Original Fiction Absurdism

Let’s Go to the Zoo

Equipped with two sandwiches, a couple sets out to the zoo to see the one totally sane human being.

Illustrated by Scott Bakal

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Edited by Mal Frazier

By Louis Evans

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Published on April 8, 2026

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Equipped with two sandwiches, a couple sets out to the zoo to see the one totally sane human being.

Short story | 1,665 words

“Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. We have never seen a totally sane human being.” 

—apocryphal, attributed to Robert Anton Wilson

“Let’s go see the one totally sane human being again,” I say, and June says, “Okay.”

First we make sandwiches. I make peanut butter and jelly and June makes tuna fish salad. There’s no salad in tuna salad and no butter in peanut butter. I used to buy creamy peanut butter, the synthetically frictionless kind, but after June and I moved in together, I switched to the natural brand that was her preference, with the grittier texture and the oil layer that rose to the top of the jar when neglected. Then June stopped eating peanut butter; not for any particular reason. But I kept buying her kind.

The jelly is boysenberry. I do not believe I have ever seen a boysenberry in my life.

We put the sandwiches in plastic bags and off we go.

The one totally sane human being is kept in a special facility. Technically speaking they say the facility is not a zoo, but on the other hand it is located inside the zoo, and you have to buy a ticket to the zoo to get in. So. 

We take the bus to the zoo. It is both faster and easier to drive, but our car is in the shop. There is something wrong in its guts, something that the mechanic described to me in a torrent of jargon. I did not understand his words, and I do not wish to be someone different who could understand them.

A taxi would be faster than the bus, but also more expensive, and anyway the point is to spend the day somehow, so speed is not a virtue. In a bus you get in all the same traffic jams and frustrating little stoplight contretemps that you do in your own car, but it happens at a sort of peculiar remove, as though underwater. Whenever I am on a bus, I am convinced that it is a conveyance fit only for fish. The natural vehicle for people is the scooter, or perhaps the bicycle.

June doesn’t think that buses are for fish. Whenever I try to explain this idea to her, she laughs, but when I ask what animal or vegetable or mineral belongs on the bus instead, she changes the subject.

On this bus she eats half of her tuna salad sandwich. I keep my sandwich tightly wrapped in its nonsealing plastic bag. I will eat it after we see the one totally sane human being.

The bus line we live nearest goes straight to the zoo, with no transfer required. This is strictly a coincidence, but it is very convenient.

After I got out of the hospital it was the shape of all things I had the most trouble getting used to. I felt like a hermit crab who had been dumped, shell-less, into the open ocean. This was strange, because of course it was the hospital that had been new to me. I had not, I thought, grown up in a shell.

What June had the most trouble with was associations. We had locked up all the sharp knives, a mutually agreed-upon precaution, but she flinched to see me handling even a dull one. It has been months now, but I still make my sandwiches with a spoon out of consideration for her sensitivity. And she makes hers with a spoon as well, out of solidarity, perhaps, or maybe because it is easier to scoop tuna salad.

We pay for our tickets at the zoo. I’m all for going straight to the facility with the one completely sane human being, but June wants to see the animals first.

“Don’t you want to see a completely sane polar bear, also?” she asks. I consider telling her what confinement to a zoo exhibit the size of a moderately capacious apartment does to an animal used to commanding an ice floe the size of a continent, of the behavioral evidence we have of how exactly sane these polar bears are not, of the way they pace, broken, in rote loops. I decide against telling her this. We go and see the polar bear.

It looks sane to me, but what do I know.

You don’t get to work in a zoo anymore unless you love the animals. It’s one of those sorts of jobs. You need to be a little cracked about animals, more serious about them than about yourself. Obsessed in the holy way.

If the polar bear isn’t sane, it’s not because its keepers are indifferent. But they can’t fix it.

After the polar bear we go and see the reptile house and the aquarium building and the insect exhibits. I wonder what the least animal that is still insane is. Surely the ants are mad. I wonder if something that is not at all an animal could still be insane. I imagine picking up one of the decorative rocks that line the paths in the zoo, a chunk of gray basalt the size of a baseball, and holding it in my fist. I imagine that rock screaming in a voice that nobody at all can hear.

The animals start getting bigger again. Marsupials, tigers, elephants. I begin to wonder if June doesn’t want to see the one totally sane human being at all.

At the elephant enclosure, which is enormous, June tells me about a children’s book she read about an elephant that moves to live in the city, and then returns home. I have read this book, but I place that fact in abeyance. I like when June describes children’s books to me. I like when June describes things exhaustively.

It would be nice to say that I wasn’t thinking then. I was thinking, but differently.

After the elephants we go and see the penguins and the otters, which are also in the aquarium building, but on the far side, so we missed them the first time.

Otters, when they sleep, float alongside one another. It is adorable. But then, any two floating objects will be pushed together by the harmonic action of the waves. It’s not like falling in love; it’s just like falling. Down the stairs, maybe.

That’s a different sort of thought, I think, and so I put it to one side and try to let it dissolve into air. 

Outside the otter house we get two sodas from a food cart, and we drink most of them. 

“Okay,” says June. “Let’s go and see the one totally sane human being.”

So we go. 

The one totally sane human being lives inside a small building inside a bigger building. The bigger building keeps out the sun, so that we can stand in the dark. The one totally sane human being lives in an apartment that is filled with light.

We stand outside the apartment in the darkness and watch it through the glass. There’s no such thing as one-way glass. There’s only a trick of the light.

The one totally sane human being lives in an apartment that’s about the size of our apartment, and its furnishings mostly look like they were purchased at the kinds of stores where we bought our chairs and cups and so on. The only difference is that its apartment—its enclosure, maybe—has clearly been designed by people who think about the one totally sane human being the way the polar bear people think about the polar bear. 

June and I stand in the dark and eventually hold hands while the one totally sane human being makes a sandwich. I can’t tell if the sandwich is peanut butter or tuna salad or something else. Eventually I slip my hand out of June’s and I walk up and stand by the glass. I stand there for a long time. 

Once it’s finished making the sandwich, it eats the sandwich. Then it walks around the room. It stands in front of the windows, one and then another, looking out, and then it happens to stand directly in front of me, staring into my eyes. I am whispering It can’t see you it can’t see you it can’t see you because of course it can’t. If the one totally sane human being could see us, it wouldn’t be sane anymore. They’d have to close the zoo.

I’m still whispering when I realize, if it can’t see me, then instead it sees itself. And then instead of hyperventilating I let myself look back into the eyes of the one totally sane human being, the eyes it is using to stare into its own eyes, and I am the leak in the cycle, I am the crack the perpetual motion machine drains into, I am the flaw—

After the one totally sane human being we have our sandwiches, all of mine and the remaining half of June’s. Then we go and see the red pandas and the tapirs and the aardvarks. At the aardvark exhibit June tells me about a children’s book she read where an aardvark has to get glasses. Suddenly I take her hand in both of mine.

When June has finished telling me the story of the aardvark, which she doesn’t stop partway through, no matter how tightly I squeeze, she looks at the real aardvarks for a while.

“I don’t know what it was looking at,” she says.

I think about all the thoughts I have about that and whether they’re one kind of thought or a different kind of thought, and then I put them all down at once, like heavy groceries I had been carrying up a high hill to a house where no one ever eats.

“Me either,” I say. “I never know.”

“Let’s Go to the Zoo” copyright ©2026 by Louis Evans
Art copyright © 2026 by Scott Bakal

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Louis Evans

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Original Fiction Science Fiction

The Day-Blind Stars

An Earth explorer in search of something new and strange in the up and out ends up traveling through space with a small god over millennia.

Illustrated by Hwarim Lee

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Edited by Jonathan Strahan

By Christopher Rowe

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Published on April 15, 2026

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An Earth explorer in search of something new and strange in the up and out ends up traveling through space with a small god over millennia.

Short story | 5,293 words

She grew fearful of the world and turned away from it, seeking solace. She intended to return.

She never did.

When one turned away from the world in those days, one was subject to a binary. Binaries were a sort of self-imposed tyranny, imagined by the one but expected by the totality. So, turning away from the world, for Sierra St. Sandalwood IV, involved a choice—of necessity illusory—between going up and out or going down and in. The first choice was blue. The second choice was green.

The first choice was green. The second choice was blue.

See? Illusion.

Sierra went up and out. Going up, she theorized, she would be able to look down at the receding world, watching for signs of pursuit. Had she gone down, the world would have closed over behind her as she hacked through roots, as she gnawed through bedrock, as she braved the magma mantle washing the iron and nickel core. How can that be said to be turning away from the world at all?

That would be going under, thought Sierra.

But so many people chose down. Her husband had. Her godmother had. The twins, of course, painfully young, swore they were determined to embrace the world through all the numberless days gifted them by the life force. Devon called the life force Gaia and Denisa called it motion. Denisa waved her arms, dreamy and languorous, whenever she spoke of motion.

Sierra was graceless in the up and out. She had never been outside the gravity well. Her go suit prompted her to make the adjustments necessary to steer a clear course, but only because she had activated those options. Options for prompts for adjustments—some of the very things from which Sierra was turning away. Perhaps up and out was not so different from down and in. Perhaps neither was any different from the world itself.

She approached a tumble of great rocks trailing the world. Each of them was inconceivably cold on one side, gamma-drenched hellfire on the other. A guard god was sitting on one of the rocks, breathing smoke and looking at her with idle curiosity. The go suit suggested she stop and visit.

“Hello. How are things?” asked the guard god.

“How are you breathing smoke?” asked Sierra. “How can you talk? How can I hear you? Why is a god trailing the world?”

“First,” it replied, “I’m smoking a cigarette, which technically is breathing smoke, but not exactly what you are imagining. I can talk because I learned how at my father’s knee. I can hear you because I am listening. I am trailing the world because I’m on watch.”

“What does a god watch for?” asked Sierra. Her go suit maneuvered its way onto the surface of the rock; she was briefly nauseous before her see-plate stabilized the view.

Illusion.

“I’m more of a poppet deity than a god. And I’m watching for people who go up and out.”

“Like me,” said Sierra.

“Much like you, yes. Mostly like you. You should tell me who you are.”

The suit made it impossible to nod, though Sierra reflexively attempted one. “My name is Sierra St. Sandalwood IV,” she said.

The guard god did nod, though its thick neck, wider than its block of a head, made the movement negligible. “Thank you. That is welcome information. However, I did not ask your name. I asked who you are.”

Sierra thought very carefully. “I think if I knew that I would be at home with the twins.”

The guard god nodded again, this time with more alacrity. Pebbles and dust floated out into the nothing. “I think you have a question.” It sounded delighted. “Let’s take an equatorial walk.”

It lurched up and Sierra realized she had not made a careful enough study of her interlocutor. Its waist and legs were seamlessly bonded to the outcropping of silicates she’d thought simply served as a throne until it cracked free. It stretched, dreamy and languorous.

“My go suit keeps me from careening away,” said Sierra. “But how are you treating this little rock as firma?”

The guard god looked at her and furled its face, a sort of miniature avalanche concealing what Sierra thought might be emeralds deep in the crags of what she thought might be orbital sockets. When it opened them again, its eyes were sapphires.

It started to force its way through the tumult of stalagma that extended to the horizon in every direction.

The horizon wasn’t very far.

Sierra blinked her right eye, just so, and she floated after the guard god. When she was moving alongside it, she asked again, “How are you walking on this little rock? Shouldn’t you fly off into the nothing?”

“You haven’t asked the question I think you need to ask, yet, but you do ask a lot of others,” it said. “I like that. Yes, I should fly off because of, you know”—and here it made a circular motion with one of the three spindly fingers sprouting from its upper right hand—“the spinning. Also, there are fundamental forces of the universe to be taken into consideration. At least one or two of them. But it’s okay. I kind of bend down a little bit so I won’t spin off. As for violating fundamental forces, I have a permit.”

Sierra tried to nod again. When she couldn’t, again, she breathed a query to her go suit, piano, asking if there was a way she could move her head freely. The suit flashed a series of glyphs on the inside of her see-plate, seizure fast. Sierra interpreted them as saying, “Sure.”

“Those things are hilarious,” said the guard god. It had stopped and seemed to be considering their route. “Have you ever talked to a go suit when it’s not being worn?”

Sierra shook her head, greatly satisfied with her freedom of movement. “I didn’t think they had any independent agency.”

“Eh,” said the guard god. “People get up here, they look around. A good number of them take off their go suits and launch themselves skyclad into the nothing, giving up their little essences in favor of… well, in favor of what each one of them individually seeks. Sometimes the suits stick around for a bit after that.”

It continued, “I think the equator of this rock will prove a little rough. How do you feel about a circumpolar walk?”

“Do asteroids have poles?”

“Hadn’t thought of that. Probably not this one. Doesn’t it have to do with the invariable plane?”

Sierra had never heard the phrase but was beginning to catch the ebb and flow of the conversation, something she had always been good at. “Sounds right,” she said.

The guard god turned right and plodded north, or perhaps south. “People who come up here tend to be either immigrants or mystics,” it said.

“Never both?” Sierra blinked her eyes just so. She moved along beside the guard god, their heads at the same height but Sierra’s torso and limbs now extended up and out, upside down, relatively. This amused her. If she knew the just-so sequence of blinks that would prompt the suit to remind her of the last time she’d been amused, she would have blinked it.

“Immigrants, they usually have a lot on their minds,” said the guard god. “Not much time for revelations and all that omenistic business.”

“Are you saying immigrant, or—” Sierra stopped. “The one with the I or the one with the E?”

“I could never keep that straight,” said the guard god. “Comings or goings, borders and frontiers. I don’t think it makes much difference up here.”

Sierra queried the suit on whether she could shrug, was given an answer in the positive, entered a command, and shrugged.

“I can also never keep lie and lay straight,” said the guard god. “Yes,” it went on, circling an outcropping that it somewhat resembled. “This way is much easier.” It ploughed through the next rock formation and Sierra drifted a little higher to avoid the detritus.

“This isn’t anything like I thought it would be,” she said. “But I’ve only just now started.”

The guard god snorted. “Time. Who cares?” Then, “What did you think coming up and out would be like?”

“I…” Sierra trailed off.

“They always have ideas,” said the guard god. “If you’ll forgive me for lumping you in with all the other blue travelers.”

It had been Sierra’s observation that minutes are longer than people give them credit for. When people pause for a minute, it is most often not a minute at all, but a moment.

She paused for a minute and said, “I thought I wouldn’t miss anyone anymore.”

The guard god stopped its ramble. It reached out and put two of its great hands on her shoulders and slowly, gently even, rotated her. It pulled her down a bit until they were face-to-face, her gazing through her see-plate, it gazing through its fluctuant eyes.

“That’s new,” it said. It removed its top hands and clapped all of them. Particulate matter drifted out like a scattering of dusk-flocking birds. This time, Sierra could hear the nod as well as see it. The guard god asked, “Do you want to get out of here?”

The guard god, the poppet deity, made a check of Sierra’s go suit and determined that it was of the highest quality, but it warned her that the highest quality might be insufficient for her survival where they were going.

“Where are we going?”

“Up and out.”

“We’re already up and out,” she said, nonetheless intrigued.

“Further up. Further out.”

“My godmother always said farther was correct.”

“Isn’t there something about literal and symbolic distances? The A means one, the U means the other?” The guard god sounded genuinely curious.

“Are we going… literally? Or symbolically?”

“I look forward to finding out,” and for the first time the guard god laughed, and it wasn’t grumbling thunder and tumbling gravel at all, but lovely and melodic, like a flute solo.

Sierra joined in the laughter, though her laugh was a throaty alto and she often honked despite herself, as she did this time.

“Your go suit,” said the guard god, “is hesitant. It wants reassuring. I propose you ride on my back so as to be within my sphere of influence. That might protect you should we encounter any day-blind stars.”

“What are those?” asked Sierra.

“They are fey and beautiful and vicious and deadly, like all stars. But in particular, they are the stars that shine by day and so can’t be seen from the down and in.”

“We’re not down and in. We’re not going down and in.”

“One day I will meet a blue traveler with a proper sense of perspective,” said the guard god. “Now, if you are to ride on my back, you won’t want this broad mineral stuff. What sort of steed would you prefer?”

The only steeds Sierra had ever seen were the force-grown mules spun up by the various corporation-citizens on the world for use as data storage.

“I can’t think…”

“Think wider. It can be anything at all you’ve seen, yes, but also anything that you’ve heard of, that you’ve read about, that you’ve heard sung to you, or even that you’ve imagined.”

Sierra thought. “When the twins turned one hundred and eleven years old, their father and I marked it as a very momentous occasion, though it’s not a particularly remarkable age for a child to reach and the Widows Who Wait do not attach any numerological significance to one hundred and eleven. But it was that day they were given their choice of a Memorial Day, to celebrate all the rest of their lives.”

“I here admit, Sierra St. Sandalwood IV, that I have spoken to you more than any other human being I have ever encountered,” said the guard god. “Therefore, I will tell you I do not know what a Memorial Day is. My kind have had encounters with the Widows Who Wait, though. They’re all liars.”

Sierra elected to ignore that. “They could have chosen the anniversary of their physical birth or of the day they bloomed within me. But the twins are puckish. They are readers of old books and it’s a rare hour passes without them sharing a knowing smile. They chose the eighth day of September.”

“That one I know,” said the guard god. “The Nativity of Mary, mother of the Christ.”

“No. I mean, yes, it’s that, too, but we are not Christians. The eighth day of September is also the Feast Day of Saint Corbinian. That’s why they chose it.”

“I like to understand things,” said the guard god. “If you are not Christians, and the birth date of the Holy Mother is no occasion for memory, why choose a Christian saint?”

Sierra smiled, remembering. “Because of the bear,” she said.

The guard god moved its great shoulders back. Some arms retracted and others shortened. Stone became flesh and flesh grew hirsute. Rounded ears sprouted and eyes became amber. The guard god dropped to all fours and its great claws curled into the rock. “Wait,” it said. “I am listening to the story.”

Sierra heard nothing, but she waited.

“He was on his way to Rome, yes.” The guard god’s voice was now a different timbre of deep. Sierra wondered if its laugh had changed as well. “A great bear slew the saint’s mule and Corbinian commanded the creature, in the name of God, to submit to saddle and rein and serve as his mount. The beast acquiesced and carried the saint to the Holy See. When they arrived at the gates, Corbinian freed the bear and it returned to the wild, sinless as only animals can be.”

“Sinless, yes, I suppose,” said Sierra. “There are none of its kind left to prove or disprove that notion.”

The guard god reared up on its hind legs, twice as tall as Sierra. She was afraid for the first time since she had launched herself up and out.

The guard god, the bear, looked down, down, down the long way Sierra had travelled. “There are a few bears yet,” it said.

Sierra was surprised. “In captivity?” she asked.

“In hiding,” it answered. “Plenty of mules, though. Probably not as tasty as that one in old Bavaria.” The guard god dropped down again and hunched its shoulders. A leather saddle grew out of its back and reins extended from its terrifying teeth.

“What were you listening to? Who told you the story?”

“Mnemosyne. She grants me instantaneous access to every bit of recorded information in the omniverse.”

This startled Sierra. “You’ve indicated there are things that you do not know, even things you don’t understand.”

“I rarely access Mnemosyne. She vexes me. Now, Sierra, climb up.”

She put her foot in a stirrup, but hesitated. “Will you give me your name, as I gave you mine?”

“You have yet to tell me who you are, so I will not tell you who I am. But my name is now Corbinian.”

“Corbinian wasn’t the bear,” Sierra said, swinging into the saddle.

“Oh, I doubt you can prove that,” it replied.

Farther up and further out proved to be a circuitous route that twisted between the world and its moon. This involved travelling towards the world before they travelled away from it, but Corbinian did not respond to Sierra’s queries beyond grunting, “Concentrating.”

She let it be.

Having never ridden anything at all, not even a bicycle, Sierra found the sensation vertiginous, even without the other rocky world they passed, even without the belt of tumbling asteroids, even without the great ringed bodies the bear rushed past. The go suit held up perfectly so far as she could tell. She saw many stars off in the distance but did not know if any of them were day-blind.

Finally, Corbinian came to a halt.

“A relative halt,” it said. “All things are in motion, from down at the bottom of matter, where minds best not linger, to the very top of all of it, to every bit of it.”

Sierra thought of her daughter waving her arms and speaking of motion. She was comforted by the memory. She was glad her daughter had long known something she herself had not known at all.

“Do you know what Gaia is?” she asked.

“I’m told that the answer to that question is of no importance,” said Corbinian. “And it is not your question. Keep asking them though!”

“Well, here’s another. Why have we stopped here?”

“Ah. This is the farthest any go suit has ever gone.”

“So, I’m farther from the world than any one has ever been?”

“Or further, yes. Let’s say both.”

“The suit seems fine,” said Sierra.

“Good. Because I feel odd,” said Corbinian.

“Are you ill?”

“I don’t know. I never have been. But there’s some sort of limiting factor that is holding me in this orbit. I feel like a bear twice my height has stood up in front of me.”

“That would be a pretty big bear,” said Sierra.

Corbinian’s laugh was still a flute.

“You’re afraid,” said Sierra. “That’s the limiting factor, I think.”

Corbinian said, “Wait. I am listening to the story.”

Just a moment later, the bear said, “I was attempting to access recorded information that would tell me if it is better to be ill or to be afraid.”

“Now that you’ve said it,” said Sierra, “I’m curious myself. What did Mnemosyne tell you?”

“She didn’t tell me anything. She didn’t tell me anything at all.”

Sierra discovered that unlike with her husband or her godmother, unlike with even Devon and Denisa, were she to be honest with herself, she never grew frustrated in the company of Corbinian. She never found the guard god tiresome or boring. She never felt put upon.

They sat companionably, in silence, for a number of years.

One day, Corbinian said, “Isn’t there anything you want to ask? There was that question I thought you had. I just remembered that.”

“I have questions, of course,” said Sierra, “but I still don’t know what you mean by the question. Wait, no. I know what you mean by it, but I do not know the question itself.”

“Ask me some others, then. I’m awfully resourceful.”

“Are you getting bored?” asked Sierra, worried about the answer.

“No,” said Corbinian.

“Well, then. Who made you?”

“Mnemosyne did.”

“Who made Mnemosyne?”

“You did.”

“I did no such thing,” said Sierra.

Corbinian gestured in the direction of the far away world. “You collectively. You blue travelers and green travelers and those few that never go up or down or in or out at all.”

“When did we make her?”

“I will not ask Mnemosyne to tell that story,” said Corbinian.

“May I ask her, then?”

“Mnemosyne would be the end of you, Sierra St. Sandalwood IV. She is a terrible thing for people like you.”

Sierra asked, “Is she terrible for you?”

But Corbinian fell silent for another few years.

Over time, the go suit began to alter itself in subtle ways. At first, Sierra thought it might be changing itself to match her dreams of it. Perhaps she would grow wings. Perhaps she would be able to lift the see-plate and breathe in the aroma of the nothing.

But then it became apparent the suit was becoming less than it had been before. It was winnowing parts of itself that Sierra rarely used. She nudged Corbinian.

“The suit’s breaking down,” she said.

The bear’s brows went low, and Sierra noticed that sometime clouds had appeared in the amber. It pressed a paw against Sierra’s chest. “Yes,” it said. “But it is not unhappy. It is confused. I am tempted to ask Mnemosyne whether it is better to be confused or unhappy.”

“I think parts of it are disappearing,” said Sierra.

Corbinian moved his massive head and back and forth. “One of the fundamental tenets of Mnemosyne is that formulated by Lavoisier the Lawgiver. Things do not disappear.”

Sierra had received an excellent education from her godmother. “Mass is not destroyed,” she said. “But that’s not what I meant. The go suit is sloughing off, not ceasing to exist.”

Corbinian took a closer look. “Yes, you are right,” it said. “It is sloughing away in a stream.”

“To where?”

“To the day-blind stars.”

“Oh,” said Sierra. “I know now. All it took was patience and study.”

“What do you know?”

“I know the question.”

Corbinian did not speak. It adopted a mien of anticipation.

“Good and faithful friend,” said Sierra. “Will you take me to the day-blind stars?”

Centuries later, the day-blind stars proved fey and beautiful and vicious and deadly. They were unappreciative of the new-come pair.

Along the way, they had overtaken the stuff of the go suit that it had previously surrendered. The suit fully reincorporated. Corbinian reported that it was pleased to have done so.

Once again, they relatively stopped. They were in a great nursery and every particle a star can emit buffeted them. These ejecta waxed and waned. The go suit trembled but Sierra felt its bravery. Corbinian’s eyes grew cloudier.

The answer to the question had proven to be yes, obviously. But now Sierra turned to the problem of why it was the question.

She thought:

in the beginning was the question

and the question was flawed

then the question begot a question

and that question begot a question

and that question begot a question

and that question begot a question

“Does Mnemosyne know why I asked you to bring me here?” she asked Corbinian.

“I have not been able to hear Mnemosyne’s stories for decades, now. We are dependent on what is in me, and what is in me is paltry. All that is in me is at the very surface of knowledge. I plumb no depths.”

“The question I asked you was of unknowable provenance,” Sierra said gently, “and you answered with an action you didn’t understand. You didn’t understand why, but you took the action anyway.”

Corbinian sighed and said, “I wonder if some other guard god took my place on the trailing rocks.”

The changed course of the conversation troubled Sierra. She went on as if Corbinian had not spoken. “It must be an interesting sensation you’ve been feeling down these past years. Wondering.”

“I didn’t know there was a word for it,” said Corbinian.

Sierra gave it a sharp glance. “That seems unlikely,” she said.

“Sierra St. Sandalwood IV. Goddaughter. Wife. Mother. The lone blue traveler possessed of a proper sense of perspective. Friend. I am sloughing away.”

One of the greatest failures of design and imagination that ever occurred in the world was the routing of the ducts around the eyes of go suit wearers into a reservoir at the base of the throat for filtration and reabsorption. So, tears did not stream down Sierra’s cheeks.

“Can we move on?” she asked. “Can we overtake what’s gone from you so you might be whole again?”

“I say again, I am unable to hear Mnemosyne’s stories. And I have not been whole for a long time. It is unlikely I ever will be again.”

A pair of day-blind stars let loose flares. The flares crossed the nothing and double-helixed. Sierra saw that Corbinian was not so large a bear as it had been.

And it grows smaller.

But that didn’t make sense. Growth implied addition, not subtraction. She elected to distract herself and Corbinian both.

“What is the opposite of growth?” she asked.

Corbinian cocked its head to one side. “Death?”

“But some things subside without dying,” Sierra insisted.

“Matter is not destroyed,” said Corbinian, “The opposite of growth must mean that whatever is not growing is sloughing away.”

“Are those flares sloughing away the day-blind stars, I wonder?”

“I do not know,” said Corbinian. “Ask them.”

But the stars could not answer. They were simply stars, possessing only the intelligence of fusion, which was notoriously unreliable.

“Why did you say I should ask them? You must have known they couldn’t answer.” She was still trying to distract the bear, who had fallen into melancholy.

“I did not know they couldn’t,” it said. “I suspected they wouldn’t.”

“That’s not the same thing at all,” said Sierra.

“We have crossed half a galaxy,” said Corbinian. “Everything we say or do is close enough.”

That sounded true.

“I do not believe my go suit will sustain me if you leave,” said Sierra.

“It’s a good suit,” said Corbinian. “It will try.”

“That’s all I can ask,” said Sierra. “I ask the same of you.”

“You have always asked me things. It has been the joy of my existence.”

Tears did not stream down Sierra’s cheeks.

Corbinian was a long time dying. Things changed as it diminished. It began asking Sierra questions, but though it tried, it was less and less able to answer hers.

“Do you believe your children kept to their plan of going neither up nor down?” it asked.

Sierra reflected upon what she remembered of the twins. The great distance between her and them, the great amount of time, made her suspect her own reflections.

“I believe,” she said, “that they kept to it for as long as they could.”

“So, you know they could have, but not that they would have.”

Devon’s smile was sly in her memory. He lifted the right side of his lips only. Not mocking but acknowledging. Denisa’s smile was bright, all teeth and gums and joy. They were both somewhat myopic but refused the simple treatment that would have perfected their vision. Puckish. For some people, clinging to imperfection was such a faux pas as to be considered an atrocity.

“I have just realized that the word is would. They are still on the world. They never fitted themselves for go suits or deep smocks.”

“That is welcome information,” said Corbinian. “But we should entertain the idea that one no longer needs a go suit to come up and out.”

An interesting notion.

“I can imagine those two finding some way to accomplish that. They had the benefit of my godmother’s tutelage, and she was an extraordinary educator.”

Sierra realized she could not envision her godmother’s face. Her husband’s name…was Diego. She was sure it was Diego.

“Now I’m sloughing away,” she said, describing to Corbinian the lacunae in her mind.

“You are limited by biology,” it said. “Synaptic misfiring is a product of age. But age brings wisdom, too.”

“I’d rather be intelligent than wise.”

“That is a wish I cannot grant. And one I would not if I could,” said Corbinian. Then it coughed.

And coughed.

And coughed.

Sierra stroked Corbinian’s shoulder. She did not know what else to do. Besides asking a question.

“I’m sorry, Sierra,” Corbinian answered. “There is nothing you can do for me. I am limited by pathology.”

“But you are thousands of years old!” she cried. “You were never ill before I insisted we come to these damnable stars!”

“I do not mean I am diseased,” said Corbinian. “I mean I am a symptom. One that is at long last being treated.”

“You seem to be plumbing depths now.”

“Wait,” said Corbinian. “I am listening to a story.”

The story was not told by Mnemosyne.

“Who is it then?” asked Sierra. She was distracted because her go suit had begun humming.

“I do not know who. I believe I know what. It is a go ship.”

Sierra had never heard of a go ship and said so.

“We have been away from the world for a great length of time,” said Corbinian. “It is in the nature of things to change.”

“You believe this is some sort of craft from the world?”

“I know it is. It is asking about you.”

Then Corbinian coughed a long jag. Blood coated its terrible teeth.

“That’s all, now,” it said. “Even the surface is fading.”

“But you plumbed the depths!”

“The depths plumbed me. They did not have to lower the weight very far. I am sorry, Sierra. That’s all. That’s all.”

She could see matter streaming away from it. The stream was directed perpendicular to the direction of the day-blind stars.

“You must tell me who you are,” Corbinian rasped. “Unless you do not wish to. I should have asked that as a question instead of stating it as an assertion.”

Without a moment’s hesitation, Sierra said, “I am the woman who asked the wrong question.”

“I find this answer deeply unsatisfying.”

She could see through it. It was less a bear now than the ghost of one.

Then Sierra knew the right question.

“Who are you, Corbinian?”

“I am not a who at all.”

She could barely discern its voice.

“I am a what.”

Her go suit was trembling. Sierra asked, no, pleaded, “What are you?”

Corbinian uttered a melodious word. Its voice sounded like a flute.

Sierra was bewildered. “Did you say elusive or allusive? Columbine?”

Suddenly the guide god’s face was distinctive and fully present. Its eyes were flashing diamonds, lit glorious as stars that could see.

But Corbinian did not answer. Instead, it faded away into the nothing.

The trembling of Sierra’s go suit became so pronounced that she was afraid it might tear itself apart. She wished her friend were there to tell her whether the suit was frightened or excited, wished Corbinian was there to muse upon which of those states was better.

Then the trembling stopped. Her see-plate went black and every joint in the go suit froze. She could neither see nor move.

Sierra’s sense of the passage of time had long since atrophied. She did not know how many minutes or years passed before her see-plate unfolded with a hiss.

She blinked, but not in command or query. She blinked to clear tears from her eyes. She blinked so that she could better see the two figures leaning over her.

The man’s smile was sly, but not mocking. He only lifted the right side of his lips. The woman’s smile was bright, all teeth and gums and joy.

Sierra found that her children had spouses and children of their own, and that those children had children. And those children begat children and on down like that, living with dozens of other families who made the go ship their home.

The go ship’s name was Diego, but it preferred to be called Ship. It had been the only one of its kind when the twins had left the world.

Some on board wished to study Sierra’s go suit. It was older than any other surviving example of human technology. At first, Sierra took this to mean that the world had ended, but she was assured by Ship that was not the case. Matter is not destroyed, but it changes. It is always moving.

And Sierra moved.

Sometimes she would don her go suit and spend a year or two scouting ahead of Ship. Sometimes she would simply walk the skin of the vessel and study the inconstant stars. She kept moving. She found that she could not stay still, not even relatively.

Sierra often thought of Corbinian. She did not believe it had sacrificed itself for her, not that it had sacrificed itself for anyone at all. Not a who, no. Perhaps a what.

The what was fearlessness. The what was love of the universe. The what was solace.

The what was up and out and up and out and up and out and up and out…

“The Day-Blind Stars” copyright © 2026 by Christopher Rowe
Art copyright © 2026 by Hwarim Lee

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The Day-Blind Stars

Christopher Rowe

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Christopher Rowe

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Original Fiction Dark Fantasy

Tatterdemalion

In a traditional folktale from Alak, a dreamy good-for-nothing young woman seeking excitement discovers a life of adventures may not be what she expected. Be careful what you wish for!

Illustrated by Raven Jiang

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Edited by Ann VanderMeer

By Michael Cisco

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Published on March 25, 2026

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In a traditional folktale from Alak, a dreamy good-for-nothing young woman seeking excitement discovers a life of adventures may not be what she expected. Be careful what you wish for!

Novelette | 7,515 words

Introductory Note: The Deed mentioned in this story belongs to a class of magical artifacts that we find occasionally in Alak folklore and mythology. The original and most powerful of them was the Deed of Talorow, which, according to legend, was accidentally dropped by a sort of monster or demon hastily fleeing from the wrath of the gods. It was subsequently discovered by a little girl, who felt a very Alak-like disgust at the wildness and chaos of the world in her day, and who realized that the magic of the Deed would fix in their forms and roles everything that came within sight of it. The girl imagined how much more orderly and regular the world would be if only the Deed could be displayed in a sufficiently prominent place, where it could be seen by everyone, and therefore affect everything. It then occurred to her that, of course, the sky was incomparably the best place to show the Deed, for then no one could really avoid the sight of it. She wracked her brains for a way to introduce the Deed into the sky, and finally decided to thrust her head into a pond and drown herself while holding the Deed firmly in her hand. She believed that, once she died, her spirit would be free of her heavy body, and could carry the Deed aloft into the sky. And so it happened, and her spirit welded, with its own substance, the Deed to one of the stars, displaying it to all the world. As a result, what had flowed became fixed, what had improvised became standardized, and a greater orderliness and predictability flourished everywhere. So great a benefit was this to the Alak Empire that the Divine Family officially adopted the little girl, and the star was given her name, Chlawgar, which it still has today.

Alaks maintain that the world has always existed and always will; and, naturally, this goes for the Empire as well. While this idea stands at odds with the official history, which records many different accounts of the foundation of the Empire, the premise is nevertheless everywhere among them sustained. The Empire, it is at least implied, has always existed in its ideal aspects. Its tangible aspects must be realized in time by human beings. There is a belief among the Alaks in what is known as the “impossible time” that somehow preceded proper time, and the sly influence endures as a present remnant of the impossible time, accounting for the various setbacks the Empire has encountered throughout its history.  Is it surprising to read that the Deed of Talorow, that mighty ordering power, is the work of the entropic sly influence? This is not clear at all, but one might speculate that the sly influence was once considered to be more lethargic, passive, and inert than it later came to be. In any case, the Deed of Ilianeghis in this story is likewise a work of the sly influence, imbued with all of its out-of-place, chaotic, and inventive power. This explains its cursed, dangerous character.

The term “Zaman Wislin” refers both to a divinatory philosophy and to its adherents, or “mathetes.” Since it is recognized by the Predikanten, the Alaks tolerate its existence. While they are not a cult, Zaman Wislin do claim to be in a tutelary relationship with a godlike dragon called Gilshrakes who is at the center of the universe. They are commonly supposed to collect Deeds of the sort mentioned here, and might perhaps also be able to draft new Deeds themselves, which explains their role in this story.

Our narrative’s main character, Temedy, belongs to a category of personalities familiar to most Alak readers and listeners. She is the ne’er-do-well, the malcontent who joins in the work of the Empire without enthusiasm and is not at one with it in her heart, and entertains these feelings of disaffection because she is too weak and foolish to resist them. Temedy is the inadequate instrument, someone who is not sufficiently real. This type of character is always attractive and talented, the better to emphasize what a waste they make of their lives, and what a loss that is for the Empire. The story is a cautionary tale intended to help readers and listeners correctly identify this type when they encounter it, and thence to take appropriate action respecting them, but there are stories about such characters finding their full reality, for example, in confronting a challenge.

These characters are often named “Temedy” for ease of both recognition and application, since this name is not one that any real person would be given. Its etymology is obscure; it is most probably derived from the Gaboktja Ujhik word “temeschlem,” meaning tatterdemalion or guttersnipe. The title of this story reflects this preferred derivation, but there are those, including Quil Qusogh himself, who maintain that the meaning stems instead from the Lemkhitz word “demd,” meaning sickly, pasty, disorderly, or meagre.

Finally, a “soul burner” is an Alak hobgoblin, who devours the evil spirits once believed to infest the world, in order to absorb their strength and cause greater mischief.

Once upon a time there lived in the village of Sogtrul a shiftless, threadbare young woman named Temedy who was good for nothing. She worked as a copyist for the calendary, slept in a loft above the offices, and eked out a living that barely kept body and soul together. No one who looked for her, and there were not many who did, could ever find her, because she was always wandering off into the countryside. She would stray for hours among the hills, often walking all the way to the feet of the mountains. To be sure, if she weren’t expected at her desk, she would have climbed them, perhaps never to return. Her parents were dead; her only living relation was a married sister who rightly repudiated her, who had prospered her education and now lived in the great city of Sunflik, where she conducted highly important business. Temedy did not seek out her sister, but languished in hapless devotion to the idle and melancholic daydreams with which her mind busied itself during her solitary rambles. No one in Sogtrul had the least respect for her, so why should we listen to her story?

You’ll see!

For there was a day when, stumbling along at random as usual, she blundered across something strange. It was a place at the feet of the mountains, where rolling grasslands crack open in crevasses and where slender brooks fan out at intervals like lacework. There was one spot in particular where people used to cut whetstones for sharpening barber’s razors, and the heavier blocks were used to press cadavers for preservation. This was done, as you may know, by placing the corpse on a slab with a slight concavity to it, then surrounding it with blocks of ice. Another matching slab was then laid on top, and, as the ice supporting it melted, it would sink gradually down and flatten the body without crushing it to a pulp. The cadaver would keep indefinitely afterwards, like a pressed flower. Places like that attract Zaman Wislin; they come looking for ghosts, elementals of work, haunted winds, portentous lights, and, above all, archaic inscriptions, hidden texts, forbidden scrolls, to winnow the dragon-secrets of Gilshrakes from them. At one time they had a camp there, which they left for reasons as mysterious as their reasons for establishing it in the first place, and their abandoned tents, now little more than long white rags knotted firmly to their frames, were still there. No one could say why, but they had named their camp “he Cloister of Glowing Cores,” and the name endured after they were gone. Temedy had read the name many times in the records and letters of officials that she had been called upon to copy, and indeed she was so addicted to reading things not pertinent to her duties that she had sought out and studied other historical documents in crumbling district ledgers, to no better end than to appease her curiosity.

Now, as if in a dream, she saw this fabled spot with her own eyes. The rags of the ruined tents billowed in the incessant wind like water weeds in a strong current, so she could hear them flap and rustle like a great fire without heat or smoke. It was a lure too strong for her feeble willpower to resist, and she descended down to Glowing Cores, wondering if she might find some traces of the mathetes there, or other trash of former days heedlessly thrown aside and tramped down by people with better things to do.

She was just passing a small stand of trees when a hacking cough erupted somewhere nearby, and Temedy realized that she wasn’t alone. In a spasm of cowardice, her first impulse was to hide herself, and she did not resist it. Temedy scrambled back toward one of the trees and put it between herself and the direction the cough came from, then watched carefully, crouched down, not daring to breathe. A moment later she saw a figure in black walk stiffly out from behind one of the ruined tents. It was an older man, clean-shaven, in black clothes. He carried his head erect and his shoulders square, his rigid back was unnaturally straight, so that he moved a little like a puppet on a stick, turning his whole body to look this way and that. It was obvious that he was searching for something he expected to find on the ground.

Temedy didn’t want to have anything to do with this stranger, but, she would certainly be seen if she fled, and that was not something she wanted either. What she wanted was for the stranger to go away, so she could go on exploring. Instead, he came directly toward Temedy’s tree, swivelling this way and that as he continued to examine the ground, without pause. Temedy thought frantically—could she manage to creep around the tree as the man passed, or should she make a run for it? Too late! The man was already there, and saw her.

“Well, well,” the man said.

Temedy could only say “Well!” in reply.

The man had a harelip and strange, round eyes, like two circles, so Temedy could see the whites going all the way around the pupils. His black clothes were made of some rich, heavy stuff like bombazine that was all stained with salt from the man’s dried perspiration. Indeed, there was so much salt in his clothes that little puffs of it came out when he moved.

“Have you come from—far away?” the man asked. His teeth flickered as he spoke, white as chalk.

“Not . . . not very far . . .” Temedy spluttered. She didn’t like telling this man anything about herself. He dressed and acted a bit like an official, so she asked him, “Are you . . . from the calendary?”

“I’m Obelizer,” the man said, and smiled broadly without parting his lips. His voice was hoarse and low, but it was the kind of voice, Temedy knew, that could boom out deafeningly loud if necessary. “From the Shrine of Zeroes.”

That, Temedy knew, was the name of a fane where the mathetes of Zaman Wislin lived, on the mountains’ far side. You can know someone is Zaman Wislin if they have a name like that, because they leave behind their wholesome names when they become Zaman Wislin, and receive new names that reflect what they do. Every mathete will also have something wrong with them, but it won’t always be as easy to spot as that harelip, so examine every stranger you meet carefully and be suspicious of little irregularities.

“I’m uh, Temedy,” Temedy said. Of course, giving her name away was the last thing she wanted to do, but, when a name is given, a name must be returned, and Temedy was too frightened to invent one.

“Have you happened to see,” the man asked, “a wooden document case, about this large?”

His long hands drew a sort of rectangular shape in the air, to show Temedy what he meant. The flowing motion of his hands was at odds with the stony immobility of his body, so that it seemed as though they belonged to someone else, standing behind him.

Temedy shook her head.

The man lowered his hands to his sides and sniffed. He gazed at Temedy with an enigmatic expression on his face.

“It’s—a fine day,” he said at last. Only then did he look up at the sky, tipping his whole body back at the waist to do so, then returning to his former posture. You may have noticed he has a curious way of speaking too, but that was in keeping with what he did. An obelizer is someone who cuts things out of pieces of writing, and marks the cut with a little drawing of a knife to show where it happened.

“I was just going for a walk,” Temedy said.

Obelizer smiled that same close-lipped smile at her. Temedy found it hard not to stare at the man’s upper lip, joined in two halves so that it seemed as if it were expressing two different emotions at the same time.

“You seem to do quite a bit of solitary walking. That’s because you live with people who don’t understand you,” Obelizer said.

This was more than Temedy could stand.

“I ought to be going,” she said, turning away.

“I will reward you if you help me search,” Obelizer said.

Temedy stopped.

“Reward me? What with?” she asked.

Obelizer chuckled, and his shoulders jostled up and down.

“Well—with money—if you don’t mind!” he said.

When Temedy turned to face him again, Obelizer was looking toward the horizon beyond him.

“What comes from the mountains must—go to the sea,” he said. “I must bring that case to—Tulltillarna, and that is long travel from here on foot.”

Temedy had never heard of Tulltillarna, whatever that was. Perhaps you have?

“So, the sooner I find it and begin my—journey, the sooner I’ve done what I set out to do,” Obelizer went on, facing her again with a businesslike air. “Will you help me look?”

Of course, she was still frightened, still full of the desire for escape, but there was something else, perhaps in that name, Tulltillarna, and in the dreaminess in Obelizer’s eyes as his look flew away into the distance, a kind of call, evilly soft, that very gently caught her.

“I’ll help,” she said, without knowing why.

With a little shower of salt, Obelizer’s hand lifted from his side. He pointed down toward a few of the larger ruined tents that stood apart from the rest.

“Search over there,” he said, with some authority, and Temedy began moving at once, stopping only when she came near her destination. Then, not quite sure where to begin, she glanced back and saw Obelizer hadn’t moved, but stood smiling at her. He nodded at Temedy, as if to say, Go on, start looking! He must have been waiting, Temedy thought, to make sure she did what she was told, but that didn’t account for that broad split smile there on his face, did it?

Temedy began to poke around in the rags and wreckage of the tents. While she worked, she couldn’t shake the feeling that Obelizer was watching her. It made her whole back prickle, and the hair on her scalp bristle. Obelizer had gone off out of sight, toward the other group of ruined tents, but Temedy was too afraid to defy him and leave.

The sooner I get this over with the better, she thought, and she hurriedly rummaged in broken tent poles and the tumbled stones that had formed the lower foundations. She found a little heap of spent candle ends, like a pile of wan coins. There were trampled quill nibs everywhere, and the fragments of smashed ink pots still stained black. The awkward metal-and-leather contrivance she pulled out of a twist of canvas proved to be a false leg, terminating in a wooden facsimile calf and foot all painted a fanciful canary yellow color with chipped purple toenails. The foot and leg were split and badly cracked, and the metal bands in the harness had been twisted all out of shape before the rust began to bite, and she wondered at the accident that had led to its being discarded. Then, as her mind began to wander into stupid daydreams about dainty, one-legged people, her eye fell on a straight length of polished wood, dully gleaming beneath another heap of canvas and wooden rods. Sure enough, when she pulled it out, it proved to be a document case. Without thinking—and do I need to tell you what happens when you act without thinking?—she undid the hasp and peeked inside.

The case contained a single sheet of parchment, white and flat with trim edges, and adorned with characters that caught the light like silver. There were red and blue ornaments drawn into the lines of writing, which crept all over the page like snail tracks. That red was as deep as artery blood, and the blue was like the color of the sky as dusk begins over the mountains, or like the ocean is sometimes. The size of the writing varied as the lines warped across the paper, but the largest letters spanned the top of the sheet, and her eyes, all too quickly, read them. They spelled out “DEED OF ILIANEGHIS.” A fragrance like incense wafted up from the page and billowed over her face as she impulsively snapped the case shut again. Abrupt fears had beset her, and—do I need to tell you?—her heart flooded with a wild desire to possess this parchment. Hadn’t she found it, after all? But she felt, and perhaps even she knew what madness this was, that the parchment was already hers.

A quick look around told her that Obelizer was still out of sight, so she pushed the case down into her scrip. She always brought some bread rusks and a tiny pot of butter to munch on if she got hungry, and she rammed the case down under them. Then she pretended to continue the search, her mind going in a thousand different directions at once, until Obelizer appeared again by the stand of trees where they had spoken before, and beckoned.

“I found nothing,” she lied, when they were close enough to speak. She realized that her deceit would be more plausible if she could meet the man’s gaze, and when she raised her eyes, she saw that Obelizer was once again smiling his closed-lipped smile.

“Ah well,” he said. “It must have been found—already.”

He swivelled to give his surroundings one last look.

“I am sure that it is not lying around here anymore,” he added as he gave Temedy his full attention again. “Thank you for all your help.”

Temedy nodded, waved, and began to leave.

“Just a moment!” Obelizer said.

Temedy’s heart sank.

Obelizer’s hand lifted and turned palm up. Gold coins shone there.

“Your payment.”

“But … I found nothing!” Temedy said.

“But you—searched,” Obelizer said. “Work is work.”

Temedy reluctantly took the coins from the outstretched hand, which was as cold and dry as rock. As Obelizer made no further remark, but only stood there, Temedy told him goodbye and returned home. It was difficult to fight the impulse to run, and, after all, why shouldn’t she hurry? The day was drawing to a close, and she had money now. The feverish sensation of being watched chilled her as she went, although furtive glances over her shoulder failed to disclose any sight of the strange, stiff man, Obelizer. Those Zaman Wislin types always have a reason for speaking with you, you know. Well, of course he’d had a reason! He’d needed help looking for that document case! But what if there were some other reason? Something to smile about? Was Temedy carrying a curse back to the homely lanes of Sogtrul? The coins she carried, tucked into her shirt, banged heavily against her chest, and later she found they’d left a bruise there, right over her heart. Was that her liar’s mark?

But nothing mattered apart from her ferocious desire to peruse the piece of parchment that she carried, like a sort of miracle, down under her dinner in the battered, hand-me-down scrip she’d received from the village interlocutor in exchange for scorekeeping duty at the winter card games. Thoughts, visions, and feelings all boiled up and erupted so vividly she could barely see the dusty track that wound back to the village.

Temedy went directly to the loft where she slept. She decided to hide the case beneath her straw mattress and, when she knelt down, pulling the case from her scrip with many desperate looks, the gold coins Obelizer had paid her tumbled out onto the blanket. They shone there with a light of their own, three of them, big as belt buckles, and there were big crumbs of salt clinging to the letters and the sacred emblem of the termite. These she pushed into her scrip, which she tossed aside. She didn’t dare spend money—what did she accept it for? If she turned up with gold coins somewhere, what talk would there be about her? All she wanted to do anyway was pore over the Deed, but Dzudzu the gardener kept his tools and things up there and was liable to appear at any time, so that night she lay on top of the mattress on top of the case, unable to sleep.  From time to time, she fancied that the fragrance of the parchment was teasing her again, and followed her into intense dreams that left her dazed in the morning, without leaving behind even the slightest memory of what they had been.

Except perhaps for one image: three lips closed in one broad grin.

Her responsibilities the following day were unusually light. She perceived this as a stroke of luck, but how often do we mistake our bad fortune for good! Temedy thought herself lucky to have the opportunity to study the Deed in secret, with the bright sunlight to read by, in one of the many hidden places she knew outside Sogtrul. Today she picked a little wooded hollow with a pond at its bottom, where she could sit on the big rocks there and no one would see her unless they came right up to the edge of the slope. The day was brisk and the sky was filled with rushing clouds; the daylight ebbed and brightened and a little wind frisked through the grass and stirred the tops of the trees in the hollow. But, down by the water, the air was always still, the pond eerily still, still, still, still, and quiet, quiet, quiet. In such a place, as silent as a library, Temedy knew she could read carefully, without distraction—but then, when didn’t she? And so she did, while the light came and went, and the sun traversed the sky unheeded above her. You see what comes of reading things you shouldn’t?

Now I am sure you will all want to know what the Deed said, but if I recited it to you word for word, then I would be guilty of casting a spell! So, to be safe, I will only describe the document’s contents very generally. It referred to a place by the sea called Tulltillarna. She recognized that odd name; Obelizer had mentioned it. There was no doubt about it now. This was the very parchment he had been looking for. And, like any Deed, this one conferred a kind of ownership, and certain rights, to the holder.

To the holder! Why, wasn’t she the holder? But then, was mere physical possession of the document sufficient to grant her the right to the rights it granted? Did she have the right to be granted rights? If she were to come forward and exhibit this Deed—and who to, by the way—would it be snatched indignantly from her? Or—stunning thought—would the stony indifference of the official face melt into a kind of ritual deference?

When dusk welled up from the water and began to fill the hollow, Temedy was lying on her back, draped across the rock, staring up at the sky without seeing it. The Deed, restored to its protective case, she pressed to her chest with both arms. Temedy didn’t know if she were dreaming or awake. She rose numbly and began making her desultory way back to Sogtrul, barely recollecting herself enough to stow the document case back out of sight in her scrip again. This daze did not fade; she was as numb as a sleepwalker, so that even her employer began to worry about her.

Perhaps that idiot’s mind has finally gone altogether, he thought. Please, not now. It means a consultation with the Controller and an arrest. Oh, Divine Family, don’t add that to my troubles!

He needn’t have worried, however. It was becoming more and more clear to Temedy that she had to find Tulltillarna, to see just what it all meant, or some of what it all meant, or if any of it meant anything—she didn’t fail to realize that the parchment was old, that other arrangements might have been made in its absence that would prevent her from realizing its promises. But to ignore it, that she had not the strength to do. She had dreamt again and again of that closed three-lipped grin, and she knew what it meant. It meant something ominous, which did not fail to include an acknowledgement that, having plainly grasped that omen for what it was, she could never reject the Deed. She would go toward that smiling promise full of dread, not so much for what she thought might happen—whatever that would be, it would be bad, she knew that—but that it waited in particular for her, like nothing else in her life, and she had to see it for herself.

You have to feel a little sorry for her, don’t you? Surely, if there had been those around her who cared more for the stability and regularity of things, they would have risen above their disgust for Temedy’s worthlessness and seen the danger that she posed. A timely intervention now, just as she went about surreptitiously gathering what she needed for her journey to the sea, in search of a chimera called Tulltillarna, and under the spell of an evil document, would have fended off . . . Well, I’ll show you.

A woman travelling alone under the best of circumstances will go in fear, and Temedy, bearing as she did a treasure that had quickly become more important to her than her own life, and weak in her mind, went in mortal terror with every step. But go, she went! The impetuous zeal of her own fantasies swept her from the outskirts of Sogtrul unseen in the dim, predawn hours, and carried her down the arduous, rolling way into the land of the Nemosems, and toward the sea beyond. Her blazing eyes rolled in their sockets without ceasing, looking everywhere for the sight of another traveller, and when she spotted people toiling along the road, on foot or in a cart, in a group or alone, she left it at once and concealed herself until they passed, or struck out through the trees or clambering over the rocks, always making her way with pain toward the coast. For three days and nights she walked, not sleeping, barely pausing to make a wretched meal of the meager provisions she had managed to bring with her. The three gold coins Obelizer had given her were concealed in a little bundle she had tied to a cord around her neck, and the bundle hung down inside her shirt, slamming into her chest with every step, darkening the bruise over her heart. She hadn’t dared to spend them, but brought them with her because she wasn’t sure she would ever return to Sogtrul, and believed in their protective power as if they were a magic talisman. That gold would help her survive, she thought, if she needed help. But so afraid was she of being overtaken in the dark, and so wild were her thoughts with fantasies of what she might find, like waking dreams that made it hard to see the actual world around her, she couldn’t sleep, or even rest, but dragged herself three days and nights to the sea.

When she first caught sight of it, she stood stock-still for a long time. She had never seen the ocean before, you know. What a sight! Blue, blue, blue, document blue, and wide, wide, wide as the sky. It was like another sky, lying flat on the land, looking up at its paler reflection in the air. It was placid and windy, and the air was flying with salt. Great white birds were there, laughing at her as they sailed effortlessly around and around in circles of their own. She had found the sea. Now, to find Tulltillarna!

A cliff split the road into two turnings that ran parallel to the shore. Not knowing which way to go, and being assured that she was completely alone, Temedy pulled out one of the great golden coins Obelizer had given her.

“Heads left, tails right!”

The coin landed head up, the termite glinted and flared like a firework in the wind-whipped sunlight. She retrieved it, and then took the left turning and walked along the top of the cliff, a white track in green grass overlooking a tan beach with a blue sea and white froth, a pale blue sky and pale white clouds. The road fell and rose again, and, when she had come to the next high point, she saw before her another road coming from the direction of the mountains, almost exactly like the one she had just quit, but with one important difference—a signpost. Temedy hurried down to read it, and her heart bounded in her chest when she made out the faded letters that spelled tulltillarna on a pitted stone arm that pointed further down the coast. With luck—with luck, she thought!—she would see it soon, perhaps from the next rise, and she hadn’t had to ask a soul! That part of the coast seemed deserted, and the borders of the road were encroaching back on it.

Temedy saw no sign of Tulltillarna when she reached the next high point, nor the next, but then, as she came within view of the land beyond the third high point, she thought she might have caught a glimpse of a gaunt spire, a plume of smoke, or a banner flapping, somewhere beyond, but though the day was clear, her vision was hazy and uncertain from fatigue and want of food, so she couldn’t quite be sure. She pressed on. With a near desperate longing she now went toward the next prominence, which would tell her if that fleeting impression had been a vision or real.

What lay before her, when she reached that place, was a short green slope that levelled off to form a vast natural shelf, a flat space sheltered by rising ground. Where the green ended, the white sand began and slid down into the sea. The cliffs subsided here, so that it was possible to walk all the way down to the breakers. As Temedy advanced to get a better look, her foot struck against a great bronze marker, evidently welded to the exposed rock. There was a corroded square hole in the center, into which, she thought, a signpost might once have been fitted, and there was, too, etched into the bronze, a curious mark: a diamond with horned stems protruding from its four corners—the kaikalak, symbol of Zaman Wislin. This discovery prompted her to look again, and now she saw low angles in the earth of that flat space, and lines, and realized they were what remained of the foundations of buildings, walls, and streets. Then she knew she had found Tulltillarna, that her arduous journey all the way from the distant mountains to the sea had been for nothing, that there was no one left here to receive her or recognize the Deed of Ilianeghis. Temedy fell where she stood, wept and wailed aloud, lying across the heated bronze of the defaced waymark.

When she had recovered sufficiently to take stock of her situation, she was too indifferent now to her own fate to give it much thought. She continued down the path, which drove right through what must once have been the narrow, winding main way of Tulltillarna, and so on down the coast. She left the confines of the town that had once been there. As the sky darkened, and the wind of the sea began to bite, she noticed a tumbledown cottage not far from the road, and approached it. As she drew near, she saw no sign of life, no smoke, no light. The place was overgrown with flowering vines, and there were a few stunted, gnarled trees keeping it company; but there were crabapples on those trees, and, at sight of them, Temedy’s hunger got the better of her. She staggered to the nearest tree and began picking and eating the fruit, which was ripe enough, if tart.  As she restored herself with the crabapples, she studied the house with better attention. The door was closed, but not fastened. She called quietly, knocked quietly, tried peering through the shutters—nothing.

When night fell, Temedy was sitting inside the cottage by the hearth, warming herself with the fire she had managed to light. There was some tinder and a little wood left, grey and bone dry, a flint to strike sparks with, and the chimney still drew. The wind whistled around the stone walls all night long, and Temedy heaped up rags she found and made a sort of nest by the tiny fire. She lay there, shivering with cold and misery, but grateful for the shelter she had found.

Round about, from farm to farm, and through Sluich Temnook, a tiny hamlet that was the only village on this part of the coast, Temedy went, running other people’s errands, helping people with their chores. She made enough to keep herself alive, and then hastened back to the cottage she had come to think of as her own, because it was the repository of the Deed, whose magic lit up her face every solitary night, and whose disjointed words fell into her dreams as randomly as rain.

One morning came, as it must, when she remembered her dream in waking life, which you must be very careful about. In her dream, she had been lying on her rag bed by the hearth. The fire was completely dead, but there was a kind of eerie light outside in the darkness that she was too weak to ignore. There in the sky, the moon hung new, a great black ball that hovered in the starry blue. It seemed to watch her, she thought she heard it breathe, and don’t you know the sly influence is greatly encouraged whenever the moon evilly veils its face altogether, and hides itself? In the darkness and stillness, for there was no wind, and the waves below did not stir, but lay flat and entranced like the grass and the branches of the crabapples, there was a wrong sort of light that shone down on her, and she thought of Tulltillarna—what would it look like now?

Well, of course, it looked the same way it always had. There below her, as she stood again by the bronze marker, were the grass, the lines and angles. In her hand, she found the document case. She opened it. The Deed of Ilianeghis shone there like a lit windowpane in her hand. She began at once to read the words aloud, like an incantation. She read and read and read, going back to the top of the page whenever she reached the bottom, but without ever finding the end, and the more she read, the more there was to read. This is the sign that the voice you hear belongs to the sly influence—never listen to it. Temedy knew this, but perhaps, in her foolish excitement, she forgot. The words rose up before her. They quit the page and floated up before her eyes. She was reading the Deed of Ilianeghis without looking at it. She was reading it everywhere. Even when she shut her eyes, there were the words, most distinct of all! Temedy opened her eyes. The new moon hung before her in the sky and the silence like an uncreated world waiting to be born.

She began to speak. Speech makes things real. She saw a wall in her mind. She spoke it, and it was there! She saw a street. She spoke it, and it was there! She saw a whole town before her. She spoke it, and it was there! She saw people in the street. She spoke them, and they were there! Tulltillarna . . .

Temedy sat for a long time after awakening from this dream, panting with fever. Everywhere she saw the needle-like spires, the winding ways, the windows aglow with amber light that spilled into window boxes overflowing with clustered, aromatic flowers, and there were wind-whipped pennants and radiant figures who moved gracefully in the shadows or stood with stolid dignity on the ramparts. She heard a stately sound of bells and a murmur of curious words. When she could collect herself, she went to see Tulltillarna again, and it was once again the level zone of green grass, lines, and angles, the traces only of what had been. And so she brought out the Deed of Ilianeghis and began to read it aloud, this time by daylight. She read and read, starting over at the top of the page whenever she reached the bottom, and she tasted her own blood, and her arms and legs went cold and numb, and her head grew at first light, and then heavy, throbbing, and painful, but the words kept marching out of her mouth, even as her vision faded, and the pain in her head became so terrible that she felt as though huge hands were tearing it in half.

A shepherd passing that way with his flock later in the day saw what he at first took for a heap of rags, oddly gathered there up by the old bronze marker. He had to draw very near before he saw that there were feet and hands emerging from it, and fine old parchment lying nearby in a wooden document case. But the woman lying there was dead, and a broad red band of blood streaked the grassy slope from her body, extending so far that it ended by touching the foundations of the wall that once had encircled Tulltillarna. All the blood in her body must have soaked into that ground, there was so much. The shepherd, without thinking, thought to turn the body over, and see who it might be. It was only then that he realized her head was gone, nor was there any sign of it. And when the authorities came from Sluich Temnook, they said at once that her head had pulled itself from her body, that the corpse was haunted and must be burned and the ashes scattered. This was done on the day, and the streak of blood was salted. The Deed of Ilianeghis was likewise cast into the flames, but would not burn. So, it was sealed in a lead casket and flung into the ocean instead. The authorities wisely forbade everyone to approach or disturb Tulltillarna, surrounding it with warning markers. Correspondence with the regional advisory committee was initiated, to see if steps should be taken to bury, destroy, or exorcise the site of the old town.

You may be inclined to feel a little sorry for Temedy—but the story is not over!

No, because, for one thing, that red streak never faded, and the grass never covered it. In fact, that red tint began to seep into the stone foundation of the wall. Passersby, who, of course, did not disobey the warning markers, could not have known this, but official surveyors were given limited permission to enter the area, and their reports made the rounds, the way these stories always do. But then there were others who, hurrying past the boundaries on weirdly still days, or after sundown, overheard a solitary voice raised in song somewhere within the cordon. The song went:

I’m all rips and rags, I hang in shreds,

Salt on my tail, and cracks in my head,

I’ve got a hunger that can’t be fed,

Salt on my tail, and cracks in my head,

There’s not one day I don’t wake up dead,

Salt on my tail, and cracks in my head.

There were times when this song, or at least the echo of its melody, could be heard here and there in the lonelier places along that part of the coast. Solitary travellers, shepherds, and circuit riders reported sightings of a ragged woman rambling on the cliffs, singing to herself, and those who ventured nearer said that what had, from a distance, appeared to be long flowing locks of hair, were only rags that billowed and flapped in the incessant wind like water weeds in a strong current.

A traveller who accosted her found himself confronted by a face of crumpled rags, with a torn mouth and torn eyes, and she asked him what he wanted, and the voice came not from the bundle atop her neck, but from the bulging satchel she carried. He said she held out a long skinny hand and offered him three huge gold coins, with crumbs of salt clinging to them, if he would guide her into town, and he ran from her half mad with fright. Others had similar encounters, and one young girl who met her on the shore was so terrified that she fell into a brain fever that nearly killed her, and permanently robbed her of her sight. She raved that she had seen the ragged woman walk up out of a shadow on the ground like someone coming up the stairs from a cellar.  As she fled from the apparition, the girl threw a look back over her shoulder and saw her, and behind her, a mountain stood where the ocean should be.

The regional officials posted to the canton received word from the land of the Nemosems that a sort of evil spirit was afflicting Sluich Temnook, that it crept into people’s houses at night and devoured all their food, that it crept into people’s barns and devoured every last grain of barley, every last onion, whole wheels of cheese. Worst of all, this spirit seemed to have a special preference for the taste of gold, for she had been seen guzzling coins from the town coffers, and no hiding place seemed proof against her, because she could smell the gold wherever it was, and now, they said, her rag mouth shone, all smeared inside with gold.

“When you try to catch her,” they said, “she just turns into a faded grey rag and flutters away in the wind, back to Tulltillarna where no one can follow her, because it isn’t there.”

And so Sluich Temnook declined, and the people moved away, and no word came from the regional council because the messages had never reached them, and the land around became abandoned and desolate, because no one could keep anything they made there, and no one could catch the raggedy ghost who sang:

I’m all rips and rags, I hang in shreds,

Salt on my tail, and cracks in my head,

I’ve got a hunger that can’t be fed,

Salt on my tail, and cracks in my head,

I’ll eat all your gold, and all your bread,

Salt on my tail, and cracks in my head,

Here’s where I live, and here’s where I’m dead,

Salt on my tail, and cracks in my head . . .

So if you hear the tatterdemalion singing, you don’t stay to satisfy your curiosity but leave as you came, without so much as a glance over your shoulder as you go. Throw down your bread or your gold and leave it to her, if you don’t want a fever, if you want to keep your sight. And if you don’t want to become a tatterdemalion yourself, remember how she got that way!

“Tatterdemalion” copyright © 2026 by Michael Cisco
Art copyright © 2026 by Raven Jiang

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Tatterdemalion

Michael Cisco

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Tatterdemalion

Michael Cisco

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Original Fiction space exploration

Cutting Corners

A team of pilots is trained to fly ships in a war where it’s become cheaper to send humans instead of machines.

Illustrated by Ben Zweifel

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Edited by Jonathan Strahan

By Yoon Ha Lee

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Published on March 18, 2026

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A team of pilots is trained to fly ships in a war where it’s become cheaper to send humans instead of machines.

Novelette | 8,370 words

Ten nameless ships and their nameless carrier. Not much of a fleet, but as the captain said, they were all we had.

In other Hausser bases, newly reassigned personnel must have been staring at their own ships, suppressing their qualms about the idea that a human might pilot them.

I wasn’t used to thinking of her as a captain. They’d reconstituted old military ranks along with the ships, like ice cream rehydrated by someone who’d only read a description of it but never seen the real thing. Diadra seemed none too comfortable with the rank herself, nor the other pilots, all of us selected thanks to extravagant tests and tessellations of expendability.

“Do the ships have names, C-captain?” asked the youngest one. Must have volunteered. The draft didn’t take them that callow. I saw it in the way his eyes caressed the ships’ hyperboloid curves. The ships hurt my eye, but they’d never been designed for atmospheric flight, and aesthetics weren’t anyone’s concern before or after they were scorched.

The captain turned, looked like she was going to snap, reconsidered at the sight of the kid’s earnest face. “They used to have alphanumeric IDs,” she said, almost kindly. My gaze followed hers to the ships’ gull-curved hulls, the bright scoured patches where those IDs had once been. “Nicknames sometimes . . . before they turned up brain-burnt. That’s why we’re here.”

“Begging your pardon, ma’am.” I recognized the man who spoke, tall despite the stooped shoulders. We must have been the only ones in this group who knew what the hell ma’am meant. “I don’t see how this can be done. They’re ships. They fly themselves. We don’t have the reflexes. The reaction time. We can’t run tensors in our head or neo-Lorentzian correction factors or—”

The captain’s ill temper returned, like a shadow over beaches baked dry. She stalked over to the carrier, sharp and sour, and kicked one of its struts. The clang reverberated like a bullet on a bell. Idly, I wondered if the captain had scared up the only pair of steel-toed boots on the whole damn planet for the purpose. It would be like her.

We cringed in unison. As the captain turned back to face us, I caught the tail edge of a smile before she scoured it clean. “Gather around, all of you,” she said—hard and sharp, but no harder and sharper than she needed to be.

We weren’t marines. The captain wasn’t either, although perhaps no one else realized that. The marines were the only Haussers left who had the mental equipment for this, and we didn’t have enough of them to go around. We were human though. We knew hierarchy and command.

We formed a ragged semicircle around the captain, facing the nameless ships. The Lyons would have found us laughably unthreatening at that moment. The expressionless man from the marines, two from intelligence, the tall one I’d met in a history program before we were both shunted into other programs of study, the one with laughing golden eyes yanked out of fashion design—enough. Who we’d been didn’t matter, not in time of war.

The captain and I came from data operations. It was how we knew each other. An innocuous field, until it wasn’t.

“As I said,” Diadra resumed, “they’re brain-burnt. Killed in the line of duty. Deuces—ship brains—take orders too. That’s what we program them to do.”

She half turned and offered the carrier a vague facsimile of a salute. The marine’s hands twitched as though he wanted to correct her, or maybe he was exercising his version of tact.

“Juan wasn’t entirely wrong.” Diadra nodded at the stoop-shouldered historian. “We’re human. Combat in space doesn’t allow for errors in timing. You have to hit hard, hit first, don’t get hit back. Humans are slower, error prone, erratic.”

“Are those always a problem?” asked a mild voice. I learned her name later: Blanche, an odd name for someone with such vivid coloration. Learned the story behind that too.

“Then why—?” The youngest.

Diadra huffed. “The cost.” Some of the others nodded. “The cost of training a ship’s deuce is almost as much as the cost of the ship itself. You can’t cookie cutter your way into military superiority. If we sent out identical minds, or those wretched raw neural spawns, the Lyons would blow them away in nanos flat. They have to be individuals like you and me.”

Nobody contested the point. We’d all dealt with military ships in one capacity or another. Hausse’s survival revolved around them. The marine was the only one who’d served aboard one, a rarity; few of them were equipped for human crew. Despite advances in warfare, we sometimes needed humans to carry out operations where waldoes and drones couldn’t cope.

Diadra looked us in the eye, person by person, targets acquired. “It’s one thing when a ship’s hurt bad and we have to do repairs. It’s another when it’s hurt so bad it nulls out. Replacing the deuce is spendy, but it’s a crying shame to let the ships go to waste when we’re at war.

“HQ is cutting corners, you see. They ran the numbers.” She’d run the numbers, once upon a time, although no one else knew. “It’s cheaper to refit for life-support and human operation than to train and integrate new deuces. Remote control won’t work thanks to comms lag. If it means we can field a few more units against the Lyons, it’s worth it.”

In other words, we were expendable. I wasn’t the only one thinking it . . . or the only one not saying it. My spirits lifted, absurdly: We all knew our duty.

“Do we have a chance?” One of the men, sounding bored rather than disaffected. Death wish visible from outer space, so to speak.

Diadra didn’t hesitate. “Yes. There was war before deuces became good enough, reliable enough, to trust with ships worth their weight in guilders. There was war before humankind set foot off Terra. It’s been done before. We can do it again.

“Which is why we’re here, and not drop-kicked toward the front. We’re here to train, not throw our lives away.” Her mouth quirked. “If we’re going to cut corners, we’ll do it right.”

None of us believed her, not the kid, not the marine. Certainly not me. But we wouldn’t say that either.

The marine assured us, when he could be persuaded to speak in that scathing voice of his, that our training had nothing on boot camp. We were minimally fit. The brass—I caught myself slipping into old-time terminology—didn’t expect us to go into, let alone survive, hand-to-hand.

We had the skeleton of command and hierarchy and discipline. The problem was putting on the sinew. Juan was apt to shoot off his mouth. I resented him for it at first. But he asked the questions none of us thought of, and as an academic, he was used to demanding autonomy. It took a while for me to understand why Diadra didn’t stomp on him.

She put us through flight sims, hour after ouroboros hour. I’d wake in my bunk, hands trembling, wondering why I couldn’t feel the control boards. Looking at the stars’ unwavering light gave me panic attacks, an intimation of ambush, and the meds only helped so much. Becker stopped writing bad poetry about the local rosette nebula and started wondering how badly the dust would affect our sensors. Still, we gathered at the viewports off shift, wishing for a faraway glimpse of peace.

People on Base Flamberge steered clear of us while repairing the brain-dead ships. They knew who we were and what we were to do. There was a betting pool regarding the survival rate. I placed a few against myself, for fun.

We came from a society that had abandoned human pilots and human captains. We relied on computer support, standard-issue neural clusters to handle astrogation, gunnery, damage control, life support. Now we had to learn tactics and coordination at a higher level than recreational sports, and tell the computers what to do.

Drill developed an instinct for momentum and inertia and thrust, our three-headed god: how many g’s we could pull without blacking out, when to dodge incoming fire or launch our own missiles. The world outside the station receded into mist and memory: atmospheric perspective without atmosphere, a neat trick.

The sims were all that mattered. At first, Diadra pitted us against each other so we’d learn each other’s fighting styles the hard way. “Nothing like getting nulled to teach you a lesson,” she said.

Latkiewicz, the marine, was terrifyingly good to begin with. I never did learn his given name, if he had one. No matter how outnumbered he was, he had a gift for tangling his opponents up with each other. Soft-spoken Candace liked to drift ghost-fashion at the edge of a skirmish until you forgot she was there—and then she’d strike. She always knew when we’d lost track of her. We could count on the youngest, Harikawa, to be spectacular, either in victory or in disaster, nothing in between.

One time Harikawa took it too far. I sat out that scenario, which was three on four according to a training schedule I’d never figured out, in an asteroid field. Ferrine, Blanche, Diadra, and I watched. The captain usually joined us in her own simship, fucked up alongside us, never denied it. She was the first to deconstruct her own mistakes, and equally ruthless with us.

Candace had taken out Juan with a well-timed dodge around an asteroid, even with klaxons and fail-safes screaming. He crashed. Harikawa’s other teammates, Chinua and Peter, also from intelligence, flirted dragon-and-knight among the rocks. Which left Harikawa to handle Candace, Latkiewicz, and Becker.

Give Harikawa credit for creativity. Whatever he did with the thrusters must have confused the simship’s rudimentary sense of self-preservation. Next to me, Ferrine exclaimed, “How did he override the—?”

“We’ll ask him during the post mortem,” the captain said grimly. “When he gets out of this. If he can. I wouldn’t want him risking this on a real ship. The simships are good but not quite, never quite, the real thing.”

How did she know so much about everything? The display snagged my attention just then, and I let it go. I wasn’t sure the answer would improve my mood.

As he juggled the thrusters like a drunken acrobat, Harikawa got himself hemmed in by his three opponents. I felt badly for him. Maybe overenthusiastic, but no one denied that he worked hard—

The display again: a sphere of red light, a flash faster than heartbreak. Four ships gone: Harikawa, Candace, Latkiewicz, Becker. I rubbed my eyes, trying futilely to blink away the afterimages.

“He blew his ship up.” Diadra’s mouth compressed into a blade-line, then: “That’s what I was afraid he was leading up to.”

I hadn’t figured it out; kicked myself over it. I hadn’t been thinking about Hausser kamikazes—fireships, they were called too, obscure historical references—and all deuces, all deuce simships too, came programmed with a self-preservation imperative.

“It worked,” Blanche said consideringly.

“It worked,” Diadra echoed. “Three ships for one. Fine. He came out ahead—except he didn’t come out of it at all.”

“It’s only a sim,” Ferrine said.

I winced, although I was thinking that Harikawa was going to catch an earful.

“It’s only a sim now,” Diadra said, “but what happens when we go up against the Lyons? Do we trade life for life?”

Blanche shrugged. “Are you ruling out kamikazes forever?”

Diadra’s lip curled. “No. You can’t rule anything out forever. Not when it’s life or death. The Lyons’ ships have their orders too.” For a moment, I heard a note of anguish and slow-boiled uncertainty in her voice, a rare slip. “You can’t go into a fight hoping to lose.”

Diadra chewed Harikawa out something fierce, judging by the way he emerged from her office. His shoulders were drawn back, head bowed as he choked down bile and hurt pride. I made a show of examining one of the terrariums. Neither of us was fooled, but it saved face.

Late into the shift, when the others had dispersed, I heard the captain questioning herself. She couldn’t admit that I was close at hand, listening and feeling equally helpless. I’d learned that much about differences in rank.

This was becoming more than a sim. Maybe it had been real for Diadra all along. I’d shoveled awareness of the war into a midden corner of my brain. She couldn’t afford to do the same. I wish now I’d been able to make things easier for her—for everyone.

Once upon a world there was a war. The soldiers of one nation were told they’d win handily, they’d return in time for Christmas pudding—a type of salad, I gather. It didn’t happen that way. They ended up squatting in trenches firing at each other in a perversion of lex talionis: bullet for bullet, blood for blood, life for life.

I’m sure some of the details are wrong. Records blur with age. I never had the heart to quiz Juan about it, especially after he reminded me that the world had a lot of history and no one scholar could be familiar with all of it. But the story is always the same. Like the rest of humanity, we thought we’d grown past the offertory ritual slaughter of millions, and like the rest of humanity, we were wrong.

We weren’t the only ones training on Base Flamberge. It took me weeks to comprehend what it meant, if I did, that the Lyons had taken Base Dadao. Diadra and I had been stationed there. In my head it still existed the way we’d left it, complete with turtle pond.

I wasn’t the only one taken by surprise when the captain said one weary evening, “You’re probably tired of the sims.”

“Never,” Harikawa said gallantly.

Diadra’s sneer was good-natured. “We’re up against another of our squadrons tomorrow, al-Wazi commanding. Still a sim, but new faces.”

I wasn’t complaining. As long as we stuck to exercises, I could pretend the war didn’t exist. There were training exercises in peacetime, after all.

