

Edited by Raymund Eich and Emily Mah

for Octavia Butler

(June 22, 1947 – February 24, 2006)

our first week instructor

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 by the individual authors

Cover design © 2012 Emily Mah Tippetts and Raymund Eich

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

The stories in this anthology are all works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, business establishments or locales is entirely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. All rights reserved.

Each contributing author holds the copyright to their work. The authors collectively hold the copyright to this anthology.

## Preface

Contained in this anthology are stories and novel excerpts by eleven authors who have one thing in common. We were all in the 2001 class of the Clarion West Writers Workshop for Science Fiction and Fantasy, and are one of the only classes to have all seventeen of its members published in professional venues. For six weeks we lived in student dorms in Seattle, Washington (home of the famous Space Needle) and were trained by Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Bradley Denton, Connie Willis, Ellen Datlow, and Jack Womack. We wrote and analyzed fiction until our tempers frayed and our egos were flattened. We endured enough sleep deprivation to hallucinate our characters. We learned to write a short story in mere hours, and tear one apart in mere minutes. In our critiques of each others stories, we said things like (and these are real quotes):

"Satan's motivation seems a bit unclear."

"You do a good job of working the story into the info dump."

"I ditto myself on that last part."

"Ewww!"

"The idea of Canada as a major power is a wonderful, fantastical notion."

"I presume it was a challenge having to write in first person omniscient."

"The word 'wife' short-circuits the whole love-story aspect."

"I ditto all the negative and insensitive comments so far."

"I read this story at 2 am, and all I could think was, why don't these people just go to sleep?"

"Basically this is Hindus, in space, on heroin."

"I just have to out myself as a former party clown."

"I don't like stories that promise to tell me something and then tell me to wait — and I'll say more about that in a minute."

"It takes balls to imagine you're a woman."

"I knew Bob was doomed from the nose-picking scene."

"The first twenty-seven pages didn't really grab me at all."

"I thought you were brilliant, but obviously you weren't."

"Four beautiful vignettes tied together with a common bulldozer."

But yes, most of us are still talking to each other eleven years later. Our class runs the gamut from magical realism to hard science fiction. One of us was nominated for a Nebula for his first week's story (Benjamin Rosenbaum). One of us was the first indie writer to be a finalist for the Cybils Awards (Susan Ee). One of us got her start in the oral storytelling tradition (Ibi Zoboi). Over a third of us are authors of color, and three of us travelled overseas to participate in the workshop.

All of us in this anthology (and a few who aren't) are still working, writing, and publishing. Consider this anthology a sample of eleven voices in science fiction and fantasy who have been trained by some of the greats, and yet are early enough in our careers that you may not have heard of us before.

## Table of Contents

Preface

The Worry Doctor by Linda DeMeulemeester

Angelfall (Novel Excerpt) by Susan Ee

Selling Short by Raymund Eich

Everyone Gets Scared Sometimes by Ari Goelman

Ruined Spa Day by Samantha Ling

Coyote Discovers Mars by Emily Mah

The Guy Who Worked for Money by Benjamin Rosenbaum

Everybody Stops at Boston's by Allan Rouselle

Rosamojo by Kiini Ibura Salaam

Lavender's Blue, Lavender's Green by Patrick Samphire

The Fire in Your Sky by Ibi Zoboi

Authors' Note

Acknowledgements

_Linda DeMeulemeester has worked in the fields of literacy and education. Her award winning middle grade_ Grim Hill _series has appeared on the Canadian best seller list in YA fiction. The first book,_ The Secret of Grim Hill _, was also featured in the_ Globe _and_ Mail. Grim Hill _is in development as a T.V. series with Wizard Hat Productions. She lives on the west coast of Canada and is currently working on book six of the series._

Her website is: www.grimhill.com

## The Worry Doctor

by Linda DeMeulemeester

A sea of shiny haired children bowed their heads in task. Angela listened and the scritch-scratch of pencils on paper filled her heart.

"That's right children, draw me a picture of your special place. It should be where you have your happy thoughts." Up and down the aisles Angela glided and nodded encouragement.

"Oh, Mary, Candy Land looks scrumptious. I'd love to visit there myself."

Two more steps forward, "James, Soccer Land would be so much fun." One more step forward, Angela stopped.

"Christa, what land is this?" She'd dropped her voice to almost a whisper.

"Why Teacher, it's Ladies Land," Christa's brow, first furrowed in concentration, now smoothed when she smiled up at her.

Ladies Land indeed, Angela studied the not-so-stick ladies, and scantily clad at that. No other grade twos drew people without their proper tunics and jumpers. But there was something else about the picture, something more disturbing.

"What are these?" Angela pointed to the pencil etched outlines behind the ladies.

"Those are trees in the woods," said Christa.

The woods past Institution! "But what are those squares the ladies are holding on to?"

"Suitcases," Christa's stubby finger traced the boxes on the page. "The ladies are moving."

"Oh," said Angela.

Angela took a calming breath and walked back to her desk. She pulled out her anomaly book. Un-uniformed ladies frolicking in the woods outside Institution – this warranted a trip to the worry doctor. Angela sighed. Good thing for Christa and for all the children's sake she was a vigilant guard of mind harmony. She took her job seriously.

"Good work children. Thank you for your lovely pictures. Tack them on the board; then you are dismissed."

The class rose in unison and posted their drawings in perfect alignment. No squabbles, no pushes, they maintained an orderly formation out the door – with the exception of Christa who trailed behind.

***

Next morning the blue card lay folded on her desk. Angela spotted it before she had even removed her sweater. Strange, she hadn't sent her report in yet. Had someone else noticed Christa's odd behavior and notified Admin? Was there a problem with one of her other pupils, some infraction in the dorms, or an upsetting weekend leave? No one from Admin needed to become involved. Angela massaged her forehead. That egotistical thought unworthy of a Teacher, melted away. Common good was all that mattered, harmony. When she unfolded the card her heart sped up.

Angela Roberts is to report to the Principal's office at noon. _All worries are unnecessary._

Why was she being summoned to the office? Her mind wrapped around that all morning as her class hummed through their motions. At 12:00 she hurried down corridors and climbed the steps to Admin sector. She reviewed her well-structured life. After marking and prep it was supper; social tea till 21:00; in the dorm and lights out by 22:30. She enjoyed weekend leave with her surrogate family, and courtship dances every other Saturday night.

"My thoughts are well ordered," Angela said as she arrived breathless at the reception room.

"I'm certain they are." The receptionist smiled. "Harmony for us all."

Angela stiffened despite the soothing interior of the office, or the friendliness of the woman in front of her. "Then why am I here?"

"Principal will see you now." The receptionist beamed.

Angela hesitated in the arch of the open door. As she glanced inside the monotone room, she was startled that Principal was not alone. A worry doctor, gray suited and inscrutable, stood against the far wall behind her. Angela forced her legs forward as the slightest gasp hissed through her clenched lips.

"Sit down, Angela." Principal's cheeks dimpled and her smile radiated warmth, but Angela felt chilled.

So this is what it's like for the children. That there might be a cost to anomaly management had never occurred to Angela...

Worry Doctor's tall frame and silver hair contrasted with Principal's short body and brown round face framed in tight black curls. Both of them looked like pythons curled to strike.

"Well, well, Angela," said the worry doctor. It's been a long time since we've seen you here."

Here? Angela stared hard at the worry doctor. A vague image rustled in her mind – him in the same gray suit but salt and pepper haired and younger, taller, fitting a happy mask across her face. She shuddered.

"Please, why am I here?" Angela's voice was now soft and small, like those of her students. "What have I done?"

"Done," Principal cut in. "Why dear... nothing. You're a model teacher in our little family here." Her hands spread, expansive – embracing. "That's what we're counting on."

They had an agenda, and they'd unfold it as it suited them. Angela waited.

"There's an emergency," the worry doctor said bluntly. "We know there is a dissident present in our catchment area."

Angela gasped.

"And dear, we need someone to find the dissident." Principal Benford nodded her head. Her dark curls shook in agreement. "The worry doctor chose you."

Angela ignored her rising dread. She had been chosen. She leaned forward and listened.

"Some records have been altered," said Principal Benford. "The problem is, we can suspect, but our minds are united, tuned. Interrogating suspects won't help us. Our thought patterns have been altered for harmony. We are incapable of the critical thinking that will be necessary."

