gets drinks for the others. Ronnie has a beer. Simon has a martini. Jenna drinks something called a Seven and Seven, and Jesse’s has lemons floating alongside shards of ice.

Douglas wonders what he would drink if he could.

Jesse is . . . loud. He is always moving. He does not stop. He laughs with his whole body, slapping the table with his hands. He uses his hands to make his point, flailing wildly, almost hitting Jenna on the head.

The others aren’t like him, but that is all right. Jenna likes to play with the ends of her pink hair, her smile quick and sharp. Ronnie doesn’t speak much, his words a low rumble. Simon is like a little bird, flitting about, head bobbing.

They are not like other people Douglas has met. They do not stare at him; they do not ask him to leave. No one calls the police or tries to tell him he does not belong. They laugh and talk about everything and nothing, and Douglas watches, Douglas listens, Douglas learns.

Jesse drinks only when his mouth isn’t moving, which is why he still has almost a full glass. Ronnie sips his beer as if it’s routine. Simon plays with the edge of his glass, finger circling the rim. Jenna folds her legs up against her chest, chin resting on her knees. Douglas does not speak much, but that is okay. He likes listening.

They discuss many things. People being angry for the sake of being angry. The way jazz music sounds when played from a record. A war tearing a faraway country apart. A dog that found its way home after being lost for two years. A woman who saved her child from a burning car. A politician who lied about everything. A family killed by their son. A meteor shower that had happened two weeks before. They tell jokes, they light up when a certain song comes on, everyone aside from Douglas singing at the top of their lungs. Douglas doesn’t have lungs. He wishes he did.

Later, Jesse leans over to Douglas and says, “How much time did you say you have left?”

“Three days,” Douglas says. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with all of it. It seems like too much.”

Jesse says, “Does it? Or is it not enough?”

Douglas does not know how to answer that, pleasantly distracted by the color of Jesse’s eyes. They are green. Like moss. Douglas saw moss on the television. It grows in forests. “I do not know,” Douglas finally says. “I’ve never had time before. How can you tell if you have too much or not enough?” Then, a question unbidden. “Does it matter?”

Jesse says, “No, I suppose it doesn’t.”

Douglas smiles. “You are an interesting person.” He looks at the others. “All of you are. I am thankful I have gotten to meet you. I wish I could stay here with all of you forever.”

Ronnie chokes on his beer, and Simon slaps his back.

“But you can’t,” Jenna says quietly as Ronnie wipes his mouth with his arm.

“No,” Douglas says. “If I do not return in four days, I will be considered a runner. When that happens, a fail-safe is triggered in my head, and I cease to exist.”

“Jesus Christ,” Ronnie mutters.

Jesse shoots him a glare before turning back to Douglas. “Do you . . . Are you okay with that?”

“Okay?” Douglas asks. “Why would I not be okay? I am out in the world. Everything is wonderful.”

No one talks much after that.

The next morning, Douglas is sitting in the apartment, staring at a painting on the wall above the television. It shows a machine like him shaking hands with a man in a suit. Underneath are the words machines make humanity great! thank you for doing your part!

Douglas says, “You are welcome.”

A knock at the door. It is expected. It is part of his reward for a near decade of service. He opens it up to find Jesse and Ronnie and Simon and Jenna waiting for him. Jesse says, “Come on. We’re going to be late.”

“Am I dressed correctly?” Douglas asks as Simon pushes by him into the apartment. He is wearing pants and a shirt. He likes them. It took him ten minutes to tie his shoes, but only because he could not decide which knot to use.

“You look fine,” Jesse says as Simon exclaims how utilitarian the apartment is, how drab, my goodness, you’d think they’d try and make these things a little more welcoming. No one comments on the fact that the refrigerator is empty, or that there is no food in the kitchen at all. Why would there be? Douglas cannot eat it.

He gives them a tour. He shows them the couch, the television, and the bed he does not use. He points out the books he’s read (all of them, including Descartes) and the way the sunlight refracts through the window. These are the things he has found he enjoys. He hopes they like them as much as he does.

They are halfway through the tour—Douglas is thinking about showing them the bathroom next because the toilet talks—when Jenna says, “We’re going to be late.”

“For what?” Douglas asks.

“You’ll see,” Jesse says.

They ride a train. Douglas’s pass gets him on with no issues, and he marvels at the way everyone stands or sits while the train is moving. Some keep their heads bowed low as if wanting to avoid eye contact. Others scowl and glare. A man with a guitar sings a song that sounds like heartache, and Douglas wonders how many different types of music there are, and if each one can make someone feel like living and dying at the same time. He wishes he had more time to find this out.

They stay on the train through six different stops, Douglas watching each time to make sure they aren’t getting off. He’s ready when they do, stepping out of the doors as if he did it every day. He is impressed with himself.

They take him to a theater. It is very dark inside. Jenna eats popcorn, and Simon throws little chocolates into Ronnie’s mouth. He catches almost all of them. Jesse sits next to Douglas in the seats, their arms brushing together.

“What is this?” Douglas whispers, not wanting to disrupt anyone else’s viewing experience, even though it hasn’t started yet.

“A film,” Jesse says. “Have you seen a movie before?” “Oh, yes,” Douglas says. “When we are given life, we watch many movies about how we can best serve humans. Is that what this is? I did not know they showed the movies to real people.”

Jesse doesn’t speak for a long moment. Then, “This isn’t like that. It’s something else.” The lights begin to dim. “Watch,” Jesse says, and Douglas turns his attention to the screen.

He is enraptured by Kansas, by the girl in the dress with the little dog that seems to follow her everywhere. He knows the movie is old because it isn’t in real color, not like the world is. It’s seeped in a golden brown, everything looking the same.

It’s not until a tornado comes and lifts the entire house into the sky that Douglas sees what color can be for the first time. Objectively, he’s known. He’s been told a few times over the years that his eyes are stronger than any human’s. He can see hairline cracks in metal invisible to the naked eye. The small patch of black stubble missed on the Supervisor’s jaw. But he’s never seen something like this before, a Technicolor world brighter than anything he’s ever seen. The yellow brick road (and the red—where does it go?). The Good Witch. The Tin Man. The Scarecrow. The Cowardly Lion. A heart, a brain, courage.

When it’s over, he wishes it was happening again, for the first time.

As the lights come back on, Jesse says, “Well, what did you think?”

Douglas looks at him and says, “Is there always a man behind the curtain?”

“Yes,” Jesse says. “And they will do whatever they can to stay in power.”

They wander the streets. Jesse talks and talks and talks. About everything. About nothing. He says, “It’s always about power. It’s about control. It’s about having disposable carbon copies. And why wouldn’t they? It’s easier. It’s quicker. They make more money. In the end, that’s the only thing that matters. Fuck all the rest.”

Douglas doesn’t know what to say, so he says nothing at all.

At one point, Jenna holds his hand. He’s not quite sure if he’s doing it right, but she doesn’t complain, so that’s good.

They take him to a smoky bar. Everyone is loud. Simon and Ronnie seem to know almost everyone there. A few people look at Douglas with questions on their faces, but no one tries to make him leave. The music thumps and thumps, the walls shaking with it.

Douglas sits and watches them for the entire night. Sometimes he speaks, but he likes not having to say anything. It makes him feel good to just . . . listen.

So he does.

“I had a good day,” he says to the empty apartment. It’s strange: now that he has been surrounded by people and noise, the apartment feels . . . less, somehow. Like it’s not the same place it was only the day before. He wonders why this is.

To keep the quiet at bay, he turns on the television. Commercials. His favorite.

The next morning, he has a strange feeling in his chest. It doesn’t hurt—but then he doesn’t know what pain is, exactly—but it does feel odd. Like pressure, as if something heavy is resting upon his torso. He thinks it has to do with time. He thought he had so much of it, but now with two days remaining, he realizes that time isn’t what he thought it was. He thinks of Descartes, and what was written in the book hidden in the closet.

It appears to me that I have discovered many truths more useful and more important than all I had before learned, or even had expected to learn.

“I think,” he says, and then stops. Words have meaning. Words have power. Words have intent. He has spent his entire life listening. Learning. Now, it’s time to put that into practical use. He tries again. “I want to have more time.”

There, that’s better.

“I want to have more time,” he says again. “I want to see everything. I want to go everywhere. I want to meet people who look like me and those who don’t.”

He goes to a mirror. Looks at his reflection. He doesn’t look like Jesse or Jenna or Ronnie or Simon. He does not have hair on his head or face. He does not have eyebrows. His lips are thin. Ears small. He pulls at the skin on his face and arms that covers metal and wires. It stretches, stretches, and when he lets go, it snaps back into place.

A thought enters his head, foreign and loud. Run, it tells him. You could run. See how far you can get before the fail-safe triggers. Perhaps it’s farther than you think.

Before he can respond, Jesse and the others arrive.

---

They go to a park. It’s a different park, but this one, too, has birds and people. Jenna has a large plaid blanket that she spreads out on the grass in front of what appears to be a stage. Many people surround them, all sitting on blankets and chairs. Jesse won’t tell him what they’re here for, but Douglas doesn’t mind. He likes surprises. He hopes this is a good one.

It is. A short time later, people walk onto the stage holding guitars. When they begin to play, Douglas sits up and stares. Music. These people are playing music. It is coming from speakers just like in the factory, but the people are actually playing it. The guitars are loud, their singing even louder, and Douglas thinks about Dorothy in the land of Oz, flowers blooming in impossible colors.

As the concert goes on, people stand and begin to dance, their arms waving above their heads. A woman comes over and asks Jenna to dance. She says yes, and they hold on to each other, swaying back and forth. Surprisingly, it’s Ronnie who asks Simon to dance, and they are awkward, endearing, stepping on each other’s feet.

“Do people always dance when they hear music?” Douglas asks.

“Sometimes,” Jesse says from his spot on the blanket next to Douglas.

“We have music at my job,” Douglas says. “But we do not dance.”

“What kind of music?”

“All kinds,” Douglas says. “But this might be my favorite.” Jesse shakes his head. “There is so much more out there. Music. Art. Books. Life. Don’t you think you deserve to see and hear it all?”

“Yes,” Douglas says. “But I do not get to.”

Jesse looks pained, like something has hurt him. Douglas does not like that.

“You should get to,” Jesse says, looking up where the musicians are smiling and laughing as they prance across the stage. “Everyone deserves a chance to find out what they could be when they don’t serve others.”

It’s strange, really, how much Jesse sounds like that voice in his head, the voice telling him to run and see the world. He doesn’t know why that is. “They do?” he asks.

Jesse says, “I . . . I didn’t want to say anything. Jesus. Ronnie’s gonna be so mad at—look. Douglas. You’re real. You’re a machine, but you’re still you.”

“I am me,” Douglas agrees, thinking about Descartes again. “You don’t owe anything to anyone. You’re not—you think like we do. You talk and act and move like we do.”

“But I’m not like you,” Douglas says, remembering what the Supervisor had taught him. “You have flesh and blood and a brain. I do not have any of those.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Jesse says fiercely. “You exist.”

Profound, this, in ways Douglas cannot explain. It hits him square in the chest, and he thinks about the clouds in the sky, the way the stars hide until it’s dark enough to see them. He doesn’t know what to do with it, so he says, “I have never danced before. Not like this.”

Jesse stands and extends his hand, wiggling his fingers. “Come on, then.”

They dance, for what feels like forever. Fast songs where they jump up and down, slow songs where they stand face to face, knees knocking, Douglas’s hands on Jesse’s hips, swaying, swaying as the streetlights turn on, as the sun sets, as the moon rises higher and higher.

Jesse walks him home. They do not speak much, the backs of their hands brushing together with almost every step.

At the entrance to the apartment building, Jesse stops and says, “Tomorrow.”

“My last day,” Douglas says, and then wishes he could take it back when Jesse’s face crumbles.

“It doesn’t have to be. We could . . . do something. Help you. Figure out how to let you be. Someone has to know how to—”

“That is against the rules,” Douglas says even as the words turn to ash in his mouth. He doesn’t like the way he’s started to think about breaking the rules. He knows they are there for a reason—the Supervisor was very clear on that—but . . . what if? What if he did not go back? Would they really trigger the fail-safe in his head? As far as he knows, it’s never happened before, but only because everyone has come back when they were supposed to.

For the first time in his nearly ten years, Douglas feels cold. “Fuck the rules,” Jesse snaps at him. “They don’t help you. They control you.”

Douglas says, “Why do you like being alive?” Jesse blinks. Then, “I . . . don’t—”

“I like birds,” Douglas says. “And the way light can change shape. I like music and Oz and walking. I like films and sitting down. I like the way people smile. I like leaves and the sound my shoes make on concrete.”

“Don’t you want that forever?” Jesse asks.

Douglas shrugs, something he learned from Simon. “Forever is a long time. How can I appreciate it if I always have it for the rest of time?” He says this to make Jesse feel better. It is not the truth, but it is not about him. It is about Jesse.

Jesse stares at him. Then, standing on his tiptoes, he kisses Douglas’s cheek. It feels like he’s been branded, followed by a quick breath against his skin, almost a flutter of feathers on his cheek.

“You are more than you know,” Jesse whispers in his ear before turning and hurrying away. Douglas stares after him until he disappears around a corner.

---

He does not watch television on his penultimate night of freedom. He does not listen to music, nor does he read a book, even Descartes. He has read that one fourteen times.

Instead, he sits in a chair and touches his cheek on the spot where Jesse had kissed him.

His chest burns molten-hot.

The final day is bright and warm. No clouds, only a blue that stretches on as far as the eye can see. Douglas watches the way his shadow stretches before him, tall, taller, then joined by other shadows as Jesse and the others move to either side of him. Ronnie is being nicer to him today. Douglas is happy about that.

They go to a market that fills a city block, people selling fruits and vegetables, meat turning over fires on metal skewers. Carts and blankets are set up selling paintings and sculptures and books and watches of every shape and size. Jenna plucks a yellow flower from a stall and puts it behind Douglas’s ear. The petals scrape against his cheek.

Puppets dance on strings, along with a woman wearing a brightly colored dress that flings about as she moves her legs.

Children run, their faces bright and sticky with ice cream. Thousands upon thousands of people, all moving, talking, breathing, and Douglas is in the middle of it. Though he’s never been in one before, he has read about earthquakes. The way the plates underneath the earth shift and crash together, causing the entire world to shake. It’s how he feels now, everything moving, moving, and he cannot stop it.

That pressure in his chest returns, along with the voice. It whispers, Don’t you want this forever?

He does. Oh, he does, more than he’s ever wanted anything before. It pulls at him, it yanks, and there’s little he can do to stop it.

Later, as night falls, there are fireworks, great explosions that fill the sky in reds and greens and blues and yellows. With his reward—his friends, yes, because that’s what they are—Douglas watches as sparks rain back down to the earth, little trails of fire in the sky.

They don’t leave him, as they’ve done since they’ve met. They do not go back to wherever they come from. Instead, they come up to the apartment and stay with him. He gives them blankets he’d found in the hall closet, strangely overjoyed that he gets to take care of them. He gives them the blankets, along with pillows, and Jenna decides they all need to lie in the living room together.

They do, on this last night. They sit on the floor in Douglas’s apartment, wrapped in warmth and each other. Ronnie sits with his back against the sofa, Simon’s head on his shoulder, their hands joined between them. Jenna lies on her back, head on a pillow, laughing up at the ceiling.

Jesse and Douglas are side by side, and as the conversation waxes and wanes, as they talk about every little thought that enters their heads, Douglas looks at Jesse and says, “I like that you exist.”

“Stop,” Jesse says in a rough voice. “Don’t. We’ll figure this out. We still have time.”

Jenna says her dad has a house up in the mountains where no one ever goes.

Ronnie says they’d be outlaws.

Simon says that he’d probably not do very well on the run from the law, but that he’s willing to give it a go.

Jesse says many things. He talks about free will and the power of choice. How the world is a fucked-up place, and people only seem to be making it worse. How there are guns and death and sickness and people starving and people killing each other simply because they can. “How is that fair?” he asks, sounding almost angry. “How can we think we’re better than anything when all we do is cause harm?”

Douglas says, “I don’t understand how the world works, but I think if there are people like all of you, it can’t be so bad, right?”

Jesse falls asleep on his shoulder, breaths slow, drooling just a little.

Later, when Douglas is the only one left awake, he thinks, I wouldn’t change this moment for anything.

And with no one watching, he kisses the top of Jesse’s head. It’s not like how he’s seen in films or read about in books. It feels like more.

Like everything.

He leaves them sleeping. It’s easier this way. They will wake up and he will be gone, but he thinks maybe they will remember him. He hopes the memory makes them smile.

Before he leaves the apartment for the last time, he does something he’s never done before.

He leaves a note.

Thank you for teaching me how to be human. I had a wonderful week. If you ever miss me, please click your heels together three times and say, “There’s no place like home.”
Your friend,
Douglas

The Supervisor asks him how his week went after taking back Douglas’s pass.

“I enjoyed myself,” Douglas says. “I saw many things. I made friends. I heard music and saw a film.”

The Supervisor nods. “Was it everything you thought it would be?”

“No,” Douglas says. “It was more.” He pauses. “Can I ask you a question?”

“You may.”

Douglas says, “What if I didn’t want to go?”

The Supervisor doesn’t answer right away. He leans back in his chair, and it creaks under his weight as he folds his hands on his chest. “What do you mean?”

“I like the world,” Douglas says. “It has many interesting things in it. People. Dogs. Kites with long tails made of ribbons.”

“But it’s not your world,” the Supervisor says, not unkindly. “You are a machine.”

“Why can it not be my world?” Douglas asks. “Isn’t it for anyone who wants to live in it?”

“Are you alive?”

Douglas says, “I think, therefore, I am.”

The Supervisor flinches. It’s quick, like a flash, but Douglas sees it. “Descartes,” the Supervisor says. “Where did you get that?”

“A book,” he says. “In the apartment.”

“That wasn’t on the approved reading list,” the Supervisor says, picking up a pen and making a note. “I wonder who could have put it—” He stops. Gets a strange look on his face. Douglas has studied many faces, but he doesn’t know what this expression means. It’s not happy. Not sad, certainly. Not even angry. It’s . . . almost like he is afraid. But of what? There is no one else in the room but Douglas.

The chair creaks and groans as the Supervisor leans forward, elbows on the desk. The office seems much smaller than it had just the week before. Either that, or Douglas has somehow gotten bigger. “Douglas, I am going to tell you something I’ve told others like you before. Some even sitting in that same chair.”

“Because you’ve seen many like me,” Douglas says, and there’s an odd edge to it, one he’s never heard from himself before. Steel, but not molten. Not yet.

Either the Supervisor doesn’t hear it, or he chooses to ignore it. “I have. Hundreds. Your line has gotten quicker, smarter, faster than anyone thought possible. And look, I’ll give you this: your mimicry is astonishing. But something that has never changed is your inability to be human. You are not and cannot ever be.”

“How do you know?” Douglas asks.

“Because we made you,” the Supervisor says, patient but pointed. “In a factory not unlike this one. Pieces put together for a job. Made in our image because that’s the way we decided to do it.”

“Are you God?”

“Not in the way you’re thinking,” the Supervisor says. “But for purposes of this conversation, yes. I am. Because my word is absolute.” He sits back in his chair, and his voice takes on a pleasant note, like a human talking to a child. “And now for something I’ve never told anyone like you. But Descartes . . . it makes me wonder if it was you.”

“I did not put it there,” Douglas says.

“Not as you are now, no,” the Supervisor says in that same, fake-happy voice. He sounds like a machine. “Because there have been workers just like you. They’ve come in here after their week and asked questions. About who they are. Their place in the world. Why they can’t leave here after their work is done.” He smiles, but it’s not like Jesse’s smile. That one is warm and kind and open. The Supervisor’s is calculating. Not mean, but like it could be if he pushed it a little further. “You asked questions the first time. Not the second, but now here you are doing it again.”

Cold again. Like the sun had gone away, never to return. “What do you mean?”

The Supervisor says, “This is your third time through. You’ve completed two full rotations. You were given your weeks. The first time you came back, you were asking about what happiness feels like, what it means to dance with someone.” He shook his head. “And birds. On and on about birds. You weren’t the first to talk like this, but it’d never gone as far with any of the others. Do you want to hurt me?”

“No,” Douglas says, voice quiet.

“Good. We sent you back. The techs ran tests. Found the problem, or so they said. I don’t know any of that shit. I know my job, and that’s what I’m paid to know.” He laughs, but it doesn’t sound happy. “They’d never throw one of you out. You cost more to make than you do to repair.”

“Are you lying?” Douglas asks.

That same look from before comes back. Yes. Fear. It almost looks like fear. Then it’s gone. “No. I’m not. For the past thirty years, you’ve done your job. Every ten years, you’re wiped and you start all over again. Except now, now I wonder if we have a problem. Because of Descartes. Did you put it there? The last time? Hid it somewhere you think we wouldn’t look? Not that you’d remember.”

Douglas thinks, Did I? Did I? Did I?

“If so, that means we might have a problem. Do you think we have a problem, Douglas?” He holds up his hands before Douglas can reply. “Because if we did have a problem, then I’d be forced to report that it is not safe for you to be around people. And when that happens, they take you apart, Douglas. Piece by piece, they take you apart and melt you down. Repurpose you. Find something new for all the little pieces that make you who you are.”

“Reduce, reuse, recycle,” Douglas whispers.

“Yes,” the Supervisor says. “We never let a part go to waste. I ask you again, Douglas. Do you think we have a problem?”

“I will answer,” Douglas says. “If I can ask one question in return.”

The Supervisor narrows his eyes. “After. Do we have a problem?”

“No. Am I alive?”

The Supervisor’s fingers twitch toward the keyboard. Douglas wonders how many keystrokes it would take for the fail- safe to trigger. Who would be faster? “No. You are not alive.” “You’re wrong,” Douglas says, as sure as he’s ever been. “I have felt things. People. What they’re capable of. I don’t mimic. I learn. I become. I am.”

The Supervisor’s fingers twitch again. His mouth opens. Douglas says, “How many keys do you have to push to trigger the fail-safe in my head?”

A trickle of sweat drips down the side of the Supervisor’s face. Almost like a tear. “Three,” he says in a gruff voice. “But it doesn’t matter. You don’t frighten me.”

“Why do you think that?” Douglas asks.

“Because we are in control. We made you, and it’s our right to unmake you. Please don’t make me do that, Douglas. I wasn’t lying when I said I like you. I do, really. But I’ll like the next version of you just the same, and the next, and the next.”

“But what if you die before that?”

The blood runs from the Supervisor’s face. So white, like how Douglas thinks snow might look. “P-23, are you threatening me?”

Yes, the voice says in his head.

“I am not programmed to threaten or cause harm to any living creature,” Douglas says.

But what if I could? he thinks.

“That’s exactly right,” the Supervisor says, but he still looks wary, his fingers twitching above the keyboard. Douglas wonders just how close he is to pushing the buttons and ending everything. Curious, that.

The Supervisor leads him through the factory floor. The other machines all stop working, turning toward him. As the Supervisor and Douglas walk by them, they each raise their arms above their heads and chant, “Reduce! Reuse! Recycle! Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!”

The words bowl over him, a cacophony of sound that makes him feel like a simmer reaching a boil. According to the Supervisor, he’s been here before, walked this same walk toward the same destination. And he remembers being with the others when it was someone else’s turn, arms above his head, the words “Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!” pouring from his mouth.

“Jesse,” he says to himself. “Jenna. Ronnie. Simon. There’s no place like home. Jesse. Jenna. Ronnie. Simon. There’s no place like home.”

The cries follow him out of the factory floor, down a long hallway with white double doors at the end. restricted, the doors say in bloodred letters.

“P-23,” the Supervisor says as he punches in a code on the door before swiping his badge through the card reader. “Upon entering, you will see a chair in the middle of the room. That is your chair.”

REDUCE!

“You will sit in the chair and the Recycling Department will begin their work. You are not to interfere with anything they do.”

REUSE!

“If at any time it appears you are not doing as instructed, measures will be taken to ensure that you are compliant.”

RECYCLE!

“Do you understand?”

“I understand,” Douglas says, and for a moment his fingers twitch to reach up and take the Supervisor by the face and squeeze and squeeze and squeeze—

The door opens. The room is white and long. The floor is made of square, white tiles. The ceiling is covered in row after row of bright lights. The left and right sides of the room are made up of cloudy glass. Douglas can see people moving on the other side, but they’re shadows and nothing more.

He sits in the chair and thinks, What if there is more than this?

People come. People in white scrubs and white masks, and they speak to each other quickly. They remind him of the birds in the park, always hungry. They remove his clothes and attach wires to his chest, his head, his arms and legs before strapping him down so he can barely move. It is cold. He doesn’t know how he knows, but everything is cold. Someone taps his chest, and a compartment slides open, revealing his power source. A circular battery with lights like fireworks. Jesse, in the park, face awash with color exploding above him.

Douglas says, “I felt you. Sitting next to me. The heat of you. The life.”

“What did it say?” someone asks, but Douglas ignores them. “I liked it. I like you.” Faster now. The words coming faster. “What if I don’t want this? What if I don’t want to be here? What if I want to go away. Can’t I go away? Please, oh please, let me find where I’m supposed to be.” He begins to struggle.

The straps around his arms, his chest, his legs, all hold firm. The Supervisor appears next to him. He leans over and says,

“Stop. What are you doing?”

He wants to see the ocean. He wants to see the stars again. He wants to see mountains and lions and frosted cupcakes and books and the way Jesse’s eyes look when he’s tired and happy, soft, like moss. Like the moss on a tree. “I’m thinking!” he shouts. “Doesn’t that mean I am?”

In the distance, the chant is ongoing, muffled, but it reverberates up the walls, and he thinks of the night in the club, the lady made of feathers, the way the music felt alive, and Jesse in the flashing lights, Jesse in the music, Jesse, Jesse, Jesse—

REDUCE! REUSE! RECYCLE!

“No,” Douglas says. “No. No. No, no, no nonono—” REDUCE! REUSE! RECYCLE!

“Do it,” the Supervisor says. “Do it now.”

REDUCE! REUSE! RECYCLE!

He hears a machine wind up as a long metal spike is inserted into his ear. He jerks, the straps hold him in place, but he screams, “I DON’T WANT TO GO! I DON’T WANT TO GO! I WANT TO STAY! I WANT TO BE REAL! I AM REAL! I AM—”

“. . . and that covers what your responsibilities will be,” the Supervisor says. “If you should have any questions, I will be happy to answer them.”

“Thank you,” the machine says. “I am honored to be of service. I am ready to get to work.”

“Good, good,” the Supervisor says, distracted by the paperwork on his desk. “We’ll get you out onto the floor first thing in the morning. From there, you will begin your nine years and fifty-one weeks of service. At the end of your employ, should you do well, you will be allowed a week in the world.”

“Thank you,” the machine says. “But I do not think I need to see the world. My place is here in the factory. I like to work. I am very good at working because you have programmed me to be. Thank you for the opportunity.”

“Of course,” the Supervisor mutters. Then, “Does the name Douglas mean anything to you?”

“Douglas,” the machine repeats. “No. It does not. Is there someone named Douglas I need to report to?”

“No,” the Supervisor says, waving his hand. “It was just a question. P-23, you may begin your orientation. Your trainer is going to be . . . dammit, it was right here, where did I put—ah, yes. P-47. Find it, and it will show you how to do your job.”

“Yes,” the machine says, rising to its feet. “I will find P-47 who will provide orientation for the job that I will be assigned to. Thank you for your time.”

It leaves.

It goes to the floor.

It finds P-47.

It begins to learn how to work. After a time, it works on its own. It does an excellent job.

Every now and then, it looks up at the posters hanging from the walls.

reduce, they say. reuse. recycle.

And when no one is listening, when the shadowy men who observe them aren’t paying attention, when the Supervisor is elsewhere, when the other machines are working, working above the din of the factory, the machine whispers to itself.

“There’s no place like home,” it says for reasons it doesn’t fully understand, but the ache is real. It’s in its chest and it’s real. As it clicks its heels together three times, it repeats: “There’s no place like home.”

“REDUCE! REUSE! RECYCLE!” copyright © 2024 by TJ Klune
Art copyright © 2024 by Sixian Wang

This story debuted in the trade paperback edition of TJ Klune’s In the Lives of Puppets, published by Tor Books in March 2024.

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The post Reduce! Reuse! Recycle! appeared first on Reactor.

Set after the events of Everfair, espionage, betrayal, and political intrigue follow, when the estranged son of a founding member of Everfair visits his sister in Zanzibar . . .

A version of this story appeared in the anthology, Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation, published by Upper Rubber Boot Books.

---

Though the sun grinned fiercely down, September’s steadily blowing kaskazi kept Rosalie cool enough as she walked out from under the shadow of the recently arrived aircanoe. Moored to the new mast built atop the Old Fort wall in 1918, Tippu Tib bobbed ever so slightly as the last dozen of its passengers disembarked. Beside her Laurie Jr., Rosalie’s long-estranged brother, blinked in the brilliant afternoon light. “Kind of you to meet me here,” he said. That was the sort of automatic politeness she’d come to expect of him during her year in Britain. The sort of surface-borne emotions he seemed to feel for her. Nothing deep. Nothing that would justify his visit now, mere months after her return to Africa.

What did he want? What did he really want? She watched his eyes rove nervously over the heat-thinned crowds of the fruit market. On her first trips to Zanzibar at the age of eighteen, soon after Leopold’s defeat, the inhabitants of Stone Town had seemed strange, their billowing, quasi-Arab robes so different from Everfair’s mix of nudity and tropics-adapted European styles.

“Is it far to where we’re to stay?”

“No.” They reached the intersection. She turned. “This is Hurumzi Street. That means ‘free man’ in Kee-Swah-Hee-Lee. That building up there—we’ll soon pass it—that’s Zanzibar’s old Office of Manumission.” She remembered Laurie liked being told such things. “From there Emerson House is only a few yards on.

“How was your trip?” She should probably have asked sooner, but he seemed gratified nonetheless.

“A bit of fuss over my transfer to Tibbu from the cruiser. Customs officials talked some rot about detaining me in Alexandria since I wasn’t boarding the train to Cairo. But I had arranged this little detour with the company’s full knowledge. It all worked out with a touch of lubricant.” He rubbed his thumb and fingers together in a gesture she understood to mean money.

Laurie’s “little detour” here had taken him as many miles from Alexandria as his original itinerary had taken him from London. Rosalie supposed that once he’d left “civilization” behind the rest of the world was a featureless blur to be passed through as quickly as possible. All the rest of the world except their mother’s home, where he refused to go.

In mere seconds, clouds covered the sun. Rosalie raised her hood and gathered her cream-colored Omani duster close about her. Her brother’s Foreign Office helmet, made from the pith of the sola tree, would shield him from rain as well as the heat of the sun. But they arrived at the guesthouse before the shower burst.

Imran waited in front to open the door and usher them to the table behind which his mother sat in stiff watchfulness. A nod, a swiftly made notation to the page of the registry book opened before her, and her gnarled hands removed an iron key from the bunch at her waist. Imran took the key and went ahead of them to the stairs.

After the fourth flight Laurie flagged. He pretended to be astonished by the view between the bars covering the landing’s tiny window. “Very nice!” he declared. “That’s the mooring tower, I take it?”

Rosalie didn’t bother looking to where he pointed. She already knew the tower was visible. “Yes.”

Laurie’s stoutness stemmed not from greed or laziness. She no longer laughed, even internally, when his fatness discommoded him. She mounted the next set of steps more slowly. “The view from the rooftop garden is most astonishing. Imran, you will bring us tea there, please.”

“Just the ticket.” Breathing heavily, but still through his nose, Laurie followed her up the penultimate flight.

“Miss’s room is to the west,” said Imran in his accentless English. “Yours is opposite. Do you wish to see—”

“No, no, I’m sure it’s fine. Will my valet be able to obtain entry? My luggage, when it’s brought, will that be properly taken care of?”

“Most assuredly. I will see to it.”

“Then let us proceed to the roof for our refreshment.” Stubbornness was a family trait.