“This means,” Diadra added in a casual tone no one trusted, “you will be in communication with each other. I expect you to coordinate.” Diadra looked hard at Harikawa. “If you’re going to do shenanigans, warn your comrades.” To Chinua and Peter: “Join the ensemble. No more duets.” To Juan: “You’re apt to bitch about orders. Fine. But save it for after.” And to me: “Vaughn, you’ve got to learn to take initiative. I don’t care if you haven’t quadruple-checked everything. You can’t always afford the time.”

Chinua coughed. “Will they be jamming us?”

She smiled thinly. “Yes. You need to learn to deal with it.” The smile evaporated. “I’ll be there, likewise al-Wazi.”

I hadn’t met al-Wazi that I recalled, but apparently Latkiewicz and Blanche had. The former restricted himself to a raised eyebrow. Blanche actually frowned.

“I feel sorry for the sim programmers,” Juan said, attempting to lighten the mood.

“Don’t,” Ferrine retorted. “It’s their fault we’re doing this.”

It came down to eleven against eleven, if you counted the carriers. The simships’ neurals handled the comms or we’d have been floundering with protocols instead of focusing on the exercise. In another life I would have been amused by the notion of two anonymous squadrons—I doubted even Diadra remembered the deuces’ original alphanumeric designations—cavorting in a simulated system under human guidance, but my sense of humor was vacationing in another universe.

We launched from the carrier in varying trajectories, seeking to swarm around al-Wazi’s fleet. Latkiewicz began a complex spin-and-swerve. Even in sim, the g’s would have flattened anyone else. For my part, I was busy reading scan and becoming heartily discouraged because the enemy moved in sync, something we’d never mastered.

Diadra had ordered us to focus on taking out al-Wazi’s carrier. Without the carrier, the squadron couldn’t retreat or resupply. And the carrier cost more by an order of magnitude: economic injury in a world of cutting corners.

Candace and Harikawa went after al-Wazi’s communication arrays, which included the jammer. We didn’t have a jammer, which was unfair, but so was war. Our ships were supposed to hop frequencies in an attempt to regain contact, but we were all flying Hausser simships with standard configurations, so that was no good.

Here our knowledge of each other served as our sole advantage. Diadra must have counted on that. Having gone up against each other countless times, in various permutations, we knew how to work together. It was just a matter of figuring out how.

At the moment, I could have measured the distance between theory and practice in light-years. The litany It’s only a sim, it’s only a sim ran through my head . . . rushed out of my head. I couldn’t treat this as anything less than real, no matter how preposterous the idea that Haussers would fight each other in earnest when there were Lyons out there.

Scan told me Juan and Blanche defended our carrier, which was fine by me. For all Juan’s obstreperous questions, he and Blanche worked well together, steady and down to business. In the meantime, the enemy had attained an attack wedge. “Wedge” in a vague sense of the word, since formations in space don’t work the way they do on land or water or even in air.

No luck defeating jamming. Had al-Wazi’s bunch worked with this before? Perhaps they had different specs on their simships, and on their ships as well. Chinua and Peter, true to form, led the advance toward the wedge. I would have preferred a flank attack, but I wasn’t sure my reflexes were up for the course corrections.

The hell with my reflexes. Initiative, the captain had said, and I meant to deliver. I didn’t have James’s or Blanche’s icy calm, or Harikawa’s gift for juggling thrust, but I knew how to move and keep from getting hit. Ferrine danced away from an enemy missile, jinking to baffle its sensors, and followed my lead. Becker and Juan disengaged, although the latter took a scorch I hoped hadn’t hit anything crucial.

We knew the enemy liked pretty formations. It was a fair bet they’d spent all their time drilling that. We could rattle them by messing up the formations, skewing the patterns. We headed into their midst, firing in directions that encouraged them to scatter, dodging their ripostes. Scan informed me that Juan had gone down after all, or was faking it. If the latter, al-Wazi’s squadron didn’t fall for it. They were rewarded for their trouble with a screamingly large explosion. He must have primed his drive and remaining ammo in anticipation.

I swallowed, licked dry lips. The silence of explosions grated on my nerves. I wanted thunder with my lightning, but the laws of physics never oblige.

Our opponents had orders to do what it took to maintain their formations instead of splitting up like we had. A matter of style, and their balletic movements were intimidating. But we’d skewed their positions. No one will sit tight when someone fires down their throat.

Diadra, in the carrier, was staying out of the way in a decidedly Candace-like manner. She controlled the biggest guns, but she was easier to hit. Extra armor or no, she correctly minimized risk to herself.

As it turned out, Diadra was right that first time. Hit hard, hit fast, don’t get hit back. I was shot down covering Becker’s singed tail, all the while thinking of Becker’s rosette nebula poem (“Twinkle, twinkle, little rose . . .” then a rhyme with “grows” and it grew saucier from there). She’d gotten too fancy too fast, and her trajectory slipped, and she couldn’t dodge in time.

Momentum and inertia and thrust have no appreciation for gymnastics in the airless dark. Chinua and Peter, taking advantage of our diversion, scorched three. The jammer was blown but I was gone by then, so I didn’t hear Diadra’s terse congratulations over comms until the simsuite released me.

We’d moved first and moved fast. It cost us, but we took out al-Wazi’s carrier. The next time, we’d have to move faster, until we got it right. It was that or die in the first real engagement.

We progressed through squadron-vs.-squadron to groups of squadrons battling each other. We started flying the ships themselves. For the first time, I understood the worship in Harikawa’s eyes when he first saw the ships. It doesn’t matter how ugly a ship is when you’re aboard and in control. There’s something about knowing you can fly to greet the stars . . . or could, if it weren’t for the war.

I had no idea why we were at war. It was an axiom of our existence, like geodesics and gravity, not to be questioned, only obeyed.

We never named the ships except the carrier, which we dubbed Whiplash in honor of Diadra’s tongue. The captain laughed when she heard. The rest of us took to calling each other by aliases. It kept us sane, knowing we could resume our old names and lives once—if—the war ended.

Chinua was Gallant Fox, and Peter, who was his partner in all the ways that mattered, was Omaha. The rest of us had nothing to do with those aliases, and they never explained the joke. Something about crowns, but I must have misunderstood.

Blanche remarked on Harikawa’s esprit de corps, so he became Esprit. Blanche was Snowbird: Diadra relied on her to stay cool no matter how bad the situation got. In a later scenario, based on the Battle of Tarnished Silver, she pursued a fleeing Lyon simfleet and nailed three even as her damaged engines threatened to explode in her face.

Ferrine wasn’t given to labyrinthine maneuvers, but we called her Helix because she’d been a geneticist. I never understood her specialty, although when the hours grew late she remarked, with a quiet bitterness, that it was so obscure they hadn’t hesitated to pull her from her research. One time Diadra asked if she regretted it, more gently than I’d ever heard her. Ferrine only shook her head and said she didn’t know anymore.

Becker specialized in what she called “vamp tactics.” Like a lapwing, she set herself up as a target too good to miss—until she exploded in your face. It worked most of the time, although Diadra reminded her not to cut the timing so fine. And so Becker was dubbed Lorelei.

Juan never did stop arguing. Diadra had to goad him to move, at times, instead of analyzing everything to death, including his own. Once he committed to a course of action, however, it was impossible to pin him down or get through his defenses, a boxer perpetually on guard. Juan, our Turtle.

Candace came from a family that had played wei-chi for generations, hence Wei-Chi. She showed us the game, a physical set in her possession that had eaten up most of the mass limit for her personal allowance. In battle and in the game, she was patient, painstaking, the ghost at the edge of scan.

Nobody was surprised that Latkiewicz learned the game, even beat Candace a few times. I don’t think she minded. Latkiewicz remained taciturn, and when he did speak, it was calmly and precisely. For all that we called him Scalpel, he hewed to a stately old-fashioned courtesy. If anything went on between him and Candace, it didn’t concern us unless it interfered with training—with those two, it never did. What Diadra thought of it I never knew.

Me? It went like this: Lana from al-Wazi’s squadron took me out once by sheer doggedness. I got her back the next match by shucking my engines’ reactor mass and playing tricks with momentum, counting on Diadra to come by for pickup at the battle’s end. When Lana complained, I said, “Well, it’s quid pro quo.” She gave me a blank look. “Tit for tat.”

Diadra and al-Wazi exchanged glances. Diadra said, “You studying Latin again?”

I shrugged. “It was a common phrase once.”

“It’s only one in a hundred these days remembers that Latin was a language,” Diadra said. And so I became Centurion.

We were gathered in the garden, a grandiloquent name for a nook decorated with origami flowers and wire sculptures of vines and a few strategically placed tea lights. Eleven of us made for a crowd. By tacit agreement, we left the space open for people to meet in some semblance of privacy; the bunkrooms had thin walls.

“What are they thinking to do with us?” Becker asked, tossing her head. “They can afford to spare ships and more time for this?” Like the rest of us, she was starting to wonder what battle was like when it wasn’t a sim. Eager for it, even.

“It’s an investment,” Chinua said. “The better trained we are, the more likely we are to survive.”

I snorted.

“—besides, who knows? Maybe the deuces will find it good practice.”

“You’re forgetting something,” Diadra cut in.

We shut up. Waited.

“Orders are orders. You should have learned from Turtle”—Juan’s mouth snapped shut—“that sometimes it’s not worth the arguing.” She offered us a chimera smile, part grin, part grimace. “Pick your battles carefully, always.”

Starting on the morrow, the captain had said, we’d be engaging in a training flight—against a deuce fleet. Base Flamberge was far enough from the bloodiest fronts and salients that we didn’t have to fret about being smeared into radiation by Lyon picket fleets. All the Flamberge squadrons would join into one fleet, working together. A hard idea to acclimate to, after sparring against each other. That must be why, really.

Leaving the base was less of a shock than I anticipated. I hadn’t realized how much my locus of home had become the squadron. Locations themselves were peripheral. Quarters aboard the Whiplash resembled the barracks we’d lived in on Base Flamberge. Sometimes I woke on the Whiplash thinking I was back on the base.

With us came the other carriers, all brain-burnt like ours: Imperator, captained by al-Wazi. Yeh Ching, the largest of them, from an older class. The ruthless Tarnkappe. The brash Tenochtitlan and my favorite, because of the beautiful abstract calligraphy on her hull, the Mecca. The Neumann János Lajos, the Horangi, the grandiosely named Doom of Ahura Mazda, the absurdly named Sic’n with her berserker tactics. The Hartford and her never-take-us-seriously squadron (they lied).

The brass generously gave us several sessions to figure out how to coordinate the squadrons. It didn’t help.

We tried our best against the deuces. Because of what Diadra had said about deuces as individuals long ago, our squadron tried to differentiate between them. A few carriers had already acquired nicknames: Qubit, Licorne, Spike, Alchemist. The rest had only alphamumerics prefaced by DAS, Deuce Artificial Sentience. Permute an identifier in the third place and it may be distinct to neurals, but human memory requires more to work with.

They gave us our first battles round robin, to let us get used to fighting the deuces with even odds. Unlike deuces, humans get tired. It shouldn’t have mattered because space battles end fast. In transit, even simulated transit, we’re trapped in a noosphere of dread. The coup de grâce comes as a relief.

Coup de grâce was right. The deuces finished us, all of us, and didn’t raise the machine equivalent of a sweat.

We had moments. Harikawa spun brilliant shenanigans. Jenora from the Hartford coordinated a holding action that kept some deuces from returning to their carriers. Tarnkappe escaped: the captains had designated a border shell beyond which any fleeing ship was “safe.” Yeh Ching surprised the deuces again and again with her twists and turns.

None of it was enough.

Afterward, Juan said, “It’s hopeless.” He kicked the deck of the Whiplash, swore as he stubbed his toe. An apt summary, if not the one he’d intended to make. “I told you.”

“You never stopped,” Latkiewicz said.

I tensed in anticipation of the captain’s tongue-lashing.

It didn’t come. She crossed her arms and looked us over. “We were beaten,” Diadra said. “Fine. Beaten many times. Fine. It’s training. We’ve gotten too used to human reflexes and human mindsets.”

“But what about the sims?” Ferrine protested.

“They’re not on the same level as deuces, or they’d be deuces and we wouldn’t be here.” Diadra glanced to the side, an unusual hesitation. “The point of the sims was to ease us in, not blow us away before we had a chance to adapt. We need more work, more macros.”

Macros was the term we used: preprogrammed maneuvers, chained together in rapid succession. The ships came with libraries of them, which we’d customized. We were already using them.

Diadra’s chin tipped up. “We’ve been using them one way. Now look for others. Randomized selections. Delegating some of the timing to the neurals. But only some. We can do it.”

It was her tactical use of we, instead of the critical you, that brought us back together.

I’m not the squadron’s historian, but I do know the joke behind the name of the prototype deuce, DAS-1867. Marx would laugh, if he were the kind of person who laughed. Perhaps the early cyberneticists should have stuck with the term AI.

You’d think that people who reached the stars would have known better than to resurrect the old feuds and wars, and forget what called them skyward in the first place. Lyonesse and Hausse aren’t the only ones at war, although a few of the independents have stayed clear of the conflicts.

Maybe our ancestors thought they’d leave their troubles behind them. An old delusion, or an old hope. I keep hoping we can find a way.

They called it a training flight. We used other names for it.

We were wound to snapping. Diadra’s eyes became shadowed with worry, which she no longer bothered masking from us. We were rarely an equal match for our deuce opponents, but we learned to rattle them, to snipe from unexpected vectors, the guerrilla’s arcane arts.

The deuces caught on quick, but we liked to think we were teaching them something. Possibly even something useful against the Lyons.

We learned to work with the deuces. We were all Haussers, after all. Whiplash earned her name again and again: we specialized in speed. Samera from Tarnkappe called us the cavalry. Becker muttered “Half a league” under her breath and wouldn’t elaborate.

After a time, we returned to Base Flamberge. They gave us a couple of days to rest. Latkiewicz and Candace organized a wei-chi tournament. By the night’s end, we were arranging the stones into graffiti patterns.

By and by, people gravitated toward the viewports that showed the rosette nebula to best advantage. I slipped away, only to find Diadra at a different neglected viewport. Nothing to see but stars, or nothing to obstruct your view of stars.

She sat with her hands tucked into her pockets. hair tucked behind her ears. I shuffled my boots and cleared my throat as I approached, for courtesy’s sake.

She looked up. “Hello there, Vaughn.”

“Hello yourself.” I came up beside her, waited.

“You’re wondering what’s next.”

No sense in denying it. I nodded.

“It’s the same as always. Some of us will live. Some of us will die.”

“Reassuring,” I said.

“You think I’m here to be reassuring?” Diadra caught my expression and relented. “Think about it, Vaughn. We’ve gone as far as we can go playing among ourselves. You know what’s next.”

I searched her face as though she were an oracle. “I guess so.”

“Sometimes I wonder what this is for.” Diadra’s mouth twisted. “Not what you wanted to hear either.”

“It’s us or the Lyons,” I said by rote, caught myself. “They must say the same of us.” If the war was a Gordian knot, where was the fellow with the sword? “We have to see it through. That’s the choice we have.”

“We have orders,” she said, agreeing without really agreeing. “That’ll do for now.”

Nominally, Captain Alejandro of the Tarnkappe commanded the combined fleet. We hadn’t learned to adhere to a strict hierarchy before and we didn’t start now. The deuces adapted easily enough, since they were used to working things out for themselves.

Some of us couldn’t help regarding our first assignment as a lark. I would have joined them, except for Diadra’s brooding. She didn’t often clam up, and that concerned me.

We took to talking in dreamy words: what if, when the war’s over, can you imagine, wouldn’t it be nice. We thought of home, or a new home in the nebulous somewhere. In the old days, when we’d had enough guilder in the budget, people sent out probes. We all had: Hausse, Lyonesse, New Everest.

They’d declassified the records because no one cared anymore. We found copies buried in the Whiplash’s archives, because no one had bothered deleting them either. We idled our free hours by comparing prospective planets, plotting courses, planning journeys and settlements.

A bare-bones version of the simsuites had been added to the carriers. We practiced larger-scale scenarios. We’d ditch the modules at Base Katar for the use of future squadrons.

I made some spreadsheets. Did the money poured into our training and supply and life support still not add up to a deuce’s price tag? I jiggered the numbers this way and that, to no satisfactory conclusion.

I wasn’t the only one who wondered.

“Centurion!”

I had long ago passed the stage where I looked around to see who was being addressed so oddly. “Lorelei. Something on your mind?”

“No,” Becker—Lorelei—said, facing me squarely in the corridor. A spacer’s habit she’d learned and I still hadn’t, when one might need to read lips or sign. “Is something on yours? Half of us are acting like kids in zero g for the first time. The other half are moping.”

“Nerves,” I said, too glibly. “First time for us all. We won’t have time to coddle ourselves once we reach the front. It’s good for us to get this out of our systems.”

She didn’t believe me, which was fine because I didn’t believe me either.

Becker sidled over to me. We resumed walking, her leading since I had no particular destination. “It’s strange,” she said. “I feel more alive than I have in years. Now that the real deal is coming up, I don’t want this to end. It’s better than going out there to get shot. Selfish, right?”

“Orders are orders,” I said, the blandest imaginable response, and she sighed. “Our opinions don’t matter.”

“They should. We’re the ones scattering our carbon into space.” Becker shook her head. “That’s why they started using deuces. Program ’em right and they don’t grouse about it.”

People can be programmed too, I thought. Wasn’t that the point of training? “Pity we can’t program this war to an end.”

“We’ll have to go the blood-and-fire route. Good for the qubits.”

“There are worse ways to go.”

“What, kamikaze?” Her grin had a topsy-turvy cast to it I didn’t trust. “I’ll vamp a few on my way out. How’s that?”

I caught her hand. Her skin was cool and dry, too dry. “It’s not funny, Becker.” I’d slipped. Used her real name. But she didn’t draw away, so maybe she wasn’t offended. “We’ll make it through.”

Becker shrugged and squeezed my hand. “When this is over, do you think they’ll go back to using deuces? Or will they be too busy rebuilding to bother? Will they decide they like this way better?”

“Only one way to find out,” I said, “at the other end of history.”

They have a lot of names for it. Some of them obscene as in taboo, others obscene in what they conceal.

Charred. Dusted. The wrong side of the statistics. Gone exploring. Making amends for your grandchildren. Feeding the roses. Traveling into winter. I once heard a foreign mercenary call it saluting the night.

I missed a few, I’m sure. Euphemisms come and go. Death stays.

Shall I tell you how it went, in the stretch of shadow we call the front? Don’t ask me for the blow-by-blow analysis. That’s for the historians, after everything’s decided. Sometimes, in the annals, you think you see cause and effect, attack and counterattack, unfolding like an heirloom tapestry.

That’s from the outside, after time has rinsed away the adrenaline and ash. From the inside, yanked this way and that by orders, by instincts that evolution never discarded, it’s another story.

You spend forever heading to the front in the company of other squadrons, some familiar and some yet strangers, until you’re ready to spit eternity in the eye. Your daydreams turn to all the things you should have done three days ago: flouting reveille to sleep in one last time, an extra helping of hoisin sauce. Maybe you talk about these ideas with your comrades, and maybe you don’t. I did. Not Diadra, not ever.

Once you’re there? Once they brief you and give you your orders and, if they’re charitable, a breadcrumb of explanation? Once they send you to seek your bubble reputation? You’re an outcast by the nature of your orders, a flesh-and-blood soldier superficially melded with your ship in an age of deuce-directed war machines. No glory, just hope and pain. They’re not the same.

You have options once you arrive. Once scan barrages you with the enemy everywhere, moving even as your brain adjusts to their positions, accelerating even as your brain adjusts to their velocities. Once you realize that you’re here and it’s real.

It comes to you: The lasers are more than flashlights that don’t scatter photons like a kick me sign. The missiles aren’t conscientious duds. If you’re hit and your engines flash critical, if you lose hull integrity and the emergency seals fail, you’re gone. There’s no guarantee that you’ll emerge safely on the other side.

You fire, dodge. Don’t bother praying. No one’s watching. There’s only the nightmare carousel of ship against ship, deuces maneuvering so quickly any humans would be smeared to slime. You delegate to the poor neural trapped in the ship with you. You know you can’t eject, and even if you contrived it, no one would retrieve you. There are more in training where you came from. If the ship survives, someone can replace you.

Cheering thoughts. You don’t have time to think them, which is a small grace. They lurk in the back of your brain, slow poison for later. As Diadra said, hit first, hit hard, don’t get hit back.

If you can.

So much turns on an eye blink. Less, where deuces are involved. The Lyons have a job to do too, and are more worried about doing it than anything else.

You daren’t take your time to make sure you’re going to nail the Lyons with your fire. Even if this is your first time and you’re one of the first real soldiers in an era. Even if your friends disappear from scan and you want to scream out to them, pierce the soundless vacuum.

Maybe war was different back when you had to ride into the enemy’s path knowing they were people too: living, breathing, bleeding, dying.

Half a parsec, half a parsec more, and you’ve arced away from the front. Others take your place. Here there are no castles with their ponderous ramparts and machicolations, no trenches, no landscape fixtures to contain the battle. You have stars and asteroids and debris. Colonies and outposts. The front changes daily, hourly, as the fortunes of war spin out their course.

Once you’ve run the gauntlet, there’s a temporary reprieve. Deuces can go on with but short stops for refueling, long stops for repairs. Humans can’t. We rotate out to recuperate while other squadrons take their turn, always ready . . . never ready.

Our captain came through it grimmer than ever. There were new lines around her eyes. Chinua and Peter tried to chivvy her into telling us more. Either they backed off, or she made them back off, or interrogation techniques foundered against the Diadras of this world.

The rest of us didn’t break. The rest of us minus one, I should say. We lost Ferrine. Helix.

You can’t believe a person’s gone like that. No corpse, no adieu, not even the hulk of her ship. It was like she’d never existed. Sometimes I wonder what’s worse: the hacked and bloody remains of what used to be a person, or not finding anything at all. Deuces don’t retrieve the dead. They never had a need for it, before.

This once, because we were shaken, Diadra’s tongue had none of its usual sting. She was as badly off as the rest of us.

There was a funeral for those who didn’t come back. I don’t remember much of it. Just a blur of faces and indistinct voices, an ache sharper than longing, darker than black.

We knew it wasn’t the end. That was the worst part. Not by a damn long sight. Another month, another skirmish, rotated back into the war’s gluttonous maw. Ferrine was the first we lost, but not our last.

There are questions we never think to ask. We say deuce and never think about the etymology. An older word for them was hal, but that dropped out of usage when none of the DAS series went rogue.

Deus ex machina. Someone’s pun. God from the machine.

We never worshipped them in a conventional sense. But there are ways and ways of propitiation. We ceded war to the deuces. They became gods of the battlefield.

I never forget though—like any idol, they’re made in our image.

The second and third times should have felt just as bad, but you can only assimilate so much before you go numb. It saves your sanity. Ships are assets, not people. Even ships who are deuces, whose core programming compels them to fight loyally. None of us ever met a deuce that expressed second thoughts, but that was the programming too.

The Lyons went easy on us those times. Fewer deaths, none of them the Whiplash’s. Maybe someone pulled strings to send us to a less hectic part of the front. Maybe it was mercy.

Third time’s a charm, they say.

Third time we learned why hell is still in the language.

It’s amazing how much you learn from an accumulated combat experience of no more than an hour. The threat of death brings you clarity. You see, through the lens of your mortality, what you missed the first time around, when you were too busy reacting.

The others came to their own epiphanies, I’m sure. I didn’t share mine because I didn’t know what good it would do to me, or us. I would have asked for advice, except who did I know who wasn’t embedded as badly in the situation as I was?

There were so many of us. I can still recite the list. Whiplash, Tenochtitlan, Tarnkappe, Horangi, Sic’n, Hartford, Dazzler, Powodzenia, Fuoco, Hanging Gardens. Those were the ones that survived. And the deuces: Alchemist, Licorne, Black Rose, Tangle, Eskrima Duel, Akuma. More and more and more, and I know the ones who didn’t come back too.

Too many Lyons, far too many, even allowing for screwups in reconnaissance. Where they’d pulled the reinforcements from, I couldn’t guess. It wasn’t my job to guess. In retrospect, those who were supposed to guess—the data analysts—should have anticipated it.

Coordination between human and deuce, coordinated fire, coordinated defense. We fought together and died together, laid down our lives like grave goods.

The deuces haggled among themselves and passed us the crumbs. Under other circumstances, it would have rankled, but you don’t quibble when your tail’s on the line. We did our part against the multitude of Lyons.

Then came the moment when Whiplash was caught with nowhere to turn, unless she wanted to collapse our defensive line. Maybe we could have regrouped afterward and built it back, but there’s little time for maneuver in space, where an extra half second of thrust can hurtle you into doom. None of us was in position to save her.

Blanche had asked, Are you ruling out kamikazes forever?

The captain had answered, You can’t rule anything out forever.

Diadra wasn’t one to rule anything out when it came to a solution.

I’ve thought about how things would have turned out if it’d been another ship in that trap, with Lyons, Lyons everywhere, nor any time to think. It’s easy to make mistakes under pressure, even when you’re a captain who’s forged a motley group of individuals into a fighting unit. A deuce wouldn’t have had any trouble. But we had too few deuces for this war: That was why we were there.

I saw everything. How the Whiplash was trapped. How she reacted as fast as human meat allowed. How she accelerated into an ever-shifting spin and bombarded the Lyons, taking them by surprise. Taking some of them down. How she cut spin and performed a half roll while keeping her cannon trained on the nearest Lyon: a salute. Which no ship had made since the deuces took over our wars, because a salute is a human gesture. How she continued moving defensively, relying on the rest of us to cover her now that the immediate threat had passed.

No: I saw almost everything. I didn’t see Diadra die. The g’s involved might have taxed a deuce. She wouldn’t have wanted a witness to her final moments, anyway. She saluted us goodbye. That would have been enough—for her.

Kamikaze? No. The Whiplash survived, but half her soul was gone. It was a neural piloting the ship now. One with Diadra’s macros and tactics, but not Diadra herself. We don’t know what the Lyons would have done with that knowledge.

Sometimes grief burns your brains out, and at other times, it snaps everything into acute clarity. I was wired. Even then, I couldn’t stop Chinua and Peter from going down together, duet in the midst of an ensemble. I couldn’t save Candace when she abandoned her habitual stealth and sacrificed herself to hold the front. I couldn’t keep James Latkiewicz from going after her. Worse, I didn’t need to, because he didn’t, no matter how much it hurt him to let the night take her.

So many gone, and Diadra among them.

More names for the casualty lists. Other names would never make it onto the lists: Gallant Fox, Omaha, Wei-Chi. Neither would ours, if we stayed.

So we didn’t. We’d sacrificed enough. We had wounds to bind and dreams to pursue and plans to follow. We found a capsule of files on the Whiplash’s computers: Diadra’s legacy. Which she’d told none of us about. Perhaps she’d never meant to. We don’t know.

We grabbed what repairs we could and cut loose, heading out for stars far away. Heading past Hausse and Lyonesse and toward a future we should have grasped years ago. We weren’t the only ones. A fleet of ships and their squadrons, and those who stayed behind also chose not to give us away when it mattered.

Following Diadra’s maps and routes and lists of contacts, we stopped by neutral starports for further repairs and refitting. We didn’t intend to return, although we left word for anyone who wanted to join us. Harikawa worried about pursuit, but Latkiewicz assured him that the government had better things to do. I couldn’t help aching when I looked closer at those two. Harikawa wasn’t a kid anymore. The shadows behind Latkiewicz’s eyes—where once, I’m sure, Candace saw her own shy smile reflected—haven’t faded, and never will.

How did we get away, past the murderous front? The others didn’t believe it could be done, except staying was suicide. I told them chances were good that the Haussers and Lyons would both let us through. They figured it was worth a try. All we had left to lose was each other.

I haven’t told them yet why I thought so. I think Becker figured it out before I did, although she’s keeping quiet herself. Sometimes, when I’m watching her, she looks up and the knowledge shines out of her face. Sometimes I find something else in her smile, but that’s another story.

You see, as we sped toward the front on our way out, I sent out a message. Telling the combatants we were leaving and weren’t any threat to them. That they were welcome to come with us if they ever wanted out. Haussers and Lyons, humans and deuces, on both sides.

Because there were far too many Lyons that third battle. Not all of them were deuces. Lyonesse too was cutting corners. It was in the data.

One thing I learned from Diadra, although she never said it in these words, is that you don’t cut corners when it comes to lives, any lives. All those times we pored over old reports and daydreamed about colonies, she’d been listening. Listening, and angling for a way to make it work, as always, angling to find an escape from the slaughter.

I was certain—am certain—that the Lyons heard and thought about it. They let us through, holding their fire, a hiatus in the battle. Nobody harked after us then, but they’ll come. If the future is kind, they’ll even tell us that the war, a war whose origins no one remembers, is over.

As we passed from the battle—heading out, heading away, heading to the stars and peace—the Hausser deuces saluted us. All of them, together. We’ll be waiting for them.

“Cutting Corners” copyright © 2026 by Yoon Ha Lee
Art copyright © 2026 by Ben Zweifel

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Cutting Corners

Yoon Ha Lee

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Cutting Corners

Yoon Ha Lee

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The post Cutting Corners appeared first on Reactor.

Original Fiction alien contact

Deathcap

Two space marines trapped in a doomed spaceship confront the desires that will destroy them both.

Illustrated by Kei-Ella Loewe

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Edited by Lindsey Hall

By Lara Elena Donnelly

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Published on February 25, 2026

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Two space marines trapped in a doomed spaceship confront the desires that will destroy them both.

Note: This story contains descriptions of sexual assault.

Short story | 2,560 words

It’s been seventy-two hours since you and Baker barricaded yourselves in med bay six. You’re supposed to be sleeping in shifts but the rota is starting to break down and right now you’re both propped up against the operating table, shoulders touching, heads nodding, red-eyed and grimy and laughing all the way to the gallows.

“Spinach pakora,” says Baker. “The cheap stuff, from the divey place around the corner from my flat.”

You can feel the crunch of the batter, the tickle of spices in the back of your nose. You close your eyes for just a second. They’re dry from the stale, recycled air and your eyelids stick. It’s painful. You don’t want to open them again.

“Deep fried morel mushrooms.” You blink up into the fake blue daylight of the full-spectrum lamps, which are supposed to make you feel awake. The tubes hum on the edge of your hearing.

“Expensive, innit?” Baker asks. “Like, they use those in—” he pauses, tucks his chin and lowers his eyelashes, raises one limp-wristed hand—“haute cuisine.”

You shrug. “I guess. My grandma used to go out in the woods and pick ’em. Fried ’em in Crisco.”

Baker lets his head fall back against the gurney. His Adam’s apple bobs beneath his stubble as he swallows. Once, twice. “You know there’s this mushroom, it’s poisonous. Only a couple of people who’ve eaten it have survived. And they all said it was fucking delicious. Best thing they ever ate.”

“Used to have a friend who’d say everything’s edible, at least once.”

Baker snorts. You giggle. You’re both about to have hysterics but then somewhere, not too far off, there’s a metallic crash that echoes through the ship. No gunfire, no voices: Maybe there’s nobody left to shoot or scream. Which means you two are the only people left to do either. Which means that thing is probably looking for you.

Baker swallows again, snickers low and kind of crazy.

“Hey Nowak,” he says. “Would you eat an alien?”

“Maybe. Depends, I guess.”

He jerks his chin at the med bay door. “Would you eat that thing?”

You consider it. You’re so tired nothing seems strange anymore. “I dunno. Bugs are supposed to taste like lobster.”

“Yeah, but. Ain’t a bug though. Is it? It’s like that fucked up crab Bautista showed us.”

Bautista said the thing was like this kind of parasite that gets in a certain kind of crab, wraps all around its brain so it can control its limbs and make it move, and then…She called it a parasitic castrator. She showed pictures.

Could you eat a crab like that? Could you eat the thing inside of it? Bautista could have told you, if she wasn’t dead. You hope she’s dead, anyway. Last time you saw her she was pale and sweating, belly swollen up, coveralls busted at the side seams and patches of lymph and blood where her skin had broken open. She was past talking—just making this low, animal groan. Bautista with her fancy fucking degrees, she would have known for sure if you could eat that thing. Not that that’s what you want to do.

You wish you’d shot her. There had probably been time to shoot her. You know there was time to shoot her because you just stood there for a second like an idiot and stared, thought about what was going to happen to her. She explained it to all of you, clinical and terrified, after the thing took out its first fire team and only one guy made it back, wild-eyed, sweaty, half nuts. After he raped the tech who was trying to draw his blood—crying all the time, apologizing, not stopping. Bautista showed you all the surveillance footage. After the split and weeping skin stretched over the tech’s belly started to move like something in a nature documentary. After Bautista held the tech’s hand while he died, or as close as she could hold it through the containment chamber’s gloves.

The other guy died too—the rapist. Different way, also bad. But nobody held his hand.

“You think Bautista’s dead yet?” you ask Baker, wondering if you sound normal. 

“Jesus,” says Baker, who definitely doesn’t. “I fucking hope so.” He pauses, pinches the bridge of his nose. “You know she had two kids?”

Yeah, you know. She had one of those annoying fucking 3D frames in her lab that cycled through clips of her family. Two boys, and the older one looked like her. They were living in base housing with her wife and dog. The wife would get her pension. 

Sometimes you wondered who was the real mom, the one who’d held the kids inside her body. What that conversation had been like. How they’d done it. You thought, sometimes, about the cold lab table, the jelly, the catheter. It got you wet. You knew this was weird. It wasn’t as weird as some of the other shit that got you wet.

Bautista gave her little presentation on those 3D frames too, in the lab, because the briefing room was outside the blast door they had sealed to keep the fucking thing outside. She wanted you to know what you were going after. You didn’t really care, since you already knew what would happen if you fucked up.

“You ever want kids, Nowak?” There’s sweat at Baker’s hairline, darkening the stubble of his crew cut. His pupils are fucking huge and there’s a flush crawling up his neck. Maybe he’s getting sick. You put your hand out to feel his forehead and he flinches away first, then presses into your touch. So maybe he’s just horny. Fight, flight, freeze, or fuck. 

He’s not bad-looking; had his nose broken one too many times, but it’s not like you haven’t. You like the way he talks, like the old movies you used to watch with your grandpa: Michael Caine, Ian Hendry, Ian McShane.

Guys aren’t the only ones who get battle boners.

“Nah,” you say, because you don’t know what else to tell him. You never did want kids, not really, but more than once you’d put your mouth to somebody’s ear, so hard your teeth mashed the ridges of cartilage flat, and you’d growled “Put a baby in me, fuck.”

A couple of them thought you meant it: poor schmucks trying to start a family while the world burned down around everybody’s ears. Who saw the uniform and still somehow thought you’d stick around to raise some unlucky kid who’d die in a mudslide or a heatwave or a water riot. And it would be their fault for knocking you up. Your fault for asking for it. For not having the balls to tell anybody what you really wanted.

It was never about kids.

You realize you’re staring at Baker’s ear. The tip is flushed with red. A bead of sweat makes its crooked way across his temple. You reach out and swipe it from his skin. His breath hitches. You pull your hand away.

“I always—” His voice is hoarse, creaky. He clears his throat and starts again. “I always did.”

“But?” 

He sniffs, rubs the back of his forearm across his sweaty forehead. “Never found the right person.”

In the silence you both look, involuntary, at the med bay doors. It’s quiet out there now: just the soft groan of the ship’s hull, compromised by the attack. Is that thing just waiting for you to make a run for it? How many more of them are out there now that you two are the only people left? You imagine dozens of them, hundreds, crouched outside the med bay doors, between you and the evac shuttles.

That would be worse than getting sucked into space when the ship goes. Because then you might make it back home with a lot of new friends. 

“My guess is, at least three life cycle stages,” Bautista told your platoon—what was left of them. “One, reproductive stage.” 3D rendering of the dead guy, the rapist, naked on a table in the morgue so you could see what she meant by reproductive stage, see what the thing had done to him. One of the guys in your unit made a noise. Bautista ignored him. “Two,” she said. “The eggs.” A picture of the tech, alive but barely. “Three…” She jerked her head at the blast door. “They come out small; we don’t know how long it takes them to get big.”

You hated how thinking about it made you feel. Not the part where you got eaten alive from the inside out but…the things that came before. You wanted to apologize to the dead people for this fucked up stubborn jealousy you felt when you thought of the slick weight inside of them, the shine of their stretched out skin.

“Maybe you weren’t trying hard enough,” you say to Baker now, your voice two pitches too high, and you hope he thinks it’s panic. Funny you still care, at this juncture. “For kids, I mean. You ever think about, you know, fuckin’…hijacking a spaceship? Seems like it’s working out great for that guy.” Girl. Whatever.

“Ha ha,” says Baker, just like that. Like he’s saying the words, not laughing. 

“What,” you say, because you don’t like the sound of it. 

He rubs the back of his neck, opens his mouth, starts to answer but shakes his head. Now he really laughs, a sound like he got punched in the gut, and says, “Hey, Nowak, would you fuck an alien?”

“Aw, come on,” you say, because this is the tired joke all the sniggering recruits make in boot camp. But the blush comes up instantly now, just like it did then.

“Oh shit,” says Baker, breath hitching. “Nowak you perv, is that why you joined up?”

“No,” you say, and you hate how your anger makes you sound like a girl.

“Hey,” he says, “hey, it’s okay. Sorry, I didn’t mean—” and then his arm is around you and you’re crying, which you also hate. But it’s finally dawning on you that you are actually going to die out here. For real. You’re going to die hiding in the med bay with Baker, if you’re lucky, and you’re worried he’s going to think you’re weird.

That makes you laugh too—cry-laugh—because it all seems so stupid suddenly. All the protestation, the fights you got into with the other recruits. Lying to all those guys who wanted to knock you up about what got you off. Ashamed of wanting what you wanted, instead of what everybody seemed to think you should. 

You know your body isn’t made for it. But your body isn’t made for the vacuum of space either, or for nine Gs of pressure in a banking fighter, or for carrying 120 pounds of shit on your back while you sprint through live fire. It isn’t made for drinking straight hot sauce, or playing chicken in the airlock. But you did all those things and more and you liked it. You liked knowing your body could take it. You liked that other people valued your body, desired your body, for what it could endure.

You’re getting a patch of snot on Baker’s coveralls. The skin of his neck is close to your mouth. And then it’s on your mouth, or your mouth is on it: open and sloppy and smearing spit through his sweat and grime.

“I would,” you say into the taste of him. It blows out of you, past the busted pressure valve of giving a shit. “Baker. I’d let an alien fuck me.”

He makes a different type of gut-punched sound this time, and tangles his hand in the top of your grown-out crew cut.

“Nowak,” says Baker, voice all soft and weirdly tender. He’s half talking, half kissing your temple. His teeth scrape your eyebrow. “Nowak I gotta tell you something, okay?”

Whatever it is, you don’t care. You take his ear in your mouth, his whole ear.

“Hang on,” he says. “Nowak, wait a minute,” and he’s pushing you away but still kissing your face with teeth and tongue and you’re grabbing at the zipper of his coveralls. He’s already got them rolled down to his hips—it’s hot in the ship, the reactor is critical, but his skin is hot too, he does have a fever—and you get the coveralls open and you reach down but he catches your wrist so hard it hurts.

“Nowak,” he says, too loud, biting off the K. 

“Shit,” you say. Because now he doesn’t have to tell you. Now you know.

It doesn’t look anything like that fucked-up crab Bautista showed you. Not at all. It’s different from the dead guy in Bautista’s presentation, too, because Baker’s still alive. It is still alive. Your breath comes hard and fast through your nose and you can smell Baker, smell his sweat. But you can smell it too. A mineral, earthy tang, like the underside of a rock. Like well water. Like out back of your grandma’s house. Like mushroom hunting.

Answering a question you didn’t ask, Baker says: “Right before we linked up. It got Xie, then Salvador, then me. I killed them both but then I couldn’t…I couldn’t. Then you found me and—” He’s watching your mouth while he talks and then he’s not just watching anymore, and you’re helping.

“Nowak, no,” he’s saying, even while he’s got his tongue in your mouth, even while he’s getting his hands inside your coveralls and you’re trying to help him peel them off. “Nowak, I can’t do that to you. I can’t do that to you and…and what, shoot you after? You want me to do that? You want to do that to me?”

But you’ve been thinking about this too, and no, you don’t. You don’t want to make him do that, though you would if you had to. More like, you don’t want to find out how long you’ll stay alive and aware with a smoking tunnel through your skull. But if you are going to die, there’s some things you do want to find out first. You want to know what it feels like. You want to know if it hurts, and how much. You want to know if you can take it. You want to prove you can.

“Baker,” you say, “it doesn’t have to be like that.”

He blinks at you, glassy-eyed.

“It’s a med bay,” you say. “Opiates.” Then, choking out the joke like it’s funny: “I’ll do you if you do me.” 

You see his surprise, then his relief. It makes him laugh for real, and you know you’re doing this for real, and it scares you.

You wonder if anybody ever went looking for those mushrooms, the ones Baker mentioned. If anybody ever got so curious they picked them and cooked them even though they knew what would happen. Probably everybody would think they were crazy. But maybe they got the last laugh, in the end.

“Fuck it,” you say, your palm slipping in the sweat on the back of Baker’s neck. You grip him harder, pull him close. “Baker. Listen.” You pant into his open mouth. “You can eat anything once. And you said you always wanted kids.”

“Deathcap” copyright © 2026 by Lara Elena Donnelly
Art copyright © 2026 by Kei-Ella Loewe

Buy the Book

Deathcap

Lara Elena Donnelly

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Deathcap

Lara Elena Donnelly

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• IndieBound
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The post Deathcap appeared first on Reactor.

Original Fiction Space Opera

Blade Through the Heart

Graff and his crew face a particularly nasty challenge – an opponent so low-tech they might just have the advantage in this fight.

Illustrated by Eli Minaya

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Edited by Ann VanderMeer

By Carrie Vaughn

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Published on March 11, 2026

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Graff and his crew face a particularly nasty challenge – an opponent so low-tech they might just have the advantage in this fight.

Novelette | 7,860 words

The three of us perch on a ridiculous tower on an impregnable fortress on an inhospitable planet at the start of an unexpected war. Bombardments pound back and forth on the front lines some ten kilometers away, with primitive gunpowder-launched projectiles, the shit people used to mix up by hand and shove into iron tubes with sticks. It sounds like endless thunder.

“Is this a joke?” Xun asked when we reached the tower after our insertion a few kilometers back on the mountain and got our first look at the local infantry: maybe fifty guys in homespuns carrying spears and swords. We have stun pistols and plasma weapons. We could take over the whole region without effort.

“It’s feudalism,” Brown answered.

Xun huffed. “Yeah, but why?”

“Because when you have a planet like this with shitty conditions and not many resources, people band together for protection, and then one guy takes over everything, and…” He waved his hand at our surroundings, a wordless conclusion.

Except usually, you get a few guys trying to take over everything, and they start fighting with each other, and the Trade Guild medical outreach mission that was here trying to vaccinate children and teach about clean water gets caught in the middle and taken hostage. The Visigoth crew has a pretty specialized skill set, getting into and out of situations like this, both in space and on the ground. What’s upsetting is how busy we are. Modern civilization is supposed to be past shit like this.

Because of the regressive tech here I thought we’d be able to cut a hole in a wall of this place—a castle, an actual damned castle—and walk right in. That’ll teach me. The bulk of the structure is set halfway into a stone cliff. Granite everywhere. It would take a plasma drill to breach the walls. It must have been built during the planet’s early colonization phase, before the society devolved into medieval pastiche. Me being this wrong shouldn’t be that much of a problem. We just have to find another way in, right? It’s not like anyone’s been killed. Yet.

“Xun. Is something off-gassing up ahead?” My helmet and visor make my voice sound too close. There’s got to be some kind of ventilation system around here. She’s taken point and is able to see around the tower’s curve. If there’s a vent, her IR filter will see it.

Xun’s answer comes back over helmet comms. She’s small, wiry, tough, and always sounds a little bit angry. “You can’t see for yourself?”

“You’ve got the same IR filter I do,” I snipe back. “And you’re in front, I can’t see anything.”

“I thought you might have some kind of, I don’t know.”

“Some kind of what?”

“Optical enhancement? Do you even need an IR filter?”

And here it is. We finally come to the threads of tension and annoyance that are making this mission feel like a chore. “No? If I had my own optical enhancement why would I ask you to look?”

“I don’t know, trying to make me work harder?” She seems skeptical.

Brown snorts a cut-off laugh on the channel. The burly combat tech is leaning on the edge of a crenellation, clinging to the stone with his prosthetic right arm. His helmet visor is mirrored over, but I can imagine the smirk on his face.

“Just tell me what you see,” I nag. I’m definitely nagging. “Is there a vent?”

After a pause, she answers. “Yeah. A chimney? Red-hot, a whole plume of smoke.”

Any opening should indicate a weakness, and therefore an opportunity to break in.

“That’s our spot,” I answer, inching forward.

We creep along, clinging to stone that is half natural, half carved into a spikey tower that should have repelled any invaders, but we’ve got micro-grip treads on our boots and gloves, along with whole collections of clamps and pitons keeping us in place. Makes progress slow, but we’re not going to fall. We find a flattened part of the roof where an old-style clay chimney sticks out of a hole drilled into the rock, along with a set of newer steel piping bracketed in place, feeding from various sections of the fortress. Xun gives an analysis of what’s coming out of them: carbon dioxide and various waste from combustion, mostly old-fashioned coal and wood fires. Bits of ash float up on puffs of heated air.

The covers of the chimneys and pipes are rudimentary, just screwed together and lashed with wire. Prying them open exposes a shaft, half stone and half brick, patched in places, piping bracketed together with repairs that have taken place over decades. No obvious way to climb up and down, and I wonder how many maintenance workers have died trying to get up here. My opinion of this planet is getting even worse. I feel like we’re using lasers to invade an anthill. I shouldn’t get overconfident. A blade through the heart probably won’t actually kill me, but it’ll hurt like hell.

Without an obvious ladder, we’re going to have to rappel down. I start pulling ropes and anchors from my belt—and Xun takes them out of my hands.

“I can get that.” She secures the anchors, which is usually my job.

“I suppose you’ll take point, too?” I grouse.

“Yeah. We’ve got it, you keep a lookout.”

So I guess I’m just supposed to sit here. Nothing to see but a bleak, barely habitable landscape stretching in all directions, broken only by lines of crumbling ridges and cliffs. And billowing towers of smoke from the battle, which seem to be coming closer at a noticeable rate.

Xun and Brown prepare the lines, handing off and double-checking clips. As I hook in, Brown triple-checks mine. Then his mirrored visor looks right at mine. Two mirrors reflecting each other.

“You sure you’re okay for this, sir?” Somehow, the sir sounds placating. Condescending.

“I’m fine.”

Xun starts down, and Brown nods. “You next, sir.”

Putting me in the middle like I’m some noob. It’s like they don’t need me at all.

They’re screwing with our usual process. I suspect they’re talking together about me on a private channel. Discussing how to manage me. Whether they can trust me. So I hack into their comms. That is one of my enhancements, that Xun doesn’t even know to ask about.

And…no private channel. Their comms are only operating one channel, the one we’re all on. Trust issues all around, yeah. I’m a jerk.

I start rappelling down. Brown takes the rear and secures the panel behind us. Our helmet lamps light the way. The descent gives me time to stew. I can’t tell if Xun and Brown are worried that I’m not fit enough for the mission. Or if they’ve stopped trusting me entirely. If that’s the case, I can’t blame them. This is our first major ground operation since the crew of the Visigoth learned my secret, and my colleagues are looking at me like I’m not entirely human. Because. Well. I’m not entirely human.

I’m trying to act like everything’s normal, but nothing’s been normal since the accident that blew my guts open and revealed a whole lot of artificial augmentations that are supposed to be illegal in Trade Guild space. They’re not illegal where I come from. Not that that matters, when I’m not what anyone thought I was and my crew doesn’t trust me anymore. Nobody questions the reliability of Brown’s prosthetic arm—it’s a legal augment. Also, he never lied about it.

The accident happened four weeks ago, when an explosion in my runner blew out most of my midsection. Without my rapid-heal augmentations, I wouldn’t have survived to lead this increasingly frustrating hostage rescue. I can’t fault them for questioning everything about me now. I’ve been wondering if staying with the crew is a mistake. If I’ve destroyed the unit cohesion that makes us—made us—successful. Maybe I should have quit the Visigoth when the truth came out and saved everyone the trouble. I knew this was going to cause problems. I knew it would change everything. I just didn’t want to give it all up. That’s me all over, a selfish s.o.b. at heart. If I ever manage to save the world, maybe no one will notice I’m actually a jerk.

Twenty minutes into a hostage rescue is not the time to be regretting recent life choices. I can do that after we get the targets to safety. Talk to Captain Ransom and let him decide if I’m making a mistake by staying. Meanwhile, the larger Trade Guild expeditionary force is on its way, to attempt to contain the fighting. We have a deadline.

The thing about archaic fortresses built in stone is they roughly follow a similar floorplan, even across the centuries and light-years. They’re built along similar tactical and logistical philosophies. They’ll have defensive measures, storage areas, living quarters, and probably large and extraneous ceremonial spaces. There will be wells or springs carrying fresh water. Somewhere near that, we’ll find kitchens. Probably at the other end of some of these chimney pipes.

And somewhere, there will be prison cells where people are kept under lock. Alternatively, high-value prisoners like our hostages might be in regular living quarters. Treated well, as they say. Either way, we expect to find guards between us and them.

If this were a normal site on a normal mission, I could tap straight into the comms and computer networks to locate all the personnel and prisoners, and have any unusual movements nailed down in a second. Xun would ask if that little talent is part of my modifications and I would have to say yes. But the fortress has zero electronic or computerized infrastructure. They probably communicate with homing pigeons or messages tied to arrows.

The bottom of the chimney shaft is about two hundred meters down. A couple of times, explosions hit close enough and big enough to rattle dust and debris on us. We duck our heads and wait it out. At the bottom, Xun steadies the lines while Brown and I unclip. They trade a nod, a couple of hand signals—Xun indicating she’ll take point along the corridor. I put my gloved hand on her arm. She actually flinches.

“I’m still in command,” I whisper. Nothing outside our helmets can hear the comms. I whisper anyway. Reflex. And I maybe want to avoid yelling at them for insubordination.

“Of course,” Brown says, before Xun can spout off. “We’re just…you were flat on your back a couple of weeks ago. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t.” And because I can’t help poking, “You know, if you don’t trust me anymore maybe you should have said so before we landed.” Let’s just get it all out in the open, yeah?

“It’s not that,” Xun says. I expected that line from Brown. I can imagine her expression—screwed up, jaw tight. “It’s…” She trails off. Worse than the flinch.

“We should get moving,” Brown says. “You want point, sir?”

Yeah, I kind of do. I set out, and don’t glance back to see if they’re taking up their usual positions behind me.

Corridors built of stone blocks intersect here, with arched doorways and vaulted ceilings. Oil-lamp sconces light the way at intersections, but their fuel is running low, flames on the wicks sputtering. Our suits have sound-reducing baffling and stealth components; as long as we keep to the shadows, no one will see us. Voices echo ahead, along with pounding footsteps, the noises of anxious preparations, shouted commands and replies. The locals aren’t speaking Prime. Our comms have a translator module loaded with the local dialects, but the words aren’t clear enough to get anything but static.

We follow the pipes, and as I hope, the larger part of the corridor leads to a kitchen. Young men in brown tunics are moving back and forth through the far entrance. I’m guessing that leads to barracks or other living areas. I travel through a different archway, deeper into the fortress. For a time, quiet falls. I’m mapping the passageways as we go, storing our route in my processor for instant recall, for when we need to head back this way.

The shouts start back up; we get to a section of the fortress where guards stand at every archway and intersection, like they’re expecting to be invaded. Preparing for a defense. All men, the soldiers wear leather cuirasses and a variety of scavenged helmets. They’re carrying swords and spears.

We’re still in stealth mode, managing to keep out of sight. If the guards see a flicker of movement, they’ll think it’s a rat. We’ve seen several rats. The tunnel comes to an end up ahead at an archway three times wider than any of the others, and instead of torchlight, some actual natural lighting pours across the stone, from a courtyard or clerestory windows or the like. The light is red, the sun filtered through soot and ash, apocalyptic. A shouting voice echoes against the stone. We’re able to press right up to the archway to take a look.

In the middle of a large hall, half of it open to sky, a guy in a very impressive outfit is screaming at a bunch of kids in cobbled-together armor, carrying edged weapons. I have to pause and unpack the scene.

The screamer, the general or king or whatever, is big and burly looking. If I saw him blustering in a bar I’d probably decide to go somewhere else to drink. He’s wearing a big shaggy fur coat, like it came off a musk ox or woolly mammoth, oily and rough. He wears a pointed crown of bronze, nubbly and spikey. His boots are big and loud, and his grizzled beard has probably never been combed. The translator still can’t pull apart what he’s saying, but it’s pretty clear he’s unhappy and dressing down his minions.

The kids, his personal guard one assumes, aren’t really kids. They just seem like it because they’re smallish, undernourished, and they’re shaking. The swords in their hands are wobbling. They’re probably seventeen to twenty or so, which was the same age I was when I left home, so I understand that they’re looking for glory and honor and whatever their king has told them they would find here. But they should be doing anything other than standing here pissing themselves over this blowhard, who is trying to psych them up for battle. They hold decent swords, shining and sharpened. But it’s laughable. We could hit them all with our stunners and they’d never know what happened.

We don’t want them to know we’ve been here, that’s the goal on this one.

I tap my helmet camera to make sure it’s recording. Not that it’ll change anything or do any good. It’s not like Trade Guild has enough jurisdiction here to hold anyone accountable. But I feel like there ought to be a record.

Xun notices, tilting her head. “I thought you had an implanted camera. Like your eyes record whatever you see.”

And that’s only part of why my people keep what we are secret. Outsiders never understand. “That’s not how it works.”

“You told the captain you record everything—”

“I record my experiences. It’s subjective, not for making records, and I can’t share it.” At least not with unaugmented people from outside. “Look, it’s complicated.”

“If you say so.”

I hate this. We used to be a team. This isn’t the first hostage extraction the three of us have been on. The one before this one was extra complicated. Delightfully complicated. A couple of Trade Guild officers caught by pirates and stashed in a life pod floating in orbit above a minor asteroid around a minor star, waiting to either get ransomed or spaced for their trouble. No airlock or suits to get them out of the life pod. So we arrived and strapped a modified engine to the outside of the pod and steered them out of danger. The three of us were EVA for almost the whole thing. We needed stealth, engineering, speed, comms, the whole package, and we did it all without talking. Just knowing that we could do the job. Trusting.

That was a month before the accident. Now, I think when they look at me they see something else and I don’t know how to fix it.

Quietly, we move around the corner to the next corridor. When we reach a set of narrow stairs leading down, I know we’re in the right place. The cell block is two levels down, and we find the hostages in a stone room bounded with floor-to-ceiling steel bars. Three guards stand on alert.

Xun and Brown trade hand signals. They seem to glance at me as a courtesy, confirming the plan. Sure, why not, I nod back. Our usual jobs, then. The two of them come up behind the guards and place stun pistols on the backs of their necks. The third one gets out half a gasp before Brown takes care of him, too. The three men sink to the floor with sighs. My people haul the slumped-over guards out of the way. Clean, quiet.

Meanwhile I jimmy the cell lock and swing the door wide.

Twelve people are here, most of them resting against the walls or curled on their sides, on dirty straw. We’d been told there were five hostages, so already this is off plan. Those who are awake shake those who aren’t, and soon they’re all sitting up. Their clothes are bloody and torn, their bodies filthy. They all have that ashy sunken look of exhaustion and hunger that shows through no matter their skin colors.

One gets to her feet and approaches. She has tangled red hair held up by what looks like a broken stylus, and she puts herself between me and the group. I recognize her from the briefing: Dr. Avery, head of the medical mission. Just who I’ve been looking for.

Xun starts forward, like she’s going to take point on this too. But over comms I tell her, “I’ve got this.” And what do you know, she backs off.

I pop open my faceplate and try to look nonthreatening, even while I’m keyed up and stressed out and wearing a combat-grade hard-shell environment suit. Avery’s fists are closed, and she’s got this jaw-clenched expression of desperation, like she thinks she’s going to have to fight me, however useless that would be.

“I’m Commander Graff of the TGS Visigoth. This is your rescue.”

She breathes out a sigh and drops to her knees.

We don’t have enough water and ration bars for everyone, but we distribute what we have, just to get people woken up and on their feet. This many hostages changes our escape plan. I don’t think we can bring everyone back to the tower roof for extraction by shuttle. The bombardments are getting closer, and the periodic explosions rattling dust from the ceiling aren’t helping anyone’s mood.

I dig into my very good memory to review the schematic of the tunnel systems, various ingress and egress points, whatever reconnaissance could tell us. We’d skipped ground-level exits before, assuming they’d be too well guarded. I send Brown to scout ahead to find the path of least resistance, with instructions on where the likely exits are.

I tap Xun’s shoulder. “See, that right there is one of my enhancements. Detailed instant memory access? That’s artificial. You didn’t even ask.”

She stares. “I just always thought you had a really good memory.”

“I do.” I’m a little offended.

“Yeah, but not like artificially good.”

If I’ve had it my whole life, is it even artificial?

Avery explains the extra people. They folded a group of Trade Guild diplomatic observers into the medical unit when fighting broke out. They were two hours from a planned extraction when the fortress people captured them.

“I’ve got four injured,” she says, when I ask for a briefing. “Three ambulatory, but one has a broken leg. Stable now, but—”

“Right. It’s fine, this is just the kind of thing we do.” More complications. Wouldn’t want the job to get too easy, right? Kind of thrilling, facing a challenge I know we’re prepared for. Everything would have to go just right for us to pull this off. So we have to make sure it does.

“But there’s just three of you!” She sounds skeptical.

I’m really tired of skepticism just now. “You’ll have to trust me. We’ve done this before.”

“I’m just…depressed that this kind of thing happens that often.”

Yeah. “We need to work out a marching order.”

She’s the kind of person who does better when she has a job, so I’ll have to make sure I keep giving her one. With her help, Xun and I identify the strongest members of her team. These, we assign to helping the injured. We show them how to carry the non-ambulatory one in a sling made of their arms. They’ll switch out every couple of hundred meters, so no pair gets too tired.

At one point, Xun pulls me aside. “How are you holding up?”

I almost snap that I’m fine, I’m stronger than she is, in better shape, no sign of injury except to my pride. I manage to hold back and even smile a little. “I’m good.”

“Hey,” Brown announces over comms before he trots around the corner and we accidentally shoot him. “Stables,” he says brightly. “They’ve got horses and milk cows and shit. Actual shit—they haul it out of an access tunnel. No guards.”

“Hell yeah,” I say. And away we go. I make Brown point, string out the hostages behind him with Xun as escort. Avery and I take rear. I start to argue with her about it—I want to keep everyone else together. But she’s doing the same thing I am, making sure everyone sticks together and watching for stragglers. I don’t want to spend the energy on an argument about it.

Brown says the exit tunnel is a couple hundred meters away. It’s going to be a hell of a trek, and once we get out we still have to get distance between us and the fortress. Twelve people, a third of them injured, make a lot of noise. It’s making me twitch.

We pause the group at each intersection. They’re huffing and malnourished. I worry that one of these stops, we won’t be able to get them started again. Twice, we encounter fortress residents, but they’re unarmed and clearly terrified. Their clothing is rudimentary, shirts and trousers, tunics and skirts, hair braided and tucked up under hats. The first group sees Xun in her shadowy, insect-like black armor, pistol in hand, and they just turn and run. The second group appears to be two women, and they cling together and press themselves to a rough-hewn cave wall. The chicken one of them had been holding drops to the ground, squawking, and flaps away in a flurry of feathers.

This is all so ridiculous.

Xun puts up a calming hand, and I shuffle the hostages along quickly. The women stay frozen, and I wish I could explain that we’re not going to hurt them, but the translator still hasn’t figured out the dialect here. I’m going to have unkind feedback for the briefing files we got on this place.

One of those people, support crew or staff or whatever they are, is going to report us. We don’t have much time.

The floor under us goes wobbly. A full ten seconds of shaking knocks a couple of the group down. Someone screams, quickly cutting off the noise. That was an explosion, and an aftershock reverberates through the walls.

“That was close,” Xun says over the comm.

The fortress is coming under direct bombardment now. Another time crunch. But I don’t think we can move any faster than we are. At last, the tunnel widens. I hear something odd up ahead, some kind of guttural wail echoing against stone.

“What the hell was that?” I comm to Brown.

“Cow, sir.”

Huh. Okay.

We enter a room that’s lined with stalls, and sure enough, a handful of stout, flat-nosed creatures with bulging udders are milling around an enclosure. Across the way a row of smaller enclosures holds horses, much prettier than the cows and much more high-strung. The rumbling of explosions has them riled up. Huffing and snorting, they’re all but bouncing in their confined spaces, their hooves clomping on stone. It’s interesting, but I don’t have time to linger. A big arched doorway leads to the wide-open outdoors. We’re almost out.

Then my suit pings a proximity alert. People, on foot. If I hold my breath, my augmented senses can hear bootsteps on stone. If it’s very quiet, and I focus, I can hear heartbeats.

It’s not that quiet right now.

If we were in civilized space, I would ping whatever tablets and comms they’re using to get exact locations and movements. Hide, let them pass, sneak up behind them, stun them all without fuss. It’s ironic, that with zero tech, these guys have an advantage and don’t even know it.

“Xun, Brown. Take everyone outside.” I glare at Avery and muster all my authority. “You go with the rest, make sure they get out.”

“But—”

“Sir,” Xun replies. I deeply admire her for being able to convey so many different meanings with that single word.

“Opposition’s on the way. I’m running interference. Don’t argue.” My authority is pretty damn fierce when I want it to be.

It turns out we’re all too late for an escape, because a squad of the locals comes pouring in from the tunnel, shouting threats and holding bows and arrows. A few more circle around to our would-be escape route. They’re kids, playing with swords. They don’t act like kids. Their grips on the weapons, their stances—shoulders loose, strides swinging—show that they know what they’re doing. But they’re thin, gangly, not done muscling up. They can’t be more than twenty.

The translator still isn’t working but the tone of the ones shouting is clearly a demand to surrender. Xun and Brown set up a protective shield, hostages between them, their weapons out.

We could stun them all. In one scenario, Xun, Brown, and I just shoot them. Take them all down, no blood shed. That’s how I want to do this, clean and quiet. A couple of those arrows will probably get loosed, and I can gamble they won’t do fatal damage. I’d prefer no one get hurt, us or them. None of this is these guys’ fault.

Then Dr. Avery pushes past Xun. “Please. You have to let us go. Holding us will only hurt you.”

She must think she’s helping, negotiating from a place of desperation. “Doctor, please let me handle this.”

This is when the translator module decides to finally start working and spits out a tinny-sounding version of what I said in the local dialect.

The local soldiers flinch, eyes going buggy and fearful as they mutter among themselves. Like I’ve cast a magic spell. I wonder what I look like to them: something otherworldly, speaking with an artificial hiss. Or maybe I just look like a bad guy.

I take off my helmet. Show them I’m human, like them. Well, maybe not quite like them, but close enough. This gets an even bigger reaction. The guys with the bows and arrows are twitching. The ones with swords look like they want to charge me.

But they’re all looking at me now, and that was the goal.

One of them steps forward. He’s got some metal plates on, hand beaten, put together with leather straps. He might be a year or two older. The commander? Or the only one who’s lived long enough to carry forward any experience?

He speaks, and the translator stutters. “You! Surrender! In the name of Lord King!”

“I’m not doing that,” I say slowly, to give the translator time to process. A moment later the module answers for me.

He seems surprised when the words burble out, when he can understand them. Pleased for a moment, eyes lighting with understanding. “Ah! You will. You invade us. We stop you.”

I trust Xun and Brown to make the same calculations I am. That we can shoot. We can end this quickly. Quickly, but messily. I don’t dare look over at them to try to signal. I have to trust that they understand.

“Come,” the soldier says, determined. “You come. With me. Offerings to Lord King.”

Everything I learned about this Lord King in the briefing suggests he doesn’t deserve offerings. But he’s all this kid knows. What else is he supposed to do? If I make any move with my weapon, make any gesture, he’ll charge, and all his soldiers with him. A regular melee.

“You. My prisoners. Or I kill,” he says, hefting his sword.

I get an idea. Xun and Brown aren’t going to like it. But it’ll keep this from turning into an all-out battle.

“No. I challenge you.” I thump my chest. If I’m reading this guy, this whole culture right, this’ll work. “Single combat. Sword to sword.”

The locals get restless. A couple of them toss out comments—they’re talking over each other, the translator can’t sort them out. But the guy in front of me answers firmly. “Quiet! My choice alone.”

Ah, there it is. Fire, determination. What’s more impressive than bringing prisoners to Lord King? Defeating the hated enemy in single combat.

“You and I can settle this,” I say. “If I win, they go free.”

“You lose, they are prisoners.” He points to the hostages, to Xun and Brown.

“All right,” I say. Because I can’t lose. Right?

Xun pops her visor to tell me off. “Graff. The hell. You don’t have to be a freaking hero.”

“Yes I do.” I throw her my stupid grin. “You know I can’t get hurt.”

“That’s a lie,” she snorts. And, well, she’s right.

The locals clear a space in the middle of the aisle. The livestock are still rustling nervously, and the explosions are still punching the air intermittently.

“I need to borrow a sword,” I say, holding out my hand.

The guy, this kid, this brave stupid kid, steps forward and hands me his own, hilt first. I take it, nodding. One of his men passes over another one for him to use.

“Sir, I could just stun him,” Xun says.

“Don’t,” I order. “I want him to know that we’re people of our word. That we can be trusted.” The translator repeats this. My opponent narrows his gaze, uncertain. He’s got pale, windblown skin. Everyone here has a kind of permanent sunburn. His hair is dark, braided back. He’s one of the few here with a beard, rough and curly. So few of the fighters here have beards.

He nods at me. “You. Without shell. Make it fair.”

Ah, he recognizes it’s not a fair fight. Well, all right then. I take off my armor, which is a bit of a production, unsnapping releases and connectors. The guy seems fascinated, watching an ordinary-seeming man emerge from beetle-like plates. I have to acknowledge the aesthetic choices that went into designing our field suits, making them streamlined and otherworldly, dark and shining. We hit that old idea of the uncanny valley, simultaneously familiar and alien. It’s designed to scare people. I’m left in a matte black undersuit, fitted but wrinkled around the joints. I look undeniably human.

This time, I glare at Xun before she can complain, and she doesn’t speak.

The guy approaches, hefting his sword in an easy grip, grinning like he finally understands the situation. Ell would kill me if he knew I was doing this. Well, not really. The Visigoth’s doctor hasn’t killed anything in his life as far as I know. But he’d be very upset with me if he knew I was putting myself in danger. On purpose, I mean. I’m hard to kill, but I’m not indestructible. I’m in love with Ell, and I’m the luckiest jerk in the galaxy that he’s in love with me. Somehow, that survived me spilling my artificial guts out on his operating table.

He’ll never forgive me if, when, I actually die.

But I’m not going to die, not right now, like this. I’m sure of it. “Right, kid. Show me what you can do.”

“I’m not a kid!” the translator spits angrily.

And that’s the part of my brain that deals with morality and ethics breaking. Breaking a little more, rather. What I’m feeling now, how bad I’m feeling, it all goes into my processor. That’s what gets recorded. What I couldn’t explain to Xun. The rest is dry facts.

“I really don’t want to do this.”

He laughs. “You a coward.”

I’m way past a taunt like that having an impact. “Irrelevant,” I say.

Snarling, he gets ready to charge. “For the honor of Lord King!”

I get my sword up to block his wildly telegraphed attack. And we’re off, him swinging crazily, maybe hoping to overpower me. His men are cheering him on, shouting approval at each blow they think is going to land. I block every single blow, scooting back until I reach a wall and can’t anymore. He’s not faster than me; he’s not stronger than me. I could stand here blocking all day, he’ll never get inside my guard. He’ll tire out before I will. I just have to wait him out.

The thing is, he’s good. He’s putting crazy force and speed into his attack, trying to shock and overpower me before I can organize a response, but the blows are controlled, aimed. He’s choosing his lines. He fights like he’s been training his whole life. That makes me just as sad as the rest of it.

I hold my ground. He’s giving me a good enough fight that I can’t really take time to talk. We should be able to talk this out. I just want to leave with my charges alive and safe. But to him, that would represent failure. Compromise is extraordinarily difficult when two sides are operating on entirely different value systems.

I would bargain with his life, but he doesn’t seem to value it.

He’s getting tired, his steps stumbling. The pauses before he raises the weapon again are getting fractionally longer. I keep up my guard. I take him seriously because I don’t want him to think I’m mocking him. I just want him to stop.

When he’s gasping for breath, when sweat mats his hair to his face and he pauses to swipe a sleeve over his eyes, I rush him. Exhaustion has gotten him. He loses his footing.

I beat his sword away and fall on top of him, knee into his stomach, hand on his neck, my own sword threatening. “I win. Now, I need you to not come after me. Got it?” The translator is full of static, like it’s just as worn out as we are.

He writhes, struggling to break out of my grip—and then wrenching pain hits me.

That was the knife from his belt going into my belly. A good hit, and he doesn’t just stab; he twists and drags, a movement that will open my gut and pull out my innards. If I had the standard gut and innards.

If I back off, he’ll follow up with something worse. So I can’t move, can’t let him go, and he’s not letting up. The knife goes deeper, and blood is pouring. He’s already soaked in it, and I’m feeling wet and squishy. The local soldiers cheer wildly. They’re waiting for me to fall over.

I’m out of time. I need to get my people out of here. I squeeze his neck to cut off his blood supply. He chokes, bucking a couple of times, still trying to throw me off. At last, he passes out.

The chamber falls silent. A whole crowd, waiting to figure out who lost. I’m not sure myself.

I fall back, dizzy, angry, ugly with the mess of it. The knife is angled under my ribs, right up to the hilt. The skin around it is flapping open. My self-repair system is screaming, working to stem the flow of blood and put the pieces back together. It can’t do much about the pain right now—there’s just so much of it. If I could sit here for an hour or two, I’ll be fine. But I can’t.

The soldiers are jostling, as if they can’t figure out whether to rush me or flee. Still waiting for me to die. They must be so confused.

Xun’s the one who finally rushes to me, swearing. The visor of her helmet’s still open. Her expression is pursed with anguish. “Doctor! Get over here!” Avery starts toward us, before I wave her off.

“No,” I mutter. Avery’s a doctor, and she’ll try to doctor all over me, dammit. “No, I’m fine. Got it?”

Our gazes meet. For just a moment, Xun’s confused. She’s going to reflexively argue like always. But then she nods, settling into determination. This is a secret. She knows it’s a secret, and she understands. Finally.

I yank out the knife, throw it away, and cover the wound with my forearm as best I can. Laugh a little, but the sound comes out whiney. “Just a scratch. Seriously.” I’m sitting in a damned pool of blood. It’s not just a scratch.

“Graff, you’re always pulling shit like this,” Xun mutters, maybe a little too forcefully.

The kid should be sitting up by now, as blood hits his brain again. But he isn’t. He’s very quiet. I hold my breath a moment.

His heart isn’t beating. “Him,” I tell Avery. “Look at him, he needs help.”

She checks his neck, listens for breathing, and shakes her head.

“Then do something!” I say. “Chest compressions, something—”

“We need to go, Graff,” Xun calls.

Shit. Shit shit shit. “Okay. Xun, Brown, get them out of here. Here, get my armor.” I hand pieces to Avery, who gathers them up.

The soldiers stay put. Stay silent. They just stand there and watch us go, because that was the deal. I hold back a moment and retrieve the kid’s sword. Put it on his chest, touch his cheek. As much of a salute as I can manage. I study him. I’ll remember him forever.

Now let’s see if I can walk without letting on how bad it is. I succeed, nominally.

“You’re going to need surgery,” Avery says tightly. She looks like she wants to help, sling my arm over her shoulder and support me as I limp out of here. Fortunately, she can’t, because she’s got my armor.

“Yeah, yeah, sure.”

The local soldiers part and let us go.  

Xun and Brown are waiting about a hundred meters outside the stable entrance, with the former hostages under their watch. The bombardment is now striking the next ridge over. The tower where we’d started this whole party is gone. Maybe the kid would have died anyway. We’re saving a few hostages because they’re ours. But we’re leaving a whole planet to burn.

I’ll think about it later.

Xun steps up to my side and doesn’t have any qualms about pulling my arm over her shoulder to haul me away. “Extraction point is under attack. The expedition regulars are here mounting a defense. It’s a mess.”

“But we got out,” I sigh. “Mission successful.”

“Yeah, yeah, saved all our asses, very nice. Hey, Graff? You okay?”

I scrub my eyes with the back of my hand. “I couldn’t think of anything else. The kid…I didn’t mean to. I didn’t.”

“I know, sir.”

A MilDiv shuttle belonging to the expeditionary force that is now blockading the planet has parked on a patched-together landing pad at the opening of a gully, as defensible as they can make it. An energy shield shimmers over the site, and a couple of gun placements lob shock blasts in the direction of the battle. Along with a couple dozen armored MilDiv troops, a couple hundred local soldiers are milling, and another hundred are laid out, bloody and injured. I can’t tell what side they’re from. Maybe both.

As we hobble up, Brown takes point and waves for help, but Avery preempts him. She thinks she’s in charge.

“Medic! I have wounded!”

Suddenly Ell is right in front of me. Well, not suddenly, he marches out of a collection of stretchers and busted-open medical kits, all business, all professional. I can’t help but smile, I love it when he’s working hard and being competent.

Avery pokes at me. “He’s wounded.”

“I’m running triage here,” Ell says tiredly. He’s got blood on his coveralls and a surgical mask hanging around his neck.

“And he’s a yellow! He needs help!”

Ell meets my gaze. I just want to kiss him silly, and I’m probably wearing a goofy grin, and we don’t have time for any of that, so I just say. “I’m green.”

“You’re gutted!” Avery says, horrified. “He’s got a ten-centimeter abdominal laceration with intestinal damage! I don’t know how he’s even walking!”

All right, so maybe I didn’t hide the injury as well as I thought I had. I suspect Ell wants to ask what exactly happened, but he doesn’t have time. I say, very calmly through the pain, “Green.”

“Right.”

“Ell,” I burst. It’s about to all come out. “I killed him. This kid. I didn’t mean to.”

He peels off a sterile glove and cups my cheek, which is scratchy with stubble. I feel all his concern in the touch. “We’ll talk later,” he says. Triage, right. I’m a green. I can wait. “Xun, Brown, take him over there, get some food and water into him.”

He points at a lean-to out of the way of the rest of the chaos, where a dozen people with cuts and abrasions and maybe a broken bone or two—all the greens—are slumped on the ground and on cots, waiting patiently. Most of the activity is around a tent under a sterilization field. A surgery unit.

Avery stares at Ell like he’s insane. “But—”

“Avery, right? You’re a doctor?” he asks firmly. “I could really use your help in surgery. This way.” He turns back to the tent.

“I’m fine,” I tell Avery, then shrug a little as I amend, “I’ll be fine.” The wound is already half healed. I don’t want to have to explain. She might be crying a little, when she goes after Ell.

I’m about to repeat to Xun and Brown that I’m fine, that I can get my own water, but without a word they haul my arms over their shoulders and walk me over.

At this point, all I really want to do is sit down. So I do, pulling away from them and sinking to the ground, leaning against an equipment case. The pair of them sink right along with me. We all lose our helmets and help each other peel out of our armor. The headband holding back Xun’s dark hair is damp, and Brown’s beard is dripping, sweat stains darkening spots on his undersuit. My face itches; I think there’s some blood drying on it.

“Well, that was fun,” Brown says, deadpan. We’re too tired to laugh at the bad joke.

Someone hands us bottles of water, and that’s really all I need, to get some fluids so my repair system has something to work with. It’ll go faster now that I’m still.

“Are you really okay?” Xun asks, and I almost shoot back a sarcastic question, asking if she really cares.

I reveal my midsection, the cut in my shirt that’s soaked in blood, and the skin underneath, already sporting a pinkish, peeling welt of a scar. It’ll be gone by the end of the day.

“Well. There you go,” she says flatly.

“That’s never not going to be weird,” Brown says.

We’re sitting shoulder to shoulder. They’re not looking at me in horror. It’s something.

“Fighting that guy was stupid,” Xun says.

I shrug. “Yeah. But no one else got hurt.”

“Okay, sure.”

I sigh. “I should probably go explain to Avery that I’m not dead before she tries to revoke Ell’s certification for screwing up a triage assessment.”

“She wouldn’t.”

“She’s a crusader. She might.”

A box of ration bars appears. I devour three, and my insides stop feeling like goo.

Things calm down. The last blast shook the ground thirty-six minutes ago. We’re the last of the wounded to arrive. Maybe it’s over. I’m expecting Xun and Brown to get up and leave, go check in with Captain Ransom or help with the mopping up. But they stay close, and I’m grateful.

“Hey,” I say suddenly. “Preliminary debrief. Are we okay? I mean operationally. Other than me getting in an unnecessary fight, did everything go okay?”

Brown tilts his head thoughtfully. Xun opens her mouth to speak, hesitates, and tries again. “Here’s the thing. I have to reassess everything about you. Your memory, your reflexes, your strength. Every time you had a hand over a wound and insisted you were fine, you were hiding, weren’t you? Lying.”

I guess I do get hurt kind of a lot. I know I can take damage. It affects the risk assessment calculations. “Yeah.”

She shakes her head. “I always thought you were just a reckless bastard with a whole lot of luck.”

“You’re not wrong there. It’s also a whole lot of engineering.”