"How would I be capable?" Angela asked. The worry doctor sat down facing her, and she squirmed under his level gaze.

He smiled fondly at Angela. "You and I go back a long way, Teacher Angela. I mind shaped you, and seeing the person you've become shows us we've all done our job."

Angela's stomach clenched.

Principal Benford proceeded. "You, the teacher, have always picked up where we've left off. After children are mind shaped and have had their negative experiences removed, then Institution works hard to replace those experiences with positive memories."

Angela smiled weakly, proud of her small part in it.

"But with only positive experiences," the worry doctor paced the floor, "with only pleasant thoughts," he stopped, "people are incapable of managing conflict."

When the principal nodded her head in agreement, it bobbed as though the worry doctor had an invisible string he pulled for emphasis.

There was something about the way they looked at her.

"We need someone to recall some discarded memories," said Principal Benford.

"Why me?" Angela's voice sounded flat.

"We can't be exposed for harmony's sake. But your experiences were somewhat sensational and documented. The worry doctor thinks we can reconstruct the events."

Angela pressed hard into the chair, physically willing all this to disappear.

"I'll reconstruct the experiences over a period of several weeks," said the worry doctor. "You'll begin to notice gradual changes as your thoughts become misaligned."

"What changes?"

"You will begin noticing things you weren't conscious of before, things that others miss. Once you've identified the dissident, we'll bring you both in."

The worry doctor patted her on the shoulder. "When it's over, we'll erase the whole experience and restore you to harmony. All worries are unnecessary."

Angela hoped so.

***

Angela visited the worry doctor every night that week. It was an unsettling sensation in the worry doctor's office when the happy mask was strapped across her face and she first inhaled the faint scent of cherries. No wonder she could never stomach the fruit. She would awaken in the chair with a sense of having misplaced something important. Except she didn't think she wanted to find whatever it was.

She had begun to notice a few subtle changes. The children, always sweet and enjoyable, had never given her a moment's concern. But now, sitting in the teachers' commons for dinner, her jaw was sore because her teeth had been clenched all day. This was to restrain herself from saying, "Come on, act a little lively. You're all so predictable." But how was becoming impatient supposed to help her find a dissident?

The dorm matron approached her the next morning. "You never signed up for this weekend's leave. I received a call from your surrogate family." Matron looked puzzled.

"I was behind on my prep and marking, and I didn't want to miss next week's courtship dance."

This time Matron smiled knowingly. "You'll be released from teaching next year. I guess it won't be long before you and Seth will be attending partnering sessions."

Angela managed to blush at this, which satisfied Matron. But Seth hadn't been on her mind at all. The blush was from not being completely forthright. It was true enough about being behind in her prep, with all the worry doctor sessions, but she didn't want to see her surrogate family. Not when she spent every night trying to remember the faces of her original family. No one recalled their mothers or siblings after they arrived at school. That was no more important than a puppy remembering its mother once it was removed from the litter. But after her sessions, as she was falling asleep, Angela saw them each night, reflected in an opaque pond, waiting for her to reach in and pull them to the surface.

The second week Angela yawned through her duties. Her eyes drooped from sleep deprivation. There were still the troubling dream snatches about her family. Also, she was staying awake late each night as blood coursed through her veins. Now, Seth was on her mind, constantly.

"I'm longing," Angela concluded with some surprise one morning as she spent twice her usual amount of time in front of the mirror. She had heard of 'longings' once partnership sessions had begun.

"Am I as pretty?" She pulled and shifted her jumper tight in flattering angles and fluffed out her wavy brown hair before tying it behind her back. As pretty as whom? An image materialized in her mind of herself, very young, standing beside someone a bit younger still, someone blond with shining blue eyes and rosy cheeks.

"Isn't she adorable," all the voices would say about the blond girl, including Mother. Hurt squeezed Angela's chest, hurt and jealousy.

Funny, as unpleasant as those feelings were, she wanted to understand them better.

***

There had been no question about her wanting to take family leave the next weekend. She couldn't wait for courtship dance. Angela stretched out on the porch swing and tried to relax. It didn't work. Shadows in corners seemed to draw her in, beckoning her to examine the ones in her mind. She resisted. Reaching down she scratched the back of Dog's neck behind its collar. Why was it that every surrogate family had two parents, two children, and a dog? Harmony?

Their own emerald green patch was situated amongst the other uniform patches lining family row. Angela swung slowly as she watched little brother throw a ball in the yard. Something wasn't right. She closed her eyes, and instead of seeing the black haired boy on the lawn, she saw a blond haired girl. Sister. Cherished sister. Angela forced open her eyes trying to block the flood of insecurity. As she ran inside the house she slammed the porch door, startling little brother and causing him to drop his ball.

Later that night Angela inhaled the pine-scented air. A shadowy horizon of trees completely surrounded the township. Courtship Hall was at the end of Family Row, close to the woods. She turned around and moved back toward the outdoor dance floor. That evening at courtship dance, the swaying color spectrum of patio lights did nothing to soothe her raw nerves, nor did the tinkling, melodious chords of the dance songs. More than a few couples glanced Angela's way when she rushed from the dance floor.

"Did you ever wonder what would happen if we all just kept on walking past Courtship Hall, past the gate and into the woods?" Angela was only trying to stir up the ritualized conversations. She hadn't meant to startle them. If only the conversations hadn't seemed trivial and insipid. Whenever she tried to maneuver people toward subjects of more substance, they only looked at her with vaporous expressions that dissolved when someone else changed the topic. They're all idiots, she thought.

"What's wrong with you tonight?" asked Seth. She grew uneasy under his searching gaze. "You're short tempered and coming up with such strange ideas."

"Is it strange to wonder what life might be like outside of Catchment?" She looked again toward the wooded horizon and wondered why no one had ever mentioned it before. This was one institution. It didn't seem remarkable to her that there would be others. What seemed remarkable was that she hadn't ever thought about it. The very prospect elicited a steady tingle that started in the pit of her stomach, fanning outwards.

Later when she was alone in the soft bed in her surrogate home, she pulled down the covers and sat up. In a soft voice she asked into the night, "Past the Hall, through the woods, out toward...?"

***

When Angela returned to the dorm it wasn't long before her last veneer of harmony chipped and peeled away. Exhausted from many sleepless nights, she decided to skip that evening's worry doctor appointment. She didn't want her memories to return; they brought uncomfortable feelings. Why did she need to be a critical thinker to find the dissident? Critical thinking made her friends and even Seth appear like morons.

Instead of her doctor's appointment, she forced herself to join the social tea. Although she'd planned on mingling, Angela sagged into the comfortable sofa by the fireplace safely distancing her from the others. Socializing wasn't worth the effort. She felt too tired.

Angela's body molded into the sofa as it grew softer every minute. Her eyes blurred as she stared into the fire until the flames grew huge and surrounded her. The memory the worry doctor had been trying to reconstruct began surfacing.

"Help me, Mommy!" Angela had screamed this from her bed. Smoke rose thick and choked her. With streaming eyes she saw her mother's soot streaked face above the flames, frozen in animal fear. Her mother had looked through the door to her, then to the other side of the hall before she turned her back and went through her sister's door.

"No. Choose me!" Angela had cried.

Angela shot up from her seat spilling her tea, oblivious to its scalding heat. Rigid, she fought to control her ragged breath. It didn't matter that she had been rescued anyway. It didn't matter that she never saw any of them again. What mattered was that her sister had been chosen. Not clumsy, plain Angela. As an adult, Angela could justify her mother's actions. Her mother likely knew there had been someone on the way to save her. Seconds after her mother had escaped with her sister, a man crashed through Angela's window and carried her down a ladder to safety. Little sister was smaller, younger. But logic had nothing to do with it. Emotion dictated her memory. She released a slow, steadying breath. Beneath her shock of the recovered memory there was a primal directive, instinct beneath conscious reason. Don't be a spectacle. Keep this to yourself.

As for keeping her shock from Principal Benford and the worry doctor, over the next few days, she discovered how simple the administrators were. Not very far up the evolutionary scale, she thought with contempt. While she didn't know how she'd bear the burden of her memory alone, it was easy not to confide in the worry doctor. When she went for her appointment, Angela read the fear in his eyes. His voice whined as he lifted off her happy mask and finished with, "All worries are unnecessary." He was afraid of being contaminated by her unhappy thoughts.