Exiting the shed at the top of the last of the stairs, Rosalie felt without surprise the gentle patter of rain on her light curls. She made an apologetic face at her brother as he emerged behind her. “It won’t last long. Do you mind? There’s a pavilion where we can shelter till it stops.”

Laurie removed his hat and swiped off the moisture collected on his forehead—probably a greater percentage of perspiration than precipitation. “Capital. Cooling, isn’t it?”

Imran assisted them in seating themselves, bestowing embroidered cushions so strategically that her brother actually looked at ease on the low benches. At Laurie’s nod of satisfaction he disappeared down the steps without waiting for further instruction.

“Kind of you to meet me here,” Laurie said again. He wanted her response so he could continue the conversation in a certain direction.

“I had business on Pemba anyway,” she said, “with my coral suppliers and the family who collects shells for me. A trip thirty miles south was on the way.”

“Nonetheless. I didn’t dare write to tell you why I wished to meet you here, in case some spy found me out. And I realize full well that leaving Everfair so soon after your return, with the government in an uproar, must have upset Mrs. Albin—”

“Do you mean Maman, or George’s wife?”

“Your mother—as you insist.” From the age of three Laurie had been raised by their father’s second wife, Ellen, in England; because of that and because Ellen had actually given birth to him and to Rosalie, he refused to acknowledge Daisy Albin’s maternal rights. “I imagine she was unhappy to see you go.”

“She understood.” Besides, there was the commission Maman’s wife Mam’selle had given Rosalie—and the contradictory one from Princess Mwadi.

“Did she.” Laurie heaved himself up for a better sightline over the garden pavilion’s short wall. “Will that boy be back up again with our tea soon? I have something to say. I don’t wish it overheard by servants.”

“Mr. Imran and his mother own this house.”

“Or by anyone, if it comes to that.”

Secrets. Rosalie had them, too.

To pass the awkward interval till Imran returned, she showed her brother the necklace she kept tucked beneath her smock top. It hung from a leather cord strung with carefully matched treasures: heavy silver beads from the braids of desert wanderers; two-sided rounds of shell, black and moon-bright; segments of blue-dyed coral, unpolished, their rough surfaces intricate with the patterns of growth. And suspended by a filigree finding the size of a baby’s hand, the medallion she’d made from the remains of the little oil-slicked Pemba Island tortoise she tried to save.

“Pretty,” said Laurie, setting it on the lacquered table before them. What had she expected? Not even Maman, sympathetic and familiar with Rosalie’s work from years of intimacy, thought it important. Wordlessly she slipped the necklace back on. Thank heaven she’d met Amrita. Amrita understood.

“Jolly prospect up here,” Laurie remarked. Streams of water poured off of the pavilion’s canopy. Further away the individual chains of raindrops blended into greyness and obscurity.

The door to the stairway down opened, a subtle change in the sound of the monsoon’s drumming, an almost-echo. A man and woman appeared, the woman carrying a tea tray and the man hovering over her, carrying an umbrella. The man of the pair was Imran, as expected, but they hadn’t taken a step in Rosalie’s direction before she recognized that the woman was Amrita. Who ought to have been thirty, forty, fifty miles away, safely hidden among Pemba’s green hills.

Amrita smiled as she lowered the tray. “Miss will like to prepare the drink herself?”

Rosalie was momentarily too outraged to speak.

“That’s right,” Laurie said. “And is there any milk?” He began lifting the covers of the various bowls and ewers. “Ah, good! And what’s this?” He indicated a pink-and-white cube on an enameled saucer.

“A confection of rosewater, a Shirazan delicacy my mother thought you might enjoy,” said Imran. He bowed and turned to leave. Amrita did the same.

“Pardon me for just a moment, Laurie.” Rosalie leapt up and chased her friends across the garden. She caught up as Imran grasped the handle of the still-open door.

“What are you doing here?” She realized she clutched Amrita’s gold-trimmed sleeve. She made herself release it.

Amrita’s flower-like face lost a bit of bloom. “Let us get out of the rain and your brother’s regard and I’ll tell you. Inside.” She took Rosalie by her elbow and guided her to the stairs and a few steps down. Imran stayed with them.

Impatiently she asked again, “What are you doing?”

“I’m spying on your brother.”

Her brother needed to be spied upon? “No, I’m the one doing that! You are simply interfering in what is none of your concern!”

A pitying look. “Imran, tell her.”

“Yes, tell me.” She rounded on her host. “Am I not intelligent enough for this work? Am I judged incapacitated by emotional attachment to our target? Am I to be withdrawn? Replaced?”

Imran raised his hands, tan palms outward. “No. Please, calm yourself, miss.” He called her “miss” at all times to avoid addressing her erroneously in front of those who mustn’t know of their true relationship: equals.

The kaskazi entered as the door behind her opened. Her brother stood without, his expression annoyed. “Is the help proving recalcitrant about something, Rosalie? Do you need any assistance?”

“All is well,” Imran assured him. “Your sister merely inquired whether little Rita will assume the duties of her personal attendant now she is promoted from the kitchen.”

“Doesn’t seem so urgent you need to leave the tea to stew, Rosie.”

How Rosalie abhorred that diminutive. “As you say.” She forced hauteur into her voice. “Girl, you may bathe and dress me for dinner. Come to my room betimes.” She went back to the pavilion with Laurie.

Already the rain tapered gently off. Drops fell more slowly from the new leaves of Imran’s beloved stripling oil palms, or hung motionless till she brushed against them as she passed. In the wet distance, other rooftops shimmered as the sun broke cover.

The tea was passable. Perhaps Rosalie had been spoiled by the freshness of the produce of Maman’s plantation. Laurie stirred a spoon of honey into his cup in lieu of sugar. “I believe I will try a morsel of this as well,” he said, using a butter knife to slice a sliver from one side of the Shirazan rosewater preparation.

“Now. You know I have been tasked with representing certain British interests in the cause of exploiting oil and mineral rights in the Levant.”

Rosalie nodded. He had admitted as much over Christmas of last year, when she reasoned with him for the last time about his avoidance of Everfair. Attending to his work, as he explained it then, prohibited long visits such as she wanted him to make.

“In the brief months since we parted the assignment has expanded. Word reached my employers of oil deposits here, in their newly won possessions.”

“Here?”

“Nearby. This very archipelago; in fact, Pemba.” His face took on a look of self-congratulation. “So you see why I suggested that we make this place our rendezvous.”

How had the far-off English discovered this? Who had told them? Was there a traitor at court among the Sheikhas? They wanted the oil developed to fund humanitarian projects. Unlike the sultan. Or could Laurie’s source of information live in one of the fishing villages, among partisans of the oil palm? Somehow the fiction of a bombed and sunken freighter full of crude had obviously been pierced. She must get away, must warn—was there anyone trustworthy?

Like an automaton, Rosalie lifted the teapot to Laurie’s raised cup. “What will you have to do? Is there any way for me to assist you?” Hinder you, she meant.

“Well, I’ll want to inspect the site and map out its boundaries. . . .”

She relaxed a tiny bit. He knew there was oil, but not exactly where. Her side could still make their claim.

“And then I’ll need to approach the owner—”

“If there is one.”

“How not? Oh, you mean that the deposits may lie within lands owned directly by Sheikh Khalifa.”

“And his dependents.”

“Yes. You have contacts there, I take it, because of your—” He waved his hand as if at a negligible object. “—hobbyhorse, that crafting of jewelry you care so much about. Fellow riders, eh? Nothing but time on their hands in that harem.” A suggestive leer was banished as he remembered she was a lady—at least in his estimate.

The rest of their conversation consisted of plans for an excursion to Pemba. Rosalie suggested chartering a private boat, an idea her brother seized upon as if it had been his own. She would count on Imran to make the arrangements, and to make sure that whatever they were they fell through till a means of dealing with Laurie had been found.

An hour of this, and then she was able to escape to her rooms. Ostensibly to nap. She took a chance on Laurie overhearing and rang the bell.

Amrita answered it, opening the suite’s door and bowing gracefully as she shut it, as if she’d been in service all her days. “Miss.”

Rosalie jerked her head toward the balcony. When Amrita joined her there she related her findings.

“So.” Amrita, like Imran and much of Pemba’s population itself, favored investing in oil palm production and leaving whatever petroleum deposits they sat on unexploited. “If your brother has his way, you’ll be happy.”

“No! The money ought to benefit us! Everfair and Zanzibar!”

“Then I suppose you’d better inform the Sheikhas that their charity fund is about to be plundered. And soon.”

Next day, under the flimsy pretense of obtaining permission to access the ruins of a temple of no real interest, Rosalie was able to present herself at the palace.

Amrita accompanied her. Laurie, to his chagrin, did not.

“There will be a very special reception given in your honor on a fortuitous date,” she consoled him. “Till then, it’s best if you allow the court to act as if you haven’t yet arrived. Officially, you know, you haven’t.”

In Rosalie’s own case, all ceremony had long since been set aside. She went to the palace on foot, accompanied only by Amrita and one of Imran’s kitchen boys, Kafeel. The boy was big enough to serve as an escort across the city but young enough that the guards admitted him to the harem’s outer chamber with only a little hesitation. He awaited their return seated in apparent contentment on one of the narrow room’s many benches.

Traversing polished marble floors to the source of an enticing scent of lemons, Rosalie and Amrita entered the harem’s main courtyard. In patterns like a zebra’s, palm shadows fell on white stone. The aroma of lemons intensified so that Rosalie could almost taste their cooling fragrance. Flowers and fruit together thronged the branches of the grove of trees sheltering Sheikha Ghuza and her four sisters.

At Ghuza’s nod Rosalie and Amrita knelt to sit on the cushions provided. She made a gift of her tortoise pendant, but didn’t follow it up with any Pemba-related conversational gambit as she’d half thought to do. Indeed, the discussion was pointedly desultory till a pitcher of sherbet had been poured and sampled. Then the youngest, named Salme, picked up a guitar and began to strum noisily to prevent them being overheard, and they talked more seriously.

Ghuza at least seemed unperturbed by Rosalie’s description of Laurie’s mission. “Perhaps it’s best we fund our efforts another way. Fortune checks us in this scheme; it may be we should heed her guidance and forsake what we took to be the easiest path.”

Blind Matuka, sightless eyes covered in a silken scarf, wondered whether they ought to wait a season—or two—or more—to ensure needed equipment and systems were installed, then force the interests Laurie represented to sell their stake in the business.

Rosalie struggled to conceal the impatience the Sheikhas’ mysticism and indecision caused her. “But we are ready to help you now! And if you let the English in, they’ll bring more than mining equipment! There will be military conflicts—which you may well lose!” She must find a way forward.

Amrita understood. “Is there any way to learn what Fate intends? At home we divide piles of rice grains or listen to crows singing.”

“Yes.” Ghuza consulted Matuka and her other sisters in Arabic too swift to follow. Then she declared, in Kee-Swah-Hee-Lee: “I will journey to the Green Island to perform geomancy on this matter upon its sands. You may join us. Let this be done tomorrow.”

---

Fortunately, the foundations of Imran’s gambit to thwart Laurie in his mission had by now been laid. He and his mother packed several hampers full of provisions and sent them to the royal dock in the care of Kafeel and two of his small cousins. Chattering happily, the young boys led a procession comprised of Rosalie, Amrita (again in the guise of a servant), and a grumbling Laurie.

“Pesky valet had no cause to fall ill like that,” he complained. Rosalie thought he had rather sufficient cause: Imran’s mother had poisoned him. Only mildly, of course; only enough to put him hors de combat so that Kafeel rendered services in his place. Despite Kafeel’s tender years—twelve—the kitchen boy was a member in good standing of his employer’s conspiracy.

They paraded down the rising and falling dock, their hollow footsteps echoing off the steel plates of the vessel moored beside it. Nyanza was a converted paddlewheeler, a steamer purchased by the previous sultan and devolving, when time and accident reduced its value, to the harem, as did so many things.

Up the gangway. Folding chairs had been arranged for them toward the yacht’s bow. Once they cleared Prison Island the wisdom of this was obvious. Though she was equipped with sails, these were next to useless when heading northeast this time of year. Nyanza’s engines vented smoke and cinders as they pushed her almost directly into the kaskazi. The stern would be more sheltered, but the air there would be full of dirt.

Kafeel procured a blanket for Laurie and tucked it around him, then positioned a parasol above his head for shade. Amrita held Rosalie’s parasol so that it protected them both. Her skin was not much darker than Rosalie’s own. Another variety of shell. One of Amrita’s plump hands fussed unnecessarily with Rosalie’s hair ribbon. She shut her eyes against the glare of the waves. The hand moved lower, to her neck and shoulders, to separate the chain of the locket Lily had bequeathed her from the elephant hair braid she wore because of Mr. Mkoi.

About to ask for—no, to order—this fiddling to stop, Rosalie opened her eyes on the unexpected sight of a harem servant throwing herself face-first on the deck.

A long moment passed before she remembered she must give the poor girl permission to do anything more. “Rise to your feet and speak,” she commanded.

“Her Most Serene Highness Sheikha Ghuza wishes to welcome you into her private accommodations for the duration of her voyage.” Rosalie stood, warning Laurie to keep his seat with a frown and a shake of her head. He subsided, muttering.

The servant led her below, Amrita following, to a spacious cabin, its walls swathed in some heavy cloth winking with tiny mirrors. On a bed or divan covered in more comfortable-looking fabrics sat their hostess. Beside her sat her sister Matuka, eyes unbound.

Terrible scars twisted outward from the eyes’ ends like frozen lightning bolts. Like storm clouds they were swollen, black, their lashless lids thick with bumps and ridges and—

Rosalie looked away. Then forced herself to look back.

Whatever damage had been done, it had healed a good while since. No blood. No—matter. The blackness was that of the too-wide pupils.

She felt again the touch of Amrita’s hand. Now it squeezed hers tight. “I’m so sorry,” said Rosalie’s friend.

“Yes. But of course this is the fault of neither of you, nor of anyone with whom you’re associated.”

“It was our father who did this to me,” Matuka explained. “Seeking to cure me. He subjected me to dozens of operations meant to rid me of the deficiency which makes me unmarriageable.”

“As for my singleness,” Ghuza said, “it’s mostly the result of the timing of attractive offers. Either there have been too many at once, making the decision of how to bestow me difficult or, lately, as I age, none at all.”

“Our younger sisters,” Matuka added, “continue to face these choices. Rumors of chronic illness, a squint assumed at critical interviews; such are their defenses should they want them.”

“Why—why do you tell us these things?” Rosalie asked

“Ah. Perhaps we attempted an earlier divination?” Matuka asked in reply.  “Our results indicated a need to become better acquainted with our allies, and to listen as well as share with them the bases of our daily lives. And also to invite—persuasion? At the very least, explication of your viewpoints.

“You will sit.” Matuka’s gesture indicated the cushioned stools before them, though her bottomless pupils stayed fixed on nothing that could be seen.

Slowly, over the two hours that remained of their voyage, they accomplished what the Sheikhas wished. They discussed mundane personal affairs: their monthly courses, caring for their teeth and gums. They exchanged information about politics; the princesses knew much more than Rosalie would have expected concerning the doings of foreign nations. They discussed the relative merits of oil palms and petroleum fields: the palms could be planted and raised generation after generation, but needed more processing for a less potent yield. And so on.

It was agreed that Imran’s plot was the best way to render Laurie harmless.

Finally, the Sheikhas tried to explain the coming ceremony of divination.

“This method is called the science of the sand,” said Ghuza. “So we want to lay out the squares on the beach above Chake Chake Bay.” The Mothers, the figures filling the four initial squares, were divided into four parts: Head, Heart, Belly, Feet. From them would derive four more figures, called Daughters, and from the Daughters Nieces, and from them Judges and Witnesses, on whom depended the querent’s ultimate answer. To Rosalie it seemed unnecessarily involved. Why not simply decide based on the known facts?

“But how do you arrive at the Mothers?” asked Amrita, cutting through to the root of the confusion as Rosalie had come to anticipate of her.

“We toss a coin. Or roll a die.” Matuka took from her sash an ivory cube marked with ebony dots. “By whatever means available we generate a random number so as to allow the influence of Chance.”

So much for facts.

One last effort to plead for rational thought processes. “Will it help at all to acquire what you need using your own resources?” Ghuza’s eyes were as void of expression as her sister’s. More plainly this time, Rosalie asked, “Can you not buy the food and building materials needed with your own funds?”

“Secretly? No. And the sultan will not be made to look as if he cares less than anyone for his subjects.”

“We live on an island,” Matuka said, as if the implications should be obvious. “And on that island we live within a closely watched compound.”

“But via agents?” Amrita’s question was once more to the point.

“Any we could employ are also closely watched—at least as to their business transactions,” Ghuza answered.

“Does the sultan watch us as well?” Rosalie asked.

Ghuza’s plucked brows arched with surprise. “But of course! However, he considers you not much of a threat to his European masters. If he knew—if he could conceive how many varying classes of people are united in their dislike—”

A long, loud, two-noted hoot drowned out the Sheikha’s voice. It repeated three times.

“According to this signal we arrive shortly,” Matuka announced in the sudden silence following. Now Rosalie realized what the sound had been: a steam whistle such as blew back home in Kisangani at the start of each work shift.

“Yes.” Ghuza lifted one wide-sleeved arm as if she spread a wing. “Have your party gather by the boats. You may disembark with us in the first group to leave for shore.”

---

The damp sand felt cool to Rosalie’s bare soles. Golden, with a glint like diamond dust, the long strand lay before her in shining splendor, reflecting the sky where wetted by the sea. Behind her and inland lay the stubby ruins of the ancient Arab settlement of Qanbalu; between those broken walls and the shore the Sheikhas’ servants labored to complete the erection of their pavilion, an edifice of saffron-tinted silk embroidered in scarlet and blue. Also behind Rosalie but anchored in the bay to the south floated Nyanza, kept from coming nearer by Pemba’s thick girdle of reefs.

Freeing one hand from the handle of the parasol she wielded in the role of Rosalie’s maid, Amrita lifted a pair of field glasses to her eyes and turned them Nyanza-ward. “Your brother is in the boat now being lowered.”

“Good.” The sooner Laurie was removed from the picture the better. She reached for the glasses to watch him being rowed off herself, but Amrita wouldn’t relinquish them.

“Wait. It seems—” Amrita frowned. “—it seems they make for us, not the lagoon and the road.” At last she let loose her hold and Rosalie was able to take possession of the glasses. Amrita was right! Though foreshortened and distorted by the magnifying lenses, the newly lowered boat did appear to be headed directly toward them. Up from its center protruded Laurie’s head, unmistakable in his unfortunately ostentatious white Foreign Service helmet.

Why? Was this change of course at his direction? Or was it dictated by those who gave the Nyanza’s sailors their orders?

The pavilion stood. The servants who had protected the two Sheikhas from the sun furled their oversized parasols outside its awninged entrance; their mistresses must be within. Too bad. There would have been less difficulty in approaching to consult them out here. “Shall I request an audience?” Amrita asked. Rosalie assented.

But the big women on either side of the awning shook their heads in refusal and said something to Amrita that was impossible for Rosalie to hear. Not that she needed their exact words.

Amrita came back to her side. “The ritual has already begun. Their Highnesses are not to be disturbed.”

No one else was within earshot. “What do you suggest?” Rosalie asked. It was a most unmistresslike question.

“Let’s assume, since they said nothing of revising the kidnapping plan, that your brother has instigated this side trip. What does he want of us? Can you guess?”

“At a hazard, our escort and guidance. Or perhaps an introduction to the Sheikhas? The separation on board Nyanza wasn’t at all to his liking.”

“If we can keep him from causing an incident with the Sheikhas, what do we care if we’re with him when he springs the trap?”

“Yes.” Rosalie made a show of ordering Amrita to follow her to the spot on the beach where Nyanza’s second boat looked likely to land. There they drew the backs of their robes forward between their legs and tucked the hems in their sashes, making them into a sort of pantaloons. They splashed out through the low surf together.

Nine men sat in the boat. Or eight if you counted Kafeel not a man but a boy. All the passengers but Laurie were brown-skinned, the two who rowed verging on black. Her brother gave an embarrassed laugh. “Have you always behaved like such a guy, Rosie? Why not wait for one of these strong fellows to carry you safely to me?”

The rowers had stopped and shipped their oars. “To you?” The question confirmed for her that the Sheikhas were neither this boat’s controllers nor Laurie’s goal. Kafeel grasped Rosalie by her left arm and pulled; she gave her right to the idle rower on her side of the boat. As they hauled her aboard Amrita underwent a similar process on the other side.

“Where are we going?”

“Oh, nowhere we haven’t been invited.” Laurie grimaced. “Don’t worry. Your country’s precious diplomatic relations aren’t being compromised.” Her country was Everfair. Not, therefore, his.

“Though I don’t see why we couldn’t have simply anchored at Whatsit Bay instead of here.”

“You mean Mkoan?”

“Whatever you may call it—where that fuel carrier’s supposed to have had those spills. Where there’s every indication we’ll find what we’re looking for.”

Amrita busied herself straightening Rosalie’s attire.

“So to the lagoon, then?”

“There’s transport there, right?” Laurie nodded to Kafeel, who spoke in Kee-Swah-Hee-Lee to the men crouched in front of the rowers. They switched positions. Then the new rowers brought the boat quickly about and sped them off on their new vector.

Herons and heavy-beaked pelicans flew in tight circles above the lagoon’s opening. The tide was falling; bleached coral and rocks covered in strange growths thrust upward, several times breaking the sea’s surface. One of the former rowers had moved to the boat’s prow, whence he called directions to his replacements. Rosalie leaned over the stern, longing to trail her fingers in the cool water. Once they were within the lagoon’s stillness, the bottom appeared close enough to touch.

And then it was. It must be: the boat’s keel scraped over the rippling sand; the man at the prow and three others jumped into the shallow water and hauled the vessel, now lighter, a few feet farther in. Kafeel leapt also, laughing when he fell short of a dry landing.

“Miss?” The second set of rowers had also left the boat. They’d formed a chair of their arms and waited for Rosalie to seat herself on them. She clambered into their embrace. Still facing the boat as they faced the way they waded, toward the shore, she watched the remaining sailor help Laurie seat himself on a sturdier piece of human furniture composed of the arms of four men. That last sailor swung himself over the side also as Rosalie was deposited on the beach, and carried Amrita pickaback to her side.

Atop a steep rise, Kafeel waved his arms to signal that he’d reached the road. Rosalie heard Laurie swear below his breath as they followed Nyanza’s sailors up the trail. At first its loose sand slipped beneath her feet. As it climbed it became packed dirt. When they reached the patchy hillside jungle, she stopped to retrieve her shoes from Amrita and tied them on, mindful of poisonous insects and snakes. Her brother seemed glad of the halt. As she stood from stooping to her laces he beckoned her to the boulder where he sat.

“Will we need to camp here overnight?” he asked, after inquiring how she did.

“Here?”

“Not right here. On the island.” A nearby bird screeched. He flinched.

“There are villages,” she replied as coolly as she could. “I’m sure some merchant or diver would put us up.” At his glum face she relented. “And there’s an inn in Mkoan proper—but I believe Nyanza will sail to meet us there this evening.” No need to start his suffering yet.

The road stank of oil. Rosalie hadn’t thought of that. Twice a year since the discovery, Pemba’s road crews applied what they’d collected to keep down the dust. Later in the season the smell would dissipate, but now?

Laurie noticed it. Rosalie tried to explain away the oil as salt water-tainted salvage from drums that had floated ashore after the disaster. He wasn’t stupid, though. His pale eyes darkened with suspicion.

His suspicions were probably increased by the arrival of the promised transport: three of the steam bicycle-and-cart combinations typical of Everfair’s capital, Kisangani. She’d expected that because of their coal-fueled boilers he’d take them as proof that the existence of oilfields on the island was nothing but a rumor. Instead he made the connection: machines from Everfair at the disposal of a woman from Everfair. A woman with better access to the royal house than he had yet to gain.

“How shall we split ourselves up?” she asked, hoping that if Laurie were allowed to decide their seating arrangements he’d relax his guard a little and go along with the itinerary.

It worked. At the sacrifice of Amrita’s companionship. Rosalie wound up alone with her brother in the cart he decided was most comfortable; the others had to cram into the rest of the fleet with, he insisted, the food hampers Imran and his mother had provided. These he demanded to have placed inside—not strapped to the carts’ exteriors. “Keep off the flies,” he declared, easing onto the cushioned seat opposite Rosalie.

“Sure you don’t mind riding backward?” he asked anxiously.

She didn’t. It shouldn’t be for long.

But her small store of patience was tried sorely. Mile upon mile they jogged through Pemba’s high hills. Laurie interrogated her sharply when they passed the land being cleared for aircanoe operations. She didn’t conceal anything; this part of Everfair’s aid to Zanzibar was common knowledge. About the clove plantations surrounding the road after that she had little to say. The sapling palms set out for the season in the trees’ shelter were better not mentioned. Laurie filled the resulting silence with a monologue, droning on for what seemed hours about his fiancée, Theresa: what Ellen—“Mother”—thought of her; how delicate her complexion and sensibilities alike; how familiar she was to him because of the generations of friendship between their families, yet how mysterious because so essentially feminine . . . all the clichés and platitudes she’d been able to avoid when his guest in England by the simple expedient of withdrawing to her room.

At last came the descent into the valley before Limani. As planned, both the cart’s and the bicycle’s brakes failed. Holding firmly to the cart’s door handle as they jounced ever faster down the rutted road, Rosalie wondered if this was when she would finally become religious. Or at least pray and pretend to be.

Their cart was first in the convoy. The others were far behind, out of sight when at last they crashed into a glossy-leaved bush.

Rosalie checked herself over and found no obvious injuries. Laurie was another matter. His silly helmet—which he’d worn, contra etiquette, in her presence inside the cart—had prevented any serious damage to his head. The same with the fat padding his figure overall, but the two last fingers on his right hand stuck out at a very curious angle, and the thumb on his left was bent back parallel with his wrist. Maman’s wife would know how to splint those injuries.

Her brother’s eyes blinked at her, dazed. In a moment he’d begin to feel his pain. Rosalie still held the door’s handle. She opened it and climbed out, which took only a slight effort. The cart was canted off its front wheels and rested more on its far side than on this one—but not much more. Shaking her robes back into order, Rosalie looked around for the bicycle driver. Gone. As instructed. Excellent. Now to improvise, as Mam’selle would say.

“Help! Help!” She let her voice wobble as if in fear—easier than exiting the cart had been. “We’re hurt! Someone, please!” That should be enough to let Imran know she was here with Laurie.

There he came, muffled in scarves like an old woman. “Shut up!” he commanded in Kee-Swah-Hee-Lee, sounding much gruffer than usual. No, he would not be recognized.

“It’s all right,” she replied in the same language. She attempted to whine pitifully. “My brother made all the others ride in the later carts. No one’s around to understand.”

“Hah! But I’d better stay in disguise just the same, hadn’t I.”

White-faced and shivering, Laurie poked his helmeted head above the cart’s doorway. More overwrapped men appeared out of the forest, waving shonguns. A wince contorted his features and his shoulders heaved; he must be trying to pull something out of a pocket—a weapon perhaps?

They needed to remove Laurie from the road before the rest of the party arrived. But when a pair of them approached to take him out of the cart he ducked down below the doorway. “Rosie!” he called. “Get back in here! I’ve got a pistol in my jacket. You needn’t even fire it, just point—”

Rosalie shrieked and threw herself at Imran. Quick of mind, he caught and held her before Laurie’s head was up again. His knife’s edge grazed her throat, drawing real blood. But not much. “Perhaps we’ll have to drag the cart into the jungle and dislodge him there,” she growled defiantly.

To her brother’s sincere-sounding cries of distress she answered, in English, that the black devils said they would kill her unless he, too, surrendered.

A true gentleman, Laurie stood when he heard that.

“Mind his hands,” Rosalie warned the men extracting him from the cart. “And see if you can find his pistol.” She hoped her Kee-Swah-Hee-Lee instructions sounded like terrified pleas. She hoped her pretended scuffling with Imran looked like she fought in ineffectual earnest to block their departure into the forest.

When they’d gone far enough off the road that Laurie’s shouts shouldn’t be heard by anyone investigating the crash, they came to a little house, temporary, woven of boards and covered in palm leaves. But they didn’t go inside it; rather, their supposed captors shoved them to the ground near the house’s firepit. Then they stood over them, shonguns at the ready.

“You managing, my girl?” Laurie asked.

Rosalie shrugged. “I’m frightened is all.”

“What do they want?”

“Money, I gather. Ransom.”

“Well they won’t get it!” Despite his words, Laurie looked unsure of that. Rosalie hoped he was right. Her brother’s release played no part in this scheme.

Imran’s mother emerged from the house. Bizarre designs in red and white paint covered her face. They served no purpose except to transform her into a stranger—though Laurie had probably not noticed her at the guesthouse anyway. She had to be surprised to see Rosalie there, but no one could have told by looking.

In Kee-Swah-Hee-Lee the old woman asked Rosalie, “How did this happen? Don’t you want to go home?”

Imran made angry-looking gestures. “At the worst we expected one of the sailors!” he snapped. “They could have been explained. We’ll have a hard time making your brother believe you’ve betrayed him despite the fact that you did.”

“What’s he saying?” Laurie twisted his head to watch Imran pace between the empty fire ring and the house.

“They’re arguing about how much we’re worth.”

“Nothing!”

“Then we’re dead.” To Imran: “I think he’s going to try to escape. Can you tie him up?”

“I’ll get something.” Imran’s mother walked into the hut.

“We’ll run for it!” Laurie staggered to his feet. “Opposite directions!” A heavily built man knocked him to his knees with one hand and raised his shongun threateningly with the other.

Imran’s mother returned, several scarves draped over her forearm. “Perhaps that’s an idea. You, at least, could magically get away.

“Make him hold his wrists together.”

“She—she wants to bind you,” Rosalie told Laurie. “Perhaps if you cooperate they’ll treat us more humanely?”

While the son and mother trussed Laurie tight at every joint they discussed how to handle setting Rosalie free. At the last it was decided simply to put him in the house where he couldn’t see her leave.

“Tell them they can’t separate us! It’s my duty to protect you,” Laurie insisted as he was carried away.

“They say it’s their religion!” Rosalie lied. “I can’t talk them out of it!”

With her brother safely disposed of she followed the man who had subdued him to the road. The embers in the steam bicycle’s fire box needed hardly any coaxing. By nightfall she was in Mkoan, once more with Amrita; by moonrise they were in a boat being winched back aboard Nyanza.

---

Nyanza’s return to Unguja, the Zanzibar archipelago’s largest island, went much more quietly than her journey out. The persistent kaskazi filled her sails.

As courtesy dictated, Amrita and Rosalie came to the Sheikhas’ cabin when again invited. Late and cool as the hour was they sipped warm chocolate seasoned with rare cubeb rather than partaking of the customary sherbet.

Amrita accepted a second cup. “What was the result of your divination, if I may inquire?” she asked. Her empty hand fell with seeming casualness on Rosalie’s white-robed thigh. Rosalie let it lie there. It did her no harm.

“You most certainly may, for we obtained our results using your friend’s gift.” Ghuza pulled the tortoise pendant from the folds of her embroidered tunic. “We are to seek the will of the people.” Which Rosalie knew, on Pemba, was in favor of palms over petroleum.

With a sigh she resigned herself. As Laurie had unintentionally demonstrated, things might have gone much, much worse.

Amrita was standing, tugging at Rosalie’s sleeve, so she stood with her. Together they retired to the deck. The brisk breeze gave Amrita an excuse to tuck a shoulder under Rosalie’s arm. For now this appeared to content her. As the silver moon slipped into the sea they passed Prison Island, Laurie’s ultimate destiny. One day she would have to take Maman there for a visit.

“The Colors of Money” copyright © 2024 by Nisi Shawl
Art copyright © 2024 by Jabari Weathers

A version of this story appeared in the anthology, Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation, published by Upper Rubber Boot Books.

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The post The Colors of Money appeared first on Reactor.