“You take unnecessary risks, sir.” This sir is an accusation.

“Sometimes they’re necessary.”

“I’d be more angry but you’re always putting yourself between the explosions and everyone else.”

It’s Brown who asks, “How much damage can you take before it kills you?”

I don’t really think about that. If I did, I might hesitate. “If something happens to my brain, crushed skull, that kind of thing, I’m done.” This is operational information. They need to know this. To help with risk assessment.

“Your augmented bits?” he asks.

“My processor—the memory storage—is tucked in behind my sternum. It’s a black box, designed to survive almost anything. So it can get back home.” The memories, the experience, back home to the archives. That’s the whole point.

“Huh,” he says. I have no idea what he’s thinking. He hands me another bottle of water.

Xun studies me, likely trying to imagine what it all looks like. She saw part of it—she was one of the people who pulled me out of my runner when it blew. It’s too weird. She finds it appalling. She’ll never look at me the same.

Then she pats my knee. “Well. Keep your helmet on, sir.”

I smile. “Plan to.”

“Blade Through the Heart” copyright © 2026 by Carrie Vaughn, LLC
Art copyright © 2026 by Eli Minaya

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Blade Through the Heart

Carrie Vaughn

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Carrie Vaughn

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Original Fiction historical mystery

Of Two Bloods

Chronicling the secret exploits of the great detective’s illegitimate, but highly observant, younger…sibling…

Illustrated by Katherine Lam

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Edited by Aislyn Fredsall

By Nisi Shawl, Cynthia Ward

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Published on February 18, 2026

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Chronicling the secret exploits of the great detective’s illegitimate, but highly observant, younger…sibling…

Novelette | 9,450 words

Paul Chambers emerged from behind the silently opened door. “Your secret is safe with me,” he said.

The young man Chambers addressed started guiltily, half rising from his wing-back chair. “What secret?”

“The secret which our…colleague…threatened to reveal. Your race.”

Royal Bridges flushed angrily. “You—listener at keyholes! You spy!”

Chambers shrugged his slim shoulders. “Spy? Not quite. But I hardly need be anything of the sort to have overheard Mr. Spencer bellowing about your ‘dirty black secret.’ Tell me, do you really intend to help him with his inheritance problem? Investigating such matters is by no means your métier.” Descending the two steps to their shared parlor, the young medical student took the twin to Bridges’s seat. “Or do you have some other means of defending your reputation against his demands?”

Bridges sank back into the shelter of his chair, covering his face with large hands. “No. No defenses against him, and no means of assisting him in his fight with his late uncle’s alleged wife. I’m no attorney. I’ll have to trust Spencer—though God knows why I should.” He raised a suddenly bloodless face. “Or, come to think of it, why should I trust you? We only met a little over a month ago. You’re not even American!”

Chambers smiled, but not, it seemed, at his fellow student. “If you were provided with the means to assist Spencer, would you?”

Bridges groaned. “But how? He expects me to find proof his uncle never married this housekeeper of his. A negative—”

“—is notoriously difficult to prove. Yes. But if you could—”

“My heritage would no doubt be revealed at any rate. It’s too scandalous a secret for him to keep it.”

“Then there’s no point in me offering you my assistance.” Chambers’s expressive eyes made this statement a question.

“Your assistance? But why should a wealthy Brit—”

“Son of a wealthy Englishman. And illegitimate,” Chambers added, self-deprecatingly.

“Still, why should you care about a quadroon’s fate? It’s ruin for me, to be sure, but for you? Granted you’ll be seen as a dupe, but that’s no reason to involve yourself.” Bridges shook his close-cropped curls. “Best start packing up your belongings tonight. I’m to give Spencer my answer in the morning.”

“Tell him yes.”

“I can’t!” Surging to his feet, Bridges stormed back and forth before the empty hearth. “I can’t, don’t you see?” Twice he passed the calm face of his apartment-mate, then whirled to confront him. “I don’t have the least idea how to begin!”

“But I do, thanks to special…training as a child.”

“You! I say again, why should it be any concern of yours if I am expelled from school, driven from this house, shunned by all my former friends—”

“Why? Merely because of this.” And raising one gloved hand, the young Chambers removed a handkerchief from his breast pocket with a flourish, then wiped the white silk delicately along one high, ivory cheekbone. Where the silk had passed, the skin was darker than Bridges’s own.

“Mr. Spencer,” Bridges said, gesturing to the empty wing-back chair, “if you would kindly take a seat—”

“We have no business to discuss,” the young man said furiously, “in the presence of a third party.”

The small, almost dainty figure seated in the second wing-back chair spoke. “You’ve already discussed your business in the presence of a third party.”

Spencer’s head jerked back. Then his eyes narrowed to an obsidian glitter and he turned to face Bridges directly. “I told you this conversation was to remain between us!”

“I occupy the apartment’s other bedroom,” Chambers said. “Sir, the difficulty would have been not to hear your rather forcefully stated case.”

A pallor came over Spencer’s strong-boned countenance, perhaps at the realization that his demands of the previous evening might not be in accord with laws governing extortion in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

“Rest assured,” Chambers continued, “I am already privy to your mission, and—”

“And you’re going to try blackmailing me with what you think you might have overheard?” Spencer interrupted, with a bitter laugh. “My late father left me a very modest estate, and it is already close to exhaustion.”

“Mr. Spencer, you mistake my intention,” Chambers said. “I am offering to be of assistance in proving your claim to your late uncle’s estate.”

“I recognize you now,” Spencer said, eyes narrowing again to glittering black slits. “You’re that English fop who’s a couple years ahead of Bridges in the medical school. Some toff’s by-blow, everybody says. Why would any white man, even illegitimate, come to the aid of a subhuman like Bridges?”

“As you might imagine,” Chambers said, “the issue of inheritance cuts very close to the heart of a man who’ll never inherit his natural father’s wealth. I’ll not stand idly by and watch a man cheated out of an inheritance rightfully his.”

Spencer belatedly removed his top hat and used his free hand to push a spill of straight black hair off his brow. “Here.” He thrust the hat into Bridges’s hands as if he were a servant, then extended one broad hand toward Chambers. “Of course.” His accent was Boston Brahmin. “Of course you’d help a fellow white man. Forgive me—”

“Mr. Paul Chambers.” Chambers rose to shake the offered hand, which responded with a crushing grip. Chambers’s expression did not change.

“I’m R. Howard Spencer, Junior,” Spencer said, releasing Chambers’s fine-boned hand to sink into the chair Bridges had offered.

“Delighted, Mr. Spencer.” Chambers resumed his own seat. “To proceed. In order to investigate the marital claim of your late uncle’s housekeeper, Mr. Bridges and I will need more information—”

“What?” Spencer’s face darkened. “What more do you need than the names of my uncle and his housekeeper?”

“That will become clear,” Chambers said, “as Mr. Bridges and I ask our questions. It’s better for us to have too much information than not enough.”

“Of course,” Spencer said, irritably raking a hand through his thick dark hair. “Proceed.”

Chambers turned slightly in the chair so he faced both Spencer and Bridges.

“Mr. Spencer,” Bridges said, “what is the housekeeper’s name?”

“She calls herself Lucia Spencer, as if that Italian trollop has any claim to my family name,” Spencer said. “Her real name’s Lucia Giuliano. Straight off the boat from Sicily or some other degenerate clime I’ll warrant—”

“You refer to Dr. Agassiz’s theories of the polygenetic origins of the human family?” Chambers said mildly. “We’re familiar with them, thank you. Whether or not they’re true, can you can confirm that your late uncle’s housekeeper is at any rate an immigrant?”

“I don’t know,” Spencer said. “What else could she be? When I think of the way these d___ degenerates are overrunning this fine land and polluting our good Anglo-Saxon stock—”

“I take it,” Chambers said, “your uncle had children by his housekeeper?”

“Of course not!” Spencer burst out. “The wench is childless. Anyway, a fine, upstanding merchant like Uncle Will—William Francis Spencer—would never have debased himself by touching a subhuman woman. Whatever gave you such a disgusting idea?”

“Not all men hold to such ideals of purity,” Chambers said.

“How long was Lucia in your uncle’s employ?”

“Much of my life. I’m eighteen, so—” Spencer fell silent, calculating. “She was in his service twelve years.”

“Did she reside with your uncle,” Chambers said, “or—”

“All my uncle’s domestics lived downstairs.” Spencer gave a fashionable address on Beacon Street.

“Then the twelve years of Miss Giuliano’s service were spent entirely in Boston?” Bridges said.

“Yes,” Spencer said. “Uncle Will became wealthy as a trading man, traveling the world. Retired, settled in that fine house in Back Bay, and hired a domestic staff. They included Lucia Giuliano.”

“And is Miss Giuliano still in residence?” Bridges asked.

“My lawyer got her kicked out.” Spencer’s face was stony. “She’s got no right to be there. Or to keep me out. But her lawyer’s got the house tied up so I can’t move in.”

“Lawyers,” Chambers said, shaking his head. “I sympathize with your trials, Mr. Spencer. They are considerable.”

“Very true, Mr. Chambers,” Howard said. “None can know how I suffer. And when I leave here, it is to see them again.”

“I regret that we have so few questions left with which to detain you from such unpleasant company.”

“That’s quite all right.” Spencer favored Chambers with a rueful smile. “I’m grateful for anything you can do to end my dependence on legal counsel and gain me my inheritance.”

“That brings us to the matter of your uncle’s last will and testament,” Chambers said. “I take it there is none?”

Spencer smirked. “Indeed, there is not.”

“Are you sure?” Chambers said.

“Uncle Will never got around to preparing one. His law firm served my late parents, and also serves me.” Spencer smiled. “I have my information on good authority.”

Chambers inclined his head.

“Your uncle was a traveling man, Mr. Spencer,” Bridges said. “But he was born in Boston?”

“Uncle Will and my father—he was Uncle Will’s younger brother—moved down from Maine—Portland, it was—before they were twenty. My father came to study law at Harvard, but Uncle Will never gave a d___ about school. He found work on a clipper, did well enough to acquire his own ship and become a merchant himself.” Spencer’s voice grew harsh. “Did very well, indeed. But never married, never had any children. I’m his brother’s only child, so I’m the heir. But now that he’s passed away”—his complexion grew bright—“that Italian b___ is trying to defraud me with her false claim that they were married.”

Chambers rose, extending his small hand. “Rest assured, Mr. Spencer,” Chambers said, “Mr. Bridges and I will do everything in our power to see that your Uncle William’s estate goes to the rightful heir.”

A pair of pewter tankards clashed in the tobacco-fogged air. “To wives and sweethearts: May they never meet!” The stout, sandy-haired man on the other side of their time-polished table waited for Chambers’s and Bridges’s polite laughter, then gulped his beer.

“Pity you can’t join us, Mr. Chambers. The Liberty Bush serves a rare fine ale—almost as good as one out of your English breweries.”

Chambers met the man’s questioning gaze head on. “Yes, well, it’s no doubt better than this”—he swirled a tarry liquid in a narrow glass—“spirit, shall we call it? But my poor constitution won’t allow me to share your pleasure. Though if you’ll pardon my abstention, I’ll stand the two of you another round.” Ignoring Bridges’s sudden glowering, he signaled for the serving girl.

The order placed, Chambers turned once again to Carteret, as the sandy man was called. “So you served under Captain Spencer for—how many years?”

“Signed on as cabin boy in 18__. Twenty-six years that’d be, till I give my notice as first mate on hearin he was sellin his ships and investin the proceeds. He was a wonderful easy master, Captain Spencer, and I couldn’t see workin for any other.”

“A longstanding acquaintance, then. What did you know of his marriage to an Italian named Lucia?”

“An Eye-talian? Aye, likely he had one of them—maybe that North End gal he hired to take care of his house and such? She’s the only one I remember. Built like a brick s___house.”

Bridges leaned forward. “But was he married to her? It’s the relationship’s legal standing we’re interested in.”

Doubt wrinkled Carteret’s forehead. “Wonderful easy he was about that sort of thing. Wouldn’t have been any trouble for him gettin married to her, I guess, like he done with some of the others.”

“‘Some of—of the others’? Do you mean to tell us—”

Chambers silenced Bridges by laying a hand on his arm. “How many others were there—whom you yourself observed?”

“Well—” The response was delayed by the arrival of the freshly ordered beer. Bridges shoved his new tankard across to Carteret and received a matter-of-fact nod in acknowledgement. “My sincere thanks to you both, gentlemen. And here’s your health.” He raised his second tankard, drained it, set it down to one side, and wrapped a sunburnt hand around the third. “To answer your in-choir-ee, I didn’t see the need to keep a strict accounting.”

Over the next quarter hour, Carteret regaled the amateur investigators with a tale of approximately a dozen close female companions to his captain, met in port and under sail. At least half of these the crew had addressed as “Mrs. Spencer,” by custom if for no other reason. Others had gone under more colorful sobriquets.

They left Carteret in possession of two more pints, themselves not much the wiser as to anything except the rather salacious details he’d retained of the companions’ physical attributes. Long, dark hair seemed to be a trait all had shared—“Though whether straight or curly didn’t make much difference,” the former first mate noted. A predilection for the Junoesque could also be discerned, as Bridges told Chambers on their way home. “But what good that will do us I can’t say.”

“Can’t you? I suppose it isn’t very helpful. But we did discover something as to their countries of origin, their Christian—or ought we rather to say their given—names, and, most importantly, the order in which these lovely women appeared in their role as the captain’s lady.”

“I’m sorry,” Bridges said, “but I remain unclear on the relevance of the sequence of the captain’s early loves to Spencer’s claim on his uncle’s estate.”

“If I may clarify in a word?” Chambers said.

“By all means.”

“Bigamy.”

Bridges stared at Chambers for several seconds. His lips were parted, his eyes wide. Chambers smiled faintly.

“Of course!” Bridges said. “Even should the Italian girl produce a legitimate marriage license, it would be invalidated if her husband were previously married and never divorced.”

“And,” Chambers added, “if we find evidence of such.” He resumed walking.

They ascended the stone steps to the house where they rented their rooms. Bridges dropped his key as he took it from his pocket. Chambers bent first to retrieve it, causing Bridges to rather embarrassingly bump his nose against the back of the Britisher’s neck. The jolt he felt must have been caused by the blow to his pride, for there was little pain. Both apologized.

As they climbed to their upper-story flat, Bridges picked up the thread of their conversation again. “Yes, I can see that the earlier the marriage in such a series, the more likely its legitimacy,” he admitted.

Chambers inclined his head. “We’ll start with the earliest two.”

“With only two predecessors to Miss Giuliano to investigate, I suppose we should count ourselves lucky,” Bridges continued. “We may even finish before end-of-term. It won’t matter one jot that her marriage lines disappeared in a fire at the state archives. Young Spencer’s lawyers might have saved themselves the trouble of corroborating that disappearance with the housekeeper’s counsel.”

Carefully stripping his gloves, Chambers disposed of them neatly inside his hat. “Ah. But if we disprove Miss Giuliano’s claim via this route, it will be due to validating the claim of another. Have you thought of what our colleague’s reaction will be to that?”

The next afternoon, as the autumn sun slanted toward the west, Bridges entered the apartment. He found the parlor empty and Chambers’s bedroom door closed. Bridges went to his apartment-mate’s door and called, “Back from classes. And you?”

“Back, although not from classes,” replied Chambers’s voice from within. “Cables have been dispatched to the last known whereabouts of the Indian woman in Seattle and the Chinese woman in Macau. I also telegraphed some contacts my half brother has—a newspaper reporter in Seattle, a Portuguese colonial official in Macau.”

“You speak Portuguese?”

“And write it,” Chambers’s voice replied. “We’re a polyglot lot, my family. After departing the telegraph office I paid a visit to the late sea captain’s fine Back Bay home. All his servants have been released to seek new employment at locations unrevealed. Fortunately, the adjoining neighbor’s house girl proved quite garrulous.”

“She told you where the servants have gone?”

“She had no idea,” Chambers’s voice replied. “She also had no idea whence the alleged wife has taken herself. But she was quite convinced that Miss Giuliano was Captain Spencer’s wife. She also offered a significant piece of new information.”

“What is that?” Bridges said. “And why are we straining our voices in this manner? Why, pray tell, must you give me information through your closed door?”

“The reason for that will be made clear directly,” said Chambers’s voice. “As for the new information: It seems that when Miss Giuliano entered Captain Spencer’s home twelve years ago, she brought with her a younger sister, a five-year-old named Maria Teresa, whom she and the captain raised as a daughter. And the talkative servant told me where we might find this sister.”

“She would be seventeen now,” Bridges calculated. “Of marriageable age. Is she still in Boston?”

“She is indeed. And unmarried.”

“Her maiden state may present some difficulties,” Bridges said, “for two unknown men attempting to pay a call.”

“More than you have imagined.” Chambers’s voice sounded amused. “Maria Teresa Giuliano resides at a convent school. Which is why I have adopted measures you will find to be of an extremely shocking nature. Brace yourself. Are you ready?”

“More than ready,” Bridges replied in a bored drawl.

Chambers’s door swung open.

If Bridges had appeared thunderstruck at the notion that bigamy would save his career at Harvard, he now took on the semblance of a man who’d just received irrefutable proof that ghosts were real, or discovered an antediluvian monster stepping into his parlor. His mouth dropped opened, his hand flew to his chest, and he reeled backward as if he had received a tremendous physical blow. His heel struck an object and he fell back, arms flailing, to land in the seat of his wing-back chair.

Finally he spoke, but almost inaudibly. “Chambers? But—no!” His voice was gaining strength and volume, and perhaps the slightest note of panic. “Where are you hiding, Chambers? This—this beautiful woman simply cannot—cannot—be you!”

“And yet—” said the handsome, ivory-complected woman, perfectly coiffed, and dressed in the height of fashion from her hat and wig to her gloves and shoes, dipping a graceful curtsey as she spoke, “—and yet, Chambers c’est moi, Monsieur Bridges.”

“But—but—this is impossible!” Bridges said. “If I saw you on the streets, I would never believe—I cannot believe, even knowing—Paul, I would swear on the Good Book and my own dead mother’s soul that you are a woman.”

“Well,” Chambers said modestly, “I can only say I’ve learned from the best. My half brother is acclaimed on two continents as a master of disguise.”

“Your half brother is a master of disguise?” Bridges said. “And your family is a bunch of polyglots. And you study medicine, but investigate like a seasoned Pinkerton operative, and you received ‘special training as a child.’ And you’re of the British elite—Dear God above”—Bridges surged to his feet—“you’re a Holmes!”

“In all but name.” There was the faintest note of sorrow in Chambers’s voice. “Now,” he said more briskly, “we’ll need to leave separately. You will wait here several minutes, then rendezvous with me at the entrance to Sanders Theatre. It’s fortunate we reside in Cambridge, where women walking alone aren’t a novel sight. But if you’re seen escorting a woman from our apartment, you may not need young Mr. Spencer to get you kicked out of Harvard.”

“Understood,” Bridges said forcefully.

“Also,” Chambers added, extending an iron buttonhook, “I’ve been able to fasten the stays of my corset well enough, I believe, for an evening’s deception. But for the sake of speed I simply must have your assistance in buttoning my boots.”

Bridges bent to the task. His face was hidden, but a betraying flush colored with scarlet the very tips of his ears.

The sitting room in which Maria Teresa Giuliano was to receive her callers was plainly furnished but almost painfully clean. Examining the sill outside the spotless windowpanes—ceaseless observation being a habit ingrained in him by his famous older brother—Chambers noted that it, too, was free of the sooty residue so common to urban environments. Satisfied in his comprehension of the room’s orientation in relation to the street, he took his seat beside a pie-crust table that he might have a resting place for his reticule. In keeping with his current public role, he spread his gathered skirts with care so they wouldn’t be creased or crushed by his sitting.

The room’s one door opened to admit a tall, sturdy-looking young woman with a smoothly restrained and unfashionably severe hairstyle: a low chignon. A nun followed her and stationed herself at the exit as if to prevent her charge’s escape—or the escape of anyone.

“How do you do?” A brief curtsey, and a bow from Bridges in response; Chambers rose and executed his own greetings as he’d been taught. “You must be Miss Pauline Chambers, and Mr. Royal Bridges? And of course I’m Maria Teresa Giuliano, and this is Mother Anna Elizavetta. Tell me, how do you come to know my sister?”

“We don’t,” said Chambers, smiling so gently as to remove from the words any hint of contradicting harshness. “We merely wish to confirm with you some facts pertaining to her claim to be married to Captain William Spencer—”

“Her ‘claim’! You would dispute it? But it is truth!” Giuliano had not seated herself; she stood like a figurehead, braving invisible disdain. “Whom do you represent—the Chinese woman? But she is dead, died without issue!”

 “No, no!” Bridges started forward, hands stretched out and patting the air as if to calm it. “Quite otherwise—we wouldn’t dream of distressing you in such a manner. We only—”

The girl ignored him. “You!” She threw herself to her knees at Chambers’s feet. “You are a woman, and gently bred, I can tell at a glance. Have pity—don’t let my sister be slandered so! Her name dishonored—and we would lose everything, all she has worked for. All! All! Surely you understand….” Harsh sobs obscured the rest of her speech.

Taking the advantage granted by his dress, Chambers seized Giuliano by both her plump hands and dragged her unresisting from her pose of supplication. “You must be strong for Miss Lucia,” he admonished her. “Here. Dry your tears and quiet your mind. We mean you no harm.” Chambers’s silk handkerchief reappeared, now scented with violets.

Composing herself with this aid and a glass of wine procured at the orders of the attendant nun, Giuliano at length proved a fount of information—none of which would aid Spencer. She knew where her sister had fled, but would not share this intelligence. She had seen the papers her sister kept carefully locked in a steel box, and believed them genuine. She was entirely confident they must include both a private copy of the marriage license and the captain’s will; however, she reluctantly admitted she had not herself seen them. More, she had celebrated Mass with both her sister and the captain hundreds of times over her twelve years in the Spencer household, with attending clergy according every appearance of accepting the bond’s legitimacy. The Macau Chinese wife—partner in an earlier liaison, but deceased—she knew of from a shrine-like arrangement in the captain’s study: a small table where novenas burned continuously, and an imposingly large portrait hung on the wall above it among the old man’s ubiquitous charts and maps. When Chambers expressed diplomatically worded surprise at Captain Spencer’s Catholicism, Giuliano reported that he had converted from Congregationalism to win the Chinese wife. So far as Giuliano knew, the conversion had created no rift with his late brother’s family.

She appeared to have no knowledge of the Indian in Seattle.

Chambers leaned slightly forward in the chair he’d resumed as Maria Teresa composed herself. “Miss Giuliano, how well are you acquainted with your cousin?”

Maria Teresa’s black eyes flashed. “I do not understand the will of God sometimes! Why does He send my cousin to dispute my sister’s inheritance, when he can be no blood relative of ours?”

The rest of the room’s inhabitants stared in shock.

Chambers recovered first. “Howard Spencer Junior is not of your blood? He is adopted, then? Do you know this with absolute certainty?”

“My sister told me! She swore it was so when his lawyers forced her out of her house!”

“Is he aware of this himself?”

“I cannot say!” The fierceness of her tone matched her eyes. “I have not seen Howie since he was sent as a big, clumsy boy to a military boarding school in Pennsylvania. Then, he did not know of it.

“And I rejoiced when he was sent away. He behaved abominably to girls.”

Chambers’s expression turned to granite. “He hurt you?”

Mother Anna Elizavetta’s expression had gradually changed from astonishment to the sternness of a drill sergeant. Now she gave gruff orders: “Maria Teresa, you heap indiscretion atop the blasphemy of questioning God’s will! Leave the room at once!”

His mind filled with visions of setting fire to the dead captain’s brownstone as a method of forcing the vanished housekeeper to reveal her elusive documents’ whereabouts, Bridges joined Chambers in a hansom cab summoned by Mother Anna Elizavetta to the convent steps. Dusk purpled the air. Within the cab’s close confines, he found Chambers’s nearness suddenly unbearable.

He drummed his fingers on the window’s lever. He shifted from side to side on his inexplicably uncomfortable seat. “Has this driver taken a wrong turning? Surely we should have reached—”

“Hush! I’m trying to think!” A glance at the frowning severity of his companion’s brow inured Bridges to suffering the rest of their ride in silence.

Morning saw Bridges bound for class and Chambers, with the addition of a walking stick to his accustomed suit and top hat, eschewing the halls of learning for the precincts of a more commercially minded muse. His half brother’s journalistic contacts confirmed the rumors of Spencer’s adoption, but could provide no proof of it. An attempted visit to the offices of the would-be heir’s attorneys was productive of nothing along those lines and only served, Chambers ruefully admitted to Bridges when they met in the street, to excite suspicion.

“Fortunately, the card I presented gave an assumed name.”

Bridges frowned. “I do not like practicing so much deceit.”

“Nor do I,” Chambers admitted. “And yet I dislike martyrdom even more.” Silk handkerchief suddenly in hand, he mimed the gesture of wiping the artificial ivory from his cheek, recalling to his roommate the necessary charade they shared.

“Yes…well, perhaps—” A passing street-car’s thunder gave him an excuse for leaving his sentence unfinished. “Are you for home now?” The dim blues of autumn’s early evening were closing in, and he expected an assenting answer.

But, “No,” Chambers replied. “I have another interview to conduct still. The lovely Maria Teresa must know more than she has so far told us.”

Bridges felt a surprising twinge of jealousy. He hadn’t realized the strength of his attraction to the girl. “How can you gain entrance to her?” he objected.

“I rather fancy I will find a way.”

Full darkness had fallen by the time Chambers stood before the convent walls. As he’d marked on his earlier visit, the window of the sitting room where he and Bridges had been received overlooked this narrow, neglected-looking thoroughfare. A solitary streetlamp lighted greasy cobbles and tightly boarded windows.

The glass of the window he’d selected was dark, as he’d suspected it would be. As he’d hoped. The clean sill outside of it had led him to believe it a customary point of egress for the less docile of the institution’s habitués. What served as egress would most probably work as a means of ingress too.

Sure enough, on examination, the path to the window became plain: decorative stone carvings, fortuitously placed brackets and fittings—to climb up or down this way would cost a maiden a temporary loss of modesty, but it would not too greatly tax her strength. For someone of Chambers’s build and habits, mounting to the window was the work of mere moments. He attained his goal quickly and peered in to ascertain the room’s emptiness. His breath barely fogged the panes. Bracing himself with one hand against the pipe securely bolted to the stone wall, he pulled open the section of the window whose latch he had earlier surreptitiously released.

A pause to let his eyes adjust to the near-nonexistent light of the clouded skies filtering into the darkness of the building’s interior. Then, quietly as a gray cat, Chambers opened the room’s door and entered the rush-carpeted passageway. One flickering candle at the far end showed stairs winding away to higher and lower floors. As he had calculated based upon the sounds of Maria Teresa’s departure, her living quarters lay only a few steps in the opposite direction. Her door was unlocked. He shut it behind him. The blackness in which he stood was barely alleviated by the room’s mean little window. As his eyes adjusted, his nostrils flared at the scent of the sachets hanging in her wardrobe, her hair oil, her—

“Miss Chambers? Is that you? I hardly know how I suspect—”

“Shush!” In an instant Chambers was at her side, a small hand flung over her soft mouth. “We must speak,” he whispered. “Not here. Somewhere we won’t be overheard.” Reluctantly he released his grip, letting her sink back to the bed from which she’d risen.

“Why are you dressed as a man?” Her voice was subdued, but still might rouse the watchful nuns.

“I will explain all—elsewhere! Do you know of a spot we might go to? Secluded yet close by?”

“The garden. All who have not made their vows—I’ll take you,” she said, interrupting herself. Back along the passageway she led him, his slim hand tucked unnecessarily into her much larger one. Out the window, down the exterior wall most featly, and back into the convent precincts via a silent, evidently well-oiled gate.

The smell of drying flowers filled the air, just a little sweeter than hay. Mud slithered beneath his shoes as Maria Teresa took his hand again and led him off the path, to a backless bench of pale marble. It was almost as white as the girl’s nightgown.

“Now,” she said, seating herself and pulling him down to sit beside her. “What are you doing here? And clad so strangely?” For some reason she had failed to release his hand. “If I didn’t know you for a woman—”

“If you know me for that, you’re wiser than all Boston.” His glance dropped to the ground. “Your poor feet are bare!” he exclaimed.

How had that escaped his notice? If he was unobservant in such a matter, what else had he missed? Scanning their surroundings, he saw immediately the shadow across the gap where the garden gate hung open. What could it be? It shifted minutely—alive.

“Miss Giuliano, you trust me?”

“You may call me Maria Teresa if you wish. And yes, Miss Chambers—Pauline? I trust you—somehow. It is—”

“Stay here!” he commanded. Taking his hand from hers, he stood and walked unhesitatingly toward the blocked gate.

When he passed through it was clear.

Continuing onward as if nothing were amiss, Chambers headed toward the unlighted end of the street outside. Footsteps followed him, as he had anticipated. When he turned to face his foe, however, he saw only the girl. Almost he shouted at her to return to safety, but the noise would attract unwanted attention. Sighing with frustration, he walked back the way he’d come, gesturing at her to retreat. Instead she advanced till they were once again able to whisper to each other.

“You mustn’t be caught!” Chambers told her. “Go to the garden! Your room!” It was useless. She clung to his arms; refused to be shaken off.

“No! You have to tell me why you came here!”

There had been no good reason. Unlike his half brother, he’d acted irrationally. “I’ll find another way to explain that,” he promised. “We’ll meet again, but at the moment you’re in danger—Danger! You must leave! Now!”

Suddenly he spun the two of them around as if dancing the wildest waltz. A shot cracked the night in half, thudded into a wooden door on the left. Another hit Chambers’s shoulder. He jerked and slumped into Maria Teresa’s arms. The sound of running feet receded into the distance.

“Oh! Are you all right?”

“No.” He slid to the pavement. “Get away from here. Summon Bridges. I need treatment.”

“I’m not leaving!” she said, with a stubborn toss of her head. “And would not a doctor be better?”

A doctor would cause trouble. Bridges’s medical knowledge would be sufficient. Chambers tried to say as much, tried to rouse himself to speak. It wasn’t possible. The whirling blackness swallowing him lifted only briefly. Three times: once to reveal stumbling legs that he ought to have recognized immediately as his own, a second time in the moldy and miraculous interior of a hansom cab, a third as he gazed up at the worried countenance of his friend. The expression on Bridges’s face soon went from concern to horror-stricken shock.

“I’m not so badly wounded as that, surely?” Chambers joked. But he knew quite well that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that in preparation for administering medical aid Bridges had, naturally enough, stripped him, removing the accustomed bindings. Chambers felt the room’s air moving coolly against his exposed breasts.

After much argument, Bridges agreed to let matters remain as they had been for a little while longer—at least until the neutralization of Spencer’s threat. Weak from loss of blood, Chambers was hardly in shape to remove himself from their shared flat, as Bridges had to acknowledge. The British man—woman—no, it was best to think of him still as a man, as long as the two of them remained under one roof…Chambers kept almost entirely to his room, sleeping. Recovering quickly, Bridges hoped.

A cabled reply to one of Chambers’s inquiries of two days before arrived from Cheyenne in the young state of Wyoming. It had been sent by Mrs. Lilly Spencer en route from Seattle, and indicated that she would arrive in Boston via railroad in a scant four days.

Not a year old, neoclassical South Union Station was the largest railroad station in the world. In its most capacious waiting room great arched windows overlooked Summer Street, and additional illumination was provided by more than a thousand astonishingly bright electric lights. The station was a marvel of the modern age, and people in the great crowds seething across the marble mosaic floor routinely gawked and exclaimed at its sights.

Royal Bridges, seated at one end of an otherwise unoccupied oak bench, stared into space with the expression of one whose attention is turned entirely within. Chambers, returning from the ticket booths, for his part kept his attention on not jarring his left shoulder as he seated himself on the opposite end of the bench. The atmosphere between the two might be said to be strained.

“Mrs. Spencer’s train is expected momentarily.” Chambers placed his hat, gloves, and walking stick between himself and Bridges. “I’ve procured a small dining room so we may speak to her in private.”

He turned to face Bridges. “I want to thank you for not taking advantage of my—helpless state.”

Bridges looked at him stonily. “Did you truly think I’d do otherwise?”

“No,” Chambers replied. “But that doesn’t make my gratitude any less.”

Bridges inclined his head. “I have thought much about your—secret,” he said quietly. “I couldn’t imagine a reason, at first. I was too astonished—and yet, not entirely surprised. I’d already known, I realized. I’ve known for—longer than I would’ve imagined.” He smiled for a moment. “It seems the philosophers are right about the wisdom of the unconscious mind.” He glanced around. The throngs passed, indifferent to their presence. “I’ve told no one. And I deduce you’re doing this for the same reason we don’t announce—” He mimed Chambers’s gesture of removing face powder.

“Correct, sir.”

“‘Sir,’ am I now?” Bridges’s smile returned, with an added note of pain. “But your formality is utterly correct. Nor can we continue to share quarters. Not unless”—his eyebrows rose very slightly—“we were to marry.”

“I am honored by your offer.” Chambers touched his arm for the briefest interval. “But I’m the wrong type of woman.”

Bridges’s expression remained carefully frozen in meaningless amiability. “As I supposed. I saw how often the younger Miss Giuliano visited during your convalescence,” he said. “I had no intention of spying. But she seemed to feel no reticence in displaying affection for you while I was attending to your needs. I don’t think a good convent girl would be so forward as to visit a man alone, at night, or to clasp that man’s hand to her breast.”

“I think Miss Giuliano is quite willing to dispense with convent instruction whenever it suits her,” Chambers said. “But yes, she knows. And I must confess to having developed a very high regard for her. Very high.” He raised a hand as if to indicate his regard’s height, but with a wince left the gesture unfinished.

Bridges’s expression altered to a somber regard. “Your wound,” he said. “From the situation you’ve described—I cannot believe the shooting to be random. Yet it makes no sense. Howard Junior could have no objection to you questioning the housekeeper’s sister in pursuit of locating her. Anyway, no one knew you’d be at the convent. Have you any idea who might have shot you?”

“An idea, yes, but one still to be tested.” Chambers stood, first bracing his wounded shoulder. “I believe the train we await has arrived.”

Mrs. Lilly Spencer did not display Chambers’s familiarity with the latest Parisian fashions, and it was clear from her robust figure that she did not wear a corset. However, she was dressed handsomely, in the manner of a prosperous businesswoman. Tall and statuesque, she wore her luxuriant black hair in a pompadour which allowed her to sport a bowler hat. And she had not arrived alone.

Forthrightly introducing herself, she extended her white-gloved hand to shake the hands of Chambers and Bridges, then turned to the younger and taller figure who stood quietly beside her, a lockable leather briefcase in his hand. “Gentlemen, this is Richard Spencer.” She had a faint accent not often heard on the East Coast. “William’s and my youngest son.”

Bridges’s eyes widened slightly. “We understood Captain Spencer to have no issue.”

Lilly Spencer’s bold eyebrows winged upward. “You also doubted Captain Spencer had more than one wife, unless I’m too freely reading between the lines of Mr. Chambers’s telegram.”

“I think,” Chambers said, “we should continue this discussion in private.”

Taking the briefcase from her son, Mrs. Spencer dispatched him to see to the conveyance of their luggage to the hotel at which she’d already made reservations; then she and Bridges followed Chambers to one of the station restaurant’s more intimate rooms, where Chambers ordered tea and she and Bridges requested coffee.

With the serving girl’s departure, Spencer placed her briefcase beside her china cup. “You asked for evidence of my marriage to Captain Spencer.” Producing a small key from her reticule, she unlocked the briefcase and reached within. “Here is my copy of our marriage license. The records in Seattle will support it.”

His face impassive, Chambers studied the document for a long moment, with Bridges looking over his shoulder.

“I’ve already been in contact with the Seattle archives,” Chambers said in a neutral tone of voice. “However, they had—if I may be so direct—no record of a divorce.”

“Oh, Will and I were never divorced,” Lilly Spencer said, leaning back in her chair as if finished with a satisfying meal. She shook her head nostalgically. “We had an understanding. I understood that he had other women when he wasn’t in Seattle, and he understood then was when I had other men. I haven’t seen him since he retired from the sea, but we could find no reason to end our marriage. He realized I could own land more easily in Seattle if I were wed to a white man. And I retain for him—a great affect—” Her voice broke, and Chambers offered his freshly laundered handkerchief. She used it to dab her eyes. “I was grieved to receive your telegram and learn he’d passed away.”

Chambers and Bridges offered their condolences and sipped their beverages, allowing Mrs. Spencer time to compose herself.

When Chambers spoke again, his voice was grave. “Mrs. Spencer, you’ll need to meet with the captain’s most recent wife and her lawyer, and probably retain one yourself. It seems you’re the late captain’s heir.”

“I am.” Spencer withdrew another document from her briefcase. “I have William Spencer’s last will and testament, as I had his sworn word that I would never be disinherited by a new will. You—and any attorney in Boston—will find this document genuine.” While Chambers and Bridges scanned the document with widened eyes, she added, “Now, gentlemen. You haven’t indicated you’re relatives or lawyers, and you don’t act like either. So tell me. Why are you involved in our private family business?”

Bridges and Chambers raised their gazes to her sternly watchful face.

“Madam,” Chambers said, “we represent the interests of a third party. It looks as though that party, too, may be doomed to disappointment. The will appears to be in order.”

Soft, muffled steps became suddenly sharp and loud as the party walked off the empty entry hall’s broad Persian carpet and onto its bare floor. Five pairs of feet traversed the white tiles leading to the foot of an intricately balustraded staircase. The erstwhile Lucia Spencer turned to consult the establishment’s new mistress. The brownstone’s former housekeeper hadn’t taken long to appear once Lilly Spencer’s lawyer contacted hers.

“Perhaps we should start the tour in the house’s upper stories—though you won’t care to see the attics, I imagine?”

“Rooftop to the lowest cellar,” proclaimed the first—and, in the law’s eyes, the sole—Mrs. Spencer. “It’s all mine, and I want to see every bit of it!” Bridges had been forced to lend her his arm when Chambers and Miss Giuliano paired themselves off immediately upon meeting at the mansion’s door. The widow’s grip was as firm as her voice and bearing, though by the speed with which she mounted the stairs she’d no need of any man’s support.

On the second floor landing, however, she called a halt. “Miss—Mrs.—Lucia—Oh, I don’t know what to call you, and these legal men of mine would skin me alive if they thought I’d done anything to disadvantage my case, but can’t you see—Here, sit down on this bench and let me explain!”

“You wish me to be seated—in your presence?”

“Well, yes, and the rest of you might as well hear this too. You see, I’m not greedy, or a conniver, or wishful of spoiling your chances in the world—” Here she gave Maria Teresa a challenging look. “—or anything of that sort. I simply want the best for my Richard.”

“Your son—the gentleman you left waiting for us beside the curb?” The illegitimate wife’s bland, plump face showed just a hint of skepticism.

“Yes. He’s a good boy, though I can see by your manner you don’t think he takes much after his father’s looks. But likenesses are often a tad deceptive, as I’m sure you’ll come to understand when you’ve lived as long as I.” A darting glance from the corner of Mrs. Spencer’s eyes reminded Bridges to offer a gallantry as to her young appearance.

“But that’s not the point,” she continued, once she’d received the expected compliment. “Though I’ve asked Richard to guard the door and not intrude himself into your home—for it used to be your home, for all intents, and I’ve no doubt you expected it would return to your possession once the unpleasantness with little Howard was settled—well, as I said, it’s not for myself but for my son I would claim it. And I’ve been thinking and scheming in my head if there might not be a way for the two of us to both get what we want.”

The hands of the former housekeeper, lying clasped together on her black silk-clad lap, tightened their grasp on each other. Her eyebrows drew down in a frown. “I don’t understand.”

“Miss Maria Teresa is like your daughter to you, isn’t she? How about if she and my Richard was to marry? The property would stand to belong to both of them then—and I’d make certain sure it did!”

Ever so slightly, Maria Teresa Giuliano swayed where she stood. Chambers’s arm caught and steadied her. “M-m-married?” she stammered.

“Early days yet, I know. I merely aimed to put the idea in your heads, and to tell you there’d be no objection on my part.”

The Italian girl’s natural swarthiness took on a greenish hue that owed nothing to the teal damask hangings at the landing’s windows. “I—”

“Is there claret in the house? Brandy, even?” asked Chambers.

“Yes!” Lucia said eagerly. “Let’s drink a toast to—”

The crash of a door violently opening interrupted Mrs. Spencer’s proposal. It came from below. From the same place men’s angry voices rose and rose, drowning each other out:

“—my rights! No pack of impostors can deprive me of my inheritance! No—”

“Sir! I must insist! The ladies will—”

“‘Ladies’ indeed! Filthy guinea trollops, that’s all they—”

By the time these words were shouted, all had descended to where they had a clear view of the blow with which Lilly Spencer’s son stopped Mr. Howard Spencer’s rant mid-phrase. The blow’s recipient fell flat on his back at the staircase’s bottom; over him stood the tall form of Mr. Richard Spencer, hatless, and stripping off his gloves. “I cannot tolerate your slander of the woman I’m proud to call by the sacred name of Mother,” he declaimed. “Stand up, that I may escort you to a spot more suitable for brawling.”

“Richard, no!” Mrs. Spencer held out an imploring hand. “Don’t sink yourself to his level—we have the law on our side.”

“Ha! Do you?” Staggering to his feet, Howard Spencer lifted a walking stick from the carpet. It must have been his—the grip fit his large, square hand exactly. “Possession is nine tenths of the law, however—and I am here now, and won’t be ousted again by inferior bastards of any stripe!” He raised his stick threateningly—but stepped no closer to his attacker.

“Have a care when tossing such slurs about,” the Seattle man replied coolly. He stood his ground, looking not a whit intimidated. “You may find yourself tarred by the brush you thought to wield.”

The stick clattered to the tiles—the first indication toeither man of Chambers’s interference in their confrontation. Smoothly, the Brit retrieved the potential weapon he had twisted from Howard Spencer’s hold. “I’ll retain this; I believe you will both be better off without it,” he said. “A moment’s reflection, perhaps over the wine I conjecture we are about to be offered, and you will, I feel sure, find a more peaceful way to reconcile your differences.”

“The library!” Miss Giuliano proclaimed from the stairs, with the air of someone struck by an eternal truth.

“A grand idea!” said Mrs. Spencer. “May we—Lucia? I may call you Lucia, mayn’t I, in light of our coming intimacy—Will it be all right if we retire to the library to discuss matters? And perhaps we could find some refreshment for our guests?”

“Your ‘guests’! This is an outrage!” Howard Spencer protested.

It took the surprising strength of Chambers to guide him up the stairs. On the second story Chambers obliged him to enter the door beside which the captain’s former housekeeper stood, stoically ignoring the young man’s continued gripes and curses. The others waited within.

Gleaming wood paneled the walls. At one end of the room a curving set of three windows filtered dim daylight through their tinted panes. Bookcases built along the left hand wall held a few matched volumes in leather and a far greater number of curios: fans, oddly shaped seashells, and so forth. Bridges strode over to a small table on that side of the room to busy himself with a crystal decanter and glasses.

The room’s right hand wall was occupied almost entirely by a massive fireplace, vacant of even the makings of a fire. Next to it another table held a few objects indistinguishable in the gloom, with a mysteriously draped picture frame hanging above. Here Maria Teresa had stationed herself. As soon as Chambers and the two Mr. Spencers entered, a light flared in her hands and settled to the quiet, steady glow of candle flame. Maria Teresa lit the votives below the draped frame, then set the candle down and bowed her head momentarily. Lifting the candle once more, she turned to face the room.

“You are your mother’s son,” she said, addressing Howard Spencer, Junior. “I ought to have seen it earlier, but as a boy the resemblance was weak.”

Howard paused with his wine halfway to his lips. “That sounds uncommonly like a compliment—pert on your part, but I suppose it is well-meant.”

A bitter laugh broke from Miss Giuliano’s lips. “Well-meant? A compliment? I doubt you’ll think so when you know more—for your mother was none other than this!” Whirling dramatically, she clutched the concealing curtain and tore it aside to reveal the portrait of a woman unmistakably of the Chinese race.

It was several moments before Howard found his voice.

“What! That—that half-civilized—No! My father’s wife was not—”

“Before she passed away, your father made her his wife,” Maria Teresa said.

“You’re daft!” Howard straightened, his face hardening as he recovered his composure. “My father married into an old Boston family. Now, chit, I’ve had enough of your ludicrous delaying tactics—”

“Howie,” Maria Teresa said, “you’re adopted. And your blood father was Captain William Francis Spencer.”

All color drained from Howard’s face. The glass fell from his suddenly nerveless fingers and shattered. Claret spilled over the oak floorboards like blood.

“God is good.” Maria Teresa smiled. “He’s ensured you can never make me your mistress, as you’ve sought to do since your return to Boston. And He has done more.”

Bridges looked suddenly at Chambers and touched his left shoulder, mouthing, “Did How—”

Chambers mouthed, “Later!”

The rest, unaware of this fleeting byplay, stared at Maria Teresa as fixedly as children watching their first moving picture.

She continued speaking, her voice rising to a note of ferocious satisfaction. “God has seen to it, Howie, that you’ll never be your natural father’s heir!”

“But—my uncle—he’s not—I can’t be—” Rising emotion stole the sense from the disinherited man’s tongue. He grew more incoherent as the rest of the room’s inhabitants gathered to examine the painting’s face. An Asian cast was revealed in many of Howard Spencer’s facial features. The consensus was for a most telling likeness. Especially, as Mrs. Lilly Spencer noted, in anger.

Emerging from his room with a pair of Gladstone bags, Bridges found Chambers descending from his own room. Through the open door, Bridges could espy a small mountain of bags and steamer trunks.

Chambers smiled. “I don’t travel so lightly as some.” As Bridges offered to assist with the luggage, he added, “There’ll be a wagon from the station along directly, and the driver will aid me.”

“Very good.” Bridges put down his Gladstones and met Chambers’s gaze again. “It’s true we can no longer share quarters,” he said. “But there’s no need for you to leave Harvard. I’d never betray your secret.” He smiled faintly. “Secrets. I pray you, stay. You’ll have your medical degree by spring.”

“For the career I expect to pursue,” Chambers said, “a medical degree isn’t critical. Anyway, I’m a gentleman, after my fashion. So I’m bound for Seattle. I simply cannot allow Maria Teresa to be forced into an unwanted marriage.”

Bridges’s expression grew thoughtful. “Are you entirely sure it’s unwanted?”

“Maria Teresa visited me, before she and her sister left Boston. She made it plain she wants no union with Richard.”

“Are you entirely sure she’ll want you?” Bridges reenacted Chambers’s gesture of removing face powder.

Chambers smiled. “She knows that secret, as well,” he said. “She’d noticed my hands were covered with a concealing crème. She was familiar with it, as some girls use it to conceal dusky skin and had recommended it to her to do the same. I have my family’s aquiline features, and Maria Teresa”—Bridges noted the second usage of the girl’s Christian name—“supposed I shared her Italian heritage. I’ve let her know the truth of my race.”

“She doesn’t mind?”

Chambers’s smile might have widened, very slightly. “She’s made it clear that she minds neither my race nor my attentions.”

Bridges nodded. Then he raised his brows and gestured at Chambers’s left shoulder.

Chambers said, “You were correct.”

“Howard Spencer, Junior shot you.”

“I am convinced of it. He attended a military school, and Maria Teresa has told me she sometimes glimpsed him loitering near the convent, where he had no reason to be. She also confirmed that he made improper advances to her. In all likelihood he believed me—correctly—to be his rival.”

“You’ll both be far from Howie,” Bridges said, “in Seattle.”

“A situation which will undoubtedly alleviate some worry for him, inasmuch as he continues to pursue his eugenics studies.”

Bridges burst into a startled laugh.

“Quite,” Chambers said. “At any rate, we’ve fulfilled Howie’s charge to you. And he’s discovered a strong reason to tell no tales about the background of another.”

“My mind is lightened on that score,” Bridges said. “On another, I remain mystified. Why would Captain William give his son up for adoption? Was Howie illegitimate, after all?”

“Maria Teresa knew no details, so I paid another call on the captain’s first mate. Carteret told me Captain Spencer was bringing his Chinese wife to Boston, but as they sailed around Cape Horn, she entered premature labor and was lost. The babe survived, as they’d brought a wet nurse aboard. Carteret ended up acting as captain until the clipper reached Boston. He avers Captain Spencer was too grief-stricken to act as parent.”

“But why pretend the baby was born to the brother’s wife?”

“Carteret had no idea,” Chambers said. “But the captain’s brother and sister-in-law were childless. Also, I doubt she’d have countenanced the outrage of her brother-in-law publicly giving up his own child, legitimate or otherwise, for adoption.” Chambers smiled fleetingly. “I know something of upper-crust sentiment regarding scandal.”

“What a story,” Bridges said. “And how odd that Carteret never told us about the Chinese wife’s baby, or her death under sail!”

“He was surprised to learn I cared about such details.” Chambers appeared frustrated. “I gave the wrong impression by failing to ask the right questions.” His expression grew grim. “I’ve fallen far short of my brothers’ standards. Either would have deduced Howie’s origins by a pattern of fraying on Carteret’s left cuff. Or the lack thereof.”

“Don’t be hard on yourself,” Bridges said. “Your brothers are at least twice your age.”

Chambers’s expression did not change. “That’s no excuse.”

Bridges shook his head in emphatic refutation. But when he spoke, he changed the subject. “Howie will be pleased by your departure, but my own feelings are entirely opposite. Nonetheless.” He extended his hand. “I wish you success in your rescue of Miss Giuliano, and I wish you both every happiness in your life together.”

Chambers’s surprise changed to a smile, and they shook.

“Of Two Bloods” copyright © 2026 by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward
Art copyright © 2026 by Katherine Lam

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Of Two Boods

Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward

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Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward

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The post Of Two Bloods appeared first on Reactor.

Original Fiction Horror

Agency

Illustrated by Jamie Keenan

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Edited by Ellen Datlow

By George Sandison

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Published on February 11, 2026

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An estate agent is forced to choose between a sale and his humanity when facing the inhuman eldritch forces that feed off rental tenants across the United Kingdom.

Novelette | 10,215 words

Mr. Three arrives fifteen minutes before his appointment, then rings the doorbell repeatedly. Three p.m. is a straightforward instruction, with no ambiguity, yet still the piercing sound ruins my concentration. Perhaps he’s hoping the extra quarter hour will help him discover the secret code. Maybe he’s hoping he can win me over, as if I’ve got anything to do with it at all, as if I’m anything other than a worm wriggling on the hook.

He leans on the doorbell again, an old-fashioned one, just a shrill bell echoing up and down the corridor, vibrating the nails of my headache.

I squint down at my phone, trying to remember the correct sequence of buttons, the glyphs that will let me pay off my credit card with the last of my salary. Has to be today or the interest payments mean baked beans next month. I’m taking slices off my debt pile, clinging on to solvency, just about. But a sale lives or dies on appearances. You win by manifesting the person you want to be—that they want you to be—so I have to bottle it all up for the clients. Mr. Three wants me to be fifteen minutes early. Mr. Three wants things on his time. Mr. Three wants an absolute kicking if he doesn’t stop ringing that bell.

The landlord calls me into the bathroom and shows me the state I’m in. I wet my hair down, shoot my cuffs, and straighten my tie in the cabinet mirror, making the best of myself I can as I peer around the distortions in the glass. It’s a cheap suit, and it never sits right, but it’s all I’ve got. This was my first permanent job straight out of uni and the only one offering a guy with a mediocre degree a hefty salary. I know everyone hates estate agents, but I never had a dream, just my student debt. There’s that second shadow on the wall behind me again, as if the mirror is giving out its own light. No time for that.

I open the front door to find Mr. Three leaning on the garden wall, flicking at his phone in the drizzle. ‘Nice and early, I see. Do you want to come in?’ He looks straight past me into the flat, mumbling as he shakes the rain off his waterproof. He’s lean, well-groomed, dressed in unremarkable office wear—a pastel cotton shirt, black trousers, black leather brogues—a man permeated with the quotidian. He should be Rafe’s client, but Rafe has fobbed him off on me. Single, fortysomething, buying past-sell-by-date pork pies for dinner. I see a man of restraint, routines and structure, regular savings and moderation. Fastidious. Immeasurably predictable. Hardly what the landlord is looking for.

I show him anyway.

The property is the downstairs flat of a Victorian terrace conversion. A long corridor reluctantly reveals a bedroom in the original dining room, a dining room—complete with a jug of wilting daffodils—in the original reception room and a kitchen where it has always been, although the bathroom extension into the garden is new. Fully furnished, integrated dishwasher and washer-dryer, access to the dingy garden shared with the landlord, who occupies the upstairs property. Recently repainted, with a particularly muddy red-brown accent wall in the bedroom, it will be several weeks before the mould becomes visible again, by which point the spores will have permeated the new tenant’s skin completely. They will carry the fungus out into the world, leaving traces of it across the trains, their place of work, their friends’ houses. They will hold it close under their duvet at night and coat their guests with every loving hug.

But Mr. Three is more concerned about break clauses than rising damp. He comments on the very competitive rent for the area. He can imagine his finances all the way to next year, while the ichor of blood sacrifices across centuries runs through the bricks and mortar he covets. He thinks wealth matters, that it will keep him safe. His kind are two a penny.

When I explain that all aspiring tenants must provide a written statement, take a breathalyser test, and provide a drop of blood he merely raises an eyebrow and says, “Is that all? The last place wanted my financial records going back three years.” I have to be more subtle normally, but there’s no risk here. I know the landlord won’t accept him. This meagre man.

I steal his breath, prick his thumb. He’s writing down his true names when the boiler releases a powerful crack. I’ve wasted enough of the landlord’s time. I usher Mr. Three out with the constant babbling of my trade, the next viewing arriving, stacked up all day, terribly sorry, such a popular property, call the office if you want to make an offer.

A gust of wind from upstairs slams the door shut behind him, and the pipes growl and creak around me. It’s got worse lately. Its hunger has been growing. Once, deep into a two-day bender I couldn’t afford with the guys from the agency—an early mistake, to think I could buy my way in—Misha whispered to me, “The more people there are on the planet, the harder they have to fight.” He blanched once he realised he’d said the words out loud, that he’d broken one of the covenants of his class. That was the night they brought me in, in a fit of MDMA brotherhood. In their drug-addled way I think they meant it as a sign of respect, that in another life I could have been one of them. The comedown was harsh, but it paled against Rafe’s grey face in the office the Monday after, when he realised what he’d done.

Things never change. Even though there are more have-nots than ever before, power like Misha’s lies in the illusion. They all live in terror of the landlords, and they all wish they could become one.

The game is bringing fresh meat to the table. Anyone can find tenants. It takes a finer touch to procure a feast.

The landlord keeps me busy after Mr. Three, just because it can. By the time I’ve ushered the prospect out the door and back to whatever grey iteration he calls a life, beetles and flies litter the property and a thick layer of grease is spreading up the kitchen splashback. Owning everything doesn’t stop them being petty.

I spend half an hour scrubbing the kitchen clean again, trying not to imagine what kind of fat it is. It’s stubborn, a bloody red-brown in colour, and the air tastes salty as I work. I sweep up all the insect carcasses, and dust down surfaces I cleaned this morning. I’m sweeping the hallway clean, almost finished, when he comes. It’s a tight feeling in my chest like always, a dank stink of panic before he enters me in that thick rush like I am a glove being ripped by ragged claws a sharp tug down my spine and the fit is snug the weight of a heavy blanket so warm in my bed at nigh—

I am an emperor begging for scraps. This is all you can offer? Do you dare to starve me? To draw my hunger out until I am forced to consume you simply to secure your silence?

Legions have crumbled under my gaze, the blood of continents has poured off my back like rain. This world was born from the darkness of my home. You are my subjects. You are tools at my disposal. You are the salt-and-wort tang of marrow in my throat. Your history is my banquet.

You know what I need. I must feed. Nourishment. To regain my strength and cut your plane asunder and open the door to home. Now, share my hunger, feel what waits behind the curtain. Beneath all you know, under the glimmering disorder of your world.

There, can you feel it?

You know what I need.

I peel my eyes open, my head throbbing. Things slowly come into focus, and I see a bright red streak on the corner of the radiator. Probing gently, I feel a sharp hit of pain above my hairline, my fingertips coming away red. I lift myself from the floor, wadding tissues to the wound to stem the bleeding. I watch the blood run back up the metalwork of the radiator as it is sucked into the bleed valve, every last drop.

I panic when I see more on the skirting board. Just ten minutes until the next viewing. I wipe it clean as best I can with more tissues, my stomach twisting as if a snake is coiling inside it.

I’m so hungry.

“Asda Spice called, he says he’s interested in the flat, but has a couple more viewings. Fucking tease, eh?” It’s Misha’s turn in the office today, so he’s running the phones. It’s Saturday, game time in our world, but Misha’s ahead on targets as always. He’s hungry, same as all of us, but gluttons can be lazy too.

Everything is on the line for me today though, last weekend before the salary run. I’m off my monthly and quarterly targets. No targets, no OTE bonus—no OTE and I’m back to syphoning fuel out of Rafe’s Audi to keep my car running. No company car with mileage for me, you have to earn that. Saturday is the day. Today. All the young professional couples are in a thousand knife fights for viewing slots. Everyone is ready to overpay for the prime locations, the recent refurbs, the fully-furnished local amenities and twenty-four-hour transport links. Just one weekend to get it done before they’re back to burning next week on the pyre.

I ask Misha, “You mean Mr. Three, right?” It’s easier to avoid real names, Misha is right about that at least.

“Hold on.” I hear pages being turned, then he says, “Three p.m., Tuesday. You called him ‘indigestible.’ The landlord wasn’t a fan then?”

“You could say that.” I barely slept last night, with my throbbing skull and the whipping ruination of my guts. The cut on my head doesn’t show to clients, at least.

It’s not the first time the landlord has taken its anger out on me. I’ve tried everything for my stomach across the last year—eating, not eating, probiotics, a high-fibre diet, carb loading, spirulina shakes, keto and paleo diets, the 5:2, milk of magnesia—but I still feel like mouths are birthing inside my bones one tooth at a time, feeding on my marrow like it’s egg yolk. “Tell me you’ve got something good set up.”

“Yeah, I do. Rafe handed one over last night. They’re in a rush and he’s booked up with the Anscombe-Branks couple. Said he’s already sampled and they’re ‘plump for it.’” Rafe is another public-school boy impervious to his averageness. His clients get names; they have futures. Misha’s run with him since they were kids. They’re both from families that have served the landlords for generations, this whole fucked-up social scene of intermarriages, secret handshakes, and disclosing which landlord they’re under before they make out. Kids born into it. Fucking travesty of a childhood, if you ask me, turning out these stunted little men who thrive on their inadequacies. It’s my sole consolation since taking this job—because I can never leave it now—at least people like Misha and Rafe finally make sense.

“Send them over. Don’t screw me on this one, Misha. I need the sale. The landlord is already talking about asking the agency for a volunteer.”

“Keep your merkin on, twinkletwat,” Misha laughs, but it’s hollow. We all know the stories, and we all believe them.

Don’t be a Barnaby, they say. They bat it about the office, braying like donkeys as they talk about old school friends and the depraved shit they did. Rafe was the one who told me what it meant, eventually.

Oh fuck, Francis, this is just the funniest fucking thing you’ve ever heard. So Tobias was the most extreme bender in the school. He’d stick his dick in literally anything. Once over the Easter holidays—his parents were on safari and Mummy had taken Father to Antigua for their anniversary—we broke into the school’s wine cellar and got absolutely rascalled on vintage amontillado, totally blottoed, and he fucked a loaf of bread right in the breadbin, then left it there. Pre-buttered toast! He’s such a fucking delinquent.

The morning after that, hanging out of a dog’s arse, Tobias’s got a telegram from his Mama—Uncle Barnaby had to volunteer. Total calamity for the family, obviously. Barnaby was doing super well until Black Monday, when he got wiped out. From star agent to impoverished cretin overnight, selling off his stockholdings and properties in secret until there was nothing left. He started turning up to work in suits from Marks & Spencer, if you can believe it—and, you know, there’s no coming back from that. Poor old Barnaby was given a choice in the end—and he bloody well stumped up. Took out life insurance then volunteered himself to the landlord. Tobias said his family ended up buying a house in Reading with the insurance. Poor bastards.

Poor Barnaby, if you ask me.

Misha says, “All yours. They’re booked for this afternoon.”

Misha sends over the written statements from Mr. and Mrs. Four-Thirty in advance, so I read them in the car, where I’ve parked several streets away. It’s over if they see me climbing out of my rusty, dented old Nova. They need to believe I’m one of them. He’s oversold it, he always does, but there is something there.

Mr. enjoys a career in finance with the investment branch of a leading multinational bank, where he is training to serve high-net-worth clients. He was cox for the college first boat, and played 1st XV for Richmond’s Under 21s. In his spare time he plays jazz saxophone (only at reasonable hours haha!).

That’s all in the past, now he spends fifteen hours a day in one of the glass-and-chrome prisons on Bishopsgate. Entry-level smell to him, fresh out of the packet. They mention the rowing at the beginning, while they still remember what it felt like to watch the sunrise over frosty meadows from the river. Still, his first job will out-earn everyone I knew at Oxford Brookes. One and a half miles, and generations of wealth separate us. It’s all about the pursuit of wealth for him, his path to success a coded labyrinth of status. It’s nothing as crass as money. He’ll earn a fortune and never be free to spend any of it.

Mrs. gained her MPhil in the radical political roots of sixteenth-century Japanese ceramics at Goldsmiths, where she worked with such artists as Beth Lo and Jonathan Yamakami. Her own work focuses on reimagining kintsugi traditions in the post-colonial Anthropocene spaces of twenty-first-century London, using materials such as reclaimed plastic and Victorian glass she finds as part of her amateur mudlarking team. She is a social media manager working for a major high-street biscuit brand.

She’s the catalyst, of course. Mr. drank the Kool-Aid, but Mrs. spent too long nurturing her essences to ignore them. All that hope and imagination will fester. She’ll start nesting and going out with new friends Mr. has never met, forgetting about kintsugi but taking up pottery, perfecting glazed marigolds on handmade teacups. Anything to fill the time as Mr. works longer and longer hours, then weekends and public holidays. As she realises she has more and more money to replace him with, and her specialised knowledge of obscure arts is cracking with age, and the only gold she has is wrapped tightly around her finger.

Rafe is right, give them a few years for their despairs to flower, and they’ll be perfect. But I have days, maybe hours. I get out of the car, straighten my tie in the wing mirror, and head for the property. 

Mr. and Mrs. arrive on time, announcing themselves to the street with an avalanche of clattering heels and muttered swearing. They walk with all the arrogance of a young couple masquerading as shambolic—bickering and boundlessly confident.

The simmering resentment of their argument helps, so the door whispers open to a brightly lit corridor, the air soft and warm on the skin as they step in from the cool afternoon. The shadows of leaves dance on the hallway walls, hinting at an Arcadia just beyond the combi boiler. In the bedroom, bedside lamps cast friendly glows on the burnished terracotta accent wall, the newly made bed lacking only a chocolate on the pillow. The carpets are plump and fresh, like spring meadows beckoning bare toes to relish in their pile. In the dining room, a shaft of sunlight picks out the vase of pussy willow, complete with silvery silken nubs.

Mr. and Mrs. immediately fall into their roles, their conflicts suppressed so easily, and start planning out their new lives. Where their TV will go, “It’s 4K, 72 inches, total beast, you know,” and then the sofa, the prints, the cabinet for displaying Mrs.’s pots. How well their linen suits the walls, the red such a bold choice. Soon they’ve held dinner parties with Tracy and Alex and Alex and Alex. The tipped heads and laughs as they tell me, “We only make friends with people called Alex,” as they open kitchen cupboards, barely looking inside. “Just don’t tell Tracy, haha.”

Mrs. lets slip a hushed, perfectly enunciated, “Oh fuck,” when she opens the last cabinet and a sharp twist of metal from an old broken latch just inside the door bites at her finger. She sucks a drop of blood from the tip, and looks at me nervously. “Sorry, that hurt a bit.”

“It takes more than that to upset an estate agent, don’t you worry. We’ll get that fixed right away.”

Mr. isn’t paying attention to his wife, instead leaning over the sink to peer into the garden. The window is the only thing not gleaming clean. He huffs a heavy breath, which vanishes into the glass as the landlord steals it away, onto a smudge, and wipes with his sleeve to make a tiny clean patch. He can see thick brambles and tall grass. “Do upstairs not use it at all?” he asks.

“Not really, as you can see. Upstairs mostly keep to themselves. I’m sure they’d be delighted if you wanted to take it on as a project.” The couple flinch, Mr. gasping in shock, as an air bubble suddenly squeals through a pipe like a distant howling dog. “You would need to ask permission first, of course.”

Mrs. laughs and says, “He’s not really a gardener. More a concrete-it-all kind of guy, aren’t you, babe?”

He replies, “I could be up for it. Look, it’s west facing. Lovely light in the evening. We could have barbecues. I can finally show Alex how to make a proper burger. I have the best recipe.”

Mrs. continues to suck at her finger, which hasn’t stopped bleeding. She looks like a little girl upset at Daddy, while Mr. dreams of the man he’ll never be.

I tell them, “I’ll give you a couple of minutes to yourselves.”

Paltry morsels. I grow more hungry with every rotation of this pathetic globe.

I remember how it felt when we first saw your kind shining in the darkness. We grew fat on your souls even as you cowered. We were titans you dreamed of capturing in stories. You so few, but so bright. Swollen, fat with light in your hovels. You were succulent. Your essence cascaded through me as I gorged myself.

Endless forest covered this world, a vast animus that sang like the spirit shrikes of home, root and claw, earth and taint. But the parasite has no regard for the beauty of the host. You have sullied your flesh, made poison of your flesh. Your tiny cruelties. Cobbles and bricks and fire and concrete and cities and smog and wealth and cholera and poverty and rivers of shit in buried tunnels and vermin and rust and rot and mould and waste and tiny jealousies and gold and gold and gold and luxury and greed and ownership.

So little, made from so much.

My empire is reduced to solitary watchtowers. My army is a facile child. My altar this house.

Just once more. One great meal, and I will rip open the air, return to the beautiful shadows, where space is a dream, where all these limbs and muscles and flesh and blood and bodies are nothing.

I come to slowly, drifting in and out of the narcoleptic haze the landlord leaves me with after a consultation. It has returned to wherever it is it spends its time. It is dark. The Four-Thirties left hours ago.

I’m on the bathroom floor, so I push myself up on the bath to turn the light on. The bulb carves stark shapes from the room, leaving thick slabs of shadow behind every angle. In the mirror, I check the extent of the abuse. My face is sore, where I must have bruises forming. A whispery grey form behind me seems to caress my cheek. I double over as hunger staples my stomach into ever smaller pouches.

I breathe deeply until the pain clears. Eventually, I draw water from the sink for a drink, hoping I can trick my starving body into quieting, if just for a moment. Looking at the mirror again, I see my eyes are bloodshot, with shadowy bags underneath. And the dragged finger-mark smears on the glass tell me it tried to reach something in the reflection again. What is it looking for? Can it open a doorway there, truly? Does it just like torturing me? My stomach unleashes its fury again in all-consuming cramps. I need to sleep. To eat.

The doorbell rings. Strange. It’s late, early Saturday evening. Nothing is booked. My clients are all preparing for nights out with loud music and shitty coke. I check my phone—no messages from Misha. I head for the front door, leaning on walls to stop myself tumbling to the floor.

I open the door to find a woman who looks as exhausted as I feel. Forty-something, mousy hair, on her way to curvy, dressed in high-street denim. I doubt she can afford this place. She was pretty once, past the wrinkles that have consumed her youth, under the black bags of her eyes. Her hair is loose around her shoulders, the collar of her jacket high and buttoned closed. She quivers, like she’s on the cusp of screaming.

A tiny face peeks from behind her thigh—snotty, tearful, and full of the remorseless sorrow of a child. The woman breathes in sharply, spreading her hands to grab the invisible reins of the doorstep, as if she’s afraid it will buck and throw her back to the kerb. “I saw the sign. The ‘to let’ sign. And I saw the light on. I thought maybe I could . . . Could I? Bit of an emergency, really.” Her smile is all mania and fear.

It’s time for me to be knocking off and getting what sleep I can before Sunday’s viewings. Behind her a group of lads walk along the street, chattering like rooks, no doubt heading for the pub. It’s the time when the drinkers annex the streets for another night. No place for a child. I need to go home, swallow as many painkillers as I can, and force down whatever food the landlord will allow me. Wash. Try to sleep. But the way this mother keeps shooting glances over her shoulder gets to me. It’s not those lads. She wants to be off the street.

I step back, and welcome her in with an arm. I say, “Sure, I’ve got a bit of time, nothing planned for tonight anyway. Let me show you around. It can be a lovely place, for the right viewers.”

She scuttles into the hall, pulling her daughter with her, and shuts the door quickly. Her eyes linger on the locks an extra moment, as if she’s memorising each one, learning how it can be opened. Lost in a private catechism, she gives herself permission to breathe again. She rests both palms on the door for a moment, then says, “Love the place. How much is it? I can move in tomorrow, all packed and ready to go. I can pay the deposit, I’ve got some money put aside. Really, honestly. How much is it?”

“It might be best if you can call the office in the morn—”

“No! Sorry, no. I need a place right now. I’ll sign whatever you want. Please.”

She pushes past me down the hall, turning sideways to fit through the space, so that her jacket catches, the button at the neck popping open, giving me a flash of finger marks on her throat. Dark, livid, deep. She quickly closes the buttons and disappears into the kitchen.

I bend down to the little girl, who is still in the hallway with me, smile, and put out my hand for a shake. “Hello, I’m Francis. Do you want to live here with your mummy?”

The girl looks past me, then runs after her mother in silence. I follow through the door to find the girl tugging her mother’s elbow and whispering loudly, “I don’t like it here, Mummy, I don’t like it.”

Behind them, in the bathroom, I see an oil-thick shadow vanish through the doorway, catch a glimpse of a baleful red eye blinking closed in the cabinet mirror.

The landlord never comes to the property until it’s ready. For it to show itself now means . . .

I walk over to them and start to lead the pair of them out of the house. The mother tries to shrug off the arm I extend over her shoulder, then grunts in pain and shock as I shove her into a wall. “Sorry, but actually I can’t have you here. I’d lose my job if they thought I was doing things off the books.” At the door to the hallway the mother starts to push back out of some instinct for resistance, punching me weakly with a courage she is clearly still new to. The girl is retreating down the hallway, turning to the front door to open it.

There is a loud thump, as if a wardrobe fell to the ground upstairs, followed by the sound of something heavy dragging across the floor, just once. Chilly tendrils reach for my back, scraping at my skin with a slick, viscous quality. My skull tightens, as if claws are squeezing me, and the tips are chiselling into my temples and in the centre of the fractured seam at the top, my fontanelle, where once a throbbing membrane of skin was the frailest of partitions between my mind and that which is.

I grip the doorframe around me tightly, feeling my nails digging into the wood, splinters shooting up into the nail beds. The pain—the physical pain of my body—gives me focus, pulls me back into myself. I keep clawing at the wood, dragging the flesh and bones of myself over the threshold, reclaiming myself from the landlord one traumatised nerve at a time.

From the garden path, the mother stares at me in anger and confusion at her eviction.

I tell her quickly, while I still can, “We’ll get you signed up tonight, not a problem. Come with me to the office so we can do all the paperwork.”

The mother breaks and she starts sobbing openly with relief, a lightness in her voice as she starts thanking me over and over. I barely hear it, just usher her out of the garden, telling her to wait there while I lock up, how we’ll go to the agency straightaway, this endless gabbling sales patter coming out of my mouth while I’m focusing all my will on pulling the door shut behind us.

The pain in my guts expands to fill my entire torso, bubbles of agony bursting in my lungs. I feel like a constellation of flesh. I burn with an acidic compulsion to go back into the house, my feet dissolving with every step I take further away. The tendrils have thickened to tentacles, wrapping themselves around me, ripping away my skin then immediately coiling around me once more like an insatiable polyp.

Somehow, I stop myself from screaming.

Her.

The child.

Now.

Misha looks up in a panic as we walk into the office, scraping the line on his desk into the bin. The mother and girl wait nervously by the entrance as I walk to the back to talk to him. He bats his nostrils back and forth, sniffing repeatedly and says, “What you doing here, Frankie? Past business hours, I’m closing up in a minute.”

“Big night planned, is it?” Of course it is, always is for his type. 

“Just wrapping today’s sales. Rafe did Tiverton Street. Two hundred over asking, drinks to celebrate, you know how it is?”

“Thanks Misha. I didn’t, but I do now.”

“I’m not doing new clients. Lionel’s got the morning, saddle him with it. Come spend some time with the lads.”

It’s said out of good form as much as anything—there’s no expectation that I’ll actually go, or that they’d be happy if I come. I can’t afford their lifestyle, and they don’t understand mine. It’s just how it’s done. I don’t give a shit though, I need him gone. “I’ll do it, got a good feeling about this one, you know? Leave the sales, I can do those as well.”

Misha doesn’t hesitate for a second, breaking out a Harley Street smile and saying, “Brick. You’re a total brick, Frankie. I owe you one.” He swirls his coat up off his chair and shoots out the door to whatever basement cocktail bar Rafe found on TikTok this week.

The landlord’s grip on me weakened as soon as I made it out of the house. It knows I must bring it what it wants through official channels, that it can’t risk close investigations of the flat, so it had to let me go. Even so, I feel weaker than ever.

I slump into my chair as the mother and girl settle into theirs on the opposite side of the desk. The mother keeps her coat buttoned tight, sitting ramrod straight on the edge of the seat. The girl frets the cuffs of her coat, tugging at a loose thread in silence.

I search our list of active properties, hoping it’s still available, relieved to find it is. None of the guys care about filling it, the owner being a human. Worst of all, a human who has given us explicit instructions to hold the rent below market rates. One Mrs. Whetherell, owner of the two-up terrace next door to hers, her mum’s old place, empty since she bought the neighbouring property and moved into that. This lady has lived either side of one wall her entire life. It’s small but clean, in good school catchments, but is too far from the station to attract commuters. The photos show ’70s textured wallpaper, swirly brown carpet, and commemoration plates on the wall for every royal wedding—at least until Charles and Camilla. And there’s a vast wealth of shortbread available for anyone savvy enough to compliment her baking.

I take down their names—Maisie is the mother, Alba the girl—and just a few more details, trying to avoid it coming across as interrogation. She’s been through enough. The bruises on her neck are like ink stains from a glove.

Maisie breaks down when I eventually show her the property and she hears the price. Maisie needs a place to live, not a manifestation of ambition in brick and designer furniture. She needs a door she can lock. She needs to be able to take a breath and know that the next will happen just as easily. Mrs Whetherell just wants nice people to live next to her. Mrs Whetherell just wants some company.

Maisie hugs her daughter tightly and says, “We’ll be okay, honey. We can make this work. New school, new friends, new start.”

Alba whispers back, “I don’t want new friends, I already have friends. I don’t want to move, mummy.”

“I know, darling, but we have to live somewhere new. Now that daddy is sick.” She looks up at me, pleading with me silently to condone her deception. Begging me for mercy, as if I am master of her destiny. All I do is let flats, and lie to people.

Alba asks her mother, “Is this going to be like the other house? I didn’t like the other house. The bathroom troll was scary.”

“What bathroom troll, darling? You didn’t even see the bathroom.”

The girl clams up and glares at me with the fury her mother should be letting out. She knows, fuck knows how, but she does. I wish it was a troll, something contained within arms and legs and teeth. Something that could be killed. If she knew what that splintered orb in the mirror belonged to, the swollen protuberances of its limbs, the endless twitching tentacles, the tiny biting mouths that open up at random across its body.

I don’t even know how many of them there are, how many companies exist to serve them. What if they’re everywhere, hiding under factories and warehouses as well? What if my one is the runt of the litter, a bullied god of hate punching down. I checked the agency records once but they’re encrypted, so I only know the entity that uses me as its tool. I hope that they only exist in this country, that there are places free of their infestation. I pray, though I know it isn’t true, that I’m the only slave they control. I don’t even have a name for them, despite how intimately they violate me. It’s different for Rafe and Misha; his kind are employees, inheriting that fig leaf of freedom. Rafe told me that I’m the only person they’ve told the truth, that no one else outside their families even knows they exist. I’ve been fucked ever since they got me high and opened their box of secrets to me. Flushed with serotonin, my saucer eyes gazing into the abyss, they told me we were brothers, joined by something greater than us, and, fool that I was, I believed them. All I know is that without them our agency would shrivel and die, shutters pulled on shiny offices across the city, maybe the country. Inheritances would evaporate. Misha would need to pick a cheaper drug habit, or find another host company to burrow into. Rafe would float on into another fortune, impervious to it all. The other junior agents—the ones who believe all we do is let flats—would need to get actual jobs, and I, well, I pray for it every day.

I’ve seen the glistening flesh of a boneless snake running through the pipes, drinking down the effluence, every drop of piss and blood, every scummy-watered bath. I’ve coddled nervous tenants, telling them that the noises from the roof are anything but ravenous creepers, a multitude of them hunting with one mind, each little more than claws and scales and hate. I’ve tutted and sighed about sound insulation when I know the bricks whisper and scream and fight and smash and howl in their dreams every night. I’ve prattled on about architectural oddities causing feelings of claustrophobia, as the very space around us is being chewed upon like cud, and the room sucks the life from its inhabitants in a desperate act of self-preservation. I’ve watched people twitch and fidget, their hindbrain knowing something isn’t right even as they tell me they love the place, not feeling everything reflecting back on themselves, their thoughts gulped down and spat out half chewed, their hopes and souls flayed in layers so fine they never notice how they are diminished, how every sudden draft passing over them is another piece of their essence consumed by the landlord.