Angela had felt intimidated by Administration. She had been in awe of the unfathomable knowledge that lay behind their smiles. Now it was clear. Their smiles weren't enigmatic, only vapid. Something tugged at her. A few moments passed before she recognized the unfamiliar feeling as disgust.

***

The next day in school, while the children were outside for exercise drill, Angela sat in her desk as if nothing was different. But everything was. Her thoughts never stopped spinning, and she wondered how her recovered memories were supposed to help. Rather than detecting a dissident, she felt drained by all the emotional upheaval. How could someone break away from order anyway? All children were indoctrinated at five years of age, and then monitored for the rest of their lives. Of course, she realized suddenly, if you knew how to lie, the monitors didn't know how to detect it. That idea intrigued her. A discarded incident emerged and her thoughts slid to a halt.

It was an insignificant moment two weeks before. Then, as now, she had been sitting at her desk when James and Christa had come forward, interrupting her constant musings.

"Teacher,"

"What, James?"

"Christa took my pencil, my good purple one."

"Christa," Angela had asked, "Did you take the pencil?"

"No I didn't. It rolled under the bookshelf."

"Oh sorry." James shrugged his shoulders and checked under the shelves. Even though he never found the pencil, Angela had just assumed it was jammed under there somewhere.

Angela sat in Christa's desk, reached and pulled out the pencil box. The tips of her fingers felt numb as she flipped open the lid. Nestled against crayons and a chewed eraser lay the purple pencil. Angela walked back to her desk on shaky legs. I won't tell anyone. I'll visit them myself. I'll see things for myself. The litany had a calming effect.

***

It was a short walk to Christa's family sector. Catchment was like a large spoked wheel with Institution in the middle. It was a reasonable distance from institution to anywhere in the township. Angela closed the gate of the white picket fence and stepped up onto the front porch of the butter yellow cottage trimmed in green. She scrutinized it, but it looked no different from every other pastel home in this sector. Taking a deep breath she knocked, not quite as firm a knock as she'd intended.

A woman opened the door. She looked strangely familiar. It took a second to register that she resembled a grown up Christa.

Confused, Angela could only sputter out, "Hello, I'm Christa's teacher. I'm concerned about Christa."

"What exactly is the matter?"

"May I come in?"

The woman shrugged for her to come in, a casual enough gesture, but Angela detected wariness in her manner. Inside the front parlor, there were no photographs, pictures, and flower vases – the typical things in a surrogate family home. She saw stacked boxes lined in the hall. Angela walked over, bent and peered into a box. Inside were clothing, dishes, and pictures of Christa.

"Where are you going?"

"Nowhere," the woman laughed. "I'm cleaning, that's all."

Angela saw the nervous twitch of the woman's hands before she clasped them tightly behind her.

"You're lying." Angela's voice sounded so matter of fact. Weeks ago this scene would have been inconceivable.

The woman backed away slowly.

"Why turn your back on order?" Angela needed to know. Here was someone else, someone who saw more than the others.

"Christa," The woman said.

Angela was puzzled. "You have her every weekend." Then she gasped. "You're not a surrogate family. Christa is your birth daughter."

The woman's face crumpled in despair.

"Keep your own child?" Angela struggled to understand, but the idea was so foreign. "Women don't keep their own children. After partnering and raising babies, all children need to leave home. Their neural dispositions need to be altered for unity's sake. Remember your history lessons; parents couldn't accomplish that. Remember the chaos in schools."

The woman reached out and grabbed her arm, "I've heard things, other ways of life outside Catchment."

Angela caught her breath. She'd wondered too.

"Imagine how hard it is to give up your own child?"

Now Angela broke from her grasp. "It isn't hard for some people," she said, remembering her own mother. The pain that memory gave her... Despite her growing disdain for Principal and the worry doctor, Institution had saved her.

"If you want to be a parent why don't you apply as a surrogate?" Angela asked.

"No," the woman sobbed. "I chose Christa."

Angela hesitated at the door. Chose. All she could remember about her own mother was that she hadn't chosen her. No one had – Except the worry doctor. Why? Why had he? Like Christa she hadn't fit in, couldn't obtain mind harmony, and couldn't fall into an exact line. She was always the unfavored child. Institution helped her. So what compelled Christa's mother to try to escape.

"Please don't turn us in. Christa's different. She'd never survive order. It could never be harmony for her. She'd need so many treatments. She'd end up a blank slate, a..." the woman choked back the rest of her sentence.

"A Teacher." Each word was an ache squeezed out of Angela's chest as she realized what had really been done to her. "A teacher like me." The room shifted and disintegrated behind her tears. Angela needed answers. She turned and ran as the woman's pleas echoed down the path.

***

It took time to reach the archives in the bowels of Institution. At each level Angela needed to pass a teacher, dorm matron, or Admin. When she succeeded past Institution's guardians with lie after lie, she felt less like a puppet and more like a puppet master, pulling her own strings, bobbing her own head.

The archive stacks loomed row upon row. Where to begin? Student records went back decades. Fifty years seemed as good as any place to start. Compared to the thin reports she recorded, those records bulged – filled with incident after incident. Bile rose in her stomach as she read about bullying, neglect and abuse. Along with incident reports of those poor children were recommendations to see the school counselors, the predecessors of worry doctors.

When Angela finally straightened up, her back ached and her neck felt stiff. There had been a time, as Angela understood it, where removing conflict had been nothing more than a healing process. Take out the bad memories, replace them with only good ones – give those children a chance. But without conflict people didn't develop critical thinking. Then the inevitable followed, manipulation and mind control. She despised the worry doctors, and envied them. Her brief experience at being a puppeteer felt so right.

***

Angela sorted through her confusing emotions. Everything had a price, including harmony. Her footsteps fell hard and heavy on the stairs up to Admin Sector. She flinched as she passed other students and teachers in the hallways. She despised their bland expressions. She didn't want to feel this way. The worry doctor would happily arrange for her to have mind harmony again. He would help Christa and her mother as well. They didn't have to suffer.

Yet, despite her pain, Angela felt tempered, stronger. She saw more than anyone now. Did she want to crawl back into her cotton-batting cocoon and be safe? Was it her place to decide that for Christa and her mother? Again Angela was amazed how much Christa's mother risked in choosing her own daughter.

The worry doctor had taken a risk, too. He had picked her for this mission. Angela stopped mid-step. Picked her – and now Angela knew why. Nothing was as strong as her desire to be chosen. Hadn't she been waiting all her life for that?

***

As usual, the worry doctor waited for her by the harmony chair in his office.

"My dear, is there any news yet?"

Angela let him lead her toward the chair. She wanted to please him, to be his chosen one. She couldn't help notice how his smooth face looked pasty and bleached under his silver hair. She hated how his eyes watered, and that he wrung his smooth manicured hands nervously while waiting for her answer. He's like putty himself, she thought, waiting to be shaped.

"My dear, I asked if there's any news?" This time his voice grated in a whine.

Angela knew she would help Christa and her mother escape. Angela also knew she could never leave Institution like them. She had been chosen. She also had a choice – to stay behind and reshape the others.

Instead of sitting down, Angela turned at the last second. She shoved hard, catching the doctor off guard. He fell into the chair instead of her. His guileless eyes blinked up at her. She choked back her bile.

Angela decided worry doctor gray would look good on her. As she lowered the happy mask over his face, Angela heard a slight hiss before he inhaled the cherry tinged gas.

" _Some worries are necessary_ ," she said.

_Originally published in Issue 2 of_ Neo-opsis _, February 2004._

_Susan Ee's short stories have been in various publications including_ Realms of Fantasy _and_ The Dragon and the Stars _anthology. She is also a filmmaker whose latest film played at major film festivals and on cable TV stations throughout the U.S. She studied creative writing through workshops at Stanford, The Iowa Writers' Workshop, and of course, Clarion West._

_To learn more about Susan, visit her website at:_ www.susanee.com

An excerpt from the bestselling dark fantasy novel:

## Angelfall

by Susan Ee
CHAPTER 1

Ironically, since the attacks, the sunsets have been glorious. Outside our condo window, the sky flames like a bruised mango in vivid orange, reds, and purples. The clouds catch on fire with sunset colors, and I'm almost scared those of us caught below will catch on fire too.

With the dying warmth on my face, I try not to think about anything other than keeping my hands from trembling as I methodically zip up my backpack.