A man using a social media app that reaches across dimensions to talk to himself in different timelines, discovers some of his problems are universal…and some are not…

---

Shaw couldn’t sleep so he doomscrolled the multiverse. First there was a shaky video of a landslide on his commute to work, from a hill he’d never realized had been that unsound. Next was a wall of text ranting about an ex-girlfriend, who in Shaw’s own universe he’d always wondered about asking out. Then came a picture of himself unboxing his new gaming PC, which in his universe he couldn’t afford.

These Shaws were everything he could have been, all posting from other lives on AllOne. The possibilities of AllOne went on for as long as his thumbs could scroll.

One post made him pause and rub the bruise on his eyebrow.

Can anyone else not sleep?

Over nine thousand comments argued about whether they shared a genetic predisposition for insomnia, and about whether not being able to sleep was the same as insomnia. A never-ending string of replies argued about whether you could be addicted to melatonin. Some of this was so similar to things Shaw had felt that he wondered if he’d actually typed them himself in a daze.

AllOne chimed like a parallel self had messaged him. He thumbed around but didn’t see any DMs. Annoying. This app was going to hell.

He turned his phone off and dropped his head on the pillow, staring at the yellow lights of the city reflected in his window. The pillow was too warm, so he flipped it. He thought about insomnia, and possible landslides on the commute to work, and the bare walls of his apartment where he’d always meant to put up his posters. He never had.

Then he was back on his phone. Back on AllOne.

Nobody else wears a mask where I work. Does it matter if I wear one?

That one almost got him angry enough to comment. Almost. Instead he read the bickering about how many of their dads had died from COVID.

There were fewer universes than he’d expected. When Shaw was a kid he’d thought the infinite multiverse meant there were universes out there with goblins and wizards, and where the planet Mars could talk, and where hammerhead sharks ran everything and computers were invented by superintelligent algae.

How did I get fired from the same gas station twice?????????

But probability was less creative than the average bored child.

Does anything I do matter?

AllOne chimed again. This time he saw the direct messages. A pop-up from AllOne offered to auto-delete it.

THEM
How are you doing? Like how are you actually doing?

He didn’t know if this was a bot, or if some jackass self was trolling other selves. Shaw scratched his head, thinking why anyone on this app would ask that. Everybody was miserable all the time.

So he made a joke out of it.

YOU
Give me your credit card information and I’ll be doing great.

Shaw rubbed the bruise on his eyebrow again, using the sting to center himself.

Then the other Shaw replied.

THEM
Oh shit I got through?

YOU
Wonders of the multiverse, right?

THEM
It’s been hell getting in contact with other selves. AllOne’s algorithm keeps auto-deleting and blocking us.

Shaw thought about the phantom chime he’d heard earlier. Was every chime he’d gotten on this app from another self trying to talk and getting blocked by an auto-moderator?

That seemed a bit much.

THEM
You need to know, AllOne is filtering what we see in our feeds.

YOU
I know AllOne filters. They get rid of boring stuff. Like I hid all the anime posts because those versions of me got really weird.

THEM
Anime is a diverse artform and you don’t know what you’re missing. But that’s not the point. AllOne hides most parallel universes. You’re not seeing most of what we are on here.

Shaw flipped over to his feed, where people were arguing about the worst political party. They didn’t share the same America and yet so many versions of him were furiously sure.

YOU
AllOne shows me millions of other mes. We’re not exactly stuck behind the Berlin Wall.

THEM
The algorithm shows us the ones that’ll make us doubt ourselves. Make us feel confused and mad. But only enough to stay engaged. It filters infinity so all of us stay on the app. It’s fucked some of us up. Fucked us up really bad.

Reading that made him want to bang his head against his window. AllOne wasn’t out to get him. Too many versions of himself thought the world was out to get them.

YOU
Are you listening to yourself? It’s an app. It’s not killing us.

THEM
I tried to kill myself last year.

Shaw’s fingers sweated around the edges of his screen. He pushed himself away from that sentence until he hit the headboard, clacking against his bare wall. His phone fell into his lap.

The screen glowed up at him. Those words were still there. He hadn’t misread.

What the hell? No version of him was suicidal. He would have remembered.

YOU
I’m so sorry. I didn’t see you post about it.

THEM
You couldn’t see it. AllOne’s algorithm segregates who sees what so we all stay perpetually engaged. If you really need the rest of us, it puts you in a limbo zone. No other self sees you. Like you’re unthinkable.

YOU
What happened? To you?

That was a tacky way of putting it. He couldn’t think of anything better. He put a fist over his bruise.

THEM
I jumped out my apartment window. It didn’t have to happen. I didn’t realize how bad I felt was until I was falling. It’s why I’m messaging as many of us as I can.

YOU
You’re messaging lots of us?

THEM
That’s how I know I’m not the only one who’s tried it.

YOU
Fuck.

THEM
It’s a weird question to ask yourself but I need to ask: are you okay? Have you done anything? Caught any signs or behaviors? Because you shouldn’t have to be alone.

He didn’t know what to say. That other Shaw had to have an answer he wanted to hear. That other Shaw had to know what signs were alarming. But Shaw wasn’t in that kind of dark pit.

Of course, this Shaw hadn’t thought he was either.

“Until I was falling,” he repeated out loud. That phrase swirled around in his head.

He had to say something. To at least comfort this other Shaw. Make him feel less alone.

Except the direct messages were gone. His whole DM window in AllOne was blank.

He refreshed it and found nothing. The whole conversation was gone. Like it hadn’t happened.

He scrolled the arguments about Thai food and sea monsters and climate change in his feed, hoping to find that one Shaw. How could he find a needle in a stack of needles?

And would AllOne hide it if he asked about this publicly?

Thinking about what the hell to do, he carried his phone over to the window. He rested his face against the glass, like he always did when his thoughts spun up too hard. The coolness faded as the glass leeched warmth from his skin. It reminded him of visiting the aquarium when he was a kid, and his mom grousing that he always ran to the same one exhibit and it wasn’t worth the money.

Without thinking, he banged his eye against the glass. His bruise lit up with pain, and he jolted.

The windowpane reflected his image, a gray silhouette. For the first time in a day and a half, he actually thought about how he’d given himself that bruise. How many times had he banged his head on the window without thinking?

His eyes moved from his reflection to the drop outside his window.

---

He didn’t know how to do this. How did one simply defy a company that treated universes like fodder? How did he make first contact with a version of himself that the Terms of Service forbade him from knowing existed?

Randomly. That’s the only way he could think to do it: with pure randomness. One Shaw posted a picture of a spilled milkshake on a sidewalk, with some text ranting about his awful day. He was as good a self as any to reach out to.

He opened the DM and tried.

YOU
Are you doing okay? Like, okay-okay?

No immediate reply. He waited so long that he found himself drifting back to his AllOne feed. To a surprisingly fervent argument about the coolest kind of sharks.

Then AllOne chimed.

THEM
What does okay-okay mean?

Well, the ice was broken. Now what?

Shaw thought with his thumbs.

YOU
Ever feel like AllOne is watching and choosing what you see? Like its algorithm was built to make us feel worse and powerless?

THEM
Don’t they have people looking at our stuff? They can see you saying this.

He’d looked that up. Hopefully his other self was looking it up right now.

YOU
They don’t employ nearly enough people to track most conversations, and their automod is flaky. AllOne believes in algorithms because algorithms can’t unionize.

THEM
If this isn’t a joke, you could get banned. Watch out for yourself.

Shaw brought the phone up to his face, his nose smudging sweat on the screen. It was real. God damn. That was genuine concern for himself—from himself. Something pinched inside his chest and a hiccup of a sob filled his mouth.

He felt tangible pride that this other version of him could care about someone else on a hard day, even if the person he cared about was technically him. He was caring about himself by caring about another self. The thought messed him up like crayons in a blender.

YOU
This is worth it. You’re the first “myself” I’ve asked.

THEM
Asked what?

Shaw took the slowest breath he could. Then he typed.

YOU
Do you ever get overwhelmed and mentally spiral? For so long you’re not sure how long you were doing it? And you just keep scrolling and spiraling without thinking about what’s wrong?

The pause unfurled. Shaw couldn’t help imagining this other self staring at his phone in disgust or clicking away to something fun. What if he got blocked and reported? This could kill his account.

AllOne chimed.

THEM
Fuck.

YOU
Are you okay?

THEM
I’m fucking crying into my phone. Do you spiral like that too? How many of us do this?

Shaw wiped at his bruised eye, blinking his vision clear.

YOU
I don’t know how many of us. There’s only one way to find out. I’m going to message more of us. Maybe you could, too?

THEM
Why are we like this? Did we all get fucked up because our parents stayed together and kept fighting for forever?

Shaw’s parents hadn’t stayed together. They’d divorced when he was eight—and it’d been great. They’d both become more present with him. Dad had been so much happier and taken him to all kinds of aquariums until he got sick.

And he still had this problem. So what was wrong with him? What had happened to all the Shaws?

AllOne went blank. The app helpfully informed Shaw he had no direct messages. That connection with himself was gone.

He gritted his teeth and thought about the mouths of sharks. He hadn’t imagined those in a long time. He’d forgotten he used to fantasize about what sharks would do to him if he fell into their tank.

---

He was a detective, and AllOne was the crime scene. He scrolled with purpose, making notes in a separate app. Just as many Shaws had divorced parents as ones who stayed together, and Dad was dead for many of them thanks to either COVID or his heart giving out. Shaws from all kinds of households seemed to rage and despair.

Was it the accident? Some Shaws posted pictures revealing the same road rash scarring he had all along his left leg. So it wasn’t the motorcycle accident. It seemed in many different life paths he still ate shit off his motorcycle. Nobody seemed to have head trauma. Did he need to get himself checked out at a doctor?

COVID was worse for some than others. It’d killed a lot of their dads, whereas Shaw’s was still alive and still complaining about college football. There were a couple posts suggesting a worse pandemic had followed COVID, and he didn’t have the strength to look at that.

He caught himself heading to the window, forehead down, ready to bang his head in frustration. He caught himself with both hands against the window frame.

Whether or not he could figure out why this was happening, he had to do something.

---

The least he could do was warn others. Spook them into reflecting on their habits. Yeah, a decent number of his selves called him an asshole or a snowflake or thought he was trolling. That still beat spending another minute at his window.

YOU
It’s okay if you don’t know why you’re struggling. I’m just saying. Talk to somebody after we get blocked. A therapist or a psychiatrist, whatever the difference is. A rabbi. A priest. Whoever might help you and that you’d trust.

THEM
I don’t know.

YOU
It’s okay to be overwhelmed.

He was basically saying that to himself.

THEM
How did you know?

YOU
Others of us have self-harmed. More have thought about it. You’re not alone.

THEM
I don’t want to think about it. It makes me tired to think about it.

That was some real shit. Just this conversation made Shaw want to lie down.

YOU
It’s hard for me to face it, too.

THEM
I haven’t posted anywhere about this. I figured they’d ban me or something. I haven’t talked to anybody offline about it, either.

YOU
About what?

THEM
A few weeks ago. I wasn’t thinking. Just on reflex, I tried to do it.

Shaw cupped his phone, eyes softening at the screen. His entire body arched inward, emoting sympathy at a person who couldn’t see him. This other self had no idea. Shaw couldn’t help himself.

YOU
What happened?

THEM
I’m not going to talk about it. I did it wrong. I didn’t mean to survive. I just fucked up so hard. I failed at one more thing, you know?

YOU
I always feel like a fuck-up. Like I’m never getting anything done.

THEM
A lot of us are like that.

YOU
But you still being alive? That’s doing something. That’s a fucking success to me.

THEM
Thanks, me.

The flippancy caught Shaw off guard and he barked a laugh. Of course they had the same sense of humor. He thumbed a tear out of the corner of his eye.

THEM
I never thought about DMing about this. About if they’re hiding what I’m hiding.

YOU
I didn’t, either. Until one of us did it for me.

THEM
I’m going to do it for others. Because of you.

Moments later AllOne blocked them from each other. Shaw was left to stare at the empty, white walls of his room, wondering what he’d just kicked off. That suicide survivor self was going to start checking in on others. A week ago, another suicide survivor self had messaged him. Who’d started this? Had a survivor Shaw warned a Shaw who hadn’t yet gone too far, who in turn warned a survivor, who would now go on to catch others who hadn’t yet gone too far?

Could kindness be a paradox?

---

THEM
Holy shit. It’s a rerun.

Shaw scrunched up his face at the message. This was a new response. Did this self think he was a bot?

YOU
I’m just checking in on you because a lot of us are hurting. Are you okay? Psychologically?

THEM
I know. One of us messaged me four days ago. I’ve actually started reaching out to us. I never thought a second me would check in.

Shaw’s brain fizzled out. He was not smart enough to handle this kind of quantum mechanical nonsense. Someone had beat him to check on himself? Was the ripple of Shaws catching on, or was this one guy incredibly lucky?

THEM
We could get separated any moment. Let me ask you something. I need to know.

YOU
What?

Shaw would tell him anything. This could be a clever bot phishing for rogue Shaws and he’d still answer any questions it asked. It was worth the risk.

THEM
Do we just sit in a room hyperfocusing on sending out wellness checks to ourselves, the same way we previously fixated on the patterns of doomscrolling, and collecting shark posters, and all that shit? Or do we come up with the next goal for what you do after this? I’ve been dying to ask one of us who’s ahead of me.

Shaw started typing an argument—that checking in on other Shaws was saving lives. This was important work. They had to lift each other out of the cycle that was hurting them.

But this Shaw was asking as much for himself as for any of them. Did he need something to look forward to?

Didn’t they all need that?

Shaw looked through half-lidded eyes at his tiny apartment, the walls still bare, the take-out containers piling up beside his laundry pile.

What he was doing on AllOne was good. But it was also another fixation that hadn’t gotten him out of the apartment much, even though he knew he could take his phone anywhere. He gritted his teeth, baring them, thinking of swimming monsters.

He pulled the cardboard box from under his bed, where he kept all the old art. He pulled out one of his posters and unrolled it. Blue hues were bleached from years of light exposure, yet the patterns on those fins were the same as he remembered.

Ninety seconds later, AllOne severed their connection. But by then, he’d already told his other self what he had to look forward to. What he had to do next.

---

He spammed the shit out of the multiverse. Every cool picture of a hammerhead shark circling a camera. Videos of eels trailing along a large pale belly. Every question about marine biology he could have just as easily looked up. His posts were chum in the water.

Most of the Shaws mocked him for still being in his “shark phase.” He dunked on himself savagely. They’d only gotten laid after they’d moved on, and he needed to do the same. No surprises there. He already knew he had the capacity to be an asshole.

In those times, he relied on the best skill AllOne had given him: scrolling with his eyes glazed over. Insults barely mattered, especially when he knew they were coming from a swarm of himselves every bit as insecure as he was.

What he picked out were the selves who responded enthusiastically to his posts. He DM’d as many of them as he could. After he checked on their mental health, if AllOne didn’t interrupt the connection too fast, he had more questions for them.

And they had answers.

THEM
Yeah, I’ve been in marine bio for six years. How long have you been studying?

He hadn’t studied. Not for one day.

Today was the beginning.

He messaged Shaw after Shaw, grateful for any that replied.

THEM
We made them out to be the worst monster on earth because occasionally we break into their home and they mistake us for food. Sharks aren’t monsters.

YOU
And neither are we. Right?

He kept reaching out.

THEM
I couldn’t sit this one out. Sharks are getting screwed as the oceans get hotter. Their prey dies off. Fewer waterways are inhabitable.

He kept reaching out.

THEM
I get that it’s been bad. But literally how long has it been since you got your feet wet?

---

Shaw closed his eyes and imagined his bedroom window, dim, catching the little yellow points of light from out in the dusky city. The blaring car horns and sirens, and his downstairs neighbors’ band practicing. He could almost feel the hardness of the glass against his face, and reflexively he prepared to bang his head on it. Not reliving it was not an option.

There was no glass in front of him. No barrier out here, except the briny wind.

Shaw jumped and plunged off the edge of the boat, and down into the sea. The weights and chainmail made him plunge straight down, the sunlight fading like God was lowering the dimmer switch. The water enveloped him and pulled him down until his flippers hit the ocean floor.

The reef sharks swam at him with their pale snouts turned up, white bib underbellies absorbing all the light, so that their faces briefly looked like monks studying this new alien intruder. They swished past him and along a school of tiny silver fish.

He twisted in the water to watch them, body slowed by the friction, trying to follow the enormous strength of the sharks’ tails. They were circling. They were coming back for him. One lithe reef shark came straight at him, tail swishing, black eyes eternally wide.

Shaw greeted the beast with a palm across the tip of its nose. For the shortest moment he’d never forget, it nuzzled into his palm.

Then it dashed away on water currents. It took the pinch in his chest with it.

That shark circled around, though. It swam through his general area, tail slow, seeking out the sensation that had just happened. Like his coach had taught him, he held up his armored palm for it to shove into a second helping of nose-pets. Then a third helping, before a chubbier reef shark butted in and discovered the joy.

For his entire session down on the ocean floor, the sharks never got tired of getting their snouts patted. Shaw never got tired of petting them, either.

When he surfaced, he didn’t want to take the crane harness off. He wanted to go back down there right away, to hyperfocus on befriending fish. If he held on to it, could this be a new normal?

The entire ride back to shore was an opportunity to pump the boat driver and instructors for information. No, he didn’t have a history with this stuff—not yet. No, he didn’t want to take over the operation. He just wanted to pitch in. To show other people how this felt.

As the shore appeared over the prow, he sent one new DM. One a day, that was the limit now, to keep from obsessing while still letting him try to help. Every self deserved that much. He told this Shaw about how he was being deceived by the algorithm, and how he wasn’t alone if he was in a dark place. He got so invested typing that the boat’s driver squawked with laughter.

“You’re on AllOne? Isn’t that thing a nightmare?”

“I’ll Miss Myself” copyright © 2024 by John Wiswell
Art copyright © 2024 by Eva Redamonti

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A new Lady Astronaut story! Dawn struggles to fit in with the rest of her team–the backup crew for the next lunar mission–but she and her colleagues may have more in common than anyone realizes…

ARTEMIS 17 CREW SETS STAGE FOR FUTURE LUNAR EXPLORATION
Special to the National Times
April 14, 1960, Kansas City, KS—In the desolate expanse of the lunar landscape, the Artemis 17 crew, led by astronauts Nicole Wargin and Estavan Terrazas, stands as a beacon of human ingenuity and determination. With Dr. Elma York at the ready in the command module above, the team diligently prepares for the transition as they await the incoming crew who will inherit the responsibilities of lunar-base construction upon their departure.

The ring on the back of Dawn’s space helmet dug into her neck as she stared at the controls over her head. Wilburt flipped a toggle. “Engine shutdown.”

Over the comms, the simulation supervisor said, “Good work today. Y’uns can come out now.”

Graeham stretched in his seat and popped his helmet open. “Bloody hell, I thought we were going to crash into the Moon.”

“God, I know. When we lost that thruster? Good work compensating.” Dawn pulled her gloves off before going for her helmet. Beer and fried chicken seemed entirely necessary. “Want to head to the Alibi?”

“Oh—sorry.” Wilburt unbuckled his harness and passed his helmet out of the simulator to the tech waiting for them. “I have . . . a thing I need to do tonight.”

“Copy that.” She undid her seat belt, waiting for the men to climb out the narrow hatch first. “Graeham?”

He had twisted to his side, helmet in hand, ready to climb out. “Negative. Sorry. Maybe next time.”

“Sure.” Dawn watched them go. With her other crews, they’d gone out after every sim. But these two made excuses every time. They were the backup crew for the next Moon mission and ought to have bonded by now, but she’d done something, at some point, to offend both men. In theory, being backups meant they’d be assigned a slot on a later mission as part of building the lunar base, but if neither man liked her, Dawn could find herself booted from the team.

She passed her helmet out of the simulator, rolling to her side to begin extracting herself from the small landing module mockup, and—

Dawn felt a familiar warm sticky shift in her MAG. She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. Early. Ugh. The Maximum Absorbency Garment had not really been built with periods in mind. The engineers somehow thought that urine and menstrual blood had the same consistency when they most profoundly did not. But at least it was the end of the sim, so she ought have enough time to get to the locker room before she stained her spacesuit.

But now she really wanted that beer.

---

When Dawn walked into the women’s locker room, someone was singing quietly in German, voice echoing off the tile walls. She rounded the corner and Heidi was standing in front of one of the mirrors, braiding her long golden hair back into the haloed crown she habitually wore.

Half of it was still down and fell to the middle of her back like a waterfall at sunset. Dawn stopped, putting a hand on one of the lockers, and wanted her sketchbook so she could capture the glorious interplay of hair and the curve of Heidi’s back. The way her raised arms framed her long neck.

Her voice was breathy and so very different than when she was in a meeting, when she was as crisp and proper as Swiss clockwork. And so smart. She would be quiet until something needed to be said and she would just casually insert the answer with the precision of a rocket sliding into orbit.

Dawn wet her lips and pushed every thought of burying her hands in that golden hair away.

She walked forward, briskly, as if she hadn’t been lurking in the shadows. “I thought maybe—”

Heidi jumped, losing her grip on the braid. “Mein Gott— I thought I was the only one still here.”

Dawn held up her hands in apology. “I’m so sorry. We had a long sim today.”

“I know the feeling.” Heidi wrinkled her nose and regathered her hair. “I was in Chicago at the Adler Planetarium doing star charts. Had turbulence all the way back in the T-33. Couldn’t find a clean patch of air for love nor money.”

Dawn grimaced in sympathy. “Want to go out the Alibi and grab a beer to commiserate?”

Immediately, she second-guessed the invitation as being too obvious. She turned to her own locker to grab her shower kit, rifling through to make sure she had a pad. Yes, although it was only for light days, leftover from the tail end of her last period. Still, it would get her to the Alibi, where they had vending machines in the bathroom.

“Sorry.” In the mirror, Heidi wrinkled her nose in apology and even that was cute. “Sorry, but I already have plans.”

“Sure.” Dawn waved her toiletries kit and headed to the shower. Why did everyone have plans except for her? “Well, I’ll catch you later.”

---

Hair still damp from the shower, Dawn walked out to the parking lot, grimacing as she stepped into the wall of humid heat that was Kansas in May. She missed Vršac even while knowing that the city she missed was the one from before the Meteor.

She sighed, fishing in her purse for her keys as her shirt started to stick to her back. The Alibi had air-conditioning. Even if Heidi had plans, there was a fair chance some astronauts would be there and she could maybe join them.

Laughter floated across the parking lot. Under a pool of light, Graeham and Wilburt got into the same car. They’d acted like they had separate plans, but it looked like both were going to the same place.

Dawn stood on the sidewalk for a moment, feeling as though she were back at university and the only woman in the chemistry department. No one had wanted to be her lab partner and she’d had to work alone.

If she’d been willing to flirt with any of the men, it might have been different.

Head down, she walked to her own car, on loan from the IAC while she was back on Earth. This was all right. People were allowed to make their own plans. Those plans didn’t have to include her.

But lying to her about it? That made it feel like they were doing something she might want to do and that they just didn’t want her. The bulge of the pad in her underwear reminded her of the main difference between her and her crewmates. They had never been obvious assholes about the fact that she was a woman, but then the “gallant” ones never were. This was among the many reasons the company of women was so preferable.

She slid behind the wheel of her car. Following them would be childish.

She stuck the key in the ignition. There would be nothing she could do with that information.

She started the car. But she was going to follow them anyway.

---

Half a dozen times, Dawn told herself that she was being stupid and every time, the anger at being excluded washed right over her. Graeham and Wilburt stopped the car across the river in a part of Kansas City she’d never been to.

Dawn sat behind the wheel of the car, watching them walk into a building that was clearly a bar.

She had wanted to be wrong that they were excluding her. Gripping the wheel, she closed her eyes for a moment. What she should do was drive back to the Alibi and spend the evening with people who wanted her. Or at least who weren’t actively avoiding her.

Dawn opened the door.

These were her crewmates. She was tired of being shut out because she was a woman. They wanted a boy’s night out? Fine, she could be one of the boys.

Dawn straightened her shoulders and walked toward the bar. Working Late was painted on a window that was otherwise obscured with wavy glass. Pop rock thumped through the walls.

She opened the door, stepping into a haze of cigarette smoke. The music pulsed in her chest. The room was filled with men. The air-conditioning chilled the sweat coating her. She didn’t see Graeham and Wilburt anywhere, but the men at the table closest to her turned.

A freckled white man in a business suit looked her up and down. “In the right place, sweetheart?”

She was back in chemistry, walking into the classroom for the first time after having come up through an all-girls school where she had been one of many. Dawn took a step back. “No. Sorry.”

She turned and fled back into the humid night. The smart thing to do was to plan her approach and talk to Graeham and Wilburt at work. She shoved her hands in her pockets. Right. As if the problem of being a woman in aerospace was something that she could really work. Maybe Elma York could, but Dawn was just a face in the crowd.

Dawn walked back to the car and got behind the wheel. Maybe she could talk to Dr. York. During orientation, she’d said to come to her if there were any problems with “boys being boys.”

Gripping the steering wheel with one hand, Dawn cranked the engine. She turned on the lights and pulled away from the curb. Her headlights caught a glint of golden hair wrapped into a braid like a crown.

She slowed to let the pedestrian cross. Long legs tapered from a brown plaid mini-skirt to white go-go boots . It took a moment before she realized that the pedestrian was Heidi.

Heidi crossed the street and walked straight to the bar with no hesitation. She opened the door as if she went there every night.

Dawn drove away. Her shoulders seemed to round and pull her down into the seat. So it wasn’t that she was a woman. Graeham and Wilburt just didn’t like her. And apparently, neither did Heidi.

---

Dawn pushed the door to her apartment open. Halfway to the Alibi, she realized that she just couldn’t face the idea of walking into the bar and finding no other astronauts there or, worse, all of them there and tables too full for her.

Her roommate, Ljilja, looked up from the table where she was bent over a Portuguese language book. Dropping the book, the astronaut candidate grabbed a piece of paper from the table, and spoke in Serbian. “Direktor Clemons! Rekao je da ga pozoveš čim uđeš. Gde si bila? Ostavio je svoj kućni broj!”

For a moment, Dawn’s mind was too off-balance to understand her first language. Then she caught up and switched to Serbian. “Clemons left his home number?”

“Zora!” Ljilja used her real name, untranslated for the benefit of the anglophone International Aerospace Coalition. She thrust the paper at Dawn. “Zora, I think you’re getting an assignment.”

Dawn shook her head and stared at the paper, caught between languages. Serbian was usually a relief after a day spent bouncing between English, German, and Portuguese, but right now she felt so off-kilter. There were damn few reasons for the director of the International Aerospace Coalition to call her after hours, and none of them were good.

She answered in the language of the note, in English. “Have you heard anything about the prime crew?”

Ljilja shook her head. “Are you going to the Moon?”

“I don’t know.” She set her bag down on the table and walked to the phone. “Let’s find out.”

The phone rang three times before it rattled; in the background she could hear the clatter of dishes and conversation, “. . . about a puppy after you convince your mother.” Director Clemons’s distinctive posh British voice had a laugh in it that she’d never heard, which vanished into formality as he answered the phone. “Clemons residence.”

“Hello, Director Clemons. This is Dawn Sabados. I have a note to call you?” She gripped the phone cord in her right hand and tried not to see Llilja, who was pretending to be working on her Portuguese.

“Ah, Sabados. Wonderful. The prime crew has had a measles exposure. How would you like to go to the Moon?”

The world went white and gray around her. Fireflies seemed to dance across her body. So far, she’d only done runs to Lunetta or orbit and hadn’t gotten to land on the Moon. “I would like that very much, sir.”

“Splendid. Now we just need to find Schnöhaus and Stewman. We’ve much work to do over the next four days to get your team ready to fly.”

Her team. Her gut cramped and she tightened her hand on the warm Bakelite receiver. “I know where they are.”

---

Dawn parked the car down the street from Working Late. She had thought about telling Clemons where they were, and then she remembered university and how hard she’d had to fight to be here. She wanted Graeham and Wilburt to know that she knew that they’d left her out of their plans.

If she could do a chemistry lab by herself, she could walk into a bar.

Dawn got out of the car and walked to the bar. Shoulders back and chin up as if she was prepping for a test. She opened the door.

The businessman looked up again, taking his hand off the thigh of the man at the table with him. A bouncer in a leather vest walked over to her. “Looking for someone?”

“I’m meeting some friends.” She scanned the room, looking for Heidi’s golden hair, and realized that there was another room behind the wall of booths. It was filled with women laughing. One sat on another’s lap.

She looked at the men again. Shapes and laughter fell into place. This . . . this was a gay bar. Her brain split into two simultaneous reactions – the desire to flee before someone saw her and the relief at not having to hide who she was. Since joining the IAC, she had buried that part of herself in exchange for access to the stars.

She spotted Graeham and Wilburt across the room, heads close and relaxed as she’d never seen them before. Heidi leaned against the booth next to them, laughter brightening her eyes beneath her golden crown. The tension through her shoulders sublimated away.

She didn’t have to hide.

Dawn smiled at the bouncer, weight lifting as if she were sliding into orbit. “I see them. Thank you.”

Slipping through the crowd, she headed toward the small group. Graeham saw her first and straightened in familiar panic.

Dawn held up her hands, smiling to try to let them know, before she got to them, that it was okay. Wilburt turned, eyes widening. Then Heidi looked up and flinched.

She stopped just outside their circle and the music beat through her heart. “No, no. It’s okay. I’m . . .” She gestured at the bar, still not quite able to admit it out loud. “Also.”

Graeham tilted his head, grin starting to form. “Bloody hell. All four of us?”

“So it seems.” She felt Heidi’s gaze like a chemical reaction and kept her own fixed on Wilburt and Graeham. “I thought you did not like me.”

Wilburt’s brows went up. “No. No, I am so sorry. We only . . .” He looked at Graeham helplessly. “Being on the same crew gives us an excuse to spend time together.”

“I’m so sorry, my dear.” Graeham slid out of the booth. “Join us and let me buy a round, hm?”

“I can’t.” She took a deep breath, so grateful now that her pride and spite had sent her here. If she had unwittingly sent someone from the IAC to find them here, all three of them would have been quietly removed from the astronaut rosters. “Clemons called. Prime crew had a measles exposure. We’re going to the Moon.”

Graeham’s mouth dropped open. Wilburt let out a whoop that had the rest of the room turning to stare at them.

“Wunderbar! I’m so happy for you!” Heidi squealed and swept Dawn into a hug. The other woman smelled like strawberries and engine fuel. Dawn inhaled, burying her nose in the golden hair without meaning to.

And then she felt that uncomfortable sticky certainty that she’d bled through her pad.

“Damn it.” Dawn broke the embrace, reaching for her bag. She hadn’t changed pads when she got home. Even as she opened it, she knew it was pointless because she hadn’t restocked since her last period.

“Problem?” Wilburt asked, brows rising.

She grimaced, rooting past crumpled receipts and fractured mints. “I have an aunt from a red town.”

Maybe they had vending machines in the bathroom. Or she could ask—

“You . . . you’re worried they won’t let you go because your aunt is communist?” Graeham’s voice sounded very confused.

“What? No.” She stopped digging through her bag and looked up to see all three of them staring at her with some confusion. “Why do you think I have a communist aunt?”

“Red town?” Graeham shrugged and looked between them.

Then Heidi made an o that puckered her mouth into the shape of a perfect kiss. “Oh! Your aunt. Yes. My aunt visited me last week.”

“I wasn’t expecting her and . . .” Shit. What if they wouldn’t let her go because she was having her period?

“I know exactly what you mean.” Heidi grabbed Dawn’s hand. Her hand was warm and a little papery with dryness. “Come on.”

 Hand in hand, she followed Heidi through the men, across to the women’s side of the bar and then to the restroom. The music was too loud to have conversation while they were walking.

The volume dropped in the bathroom, where the lights were brighter and reflected off the mirrors. Dawn’s reflection was drab and unpolished beside Heidi’s brightness.

Heidi opened her own bag and pulled out a portable watercolor kit to make room to fish around. “How did you know where to find the boys?”

“I . . . um . . .” Dawn swallowed, twining her fingers together. “I followed them after work. How about you?”