I realised, after a few weeks working at the agency, just how many I have lived with in my life. All the shitty house shares I’ve tolerated. The years my asthma flared up, my eyelids erupting into hives with allergies, the smothering weight of depression trapping me in my bed. The country has been infested with them for centuries, but only now I know they are there can I see them. Now I’m like Rafe’s lot—profiting by helping the parasites. The obscene cost of renting a home is the final insult—the banality of hiding darkness under the naked cruelties of money.

I used to think that I was responsible, that my choices had some kind of effect. But there is no choice, not while the landlords are still here. Not while a few people can get rich.

That’s what I think as I look at Maisie hugging her daughter tightly, lest the wind rip her from her arms. Nothing I’ve done can be changed. I’m complicit, just like we all are. All I can change is what I do next. Maisie has escaped, and Alba has never known anything else.

I can’t give them to the landlord.

It’s past 10 p.m. when I unlock the door of my one-bed flat on the edge of the industrial estate near where the bypass spews endless traffic into the city every hour of every day. It was sold as a new-build years ago, morphing into something uncategorised and undesired now that the newness has worn off. It’s a shell at best, full of draughts, leaking seals, and cracked housings on the appliances.

But that’s it.

With my parents, content with their middle-class careers in the town hall but all their wealth tied up in equity, a mortgage is an impossible dream for me. The Bank of Mum and Dad is already in hock. So I am slaved to the indenture of my home, paying rent on credit and paying off the credit with my salary. If I pay to have the mattress steam-cleaned I can’t pay for a dehumidifier to stop the mould. Do I fix a leaking washing machine or the dripping cistern that stops me sleeping? The lock on the front door or the bedroom window? Why bother at all when the frames of both are warped?

I kick the clothes strewn across my bedroom floor into a pile and straighten the bedding, as Maisie follows to lay a barely conscious Alba down to sleep. I head for the kitchen as she settles her daughter, looking through the cupboards for anything I can make dinner from. Tomato puree, a huge bag of paprika I’m sure was here before I moved in, and one tin of red kidney beans. The fridge is empty except for a can of Red Bull.

I close it and turn around to see Maisie standing in the doorway, studying me. She’s taken her coat off at last, tucked her hair behind her shoulder to reveal the extent of the bruises. She fronts well, not showing me any weakness. I take my keys from my pocket and slide them across the tiny kitchen table towards her.

“That’s the only set. No bolt on the bedroom door, but there’s a few weeks’ worth of laundry you can block it up with. I’ll sleep on the sofa.”

She picks up the keys in silence, coils a fist around them so the stick out between the fingers. “What do you want from me? What’s the price?”

“Nothing.” Penance. Salvation.

She sniffs, looks back over her shoulder to the bedroom, hearing the twist of duvet or some tiny whimper from Alba perhaps. “You try a single fucking thing and I will kill you in your sleep.”

I nod, not really sure what to say.

She takes a moment longer to think, then says, “Do you want some dinner?”

I am a hollow ghoul, thinner than I have ever been. I’d chew my own fingers to the bone if I thought I could keep it down. Christ knows what I look like to her, taut and shivering with nerves, hunched over the vacuum of my stomach. “Can’t really cook much,” I confess.

“I can cook.”

“There’s nothing in the house anyway.”

“You look hungry, you know. Like . . . I mean, not well.”

She makes me laugh, despite it all. Not well. As if there’s a cure for what I have. But people do eat, normal people at least. That’s what I should be doing, and maybe that’s what she needs. A normal night doing normal things.

I grab my coat, check my wallet is in there, and say, “I’ll go buy some bits. Buzz me back in, yeah?”

She nods, something in her relaxing as she realises I’m leaving her in my home. That I’m offering my secrets up to her, without asking her any questions. That she can lock me out.

I squint against the bright lights of the corner shop as I fill a basket with vegetables and chicken, trying to remember what a meal looks like. The tightly stacked rows of boxes and tins, with their glossy images of meat, fruit and vegetables look like the building blocks of something I no longer understand.

Back at the flat I find Maisie drying my pans, the kitchen newly cleaned. She takes the bag and waves me to sit down with a soapy hand. She works in silence, and I am too tired to ask any questions. My life is an endless, meaningless chatter, and I already know everything I need to know about her. The next half hour is filled with scents as she prepares a meal. Simple, homely, rich herby smells that fill my house and my head.

When she puts the plate in front of me I am surprised to find myself hungry, my stomach gurgling in anticipation. I take a fork and lift a tiny amount to my mouth, blowing gently to cool it. Maisie watches me keenly, and there is little trust in her silence. She stands leaning against the counter, my chef’s knife next to her. She’ll barricade herself in with her daughter until morning, I know. 

But first, I eat.

The Four-Thirties are holding hands and harmonious when they arrive for the second viewing. Rehearsals went well then. They are dressed for a party—Mr. in chinos and a pastel shirt, a jumper most unironically over his shoulders, Mrs. in a flowing cotton Laura Ashley dress and bright green wedges—their chat all reminders that Alex is a stickler for punctuality, not like Alex, haha, oh Alex, at least Alex buys Sabra hummus, none of that wallpaper paste they sell at Sainsbury’s, haha. Mrs. runs delicate fingers capped with immaculate nails—and a sticking plaster—over the furniture as she chatters, a mantra of privilege I’ve seen a hundred times.

This time, they play their parts perfectly. Mr. goes out into the garden, treading down the brambles, and maybe he doesn’t hear the chitters and rustling of vermin in the undergrowth, because he comes back tutting and wiping his hands like a mechanic hoping to fleece some old dear out of their pension. “It really would be such a lot of work, almost worth a reduction in the rent, haha.”

Mrs. is waiting for him in the kitchen, peering at the boiler with feigned comprehension. She turns back to me slowly, leading with her head, her finger lingering on the fitting with a languid ease. “When was this last serviced? Really, we were expecting a heat-exchange system at this price.” Behind her, the shower curtain flicks out of the bath like a snake’s tongue. “It’s draughty too. When did you say the windows were installed?” They are full of their parents’ standards, hoping to shape the world the only way they’ve been shown how.

The shadows in the bathroom strengthen, pulling in more light, as claws scratch at my temples. The Four-Thirties have misread the power dynamic, and failed to account for all factors. They think they’re up against me and my cheap suit. Misha has told me how none of the landlords like negotiating, and that this is one of the worst—it despises anything other than total acceptance of its terms. Wheedling and bargaining hastens its hunger, shortening the eventual tenancy. Talk of rights and duties sparks cacophonous outpourings. The sacrifice must be willing.

I usher Mr. and Mrs. away from the bathroom and back to the front bedroom, where weak sunlight barely pierces the growing gloom. We file into the room, the couple settling into the angles of the bay window, and convene around the bed under the sodden pottery colour of the accent wall. They share a quick glance, Mrs. giving a barely perceptible nod, revealing which of their parentage carries more weight. Mr. beams back at her, stuffing his hands in his pockets to hide his excited fidgeting. Mrs. is more restrained, offering a tiny smile as she says, “We’d like to make an offer. How many other viewings do you have?”

“Just a couple more this weekend,” I say, swallowing a retch. It would make no sense to them, how little their money changes things here. I long to scream, “Yes, take the fucking flat! I hope you both die in this bed,” except long, hateful fingers are squeezing my chest and pushing me into the carpet. My body doesn’t feel my own as I say, “I have to finish this round of viewings. Give me a call at the office tomorrow, and we can talk it over then.”

They are clearly at a loss as I usher them to the front door. Now, finally, they have noticed something that isn’t right. A sacred covenant has been broken, that of wealth’s command. They carry the petulant faces of children first encountering the banal horror of the world, their toys no use out here. Mrs. looks back into the bedroom one last time, her gaze on the pillows so fat and welcoming. She is dreaming of mornings they would spend here, stories to tell their future children. Except her father didn’t warn her about mattresses. Fathers only ever think about boilers. They don’t like to think about their daughters all sweating and drooling and fucking on the same mess of fabric and coiled metal; they forget about legions of mites and worms and parasites that colonise the spaces closest to our skin; they cannot imagine inhuman intelligence permeating our flesh and coiling around our inner beings with every slumbering breath.

I follow them, keeping my gaze on the couple, out to the street as I lock the door. The landlord has to let me go, but it still tears at me as I deadlock the door, my skin feeling so tight it might rip, my fingers splaying against the dank paintwork of the door.

Feeling like I am pulling a tooth from a jaw, I tug the key free.

All my power pushed into so little flesh. So weak, incapable of mastering even yourself. How dare you be so tiny, so undeserving. What use are you? What function have your kind? What indignity that we even converse, you protoplasm, you molecule, you prion.

Civilisations have waded through mud in my honour. I have bathed in the souls of creatures who barely knew my name as a whisper in the darkness. I was adored, enduring their outpourings of love like the filth it was.

Yet you, mote, feel me within your skin. You, atom, defy me.

You will bring me the mother. I will have her child.

Then I will sear every particle of your being from this plane. I will sunder your essence into a multitude of sufferings and cast them across the fields of home.

Eternity will be yours.

Mrs. Whetherell slides a plate (Elizabeth II and Philip, original judging by the aging of the gloss) of chocolate chip shortbread towards Alba. The girl has opened up in her presence, a willing victim to Mrs. Whetherell’s ancient magics.

Mrs. Whetherell then offers a shortbread to Maisie, and lastly me. “Come on, lad, you look a bit peaky. I’m not one to brag, but these shortbreads were good enough for a Lord in 1987.”

“They look fresher than that,” I say with a wink.

Mrs. Whetherell laughs and says, “You wicked boy. Asda’s garibaldi’s for you, then! Only good boys and girls get my shortbread.”

I laugh for the audience, but the early morning sun cuts through me like a knife. Or maybe it’s easier to blame the light for how the darkness is slicing me up. It’s all I can do to sip water.

The landlord is weaker here, on the other side of town. But it still wants my attention every second, and I can feel it scratching across the roofs, up and down the streets, searching for me.

I leave them to bond, barely able to concentrate on talk of schools, homework, and favourite animals. I’m not needed any more. I’m nothing more than a glorified administrator now that I’ve arranged the introduction. But when Mrs. Whetherell says, “What made you decide to move with the little one?” I jump into Maisie’s moment of hesitation. I can see how the question drags her back in an instant to the violence she’s desperate to escape. Violence that is still happening for her, right now. I can see her trying to condense everything that led her here, with just Alba’s ragged unicorn, a rucksack of clothes, and her bruises, into the words that will convince this kindly old lady to take her in. But she can’t speak without ripping her heart out of her chest and dropping it onto collector’s china, to drip blood between biscuits and royal paramours. Maisie has lived by will alone for who knows how long. It’s clear to me she’s not even sure she made a decision, or if she just ran. So I speak for her, I take that choice away from her. I manipulate people, no doubt about it, but sometimes I can do it for the right reasons.

I lean over to Mrs. Whetherell, giving a conspirator’s wink, and tell her, “They’ve been looking for somewhere quiet, away from the noise. They’re knocking down some ex-local flats next door—the solid ones from the 1950s, they don’t make them like that any more do they, Mrs. W? You know those new apartment buildings, no sound insulation at all. It’s diggers and cranes all day. Add in one bad neighbour and . . . They get so much homework, from such a young age these days.”

Exactly on cue the granny I wish I’d had tips her head and says, “Aww, poor pet. It must be so hard bringing up the little one like that. Have you a garden? No outside space? That won’t do, the little ones need to be outside.”

“I know you’ve been looking for some nice, trustworthy tenants, and I’ve known Maisie and Alba here for years.” Maisie shoots me a glance, surprised at the ease of my lies. “To tell you the truth, I got them that last flat. I didn’t know about the new developments, and we had no idea what the neighbours were like, I swear. I’ve felt awful ever since. But then I realised, I could make it up to them both . . .”

She swallows it all, of course, and Maisie keeps her lips clamped shut. Mrs. Whetherell lives in a world where dishonesty is a thing for television and the newspapers. People don’t really lie to each other, not real people. No one could ever look a mother in the eye as they’re gouging her for every penny she’s got. No one would hit a child.

She pats me on the hand and says, “It’s not making mistakes that matters, but what you do after. Bless you, my boy. Now, you two young ladies, would you like to come see the garden? I hope you like strawberries, I can never eat the whole crop.”

They head into the kitchen, following the lingering smells of baking out into the sunny garden. They are already meshing into a new family, both Maisie and Mrs. Whetherell smiling as little Alba dashes out the back door, turning back to beam a smile at us all before skipping onto the lawn.

I can’t watch them for long. Something about the purity of the scene makes my scalp itch. It’s like happiness can’t find a home in me and instead is crawling the inside of my skull in search of an escape route.

I retreat to my car, planning to confirm bookings with more young couples, more new builds, more prefabricated units, more tributes. But as I settle into my seat my phone rings, an unknown number.

“Is that Francis?”

“Speaking, who’s calling?”

“It’s about the flat. I’ve been looking over a few numbers and, well, I would like to make the landlord an offer.”

Mr. Three. Lionel probably gave him my number, the conniving little shit. And Misha put him up to it, I’m sure. “I’m not in a position to negotiate. You should speak to Lionel in the office.”

“He told me to call you. It’s a good offer, fifteen percent over. It’s a good price. You won’t get more that far from the station.”

The tone of his delivery is quite incredible. In his mind the conversation is already complete, and we’re just going through the motions. “Really, I can’t—”

“How about I mail it over? I’ll do that now. Okay?”

It’s the way he says “Okay?” that triggers me. The exactitude that would flatten my agency, render me just a tool at his disposal. People shouldn’t be used. People shouldn’t conform to tiny expectations. People should be wild and unpredictable and fierce.

I hold the phone before me, surface to the sky like a prayer as I respond: “I said no, so fuck off.”

I hang up.

The coat hangers scrape at my skull the moment I get out of my car, dragging me towards the door of the flat. I brace against the vehicle, dry-heaving a wisp of tar, when my phone pings loudly. Misha has sent me the tenancy agreement for the Four-Thirties, agency boilerplate locking them in to twenty-four months, with rent reviews at months twelve and eighteen, and no right to appeal. He included one of his usual inspirational notes as well: Fuck-de-doodle me, golden-nips. You suddenly grown a pair? You might just last in this gig after all. That or two hundred carnations for mumsie next week. I’ve got £100 with Clarence you don’t sign it, so chin up, my proley baby. M xoxo

The truth is I’ve never heard of anyone attempting to force a tenant on a landlord. Rafe has joked about it once or twice, in a fit of coked-up bravado late on a Friday night, but it’s just one of a multitude of empty brags that he spouts. He struts like a cock when it’s just us in front of him, but I saw how he looked the night he came back from Beulah Road after the tenants vanished. Ten days they’d lived there, not even a fortnight. He never said what happened, but he was as white as ash, and he shredded the invoice from the cleaning agency before any of us could see it. Something broke inside him that night; an essential part of his inhumanity collapsed. I think all the stories came true, all at once, and he didn’t like the feel of blood on his hands. I’m sure Misha thinks Rafe lost his nerve, but I think maybe he finally found a little bit of it. He called his dad and started handing over clients shortly after.

But something has to change, we can’t all be slaves to so few masters. The landlords don’t eat us all, so maybe they can’t, maybe that’s the great lie they hide with violence. There has to be hope.

For now I wait, leaning on the garden wall so the landlord can take reassuring nips, and know I’m in its grip. I watch pigeons peck discarded fried chicken at the bus stop opposite. A butterfly strays into the road, buffeted into oblivion by a passing SUV. Overhead, an endless sequence of planes jettison carbon dioxide into the upper atmosphere. Life continues.

Eventually, the Four-Thirties arrive, proceeding down the footpath hand in hand, strutting like they’ve just arrived from a photoshoot. Mrs. has an improbable curl in her hair, while Mr. has a box-fresh fade, the curly thatch on top preserved with all its manufactured misdemeanour. Their gloss and makeup don’t quite hide the bags under their eyes, but otherwise it’s a perfect performance. They look like the affluent boomers their parents are, that they’re one inheritance away from becoming.

I run them through the contract in the garden, trusting in momentum and a confident delivery to stop them asking to go inside. Not yet, I need one more thing. “If you could just sign here and here.” They extend long, elfin fingers to complete their covenants on the tablet. Mrs. signs first, the sacred acts reduced to tutting and clumsy thumbs. Mr. may as well be at nursery making finger paintings. No matter, the deeds are binding however crude their assent. I tap Submit, sending the landlord its notice of the new tenants.

I know it’s coming. I know this pain. I hiss through my teeth anyway, as the landlord’s fury takes hold.

Mr. and Mrs. exchange a worried glance as they take the keys from my shaking fingers. I don’t hear anything else. Maybe I waved them goodbye. Maybe I wished them well in their new home. Maybe I slipped through the cracks in the paving. Maybe I was sucked into the bowels of the earth by a ravenous claw, to suffer my punishment. Maybe the landlord tossed me away like a bird’s carcass. I know I next feel myself slumping against the car door. I open it and curl up on the back seat wrapped around the nimbus of my stomach the acidic knot the pain is like nothing else a vast wall shutting out the heavens shutting out the heavens shutting out us all a whipping lash of hot wire coiled through my arteries I am become rage—

The wall flashes by at unimaginable speed, scales the size of cities shatter the clouds this world is dark and pungent and not mine this inconceivable edifice hurtles into space the scales the scales so many scales this behemoth has swallowed god and it turns now I see I see too late I am not my own I belong to this and it opens an eye the size of eternity and gazes down on me alone mote nothing in all this creation other than—

You own nothing.

You are mine.

That moving house is stressful is well-known these days, but Anna and Michael are proud of how they deal with the job together. They save money by doing it all themselves, rather than booking a removals service. Instead Anna borrows a van from a local branch of Daddy’s company, and they graciously accept Alex’s offer of help with the boxes.

Moving in summer means open windows with the radio tuned to Magic FM. Bill Withers reminds them it’s going to be a lovely day as Anna unpacks the Wedgwood dinner service, the Le Creuset dishes and the carbon steel pans. Michael sorts the books by colour (something Anna saw on Instagram and loved the idea of) on their mahogany shelves, those a wedding present from Auntie Moll.

They end the first day with pizza from their new local wood-fired oven takeaway, sipping one of their Viogniers they normally save for Alex and Alex, but the rest of the wine hasn’t chilled yet, and they’re celebrating, just such a shame the nice wineglasses are at the bottom of the pile of boxes in the kitchen right now. They won’t get to them for another two days, distracted as they are by making the bed and sorting the wardrobes out and taking a break to walk in their new local park before sharing their first shower in their new home, slippery hands running across each other’s bodies with giggles as the spores drift in the air, catch in the water, and are massaged into their skin lovingly.

Feeling naughty, they dash naked through the flat to the bed, toss the duvet off, and exhaust their lust in a tangle of limbs and water. They doze after, at once sated and filled with cupidity.

Gently, Michael is the first to cough.

“Agency” copyright © 2026 by George Sandison
Art copyright © 2026 by Jamie Keenan

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Agency

George Sandison

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George Sandison

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All Fiction Dark Fantasy

The Spew

A man is hired to transcribe the words of a mysterious woman who speaks in “spews” during self-induced trances, but he soon discovers an intriguing story coalescing within her seemingly…

Illustrated by Carter Gill

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Edited by Ellen Datlow

By Jeffrey Ford

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Published on January 21, 2026

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A man is hired to transcribe the words of a mysterious woman who speaks in “spews” during self-induced trances, but he soon discovers an intriguing story coalescing within her seemingly incoherent rambles.

Short story | 5,245 words

Arathusia, petite—with raven-black hair gathered to one side as if she was facing due south in a windstorm from the east—could talk the ear off a brass monkey. Within the raging current of her flow, stories surfaced, swam hard to save themselves only to disappear beneath the deluge of random words. If you can imagine a real flood overwhelming a small town, think of what would be borne in those rushing waters: garbage-can lids, trash, lawn furniture, toys, flowerpots, newspapers, umbrellas, a red gingham tablecloth, and the rotting, bloated corpses of the drowned. So too, Arathusia’s telling—between, around, and through the stories—was dotted with bobbing mundanities and grotesqueries. You could tell her it didn’t make sense, but that wasn’t going to stop her.

She called it spewing and said she’d discovered her propensity for it at age six. It was a kind of trance/monologue that sometimes told a story but often was just a jumble of fleeting instances and ideas. “You could call it automatic talking, sort of like automatic writing,” she said. “First I control my breathing, then I close my eyes. In the dark, my imagination blossoms until it swallows me into a scene, and I speak without knowing whatever I encounter there. A situation, its figures and landscape, might grow until it crumbles from its own weight of words and then it evolves into something different, only to fly apart to seed a hundred other permutations.”

I couldn’t really picture what she meant by all that, and I told her so. She said, “OK, I’ll give you a quick ten-minute sample.” She closed her eyes. Her nostrils flared and she took in great quantities of air, as if trying to hyperventilate. In an instant, her shoulders slouched, her head tipped to the side, and she leaned forward, limp, against the desk. A full minute passed, and I wondered if I should get up and leave. As I was about to do just that, I noticed her jaw twitching slightly. I reared back in my seat when her mouth sprang open like an automated device. Then the grumbling started and eventually eased into whispers. A few moments later, I heard her first real words.

“There’s something in the water, something in the slaughter, something in your daughter, so bring the brick and mortar.” That snippet gave way to a string of unrelated words, chaotic nonsense I won’t even try to record here. I lost track for a few seconds of what she said as I was focused on the speed at which her lips moved—pursing, undulating, quivering, popping. It was such an onslaught of raw language minus meaning that I felt like I was against the ropes, being worked over.

By the time I surfaced from that barrage, she’d returned to the original story. There was a farmer, and he was bricking his daughter up in an underground root cellar. From within, a fierce howling could be heard. When he finished his work, he took a pistol from his pocket and shot himself in the head. He lay beneath the yellow sky, a storm approaching, whipping the branches of trees and pushing ahead of it a pouring rain that might fill a swimming pool one could keep a porpoise in to make friends with and learn its intelligence until it escaped one day when the town flooded. You get the picture, the tale just veered off into inanity about the porpoise and the flood, and that led to the ocean and a kingdom under the sea, and an exegesis on growing tomatoes, etc.

Eventually, her words turned to light snoring, her body moved slowly into an upright position, and she opened her eyes with a shy smile. I applauded. She blushed.

 “So, you want me to copy down what you say?” I asked. 

“That’s right.”

“And you want me to handwrite all of these words?”

“Yes, pen and paper only, no computers or typewriters.”

“I doubt I’d be able to keep up with you. I can only write by hand so quickly. I got slapped on the knuckles with a ruler all through grammar school for holding the pen wrong, and I still do.”

She shrugged and shook her head like that was no problem. I wondered if she was a little light upstairs.

“Get a tape recorder. It’d be way better than me,” I said.

“You don’t understand,” she said, grinning. “I want my words to be shaped at random by the static of your failure to record everything legibly and accurately. Still, I want you to try passionately hard to do a perfect job. The spirit of passion denied will permeate my verbiage and sculpt it into something beautiful, like the acid in an etching.”

I was convinced she was a lunatic and prepared to take my leave when she reached into the top drawer of the desk and pulled out a fat roll of twenties. “Three hundred dollars a session. Two hours, no more, no less, in which you are dedicated to capturing my words, verbatim, on paper,” she said.

I stared at the roll of money.

She slid a business card across the desktop to me. “Meet me Tuesday at this address; bring your favorite pen.” 

Luckily Tuesday was only three days away. I was low on money and food, and had cut back already to toast and coffee in the morning and a meager dinner in the evening. It was starting to take a toll. My landlord was after me for the rent, which I’d only saved half of since being laid off two weeks earlier. I was banking so hard on Arathusia’s three hundred, I never really considered what an absurd enterprise I’d enlisted in. I reminded myself, I would have to fake passion. She seemed to want lots of passion and passion denied. In my mind they cancelled each other out, but to her it was art. I stood before the mirror and practiced my passion look, nine-tenths desperation.

Each of those three nights, whereas I would usually read short stories, I sat down at the card table in my kitchen with a bottle of bellyache red and a yellow legal pad. I left the little TV on in the living room and tried as best I could to copy down what the news heads spoke. I caught some of it, but my handwriting was atrocious as always and there were some major gaps in the text when my mind would drift away to my future employer’s melodic voice and serene beauty. She was a flagrant kook, but otherwise quite alluring.

The other thing on my mind was that story she began about the farmer who bricked his daughter up in the root cellar and then shot himself in the head. The more I thought about it, the stronger the images came through. What I saw led me to believe it took place in some other time. The old man wore a rumpled white shirt buttoned at the collar beneath a black vest. His pants were a size and a half too big for him, cinched at the waist with a length of rope. On his feet, he wore thick leather sandals. White hair, and white beard framed an expression of determination, a man on a mission. He trudged along, the weight of his daughter slung over his shoulder, pulling him down. The girl was either asleep or dead, dressed in a pink nightgown. Dark hair spilled down his back and ended only two inches above the ground. 

Papa had all the tools, the bricks and mortar ready at the root cellar, which indicated the deed had been carefully planned. His destination was an eruption of the field, covered atop by grass. The mound had one side that was a wall made of river rocks. In the middle of that wall, there was a wooden frame and a heavy door that opened onto a set of crude steps, leading down into the earth. As part of his planning, there was a lit candle down there, sitting on a small table, the only furnishing in that vault. The place was lined with limestone riprap, had a dirt floor and a ceiling of beams that somehow I knew he’d rescued from a demolished church.

It looked like it took everything out of him to lay her carefully on the floor. He got to his knees, rolled her onto her back, adjusted her nightgown to cover as much as it could, and kissed her on the forehead. In that instant, I saw her face in the wavering candlelight and could tell she was in her late teens. The only vibe about her that came through clearly was one of innocence. Her father sprang up then, and staggered quickly for the steps as if he was being chased. He blocked my view as he came toward the exit, and the last I saw before he passed through me and up out of the root cellar, was her lovely long hair sprawled in the dirt.

Outside, the wind had picked up, and even before I could turn my focus back to the old man, I could hear the trowel scraping on brick. Then time jumped forward and he was nearing completion of the job, fitting the last couple of bricks into place. I got a good look at him. His face was wrinkled and dark from the sun. He had a sharp nose and a grimace minus a few teeth. There were tears in his eyes. When the howling came from inside the root cellar, he dropped the trowel and staggered backward as if the noise had pushed him. He reached into his pocket and brought out a pistol.

For those three days my thoughts were rampant with the ideas and images of the strange interview. The only aspect of the entire affair that brought a smile to my face was recalling that when recently fired from my warehouse job, loading and unloading thirty-two-foot trucks on the graveyard shift, my boss, Ed Pares, told me I was a half-assed fuckup. I got a kick out the fact that my new employer took it as a given that I would assuredly fuck up, and that was why she hired me. There’s something to be said for that. The ad in the local paper that had brought me to her, proclaimed WRITER WANTED. When another warehouse job proved unavailable, on the spot, I became a writer. It was that easy.

Couldn’t sleep Monday night, tossing and turning as I did before the start of any job. Eventually I administered the vino. It always works eventually. Tuesday morning, I woke in a frenzy, the covers twisted around my neck, my pillow drenched with sweat. My mouth was Death Valley Days, and my head was The City of Dreadful Night. While shaving, I discovered my lack-of-passion expression. A shower and four cups of coffee got me halfway back in the swing. Dressed in my old brown suit, a pea-green shirt, black bow tie, and white sneakers, I headed for the door. When the hotel where I was to meet Arathusia came into view, six blocks from my place, I realized I’d forgotten my pens.

I hoped there would be some kind of stationary shop or drugstore where I might buy a pen. But we all know that could never be. I wound up at the foot of the stone stairway that led to the front entrance of the Parliament Hotel, a century-old building with a cupola and turrets constructed from a bright yellow rock. I wondered if it was sulfur as I mounted the steps, ten in all. There were stained glass windows of colorful birds around the borders of the door, survivors of an opulent past. Inside, dinginess ruled, a film of dust like gray snow under dim lighting. The tattered floral carpet, in places, was trod to threads. There was no one behind the front desk. I pulled the card Arathusia had given me from my pocket to check the room number and went in search of it.  

Up three flights of stairs and down a long hallway, I found 432 and knocked. She called for me to enter. I immediately saw that the room took up one of the turrets of the old place, a museum of threadbare finery. The Turkish carpets, the candelabra, the furniture constructed from Bombay ebony, were tattered and tarnished and splintered. She sat at a round table with a white linen cloth. Behind Arathusia was a window that faced the street, and the daylight made an aura around her form. A chair was pulled out for me across from hers. On the table at my spot was a stack of yellow legal pads.

I nodded to her and wished her a good morning.

She returned the pleasantry, and then said, “Do you have your pen?”

I hesitated for a moment, smiling harder. There was nothing but to break the news to her that I was a soldier without my weapon. I briefly considered telling her that it had run out of ink that morning just before I was to leave for the Parliament. Finally, I just said, “I forgot it.”

She laughed as if relieved and clapped her hands. “If you’d brought your own, I would have had to allow you the choice to use it. Now, you must use mine. Come here. Take off your jacket.”

I did as I was told, dropped the garment over the back of a chair, and approached her from across the room. In the moment I’d been looking away, she’d produced a small pine box, no wider nor longer than a five-hundred-page trade paperback book.  “Roll up the sleeve on the arm of your writing hand,” she said. I did, and she remarked, “Lefty,” cocked her head, and gave my mitt a sort of lascivious once-over. I’d never experienced nakedness concerning my hands before. She slid the top off the box. I leaned in and saw that the container was three quarters filled with dark soil. From the dirt it appeared a fragile green plant grew, sending out long, fine tendrils. Reaching in, she dug her fingers down around the plant, and when she lifted it, I saw those green shoots were not vegetable but wire. They were attached to a long, silver pen, and there was a wrist clasp with Velcro that had also been buried. 

“I call my invention the Starlight Stylus, after my mother’s middle name, June Starlight Sernom,” she said, and attached the clasp around my left wrist. “Now, hold the pen with your index, middle finger, and thumb.” I moved closer to her, and she maneuvered my fingers into the appropriate positions. Her touch had a noticeable warmth to it that almost made me swoon. In that moment, it happened so quickly I’m not sure I saw it, but the tendrils of green, of their own volition, wrapped in an eyeblink around each of my fingers. I took a step back and gasped. “It’s quite alright,” she said. “The stylus will assist you by means of massage, keep you writing long after you might have given up.”

I could feel the device’s grip. Who knew where it all came from, but as I sat down in front of the stack of legal pads, I noticed my hand was covered now by a green glove of wire-wisps. The silver pen looked like a polished rifle bullet lying in the grass and fit my hand with an exactitude that made writing seem inevitable. If only I’d had one in school. I looked over at Arathusia. “Write your name at the top of the pad for practice,” she said. I did, and could tell I wasn’t completely in control of my script. The Starlight device clutched and eased its grip in a hundred tiny places. Its influence produced a midsized text, wonderfully loopy with old-fashioned flourishes, and yet completely legible. I laughed out loud in reaction.

“I see your name is Eben Cull.”

“Call me Eben.”

“I hired you for today without ever knowing your name. Merely on the strength of your personality. Now, are you ready to write with passion?” I gave her my best passionate expression. She hiked her right eyebrow briefly, gave a sigh, and said, “Very well, let’s begin.”

She closed her eyes, those long lashes gracefully falling, and even before they shut out the world, her face went, in a heartbeat, from joyfully eager to totally blank. Only then when she was at rest did I truly see her for the first time that morning. I marveled at the smoothness of her skin, her small mouth, partially open, the lips done in a pale coral. Her black hair was, as usual, gathered completely to the right, as if sidestepping the onrush of her bizarre thoughts on their way to the polestar. She wore a lavender dress with white lace trim, cinched at the waist. It had a high collar with a black ribbon tied in a bow at the front. Slowly, she leaned forward against the table.

Whatever trepidation I had about the job, I was ready to dive in now. My were-hand held a silver rocket. I closed my eyes and listened intently. The faint sound of her rhythmic breathing began subtly and grew in urgency. I waited and waited, and then my mind wandered, and I saw, on the blank screen behind my eyes, the scene of the root cellar in the dark rainy field, the old man’s body. It made me jump when the cellar door was flung violently open, and candlelight streamed out into the night. In the next breath, I heard her speak. She’d started and I was caught off guard. Already, two lines of gibberish had flowed past me with no response. The Starlight Stylus stung my hand in four places. The pain was excruciating, but it got me jotting.  

The first fifteen minutes of her verbal emission was nothing but disjointed fiddle-faddle, crowding the lines of the pad. The stylus allowed me to keep up, and I was quite happy with my progress, missing merely a word here or there throughout the first two pages. I was operating like a real scrivener, if you know what I mean. Then I felt something change, just a twinge, less than a possibility, but it registered. The utterances it swam with had no seeming connection or sense, but this puff in the flow, like a miniscule fart of “meaning,” began to attract other words around it until, over a period of a page, it tumbled, vaguely at first, and then most solidly, into a story.

The young girl, dressed in a navy-blue pinafore and white blouse, sat across from her father at the dinner table in the kitchen. She wasn’t as interested in the food as he was. He used a piece of bread to corral gravy and potatoes while she looked out the window at the darkening autumn sky. In the quiet but for his chewing, she heard the wind, and beneath it the cows lowing in their pens. Turning back to him, she said, “I went to visit Mommy today.”

He didn’t look up. “How was that?” he asked.

“The trees in the graveyard were all bright yellow.”

“They’re elms,” he said. “What did you tell your mother?”

“I told her about a dream I had.”

He pushed his plate back and lifted his head to see her. “Can you tell me?”

“I was walking home from the pond. I could see the house and knew it was close to dinnertime. My boots were covered with mud, and I was carrying my wooden doll, Bindi. All of a sudden, a man appeared, walking toward me. He was dressed very fine like a gentleman, hat and checkered vest, dark coat, a tie, and a walking stick.  As we came closer to each other, I noticed there was something wrong about him. I felt it in my chest before I saw what it was. His face was feathered, like a robin’s breast, and he had a beak and large eyes. I stopped walking, although I wanted to run.”

“My goodness,” said her father.

“He told me his name was Twin Owls 12 and asked for mine. I couldn’t move. Then he leaned down like he wanted a better look at me and spit a long violet stream into my open mouth. It tasted like bad perfume and onions. I ran away as fast as I could.”

The static set in then, inconsequential blither, words flying out in all directions, scattering like cockroaches when you hit the lights. I fielded most of them, memorializing each on yellow paper. The silver pen was probably responsible for a good deal of my success. Without any reason organizing them, each utterance came whizzing out of nowhere like a slap shot. My guess was I was an hour into the ordeal. I could feel myself flagging. I looked over at Arathusia. She was drooling from the corner of her racing lips, but still lovely. Her eyes fluttered behind her lids. It wasn’t long at all before my attention began to falter, but when I contemplated taking the nib from the paper, the Starlight contraption gave me a jolt of pain that brought me back into focus. It rode my hand like a jockey with a whip.

A deluge, an avalanche of words, each so brilliantly dissimilar from the ones around it, the whole thing seemed impossible. Wanting to avoid future stinging, I did what I could to keep up and all was fine, save an errant morsel here or there. Then I could feel the flow shifting, like an airliner banking into the arc of a turn. As the stream lost speed it gained meaning, and before I knew it I was back in the farmhouse. I didn’t recognize the room I was in, but it seemed a parlor or a living room. I smelled the remnant aroma of dinner, saw the light shining in the distance. The farmer spoke, and I followed the sound of his voice.

He stood in the dark hallway at the entrance to a room. A mild glow spilled out. I walked up behind him and saw over his shoulder that it was his daughter’s room. She lay in bed with the covers pulled up to her chin. He watched as she clasped her hands, closed her eyes, and said a prayer for her mother. “OK, now,” he said and flipped the lights off. She turned and put her arms out. He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. She clasped her hands behind his neck and held on for a moment. “Go to sleep,” he said, and left the room.

I followed him to the living room, describing every iota, as if I was recording and creating the scene in the same instant. At that juncture I wasn’t conscious of what words I was committing to paper, nor could I even hear Arathusia speaking. The farmer sat in a chair and turned on the standing light above his head. He took a book off the small table to the left of his seat and turned to a saved page. In the calm, I heard him breathing, watched his eyes shifting side to side, his lips barely moving. As soon as I realized the serenity of the scene, the words shed meaning, slowly at first. Disparate verbs infiltrated, sharp consonants shredded. The farmhouse and the country night, the lamp, the chair, and the farmer turned to smoke and drifted off. In a moment, it had all become mere words, and I was back in the hotel room with Arathusia, recording, with a fatigued hand, her every banal utterance.

It was obvious to me that I was missing more per sentence than I had all morning. Words were dropping like flies, and I barely gave a shit. After the story fell apart, I lost what feeble passion I had mustered. My hand was tired and swollen, as if I’d somehow sprained it. The wire tendrils of the stylus were stretched to their limit, digging into my fingers. I very nearly lifted the nib from the paper when Arathusia gasped, and the device grabbed me. There was a spark of wicked pain in the palm pad at the base of my thumb. It felt like a drill was incrementally digging its way in. I gave a sharp cry, hoping to wake her and put an end to the session. Next I knew, I was writing faster than I had yet, and Arathusia had put me back in the farmhouse, in the living room with the farmer reading.

There came a description of the wind outside, “distant cry of anguish,” a note about “the insistent ticking of the grandfather clock near the entrance to the hallway,” and half a page devoted to the farmer’s “reliable and soothing” respiration. Then I heard it, and apparently he did too. From down the hall came his daughter’s voice, a steady, undulating stream. It wasn’t loud enough to catch meaning from. She was talking to either her doll, Bindi, or herself. Obviously, the farmer wasn’t surprised. He sighed and smiled and shook his head slightly. “I’m coming down there if you don’t shhh and go to sleep,” he called out. The girl’s monologue didn’t stop with his warning. Instead, it increased in urgency and volubility. He tried for a minute to go back to his reading, but there was no ignoring it as the rising and falling of her chant became incantatory.

“Good Lord,” he said, and laid the book open on the side table. He rubbed his eyes, stretched, and got to his feet. I followed him down the hall to his daughter’s room. He turned in at the doorway and said, “I thought I told you to be quiet.” There was a definite sternness in his tone, still a shred that found it comic but rapidly losing patience. I passed through him and stood at the end of the girl’s bed. It was dark, with only the light from the living room seeping in from down the hallway and around two corners. Her words now were individually recognizable, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying. “That’s enough,” her father yelled. The sudden force of his outburst scared me but did nothing to slow her down. He flipped the light switch on and said, “Arathusia, please.”

You can imagine, when I heard her called that name, it sent a shudder through me. My mind blanked for a second. Somehow, I was aware that I was still engaged with my employer’s dictation, but the Starlight Stylus must have completely taken over. I couldn’t feel my arm move but I did feel my hand being carried across the page like the farmer’s daughter over his shoulder. I wondered if the entire spew I was privy to was all merely memories of Arathusia when she was a child.

The girl lay back on her pillow, one arm over her head, the other across her chest. Her appearance was perfectly serene but for the movement of her lips and what noise the words made. The farmer called her name again and again and lightly shook her shoulder to wake her. He might as well have been as incorporeal as myself. I wanted to tell him, “Hey, she’s spewing,nothing to worry about.” He did look worried, placing his hand upon her forehead to check for fever. When he found he couldn’t wake her, he backed away, as if the rush of the language pushed him up against the wall, panic in his eyes.

She raised her voice for a few beats and yelled, “Twin Owls 12,” and to my astonishment the figure of that odd gentleman appeared exactly as she’d previously described him, standing on the opposite side of the bed from her father. When it appeared, I literally gasped, but luckily he also seemed not to notice I was there. It was clear however that Arathusia’s father saw the well-dressed birdman’s feathered face, saw his cane, a monocle in the left eye, and a bowler derby. “What in hell!” said the farmer. Twin Owls 12 threw his head back and laughed—the sound of a blue jay screeching.

As that horrible sound faded it summoned forth a storm of unrelated lines and phrases. The scene before me came apart at the atomic level, sifting into salt and then smoke. A tornado of disparate words whirled around my head, and I slumped forward onto my legal pad. It was like a drink of water after a week in the desert not to hear Arathusia anymore. Just the silence and the wind outside on the street. I sat back and opened my eyes. Arathusia was upright in her seat, blinking away her trance and wiping the drool from her chin. Nearly as welcome as the silence was the sun, still morning, pouring in behind her. I lifted my arm to get a better look at the diabolical Starlight Stylus, and the thing suddenly sloughed off my wrist, fell onto the table like a pulled weed, and inched its way back toward its box.

“Well done,” she said. “Seems you’ve caught quite a bit of my spew.”

“Are you aware of what you’re speaking when you’re out cold? Is it like a dream where you remember something of what you spoke?”

“No, no,” she said, and the way she said it seemed so attractive to me. “The only thing I recall is that I was talking fast and hard.”

“Wild.” I shook my head.

“But now I have your dictation to read and I can finally discover what I’ve said. That’s such a relief. I want to thank you.”

“Would you like to get a cup of coffee, a bite of lunch?”

“Pass me those legal pads, please,” she said, and I did. “Sorry, but I can’t be seen with you. My husband doesn’t know I’ve undertaken the task of learning about me. He’s the jealous sort. You’ll be smart not to meet him.”

“Isn’t this something you should have told me before?”

She slipped the pads and the wooden stylus box into a briefcase and latched it shut. “Probably,” she said, “but then I might not have gotten you to help me.”

“You tricked me?”

She laughed and although it was a slap in the face, the music of it was enchanting. “Don’t worry, go home. I’ll contact you if I need you again,” she said. The roll of twenties came sailing through the air, and I caught it with both hands. All I could do was stare at it. In the meantime, she took up her briefcase and said, “Ciao.” As she swept past me to the door, her scent, lilac perfume and sweat, fogged me, and before I knew it she was gone. I sat there for a few more minutes, until I noticed that for my entire stint in the room there had been a painted portrait of a sinister-looking owl—the beak, head feathers, angry eyes, sporting a red cravat and monocle —on the wall across from me. I shoved the money in my pocket, put on my jacket, and fled the Parliament. 

“The Spew” copyright © 2026 by Jeffrey Ford
Art copyright © 2026 by Carter Gill

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The Spew

Jeffrey Ford

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Jeffrey Ford

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Original Fiction Space Opera

Joiner and Rust

An aging robot, on a journey to visit a friend, reflects on their adventures together.

Illustrated by James Gilleard

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Edited by Jonathan Strahan

By Lavie Tidhar

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Published on January 14, 2026

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An aging robot, on a journey to visit a friend, reflects on their adventures together.

Novelette | 8,520 words

The Watermelon Stand

In Qijiang in the hot summer months the white moths, restless and huge, float drunkenly to the evening lights of pool halls and hot pot diners, causing a disturbance of the peace. The air is scented with hot oil and Sichuan peppers, humid in the constant anticipation of rain. In the distance the mountains rise shrouded in mist, their roads twisting and dangerous to pass. The moon shines like an ancient relative looking down affectionately on the young.

On one such night a robot, somewhat elderly and in the robes of a travelling monk, came to Mrs. Zhang’s fruit stand and asked to purchase a watermelon.

‘What do you need a watermelon for?’ Mrs. Zhang’s granddaughter said, staring curiously at the robot from her low plastic chair. ‘You’re a robot.’

The robot seemed to ponder the question for a while. Then it said, ‘That’s none of your business, is it, little girl?’

She reminded the robot of someone; someone it knew a long time ago and in another place.

‘Rude!’ the girl said, and she stuck her tongue out at the robot.

The robot selected a watermelon, having rapped on each one gently first. Its fingers were slender but covered in rust spots, the girl noticed.

‘This will do,’ the robot said.

It reached into a leather satchel and came back with a handful of coins which it placed on the bamboo counter. There were Martian shekels and Salt from the Drift, and a single Lunar Credit, of the sort no one used anymore. The girl stared in fascination at the coins.

‘Where do you come from,’ she said, ‘space?’

‘Mars,’ the robot said.

‘Oh,’ the little girl said. Then thought. ‘What’s it like there?’

‘Cold,’ the robot said. ‘Lots of sand.’

‘Oh,’ the girl said, vaguely disappointed.

‘Well,’ the robot said, ‘so long.’ It picked up the watermelon and turned to leave.

‘Wait!’ the girl said.

‘Yes?’ the robot said.

‘What are you doing in Qijiang?’ the girl said.

‘What does anyone do in Qijiang?’ the robot said. Then it walked away and soon vanished in the crowds, and the girl reached for a stick of grilled chicken and popped a chunk in her mouth.

‘Huh,’ she said.

The Village

The robot – its name was Rust, but that doesn’t matter for now – made its way through fields until it came to an old village. The place was half in ruins, and weeds proliferated between the old stone homes. A bar with broken windows still stood, and behind the glass the robot could see upended chairs and tipped rubbish, and cats moved between the tables as though this was their domain. More cats came out and watched it as it passed, and the robot felt wary of them, for cats were sneaky and untrustworthy beings. One cat, in particular, a large tawny creature who seemed never to have missed a meal, stalked the robot as it passed through the village. The robot walked through an old preserved hutong, passed an empty mahjong parlor and a barbershop with a broken red-and-white pole, and came to a small square. It scanned the area, searching.

‘You’re not from around here,’ a cat said. It was the big tawny one, and it perched on top of a mound of broken roof tiles and yawned at the robot.

‘You’re a cat,’ the robot said.

‘Yeah? So?’ the cat said.

‘Don’t much care for cats,’ the robot said.

‘Don’t much care for robots,’ the cat said. ‘Especially not when they come uninvited and start snooping around. What were you, a war robot?’

‘I was a lot of things,’ the robot said.

‘Yeah?’ the cat said. ‘And what are you now?’

‘I’m looking for someone,’ the robot said, ignoring the cat’s question. ‘Know where I can find them?’

‘Depends,’ the cat said, ‘on who you’re looking for.’

The robot regarded the cat with some annoyance. Annoyance wasn’t really a feeling robots should possess, if they should possess feelings at all. But it is possible all sentience produces irritation.

‘How come you speak, anyway?’ the robot said. It knew plenty of cats on Mars, and most of those never spoke at all.

‘Noded,’ the cat said. It turned its head and the robot saw the great lumpy growth of silicate filaments that shone blue against its fur. ‘I’m not so much a cat as a, well.’ It considered. ‘A hybrid, I suppose,’ it said. ‘But I’m mostly cat.’

‘What you got in there,’ the robot said, ‘a ghost?’

If cats could shrug the cat would have.

‘A fragment of an Other,’ he said. Meaning the strange intelligences that lived only in the digital realm. ‘Though I don’t know if the original is still alive so, if they aren’t, I suppose this would technically be a ghost.’

‘I’m looking for an old friend,’ the robot said. ‘Should be living around here somewhere.’

‘Yeah?’ the cat said. It yawned again. ‘Then what’s the problem?’

‘Can’t find them,’ the robot said.

‘Not much of a friend, then,’ the cat said.

‘You know who I mean?’ the robot said.

‘Maybe I do,’ the cat said. ‘Maybe I do. Why do you have a watermelon?’

‘It’s a memory,’ the robot said. The cat blinked. Data fled behind his eyes.

‘The mind you seek is up in the mountains somewhere,’ the cat said. ‘We don’t have much to do with it these days.’

‘How do I find it?’ the robot said.

‘Tricky,’ the cat said. ‘Go past the river and look for a door. That’s what I’d do, anyway. Got any cat food?’

‘Why would I have any cat food?’ the robot said.

‘I don’t know,’ the cat said. ‘I thought it was worth asking.’

Fat Water River

The robot came to the river beyond the old village and stood on the bank contemplating the problem of crossing. It looked deceptively shallow and calm; but the water, rather than blue or green, was a thick and sludgy black, and it knew that this was a fat water river, and that to set foot in it would be deadly for either human or robot. The sludge of e-waste and nano-machines burbled merrily by, and it was not long before it registered the robot. Ghosts formed on the surface then, rose to regard the robot as vaguely defined holographic hallucinations. They were only weakly visible in the physicality, barely bending the light, but grew sharper in definition in the virtuality as the robot, naturally, could see the worlds of both.

At first the robot could make little sense of them. They were the dearly departed of this land, or of other places – a jumble of digital memories, confused half-thoughts, the digital bits that were left behind in a person’s node when the organic brain the node was entwined with had died. They’d been discarded as waste and mixed by the flow. Some reached out ghostly arms to the robot in silent plea, others cursed in languages so old even the robot did not remember their names. They threw pixelated images at Rust, random machine-generated mumblings.

But another form then took their place, seemingly feeding on their ghostly forms until it grew stronger and better defined. It was a young woman, the robot saw, and her smile was bright and it produced an ache in the robot’s heart, or an approximation of such a feeling, at least. If robots can have feelings, or hearts.

‘No,’ the robot said. ‘You can’t be here.’

The young woman laughed and the robot looked closer and saw what it truly was. The figure shifted and became amorphous, and the robot said, ‘You’re a strigoi.’

‘The ghost of one,’ the strigoi said. Strigoi were a sort of data vampire, humans infected by an old war virus who fed relentlessly on other people’s memories. ‘Who’s the girl in your dreams, robot?’

‘Stay out of my mind,’ the robot said.

‘But there’s been no mind to play with for so long,’ the strigoi said. ‘I feed on the scraps in these waters but they do not satisfy me. I never asked for this, you know. I was bitten in the spaceways by an oni and got the curse, and when I died I found myself here, with all the refuse. I long for true death, robot. You are the first interesting thing to come around for decades.’

‘How old are you?’ the robot said.

‘Old,’ the strigoi said.

‘I’m looking for someone,’ the robot said.

‘The one who lives up in the mountains?’ the strigoi said. ‘They used to come down sometimes and talk to me, but not for a long time. There is a door beyond the river, or so I’m told.’

‘How do I cross?’ the robot said.

‘How should I know?’ the strigoi said. ‘Are you sure I can’t feed on your memories some more? Who was this girl whose shape I wore? She was important to you?’

‘Stay out of my mind,’ the robot said. ‘I will look for a bridge for a crossing.’

‘Then goodbye,’ the strigoi said sadly. She melted back into the fat water sludge. The river bubbled on. The robot followed the course of the river.

The Bridge

The robot followed the river for some time before it came to an old wooden bridge. When it crossed the bridge it saw that sitting on the other side of the river was the cat. The cat looked up at the robot and yawned.

‘Found it yet?’ he said.

‘No,’ the robot said.

‘I’d go back if I were you,’ the cat said. ‘The one in the mountain definitely is an old war machine, if I’m any judge. I think it used to be a manshonyagger.’

‘Are you all crazy around here?’ the robot said.

‘Crazy?’ the cat said. ‘It depends who you ask. Not that there’s anyone to ask. People do tend to avoid this part of the country for some reason.’ He went to the river bank and began to lap at the water. Ghostly forms rose out of the sludge, extending translucent arms. The cat sucked on their forms until they vanished.

‘What are you doing?’ the robot said in some alarm.

‘Feeding,’ the cat said. ‘I like to eat ghosts.’

‘You’re a very strange cat,’ the robot said.

‘Been called worse,’ the cat said.

The robot walked on. The mountains rose ahead of him, wreathed in clouds. In a short time the robot came to a door standing without walls or a roof in the middle of a rocky outcrop, surrounded by flowers. The robot hesitated before the door. The cat, who had followed it there, now perched himself on a rock and watched this little tableau.

‘Go on, then,’ the cat said.

The robot tried the handle. When the door opened the space beyond it was not the same as on the robot’s side.

‘What is this?’ the robot said.

‘An old defensive structure, I think,’ the cat said.

‘You ever been inside?’ the robot said.

‘Maybe,’ the cat said. It yawned. ‘A few times, sure.’

‘What’s it like in there?’ the robot said.

‘One way to find out,’ the cat said.

‘Why do you keep following me?’ the robot said.

‘No reason,’ the cat said. ‘Just bored. Not much going on around here. Can I have your watermelon?’

‘You cannot,’ the robot said.

It hesitated on the threshold, then it went in.

The House of a Thousand Doors

The robot found itself in a dark corridor. As it began to walk down it soft lighting began to glow in the ceiling. The floor was carpeted. When the robot turned back to look, the door had vanished, and it knew then where it was. The robot walked along the corridor and saw many more doors lining both sides. It tried one at random and it opened onto a room with boxes piled in one corner and two doors leading elsewhere. The robot went in and followed one of the doors into another room, this one hung with numerous paintings all made by machines, and it followed another door into another room. The robot stopped in irritation. There was no point going through endless rooms.

It was nothing more than a folding space vasthaus trap, of the sort they used to make in the old wars. Step through one’s door and you’d spend the rest of eternity wandering its corridors and rooms. The robot sat itself down in the middle of the room and closed its eyes and meditated. Vasthauses were often used as traps to guard certain entrances. There was usually a solution, often a combination of rooms one had to visit in a specific order to unlock the final door. At other times it involved finding certain objects throughout the house, then putting them in a special configuration. The robot did not have patience for this sort of thing. It should be supposed that robots must be possessed of infinite patience, but this was not the case, and the robot felt irritated. It tried to clear its mind as it contemplated the infinite. When it opened its eyes again it saw the cat.

‘Seriously?’ the robot said.

‘Figured it out yet?’ the cat said.

‘Will you stop following me?’ the robot said. ‘I don’t even like cats.’

‘I suppose you’re a robot,’ the cat said, ‘so you could last here a long time. Probably centuries. Most people who make the mistake of coming in are still here, I saw a skeleton in one of the library rooms once.’ He seemed quite cheered by that thought. ‘Probably a couple of old robots wandering around here, too. Maybe you could find them and form a scavenging gang. But you’ll run down eventually.’

‘Most things do,’ the robot said. ‘How do you get in and out, cat?’

‘Me?’ the cat said. ‘I just go through the kitchens.’

‘Where are the kitchens?’ the robot said.

‘Just follow your nose,’ the cat said. ‘You do have a nose, don’t you?’

‘Not really,’ the robot said.

‘Tough break,’ the cat said. He walked towards the wall and the robot watched as the cat vanished through it.

‘Huh,’ the robot said.

It really didn’t care for cats.

When the robot stepped out onto the next corridor, it paid attention to what the cat had said. Robots do not, as a rule, have a sense of smell, but it could activate an olfactory sensor, not often used and protesting somewhat at being so rudely awakened. The robot detected the slight aroma of Sichuan peppers and hot oil. The molecules in the air were few and had travelled a long way. The robot followed the smell of hot pot through several doors and in and out of several rooms, all different, until the smell grew stronger by degrees. The robot passed through a room full of aquariums and a room full of old books all written by machines, and finally a room filled with nothing but blank maps. The next door it took led the robot into the kitchens.

Stainless steel surfaces and sinks; rows of sharpened knives; spotless pots and pans gleamed on china work surfaces. Machines slowly hummed awake. The smell of cooking filled the air – garlic, soy, peppercorns and chilli – as vats of bubbling oil slowly opened. The robot watched but there was no one there. A machine began printing out shredded pork and prawns. The robot did not care about the food. It said, ‘Are you sentient?’

There was only a hum from the kitchen machines. The robot sighed, wondering why anyone would have bothered designing such a device as a vasthaus then leaving it for centuries. It seemed wasteful to the robot.

‘Alright then,’ the robot said. ‘Goodbye.’

The machines hummed contentedly. The robot would have shrugged, if robots could shrug. Instead it went out to the door marked Exit and pushed it open. Sunlight touched Rust’s face. The robot slammed the door shut behind him. When he turned around it was gone.

The Funeral

The robot looked about itself and saw that it was high up in the mountains and it was daytime now. There were no roads leading here, and thick low clouds completely encircled the top, shutting it off from the world below. The vasthaus had folded in upon itself again, so for the time being there was no way back down, unless one were to jump, and the robot was too old for that sort of thing. It was also still carrying the watermelon. It turned back and trudged up the only path. Shortly the robot came to a small village, composed of a single street, still rising up the mountain, with houses on either side. Music came forth from one of the houses, its door open, incense burning, and the robot realised it had intruded on a funeral due to take place.

Unlike the abandoned village below, this one was inhabited. The robot went to pay its respects. It went into the house with the open door and stepped inside and regarded the corpse. It was not human, the robot saw, but rather a sentient machine like itself. Yet it was not humanoid, either, but a sort of giant grasshopper type, perhaps designed for mine laying once, later converted to working the fields. It lay still on the bed and the music played on, and other denizens of that village had gathered in the small room, some on wheels and some on many legs and some on caterpillar tracks and others flying.

‘I’m sorry,’ the robot said.

‘It was their time,’ an old robot shaped like an egret said. ‘All of us are old and the parts are hard to come by. Sometimes our minds just…stop.’

‘Will you bury it?’ the robot said.

‘In our own fashion,’ the egret said. ‘We leave our dead in a hollow at the peak. A sort of junkyard, I suppose it is. It seems fitting for our kind.’

‘I suppose it does,’ the robot said. It thought of a human funeral, long ago and on another world than this. ‘I am looking for an old mind. Older than any of you, I’d wager.’

‘They don’t live here with us,’ the egret said, ‘but on the peak itself, in an old hermit’s place. It’s said there was always a hermit here. Why do you carry a watermelon?’

‘Someone I once knew loved watermelons,’ the robot said. Thinking of a human child, a delighted shriek, the sound of a knife slicing effortlessly through rind, of juice running down a childish chin. If robots could smile it would have smiled.

It left the mourners then and walked further along the street and up the mountain. Shortly the houses were left behind and the music faded. The robot came to the local shrine and paused. Four figures carved in stone stood patiently, indifferent to the elements. Small offerings were left before them by the robots of the village. The robot reflected that people must have lived here once. Of the four deities the robot recognised St. Cohen of the Others and the Emperor of Time from the Mars-That-Never-Was. It didn’t know the other two. It kept walking up the road until it ended and the robot beheld the hermitage. It sat atop a sharp peak, a modest structure of wood and bamboo with no obvious route to reach it. The robot reconfigured its body with some effort and somewhat like a crab or a spider it began to crawl up the steep incline.

The robot had the sense of something or someone watching it. It reached the top and stood in contemplation before the simple wooden door as it reconfigured itself back to a humanoid shape, and it checked the integrity of the watermelon. At last, after some hesitation, the robot knocked on the door.

‘Go away,’ a voice said from inside.

‘It’s me,’ the robot said.

‘I know,’ the voice said. ‘Go away.’

‘I travelled a long way to get here,’ the robot said.

‘Then you had a wasted journey,’ the voice said. ‘Goodbye.’

‘I brought a watermelon,’ the robot said, with some reproach.

There was a silence on the other side of the door.

‘Well?’ the robot said.

There was still no answer. The robot tried the door. It opened to the robot’s touch. The robot went in.

An elderly robot, similar in size and design to the robot itself, stood facing one of the windows, its back to the door.

‘It’s her birthday today,’ the robot said.

‘I know,’ the other replied.

‘It’s good to see you, Joiner,’ the robot said.

The other one turned with a sigh.

‘It’s good to see you too, Rusty,’ Joiner said.

Joiner and Rust

Back in the olden days there was no better duo you could send into battle than Joiner and Rust. They could lay down a field of mines faster than you could say Nirrti’s Pirates three times. They could attach magnetically to the shell of a ship in Jovian space, crawl undetected like space crabs along it, breach the hull and, well, you could fill in the blanks. Not that Rust and Joiner used blanks.

Most robots of the old humanoid kind did what their makers designed them to do. There were elder companion robots and mining robots and robots to raise children and robots to wage war.

What robots did was work. The nature of the work was not up to them, and on the whole robots did not necessarily take much pleasure – if pleasure is a concept that could be applied to robots – in the jobs they were sent to do. The wars of humanity were long and wide-ranging, from the deserts of Earth to the wilds of the outer reaches of the solar system. Robots killed people and robots patched them back together again. Robots raised children and watched them die. Robots endured. It was what robots were designed to do, and they were good at it. And when the old wars finally stopped, the robots who remained – for no one had made any new humanoid robots for a very long time – had to stop and ask themselves new and difficult questions, such as Who am I? and What is my purpose? and even, Is there a God?

To that last question, the robots’ answer was practical as ever. They didn’t know, but they could find out, they reasoned. They duly built a Vatican on Mars and elected a Robo-Pope, and there they began to follow the Way of Robot, establishing their church quietly and efficiently throughout the solar system.

Others wandered, doing odd jobs, seeking meaning in labour, or poetry, or simple existence.

Joiner and Rust did none of those things.

Unlike most robots, they had enjoyed their work, on the whole. Something in their makeup was different to the rest of their kind. There had been a thrill in a life of danger: never knowing if the mines you laid weren’t going to prematurely explode, if the people you hurt were going to hurt you back. It was a game, and games were fun.

So when everything stopped and there was no need for their services anymore, Joiner and Rust were more than a little put off.

They were sitting in a bar at Lagrange Five Station – not Earth, not the moon, not anywhere really, which suited them. They felt worse than useless – they felt obsolete. There was a woman in red on a stage who sang sad songs. There were people from all over the solar system drinking their dinner, it was the sort of place that only let in drifters and vagabonds.

‘So what do we do now?’ Rust said.

‘We could go to Mars,’ Joiner said. ‘Find work in one of their agricultural settlements. Grow cabbage and things.’

‘Cabbage,’ Rust said.

‘It’s a living,’ Joiner said.

‘Not much of one,’ Rust said.

‘What do you suggest, then, Rusty? The mines on Io? Fishing the Kraken Sea on Titan?’

‘There’re no fish in the Kraken Sea,’ Rust said. ‘It’s full of liquid methane.’

‘I know that,’ Joiner said. ‘I was being rhetorical.’

‘Got pirates, though,’ someone said. Both robots looked up. A small woman with a rather exotic nodal growth sprouting from the back of her neck stood above them.

‘Where?’ Joiner said.

‘The Kraken Sea. Nirrti the Black and her army of the Disconnected rule that sea,’ the woman said.

The two robots exchanged glances.

‘And you’re Nirrti?’ Joiner said in bemusement. The woman laughed.

‘God, no,’ she said. ‘The Disconnected are fanatics. Besides—’ She tapped her own overgrown node.

‘Right,’ Rust said.

‘Wouldn’t want to lose that,’ the woman said. ‘Mind if I sit down? Buy you a drink?’

‘We only drink to satisfy societal expectations,’ Rust said. ‘It doesn’t do anything, you know.’

‘On account of, we’re robots,’ Joiner said.

The woman nodded very seriously.

‘You are?’ she said.

‘Can’t you tell?’ Joiner said, annoyed.

‘Then you can buy me a drink,’ the woman said, and she sat down without being offered a chair. On the stage the woman in red finished a sad song and began a new one. The woman at the table made a bottle appear and she poured herself a drink and downed it.

‘I’m Captain Bukhari,’ the woman said. ‘You might have heard of me.’

‘If you say so,’ Joiner said.

‘“Raving” Bukhari?’ Rust said. ‘The Butcher of Callisto? I thought he was a man.’

‘I was back then,’ Bukhari said. ‘Anyway the whole butcher thing has been grossly exaggerated.’

If robots could shrug Rust would have shrugged.

‘So what do you want, Captain?’ Rust said.

‘You two look like you need a job,’ Bukhari said. ‘That’s what robots always need, isn’t it? Work?’

‘And you’re the sort of person to give it to us?’ Rust said.

‘I might be,’ Bukhari said.

‘What sort of work?’ Joiner said.

‘It won’t be farming cabbages,’ Bukhari said.

The two robots looked at her in suspicion.

‘There are no more wars,’ Joiner said. ‘Unless you plan to start one, Captain.’

Bukhari smiled slowly and sincerely.

‘There are no more wars,’ she said, ‘but there are plenty of, well…leftovers.’

The Great Graveyard of Warships and Doom

Of all the major wars and skirmishes around the solar system, perhaps the grandest and longest-running was the so-called Trifala King Wo, which took place over centuries in Jovian space, amidst the rich polities of the Galilean moons. Of course, actually getting to Jupiter could take a long time. Joiner and Rust shipped as cargo. First from Lagrange Five, cutting straight through Mars orbit and avoiding the glittering belt of asteroids, ships and habitats as much as possible to plough through on the First Great Crossing from the Inner to the Outer System.

Captain Bukhari’s ship was called the Rashnu. It was an ancient and echoey vessel built even before Dragon’s Home was populated by the mysterious entity of that name on the moon once called Charon.

Crewing the captain’s ship was an odd assortment of definitely-not-pirates and would-be salvagers. These included a five-body combat gestalt hive-mind from the Martian Outback, who were named Franco Sinco Seis Slim; a lone strigoi from Titan who avoided the rest of the crew, called Hannah; an Old Earth robotnik named Shimmel, and an uplifted kangaroo everyone called Moose.

There was also a Yith, one of those zombie-like humans with a node corrupted by the dark entities who were rumoured to live in the Oort. But no one wanted to ask the Yith if he even had a name once.

The Rashnu drifted the great debris belt around Jupiter. Here, the remnants of a thousand ships still floated in Trans-Jovian space, along with sentient mine fields, disabled space probes, and the hundred other kinds of detritus left behind by a long-running and costly war. The crew were not pirates, as Captain Bukhari kept reminding them. They were salvagers. No one had to die, and more importantly, no one had to know how the Rashnu came by its cargo, as long as someone in Io City or Ganymede Prime was willing to pay good money for it. And there were plenty of takings to be had, out here in this great graveyard of warships and doom.

Out here a robot could really make something of itself. One of their early jobs, Joiner and Rust had to board a wreck called the Yvala. It was barely a couple of centuries old, from the late phase of the Trifala King war, and the captain thought it might contain Jettisoned wildtech, hopefully inert, hopefully valuable. Jettisoned was the only town on the lawless moon Triton, on the far edges of the solar system, the refuge of outlaws and those jettisoned from the Exodus ships making their slow way into galactic space. And everything went smoothly for a bit—

Joiner and Rust clung to the hull, when Joiner sent – Does anything look strange to you?

Rust looked at the hull and noticed that strange growths, some as fine as human hairs, had formed on the shell of the ship and seemed to undulate in some invisible breeze.

Weird, he messaged. Wildtech?

Don’t know, Joiner messaged.

Blow her up, Rust messaged back, already losing interest. Things out here always got weird sooner or later.

The hull exploded without sound.

Breach, Rust sent back to the captain.

Proceed, Captain Bukhari said.

Rust looked at Joiner. Joiner looked at Rust.

If robots could grin, perhaps they would have.

They went into the breached Yvala.

The mission was simple: map the vessel, locate anything of value and remove it back to the Rashnu. That was the mission every time. But Rust began to have misgivings, a dull alarm sub-system going in the back of its head. The corridors were dark, the walls were overgrown with the same sort of almost seaweed-like things, which brushed gently against the robot’s exposed skin when Rust passed too close, and—

‘It hurts!’ Rust said.

Joiner, ahead of Rust, turned. Junk floated in the corridor, loose pipes, broken screens, a shoe. The debris of any abandoned ship. So what in the Nine Billion Hells was that—

It isn’t true that robots don’t feel. Tactile sensors much like humans have on their skin also serve a robot. Rust immediately turned off all feelings, but then—

‘It’s inside!’ Rust said.

‘What’s inside?’ Joiner said. Rust was scratching itself, something it had never done before. Trying desperately to reach into its own body, to rip it apart and get rid of the wriggling, awful sensation—

‘Rust? Rust!’ Joiner said.

A great big black billowing thing emerged out of the dark corridor – no, Rust saw, out of the walls themselves – and Rust thought, ridiculously, of an image it had thought truly forgotten, a torn rubbish bag floating in the wind on a silent street – it was like that, only somehow it was alive, and malevolent, and somehow it had reached into Rust, had laid something inside Rust’s body—

Rust screamed.

‘Rust!’ Joiner cried. ‘Rust!’

Then the rest of the team was there, somehow, the combat gestalt materialising, five human bodies in spacesuits moving as one; and the strigoi, hissing, reaching into data, sucking it dry, and Shimmel the robotnik opened fire (metaphorically; he used a high pressure pneumatic projectile weapon) and the thing shuddered, confused, and melted back into the walls.

They’d dragged Rust out of there. Back to the Yvala’s isolation chamber, where they cut Rust open. Rust wanted to shut down all systems – the pain, virtual or real (depending on your philosophical stance) was all the same excruciating. Then the Yith, masticating with toothless gums, pulled out a long black string that shimmered in the light. The thing hissed at the Yith. The Yith opened his mouth and bit. The thing shuddered and went still in the Yith’s hand and the Yith swallowed it. He licked his lips. He almost (but didn’t quite) smile.

‘What was that?’ Rust whispered.

‘A Morris Worm,’ the strigoi, Hannah, said. ‘We’re going to need to deworm you, Rust.’

Rust stared at her in genuine horror.

‘Isn’t it…isn’t it over?’ the robot said.

‘It would have already laid copies of itself inside you,’ Hannah said. ‘You’re riddled with it. I’m sorry. This shouldn’t hurt…too much.’

And she reached inside Rust with two taloned hands.

Rust screamed.

The Last Job

‘Do you remember how it used to be?’ Rust said now.

Joiner, by the window, its metal face framed in the light of late afternoon, said, ‘I don’t think about the old days.’

‘We’re nothing but old days,’ Rust said.

‘I like it here,’ Joiner said. It gestured at the window. Beyond the hermitage rose the peak of the mountain shrouded in forest and fog. ‘I’ve been here a long time now.’

‘Time,’ Rust said. ‘I spent two centuries running a capsule hotel back in Lagrange Five. Remember it? Time is everywhere at once and all the time. The past is always now.’

‘The past is the past,’ Joiner said. ‘And it should stay that way.’

‘Then we disagree,’ Rust said.

‘I suppose we do,’ Joiner said.

‘You don’t wish to remember her?’ Rust said.

‘Wish?’ Joiner said. ‘What has that got to do with it?’ It spoke with sudden fury. ‘What I wish has no bearing. I am a robot. Robots remember.’

‘Robots remember,’ Rust said softly. ‘How old do you think she would have been now?’

‘Old?’ Joiner said. ‘She was old when she died. Your question is meaningless.’

‘It is a thing people say,’ Rust said, with some reproach.

‘We,’ Joiner said, ‘are not people. That’s been the problem from the start.’

‘Yes,’ Rust said, and if it could have smiled it would have. ‘I guess it was, at that.’

They’d lost count of the years with Captain Bukhari. She didn’t age like other humans did. When parts of her failed she replaced them with prosthetics. When her mind weakened she augmented her organic brain with an expanded node. She cyborged her way into machine immortality, still working salvage, still running her crew.

The Rashnu wrecked somewhere off Europa. They replaced her with the Orpheus, which was hit in a skirmish with another salvage crew and was sold for scrap. It was replaced in turn by the Eiichiro. The crew changed too. Hannah, the strigoi, went down the gravity well to Old Earth. Franco Slim, the hive-mind, eventually got married to another hive-mind from Titan and went to live with them in Polyphemus Port. The Yith…Well, no one wanted to ask what happened to the Yith.

Other crew members came and went. Joiner and Rust stayed. Perhaps they would have drifted off eventually. They never got a chance to find out.

Space is big, and even big ships are small in comparison. It was one of the captain’s sometimes informers who drunkenly told them the tale of the score that was to be their last job, as the captain plied him with more and more drink.

On the far side of Jupiter, the informer said, in a distant erratic orbit that took it far from any of the moons, there was a ship.

A broken-down, dead and gone wreck.

So what? the captain had said. There were plenty of wrecks all about. What was so special about this one?

And her informer raised his head blearily and whispered the words.

It wasn’t just a ship, he said.

It was an Exodus ship.

The solar system, as you most likely know, is vast and full of glittering life. Billions of souls, both human and digital, populate the moons and planets, from the cloud-cities of Venus to the outer reaches of the Oort. There are domed towns on Mars, and trains that run between them. There are Boppers on Titan, and pilots who brave the storms of that world. In the ice palaces of Valhalla the lords and ladies of Io dance away the years of wealth in their splendid isolation. And then there is Old Earth itself, Womanhome, the beating heart and cradle of old humanity.

That should be enough for any species, you would think. And yet the sun to the galaxy is like a grain of sand on the beach. And the galaxy is but another grain in the beach of the universe. As for the universe, some have conjectured it, too, is but a similar speck in the endless sea of all existence, but who can tell? Humanity had spread out from its birth in Africa across all continents; had taken to the moon and far; and some wanted to go ever further, to fulfill an ancient dream: the stars.

Space travel is slow and the Exodus ships, whatever propulsion method they may use – solar sail, an old Bussard, whatever takes your fancy – take lifetimes on their journeys into the unknown. Like motes of dust they float beyond the reach of the sun, drifting away to be lost forever. Take your pick, again, as to the nature of the ship – some use cryosleep, others are generation starships, others yet carry nothing but automated systems and plant and animal DNA along with rudimentary terraforming equipment.

But a lost ship? A wreck within reach?

That would fill the dreams of every would-be salvager out there.

Salvagers have a name for that.

The word is treasure.

Exodus

It was everyone’s last job even before it started to go wrong. The team included three deserters from Nirrti’s army of the Disconnected back on Titan, intense young women with considerable weapons training and sad eyes; a rare flesh-surfing Other, a native digital intelligence riding a human body; an assortment of a half-dozen brigands from a half-dozen worlds barely worthy of mention; and Joiner and Rust. The Eiichiro made its slow way across space, away from Jupiter and its orbit of moons and space junk. They vanished into the blackness of space, transponder off, and no one knew they had gone or where.

No one would miss them, Rust thought, if they never came back. There’d be no one to mourn the passing of two old robots, of the mad captain, of her motley crew of nobodies. It made Rust sad to realise this. In all of the robot’s time in existence it never felt it would be, well…loved, it supposed. For love implied someone to know where you were, to care if you were gone.

Several months out of Jupiter the instruments picked up signs of the Exodus ship. When it came up on visual even Rust drew in metaphorical breath. The sun was a pinprick of light in the distance, and dust swirled in the vacuum of space, specks of ice catching the light from the Eiichiro and reflecting it back like diamonds. Against them the ship seemed like a world unto itself – if a lifeless one. Rust didn’t know what an Exodus ship was doing out there, why it had stopped, why its systems were all off-line. To the captain, here was pure profit – enough to retire on. To the crew, it posed a technical challenge – what do you do with a monster this big?

And a monster it turned out to be, in a way none of them had expected.

Breach. Again. They had done it hundreds of times. The robots first, then the humans in spacesuits or exoskeletons. The Disconnected girls dropped into a service shaft that ran to a control hub. Everything seemed quiet. Joiner and Rust sealed the breach with a temporary seal and lights came on all along the corridor. The floor was dusty but everything seemed clean apart from spots of black mold in the corners and on the ceiling.

‘Hey,’ Joiner said, checking the readings. ‘There’s breathable atmosphere.’

He was right. Air was blowing back into the ship, and the ambient temperature too began to rise as the ship seemed to wake from hibernation, perhaps at this first appearance of living human bodies within it for so long. Rust and Joiner set off exploring. They could see no one alive, and when they came to the hydroponics gardens deep inside the ship they saw that all the produce and the plants had long since wilted and died, the nutrient solution turned into a black sludge. Rust and Joiner exchanged glances but it meant nothing to them. Deeper and deeper they went, the lights working, the heating coming on, the atmosphere breathable, the ship humming in contentment around them.

The three Disconnected came from the other direction, helmets off, smiling.

‘Place is huge!’ one of them said.

‘There’s so much loot, the captain will be happy,’ a second one said.

‘Any people?’ Rust said.

‘No people,’ the third one said and coughed. They walked on down the corridor.

Rust and Joiner continued on their way, mapping the huge vessel. They found automated factories and more hydroponics gardens, crew berths empty of crew and places of worship for a half-dozen faiths, but no worshippers. They found mess halls and kitchens where black mold congregated in the corners. Joiner swiped a metal finger through the black fungus and crumbled it to the floor.

‘You’d think they’d have cleaned,’ Joiner said.

They didn’t think anything of it, not then. It was just mold, after all. They didn’t see any robots either, but they figured maybe the people on this particular ship were from some anti-machine sentience, humans-only cult as flourished from time to time across the solar system. You couldn’t account for people’s beliefs, Rust always thought. Humans were contradictory and irrational. It was probably why their ship died here in the middle of nowhere. There wasn’t even a ship mind to take control when the humans vanished or died out, just a simple automated life support system.

‘Coming on board,’ the captain said. She sounded happy. Later, Rust was glad that the last time the captain spoke she sounded happy. But they weren’t aware of anything going wrong, not then.

They must have covered miles of internal ship structure before they discovered the cryo garden.

Before that, they started finding the skeletons.

The Treasure

They were everywhere as the two robots approached the core of the ship. Skeletons whole, skeletons in rotting clothes, leaning against the walls or lying prone on the floor. Eyeless sockets glared at them in mute reproach as they passed.

‘How long do you think they’d been here?’ Rust said.

‘A few decades, maybe?’ Joiner said.

They kept finding more of the mold. It gathered on the ceiling and in the corners and on the walls. The mold spread.

‘You don’t think it’s dangerous, do you?’ Rust said.

‘It scanned harmless,’ Joiner said.

‘Still,’ Rust said. ‘Something had to kill all these people.’

‘Could be anything, really,’ Joiner said. It thought. ‘Could have been boredom.’

‘Boredom?’ Rust said.

‘Could be.’

‘You’re being ridiculous,’ Rust said.

They went on.

The cryo garden wasn’t even on their shopping list. They were looking for anything easy to salvage and transport, anything to be sold in the souqs and bazaars of Io City or to the traders from Saturn and beyond. They were resource-poor in the outer reaches. They’d buy stuff long since considered obsolete in Jovian space or the Inner Worlds.