I pull on my favorite boots. They used to be my favorites because I once got a compliment from Misty Johnson about the look of the leather strips laddering down the sides. She is-was-a cheerleader and known for her fashionable taste, so I figured these boots were my token fashion statement even though they're made by a hiking boot company for serious wear. Now they're my favorites because the strips make for a perfect knife holder.

I also slip sharpened steak knives into Paige's wheelchair pocket. I hesitate before putting one into Mom's shopping cart in the living room, but I do it anyway. I slip it in between a stack of Bibles and a pile of empty soda bottles. I shift some clothes over it when she's not looking, hoping she'll never have to know it's there.

Before it gets fully dark, I roll Paige down the common hall to the stairs. She can roll on her own, thanks to her preference for a conventional chair over the electric kind. But I can tell she feels more secure when I push her. The elevator is useless now, of course, unless you're willing to risk getting stuck when the electricity goes out.

I help Paige out of the chair and carry her on my back while our mother rolls the chair down three flights of stairs. I don't like the bony feel of my sister. She's too light now, even for a seven year old, and it scares me more than everything else combined.

Once we reach the lobby, I put Paige back into her chair. I sweep a strand of dark hair behind her ear. With her high cheekbones and midnight eyes, we could almost be twins. Her face is more pixie-like than mine, but give her another ten years and she'd look just like me. No one would ever get us mixed up, though, even if we were both seventeen, any more than people would mix up soft and hard, warm and cold. Even now, frightened as she is, the corners of her mouth are tipped up in a ghost of a smile, more concerned for me than herself. I give her one back, trying to radiate confidence.

I run back up stairs to help Mom bring her cart down. We struggle with the ungainly thing, making all kinds of clanking as we wobble down the stairs. This is the first time I've been glad no one's left in the building to hear it. The cart is crammed full of empty bottles, Paige's baby blankets, stacks of magazines and Bibles, every shirt Dad left in the closet when he moved out, and of course, cartons of her precious rotten eggs. She's also stuffed every pocket of her sweater and jacket with the eggs.

I consider abandoning the cart, but the fight I'd have with my mother would take much longer and be much louder than helping her. I just hope Paige will be all right for the length of time it takes to bring it down. I could kick myself for not bringing down the cart first so Paige could be in the relatively safer spot upstairs, rather than waiting for us in the lobby.

By the time we reach the front door of the building, I'm already sweating and my nerves are frayed.

"Remember," I say. "No matter what happens, just keep running down El Camino until you reach Page Mill. Then head for the hills. If we get separated, we'll meet at the top of the hills, okay?"

If we get separated, there's not much hope of us ever meeting anywhere, but I need to keep up the pretense of hope because that may be all we have.

I put my ear to the front door of our condo building. I hear nothing. No wind, no birds, no cars, no voices. I pull back the heavy door just a crack and peek out.

The streets are deserted except for empty cars parked in every lane. The dying light washes the concrete and steel with graying echoes of color.

The day belongs to the refugees and raid gangs. But at night, they all clear out, leaving the streets deserted by dusk. There's a strong fear of the supernatural now. Both mortal predators and prey seem to agree on listening to their primal fears and hiding until dawn. Even the worst of the new street gangs leave the night to whatever creatures may roam the darkness in this new world.

At least, they have so far. At some point, the most desperate will start to take advantage of the cover of night despite the risks. I'm hoping we'll be the first so that we'll be the only ones out there, if for no other reason than that I won't have to drag Paige away from helping someone in trouble.

Mom grips my arm as she stares out into the night. Her eyes are intense with fear. She's cried so much this past year since Dad left that her eyes are now permanently swollen. She has a special terror of the night, but there's nothing I can do about that. I start to tell her it'll be all right, but the lie dries up in my mouth. It's pointless to reassure her.

I take a deep breath, and yank open the door.
CHAPTER 2

I instantly feel exposed. My muscles tighten as if expecting to get shot any moment.

I grab Paige's chair and wheel her out of the building. I scan the sky, then all around us like a good little rabbit running from predators.

The shadows are quickly darkening over the abandoned buildings, cars, and dying shrubbery that hasn't been watered in six weeks. Some tag artist has spray-painted an angry angel with enormous wings and a sword on the condo wall across the street. The giant crack that splits the wall zigzags through the angel's face, making it look demented. Below it, a wannabe poet has scrawled the words, "Who will guard against the guardians?"

I cringe at the clattering noise my mother's cart makes as she shoves it over the doorway and onto the sidewalk. We crunch over broken glass, which convinces me even more that we've stayed hidden in our condo for longer than we should have. The first floor windows have been broken.

And someone has nailed a feather on the door.

I don't believe for a second that it's a real angel feather, although that's clearly what's being implied. None of the new gangs are that strong or wealthy. Not yet, anyway.

The feather has been dipped in red paint that drips down the wood. At least, I hope it's paint. I've seen this gang symbol on supermarkets and drug stores in the last few weeks, warning off scavengers. It won't be long before the gang members come to claim whatever's left on the higher floors. Too bad for them we won't be there. For now, they're still busy claiming territory before the competing gangs get to it first.

We sprint to the nearest car, ducking for cover.

I don't need to check behind me to make sure Mom is following because the rattling of the cart wheels tells me she's moving. I take a quick glance up, then in either direction. There's no motion in the shadows.

Hope flickers through me for the first time since I made our plan. Maybe tonight will be one of those nights where nothing happens on the streets. No gangs, no chewed-up animal remains to be found in the morning, no screams to echo through the night.

My confidence builds as we hop from one car to another, moving faster than I expected.

We turn onto El Camino Real, a main artery of Silicon Valley. It means "The Royal Path," according to my Spanish teacher. The name fits, considering that our local royalty-the founders and early employees of the most cutting edge tech companies in the world-probably got stuck on this road like everyone else.

The intersections are gridlocked with abandoned cars. I'd never seen a gridlock in the valley before six weeks ago. The drivers here were always as polite as can be. But the thing that really convinces me that the apocalypse is here is the crunching of smartphones under my feet. Nothing short of the end of the world would get our eco-conscious techies to toss their latest gadgets onto the street. It's practically sacrilegious, even if the gadgets are just dead weight now.

I had considered staying on the smaller streets but the gangs are more likely to be hiding where they are less exposed. Even though it's night, if we tempt them on their own street, they might be willing to risk exposing themselves for a cartful of loot. At that distance, it's unlikely they'll be able to see that it's only empty bottles and rags.

I'm about to pop up behind an SUV to scope out our next hop when Paige leans through the gaping car door and reaches for something on the seat.

It's an energy bar. Unopened.

It is nestled among a scattering of papers as if they'd all fallen out of a bag. The smart thing to do would be for us to grab it and run, then eat it in a safe place. But I've learned in the past few weeks that your stomach can pretty easily override your brain.

Paige rips open the package and snaps the bar into thirds. Her face is radiant as she passes the pieces around. Her hand trembles with hunger and excitement. But despite that, she gives us oversized pieces and only keeps the smallest for herself.

I break mine in half and give half of my share to Paige. Mom does the same. Paige looks crestfallen that we're rejecting her gifts. I put my finger to my lips and give her a stern look. She reluctantly takes the offered food.

Paige has been a vegetarian since she was three years old when we visited the petting zoo. Although she was practically a baby, she still made the connection between the turkey that made her laugh and the sandwiches she ate. We called her our own little Dalai Lama until a couple of weeks ago when I started insisting she eat whatever I manage to scrounge off the street. An energy bar is the best we can do for her these days.

All our faces relax in relief as we bite into the crispy bar. Sugar and chocolate! Calories and vitamins.

One of the pieces of paper flutters down from the passenger seat. I catch a glimpse of the caption.

"Rejoice! The Lord is Coming! Join New Dawn and Be the First to Go to Paradise."

It's one of the fliers from the apocalypse cults that sprang up like pimples on greased skin after the attacks. It has blurry photos of the fiery destruction of Jerusalem, Mecca, and the Vatican. It looks like someone took still shots from the news videos and printed them on a cheap color printer. It has a hurried, homemade look to it.

We gobble up our meal, but I'm too nervous to enjoy the sweet flavor. We are almost at Page Mill Rd, which would take us up to the hills through a relatively unpopulated area. I figure once we near the hills, our chances of survival will dramatically increase. It's full night now, the deserted cars lit eerily by the half moon.

There's something about the silence that puts my nerves on edge. It seems there should be some noise-maybe the skittering of a rat or birds or crickets or something. Even the wind seems afraid to move.