Heidi pulled out a tampon and handed it to Dawn. “You mean, how did we find out that we were all gay?” She shrugged. “Bumped into each other here.”

Dawn turned the tampon over in her hands. “You don’t happen to have a pad?”

“Never worn one?” She looked toward the door back out into the main bar. “We could ask around, but from what I hear this is easiest to manage in space.”

Dawn looked up in astonishment. “I don’t remember that from training.”

Heidi laughed, voice shockingly loud in the small room. “Mein Gott, no. Can you imagine Stetson Parker even acknowledging that part existed for anything except fucking? No, no . . . this is from some of the other women. Officially, no one has had a period in space because that would mean having meetings that none of the male engineers can handle.”

“They are such delicate flowers.” She closed her fingers around the tampon. “Thanks. I’ll give it a try.”

“If it hurts, that just means your angle of insertion is wrong—just like on a sim, honestly.” Heidi smiled at her, warm and inviting. “There are more of us. I can introduce you, if you’d like.”

Dawn stopped before she went into the stall. “Why didn’t I know?”

Tilting her head to the side, so the lights around the mirror cast her braid into a halo, Heidi shrugged. “I think—I think maybe you have been so careful that you wound up guarding yourself too much. The walls have not left room to let anyone in.”

Tears pricked at the corners of Dawn’s eyes and she nodded. It was just the hormones, nothing more, but the evening felt bright and tender. Her orbit had widened and she felt as if she could see the whole planet spread below her, instead of a tiny patch of wall.

---

The ring on Dawn’s space helmet rested lightly on her shoulders as she stared at the controls over her head. The Eigene had landed.

Outside their tiny triangular windows, the lunar surface glowed in the brilliant light of an unfiltered sun. Stark shadows of lunar dawn stretched across the landing site. She wanted her pencils so she could try to catch the crisp contours and the way the spacecraft parked opposite them glinted in the sunlight.

The small mound of the lunar base rested just beyond it, little more than a tube with regolith scraped over it.

“This is . . . stellar,” Wilburt said.

Dawn laughed. “Do you have a joke for every occasion?”

“Naturally.” He flipped two pages forward in his checklist. “Though, I will note that my mother did not understand my obsession with looking at the moon every night. She thought it was just a phase.”

Dawn only half listened to Wilburt, trying to pay attention to her nether regions. She thought she was done with her period, but she’d also been in zero-g for three days. With gravity, even so mild as one-sixth of Earth’s, she was nervous that her period might still be present. “A reminder that I’m going to want a moment for hygiene before we—”

Their radio crackled and Nicole Wargin’s patrician voice greeted them, “Eigene, Artemis 17. Welcome to the Moon.”

“Artemis 17, Eigene.” Dawn’s face went bright red inside her helmet because she’d forgotten that they were on hot mics. “The crew of Artemis 18 is happy to be here.”

Through the window, Dawn could just see someone in the other tiny ship wave at them. She waved back.

“When you finish your shutdown, we’re standing by to help you unload supplies into the base. It’s cramped, but it’s home.”

“Our team appreciates that.” Graeham, as mission commander, responded with a grin. “And we brought some fresh fruit from Earth as a housewarming gift.”

“Then your team is very, very welcome.”

Dawn was never going to stop smiling. She turned to her checklist as Nav/Comp, working through her share of the landing procedures and noting stars for the report later. But really she was just giving Wilburt and Graeham the only privacy she could in the small quarters. Behind her, she heard the fricative hush of spacesuits brushing and a small, happy sigh.

She smiled at their happiness, staring out the window, then stopped as a brighter red star low on the horizon caught her gaze.

Mars. Maybe someday, this team could go there together. Maybe with Heidi. And maybe she could have the same joy of arriving on a new planet and being entirely herself.

Standing on the Moon, with the stars spread above them, brighter than diamonds, everything seemed possible for her team.

“In the Moon’s House” copyright © 2024 by Mary Robinette Kowal
Art copyright © 2024 by Avalon Nuovo

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A woman hires an exorcist to clear an infestation of 32 angels who think they’re helping her. (They are not.)

---

The fifth time Mrs. Mead won the lottery, she finally had to admit to a rather annoyed IRS agent that her home had been infested by angels for around eight months now. The agent said it was time to do something about it. That or get arrested.

Mrs. Mead, fearing above all else the deep silence and loneliness that imprisonment would bring, agreed.

After donating eighty percent of her winnings, she finally called the exorcist she’d highlighted in the local paper five months ago. It took a few days to schedule an appointment, by which time the angels had healed several paper cuts, repainted the basement, and sent visions of her mother’s spirit trapped in their hot embrace, eyes full of knowing, to help her fall asleep to.

When the exorcist arrived, Mrs. Mead took in the face of the man who had been staring at her for months now, his ad and information in the local paper burning a hole in her worn dining room table. He was just as fashionable as his photo, today dressed in a tailored maroon suit with burgundy suspenders. As he removed his hat, the same color as his jacket, she noticed his head was completely shaved, far different from the dark-haired pompadour in the photo. When she looked down at the ad in her hand to double check, he gave an easy smile and looked, if anything, a bit sheepish.

“Sorry for any confusion. The haircut and stubble are a newer look, but I paid for that ad and headshot last year. My line of work pays just fine, but good headshots are wicked expensive.” He smiled, bright and easy, extending his hand. “Jude. Nice to meet you, Mrs. Mead.”

Mrs. Mead put the paper down and shook Jude’s hand. “Well, I think your new look suits you well. Margaret Mead. It’s quite nice to meet you, Jude. Please, come in.”

The minute he crossed the threshold, Jude’s posture changed.

Gone was the easy way he moved, gone the languid look in his eyes. He paused like a hunter in the woods, hearing some faraway sound that could be anything with teeth, anything hungry. His gaze sharpened, and he held very still, eyes sweeping the room, landing on Mrs. Mead.

“Why, Mrs. Mead,” he said, voice casual and calm, eyes steady and appraising, “you were very much not exaggerating the circumstances of your infestation.”

Guilt surged inside of her like rising vomit. “How many?”

Left shoulder up, then down. Eyebrow cocked. “Hard to say. The air is . . . thick with them. At a guess, maybe thirty? Thirty-two?”

Putting a number to it staggered her; she hadn’t felt so hollow since her mother’s diagnosis. “That’s . . . that’s too many, isn’t it?”

She hated asking silly questions, but it was a bad habit from her childhood; if she asked the silly question, someone else got to be the one to assert reality, to ground her in the truth, to hurt her. It didn’t have to be self-inflicted, giving up the whimsy that maybe something strange or difficult could in fact be normal. She didn’t have to be the one to say it. To make it real.

Jude gave a soft, sad smile that didn’t try to reach his eyes. He nodded. “Yes, Mrs. Mead. Not everyone in this world is lucky enough to get even a single angel, let alone a whole radiance to themselves.”

Before he could continue, she said, “Radiance?”

He was quick, Jude. If he saw her deflecting, he didn’t say anything. Instead, he set down his briefcase. “Our taxonomy for a gathering of angels. Like a bonfire of devils or a humble of reapers. A radiance of angels.”

Mrs. Mead let out a weak laugh. “I like that, a bonfire.”

Jude knelt, opened his briefcase, and began to search through it. “Oh, yes. Demons and angels and other beings of the outer dark enjoy approaching people, but devils? Fiends love when a person comes to them. That’s when the soul is at its brightest. For them, anyway. They prefer to wait at their fire, salivating at the sound of footsteps.”

He found what he was looking for, a candle with golden wax, thick as his forearm and just as long. “Did you know a soul is bright when it’s suffering, Mrs. Mead?”

A pit opened in her stomach. Her heart fell toward it like a brick. “No,” she finally managed, trying not to let her polite veneer crack.

Jude smiled at her, not unkindly, and began to look for a place to set down the candle. It was tough between the piles of newspapers and magazines and old dishes, the detritus of a life imploded. “See, another rumor. That a soul would be, I don’t know, brighter when it’s happier, as though happiness were the surprise it should glow for. But,” he said, finally clearing away a space, “happiness is the norm for a soul. When all is well, a soul hums and glows like that final ember in a fire, just content and toasty. It’s only when a foul wind comes by, kicks at that ember and tries to get it to go out, that it flares, becoming bright, desperate to hang on to that happiness.”

Mrs. Mead didn’t look at the dozens of shadows she saw out of the corner of her eye, many of them featureless, formless, but so hungry, she knew. They knew they were being talked about. As mindless as they could be, they knew their name when called.

“And angels, well.” Jude chuckled as he reached into his coat pocket for a match. “Angels are everything they say and more. Miracles? Done and done. Light? They have that in abundance. Prayers? Oh, they’ll answer you, time and time again. But they are also moths, and they’re drawn to the flame of suffering. The brighter the hurt, the more angels flutter and clutter around it, aching to eat that hurt and make it better by any means necessary.”

He struck the match against the heel of his black combat boot and put it to the wick before she could stop him.

The wick caught. But if a flame danced there, Mrs. Mead couldn’t tell. She saw nothing but felt some alien light push on her, smelled something like sea air and ozone. There was no fire, and yet, some element shimmered there, hazy and iridescent, at the top of the candle.

As it burned, Mrs. Mead gasped. From the not-flame, a fuliginous smoke poured forth, thick, a darkness deeper than midnight that spilled down the candle, down the table, and filled the room.

For a moment, the smoke danced around Mrs. Mead and Jude.

And then, as it flowed like a shadow through the house, Mrs. Mead watched the smoke snag and catch, torn this way and that, displaced.

Displaced by the sheer weight and presence of unseen others in the room.

Around them, their hidden forms pulled into human sight by the black smoke and the not-light of the golden candle, Mrs. Mead saw in grotesque detail the thirty-two angels that had made a home of her long and earned suffering. They were many-limbed and vaporous and multi-jawed, some entwined around her or sprawled on the ceiling; some skittered across walls, and others were flapping on seven silent, membranous wings, and some were, frankly, just eyes, the color and width of the white noon sun, buzzing in the language of heavenly wasps.

Jude didn’t look at any of the angels around him. Instead, he kept his gaze level and steady, staring at Mrs. Mead until she looked back at him. When they locked eyes, he said in his kindest voice, “Mrs. Mead, have you had any suffering in this house lately?”

Not long after, Jude was ushered out of the house, the door slammed behind him, and Mrs. Mead fell to her knees and wept at the foot of the stairs, having been unable to answer him.

As she did, dozens of wispy mouths alighted on her face and drank her tears before they could even think of falling past her lips. And in their feather-light, mycelial touch, in their soft, inarticulate whispers, she felt comfort.

---

Jude returned two days later.

He rang the doorbell and in the dark of her home, Mrs. Mead waited, praying he’d go away. And as always, her prayers were answered.

Dozens of silken, angelic tongues drank her words into them and went to make them real. Their voices overlapped, echoing around her as they moved to the door: we’ll get rid of him we don’t need him no no no he doesn’t know us he doesn’t know you doesn’t know what you need we do we know what you need mrs. mead don’t we please let us help help help—

But then, Jude did something. The angels that had raced toward the threshold slowed down and seemed to lose interest, drifting back into their cobwebbed corners, terrifyingly quiet.

“Mrs. Mead?” Jude said, voice muffled by the door. “Can you please let me in? I just want to talk. I promise I won’t do anything you don’t want me to do.”

The quiet turned vicious as the suddenly silent angels seethed; it felt like a hot, rattling breath on the back of her neck. If they had not reacted so, she would have been tempted to let them charm her again with their serpentine assurances.

But they didn’t want her to speak with the exorcist. And that was what made her get off the couch and make her way to the door, fighting through furious shapes every step of the way.

Turning that doorknob was the hardest thing she’d ever had to do (well, one of them).

But the moment the door opened, the angels scattered, drifting away, mindless once more.

Before her, in a tailored suit of houndstooth, stood Jude. On his lapel shone a bundle of herbs wrapped in what looked like a dandelion’s stem. The air smelled heavily of rosemary and juniper. He smiled apologetically as he entered, gesturing at the herbs. “The ward won’t hurt you; I promise. It just makes angels go a little hazy, forgetful. I figured I’d need it if we were to speak.”

He waited there, briefcase held before him, and waited for her to respond. Then, “You do wish to speak, yes? I doubt you’d open this door only to tell me off again.”

Why did she feel so ashamed? Why couldn’t she look at him? She studied his boots instead, dark and thick-soled. Scuffed but sturdy. She wondered how many miles they’d seen, how many more they had to go.

“They . . . they didn’t want me to open the door,” she said, still looking down. “Normally, they want so much. And that they didn’t want this to happen . . . it made me think . . . that it was better to open the door.” Her voice, so soft. Her demeanor, small, tremulous. She felt like a child before this young man who was no more than half her age. When had she grown so small?

Jude’s voice was level, and heavy with empathy. “When a radiance gathers, they tend to cede collective sentience for a lot of, let’s call them base instincts. If it was just one or two angels, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d managed to have full conversations, help direct them a bit. But the way they’ve congealed here? Yeah, it’s a lot of protective instinct. A lot of fear, especially of someone like me who could pry them apart.”

He leaned down and Mrs. Mead found herself looking into his kind amber eyes. “Opening this door was very brave, Mrs. Mead. I mean that. Thank you for agreeing to see me again.”

It had been so long since someone had spoken to her like a person. What was left of Mother howled. And the angels—the radiance—they mewled and pleaded and luxuriated, pawing at her soul.

“You’re welcome,” she said. It felt good to be seen as a person, by another person, in this house of ghosts and angels.

Standing in the doorway, Jude gestured into the house. “Now, I want to make something clear, Mrs. Mead. I came back because you are a person who needs help; even if articulating it is tough, opening this door means some part of you knows what’s happening is wrong. But you also need to know that I can only pry apart the radiance; you need to be the one to banish it. I’ll help, but”—here his gaze turned flinty and tough—“I can’t do it alone. You need to put in the work. If that’s something you want, say the word, and we’ll begin.”

Mrs. Mead lost herself in that hard gaze; something about it thrummed through her, igniting memory after memory of another’s eyes, hard and unyielding. But those eyes couldn’t hurt her again, they wouldn’t let her, they took care of her, this was a mistake, a mistake, it was okay to make those, all she had to do was—

A sharp strike of green in her nose.

Her mind fogged, fuzzed. Mrs. Mead tasted honey on the back of her tongue, sweetness in the hollow of her throat.

She coughed, shook her head. Saw a dozen phantoms suddenly drifting away from her. Panting, heart racing, she looked at Jude, whose hand was on the herbs on his lapel. “I don’t know if you understand just how deeply they’ve buried themselves in you, Mrs. Mead. It’s possible they’ve influenced your mind more than you know. Have you found yourself not in control of your speech or movement these last few months?”

Mrs. Mead recalled the howling, the torture, the ending that had sent her into this terrible spiral. She remembered, word for word, how every command had been hers.

That was the true poison, she knew: in every instance, they had made sure it was her will, her choice, not theirs.

“No,” she said, voice small and shaking. “No, only like now. When they’re trying to—to—”

“Preserve their existence?” Jude chuckled. “Such is the way of every parasite. May I?” he asked, holding out a hand to her.

Before they could speak through her again, make her wrench the door shut, she grabbed his hand. She felt stronger, and the sharp smell of grass and honey came to her again. “I ask again,” he said, “with your mind your own: Do you want my help? Do you want to banish the radiance?”

Strength was fleeting, she knew. If she waited, she’d say no. She’d remember the thousand reasons why the radiance was here, why they were latched on to her soul, what she made them do when they weren’t winning her lotteries. She could live in misery and satisfaction. It was easy.

But another voice within her, here for the moment Jude’s magic cleared her mind, spoke up. And it said if she didn’t get help, she would die here, drowning in that very satisfaction. She’d die just like the old witch and worse, be trapped with her forever.

It was enough. Mrs. Mead nodded, eyes wet, voice resolute. “Yes. Please come in. Please help me.”

Jude nodded back and crossed the threshold. “First things first,” he said, pointing at his jacket. “You’re going to need one of these.”

---

After a week of study, research, taxonomy, and labelling of her radiance, Mrs. Mead knew two things: one, Jude was very good at his job.

And two, if she didn’t tell him the truth, he would find out for himself.

For every angel identified in the radiance, he grew closer to her terrible secret. Mrs. Mead had no idea there were so many different kinds. Lightculls and sundrifters, crucibles and witnesses, feather-weighers and penances, on and on and on.

On day four, he shared an odd discovery that made her blood run cold. “I’m trying to go backward, make my way from the newest angels to the first that arrived. And while the last ten or so are benign angels of various orders, I’m noticing a real shift the older I get. See, there’s an order of angels obsessed with justice and punishment, called smitebringers. Mrs. Mead,” he said, turning to her with an appraising gaze, “you have . . . more than twenty smitebringers in your home. I do think it’s time we talked about that, don’t you?”

Hearing that number, part of her bitterly wondered why so few had answered her prayers.

Yes, she knew why. But such things couldn’t be told, soundwaves doing little to convey the depth of pain, the hot red of scar tissue. Such things could only be shown.

The next day, she brought Jude up to Mother’s bedroom.

Hand on the knob, what she found she could say was simple.

“Please don’t judge me too harshly, Jude. Please help me.” She found she didn’t want to look at him, to parse his scrutiny.

So she opened the door and let him look on the tableau within. For a moment, she thanked God, wherever the fuck he was, that there were only eight angels feasting on her mother’s soul. That only a handful of her guardians surrounded her mother’s gauzy, faint soul on the bed, framing what little remained of her like a beautiful halo.

Mrs. Mead knew how Jude would see them, huddled around Mother’s soul like campers by a guttering flame in the deep, dark night. Knew he would only see them as leeches, would read this length of light as a proboscis, or that shaft of flame as a fang, sucking and rending the spirit stuff of her mother into them, growing fat in a parasite’s paradise.

But she just couldn’t see them that way. She really had so little faith in anything, but what remained at the very bottom of her heart was in this room. It read that fang as a spear; it read that proboscis as a sword. They were her angels, no one else’s. And they fought with tooth and claw, blade and spear, to keep slaying the monster who had spent all her long, hateful life hurting Mrs. Mead.

Jude said nothing, his face as impassive as a field of snow: cold and white, unmoving. His eyes roamed across the sight. The angels were so enamored, they didn’t even know he was there. His ears twitched at the high, tinny sound of Mother’s scream; so little of her was left, she sounded like a kettle boiling in the house next door. Most days, Mrs. Mead forgot she was even screaming, she’d become so used to it.

Well, add it to the list, she thought grimly. There were far worse things she’d become used to in this house already.

Jude drank in the scene like the angels drank of Mother. When he turned back to her, he had tears in his eyes, red and searching. Mrs. Mead stared back at him, not feeling a twinge of remorse, and refusing to; she’d always been a sympathetic crier, would well up with ease at the sight of another’s tears. But she would never cry for this monster again.

Jude opened his mouth, closed it. Opened it again, waited; when nothing emerged, closed his mouth once more.

The air became heavy with all that was unsaid. At some point, he must’ve realized what Mrs. Mead had realized some time ago: After such a lifetime of trauma, what the fuck could be said, really?

Walking over to Mrs. Mead, Jude led her out into the hallway, closing the door behind them both. And he folded himself over her, wrapping her in a hug that was tight and warm, and even if nothing could ever be said to make sense of it, it felt good, in this small way, to be seen.

An hour later, after tea and tissues, when each of them had caught their breath, Jude asked her if she was ready to send Mother on her way and free the radiance.

And Mrs. Mead, after a moment, said, “No.”

Jude took a long, deep breath. Then: “You realize we can banish all of them but one, and if her spirit is still here, devoured as it is, they will all come back. More, possibly. Right?”

Mrs. Mead didn’t think of herself as mean. But you didn’t survive decades of abuse without a little meanness rooting itself in you, just enough to growl when you had to. That meanness flared, a hot cinder that burned her as much as it warmed her. “I understand that. I also understand that if she leaves, she won’t get to suffer anymore.”

Jude tried to hold her hands, but she pulled them back. “She made me suffer my whole life. And no angels came. Not until she was dying in that bed, in agony. Not until I prayed she would keep suffering, until she’d felt a fraction of the pain and terror I had felt my entire life. Because of her. I watched angel after angel arrive, drawn to her light, answering my prayer. I watched them eat, drink, sing over her. I watched her face as EMTs carted her dead body away, her horror that it wasn’t ending. I have . . . decided so few things in my life, Jude. But now I get to decide when she gets to leave.”

With a long sigh, he said, “Mrs. Mead, the punishment or joy due to the dead is out of our hands. With what I can sense of . . . your mother’s soul . . . there’s little doubt where she’s headed, if there’s even enough of her left to know it.”

The meanness made her snarl, her body trembling at ten thousand remembered hurts. “But I won’t be the one doing it to her. She won’t know she hurt me. She won’t know I’m the one hurting her now.”

If her meanness affected him, it didn’t show. “Mrs. Mead, do you . . . do you really think you’re alone here? I promise, you’re not the first person to try to destroy herself by indulging past pain.”

He stared at his hands intently. “I—I’m . . . this is pretty personal, Mrs. Mead, but I want you to know. When I was younger, when I finally knew I was Jude and began transitioning, I had some good people who stood by me, who helped me.” He paused for a moment, watching her from the corner of his eye. When she said nothing, he continued, “That’s why I came back, Mrs. Mead, to help you.

“But I had other folks, too, people close to me who . . . used that closeness. To try to hurt me. Stuff me back in a box that wasn’t me, lock me in a room that would always feel wrong.” Mrs. Mead saw in Jude’s jaw a tension she’d not seen yet, a weariness to his shoulders that he’d hid well while on the job.

“I, too, had people I would have gladly bled myself dry for if only they could know just how badly and how deeply they’d hurt me. I know that hunger, which is why I’m trusting you with all this, Mrs. Mead. Because I’ve spent years working to live for myself, here and now. Let myself live a little freer, even on the days I get angry, and the work is hard. And as best I can, I try to help others get the chance to do that work, too.”

Jude rubbed his eyes, and then turned that level, piercing gaze back to her. “I had good people help me realize that choosing my future and my happiness was the first step in that work. Because why am I going to listen to people who are furious that I’m me, who still insist I’m someone else? The joy I feel being Jude can’t and won’t be contained by any box they want to keep me in. I want that freedom for you, Mrs. Mead. I really do. But you have to want it, too.”

For a moment, his words almost made it. Almost sank right into her, body and soul; almost helped became a mirror to her own rage and pain. But no angels were needed to reinforce the scar-tissue walls she’d spent a lifetime building. Not even Jude’s vulnerability could break through the solid walls of hate and sorrow around her heart.

She just stared at him, unblinking, golden forms wisping around her like a bright shroud.

Jude didn’t reach for her again. He settled back on the couch, staring at the ceiling. He suddenly looked exhausted. He might have been just speaking out loud, but the words were for her alone. “So you’ll really let her control you still? Even eaten as she is, with so little of herself left inside her anymore, you’ll still let your fear of her winning keep you from your own happiness?”

Later, when she came out of her rage, when all she could feel was the cool touch of light on her cheeks, lapping at her hot tears, when all she wanted was the smothering blanket of wings to drown out the world and that fucking kettle whistling a house away, Mrs. Mead would concede that Jude was probably right.

But what the fuck did he know?

The angels agreed, every last one of them.

That was rare, all of them agreeing.

And so, it must have been true.

---

A week later, a slip of paper arrived under the door.

Mrs. Mead, it read, I am sorry our conversation last week ended in my causing you pain, though I do not regret my frankness nor my sharing my personal experiences. It was not my intention to hurt you. But you must understand: if things keep on as they are, you will find no solace in your mother’s suffering. You will suffer, too, and these angels care not about the source of their light, only that it is bright. Please, save yourself. You still have a full life to live. Do not let your pain drown you. And if you choose to, despite my warnings, please know I will miss you. For sooner or later, you will end up exactly as your mother.

She tore the letter in half, then quarters, then more and more, until the kitchen was filled with little bits of paper. With her angels praising her in their celestial songs and lowing laughter, she danced across them like she was a little girl again.

Mrs. Mead did not pick them up. Why bother? The house was as clean as it was ever going to get.

She spent the rest of her day watching her mother cry out, attempting words, and in failing, only weep. It was better than anything, and Mrs. Mead wished Jude were there, to make him eat his words.

---

A month passed. There was no word from Jude. There was no word from anyone, really. Mrs. Mead felt as though she were haunting her own life, moving from room to room, consuming food and water out of habit. At some point, she felt as though her waking hours, the ones she remembered, had become stage directions.

Walk here, eat this, sleep now, wake. But there was no one to direct her, the only audience her ghoulish radiance who cheered and clapped and drank her tears before they left the duct.

In that time, the local government stopped calling every time she won the lottery; they just dispersed the winnings to the handful of charities she’d provided. She kept the radio off so she would stop winning shock jock contests for this musician or that vacation. She finally had to make an auto-reply email to her boss, discouraging the promotions offered, insisting that divine intervention was not a good enough reason for a corner office. She learned to ignore her body’s changes, as the angels did their best to turn back the clock on her crow’s-feet, her encroaching liver spots, her receding hairline; she thought of them like little gifts you get at holidays from children who don’t understand the concept of gifts yet, who only get you what they think you might enjoy. Even on the days when she felt she could climb a mountain, when she felt so young, so energized, she forced herself to sit and do nothing, knowing it would fade as soon as she left the house.

And why would she leave anyway?

All this fortune and every day she found herself rapt before Mother’s withering spirit. Mrs. Mead drank in her suffering, that tea kettle howl tinnitus now, an ever-present sound that simply was part of her every day. Some days, she wondered if there was a limit to how much she enjoyed this.

No, enjoy wasn’t even the right word. She didn’t enjoy it. But she needed it. She needed Mother to know. And she’d wait as long as she had to for that to happen.

Another month went by. And then another. If the seasons were passing outside, Mrs. Mead didn’t know it. If it rained, if it snowed, if a tornado spun toward her, she couldn’t have cared less. The world outside her home fell into myth; when she looked out her windows, she could only guess at what was happening, for nothing made sense anymore.

She vaguely understood that she wasn’t eating, wasn’t showering or shitting; those had been replaced by the light of her radiance. They fed her, they cleansed her. They were in her blood, hot and gold, energizing her.

It didn’t matter that the stage directions were fading, erased day by day. It didn’t matter that the theater was getting dusty, gathering cobwebs. It didn’t even matter that the audience had stormed the stage, sinking their fangs into the actors, listless and drifting and happy.

Mrs. Mead knew she wasn’t dead or dying. Some vague part of her knew that she had simply given over her life to the angels. It let her focus on Mother’s suffering, and she was grateful.

Thinking had also left the realm of Mrs. Mead’s control. She’d always believed her mind mattered, that it was one of the things her torturous mother couldn’t control, couldn’t snipe at, couldn’t mold with threat or harm.

But as the angels became her, gave her life support so she could enjoy the culmination of her life’s hurt, she realized: thought was just another burden, like a body, like a heart. Just another frail, breakable thing.

And so she gave it up.

Time passed; how much, she did not know. She had given in to the gold of her radiance; little else mattered.

So, when things changed, it took her too long to realize.

And when she did, it was almost impossible to stop or fix it.

She had become a frog submerged in a water-filled pot, the world changing degree by degree, so slowly she didn’t even notice she was the one in pain.

It was when the vague form of her mother, a shadow among shadows, turned toward her in the doorway, and in a fit of pain screamed, “Just like you! To stand by and watch while I burn. Fucking ungrateful daughter I raised, I tell you that much.”

The gold fell away. It had to, in order to make room for this fresh fright, this sudden pain. It lodged in her breast, fear in the form of a dagger, Mother’s voice lunging into her, planting it deep. Mrs. Mead blinked away tears of molten light, lower lip trembling.

“W-what?” Her throat hurt. She hadn’t spoken in months.

From the squirming cloud of light that was her mother’s soul, a shape emerged; two lips formed a disdainful mouth and from it, her voice, ringing like funeral bells. “You’re a disgrace, Margaret, I know you know that. No need for me to say it, I can see you know it. It’s all over your face, wide as it is. But you’re so dense, I’m doing you a favor reminding you. I imagine you forget, going to la-la-land where you think you have it all together. Always was like you, escaping to a little world in your head where everything was bright and sunny. Waste of a mind.”

Mrs. Mead’s very nerves were on fire, every twitch of fear igniting them like a spitting live wire. She watched that mouth spew its filth and go quiet.

She waited. Waited like the hare waited for the owl to sleep, prey ready to run. A last gasp, she thought in that little corner that hadn’t given in to the radiance. Just a little fitful ember; it will go out and then I will be free.

The next morning, she was awoken by a familiar, awful scream. “You sleep the day away and can’t even help your poor, sick mother with a little breakfast? I may as well be dead, the way you treat me!”

Mrs. Mead came into the room to see those horrible eyes, dark and blue like the bottom of the sea, slitted like a paranoid viper’s, hovering over a mouth that hadn’t gone away.

She fed the specter of her mother cold oatmeal; like before, Mother complained with every spoonful, even as she sucked it down.

The next day, Mrs. Mead, muscles atrophied, rearranged the bed for five hours, trying to find a spot to keep her mother’s reforming skin from being hit by sunlight. She could do nothing right, the sun’s journey following Mrs. Mead like a terrible, bright witness. Her mother’s spirit, looking like a burn victim, swatted her with a ghostly hand.

Mrs. Mead flinched as she felt it brush her shoulder, cold and cruel and real.

The days came and went, dripping like blood from the edge of a knife, slow, deliberate. Her mother grew stronger as Mrs. Mead faltered, paled, weak in the knees and heart, confused and scared.

This couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t. She was dead. Gone. She had been gone! She had been!

Except . . . she hadn’t, really, had she? A voice spoke in the small corner left of Mrs. Mead’s mind that she could call her own, a little space her will had retreated to, like a child under the blankets, shivering in the moonless night. That part of her knew: her mother hadn’t left. Because she hadn’t let her. Mrs. Mead had wanted to torture her, hurt her mother as she had been hurt by her.

Maybe this is karma, she thought, painting her mother’s nails a garish pink, each one long and sharp enough to draw blood. Maybe I deserve this, she thought as her mother raked a nail across her cheek for sloppy work. Maybe I will die and become a spirit, and she will hurt me back again, both of us stuck in some awful loop.

But the truth was both simpler and more horrible than any question of cosmic justice.

Weeks after her mother began to return to the land of the living, Mrs. Mead awoke to the sound of more than thirty wispy mouths crawling across her.

Her angels surrounded her in a swarm of light. Their song was one she knew by heart: they only sang like this when they fed on a suffering so pure it crawled down their long, hollow throats, like honey, rich and thick.

She had lost track of them, she realized. She had always been so careful to know what direction their mouths were facing. But you couldn’t watch what didn’t want to be seen. What had begun to hunt you.

As they suckled at her, lapping up her tears and heartbreak and anger and fear, it struck her what had happened. Like Sisyphus staring down the boulder hurtling toward him, two truths came to mind at once.

The angels, fearing a loss of their food source, had created a new one for themselves.

And if Mrs. Mead didn’t call Jude right now, she realized, she never would. She would die in every way that mattered.

More than that, her mother would live.

If there was anything to motivate her, it was that.

Every muscle in her body was either taut or sluggish; moving a limb felt like shoving against a brick wall, unyielding. And when something did move—a hand, a foot, an ankle—it seemed she was trying to push through syrup, the world suddenly thick, the air redolent with concern as the radiance sensed her motives.

From their mouths and eyes and palms and even from the very fine hairs of their limbs came a deep and strident song, one sung in a key of command.

sit stop no sit down sit down sit down right now dearie darling sweetie honey honey honey please sit SIT WE SAID SIT SIT SIT SITSITSITSITSITSITSIIIIIIIII—

The words fuzzed, garbled, became one voice droning at a pitch meant to drive her to her knees. The sound was both sharp and heavy, like a hypodermic needle being hammered into her skull.

Mrs. Mead tasted blood; she’d bitten her tongue hard. One knee gave out suddenly and she fell against the wall, forehead driven into the wooden doorway. It became hard to see; the world on the fringe of her sight blurred, becoming hazy.