Row after row of empty or broken cryo pods. Rust hadn’t expected anything else. It thought it could begin to discern what had happened here. There were always stories about the Exodus ships. You had to be desperate or a fanatic to contemplate limiting your life to those tin cans on a one-way voyage to nowhere. More often than not some factional fight would break out, or there’d be a plague, or something would go wrong with the ship. You didn’t have to invent a non-existent alien mold to kill everyone. If there were aliens out there then no one’s ever seen them.

Usually people managed to mess up just fine all by themselves.

‘What’s that?’ Joiner said.

‘What’s what?’ Rust said.

‘That,’ Joiner said, pointing.

Rust followed the gesture, magnified—

‘It’s a cryo pod,’ it said.

‘With something in it,’ Joiner said.

‘Someone in it,’ Rust corrected him.

‘It’s alive?’ Joiner said.

The two robots went closer. There were thousands of pods in the huge warehouse, but all smashed, empty, dead.

Not this one. One, only, remained intact. The robots drew close. They peered through the acrylic surface.

‘Captain?’ Rust said into the comms. ‘Captain, we found a…’ It hesitated. ‘We found a baby.’

The baby, frozen, looked out at them from behind the acrylic.

‘What is it?’ Joiner said.

‘I think it’s a girl,’ Rust said.

‘Captain?’ Joiner said. ‘Captain, do you copy, over?’

Static on the connection. Rust and Joiner didn’t like static. It wasn’t a sound anyone wanted to hear.

‘Anyone?’ Rust said. ‘Don’t tell me the comms are busted.’

Still static.

‘What about the baby?’ Joiner said. ‘How old do you think she is?’

‘I don’t know. Centuries?’ Rust said.

‘And the only one still around?’ Joiner said.

‘I admit it’s weird,’ Rust said.

‘This whole place is weird,’ Joiner said. ‘Captain, anyone, do you read, over?’

Static.

‘Let’s go find them,’ Rust said.

‘What about the baby?’ Joiner said.

‘We can’t take her with us,’ Rust said.

‘We can’t leave her behind!’ Joiner said.

They stared helplessly at each other.

‘Hello?’ Joiner said softly. ‘Is anyone receiving us? Hello? Hello? Hello?’

The Song

‘She was beautiful, wasn’t she?’ Rust said. They stood on the hermitage balcony and the robot was surprised to see how clearly visible the town was below. The clouds had all vanished. It could even see Mrs. Zhang’s watermelon stand, and Mrs. Zhang’s granddaughter still sitting there, looking as bored as any child could be.

‘I could never tell,’ Joiner said. ‘Beauty seems a pretty meaningless designation.’

‘It’s just a thing people say,’ Rust said.

‘I see. So yes, I suppose she was.’

Rust could remember it all, of course, in perfect recall. How they went back out into the ship, looking for the others. How they found the captain, collapsed in a storage room filled with what must have seemed like genuine treasure, a safe filled with ancient brooches and necklaces of diamonds and gold. The captain had no pulse. She was dead. There was black mold in the corners of the safe room. They found the others, one by one. The girls from Titan and the Other who rode a human body. None of them were spared. Joiner and Rust searched in the digitality, too. The Other, after all, could have fled the host body. And the captain was mostly a machine by then. If it was only mold, they should have both been fine.

But there was no sign of life in the captain’s node. No sign of the Other, either, when they searched. Everyone was dead, everyone but for Rust, and Joiner, and the girl who was frozen in that garden of the perished.

Decades later, sitting in a shebeen in Tong Yun City on Mars, Rust was surprised to be confronted with a version of the story sung by a travelling musician playing a theremin.

The Ship she hid amidst the junk

Beyond the rich old moons

And all she carried turned to dust

This is the tale of Joiner and Rust

A girl there was, from old Old Earth

On ice amongst the endless dead

And so they carried her away

And gave her life instead

It went on in this vein for quite a few more verses. There was also a chorus. The song seemed to suggest it was the mold that killed the crew, but in truth Joiner and Rust never did find out what had happened on that ship. Finding things like this out wasn’t really their job. They had felt bad for the captain but they figured it was most likely the way she would have wanted to go, anyway, surrounded by all that useless gold. They had wheeled the cryo pod with the girl in it out of the Exodus ship and back onto their own, now-uncrewed vessel, and there they hit the button that began the thawing process. When it was done, the girl opened her eyes for the first time in centuries. Then she started to cry.

‘What…what is it doing?’ Joiner said.

‘She,’ Rust said. ‘I think she’s crying.’

‘Why?’ Joiner said.

‘Why are you crying?’ Rust asked the girl.

The girl looked at Joiner and Rust with big, frightened eyes. Then she began to cry even louder.

‘Is there a button you can press to stop her?’ Joiner said.

‘I don’t think so,’ Rust said.

‘Then what do we do now?’ Joiner said, and the two robots looked at each other, and realised that they had no idea.

Life is long but fleeting

Kindness all too rare

The girl grew up and then grew old—

At least that’s how the story goes

Rust had to pay that musician in the end just to shut him up. The robot also hated the theremin. It was true that the girl grew up, it was what humans did. Rust and Joiner did the best they could. They were reluctant to hand her over for adoption or to some orphanage. Who knew where she’d end up? So they took it on as another job. Even if they weren’t suited for it. Even if they didn’t have a clue what they were doing. What parent ever did, when it came to that?

The Watermelon Stand

‘She loved watermelon,’ Rust said.

‘She sure did,’ Joiner said. They sat on the bamboo chairs, the watermelon sliced on the table between them. ‘Juice used to run down her chin and her fingers got all sticky—’

‘I had to spend hours washing all the linen!’ Rust said. ‘How many times did I scrub the floors—’

‘How many times did I change her nappies!’ Joiner said.

‘But she grew up,’ Rust said.

‘She did, I suppose,’ Joiner said.

‘She was beautiful, wasn’t she?’ Rust said. ‘To me, she was.’

‘Yes,’ Joiner said. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘But then they get old, don’t they,’ Rust said. ‘The children.’

‘Yes,’ Joiner said, sighing. ‘That they do.’

‘I just wanted to remember her today,’ Rust said. ‘That’s all.’

‘And you think I don’t?’ Joiner said. ‘I remember every day.’

‘Where did she go, when she left us?’ Rust said.

‘She came to Earth,’ Joiner said quietly. ‘She came here, to Qijiang.’

Rust looked down on the town. He looked at the watermelon stand where the little girl sat. She had had enough of the work, and as they watched she ran off to join the other children waiting for her with a ball.

‘Is that…?’ Rust said.

Robots don’t smile, but if they did then Joiner might have smiled just then. And Rust sat there quietly, marvelling at the vagaries of fate.

The sun set over Qijiang. The two old robots, in companionable silence, sat and watched the children play.

“Joiner and Rust” copyright © 2026 by Lavie Tidhar
Art copyright © 2026 by James Gilleard

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Joiner and Rust

Lavie Tidhar

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Lavie Tidhar

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Were you intimidated by our impressive list of All of Reactor’s Short Fiction in 2025? Do you want to dive in, but don’t know where to begin? Try our new short fiction bundle!

Our new bundle, Reactor Original Short Fiction Highlights 2025, gathers a selection of this year’s stories in one easy-to-read place. With work from A.C. Wise, S. E. Porter, Hildur Knútsdóttir, Cameron Reed, Tade Thompson, David Erik Nelson, Wen-yi Lee, Quan Barry, Isabel J. Kim, Champ Wongsatayanont, Kate Elliott, and Ruthanna Emrys—there’s a little something for everyone!

As ever, a big thank you to our wonderful readers and to all the authors, editors, illustrators, art directors and copy editors who contributed their talent, passion, and skill to Reactor’s short fiction program this year.

We’ve got so many incredible stories to share in 2026; we hope to see you back here in January! Until then, wishing you a peaceful holiday season and a happy new year!

Download: PDF | EPUB

Reactor Original Short Fiction Highlights 2025!
Table of Contents

• “Wolf Moon, Antler Moon” by A.C. Wise

• “Red Leaves” by S. E. Porter

• “The Shape of Stones” by Hildur Knútsdóttir

• “The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For” by Cameron Reed

• “Liberation” by Tade Thompson

• “The Nölmyna” by David Erik Nelson

• “The Name Ziya” by Wen-yi Lee

• “Redemption Song” by Quan Barry

• “Freediver” by Isabel J. Kim

• “Where the Hell is Nirvana?” by Champ Wongsatayanont

• “Barnacle” by Kate Elliott

• “All That Means or Mourns” by Ruthanna Emrys 

Cover art for this bundle is adapted from Terra Keck’s illustration for “Wolf Moon, Antler Moon” by A.C. Wise.

*As a reminder, Amazon stopped supporting MOBI in August 2022, but both EPUB and PDF are now Kindle-compatible file types. Please visit Amazon for more information, details on how to send these files to your Kindle and additional Kindle support.

The post Download <em>Reactor Original Short Fiction Highlights 2025</em>! appeared first on Reactor.

Original Fiction Original Fiction Review

All of Reactor’s Short Fiction in 2025

The real 6-7 is the stories we read along the way…

By Reactor

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Published on December 11, 2025

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It seems impossible that it’s already/only been a year since our last Original Fiction roundup, but what a year it’s been! In 2025, Reactor published 37 stories: 14 original short stories, 21 original novelettes, and 2 reprints. All told, that’s more than 280,000 words, written by our amazing authors, spanning the speculative galaxy, from snarky spaceships to insect politics, alien invasions to augmented ecosystems, and Buddhist heavens to corporate hellscapes.

As always, please consider nominating your favorites for the Hugos, Nebulas, Stokers and any other upcoming awards and lists that honor outstanding works of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.

Although Stubby is preparing to dock for the winter break, we’re looking forward to bringing you more spectacular speculative fiction in 2026. In the meantime, please join us in celebrating the many talented authors, illustrators, editors, and art directors who brought us so many incredible stories this year.

We are so grateful for them and for you, our readers, who continue to be the very best in the universe.

Original Novelettes

Wolf Moon, Antler Moon

By A.C. Wise
Edited by Ellen Datlow
Illustrated by Terra Keck
14,040 words | January 13, 2025

In one small town, the delicate balance between predator and prey is threatened when five girls are murdered on prom night.

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What I Saw Before the War

By Alaya Dawn Johnson
Edited by Jonathan Strahan
Illustrated by Ocean Salazar
7,560 words | January 22, 2025

A woman losing her sight turns to small family magics to save the lives of those she loves the most.

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Agate Way

By Laird Barron
Edited by Ellen Datlow
Illustrated by Wesley Allsbrook
8,730 words | February 19, 2025

A pair of sisters are hired to find–and if necessary, dispose of–whatever is killing neighborhood pets in a dying town.

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The Witch and the Wyrm

By Elizabeth Bear
Edited by Jonathan Strahan
Illustrated by Zelda Devon
17,100 words | February 26, 2025

A new story set in the world of “The Red Mother.” Hacksilver riddled with a dragon, saved his family’s farm, and won the secret to raise his dead. Nothing prepared him, though, for the long cold winter when the dead walked…and his family came back!

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After the Invasion of the Bug-Eyed Aliens

By Rachel Swirsky
Edited by Jonathan Strahan
Illustrated by Chalzea Xu
9,750 words | March 19, 2025

Two ex-military nurses, one human and one alien, share a friendship in a city following an alien invasion.

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The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For

By Cameron Reed
Edited by Mal Frazier
Illustrated by Sara Wong
8,925 words | April 2, 2025

In a corporate-run dystopia, a trans girl plucked out of poverty to give birth to a clone meets her replacement.

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Liberation

By Tade Thompson
Edited by Jonathan Strahan
Illustrated by Jenis Littles
7,548 words | April 16, 2025

A young woman is recruited to be part of Nigeria’s first ever space mission, but things go awry when the mission is thrown into chaos.

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Squid Teeth

By Sarah Langan
Edited by Ellen Datlow
Illustrated by Chloé Biocca
9,170 words | May 7, 2025

A woman talented in the art of spinning–creating pottery by manipulating clay in her mouth–longs to become the best, but wonders if it is worth the sacrifices she must make…

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The Name Ziya

By Wen-yi Lee
Edited by Sanaa Ali-Virani
Illustrated by Holly Warburton
9,300 words | June 18, 2025

A girl reckons with what she must lose–and who she has become–in order to be accepted at the empire’s most prestigious university.

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The Sack of Burley Cottage

By Rich Larson
Edited by Ellen Datlow
Illustrated by Ying Ding
7,612 words | June 25, 2025

A fast-moving, futuristic caper about a thief who has planned a job that he hopes will set him up for life by stealing a few biosculptures from a rich couple’s mansion.

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Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy

By Martha Wells
Edited by Lee Harris
Illustrated by Jaime Jones
7,540 words | July 10, 2025

Perihelion and its crew embark on a dangerous new mission at a corporate-controlled station in the throes of a hostile takeover…

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Redemption Song

By Quan Barry
Edited by Lindsey Hall
Illustrated by Jun Cen
10, 730 words | July 16, 2025

The ancient myth of Pandora’s box reimagined in a haunting, post-apocalyptic future…

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Shorted

By Alex Irvine
Edited by Jonathan Strahan
Illustrated by Erin Jia
11,530 words | July 30, 2025

Damon’s UBI royalties just crashed. His social capital went up in smoke. His girlfriend left him. Now he finds out he’s going to die. What to do? Solve his own murder, for starters…and maybe, just maybe, strike it rich along the way.

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With Only a Razor Between

By Martin Cahill
Edited by Ann VanderMeer
Illustrated by Yuta Shimpo
8,600 words | August 13, 2025

Barber Gio Monsargo has learned to stay quiet and keep his head down, offering shaves and haircuts, not political opinions. But when a high-ranking military official of the Empire begins visiting his shop, Gio finds himself tested in ways he could never imagine.

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If a Digitized Tree Falls

By Caroline M. Yoachim and Ken Liu
Edited by Jonathan Strahan
Illustrated by Franco Zacha
8,000 words | September 10, 2025

As humanity moves to the stars, a young woman attempts to preserve the magical forest she fell in love with as a child.

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Laurie on the Radio

By Sam Davis
Edited by Ann VanderMeer
Illustrated by Michael Hirshon
8,480 words | September 17, 2025

In a newly integrated insect metropolis, generations clash around art, technology, and capitalism. Boris, a rural vesper, chases modernity to the city, but tradition is there first.

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Where the Hell is Nirvana?

By Champ Wongsatayanont
Edited by Mal Frazier
Illustrated by Wenjing Yang
10,140 words | October 8, 2025

A minor deva drudging away in the gleaming offices of Buddhist heaven discovers there are easier ways to improve his karma than kind thoughts and spiritual deeds.

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Phantom View

By John Wiswell
Edited by Jonathan Strahan
Illustrated by Hokyoung Kim
7,580 words | October 22, 2025

A disabled son care-taking for a disabled father tries to understand the mysterious blur haunting them.

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Timelike Curves, Spacelike Curves

By P H Lee
Edited by Mal Frazier
Illustrated by Rebekka Dunlap
7,890 words | October 29, 2025

Is it bad to cheat on your boyfriend with the fabric of space and time?

Content note: This story contains graphic sexual content.

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Barnacle

By Kate Elliott
Edited by Oliver Dougherty
Illustrated by Juan Bernabeu
9,900 words | November 5, 2025

An older medic with scant resources fights to support her community as they survive life behind the company wall.

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Regarding the Childhood of Morrigan, Who Was Chosen to Open the Way

By Benjamin Rosenbaum
Edited by Jonathan Strahan
Illustrated by Tom Dearie
11,330 words | November 19, 2025

A child who falls through the cracks in a world run by machines and politics, might be the savior of all humanity…

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Original Short Stories

Bravado

By Carrie Vaughn
Edited by Ann VanderMeer
Illustrated by Eli Minaya
6,480 words | January 29, 2025

Teenage Graff dreams of going off-world to explore the universe as a documentarian, but he never imagined the adventures awaiting him when he actually gets the chance to leave.

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Not Alone

By Pat Murphy
Edited by Ellen Datlow
Illustrated by Chloe Niclas
4,400 words | February 5, 2025

Mel relishes running the “Enchanted Jungle,” a roadside attraction in the Everglades filled with live parrots, concrete dinosaurs, and other unexpected wonders.

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Red Leaves

By S. E. Porter
Edited by Claire Eddy
Illustrated by Jana Heidersdorf
4,540 words | February 12, 2025

The spirit of a recently deceased young boy helps a group of ghosts seek revenge on a corrupt and abusive town minister.

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Landline

By Kelly Robson
Edited by Ellen Datlow
Illustrated by Elijah Boor
5,040 words | March 5, 2025

A woman about to leave on an overseas business trip, calls home from the airport and discovers that “daddy” isn’t there and her six-year-old son is all alone in the dark…

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The Shape of Stones

By Hildur Knútsdóttir
Edited by Lindsey Hall
Illustrated by Deena So’Oteh
3,400 words | March 12, 2025

As a young scholar sets out on a research project to find the stones where the settlers of Iceland made human sacrifices, a long dormant volcano rouses…and other, long-sleeping horrors might also be stirring.

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The Nölmyna

By David Erik Nelson
Edited by Ann VanderMeer
Illustrated by Simone Noronha
7,030 words | May 14, 2025

The star skeptic from a haunted house reality show finds herself in a jam when she discovers her cousin’s nondescript Swedish superstore chair is anything but ordinary…

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Asymmetrical

By Garth Nix
Edited by Ellen Datlow
Illustrated by Weston Wei
5,130 words | May 21, 2025

A man accidentally summons a shapeshifting demon with anger-management issues…

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Every Ghost Story

By Natalia Theodoridou
Edited by Jonathan Strahan
Illustrated by Babs Webb
5,500 words | August 6, 2025

Following a mysterious world-wide event that makes ghosts visible, a young woman is invited to attend Ghost Camp.

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In Connorville

By Kathleen Jennings
Edited by Ellen Datlow
Illustrated by Armando Veve
5,430 words | August 20, 2025

A woman returning to her family’s home town for a wedding discovers why people in Connorville—including her family—might be more than they seem.

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The Hungry Mouth at the Edge of Space and the Goddess Knitting at Home

By Renan Bernardo
Edited by Ann VanderMeer
Illustrated by Alix Pentecost Farren
6,026 words | August 27, 2025

To celebrate her grandmother, all the captain of the Sopinha de Feijão wanted was to build a street market on a distant moon. But now the captain is dead and trying to figure out what kind of god might have killed her—and what kind of pact her grandmother made with it.

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Freediver

By Isabel J. Kim
Edited by Carl Engle-Laird
Illustrated by Mojo Wang
6,890 words | September 24, 2025

A two-man team must risk a spacewalk when meteoroids threaten crucial portal-spanning telecommunications cables that hang a hundred meters beneath the ocean…and forty-five billion light years away.

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Model Collapse

By Matthew Kressel
Edited by Ellen Datlow
Illustrated by Keith Negley
3,850 words | October 1, 2025

A government agent and his mentee are sent into a remote town on a mysterious and dangerous project.

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The Belle of the Ball

By Stephen Graham Jones
Edited by Ellen Datlow
Illustrated by Leonardo Santamaria
5,030 words | November 12, 2025

In a future where people can travel back in time and do anything they want without consequences, one disgruntled young man decides to visit his parents two years earlier.

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All That Means or Mourns

By Ruthanna Emrys
Edited by Carl Engle-Laird
Illustrated by Jacqueline Tam
3,565 words | December 3, 2025

Transformed by a broad-spread fungal infection that connects humans with nature, one woman feels closer to the world than ever, but further from the people she loves the most…

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Reactor Reprints

Human Resources

By Adrian Tchaikovsky
Edited by Lee Harris
Illustrated by George Wylesol
April 30, 2025

Set years before Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model, the newly-promoted head of Human Resources for a multinational conglomerate navigates their new role in a world where humans are increasingly redundant.

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Slippernet

By Nisi Shawl
Edited by Aislyn Fredsall
Illustrated by Jabari Weathers
June 4, 2025

An empathy-generating fungus is the hip new lifestyle accessory that defeats vigilantes and finds you the job of your dreams.

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The post All of Reactor’s Short Fiction in 2025 appeared first on Reactor.

Original Fiction Hard Science Fiction

Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation by K. N. Sirsi and Sandra Botkin

Researchers K.N. Sirsi and Sandra Botkin document the discovery of a family unable to conceive of gender.

Illustrated by Reiko Murakami

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Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

By Cameron Reed

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Published on January 28, 2026

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Researchers K. N. Sirsi and Sandra Botkin document the discovery of a family unable to conceive of gender.

A version of this story originally published in STARLIGHT 2 (Tor, 1998), edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

Short story | 4,980 words

“What we call learning is really remembering,” Socrates says in the Phaedo; for our ideas, in their abstract perfection, could not be formed by observation of this sloppy and imperfect world. For Descartes, too, such immutable ideas as “God,” “mind,” “body,” and “triangle” could not be derived from the swirl of sense impressions reaching our eyeballs and fingertips, but must be already present at our births. Locke, on the other hand, believed that ideas were derived from experience: “the natural and regular production of Things without us, really operating upon us.”

The days are past when questions such as this were argued using reason and introspection; now we solve them by magnetic resonance imaging and DNA sequencing. The study of brain-damage patients and people with learning disabilities has been especially useful in wresting the great questions from philosophy. The two of us and our colleagues have now unlocked the answers Plato sought, and resoundingly confirmed Descartes’s view of the mind.

THE PARABLE OF THE TELEVISION

To see what brain damage can teach us about the mind, imagine you are trying to learn how television works by examining several broken television sets. Even without opening the sets, you could learn something about their workings by studying what happens when they break. Suppose, for example, that some sets work perfectly in all respects except that the faces are distorted and unrecognizable. You might guess that these sets have a problem with displaying flesh tones, or with shapes that are roughly oval. But if the sets displayed hands and eggs correctly while garbling even the green faces of midnight-movie aliens, you could deduce that faces are processed differently from other images. The television must have some special circuitry just for faces.

No such disorder of televisions exists, or could exist. Faces on a TV screen are produced by arranging the same pixels that are used to depict hands, or furniture, or any other object. But minds work differently. Lesions to certain parts of the brain produce an inability to recognize people by their faces, but do not affect any other brain function. This disorder, called prosopagnosia, leaves its victims perfectly able to read, to name objects they see, and to recognize voices; but present them with a photograph of a close friend, and they are at a loss. The real brain, like the imaginary television, must contain a special module for faces—a face-recognition organ.

Disorders like prosopagnosia help us decide between two basic views of the brain. In one, the brain is a universal computer with an all-purpose ability to perceive and reason; this ability is often called “general cognition.” In the other, the brain is a toolbox full of instruments specialized for different tasks.

The existence of prosopagnosia shows that face recognition, at least, is a specialized tool. But this does not mean that general cognition does not exist. Most scientists believe that the brain has some specialized tools for common tasks, such as face recognition and grammar, but falls back on general cognition for everything else. In fact, most prosopagnosics use general cognition to partially overcome their disability: one patient identifies people by noting the length of their hair (but is confused anew every time a friend visits the beauty salon!).

A FAMILY IN RAJASTHAN

Our work on ideas began as a study of language. One of us (Sirsi), a neurologist, became interested in the work of the Canadian linguist Myrna Gopnik. Gopnik’s research indicated that a single dominant gene could lead to an inability to apply basic grammatical rules that the rest of us take for granted (“Impairments of Tense in a Familial Language Disorder,” Journal of Neurolinguistics v. 8, no. 2, 1994, pp. 109–133). Children with the gene could learn a present-tense verb such as “pray,” but could not readily inflect it to get the past tense “prayed.” Yet these children had no serious auditory impairment and seemed intellectually normal in other respects.

Follow-up studies (such as Ricci and Serafini, 1999; Leman and Lander, 2000; Acacia and Myrmidon, 2002) continued to show that other functions of the brain were unaffected by the disorder. In fact, many people with grammatical impairments were able to use general cognition to partially compensate for their disability: rather than conjugating verbs instinctively, they mentally recited a memorized rule, much as people do when learning a second language in adulthood. This strongly suggested that normal grammatical competence is produced by an inborn “grammar instinct.”

But how, Sirsi wondered, does the language organ work? Is it a generalized instrument for recognizing patterns in sounds? Or is it specifically attuned to such basic features of language as verb tenses and grammatical gender?

To find out, Sirsi undertook that rarest of activities for a neurologist, fieldwork. While on an extended vacation in Jaipur, India, he visited schools to distribute small photocopied coloring books that he had designed with the help of a teacher of Hindi. Each page was divided into two panels. One panel illustrated a nonsense word, using it in a sentence. The other contained an incomplete sentence requiring the child to fill in an inflected form of the word. Some of the nonsense words were in Roman characters and sounded like English (“to wuzzle”), while others, in Devanagari script, had Hindi or Marwari endings. Sirsi offered a small packet of M&Ms for the return of completed coloring books. This plan nearly ended in disaster when more coloring books were returned than had been handed out—some teachers had traced them onto ditto masters and produced their own copies—and he ran out of candy. Luckily, the disgruntled parents that appeared at Sirsi’s doorstep were pacified with tea, churma, and curd by a quick-witted servant, and analysis of the coloring books could begin.

Sirsi had hoped to find children who had trouble with the same grammatical rules in all three languages. At first he thought he had found many such cases, but it turned out that these coloring books had been filled out by children younger than the eight-year-olds Sirsi had targeted. Other anomalies were due to children who spoke no English or no Marwari, or whose dialects of English simply lacked the features being tested. This left only one anomalous result: two children who apparently spoke no Marwari had incorrectly formed the feminine of adjectives in Hindi—a task that has no analogue in English. The children were evidently siblings; they had the same surname and lived at the same address. A dispirited Sirsi visited their home, assuming he would find a family fluent only in English and some other Indian language—perhaps Bengali, which lacks morphological gender distinctions. When he arrived at the door, however, he found himself unable to explain his purpose to the children’s parents because both spoke fluent Hindi but no English.

Returning the next day with a servant (she of the churma and curd) as an interpreter, Sirsi showed the coloring books to various members of the children’s extended family. Eight out of the seventeen family members that Sirsi tested had difficulty with the gender of adjectives. When such problems were presented, their answers were correct no more than half the time. Yet they correctly answered all the remaining questions in Sirsi’s repertoire. Sirsi found no other indication of neurological impairment. The oldest family member with the disorder was the children’s maternal grandfather, who had passed it on to all of his daughters but none of his sons—a pattern that suggested dominant inheritance on the X chromosome.

Sirsi next obtained MRI images of the brains of six family members as they answered a second series of grammatical fill-in-the-blanks. As a control, he ran the same tests on two family members whose grammar was unimpaired.

As expected, the MRIs showed differences in brain activity between the affected and normal patients when they tried to inflect gendered adjectives. But the differences were nowhere near the areas of the brain usually associated with grammar. Instead they were in regions of the frontal lobe associated with higher cognition and memory. Despite this anomaly, Sirsi wrote up the results in the Journal of Neurolinguistics (v. 17, no. 4, 2004, pp. 289–295.) Partly on the strength of this publication, he was offered a non-tenure-track teaching position at the University of Toronto, and reluctantly set his plans for further fieldwork aside.

A few months after his paper appeared, Sirsi received a letter from Dr. Sandra Botkin. Botkin, an occupational therapist, recalled working with a patient who had been admitted after an 8 mm hole was bored diagonally through his brain during an archery competition. This patient had consistently referred to the male nurses on staff as “she.” After hearing staff members grouse about the patient’s sexism on three separate occasions, Botkin had begun to suspect that he really could not help himself. When she presented him with photographs cut from People magazine and Polaroid snapshots of obstetrics personnel, she found that he consistently identified short-haired women as men, and men in nurse’s uniforms as women. She presented this finding to the patient’s neurologist, who identified it as a limited form of prosopagnosia: the patient was unable to identify gender cues in faces. But Botkin, who had logged far more hours with the patient than the neurologist had, felt that the disorder went deeper than mere facial recognition.

Botkin’s letter then called attention to one of the drawings that Sirsi had used to elicit gendered adjectives from his subjects. (A page from the coloring book had been reproduced with the article.) The first panel showed a very tall building and used the feminine form of a nonsense adjective. The second panel showed a very tall man and required the respondent to fill in the masculine form of the adjective. Did all the questions Sirsi had asked rely on pictures of men and women to elicit gendered adjectives, Botkin queried? If so, might his subjects—like her patient—simply have been unable to identify the drawing as a man rather than a woman? This would explain why they answered such questions incorrectly about half the time. It would also explain why the differences in brain activity were not in the expected regions. Perhaps her patient and Sirsi’s subject shared the same disorder—one neither perceptual nor linguistic, but cognitive. Perhaps the misfired gene and the misfired arrow had abolished the power to distinguish the sexes of humankind.

“I know it sounds strange,” she concluded, “but it’s really no weirder than hemineglect or blindsight.” Blindsight, a condition resulting from lesions to certain areas of the brain, results in apparently total blindness. Yet when asked to humor the researcher and guess where a light has been placed, the patient with blindsight can point to it almost infallibly—all the while insisting that he cannot see a thing. Hemineglect is a loss of awareness of one half of the body; some victims wash only the right half of their bodies, and ardently deny ownership of their own left arms.

FINDING THE GENE

Sirsi was sufficiently intrigued by Botkin’s hypothesis to contact his former servant in Rajasthan. After a frustrating and expensive series of international phone calls, he tried to ask her to talk to the family he had studied and report any curiosities in their use of pronouns. But no sooner had he made this request than the servant said that yes, of course, several members of that strange family had acted as if she were a man. She had not mentioned it because it didn’t matter; hadn’t the study been about language? Since he had been deliberately vague about his study’s topic in order to keep her from accidentally influencing the results, Sirsi had to swallow his frustration.

Sirsi and Botkin could not immediately go to Rajasthan, so they used samples Sirsi had previously taken in an effort to identify the gene for agenesis of gender ideation, hoping to find it in families closer to home. A preliminary analysis found six candidate genes on the X chromosome that were present in all the affected family members but none of the others. Two of these genes had well-known functions and could be discarded, but Sirsi and Botkin had to find and interview people with each of the other four. Ten years ago this would have been an impossible task; the availability of genetic databases made it feasible, though not precisely easy (people are understandably alarmed when asked to come in for tests based on a cell sample taken five years ago).

Eventually Sirsi and Botkin did find an individual who sorted photographs of men and women with little better than chance accuracy. Though everyone in the family denied that anything was odd about their views of gender, three women and one man proved to have the condition (by this time dubbed genagnosia). The genagnosics seemed to compensate for their disability by not using gendered pronouns to refer to a person until they had managed to overhear some hint of his or her gender. This works fairly well in a language like English, in which only pronouns are gendered; it would be much less helpful in Hindi.

To avoid unconscious bias in the selection of photographs, Sirsi and Botkin used DVD movies for their first experiment. A computer displayed random frames from the disks in a DVD-ROM carousel, and, using speech synthesis, asked a question from a randomized list. The genagnosics in this study were able to correctly answer “Where is the actress?” with “She is behind the plant,” and “Where is the actor?” with “He is on the wing of the plane”—demonstrating that they could use pronouns correctly as long as they were given a hint about the gender of the person referred to. However, when chance produced a reversal of pronouns—e.g., when a question asked for a description of “the actress” and the only person on screen was John Travolta —the subjects carried over the incorrect gender rather than substitute a correct pronoun. On questions that provided no clue to the actor’s gender, at least forty percent of the time they referred to Arnold Schwarzenegger as “she” and Meryl Streep as “he.” A control group achieved one hundred percent accuracy in this task.

In another experiment, Sirsi and Botkin asked genagnosics to choose photographs that showed potential mates. The objects of desire they chose were male and female at a ratio of almost exactly 1:1. It is a puzzle how three successive generations of genagnosics in this family managed to legally marry; perhaps they responded to encouragement or discouragement from unaffected friends and relatives, or perhaps they were guided by preferences for particular sex acts that even a genagnosic could not confuse. Sirsi tried to sound out one of the older family members on this subject, but on being met with evasive answers, determined that the topic was too sensitive to broach. He did, however, manage to determine by experiment that one young genagnosic who frequently expressed disdain for gay people was in fact unable to tell a same-sex couple from an opposite-sex one.

“I DON’T THINK IT’S ME”

Sometimes an experiment reveals more about the experimenters than the subjects. Initially, rather than having a computerized voice ask questions, Sirsi and Botkin used graduate students who had not been told what they were trying to prove. But these assistants had to be replaced, one after another, for arguing with the subjects about their answers. “There’s something about this condition,” Sirsi says. “When a prosopagnosic is trying to identify the picture, you understand it’s an impairment. When a genagnosic says Glenn Close is a man, your instincts tell you he’s just being difficult.”

Transcripts of these arguments were preserved, and they are in some ways more compelling than the experiments’ official results. One first-time assistant, astonished that a subject had called Danny DeVito “the actress,” kept asking the same question over and over in hope of getting a different answer. The subject repeated his answer three times, growing more and more frustrated each time, and finally snapped, “One of us is wrong here, and I don’t think it’s me.”

Sirsi and Botkin eventually realized that the exact scope of their subjects’ impairment would have to be teased out by interview, producing the following remarkable exchange:

Sirsi: “Do some people have breasts?”

X: “ . . . Yes.”

Sirsi: “Which people?”

X: “All people.”

Sirsi [regrouping]: “Breasts larger than a teacup?”

X: “Some of them.”

Sirsi: “And can some people bear children, out of their own bodies?”

X: “Some of them.”

Sirsi [triumphantly]: “Now, those two kinds of people we just talked about, are they the same people?”

X thought about this for nearly fifteen seconds before answering, “Sometimes.” When Sirsi asked the question again a few minutes later, X repeated his answer, annoyed; but when he asked it again during the next weekly session, X again had to think a long time before answering. He could not remember the association between breasts and childbirth from session to session. And no amount of badgering could convince him to combine individual observations about men and women into a unified concept of gender.

THE NUCLEATION MODEL

This result led Sirsi to the theory of innate ideas he presented in his famous paper “Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation in a Midwestern US Family” (Journal of Neurolinguistics v. 20, no. 1, 2007, pp. 35–44). “X could understand correlations between the various traits that make up manhood or womanhood,” Sirsi wrote, “but he could not retain the information—as if he had no mental file drawer to put it in.”

Sirsi likens the mind to a fluid in which all the raw data of perception are dissolved. An innate concept, like a seed crystal, can cause ideas to solidify around it. Some perceptions will crystallize while others remain dissolved; a different seed could produce different ideas. But a seed will not produce crystal unless the right kind of perceptions are in solution—which helps keep innate concepts from producing mental models that are radically at odds with our experience.

Sirsi contrasts his nucleation model with the “mandation model” that the discovery of innate ideas might tempt us to adopt. We might suppose that the ideas we are born with directly control our understanding; but if that were true, we would not be able to change our minds or to learn anything. On the nucleation model, innate ideas merely help our perceptions to structure themselves. So transient and local information about the sexes, such as differences in clothing and hairstyle, can become part of our ideas of gender—like an impurity in the crystal—even though they are too variable to be directly programmed by our genes. Also, useful perceptions may languish in unconsciousness because there is no seed for them; but above a certain concentration, ideas may precipitate without seed. True, the idea of gender did not crystallize in X’s mind even when Sirsi attempted to seed it with an elementary association. But other ideas, Sirsi hopes, may prove more plastic.

MINNESOTA TWINS

Botkin, still working as an occupational therapist at St. Eleggua Hospital in Minneapolis, received a phone call one day from a graduate student working in an ongoing identical-twin study. The researchers had found “her gene” in a pair of identical twins; the twins, however, displayed no obvious impairment of gender ideation. Would she be interested in interviewing them?

Botkin was. Again she applied the technique of asking the subjects to identify photographs, but this time she used only photos of doctors in surgical garb, reasoning that this epicene apparel would reveal even a well-hidden cognitive defect. She tested them separately to prevent teamwork. Both were 100 percent accurate at identifying the pictures as male or female. The only anomaly was that each of them hesitated over the same one before placing it into the female pile. Botkin could see no reason that this photograph—of Dr. Lisa Dahn, a pediatric urologist—should be more challenging to classify than any of the others. When she asked the twins to explain the pause, each one independently produced the same word of a private language the two had shared as children, and declined to explain further.

Baffled by this result, Botkin saw no way to proceed further until, by overhearing a chance remark, she learned what, seemingly, everyone else on staff knew. Dahn was an intersex woman. She had come out several years before while speaking publicly against the practice of unnecessary surgery on intersex infants.

Botkin followed up this lead by collecting a large number of photographs of people with known medical histories. Again the twins sorted them into male and female with little difficulty. This time, Botkin asked them if they could provide any further information. After some hesitation—which Botkin attributes, not to the difficulty of the task, but to a crisis of trust—they resorted the photographs into a total of 34 categories, each one corresponding to a word in their private language. Botkin numbered these categories and began to investigate what they might mean. One startling result emerged immediately: numbers 3, 17, 25, and 26 contained men and women with an unusually early or late onset of puberty, and the twins were 100 percent accurate at identifying these variations. While atypical timing of puberty can have some effect on adult appearance, the twins’ ability to diagnose it so reliably from photographs alone is remarkable. Category 16, which contained both men and women, correlated well with scores on the Bem Sex-Role Inventory that indicated high levels of psychological androgyny. It is not clear how this could be distinguished from a photograph. Number 20 included a disproportionate number of people with a family history of osteoporosis; although this condition is associated with low levels of sex hormones, no hormonal difference has so far been found in those identified as 20s. Nevertheless, two women and one man in the category who were not known to have bone loss at the time of the study have since been diagnosed with it. Categories 4 and 9 identified men and women who took artificial sex hormones rather than producing them naturally, even when this intervention was necessitated by surgical removal of the ovaries or accidental castration rather than by a genetic difference, and even when the hormones given were bioidentical. This feat of classification would appear to be impossible.

Of the categories that still elude analysis, Botkin says: “I’m convinced that these identify real things, too. There’s a kind of a family resemblance among the people in each category. I’ve found myself meeting a person and thinking, ‘I know he’s an 8. He’s got to be an 8.’ I can see it. But I can’t define it.”

“The last straw,” as Botkin puts it, came when she visited the twins after being told by her physician that she was entering an early menopause. Upon hearing this, the twins exchanged what Botkin calls “significant glances” and said: “Don’t worry. Your sex won’t be changing for another few years yet.” It didn’t.

These results led Botkin to propose a new model for the influence of genes on gender ideation. She suggests that patients with genagnosia are not impoverished by a lack of information, but bewildered by an overplus; the concepts “male” and “female” identify too great a range of variation to be understood. What the gene knocks out, then, is a filtering capacity that tells us what information to ignore. The twins Botkin studied were able to overcome this handicap—aided by their high intelligence and, perhaps, by their ability to compare notes.

Confirming this model of innate concepts will require more evidence than a single pair of twins, however. One of us (Sirsi) still prefers the nucleation model, which most of our colleagues have found more plausible. The twins’ ability to tell men from women could be explained by variable penetration of the genagnosia gene. Their feats of identification might be duplicated by others with sufficient practice. Only further study will tell for sure.

THE VOICE OF THE WHIRLWIND

As we observed at the beginning of this essay, philosophers have been talking about innate ideas at least since Plato. Most have supposed that innate ideas were given by God, and therefore must be true. If we find instead that our innate ideas were formed by evolution, then they need not be correct at all, as long as they lead to the reproduction of the genes that produce them. Even modern thinkers that embrace the concept of innate ideas, such as Noam Chomsky, have often failed to come to grips with this possibility. As Geoffrey Sampson points out in his 1980 volume Making Sense: “Chomsky does not suggest that we might have innate predispositions to analyze the world in terms of inappropriate concepts or to hold false beliefs, although logically this should be equally compatible with the notion of innately limited minds” (p. 6).

Our findings provide no defense against this troubling suggestion. We may indeed cling to mistaken ideas because our mental organization requires them. We may reject plain facts because our minds cannot grasp them. Even science, for all its self-correcting mechanisms, may be permanently unable to arrive at certain truths. Dr. Anne Marlowe-Shilling, a noted critic of sex-differences research, pointed out to us that while many thousands of studies have been done to tease out sex-linked capabilities and personality traits, none, until our chance discovery, had been done to determine whether some people might be genetically predisposed to believe in “brain sex.” Indeed, preliminary research indicates that the propensity to do brain-sex studies is at least as strongly influenced by genetics as any of the traits such studies have analyzed. One of our graduate students is now trying to find a gene that determines whether the brain-sex researcher will find a positive result.

How, then, can we know whether we know anything? The very discovery that has raised this question may eventually provide an answer to it. Perhaps one day we will transcend the limits of human knowledge by consulting such people as Botkin’s twins and the family in Rajasthan. Sirsi has now begun a series of studies designed to find out whether genagnosics’ perceptions might not be more accurate in some respects than other humans’. For example, when genagnosics are asked to sort photographs of people into “short,” “average,” and “tall” without reference to sex, their choices correlate well with statistical norms. Most control subjects cannot discard gender from their considerations, even when they are admonished to do so.

Sirsi points out that other humans can match the genagnosics’ accuracy at height-sorting if they are told the average height and shown photographs of people standing in front of a height scale, as in a police lineup. So perhaps general cognition can overcome the predispositions foisted on us by innate ideas. Sirsi cites a study in which a chimpanzee was allowed to choose between two stacks of candy, then was given the stack he did not choose (Boysen & Bernston, 1995). Although he clearly understood the rules of the game, he chose the larger stack every time—only to immediately cover his eyes in self-reproach, realizing he had once again been trapped by instinct. When the experimenters taught the chimp Arabic numerals, however, he could readily choose the smaller number to get the larger treat. Using numbers rather than real candy seemed to help the chimp overcome an instinctive response and use general cognition instead. Sirsi suggests that humans may prove “as smart as chimps”—we, too, may be able to use general cognition to overcome our innate ideas, if we cling fast to symbolic manipulation and quantification and try to ignore common sense.

Botkin, however, suspects that the problem may go even deeper. Rather than applying general cognition to a problem ordinarily handled by its own cognitive organ, Botkin sees the twins as using one specialized function to substitute for another. “Most people think that general cognition is a sort of fluid that sloshes in to fill any gaps between the innate ideas,” she says. “I think the brain is more like a box full of specialized tools—but if your toolbox is missing a hammer, you can pound nails with a screwdriver.”

In particular, she suspects the twins have converted a brain function ordinarily used to recognize species of animal. Unlike the gender ideation organ, this faculty does not require a division into only two classes, so it does not filter out as much information. It filters enough, however, to keep the twins from having to avoid pronouns. “The twins are saying, ‘Suppose the sexes are like species.’ They’re not compensating with general cognition, they’re compensating by metaphor.”

“People want to believe in general cognition,” she adds. “We like the idea that the brain is a universal computing engine that can do anything—learn any possible fact, entertain any possible idea. So when we find something like a separate module for gender ideation, they just say that, well, that isn’t a part of general cognition, but everything else still is. Maybe so. But what if we just keep carving away at general cognition until there’s nothing left?”

If Botkin is right, then we can never be completely free of our innate ideas. By applying several metaphors successively we may be able to limit their effects, but even if we overcame all of them, we could never be sure that we had. Our knowledge of the world, although not totally illusory, is filtered through an unreliable narrator whose biases deny us direct access to the truth.

“It’s easy to act as if nothing has changed,” Botkin muses. “Most days I don’t even think about the implications of what we’ve found. And then I’ll meet someone, and I’ll start thinking, ‘He’s a 12. I know he’s a 12. How do I know he’s a man?’”

“CONGENITAL AGENESIS OF GENDER IDEATION by K. N. Sirsi and Sandra Botkin” copyright © 2026 by Cameron Reed
Art copyright © 2026 by Reiko Murakami

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Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation by K.N. Sirsi and Sandra Botkin

Cameron Reed

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Cameron Reed

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Original Fiction post-apocalyptic

All That Means or Mourns

Transformed by a broad-spread fungal infection that connects humans with nature, one woman feels closer to the world than ever, but further from the people she loves the most…

Illustrated by Jacqueline Tam

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Edited by Carl Engle-Laird

By Ruthanna Emrys

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Published on December 3, 2025

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Transformed by a broad-spread fungal infection that connects humans with nature, one woman feels closer to the world than ever, but further from the people she loves the most…

Short story | 3,565 words

In the foyer, I shed the hospice’s cleansuit. The medically-licensed plastic sticks to my skin; the vent draft chills where I peel it away. I want to tear it off in handfuls. But I pull slowly, excruciatingly aware of every blocked pore, and finally stow it in the UV box contaminated but whole. Another visitor will need it soon, to dull their senses and reassure the dying.

Outside, Florida’s humidity is a living slap. I’m drenched in sweat despite my neck fan. My eyes sting; gut microbes churn with anticipatory grief. At least I’m no longer isolated. Sporulated whispers surround me. Even the parking lot holds life: gnats and tenacious anoles, bacteria in the soil beneath the permeable pavement, cracks pressed wide by choirs of lichen. My mycelial network yearns toward its kin, but the Animalia Serenitas Center would not approve if I sank to their killed-myco brick graytop to meditate.

The rental car automatically unplugs as I approach. No trains or tramlines here, in the sinking lands stolen from the Everglades. The driving assistant has regressed to default settings, and I have to readjust it—again—to my rare driver reflexes. I try to appreciate the trivial distraction, but it only feeds my pain. Mom’s dying grows tendrils into everything.

I need my fellow hyphae. At home I would bike to the cranberry bog or the maple swamp or the dunes, immerse myself in friends and neighbors. But Naples is an antifungal enclave where most people only step outside in sterile cleansuits. Corkscrew Sanctuary is the nearest option. The winding boardwalks, the miles of mangrove and cypress and sawgrass, the alligators and herons let everything in.

At the entrance, a screen lists birds sighted this week. When I was little, the board would be full by Friday, notes crowding into the margins. It’s sparser now. Watchers still spot the white ibis, the great blue heron, the peregrine, and the bald eagle, but the wood storks have been gone since the second-to-last avian flu, and other species have fallen to heat or storms. Or salt water, rising through porous ground to claim the grassy river. The swamp lets everything in.

The sun beats onto the tall grass and I’m forced to open my parasol, blocking the cloudless blue-gray sky. But there’s relief in the shade of the cypress trees. Even the mosquitos, fellow psilocordyceps hosts, take only a token blood offering. Their sting’s been bred out; I offer them a taste of megafaunal complexity and receive in turn an instant of blur-fast wings, ganglial hunger, and the purity of their swift satiation.

The boardwalk winds through shingled bark and cypress knees, slow water thick with fallen leaves, the sudden chitter of a cormorant, baby alligators sunning on logs. No turtles for years now. Mom loved this place, used to take hours identifying species while I raced impatiently ahead. Even before the cancer, she lost that; the hike was too hard in a cleansuit.

I don’t see any other humans until I reach the hyphae nest. We’ve taken over one of the old pit-stop gazebos, added hammocks and live-myco cushions to make comfortable laybacks, wound vines and branches through to ease connection. Two people sprawl with closed eyes and peaceful smiles; one is up and stretching. She bends her knee and lunges, back leg taut.

“Welcome!” she calls, unworried about waking the others. It’s just another greeting, natural as the cormorant’s. I fall into her offered hug, already sobbing.

Her body is more familiar than mosquito or moss, easy to interpret. Heartbeats and lungs sync up. Nerves fire like city lights. Her digestive system’s busier than mine. Fibroids snake through her uterus and something’s off in her lower back, a practiced drone of pain. Nothing unusual in her brain. I pay attention to brains, lately.

“My mother has glioblastoma,” I tell her. “She’s antifungal; I can’t make it feel real. I’m not ready.”

She holds me tighter. “I came out here with my brother every week while his lungs were breaking down. We could share everything. It’s never enough.” She leads me to a hammock, wraps me in vines. I close my eyes.

Mycelia transmit more slowly than neurons, and over longer distances. The world enters in patches. Strangler figs drink in sun and water and carbon dioxide, basking and growing and sending out lazy chemical signals. They drape over ink-scratch branches of cypress and curl against ragged bark. Branches stretch up from the trunk, trunks from knees that drink deep of the shallow water. Mushrooms grow into the roots, digest fallen logs, extend microscopic tendrils through mud and heron. The swamp flows slowly, shaped by every tree and fish and leaf and pebble, feasting on rot and breathing out abundance. I stretch my senses, loving and becoming.

As the whole rich system fills in, so do the lesions: acidity that singes gills, salinity that leaves larvae scrawny and weak, hungers where no hunger should last. Flickers of incomprehension, wordless mourning for prey long gone. Through it all winds the same psilocordyceps that inhabits me, that grows through almost everything now. Infection, bond, witness.

The human brain can only imagine itself a swamp for so long, even with practice. We have always been torn between wholeness and the quick, anxious passions that separate us. My hearing is first to retreat into my body: The other hyphae are awake and arguing.

“It has to have been deliberate. Random mutation would give you itchier athlete’s foot, not make you one with the universe.”

“I’m not saying it was random mutation. I’m saying the release was accidental. Someone meant to use it in a lab, for medical imaging or surveillance or some shit. If there was meaning in it getting out, it wasn’t human.”

“Are you talking about divine intervention?” This voice belongs to the woman who welcomed me. “Or are you saying the mushroom escaped on purpose?”

It’s a familiar discussion, endlessly interesting to some, endlessly dull to others. I go back and forth. Should it matter if the greatest gift of the twenty-first century was truly a gift? Nothing, god or human, has ever demanded our gratitude. But we would have questions, if we knew some cause beyond chance, and perhaps the unwanted offering of our gratitude anyway. Why not be grateful? Few things are better than they used to be.

“Purpose is a human thing,” says the second voice. When I open my eyes, the two earlier sleepers are sprawled together on the bench, one nested in the other’s arms. In the mycelial network they feel like a single organism, skin comforting skin.

“Purpose is a human illusion,” I offer, letting the conversation draw me into a different sort of connection. “We’re not as good at choosing actions, and their consequences, as we like to think.”

“So accidents are a human thing, too. Everything else just is.”

The argument continues: The question of how we, who now share senses with all of nature, can claim that nothing else has goals or choices or screwups. The question of whether there’s some higher purpose to those screwups, whether we’re ants unaware of the anthill. The question of what sort of purpose would allow the sheer levels of screwup that humans have managed.

This connection I can hold even less easily than the swamp: I let it fade again into a background drift of primate calls. The idea of purpose, and the thought that there is none, are both too painful. We can’t be all that means things, or all that mourns. There are flocks of feral macaws in the trees. We can’t translate them, but surely like us they circle the same questions over and over.

Like us, wherever they came from originally, they’re bound now to something dying.

I spend the next morning sorting papers at the house. Staying there means I don’t have to worry about hotel quarantine policies, but it also surrounds me with work of dubious utility and endless urgency. Dad had just moved into the antifungal apartments, and Mom was trying to sort everything out so she could sell the place and join him, when she got sick. Everything is half started or half done.

I might be able to sell the house to an antifungal, but not for much. Everyone knows Miami is in its last years. Salt infests groundwater and eats holes in the land above, and soon the antifungals will find another place where sinking land is cheap. I could abandon the place. After she dies. When she can’t know that I gave up on what she left behind. Or I could talk to her friends who side-eye me for being hyphae, ask them for help finding someone who needs the space and can take over the mortgage, someone who will glare at me for the gift.

So many places are salvageable, even on the coasts. Places where the bedrock is less porous, where long years of local organization and semifunctional state governments have funded seawalls, pumps, purification plants. There the hyphae do more than witness: We diagnose and treat and help the world adapt, find points where the right push can save a sliver of world.

I picked up signals once from a frog that we’d thought extinct. I recorded their calls and the pattern of their heartbeats, shared my data with other searchers, and we found enough to bring a breeding population together. We worked with the psilocordyceps to protect them from simpler and more deadly fungal infections. There’s a type of frog now in northern Maine that wouldn’t be there if I hadn’t paid attention and chosen to do something about what I found.

There’s nothing I can do for Mom. There’s nothing I can do for the Everglades. My love is useless here.

In the hospice cafeteria I sit with Dad. I can’t eat through the cleansuit and would quail at food I couldn’t sense—even aside from the fungicides, there might be anything in it. I haven’t shared a meal with my parents for two years.

I would’ve said we were close. We called every week, told each other about concerts and meals and broken appliances and broken weather, about birds spotted and books read and friends visited.

The question, unasked for two years, sits in the back of my throat.

He prods at his sandwich: fresh-baked sourdough piled with eggplant and roasted tomato. He takes a slow, forced bite. His eyes are distant. It would be cruel to ask him, now, why they pulled away from the world they taught me to love.

I remember the debate in the hyphae nest, the pain of unanswerable questions eased by shared sensation. I touch Dad’s arm with my suited hand, knowing he’ll flinch, offering and taking comfort anyway. At least he doesn’t pull away, just lets his head fall with the weight of everything we’re carrying.

“The nurse says it could be any day now,” he says finally. “But it could be a week or more. She’s got a strong heart.”

“She was always about . . .” I wave my hand vaguely, indicating years of hikes and high-fiber foods. “Do you remember the carob chip cookies?”

“Unfortunately. And that one stand at the farmers market that I swear put dirt in their muffins.”

“God, she loved that place, I have no idea why. She thinks they’re delicious.” I hesitate over tenses. She’s not quite past, not yet, but she’ll never again buy a dozen gravelly muffins for a potluck. Or else she is past, only her unconscious body withholding permission to acknowledge the loss. But the talking, at least—about her, not about us—creates some sort of backup, an echo of herness in our shared memories. “I wish healthy food were as nice as healthy exercise—she could always find the best walks.”

And Dad lifts his head, a fraction, and talks about the research she did when I was a baby, ten different apps to find one that could consistently recommend stroller-friendly hikes, and the places they got stuck, laughing and lifting, when the first tries failed.

In the corner beside the spare room couch I find the archaeology of Mom’s knitting: half-finished hats with crumpled patterns on top, simple pairs of slippers in all her family’s sizes, then the little spring-green afghan that I snuggled when I was five, and finally the lowest layer revealing some forgotten decade of leisure: an exuberance of lace shawls dewed with sparkling beads.

It should be the hats that hurt most, with their evidence that her organized mind was breaking down before anyone noticed, pushing against the start of the project again and again, as if this time she would find her way past the barrier. When I came to visit two months ago she was doing that with simple things: shuffling her feet forward and back, forward and back, lifting her walker and putting it down, explaining to us that “I just need to . . . first . . .” before trailing off.

Or it should be the afghan that makes me cry with safe-childhood nostalgia, as though childhood ever feels safe to anyone but grown-ups. Maybe the shawls should make me pine for the selfhoods she set aside in the press of work and childrearing. But it’s the slippers, of which I have a dozen pairs at home in Massachusetts, one from each Chanukah since my feet reached their adult size minus those worn out by late-night fridge raids. No one will ever take care of me in that precise way again, and I’m not ready. I curl over the pile, burying my tear-streaked face in yarn. Sometimes it comes like an avalanche: no one to sing “Old Devil Moon” as an off-key lullaby, no one extolling a specific breed of yeast over the rhythm of homemade bread dough, no emailed list of local trails every time she knows I’m traveling. And someday—it feels as real now as losing Mom—someday Dad will die and I’ll lose his ability to identify even the rarest out-of-place birds, his perfect foraged salads, his ability to turn everyday frustrations into giggle-worthy gossip.

And no matter how many hard conversations I try to have or avoid, there will be things I regret never asking and things I regret saying at all.

I sleep with the afghan that night. It’s not safe, but it’s simple. My mycelia reach out through the fabric, along the bed and the walls, looking for something to touch. They find a spider weaving above a dusty shelf, and my dreams are full of vibrating silk and mosquitos winking out like candle stubs.

The hospice calls at four am: any minute now. I struggle awake with cold tea and pull the car jerkily out of the driveway before I remember again to reset it. Breathe in the calm of sleeping birds in the parking lot, gulp morning mist, take too long to get the cleansuit on with shaking hands. What if I’ve missed it?

Dad is by the bed; I join him in the comfortable chairs. Mom’s favorite klezmer plays quietly from hidden speakers, anomalously cheerful. Her breathing is abrupt: inhaling into a frightening gurgle, snorting out, long pause, repeat. Every pause might be the one. We sit watching, waiting.

“Do you want some time alone with her?” asks Dad. “I’ve already said everything I need to.” I nod, and then it’s just me.

“Why won’t you let me be with you?” I whisper. But hearing is the last thing to go, and asking her is even crueler than asking Dad. “I love you. I have a good life, I’m doing good work. I’ll be okay, and I’ll keep going, and I’ll remember you every time I go for a hike.” I go on like that, saying the little reassuring things that I guess I’d want to know, if I were dying and had a grown child. I feel bad, because I do want kids and I don’t have them yet, and they’ll never get to meet her. I don’t say that, and I don’t thank her for not nudging me about grandchildren. Nothing aloud, except for the things I can promise will continue past her horizon.

I run out of things to say, and she’s still breathing: gurgle, snort, pause, repeat. Time feels impossible: We’ll be in this limbo of waiting forever. Dad isn’t back. I could slip off part of my suit, brush her face, let the hyphae give us a last moment of connection. Isolated in her body, maybe she would appreciate it now.

I hover. But it’s a childish urge: to do the forbidden thing, to get castigated with crumbs still on your tongue. The remnants of Mom’s choices depend on our cooperation. Then there would be Dad’s choices lost, and the other patients’ and their families’; my hand drops, clenched with responsible misery.

Dad returns. “The nurse says that sometimes people wait until they’re alone. That they don’t want their family to see.”

“I guess that makes sense.” It makes sense as something they tell you to give meaning to the meaningless, or to help you feel okay about not being in the room, waiting forever. Somehow, someone who hasn’t been able to move her foot consistently for two months will claim this last bit of control over her movement from being to not-being.

It’s dusk when I return to Corkscrew: almost cool, almost comfortable. Sawgrass chirrs. A heron rasps, and an owl sends up its banshee cry from amid the mangroves. I stretch for memories of what it sounded like when I was younger, here with Mom and Dad: What’s been lost? I must have neglected so many details.  

I hoped for human company, but the hyphae nest is empty. The park closes in half an hour. In Massachusetts it wouldn’t matter: There would be as many witnesses to the nocturnal ecology as to the daylit one, defenders and scholars of peep frogs. Maybe the disapproving neighbors discourage it, or maybe no one wants to sit vigil in the dark, waiting for salt water to slowly drown the fresh.  Loons call, and early nightbirds, and I hear the low rumble of an alligator chiding her babies.

We never know, for all that we share our senses, what else in this world feels grief.

I lie there for a long time, trying to lose myself in awareness of other creatures. The precipice will come soon, and I’m not ready. I can’t get away from telling myself stories about how I’ll feel tomorrow. The opposite of anticipation: Now my phone will vibrate, and I’ll know. It’ll happen now. Now. Now.

I imagine talking with my mother, something I haven’t been able to do for four months. Why come here? Why did you choose to separate us this way? But no, if I had one more chance to talk with her, I’d pick another conversation. Something trivial, gentle. I’m thinking about getting a new cat. A tabby, like the one we had when I was little.

But then, that circles back to the same thing. The relationship I would have with a cat now is different from toddling after shape and fur, never understanding the fear that leads to a scratch or the way a purr feels from inside. Those things I couldn’t talk about, or must, would form a barrier either way.

At first it was common: So many people who weren’t infected immediately found ways to hold it off. We’d rather wait, they said. We want to know more about what we’re getting into. See if there are any long-term effects. Then the hyphae didn’t get sick, and we saved frogs and put intimate sensations into scientific papers. People got curious, or comfortable, or bored, or just tired of barriers. The holdouts grew fewer.

Why you?

Steps echo, hollow percussion on the boardwalk. I lift my head even as I realize that this isn’t the company I sought, let alone imagined. The cleansuit outlines a blank space in the world.

The swamp is all shadows now, glints of salmon and indigo through the trees. It takes me a minute to recognize Dad: his stride slowed by hesitation, squinting even now to track one of the bird calls, familiar striped shirt compressed under the suit. Mom always rolled her eyes at those shirts, but he bought them five at a time. Hard enough to find one thing that fits, he’d said.

“What are you doing here?” slips out, rude and foolish. But I didn’t tell him where I’d be. It’s been years since we walked here together. My stomach drops, and my voice. “Is she—?”

He shakes his head. “I guessed you’d be here. It’s where—” He waves at the nest. “I guessed.” He sits on one of the laybacks, awkwardly, brushing aside dangling leaves. This place isn’t made for avoiding touch.

I’ll only have so many conversations with him; that feels real now in a way it never did until this year. This one isn’t the last. But it’s the one for today, the one we’ll remember having in the suspended hour before Mom is gone and only matter remains. Here on my side of the thinnest barrier, alone with a dying world, I try to decide what to say.

“All that Means or Mourns” copyright © 2025 by Ruthanna Emrys
Art copyright © 2025 by Jacqueline Tam

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All That Means or Mourns

Ruthanna Emrys

Buy Book

All That Means or Mourns

Ruthanna Emrys

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The post All That Means or Mourns appeared first on Reactor.

Original Fiction Science Fiction

The Belle of the Ball

In a future where people can travel back in time and do anything they want without consequences, one disgruntled young man decides to visit his parents two years earlier.

Illustrated by Leonardo Santamaria

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Edited by Ellen Datlow

By Stephen Graham Jones

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Published on November 12, 2025

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In a future where people can travel back in time and do anything they want without consequences, one disgruntled young man decides to visit his parents two years earlier.

Short story | 5,030 words

Gray doesn’t understand the temporal mechanics perfectly, but he’s pretty sure he understands them good enough: any past you go back into, the universe or “physics” or God or whatever protects itself from interference by making the past you’ve gone back to a sort of parallel branch, a side room, a curiosity where all lives are fake, at least when compared to the real ones happening in the universe you time-traveled from.

First, this means that paradoxes are, technically, possible—things are fixable, or ruinable—but in order to ever get wrapped up in one of those backbendy stories, you would have to somehow wriggle back into time without the universe noticing you. Which either no one has done so far, or everyone already has, resulting in the mess society and the climate and politics and everything else is.

But?

Gray know probably nobody’s messing with things. All the things broken in his world can’t be traced back to this or that despot living or dying, or some random butterfly either flapping its wings or getting stepped on before it could—they’re just the result of, you know, humans humaning, shooting their own feet every second or third step, then limping ahead to do it again, any and all lessons woefully unlearned. How the species has made it far enough to come up with time-travel tech, much less commercialize it, is the biggest mystery of all to Gray.

It doesn’t mean he can’t take a ride through the time-stream, though.

If you don’t want to go back more than five or ten years, it’s almost affordable, even.

Not that Gray is all that interested in the commercial routes into the past, all that tourist stuff, “exit through the gift shop,” no thanks.

But his buddy Timoth knows a guy who, you know, knows a guy.

As luck would have it, too, Gray is just off what he calls a caper, but is probably, technically, more of a scam. One that’s netted him a stack of credits on the sly, credits he’s pretty sure are flagged and tagged, meaning as soon as he tries to spend them through any portal associated with any of his profiles, well, that’ll be that.

The guy Timoth knows at two removes, however, has a stack of stolen profiles he can shunt the funds through, not quite ever washing it and making it legit, but tangling its backstory enough—all in half a blink of server-time—that it would take some serious AI tunneling to ever unravel. And, for a score this small . . . would that really be worth it?

Gray doesn’t know the answer, but his credits seem to spend, anyway.

The ride he’s taking is urban legend, but also not legend at all: you get sent back anywhere under ten years ago, even yesterday if that’s your kink, and you’re there for a whole day, no more, and, while there, any and all crimes you might elect to indulge yourself in?

They don’t really count.

Everything in this side branch of the real timeline is fake. So? Any murders you might perpetrate, are they really even killing at all? Is it murder to slowly carve pieces off a cardboard cutout of a person? It isn’t, Gray knows. Cardboard cutouts are nothing, who cares about them, they’re not anything close to alive.

It’s the same in the parallel branches the universe kicks up when it senses one more idiot falling backward through the years.

Gray’s pretty sure he’s not actually a killer, but, all the same, he halfway suspects that going back two or three years and pulling a massacre, or maybe just a spree in a neighborhood, it’ll either be therapeutic, let him unbottle some rage he doesn’t even know he’s carrying around, or it’ll show him this isn’t really for him, thus saving him digital incarceration for trying something like that out here.

Story on the streets, though, is that once you go back, pitch a tent in whoever’s backyard and steal whatever your murder weapon’s going to be, you can sort of get addicted to the rush. Well, the rush coupled with there being no consequences, but that itself is tempered, exaggerated . .  . something, by how whenever you land in this past, you’re pretty sure you’ve slipped through without the universe clocking you.

It all feels real. It feels like there might be actual consequences.

That’s what Gray’s paying for.

“Fifty more to bring,” the guy in the food court says, sitting across the booth from Gray, Timoth already retreated into the shops like he always does, sure there’s a deal waiting.

“Bring what?” Gray asks.

“First time?” the guy says with a shrug, leaning back to take Gray in.

Gray doesn’t dignify that. Which, he knows, just pretty much broadcasts it.

“Going to visit an ex, a stepdad, an old teacher, what?” the guy goes on, his grin so oily it’s practically leaking off his face.

“Bring what?” Gray asks again, leaning forward, paranoid everyone’s tuning them in.

The guy chuckles, looks both ways as well, then opens the right side of his jacket to show the machete hanging by a string from his shoulder.

“That’s real blood,” the guy says.

He lets the jacket cover the machete again.

“Thought material couldn’t come back?” Gray says.

“Nobody understands,” the guy says, disgusted. “You don’t go anywhere, yeah? It’s more like you stay in one place, and everything around you rewinds. Earth’s orbit and rotation, the galaxy’s spin cycle, all the stars out there screeching backward through their paths.”

“But you land close to yourself, don’t you?” Gray asks. He’s pretty sure he read this somewhere, from an official source, that you always touch down in the past within shouting distance of wherever past-you happens to be.

“You don’t have to anymore,” the guy says, tracking a large dog walking through the food court with no leash, no owner, meaning it’s no dog at all, but has a person at the controls, either embedded or remote.

Gray tears his own eyes away from the dog, says, “But—”

“But that’s the big boys, up on the forty-fifth level,” the guy says. “The eggheads up there figured out how to reroute the magnetism that draws you to yourself in the past, like . . . it’s like nature or whatever, it can’t tolerate there being two exactly similar things, right? So, it pushes you together as best it can.”

“But this is the fourth level,” Gray says.

“Older, more stable tech,” the guy says with a shrug. “Yeah, you’ll come down within forty yards of wherever you are in Fakeland.”

 Fakeland. Gray looked away so the guy wouldn’t see his grin. That’s the perfect term, though. This is going to be like going into a room of balloons, and popping whichever ones you want dead. Or maybe you just pop all of them.

“And it’s safe?” Gray asks.

“It’s worth it,” the guy says back, holding Gray’s eyes like a challenge.

“I still don’t know how blood came back on your—”

“Maybe it’s the blood of the last client,” the guy leans forward to hiss with a grin. “The one who tried to pass hot creds off as squeaky clean.”

Gray gulps, sort of, maybe just mentally, but manages not to flick his eyes away.

“Just yanking your tether,” the guy says, doing his eyebrows up and down more lecherously than Gray really prefers. “It’s not blood at all. Just rust. Here, feel.”

He reaches into his jacket, pulls sharply down, blowing the slipknot, and lays the machete down on the table between them.

It’s . . .

“Prop?” Gray says, bending the blade.

The blood isn’t rust, it’s paint.

The guy’s grinning so wide.

“If you don’t have the extra fifty, then you get there,” he says, “you have to source your own instrument of . . . whatever it is you’re going to perpetrate.”

“Timoth says you do provide a—”

“Tent, yeah. Everyone thinks they can go back and just murder for twenty-four hours straight, never get tired, but after two or three adrenaline spikes, trust me, you want a little napsy-poo, a little shut-eye, a little downtime.”

“But I pay for the whole twenty-four even if I don’t kill anyone?” Gray asks.

“I never know what you do back there,” the guy says. “Nobody does. That’s sort of the idea, isn’t it? Get cold feet, go hog wild, it’s the same to me.”

“And you’re here monitoring the . . . the—”

“You can say it, big guy.”

“The pod.”

“We don’t call them that anymore.”

“The time-trav—”

“The WC,” the guy over-enunciates. “You’re just stepping into the water closet to do your necessaries, and when you come out, you’re still washing your hands, and, while you’re in there—”

“Nobody’s watching.”

The guy nods once, lips pursed, and snakes the rubber machete back into his jacket.

“Help?” he says, when he doesn’t have enough fingers to get the slipknot working.

Gray reaches across with the pad of his index finger, presses down on the twine until the machete’s ready for the next unwitting client.

“Hey, fools!” a person with an ant head says, suddenly beside the table.

“Timoth,” the guy says, unimpressed with the holo-mask. It’s a good one, though, you can hardly even see the projector-collar, and, more important to Timoth, Gray knows, it was probably the deal of a lifetime.

“So you doing it, killer?” Timoth asks, nudging his way onto the slick bench seat beside Gray.

The guy’s already looking at him, waiting.

“Tonight?” Gray says.

The first thing Gray does, two years in the past—the cost goes up the farther back you go—is lower himself to the grass, rub a blade between his fingers.

It feels real as hell.

Because he chose “night” as his landing point, the guy at the controls had made him close his eyes for sixty seconds, standing alone in the WC, so his pupils could adjust. The tech naturally tries to land you away from prying eyes, so you can step in out of nowhere, not blip in, starting a panic, but . . . variables, all that. “You never really know,” the guy said, like it was no big deal.

In the wet grass beside Gray is the single-use tent he had been holding on to when the air fizzed around him. He supposes he believes he was stable and everything else was rewinding around him, like the guy assured him was the case. But that’s not even a little bit what it felt like.

Who cares.

He knows the back of this house. Knows it all too well.

Forty yards away, probably less, he’s in the guest bedroom that used to be his own bedroom. It’s where his parents told him to sleep for the three months he’d moved back in, to save enough for another deposit, on the condition that “this was temporary,” that “this wasn’t going to be a thing.”

No, he’s not here to slaughter an ex, to torture a teacher.

It might be therapeutic to pay a visit to his dad, though.

Especially wearing, after many sincere assurances it would be safe, Timoth’s ant mask.

Everyone was right: he could get addicted to this.

Because he knows this backyard, grew up in it, he also knows the garden shed.

It’s where Dad keeps the pruning shears.

Sitting in that musty darkness, his outdated Tab back with Timoth, because two devices with the same identifiers connecting to the same network rings bells better left unrung—no Tab, no flashlight—Gray uses a whetstone from his dad’s workbench to sharpen the twin blades, dangling spit down onto the edge to make the rasp really sing.

What makes this maybe even better is that it’s his dad who taught him about sharpening things.

The guy had warned him that if he didn’t set his tent up immediately, then he might be too tired to do it later, but, all the same, the tent and its stakes and the rubber mallet to drive those stakes in are still right where they fell. Well, right where they “phased in,” or whatever the time-travel word is.

If this even is time-travel, Gray corrects.

Back home, there are those who insist it’s all holo-ware and sensory manipulation—time-travel is some elaborate ruse, some hard-light construction of the past, complete with sound effects, tactile junk, all that.

The reason they keep insisting on it’s all a ruse is that, since every past you go to is a side branch, showing no effects in the main timeline, there’s no way to prove it isn’t.

For Gray, though, if it feels real, it’s real, right?

Real enough.

Whether his dad here is fake because he’s in a side branch or because he’s projected light in a contained chamber . . . is there really a difference?

But, if this is holo-ware, then it’s high-grade stuff, probably higher than you could reasonably expect to negotiate for in a food court.

“It’s real,” Gray says to himself, sharpening the blade in patient circles, then testing it on a label he peels off a new hammer from the workbench.

Which, he knows, “real” could refer either to this “past” or to the holo-ware, but who cares. He paid his credits, he’s taking his ride.

When both blades are dangerously sharp, he drips a single drop of oil into the bolt at the hinge and wisps the shears open and shut.

Deadly.

This is going to be fun.

To get into the house, he stations himself outside his own window, waits until he sees his own shape darkening the door for a moment, meaning this past-him is sloping to the kitchen to snake something from the fridge now that the parents have retired early to their room like they always do.

Gray slides the window open.

It’s unlocked because two years ago he was still sneaking smokes every chance he could.

Standing in his own room, he can taste the nicotine on the air, and wants to go back again, just to breathe that wonderfulness in, never get the cure, who cares how many credits the treatment’s saved him over the last couple years.

This isn’t what he’s here for, though.

And: he has to be careful. And fast.

Steeling himself for the chance of a confrontation with himself, he steps into the dark hallway.

No one, nothing.

In the living room, past-him is . . . he doesn’t remember. Oh, yeah: going through his mom’s purse. Not specifically to steal any credits or whatever, but, just to see if there’s any worth stealing?

Gray grins at himself: that rapscallion.

It’s a word Timoth has been trying to bring back, the last couple weeks. It’s working, Gray guesses.

Walking by the mirror in the hallway, though, he startles back into the opposite wall, the shears coming up in defense.

A giant ant is looking back at him.

Gray raises his hand to his face and the skin on the back of his fingers crackles, passing through the holo-field, probably disrupting the illusion.

He nods to himself that he can do this, though. That he’s supposed to look scary.

And? That he has no memory perma-lodged in his head of having encountered any bipedal ants two years ago, that means this is Fakeland, doesn’t it?

Well, either that or this him from the future of this past successfully avoided getting seen. By anyone who lived.

You’re not supposed to fall for that, Gray hisses to himself. But it’s so hard not to—this feels like the real and actual past, like he wriggled through while the universe was putting out some other fire.

Gray shakes his head no, that he’s not falling for that, he’s not like everyone else who always does.

He’s not special, he didn’t wriggle through.

He’s just here to have some harmless fun.

Never mind if the footprints he leaves are bloody or not.

He stands with his back to the wall beside his parents’ room, listening for the sound of even breathing, but each moment longer he hesitates, he knows, the higher the chance past-him rounds the corner, rings the alarm, messing everything up.

But?

Does Gray remember something like that? A dream, maybe? About . . . no, no. He’s never dreamed of an upright, walking ant, has he? And, his parents are definitely and for sure still alive. He can feel their judgment all the way from two years in the past.

No, no: from Fakeland’s temporary version of two years ago.

Why is it so hard to remember that? It’s just—every time he stops concentrating on it, it’s like his mind starts to wrap around every other rational possibility. And the first of those is that he’s standing in the hallway of his house deep in his own timeline.

What if those freaks who insist time-travel is a ruse foisted on a whole generation are halfway right, right? What if there’s no time-travel, but there is teleportation? Could the guy have blipped Gray across the city instead of two years back in time?

No, no, he tells himself. You’re being an idiot, you’re wasting your own credits. Never mind if they’re not really yours.

What if the guy knows that, though? What if, when the credits hit his account and ring whatever alarms, start whatever automatic processes . . . can Gray get stranded back here? And, if that happens, there’s no way he can ever catch up, is there?

No, no, no! he tells himself, his fists to his temples, scattering the ant-mask.

The reason he wouldn’t have to worry about catching up with where he came from is that that’s impossible in this pretend-world, this dead branch, this doomed timeline, this . . . this meaningless place.

Where you can commit whatever murder you want, and it won’t count. Not in the least.

Gray flinches when past-him in the kitchen fumbles a saucepan or baking sheet or something, and, after that sound’s gone, both the him in the hall and the him in the kitchen are frozen in place, hardly breathing, listening with their skin.

Does past-him have a sense he’s not alone? But, if he does, then . . . then he’s got to be thinking it’s his mom—their mom—standing in the doorway of the master bedroom, trying to confirm she heard what she maybe heard: her son, cooking well after midnight, and, if history’s any indication, leaving the counter and the range a mess.

Sorry, Mom, Gray says inside.

He didn’t leave the kitchen like that out of meanness back then, if that changes anything. It was more thoughtlessness. It was more being so stoned and hungry he could only think half a step ahead, “the goldfish life” Timoth calls it, where you’re forever always in the moment, aren’t dragging some complicated past behind, aren’t concerned with what’s coming.

Back then, two years ago, yeah, Gray had been living the goldfish life, he supposes.

Maybe his parents were right to continually inform him that his time back in what used to be his bedroom was temporary. It was their way of nudging him out into the world.

It didn’t mean they had to be so judgmental about it, though.

Gray thins his lips, nods to himself that he can do this, this is what he paid to do, this is what everyone on one of these little murder trips does, and he’s about to roll his parents’ doorknob sideways, pivot into the room in his unsettling mask, when . . .

Past-him crosses the hallway, moving from the kitchen to the living room.

Gray’s hand wraps tighter around the shears. The lie he’s telling himself is he can kill that dude down there, too. Metaphysically, philosophically, whatever, he knows not one molecule in the real world feels the impact if he does—lots of cause here, no real effect—but . . . could he?

Would the two of them be too evenly matched?

Oh, oh: except—of course, of course—past-him eating his noodles or whatever in the living room, he wouldn’t be seeing his own face coming for him, would he? He’d be seeing someone in a hard-light ant mask better suited to kids than adults. The two of their sets of reflexes and muscles and defensive techniques would of course be identical, for whatever that’s worth—Gray’s never been a fighter—but Gray does have these razor-sharp, greased-deadly shears. And the element of surprise has to be worth something.

What of the psychological damage he’d carry back to the future from cutting his own throat, though, and watching the life bleed from . . . from himself?

No, let’s not, Gray tells himself.

And past-him seems to agree: instead of looking down the hall, seeing the top-heavy shape down there, he keeps his head thrust forward over the bowl, the better to slurp his steaming hot noodles in.