My mother's cart sounds especially loud in this silence. I wish I had time to argue with her. A sense of urgency builds in me as if responding to the buildup before lightning. We just need to make it to Page Mill.

I push faster, zigzagging from car to car. Behind me, Mom's breathing gets heavier and more labored. Paige is so silent, I half suspect she's holding her breath.

Something white floats gently down and lands on Paige. She picks it up and turns to show me. All the blood drains from her face and her eyes are enormous.

It's a fluffy piece of down. A snowy feather. The kind that might work its way out of a goose down comforter, only a little larger.

The blood drains out of my face too.

What are the chances?

They mostly target the major cities. Silicon Valley is just a plain strip of low-storied offices and suburbs between San Francisco and San Jose. San Francisco's already been hit, so if they were going to attack anything in this area, it'd be San Jose, not the valley. It's just some bird flying by, that's all. That's all.

But I'm already panting with panic.

I force myself to look up. All I see is endless dark sky.

But then, I do see something. Another, larger feather floats down lazily toward my head.

Sweat prickles my brow. I break out into an all-out sprint.

Mom's cart rattles crazily behind me as she desperately follows. She doesn't need explanations or encouragement to run. I'm scared one of us will fall, or Paige's chair will tip, but I can't stop. We have to find a place to hide. Now, now, now.

The hybrid car I was aiming for suddenly crumples under the weight of something crashing down on it. The thunder of the crash almost makes me jump out of my boots. Luckily, it covers Mom's scream.

I catch a flash of tawny limbs and snowy wings.

An angel.

I have to blink to make sure it's real.

I've never seen an angel before, not live anyway. Of course, we've all seen the looping footage of golden-winged Gabriel, Messenger of God, being gunned down from the pile of rubble that was Jerusalem. But watching TV, you could always tell yourself it wasn't real, even if it was on every news program for days.

There's no denying that this is the real deal, though. Men with wings. Angels of the Apocalypse. Supernatural beings who've pulverized the modern world and killed millions, maybe even billions of people.

And here's one of the horrors, right in front of me.
CHAPTER 3

I almost tip Paige in my rush to spin around and change direction. We skid to a halt behind a parked moving truck. I peek out from behind it, unable to stop watching.

Five more angels swoop down on the one with the snowy wings. Judging by their aggressive stance, it's a fight of five against one. It's too dark to see any details on the landing angels but there's something about the shape of the wings of one of them that strikes me as different. Their wings fold too fast when they land for me to take a good look and I'm left wondering if there actually was anything different about that one. He's a giant, towering over the rest.

We hunker down and my muscles freeze, refusing to move from the relative safety behind the truck's tire. So far, they don't seem to notice us.

A light suddenly flickers and turns on above the crushed hybrid. The electricity has come back on and this street lamp is one of the few that hasn't yet been broken. The lone pool of light looks over-bright and eerie, highlighting contrasts more than illuminating. A few empty windows light up along the street as well, giving enough light to show me the angels a little better.

They have different colored wings. The one who smashed into the car has snowy white wings. The giant has wings the color of night. The others are blue, green, burnt orange and tiger-striped.

They're all shirtless, their muscled forms flexing with every movement. Like their wings, their skin tones vary. The snowy-winged angel that crushed the car has light caramel skin. The night-winged one has skin as pale as an egg. The rest range from gold to dark brown. These angels look like the type to be heavily scarred by battle wounds but instead, have the kind of perfectly unmarred skin prom queens around the country would kill their prom kings for.

The snowy angel rolls painfully off the crushed car. Despite his injuries, he lands in a half crouch, ready for an attack. His athletic grace reminds me of a puma I once saw on TV.

I can tell he's a formidable opponent by the way the others warily approach him even though he is injured and far outnumbered. Although the others are muscular, they look brutish and clumsy compared to him. He has the body of an Olympic swimmer, taut and muscled. He looks ready to fight them barehanded even though almost all his enemies are armed with swords.

His sword lies a few feet from the car where it landed during his fall. Like the other angel swords, it is short with two feet of throat-slitting, double-edged blade.

He sees it and shifts to lunge for it. But Burnt Angel kicks the sword. It spins lazily across the asphalt away from its owner, but the distance it moves is surprisingly short. It must be as heavy as lead. It is still far enough away, though, to ensure that Snowy Wings doesn't have a prayer of reaching it.

I settle in to watch the angel execution. There's no question of the outcome. Still, Snow puts up a good fight. He kicks the tiger striped one and manages to hold his own against two others. But he is no match for all five of them together.

When four of them finally manage to pin him down on the ground, practically sitting on him, Night Giant walks up to him. He stalks like the Angel of Death, which I suppose he could be. I get the distinct impression that this is the culmination of several battles between them. I sense history between them in the way they look at each other, in the way Night yanks at Snow's wing, spreading it out. He nods at Stripes, who lifts his sword above Snow.

I want to close my eyes against the final blow but I can't. My eyes stay glued open, forgetting how to close.

"You should have accepted our invitation when you had the chance," says Night, straining against the wing to hold it away from Snow's body. "Although even I wouldn't have predicted this kind of end for you."

He nods again to Stripes. The blade whips down and slices off the wing.

Snow shrieks his fury. The street fills with echoes of his rage and agony.

Blood sprays everywhere, showering the others. They struggle to hold him down as the blood makes him slick. Snow twists and kicks two of the bullies with lightning speed. They end up rolling on the asphalt, curling around their stomachs. For a moment, as the remaining two angels fight to keep him down, I think he'll manage to bust loose.

But Night stomps his boot on Snow's back, right on the raw wound.

Snow hisses in a breath filled with pain but does not scream. The others take the opportunity to slink back into position, holding him down.

Night drops the severed wing. It lands with the thud of a dead animal on the asphalt.

Snow's expression is furious. He still has fight in him, but it's draining fast along with his blood. Blood soaks his skin, mats his hair.

Night grabs the remaining wing and yanks it open.

"If it was up to me, I'd let you go," says Night. There's enough admiration in his voice to make me suspect he might mean it. "But we all have our orders." Despite the admiration, he doesn't show any regret.

Stripes' blade, poised on Snow's wing joint, catches the moon's reflection.

I cringe, expecting another bloody blow. Behind me, the tiniest, sympathetic sound escapes Paige.

Burnt suddenly tilts his head from behind Night. He looks right at us.

I freeze, still crouched behind the moving van. My heart skips a beat, then races triple time.

Burnt gets up and walks away from the carnage.

Straight towards us.
CHAPTER 4

My brain clamps shut in fear. The only thing I can think to do is to distract the angel while my mother pushes Paige to safety.

"Run!"

My mother's face freezes wide-eyed in horror. In her panic, she turns and runs off without Paige. She must have assumed I'd push the wheelchair. Paige looks at me with terrified eyes dominating her pixie face.

She swivels her chair and rolls as fast as she can after Mom. My sister can roll her own chair, but not nearly as fast as someone can push her.

None of us will make it out alive without a distraction. With no time to consider the pros and cons, I make a split-second decision.

I sprint out into the open straight toward Burnt.

I dimly register an outraged roar filled with agony somewhere in the background. The second wing is being cut. It's probably already too late. But I'm at the place where Snow's sword lies, and there's not enough time for me to come up with a new plan.

I scoop the sword almost from under Burnt's feet. I grab it with both hands, expecting it to be very heavy. It lifts in my hands, as light as air. I throw it toward Snow.

"Hey!" I scream at the top of my lungs.

Burnt ducks, looking as surprised as I feel at the sight of the sword flying overhead. It's a desperate and poorly thought-out move on my part, especially since the angel is probably bleeding to death right now. But the sword flies much truer than I expect and lands hilt-first right in Snow's outstretched hand, almost as if it was guided there.

Without a pause, the wingless angel swings his sword at Night. Despite his overwhelming injuries, he is fast and furious. I can understand why the others had to dramatically outnumber him before cornering him.

The blade slices through Night's stomach. His blood gushes out and mixes with the crimson pool already on the road. Stripes leaps to his boss and grabs him before he falls.

Snow, stumbling to regain his balance without his wings, bleeds rivers down his back. He manages to swing his sword again, laying open Stripes' leg as he runs off with Night in his arms. But that doesn't stop them.

The two others who'd backed off as soon as things got ugly rush to grab Night and Stripes. They pump their powerful wings while running with the injured, leaving a trail of blood dripping to the ground as they take off into the night.