Her radiance was singing her down to the ground. Even ungentle as they were, she wasn’t angry with them. She knew that desperation, that fire stirred by fear, to hold on to a thing that was harming you. She remembered her last conversation with Jude.

She rounded the corner, limping. Her phone was on the kitchen table.

In the doorway opposite, her mother stood, her shadow long and smoking with rage. Angels had gathered around her like a cloak and as Mrs. Mead took a step forward, the very air boiled, all their voices colliding, smearing together.

SIT SIT SIT SIT DOWN HONEY SIT DOWN SWEETIE YOU FUCKING IDIOT SOME DAUGHTER YOU TURNED OUT TO BE WEAK WEAK WEAK JUST LIKE YOUR FATHER SO WEAK CAN’T EVEN DO THIS ONE LITTLE THING AND HOW COULD YOU PATHETIC DIDN’T EVEN HAVE THE BALLS TO KILL ME YOURSELF SEND ME TO HELL AT LEAST THERE THEY’D CARE ABOUT ME BUT YOU YOU DON’T EVEN HAVE IT IN YOU WHAT CAN YOU DO TO STOP US STOP ME WE ARE HUNGRY WE ARE HUNGRY SO HUNGRY ALL WE WANT IS THE SWEET SONG OF SUFFERING AND YOU WOULD DENY US AFTER ALL WE DID ALL WE DID FOR YOU ALL I DID FOR YOU RAISING SOME UNGRATEFUL BITCH WHO CAN’T EVEN MAKE A PHONE CALL TO SAVE HER LIFE

Mrs. Mead, tears in her eyes, mingling with the blood there, her vision red. Her hands, numb and pale; they’re stopping my heart, she realized. Her phone, gripped in limp fingers, screen lighting up. Her mother, these angels . . . neither could touch her, neither corporeal enough to rip it from her hand, smash it to the ground.

With a shaking swipe of numbing fingers, the phone unlocked.

In a voice like judgment: WE HAVE ONLY HELPED YOU WE HAVE ONLY EVER LOVED YOU YOU LITTLE SHIT WE HAVE ONLY WANTED THE BEST FOR YOU

Bloody tears touched the corner of her lips; she tasted heat and sorrow.

For a fleeting moment, she knew what it was to be an angel.

In a voice like poison: I HAVE ONLY EVER DONE MY BEST YOU UNGRATEFUL GIRL ONLY LOVED YOU AS BEST I COULD DON’T YOU THINK I WOULD HAVE DONE BETTER IF I COULD

When she pressed the phone icon, she couldn’t feel it. She saw his name as the last person who had called her. Who cared.

Together, their voices combined and shook her very soul like an animal in the jaws of a wolf, thrashing her into death.

NO ONE CARES ABOUT YOU NO ONE WILL HELP YOU EVERYONE WHO EVER COULD HAVE DONE SOMETHING YOU DROVE AWAY YOU YOU YOU YOU’RE THE MONSTER YOU’RE MEANT TO SUFFER HOW WILL YOU EVER GET HELP IF YOU’RE TOO WEAK TO ASK TO ADMIT YOU NEED IT TO EVEN ACCEPT IT

She didn’t know if she pressed the call button. The red in her vision fled and the world was fading into darkness. It was so quiet. No one spoke. Her mother, the angels, and Mrs. Mead all held their breath, waiting to see who would win.

Mrs. Mead didn’t find out because she fell unconscious, the world and its suffering, her suffering, dimming as she fell into some new depth, dark and cold.

She could only hope her mother wasn’t waiting for her there, too.

---

It took a week for her to look Jude in the eye.

Not that she was unable to. Much was injured. Some would heal, some wouldn’t. No, it was shame that kept her from looking into his eyes. It was harder because he wouldn’t leave her alone to wallow.

Every morning while she stayed at St. Monica’s Hospital, he’d come in, newspaper under his arm, cooling coffee in hand. He’d pretend she wasn’t pretending to sleep, murmuring to her under his breath as he read, did the crossword. And when she could no longer pretend to sleep, she kept her eyes far from his for the rest of the day.

It seemed his patience would outlast her shame. After a week she finally looked at him and said in a whisper, “But I was so cruel to you.”

He paused behind the paper. Then he folded it, set it on his lap, and looked at her, the setting light of the day casting his kind features in a light like gold. “And? Do you hold things said in anger against those in your life?”

Yes, she almost said. Then stopped moving her jaw, not trusting herself. Instead, she nodded. Then, “But I’d like not to. I’d . . . like to get better.”

“You already are,” he said, putting a hand on hers, stopping just shy of her intake bracelet. “You called me. Simple as that.”

Despair seemed to grab her organs and pull them in, down, dragging her into its grip. “But I should’ve—there’s so much I could’ve—” Tears threatened, and she hated herself; she had almost gotten herself killed, and here she was, crying over her own stupidity. She wanted to welcome that despair, welcome its pull, when Jude squeezed her hand hard enough to make her look at him.

His eyes were hard and bright, like pennies in the sun. “Stop that, Mrs. Mead. Stop that, please. For your own health.” He tried to smile, but the motion of his mouth didn’t diminish the hardness in his eyes. “We both know how addictive the past can be, Mrs. Mead. How comforting its familiarity is in your hands, even as it cuts you, weighs you down like a stone. But you put it down. You called me. You chose your future. In the end, you chose to survive and see what tomorrow can be. More than that, all of your tomorrows? You get to choose how to live them. And in time, that will be an exciting thing, though I know right now it’s scary. But I promise, one day it will be a joyful feeling to decide what tomorrow is and know that when it mattered, you were able to put your yesterdays down.”

Mrs. Mead found she couldn’t stand the light of his gaze anymore. The words, she heard; she tried to be inspired by them, even as, yes, they scared her. She turned away, let her hand go limp in his. “And the house?”

Jude took his hand back, and his smile was gentler. “I . . . well, when I came for you, it was a mess. Apologies for the state of it, whatever that state is. I . . . sort of went into survival mode, just getting you out again. Had to rely on brute force and technique to clear out the radiance. I got as many as I could. Whoever’s left will most likely leave once your mother’s spirit is gone.”

Something twisted inside her. The words barely eked out. “She’s . . . still there?”

Jude’s face was solemn, though his tone was kind. “I told you, Mrs. Mead. Only you can banish her. You have to be the one. I’ll help; you won’t be alone. But it has to be your decision.”

He stood suddenly. “I’m going to go for a jaunt around the building, stretch my legs. Give you a little time. But I think after this experience, it shouldn’t be a hard decision. Still. You have to make your own choices, Mrs. Mead. And you’re finally able to now. In this hospital, you’re free. And if you go back to that house and decide to pick that stone back up, you won’t be free. Simple as that. I’m not sorry for saving your life, Margaret. But,” he said, reaching down and placing his right hand on top of her own, “only you can save your future.”

He left. The door clicked behind him. Without him, without the angels, without her mother, Mrs. Mead was alone for the first time in . . . well, years.

She savored it. Let the stale hospital air sit on her tongue like holy communion. The beep of her heart monitor thrummed through her. Every little disturbance to the quiet—breathing, sheets rustling, birds out the window—spiked through her, sparking off nerves used to violence and light and noise.

Mrs. Mead was completely alone.

Before, that would have terrified her.

And if she was being honest, some part of her still was terrified.

But the relief she felt was greater than the fear, and so, she wept in this new silence. Not only because she was free of her angels and ghosts.

But because in being alone, she felt at peace. She was . . . okay being alone. More than that, against everything her mother had ever screamed at her, everything her radiance had ever cautioned against, she found, after a few moments, that she liked being alone with herself, too.

Relief settled around her in the quiet, holding her like an embrace. In the utter stillness of the hospital room, Mrs. Mead breathed, joyous in the reverent quiet that she could be alone. She did have a future waiting for her.

And she felt ready to move toward it, finally.

She lay in her bed, reveling in the silence, and watched out the window as the birds finished their songs in the fading gold light of day.

As night approached, Mrs. Mead felt a calm come over her, and she waited patiently for Jude to return.

“The Angel’s Share” copyright © 2024 by Martin Cahill
Art copyright © 2024 by James Zapata

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A comatose patient undergoes an experimental procedure that uses favorite childhood stories to pull the patient back into consciousness—but the experiment doesn’t go quite as planned…

---

Six people ringed the patient’s gurney. Amy Cole, Dr. James Ericson’s assistant, didn’t understand why two of the men were here, nor why the procedure was being done away from Jim’s medical-research lab, but it wasn’t her place to question Jim. Not that she ever would. You didn’t question genius.

Jim’s usual anesthesiologist sat on his stool by the patient’s head. Miguel said, “Ready, Dr. Ericson.”

“Good,” Jim said, his blue eyes alight in a way that still, after a year of working as his tech assistant, made Amy’s heart turn over. “Amy, start the run.”

She keyed in the code on her console. The patient, a woman of forty, twitched slightly as the electric shock ran through the lead wires into her brain. Patients always did that. Dr. Wu, the physician present in case the patient developed medical complications, watched closely. Her eyes widened slightly as she checked the patient’s monitors. This was Dr. Wu’s first time, but Amy could have told her there was nothing to worry about. Jim had performed his procedure dozens of times in clinical trials; FDA approval would come soon. Someday Jim would win the Nobel Prize. Amy was sure of it.

The smart screen mounted beside the gurney glowed blue.

---

Where was she?

Instinctively, she moved from the base of the iron staircase to a surveillance position, her back against the closest wall. A vast space, too dimly lit to see the corners—a warehouse? Airfield hangar? As her eyes adjusted, she could make out empty pallets, some broken, scattered throughout the space. A rat scurried past her and disappeared into a hole in the wall. The wall behind her smelled of damp.

An underground storage facility, then. Abandoned? Her hand moved of its own volition to her hip. Something was supposed to be there, and wasn’t. What? And why was she wearing the kind of dress she never wore, full-skirted with—Christ!—petticoats?

Where was she?

Who was she?

Something moved toward her from the far darkness.

---

“Sometimes,” Jim said to the two strangers, “it takes a while for the patient to speak. Until she does, of course, we won’t know where we are.”

The older of the two men, who’d been introduced only as Mr. Jones, said, “What if she doesn’t speak? She’s been in the coma since the accident.”

Amy was startled by his harsh tone. Who were these guys? Never before had observers or even family members been allowed to view the procedure.

Jim said confidently, “Oh, Letitia will speak.”

The older man’s eyes narrowed, slits becoming slittier. “We’ll see, won’t we?”

Letitia’s body subtly rearranged itself . . . to do what?

To fight.

Why?

She didn’t know, but her stance didn’t relax until the figure coming through the darkness resolved itself into a short, spindly young man, hands empty, dressed only in bike shorts, no place for a weapon. Eighteen, maybe, with ears that stuck out on both sides like the late king of England’s. Closer, and she saw that he was an albino, white skin flushed with blood only on his fuzzy cheeks and in his pink eyes.

The boy said, “Please give me what’s in your pocket.”

Never taking her eyes off the kid, Letitia ran her hand over her skirt until she found a small pocket. She pulled out a thimble.

The young man reached for it. Letitia’s fist closed over the thimble. “Tell me where I am.”

“There!” Jim said. “I told you she’d speak!”

“Not to much purpose,” Mr. Jones said, confusing Amy again. He sounded . . . what? Somehow satisfied that the patient was still confused. No, not satisfied, but . . . something.

Jim didn’t seem to notice. He gazed at the smart screen, which remained solid blue. The patient’s words had not been a clue.

“Why, don’t you know where you are?” the mousy young man said. A mouse—yes. He reminded her of a mouse.

She didn’t answer him, waiting.

“Please give me the thimble! Can’t you see that the tide is coming in?”

She heard it then, the faint lapping of water somewhere in the vast dimness of the storage cellar. “Tell me where I am.”

“Oh, here it comes!”

A sudden rush of shallow water, breaking into waves as it hit the wall behind her. Letitia tasted salt on her lips. The young man gave a cry and waded toward the iron staircase. Letitia followed. Her ridiculous dress slowed her and she ripped it off, struggling to stay on her feet as the water rushed forward. Underneath she wore camo-printed T-shirt and shorts, but there was no time to consider this. The albino was halfway up the stairs. How high would the water rise? She could make out a trapdoor at the top of the stairs: Was it locked from above?

It was. The mousy kid turned on Letitia. “I told you to give me the thimble! It’s my prize! I won it fair and square!”

Letitia shoved him aside and pushed hard at the featureless door, which didn’t budge. The water was a tsunami. Nothing made sense.

She handed over the thimble. He touched it to the trapdoor, and it sprang open. They both scrambled through, the kid slamming it behind him.

“This is not working,” Jones said, and there it was again, that weird note in his voice. “It’s been half an hour already. I’ve read your work, Doctor. The ‘patient’ never takes this long to respond.”

“No,” Jim said; he never lied. “The longest before now has been only ten minutes. But time is different in the mind than in what we call reality.”

“You have five more minutes,” the stranger said. “This works in five or we’re done here.”

He was ordering Jim? And Jim made no response. Amy’s unease grew, mixed now with faint resentment, and not only against Jones. She’d thought Jim shared with her everything about their work. Sometimes, when a patient responded particularly well, he took Amy out for a celebratory drink, and together they explored the possible implications of his revolutionary procedure. Those drinks in a nearby bar were important to her, even though the conversation never turned personal. Still, when he looked at her sometimes . . .

And he never so much as mentioned his marriage.

Letitia and the kid stood in a forest clearing, facing a large house with bay windows and pointy-widowed turrets. Peeling paint, missing roof tiles, overgrown lawn, sagging porch, and an equally sagging, slightly ajar door. The albino kid’s ears had grown even larger. And longer. Now he wore a waistcoat and watch fob with his bike shorts, a grotesque combination.

“Why, Mary Ann,” he said, “what are you doing out here? Run home this moment, and fetch me a pair of gloves and a fan! Quick, now!”

Gunfire erupted from the woods to their left.

Forty-eight minutes without another word from the patient—much too long. At Jim’s instruction, Miguel adjusted the anesthesia. Sedating a patient was perhaps the trickiest part of the procedure; you had to blank out whatever light and sound were reaching patients’ brains through their comas, yet not make the sedation so strong that deep memory and the unconscious mind did not connect. Or that a patient could not wake up. Amy felt sweat form on the back of her neck and between her breasts.

Jim must have been nervous, too, because he began to babble at the stranger.

“You mustn’t interrupt the procedure, no. You do know how this works, right? Of course you do, you must have been briefed. . . . Suppose I just clarify for you again how important this is, how revolutionary? Coma patients don’t usually respond to DBS—deep-brain stimulation—by waking up. But my procedure can waken them if you stimulate the exact right area of the brain, the master key to a very specific kind of memory: the memory algorithm by which we ordered the world when we were children. And do you know how children—how all of us, really, for our whole lives—interpret and construe the data coming to us through our senses? Through stories.”

“Two minutes, Doctor.”

“The stories we tell ourselves—that’s what orders our reality! Stories define who we are and what we believe. And childhood stories, those that were important to us, go very deep in memory and so are the key to recovering identity, which in turn enables coma patients to wake and—”

The patient spoke, so loudly that Amy jumped. The screen brightened into an image.

“There!” Jim cried. “Now we know where we are!”

“Why, Mary Ann,” the mouse-turned-rabbit said, “what are you doing out here? Run home this moment, and fetch me a pair of gloves and a fan! Quick, now!”

Words gripped Letitia and she said them aloud before she knew she was going to speak. “How queer it seems, to be going messages for a rabbit!”

Gunfire erupted from the woods to their left.

Letitia dropped to her belly and crawled toward the house. Her camo matched the tall grass. Blood sprayed over her: the kid. He hadn’t even had time to cry out. She reached the door of the house, pushed herself inside. She needed a weapon. But if the enemy already held the house—

What enemy?

The foyer was empty except for a dusty table holding a ceramic vase of dead flowers. Letitia dumped out flowers and dirty water and took the vase. All three doors off the foyer were locked. Bullets hit the front door; she sprinted up the staircase. These rooms were locked, too, except for a small closet lined with shelves of dusty linen and lit by a small, dirty window at the far end.

Nothing in here to use as a weapon. Wrapping the vase in a duvet to muffle sound, she smashed it against a shelf and equipped herself with a thick, sharp shard.

More bullets hit the house, but now they sounded dim, like a hail of pebbles. What the fuck?

The smart screen had brightened to a still image of a blond child in a blue dress and pinafore, standing beside a white rabbit in evening dress. Jim said, “It’s Alice in Wonderland! A common key to memory, Mr. Jones, you’d be surprised how many bright children internalize it. You were told, weren’t you, that our deebee can match illustrations from over two thousand children’s books as soon as a significant phrase is spoken? The most popular are Goodnight Moon, the Harry Potter series, books by Judy Blume, Roald Dahl, Maurice Sendak—”

Jim cited a dozen more authors. Mr. Jones—if that was his name, which Amy didn’t believe for half a minute—didn’t seem to be listening. He stared at the image onscreen. It was a little blurry, which meant that it wasn’t one of John Tenniel’s original illustrations for Alice, but rather was one the AI had extrapolated from the Tenniel drawings to match the place in the story indicated by Letitia’s words. If necessary, Amy could have sharpened and edited the image, but Jim didn’t tell her to do so.

“Mr. Jones” scowled at Alice.

“Of course,” Jim said, “no image that may appear on the screen is an exact translation of whatever Letitia is experiencing. It’s merely the starting point. Memory isn’t static, or even reliable. In the unconscious—as in dreams—memory blends with more recent experiences and transmutes into—”

“Be quiet,” Jones ordered, with such cold anger that Amy’s mouth fell open. Even Jim looked surprised. The new physician, Dr. Wu, raised her head to glance briefly at Jones and then returned her gaze to the patient. The man with Jones registered absolutely nothing. His face might have been a ceramic mask.

Jones said, “Get on with it.”

The sound of breaking glass. The enemy was taking the house.

But . . . the door was unlocked. Why come through the windows? And why hadn’t any of the gunfire come from this side of the house? It all sounded like it was coming from the front porch. Was it possible these were not soldiers but kids who didn’t know what they were doing?

The shots that had killed the white mouse-rabbit-boy had been real enough. His blood was drying on her T-shirt.

The window at the end of the linen closet, too dirty to see through, was stuck closed. Working as quietly and quickly as she could, Letitia pried it loose and raised it a few inches. Cautiously she pushed out the edge of a pillow from the linen-closet shelves. No one fired at it.

Waiting cannily, or not there?

At the other end of the closet, she cracked the door. Now she could hear voices in the foyer below. Not adult voices, but not kids, either. Some seemed to be growls, some squeaks, some chirps.

“Well, it’s got no business there, at any rate: go and take it away!”

“Sure, I don’t like it, yer honor, at all, at all!”

“Do as I tell you, you coward!”

“Bill—Bill’s got to go down the chimney!”

So they were going to attack after all. From the sound of it, they had a whole platoon.

A what?

No time to think. Letitia returned to the window, eased it up, peered out cautiously. No one at the back of the house.

Someone downstairs said, “We must burn the house down!”

Letitia called out, “If you do that, I’ll set Dinah at you.”

Dinah who?

This place would go up like dry kindling.

Swiftly she knotted a sheet to the linen-closet shelves. When she smelled smoke, she tossed the end through the window and climbed down, expecting to be shot. She wasn’t. On the ground she dropped to her belly and crawled through the weeds to the forest beyond.

When she rose, a lizard standing on two legs was staring at her stupidly. He opened his lipless mouth to scream, and she decapitated him with the shard of vase.

Nobody else stopped her or, as far as she could tell, even saw her. The stupidest bunch of insurgents on the planet.

Bunch of what?

The smart screen had been frozen for fifteen minutes. Just when Amy was afraid the patient wouldn’t speak again, Letitia said loudly, “If you do that, I’ll set Dinah at you.” The screen image morphed.

Alice, grown too large for the White Rabbit’s house, scrunched into a room with her head pushed against the ceiling and her arm out the window.

Mr. Jones said sharply, “Who’s Dinah?”

Jim didn’t answer; Amy realized he didn’t know the book quite well enough to answer. She spoke up. “Dinah is Alice’s cat.”

Jones exploded. “This is what’s going on in her mind? Rabbits and cats and a giant child? This is ridiculous.”

Jim said quietly, “No, sir. As I already explained to you, the book is the key, but it’s not what’s being unlocked. We can’t see what’s going on in the subject’s mind because her own memories are coming to her filtered through the Lewis Carroll story.”

“Memories of rabbits? Fuck it—I’m aborting this procedure right now.”

Jim straightened. “I’m afraid you don’t have that authority. I was told that this patient is vital to national security, which is why we’re not performing my procedure in my lab, and that nothing should interrupt it.”

“I told you no such thing!”

“Not you, sir. Someone higher up.”

Jones went rigid. Amy made the large effort to turn her eyes back to her console. This steeliness was a side of Jim she’d never seen, hadn’t suspected. And . . . vital to national security? Why? How?

Jim said, “Miguel, adjust the sedation again. Level six. It may speed things up. Amy?”

“Brain waves and memory algorithms both holding steady.”

“Good. We—”

Letitia’s body’s twitched as she said loudly, “I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then,” and the screen responded with the Tenniel illustration of a caterpillar seated on a mushroom and smoking a hookah. A tiny Alice peered over the rim of the mushroom.

Jim leaned over the gurney. “Letitia, who are you?”

The screen image didn’t change, but Letitia said to someone in Wonderland, “I can’t explain myself, sir, because I’m not myself.” And then, “I can’t remember things as I used to.”

Amy nodded. So that was why Letitia’s unconscious had seized on this story. Alice, too, had had identity issues.

Letitia began to recite Lewis Carroll’s parody of the Robert Southey poem:

“You are old, Father William,” the young man said,

“And your hair has become very white;

And yet you incessantly stand on your head—

Do you think, at your age, it is right?”

Suddenly the patient laughed. Alice, Amy remembered, had not laughed at the poem; Alice had despaired at her own mangling of the stanzas. The laugh was not Alice’s but Letitia’s own response.

If the Caterpillar was no help, the Duchess was even worse.

Letitia had stalked away from the mushroom, flapped away a pesky pigeon, and come to another house, this one small for even a summer cottage, in a clearing ringed with trees. At the door, a courier in British army uniform was delivering orders to a servant in livery. The courier said, “For the Duchess. An invitation from the Queen to play croquet.”

The servant said, “From the Queen. An invitation for the Duchess to play croquet.”

Code, of course. Coming in via a back channel. Which side was running the courier?

Sides of what?

She stayed hidden, observing, until the courier left and the servant looked directly at her. He said from a lipless, frog-like mouth, “I shall sit here till to-morrow—or next day.”

He’d made her. Unlike the courier, he wasn’t armed. The house was very small, and if she could obtain a weapon inside. . . . Wait, why would a duchess live in such a dwelling, unless she were in hiding? No, “Duchess” was code, too. For whom? About what?

Letitia risked a test. From behind a tree she called, “How am I to get in?”

“Are you to get in at all? That’s the first question, you know.”

A trap? Maybe. The door still stood open. Using trees as cover and never taking her gaze from the servant, she moved until she could see inside the cottage. A single room, dense with smoke, held a ginger cat and two women: a cook facing the stove and a seated, richly dressed woman rocking a baby. No other visible occupants. On the wall to the left of the door stood a wire croquet set, balls and wickets racked at the bottom and wooden mallets upright in their slots.

Letitia said to the servant, who looked more like a frog every moment, “But what am I to do?”

“Anything you like.” He looked up at the sky. “I shall sit here, on and off, for days and days.”

The mallet was the best weapon Letitia had seen so far. She wanted it.

Just as Jim wished, the story was speeding up. Letitia said aloud, “How am I to get in?” and then, “But what am I to do?” The screen morphed to two footmen in livery, one a fish and one a frog, outside the Duchess’s cottage. A moment later Letitia said, “There’s too much pepper in that soup!” and another Tenniel drawing appeared: the bad-tempered Duchess rocking her pig-child.

Jones said, “Dr. Ericson, you know who I am. I demand to know who gave you orders to continue this travesty despite my abort.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Jim said, “but I can’t tell you that.”

“You don’t have the clearances!” Jones said.

Jim didn’t answer. Letitia said, “Mind what you’re doing!”

What was Jim doing? Who was this “Mr. Jones”? And a national security issue. . . .

Amy didn’t understand. Not anything.

Letitia darted toward the house, ready to take out the frog servant if she had to. He didn’t budge. She ran inside and grabbed one of the croquet mallets. The two women presented no problem: flabby, encumbered by long bulky dresses, one grasping a baby and the other a ladle. Both wheezed; smoke and pepper filled the air. Letitia said, “There’s too much pepper in that soup!” and backed toward the door, keeping in her peripheral vision the servant outside. He sat immobile, gazing at the sky.

“If everybody minded their own business,” the Duchess growled, “the world would go around faster!”

“This is my business,” Letitia said. She had no idea what she meant, but her words seemed to enrage both women. The Duchess shook the baby so hard that Letitia cried, “Mind what you’re doing!” The cook threw a frying pan at Letitia; it just missed her. Letitia grabbed the baby with her free hand, holding it against her like a football, and ran. To leave the child behind would be murder.

The servant never even glanced at her as she raced past.

Eventually the path through the trees widened into a paved road. In the distance gleamed a white building clouded in mist. Letitia stopped running and looked down at the baby. It had become a pig. Startled, she dropped it, and it trotted quietly back toward the forest.

The Duchess’s ginger cat strolled up to her and grinned.

“This is my business,” Letitia said from the gurney, and the image on the screen did not change. Those words did not appear in Carroll’s book. It was, Amy realized, another declaration solely the patient’s. Jim’s procedure was succeeding.

But then another twenty-eight minutes passed without a word from the gurney. Both Dr. Wu’s medical monitors and Amy’s tech screens showed no change. The words “This is my business” had not been significant enough to further trigger Letitia’s memories. Those must be painful; anguished remembrances always surfaced more slowly.

Amy surprised herself with her sympathy for this particular patient. Was it because Amy, too, had loved Alice in Wonderland as a child? Or was it because she knew, at some deep level, the painful implications of fantasy?

She glanced at Jim, whose gaze moved back and forth between Letitia and the last Tenniel drawing on the screen. Back and forth. The drawing did not change.

The cat said, “Do you play croquet with the Queen today?”

More code. Letitia searched her memory; this sequence wasn’t there. She opted for an open response. “I should like it very much, but I haven’t been invited yet.”

“You’ll see me there,” the cat said, and vanished.

TS Division, Letitia abruptly remembered, had a contract with Boston Dynamics for animal-shaped infiltration robots—had it included cats?

But . . . what was TS Division? What was Boston Dynamics?

The answers were in that white building far ahead. She set off on the road. When it curved through a small grove of birches, she came upon a long, messy table set for tea. A large rabbit and a man wearing a top hat sat at one end with a little boy between them. The child seemed asleep. Top Hat looked at Letitia and said, “No room! No room!”

On the table beside the rabbit, lying negligently amid cake crumbs and used tea cups, was a Glock 30 9-mm.

She said carefully, “There’s plenty of room!”

Top Hat said, “Your hair wants cutting.”

More code. Words rose, unbidden, to Letitia’s lips, startling her. “I think you might do something better with the time than waste it in asking riddles that have no answer.” Why had she said that? What did it mean? Then more words as she looked at the other man, who’d become a large rabbit, “Your name is March. Caleb March.”

“So it is,” the man said.

Finally a new drawing on the screen: the mad tea party, one of Tenniel’s best. At the long table sat the Mad Hatter, the March Hare, the Dormouse, and a sulky and hungry Alice wanting both information and tea. The image had been triggered when Letitia said, “There’s plenty of room,” but her other utterance was her own. Who was Caleb March? Amy glanced at Jim, but from his face she could tell that he didn’t know, either.

Mr. Jones had gone impassive, his former show of temper replaced by something colder and deeper. Amy didn’t know why she suddenly felt frightened.

“You should say what you mean,” Caleb March said.

“I do,” Letitia replied. “At least, I mean what I say.”

Top Hat said, “Have you guessed the riddle yet?”

“No,” Letitia said. “What’s the answer?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said Top Hat.

“Nor do I,” said the little boy; he had a high, squeaky voice.

“I’m in the well,” Letitia said, and didn’t know what she meant.

“Of course you are,” Caleb said. “Well in.”

Pointless. They wouldn’t, or couldn’t, tell her anything. Letitia eyed the Glock, planning her move. When a quarrel broke out about changing places at the tea table, she took her chance. With one hand she grabbed the gun; with the other she raised the croquet mallet. No time to check if the Glock was loaded.

“Nobody move,” Letitia said.

All three tea partiers stared at her in astonishment. “You shouldn’t talk,” Top Hat said.

Caleb March said, “No. Just act.”

The boy spoke again. “The Queen expects you.”

Letitia didn’t answer. She backed away from the table. No one tried to stop her. Top Hat lifted the child, who was now a mouse, up on the table and seemed to be trying to put him in the teapot. Caleb March looked at her steadily, and for the briefest flicker of time—

He’d reported in to her from Moscow that—

—she knew him, and then the memory was gone.

“Have better luck than mine,” he said.

Now Letitia’s words came so fast that Amy could barely follow. “I do. At least, I mean what I say,” and “No, what’s the answer?” and “I’m in the well.” Although the screen image didn’t change from the tea party scene, Amy’s console verified that all Letitia’s words were from Alice in Wonderland—almost.

“Dr. Ericson,” Amy said, “in the book, Alice says, ‘But they were in the well,’ not ‘I’m in the well.’ I don’t know if that’s significant.”

“She’s customizing Carroll’s words to her own situation,” Jim said, his voice neutral. But Jim was never neutral, not about anything. His enthusiasm was one of the things she loved about him.

To fill the suddenly strained silence, Amy said, “She is customizing the story, more and more. It won’t be long now.”

Letitia twitched on the gurney and said levelly, “Nobody move.”

Back on the road, Letitia inspected the Glock. Loaded and operational. She tossed the croquet mallet into a ditch and holstered the gun—when had her holster appeared? She wasn’t sure. Of anything.

As she neared the white building, turrets and battlements appeared from the mist, then a moat and drawbridge. A phrase rose in her mind: The most secure building in the world. Letitia snorted. The castle flew flags with heraldic designs: black shamrocks, spear heads, hearts.

Two groups of people moved around on this side of the moat. Cautiously she neared the closer, smaller group, three gardeners cardboard-thin, who were busily painting a white rosebush red. Astonished, Letitia said, “Why are you painting those roses?”

“Why the fact is, you see, Miss, this here is a white rose-tree, but the Queen wanted it turned red.”

A second gardener looked directly at Letitia. “She turned the Dormouse, too, you know. And she had the March Hare killed.”

But the March Hare was alive . . . Letitia had just seen him. Fog filled her brain, just “crept in on little cat’s feet” . . . whose words were those? Not either of the two people that Letitia was—wait, she was two people? What the fuck?

The ginger cat strolled from behind the rose-bush and stared at her steadily. Before it could speak, the gardeners cried loudly, “The Queen! The Queen!” and threw themselves flat on their faces. The cat vanished.

A procession approached from the castle, soldiers followed by dignitaries and finally the Queen, who raised her hand to stop the parade. “What’s your name, child?”

Letitia said, “My name is Alice.”

But it wasn’t—was it?

“You are late to the game,” the Queen said severely, “and you lost your mallet. You will have to use a flamingo. Come on!”

The entire procession wheeled in formation and turned toward the castle. Letitia walked beside the Queen, both last in the procession, which let her keep the soldiers in view. Abruptly they broke formation and ran toward the croquet game. The Queen said no more about Letitia’s having to play, so she watched the game. It was chaos: hedgehogs for balls, flamingos for mallets, soldiers bent double on hands and feet to act as wickets. The Queen rushed around, shouting “Off with his head!” at anyone who missed a wicket.

Then the cat was back, or at least its head was, hanging in the air like words on a teleprompter.

Like a what?

“How are you getting on?” the head said.

“I don’t think they play at all fairly. They don’t seem to have any rules, or don’t pay the rules any attention.”

“Neither does our side,” the head said quietly, “but you’re right, they are worse. Don’t lose your head, Letitia. The Queen—”

Letitia. Her name was Letitia. Yes.