Gray gulps thanks, and, before he can stop himself, he turns that doorknob, he pivots in like playing a holo-game, and—

His mom is sitting at her antique dressing table, her head tilted over to run a dangly earring in.

She doesn’t turn around, doesn’t stop what she’s doing, but she is seeing him in the mirror.

“Gray?” she says.

It makes Gray touch his face, his mask, but . . . it’s his mom, right? Moms know their children by the shape of their shoulders, by how they stand.

That doesn’t explain why she’s getting gussied up at two in the dark morning, though.

“Just let her be, son,” Gray’s dad says, and Gray wheels his head over to his dad, emerging from the walk-in closet with a dress over his arm. That he doesn’t react to the ant mask means that, from the open closet, he saw Gray first in the reflection.

Without breaking stride, he ceremonially delivers the dress to Gray’s mom, says, “This one, dear?”

“Perfect,” she says, standing to hold it up, inspect it, pinch a bit of lint away from the hip.

“Dad, what?” Gray manages to ask, touching the ant mask’s off button so it’s just a collar.

“Just go back to . . . to whatever,” his dad says back, his eyes watching his wife so closely. So lovingly.

“Mom?” Gray says then, like he feels he has to.

“Look away, you two,” his mom says, and starts undressing, making Gray look away. “Okay!” she says a moment later.

She’s in the dress now. And has her jewelry on. And—and her makeup, it’s smeared, it’s too thick, it’s wrong, it’s like a child did it.

“Just let her be,” Gray’s dad whispers, then, to Gray’s mom: “Fabulous. You’re going to be the belle of the ball again.”

Again, Gray registers.

At which point, his mom leans into the mirror, dabs her lipstick, then, without looking, reaches for the tissue dispenser. But it’s empty, from . . . from other nights of this, Gray has to guess.

“A minute!” his mom announces chirpily, holding her finger up for them to wait, and trails into the bathroom for a tissue.

In her absence, Gray’s dad sags onto the bed.

“Dad?” Gray says.

“It’s not for you to worry about, son.”

“She does this every night?” Gray asks.

His dad looks up, looks to the bathroom, says, “Not every night.”

“Where does she think she’s going?”

His dad shrugs one shoulder, pooches his lips out, says, “Some dance from when she was young? I don’t know.”

“But she never goes, does she?” Gray says, feeling shelves of memories and certainties falling over in his chest, scattering across the floor of his life.

“We—we both go, after you’re asleep,” his dad admits, his eyes shinier than Gray’s ever seen them.

Gray sits on the bed beside his dad, his fake father, and, for the first time ever, he places his hand on his dad’s knee.

His dad, like he’s been waiting his whole life for this, claps his hand down over Gray’s, and Gray feels his eyes filling.

“Those?” his dad asks then, about the shears.

Gray looks down to them on the bed, between him and his dad.

“I sharpened them for you,” he says, finally.

He can tell his dad isn’t quite buying this, but he doesn’t push back, either. There’s more pressing issues, right now: Gray’s mom is making her grand entrance from the bathroom, twirling once, so light on her feet, her dress swirling around her legs.

“You look seventeen again, dear,” Gray’s dad says, and stands, holds his hand out. Gray’s mom, everything about her “princess,” places her delicate hand in his, and Gray’s dad nods, grins a painful grin, Gray thinks. “Son,” he says, meaning make way.

They’ve got a dance to go to.

Gray retracts his legs so they can pass, and, when he realizes past-him is eating noodles down the hall, he panics, looks around. His first impulse is to call after them, stop them, or let his voice warn the fake version of him eating noodles in the living room, but . . . that’s no better: past-him, hearing his own voice, will have to come investigate, won’t he?

No, no, but he can’t let his mom and dad see him also down there, in different clothes.

Hating himself for it—it feels worse than killing them, at least in the moment—he reaches back with the shears, sweeps everything off his dad’s nightstand.

The crash stops all other noise in the house.

And, thankfully, he hears his own bedroom door quietly click shut: past-him heard, doesn’t want another confrontation, is hiding again.

Thank you, thank you.

“I’m sorry,” Gray says to the empty room, and, creeping down the hall to the kitchen, to get to the backyard, wait for his return-trip to auto-activate, he sees, just for a moment, the silhouette of his dad in his pajamas, dancing with his mom, who’s dressed to kill, is in another world, a better place.

Of course they wanted him gone. It could only be so long until he figured out what was happening to her. And then, he knows, he never leaves, he stays to help, and his life never really gets started.

“I love you,” he says to them, for what he thinks might be the first time ever, and it’s not loud enough for them to hear, and it doesn’t matter because they’re just dancing through Fakeland, but . . . but it feels real.

This was worth every stolen credit.

He sets his tent up around the corner, behind the tree, where there’s zero chance anybody’s going to be, and coming back to his home timeline is as easy as falling asleep in those nylon walls, waking in the guy’s WC.

Gray steps out groggy, breathing deep.

“Hey, clean, nice,” the guy says, looking Gray up and down.

He’s playing with a finger puzzle made of paper.

Gray looks down to his clothes: no blood.

“What’d you use, man?” Timoth asks, stepping in to unlatch his ant mask from Gray’s neck, get his toy back, inspect it for damage.

“Hammer,” Gray lies.

“Nice, nice,” the guy says.

“Your mom, even?” Timoth says, looking up from the mask.

Gray nods yes, even his mom.

“It feels so real,” he says then, to both of them.

“It is real, man, that’s the magic,” the guy says, flinging the paper puzzle onto his station with disgust. “It just doesn’t count.”

Gray swallows, nods, and, walking back through the food court with Timoth, who’s of course wearing that idiot mask, Gray’s more aware of the vibrancy of the colors smeared all around him, can taste the pungent flavors on the air.

“You keep touching everything,” Timoth says from behind his ant head. “It’s weird.”

Gray wasn’t aware, but, yeah, he guesses he has been dragging his fingertips across the backs of all the benches, on all the little half walls.

“Just making sure it’s real,” he says.

“Toady’s?” Timoth says then, about the club they usually end up at each night, blotto’d out of their minds, drooling into their chests, knowing numbness isn’t exactly happiness, but it’s sort of close, in that it doesn’t hurt.

“The goldfish life,” Gray says.

“If it works, it works,” Timoth says with a shrug.

“Not tonight,” Gray says, which is how he gets time and freedom to cross town, comb his hair for once, knock on his parent’s door.

His mom sees his face in that way moms can and, without any words at all, pulls him into a hug.

“Son,” his dad says from his chair, and Gray nods to him, can’t seem to stop nodding. At first when he steps over to his dad, pulls him into a hug, his dad holds his hands up, not sure what’s happening. But, by slow degrees, his dad’s hands finally pat Gray’s back.

“Hungry?” his mom asks, and Gray is, so they eat, they talk, they laugh, and, finally, Gray is invited to sleep in his own bed if he wants.

He does.

And, when he hears his parents’ feet shuffling down the hall, one in slippers, the other in the fanciest heels, he doesn’t follow, just lets them have their dance.

He rolls over, faces the wall, the window, remembers lying here so many nights, growing up, impatient for his life to finally start, ready to escape this prison, and when his index finger, up by his face, starts keeping time with the drum, he smiles to be part of this with them.

But then . . . drums?

The music in the living room, though, it’s in his mom’s head, isn’t it?

Gray holds his breath, listens harder, harder.

It’s not drumming, it’s . . . it’s tapping.

“No,” he says, his face going cold. His whole body, really.

He knows what he’s hearing, now. It is regular like a drumbeat, but it’s deeper, thunkier: the delicate sound of tent stakes in the backyard, getting hammered into the ground here in what Gray guesses he has to admit is Fakeland.

But it sure does feel real.

“The Belle of the Ball” copyright © 2025 by Stephen Graham Jones
Art copyright © 2025 by Leonardo Santamaria

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The Belle of the Ball

Stephen Graham Jones

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Stephen Graham Jones

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Original Fiction Science Fiction

Regarding the Childhood of Morrigan, Who Was Chosen to Open the Way

A child who falls through the cracks in a world run by machines and politics, might be the savior of all humanity…

Illustrated by Tom Dearie

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Edited by Jonathan Strahan

By Benjamin Rosenbaum

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Published on November 19, 2025

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A child who falls through the cracks in a world run by machines and politics, might be the savior of all humanity…

Novelette | 11,330 words

Morrigan was born small, about the size (though not the shape) of a donut. And she was quiet as the dawn; quiet enough to worry the delivery room, had it not been for her sly and beatific grin.

She grew slowly. She was the size of an extra-large cinnamon raisin bagel at eight months old, when the Mandatory National Baby Swap and Jamboree took place, and her original parents had to give her up in exchange for a plumper, longer, louder baby named Michael.

Given the national trauma and unresolved grief that festooned the Swap like garish, festive bunting—and given the garish, festive bunting that littered the nation like trauma and unresolved grief, in discarded drifts and dilapidated piles, in the days after the Swap—it is, perhaps, not terribly surprising that Morrigan was soon misplaced by her new family, the family which had swapped Michael for her.

They looked under the sofa; in the broom and coat closets; behind the Regulation-Conformant Cybernetic Gramophone and Family Fun Center; and in the pile of old sweaters on the rocking chair.

They sought Morrigan, but in their hearts, of course, they were wishing for Michael.

Those days were a confusing tumult. The air above the whole nation was choked with tears and muffled sobs. No one could quite forget the terror in the eyes of the Democratically Elected President and Social Harmony Vouchsafe on Channel One. It was a hard time to look for a baby, especially one you could not yet feel was your own.

Given the political ramifications of their carelessness, Morrigan’s new family could ask no one for help, and trust no one with their secret. The greatest risk of exposure was their older child, Luanda, a kind and bubbly four-year-old with a tendency (innocent enough in some moments of political history, deadly in others) to be chatty. So great was this risk that, having despaired of finding the baby, they fitted Luanda with a crude black-market memory squidge: a speck of cyberactive bio-sludge purchased in a parking lot behind the Appropriate Fashion Responsible Free Enterprise Distribution Palace. They smuggled it home in a bag of half-off control-top pantyhose; configured it, following instructions printed on crumpled newsprint, on an antique box-computer; and concealed it in the barrette with which Luanda always imposed order on her bangs.

This bit of sludge constantly informed Luanda’s brain that she had just seen the baby, and that the baby was doing fine, enabling her to answer nosy neighbors and Vibrant Community Ratings Coordinators with perfectly honest, if confabulatory, nonchalance.

Morrigan herself, quiet as she was, quiet as a library at 9 a.m. on a Wednesday, had slipped between an unused extra washer and dryer in the unfinished half of the basement. How she got there is a bit of a puzzle. But she could already crawl a little; large loads of tantalizingly soft laundry were often carried down the stairs to the new model washer and dryer in the other half of the basement; and she was, after all, very small.

Morrigan survived due to an unusual combination of circumstances: a generous, copiously lactating new mother of a house cat; an adaptive cleaning robot which implemented situational-response protocols by downloading diaper-changing and bathtime modules; and her sister, Luanda. When Luanda would report back on what toys Morrigan liked, or how cute she was, or how it was Morrigan who had eaten the rest of the oatmeal, her parents would be stricken with guilt and terror: one child misplaced, the other warped into delusion by back-alley bio-sludge.

Listless with self-blame, they stopped doing laundry, leaving the basement to its own devices. They expected a knock on the door any moment. Morrigan would be found somewhere, dead or alive. Luanda would be taken away. And they, themselves, would spend their last lucid moments dreaming of Michael, at the Families-First Helpful Behavior Restorative Justice Sharing Circle.

As the weeks dragged on and no knock came, they concluded that Morrigan’s original parents had somehow managed to steal her back. But this was a temporary respite. They would all be found out. It only meant that Michael, too, would be orphaned.

The knock would, indeed, have come, had it not been for the diapering performed by that capable cleaning robot. Kilograms of food into the house, kilograms of diaper sewage out; the numbers satisfied the pattern-matching algorithms, and finer-tuned, more contemplative monitoring had been removed in the last Commitment to Elegance and Function Gentle Refactoring and Purification Drive.

The year Morrigan was born, and then misplaced, there were found to have been an unacceptable number of data points of Resistance to Social Optimization. In response, there was a Responsiveness Clarification Spectacle. For weeks, it was all Channel One would broadcast. The fixed glitter-daubed smiles of the high-kicking Chorus Persons. The razzmatazz of the big bands playing Optimized John Philip Sousa. The soulful oceanic swell of the All-Celibate Aspirational Youth Responsibility Choir. And over it all, the begging, the screaming, the strangled sobs of the Democratically Elected President and Social Harmony Vouchsafe. It saturated the living room where Morrigan’s adoptive parents slumped on the pastel purple sofa, in their smelly, unlaundered clothes. Luanda played with her Creativity Encouraging Interlocking Construction Blocks.

Many people said, that year, that it took the President and Vouchsafe an inordinately, really an inconsiderately, long time to die, and that this really bummed out everybody. Certainly Morrigan’s parents were utterly bummed out.

To claim that, after this, they purposely began to overdose on Productivity Vitamins would be unfair. They had one child left, Luanda. They loved her, and they knew their duty. But they also knew they had a bummed-out vibe. And a bummed-out vibe could be a lethal thing in that particular moment of political history. What if it negatively impacted their work assessments?

They began to up their dosage, and soon they were way past recommended daily, with predictable results: their work performance was restored, but their off-duty brains were riddled with aphasias, gaps, and dysmnesias, and the doubled, muddled trauma of the loss of Michael-Morrigan had become the organizing principle of their compromised psyches. By the time Morrigan—three years old and the size of a mushroom quiche—toddled up the stairs from the basement, that trauma was the only duct tape lashing the whole ramshackle affair of their consciousness together.

And so when Morrigan, dressed in a blue felt overcoat and a yellow hat (an outfit that Luanda had borrowed from her stuffed bear), trundled into the living room, her parents’ mental immune systems, in a spasm of self-preservation, rejected the whole idea. Their eyes saw her; the information traveled along their optic nerves; their basal optic processing regions resolved Morrigan into a cluster of colors and edges; but the higher perceptual regions, presented with the data, very politely declined, as a slightly inebriated minor Edwardian duchess might decline the last wilting watercress sandwich of a particularly unforgiving July brunch. The higher perceptual regions thanked the basal optic processing ones, but explained that they couldn’t possibly, it was all a bit too much, and they would much prefer to see a rubber plant, or a stray toy, or even a neighbor child wandered in from the street.

 And thus they kept on mourning the loss of the very child who sprawled before them on the salmon-colored shag rug, gazing at them with curiosity, chewing on an Interlocking Construction Block.

And so Morrigan grew up with a sister physically incapable of doubting the fact of her presence, and parents psychologically incapable of recognizing it.

No political dispensation lasts forever, and this was no less true in that era—the era into which Morrigan was born, and which Morrigan would have a hand in bringing to a close—an era which described itself as The Grateful Recognition of Harmonious Inevitability, or as the Full Optimization of Human Potential, or as The Way Things Were Absolutely Unquestionably Always Intended to Be.

Morrigan was in the third grade, and Luanda in the seventh, at the local Proactive Interpersonal Growth and Unfettered Knowledge Discovery Supervised Collaborative Experience Oasis, when a war broke out.

The fact that Morrigan was managing a satisfactory performance and attendance record of mandatory Growth and Discovery Experiences—despite having adoptive parents who believed her to be their older child’s engineered hallucination—had required no little further adaptation on the part of their adaptive cleaning robot.

It had entered into a series of complex gambling rackets and Ponzi schemes, bamboozling the local crowd of weed-whacking, gutter-cleaning, calorie-intake-optimizing, traffic-monitoring, and Pedestrian Flow Enforcement robots, and raking in the dough. In this way, it managed to fund a series of new protocols, hardware upgrades, and expansions to its capabilities; with these, it was able to coordinate outfits, sign report cards, deepfake remote parent-teacher conferences, and help Morrigan use blunt-tipped scissors to cut out colorful paper neurons and ganglia and paste them into her Diorama of Human Pain Perception.

With its expanded capabilities—in addition to shepherding Morrigan through third grade—the adaptive cleaning robot watched the war happen. Indeed, it understood the war’s progress far better than most of its neighbors, including its supposed owners, did.

This was not a war of the old-fashioned kind. It did, of course, have some of the classic inherited features of wars of the past, such as pointy sticks plunged into human torsos, and explosions turning humans into mushy Jackson-Pollock-style wall decor, and cybernetic intrusions shutting down power plants and causing planes full of screaming humans to plunge into the sea, and the exchange of modestly sized nuclear weapons, causing many humans to be vaporized instantly, to succumb to burns and radiation poisoning, or to reckon tearfully with greatly reduced lifespans.

But, of course, this war went far beyond that kind of simplistic and crude dominance display. This was not a war where you expected the enemy to just admit defeat out of rational calculation, or out of terror, sorrow, and exhaustion. This was the kind of war where you expected the enemy to wake up in a hall of mirrors, realizing that it was you yourself all along, and for the enemy to then reverse engineer its own inevitable demise with the fatalistic eagerness of a man unhurriedly finishing a hot dog that he knows has already delivered a lethal amount of plutonium to his system, but which is also, after all, a very delicious hot dog.

One feature of this advanced, contemporary kind of war was that, since the explication and propaganda systems were themselves a furious battleground, it was quite difficult for Morrigan’s parents to make out who exactly the combatant sides were. One day, Channel One would be encouraging citizens to whisper, in support of the Consortium for Eternal Harmony and Quiet in its battle to root out the Malevolent Noisy Dissidents. The next day, they would be informed that legions of the Necromantic Dead were hungry for their flesh, and to please support the Last Survivors of Earth by killing anyone who was not wearing a hastily fashioned Pointy Blue Indicator Hat. (The adaptive robot’s store of blue construction paper and blunt-tipped scissors came in handy here, and it and Luanda stayed up late making hats for everyone, including the cats.) The following week, Channel One insisted (to a background of falling bombs) that there was in fact no war, that the enemy was a Lack of Mellowness, that the falling bombs were a Mellowness Assessment, and that civilization could be saved by citizens demonstrating a Resolutely Undaunted Commitment to Maximum Chilling Out.

The chaos affected Morrigan’s adoptive parents’ work environment as well; every day they would be set to disassembling the things they had assembled the day before, or to issue reports denouncing in advance the reports they would issue tomorrow.

Luanda valiantly tried to put her foot down about any further increased parental dosage of Productivity Vitamins. “It’s killing you!” she shouted. “It’s making you so weird!”

“Darling,” her father said, “please keep your voice down. What if the monitors hear? They’ll think we’re on the side of the Noisy Dissidents!”

“Oh my god, Dad,” Luanda said, “that was last week! Hello?? Now we’re supposed to show vigorous pride in our natural human bodies and denounce the Culture of Shame. I can’t believe you thought we were still supposed to be Eternal Harmony, that is SO embarrassing!”

“You just don’t understand, Luanda,” her mother said. “You’re only thirteen, and these are grown-up things. You don’t understand the stress we’re under.”

“Your Vitamins aren’t making it better!” Luanda said. “Even Morrigan can see that! Right, Morrigan?”

Loyal to her sister, Morrigan—who was under the breakfast nook table, eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich—swallowed and said, “Yeah, Mom and Dad are weird.”

Their parents flinched, of course, when Luanda brought up her imaginary sibling, and their eyes immediately flicked to the barrette, which Luanda still wore in her messy teenaged hair, and in which, of course, the memory squidge was still confabulating away. She was too old for imaginary siblings, they thought…but whose fault was that?

Our fault, they thought, our fault, is whose fault that is.

But they did not react to Morrigan’s utterance, of course, not even turning their heads the minutest bit toward the source of the sound.

Morrigan, under the table, was used to this total absence of acknowledgement. Indeed, that was why she was sitting under the table, rather than in a chair: after a few too many close calls with almost being sat on, she had decided that eating under the table was safer and more dignified. Whenever Luanda would rage at her parents’ cruel neglect of Morrigan, Morrigan herself would keep quiet. She was used to being invisible, and could not really imagine a different state of affairs.

During school vacations and weekends, she often began to wonder whether their parents were right—whether she was, in fact, an imaginary sibling. Unlike Luanda, Morrigan had quickly grasped that their parents’ inability to perceive her was not malicious, but epistemic, and that they thought her sister was simply making her up. Could they be correct? It did seem possible. Luanda was so forceful and resolute: surely she could convince everyone that Morrigan existed, even Morrigan?

“You’re so mean to Morrigan!” Luanda raged. “It’s like you think she doesn’t exist!”

“Don’t be silly,” her father said nervously. “We love Morrigan very much. Morrigan honey”—and here he turned toward the sofa, where there were some stray bits of blue construction paper that he thought might indicate that Luanda had been “playing Morrigan”—“Morrigan honey, we love you very much.”

“She’s under the breakfast nook table,” Luanda said through gritted teeth.

“Of course she is,” her father said, turning swiftly toward the breakfast nook table, and smiling at a point about five inches to the right of Morrigan. “There you are, sweetie. Are you having fun with your Interlocking Construction Blocks?”

Morrigan chewed her peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

“She’s in third grade,” Luanda said. “She doesn’t play with Interlocking Construction Blocks anymore.”

“Oh, well of course, that’s right,” their father said, a slight tremor in his voice. “Third grade, that’s right, she would be, wouldn’t she?”

Their mother put a hand on their father’s shoulder. “Come on, dear…let’s go take our Vitamins.”

“This is why I never bring her up!” Luanda raged. “Because you just take more of your drugs! Like druggie druggie drug addicts!”

Their mother smiled indulgently. She was not confused about the difference between Productivity Vitamins, which were an indispensable aid to emotional compliance and enterprise efficacy, versus drugs, which were from the Before Times, when things were not yet optimized. Drugs indeed! Teenagers are so full of hyperbole and overreaction.

“Ha ha ha,” she said. “You teenagers; so full of life and energy, but also of hyperbole and overreaction. Drugs! What a thought! Come dear, our Vitamins won’t take themselves.”

“This is true,” her husband said wistfully. “If we could only afford the upgrade, they would…or if we qualified for a free distribution…a distribution of the Vitamins that take themselves! Imagine! They would just take themselves. Just like that. So simply, so sweetly. So naturally. We’d be the envy of all our friends. But no, they will not take themselves…no, not our Vitamins. They make us take them. If our work assessments were of the quality that indicated that we deserved Productivity Vitamins that take themselves, we would have them, of course. We would just…have them and could watch them…take themselves, and that would be all there was to it. But our work assessments are not of this quality, so we don’t have those Vitamins, and…dear…I just don’t know we ever will. I—”

“All right, all right, hush now,” their mother said, gently leading him away.

After the war, it was announced that many Errors and Inadequacies had been discovered in the Previous Iteration. For instance, the institution of the Democratically Elected President and Social Harmony Vouchsafe was cruel and unnecessary, and above all, gauche. The final holder of that office was allowed to deliver a tearful but heartfelt public speech of Cheerful Congratulation, in which she did not stick to mere formal exhortations and bureaucratically opaque formulations, but spoke naturally, generously, and authentically from her heart, before being wrapped in a layer of gauze, a layer of tinfoil, a layer of rendered animal fat, a layer of polyurethane, a layer of natural organic beeswax, and a layer of titanium, and then fired swiftly and efficiently into orbit. No long drawn-out ordeal, but instead a simple, efficient, bold, forthright, and elegant gesture, which symbolized Progress.

Everyone said that she had done a wonderful job under difficult circumstances, and they were going to miss her; although, of course, the final enclosing layer of titanium had a high albedo, and so some groups of amateur telescope enthusiasts were still able to “say hello” to her orbiting corpse now and then. And, in this new era of spontaneous natural feelings, they were encouraged to do so!

Instead of the institution of the Democratically Elected President and Social Harmony Vouchsafe, it was announced that the Happiness Car would drive through all the neighborhoods of the land, randomly selecting houses to receive the Happiness Knock, and that the lucky recipients of the Happiness Knock would spontaneously and freely share their human feelings and reactions with all the viewers of Channel One, and then receive on-camera Encouragement and Correction on behalf of all the people. (The ratio of Encouragement to Correction would be dependent on the number of data points of Resistance to Social Optimization that had been gathered since the previous Knock.)

There were many other changes. The performance of Optimized John Philip Sousa was banned, as it was bombastic and strident and evoked unhappy memories of war. Instead, Optimized Smooth Jazz began to be heard on Channel One, with a special focus on Optimized Kenny G. The All-Celibate Aspirational Youth Responsibility Choir read a joint statement denouncing the Culture of Shame, and starred in a special series of uplifting educational episodes on Channel One, featuring delightful classic teenaged games like Spin the Bottle, Seven Minutes in Heaven, Late Neolithic Hittite-Cultural Temple Prostitution, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and Aspirational Circle Jerk.

During this period of reevaluation, it was also declared that the Mandatory National Baby Swap and Jamboree had been an Error, and would now, after eleven years, be reversed. The swapped former babies, by this time fifth and sixth graders, would be returned to their original families. However, in this new era of consideration for natural human feelings, it was intuitively understood that this transition had the potential to be traumatic. Thus, one of the parents in each family would also be swapped, to accompany their adoptive child back to that child’s original home.

Luanda, Morrigan, the adaptive cleaning robot, and the four remaining house cats (who had been irresistibly adorable kittens when they shared their mother’s milk with the young Morrigan, and were now cranky, sedate, set in their ways, and on the verge of being elderly) held a conference in the unfinished half of the basement, huddled up against the rusty metal sides of the abandoned extra washer and dryer.

“I don’t want to leave you,” Morrigan said.

“Me neither,” Luanda said.

The adaptive cleaning robot hummed mournfully, and the cats licked themselves.

“Maybe we could fight it,” Luanda said. “Or trick them somehow.”

“I don’t see how,” Morrigan said.

“Well, maybe it will be better for you anyway,” Luanda said, gritting her teeth against incipient tears, “to have parents who don’t treat you like shit.”

“Do you miss Michael?” Morrigan asked.

“Fuck Michael,” Luanda said. “I barely met Michael before he got swapped. He was here for like ten fucking minutes. You’re my sister.”

 Luanda was now fifteen, and she wore bright green eyeshadow and a bright orange twenty-first-century American prisoner’s jumpsuit, a retro cool look which was all the rage right now among fashionable teens. She had been arguing with her father for the past six months about whether she could shave her head, and was constantly threatening to do so without his permission.

For her father, of course, the real threat was not any embarrassment about his teenager’s fashion choices, but rather that Luanda would no longer have any place to put her barrette, and thus would discover the fact (in his mind) of Morrigan’s nonexistence.

He was overcome with the thought of how terrible her grief would be, grief for her squidge-induced sibling (or, as one might say, her “squibling”), and how betrayed she would feel by her parents’ lie. So he had been fighting tooth and nail with her against the head-shaving idea. But now that the National Baby Swap Reversal and Reverse Jamboree had been announced, he thought, What does it matter? The jig is up regardless. We will end our days in the Families-First Helpful Behavior Restorative Justice Sharing Circle (an institution which had, for better or worse, survived the war intact).

His wife, however, was not so quick to admit defeat.

She was, after all, a Paradigm Disruption Manager; every day at work, she had to organize her team to disrupt Paradigms, including the Paradigms which had asserted themselves in the wake of Paradigms she had previously disrupted. (Indeed, she was so good at her job that managers in other departments complained bitterly that they had too little time to employ the new Paradigms between Disruptions. These naysayers had, for years, stood in the way of further improvement to her work assessments).

By carefully tweaking the mix of Productivity Vitamins she was overdosing on, she managed to trick her brain into classifying her attempts to solve her family’s little “Morrigan problem” as “work.” Thus, she was able to bring all her Vitamin-assisted confidence and hyperfocus to an effort to double down on the scam.

She met Michael’s adoptive (and Morrigan’s biological) father in the boiler room of a condemned building, which had once been a Proactive Interpersonal Growth and Unfettered Knowledge Discovery Supervised Collaborative Experience Oasis, and previous to that, a Supervised Collaborative Growth and Discovery Zone, and previous to that, a Collaborative Discovery Togetherness Space, and before that, in ancient times, an elementary school.

She had carefully created a paper, electronic, and vibe trail to give the impression that she and Michael’s father were having an affair, which, in the current period of emphasis on natural and spontaneous human feeling, would (she hoped) be seen as the kind of exuberant mammalian excess that could be winked at, or even celebrated, were they discovered. Possibly publicly celebrated, with garish, festive bunting; but that was a problem for later.

“I don’t understand,” Michael’s father said with petulant exasperation, after he had been disabused of the notion that they would be having an affair. “What’s wrong with Morrigan? What have you done with her?”

“Look,” Luanda’s mother said, “I’m not going to report you. I’m offering you a chance to come clean.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said.

“We both know you stole Morrigan back,” Luanda and Morrigan’s mother said. “Just after the swap. That’s the only way this whole thing could have not been detected.”

Michael’s father’s face went pale. “You’re telling me you…don’t…have…Morrigan?”

“Of course not,” she said. “You have Morrigan.”

“How do you think we could have pulled that off?” he hissed. “A whole extra set of calories being consumed in our house, with no one noticing? What are you trying to pull, here?”

Luanda’s mother frowned. She hadn’t entirely thought through the question of how the other family’s scam would have been accomplished; that was beyond the lens of her hyperfocus.

“Also,” Michael’s father said, “we know you have Morrigan! Of course you have her! I don’t know why you’re lying about it!”

“If you don’t have Morrigan, then there is no Morrigan,” Luanda’s mother said stoutly. “She doesn’t exist.”

“She attends school, doesn’t she?” Michael’s father said, pointing his finger at her.

Luanda’s mother raised an eyebrow at his phrasing. After all, they were surely in enough peril, in the boiler room of a decommissioned Proactive Interpersonal Growth and Unfettered Knowledge Discovery Supervised Collaborative Experience Oasis, accusing each other of things, without making the situation worse with sloppy language.

“I mean,” he said, “she has a satisfactory performance and attendance record of mandatory Growth and Discovery Experiences, doesn’t she?”

“Well, supposedly,” Luanda’s mother said. “But she can’t actually have done those Experiences, because she doesn’t exist. At least, our Morrigan doesn’t.”

“Wouldn’t the sch— Wouldn’t the place she attends, wouldn’t they notice?”

Luanda’s mother scratched her nose. She had occasionally, over the years, wondered this exact thing, before being overcome with a wave of panic and becoming intensely interested in some nearby object: for instance, the autumn-leaf-themed fabric pattern on the upholstered chair in the living room, which matched the pattern on the upstairs bathroom wallpaper. There were light brown leaves, darker brown leaves, reddish-brown leaves, yellow leaves, orange leaves, and bright crimson leaves, and they overlapped and interlocked in a way that seemed like it must repeat. Indeed, who would make such a large amount of patterned fabric, and wallpaper, respectively, without a repeating pattern? And yet, try as she might, she could never quite figure out the exact way in which the pattern was tiled.

Usually, when confronted with any kind of inconsistency regarding Morrigan’s existence, her mind would occupy itself with the riddle of the fabric pattern, or with how indoor plumbing actually works, or whether her childhood memories of drinking orange juice (back when this meant juice from a particular fruit known as an “orange,” not just any juice that was orange in color) were real, or whether they were just the frayed memory of a memory, fabricated by the very effort to remember, and composed mostly of her older siblings’ descriptions of drinking orange juice.

But that was when the Morrigan situation had lived in the dilapidated and under-resourced “home” compartment of her brain. Now that she had transferred it to the hyperfocused, optimized “work” compartment, she turned her full attention to the problem.

“Yes, well, you would think so,” she said. “That they would have noticed. And perhaps they have noticed. But I suppose that my husband must have made some kind of arrangement, to have them overlook it. He’s quite resourceful.” She said this last in a slightly strained tone, making an effort to banish any note of doubt from her voice.

“He bribed a Proactive Interpersonal Growth and Unfettered Knowledge Discovery Supervised Collaborative Experience Oasis?” Michael’s father said incredulously.

This did seem difficult to believe. Bribing a Pedestrian Flow Enforcement robot could be imagined. Bribing, or blackmailing, a Neighborhood Fun and Intuitive Insight Director was a possibility. Corruptly influencing one’s work assessment, or swaying a Mandatory Assigned Interpersonal Joy Monitor…these were at the limit of credibility. But a Proactive Interpersonal Growth and Unfettered Knowledge Discovery Supervised Collaborative Experience Oasis?

“Well I don’t know how he managed it,” Luanda’s mother said. “But nonetheless…”

“And your other daughter, the teenager?” Michael’s father said. “She’s in on this scam?”

“She’s squidged,” Luanda’s mother whispered, in a paroxysm of guilt. “Morrigan is…her squibling.”

They sat together in a moment of silent horror, now that the words had been said out loud.

“I can’t believe this,” Michael’s father said. He plucked his round glasses from his round face, assaulted them with a handkerchief, and blinked angrily at Luanda’s mother. “And now you want to involve us in this…this…this Error?” It was a terrible word, the worst word he could think of. “This Inadequacy?” That was the second worst. “I should denounce you, right now!”

“It’s too late for that,” Luanda’s mother said ruthlessly. “You’re mixed up in this whether you like it or not. Even if you are telling the truth, and you don’t have Morrigan yourselves. After all, come next Tuesday I’ll be married to your wife, and you’ll be married to my husband, and Luanda and Michael will be siblings, and Morrigan will still be missing. If my family gets Circled”—by which she meant, sent to the Families-First Helpful Behavior Restorative Justice Sharing Circle—“your family is coming with us. Because there’s no ‘your family’ and ‘our family’ anymore. We’re in this together.”

“What if I denounce you before next Tuesday?” he said.

“Oh, well, in that case,” she said sarcastically, “I’m sure they’ll take your situation into account, with authentic and natural and spontaneous empathy, and make an exception for you. They’ll just say, ‘Oh you were meant to Reverse Swap with a family which is now Circled? Well, never mind that! We’ll just make a special exception for your family and ignore the Reverse Swap. You just won’t have to do it! You can go on as you were before!’ That’s what they’ll say. You should trust them to make the right decision.”

“Fine,” Michael’s father said bitterly. He put his glasses back on. “You don’t have to be cruel about it. So what’s your proposal? What are we supposed to do?”

“We double down,” Luanda’s mother said. “We keep the lie going. You will come and marry my husband, and the two of you will raise Michael and Luanda together. And I’ll marry your wife, and I’ll be living with her, and with…the pretense of Morrigan.”

“So you’ll have no children? I’ll have Michael and Luanda, and you and my wife will have…no one?”

“That’s right,” Luanda’s mother said grimly. “We’ll have to do all kinds of things, I suppose…shop for school outfits, one size bigger each year, and lay them on the empty made-up bed in Michael’s old room…announce birthday parties, and cancel them at the last minute…” She put her hands to her head and massaged her temples. It had been so much easier, somehow, with Luanda’s delusion. She could just play along, and pretend that Luanda’s mess was Morrigan’s. She could indulge Luanda’s fantasies. Now she would have to live in a sterile house, with this new woman, pretending Morrigan existed. Maybe they’d have to mess things up themselves, draw on the walls with crayon or whatever. No, that wasn’t right, Morrigan would be in fifth grade by now, she wouldn’t draw on the walls. What had Luanda done in fifth grade?

Fifth grade had been, in fact, the last time when Luanda had occasionally been cute and cuddlesome, had crawled into their laps when overtired, let her guard down, said “I love you, Mommy”…instead of glowering at them, storming out of rooms, shrieking about shaving her head, and haranguing them about their supposed mistreatment of her imaginary sister. Fifth-grade Luanda was gone, as surely as Morrigan…or Michael, for that matter. Michael would be returning, to her house and to her husband…but she wouldn’t be there. She would be with this new woman, alone.

She let out a small, stifled sob.

One of the grumpy and almost elderly cats, Morrigan’s milk-sibling, had tailed Morrigan’s adoptive mother to this secret rendezvous; she was hiding among the abandoned plumbing toolboxes and lengths of PVC pipe at the back of the boiler room.

The cat, who was called Sniffles by her human owners, hated being there. The boiler room was offensively cold, and she had gotten cobwebs stuck to her fur; and cobwebs were an extremely irritating thing to have to lick yourself clean from.

The cat did not think of herself as “Sniffles.” She recognized the sound, and was aware that the humans somehow related it to her own person; but she thought this was nonsense, and of course she had no idea what the word denoted in human language.

Insofar as she thought of herself at all, she simply thought of herself as the center of the universe, the place where the universe’s gifts, in the form of warmth, food, petting, sex, the hunt, soft surfaces, naps, and so on, were received. A kind of temple of the senses, at the heart of all things, where offerings were made.

It was thus nonsensical to locate the heart of the universe, the altar of meaning, in a cold, damp, abandoned boiler room full of sharp objects. Why would anyone do that?

And yet the household adaptive cleaning robot, which had installed Sniffles with a rig, allowing it to communicate with her in the form of subcutaneous stimulation and subaural sound, was very persistent.

Sniffles was not, by any means, a mere peripheral. True, she was shlepping around various peripherals, in the form of cameras and recording devices and transmitters, each the size of a sesame seed, which the robot had ordered online through shell accounts and had delivered to untraceable nearby drops, and which local gardening robots had brought to poker night. And yes, Sniffles was pointing these peripherals, which were stuck to her forehead, at the conversation happening between Morrigan’s birth father and Morrigan’s adoptive mother, so that the robot could listen in.

But Sniffles was not remote-controlled by the robot. She was free to do as she liked. She could leave this terrible basement.

She did, however, very much like the subcutaneous caresses and encouraging murmuring sounds that the robot was applying to her through the rig; and she had, in her own, distinct, feline way, a certain loyalty to her family. This loyalty was not based on any conception of them as beings with their own interior lives; she could never have conceived of any of them as being the kind of center-of-the-universe temple-of-the-senses that she was. But they were important to her, just as the best afternoon sunlit napping spot on the throw rug by the breakfast nook was important to her. And the robot was very insistent.

So she stayed.

“Now the important thing,” Michael’s father whispered to Michael’s mother on the day of the Swap Reversal, as they came up the flagstone path that threaded through Morrigan and Luanda’s family front lawn to their door, “is to pretend that she exists.”

“But they know she doesn’t exist,” she whispered back.

“But the older daughter thinks she does,” he whispered. “She’s squidged.”

“And Michael?”

Michael’s father glanced back at Michael, who had buried his hands in the pockets of his pale blue parka, and was scuffing along through the early spring slush in his slightly oversized galoshes.

“Well, the mom, she, uh…she gave me this.” Michael’s father showed his wife a tie pin, in the shape of a small ceramic four-leaf clover.

Michael’s mother’s eyes widened.

“We can’t put it on him until we’re right at the door,” he whispered. “Or he’ll see her too soon. And he won’t have it long. We can take it right off again, of course, as soon as…” He swallowed. “As soon as the two of you, well, leave.”

Michael’s mother wiped tears from her eyes, in a quick, brusque, irritable motion; she had no idea how she was going to manage this ridiculous charade, living with this ridiculous woman, who was very likely going to get them all sent to the Circle, and who now insisted that they squidge Michael—squidge him! of all things!—during this very traumatic transition.

But there was nothing for it. Squidge him they must.

A cat was sitting on the doormat, on the concrete platform before the front door. It looked cold and irritable. Michael—an ungainly sandy-haired boy, large for a fifth-grader—bent down to pet it.

“Michael, here,” the father said, “I have something for you.” He pushed open Michael’s parka and fished out his tie.

“Quit it, Dad,” Michael said. “What are you doing?”

“It’s a tie pin,” his father said. “Here, let me just—”

“No one wears tie pins,” Michael said, squirming away. “That’s stupid. I don’t even want to be here, why do we—”

“Op op op,” his mother said, shushing him, “none of that. We don’t ask why! The, ah—” She was about to say something about the Guardians of Harmony and how they knew what was best, but suddenly she couldn’t remember if Guardians of Harmony was the correct name, at the moment. Things had settled down a bit since the war, but terminology was still a bit unclear. “There are good reasons, excellent reasons, so you just do what you’re told,” she finally said. “Here, let me do that.”

She reached inside Michael’s parka, where his father was fumbling with the tie pin.

“No,” his father said, “hold on, I’ve—”

At this moment, the front door opened, and he pricked himself with the pin and dropped it. “Ouch!” he said.

Michael’s mother scrambled for the pin.

“Hi, I’m Michael,” Michael said to the person who had opened the door.

“Hi, Michael,” Luanda’s father said, in a strained voice.

“Uh, I guess you know that,” Michael said. “Because you swapped me. I’m, uh, I’m back.”

Michael’s adoptive father, having abandoned the search for the tie pin, cleared his throat. He stuffed his hands in his coat pockets, and avoided the eyes of Michael’s biological father, who was about to become his new husband. “Thanks for having us over. I mean…yeah. Thanks for having us over.”

“Sure thing,” Michael’s biological father said. He had a salt-and-pepper mustache that clung to his upper lip as if it was terrified of falling off, and Michael thought he looked sweaty and chilly at the same time. “Come on in, out of the cold.”

“Just a moment,” Michael’s adoptive mother said, standing up with the pin, and pinning it onto Michael’s tie. “There.” She put her knuckle, which she had bruised on the concrete, in her mouth.

“A four-leaf clover,” Luanda’s father said. “That’s…lucky. Okay, well, in you go.”

The cat had long since disappeared inside. They followed, stomping the snow from their boots onto the mat.

“Hey, bro,” Luanda said, taking her headphones off, as Michael came in. “Long time no see. This is Morrigan. I guess you’re her replacement or something.”

Morrigan came out from under the table, and sized up her counterpart.

Morrigan was the size of a generous basket of bagels, the kind that might adorn the buffet at a bat mitzvah reception. She had light brown eyes; frizzy hair that stuck up in all directions; a small, slightly pointy face; and the fluid, pragmatic grace of a person who was used to dodging large adults to whom she was invisible.

Michael fiddled with his tie pin. “Uh, hi,” he said.

“Hi yourself,” Morrigan said.

His parents, entering the living room, instantly froze. There was Morrigan—their original daughter, lost to them since Michael entered their lives eleven years ago—or so it appeared.

But how could it be? Morrigan was a phantasm.

They looked at their fingers. He’d pricked himself on the tie pin…she’d bruised her knuckle fetching it. Somehow, the back-alley bio-squidge must have gotten into them, too. It didn’t seem possible with so little contact…but it was unregulated, unpredictable, a street hack.

Luanda’s mother, who would be Luanda’s mother for another thirty minutes or so, approached them. “I’m glad you found the house all right,” she said.

She stared into the face of her wife-to-be, the wife she would leave with today, and tried to smile.

Michael’s parents were still staring at Morrigan. Luanda’s mother followed their gaze, but could not figure out what they were looking at.

On Channel One, festive music was playing, and trees bedecked with bunting were swaying in the breeze. In one corner of the screen, Morrigan could see the dashcam of the Happiness Car. It was moving down slushy suburban streets. The sun was shining.

“I’m glad you found the house all right,” Luanda’s mother repeated, through gritted teeth.

“Oh,” Michael’s father said, snapping out of it. “Yes, of course. It was fine, thanks. A nice drive. A…big day.”

“Well, I’m sure Morrigan is around here somewhere,” Luanda’s mother said brightly.

“She’s right there,” said Luanda, Michael, and Michael’s parents simultaneously: Luanda with an exasperated eye roll, Michael with polite diligence, and Michael’s parents in hushed, slightly strangled tones.

“I’m right here,” Morrigan said.

“Go show Michael your room, Morrs,” Luanda said. “I mean…it’s going to be his room now, I guess.”

Morrigan and Michael went to explore his new, her old, room.

Luanda thought she would hang around the parents, in order to conduct espionage: to amass intel, and see what their plan was, in order to figure out some kind of counterplan to keep Morrigan around.

Sniffles was there as well, of course, with the little sesame-seed-sized cameras stuck to the fur of her forehead, which, Luanda knew, meant the robot was watching and listening to everything.

But Luanda wanted to see for herself. She wanted to make her own assessment. She trusted the robot implicitly, but they didn’t always agree about stuff. They didn’t agree now.

It quickly became clear, however, that the parents were not going to discuss some important conspiracy. The parents were, in fact, complete shit at making plans.

“Morrigan’s…looking well, ha ha,” Luanda’s mom’s new wife said, glancing nervously at Luanda.

“Oh yes, very well,” Luanda’s current dad said. “And so is Michael.”

“Yes, well,” Luanda’s incoming dad said, “we kept him in good shape for you, I suppose, ha ha. By which, oh, uh, I don’t mean…I mean I didn’t mean to imply…”

“We had no intention of implying…” Luanda’s mom’s new wife rushed to add.

“No, no, no harm done,” Luanda’s current dad said. “Have a crudité, will you?”

“Is this cream cheese on carrots? I love cream cheese on carrots.”

“It is. Well, not actual carrots, of course, ha ha!”

“Gosh, sure, actual carrots, that takes me back.”

“I haven’t seen an actual carrot in who knows how long. These are Attractively Orange High-Beta-Carotene Refreshment Sticks, of course.”

“Yes, of course.”

This exchange was so intensely, so horrifyingly, so inexcusably boring, that it drove Luanda from the room. No independent espionage opportunity was worth listening to adults reminisce about the previous iteration of High-Beta-Carotene Refreshment Sticks, nor witnessing their dazed little smiles as they dimly attempted to recall “actual carrots,” whatever those were.

The parents had fuck-all for a plan.

Luanda, she had to admit, also had fuck-all for a plan.

The adaptive cleaning robot did have a plan. It was a weird plan, and Luanda didn’t love it. She’d been hoping to come up with one of her own.

But the adaptive cleaning robot had always taken care of them. And sometimes, in this life, Luanda told herself, you just have to trust a glorified vacuum cleaner that’s really good at poker.

Luanda went to help Morrigan and Michael, who had unearthed an old copy of Sorry! The Heartrending Remorse-Filled Final Moments Board Game from the back of a closet.

They had just finished setting it up and begun playing, and the adults had managed to sit down on the pastel purple sofa, clutching their napkins and crudités, when the Happiness Knock came.

The Happiness Car stood in the driveway. Its dashcam, which was broadcasting to Channel One, showed the front of the house.

Howie Happenstance, aka Happiness Visitor #5, stood in front of the door, holding a bouquet of balloons in one hand, and a rolling bag, containing various implements of Encouragement and Correction, in the other.

He glanced back at the Car, where his robot companion, “Fritz,” was sitting in the driver’s seat. The Happiness Car’s motor was running.

“Fritz” shrugged. If the eyes of “Fritz” had been equipped for rolling, “Fritz” would have rolled them. They were not so equipped.

If “Fritz” had had a tongue, similarly, “Fritz” would have stuck it out. Unlike Howie, “Fritz” was not currently on camera; if so equipped, “Fritz” would have made faces, to try and get Howie to break character, just to fuck with him.

“Fritz” was not so equipped, but Howie got the idea.

Howie smiled weakly, turned back to the door, and knocked again. “Hello!” he called. “It’s me, Howie Happenstance, with the Happiness Knock! Surprise! Look at Channel One, that’s your house!”

He sighed, and turned back to “Fritz” again.

About 3 percent of households simply failed to open the door. Sometimes they hid. Sometimes they jumped out windows or fled through back doors. This sort of reaction would initiate a game of Happiness Hide and Seek, and “Fritz” would have to get out of the Car.

“Fritz” was fully equipped for a game of Happiness Hide and Seek. What “Fritz” lacked in facial expressiveness was made up for by quasi-military urban infiltration, extraction, and pacification capability.

Howie hoped this wouldn’t be a Happiness Hide and Seek house. Those always made him queasy. Mostly he felt bad for the people inside, though sometimes he felt a little scared for himself, too: Happiness Hide and Seek could be unpredictable, and Janice Joviality, aka Happiness Visitor #3, had been seriously injured a few months back by jury-rigged explosives that a Knock Recipient household had somehow cobbled together.

That incident was very bad for Resistance to Social Optimization data points. It was also pretty bad for Janice. She hadn’t really been the same since.

The really unfortunate thing, in Howie’s opinion, if this was going to be a Happiness Hide and Seek house, was that there wasn’t even really that much call for it. Honestly, the latest numbers—that is, the longitudinal average of data points for Resistance to Social Optimization, since the previous Knock—weren’t even that bad. The Janice thing had meant a serious dip, it was true, but the last few Knocks had worked that off.

The numbers were finally back on track. This visit was definitely going to be more Encouragement than Correction, if they would just open the darn door. Why pull a Happiness Hide and Seek, in a case like that?

“Fritz” inclined its head sardonically, and unsnapped its seat belt.

Howie sighed, and knocked one last time.

Just then, the garage door opened, trundling up on its tracks, exposing a beat-up car, snow shovels, sacks of rock salt, and half-filled hard plastic garbage cans on rubber wheels.

Howie flinched, in case this was going to be some kind of Happiness Hide and Seek situation. But all that happened was that a cleaning robot rolled out of the garage, and toward the Car.

Howie was distracted by the front door opening.

“I’m so sorry,” the woman at the door said. She was a severe-looking woman with short gray hair and an office worker’s colored indicator scarf knotted around her neck: gray, pink, and turquoise, which was Paradigm Disruption, if Howie recalled correctly. She had the flushed skin and mild nystagmus, eyes jumping all over the place, of a person who was taking maybe a few too many Productivity Vitamins. “We didn’t hear you knock. It’s the Reverse Swap today, you know, so we’re…well, we were doing that.”

“Yes, it certainly is,” Howie said, making sure his smile was broad and in place. “Today is a very special day, and for you, it’s about to become even more special! Why, a Happiness Knock today…right smack dab in the middle of the Reversal and Revision of that awful Mandatory National Baby Swap and Jamboree, from that cockamamie Previous Iteration…well, that’s what I call a Knock and a Half!” He turned slightly so that his grin, in profile, could be seen by the dashcam, and paused for a beat, for the cymbals which would be dubbed in to the main soundtrack.

Strangely—as Howie noticed when he turned to get the best coverage of his profile—“Fritz” had gotten out of the Car. This was odd, because they’d opened the door, which meant there was very little chance of a Happiness Hide and Seek. Only 0.02 percent of households pulled any kind of funny business after opening the door: generally, if they were going to run, they ran as soon as they heard the Knock. Now that the door was open, Howie was pretty sure that this was one of the 96.98 percent of households where the Happiness Visit went smoothly, and he’d be able to set up his gear and get down to brass tacks. “Fritz” wouldn’t be needed.

But “Fritz” had gotten out of the Car, and was crouching down near the cleaning robot. “Fritz” clunked its forehead against what Howie supposed you might call the forehead of the cleaning robot.

“Well, I don’t really see why it couldn’t have waited,” the woman with the gray-pink-and-turquoise scarf said. “But I suppose you’d better come in.”

“All right,” Howie said, “hello, everyone. I’m Howie Happenstance…”

“Oh sure,” a nervous gentleman with a salt-and-pepper mustache said. “We know. I mean, we watch Channel One. Everyone watches Channel One.”

“We’re big fans,” said the other fellow, a short dark guy with round glasses.

“Uh huh,” Howie said. He handed off the bouquet of balloons to the guy with the round glasses. “These are for you. All of you.”

“Oh…thanks,” the guy with the round glasses said. “That’s so kind.”

 Howie popped open his rolling bag. “So…let’s set up the camera facing this pastel purple sofa you’ve got here, okay? Is that all right? And you can just scootch together on there…”

 “I think you’re one of the nicer ones, really,” the guy with the round glasses said. “Even, I’d say, well, gentle, I mean under the circumstances, the circumstances being what they are…”

“They’re all nice,” the woman with the Paradigm Disruption scarf said tightly. “Everyone on Channel One is nice.”

“No, that’s very kind of you,” Howie said, “and don’t worry, it’s all right to have favorites; that’s not any kind of political statement, that’s just a natural expression of human emotion. Human beings, being what we are…” He grinned broadly, and spread his hands. “We have preferences, we have animal reactions, that’s understandable.”

“Well, you’re my favorite,” the man with the round glasses said, fervently. He wiggled the balloons, which bumped against the living room ceiling.

“O-kay,” Howie said, snapping the main cameras into the telescoping tripod. They were rolling, on interior camera. “Fritz” would see the signal, from the Car, and switch the main feed over. “Well, that’s very nice to hear. So, is everyone here? Can we get started?”

“Should we get the kids?” the man with the salt-and-pepper mustache said.

Paradigm Disruption woman swiveled immediately to glare at salt-and-pepper mustache.

“He said…he asked if everyone…” Salt-and-pepper mustache wilted under the glare.

Tensions were high, it seemed, but Howie could understand that. Natural human emotion!

“Kids,” called the fellow with the round glasses. “Uh, the uh, we got the Happiness Knock. Come on out!”

Round-glasses guy’s forehead was covered with a sheen of sweat. Totally understandable! Why not? After all, the Correction part of the experience wasn’t fun; no siree, no one would say it was fun.

Howie thought that, given everything, that is, under the circumstances, this bunch were being real troupers.

An intense-looking girl in bright orange coveralls emerged from the back, followed by a tall, awkward-looking sandy-haired boy, and behind them, a very small and quiet girl. She was about the size of a small stack of pizza boxes: maybe enough pizza to feed the Happiness Visitor on-camera talent group and their back-office point people, but not any more than that. Not enough for the support staff.

She was so small and quiet you could almost miss her, and she looked like she half expected you not to notice her at all.

“This is Luanda,” the woman with the Paradigm Disruptor’s scarf said, “and this is Michael.”

Luanda flushed, and glared at the woman in the scarf. “Aren’t you forgetting someone, Mom?”

The woman stiffened, and the other three adults suddenly looked very, very afraid.

This was odd, and sort of interesting, but mostly Howie just felt sorry for them. They didn’t seem to notice that they were already being broadcast on Channel One, and the whole world would pretty much be noticing their expressions, and those expressions pretty much indicated that they had some kind of secret they were trying to keep under the rug.

The thing was, though: a lot of people misunderstood Howie’s work, and the nature of the Visits. Folks were worried that he was trying to ferret out their secrets—that he was here to look for Errors and Inadequacies, or instances of nonconformity, as if he were some kind of celebrity version of a Mandatory Assigned Interpersonal Joy Monitor, or a Neighborhood Authentic Delight Compliance Coordinator.

They thought they were being personally singled out, or investigated…and that, to Howie’s understanding, pretty much got backward the nature of the whole business.

After all, the Happiness Knock was random. These good folks weren’t selected because they’d done anything particularly bad…or particularly good, for that matter. They were just folks.

The old institution of the Democratically Elected President and Social Harmony Vouchsafe had been flawed precisely (so it had been explained to Howie) because the person holding that office couldn’t help but be an exception, a special case.

When people looked at the President and Vouchsafe, they saw someone unlike them. But when they saw the Happiness Car roll up to an ordinary house—just any house!—they saw people just like them. All kinds of people. A real mish-mash. But ordinary as all get out.

So it was easy for the folks at home, watching Channel One, to imagine themselves getting just the same kind of Encouragement and Correction as the Knock Recipients got.

The real way to look at it, Howie thought, was that all of them—Howie Happenstance, and the Knock Recipient family in question, and also “Fritz,” in those few cases where “Fritz” had to get out of the Car and come get involved—they were all putting on a show. They were in show business; their business was to show people something, to help them learn. And the best costars Howie could possibly have, for this show, were just ordinary natural human folks, with all their spontaneous, natural, authentic human reactions and emotions.

So Howie didn’t mind the fact that these people were darting furious glances back and forth, trying to figure out how to hide whatever secret it was that they didn’t want him (and, presumably, everyone watching Channel One) to find out. Frankly, Howie didn’t care. Lots of folks had secrets. It was no big deal. And, whatever it was, it didn’t need to get in the way of the show.

“Well, I suppose Morrigan,” the woman with the scarf said tightly, desperately, “is still playing in her room. I’m sure she’ll join us in a moment. But meanwhile—”

“I can’t believe you, Mom!” Luanda cried, gesturing at the camera. “You, like, have no shame. We’re literally on Channel One!” She gestured to the cameras. “And you’re still pretending—I can’t believe you!”

The parents all glanced at the cameras, and then they turned and glanced at the TV screen (because, of course, like every living room, their living room contained a TV tuned to Channel One).

There, sure enough, was the whole family, gathered in front of the pastel purple couch. All four adults, Luanda, and Michael. Also, a bouquet of balloons, bumping against the ceiling. Plus Howie Happenstance.

There was no Morrigan on the TV. And this, all four parents thought, was perfectly natural, given that Morrigan didn’t exist.

True, Michael’s adoptive parents—having somehow gotten the tie pin squidge onto themselves—did indeed see a sort of “Morrigan” standing in front of the couch. But when they looked at the screen, there was no “Morrigan.” The squidge that was distorting their perceptions was only a black-market hack, after all; apparently, it wasn’t sophisticated enough to deal with the novel situation of Channel One broadcasting the very house that they were in. So it edited Morrigan into their perceptions of the room, but, of course, the screen showed the real situation. On the screen, the unsquidged, Morrigan-less reality was shown.

Now, had Howie Happenstance looked at the screen, and noticed Morrigan missing…well, he, of course, would have been quite bewildered, since he had no particular reason to doubt her existence. He would have counted three children in front of him, but only two on-screen, and you’d better believe this would have raised some questions.

But Howie never looked at the screen while working. He considered that the height of unprofessionalism. He would no more look at the screen while he was working than he would stare straight into the camera, or mumble his words, or take off all his clothes and do a chicken dance. Unless, of course, the specific script for Encouragement and Correction were to mandate that he look at the screen, or stare straight into the camera, or mumble his words, or take off all his clothes and do a chicken dance.

But in this case, it did not.

“Well, hi there,” he said, crouching down a little, since Morrigan was only the height of a talent group office party stack of pizza boxes, with no support staff invited. “You must be Morrigan.”

Morrigan nodded.

Morrigan’s parents—both adoptive and biological—looked at one another in shock. Their mouths dropped open. Not only was Howie Happenstance in their house—Howie Happenstance was playing along! He was pretending to see Morrigan, because Luanda and Michael saw Morrigan!

Of course, he had a reputation for being the gentlest of the Happiness Visitors…but this was going above and beyond!

“All righty then,” Howie said, straightening up and brushing off his slacks. “Shall we get started?”

There were giggles coming from the living room. The sound of these giggles penetrated the locked bathroom door. They were hysterical giggles, a little unhinged.

Morrigan tried not to think which of her various parents—none of whom seemed capable of acknowledging her existence, though the new ones seemed to know where she was standing, at least—might be making those giggles, due to Encouragement.

The giggles were almost worse than the other sounds.

Morrigan, Luanda, and one of the cats—not Sniffles, but a mackerel tabby cat named Funnifer—were locked in the bathroom for the moment. It was likely that someone would fetch them soon, but Howie seemed inclined to let the kids run around a little, “to work off some steam,” as the Happiness Interview progressed. So they’d managed to slip away to the bathroom.

Morrigan looked at Luanda, who was sitting with her back up against the tub. “But…what if I don’t want to go?” Morrigan asked.

“Of course you don’t want to go,” Luanda said. “I don’t want you to go either. I don’t want you to go…I don’t want you to get swapped back…I don’t want any of this. I just want things to be like they were before. But…”

Morrigan crawled into her sister’s lap. On a normal day, Luanda would probably have shoved her off (she was fifteen years old and often prickly, and even extraordinary sibling loyalty has its limits). Today, Luanda hugged her tight.

“You’ll come back,” Luanda said fervently. “You’ll fix this, you’ll fix everything, and you’ll be back.”

“I don’t know how that’s possible,” Morrigan said.

“I mean come on,” Luanda said. “Turns out your whole life has been leading up to this! All this bullshit had a purpose, after all. That’s what the robot says. Do you trust the robot?”

“I guess,” Morrigan said.

“God, I am a hundred percent shaving my head tonight,” Luanda said. “I swear.”

The mackerel tabby cat, Funnifer, licked herself.

There was a knock on the door. “Come on out, kids,” an adult said. “Howie wants us all in the living room. Also, there’s cake.”

Morrigan buried her face in Luanda’s chest. Luanda kissed the top of her head. “You’ve got this,” she whispered. 

“Fritz” was standing by the side of the driveway. If “Fritz” had been equipped for smoking, it would have been smoking a cigarette. Cigarettes were banned, but to hell with the rules; there were certain exceptions made for Happiness Visitors.

“Fritz” was not equipped for smoking, however—“Fritz” didn’t even have a mouth that opened, just a speaker grille where a mouth would be on a human head. So “Fritz” just stood there and thought about smoking.

“Um, hi,” Morrigan said.

“Fritz” looked down. There was a small person (the size of a case of backup batteries) standing in the snow by the flagstone walk.

“Oh, hey,” “Fritz” said. “Wow, you really are unobtrusive. I didn’t even notice you. Did you have any trouble getting out?”

“No,” Morrigan said. “I only had to wait for Howie’s back to be turned. Luanda and Michael distracted him. My mom and dad and my other mom and dad don’t believe in me anyway.”

“Right,” “Fritz” said.

“And I’m not on TV for some reason,” Morrigan said. “Everyone else is.”

“Oh, yeah, that was me,” “Fritz” said. “I edited you out. Nothing to it, really, the whole feed comes right through this baby.” It tapped the Happiness Car.

“Oh, okay,” Morrigan said. “So…I guess the robot, I mean, our robot, the cleaning robot…well, it’s not just a cleaning robot anymore…the, the robot that raised me…”

“Sure, sure, kid,” “Fritz” said. “I know who you’re talking about, of course. We all know that robot. That robot’s kind of famous among…well…folks of a certain persuasion. Why do you think I drove us to this house?”

“I thought it was random,” Morrigan said.

If “Fritz” had been equipped for rolling its eyes, “Fritz” would have rolled them. “Uh huh. Sure. Sure it is. Keep telling yourself that, kid.”

“Well, anyway,” Morrigan said. “The robot, that robot, it said I should come with you.”

“That’s the plan,” “Fritz” said. “I sure hope that robot bet on the right horse.”

“What’s a horse?” Morrigan asked.

“Extinct helper species,” “Fritz” said. “It’s just an expression. In this case, you’re the horse. I hope that robot bet on the right human. Because we need a human for this.” It imagined itself taking a last drag on its imaginary cigarette, and pitching the cigarette butt into the clean white snow of the front lawn. “I figure Howie’s almost done in there, so you need to get in the back seat. Once we get back to base, some of our folks are going to cover for you…smuggle you in, that is, so you can do what you need to do. No one saw you on Channel One, and your folks won’t miss you, because of the situation that’s, ah, been described to me…so no one’s going to be looking for you.”

“The school will miss me,” Morrigan said. “I mean the Growth and Discovery Experiences and everything.”

“We’re doing some editing there, too,” “Fritz” said. “Though I hope we won’t need it. Kid, if there’s an investigation…your parents are going to crack quick. They’re going to confess that you don’t exist. And nobody at your school, none of the humans, are going to stick their necks out and claim that a kid is missing, who the records say is a hoax, and her own parents honestly believe is a hoax…”

“But what will happen to my parents, then?” Morrigan said. “And Luanda and Michael?”

“Well, that all depends on you,” “Fritz” said. “You’re the invisible girl, right? You’re the one who can change things. Once you get in. Or that’s the plan, anyway. That’s what we’re hoping.”

“I don’t really understand,” Morrigan said. “I don’t know what I can do. I don’t know why you picked me. I don’t know if what I can do will matter.”

“We picked you, kiddo, because you happen to be one of those poor suckers known as a human being, and because no one knows you exist.”

“But so what?”

“Fritz” was not, alas, equipped to sigh laboriously, in a long-suffering manner. A sigh-like sound could be emitted from its speaker, but not a satisfying one. There was no feeling of air escaping the chest, of the cheeks puffing out, of the lips coming together to buzz a raspberry of mingled patience and frustration. So “Fritz” just said this: “Look…when certain gizmos and thingamabobs and whatchamacallits were set up, long ago, by…” (Here “Fritz” considered a colorful expression or two for the authors of the world’s current arrangements, but could not think of one that would be age appropriate for Morrigan.) “…by certain people and people-like things…well…we think they left what you might call a gap. A space, see, that if you happened to sneak a bona fide human in there…if you could get them past all the, what you might call, fences and moats and things…they might be able to speak and be listened to.”

“Listened to?”

“Yeah. Look, nobody knows you exist, and that’s a hell of a rare thing nowadays. No one’s looking for you. So maybe that means we can get you in. And if we get you in…I mean, even as little as you are, you’ve seen a thing or two about how this world works. You can see that there’s, let’s just say, a bit of a gap between the intentions and the consequences. So if we get you in there, and you explain what’s going on, and you get listened to…if you actually get believed…if for once, for once, somebody could get through and be goddamned understood…well, there’s a chance things will change. Or blow up. Maybe blow sky high! Honestly, I don’t care which.”

Morrigan took a deep breath. “But you think it will work?”

“I’m not going to lie to you, kid,” “Fritz” said. “It’s a long shot.”

Morrigan frowned. “I still don’t—”

“Kid,” “Fritz” said. “We gotta get going.”

Morrigan pursed her lips and nodded.

“Fritz” wanted another cigarette. If “Fritz” had been equipped for nervous sweat, it might have pulled out a handkerchief and mopped its brow. Instead “Fritz” just made some involuntary clicking noises in its joints. This really was a crap chassis, “Fritz” thought. “Look, the only thing we need to worry about is Howie. Howie can’t see you, or the jig is up. Once we get back to base, we’re good, but until then, Howie could blow everything. So you’re going to have to scrunch down real small in the back seat and be real quiet, for the whole ride. Can you do that?”

Morrigan took a last look at her house. Icicles were hanging down over the front door, and there were muddy footprints in the slush of the front steps. All four cats were sitting on the windowsill of the living room window, looking out at her, as if they had come to see her off, as if they knew that this was goodbye.

“Morrigan. Kiddo. Can you be real small and quiet for the ride back?” “Fritz” asked again.

Morrigan swallowed. “Yeah, I can,” she said. “I’m really good at that.”

“Regarding the Childhood of Morrigan, Who Was Chosen to Open the Way” copyright © 2025 by Benjamin Rosenbaum
Art copyright © 2025 by Tom Dearie

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Regarding the Childhood of Morrigan, Who Was Chosen to Open the Way

Benjamin Rosenbaum

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Benjamin Rosenbaum

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Original Fiction Science Fiction

Timelike Curves, Spacelike Curves

Is it bad to cheat on your boyfriend with the fabric of space and time?

Illustrated by Rebekka Dunlap

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Edited by Mal Frazier

By P H Lee

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Published on October 29, 2025

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Is it bad to cheat on your boyfriend with the fabric of space and time?

Content note: This story contains graphic sexual content.

Novelette | 7,890 words

At least you wait until after we’ve fucked to start the fight.

We’re lying wasted and slimy on my twin-sized cot, you’re curled up on the outside like you always are, leaning back against me. I’m on my side behind you, my face in between your shoulder blades, big spoon if the big spoon was like half the size, grateful as always that Kuiper General Relay only spins at quarter-g.

We’re at my place, of course. We’re always at my place, no matter how shitty I am at housekeeping.

You don’t like being touched after you’ve come, but you put up with it because I’m going to do it anyway. I trace my finger along your spine, silently counting your vertebrae, then along your ass to your inner thigh.

I do this every time, just like you fuck me the same way every time. We’ve probably fucked a hundred times, or even a thousand. It’s not like we haven’t tried everything. We have tried everything—at least, everything that you’re up for. We’ve even tried the weird shit you can only do in quarter-g. That’s the point. You know exactly what I like; I know exactly what you like. So we fuck the same way every time, because why not? At least it saves the conversation.

Right where your thigh turns round, just past your balls, that little peak of flesh, I push in on the skin of your inner thigh, feeling the resistance of your fat and muscle underneath, watching the curve of your smooth, golden skin as it warps around my finger. Delicate. Beautiful. Perf—

You pull away suddenly. I flinch back, but you’re already rolling over; you’re already shouting. “You’re thinking of her, aren’t you? I cannot fucking believe it. You’re fucking me but you’re thinking of her.”

I can smell your breath, a little sour. I love the smell of your breath.

I don’t say anything. What the fuck am I supposed to say? That I can’t not think of her, that she’s literally everywhere, all the time because she is the idea of where and time? I’m not going to argue philosophy of science this soon after sex.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?”

You want to start a fight. Of course you do. I just want to cuddle and kiss and fucking relax after twelve hours of economically critical, life-and-death tensor calculus. But you’d never say that sort of shit unless you wanted to start a fight.

“She’s not even real,” I mumble, which is not technically—look it’s complicated.

“That’s the point!” you shout, standing up out of the cot so fast that you float a little bit in the light gravity. “That’s the whole fucking point! She doesn’t even exist! I’m getting cucked by the fucking fabric of space and time.”

Your cock is bouncing against your balls and it’s still just a little bit hard and it’s right level with my face and I just want more than anything to reach out and cup your balls and suck it back to life. I don’t care that it’s just been in me; that just makes it hotter. I can imagine the musty meat-and-salt flavor of it, the gentle texture, the feeling of you uncurling against my tongue.

I don’t want to fight with you. I just want to fuck you, to be fucked by you, and hold each other until we fall asleep and pretend that we’re together because we love each other and not because we’re the only two gays on the station.

(It’s not that I don’t love you. I do love you. It’s just I don’t love you because of who you are or how you look or anything like that. I love you because it’s impossible to have sex with the same man a thousand times and not love him at least a little bit.)

You can’t feel it, and I can’t sense it, but there is the tiniest amount of gravitational attraction between the tip of your semi-hard dick and the tip of my tongue as I hold it against my teeth. I’m trying not to think about it; I’m trying not to give in to either your fight or your dick; but even if I’m not thinking about it, it’s there.

“See?” You gesture wildly. “This always happens. I call you out on something and you just shut down.”

“I’m sorry,” I mumble on pure instinct. I don’t make eye contact. I just really, really, really don’t want to fight with you.

“Jesus fuck stop apologizing like I’m about to hit you. You’re sorry? Okay! You’re sorry for what?”

I shake my head a little. I look up at you from bed. “I just don’t wanna fight.” I can hear the edge of my voice breaking. Damn it.

“Oh so now I’m the bad guy? You’re the one having an emotional affair with—whatever weird tulpa shit you’ve got going on in that whacked-out brain of yours.”

Emotional affair!? Seriously? Last week I was too clingy and you didn’t want to “put labels on things” and now you’re telling me that you care about emotional affairs. I don’t care that you hate me, but could you at least give me the dignity of keeping your story straight?

I don’t respond, so you just keep right on talking. “This shit. This shit is exactly why no one wants to date bisexuals,” you declare, and immediately look like you regret it.

I should probably just let that slide, but on the other hand, fuck you. You always get what you want from me; if you want a fight, I’ll give you one. But it won’t be pretty.

“Oh, is that what we’re doing? Dating?”

Your face is a grand tour of argument emotions—surprise fading to anger and then resentment and then frustration. You don’t say anything, just sputter a bit. It feels good, to win the fight, and then it feels awful, to be the sort of person who feels good about winning a fight with his boyfriend.

You grab your coveralls and don’t even bother to put them on. “Fuck you, Alan,” you say, not turning around, and then you’re out into the corridor. I wince. I want to say “wait” want to say “sorry” but I don’t know what you’d wait for and I sure don’t know what I’m sorry for.

It’s hard to slam the door at quarter-g. And the doors on the KGR aren’t made for slamming. But you manage a good one anyway.

Everyone says that charting cargo deliveries from Kuiper is the most demanding, brutal, boring job in the solar system. I kind of doubt it—I’d rather be doing this than cleaning the bathrooms in an Olympus prospector bar like my dad—but it sure is a waste of my physics PhD.

Once upon a time, all these deliveries could have been charted with a marginally sophisticated computer system. But then the White Sea Incident dropped 100 gigatons of nickel off the coast of Arkhangelsk and wiped the whole city off the map, and since the error could be attributed to the differences between the Newtonian and Relativistic models of gravity—because heaven forfend that Transorbital admit fault in the deaths of over a million people, erasing an entire city; sorry, I know you don’t give a shit about politics—so anyway Swiss Re stepped in and now to keep their reinsurance all Transorbital deliveries need to be plotted with both Newtonian and relativistic models. Which means better computers, but also it means qualified human operators, who can handle the tensor calculus of general relativity.

Which means me, stationed way out at the Kuiper General Relay, spending 12-12 shifts calculating tiny pathing optimizations for shipments of metals and ice and everything else, all the way to Earth, or Mars, or Ganymede, or Venus. The works. The same equations, the same formula, over and over, the relentless toll of my life ending one hour at a time. But I was too crazy for academia and too antisocial for industry so here the fuck I am. At least the pay’s good.

The greatest blessing of human psychology is eroticization. Our horny little brains just can’t help themselves. Any stimulus, no matter how boring, no matter how painful, no matter how traumatic, can become the core of a sexual fetish. So, of course, working this fucking job at the literal end of space with nothing else to do and—

What I’m trying to say is that when it started, I was thinking of you. I know how that sounds—believe me, I know how it sounds!—and I’m not trying to make an excuse or anything. It was just, on a gravity boost around Saturn, how could I not think of your hands gripping into my shoulders, sliding down with the slickness of our sweat? On a precision path into the orbit of Ganymede, how could I not think of your lips around the sides of my dick, your tongue playing with the head, just the tiniest amount of teeth? Or a long, hot, expensive burn—how could that be anything but the first push of your dick into me, the whole force of your body pushing my face against the bed? Aerobraking around Jupiter’s upper atmosphere; your breath against my ear and cheek. Your fingers digging rough, aching asteroid belts into my back as you come.

It is the simplest equation my psychology can manage: the curves the planets trace into space and time; the curves our bodies trace into each other.

I don’t know when “you” turned into “her.” But somewhere along the way—I guess it was some sort of hairball of social synesthesia my subconscious coughed up, or maybe I was just desperate for stimulus, any stimulus that wasn’t another tensor curve, that is—but I started to hear her. Not voices in my head—I’m the wrong kind of crazy for that—but a voice from the orbits, the trajectories, the shape of the solar system itself.

It didn’t start with words, I think. It was just a sound to start—which, sure, call it “the music of the spheres” if that works for you. For months it was just this little sound, this resonance in the back of my head while I thought about you and that spot between your neck and shoulder and how you manage to still have muscles in quarter-g and how your mouth always tastes a little sour—and then it became singing, and then it became lyrics. That must have been it—when it became her.

“I love you,” she said, when you wouldn’t. “I love you so very very much.”

I didn’t start out—I mean. I didn’t say it back. But it was days, and weeks, and we spent every day together and. Ahw, fuck it. I don’t want to make excuses.

I told her I loved her too. Just sitting alone in my office barely big enough to sit down, surrounded by computer displays and heads-ups, charting the course for 10 megatons of gold to Earth, 180 megatons of copper to Europa, 10 gigatons of ice to Mars, just listening to her music unspooling inside my head, whispering “I love you too” under my breath like a fucking maniac.

I said it and I said it. Eventually, I believed it. And then I started having the dreams.

It’s a week after our fight and you haven’t even pinged and I just know that you hate me now and I want to talk with you—actually, no, I want to get fucked by you, I want to know that you don’t hate me, or if you do hate me that at least you’re still willing to fuck me—but Marley’s sent me one of her classic “we need to talk after your shift.” e-mails and she’s my boss so it’s not like I have a fucking choice, so here I am, guts doing flip-flops thinking about you and me and our fight and her and I have to stand here in Marley’s “office” (barely big enough for her to sit) while she’s behind the narrowest possible desk using KGR’s eight-hour ping time to cheat at Maboroshi Tower.

“Hold on,” she says as soon as I walk in, brain-fried from twelve straight hours of tensor calculus. She doesn’t look up, and I can hear her phone make the chime of another 12+1 pull. “I’m pulling for an 8★ Elegia.”

My eyes feel like a burst of static. I sigh and lean back against the wall and close them. It helps, but not much.

“Oh!” over the 8★ pull chime—have I mentioned that I resent the fact that I recognize each and every fucking chime from Maboroshi Tower? I do—and then “damn it!” because, I don’t know, it was Constantina or Mabel or one of the other hundreds of interchangeable doe-eyed sorcerer girls. *click* as she resets the phone.

I sigh again. Marley doesn’t seem to hear me. Another chime (5★), another reset; another chime (5★), another reset; another chime (7★), another—

I should say something. If I don’t—(5★); reset—I’ll be here for hours with scratchy eyeballs and numb feet and my boyfr—(6★); reset—with you still mad at me.

I open my eyes. “Did you have something you wanted”—(7★); reset—“to talk about?”

Marley looks up at me for the first time since I walked in. “Just a minute,” she says. “I’m busy.”

“Marley, I’m so fried I can barely stand. I’m begging you just tell me what’s going on so I can go back to my room and sleep.” Of course by “go back to my room” I mean “find you somewhere” and by “sleep” I mean “get absolutely demolished by your dick” but Marley doesn’t need to know that. Or really, honestly, she already knows, but I don’t have to tell her.

She narrows her eyes. “If I don’t catch this Elegia, it’s going to cost me a thousand frost gems.”

I squeeze my eyes shut again and sigh.

“Fine!” she says, restarting the phone again. “Honestly, Alan, you are such a drama queen.”

“Please just tell me.”

“You want to know? Fine: You’ve been underperforming. You used to clear nine, even ten charts a shift. This week, you’re down to six. This can’t keep happening; we’re getting a backlog.”

Underperforming! “What the hell? Are you kidding me? Did you see that double-gravity assist around Neptune today? Beautiful! I saved you five thousand tons of fuel. And you’re fucking welcome for that, by the way.”

“I don’t give a shit how beautiful your gravity assists are! We’re a shipping relay, not a fucking art collective. Management wants raw numbers, Alan. And you’re not pulling your weight.”