My distraction is a shocking success. Hope surges in me that maybe my family has found a new hiding place by now.

Then the world explodes in pain as Burnt backhands me.

I fly backwards and slam onto the asphalt. My lungs contract so hard I can't even begin to think about taking a breath. All I can do is curl into a ball, trying to get a sip of air back into my body.

Burnt turns to Snow who can no longer be called snowy. He hesitates with all his muscles tense as though considering his odds of winning against the injured angel. Snow, wingless and drenched in blood, sways on his feet, barely able to stand. But his sword is steady and pointed at Burnt. Snow's eyes burn with fury and determination which is probably all that's holding him up.

The bloodied angel must have one hell of a reputation because despite his condition, the perfectly healthy and beefy Burnt slams his sword back into his sheath. He gives me a disgusted glare and takes off. He runs down the street, his wings taking him airborne after half a dozen steps.

The second his enemy turns his back on him, the injured angel collapses to his knees between his severed wings. He looks like he's bleeding out pretty fast and I'm pretty sure he'll be road kill in a few minutes.

I finally manage to suck in a decent breath. It burns as it goes into my lungs, but my muscles unclench as they get oxygen again. I revel in a moment of relief. I unwind my body and turn to look down the street.

What I see sends a jolt through me.

Paige is laboriously wheeling herself down the street. Above her, Burnt stops his ascent, circles like a vulture and begins to swoop down toward her.

I'm up and running like a bullet.

My lungs scream for air but I ignore it.

Burnt looks at me with a smug expression. His wings blow my hair back as I sprint.

So close, so close. Just a little faster. My fault. I pissed him off enough to hurt Paige out of sheer spite. My guilt makes me all the more frantic to save her.

Burnt yells, "Run, monkey! Run!"

Hands reach down and snatch Paige.

"No!" I scream as I reach out to her.

She's lifted into the air, screaming my name. "Penryn!"

I catch the hem of her pants, my hand gripping the cotton with the yellow starburst sewn onto it by Mom for protection against evil.

Just for a moment, I let myself believe I can pull her back. For a moment, the tightness in my chest begins to relax with anticipated relief.

The fabric slips out of my hand.

"No!" I jump for her feet. My fingertips brush her shoes. "Bring her back! You don't want her! She's just a little girl!" My voice breaks at the end.

In no time, the angel is too high to even hear me. I yell at him anyway, chasing them down the street long after Paige's screams fade into the distance. My heart practically stops at the thought of him dropping her from that height.

Long minutes pass as I stand panting on the street, watching the speck in the sky shrink to nothing.
CHAPTER 5

It is long after Paige disappears into the clouds that I turn around, looking for my mother. It's not that I don't care about her. It's just that our relationship is more complicated than the usual daughter-mother relationships. The rosy love I'm supposed to feel for her is slashed with black and splattered with various shades of gray.

There is no sign of her. Her cart lies on its side with its junk contents strewn beside the truck we were hiding behind. I hesitate only for a moment before yelling out.

"Mom?" Anyone or anything that might have been attracted by noise would already be here, watching in the shadows.

"Mom!"

Nothing stirs in the deserted street. If the silent watchers behind the dark windows lining the street saw where she went, nobody is volunteering to tell me. I try to remember if I had maybe seen another angel grab her, but all I can see is Paige's dead legs as she is lifted from the chair. Anything could have happened around me at that time, and I would have been oblivious to it.

In a civilized world where there are laws, banks and supermarkets, being a paranoid schizophrenic is a major problem. But in a world where the banks and supermarkets are used by gangs as local torture stations, being a little paranoid is actually an advantage. The schizophrenic part, though, is still a problem. Not being able to tell reality from fantasy is less than ideal.

Still, there is a good chance that Mom made herself scarce before things got too ugly. She is probably hiding somewhere, most likely tracking my movements until she feels safe enough to come out.

I survey the scene again. I see only buildings with dark windows and dead cars. If I hadn't spent weeks secretly peering out of one of those dark windows, I might have believed I was the last human on the planet. But I know that out there, behind the concrete and steel, there are at least a few pairs of eyes whose owners are considering whether it is worth the risk of running out into the street to scavenge the angel's wings along with any other part of him they can cut off.

According to Justin, who was our neighbor until a week ago, word on the street is that somebody has put a bounty on angel parts. A whole economy is being created around tearing angels to pieces. The wings fetch the highest price, but hands, feet, scalp, and other, more sensitive parts, could also fetch a nice sum if only you can prove they're from an angel.

A low groan interrupts my thoughts. My muscles tense instantly, ready for another fight. Are the gangs coming?

Another low moan. The sound is coming not from the buildings, but directly in front of me. The only thing in front of me is the bleeding angel lying on his face.

Could he still be alive?

All the stories I've heard say that if you cut off an angel's wings, he would die. But maybe that is true in the way that if you cut off a person's arm, he would die. Left unchecked, he would simply bleed to death.

There can't be that many chances to get yourself a piece of angel. The street might be flooded with scavengers any minute. The smart thing to do would be to get out while I still can.

But if he's alive, maybe he knows where they took Paige. I trot over, my heart beating furiously with hope.

Blood streams down his back and pools on the asphalt. I flip him over unceremoniously, not even thinking twice about touching him. Even in my panic, I notice his ethereal beauty, the smooth rise of his chest. I imagine his face would be classically angelic if it hadn't been for the bruises and welts.

I shake him. He lies unresponsive, like the Greek God statue he resembles.

I slap him hard. His eyes flutter, and for a moment, they register me. I fight the panicked urge to run.

"Where are they going?"

He moans, his eyelids dropping down. I slap him again, as hard as I can.

"Tell me where they're going. Where are they taking her?"

A part of me hates the new Penryn I've become. Hates the girl who slaps a dying being. But I shove that part deep into a dark corner where it can nag me some other time when Paige is out of danger.

He groans again, and I know he won't be able to tell me anything if I don't stop his bleeding and take him to a place where the gangs aren't likely to swoop down and chop him into little trophies. He is shivering, probably going into deep shock. I flip him over onto his face, this time noticing how light he is.

I run over to my mother's upended cart. I dig through the pile looking for rags to wrap him with. A first aid kit is hidden at the bottom of the cart. I hesitate only a moment before grabbing it. I hate to waste precious first aid supplies on an angel who will die anyway, but he looks so human without his wings that I allow myself to use a few sterile bandages as a layer on his cut.

His back is covered with so much blood and dirt that I can't actually see how bad the wounds are. I decide it doesn't matter, so long as I can keep him alive long enough to tell me where they took Paige. I wrap strips of rags around his torso as tightly as I can, trying to put as much pressure on the wounds as possible. I don't know if you can kill a person by making the bindings too tight, but I do know that bleeding to death is faster than death by almost any other way.

I can all but feel the pressure of unseen eyes on my back as I work. The gangs would assume that I'm cutting out trophies. They're probably assessing whether the other angels are likely to come back while they're wrestling the pieces out of my hands. I have to bundle him up and get him out of here before they grow too bold. In my haste, I knot him up like a rag doll.

I run over and grab Paige's wheelchair. He is surprisingly light for his size, and it's far less of a struggle than I'd anticipated to get him into the chair. I suppose it makes sense when you think about it. It's easier to fly when you weigh 50 pounds than 500. Knowing he is stronger and lighter than humans doesn't make me feel any warmer toward him.

I make a show of lifting him and putting him into the chair, grunting and staggering as though he's terribly heavy. I want the watchers to think the angel is as heavy as he looks, because maybe then they'll conclude that I'm stronger and tougher than I look in my underfed five-foot-two frame.

Is that the beginning of an amused grin forming on the angel's face?

Whatever it is, it turns into a grimace of pain as I dump him into the chair. He is too big to fit comfortably, but it'll do.

I quickly grab the silken wings to wrap them in a moth-eaten blanket from my mother's cart. The snowy feathers are wondrously soft, especially compared to the coarse blanket. Even in this panicked moment, I'm tempted to stroke the smooth down. If I pluck the feathers and use them as currency one at a time, a single wing could probably house and feed all three of us for a year. That is, assuming I can get all three of us back together again.

I quickly wrap both wings, not fretting too much about whether the feathers are being broken. I consider leaving one of the wings here on the street to distract the gangs and encourage them to fight amongst each other instead of chasing me. But I need the wings too much if I am to entice the angel into giving me information. I grab the sword, which is amazingly as light as the feathers, and stick it unceremoniously in the seat pocket of the wheelchair.