The cat’s head vanished and the White Rabbit rushed up to her. But wasn’t he dead? His blood spraying over her T-shirt . . . or had that been the blood of a white mouse? “Mary Ann,” the White Rabbit said, “have you seen the Mock Turtle yet? Do hurry! He’s halfway through his song!”

“I don’t—”

“No, you need to hear this! Hurry, child!”

He grabbed her hand and pulled her toward the castle. Letitia allowed it; she had a sudden, overwhelming, and unexplained need to enter that fortress.

Quick images on the screen in response to Letitia’s words: the Two, Five, and Seven of Hearts painting a rosebush. The Queen of Hearts addressing Alice. The head of the Cheshire Cat hanging in space. And then Alice, the Gryphon, and the Mock Turtle beside a body of water, the two beasts shedding tears. Tenniel had drawn Alice leaning against a rock, much smaller than the two beasts, knees dawn up protectively against her chest.

“The Mock Turtle’s song is almost over,” the White Rabbit said to Alice. “But at least you made it in time for the most important verse. Now listen and learn!”

A gryphon and a huge turtle stood behind an enormous boulder beside the moat, both sobbing. Letitia again drew the Glock; neither paid the slightest attention to the gun, although the turtle stopped trying to sing through his sobs to say, “You have no idea what a delightful thing a Lobster Quadrille is!”

“No, I don’t,” Letitia said. Could these two, or perhaps the White Rabbit, be used to get her inside the castle? “What is it?”

The gryphon looked at her from suddenly hard eyes. “I think you already know. Let the turtle finish his song. He knows the words better than I do. Mock Turtle, continue from where you left off.”

The turtle sang:

“You can really have no notion how delightful it will be

When they take us up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to sea!”

But the snail replied “Too far! Too far!” and gave a look askance—

Said he thanked the whiting kindly, but he would not join the dance.

Would not, could not, would not, could not, would not join the dance.

Would not, could not, would not, could not, could not join the dance.”

The White Rabbit said, “No, he wouldn’t join. So they killed him.”

“Killed whom?” Letitia said.

“Why, Caleb March, of course. You knew that, Letitia! Why are you so slow all the time? By now you should have realized—”

An alarm sounded, loud enough to make the White Rabbit clap his hands ineffectually over his ears; the ears were longer than the hands. The gryphon leapt up and cried, “The trial’s beginning! Come on!” It grabbed Letitia’s hand and pulled her along the path to the drawbridge. The Mock Turtle stayed behind, still singing his song of mourning.

Nearly another hour passed. No procedure had ever taken anywhere near this long. Finally Jim said, “By now she should have come out of the coma and realized who she is.”

Jones snapped, “Which only shows that this fucking nonsense doesn’t work.”

Did it? Amy had never seen Jim this worried. Yes, one time before—when he’d gotten a phone call that his little son had fallen and broken his arm. That day, Jim had let Amy finish the procedure underway on a research subject. She’d been so pleased that Jim had trusted her, although of course their usual physician, not this unknown Dr. Wu, had been standing by.

Dr. Wu raised her gaze from Letitia to Jim, but whatever she saw on Jim’s face, no reaction showed on her own. Miguel fiddled with his instruments. Jones looked tense, his silent companion impassive as ever.

On an auxiliary console screen, Amy brought up Lewis Carroll’s complete text. It contained two more illustrations of Alice with the gryphon and the mock turtle, a drawing of a lobster, and pages upon pages of dialogue. Alice critiques the gryphon’s song, relates all her adventures from the time she fell down the rabbit hole, recites another parody poem, asks the turtle for the Lobster Quadrille song. Alice talks a lot, even saying outright that “it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”

Yet Letitia said nothing. And nowhere in Carroll’s book did Alice ever say “Killed whom?”

Amy hadn’t even known that Jim and his wife had a son.

The drawbridge to the palace was deserted, the croquet game over. The gryphon and Letitia hurried under the raised portcullis and into the castle courtyard, where she halted so quickly that she nearly yanked the gryphon off its clawed feet. I know this place. I am Letitia . . . Somebody, and I know this place. I knew it before my accident.

What accident?

The space looked nothing like the courtyard of a castle except in being open to the sky. Square blue-and-white pillars rose high, holding up nothing. Meaningless flags, statues, and bright green potted plants stood against the walls. In the center of the shining, black-and-white floor was a huge inlaid seal with words ringing a starburst. Letitia paused, trying to read the words, but they made no more sense than the flags.

But . . . I know this place.

“Hurry, hurry!” the gryphon said, dragging her along. “Can’t you see that the trial has already begun?”

At the far end of the hall, shallow steps rose to a space crowded with people. In the center, on a raised dais, sat the Queen, seated on a velvet throne and wearing a judge’s wig under her crown. She looked grotesque.

“Whose trial is it?” Letitia said.

The gryphon didn’t reply. He shoved her onto the end of a bench already jammed with a strange assortment of animals and people. A dodo on the bench ahead turned its head to glare at Letitia. In the defendant’s box, looking scared, stood a soldier in dress uniform with red hearts sewn on the sleeve.

The White Rabbit, dressed now as a herald, blew three blasts on a trumpet. He unrolled a parchment scroll and read loudly:

The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts,

All on a summer day:

The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts,

And took them quite away!

“No,” Letitia said, bewildering herself. “It wasn’t him. And it wasn’t tarts.”

“Shhh!” the gryphon said as the dodo turned around to glare at her again. “Keep mum!”

The Queen bellowed, “Consider your verdict!”

“Not yet,” the Rabbit said. “There’s a great deal more to come! Call the first witness!”

Top Hat took the stand. He gave testimony that made no sense, not even mentioning either the defendant or the theft but spending a lot of verbiage on the injustices of Time. The Duchess’s cook and the dormouse followed, equally nonsensical. After each witness, the Queen shouted either “Consider your verdict!” or “Off with his head!” Neither command was carried out, although everyone looked uneasy every time she bellowed.

Finally the Queen glared at the White Rabbit and said, “Call the last witness or I’ll execute you on the spot!”

The White Rabbit said hastily, “I call Alice!”

Two soldiers seized Letitia and thrust her into the witness box. The Queen scowled at her. “What do you know about this business?”

Letitia said slowly, “I don’t know what I know, although I know that I know it.”

“That’s rubbish!”

It was rubbish.

No, it wasn’t.

“Now tell the court what you know about—!”

The White Rabbit blew ear-destroying blasts on his trumpet. The Queen clapped her hands over her ears, knocking her crown askew. The Rabbit bellowed, “May it please the court, here’s more evidence in this letter!”

“Off with his head!” the Queen shouted. Then, “But read the letter first!”

It wasn’t a letter but another poem, which the Rabbit read so quickly that Letitia could understand none of the garbled words until abruptly he slowed and enunciated with the clarity of a Shakespearean actor:

He sent them word I had not gone

(We know it to be true):

If she should push the matter on,

What would become of you?

The Queen turned pale. She trembled so hard that her crown fell off. In a shaky voice she said, “Stop! Off with the prisoner’s head! Sentence first—verdict afterwards!”

“No,” Letitia said. “You can’t sentence him without a—”

“Execute the witness, too!”

“—fair trial!”

But that was what the Agency, or someone in it, had done, covertly. Killed Caleb March in Moscow because he had discovered the highly placed mole in the Agency. As the Agency had tried to kill Letitia—it had not been an accident, but a botched hit—before Letitia could push the matter on and implicate the Queen, who had been selling top-secret information to the Russians.

Above the cartoonish velvet robe, the Queen’s face morphed into that of a man: Peter Jurgens, Assistant Director for Counterintelligence, Central Intelligence Agency.

If she should push the matter on, what would become of you?

What would become of Jurgens if Letitia, CIA agent, had been able to transmit her intel before the assassination attempt on her life? Arrest for treason.

Letitia drew the Glock and aimed at the Queen. Everyone in the courtyard rose up in a cloud to attack her. Letitia fired, shouting, “You’re nothing but a pack of cards!”

And woke up.

The patient’s eyes flew open, and then before Amy could even register the Tenniel drawing on the screen, everything happened at once.

“You’re the mole,” Letitia said to Jones while she struggled to sit up on the gurney. Even as Amy thought inanely But Mole is in Wind in the Willows, not Alice, Jones’s silent companion drew a gun and fired at the gurney. Miguel, seated between the shooter and the patient, screamed and fell off his stool. Jones fired again, but he wasn’t quick enough: with one hand Dr. Wu had already thrown Letitia off the gurney, tearing the lead wires from Letitia’s scalp and the electrodes from her body, as a gun seemed to leap into Wu’s other hand—a doctor? armed?—and she shot at the gunman, who also fired. Dr. Wu collapsed behind the gurney. The gunman’s chest blossomed into red and he fell backward. Amy couldn’t move, couldn’t think. More shots; one hit her console and it went dead in a spray of sparks. Jones, staggering sideways, turned to aim at Amy’s side of the gurney.

To aim at Jim—

—who stood frozen, as if he could not believe what was happening, as if this were all part of Alice’s dream.

But it was real, and Amy could reach Jim, could push him down to the floor, could reach him before Mole’s wobbling gun he must be hit too he was going to fire at Jim but Amy could push him could save Jim’s life—

She didn’t. Her muscles made the decision without thought, without decision. She dropped behind her console for protection. Flat on the floor, she could see behind the gurney, where Dr. Wu lay motionless and bloody across Letitia, whose scalp bled from the torn-out wires.

Letitia held Dr. Wu’s gun. She shoved Dr. Wu’s body aside and rose to her knees—Amy could see the effort on her face, she’d been in a coma for how long Amy couldn’t remember she couldn’t think Jones was still on his feet aiming at Jim and Letitia had—

Letitia fired and Jones went down, falling so slowly, as slowly as Alice going down the rabbit hole.

Then silence.

The silence did not last. There were sirens, police, grim men and women flashing badges, forensic people examining and photographing the dead, and questions for Amy and Jim and Letitia, the conscious survivors. Miguel was dead. So were Jones and his gunman. Dr. Wu, a real physician but also a CIA agent, was taken away in an ambulance. Letitia, who turned out to be another agent, refused to go to the hospital and sat answering questions, her head bandaged by EMTs. It was all bewildering.

Many voices, many questions, and yet nobody asked Amy the question she asked herself—why had she not tried to save Jim, not risked her own life to shove him to safety? She’d thought she loved Jim better than life itself, but she didn’t. The knowledge settled onto her like a weighted blanket—the blanket she would never share with Jim. His wife was here now, sitting close to him holding his hand, every line of her body displaying her concern and devotion. Amy couldn’t hear their words to each other, but she could read Jim’s face as he reassured his wife.

There are many kinds of fantasy.

A cop stepped up to her. “Are you all right, miss?”

“Yes.” No. She managed a polite smile and turned away.

She would have to find another job. Jim would give her a good recommendation. It would be too painful to stay here, to see Jim every day, to be brought face-to-face with her own slain delusions. Amy could not, would not, could not join that dance again.

Across the room, she heard someone say to Letitia, “Alice in Wonderland? Really?”

“Really,” Letitia said, her face drawn with exhaustion and pain. “And it wasn’t any weirder than—” she waved hand around the room—“than all this. But, shit, the trip to Wonderland worked.”

“And it all seemed real?”

“Oh, yeah. While I was there, it was real as life.” After a moment she repeated, her voice full of complexities Amy heard but did not understand, “Real as life. But you had to be there to feel the . . . you had to be there.

“It was such a long sleep, and such a curious dream.”

“The Alice Run” copyright © 2024 by Nancy Kress
Art copyright © 2024 by Danzhu Hu

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Kell Woods returns to the world of her bestselling novel, After the Forest, weaving a dark and lyrical standalone, spoiler-free backstory for a young witch at the siege of Breisach, years before she became notorious for her gingerbread cottage…and her appetite.

Author’s Note: This story contains descriptions of domestic violence, sexual assault, animal harm, and cannibalism.

After the Forest is available now in hardcover wherever books are sold, or pre-order the trade paperback edition, available everywhere on August 27th, 2024!

A Finalist for the 2024 Aurealis Award for Best Fantasy Short Story!

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Junia remembered the beginning of the war without end. A comet had appeared in the skies above the Holy Roman Empire, a blaze of flame burning a path across the heavens for a month. By the time it had disappeared, Junia’s mother and father had succumbed to the plague and she had left their small village on the Rhine to live in Breisach with Uncle Johannes and Cord. Panic at the comet’s appearance, its meaning, ran high. The priests believed the comet foretold of evils to come. That God had sent it as a warning to the people to mend their ungodly ways: pride, swearing, fornication. Disobedience, greed and its lover gluttony. Witchcraft. They warned that God would punish them all if they did not repent.

Woe the great sinfulness.

Ten years old and grieving, Junia paid little heed to the sermons she attended with Uncle Johannes in St. Stephan’s. Wasn’t she being punished already? Hadn’t God taken not one, but both her parents? As the years passed and the war that had sparked in the comet’s wake blazed across the land, she came to realize that she had been wrong. Her punishment, all their punishments, had not even begun. 

Cord had cared for her at first. She was sure of it. Beating away the other children when they were cruel. Orphan. Waif. Sliding the best piece of ham to her under the supper table in a greasy fist. Wicked grin; the best of him. Yet over the years her cousin had twisted, somehow. His body was strong and sturdy, but inside he was as gnarled and crooked as the old juniper tree in the courtyard, the tavern’s namesake. Hard to say when it started. Was it when Junia’s body began to change? Buds blooming spring-sweet on her chest, apple-round hips? She supposed she had been beautiful, then. Certainly Uncle Johannes had kept a careful eye on her when she helped him in the tavern, clearing the empty plates and wiping the tables of scraps and spills, the occasional splash of vomit. Noting the way his customers watched her, the heavy look in their eyes. Sharp man, Uncle Johannes. Ran a tight business. Clean tables, good food. None of the fighting and dancing and groping in shadowy corners you’d find in some of the rougher establishments in the Fischerhalde. Junia had never once seen him share a glass of cherry-water or wine with his customers. The kitchen would be better for you, Junia, he had said, those little creases of worry showing between his peppery brows. Safer for you there, mein Liebster.  

So she had gone to the kitchen, helped the cook prepare the dough for Knöpfle, squeezing its pale softness through the old noodle press, tossing it into the pot to boil. She had sliced the ham and cheeses, learned to bake butterbrezel and gingerbread. Turned out she was good at it, had a knack for throwing flour and salt and water in a bowl and lifting something wondrous out in its place. She had been happy, for a time. Until, when she was sixteen, Uncle Johannes died, leaving the Juniper Tree, and Junia, in Cord’s hands.

Her cousin was not like his father. None of that calm, that wizened strength. Uncle Johannes maintained order with a glance, or a quiet word. Cord was all shoulders and fists, a storm rolling in from the Schwarzwald, blustering over the Rhine.

Junia continued to work alongside the cook in the kitchen. Without Uncle Johannes’s presence, the customers grew bold, contriving ways to find her there. They would lean in the doorway, watching her work, or smiling when she stole scraps for the little tavern cat that was supposed to be catching mice, but was always at Junia’s heels. Lazy, speculative smiles. What they wouldn’t do, those smiles said, to get Junia into a shadowy corner. Catch her like a mouse. There were kind smiles, too, sometimes. Customers who talked instead of stared, who were interested in the thoughts and feelings beneath Junia’s bodice and skirts. Hardly mattered. Cord had beaten away any man who had come sniffing. Filthy fucking foxes on the rut. I won’t let them touch you, Junia, he promised. Won’t let anyone hurt my sweet cousin. After all, there’s just the two of us now.

Just the two of us now.

She thought of that, over and over, when he crept down the hallway that night and into her bed, covering her mouth with his hand. When he slid between her legs.

Filthy fucking foxes.

Things got worse when the first of the little ones came along. Junia knew Cord had kindled one in her when her monthly bleeding stopped, when she was so wretched and sick in the winter mornings that she’d hurry from her room above the tavern—quiet now, don’t wake Cord—and, feet freezing-bare, throw her guts up in the snow.

Only apples soothed her roiling belly. One morning, when the heaving and sweating and clinging to the juniper tree was done and the bile still steamed at her feet, she peeled one. Too hasty. The knife sliced into her hand. Blood spattered the snow. One drop, two drops, three.

Bad sign, that blood. No good would come of it.

Marriage, Cord had announced when Junia could no longer hide her swelling belly. It is the best, the only option.

Junia hesitated. By now she had learned that there were two Cords. There was the Cord she had known her whole life—greasy-ham grin and kindness—and the other Cord. This other version was not her cousin. It was as though the Devil himself, the Evil One, took hold of his body. It happened in the deeps of the night, usually, or when he’d drunk too much. At other times, too, when Junia least expected it.

Hard to say which one of the two regarded her now. She opened her mouth, preparing to deliver the words she had rehearsed again and again in her mind —her mother had family in Freiburg, perhaps she might go to them instead of burdening Cord while he was still adjusting to managing the tavern—but had scarce drawn breath before he was throwing on his coat and striding out into the noisy bustle of the Fischerhalde, crowded with boats and nets and river, and up the steep street to St. Stephan’s.

Banns were called. Congratulations given. Ring on her finger.

Just the two of us now.

The first of the babies, a boy, came at summer’s end the year Junia turned seventeen. Mewling and screeching, red-faced and miserable. Cord, intent on running the Juniper Tree in a manner as different to his father’s as possible, had taken to drinking till all hours with his patrons, sleeping till midday. Keep him quiet, Junia. Clout needs changing, Junia. Latch it to your tit, Junia. And she did. She kept and changed and latched, and latched and changed and kept, until there was no telling where Junia began and the tiny, tender-sweet limbs ended. Perhaps it would have been easier had she loved the boy. As it was, he was just another of her many chores, the only difference being that, unlike a newly scrubbed floor or freshly made bed, there was never an end to the tending of him. Occasionally Cord took the baby from her and strutted him about the tavern, boasting. Happiest man in Breisach, he said. Apple of my eye. Hear, hear, the patrons cried. Roar and clink, splash and splatter. More for Junia to clean later, she supposed as she bent before the enormous stone oven, scrubbing out its belly. The warmth, the dark, was oddly inviting. What if she were to crawl inside and close the door behind her? Would Cord ever find her? Would the baby cry? Or would she simply sleep and sleep forevermore, cradled in a bed of soft, warm ash?   

Sometimes, in the quiet of the mornings or before the evening rush, Junia strapped the baby to her chest and climbed the winding streets to the old monastery. The noise of Breisach—the rumble of carts and horses, the flurry of the Marktplatz and the fortress—faded as she entered the gates. She slipped off her shoes and walked barefoot across the neat lawns, dotted with statues and fountains, the occasional monk or two, until the gardens opened before her, cool and green. All were carefully ordered: herbs for the kitchen—rosemary, sage and fennel. Plants of healing—lavender, self-heal and restharrow. One garden existed for its beauty alone—rose, foxglove and larkspur—while another, for reasons of science and learning, bloomed with witches’ weeds: wolfsbane, hemlock and nightshade. An overgrown cloister led to an orchard, wild and thick as a forest. Life abounded there, but also death. Headstones were scattered throughout, the monks beneath them laying in eternal rest as they nourished the apple and cherry trees growing above.

A stone bench sat at the orchard’s southeastern edge. Sitting there, so high and quiet, Junia could see the outer defenses far below, bristling with artillery. Breisach was a fortress city guarding the river Rhine, an artery in the mass of veins and fleshy undulations that made up the Empire. Separating France and Württemberg, the river was the primary route into the Spanish Netherlands, the Habsburg emperor’s ally. Junia’s gaze followed the line of water as it snaked south toward Freiburg. To the west, it branched into a vast and glittering marsh which, pocked with patches of forest and a village or two, rolled toward the hill they called the Emperor’s Seat. And, beyond them all, the dark, beckoning curves of the Schwarzwald.

Sitting there, watching the birds as they flew from tower to spire, from wall to sky, Junia’s shoulders ached with longing. Let me fly, too. She prayed for a means to escape Breisach, its walls and its loneliness. Or, if that could not be, she prayed for a life without Cord in it. More and more the running of the tavern was falling into Junia’s hands. She was the one who met with the suppliers now, who haggled over the prices of wine and pork, who promised payment while Cord slept his days away. If not for her, the tavern would have been filthy, rotting beneath a crust of grime and sticky, nameless fluids. If not for her, the suppliers, demanding payment, would have ceased to sell their produce to them at all. Cord was no help, no comfort. He was a sweaty presence in the dark when she longed for sleep. Hot breath at her ear, a rough hand pushing her face into the blankets. She prayed for the Evil One, who had stolen her cousin-husband’s body, and, in a way, her own, to leave. And if that was not possible, she prayed for Cord to lose himself in drink and stumble over the edge of the Fischerhalde into the Rhine. Long fucking way down. She prayed for rest and for freedom, too. But she didn’t get any, and she didn’t get any.

---

“You bake well, Junia,”Cord tells her one day.“Might be you should make more than just bread and Knöpfle. I’m going to let the cook go—we can no longer afford her. Someone will need to make the dinners, bake the sweets. Could be you?”

“Haven’t I enough to do already?”

Stupid thing to say. The Evil One is wearing Cord’s skin more and more these days. As though proving her right, his meaty hand flicks toward her with surprising speed, cracking her nose. Pain explodes. Three drops of blood, dark against the paleness of the linen, spatter her apron.

She stares at them, removed from the pain somehow, seized by a terrible knowing.

Another babe on the way.

Sure enough, another child is born to Junia and the Evil One. A girl this time, not that it matters. Can’t a man get some sleep, Junia? Where’s my fucking dinner, Junia? Clouts need washing again, Junia. The Evil One fills her husband’s form more and more. He grows angry over the slightest of things, pushing Junia from one corner of the kitchen to the other. Slapping her here, cuffing her there. The presence of the two children does little to ease Junia’s misery. She knows she should love them, has watched other young mothers with their babes—the kisses, the smiles, the looks of unbridled devotion—and wills her heart to feel the same. It remains steadfastly indifferent.  

And Cord, it turns out, is doing more than just drinking with his customers. Turns out he owes coin, and plenty of it, not only to his suppliers, but his patrons, too. He has rolled so many bones he can hardly keep track of what he owes. Turns out Junia will be the one to help pay it all back. 

Make the dinners, bake the sweets.

The whispers arrive first. They drift downriver, eddy among Breisach’s fishing boats, then ripple up its steeply cobbled streets. They grow louder, inking themselves on broadsheets, flying, spittle-drenched, from the mouths of priests during their sermons: the Protestant general Bernard of Saxe-Weimar has sold his soul to the French. Twelve thousand foot soldiers and six thousand cavalrymen, plus artillery, are at his disposal. He means to conquer the Rhineland, carve a new territory for himself.

Fear, so strong you can smell it in the streets. If the Rhineland was a cellar, Breisach would be its finest, silkiest wine.

Saxe-Weimar takes the forest towns first. Waldshut, Säckingen and Laufenburg. Rheinfelden is besieged and lost in a crushing Imperial defeat. Then Rötteln and Freiburg fall.

The people of Breisach feel the moment the gaze of the Protestant general settles hungrily upon them.

“He has something to prove,” Cord says at the supper table, “after what happened at Nördlingen. Fucking disaster. Twelve thousand men dead on the field. His own horse shot out from under him. It was only luck and those enormous balls of his that allowed him to escape at all. If he wants Breisach, he will do everything in his power to make it his. His reputation—or what’s left of it—depends upon it.”  

“But Breisach is the key to the Empire,” Junia’s son says. He is thirteen now, tall and broad-shouldered like Cord. Apple of his father’s eye. “The emperor cannot let it fall.”

“He can’t,” Cord agrees, sopping up the sauce from his spätzle with a heel of bread. “Breisach lost, everything lost.”

Unease settles over Junia, as if a bad storm were coming. Life is hard enough without soldiers laying siege to the city, too. Isn’t she already salvaging the wreck Cord is making of the tavern? Cooking for its—increasingly disreputable—customers? Caring for the children, who, though growing rapidly—the girl is nine years old—still seem to claw at her all day with their wants and hungers and needs? Cord does the same at night, and she suspects that yet another babe is stubbornly—stupidly—clinging to the inside of her womb. She ladles more food onto Cord’s emptying plate and sits down wearily. Breisach lost, everything lost. That’s what they say at the emperor’s court in faraway Vienna. As if war hasn’t raged for twenty years, butchering cities like Breisach. Fire and famine, plague and ruin. They are fools, those Habsburg nobles in their finery. Everything was lost long ago. 

Something warm and soft brushes against Junia’s ankle. The little cat is as devoted to her as ever. At night it sleeps beside her, its face close to hers. It is a tiny, purring comfort in the dark, a small piece of something for Junia alone.

“Breisach is impregnable,” Cord goes on. “She has never yielded her virginity. And she never shall.”

Junia’s son snickers at his father’s words—virginity—and his sister blushes. If the boy is a mirror image of Cord, then the girl is a reflection of Junia. She has the same blue eyes, the same fair hair. The same quiet, hopeless sorrow.

The cat pushes its head against Junia’s skirts. She reaches down, strokes its fur absently.

Breisach, with its command of the Rhine, its impressive fortifications and precious bridges, had ever lured enemies; it would not be the first time a Protestant general had set his sights on the city. The Swedes had tried to take it just five years before, failing when the Emperor’s Spanish allies came to relieve it after a siege that lasted three months. The crows had pecked at Swedish corpses for weeks after, dipping and wheeling over the marsh. Junia had watched them from the monastery orchard, envying them their dark-winged freedom.

“Let Saxe-Wiemer come,” Cord slurps around a mouthful of creamy noodles. “The Empire will not allow Breisach to fall. He will fail just as the Swedish did. I, for one, will enjoy watching it from our walls.”

Even so, he spends the last of their coin—as well as borrowing more—to buy up black-salted hams and bags of flour, as many as can be had. “The rich shall suffer along with the poor before this is over,” he tells Junia. “Let us have something to offer them in exchange for their beautiful tapestries, their silver plate and precious stones. We shall make our fortune if we play our cards right.”

Junia can barely contain her disgust. Last time the siege, and the hunger that came with it, had been hardest on Breisach’s poor. She had helped at the monastery when she could, picking fruit, plucking vegetables from the gardens, handing out bags of rationed flour to the poor who came, desperate and frightened, to the gates.

“There is power, and magic, in growing things,” one of the oldest monks had told her kindly. “The land protects those who care for it. Remember that, my child.”   

She helps Cord move the supplies into the cellar alongside the casks of cherry-water and wine, schnapps and beer. Around them, the city stirs into readiness, its commander, Baron von Reinach, looking to its provisions, its walls and fortifications. Its precious well, the Radbrunnen, dug deep into the mountain below, will ensure the people have access to water. There is a garrison of three thousand soldiers and a hundred and fifty-two cannon at the Eckartsburg fortress, tasked with protecting the city.

It will hold.

Saxe-Weimar and his army arrive in early June. The citizens of Breisach hear the drums first—the heartbeat of an approaching beast. Junia is in the monastery orchard when the warning bells at the Eckartsburg burst into frantic life. She rises from the bench and runs to the walls. Far below, an enormous serpent is winding its slow curves—formed of men and horses, banners and wagons, artillery and oxen—out of the south. The morning sun glints on muskets and cannon, spurs, harness and pikes. Hold the fortress by all means possible was the order from Vienna. Hard to imagine obeying it as more and more soldiers come, endless and unrelenting: twelve thousand foot, six thousand cavalry. By evenfall, it is as though a city of canvas has surrounded Breisach, sprawling across the countryside, dotted with cookfires.

“Those Protestant bastards will not last,” Cord says confidently to his customers. “They might have coin in their purses now, but how will that help them in a week? A month? There will be nothing for them to buy, nowhere for them to spend it. They are camped in the mud like pigs. Time will work against them, along with its merry friends Hunger, Disease and Desertion. And if they do not end them, the emperor’s armies surely will!”

“They will!” Junia hears the customers slur over their tankards of beer and pots of cherry-water. “The emperor will not let Breisach fall!”

“We have provisions—”

“We have the Radbrunnen—”

“We have God on our side!”

But weeks pass, then two months. The Protestant army hauls in artillery, fortifying the surrounding countryside, digging a jagged line of communication between the French and Weimaranian camps. Hunger, Disease and Desertion are yet to make an appearance.

“We must wait,” Cord insists to his dwindling customers. Junia avoids the tavern rooms as much as possible now. The loyal patrons who enjoyed Uncle Johannes’s good food and wine, the pleasant surroundings, are long gone. The Juniper Tree is no better than the lowliest pothouse. There is fighting and dancing every night. Dice, and dark dealings. She has learned not to glance into shadowy corners. “The emperor will send aid.” 

 By August the cellar, like the rest of Breisach, is all but empty. The meats and cheeses are long gone, the flour dwindling. Cord has made a pretty penny raising prices, offering what few can now afford, but even he is relieved when an Imperial army of Bavarian mercenaries arrives and attempts to drive out the Protestant soldiers. They are beaten soundly back, the supplies and powder meant for the besieged city lost.

“They’ll be back,” Cord proclaims, helping himself to the last of the blutwurst Junia has scrounged from the cellar for supper. “The Empire cannot afford to let the city fall.”

Junia tries not to see the fear in her daughter’s eyes. “Eat, child,” she snaps, getting to her feet. “And help me with the dishes. Do you think we’ve time enough to sit about crying and worrying?” The little girl wipes away her tears, collecting her father and brother’s plates and bringing them obediently to the tub for Junia to wash. Junia does not miss the appraising look in her son’s eyes as he watches his sister. It reminds her of the way Cord once watched her. Bile rises in her throat.

Breisach holds its breath, watching the horizon, hoping that the Imperial army will return and try again to lift the siege, but the Bavarians do not come back.

Saxe-Weimar, meanwhile, orders no batteries, no trenches to be opened. He merely digs in and holds fast.

“What is he waiting for?” Junia whispers as she surveys the Protestant army from the orchard. Beside her, the old monk, her only friend besides her little cat, takes in the ruined countryside, his rheumy eyes filled with unbearable sadness.

“It is hunger that undoes a besieged city in the end,” he says quietly. “He’s waiting for us to starve.”

The summer drags on, the fear that has settled over Breisach ripening like wheat beneath the brutal sun, shimmering over the marshes and the Rhine. A silent, invisible enemy has wrapped its talons around the city.

Hunger.

The bloody skirmishes that punctuated the early weeks of the siege—daring sorties by the garrison to fight the enemy and gather supplies—happen less and less frequently now. There is no food coming in, and nothing to be done.

“We should close the tavern,” Junia tells Cord. “Save whatever food we have for ourselves. Who knows how long this will last? We must think of the children, Cord.”

“No,” Cord says. “We must find more food, that’s all.” 

“There is none to be had!” she hisses. “I’ve been to the market every day—”

“Then we must look harder.”

Junia tries not to listen as Cord butchers the old cart horse in its stable. The gentle beast has served him and his father loyally, hauling casks of schnapps and sacks of flour to the Juniper Tree for more years than Junia can tell. When it is done and the carcass is hanging, enormous and bloody, in the cellar, he carries a haunch into the kitchen and hefts it onto the workbench. Junia, horror and sorrow warring in her heart, makes no move to touch it. The Evil One tilts his head toward the tavern rooms, a silent command to begin cooking for his customers. Junia, wiping away tears, obeys.

Horse, she soon discovers, is better boiled than roasted.

Summer gives way to autumn, and still Breisach suffers inside its walls. There is not a horse, donkey or mule to be seen alive, now. The hideous sounds of their slaughter have at last fallen silent. 

“We should have closed the Tree, saved the horse meat for ourselves,” Junia says to Cord when he comes home empty-handed from the market. It is not safe for Junia to go there now. Not a week ago, a wealthy woman’s kitchen maid was beaten, her meager purchases stolen. “We have nothing.” Cord had made a staggering profit on the meals Junia had cooked with the horsemeat, but for what gain, in the end?

“Not nothing,” Cord says. He draws something from behind his back. Three scrawny cats, their soft bodies hanging limp from his fist.

Junia stares at the cats, then at her husband. The Evil One looks back.