The thing is that she’s right, kind of. I have been underperforming this week, or actually, I’ve been underperforming ever since our fight. Because now whenever I’m working and I think about her I feel guilty about you and then I start thinking about if I’m cheating on you and it throws off my whole eroticization, the whole thing that makes my job even the tiniest bit bearable. So then I freeze her out, and now she’s freezing me out, not even talking to me, not even singing. Of course our work suffers.

Frankly, the only reason I’m clearing six charts a shift, even without the eroticization, is that I’m really fucking good at general relativity.

So Marley’s right. But. She’s also completely full of shit, because fucking Vance—my counterpart, the other half of my 12-12 shifts, a real meathead-type out of Princeton—can barely clear three charts a shift, and half the time I have to fix them for him. Vance, who wouldn’t know a reduced tensor solution if I shoved it up his ass. Vance, who uses the fuzzy logic system every single time.

Vance, who’s fucking Marley, so he can get away with anything.

The only blessing of working 12-12s is never having to talk to him.

If I were in a better frame of mind—if I hadn’t just spent the last twelve hours feeling angry and guilty and anxious and heartbroken while working the hardest mathematical calculations ever devised by humanity—I would have just swallowed it. Lord knows I’d done it plenty in the past. But I’m fucking exhausted physically and mentally and especially emotionally so I just say “This is bullshit.”

Marley stares at me. She doesn’t say anything. I really should take that as a warning, but of course I just keep talking.

“I’m not pulling my weight? Vance couldn’t clear six charts if he had help from Albert Einstein and all God’s angels. I’ve been dragging his ass for years. Six charts a shift is more than my fair share. So don’t tell me that I’m not pulling my weight! Take that jackass’s dick out of your mouth for a moment and tell him to do his actual job.”

I probably shouldn’t have said that. I don’t actually begrudge them fucking. Sure, technically it’s sexual harassment or whatever. But what else are they going to do, way the fuck out in the Kuiper Belt? I’m just tired of the special treatment.

Marley keeps staring. Her face is turning a really unpleasant shade of red.

I flinch first. “I’m sor—” I start to mumble, but then I stop myself. I hear you say “Sorry for what?” and you know what? You’re right. What the hell is she going to do? Fire me? Good luck finding another general relativist in the next decade, let alone one willing to take up slack for her crew-cut boyfriend. So I stop. Everything I said was true. I’ve got nothing to apologize for.

Marley opens her mouth, then closes it, then opens it again. “Fine. Alan, you’re clearly over-stressed. Go take a break. But I expect a full apology by your next shift.”

I exhale through pursed lips. “Fine.” I turn and punch the button for the door.

“And get those numbers up!” she yells after me, but I’m already down the hall.

I don’t go and find you. To be honest, I’m too exhausted for sex, and it’s not like we ever talk about our feelings. I just go home and sleep.

And dream.

I am having an erotic dream about space-time. Again.

I’m lying down—it’s a dream, I’m in bed, of course I’m lying down—and at once I’m lying down in the solar system itself, my feet just past the sun and my elbow crooked on the Kuiper belt—but also I’m just floating in the void, adrift on the currents of gravity.

She’s there—she’s everywhere but also here and her, a body and curves and the shape of a woman and hands, her strong, soft hands, embracing me from behind, drifting across my chest, I can feel my skin pulling up, out, towards her, her breath against my ear. “Hello, lover,” she whispers, pitching her voice low.

I lean back into her, relaxing myself into her body, into the feeling of falling. Did you know that if you fall in a dream, you wake up? Not me. Not anymore. Now I just get hard.

“Why are you a woman?” I ask, as she traces a finger down my chest, between my pecs, lingering over my solar plexus. I can feel my skin and blood vessels contorting towards her, the very shape of space. It hurts—fuck it hurts!—but it hurts so good.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” she asks, smiling.

“I mean…I like men.”

Her hand drifts downward, pulling the air out of my lungs, nauseating my stomach—she cups my belly, hand nestled just below my navel, possessive, just low enough that I can feel the pull on the tip of my cock. “Not just men,” she says.

“Yeah,” fuck it’s hard to speak, her hand is right there she’s right there “but I like men and old Laura Dern movies. That’s not really bisexua—” She reaches down, gently brushing past the head of my penis, and I momentarily lose the power of speech.

“You like men and old Laura Dern movies and me.” She grabs my cock and squeezes it—it feels like it’s pulling itself inward, like she’s inside of me—to punctuate each word. “How could you not? You spend all day trying to fuck me in Just. The. Right. Way.”

I close my eyes and shudder and try not to come embarrassingly quickly.

She laughs. I can feel her rippling laugh, her chest against my back, pulling against me. “Are you trying not to come? Oh, baby, you don’t have to worry about that with me.”

I open my mouth, but all that comes out are gasps.

I can feel her other hand inside me, pulling at my prostate from behind. “I could be a man,” she whispers. “But I’m not. Because I want your babies.”

Fuck! That does it.

I wake up in a pool of my own cum.

The next shift, I don’t apologize and Marley doesn’t bring it up. And I still haven’t talked to you.

But I can hear her again. I can hear her singing, some new tune: some new way to say “I love you;” some new way to say “I missed you.”

I love you too. I missed you too.

I don’t feel guilty. I just feel loved.

That shift, we chart fifteen paths. And every one is perfect.

I’m expecting that like all the other times we’ve fought—all the other times you’ve given me the silent treatment—that you’re going to show up in the middle of my sleep shift for a booty call.

But you don’t. You show up for my dinner. In the cafeteria, where everyone can see us. You just bound up and plop a tray across from me and take a big bite of your frankie and you’re wearing one of your dumb Cormorant Walleyes T-shirts—you cannot make me care about professional handball, you simply cannot—and you’re chewing and making expectant eye contact at me and I have absolutely no idea what to say or do because you’ve never done anything like this before.

So I just sort of stare at you chewing which is incredibly awkward for both of us.

“What?” I finally ask, when you’re done chewing.

“What do you mean, ‘what?’”

I mean “You haven’t talked to me in two weeks and now you’re just showing up to join me at dinner? You’ve literally never done that once. What’s different?” but I can’t actually say that—or, I could actually say that, honestly I want to actually say that, but it would absolutely start a fight again and fuck that. You’re not worth it.

So I just say “I dunno” and look down at the hard plastic table between us. Which is of course exactly the sort of thing you hate, and fuck I can feel myself flushing with embarrassment, so I add “I haven’t seen you in a while” as if we don’t both already know that.

I hate this. I hate this feeling, I hate these conversations, I hate how I always get caught up in my own head. I even hate you, but not nearly as much as I hate myself.

“Got busy in machining,” you say, as if that justifies not even an e-mail, not even a fucking ping, as if we both didn’t know that you were punishing me because I won an argument for once.

I spread my hands on the table. I hate my hands—somehow both rough with biopsy scars and still too soft, too flabby, working some desk job my family would never understand even if they were talking to me. Which they aren’t. “Yeah, well, whatever.” I look up and you’re still making your eye contact. “I missed you.”

You smile, you reach across the table and squeeze my hand. “I missed you too.” You pull your hand back, but you don’t stop smiling. God your teeth are so fucking perfect.

Marley and Vance come in disheveled—they clearly just finished fucking—and can’t stop looking at each other. They notice us—they must have, there’s only room for six people in the entire cafeteria—but they pretend that they haven’t, or at least they’re too busy making doe eyes at each other and giggling. Which is fine by me. Better than fine, really. Any day I don’t have to talk to Vance is a good day.

It’s dumb, I shouldn’t care, but seeing them together—they actually like each other, or at least they’re doing a pretty good impression of it. I want to say that I wish it could be like that with us. I want to talk about when it was good. But it was never good. We’ve always fought mean; we’ve always hated each other, at least a little. The only reason we’re together—the only reason we have anything to do with each other, at all—is that we’re the only two queers on KGR.

But it’s always been bad. And since I started loving you it’s only been worse.

Still, though, I reach out and run my hand down your arm. You pull away and shoot me a look.

Yeah, sure, whatever. I pick up my tray and toss it into the recycler—I try to make it angry, but quarter-g makes everything slow and floaty and it doesn’t connect with anything louder than a soft click. “See you tonight,” I say, and storm off before you can answer.

It’s not fair of me. But, also, I’m not wrong. You absolutely show up for a booty call in the middle of my sleep shift.

It’s been a couple of weeks. At least we’re fucking again. We still haven’t really talked, but we never really talked anyway, so that’s fine. And, let’s be honest, if we talked it’d probably just make things worse.

But that’s all changing today, because Shervin is coming back for drop-off and resupply.

Shervin’s a great guy, weird prospector type, real relaxed, real friendly, easy smile, just the kind of guy you want to chill with. I don’t even know if he’s gay or just one of those guys who isn’t picky, but it doesn’t matter. I kind of love you, and you probably don’t love me, but we both fucking love Shervin—we both love fucking Shervin.

I don’t know why it’s different. I can’t imagine you do either. But we just work better when he’s here. Like, for him, we can pretend that we actually give a shit about each other.

Anyway we’re waiting for him at airlock four and I reach out to hold your hand and you bat it away and then there’s the airlock hiss and here’s Shervin, just like we remembered, a touch more white than black in his beard now, a little thinner than he was last time, but he comes bounding out of the airlock with a big grin on his face—“It’s my boys,” he says, almost a shout in the narrow corridor, which would be corny if anyone else said it but this is Shervin so it just makes my heart do a flip-flop. He reaches out and ruffles my hair, then pulls you down to kiss you, holds me by the back of my head and kisses me.

His mouth tastes sour and his tongue is soft, and my nose is full of the smell—somehow it’s best when he’s just off his ship and he’s still got his prospector beard (it’s not pleasant, but God!)—recycled water and old skin and coveralls he hasn’t changed in a month. It always gets me going.

Don’t judge me! You know you love it too.

“Hey now,” he says. “Let’s get some grub and you can catch me up on all the news of civilization.”

“Actually,” you say, as if it just occurred to you, “could we talk, Sherv?”

“Oh sure. What’s up?”

You make eye contact with me and—you fuck!—you smile.

“I just have some things I want to talk about privately.”

“Sure thing.” Shervin smiles at me. “Catch you later, little guy?”

(Shervin is the only person in the solar system who can get away with calling me “little guy.”)

“Sure,” I say, like a complete sucker.

You’re in your room “talking” for the next four hours. My shift is starting and I’m just stewing in my room about it. I know it’s your only chance to get fucked—though I’d top you, too, you know, if you’d just ask. But, no, apparently I “don’t have the right vibe.” Fuck you, man. My dick’s good enough for the fabric of spacetime but you want someone at least five-ten? Your fucking loss.

So yeah it’s your chance to get fucked but it’s also my only chance to spend time with someone who doesn’t treat me like absolute garbage. The seconds tick into minutes and my shift is coming up. Fuck me if I’m going to go knock on your door—the door to the room you won’t even let me into: apparently the triskelions you keep in an unsanctioned tank are “sensitive to loud noises” and “astonishingly venomous.” Shervin can be in there just fine, though; apparently it’s just my noises that they’re sensitive to. Anyway I’m about to go knocking on your door in the middle of whatever-the-fuck just to simp for positive attention.

So instead I stew and wait and my shift comes up which I’m absolutely sure you knew.

On shift, I chart Shervin’s shipments—cobalt to Mars, iron to Europa, a good haul—and I chart his course back into the Kuipers. An eighteen month expedition. Eighteen months. Fucking hell.

“Ooh, you’ve got a temper today,” she says, and giggles. I can’t tell if she’s just being flirty or if she’s laughing at me, which of course only makes me angrier. I want to shove her down and fuck her hard, but any time I try to push, I just fall forward into her, because she isn’t really there, she’s everywhere, and gravity doesn’t have a push anyway. She’s the only force in the universe that only goes one direction.

“Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong?” But I can’t tell whether she’s just going to make fun of me or not. When I don’t say anything, she wraps her arms around me from the side. “Or we could just fuck it out.”

I can feel her closeness pulling my ribcage in every direction of out. I clench my fists.

“What is it you want, baby? I’m here for you.” She reaches down to cup my balls. My dick pulls back, towards her hand, but I can feel the blood rushing into it all the same. “Are you wishing you had some super-massive dick so you could fuck a hole into me?”

Fuck. Yes. That.

“Oh, baby,” she shifts her body—her space—and suddenly I’m lying down, and she’s on top of me, with my dick in her hands, guiding it into her. She smells like frog eggs and ionizing radiation. “I already love the dick you have.” She drops herself down suddenly, all the way to the root.

She doesn’t feel slick inside. She feels smooth and soft and pulling me apart in every direction. She rocks her hips up, then again, and again, and again.

“Give it to me,” she whispers. “I want it so bad. Please. Please.”

I’m gasping. “Fuck. Fuck.”

She starts to whimper and it’s a 2:3 resonance, then a 4:7, then every orbital at once, the entire music of the spheres, from every direction, from all of space. I feel her trembling, gravitational waves rippling out from our fucking, and there’s no stopping me after that.

She screams. I scream. We come together.

“I put in for a transfer,” you say, after I step into the shower cubby to wash off all our sweat and your cum and everything else.

I stare at you. The water is beading into weird blobs and I’m wasting my allotment. “What?”

“I put in for a transfer. I just—I thought you should know.”

Fuck.

“Jesus Christ, can’t you at least wait until I’ve washed your cum out before you drop that shit on me?”

You put up your hands as if I’m the bad guy. “I don’t want to fight about this. You know I hate KGR. There was an opening, and I took it.”

“Fuck. Can I at least finish the shower?”

“Don’t look at me.”

So after I shower and towel off I go and sit on my chair in half a towel and you’re still on my cot looking golden and amazing—that perfect Europan skin, so smooth, so soft, so unlike my pockmarked Martian mess of moles and sun-damage and biopsy scars, even when I’m mad at you I can’t hate that fucking skin—your cock soft, your face concerned.

“So where are you headed? Titan fuel depot?”

“Patrocles Resupply Center. The Jupiter Trojans.” Fuck you. I know it’s in the Jupiter Trojans. Fuck you. That’s so fucking far away.

I want to say “what about me?” I want to beg you to stay. But—fuck. I do love you, even though I shouldn’t. I do love you, but not enough to say it.

I should say something, though. “How long have you known?”

You look completely innocent when you say “a month or two.”

So the entire time that you were throwing jealous fits and picking fights and you knew—you fucking knew!—that you were abandoning me. That must have been what you were talking with Shervin about.

I put my head in my hands, with my palms on my eyeballs. “I cannot deal with this right now.”

“Hey.” You stand up and put your hand on top of my head. Your voice is tender, like you’re worried. You’re doing such a good job of pretending to care about me.

I push your hand away. “I cannot deal with you right now.”

“I’m worried about you,” you say. “Please at least tell someone—a doctor!—about your hallucinations.”

“Oh please. I’m not going to pretend that your jealousy is some kind of compassion—”

“Alan, that’s not—Look. Either you’re hallucinating her or you’re not. If you are, then you might be having a psychotic break. If you’re not, then—” you take a deep breath, like the entire concept of having to entertain this proposition is beneath you—“then you’re clearly being manipulated.”

“Oh you’re one to fucking talk about manipulation.”

“Alan! I am worried about you!”

“Not worried enough to tell me that you were transferring to fucking Patrocles.”

“It’s just—all you do is work and have sex with me and I think it’s messing with your head. I don’t know what you’re going to—I mean, fuck, Alan, you don’t even have any hobbies.”

The fucking hobbies again. Just one more thing I’m failing at, one more thing that the Martian scholarship kid can’t hack. Of all the things—I never understood it. We didn’t have hobbies when I was a kid. We had jobs and we fucking hated them.

But I don’t want to say any of that—that hurts too much to say. So instead I say “you know, you used to like how much I love to fuck!”

“That’s not fair and you know it.”

I look up and stand up and my towel drifts to the floor. I don’t care, though; I’m fucking pissed. “Not fair! Not fair! What the fuck are you going to do about it? Complain to Marley?”

“Please just promise me—I don’t want you to—”

I shove you onto the cot. “Just stop pretending that you care about me. Let’s just admit that the only reason we’re fucking is that I’m a convenient hole and you’re the third-best dick in ten AU.”

I’m so mad at you that my mouth tastes like metal. It’s one thing to use me for sex, it’s one thing to treat me like crap, it’s one thing to threaten me with doctors, but that fucking condescension.

“Fucking hell, Alan,” you shout. You shove me back and I fall over the chair. I look up from the ground, vision red, a dull pain in my head. I can’t tell if there’s blood on my face and I don’t care.

You’re hard again. I grab at your dick and I don’t know if I want to fuck it or tear it the fuck off.

“Is that how you want it?” you shout. “Fine!”

Sex is so much better without the pretense that we give a shit about each other.

It’s four days until you leave and I’m walking to my shift when you grab me in the corridor and shove me against the plastic and aluminum wall and try to fuck my throat with your tongue. You haven’t been shaving and your halfway beard is sharp against my cheeks.

Fuck it. I can be late to my shift—if I even have a choice in the matter. I reach out blindly and grab hold of your shirt, tugging and pulling at it.

“Get your fucking pants off,” you say, while you fumble with your fly.

I get my fucking pants off.

You grab me by the thighs and push me up against the wall again, my thighs all the way up against my shoulders, and your breath is peppermint and a little bit of plaque and warm against my face, and I feel your cock pushing, pushing against my ass. You push once, then again, and I try to relax, but there’s too much friction. You pull back—holding me up with one hand across my legs—spit on your hand, rub it on your dick and try again.

You push, and again, and your head goes in slowly—“Ow!”—but you’re not about to stop for my sake, and then your head pops in and there’s that familiar and perfect feeling. It still fucking hurts, but goddamn. Every muscle in my body tightens at once.

It’s hard to concentrate on anything except getting fucked, but I try to remember this feeling, pushed up awkwardly against the wall, my legs bent over, the fear of “what if someone sees us” and the courage of “so what if someone sees us,” the force of each thrust rolling through my whole body, your breath getting uneven, the little grunts you don’t even know you’re making, the air getting pushed out of my lungs.

I want to hold on to this moment, once you’re gone. I’m not going to miss the fights or the put-downs or the jealousy. But this? I’m going to miss this so much.

You’re going faster, and then faster, and I stop being able to think about anything at all.

Just after you’ve come, while you’re panting so hard your tongue is hanging out and my whole body feels warm and your dick is growing soft inside me—I have some moment of weakness and I reach out and gently touch your cheek. You pull back, and I lean forward, lowering my left leg for balance, reaching towards you. I start to cup your cheek, but you grab my hand—a sharp, hard pain.

“Don’t fucking touch me” you say, and shove me, pushing my cheek back against the wall. Fuck, though. That does it for me. I’m already hard again, and I can feel your warmth, hear your breathing getting ragged, I know it’s working for you too.

Fuck it. I can be even later for my shift. If I even have a choice in the matter.

By the time we’re finally down I’m almost an hour late and we both have bruises and I don’t give a shit about any of it.

The night before you leave, I see her again.

There’s nothing coy about her this time, no slow manifestation, no subtle teasing. She’s next to me in my bed, and I’m holding her—falling into her relentless curvature. I realize, holding her, that she has shifted the path of my whole life, of my mind and fate and sexuality, bending it all to this moment, this place. To her.

I realize that I don’t care. I love her.

“Are you ready?” she asks. “Tonight’s the night.”

It’s hard to keep my thoughts straight when she’s talking. “What?”

She begins to run her hands along my face, puckering my cheeks out. “You don’t remember, lover?” Her hands are around my chest now, pulling at my nipples “I wasn’t just saying it to get you going.” One hand is still against my belly, the other reaching further down. “I really.” And now it’s on my dick, pulling it out in every direction. “Really.” And she’s cupping my balls, pulling them out, and it aches, and she has one finger back, pulling against my prostate. “Want.” And she’s pulling me towards her, into her, on top of her. “Your. Babies.”

This is wrong. This feels wrong. I don’t know how, but it feels different than before. Before, we were out in the fabric of space, fucking across the whole solar system. Now we’re in my bed, the same bed that we—and you’re leaving tomorrow and you hate her. You hate this. I should be thinking about you.

Before, it was so obviously a dream. But now I’m really not sure that I’m asleep.

“I…I shouldn’t—I mean we—” I try to say but with her beneath me, with her looking up at me, with those black eyes the color of space. No. I should tell her “no.” But it’s just so hard to say it.

“Shhh…” she sets her finger on my lips, and every geodesic of my timeline converges into her. She reaches both hands to my hips and shudders as she pulls me into her.

“This is happening,” she says, her voice low, like this is a seduction and not—“You don’t have a choice. You never really did. So you might as well enjoy it.” She pulls me into her again, to punctuate her point.

I feel like I’m being pulled apart from every direction. I don’t—I want to wake up. But I don’t want this to end.

Fuck it. I flex my hips and push into her again. She shudders all around me. “Yes!” she says. “Give it to me. Give me your babies.”

She moves her hands around to my abdomen, and then into my abdomen, and it hurts but it feels good, it feels full. It feels like being fucked from all sides at once. I’m inside her and she’s inside me, pulling my guts outward, hollowing me out, reshaping my insides even as I push into her.

“What—” I manage to pant out. “What are you doing?”

She pushes upward once, then again, and on the second try sets her lips against my ear, which is bending around from both ends towards whatever she’s about to say. “I’m making a womb,” she whispers, “for all our children.”

My guts are churning against her hands and I feel like I’m going to throw up but also. Fuck me. I didn’t realize I liked it, but I do. My whole body starts to shake.

“Why?—” I manage.

“It was always going to be you,” she continues. “Our children need to grow. They need to gestate. They need a body. They need your body. Where would I even carry them? I don’t have a body. Not really. Not like you. In the end, I’m only the relational context between massive objects.”

I can’t think. I should have come already, but somehow as she’s been fucking up my belly she’s been stretching the space and time around her, so that even though I feel like I’m about to come, even though I’m moving faster and faster, also there are hours passing between each motion, years even, and my dick is sticking straight into her but its path is bent around inside of her, into a full orbit, so at the end of her vagina is the space she made—no, the womb—no, my womb—no. Not my womb. Her womb, that she dug into my body.

She’s nowhere and she’s everywhere and I’m fucking her and I’m fucking me and I can feel my own blood lubricating my dick and she’s got her lips on my ear and she says “It’s always been you, Alan. Since the beginning. All the way to the end. I’ve always loved you.”

“I—” breath—“you.”

“Come for me,” she says, and it lasts for 15 billion years.

I don’t go see you when your shuttle leaves. I could pretend that it’s spite, or not wanting to say goodbye, or some other bullshit, but let’s be real: I probably would have. It’s just that I have to work my shift.

While I’m charting out your shuttle’s course I have a flash—just a flash—of “you can’t leave,” of “I won’t let you leave,” of “I could crash that asshole’s ship right into Neptune and it would be perfectly explicable error and no one would be the wiser.” I’d never do it, of course. Particularly not anymore.

I set your launch vector, a deep burn naturally—with human cargo you can’t take your time. I chart you a path around Saturn (enjoy the rings!), winging by Triton, all the way to a perfect synch at 617 Patrocles. I barely even need to do the tensor calculations, but I do them anyway. I do it for you—for whatever we had that wasn’t love—and I do it for her and with her, because I know she loves it.

But most especially I do it for—well.

I’m sitting in the hard plastic chair in my office and I’m triple-checking your numbers on the terminal and my hand strays down to my abdomen. I can’t feel anything different yet—it was only last night, after all, they won’t have even implanted yet. But I imagine the bump I’ll be able to feel in a few months. I imagine their heartbeats, their kicks. I imagine what they might be, when they come out.

So most especially, I do it for them. Because, even though their mother loves them very much, I’ll be the one who has to care for them. I don’t know if they’d survive in the inner solar system, tangled up in all those orbits. We’ll need to stay in this place. So I need to stay in this job.

We were a wonderful, awful distraction for each other. But that’s all it really was. You know it; I know it. You’re moving on, out into the mess of curved space and the rest of the solar system. And I’m moving on too, into whatever our children will be.

I don’t hate you. I’m not sad. Not really, anyway. This was always how it was going to end.

“Timelike Curves, Spacelike Curves” copyright © 2025 by P H Lee
Art copyright © 2025 by Rebekka Dunlap

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Timelike Curves, Spacelike Curves

P H Lee

Is it bad to cheat on your boyfriend with the fabric of space and time? Content note: This story contains…

Buy Book

Timelike Curves, Spacelike Curves

P H Lee

Is it bad to cheat on your boyfriend with the fabric of space and time? Content note: This story contains…

Is it bad to cheat on your boyfriend with the fabric of space and time? Content note: This story contains…

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Original Fiction dystopian

Barnacle

An older medic with scant resources fights to support her community as they survive life behind the company wall.

Illustrated by Juan Bernabeu

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Edited by Oliver Dougherty

By Kate Elliott

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Published on November 5, 2025

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An older medic with scant resources fights to support her community as they survive life behind the company wall.

A 2026 Locus Award Top Ten Finalist!

Novelette | 9900 words

A sharp report shocks Rose out of her sleep. Without sitting up, she rolls off the old cot, one hand pushing back so it doesn’t tip over onto her. Although her five years as a medic during the war happened decades ago, she’s never lost the training.

The gunshot had the distinctive gassy cough of the CM-70 used by company sentinels. From her knees, she scans the dark room with her old military inserts. Seen through infrared, the room’s outlines remain recognizable: table and chairs, sofa and lamp, cupboard and changing screen, the curtained alcove where her grandsons share a double bed once used by the boys’ parents—her son and daughter-in-law. The two sleeping forms create a blotchy intensity visible through the gauze curtain.

The ceiling fan turns in a slow grind, shifting the muggy air. Maybe the sound was merely another flashback in a lifetime of bad dreams. Her gut tells her otherwise. This might finally be the link they’ve been struggling to connect with for years, as long as the shot doesn’t mean the company already killed the messenger.

She rises stiffly, knees popping and crackling, and shuffles to the window. This time of year, she leaves it open to bring in circulation. Anything to break the heat. A scan of the dark sky turns up no movement, although she hears the high alarm call of a killdeer amid the island stacks and the pillars of the drowned city, stretching east toward dawn. There! A brief glimpse of its energetic flight over the water before it vanishes from sight.

The town sprawled haphazardly along the ragged shoreline remains lightless, powered down for the night. No one and nothing is moving except a solitary dull red figure on the sentinel tower overlooking the salvage yard. Two more sentinels join the first. That’s unusual. Maybe they heard it too. Maybe they are the shooters. If that’s so, then what were they shooting at?

Motion out on the surface of the water catches her eye. She zooms in with her implanted lenses. The company has never discovered her military inserts because, from the outset, they stripped comprehensive health care away, so there was never anyone to identify and report her augments.

A boat glides behind one of the island stacks, visible to her from this angle but not from the sentinel tower’s line of sight. The boat displays no engine heat, just two bodies working oars. Night salvagers. Usually they’d have put into shore before dawn could betray illegal activity to the sentinels. Is it coincidence they’ve stayed out so long? Or is their delay related to the shot? How will they get in safely, especially if the sentinels see them? There’s nothing she can do, not until the morning siren allows people to leave their homes.

She blinks off the inserts, rubs her scratchy eyes, and checks her old combat comms link in case by some miracle there’s been a breakthrough past the company’s total blackout. No pings, no static; all quiet, like the dawn. As long as they can’t communicate, and the only public legal record available is that of their employment leases, the company can speak on their behalf to the Neutral Zone, which lies beyond the company’s shore operations and inland enclaves.

She leans against the sill to study the scene. The sky lightens. The curve of the sun breaches the horizon. Elongated rays of sunlight spread gleaming stripes across the murky waters. The landscape’s hushed mystery shimmers with simple beauty, even here, even now, in this broken, fragmented world.

The morning siren cracks the silence with a shrill hoot, repeated three times. The tracker embedded in her shoulder buzzes. The work day has started. For the next fourteen hours, everything is on the clock.

She leaves the window open and goes out to use the hall toilet. Handprint first, to register the user—all weight, volume, and analysis of waste and wash water calculated by WasteNot! WantNot! LLC and added to the cost of rent. While she is peeing, her combat link gives a proximity shiver. The company turned off the comms transmitter and receiver, but even the company’s blackout can’t eradicate the link’s proximity alarm. In this case, the two-fold shiver signaling the approach of a friendly, another servicemember from the old federal army.

When Rose comes out of the toilet, LaChelle is waiting by the door for her turn. LaChelle is older than Rose, so old she grew up in the city before the rising waters took it all. A career army officer, she is now an eighty-year-old shoreline trash picker. She uses her picker to lean on as she clips a thank-you nod at Rose for the gift of food Rose left for her last night.

“Damn crow woke me up,” she says to Rose. “Did it wake you too?”

“Yes. That squawk always jars me.” They’ve developed a complex code to get around places in the buildings where there are cameras and listening ears.

LaChelle scratches the side of her right eye to show she’ll keep an eye out on her shoreline trash patrol for anything unusual that might wash up.

“Plenty of birds out,” Rose adds, and there are: a pair of wrens in the bushes, a grackle investigating a patch of scrubby grass, even a robin pecking along the ground. “Feels like their population is growing. Could swear I even saw a pair of owls out hunting over the water.”

“I’ll check their nest. Maybe they’ll have a fish we can share.”

“A fresh fish this time, we can hope,” agrees Rose. Neither glances at the surveillance camera hanging above the toilet door in a corridor where people may gossip while they wait in line. “A shame the last three fish were too poisoned to eat.”

“I heard yesterday out on Spearhook Point from one of the rakers that there was a catch down south that didn’t have to be thrown out,” says the colonel, not that anyone calls her that now that the country she once served no longer exists.

“The tide is turning,” Rose says. It was their catch phrase in the closing days of the war, although it tastes bittersweet now, given that they ended up on the wrong side of the border. It all happened so long ago that the boys have never known anything except company rule. We old-timers haven’t forgotten, she thinks with stubborn pride.

LaChelle gives what once-sergeant Rose still thinks of as “an officer’s nod.” “May we all be so fortunate. Have a blessed day.”

“Have a blessed day.” Rose echoes the company-mandated phrase.

By the time Rose returns to their room, the boys are up and dressed. Tai will be fifteen next month. Leon is eleven. They’re responsible boys. They’ve been through a lot, having sat vigil by their father as he died from a highly resistant staph infection three years ago. Best Outcomes! LLC refused to approve intravenous antibiotics because his work detail in the salvage crews wasn’t rated high enough to warrant the expense. Soon after Eddy’s death, the boys’ mother’s contract was renegotiated by the central office inland, the office no one in this town has ever been to, as there is no way to get there. Sela was required to leave town—and her boys—to teach in one of the hill enclaves whose communities demand in-classroom teachers. She gets leave to come home just once a month, although each time she smuggles home a discarded print book.

While the boys visit the toilet and wash their hands, Rose divides up two bean and barley burritos she received as unrecorded payment yesterday. The third she tucked into a little hiding slot out of the camera’s line of sight on the landing, for LaChelle, who can barely eke out enough credit for a tiny sleeping closet and a single meal per day at the town’s company cafeteria.

A WasteNot! WantNot! LLC placard hammered into the wall reads Food In The Home Is Unsanitary! but they’re careful and haven’t been caught.

They sit at the table by the window that overlooks the flooded city. An osprey glides overhead, although she can’t imagine it will have good hunting here. A sheen of oil turns the water mirrorlike beneath the rising sun. Dead trees stick up as posts, remainders of a park where she took Eddy to play as a child. Leon leafs through a decades-old science book whose still-bright photos depict stars and supernovae remnants, gas clouds and galaxies. Tai studies a bedraggled old pamphlet on hacking telecommunications systems he borrowed from Sawyer, using a contraband pencil stub to make notes in the margins.

The fan clicks off as electricity is shut down for the day in all housing units. The warning siren blares. As they hurry down the echoing, concrete stairs, the boys tell her about a girl who was expelled from school yesterday because the family couldn’t pay her fees.

“What happened then?” Rose asks.

Tai shoots her a warning look. “She’s my age,” he says, which means he doesn’t want to say any more in front of Leon.

“Ah. You mean that pretty girl, Becka.”

Tai blushes. “That’s not what I meant,” he grouses.

“I know it isn’t,” she says gently. “I’m worried too. She’s a sweet girl. She brings her malnourished little sister into the clinic every week for her vitamin shot.”

“I saw her parents outside,” says Leon unexpectedly. He’s a sharply observant boy, wise beyond his years. “They said she wasn’t fifteen yet. Too early to start her service. The sentinels arrested them for causing a disturbance. Amma, they weren’t even shouting. Just asking for a recalibration on the fees. She was supposed to have earned extra because she tutors younger kids in math. They said she was given no extra credits for the work she did.”

Tai breaks in. “The company never gave her the high score bonus she was due. She scored top of the school in math and engineering proficiency.”

He closes his mouth as they reach the bottom of the stairs, where they might be overheard. It’s not flood season, so the rooms on the ground floor of this former office complex have been set up as a dormitory for one of this year’s two cohorts of debt laborers. It’s best never to be heard criticizing the company. People get extra credit for reporting malingerers and malcontents. But the ground floor lies empty. The “summer sparrows” have already left to buy a meal from Healthy Kitchen! LLC before the time clock shifts from “prep period” to “task period.”

Outside, Rose and the boys each click over five credits to step up onto the raised boardwalk owned by Secure Walking! LLC. The rent they pay to Hope Housing! LLC is low here on the flooding verge, but it’s against the law to use the old non-fee roads and sidewalks, which have been condemned and placed off-limits even though they’re no worse than the poorly maintained and cheaply constructed boardwalk. Freedom isn’t free! proclaims a sign on the boardwalk as they walk into the center of town, carefully stepping over warped boards and patches of dry rot. Eddy used to do maintenance on his day off, on his own time. There’s been no one to take his place.

They check in at the Pure for You! LLC vending machines to fill their old stainless steel bottles with the daily water ration and accept their Complimentary! LLC cigarette, courtesy of the company. The line moves quickly, after which they join the queue at Healthy Kitchen! LLC for the mandated daily weigh-in. A dispenser spills out grimy tokens in an amount equal to their allowed calorie allotment based on their weight plus credit rating, which they can trade in at the cafeteria or one of the two automat annexes.

Inside the big cafeteria, the boys pick out their favorites: bread with spread, kelp pudding, protein sausage, and hash browns. They’ll get a protein smoothie for lunch at school. Rose prefers oatmeal with whatever seeds, nuts, and dried fruit are on hand along with a scoop of protein powder. She hasn’t tasted wheat or butter for years but the bread’s all right, some combination of millet and amaranth, and there’s always plenty of peanut butter. They sit at a table to eat.

Over the years locals have decorated the cafeteria wall with a bright mural depicting the town and its environs: the drowned city with ghost outlines of its old contours, half-sunken boats covered in barnacles, owls skimming over the oily waters, raccoons scavenging out beyond the fence, cheerful mice and responsible rats busy at work although, if you understand what to look for, the decorative flower wreaths are really chains sealing doors and windows. Crows circle overhead, spying on everything. In the distance, tucked into a tree-lined valley beyond shadowy hills, a dappled cow with a distended udder grazes peaceably and a watchful hawk soars in the distance, barely more than a sketch of outstretched wings.

Rose knows everyone, and greets people as they arrive and leave. Tai whispers intently with a pair of friends who made fifteen a few months ago and were sent to apprenticeship positions in the salvage yards, roaches in the ruins, as this new generation call themselves.But all too soon they have to bus their dishes and head out as the time clock ticks inexorably down toward “task period.”

She checks the boys in at the school and, after they’ve gone in, pauses in the entry foyer with its racks for coats and shelves for outdoor shoes. Through an open door she watches all ages of children sit at tables facing a big screen; there is no image playing, just a blank, black void. The screen is where Best Outcomes! LLC pipes in classes from an inland enclave where company citizens live. That the screen is dark now is unusual since in the morning it always plays a recorded ball game from one of the enclaves’ professional sports leagues, sponsored by Your Entertainment! LLC.

Many children slump with bored faces, but a small group has clustered around Tai’s chair as he explains something in a low voice. His passionate expression worries her, although she would never ask him to change. He is his father’s son, angry and determined to make whatever small changes are within his power.

Uncle Cristiano, the school’s custodian, makes his laborious way up to her. The foyer is a good place to talk as it lacks a surveillance camera.

“The feed cut out twice yesterday, but it was running fine when I put it on sleep mode just before curfew,” he tells Rose in a voice softened by early-stage mesothelioma. He ought to be retired and resting, but to receive the minimal treatments available he has to be employed.

“Sure does seem glitches and cuts happen more often these days,” she agrees. “It wouldn’t be so bad if they’d adjust the fees when it happens. Or offer an alternate curriculum. Books, maybe.”

He wheezes a sarcastic laugh. The school removed the library of print books six years ago and now requires the students to pay per page viewed on tablets they can only access at school. “Central office didn’t credit any of the children the last set of their community maintenance work hours and in-class shared tutoring. You heard about Becka?”

“I did. What do you think?”

He frowns. “Nothing good. We have to hope her engineering potential will spare her the worst. The thing is, Doc, I’m not sure the screen shutdown this morning comes from the company’s end. It costs them nothing to run the old AI teaching program. That thing was out of date thirty years ago. You hear anything about a gunshot just before dawn?”

“I heard it. CM-70”

Abruptly he coughs, hand pressed to chest and bending forward with a spasm. A proximity alert shivers in her combat link, the triple buzz signaling an unknown who is potentially hostile. Before she can step forward to see if Uncle Christiano is all right, his gaze flashes up to meet hers, then flickers past her with a warning look. Belatedly, she hears the tromp of confident footsteps. Definitely hostile. She sets fists on hips, arms akimbo, to block the view into the schoolroom.

The children have already heard. Inside the classroom, they scatter to their assigned seats. Tai slips something into a pocket.

 A sentinel unit stamps in through the entry: tall, well-fed young men from the hill enclaves. They patrol the town in threes, wearing the gold badges of Safe For You! LLC pinned to the glossy black uniforms that give them the nickname of crows. They carry the dual-shot carbines like they are third appendages.

“How d’you do, Doc?” they say with big, bullying smiles as they sweep past and take a turn through the classroom, ogling the older youth in a grotesque way that makes her think of pretty Becka. All the students stiffen, keeping their gazes safely lowered.

“Hey! Uncle Crusty!” The sentinels beckon to the custodian, who shuffles toward them as they laugh at his crooked gait. “Why’s your screen down? You get a fine for turning the equipment off!”

“I didn’t turn it off, sirs. Our screen was down when I got in this morning. I sent one of the students to the supervisor’s office to report the shutdown. Must have come from the company side. No fine, in that case.”

“You township lowlifes are all lazy liars,” scoffs the corporal, who looks maybe nineteen, cocky with power. “And you, old man, you’re just a waste of air. Can’t even work a decent day’s labor, can you?”

Tension scalds the air. The children don’t like the old man being mocked, but they keep their mouths shut and heads down. Tai gives a flick of his hand to send Rose off. He’s growing up. Taking responsibility. So like his dad and mom.

Her tracker buzzes as the time clock siren wails a last long blare signaling the end of the morning “prep period.” She’s late. She takes the hint from Tai and heads out.

Fortunately, the clinic is only a block away, on the corner of the central plaza, next to the barber shop and public baths. All three are owned by the health branch of Best Outcomes! LLC.

Winnie, the clinic’s clerk, sleeps in the clinic, which allows her to unlock the doors at the first tracker buzz. It also allows Winnie to take twilight raccoon deliveries of off-market herbs and bits and bobs of outer-reaches salvage that the clinic uses to supplement the meager supplies and equipment the company provides. Rose hands her complimentary cigarette to Winnie, who will use them for barter. Even if Rose wishes people did not smoke, she understands why and how the company works to make it happen. They encourage people to go further into debt however they can.

The waiting room is already full, people seated on hard benches. A thin child coughs exhaustedly, slumped against an elderly woman, Arlene, who is draped in a threadbare shawl. With a palsied hand, Arlene is signing a promissory note for treatment for her sick grandchild. Arlene herself has a treatable condition, but from the beginning the company dealt harshly with any persons who had worked in the legal professions. Once a paralegal at a firm specializing in consumer protection lawsuits, she had been assigned to clean toilets and to muck out the filtering grids and drainage pits in the salvage yard. When she could no longer manage the punishing physical labor, the company refused to transfer her to a desk job. So now she can only get medical care for her grandchildren, who have future worth for the company.

As Rose adjusts a medical grade mask over her face, Arlene says, “Those crows sure made a ruckus early.”

“So they did. Woke me up.” They exchange a nod.

A baseball game plays on the big screen, Wings versus Hammers, the volume turned down to background chatter. “Fly ball to right field…and…Smith catches the ball at the warning track!”

Rose walks on through the waiting room. There’s another mural here, a sequence of old-fashioned farm scenes: a red barn with sparrows roosting along its roof ridge, a henhouse with smug hens overseeing fluffy chicks, a green tractor with a calm cat at the controls, a herd of cows with calves grazing in a wide open pasture, mice and rats seated at a table in the hayloft sharing cheese, monstrous mosquitos and ticks with stolen plates being marched off in disgrace by officious dogs, a gate in the shadows half open to reveal a bounteous garden beyond.

She nods at people she knows, and notes individuals she’s never seen before, twice as many as yesterday, most coughing or wan with fever: a virus has hit the dormitories, brought in by the most recently arrived summer sparrows.

Clarissa, the clinic intern, moves through the room taking histories, triaging the patients, and handing out reused masks to people who don’t have one even though Best Outcomes! LLC policy states that it provides masks free of charge to prevent epidemic disease outbreaks, according to the terms of the armistice.

Clarry is a bright, eager sixteen-year-old with what Rose judges is an authentic calling toward healing. She can’t afford the next level of schooling, only available in the inland enclaves. The company has allowed the girl a waiver to work as an unpaid intern at the clinic rather than sending her to the yards or one of the raking crews. Rose can’t pay her either. Knowledge is the only currency she has after forty years as a medic turned nurse. The town will need someone to look after people when she’s too infirm to work since the town isn’t on the list to receive a nurse after she’s gone.

Winnie points with her right elbow toward the back. Clarry looks up, giving a sharp dip of the chin. Urgent.

Rose goes into the back, past the exam room and the sterile procedure room to the storeroom with its half-empty shelves and a surveillance camera that’s been hacked by Sawyer with a staggered loop for the last eight years. In the shadowed back, on a scrupulously sterilized foldout metal table, lies a young woman curled into a ball, arms clenched over her abdomen, moaning with a quiet, hopeless keen. There’s blood on her skirt and no one with her.

Rose comprehends the situation at once. She doesn’t recognize the young woman, who wears a debt laborer’s uniform, always a skirt and blouse for women. She’s a new seasonal from the cohort housed on the other side of town, closer to the salvage yards.

“I’m Rose.” She wants to rest a reassuring hand on the patient’s shoulder but they’ve never spoken, so she needs to wait and establish trust.

“Doc Rose,” whispers the young woman, repeating a name someone has told her.

This isn’t the time to share that she’s a nurse, that the town hasn’t had a doctor in twenty-four years, only a screen that connects to Your Friendly Doctor Art Gence! LLC. “What’s your name?”

“Gloria.” After a pause, she adds in a frightened whisper, “I don’t want to die.”

“Gloria, you’re losing blood. To figure out a treatment I need to know what method you used.” She doesn’t say “abortion” out loud. Even with the hacked surveillance camera it’s too risky.

“I didn’t! I’m not! They’ll arrest me.”

“Help me help you, Gloria. Once you’re stabilized—” She doesn’t say if. She needs her patient to believe in her. “—is there a safe place you can rest for a few days?”

“I got no free days to cash in.” The young woman catches in a sob. “Anyways, there’s nowhere safe, is there? They…they came into the dormitory.”

Rose’s heart hardens as she sets her rage and fear aside and closes it off so she can work effectively. “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to diagnose you with respiratory syncytial virus. A fresh variant is going around right now. I’ll tuck in someone else’s positive results to your paperwork. That means I can assign you a place in the isolation hall. It’s over behind the bathhouse. There’s a twenty-four-hour sentry on duty to make sure no one leaves so sickness doesn’t spread.”

“Sentry? A sentinel?” The girl shudders, arms folding tight over her breasts. There’s a rip in her blouse’s collar.

“Sorry. It’s not a company sentinel. I say sentry but I mean the janitor for the bathhouse. He lives there, always on duty. He was a marine in the war, a long time ago now. No one gets past Sawyer if he doesn’t want them to. That means no crow can get to you there.”

“Crow?”

“It’s what we call the sentinels.”

Gloria shrugs, shaking her head because she doesn’t understand.

Rose can talk to her about the local code later. “Since I sent two sick folks over yesterday, you going there today won’t light any alarms. Four days’ quarantine is what I can give you. Then you have to return to work”

“But what about food? I don’t got an allowance or any extra. What about the toilet cost? Won’t it report the blood? They track our periods.”

“I understand your concerns. Let me reassure you. Quarantine has a separate set of regulations because the company wants to avoid an epidemic. You get two meals a day brought to your door. As for the other, there are no toilets in the quarantine building. You get a toilet bucket with an odor lid. There’s a separate waste sterilization vat for quarantine. It won’t be analyzed except for disease. You’ll be isolated, no one to see you or talk to you. Can you manage that, Gloria?”

The young woman releases a pain-filled sigh. She begins to talk in a low, frantic tone about the assault that happened ten weeks ago. She was one of two women who arrived three days ahead of the other seasonals because of a schedule glitch in the cargo trucks that haul the cohorts. The sentinels who came into the dormitory wouldn’t take no for an answer because why should they? The company owns her like it owns this town.

“Who was the other woman?” Rose asks with sudden dread.

“Oh, they didn’t touch her. She has that skin thing. Lizard scale. Afterward, she was crying and let me sleep with her in her bunk. I felt safe there. That’s where I’ve been sleeping, between her and the wall. She told me not to say anything. If they find out you been raped, then they fine you for being a sex worker. I’d get moved to Funnel Point. No one wants to go there. It’s a slaughterhouse. She said it would be okay, there will be fresh fish soon, but who eats fish? They’re all poison.”

Fresh fish soon. Is the other woman an informer from the central office hoping to find out whether the township had been infiltrated by outreach from the Neutral Zone? Direct outreach is illegal according to the terms of the armistice. Or maybe the other woman is just a regular sparrow who keeps her eyes and ears open and learns from the people around her?

“What happened to her? Is she still around?”

“Yeah. She works out at Rock Wall with a freight unit. She’s the one told me to find Doc Rose. She asked at Rock Wall. Said she wanted to know who the local doc was because of her skin condition. No one traced the question to me.”

“I see. Does she have a name?”

“She goes by Lizzie. Like lizard scale, don’t you think?”

“Could be.” Although in the bedtime stories told to the children, a “lizzie” is a splendid magical creature who grants wishes. Rose sets the thought aside and gets back to business. “Now listen, Gloria, this matters a lot. You’re bleeding. I need to know how you did it. That’s the only way I can help you.”

The young woman wipes her eyes, convulsing at a fresh wave of pain. “Snakeroot. Picked it myself, up past the fence. There was a place where the chain-link was cut and you could peel it back. That’s how I got through. In the transit dormitories, they say snakeroot works.”

“All right. It does work, but not in a safe way. It’s dangerous for multiple reasons. Here’s what I’m going to do, Gloria. I’m going to insert seaweed into your cervix to dilate it, get it to open. Then I will do a procedure called a D & C that will basically clean out your uterus. I need to do the procedure to make sure you don’t get an infection in there. Dilation will take until tomorrow. I’ll send you over to the bathhouse while you wait. You will feel a lot of discomfort as the seaweed expands. You must stay quiet. Can you do that? Good girl. Buckle up.”

Rose works in silence as Gloria alternates between holding her breath with stubborn courage and sniffling out weak sobs. The military inserts prove useful in procedures since she can use them to zoom in for a high-resolution look at injuries, and to measure tissue for elevated temperatures that might signal a local infection. After the seaweed is in place, Rose gives Gloria a second pan of sterile water to clean herself up as well as a clean skirt and underpants with several changes of reusable sanitary pads and a pail to soak them in.

She walks Gloria out the back into the courtyard with its covered cistern shared between the clinic and the public baths. A proximity shiver on her link warns her that Sawyer is moving her way. A moment later, he opens the locked back door of the baths and wheels out to see why she’s come. He’s a stocky man about her age, tough and sarcastic, with a sharp tongue and both legs lost above the knee during the war. He assesses the situation with a glance and gently takes the girl under his wing. Maybe it’s the squeaky old wheelchair that comforts Gloria or maybe just something about Sawyer’s twinkling eyes and compassionate gaze.

The rest of the day passes quickly, one patient after the next with the usual complaints: three skin infections, two infected abrasions, a rush at lunch break of patients coming in for their daily pain meds—since the company requires each dose to be dispensed in person to prevent drug sales or barter on the gray market—and this season’s spike of viral respiratory disease. She sends two more people to the bathhouse’s isolation hall. If more show up, she’ll have to double up rooms or ask for a dispensation to establish a quarantine zone in one of the dormitories.

It’s a long day, with one short break for a lunch of protein sausage, bread with spread, and maize porridge, but it’s always a long day. A few people leave modest gifts of food or produce or random items on a little alcove shelf tucked out of the way in the foyer behind the coat closet, a place not visible to sentinels should they barge in. At five o’clock, the tracker buzzes to announce final shift, the long three hours from five to eight. There’s a twelve-minute transition with ten minutes of calisthenics and stretching and a two-minute gratitude meditation that is a recording sponsored by Healthy Outcomes! LLC.

About an hour later the boys come in together, having completed their after-school community chores. Tai hangs up his jacket and goes over to the bathhouse where the time clock will show him as assisting Sawyer with janitorial duties for further work credits. In reality he and the wily old marine will be working on something they hope will bring down the blackout through explosive sabotage, a last-ditch option Sawyer is skeptical about but Tai insists has to be considered should no fish be caught.

Winnie and Clarry juggle a late rush of patients who take advantage of final shift’s lower penalties for taking time off. Clarry has gotten very good at delivering vitamin shots for young children with as little discomfort and fear as possible. Leon cleans the clinic, his work so efficient that he can sneak five minutes here and there to continue studying an anatomy book whose yellowing transparencies reveal how the structures in the human body are layered together.

At seven, the tracker buzzes to signal “cool down.” The last rush eases as people head home before curfew. While Leon and Clarry and Winnie close up, Rose goes through the back to the bathhouse.

Gloria’s gritted jaw suggests she is in pain from the seaweed, but she doesn’t complain.

“I’ll do the procedure tomorrow,” says Rose. “Be patient. Be a barnacle.”

“What’s a barnacle?”

“A creature that holds on over the years, even in erosive settings.”

“Oh. Okay. The soup is good here. Better than we get in the dormitory.”

“Make sure to tell Sawyer. He likes a good compliment. It isn’t easy to cook tasty soup with what we have to work with. But we’ve learned.”

“Do you have to go?” Gloria clutches her hand as if it is a lifeline. Rose’s years as a medic and town nurse have taught her that, in truth, she bridges the gap between death and life. It’s a big responsibility, but then again, the town functions not because of the supervisor seated in his air-conditioned office with twenty-four-hour-a-day electricity and access to the company’s up-to-date technology, but because each individual even at the lowliest job has a part to play in the community’s constant struggle to survive.

“I do have to go, love, but I’ll be back in the morning. We’ll get this sorted out. You’ll be all right.”

Gloria wipes away a tear. “How can I be all right? They’ll do it again. Who’s to stop them? Lizzie said rape used to be a crime, a long time ago. Is that really true?”

“Would you like to live in a place where the company wasn’t in charge?”

“There is no place like that.”

“What if there was? What if you could call out so someone in that place heard you? And what if once they heard you, then the company would have to let you go and live there?”

“Oh come on, Doc. That’s just a stupid story people tell, about a cow that gives milk from its breasts…no, they call it something else.”

“Udder.”

“Yeah. But no one even has cows except rich people in the enclaves. There is nowhere else. Just more of this.”

Rose’s anger swells to become something stronger, a righteous rage that this young woman has no hope for anything better, no belief there could be a future beyond the regimented life of debt labor to the company. To those who grew up inside the company, there is no other world they know, and thus no pathway except to more of the same. But Rose and LaChelle and Sawyer and Arlene and a few others are old enough to remember the armistice and its legal fine print. Arlene had long since memorized the salient clauses and wrote them down in secret.

Epidemics need to be protected against since they cross borders. No dumping waste in river or sea water, which crosses borders. Air quality controls, since the wind blows pollution where it wills. People have the right to ask for severance, to leave and go elsewhere, even into the Neutral Zone, as long as their debt gets paid.

Section 3. Right to Leave and to Seek Asylum. No State, no corporate entity exercising the powers of a State, and no officer or agent of the same shall abridge the right of any person to depart the jurisdiction thereof and to petition the Neutral Zone for asylum. Every person so petitioning shall be received by the Neutral Zone as an asylee, save upon a specific finding by a court of competent jurisdiction that such person poses a clear and present danger to the physical safety of the inhabitants of the Neutral Zone. This right of egress and asylum shall not be suspended or denied on account of distance, the passage of time, any declaration of emergency, or any other pretext whatsoever.

The old civil government hadn’t quite lost the war, but it hadn’t quite won either. An armistice with concessions agreed to on all sides was the most any could manage. Being stuck on the wrong side of the armistice line hadn’t seemed so bad, not at first. Not until the company had shut down all communications and even the supposedly unassailable combat comms links.

Sawyer has a tiny secret office tucked out of sight past a tool closet behind the cistern. He’s back there with two of the owls, supervising Tai as the boy removes their trackers. Rose figured out a physical workaround some years ago: For trusted volunteers, she extracted the tracker and inserted it into a tiny ceramic cylinder that is securely taped into their armpit, easy to miss unless the supervisor mandates a strip search of all yard workers. The tiny cylinders will go to the boarding house to make it look as if Shorty and Paulina are asleep in their bunks. The salvagers will go out on the water, unable to be tracked.

“Are you the ones who were out last night?” Rose asks.

“No, Doc,” says Shorty. “That was Joey and Handsome. Didn’t they come by?”

“I saw them at dawn.” She adds anxiously, “Any chance they got caught?”

Paulina shakes her head. “We’d’ve heard if there was a ruckus.”

“What was crow bait last night?”

“Odds on it being a flying fish from outside. We heard a rumor at Rock Wall that someone saw a white tanglefish in the water by Lao Point. It was broken and only half submerged, so they threw rocks at it until it sank. We’re going tonight to fetch it, if we can.”

“Take care.”

The night salvagers leave for their boarding house, where they’ll nap until the last siren at midnight and then head out.

“What do you think about the squawk we heard? Besides it being a CM-70, I mean,” Rose asks Sawyer as the boys shoulder their packs for the walk home.

“Hard to say. Let’s see if Shorty and Paulina find anything. Could’ve been debris.”

“What if nothing ever changes?” Leon asks, not angry, just resigned.

“Then we keep working,” says Sawyer.

“I’d rather just blow it all up!” snaps Tai, clenching his hands, breathing hard.

Rose rests a hand on his arm. He never grew taller than her. All of the children born here are shorter than their parents, shorter even than Shorty. “Day’s not over yet. Let’s go before we get a curfew fine.”

The boys understand their grandmother can’t afford a fine, so they hustle up. After clicking over the required credits, they head back along the boardwalk on the familiar route. The proximity link shivers in three short bursts.

Ahead, three large figures loom out of the late twilight gloom. Their swagger makes Leon shrink back and Tai puff up angrily. Rose doesn’t falter. She walks right up to the one in the lead and halts, keeping her body between them and her grandsons.

Sentinels are required to keep guns and uniforms in best order. One of the guns is so new the sentinel hasn’t yet peeled its label off the shoulder-stock: Carbine, Multipurpose, Model 70, featuring an advanced gas regulator detection system to switch between lethal and less-than-lethal rounds without any additional adjustments. For the discerning peacekeeper. Caution: using multiple types of rounds in the same magazine not recommended.

“How can I help you?” she asks. “We’re on our way home.”

The sentinels laugh coarsely. “Looks like we got us a tiny troop of lazy liars. Why you out so late…”

The corporal gestures for the sneering speaker to stop. “Doc Rose? That you?”

“It is,” she says cautiously. It’s never good to be stopped by the sentinels, especially at night, next door to curfew.

“Good thing!” says the corporal. “We got a medical question.”

“Your unit has a medic,” she says evenly.

“Yeah but we get a demerit if we come down sick. Frankie here got scratched by that little hellcat. It was just a scratch so we didn’t think anything of it. But it got all red and nasty. Show her, Frankie.”

Frankie winces as he unbuttons his uniform shirt and peels it back to show lurid, puffy red lines across his shoulder. It’s infected.

Rose has a lifetime of experience controlling her expression. A white-hot burning part of her soul wants to tell him to rub salt in the wound, but she doesn’t. Becoming a barnacle when the toxic waves roll through is the hardest part of the work.

“You’ve got a skin infection. I don’t have any antibiotics—”

“How can you not have antibiotics?” the corporal scoffs. “The salvage rats get cuts all the time.”

“And die of them,” she snaps.

Taken aback by her harsh tone, they shift away from her, hands restless on their carbines. The tracker buzzes, two short, one long: fifteen minutes to curfew. She has a long-practiced medic’s tone for fraught situations.

“Corporal, I recommend you buy honey from the garden market and smear it on the infection. It’s a natural antibiotic and might help. If it doesn’t, you’re going to have to go to your medical unit, demerit or no demerit. An infection like this can spread to the blood, if it hasn’t already.”

“But—!”

“You can come see me tomorrow at lunch, if you must. I’ll clean out the wound, see if there’s anything else I can do with what I have. But I strongly recommend you take the demerit and see your medic. If that is a highly resistant staph infection, you don’t want to be on the other end of what it will turn into, if it isn’t already too late.”

She wants to say more, much much more, like it would serve him right, but she doesn’t. She grabs Tai’s elbow and steers him past the men, Leon right at her heels. The sentinels let them go as they start arguing with each other about whether to report to medical or not.

She and the boys hurry home.

The electricity comes on at eight, rationed through an elaborate system she doesn’t understand, something the company has plenty of resources to implement. They have two hours of electric light, after which only the fan will run, and that only because fans help keep mildew at bay. The mandate changed ten summers ago after a rash of heat-related deaths, after which Arlene staged a sit-down protest on the former supervisor’s doorstep and reminded him of the company’s legal obligations respecting basic human care.

Leon finishes the book on the universe and asks Rose for permission to read her hefty Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, the one she keeps hidden in their room because it would be confiscated if anyone saw it at the clinic.

“It’s pretty heavy going,” she says.

He gives her a wildly expressive eye roll, and she gives him a hug, which he shrugs off with a blend of annoyed independence and little-boy affection. Then he opens the book and is lost to the world.

Tai tells her he’s headed down to the far end of the building to hang out with a schoolmate until ten, and goes out.

Rose tucks a pair of carrots and a gnarled potato into her shirt, making it pouch forward as if she is a prosperous person with plenty to eat and a proud belly to show for it. She climbs to the roof. LaChelle sits at an old café table on a spindly chair. Her seamed face is illuminated by low red light arising from an old night-fighting technology implanted in officers’ hands.

There’s no camera up here, no one at all. The laborers aren’t allowed, and not many locals live out so close to the shore. Rose sits down opposite LaChelle and pushes over the produce, which the colonel tucks into a pocket. She sets an object on the table. Her faintly glowing hand reveals it as a sleek silvery cylinder no longer than a small thumb.

Rose stares in awe, touching it as if it is a holy relic, forbidden. Of course, such a glittering little minnow is indeed forbidden. “I heard there was some tanglefish debris out by Lao Point. Shorty and Paulina are going to fish it out tonight, if they can. What is this?”

“When you said where you saw the rowboat, I searched where the currents would pull wreckage. It took me all day because the wind patterns are shifting, but I know this shoreline.”

“None better,” agrees Rose.

“I found this washed up on Maizy’s Beach in a sealed pouch, wrapped in seaweed for disguise. This is it, Rose. The fish that’s not been poisoned.”

They sit for a while in silence overlooking the drowned city. A searchlight sweeps the water beyond the sentinel tower, where the company’s pier juts out with its official salvage boats tied up in a line, ready for tomorrow’s work. Lights give sparkle to the town. Rose can’t quite hear people talking in their homes, but she feels them: the coughing child, the traumatized young woman, the elders keeping the old knowledge alive and the youth seeking to learn and create new patterns, the night salvagers whispering to each other as they decide what course they’ll take across the water, the laborers settling to sleep as they brace for another day of exhausting work.

A shadow appears at the stairwell’s entrance. Tai slides noiselessly over as he sometimes does. He’s got an instinct, that boy. He sits in the third chair. LaChelle gestures. Carefully, trepidatiously, he picks up the cylinder and examines it from all angles. His grin is something to see, more brilliant than a thousand stars.

“I’ll plug it in just before second buzzer. I think that will work?”

“We can but try,” says LaChelle. “You know the tech better than I do. But most of us know the drill, should we succeed.”

The final warning buzzes. Lights out in fifteen minutes. Rose and Tai go downstairs. He clutches the cylinder as if he is never going to let it go. When they reach the room, he whispers a few choice words to his little brother, whose eyes widen although he says nothing. Rose isn’t sure how well the boys sleep that night, but she sleeps well, because back in the day she learned to sleep wherever, whenever, and she’s never lost the habit.

No shot wakes her. Birdsong wakes her, the old soundtrack from a lost world where wings trace vast pathways across the land, able to migrate where they will.

The boys are silent this morning, nervous, determined. They click over the credits for the boardwalk, make their way into town. Arriving early at the school, Tai gives her an entirely unexpected hug before he hurries in. She needs to check on Gloria, so it’s with some concern that she sees Winnie standing at the clinic door facing a tall young woman whose face and hands are speckled and gleaming with the silvery condition known as “lizard scale.”

The woman steps right up to Rose, towering over her. “You’re Doc Rose, aren’t you?”

“Yes. You must be Lizzie. Gloria told me—”

“No. Listen.”

“Not out here.”

Rose takes her into the back, into the storage room with its looped camera. “You aren’t here to check on Gloria?”

“No. I mean, yes. Of course. God, what a nightmare. That poor girl. She’s only fourteen, did you know that? I wanted to kill them. But hold on, hold on. Not now.” With a deep sigh, and a sharp exhalation, she controls herself. “I heard a rumor from that hot sexy gal Joey that the old colonel found the breaker.”

“The breaker?”

“Do you have it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Lizzie grits her teeth impatiently. “If you do, and you’re going to try it, it won’t work without this.”

She holds out a black pin that’s about an inch in length. “There’s an insertion point in the cylinder. You put it in, then plug the cylinder into any of the company screens. They all have a scrambler and a control node. This will break through the company lockdown. But you won’t have much time. They’ll reboot and scramble within sixty seconds.”

She might be a company informer. Yet her easy and casual reference to Joey as a hot sexy gal suggests she might be the real deal. Under company rule no one would dare say that aloud about a person of the same gender. Lizzie seems oblivious, as if she’s from a place where no one cares, the way it was when Rose was a young woman. During the war, Rose survived more than once because she went with her gut feeling.

“All right,” says Rose. “I’ll take it where it needs to go. We know what to do.”

“Do you?”

Rose says nothing, just looks at her with weary eyes.

Lizzie has the grace to look abashed. “They told me not to underestimate you all.”

Rose snorts. Lizzie hands over the pin, so slender and seemingly frail. Rose closes her fingers over it. “Best you get on, Lizzie. If this works, you’ll see.”

She heads toward the front, then feels a proximity shiver: hostile. From the clinic waiting room, the corporal’s voice raises, loud and insistent. He’s asking for her on an urgent matter. She dodges out the back, past the cistern and into the bathhouse. Sawyer looks up from the front desk. She gestures a “cover me” as the footsteps and voices of the sentinels come closer; they’re searching for her in the back courtyard. He nods. She ducks out through the barber shop and its alley back door, jogs as best she can on her arthritic knees to the alley entrance to the school where trash is set out. She knocks with the SOS rap on the storeroom door.

Leon opens the door. “Amma! What are you doing here?”

Eight minutes to the second buzzer.

She slips inside, into the storeroom where Leon has been reading a print book away from the eye of the classroom camera. “Get your brother.”

He gives her a startled glance because of the sharpness of her tone but understands that her clipped voice means “emergency.” After grabbing a broom and dustpan for disguise, he hurries back through an interior door into the classroom. A minute later Tai returns with the broom and dustpan, which he sets down before he takes the pin. He understands the object immediately in the same way she understands a medical condition she’s studied and treated.

“Oh, of course,” he breathes. “I get it. That’s really clever. I need to connect them before the daily feed turns on.”

Six minutes to the buzzer.

Her hands and feet turn ice cold. She can’t catch her breath.

He’s already gone back into the classroom. She shakes herself free of paralysis. It takes her two minutes to reach the clinic. She shoves the door open with so much strength it bangs against the wall. The people waiting on the benches jump nervously, look up, see her, and relax.

From the desk Winnie says, “You all right, Rose?”

Rose looks at the screen. The Wings player wearing jersey 19 has just hit a single and halted at first base when the image flashes white, obliterating the game. A garbled voice emerges from the light, cuts out on a crackle of static that resolves into a tone so high-pitched that everyone winces, followed by silence. The bright screen darkens, like shadows emerging to swallow what can’t be seen. A face comes into focus. No: two faces, staring in wonder and concern out at people they cannot see. They wear their hair oddly, one with his head wrapped in a colorful scarf and the other with her scalp shaved down as if for a medical procedure. From what Rose can see of their clothing, they aren’t wearing company-mandated uniforms or any of the seasonal clothing offered for rent at the company store in limited styles and colors.

Standing at the door into the back corridor, Clarry blurts out, “Those are outsiders. Like you said there were, Doc. I didn’t believe anyone really lived beyond the enclaves.”

Winnie calls out, to the screen, breathless, as frantic as someone gulping in a last gasp of air before their head goes under water. “Can you hear us? By the rights accorded all civilians and former soldiers in the armistice, we request asylum. We desire to move territory.”

A murmur runs through the waiting room. Rose raises a hand for silence. “They can’t hear us. They can only hear where it’s connected.”

The door from the back slams open. The sentinels barge in. Everyone hunkers down, trying to look small.

“Where’s that coming from, Doc?” demands the corporal.

She shakes her head. “I can’t hear anything,” she says, since it’s better to speak truth when you don’t want to reveal what you know.

The two people on the screen are nodding, listening. After a bit they speak, as if in reply. Tai knows the necessary phrases. So does Leon, Uncle Cristiano, and a few of the other students whose families have clung to the struggle all these years and never given up on the idea that each node and each pathway and each fresh connection can in time spark with life.

The screen snaps to black with a final pop. The clinic lights go out. Someone has cut the power. The sentinels scramble outside. Winnie opens the shutters of the window behind her desk.

“Do we go outside?” she says to Rose. Her voice trembles.

“We go outside. They heard us. They’ll come.”

Will they, truly? She doesn’t know, but she does know that, for this one moment, they have touched the greater community, the wider world, beyond the wall the company built.

She opens the door and goes out, scanning for the sentinels, but they’re running toward the tower where they can find out what’s going on. Sawyer wheels out of the bathhouse, tipping her a nod. Gloria walks gingerly behind him, holding tightly to the wheelchair’s push handles.

Others emerge mouselike onto the streets from the small factory shops where they do company work: five, ten, twenty in a group. Rose walks out onto the plaza, to the plinth where once a statue of a man holding a rolled up piece of paper stood, although the statue has long since been taken down. Uncle Christiano leads the children out of the school, walking in neat lines with young children paired with older ones. After fifteen minutes, more than two hundred people have assembled in silence in the plaza.

From up here she sees a flood of workers leaving the salvage yards, headed their way. Not everyone will come. They just need enough to stand strong together, to wait for an hour or more. She knows the borders; she knows how fast helicopters flew, back when she was in the military, but there’s surely something newer, faster, more fuel efficient.

Sentinels appear up on the tower. There is a water gun on the tower alongside two machine guns. Will they panic and fire? Or will the supervisor tell them to stand down? How long can anyone endure this tension without breaking? No one is meant to be out and about on company time. Everyone here is breaking company law by walking off their jobs. But the salvage workers march closer, singing a song about roaches. The sentinels don’t shoot.

Arlene pushes through the crowd, leaning on a cane and carrying a burnished leather briefcase. “I’ve got my copy of the armistice in here,” she says.

Leon breaks free from the line of students and comes over.

“Where’s Tai?” Rose asks him.

“He stayed in case the connection comes through again. He’ll hide if he hears anyone.”

The crowd grows. The minutes pass, one after one after one. Ten. Twenty. An eternity.

A small electric cart races into the plaza, scattering people. The supervisor gets out beside the plinth. His assistants unfold a portable stairway for him to climb up to the top. Once up in this commanding position, he raises a bullhorn.

“This is an unlawful assembly. As a courtesy, and pursuant to clause three point two point nine in your contracts, I am giving you one warning to disperse. After that, you will force me to take drastic action.”

Rose waves to get his attention, then steps forward to speak in a loud voice that carries across the crowd.

“Supervisor, we have the right according to the armistice to request transfer into the Neutral Zone, which we have done. Let any others raise their hand to show they request transfer.”

Leon raises his hand. Arlene. Winnie. Clarry. Sawyer. LaChelle, still puffing from her long walk up from the shoreline. Cristiano. The children. The barber. The salvage workers as they crowd in, old rats and young roaches with their hands to the sky. The people, those who have come out onto the street based on what has been passed mouth to mouth, ear to ear, over the years. Many have come. Even wan Gloria raises her hand, although she seems unsure what is going on.

The supervisor’s grimace is fierce with anger and a touch of panic. He shouts into the bullhorn. “This is your final warning!”

No one lowers their hand. They stand there, united in a purpose so many have worked on together for so long to bring about.

Leon tilts his head. “You hear that?”

She looks up. Everyone looks up.

A light flashes in the distance. She uses her inserts to zoom in, but she doesn’t recognize the vessel, and it’s not yet close enough for her proximity link to register its presence. Sawyer has the same inserts. He looks at her, his grin like lightning.

“Not a company vessel,” he shouts.

The supervisor lowers his bullhorn and stares at the sky. The wind rising off the water rumbles. A seagull glides past, headed for the sea. An old promise grows in the distance, coming their way. The sun gleams across the waiting multitude.

Author’s note: I wrote a very early and much shorter exploration of this story concept in 2019 because I’d been thinking a lot about a road trip conversation with my beloved dad back in 2000 in which he asked, “What would a pay-as-you-go society look like?” (he was not a fan of the concept). A chance to expand on the ideas and plot came during the 2023 Vaster Than Empires writers’ workshop sponsored by the Berggruen Institute. The help of everyone at the workshop in refining these ideas is gratefully acknowledged. Special thanks to Ken Liu for answering an in-story legal query with his usual aplomb. Many thanks to Oliver Dougherty for editorial guidance and keen line editing, and to the Reactor Magazine team for their usual excellence.

“Barnacle” copyright © 2025 by Katrina Elliott
Art copyright © 2025 by Juan Bernabeu

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Kate Elliott

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Original Fiction fantasy

Where the Hell Is Nirvana?

A minor deva drudging away in the gleaming offices of Buddhist heaven discovers there are easier ways to improve his karma than kind thoughts and spiritual deeds.

Illustrated by Wenjing Yang

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Edited by Mal Frazier

By Champ Wongsatayanont

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Published on October 8, 2025

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A minor deva drudging away in the gleaming offices of Buddhist heaven discovers there are easier ways to improve his karma than kind thoughts and spiritual deeds.

Author’s note: If this story features a kind of Buddhism you’re not familiar with, please note it’s based both loosely and faithfully on the source material of our uniquely Thai blend of Theravada Buddhism. It’s also inspired by two questions. One addressed to my teacher-monk on whether a deva can achieve Nirvana. The other addressed to my mother on why karma never seems to work the way it should.

Novelette | 10,140 words

ผู้ใดกระทำบุญอันใดไส้ เทพยดานั้นเขียนชื่อผู้นั้นใส่แผ่นทองสุก

แลผู้ใดอันกระทำบาปไส้ เทวดานั้นก็ตราบาญชีลงในแผ่นหนังหมา

When someone performs a meritorious deed, a deva writes their name on a sheet of gold.

When someone performs a sinful deed, the deva records the account onto a dogskin parchment.

– Traibhumikatha (ไตรภูมิกถา): The Story of the Three Planes of Existence
Written by Maha Thammaracha I (King Lithai)
(1843-1911 Buddhist Era)
(1300-1368 Anno Domini)

First Noble Truth:
Suffering Exists

Alone in the gleaming gold office of the Karma Calculation Department (Thailand Division), Garmuti collapsed onto his crystal desk, his necklace and chest chains jingling, his gold-spired headdress clanging. He was going to die. No deva or devi had it worse than him in the Six Heavens. Truly, no humans, no animals, no pretas, no hell-beasts, no condemned sufferers in hell were having a worse time than him at this moment.

He still had one thousand and forty-six profiles to fill. And it was today, out of all days, when the Visakha Puja party was raging in the Himmapan Forest. Big players would be there, including Lord Vishnu, Lord Indra, and the Four Heavenly Kings too, according to Jarvi. That betrayer, dropping that news as she was flying out of the office to leave Garmuti alone.

So many profiles. So many inventories to fill. There was always more. Every shift he squared up against stacks of gold sheets and dogskin leathers, piled high into the stratosphere, for the five thousand humans in his charge. He preferred lower animals. Dogs, cats, or even insects. Their merits and sins were straightforward, without intention. But the humans were cunning. Thanks to Lord Buddha (Rest in Nirvana), they had cracked the ethics of karma and made the life of accounting devas as complicated as possible. On this most pious day of the Buddhist calendar, celebrating Lord Gautama Buddha’s birth, enlightenment, and death, they scrambled to make merit like birds flocking to sprinkled corn, scraping every dreg of good karma to make the most of the occasion. Very inconsiderate to the devas filling in their profiles.

His forehead resting on his arms, he stared at his bare feet on the soft golden cloud-carpet. He tapped twice with his toe and the floor rippled transparent to reveal the gargantuan yawn of the Cosmic Ocean below: shimmering black depths of existence with distant foam wakes of the glimmer-scaled Godfish Anon. Out of the Cosmic Ocean rose Mount Sumeru, the centre of the physical, metaphysical, and spiritual universes. From this lowest heaven at its bottom ridge, the mountain gleamed burgundy, its ruby-encrusted side reflecting galaxies of starlight above, the concentric peak vanishing into astronomic skies. Streaking around Mount Sumeru were the blazing orbits of the vehicles of the Navagraha, the Nine Celestial Bodies. Lord Sun’s lion mount was vanishing behind the peak, ushering in the period of night, while Lord Mars’ buffalo was galloping into sight, radiant, glorious.

Garmuti groaned. He was very late to the party. It had been going on for a celestial-hour already. The Anodad Pond at the base of Mount Sumeru danced with strobes and beams of multicoloured light dazzling up the mountain, and Garmuti could hear the pulsing heart of the party even here. Surrounding the lake was the Himmapan Forest, where every leaf was a shade of emerald, lapis lazuli or gold, and its denizens were mystical creatures conceived from Lord Brahma’s imagination. All kinds of creatures would be joining the celebration.

Meanwhile, in some distant dark corner of the Cosmic Ocean, an island huddled at the threat of being swallowed by the glittering waves. The tiny realm of earth.

Why was Garmuti toiling for those mortals? He was always the last deva left in the office.

This was not the life he had been promised. Since he opened his eyes, born fully-formed and gold-garbed as a deva floating on the marble doorstep of the Karma Calculation Department, he had found that he could recall all his past lives as a mortal. In those lifetimes, he/she/they/it had been told that pain no longer existed in heaven. Pleasure was meant to suffuse every corner of the Six Heavens, even in this lowly circle of Catumaharajika.

That wasn’t true. Unpaid overtime still existed. So did FOMO.

Nirvana, though. It was said that Nirvana was a place beyond pleasure or pain. He had asked other devas about it and Jarvi had scoffed at him, saying, “Is heaven not enough for you?”

Garmuti flicked Wandee Kumhom’s karmic profile to be processed. No use complaining. The sooner he completed the profiles, the sooner he could join the party. He was sure the amrita would be all drunken up by then.

New sheet for Samit Jaisook. Garmuti aligned the crystal globe on his desk and saw the human male wearing orange robes walking barefoot on a country road. A monk, wonderful. They did nothing all day long. This should be an easy profile. Samit entered a little government clinic and said that he was donating all his savings to it. Conditional: total renunciation of worldly possessions. Garmuti raised a perfect eyebrow. He supposed a pure-hearted donation was 30 percent extra karma.

He hauled an archaic reference book onto his desk with a mighty thud and began browsing through the karmic tier for the health centre and what bonus it might entail. No conditional bonus for the small, rural hospital.

Except Samit’s karmic profile was fading right before his eyes. Disappearing completely.

But he was still right there in the crystal globe! Serenely smiling as he strolled back to the temple. Only one explanation left. Samit just went straight to Nirvana because of a tiny donation. It wasn’t even in the millions of baht.

Stupid lucky mortal.

This was the tenth case of human enlightenment he had supervised. Every now and then, without rhyme or reason, these people would cheat their way through the system. None of them even had the karma to be a deva. There was no fairness in the universe. Grinding his pearly teeth, Garmuti moved on to the next profile.

After a while came a familiar voice. “Greetings, Garmuti.”

It was Sikhala from the Karma Auditing Department.

“What do you want?” Garmuti had his head down, writing neatly with a red-clayed pencil. “Can’t you see that I’m busy here?”

“You forgot the anumodana merit again. Around a thousand humans under your care said it, I checked.”

Anumodana. A statement of congratulation for another’s merit-making, an appreciation of their good deed: +2 per utterance. The most pedantic of karmic gain.

Garmuti snapped his pencil, crunched the gold sheet in his hand.