I take off at a dead run down the street, pushing him as fast as I can into the night.

_Raymund Eich has written patent applications, herded cattle, delivered pizzas, researched reactions between nitric oxide and myoglobin, won a national championship in a collegiate quiz bowl competition, built furniture, changed oil, smoked a brisket, written code, circled the world, read widely, thought deeply, and affirmed Robert Heinlein's dictum that specialization is for insects. He lives with his wife and son about thirty miles from Johnson Space Center, and online at_ raymundeich.com

## Selling Short

by Raymund Eich

The freighter _Coronado's_ conference room had a hardwood floor and leather chairs. Reflected light smeared over the polished ebony table as Marqus sat. No one else had arrived yet. His hands slid over the wood, and six hundred yards below the floor the ship's fusion drive rumbled. He smiled a giddy grin. New Liberia, his home, five space habitats orbiting Saturn's moon Titan, lay two hours behind the ship. He lived his own life now, not the one his parents wanted him to live.

Unfamiliar bodies and voices flowed into the room. The chair to his right squeaked, and he turned to see Raveena. "Hi, Marqus," she said. "Welcome aboard."

"Thanks." In the flesh, she looked like the avatar she'd shown in his Virtual job interview a week before. South Asian, Raveena had a long narrow nose and thin lips. She wore a navy blue jumper and straight black hair in a pageboy cut.

"Settled in?" she asked.

He nodded, and glanced up as more people entered the room. "I've been in my cabin a few hours."

"All unpacked?"

"One of your robots unpacked my things." The ship had fifteen robots, like pygmy centaurs with tiger-stripe plastic skin, three feet long and two feet to the shoulder. They performed service and maintenance tasks; the one that helped Marqus had climbed the walls on its gecko feet to hang his clothes bags.

"You must have brought a lot, if it took you so long."

"Not really..." Sweat trickled on his nape. In his cabin, he'd installed and primed a censorship program Captain Garcia had purchased: _Sun, helium, Venus_ ... He couldn't tell her that.

"Have you met everyone?"

"In Virtual, yes." Eight other people sat around the table, and chatted amongst themselves. Sonoma, a pale woman, talked with Naseem, a slender Arab. The latter glanced at Marqus, with a look his ancestors had fixed on black men during slave raids centuries ago. Marqus turned away, but watched Sonoma through one of the ship's cameras. She had high cheekbones and straight red hair. He'd never seen a woman like her. She leaned toward Naseem, and parted her full lips in a shared laugh. "Some people don't resemble their avatars."

At the table's head, the Chinese man, navigator Xi Qen, and Annike Olson, the financial officer, flanked Captain Garcia. The captain laughed at someone's joke, then stood and cleared his throat. Conversations died down. Garcia stood six-feet-two, with brown eyes under thick eyebrows. His van dyke beard emphasized his jaw. "First, has everyone met our new officer trainee, Marqus du Bois? We hired him at New Liberia."

Nods ringed the table. Olson folded her arms. She'd been aloof in his interview, and he couldn't tell why. Garcia looked at him and raised an eyebrow. —Say something,— the captain said privately.

"I'll administer the ship's computer system," Marqus said. "I look forward to working with you." He couldn't think of anything else, and closed his mouth.

-Thanks, Marqus,— Garcia said. "The second order of business involves our destination and cargo."

Murmurs bubbled, and Raveena leaned forward. "Why _did_ you refit the _Coronado_ with insulation? Why are we taking methane to colonies around Neptune? The profit margin's thin."

Garcia grinned. "I'll be happy to tell you everything." He looked around the table. "But first, you have to consent to running your outgoing messages through a censor program."

The murmurs doubled. "Censorship?" Ludmilla said. Glitter on her eyelids flashed when she blinked. "We have a right to privacy!"

"Your right to privacy ends where ship's security begins," Garcia said, but then softened his voice. "We won't record what you say. The program will flag messages containing certain words, and I'll review only those messages before they go out. I don't want to do this, but if certain parties in the solar system knew our plan, we could be in trouble. You'll have to trust me." Marqus sensed everyone agree.

"Now Raveena, you asked why we're hauling methane to a gas giant? Simple. We're not. I sold it before we took delivery." Garcia's gaze darted from face to face. "Everyone get up to speed on terraforming Venus."

The ship's network fed thoughts to Marqus like a forgotten memory returning to mind. Before humans arrived, hot carbon dioxide smothered the planet. To terraform Venus, people first had to remove the atmosphere. He superimposed a hologram of the planet over his real vision. Venus appeared as a fuzzy, striped yellow ball above the conference table. It hung in the shadow of a rotating disc eight thousand miles across. Dubbed the SPF-Infinity, the disc blocked sunlight and allowed the atmosphere to cool. Humans lived in cities along the disc's rim. When cold enough, the atmosphere would rain on the surface, and then freeze into a dry ice shell half a mile deep. Unaided, though, cooling would take centuries.

To speed the process, the Venus Climatology Ministry had built a cooling tower, Beanstalk-1. Five hundred miles high, the tower jutted through Venus' clouds. Marqus looked for it, and rotated the Virtual hologram until the tower's tip, marked by a beacon, came into view. Though huge, the cooling tower operated on a simple principle: liquid helium flowed down the tower's inner wall, and near the surface atmospheric heat turned it into gas. Helium vapor then floated up the tower's annulus, radiated its heat into space, and became liquid again to restart the cycle. Beanstalk-2 was under construction, and radicals in the Venus parliament demanded a third.

"It all comes down to helium," Garcia said. "There isn't any in Venus' atmosphere, so the government has to import it. Some helium always leaks out, and the second tower will double demand. Now, when demand goes up—"

The planet's image vanished, and up popped a chart of helium prices at the market in Ishtar, the largest city on SPF-Infinity's rim. So far this year, the price had gone up five-fold; it now traded at two thousand sols per ton.

"Two thousand sols a ton!" Garcia said. "The _Coronado_ can carry 180,000 tons. Do the math!"

Marqus had hired on for 2.0% of the ship's profits. His jaw sagged. He would earn over seven million sols! He could retire after one journey! They all could. Naseem grinned, and Sonomaglanced at the captain with a satisfied look.

"It's not so simple," Xi said. Concern marred his face. "The price is up because of the Preservationists. Ever since their hard-line faction took over..."

"They'll boycott the _Coronado_ , and each of us, for the rest of our lives," Raveena said.

Heinrich palmed his shaven, tattooed scalp. "We won't have a rest of our lives. Between here and Venus, bulk helium is only found in Jupiter's atmosphere. Surrounded by Preservationist settlements on its moons! If we try to take helium, they'll gun us down!"

"Another gas giant?" Naseem asked. "No, the Presers could intercept us on the way to Venus."

Marqus' eyes went wide, and he blinked at the captain with sudden respect.

"You've all missed it," Garcia said. "We're going to the sun."

"We'll burn up!" Heinrich said.

Garcia shook his head. "That's why I refitted the _Coronado_ with ceramic insulator all around the hull. It'll stop radiation and slow heat absorption. We'll have two weeks before the ship's interior gets too hot." His smile had a manic edge. "We can mine helium from the sun."

Ludmilla's brow furrowed. "The photosphere is 10,000 degrees, and it gets hotter further in!"

"We won't go further in," Garcia said. "There's enough helium outside the photosphere for us to fill the hold in nine or ten days. The gas out there, in the chromosphere, is also less dense, so it'll be a gentler ride. It can be done." He leaned forward, fists on the table. "This will be our most profitable trip ever."

***

The ship accelerated at point-two gee, enough to keep Marqus' soles on the deck. New Liberia's spinning-wheel space habitats soon faded from naked eyesight against Titan's orange clouds. Abstractly, he'd known New Liberia was insular and isolated; he'd seen how tiny it was from a distance in Virtuals; but seeing it for real, as an image derived from photons reflected off atoms and not neurons induced to fire within his visual cortex, made his cheeks clammy. Even if he went back, he'd never think of New Liberia the same way.

The _Coronado_ had filed a flight plan, destination Neptune, with a gravitational slingshot around the sun to gain more speed. In his mind's eye, Marqus saw the flight plan, a blue line, turn yellow as the ship crept along it. At the sun, their true flight plan, a red line, curled off and wound itself around Sol. It wouldn't be easy – the orbital insertion into the sun's chromosphere required the _Coronado_ to decelerate at three gees for a day and a half – but the ship could do it.