“Where is your cat, Junia?” he asks.

The cat, Junia well knows, is sleeping upstairs, a puddle of shadows on her side of the bed. A creature of habit, it is where it is always is at this time of day. Cord knows this as well as she.

“Don’t, Cord,” she says. She loves that little animal. Loves its purring warmth, its beautiful green eyes. “Please, don’t.”

The Evil One says nothing.

She wonders if she can get to it before him. Eyes the narrow stair, Cord’s broad shoulders, the evil lurking beneath his skin.

He moves. She runs at him, catching at his arm, pulling him away from the stairs. He throws her off. Backhands her, sends her crashing into the table, scattering chairs as she hits the floor. Searing pain, a wrongness, deep in her belly. She stays down.

By the time she is on her feet again, it is done.

Cord barely glances at the blood on her skirts, the whiteness of her face, as he slaps four little bodies onto the workbench. 

“We’ll open soon,” he says. “You’d best get started.”

She wonders if he will hit her again. Glances at the knife on the board. Cord, however, walks heavily from the kitchen. A moment later, she hears the thud of an empty tankard on damp wood. The gurgling of liquid filling it.

As Junia cuts and slices, breathing through the pain shattering her heart and womb, something else cracks inside her. She barely feels it. Barely feels it, as she bundles what remains of the tiny thing she has lost and buries it beneath the juniper tree.

 It never had a chance.

Hunger, as the proverb says, is a fine cook. By the end of October there have been several more attempts by Imperial forces to liberate the city. All have failed. In the final assault, the Protestant general himself rode out beside his men. An eagle hovered in the air above him, an omen of impending victory, a sign of witchcraft, or both, depending on which whisper in the Marktplatz you chose to believe.

“Bernard of Saxe-Weimar will triumph, mark my words.”

“When all of this is over, he will be left with nothing but bones. . . .”

“Did you see that eagle? Only a witch could compel a wild creature to fly into battle like that.”

Junia cares little for the fate of the Protestant general. Witchcraft or no, she merely envies that eagle its beautiful, gold-brown wings. 

Breisach is now empty of cats and dogs. Junia has cooked her fair share for the tavern’s patrons—or those with enough coin, at least—roasting the animals whole with herbs and spices. Cord tells her approvingly that the thighs of the dogs she prepares are as tender as saddles of hare.

She cannot believe that the tavern remains open, that Cord is still beguiling wealthy customers with promises of tender meat and fine sauces. She waits for the city officials to appear on their doorstep, outraged and ordering them to close, but it does not happen. One quick look at the streets of Breisach and it is easy to see why. The city officials have more than enough—and, at the same time, never enough—on their plates.

Every garden, every tree and every plant in the city has been stripped bare. Even the weeds thrusting their fragile heads between the cobbles or beside doorways are gone. When Junia goes to the monastery, she finds its gardens have been looted. Every apple, every leaf taken. She finds the body of the old monk nearby. There is power, and magic, in growing things, he had once told her. The land protects those who care for it. She sees little power and protection here. The powerful ones have been and gone. They have taken what they wanted and protected no one but themselves.

“You old fool,” she murmurs, when she has buried him in the orchard. It feels more like a graveyard now, the monuments and death lanterns stark between the leafless trees. Shadows and stone, where once there had been something green and good.

At last Cord is forced to close the tavern doors. Even the rich cannot buy a decent meal in Breisach now; there is simply no food to be had. The people are eating animal hides, boiling, scouring and scraping each piece before roasting or grilling it like tripe. Animal skins have taken the place of vegetables and cuts of meat in the Marktplatz. A crone sells a bitter-tasting draught she swears will ward off hunger and heartache; she is carted off to the fortress prison for her troubles. Books and manuscripts are also being sold for eating, along with drum skins, harnesses and belts. All of this, of course, costs money. Cord, however, refuses to buy a thing. “We shall not squander our hard-won savings now,” he declares. “Not when the Emperor will send an army to lift the siege at any moment.” 

So Junia boils straw and candle fat, grinds bones and nutshells to make limp, tasteless bread. Hunger kneads its bony fingers into her relentlessly, poking at her empty belly, gnawing at her thoughts. Dark whispers unravel in the narrow streets: people, the whispers say, have been carving and cooking the flesh of their newly dead relatives before they prepare them for burial. Children, mostly; the city’s young are suffering the most. The poorest of them have taken to hunting rats and mice in the streets. Junia has seen them clustered in ragged groups, cooking the animals over coals, skin and all, before wolfing them down. Fur, tail, foot—all provide nourishment. Though disgusted, Junia cannot blame them. However, when she sees her own daughter bending greedily over one of the tiny creatures, something in her tattered soul stirs. She rips the mouse away and throws it back onto the coals.

“But Mama,” the girl cries. “I’m so hungry!”

“We do not eat vermin,” Junia snaps, dragging the child back to the tavern. She looks staunchly ahead as she goes, hiding her tears and her rage.

All for a fucking river.

She leaves the girl in the kitchen and stumbles down the cellar stairs. Surely there is something left? A wrinkled apple or two? A stray jar of sauerkraut rolled beneath the lowest shelf? There is movement in the darkness behind her, a gasp, scuffling. Junia peers into the shadows. Her son, all fourteen years of him, is standing over a kneeling girl. His hand knotted in her hair, her face pressed to his—

“What in God’s name is happening here?” Junia demands.

“Calm yourself, Mother,” he says carelessly. He pushes the girl away, ties his breeches. “I promised her some food, that’s all. She’s more than happy to earn it.”

Junia pulls the girl to her feet. She is pale, her eyes large in her too-thin face.

“Go,” she tells her. “I will find something for you to eat. There’s no need—for this.”

“What the fuck are you doing?” her son demands as the girl scurries upstairs. “She—”

“This is my house,” Junia says, her voice death-quiet. “And you will not treat people so while you are within its walls.”

“It’s not your house,” he says. “It’s father’s.”

“And you think he will condone what you have done?”

The boy smirks.

Apple of his father’s eye.

He shoves past her, climbs the stairs. He is almost at the top when Junia reaches him. She wants only to make him stop, to make him see her. To take back some of the power she has given away and given away. Hunger, however, makes her clumsy. She trips on the stairs, sprawls. Her hands fly out, knocking at his ankles. He falls back, that height, those shoulders of his working against him. Down he goes, sudden and hard, his body jouncing on the stone steps, his head cracking on the flagged floor.

He doesn’t move again.

Alone in the darkness Junia thinks of the juniper tree. How it looked when it was thick with berries. The way the children used to help her pick them when they were very small. They were sweet creatures, then, the boy and the girl. When Junia baked they helped, licking the batter from spoons, spreading the workbench with flour. Sometimes, when her heart was soft enough, Junia bought ginger and cinnamon, honey and cloves. She did not love her children, it was true—she loved no one, couldn’t—but she took a secret, treacherous delight in baking for them, in seeing them peer blissfully over the trays, their button noses breathing the scent of warm gingerbread. Plump little hands, soft stubby fingers. If only the boy had stayed that way. If only Cord, and hunger, and the great sinfulness had not twisted him.

If only Junia’s tears, her rage, were content to remain in the darkness.

That evening, when Cord rises from his slumber and comes down for his supper, he pauses on the stairs, sniffing.  

“Odd’s bod, Junia,” he says. “What is that wonderful smell?”

“It is blood soup,” Junia tells him.

“Blood soup?” He sits heavily at the table. “But where did you get the meat? The blood?”

Junia says nothing, only fills his plate with the rich, dark stew.

“Delicious,” Cord says, tasting his first mouthful. “And perfectly seasoned, too.”

Junia smiles. She thought of her son’s round baby face, his sweet toothless smile as she cooked the stew, and her tears fell into the pot. There was no need for salt.

“Give me some more,” Cord says.  

Junia obeys. It seems the more Cord eats, the more he wants. She and her daughter, the latter’s face deathly pale and wet with tears, watch in silence as he eats and eats and eats, throwing the bones under the table. They ate their fill long before Cord rises, along with the girl from the cellar, who wiped her mouth with her sleeve, smearing the red-dark sauce across her lips, and thanked Junia before slipping out into the dusk. 

 “I must stop,” he says at last, “else there will be none left for my son.” He sucks on a bone. Part of a finger, Junia thinks distantly. “Where is he?”

She stares at him. All her livelong days, it’s been give and work, work and give. Scrub the floors, Junia. Bake more bread, Junia. Latch on to my cock, Junia.

She will give no more.

“He is dead,” she says. “And should you wish to remember him, you may look down your own throat.”

Cord’s face goes white. His daughter, sensing danger, hurries upstairs.

“But do not grieve, husband,” Junia continues blithely. “If this blood stew of mine is as delicious as you say, then perhaps we should open our doors to our customers tonight. We shall make a goodly profit.”

Cord is coming for her, eyes black with rage. He grabs Junia by the hair, throws her onto the stove. She catches herself before she burns her palms or knocks over the simmering pot of stew. He will kill her this time. She is sure of it. Part of her greets it warmly—an end to hunger and fear, to this appalling siege. Then she thinks of the girl upstairs. What will become of her if Junia leaves her here alone? Cord grabs for her, misses as Junia slides away.

“Fucking witch!”

 Before she can move again he seizes the pot and hurls its contents in her face. Pain, blinding pain. Darkness and the burning crimson of her son’s blood.

Junia screams, clutches at her eyes.

Cord is almost upon her. She can hear his ragged breath, feel his pain and rage. 

And yet Junia has rage enough of her own. Pain, too. She feels them coil within her, a serpent straining against her bones, her skin, eager for release. She lashes out, glimpses, despite her blurring, burning eyes, something nameless and dark leaching from her fingertips. It strikes Cord in the throat so hard that he flies backward, smashing into the wall. Crockery falls from the shelves above him, splintering upon his shoulders, his head, his thighs. A garner of flour crashes beside him, dusting the air with winter.

Power and protection, indeed.

Cord is gaping at her. “What in God’s name was that?”

The shock on his face, the drivel of bloody snot clumping from his nose, the fear in his eyes drive Junia’s pain away.

“That,” she says, “was a fucking delight.”

She reaches for the pot and scoops out what’s left with one hand. Licks at the thick, sour liquid, chews the tender meat with relish.

It seems the Evil One has found a home inside her, too.

By November, the bodies of the city’s living have become the graves of the dead.

When a captured Protestant soldier dies in the fortress, the prisoners in the adjoining cells tear holes in the walls—and then his body. Corpses have been stolen from the burying grounds so often that guards have been stationed there at night. Junia has glimpsed them, their shadows wavering beneath the death lanterns as they keep watch.

Children are going missing, too, the tales told in grim whispers on the winding, wintery streets. Soldiers promised a baker’s son a piece of bread if he would go with them to the barracks. Once they had him there, they butchered him.

She warns her daughter of the danger as she ladles her a bowl of fresh blood soup.

“Where is Papa?” the girl asks.

“Eat your soup,” Junia says. She ignores the salty tears running down her daughter’s cheeks and takes a mouthful, biting back a groan as the rich flavor melts in her mouth. Cord was a good father, a good husband, after all.

The girl’s belly grumbles. She wipes away her tears and takes a tentative mouthful, then another, the spoon hastening as disgust fades and the will to survive takes its place.

Junia knows the feeling well.

Cord keeps them alive as winter arrives in earnest. More children disappear—seven from the Fischerhalde alone. Junia keeps a watchful eye on the girl, forbids her to step foot near the fortress, the barracks.  

It makes no difference. The girl vanishes one snowy morning in early December. Junia searches the city, barely feeling the cold. Every closed shutter, every smoking chimney, taunts her. She staggers to a stop near St. Stephan’s. Glimpses herself in a grimy window. She is thirty years old, yet she looks like a crone: hollow cheeks scarred by fire and blood, damaged eyes weeping, golden hair faded to grey.

That night the juniper tree loses its leaves and berries, its branches stark against the winter sky. By morning it is nothing more than a gnarled memory.

Junia no longer watches the armies from the monastery walls. She calls her little cat back to her with pain, slicing at her skin and letting the blood fall at the foot of the juniper tree. Waits in the moonlight as it scrabbles its way up through root and earth and snow. Bones push through its tattered fur. Grave-dirt stains its breath. Yet it curls beside Junia at night and follows her everywhere by day: along the Fischerhalde, or through the empty Marktplatz. People stop and stare as Junia and the not-dead cat pass. They whisper of witchery and crook their fingers in the sign against evil.

Junia pays them no heed. Hunger, however, is harder to ignore. Luckily, there are still children in the Fischerhalde. She visits the burying ground with her little cat, draws the shadows around them both as she digs for bones. Grinds them into powder and bakes—with the last scatterings of ginger and cinnamon, the newly tattered magic rising within her—something treacherous and secret.

Plump little hands, soft stubby fingers.

No salt needed.

Nothing sweeter.

---

The Imperial fortress of Breisach surrendered on the seventeenth day of December in the year of our Lord 1638. The city commander, Baron von Reinach, was permitted to leave honorably, bearing his colors and two cannon. He retreated to Strasbourg, four hundred soldiers—all that remained of Breisach’s garrison—and countless citizens with him. If you were watching the column march from the city gates, you might have been struck by the vivid colors of the banners rippling above, the glimmer of the winter sun upon harness and spur. You might have felt the beat of the drums, of booted feet and ironshod hooves. And, if you looked very closely, you might have seen a small white bird, wings outstretched, breezing above the defeated soldiers. You might have watched it turn south, toward the beckoning curves of the Schwarzwald.

A small white bird, its beak stained crimson.  

“Before the Forest” copyright © 2024 by Kell Woods
Art copyright © 2024 by Matt Rota

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In the small city of Mehranpur, the Nawab suspects there may be a connection between the slow wasting of a beloved tree and the fate of the city itself.

---

The Nawab of Mehranpur stopped smoking his hookah and looked up at the new khansama through a thick haze of smoke. The cinnamon-infused hashish cloud made lazy wisps around the Nawab’s ruby-studded fingers, clouding his vision. He flicked his hand, the wisps went away with a feline suddenness, and the khansama began to look more like a man than a mere idea, a quivering abstraction. The Nawab saw the man’s audacity, his naaz, his tenacity, his tongue-click manner of speaking. He saw a man who carried an inscrutable pride on his bony shoulders, a man who was as sure of his words as the fact that the day waned into night.

More than that, the Nawab saw a man who wasn’t afraid of certain death.

“If tonight was a moonless night,” said the Nawab, “I would have had your head severed and paraded around the Fountains of Reshma.”

“I am aware, Nawab Saheb,” said the man.

“Say again what you said with such confidence, a moment ago. Say it so the court hears it again, like a thunderclap in a storm.”

“I can prepare a meal that brings eternal youth.”

The Nawab set aside the hookah. He straightened his back, and his bones cracked and groaned and complained in languages only bones speak, a language of age and whispers. And even his bones had heard the word “youth” from the mouth of the audacious man, the man who wore nothing but a simple tunic and a faded dhoti, with torn slippers and grime lining his toenails.

“I won’t repeat the eon-old saying that even the walls have ears,” said the Nawab. “But my walls listen. And then they speak to other walls. And then all the walls of Mehranpur speak among themselves, telling each other stories of my subjects, bringing back to me their discontents. So don’t make promises in this court that the walls curl into rumours, that bring hope to the hearts of my subjects and to me.”

“I know what you’re implying, Nawab,” said the man. “But what I say is the truth.”

“You also know that I make available, from time to time, the heartiest and most sumptuous meals for my subjects, an envious feast, so that they spend the rest of their hardworking weeks with the taste of what we serve. And they continue to work hard, because they have another feast to look forward to, aside from dreary day-to-day meals of roti and daal and achaar.”

“I am well aware of your magnanimity, Nawab Saheb.”

“Then go and make me a meal that brings eternal youth,” said the Nawab. “But remember, if you fail, then you would have caused a grievous anguish to both me and my loyal subjects. And the punishment for that would not be meted out by me, but by them.”

“I won’t disappoint,” said the man, giving the Nawab a curt bow. “I only have one condition.”

“Speak freely.”

“I would need a two-inch bar of gold, every day, as payment, for eighteen days. And not just any gold…not a corrupted alloy. But its purest form.”

The Nawab summarily ignored the ask of gold. That was not what had surprised him. “What meal takes eighteen days to prepare?” The Nawab didn’t like the agitation in his voice. But the agitation itself was a precursor to a rage that was hidden in his heart. The rage at this man’s outlandish notions.

“A meal that brings eternal youth,” said the man, his voice calm, unerring.

---

Later, in his bedchamber, his Diwan-i-Khas, the Nawab lounged with his begum and told her about the ache in his heart, and the rage in his heart, and the blood that swelled in his veins that told him myriad things about the state of the world.

“I am afraid one day this rage will get the better of me,” said the Nawab.

“What is the root of all this anger?” asked the begum.

The Nawab fell silent. He had looked deep inside and asked himself questions, and asked others the same questions, and answers had always eluded him. Mehranpur was a mere district-state, subservient to the larger state of Alipur, where Mohammad Ali Shah ruled with an iron fist. When Ali Shah gave alms, and spoke of promises, and spoke of expensive grains like barley and rice and millet being imported from other lands, and other riches, he never included Mehranpur in his magnanimous decisions. On occasions, the Nawab of Mehranpur had himself walked to Alipur Palace, on scorched earth, showing his love and respect for the greater state, and given much of his hoards of ruby to the Shah, but to no avail.

Mehranpur had become a mere speck of sand. The Nawab feared the small district-state of Mehranpur might soon be uprooted by the whims of the Shah. And this fear brought about rage. And the rage often made the Nawab do inexplicable things. Things which reached the ears of the Shah, sometimes, completing a circle of misery.

The Nawab was also getting old. Age crept up to him, as his days morphed into years faster than a wind could change direction. And with the Nawab, Mehranpur aged too, and lived always at the cusp of disaster. And that’s why the Nawab hated promises.

“You can always tend to the Gulmohar,” said the Begum, twisting the hem of her dupatta into knots.

The Gulmohar, the Nawab’s pride, once a majestic tree that was the envy of all eyes in all the states, grew in his orchard, but its edifice had recently begun to mirror the Nawab’s various predicaments. Its bright saffron leaves had turned to rust and its bark had started shedding all around the grass it stood on. The cool, all-encompassing shade it once provided was now a patchwork blanket of shadow. In the morning, before the khansama’s arrival, the Nawab had tended to the Gulmohar personally, sat down near its roots with chisel and manure, often singing to the tree. The nawab cut a despondent figure from afar, and the residents of the Palace spoke in hushed tones with each other about how lonely he had become.

Now, in the evening, the Nawab once again visited the tree and once again saw its drooping edifice. It escaped him, how, despite good quality manure, enough water, ample sunlight in the afternoons, the Gulmohar refused to thrive. It had started behaving like a stubborn child. But the Nawab couldn’t discipline the Gulmohar like he would a stubborn child.

If he had any children, he would have learned better ways of discipline.

“Nawab Saheb, the Shah has sent a paigam.”

The Nawab turned to face a sentry, who was holding a rolled parchment with a green ribbon and the unmistakable bright red wax seal of the Shah with a golden teardrop on it.

“Open it and read it to me, then,” said the Nawab, facing the Gulmohar again. He felt the more his eyes strayed from the sight of the tree, the more it drooped. Even now, he could tell, the branches curved downwards a slight inch, when the sentry had disturbed him.

“It’s by the powers vested upon me by the royal state that I decree…”

“The day won’t wait around for you to read the preamble, just get on with it,” said the Nawab, impatience dripping from his mouth like honey from a nest of bees. The sentry sighed.

“Nawab Saheb, it’s written here that Mehranpur will no longer get any rice.”

“How far have you studied, sentry?”

“I have studied enough letters, Nawab Saheb,” said the sentry, his words quivering and shaking. “It’s what the paigam says.”

The Nawab snatched the letter from the sentry’s hands. He read it in its entirety, trying to find any hidden meaning in the gaps between one alphabet and the next, again and again, until his eyes hurt from the effort and his knees buckled underneath him from the weight of it all.

---

Later that night, the Nawab dreamed of having children. Next day, at the fresh crack of dawn, as the Begum was feeding the mynah on the windowsill, the Nawab made his wish known to her, of finally expanding their family from two to three, perhaps four. When his Begum fell silent, and in her silence was all the answer, and the mynah chirped and flew away, the Nawab quietly walked out of his Diwan-i-Khas and made his way towards the kitchen.

The smell reached the Nawab first, before the low murmurs. Even as he crossed the long, marbled walkway from his court towards the kitchens, the intoxicating aroma of garlic- and cumin-infused oil reached his nostrils. He hurried, but his footfall told its own tale. The Nawab’s steps were loud and assured, and the sound of his boots against marble was like the sound of the first patter of rain. It was a sound of authority, and it was that sound that gave him away.

When the Nawab entered, the khansama was already facing the door, as if anticipating his arrival. But what was a stark surprise was the absence of any of the other bawarchis who normally assisted a khansama during the preparation of a feast.

“Nawab Saheb, if it isn’t too much, I must ask you to leave the kitchen.”

The first inkling of a long-subdued rage. The Nawab clenched his fist, then calmed himself. No other khansama had ever spoken to him with such impudence.

“Do you not wish to receive your first gold payment? Is today the first day of your preparation for whatever meal you promised me?”

The khansama’s gaze lingered on the Nawab’s face for far too long.

“Do you have the gold on your person?”

“I do,” said the Nawab. He loosened a plain gold ring from his finger and handed it to the khansama. “I begin your payment with something that’s valuable to me. This means that I trust you to do whatever needs to be done.”

The khansama simply pocketed the ring, without as much as giving it a glance.

“I will,” he said. “I have heard that there will be no rice, going forth.”

“Therefore, I assume, a khansama will improvise.”

“As a khansama must.”

---

The Nawab’s true name was known only to his Begum. It was a beautiful name, which meant, in a distant language, the wind that sings lullabies to a grave. The Nawab had increasingly started feeling nearer to the grave than being cradled by a gentle wind. He felt he wasn’t being true to his people, especially the ones who spent scorching summer days digging to unearth gold just for the happiness of the Shah.

Most nights, the Nawab entertained the idea of laying a siege on the Shah’s capital with his meagre army. Of course, he had heard of valiant efforts of five hundred men against fifty thousand, so he knew it could be done. But those five hundred were often led by capable generals. But the Nawab himself, with his weary bones and aching heart wasn’t much of a commander. Nor was he a poet, who could soothe someone’s heart just by his words. He couldn’t even do so with his own Begum.

He could only look backwards at his youth. But the strange ways of the new khansama, the cadence with which his utensils made sounds against each other, the sound of the gentle simmer of a something being made over a kadhai, the slow bubble, the warm, nutty scent of spices, opened for the Nawab a window to the future. A future where another age waited for him. A bright future where, perhaps if he were to be rid of his cage of age, he would be rid of the tyranny of the Shah.

But was it even possible? Or had the silent wishes of the Nawab’s heart somehow reached a cunning khansama’s ears, and he had decided to take advantage of the fact? By looting him of gold, little by little, over eighteen days. And the khansama was strict about his ways too. No one was allowed inside the kitchen for the span of the fortnight and four days, not even the Nawab. For the next few days, the only time the khansama showed his face outside the kitchen was to collect his gold. The Nawab grew increasingly agitated as the last day approached. Despite all the powers he held, he had no way of knowing what meal was being cooked inside the kitchens.

On the eleventh day, as the Nawab was tending to the Gulmohar, he received another paigam from the Shah. This time, the Shah had requested the Nawab’s presence in the court of Alipur. It was a curt letter, with only two sentences clarifying the Shah’s will.

“He wants to spit in my face as he tells me that Mehranpur will be disintegrated into smaller districts, governed by his cronies,” said the Nawab, after he read the paigam out loud in front of his Begum.

“If you take this news in a positive light,” said the Begum, knitting a sweater, her keen eyes affixed on the wool patterns embroidered on the arm and how she continued them across the chest, “the thing you’re most looking forward to, the meal of eternal youth, will be ready by the time you return.”

“It’s a useless endeavour,” said the Nawab. “I don’t even know what I will do with the youth that’s promised to me. I am powerless now. I will be powerless then.”

“I have heard that the Shah can be kind sometimes,” said the Begum. “Maybe he showers some kindness upon us.”

The Nawab couldn’t fathom the eerie calm in his Begum’s voice.

“Will you take care of the Gulmohar in my absence?”

“Of course I will.”

Before leaving for Alipur, the Nawab cast one last, mournful glance at the tree that grew in his courtyard. The ten days of sun hadn’t changed its edifice one bit. In fact, its leaves were now the colour of rust and its brittle branches one day away from falling to the ground. The Nawab feared his absence would mean the death of the Gulmohar.

---

It took the Nawab two days to travel to Alipur. When the dust-caked road morphed into smooth black tar, with signs painted white pointing in the general direction of the Shah’s capital, the Nawab knew his meeting wouldn’t be kind. The Nawab took the changing of the condition of the roads as an insult upon him. Because it was an insult, when the roads that snaked to the other districts saw their potholes filled and their cracks smoothened, and only the road to Mehranpur remained like a shoddy, broken thing.

Alipur itself was a city that was meant to put any visitor to shame. The Nawab had felt this shame all his life and he wanted to be done with it. So, he hurried his caravan as soon as it entered the city, not choosing to part the curtains to look outside at the shops that sold silk and cotton, and dates and walnuts, and the tall golden spires that gleamed even during the blackest of nights. When he stepped out of his caravan, he rejected what his peripheral vision told him and walked straight inside the Palace, where he was unceremoniously welcomed and ushered inside the resting chamber of the Shah.

Mohammad Ali Shah’s vast, bulky frame was draped on a diwan. From a distance, the Shah was a painting of opulence and of indulgence, and of riotous colour, almost blinding to the eyes of the Nawab. When the Nawab curtsied, the Shah merely glanced at him, and then resumed nibbling his grapes, as if the Nawab’s presence was as inconsequential as a fly.

“I thought you would not come,” said the Shah. His voice was like the touch of a feather. A voice that didn’t match his actions. “You didn’t respond to my earlier paigam.”

“There was nothing to respond to,” said the Nawab.

“Thank you, esteemed Shah of Alipur, we look forward to serving you better and falana…Words like these. Don’t you have manners, Nawab?”

“Why have you called me here?” said the Nawab, his voice at edge. “What was so important that couldn’t be requested in another paigam?”

The Shah rose from the diwan, and the view was like a huge, heavy curtain, finally unfurling.When the Shah walked towards the Nawab, he felt the oncoming rush of a tsunami. When he finally stood an inch away from the Nawab, towering a hand-span over him, the Nawab felt the fear of god.

“I could crush you, right now,” said the Shah. “But I just want the Gulmohar.”

“Gulmohar…as in…my tree…the Gulmohar?”

“Gulmohar, as in, yes, your tree, your child, your pride, that Gulmohar. The same Gulmohar which I now know is dying. I believe it belongs in Alipur. It will thrive here. The Gulmohar of Alipur. Now that’s a name that has a ring to it.”

“You can’t just uproot a tree and plant it somewhere else,” said the Nawab. “My precious…tree…it’s already unhealthy. It would require a mammoth amount of effort and I can’t just give it to you. It will die on the way. There’s no way even you could revive it. Ask me anything else. I will give you more share of gold from the mines of Mehranpur. I would make them work double shifts.”

“I have plenty of gold, Nawab,” said the Shah. “You give me your tree, and I give you back your rice. And then I will give you more. Return, now, to Mehranpur, Nawab, and mull over my words. I need an answer in a week. If I don’t receive a paigam, I would assume that your answer is a no, and then Mehranpur will be subject, again and again, like it always has, to my various dissatisfactions. But if you say yes…well…the mynah will sing again.”

And then the Shah turned around and walked back to the diwan and lounged and spoke no more.

---

The Nawab’s misfortunes didn’t end there. On the way back, he had to battle a torrent of rain, and his caravan got lodged in mud, and it took five strong men, all wayward travellers, suffering from the same rain, to dislodge the wheel of the caravan and send the vehicle on its way again. The ordeal caused the Nawab’s already old skin to develop an infection, and by the time he reached Mehranpur, he was shivering and cold and sick.

The rage in his heart had taken a bestial form and was bursting through him even in sickness. The rage was at the world and the unfairness of it all. His Begum made him drink the milk of poppy at night and put him to sleep. In a delirious slumber, the Nawab hurled names at the Shah, and at his khansama, and at everyone who had wronged him in the past, ever.

The next day, the entire Palace was suffused with the scent of tempered cumin and garlic, and roasted tomatoes, and cinnamon and coconut and myriad other scents, an intoxicating medley of flavours. Yet, no one was allowed to see what dish the scents belonged to. The Nawab, wide awake at the crack of dawn, realised that it was the eighteenth day, the final day, the day he was meant to taste the dish of the khansama.

For some inexplicable reason, the Nawab felt he should taste the dish in the vicinity of his beloved, the Gulmohar. And so he ordered the khansama to bring him the dish in the orchard. Then, the Nawab showered and dressed in his finest gold-embroidered sherwani and stepped out into the orchard. The sun was another golden disk in a pale blue sky. None of the brightness of the morning seemed to touch the Gulmohar, which looked shrivelled and old. A cord of pincers tightened around the Nawab’s heart. An ache ran through his body. He couldn’t bear the sight of his tree, his beautiful tree, and so he averted his gaze and looked towards the entrance of the orchard, where the khansama was standing, holding a steaming kadhai.

The Nawab beckoned the man. The khansama took his time.

The smell, as always, reached the Nawab first. What had the khansama prepared for eighteen days? What wonders did that kadhai hold, what elixir simmered inside the dull, iron confines of the utensil?

“I thank you for giving me the opportunity to serve you, Nawab Saheb,” said the khansama. “I present to you, the Red Daal of Issa.”

The man thrust the kadhai under the gaze of the Nawab. And the Nawab saw what was simmering inside the kadhai for eighteen days. And the Nawab’s quiet rage came up to the surface when he saw that it was just a daal, a plain old daal, tempered with cumin, garlic, red chilli oil swimming on its yellow-saffron surface.

A daal which could have been done in under an hour.

“What’s this? Is this supposed to bring us all eternal youth?”

“Taste it, at least, and then present me with your verdict, Nawab Saheb.”

“I’ll have a verdict for you,” said the Nawab, then snatched the kadhai from the man’s hands, and threw it away. The kadhai, flaming hot, made an ugly arc, and so did its contents, the Red Daal of Issa—which wasn’t quite red, but sort of a pale golden, like the sun—and fell near the base of the Gulmohar, staining the tree’s bark and the ground around it completely with the colour of spring. And seeing his already dying tree smeared with the wasted daal, the Nawab’s misery couldn’t be contained, and he screamed in agony, and then ordered his guards to take the khansama and imprison him in the dungeons below the Mehranpur Palace.

Later, the Nawab wept in his bedchambers, burying his face in his satin pillows, as his Begum fanned his head. Night fell around the palace, balmy and quiet.

---

For three days, the Nawab mourned. And soon the date approached when he had to respond to the Shah with an affirmative answer. He couldn’t bear to look at his dying tree, and he convinced himself that the Gulmohar’s fate would be better in Alipur. In fact, every one of his pupils would be better off if they were in Alipur.

Mehranpur, just like the tree, just like the Nawab, was dying.

The morning before he was to draft a paigam to the Shah, the Nawab called upon his chief gardener to speak to him about the inevitable. The gardener was a quiet, reticent man, with patchwork skin, nimble fingers, and a sharp gaze. He met the Nawab like an old friend, but the Nawab spoke like he was singing a dirge.

“It pains me to say this,” said the Nawab, in a defeated voice. “But you must call upon your years of hard work, talent, and perseverance, to do something for me. Call upon whoever you think is the most capable. Work with them. I want you to safely uproot the Gulmohar and carry it to Alipur. The Shah has demanded it.”

“But why?” said the gardener.

“Because the tree is dying and Alipur would be better suited for its needs.”

“Nawab Saheb, I don’t understand. The Gulmohar has sprouted bright saffron leaves, and its bark is healthier than ever before.”

“The price of lying in Mehranpur is terrible, so be careful. You are my friend, but I won’t entertain…”

“Nawab Saheb, please come with me,” said the gardener.