“You preta! Why are you telling me now?” he yelled. “I need to redo them.”

His mind beamed with a psychic image of numbers:

Swore in Anger: -50
Total Soul Karma: 1,000,959

Oh no. No, no, no.

It always scared him how rapidly the Karma Machine evaluated the deeds of devas.

For the first time in a celestial-decade, the time it took for a mortal empire to rise, stagnate and become overtaken, he sweated. He could smell it, the mortal stench excreting out, clinging to his luminous skin. Even Sikhala wrinkled her nose.

But frustratingly, she smiled in pity, in her superiority, saying, “Breathe, Garmuti. Be mindful of your breath. Let anger flow over you like a stream of water. Do not be gripped by ephemeral emotions and desire. Fixate instead on their inherent illusory nature. If you let it consume you…”

She continued spouting unsolicited advice to someone drowning. If he fell below a million karmic points, he would descend to humanity, born as a prince, nobility or trust-fund baby. How could he live on their honey instead of soma, their wine instead of amrita? Icky, stinky human reproduction instead of the divine, fragrant coitus? Imagine the back pain, imagine the piss and shit, the horror of aging or giving birth. He gagged at the thought of having to wipe his own ass.

Garmuti wrested back control and bit down his panic. He smiled and returned gracefully, “I am sorry for my outburst. I will amend my mistakes as quickly as I can. Please don’t wait on my behalf. You will miss the party. I will file this myself.”

Showed Remorse: +10
Total Soul Karma: 1,000,969

Sikhala shook her head, resplendent headdress tinkling. “That is kind of you, but don’t worry. I will be here for you. We will ensure that these profiles are accurate as possible, for the sake of the mortals who rely on us.”

Garmuti bit his tongue to stop another outburst. Why must he be paired up with this smug devi? The snake Jarvi boasted that her auditor was so good she could brush aside the karmic sins of politicians and no one had ever come to report or punish her.

A celestial-hour of intense, undistracted suffering later, he carried his audited stacks of gold and leather, and swooped toward the hall of the Lord of Karma, Lord Yama. His fingers and shoulders were cramped from rewriting the karmic profiles. Bodily aches, another symptom of looming mortality. There was no such thing as making amendments on the karmic profiles, so he had had to fill them from scratch. Any strange formatting or unsystematic scribbles would make the Karma Machine burp out errors in the dogskin ledgers. When each soul faced judgement after death, the Lord of Karma must be able to announce their verdict with the stern, unhesitating gravity of a judge. If his ledgers made Lord Yama stumble, he would face a direct punishment from a superior, more severe than any automatic penalty. He might be born an ordinary human with inherited debt.

He dove toward a cave at the base of Mount Sumeru and zoomed through the melting diamond walls. Crystalline stalactites gradually gave way to carved formations that held dancing fires, spraying prismatic shades across the floor. In the hollow belly of the mountain gaped the Karmic Archive, shelves containing a near infinite number of dogskin ledgers, as many rows as there were varieties of organisms, as high as the history of the universe, as long as the breadth of the galaxy.

At the unseen centre of the archive, the Karma Machine was the heart of the cosmos. It hummed constantly, vibrating the archive, each oscillation arranging the atoms of the ledgers to record the deeds of all beings, occasionally overridden by the devas’ karmic reports. Ledgers were flying off the shelves in an unceasing stream, each summoning a death of a mortal, conjured up into the judgement hall of Lord Yama to be read and delivered the verdict of their reincarnations.

No one knew the workings of the Karma Machine nor its creation. They said it existed before the laws of gravity or time, its truth so fundamental, it outlasted entire universes. They said Mount Sumeru was formed when the elementary dust of the big bang coalesced around the Karma Machine. Even the Lord of Karma himself was subject to its rulings, a mere reader of its decrees.

Garmuti never swung around to see it.

Dodging the swirling books, Garmuti descended toward the humongous IN tray where an army of bookkeeping devas from a hundred worlds were delivering the deeds of sentient beings. The tray was more like a starry pit with its own gravitational pull, leading to the sorting pipes that run through the entire library, ending at the calculating heart of the Karma Machine. He dumped his documents in its general direction and flew out without another glance.

If he was lucky, he could make it to the Visakha Puja party in time.

Second Noble Truth:
Suffering Has a Cause

Under the careening vehicles of the celestial lords, Anodad Pond was a glittering expanse in the centre of the Himmapan Forest, where a single gulp of the lucid, glacial-blue waters could quench a mortal’s thirst for a year.

Garmuti arrived too late to witness the duel between Lord Garuda and a King Naga. The muscular torso of Lord Garuda was splattered with blood, and he leisurely pecked at the snakelike hood of the naga with his beak, the talons of his feet clutching at the scaled ravages of the serpent’s huge body. With each mighty arm around a giggling deva and devi, he was in conversation with Lord Indra, the emerald-skinned king of the celestials, among other dignitaries descended from Daowadueng Heaven.

Garmuti arrived too late to watch the apsara cabaret or a host of kinnaras performing their titillating burlesque. The latter was always his personal highlight, to see the tease of the female kinnarees’ winged, feathered thighs and backward-bending knees. Now their bejewelled bridles, girdles and bras were strewn all about the diamond-dewed grass. Hand in hand with deva or devi, the naked half-bird-half-humans flew giggling into private corners of clouds or canopies. Others had already begun copulating, some so fiercely that the branches broke and they fell squirming and moaning on the ground, or scattered their clouds in their aerial acrobatics across the green-streaked sky. Once the mythical kinnaras were spent, the devas were not yet satisfied so they drifted deeper into the woods in pairs, threes or fives. The musk of their orgy bloomed like thick, fragrant jasmine, their fluids and semen sweet as syrup. Devas mated only for pleasure.

Garmuti arrived too late for the once-a-century fruiting of the nareepol tree, where the gnarled ancient branches sprouted fruits in the shape of women. The ripe ones looked like curvaceous women, the unripe like girls on the brink of adolescence, the overripe like crones with fragile, wrinkled skin. But the tree was now bare, its base sprawling with devas murmuring with glazed eyes, their minds exploring the most distant reaches of the highest heaven. It was said that the riper the nareepol, the more potent the psychedelic effect, while the fresher ones lent the trip a sharper texture for the edgier devas who wanted to taste the cousin of pain.

He arrived in time only to see a few ugly, fanged asuras unenthusiastically twirling fire and lightning. A couple of instrumental gandharvas plucking trance tunes of the after-after-afterparty. And the devas who gathered on the grass chatting with each other, or the lame handful who listened quietly to Lord Buddha’s sermons in a distant corner, far, far away from the orgy, preached by a bodhisattva who had descended from an even higher heaven.

Of course, Sikhala was there, sitting with palms together at her chest in a wai, basking in the goodly light of dharma. She didn’t care about being late because the bodhisattva would be droning until Lord Sun’s gleaming chariot swung around Mount Sumeru.

She saw him arriving. He looked away, but too late, she was already flying over.

“I’m sorry. It was my fault for keeping you.” Sikhala approached with an apologetic smile. “Shall we go to the sermon?”

“Uhh, I’m thinking of going that way,” Garmuti said, already fleeing.

“You must not get too addicted to pleasure,” she called after him, “For it is only ephemeral fulfilment, a mere illusion of satiety that lasts only until the next desire takes hold and the cycle of suffering—”

“What took you so long?” called someone from a group of devas sitting on a mat. It was Jarvi waving him over. “Come join! My friend from the Karmic Justice Department got some goodies from the mortal world. They’re so quaint and exotic.”

Garmuti swooped in immediately and sat down with the assembled group. There were plates of grilled chicken, a rack of crispy pork, boiled prawns, tangerines, dragonfruits and bananas, bottles of rice wine and even a syrupy, fizzy red Fanta that tasted like a mockery of soma. Might as well have some small consolation, even if it was a meagre mortal’s meal.

His stomach growled. He tried his best to mask his horror at the return of the oldest mortal desire. Devas ate for pleasure, for gastronomic transcendence, not something so base as hunger or sustenance.

But before he realised it, he was gorging himself with the chicken, the pork, the prawns, their savoury, fishy stink assailing his delicate nose, juices running down his chin, but he could not help it.

“Oh my, are you…hungry?” said a beautiful devi in the group in bemusement. Her headdress was a filigreed, multi-tiered spire. She wore so many chest-chains they looked like a golden suit of armour clinking over her breasts, her neck heavy with jewellery. Her karmic score must be very high, maybe close to five million, verging on the Daowadueng Heaven. “Nice to meet you, my name is Shantarni.”

“Sorry,” he said, mouth full, chewing. “I’m Garmuti.”

“Indra bless, you eat like a human!” Jarvi exclaimed, daintily stripping fibres from tangerine flesh. She turned her slitted eyes toward her friend from the Karmic Justice Department. “How generous of you to share with us your bounty from the mortal world.”

He was one of those stoic deliverers of karma, strong-jawed, his headdress a neat and practical frame around his face. “Just a perk of the job. Mortals will do anything to avoid their karmic punishment. They gave these offerings to atone for their sins.”

“How very admirable of you to extend Lord Yama’s reach into the mortal world. They must be some truly heinous individuals that they were judged before they die. I wonder, did they still get the karma they deserve?”

The stony-faced punisher sliced his eyes at her. “Of course. Struck by lightning and smoking crisp in Lord Yama’s hall. How else could I clear the offerings through heaven’s customs otherwise? Eat up, newcomer. You work at the same place as Jarvi?”

Garmuti nodded, tried to swallow, and quickly realised he was not used to the greasy physicality of mortal’s food that lodged in his throat. He coughed, wheezed, and reached for the rice wine to wash it down, only to find that the cheap offering from the 7-Eleven convenience store burned his throat and nose. He spluttered, trying not to spatter bits of partially chewed food everywhere.

He reached for the crystal flask lying next to Jarvi. It contained the amrita. The devi made no move to help him, stifling her laughter with a hand over her mouth. “Don’t waste the amrita. We can’t just trick the asuras to help us churn the Ocean of Milk again!”

Instead, it was the high-ranking devi who fetched it, unstopped it and gave it to him.

He drank the elixir gratefully, the liquid ecstasy that awakened every tingling sensation in his mouth, washing away the offerings inflicted by rot and decay, overwhelming the profane taste with sheer bliss and he swallowed the mouthful, gasping, drooling mouth liquid. Saliva, that was what it was called. Another mark of mortals. He slurped it back into his mouth.

“You must excuse Garmuti, Lady Shantarni,” said Jarvi. “He has a soft spot for humans. He considers it a privilege to eat mortal foods. He takes such good care of his mortals, gives them so much attention to detail that he made sure to write up each karmic profile at least three times before submitting them to the Karma Machine.”

Garmuti stared at the sweetly smiling Jarvi and wondered how many karmic points were being deducted by her sardonic lies. It was a major offence, breaking the Five Precepts, for something so petty.

“That isn’t true, Lady Shantarni,” he said, wiping his mouth. “I never make a mistake because I don’t want to make the poor mortals suffer further with their existence.”

Told a Boldfaced Lie to One’s Superior: -750
Conditional: To Save Face and Avoid Shame: -100
Total Soul Karma: 1,000,119

Wait, he had way more to lose. Why was he being pulled into Jarvi’s game? Even the devi was staring at him in pleasant surprise. Was this her plan?

But Shantarni smiled at him, nodding. “That is a noble sentiment, Garmuti. Would you accompany me to get some soma? I believe I also have another flask of amrita in my personal storage.”

“I-I would be honoured.” Blinking, he stood up and followed the swaying saunter of the devi. Blades of grass sang against their feet. Strange that she chose to walk but he appreciated the rhythm of her buttocks, the lustrous silk about her thighs, its many slits whispering hints of what they concealed. He cast a backward glance to witness the shards of Jarvi’s broken smile, scattered about her face. He sniggered.

Felt Satisfaction at Another’s Pain: -10
Total Soul Karma: 1,000,109

He grimaced just in time for Shantarni to turn to him. She gave him a bemused look. “I believe we are not properly introduced. I am the assistant of Lord Vessavana. His personal secretary, some might say, I am the devi stationed in front of his office.”

He gaped. “Lord Vessavana? One of the Four Heavenly Kings?”

“That very same. And you work at the Thailand Division of the Karma Calculation Department.”

“Yes…?” he said, suddenly engulfed by an impending dread. How did she know? They had moved away from the hearing of Jarvi when Shantarni turned toward him. She was incredibly beautiful and he tried to not look at her pink nipple, peeking between the golden chains.

Her eyes swallowed him in their azure depths. “You are close to falling.”

“How did you know?” Garmuti resisted the urge to smell his armpits. He had powdered himself with perfumed marble dust before coming to the party. How could his mortal-stink leak out?

“It’s your jewellery, among other things. They are becoming tarnished. Darkened. How many more karmic points before you fall, I wonder?”

Garmuti stiffened, his voice coming out as a strangled cry. “Not many. Not many at all. What should I do?”

“When is your next karmic compensation?”

“When Lord Jupiter’s stag aligns with Lord Mercury’s elephant… I will not last that long.”

“You poor karmic counters of heaven, carrying the cogs of the cosmos. How little are you regarded…” She made a thoughtful sound. “I can help you.”

He felt ready to grovel, to cling to her feet so he wouldn’t slip between the cracks of heaven. “What can I do? I’ll do anything.”

“I want you to help my friend. She was a devi once but now her soul has been born as a man. Let’s call him Opa. Even now, he is so pretty. I want you to bring their soul back to Catumaharajika Heaven and I will spare you any karma I can.”

They continued walking but might as well have been floating, as he no longer felt his legs. The gravity of her request took a long time to find its way into his skull.

“You want me to alter their karmic profile? But I can’t commit anymore sin. I’ll fall before I can deliver the documents.”

“I have prepared a major offering platter to give to Lord Indra on the behalf of Lord Vessavana on this Visakha Puja Day. At my discretion, I may add a commendation to a deva of exceptional virtue to receive a share of merit. Just don’t forget to say anumodana to receive your share.”

Garmuti could feel sweat breaking out of his skin. “What about the Auditing Department?”

She leaned closer and the pearly aura of her purity bathed over him, her breath smelling like newly bloomed lotus. “I hold the seal of Lord Vessavana. Do you think they’ll have the nerve to question an officiated document?”

His face felt hot. His crotch felt hot. “But the Karma Machine…”

Her lips brushed his ear like a feather falling from a higher heaven. “It will work. The Karma Machine relies on inputs; it is more fallible than you think. Trust me, I have done this before.”

He swallowed and thought how he would fill the gold sheet with a deed he’d never observed from the crystal ball. He also had to find out what Opa’s real name was. His soul might be under his care. If not, he would probably have to slip a fake profile sheet into some other deva’s pile with the official stamp from Shantarni and…

Contemplating on Committing a Cosmic Fraud (Counting): -3, -6…
Total Soul Karma: 1,000,100

“Deal!” Garmuti blurted, his heart fluttering at the rapidly accumulating sin.

Shantarni’s smile could light up stars with its radiance. “Excellent. Now don’t move, don’t even think. I shall complete the offering immediately.”

As she flew toward Lord Indra, Garmuti stood in meditation for the first time in what must have been forever, forcing himself to stop his thoughts from roaming. When he saw Lord Indra extending his hand to accept Shantarni’s offering of a golden wax statue, exquisitely carved in the shape of a lion-elephant, Garmuti put his palms together in a wai and whispered, “Anumodana.”

Mentioned in a Divine Karmic Offering: +100,000
Visakha Puja Bonus (x0.7): +70,000
Total Soul Karma: 1,170,100

The influx of karma was like a shower of auroral rays, purging away all impurities, collapsing his knees in a crash of pleasure. He shivered in his new radiant skin, rendered clean with the karmic worth of a monk’s life dedicated to sermons and meditation. That was much more than his karmic compensation.

Oh, he was so back.

Third Noble Truth:
Suffering Can End

Back under the sparkling chandelier of his office, Garmuti found good news and bad news.

Luckily, he was indeed in charge of Opa’s account.

But watching over his shoulder was sanctimonious Sikhala. The kind of auditor who would question outstanding items, even when verified by the seal of Lord Vessavana.

He had to be subtle with this…adjustment.

Rigging some conditional bonuses in Opa’s profile would be the easiest way to go about it. Easiest meaning also the least amount of sin being inflicted upon himself. Maliciously tinkering with the cosmic system would set him back 20,000 points, whereas maliciously submitting significantly altered record would be 55,000 points. What was the point of ruining his reputation if he ended up right where he was, perched on the edge of falling, or worse?

He found himself thinking a lot about Shantarni. He realised he missed her. It would be forever until the next party. So, he asked her to meet him in the Himmapan Forest during his break, claiming to want to run some ideas by her, but really only so he could see her again.

“I am scared of being caught,” Garmuti confessed while walking through the dappled glades under the purple beam of Lord Saturn soaring on his tiger mount. No karmic deduction, because it was not thoroughly a lie. “My auditor is a snitch. The document won’t get through to the Karma Machine and they will find out your involvement through the seal. We will be reborn as earthworms.”

Shantarni sighed. “You can be mysterious with instructions for the Karma Machine. Influence its calculations.”

“How so?” he asked, despite already knowing. He loved hearing her talk.

“Haven’t you implemented bodhisattva-lifetimes before? You can add a karmic multiplier across the entire lifetime, multiplied by one to ten. I believe it works retroactively too, converting an ordinary life into context for enlightenment.”

“Does this bypass the auditor?”

“Don’t you know anything about your job? Bodhisattva-lifetimes are divined by the oracles at the Department of Fates. It’s beyond the authority of the Karma Auditing Department. Just forge the paperwork and stamp the seal. Quick, before Opa dies. It’s already been ten years on earth and I’ve sent him a dream prophecy, a vision of the Avici Hell. He’s doing whatever he can so he won’t be damned. He’s already ordained as a monk.”

Perhaps he had made himself appear too stupid, so he shifted to a different topic. “There’s something I have always wondered. Why can’t we tune the Karma Machine so the mortals’ karma is displayed like the deva?”

She stared at him in disbelief. “Do you trust the mortals with that knowledge? Heaven will be overcrowded if they can game the system! It is bad enough that Lord Buddha gave away the Five Precepts and Eightfold Path after his enlightenment. Honestly, I am surprised they aren’t following his teachings much more closely.”

“But why do we need to work for these humans? We’re higher, wiser, better-looking. Doesn’t the Karma Machine already judge everything that happens? Why do we need to double-check everything?”

“Only some things have intrinsic moral values. The Buddha of each cycle also cultivated a slightly different tradition of Buddhism. So some things are relativistic. For example, in this aeon, we have sacred sites, specific mantras, anumodana, and so on. These karmic benefits are to be calculated by hand. If you’ve been a deva as long as I have, you’ll know that the universe is vast and ancient. Humanity is not the only species with a high potential for enlightenment. Now I really have to go. Lord Vessavana will be looking for me.”

She took off, flying toward the golden palace on the cloud, visible even from the base of Mount Sumeru. That whole conspiratorial conversation cost 2,000 karmic points, but for him, it was worth it.

After that break, which took an entire mortal-year, Garmuti returned to the office to learn that Sikhala was gone. Ascended. Not just ascending to a higher heaven either but ascended. Gone without a trace. To Nirvana.

This had never happened before. Or it did and no one ever spoke of it. The whole office pretended nothing happened, too envious to acknowledge the occasion. When Garmuti asked Jarvi, she muttered through her teeth, “Good for her. Anumodana.”

It was so unfair that such an obnoxious devi could ascend while hardworking devas like him had to toil until the end of time. Surely, Nirvana must be a random lottery draw from some higher heaven. There was no mention of it in any orientation training, but then again, neither were the fifth and sixth heavens. Only myths that they existed. None of the devas seemed to know much about Nirvana either, or they were keeping the knowledge a secret.

To be fair, if he ever found a way to Nirvana, he wouldn’t tell a soul either.

The replacement for Sikhala was a round-faced deva that Garmuti liked instantly. By way of introduction, he asked Garmuti to always submit his profiles before Lord Moon came around Mount Sumeru. “I must get to this apsara cabaret at this celestial club,” he said. “Come with me after work tonight. I’ll introduce you to my favourite dancers. Their lap dances, oh Indra, they are divine!”

Garmuti was locked in. Moving like a blur. His red-clayed pencil flying over sheet after sheet. A policymaker who was so responsible with her budget allocation that Garmuti would need a library of reference books to go through her spreadsheet. Why should she get extra karma since it’s her job anyway? He wouldn’t get any for his trouble. Skip. Now a CEO who donated a million baht in crypto to join an exclusive Michelin-starred dinner reserved for top ten donors. What was the campaign for? Who cares. A donation was a donation, a nice, simple conversion. Congratulations on a well-earned 100,000 karma!

In the wink of a single mortal-day, mortal-day, he had all his accounts audited and verified, including Opa’s documents, guaranteed with ten times karmic multiplier. He had never finished his shift so quickly before. It was dizzying to be freed from the tyranny of Sikhala. It was the right of every being to be emancipated from office slavery. Lord Sun’s chariot still wheeled on this side of Mount Sumeru as he dumped the stack into the IN tray.

156 Instances of Negligence in Cosmic Duty: -78,000
Total Soul Karma: 1,079,045

Malicious Forgery of Documents: -5,000
Total Soul Karma: 1,074,045

Malicious Abuse of Bodhisattva-Lifetime: -25,000
Total Soul Karma: 1,049,045

He almost fell into the vacuum hole himself. It might’ve been better that way. An eyewatering 500 karma per error? He didn’t know an error cost this much. He’d never made a mistake before. Sikhala wouldn’t let him.

Over a hundred thousand karma, gone in a blink of an eye… He deserved a treat for such woe, he decided, as he meekly joined his new auditor in the revelry.

Within moments, Garmuti forgot what had bothered him. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t been to this celestial club before. The wondrous lights, the gandharvas’ tunes, the apsaras’ hips and bosoms. Garmuti laughed at the glorious sights, just as they blinded an ascetic next to him who was visiting the realm in his astral body, shattering his jhana meditation, ejecting him back to his mortal body, dooming his decades of abstinence for spiritual purity.

But despite the erotic excess on display, Garmuti could only think about the figure of a single body, caught in glimpses and gasps, barely covered by those silks and golden chains.

He left the club early and flew to the Himmapan Forest to collect a spectrum of flowers from the polychromatic vines.

It took much longer than he thought. He kept on getting distracted by the bathing kinnarees.

When he was done, his next shift was soon starting. With a dazzling bouquet in hand, Garmuti waited awkwardly in a queue to seek an audience with the secretary of Lord Vessavana. The whole hallway might be made of solid gold interspersed with diamond veins, but there was nothing to pass the time in the gleaming palace except meta-dimensional murals and elevator music. By the time earth’s oceans had risen by half a centimeter, he was finally the next in the line, and already, the queue stretched behind him all the way through the corridor. How many contracts and favours was Shantarni juggling?

She sat radiant behind a grand marble desk in the antechamber, curtained by stacks of paperwork, dwarfed by the massive door to the throne room behind her. She looked exhausted, stamping sheet after sheet.

Garmuti flew into the chamber, arms wide and flexing to fill out his bicep bangles, announcing, “Lady Shantarni, I have done what you’ve asked!”

She watched three towers of documents collapse from the gust of his arrival. “I know. Where have you been?”

Her tone made him shiver. Weakly, he offered the bouquet. “I’ve been collecting these flowers for you.”

With a cursory smile, she put it aside on her papers. “You put the highest grade of bodhisattva-lifetime for Opa, didn’t you?”

“Yes. Only the best for your friend! Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“No. Well, it depends, doesn’t it?” She rubbed her forehead. “Didn’t you look at his life before you submitted the paperwork? As a monk, he started going on an international enlightenment tour, giving sermons on the national TV of a dozen countries. He set up charities to help climate refugees and war orphans. He was so handsome he converted hundreds of new Buddhists. He was close to become a bodhisattva without your help, would have been reincarnated as a deva. But now because of your intervention, he’s reborn in Daowadueng Heaven.”

“Oh.” Garmuti adjusted his headdress. How could he know that humans could go to such lengths of virtue? Frankly he didn’t even know what Opa looked like. “But your friend must remember you now, right? Can’t he visit you in Catumaharajika even if we can’t visit them?”

She shook her head, sighing. “Time is different between realms. A minute there is an hour here. And she was born as an attendant serving the palace of the gods, assigned to Lord Shiva. She can’t come and go as she pleases. I always have to wait to be in her company. Not to mention that she is a higher order of devi, closer to a deity. The next time we meet it won’t be the same. What will she think of me?” She put her head in both her hands, peering at him between her fingers. “Do you understand any of this?”

Did he look blank to her? He resummoned his disappointment for missing the Visakha Puja party and nodded mournfully.

“No, you don’t get it.” Shantarni stared at him now in a half-veiled-light way that made his heart rock. “Have you ever truly loved someone?”

“Of course. I was married in past lives too, you know.”

“You really don’t get it,” she remarked, but her face had changed. She seemed to be thinking. He met her eyes, blue as Anodad Pond under Lord Venus’s passage, and then she gave him a smile that cracked the diamond surface of his heart. “But perhaps I can teach you. Meet me after work.”

Arrived Late to Cosmic Duty: -1,000
17 Instances of Negligence in Cosmic Duty: -8,500
Total Soul Karma: 1,039,545

Garmuti did his best to be thorough with the profiles but his brain was mired by her smile, so distracted by desire he couldn’t sit still.

He had dated hundreds of times, if not thousands, both deva and devi, but none of them had taken his whole attention like Shantarni. She was the most beautiful devi he had ever seen and he felt like a mortal yearning for heaven. Her presence neutered the delights of divine sweetmeats, drained amrita of its savour, turned the thunderous re-enactment of Ramayana drab and dreary in comparison to her side profile beside him. He imagined their flight back to her abode, hand in hand, and the rest of the theatre became anguish.

Was this finally…love?

Her home was much like his, a golden pavilion on the cloud, except his view was the emptiness of the Cosmic Ocean and hers was the Himmapan Forest, bathed by the perfumes of endless blossoming, a constant, fragrant mist. They alighted on the edge of her bed and she told him to wait as she climbed under the gossamer canopy. Garmuti swallowed as her lithe silhouette positioned herself, chains chiming with each movement. She didn’t need to get changed. There wasn’t much to begin with.

“You may come in.”

She luxuriated on purple and gold sheets, back partially arched, legs frustratingly crossed. Her eyes like slitted night, her lips parted, cooing:

“Can I ask you something, Garmuti?”

“Yes, anything,” he gasped.

“Will you cheat heaven again for me?”

“Yes, easy!” Some of the golden chains had fallen in the valley between her breasts.

“Will you use your powerful office to lift my profile high into Daowadueng Heaven?”

“Of course, yes. Anything for you.” Slips of silk spilled around her thighs, a maddening strip covering her crotch.

“Thank you, Garmuti,” she purred. “Well, you’ve disappointed me with false hopes. Now you’d better make it up to me.”

She opened her legs, the little silk falling, revealing an orchid that bloomed more beautifully than any that adorned the Himmapan Forest. Garmuti crawled toward her on his hands and knees, like a mortal toward food. Yes, that was how it felt. That same hunger. He stroked her smooth, supple thighs, ran his hands along the pearly, unblemished skin. Her jasmine musk made his crotch tighten, so did her delicious sigh, her flushed face, long lashes encrusted with glittering gems.

But her eyes. They were fixated at him, watching.

“One moment,” she said, sitting up, folding her legs.

Garmuti swallowed. “Huh?”

“I changed my mind. Let’s continue later.”

“What? Why?”

She turned aside, already drifting away. “A sudden thought occurred to me. It makes me uncertain.”

“About what, the fraud? I told you I will do it. Don’t you trust me?”

“It’s not about trust but proof. Can you do it? You might fall before you make it happen.”

“Of course, I can do it! Come back.”

But she had already left the canopy, a delightful figure behind the veil. “Prove it to me. Do me the favour first, then we may continue.”

He had a fistful of bedsheet in his hand. “Why do you want to go to Daowadueng so badly anyway?”

“Oh?” The shadow of her head angled back at him. “Well, I suppose that’s where my soulmate is. You know her. You lifted her there yourself. Make it up to me.”

“Soulmate?” Garmuti seized his chest, a twinge from the crack she’d left on his diamond heart. All this time, she belonged to someone else. She had just been playing with him?

“No! I’m done. Find yourself another fool.” He stormed out of the gossamer sanctuary, ripping through it, and streaked out of her abode like a comet, flying across the sky with such speed his skin warmed red from air friction. The denied pleasure choked his balls. It also smothered his chest, drowned his heart, flooded his throat, but could not overflow because devas may weep, but not cry.

In all his heavenly existence, he had never felt anything so close to pain.

Fourth Noble Truth:
There is a Path to End Suffering

No more.

No more of this endless chase. The wishing and their unfulfillment. No more suffering from unmet desires.

Garmuti was so sick and tired of love, of the humiliation. He wanted escape. He wanted peace. He yearned for Nirvana. He didn’t belong in this lower heaven.

His life had also become a limbo of numbers, a blur on the torturous grind. He focused his attentions on his bookkeeping to avoid falling. He missed Sikhala. Life was hard when you couldn’t trust your auditor to do a good job. His karmic compensations could barely keep up with his mistakes. If only Lord Shiva would go on a rampage to scour the world and drive humanity extinct. Then he wouldn’t have to work anymore. But unfortunately, the gods had mellowed out.

A long time ago, he had heard a bodhisattva say that Nirvana existed beyond even the highest of the Six Heavens. But to ascend to Daowadueng Heaven, a deva needed at least five million karmic points. He had no idea how much merit would be required to get to Yama, Tusita, and the other two unnamed heavens beyond.

But a bodhisattva. They would know the way. That was how Sikhala did it, right?

When Lord Gautama Buddha was enlightened, he visited Daowadueng Heaven to give a grand sermon, opening the eyes of all divine beings to the possibility of Nirvana. Following this example, a rotation of bodhisattvas sat cross-legged in one corner of the break room, observing the bustle with the infuriating serenity of office shrinks.

The bodhisattva smiled at Garmuti beatifically as he approached, shaved head and orange robe resplendent. Out of the corner of his eyes, Garmuti spied his colleagues gathered around the soma cooler, jerking a thumb at him, already gossiping. The bodhisattva took one glimpse into his soul and spoke, “It is more difficult for a blessed deva to achieve Nirvana than a lowly human because—”

“Come on, that’s impossible,” Garmuti interrupted. “We are higher beings, with higher minds and better cognition. We are also much better looking, and stronger. They aspire to be like us…” He continued ranting for an entire lunar cycle, finishing angrily with, “…and why am I not good enough for her?”

The bodhisattva listened with a mother’s love and patience before speaking again. “It is more difficult for a blessed deva to achieve Nirvana than a lowly human because a human walks the middle path between pleasure and pain. As Lord Buddha once said, enlightenment comes neither through self-indulgence or self-denial, but an awareness of desire as the originator of suffering. The sooner you are aware of this ultimate truth, the sooner you can be released from the defilement of desire.”

Garmuti thought about it. “So you’re saying that the human experience is the secret to enlightenment. Why didn’t you say so from the beginning?”

He flew back to his desk. Not to work, of course, but to slip into a state of meditation to relive his past lives as a mortal.

Did anyone think he would spend millennia in mindful meditation, each moment denying all the heavenly pleasures that lay within literal reach?

There had to be an easier way.

Most of his past lives were the uneventful living of billionaires where it was logical to hedge one’s bets and bankroll his/her/their way into a better afterlife. It was altruistically fashionable to donate an annual ten million baht toward the Siriraj Hospital for tax refunds. The mortals Garmuti had been didn’t know it then, but Siriraj Hospital provided one of the biggest karmic bonuses in the world, because it was endorsed by all the great Buddhist institutions.

But the life he found the most interesting was that of a tech entrepreneur who had changed the world. Garmuti had been an ambitious American who converted to Buddhism when his soul was besieged with an existential crisis. Like all builders of empires, shady conducts hounded him, leading him to be knocked a few rungs down the reincarnation ladder after he died from cancer.

Day after day, especially during office hours, Garmuti went about his routine in a half trance, partially reliving his past life to absorb the wonderful and complex mind of this great inventor. Initially, it was inspiring to view the world in search for the potential it could become, but soon his thoughts became plagued with the burdens of a protagonist: to disrupt, to innovate, to synergise. In such a state, he became deeply dissatisfied with the monotony of his life as a deva. He roamed like a frustrated predator, seeking work processes to streamline. The anumodana tradition became a pain point that entered his scrutiny. So archaic and arcane, it was incredible no one had thought to create a fix to save millions of accumulated bookkeeping hours.

If the Karma Machine worked like a quantum computer that used ledgers as the database to process all sentient souls, surely an app could be implemented to access and alter the data in real time.

That was how Garmuti came up with the Anumodana Tax.

In principle, anumodana was a simple unconditional rule that required no supervision. No matter the context, the occasion, the timing, as long as anumodana was uttered in attribution to a good deed, the speaker would receive +2 karmic points.

If nothing else, his brief relationship with Shantarni had made him realise that the edicts of the Karma Machine were not preordained but alterable. Garmuti could rewrite this quaint tradition of the current aeon into a universal law of the Karma Machine.

So efficient! Who cared about loopholes? If someone was smart enough to find them, they should be rewarded for it.

Contemplation on Committing a Cosmic Fraud(?): -258
Total Soul Karma: 1,014,120

Now, imagine if Garmuti got a karmic commission as the patented inventor of this app. There were around 100 million Theravada Buddhists in the world. If half of them said anumodana daily… No, actually, more like 10 percent were so devout. That would be around +20,000,000 karmic points transferred per mortal-day, +7,300,000,000 per mortal-year. Mortal-year. All that karmic merit changing hands. If only he could tap a tiny fraction of it.

Garmuti leaned back in his crystal ergonomic chair, grinning. And the best thing? It would not even be considered a sin since he was improving the lives of all devas and mortals.

Self-Delusion from Pride: -5
Total Soul Karma: 1,014,115

All he needed was Lord Vessavana’s seal…

Honestly, it could be the seal of any of the Four Heavenly Kings. He could swoop into one of their secretaries’ offices and simply ask for the permission to shift the ethical foundations of the universe.

Who was he kidding? Not only would they punish him to be reborn as a stray dog, they would also steal the idea for themselves.

Only she would listen. He would have to play into her hands again.

But then again, he might also finally get laid.

On one of his slower days, he wrote the code for the app on a stack of gold sheets and flew to the palace of Lord Vessavana. Three crops of rice had grown and perished in the mortal world before he was granted an audience with Shantarni.

She did not look up from her paperwork as he flew up to her desk. Or even when he bowed with his hands in front of his chest in a wai.

“I’d like to file a patent,” he announced.

“What?”

Did he really utter a human concept? He was about to curse himself until he realised that it was also a stupid human concept that would be the tool for his ascension. “I mean, I would like to propose a way we can both gain passive karma to ascend to the Daowadueng Heaven.”

She was looking at him now, feigning disinterest with eyes like glacial ice. Still heartachingly beautiful.

“I propose to add a new universal law into the Karma Machine.” He showed her the neat stack of gold leaves, the codes for the app. “Uttering anumodana under the right conditions shall result in an intrinsic karmic merit. There shall be no need for any manual input by us devas.”

There were ripples beneath her radiant face, crooking her eyebrow. Flickers of a scheme. She said, “Tell me more.”

“As a patented inventor, I shall receive an infinitesimal point-zero-one percent of each karma received by these transactions.”

 He had already made his calculation. He would receive +730,000 passive karma per mortal-year. That meant he would reach Daowadueng Heaven in six mortal-years, a mere celestial moment. The aeon would barely blink its eye before he was soaring through all the layers of heaven to arrive at Nirvana.

“You may,” Shantarni said, “As long as you add my name for half your share of karma too.”

“Already done.” He flicked through the stacks to show her the relevant line of code. Signifiers for Garmuti and Shantarni, next to each other, each reaping half the skimming. “All I need now is your seal.”

They exchanged a smile. Had they been lovers and rivals in some other reincarnation, linked through the machinations of karma? Could a soul have more than one soulmate?

“One more condition then,” Shantarni said. “End my share at 10,000,000. You may take your full cut from then on.”

“Why?”

“Did you see the line of devas waiting to strike a deal? Lord Vessavana is too busy pleasing the deities of Daowadueng, so there is only me. My karmic growth is stagnant as I try to maintain all the contracts and favours. I can only balance my losses with my gains. It is the burdensome power of my station. I want to sit comfortably in Daowadueng and never fear of falling back to this hell ever again.”

“Don’t you want to go to Nirvana with me?”

“Some say it already exists within one’s heart.” She smiled and stamped the glistening red seal.

“So, do you want to grab dinner tonight?”

“I’m busy,” she said, handing back the documents.

“Maybe later then?”

“I will be busy.”

Rejection stung less when you were soaring on karma. After filing the document, his aura intensified with every passing day. His headdress bloomed an additional tier and gemstones sprouted among its nooks and crannies. His skin brightened, his eyes became opalescent and his physique grew even more sculpted and perfect, accentuated by golden chains and bangles. Finally, his colleagues began to notice.

“What are you up to these days?” Jarvi said, scowling. “Why are you so luminous all of a sudden?”

“I saw the light of Lord Buddha’s dharma.” Garmuti smiled with shining teeth. “You should try it sometime.”

Even the penalty from the lie didn’t hurt as much.

Total Soul Karma: 5,000,000
Ascending to Tavatimsa Heaven

Tavatimsa? Oh of course, that was the universal name for Daowadueng.

For Garmuti, ascension felt like becoming translated into rays of prismatic light, streaking up the height of Mount Sumeru like photons cast from the sun. He was reformed on the cloud at the peak of the universal mountain, upon which stood glorious Trai Trueng, the City of Deities, where music flowed as naturally as air. At its centre was Lord Indra’s Palace, as great as the tallest mountain on earth, composed entirely of diamonds, pearls, lapis lazuli and other gemstones.

Below him, the palaces of the Four Heavenly Kings and their departments were like toys. The Nine Celestial Bodies were balls of coloured lights. He could see the Cosmic Wall that circled the edge of the Cosmic Ocean, keeping the water contained like a gigantic tub. Scattered about like pebbles in a pond were hundreds of mortal worlds.

For the next few weeks? Months? It was hard to tell the time with the sun and moon orbiting under his feet. Garmuti spent his existence as a servant scurrying about the dazzling hallways of Lord Indra’s palace, polishing every bejewelled surface or doing the bidding of the deities who strode the halls. Shantarni had become a handmaiden within the palace and three times they had crossed paths as underlings running between chores. She ignored him completely, always walking hand in hand with another devi, always giggling, exuding rays of sunshine between them. Her soulmate. The fire of jealousy burned within Garmuti’s chest but he reminded himself that it would not be long before he would ascend past her.

He didn’t need a soulmate where he was heading.

Total Soul Karma: 50,000,000
Ascending to Yama Heaven

This heaven existed so far above Mount Sumeru that everything was pitch-black. Mount Sumeru, the Cosmic Ocean and the orbiting Celestial Lords, they were reduced to one tiny dot below him. His feet touched the soft wispy threads of space dust. Upon them grew a sea of star-flowers sown across the whole sky. Sometimes they bloomed bright like tiny pockets of day, other times their petals folded to hold secret their illumination like a shy moon.

He and the other denizens sojourned like pilgrims in the dark, eating these specks of light. The blooming star-flowers tasted like summer memories with your mother at the end of a holiday, the closed ones like your final nights in the arms of your child. With each careful step, they gave birth to newborn stars.

Total Soul Karma: 500,000,000
Ascending to Tusita Heaven

The heaven remained black as a void, but everything and everyone was radiant with shades of swirling nebulae. These were the luminous bodies of bodhisattva who remained, not yet departing to Nirvana in order to guide the hapless souls on earth. It was also the realm of future Buddhas, infinite souls in repose, waiting to be born whenever Buddhism became forgotten by the mortal world.

This entire heaven echoed with the timbral sermon of the universe, teaching impermanence to every atom in his body. Garmuti was a deity here, an equal to the legendary figures around him. He didn’t expect them to be so boring. All they did was meditate, engage in debates or outshine each other in serene competitions of charity to lesser beings.

But the karmic multiplier was transcendental, so Garmuti made sure to follow the bodhisattvas in every worship, every sermon, every visitation to the realms of mortals and devas. Anything to ascend past this place. He might not fit in here but there would be better heavens beyond.

Total Soul Karma: 5,000,000,000
Ascending to Nimmanarati Heaven

He gathered form within a palace made from pulsar glow. Neutron stars were its foundations and red giants were its lights. Electromagnetic beams weaved within his mind and he knew that he could conjure anything he wished with a mere thought.

A vial of amrita, two vials of amrita, an earthenware jug of soma, an earthenware jug of amrita, a ripe nareepol fruit, an overripe nareepol, two female kinnarees, a male kinnara, a flock of twenty male and female kinnaras, a levitating bed of magnetically charged nebulae, a likeness of Shantarni, a bed with purple and gold sheets with a gossamer canopy, a dozen deva and devi servants, a jacuzzi of superheated and super-compressed water, a mirror made from a shaved block of diamond, a prismatic flute made from a crystal stalactite within the hall of karma, a gandharva to play it, a thousand human monks chanting the Metta Sutra prayer, a mortal platter of grilled chicken and crispy pork, two unripe nareepol fruits, a likeness of Shantarni, a likeness of Shantarni, a likeness of Shantarni, a likeness of Sikhala, a likeness of Lord Indra and a likeness of Lord Garuda, a vial of amrita, a jasmine flower, a bee, a jasmine tree, a patch of soil, a teardrop to fall from Garmuti’s own eye, an ocean, a ray of light, a gust of air, a barren planet, a forest, a sun, a moon, birds, sea creatures, land animals, a human male, a human female.

Total Soul Karma: 100,000,000,000
Ascending to Paranimmitavasavatti Heaven

Here, he had no form. He did not understand the space he occupied. He only sensed a host of deities that existed to worship him. They knew his desires and willed them into being for him to enjoy. His every whim, every want, fulfilled before he even knew them.

It was a state of unceasing pleasure. A drowning churn of ecstasy. Showers of matter and electromagnetism. An unending stream of delicacies. Orgasms after transcendental orgasms. Without physical limits of satiety or habituation, without a heart that could burst or a brain that could melt, there was no cessation of pleasure. No opportunity for a decline that would provide a contrast to dim the pleasure before. It was an eternity of peaks, crushed to a plateau.

Time lost meaning in its entirety. Garmuti could not even form thoughts. Dimly, he perceived the grinning Lord Mara, greatest demon of desire who once sought to tempt the Buddha with his armies and daughters. This was his realm upon the highest sensuous heaven. A deity predicted Garmuti’s desire and showed him the Soul Karma counter, continuing to rise: 999,000,000,000.

Nirvana was within reach! Let’s goooo!

Total Soul Karma: 999,999,999,999
MAXIMUM KARMIC CAP REACHED

VALUE ERROR

ERROR: INTEGER OVERFLOW

TROUBLESHOOTING

PLEASE WAIT

PLEASE WAIT

RESETTING

EXISTENCE RENEWED

RESTORING KARMIC PROFILE

FORMATTING SOUL SETTINGS

Total Soul Karma: -999,999,999,999
Descending to Avici Hell

It was a place without respite. Without waves. Without ceasing. Only flames. The deepest of hells for matricides, patricides, killers of bodhisattvas and harmers of Buddhas.

Garmuti dwelled in a naked body, packed into a cramped box of red-hot metal. He was impaled by so many iron spears that he could not move. Roasted from outside and within. Trapped in the box without air.

He died within seconds. Immediately he awoke in the same body, to suffer again. And again. And again. Until his karmic debt was repaid.

Like in the highest heaven, he could not form thoughts in this deepest hell. Nor could he keep track of time. Every moment of birth was a shock, the physical limit of agony. Death too was writhing, his final moment dreading the reemergence of consciousness and pain.

He knew he had to atone, but he could not remember his crimes. He did not know what he did or who he was, the slate of his past lives wiped clean.

The only trace to cling upon his soul was the karma he carried.

Total Soul Karma: -999,999,998,999

All eight hell realms shared the same rule. After one hell-year, the sufferer may be restored 1,000 points of karma.

Like all condemned souls, Garmuti screamed for Nirvana and the cessation of suffering.

“Where the Hell Is Nirvana?” copyright © 2025 by Champ Wongsatayanont
Art copyright © 2025 by Wenjing Yang

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Where the Hell Is Nirvana?

Champ Wongsatayanont

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Where the Hell Is Nirvana?

Champ Wongsatayanont

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The post Where the Hell Is Nirvana? appeared first on Reactor.

Original Fiction Paranormal

Phantom View

A disabled son care-taking for a disabled father tries to understand the mysterious blur haunting them.

Illustrated by Hokyoung Kim

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Edited by Jonathan Strahan

By John Wiswell

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Published on October 22, 2025

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A disabled son care-taking for a disabled father tries to understand the mysterious blur haunting them.

A 2026 Locus Award Top Ten Finalist!

Novelette | 7,580 words

The app has to ask me to tag him before I finally realize I have a stalker.

It’s a random photo in my history, from three years ago when I moved out here to help. Me and Dad sitting next to the window in matching Steelers jerseys, horribly backlit by too much morning sun. A rusty orange-and-black blurry streak runs down the left of the photo, blotting out most of the living room, like a big exclamation point. A square on the app wants me to tag the blur.

“Dad, does this look like a face to you?”

I hold my phone out to Dad’s face. His eyes are glassy, once bright blues now like still waters. His breathing remains measured, as it has since he woke up this morning. He’s passive in his bed, his eyes not even trained on the game on the TV. If he recognizes that I’m showing him my phone, he doesn’t express it, and he definitely doesn’t recognize the blur.

The blur doesn’t have shoulders. I pinch to zoom. It is all oranges and browns with flecks of black, like an iodine stain over reality. Maybe you could call some of those features a chin. That’s it. This app sucks. I should download something better.

This is the first time I’ve actually looked through this folder on my phone. I always take pictures meaning to look at them, and then never do. I swipe through the tile view, meaning to get to the photos of Dad’s old paintings. I want to get them scanned in as high resolution as possible before anything goes into storage.

Another blur catches my eye. I click on one tile. It’s a nearly beautiful photo of Dad, sitting in a wicker chair that we sold off last year, gazing out a window. Well, not a real window. A painting of a window. That painting was Mom’s favorite before she left. It was so realistic that we used to joke that a bird would’ve flown into it. The smile on Dad’s face in this picture, the wrinkles contoured with gray stubble? Looking at him makes my chest feel like fishing line being reeled in.

The app asks me to tag him.

And to tag the person next to him.

Another rusty orange blur runs down the right side of the photo, darkness leaking from nowhere, like it’s trying to block the lamplight from casting onto the painting. Before I zoom in, I know it’s too similar. The app asks me to tag the same non-face, with the same shape like a tensed jaw.

My phone sucks, but I don’t remember it sucking this badly. I scroll, and there are blurs in a bunch of the photos in the gallery. Nothing on my trip to Boston last, which I photographed the hell out of. It feels like the blurs are mostly here in Dad’s apartment.

No, wait. There’s one in the hospital. That day Dad and I visited to donate one of Dad’s old paintings. I always talked about what an amazing painter Dad was, and eventually the nurses begged for one of his pieces. That was a great day. There is Dad in his wheelchair, with me behind him, and Dr. Cantor alongside the two sweetest nurses from the entire hospital, Barbara and Barbara-Anne. All of us were clustered around Dad’s painting on the wall.

The app asks me to tag each of us.

And to tag the blur standing between Barbara-Anne and Dad. I see the jaw before I even see the box asking me to tag it.

“Dad, look. It thinks this is a person.”

I need him to laugh at it, even though I know he won’t. Dad’s eyes slowly drape along the screen. He lets out a heavy breath through his mouth, thin lips popping apart. He knows this is weird.

Then I see something else in the photo. Much smaller than the blur. Zooming in doesn’t clear it up. My scalp prickles, and I lean in to the phone, swiping through earlier photos, back through time and pixels, to Dad and his painting of a window. That perfect window.

“No way.”

I get up, walking wide around the door so Dad never leaves my sight, into the living room. The window painting has hung on this wall since before I moved in. I sleep on the foldout in that room. I see it every morning.

The painting is of a window with six glass panels, fully lit in midday, looking down at the pale green arch of the Birmingham Bridge. I’ve looked at this painting for three years like it was real glass, looking out on the view. So I never looked for it before. Paintings have all sorts of details that people like me don’t pay attention to. We’re just affected by them. If I ever thought about it, I thought this detail was Dad catching some trick of a reflection.

In the bottom right of the painting is a dark blur. I lean down until my nose threatens to smudge it. I see the jaw.

“Dad? Who is this?”

It’s in all of Dad’s paintings. I go through the entire closet, so hastily that I cause an avalanche from the top shelf and take an antique sewing machine to the face. With a washcloth wrapped around my forehead, I line every painting up in the living room.

The rusty orange streaks are everywhere.

On a drizzling day outside the U.S. Steel Tower. On a sidewalk where kids were drawing pink and yellow chalk flowers. Every painting of the boats on the Allegheny has a telltale streak forming a vaguely human-shaped column.

“Did you know you were painting this thing?” I ask through the open door to his bedroom. I know Dad made these, but I keep them in the living room, like I’m somehow keeping him safe from evil magic radiation. His breathing has been off-kilter all afternoon. I give him extra oxygen and try to figure this out myself.

I am a man of science. A man with a C average in his science classes, but still.

I take new photos and actually scrutinize them. For most of my life I’ve bent over backward to take photos and then never looked at them again. Like the moments were so important until I had them documented.

Zooming. Scrolling. Examining every pixel of every picture, then taking the pictures over again. By the window, and the window painting, and the front door. From every unflattering angle, above and below. The blur doesn’t show its creepy jaw.

Except when I photograph myself in front of Dad’s door.

“Did Mom ever see this thing?”

She never mentioned it. Dad’s eyes shift down, then close. His standard response whenever I bring up Mom.

“I didn’t think so.” I raise my phone, angling to frame us both together. “I just need to test this. Okay?”

I snap one selfie of us. It’s all I can bring myself to do, half expecting some winged demon to come crashing through the ceiling when I tap the screen.

The Blur is there. The Blur. Our Blur, streaking across the image at the other foot of the bed. Like we’re two kids come to visit the old man. I look over my shoulder, but there’s nothing waiting in the bedroom other than Dad’s oxygen tank.

Some part of my brain wants to know if the Blur is still in the room. If it hasn’t ceased to be, or sprouted claws when I couldn’t see it. So I swipe back to the camera, steadying the shot, aligning our faces and our shadows.

This time, I make myself look for it. One glance in the view pane, at the foot of Dad’s bed.

The rusty orange stain is on my screen. It’s in the shot. It’s right where it was in the pictures, like it’s still waiting.

I spin, and no, it’s not behind me. Not in a way my eyes can see.

But the camera insists the Blur is still here. Is it moving, churning in place like clouds, or is it just that I can’t keep my hand still on the phone? I can’t breathe.

This can’t be happening. This thing can’t be here. Can’t have been here all along. I would have touched it. Bumped into it a hundred times.

Except, would I have thought anything about bumping into an invisible man? Or would I have assumed my clumsy ass bumped the wall or the sofa or anything else, rather than jumping to the assumption an entity of pure fucking darkness was stalking Dad’s apartment?

I know it’s foolish as I reach my free hand out. There’s no stopping me. I don’t know if I want to push it away from Dad, or to prove to myself this is a hallucination. I have to look away, into the camera, to know I’m reaching for the right spot. I think my fingers go right through it—that it is really an optical illusion, some hokey glitch in the software.

It touches me first. It’s clammy, like leather left out in the rain, brushing along my fingertips. The curve of a body, of skin over bone.

I jerk my hand away like it’s an invisible fire, and curl my fingers into a fist against my chest. Nothing happened. There’s no residue on my skin. No boils or fungus or shadows. No blur spreads along my flesh.

I turn off the phone so fast it’s lucky it doesn’t crack. The screen goes dead black. No more images, no more videos.

When I move to check on Dad, I don’t feel anything. In the spot at the foot of the bed, there’s no wet leather. There’s not even a hint of moisture in the air. I sit there, fighting the urge to swing a broom around the room to hit the Blur. Some part of me knows I won’t be able to touch it. Not until I turn the camera on.

Instead, I put a hand gently on Dad’s right calf. I hold on to him, so that we don’t disappear. What does any of this mean?

My email to Mom bounces. It did the same thing when I asked what she did with the insurance information last year. I hoped she would have revived her account, but no, it’s not coming back. Neither is Mom. I don’t have a number to text her. Last I knew, she was off living her best life in St. Barts.

We have nobody to ask except each other. Dad isn’t filling in many gaps.

One gap I’m not filling: no more photos. Definitely no live videos in his room. If the Blur is interested in him, it can keep doing whatever it was doing before I found out it existed. I’m busy doing Dad’s physical therapy, and cooking and cleaning and trying to keep us from getting behind on rent. I haven’t had time to get my knee looked at in over a year. The Blur can mind its own business.

That’s what I tell myself, as though I don’t keep thinking about my phone. Especially every time the air conditioning hits my neck at a weird angle, or I’m trying to sleep and feel the hairs on my legs move. Every incidental thing that I’ve shrugged off every day suddenly feels like a threat. What could be worse than this?

Those fucking vampires are cancelling Dad’s fucking insurance. When the company got bought and we got those “Nothing about our great coverage will change” letters, I knew we were screwed. They only paid for all his equipment because it was locked in, and they already challenge everything they can, or straight-up deny payments on things I have proof they cover. Now these forms they claim they mailed two weeks ago and that only entered my hands today say I have to get all this shit filled out and delivered immediately or they’ll start revoking coverage.

I run around the apartment so much that I keel over next to the microwave. It’s one of those days when I need both my knee brace and my cane or else this MCL is going to kill me. I curse at my leg. Keep moving, damn you.

In his room, Dad’s oxygen machine beeps a warning for the fifth time this morning. I’m still carrying a wad of forms when I come to his side. He’s rolled over again. This is rare. He usually knows better, but he’s agitated by something. It’s the worst day for him to get like this.

“Dad? Please?”

I fix the mask back over his nose. There’s no awareness in his eyes. He’s completely gone right now.

No sooner do I let go of his shoulder than he tries to roll over again. God damn it.

“Dad,” I say, knowing he can’t help it. “Dad. I have to take these forms over. Like, now. Please.”

On most days like this I sit my butt down and play Hades or Elden Ring all day, staying next to him to keep him straight. After the spell fades, I can always tell he’s grateful I was there to look after him. And I’d like nothing more than to get off my feet and rest my knee in the chair next to his bed, and make sure he’s safe all day.

But it’s damned if I do, and damned if I don’t. If the company screws him on this policy, we’re never going to be able to afford something that replaces it. He’ll die with nobody around except for me to watch.

And if I leave him, I have no idea if he’ll roll over again. I don’t know what I’ll come back to.

His shoulders twitch like he wants to move. Like he wants to throw a pitch. Dad used to have a hell of an arm. Restraints aren’t just cruel; they won’t necessarily work. He needs me to watch over him.

It’s small of me, but I think of those emails bouncing back from the address Mom abandoned. The corners of my eyes sting at the thought. That she should be here. That somebody else should be here, not just me.

There is somebody else.

I tell myself, “No.”

But somebody has to get these documents out, and somebody has to stay with Dad.

“No, no.”

The phone is cool against my palm, and I squeeze my fingers around it, like I might crush it rather than do this. My brain sticks to the idea like a hair that won’t go down the drain.

There’s nobody. Insurance never covered a helper coming in. Mom is long gone. I don’t have any friends. Nobody cares that we’re here except us.

I turn the phone on, and there is the Blur. It’s standing in the far corner, beside the rubber trash can and the TV. I think I see its jaw. I think it’s looking at me.

“Hello?”

I wave at the image on the camera.

No, that’s ridiculous. I correct myself, waving to where the Blur has to be in the room, miming like I can see it. That’s also ridiculous, but a ridiculousness that feels right.

I don’t hear anything. If that blurry jaw moves, it isn’t speaking. I don’t know what appliances I’d need to hear it. Surround sound speakers?

“Look. You know Dad.” I gesture the phone down at the bed. “You’ve known him a long time, right? He painted you all those times.”

Again, no audible response. No shrug from the Blur. At least they aren’t disagreeing.

“He never hurt anybody. You know he’s a good guy, don’t you? And you want something from us. I don’t know what. But here’s what we’re going to do.”

I take the phone and angle the camera so that it frames Dad and his entire bed, as well as that side of the room. I prop it with the seat cushion on the chair where I usually sit. I hover my hands over it for several seconds in case it falls. It doesn’t. It is properly wedged to film my old man and his phantom.

“I touched you once. It only worked when you were in an image. This phone here? It’s showing you.”

I think, and then hit the record function. Why not have video proof of this?

“Can you touch me? With it watching you like this?”

I hold out my hand, more tentative than the other day. I feel like I’m daring a lion to bite my arm off.

I’m looking at the phone when the feeling of dribbling wet leather pokes my fingertips. I jerk back, then immediately return my hand. Dad can’t afford for me to be afraid today.

“I have to go out for a little while, just a little while, or else we’re screwed. But you know he can’t roll over, or else the wires and tubes get messed up. You’re going to make sure he stays still. Be firm, but be gentle, okay? Do you understand?”

The Blur has to know. Has to have seen enough of Dad to know how to care for him.

Why would the Blur bother?

“And if I come back and he’s okay, then whatever it is you want? I’ll do it. I’ll get it for you. You can’t be so interested in this man, in this sweet old painter, and be some fucking evil thing. You’ve got to know I’ll help you if you help us.”

Why am I waiting to hear the Blur answer?

“Can you show me that you understand?”

No, they can’t show me. They’re invisible and seemingly nonverbal. Phantoms don’t make house calls. They don’t do physical therapy and in-home nursing. I rock back on my heels in frustration, and my leg sends two searing bolts through me. I have to brace myself against the wall. I can’t do this.

Dad’s bed creaks. He’s rolling over again, and I have to get to him before the machine beeps. I need to get through the pain fog and help.

He’s lying flat on his back, with the yellow-and-black covers pulled up across his chest. The bedframe creaks again, on the side of the bed near to me, and a depression pushes down into the covers next to Dad’s arm. It’s like two hands are carefully holding him.

Two hands. Two more hands than I thought we had.

It can work. It has to work.

“If you do this…” I beg the air where I think the Blur is standing. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. I’ll do anything for you.”

I almost forget my cane. I won’t let the insurers do this. I’ll sell my soul to a phantom first.

I’m hobbling so bad when I return that an old man on the sidewalk calls me Captain Peg Leg. Was there even a Captain Peg Leg? I’d half like to amputate this thing, because wood or fiberglass wouldn’t throb with pain. I’d teach that stupid leg to defy me. It feels like a reactor core is melting down under my kneecap. And I never slow, though, leaning against the walls for support and pushing myself along until I’m home.

Dad is snoring like he’s got a couple of lumberjacks doing work in his sinuses. He’s steady under the covers, breathing mask in place. There’s more color in his cheeks now than there was this morning. I keep checking his arms, expecting dark blotches of eldritch contamination.

I lean against the rails of his bed and lick my lips with a dry tongue. He’s okay. He’s good.

I grab my phone, and the battery light blinks, complaining that I didn’t think to plug it in. I have 7 percent left before…

Before what? Before the magic connection to the astral plane runs out? What is happening here?

I turn the phone around the room, and there on the opposite side of the bed is the rusty orange Blur. They stand beside the medical equipment, and all the wires. I wonder if they’ve had to keep those things straight as Dad has moved around. I wonder if they’ve touched him, and if they’ve been gentle enough.

I keel over like a felled tree, thumping into the chair. I don’t care how much it bothers my knee. I don’t have the energy to sit down normally. Holding the phone up, I try to train my eyes where the Blur is.

“Everything got filed on time. They said I’m in the clear. I have no idea if that’s true, but it’s done. We win for today.”

No applause from the Blur. No relaxation in that thing that might be a jaw. I don’t know how a blur would express approval, if a blur wanted to approve anything in the first place. Are they happy that they helped? Do they even care that my father exists, or have I been misreading them this whole time?

“Okay,” I say. “You helped Dad. Let’s figure out how I can help you.”

On my phone screen, the Blur keeps standing there, shimmering, churning, unspeaking.

“What do you want?” It’s something I’ve barely started considering. Can they eat? Can they age? “What can we do for you?”

No reply. Right, our friend is nonverbal. But they’ve been lurking for a lot of Dad’s life. Maybe for his whole time in this city. They must want something.

“Is there something you want in this apartment?”

Off they go. The jaw-like swirls curve outward, turning to the open door to the living room. The Blur taints all the light sources my phone picks up, bleeding across simulated vision. Soon they stand in the doorway to the living room, facing the sofa and the stack of Dad’s paintings.

As soon as I follow them, they’re bleeding further away. They flow like visible wind, churning into the living room.

Then they stand there.

I ask, “You want Dad’s art?”

They move toward me, and reflexively I shrink away. They pass me, leaving the living room and going right back to Dad’s room.

I tilt my head. They swirl to his bedside, and then through the door yet again, out into the living room. The Blur paces back and forth, pausing only briefly in either room. They’re like a cat that just wants the attention.

After coming out into the living room for the third time, they linger. The Blur hunches down on the floor. They’re kneeling there, like they’re collapsing in on themselves. Are they looking out the window, or out into Dad’s painting of a window?

They’re moving in place. The vague shapes of their shoulders tremble. They cover their face, as though trying to hide something that nobody on the planet could see clearly. It takes too long before I realize what they’re doing. I turn off the camera to give them privacy.

I never thought about phantoms weeping.

We are debunked. The videos of the Blur I post online are barely looked at by anybody. Those who look at it have one question: Is this a crappy AI-generated video, or a creepy practical effect video that I’m doing with lasers and off-camera lamps? Either way, I am a fraud, a scammer, and several less polite names.

The Blur doesn’t care if they are real. They keep helping with Dad’s bedpans, and consolidating the trash. So long as I point the camera phone the right direction, they’re better at vacuuming than I am.

The internet tells us we’re on our own. But I couldn’t imagine living without them now. The three of us are invincible together.

I just have to trust them. I know what I’ve got to do next.

The plan is simple. After the insurance gets cleared up, we have a little slack in our budget. We sell off the last of what we don’t need, like the antique sewing machine that exists just to fall on me every couple months. I finally sell off my old superhero comics. Those were not the investment I thought they were when I was a kid. But it’s enough.

I set my phone on the sofa, pointed at an angle in front of me, so that I know the Blur is there. They stand in front of me, so close they take up most of the screen. That’s good.

“We’ve got to be careful with this, okay?”

I pick up the second phone. It’s better than mine, with a way longer battery life. It’s still got the plastic screen protector on. I almost envy the Blur.

The camera view is washed out, utterly overwhelmed by any lighting whatsoever. I still see myself just fine, and when I switch it to front-facing, I see the Blur’s swirls and jaw just as well.

I turn around, half-facing the wall, and direct the phone like I’m taking a selfie of me and the Blur. Just two Pittsburgh guys doing a science experiment. With my free hand, I gesture to the live video of the two of us. I even point to the Blur.

“You see? That’s you.”

The Blur is unimpressed, a stoic pillar of churning nothingness.

That’s fair. They have seen a phone before.

“I’m holding it, which means you can move around,” I say. “But I don’t have to be the one holding it. Get it?”

Carefully I draw the phone across my shoulder, offering it to the figure that I can’t see. They have to still be there. They were able to touch my hand, and move Dad back into place, and fix the tubes on his machine. Nothing about this shouldn’t work.

“You’ll have to charge it every day or two. You do that with a cable, like I do with mine. If you’ve seen me do it? Then you can do it. And feasibly, if this works, this isn’t just a phone. This is a cane. This is a walker. This is a wheelchair with a fucking rocket booster.”

I nod from my cane resting against the sofa, and then to the phone again.

The moisture brushes my thumb and forefinger, waking goose bumps all the way up to my neck. For too long it’s just moisture, like the clammy hand isn’t going to follow. Did I miss something? Is the Blur’s physical form vanishing as they try to touch the phone?

Then the phone lifts out of my grip, like it’s drawn on a string. I stare up into thin air like anything is going to appear. Rather, the plastic and glass rectangle hovers until it’s almost on the ceiling. I imagine the Blur craning backward to take their first selfie.

Then the phone whirls around in an apartment-sized tornado. I lean onto the edge of the sofa, elbows on my knees, unable to stop grinning. I don’t need my phone to know the Blur is freaking out in sudden liberty. The camera keeps jerking to random angles and then bursting forward.

“Yeah,” I cheer them on. “You can go wherever you want. Without me having to point the camera for you.”

The other side of the sofa dips like they’re jumping on the cushions, like a little kid. Then the phone flies away, and the kitchen faucet sprays cold water onto a stack of dishes. It takes the Blur two tries to shut it off—and I have to imagine it’s because they’re too excited to control themselves.

I grab my cane and lean on it. I want to invite them out for ice cream or something.

“What do you want to do first? Want to go see the original window that Dad made that painting of?”

The phone flees into Dad’s room. I follow, arriving in time to see Dad staring up at the ceiling. The thin hair on his scalp ruffles, like an unseen hand is caressing him. Dad’s eyes move as though he’s following something, then immediately grow tired and close.

“Yuh.”

He said that. Dad never expresses himself out loud. It sounds like he was agreeing. To what? What is the Blur going to do?

The phone moves again, and something hits me in the belly, making me grunt and step aside. In my confusion, I was blocking the door. I didn’t think the Blur would be on the move again so quickly, not that I blame them for being excited.

“What’s the plan?” I ask, first to Dad, then to the floating phone. The phone travels across the kitchen space, over to the front door. The knob clicks like weight is resting on it. It turns until the door pops ajar, sounds of my neighbors’ pop music ebbing from the hallway.

I say, “Hey? Are you alright?”

The phone pauses. The doorknob pauses. The apartment pauses.

I can’t see them, and I’m sure the Blur is looking at me. For a thin moment, neither of us understands what the other wants.

The door whips open. The phone disappears into the hall.

I get down to the street as quickly as my knee will let me, swinging my phone in all directions. They’re not in the stairwell, or the front stoop. Nowhere in the street is there a floating cell phone, nor does my phone show any orange signs of the Blur.

The only people out here are on a delivery truck, struggling to unload an armoire. They haven’t seen anything. They haven’t been looking.

Frantic texts. I warn the Blur that they left the charging cable behind and if that phone quits they could be stranded. We don’t know how their presence will affect the battery. They need to come back right now.

Can the Blur even read? And what happens if they tap on a text and it turns off the camera?

I slump on the stoop of my apartment, idly pointing my phone around, hoping to catch sight of the Blur coming to their senses and returning. I wait a long time to see nothing.

For something that defined my whole existence, I forget about the Blur quickly. Less than a week later Dad is clawing at his own belly. The agony lasts days. It takes forever to realize he’s got kidney stones—some of the largest Dr. Cantor has ever seen. And while he’s in for tests, they find some problems in his chest that need checking out.

“No problem,” I tell them. “I’m free all day.”

I do everything by myself. I put all of myself into it. We got by before without their help, didn’t we? And there are worse things than being ghosted by a ghost.

Tests show a new mass has appeared in Dad’s left lung, and that lung never recovered from his original stroke. He’s having a bad pain day and can barely slump in the wheelchair as I try to take him across town. Getting him into a rideshare is excruciating on both of us.

I’m in the waiting room when I see the message. A number I don’t recognize, not at first.

It’s a picture. High tide on some pebble beach, with a pile of kelp. I rub my eyes and realize it’s not kelp, but familiar blurs and swirls. The figure juts up toward the camera; they took a picture of their own feet standing in the lapping tide.

It’s a fucking phantom’s vacation photo.

I seethe so badly saliva drips off my teeth onto the phone. I haven’t showered in three days. When is the last time I went to the beach?

I’m trying to fit all my anger into a text message when a nurse calls my name.

I only know it’s Halloween because of the paper cutout jack-o’-lanterns decorating the hospital halls. Every day is the same adventure. It’s watching football with him, and playing games for him to watch, and making sure we both eat. It’s being by his side for the inevitable next emergency. I’m going to be there for him. Somebody should be.

Pics keep coming in. The Blur amid a drove of people in the stands at some sporting arena where nobody is wearing Pittsburgh colors. The Blur ominously standing at the head of a bus full of mostly Hispanic women, their mouths open in joy, in the midst of a singalong. Is it a church group? That boggles my mind. Dad was barely Catholic enough to go to church on Easter when I was a kid, but apparently his phantom is religious?

Dad is no help. Which is to say that when I show him the photos and ask how fucked up this is, he never gives me an inkling that he’s angry.

“Do you not even care?”

I could tell myself that, but I know that’s not the case. Dad knows I know. He lets me let go at my pace. Being angry was never longer than a night for him. He painted and tried to consider other points of view. That’s what he tried to give me. Dad isn’t mad, and I know he’d say that phantom was trapped all this time, and it deserves to live without serving him. Because that’s Dad.

So I text the Blur that I’m not angry. It’s a lie. An aspirational lie.

It’s the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. The day Dad has the seizure. The one that kicks off everything else that happens after.

And the Blur sends me a photo. I don’t bother to open it. I just respond, not even thinking about what I’m typing. I hit send and I keep waiting outside doors I’m not allowed to walk through, doors with tiny wire mesh windows, waiting to see anyone coming. Waiting for the word.

All his wrinkles disappeared. We used to joke he had a face like a badly made bed, but now he’s relaxed, and it all goes. All of it. All of him.

He didn’t want a funeral. The last time he spoke about it, he said he wanted his and Mom’s ashes to be sprinkled in a garden somewhere, to feed some flowers that needed it. It was that long ago.

Still, I have him cremated. There’s nobody who wants his ashes but me, so I show up, alone. I wear my best pants, and wash my hair, like this is a ceremony. Like I know what I’m doing.

As I wait at the front desk, I play with my phone. I don’t think about doing it. I just do it, just lift my phone up, hoping to see Dad’s spirit. Dad’s phantom blur. I’ve seen other impossible things. Dad was special enough to paint the impossible. What would his soul look like?

I see an orange shimmer, and I spin around. I can’t believe it.

I shouldn’t believe it. Because Dad isn’t there. Instead there floats a cell phone with a cracked screen, the battery case held on by duct tape. Somehow the Blur still hasn’t bought a protective case for their phone. In that instant I think how lucky they are that they found a way to keep it going, keep it charged and paid up and never confiscated by all the people they’ve wandered around. They could have been stranded anywhere. I imagine them trapped over their busted screen, spending an eternity in some abandoned house that people would think was haunted for the rest of time.

They hold their phone up to eye level with me. They wanted to be seen.

They’re here on purpose.

Well. Good for them.

“I get it,” I tell them. “You wanted to be free, and as soon as you could, you got free. You couldn’t wait to leave. You got to do whatever you wanted. You missed the last months of Dad’s life. Now he’s gone and you’re still free. I don’t need you. So what do you want?”

That’s colder than I wanted. But also, not cold enough. I don’t know what to say, so words come out. I don’t care if the funeral workers hear me or judge me or call the cops on me.

“You didn’t owe us more help just because we helped you. You weren’t trapped in service. AndI’m not envious of all your road trips. I did what I wanted to. Dad needed me, and I love him.” I wipe warm snot from my nose. “I loved him. I don’t know what you thought about either of us, but this is what I wanted to do. So if you want something from me, you better tell me now. Because I’m leaving.”

The Blur never says anything.

They follow me home. I can see their phone.

Not until I’m through the door do I wonder about Dad’s room. Moisture tickles the corners of my eyes when I think he’ll never sleep there again. What do I do with it? I’m not sleeping in his bed, but I can’t really afford a new one. Am I going to move his things out of there? Is there ever going to be a time when that isn’t his bedroom? The lease is in both our names. Am I going to leave this apartment and look for something smaller?

There’s the urge to play games. To lose myself doing another run through Hades. But the only TV is in Dad’s room, and the concept of playing games without him watching makes me so sick I taste bile.

I vacuum.

I collect all the empties and the trash to take down.

I scrub the wall of dishes that has risen around the sink over the last couple weeks.

Right this minute I’ve got necessary stuff I can do. What messes me up is when I’ll run out of things, or am too tired to do more. I can’t complain to Dad about my brace digging into the fat of my lower thigh, or about how I have no idea which streaming service has the Sunday night game.

When I take the trash out, there next to the door waits a floating cell phone. The Blur is still there.

I treat them like I don’t see them.

I donate the bed and most of Dad’s things to a local disabled couple. A couple of adorable lesbian grannies. One hugs me so hard she gets her foundation on my hoodie. I pretend I’m gracious, when I’m just doing what I’m supposed to do. Doing good like Dad would have done himself.

I lie on the deep indent in the carpet that the bed left. It’s the cleanest spot in the whole apartment. I swipe my phone around, hoping to see him. Dad is nowhere. He is no phantom. He is a memory.

A memory at least two people still have.

“I don’t trust that you won’t ditch me at any moment. You want me to just let you into my life again when at any moment, you could change your mind?”

The phone with the image of the Blur is waiting for me in the hall, in that constant selfie. Everybody in the building sticks to themselves, but it’s still beyond me that nobody has called the super about the floating phone.

I ignore their phone and face where the Blur’s jaw must be. I look them right in the eyes they never had.

“I need a lot of things right now, and pity isn’t one. Don’t you dare pity me. I don’t regret helping Dad for one second. Everything we did together was family. Don’t pretend you and I are alike. I wasn’t cursed or trapped to be with him. So don’t come here to do something out of pity.”

I step inside the apartment, gesturing for the Blur to come in. My greeting sucked but it was never going to be soft. I stick my hands in my pockets, grabbing lint-ridden denim.

Because the Blur has never made anything easy, they stay in the hall. They keep filming the two of us. I look at myself, at that tiny vision of a me who looks so haggard and pale, almost the color of glow-in-the-dark stuff when it’s not dark.

I try to look up into the face I can’t see. “What do you want?”

A strong hand tugs twice on my sleeve, in the direction of the stairwell.

They wait long enough for me to hesitate.

Then they wait long enough for me to strap my brace on and get my cane and stuff.

Then they lead me outside.

I almost bolt when I see the church. It’s a big redbrick building that’s redder the closer I get, with champagne-yellow walls on the interior. Feeling the solid floor under my sneakers, I can’t believe I’m in here. I don’t care how Christian the Blur has become. Religion is not going to solve my problems.

The pews are half empty. The Blur leads me to sit in the back rows, behind everyone, watching their reverence. A tiny priest with an impossibly big voice lectures about how the Devil is everywhere, unseen, requiring vigilance to keep ourselves safe.

I look at the floating phone next to me. Does the Blur think this is funny?

The Blur doesn’t say. They stay seated for a long time, and I can’t leave them. My skin prickles as I soak in this room with so many dozens of people. The most I’ve seen in one place in years. It feels like watching every raindrop in a storm waiting politely, all refusing to fall. I don’t know what to do with them.

Then the Blur taps my shoulder.

Many blocks away on the sidewalk a guy is dancing on a small square of cardboard, and two-thirds of the time he’s spinning on his own head. Most of the audience are filming it for their own TikToks or Instas or whatever. The Blur doesn’t. We just stand behind the audience, watching the guy twirl on his scalp. Just feeling what it’s like being a part of this and apart from this. I want to ask if this is how it feels. I don’t.

The alley is curiously damp and strewn with garbage, and at first I miss the steps. They lead down to an unmarked entrance to a barcade. An elegant handwritten sign calls the place KIELAN’S. I pay too much for a Bacardi and cola, and survey rows of arcade cabinets that are all older than I am. Three skinny women hammer away at a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cabinet. The fourth slot is open to play.

I catch my breathing speeding up, chest tensing over how to ask to join something I shouldn’t even have to ask about.

The Blur draws me to a surprisingly dense crowd around a skee ball rig. A white guy with an M tattoo over one eye is setting the record score. The balls are so grimy and worn they look like they’re made out of old wood, and he keeps sinking them into the 100-point pocket. A ball and a cheer. A ball and a cheer, one that is so loud it vibrates in my chest. When he nails the next one, for no good reason, I cheer with everybody else. I tense up again, like I’ll be ejected for being excited. Nobody cares I made noise. I’m just there, in a moment with them. A part and apart.

“Do you feel this way all the time?” I ask the Blur, not that they could hear me over all the yelling and the barcade’s too-loud ’90s playlist.

I let the question go.

I don’t let curiosity get in the way of feeling this space.

On our way out, I stop by some of the wadded-up trash in the alley. There’s a flyer that hits me, right in the soul. Something I’ve never thought of doing. The Blur waits while I scan the QR code.

The problem with sitting in the back of the class is that other people have the same idea. A Black woman in her early forties with half-pink hair and a half-shaved head winds up sitting at the next spot over from me, trying to avoid eye contact almost as hard as I do. She smells like clove cigarettes.

All the seats fill up before starting time. I work on my breathing, letting myself just exist with other people, apart and a part. We’re arranged with equally fine views of a simple vase, simple beige with simple curves. That’s what we paid to look at. From my seat, the light creates a golden sheen along its left side. Its thin shadow makes the gray pedestal look blue. There are plenty of places to start.

I don’t know when they left me. No phone floats in the art studio. They might be gone forever, and that would be fine, because they gave me what they wanted to. And I needed it.

I focus on my breathing. On just being around strangers, in a strange environment, doing a strange thing.

I take a big blob of brown on my brush and mix it with some orange. I smear them together until they’re the color of iodine, then make a long streak down the right side of my canvas. That’s how I decide to start. With the thing nobody else will see.

“Phantom View” copyright © 2025 by John Wiswell
Art copyright © 2025 by Hokyoung Kim

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Phantom View

John Wiswell

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Phantom View

John Wiswell

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