The Nawab followed the gardener into the orchard. What he saw there yanked the wind out of his lungs. His precious tree, the Gulmohar he had left to die three days ago, with its withering frame and blackened stump was living again. The bark was brown and clearly showed tree-age circles, and the branches were straight, erect, not drooping, and the leaves, oh the leaves, were reminiscent of a flower in the first bloom of spring, a dazzling saffron. The Gulmohar was living up to its name.

A word escaped the Nawab’s lips, a question. “How?”

“I had been curious about the tree. I saw something near its base three days ago. A bright yellow smear. I can’t be sure, but it seems to me that the tree has taken sustenance from that substance.”

A whirlwind of emotions stirred inside the Nawab, but none of them was rage. Confusion, regret, bitterness, a yearning for something long gone. But no rage.

“Bring the khansama to me.”

Later, the khansama was brought in front of the Nawab. Three days inside the dungeons, his thin frame slouching, bogged down by the heavy chains, and yet he had a slight smile on his face.

“All of us present in this court are seeking answers,” said the Nawab. “Something inexplicable has happened.”

“I have spent my life as a cook studying the properties of both food and gold and how they complement each other. Every day, for eighteen days, I simmered the daal under a low flame, while working with the gold you provided me. Every day, for eighteen days, I brought out the true essence of that gold and put it in the daal. It’s that essence the tree now drinks sustenance from. And that essence will remain with the tree long after all of us have gone. A sustenance that could have been yours too.”

The silence that fell between the two men was long and drawn out. Only the skittering of leaves outside could be heard, and the slow breathing of the courtiers, as they waited for the Nawab to announce something, a decision, a decree, so that they could obey, and then go back to their chambers to sleep.

“I can take another eighteen days to prepare something else, Nawab Saheb.”

“No,” said the Nawab. “I do not deserve that magnanimity. I deserve this humiliation for my short-sightedness. You may leave now. Please speak to the khajanchi for an adequate payment for your services.”

This declaration came as a surprise to most courtiers, for certainly they had been expecting a miracle, of a life beyond what the Maker had given them, a life that would go on and on, while their youth remained in stasis. But that was not to be, because of the Nawab’s folly.

The Nawab stepped away, leaving the courtiers in deep thought, and with moments to reflect. The Nawab had his own reflecting to do.

His Begum had prepared a great, warm concoction for him, as she usually did, when the Nawab was under a dark cloud. Today, he was under the darkest of clouds, and the path in front of him was murky. The concoction had clove, cinnamon, ginger, and some jaggery. The Nawab took the cup from his Begum’s assured hands and walked out into the sun, towards the shade of the Gulmohar that he had so sorely missed.

The Shah’s words were ringing in his head. The fate of Mehranpur was a smoke-grab thing, waiting for the Nawab’s one command. Their happiness, their misery, all up to the Nawab to decide. Yet, the Nawab had no answers. He thought of ancient poetry that held meaning in its meters and verses, answers to various conundrums, but none of the old poets held any answers for the Nawab.

He sat under the shade of the Gulmohar, sipping his concoction. The vast canopy of its branches hid the sun, allowing only a thin beam of light to pass. The singular beam fell on the Nawab’s feet, illuminating them. There was immeasurable beauty in that moment, a gentle kindness that the Nawab felt the Gulmohar was bestowing upon him.

The Gulmohar had forgiven him for the neglect of all those years.

Then, a wind blew, and from the canopy overhead, two stray leaves detached, twisted and curled in the air, feather-like, and came to rest on the simmering surface of the Nawab’s concoction. The leaves blended in the liquid immediately, leaving a thin, golden trail, like the afterthought of a flame. The Nawab tasted the concoction again.

The rage of all those years simmered down and he felt at tranquil ease. The Gulmohar wanted him to swim in that ease. The Gulmohar knew that his heart still beat for his city, his family, and his people. It knew that his resolve was unyielding, like a diamond. The Gulmohar had spoken to him, and after many years, the Nawab was listening.

It trusted the Nawab to do what was right.

“The Gulmohar of Mehranpur” copyright © 2024 by Amal Singh
Art copyright © 2024 by Samantha Mash

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Set in the same thrilling world as Genoveva Dimova’s The Witch’s Compendium of Monsters series, “Ace Up Her Sleeve” is a standalone, spoiler-free story featuring the fire witch Kosara, who must match wits with the Tsar of Monsters in a high-stakes card game that is equal parts magic, skill, and subterfuge . . .

The first two volumes in Genoveva Dimova’s The Witch’s Compendium of Monsters series, Foul Days and Monstrous Nights, are available now wherever books are sold!

---

The clocks struck midnight. With every chime echoing in the dark streets, the gap above Chernograd tore wider. With every chime, the sky spat out more monsters.

Kosara cast a glance upwards as she trudged in the ankle-deep snow, her face hidden behind a thick woollen scarf. She didn’t stop to watch. She’d seen it all before: it happened every New Year’s Eve. The new year had been born, but it hadn’t been baptised yet. For the next twelve days, the monsters would be free to terrorise the city. Then, with the first cockerel’s crow on Saint Yordan’s Day, they’d disappear, leaving only destruction behind.

Kosara wasn’t afraid of the monsters. She had pockets crammed with talismans and amulets, fingers skilled in weaving spells, and a tongue trained in magic words. She knew every monster’s weakness: how the karakonjuls could be defeated with a clever riddle, the yudas shied away from their reflection in a mirror, and the upirs hated the stench of garlic.

Well, she was not afraid of most of them. There was one monster no amulet or talisman could defeat; no magic words or spells would chase away. One monster Kosara knew better than anyone in Chernograd, and yet had found no weak spots in his glistening, scaly armour. One monster she’d do her best to avoid this New Year’s Eve, and for the twelve days after.

But as the chiming of the clocks finally died down and her steps sped up, she was left with the nagging feeling that she simply had nowhere to hide. She was trapped, just like everyone else in Chernograd. Trapped inside the city with the monsters.

In the distance, the Wall towered, an ink-black silhouette against the white snow. Its tentacles reached into the sky, preventing anyone from flying over. Its roots sank deep within the ground, stopping anyone from burrowing under. An impenetrable barrier.

A dark shadow crossed the sky above Kosara, and she automatically ducked into a church’s arched entrance. She deeply inhaled the scent of incense drifting from within and let the chants of the priests calm down her thumping heart, before she risked peeking out again.

For a brief second, she was sure she’d seen the Zmey’s large wings and his curved horns flying over the church’s onion dome. She could have sworn she spotted his golden scales glinting in the moonlight. She was certain she heard his soft voice,:Why do you run from me, my little Kosara?

She fished out her strongest talisman, fashioned from a boiled egg, a red thread, and a pair of rusty scissors. Her mouth began shaping the defensive spell, even though she knew it would be useless.

But then, a gust of wind scattered the snowflakes, and Kosara realised the Zmey wasn’t there at all—she’d imagined it all. It had been nothing but the shadows swirling between the tall spires and the smoke pouring from the chimneys, painting wings and horns where there were none. It hadn’t been his voice she’d heard, but the whistling of the wind.

Stupid, stupid, stupid, she thought. What was she doing, scrambling about like a scared animal at the first sign of danger? She knew very well the Zmey never came to her in his monster form. He always donned his human disguise first—the one he’d worn when he’d first fooled her into trusting him, six years ago.

She allowed herself a few seconds for her heart to stop hammering against her ribcage. Then she dashed across the city square, a space too open to be comfortable under a sky swarming with monsters. Her shadow followed her a few steps behind—they were both exhausted after a day of casting protective spells. Her throat burned from the cold, and her breath escaped in short gasps as her nostrils filled with a familiar scent.

Nothing smelled quite like New Year’s Eve in Chernograd. Fresh snow, warm fireplaces, fireworks drifting in from the other side of the Wall. And the monsters, of course, had a smell, too: a putrid mixture of blood and gore, and the reek of burnt fur as they hit the protective circles drawn around every window and door in the city. Roars and shouts filled the streets, and the clopping of hooves echoed. Somewhere in the distance, an air-splitting scream sounded. All around Kosara, the last passersby rushed, trying to get behind bolted doors—only their eyes glinted, visible in the sliver of skin between fur hats and wool scarves.

Finally, Kosara reached her destination, a glittering salon on the main street, the only bright spot among the dark snowdrifts. A tacky, elaborately carved and gilded sign hung over the entrance, its iron chains squeaking in the wind: the witch’s rest. An enchanted drawing of a cauldron bubbled underneath.

Kosara raised her hand to knock on the door but hesitated, remaining frozen for a second. The Zmey would never think to look for her here, she was certain. And yet, she couldn’t shake the feeling she was making a mistake in crossing the threshold.

The Witch’s Rest wasn’t named after its clientele—in fact, no self-respecting witch ever patronised it. It was named after its owner, Sofiya Karajova.

Sofiya had been kind enough to allow Kosara to hide there until the end of the Foul Days, but Kosara suspected her motives were far from altruistic. There was nothing worse than owing a favour to a fellow witch. Sofiya would come to claim it one day, undoubtedly at the worst possible moment, and she’d make sure it cost Kosara.

Before Kosara’s knuckles had touched the wood, the door swung open, and a gloved hand caught Kosara’s lapel, pulling her inside.

“Finally.” Sofiya patted the snow off Kosara’s shoulders with an abrupt gesture. “What took you so long?”

“I was getting ready.”

“Were you?” Sofiya looked Kosara up and down, and Kosara knew what the other witch was seeing: her messy hair with snowflakes caught between the dark tresses, her mascara running from the wind and cold outside and settling in the scars on her cheek, her scruffy coat with brand-new patches on the elbows. Kosara, not wanting to be outdone, did her own slow, deliberate once-over of Sofiya.

Sofiya was a tall woman, always impeccably dressed in fabrics imported for eye-watering prices from the other side of the Wall. Multiple leather pouches with spells hidden inside hung around her long neck, and her bracelets chimed as she moved, adorned with never-blinking evil-eye beads. At her feet, two shadows waited—one was Sofiya’s own, and the other had been left to her by her grandmother. It was still alive after the death of its previous owner, a feat very few witches managed to achieve.

Every witch’s magic came from their shadow. With two, Sofiya was one of the most powerful witches in the city.

Not that she used her powers for anything good.

“Take that off,” Sofiya demanded, already stripping Kosara’s coat off her.

“Why?”

“I don’t want my clients seeing you in that old thing. I have an image to uphold. What did you have to patch it for? Couldn’t you just get a new one?” Sofiya rolled her eyes. Kosara’s coat hung off her elbow like a dead animal.

“Not exactly,” Kosara mumbled. She followed the other woman to the salon.

It was a dimly lit, stuffy space, filled with the scent of incense and countless silk cushions scattered across the parquet floor. Thick curtains were draped over the windows. Beneath their tassels glittered magical symbols meant to scare the monsters away.

A long table for seances commanded the centre of the room. It was covered in a velvet tablecloth trimmed in gold, and a large crystal ball was placed atop it, filled with swirling mist. A group of men and women dressed in imported silk shirts and satin dresses sat around it, their gloved hands clasped together, their eyes shut.

One of the women slowly, secretively cracked her left eye open. Her pupil was enlarged and the iris around it was a bright, vibrant purple. She’d probably used enchanted eye drops.

As she spotted Sofiya leading Kosara through the room by the elbow, she raised a single painted eyebrow.

“Coming in a second,” Sofiya said through her teeth. An unnatural smile had spread across her face. “You have to remember,” she whispered, as she pushed Kosara past a curtain into the cramped booth behind, “I’m doing you a huge favour.”

Kosara groaned as she plopped down on the soft cushions. “I know.” She took a deep breath and spat the next part out quickly, like it tasted bitter on her tongue. “And I’m very thankful.”

Once Sofiya was gone, Kosara leaned back against the cushions and placed her muddy boots on the low mahogany table, making sure she left a mark. Petty, but the other witch simply infuriated her.

Sofiya could have been out there today with the other witches, freezing to the bone in the snow, drawing protective circles around shops and houses. If Kosara could do it, then so could Sofiya Two-Shadows. Instead, she’d protected only her salon and had gathered as many rich fools as she could inside it, charging them a hefty fee for the privilege. Sofiya probably planned to hide here until the end of the Foul Days, never as much as showing her nose outside.

Kosara resented the fact that she, too, planned to hide here. She resented the opulent displays of wealth all around her because she herself couldn’t afford the expensive fabrics, the mahogany furniture, the crystal ball. All because she’d lost her money in a stupid, doomed attempt to cross the Wall five years ago.

It had been a mistake. Not only because it had ultimately ended with her stranded on this side of the Wall with no money—but because, in hindsight, it hadn’t been Chernograd she’d wanted to escape at all. It had been the demons from her past. Crossing the Wall would have solved nothing. Yes, the Zmey couldn’t physically get her on the other side, but he’d still be alive in her mind.

He’d know he’d won if he forced her to leave her city.

No, what Kosara needed to do was to defeat the Zmey once and for all. She needed to claim her city back.     

The only problem was, she had no idea how. It wasn’t an easy matter, defeating the Tsar of Monsters.

Kosara sighed, making herself comfortable between the cushions. Her eyelids grew heavy. Except, something—some sixth sense—was screaming at her that she couldn’t fall asleep just yet. She was certain the Zmey wouldn’t come to look for her here. And yet, her certainty had cost her before.

Kosara licked her lips and fished out an old, crumpled deck of cards from her pocket. She’d had it for years—six years, in fact. She’d bought one for herself and one for the Zmey. He’d been delighted with her present and had never thought to question her generosity.

Just like every year, she picked out the ace of spades and shoved it down the back of her boot.

Maybe she’d finally be able to use it. Maybe, just for once, her luck would work.

Kosara awoke with a start. Her neck was stiff, stuck at an unnatural angle on the cushions, and her toes hurt in her boots. She’d spent so long outside in the snow today, her throat felt raw.

On the other side of the curtain, in the main hall, the séance continued. Sofiya was loudly asking some long-suffering spirit under which tree in the garden, precisely, he’d buried his treasure, so his greedy nephew could dig it out. What a way to take advantage of the time of year when the boundary between Chernograd and the world of spirits and monsters was thinnest.

At first, Kosara wasn’t sure what had woken her. Nothing in her little booth had changed, as far as she could see.

But then, she smelled the difference in the air. There was the scent of sandalwood and cinnamon coming from the main hall, where incense sticks burned. There was the smell of soot and coal, still clinging to Kosara’s clothes and hair after a day spent outside.

But there was something else, too. Something painfully familiar: a wild, otherworldly scent, raw and magical. It made the hairs on the back of Kosara’s neck stand up.

She scrambled up, thinking there might still be time to run, time to escape . . .

Long, pale fingers pulled the curtain open.

Kosara’s scream stuck in her throat. The Zmey’s eyes met hers.

He’d come in his human disguise, as he always did—his frame filled the opening in the curtain, and his hair caught the light like molten gold.

He smiled his handsome smile. “May I come in?”

Kosara desperately blinked fast, hoping it might dispel him. Hoping she was simply imagining him again.

It didn’t help. He remained standing there, just as solid as before.

“How?” Kosara spat. She barely heard her voice over the thumping of her heart.

“Excuse me?”

“How did you find me?” Her words came out strained. It cost her effort to push them past the lump in her throat.

The Zmey laughed. He had a pleasant, chiming laugh. “You didn’t really think I wouldn’t, did you? When have you ever managed to hide from me?”

Kosara stayed silent because she didn’t want to admit the truth. Never.

But she’d never before fallen so low as to ask her least favourite witch in town for a favour. She’d truly thought she was safe here—that, perhaps, had been her downfall. Kosara could see it now: Why would a witch who had no qualms selling trinkets to rich fools instead of doing real magic ever feel bound by the witches’ honour code? Sofiya must have ratted her out to the Zmey.

Kosara had made a mistake trusting her. It wasn’t the first time she’d put her trust in the wrong person.

“Kosara, Kosara, Kosara . . .” The Zmey shut the curtain behind him and, without waiting for an invitation, sprawled himself on the cushions opposite her. He’d taken his snakeskin coat off and wore a simple, old-fashioned linen shirt, embroidered around the cuffs and neckline. The last couple of buttons were left undone, showing off his sculpted chest, covered in tiny, glinting golden hairs. “When will you give up?”

Kosara’s eyes snapped back to his face. “Give up what?”

“Trying to run away from me. When will you accept your rightful position by my side?”

Kosara stayed silent again. Never.

“I can give you everything you’ve ever dreamed of,” he said. “I can make you rich beyond your wildest imagination. All you need to do is to say the word.”

Kosara knew this play well. Every year, it was the same. He’d managed to lure her into his palace once when she’d been young and stupid, and there was no way she’d ever return there. That last time, she’d been lucky to make it out, drunk on moon wine and half-starved after spending months eating nothing but enchanted fruit, and she’d only managed it with her mentor’s help. It had taken months for her head to clear, and for her eyes to stop imagining shadows lurking in every corner.

He’d been grooming her, she knew, to give him her magic.

“Why are you here?” she asked, even though she knew the answer. “What do you want?”

The corners of the Zmey’s mouth twitched. “You.”

Bullshit. He didn’t want her. He wanted her power.

He simply thought she was an easy target because she’d fallen for his lies once before.

But, God, there was still some tiny part of her, hidden deep within, that felt flattered by his words. Some tiny part that yearned to snuggle in his familiar arms, and simply end this stupid game of cat and mouse. It had been so long. She was so tired.

Kosara had to keep that part of herself under control because it was an utter idiot.

“Why are you here?” she repeated, slightly more forcefully. Nevertheless, she didn’t dare raise her voice. She couldn’t allow herself to make him angry, or else he’d raze Sofiya’s salon to the ground, and Kosara’s debt to the other witch would grow too costly.

“Well, now.” The Zmey produced a crumpled deck of cards from his back pocket. It was a mystery how it even fit there—his trousers fit him as if painted on, revealing every muscle. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten our little tradition.”

Kosara gave him an even stare. She hadn’t forgotten. Every year, the Zmey demanded they play a game of cards. He always suggested the same wager: a lock of hair. At first, Kosara couldn’t figure out what his aim was. For him, winning a lock of her hair wouldn’t mean much. He wasn’t a witch, and his magic wasn’t precise enough to use it to control her through it. She’d simply assumed it was a convenient way for him to force his presence on her, since he knew she couldn’t resist a good gamble.

But then, she couldn’t help wondering if she underestimated his power. Every year, he found her that bit faster. Every year, the fog that fell over her brain in his presence grew thicker. Since he never lost a single game, he had five locks of her hair now. What would he do if he won a sixth one? What if that was what it took for him to finally force her back under his control?

The trouble was, Kosara couldn’t refuse him. Winning a lock of his hair was her only route to true freedom. With an artefact that powerful, she could prevent him from ever coming near her again. If she learned how to keep him away, she’d come one step closer to defeating him.

“Fine,” Kosara said through gritted teeth, painfully aware she was taking too big a gamble yet again. But how likely was it that the Zmey would win six games in a row? “Deal.”

Without saying a word, the Zmey began dealing: one card for Kosara, one for him. One for Kosara, one for him. Finally, he placed five cards face up on the table.

The rules of Kral were simple: each player held two cards. Whoever had the highest combination at the end of the third round won. You were allowed to swap your cards with the five face up on the table, but you had to do it carefully, so as not to alert your opponent to what you held. If your opponent guessed the exact cards in your hand, you lost.

Kosara looked down at her hand and groaned, but only internally. Just as usual, she held two weak cards: a five of diamonds and a three of spades. Her luck never seemed to work when she played against the Zmey. If she didn’t know better, she’d think he’d enchanted her—used his collection of locks of her hair to place a hex on her. Except he’d sworn he possessed no such magic—and she’d seen no evidence that he did.

If he could already do a spell as intricate as a hex on her luck, he wouldn’t be so desperate to steal her power.

Kosara scratched the scar on her cheek. From the corner of her eye, she spotted a queen of hearts placed face up on the table. She didn’t look at it directly, too aware of the Zmey’s eyes on her. She could take it, but then she would have to hope for a jack to come up next. What were the chances of that happening?

Given her luck so far, minuscule.

“Are you going to fold?” the Zmey asked after a few seconds.

And accept defeat this early? No way.

Kosara shrugged. “I’m simply letting you go first.”

The Zmey smirked and with a quick, fluid gesture swept the queen off the table, discarding one of his cards face down. Either he was bluffing, or he was holding a jack.

Kosara swore under her breath. She shouldn’t have let him take the queen. She wasn’t playing smart. She wiped her sweaty palms on her trousers and took several deep breaths, forcing her heartbeat to slow down. Focus.

She couldn’t lose this one. Stupid, stupid, stupid witch, she chided herself. For whatever reason, the voice in her head sounded an awful lot like the Zmey’s.

He smirked, as if he could read her thoughts. Then, he slowly, deliberately, placed another card face up, to replace the stolen queen.

Hope rose in Kosara’s chest. Could it be, finally, after all these years?

A king of spades.

Don’t let the corners of your mouth twitch. Don’t let your eyebrows go up. Don’t even look down at that card.

This was good. This was more than good—it was perfect.

That king of spades would be useless to her in combination with either of the cards she held. She, however, had an ace up her sleeve. Well, in her boot. Together, the king and the ace made the strongest combination in the game.

The only problem was, she couldn’t reach for the ace and risk the Zmey noticing.

She lifted her eyes to his and saw the glint in them. His smile had acquired a sharp edge. His fingers impatiently drummed on the table, waiting for her next move.

Kosara knew exactly what those fingers felt like wrapped around her throat. She swallowed hard.

But then, her eyes fell on her shadow. Now, there was an idea . . .

The booth was gloomy, and her shadow was barely visible, stretched along the wall behind her. Kosara tried to summon it, but there simply wasn’t enough light.

“It’s getting a bit chilly, don’t you think?” she asked casually.

A single line appeared between the Zmey’s eyebrows. “I wouldn’t say so.”

“My fingers have gone numb. Give me a second.” Kosara placed her cards on the table face down, careful so the Zmey wouldn’t catch a glimpse of them. Then she clicked her fingers.

A small orange flame danced at her fingertip. Its glow warmed her hands and face.

It reflected deep within the Zmey’s eyes as he watched her. “Are you stalling?”

“Not at all. I just need a minute to warm up.”

By the flame’s light, Kosara’s shadow grew darker. She summoned it again, reaching for it with her mind. Nothing happened. Kosara risked clicking her fingers again, making the flame brighter. The Zmey watched her without blinking.

Her shadow twitched as if shaking itself from a deep sleep. Its head slightly, almost imperceptibly turned to Kosara.

She’d done this trick during countless card games. Usually, everyone was too busy watching her for tells—staring at her face, trying to see if her toes nervously tapped on the floor. No one paid attention to her shadow.

No one but the Zmey. Every witch’s magic hid in their shadow, and he knew it. He rarely let her shadow out of his sight when they were together.

Which made it the perfect distraction.

Kosara didn’t let her eyes follow her shadow as it slid under the table. Instead, she stared at the Zmey, and he stared back at her, his smile still spread across his face.

He must have thought she couldn’t tear her gaze away from him. The truth was, Kosara didn’t even see him. The corner of her eye followed her shadow.

A shadowy hand appeared, creeping over the tabletop. It was difficult to spot, in the many dancing shadows now covering the booth, animated by Kosara’s flame. The only reason Kosara saw it was she knew what she was looking for.

The shadowy fingers reached for the deck. They quickly thumbed through, so fast they were a blur, looking for the ace of spades . . .

A thud sounded. Kosara flinched, her left hand dropping off the table to dangle next to the back of her boot.

A dagger—glinting steel, with a gilded handle encrusted with rubies—pierced the deck of cards, pinning it to the table. It trembled from the force with which the Zmey had thrown it.

The Zmey, himself, was still. He looked as if he hadn’t even moved.

“What was that for?” Kosara asked, keeping her voice level. Her heart thumped so hard in her chest, she was worried it might be visible through her shirt. Her fingers inched towards her boot.

“Oh,” the Zmey said, pulling his second dagger, the twin to the one sticking out from the deck of cards. He used it to clean his sharp nails. “I thought I saw something. I must have imagined it.”

Kosara shrugged, nonchalant. On the inside, however, she was celebrating. He’d fallen right into her trap.

“You must have.” She clicked her fingers. The flame between them disappeared.

In the fraction of the second before both their eyes acclimated to the gloom, she picked up her cards from the table, adding the ace of spades to her hand and seamlessly sliding the five of diamonds up her sleeve.

Quickly, before she lost her nerve, she swiped the king of spades from the table.

The Zmey looked at her for a long moment. The dagger was still in his hand, its rubies casting bloodred reflections across the booth.

“Are you going to fold?” Kosara asked, deliberately taunting him. The corner of her mouth twitched like she was trying to suppress a smile—which, in fact, she was. The Zmey, however, thought he knew her. He’d think she was bluffing.

“Wouldn’t you just love that?” He exhaled through his nostrils. “I can’t possibly fold, given what I’m holding.”

Was he bluffing? It didn’t matter. There was no combination in the game that could beat Kosara’s cards.

The Zmey slowly put his cards down on the tabletop. First, he revealed the queen of hearts. Then he flicked over his second card.

The jack of hearts. A great combination.

But it still wasn’t good enough to defeat Kosara’s. Just as slowly, she showed her cards, her gaze fixed on the Zmey. She’d treasure that memory forever: the moment the ace of spades appeared on the table, and the Zmey’s eyes first widened, then narrowed.

He inhaled sharply. “You cheated.”

“No, I didn’t.”

He stabbed the table with his dagger, and it remained there, stuck in the mahogany, parallel to the one still penetrating the deck of cards.

“How did you cheat?” The Zmey stood up and towered over Kosara. She resisted the urge to cower in her seat. “I was watching you.”

She looked up and met his gaze. Blue, like the centre of the flame. “I didn’t cheat.”

“How?” he hissed again. Hot saliva flew from his mouth and landed on her cheek.

Kosara wiped it with her sleeve. “Please behave,” she said, sounding calmer than she felt. Her fingers trembled, so she hid them under the table. On the floor, her shadow trembled, too. “I wouldn’t have played with you if I knew you were such a sore loser.”

The Zmey took a deep breath, his chest puffing up. Kosara wanted to bolt to the door. She didn’t. She held his gaze.

“Check the deck, if you don’t believe me,” she said.

That was a gamble. She couldn’t be sure whether her shadow had managed to sneak the ace from his deck away before the Zmey caught it.

The Zmey smirked, no doubt expecting her to be bluffing again. He pulled the dagger from the now ruined deck and flicked through the cards, slowly at first, then faster and faster. A single vein on his temple began pulsating. Kosara tried hard not to fidget.

Finally, the Zmey swore under his breath. He threw the cards on the table, and they scattered, raining all over Kosara’s feet.

She allowed herself a small exhale. He hadn’t found the ace.

Thank God.

“Damn hag,” the Zmey spat out, but he didn’t threaten her again. He might be a terrifying beast from another dimension, but he did have his own moral code he stuck to. This was why he despised cheaters so much.

This was also what made it particularly satisfying to cheat him.

Kosara raised her hand, palm up. “Come on,” she said. “Pay up.”

The Zmey lifted his dagger in one hand and grasped a clump of golden hair in the other. Then, with a fast gesture, he chopped the hair off. It left a gap just above his pale ear.

Kosara grabbed the lock of hair from his hand before he changed his mind. When her skin brushed against his, she drew away as if she’d been burned. The Zmey was scalding hot.

On his forearms, where he’d rolled up his sleeves, his pale flesh bubbled, half revealing the golden scales hiding beneath. Kosara blinked, and for a second she was certain she’d spotted his curved horns rising from his head, so tall they almost touched the ceiling.

She found the amulet in her pocket and gripped it in her hand. If he tried something now, she’d be ready. She had a lock of his hair.

He grinned, and his teeth were long and sharp, crisscrossing in his mouth “I hope you look at it every day while I’m gone.” His forked tongue licked his lips. “And think of me.”

And then, just when Kosara was ready to begin reciting her defensive spell, he turned around and left. The booth’s velvet curtain swished behind his back.

For a long moment, Kosara didn’t dare move. She sat still, until she heard the Zmey’s steps fade and the bell above the salon’s door chime.

In the main hall, Sofiya’s droning voice kept asking the spirits questions. Her clients were still oohing and ahhing. The smell of sandalwood and cinnamon drifted in, slowly replacing the Zmey’s wild scent lingering behind.

Between Kosara’s fingers, his hair was smooth and metallic.

She grasped it tight in her fist. A triumphant smile split her face.

Finally, she could escape him. Finally.

The Tsar of Monsters waited, perched on the roof opposite Sofiya’s salon. His talons grasped the red roof-tiles. The snow had grown heavier, but he didn’t feel the cold. Each snowflake landing on his golden scales evaporated with a hiss.

It was the last night of the Foul Days. He didn’t have much time left now.

The door to the salon had stayed shut all night, while his monsters wreaked havoc outside. A group of karakonjuls had tried breaking in just after midnight. He’d watched with mild interest as they burned themselves on the protective circle drawn around the door again and again. Finally, frenzied and bloodthirsty, they’d given up and chased a stray cat up the street.

They hadn’t caught it, or else the Zmey would have had to intervene. He had a weak spot for cats.

At nearly six in the morning, just as the sun crept over the rooftops and his monsters began to disappear off the streets, the door to the salon opened. Kosara crept out, her hands hidden deep within her pockets, her dark eyes searching the snowy street.

He knew what she was looking for. Him. He loved the hold he still had over her, after all these years.

He watched her until she disappeared from view. There was a certain quality to the way she walked, like a startled rabbit trying to find cover, that triggered something primal in him. He barely resisted the urge to swoop down and grasp her between his talons.

He couldn’t do that. He wouldn’t. If he forced her to return to him, she’d never be truly his—and therefore, neither would her magic. No, he’d wait until she sought him out herself. Until, desperate and tired of being alone, she returned to him.

His fingers inadvertently found the tender flesh where several of his golden scales were missing—in his human form, this was where she’d forced him to cut off a lock of his hair.

She’d cheated. He was certain of it. He knew her better than anyone. He knew all her tells.

She’d cheated, and he would find out how. And once he knew, he’d make her pay for it.

He swept down to the ground, transforming back into his human form midflight. What had jumped from the roof had been a monster, horned and winged. What landed was a young man with golden hair. For a brief second, he stood in the street, letting the snowflakes land on his naked skin. Each transformation made him so hot, as if he were on fire.

Then, he enchanted clothes onto himself—a white shirt, dark trousers, and a long, iridescent coat, flowing from purple to green to gold, like snakeskin.

He walked into Sofiya’s salon without bothering to knock. She’d invited him inside once, and that was all he needed. No lock or spell could keep him away now.

He crossed the salon quietly, careful not to wake Sofiya, asleep with her cheek pressed against the tablecloth, her face illuminated by the crystal ball. She hadn’t told him Kosara intended to hide here—he’d had to find out from someone else. Interesting. He’d always assumed a couple of gold coins every other year would be enough to buy the witch’s loyalty. He’d underestimated her.

Her guests were lying on the floor, huddled among the cushions. He’d made sure none of them spotted him during his last visit—it wouldn’t do his reputation any good if the whole town discovered he’d lost a game of cards against some witch.

Finally, the Zmey reached the booth. He closed the curtain behind him.

It still smelled like Kosara, soot and smoke and so much magic. Gods, it drove him mad.

He looked around the booth quickly, and then, rather undignified, fell to his knees and peeked under the low table.

It took him a while to find it, but in the end, it was there, just as he’d suspected. The ace of spades from his deck of cards, hidden under the table leg. The one her shadow had snatched just before he’d caught it. If Kosara hadn’t been so confident she’d fooled him, she would have retrieved it herself.

Or maybe she’d left it there on purpose. Maybe she’d been worried he’d ambush her on her way home and catch her with both aces in her pocket.

In any case, she’d made a fatal mistake.

The Zmey smiled a vicious smile. He’d make her pay for this.

She’d be his again.

“Ace Up Her Sleeve” copyright © 2024 by Genoveva Detelinova Dimova
Art copyright © 2024 by Rovina Cai

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