Should he call his parents? Mother would be worried, but Father would try to put doubts in his head. _Those ofays and oreos will never treat you as an equal_ , Marqus imagined his father would say. He had to prove himself first. He got to work.

The prior computer administrator, Lorelei, had left the ship six months before. The public memory had grown sloppy since then, littered with file fragments and backed up behind schedule, if at all. Between cleaning up the computer system and absorbing technical manuals, he worked late the first few nights. When he woke, though, deep in his third night aboard with the lights in his cabin still on and murky thoughts of transmitter hardware in his mind, he knew he had to do more than work.

So he sought out his crewmates. Though he felt uneasy at first, the crew's friendliness showed him most people didn't fit into stereotypes. He liked Raveena, despite her fondness for martial arts and role playing Virtuals with dancing elephants and six-armed blue gods. He played chess with Heinrich and racquetball with the captain. Ludmilla introduced him to golf in Virtual. He felt foolish at first, in long pants and spiked shoes, but legends of Tiger Woods and Albert Nkomo buoyed him. By the eighteenth tee, he wanted to try again.

The person he most wanted to meet, though, was the least accessible: Sonoma. Her hazel eyes made his heart pound and sweat meander down his back. He told his software assistant to calm his heartrate and deepen his voice when he met her. As soon as he next saw her, though, he felt certain she saw what he'd done and she'd think less of him for it. He stammered through the conversation, and walked away with hot cheeks. He wondered if his mother had been right about white women's witchery.

He avoided Naseem, and both Xi and Olson remained aloof. The navigator spent his free time in his cabin. The whine of precision tools and the sweet stink of hot polymers sneaked into the corridor.

"What's his hobby?" Marqus asked Raveena as they passed Xi's door.

She shrugged. "He tinkers. He never socialized much, but he's been a hermit since his wife left."

"Lorelei?" he asked. Raveena nodded. "Why'd she go?"

"She became a Preservationist. Filed for divorce and left for Callisto. And she took their daughter, which bothers me the most."

"How so?" Marqus asked. "I don't know much about Preservationists."

"They think human beings are a cancer on the Solar System," she said. His software assistant told him cancer was a disease. "It's a bad enough life for an adult to choose: a tiny apartment and meditating on the beauty of ice and rocks all day. Inflicting that on a child..." Marqus felt sudden sympathy for Xi.

Olson, on the other hand, played a strong role in the ship's social life, but Marqus felt small whenever he met her. Late one night, he stepped into the main corridor of the crew deck and almost collided with her as she jogged.

"I'm sorry," he said, and shuffled to the side.

She jogged in place. Her sweat masked the dead odor of white people. "Don't mention it." Olson's blue eyes stared without seeing; her software assistant had spoken through her mouth. She took a step.

It had been five days. He had to speak. "Ms. Olson?"

Her body turned. "Call me Annike."

"Have I offended you?"

"No," came from her mouth.

His father, face stern, had told him he'd come crawling home. Dread filled Marqus. "Do you dislike me because I'm black?"

Annike stopped jogging, and muscles flowed in her face. "What!? What gave you that idea?"

"You don't want me on board. I don't know why."

She shrugged. "Marqus, it's nothing personal, but we shouldn't have hired you right now. We don't need a sixth officer trainee. You're not worth the cost."

"Your computer system's a mess—"

"You worked for New Liberia traffic control, right? Computer glitches could crash ships. Our system's good enough. I've handled it for six months. Pardon me?"

He nodded. Her face reset, and she jogged away. Her body veered around a robot carrying a laundry bag on its back. It glanced at her with doting eyes. He watched the small of Annike's back, where sweat darkened her gray sportbra, until the curving corridor took her out of sight. His chin lifted. They didn't need him? He'd prove her wrong! He belonged on the _Coronado_. He'd prove it.

***

On the twelfth day out from New Liberia, the ship accelerated past Jupiter. Sol lay a week away, and it looked to be a long week.

A news item crossed the solar system. The Presers demanded a ban on all helium deliveries to Venus. They weren't bluffing, either. The Presers had an outpost on Uranus' moon Desdemona. A warship from the outpost chased a helium harvester leaving the gas giant's atmosphere, destroyed the harvester's fusion drive, then arrested the crew. The Venus Defense Ministry launched a squadron on maneuvers to the asteroid belt. Helium's cash price jumped to 6872¼ sols a ton, and the futures contract for next-month deliveries broke six thousand.

Garcia invited the crew to the conference room. Robots circled the room with bottles of Riesling and Pinot Noir. Marqus smiled wide to jolt their pleasure circuits each time they filled his glass. Virtual vases with yellow hydrangeas stood around the room. Dance music played in the crew's heads, and a few crewmen's bodies jerked to the rhythm. "Come celebrate! We're rich!" Garcia made avatars appear to expand the crowd, and mingled with a glint in his eyes.

After a while, Marqus talked with Raveena while she drank. "The captain's excited," Marqus said.

"His potential profit is a half-billion sols. I'd be bouncing off the ceiling." She held his gaze for a moment, then looked away.

"So why isn't Annike happy?" She stood at the doorway, her back to the jamb, and talked with Naseem and Sonoma. Maybe now he could talk to Sonoma. Marqus went over, and Raveena followed.

"We should sell a futures contract now." Annike spoke with exaggerated drunken care. "Prices can't stay this high. The profit takers will act. We could sell 150,000 tons for next-month delivery and lock in a good profit."

"Good?" Naseem said. "That's a billion sols! Why doesn't the captain—"

"He'll make up some bullshit about the Presers finding us. But that's not it. He's deep in debt."

Marqus couldn't speak for a moment. —How can she air his secrets like that!-

-She's letting the wine talk for her.— Raveena frowned. Through the thoughtspace, Marqus sensed she talked with Annike.

Annike shook her head. "No, he's behind on payments, and he took shaky loans to pay for the insulation—"

Garcia must have been eavesdropping. He strode toward them, his hand clenched white around a bottle's neck. His gaze swept over them, and Marqus quailed. "Despite what Annike might want, we will not sell a futures contract. First, we'd have to disable the censor program to send the sell order."

Annike reeled, then pressed her lips together. "We code the message."

"You think they don't have agents among the Venus futures brokers? Second, we'd be fools to sell now. The price is still climbing."

"Rey, there will be profit taking—"

"And the Presers will blow helium haulers apart. We're fine." Garcia glared, his pupils wide. "Come with me." He hooked her arm and led her out.

Naseem squinted at their backs. "Damn, isn't a billion sols enough for him?"

"He's right," Marqus said.

The Arab rolled his eyes. "He's not here. You don't have to suck up."

Sonoma turned to Marqus. "You think he's right?"

Naseem brooded with sudden jealousy. Good. Sonoma's hazel eyes made him light-headed, but he managed to speak. "I can understand her desire to cash in, but the captain's right about security."

Naseem shook his head. "A billion sols is worth the risk." To Sonoma he said, "The party's fading. Let's go."

"Sure," she said, but on the way out she held Marqus' gaze for a moment. He stared after her until Raveena cleared her throat.

"Marqus, can we talk?"

"Sure. What about?"

"I'm not normally so forthright." She bowed her head, and a blush bloomed on her cheeks. "I'd like to date you." She looked up with her eyes wide and hopeful.

His mouth opened, but he couldn't smile. Why not? Despite her skinny rear, he found her attractive enough. Friendly, too. What held him back? His parents' slanders of "dotheads?" His hopes about Sonoma? Not even that...

His software assistant fed a thought to his consciousness. Raveena simply wasn't feminine enough. Her baggy jumpsuits and _jeet kune do_ didn't appeal to him. "I'm sorry. I like you, but not romantically."

"You could if you wanted to." She shrugged. "But if you don't, your loss."

Sure, he could reconfigure his mind. But he might lose something he liked about himself. Though the outlines were usually clear, reconfiguring was always unpredictable. She half-smiled with her mouth and cheeks, but not her eyes. "Thanks for understanding," he said, though he wasn't sure she did. She soon said good night.

Tensions, both in the solar system and on board, wound tighter the next few days. The Presers ordered a squadron toward Venus. Premier Zhao of the East Asian Federation of Peoples' Republics invited diplomats from both sides to a meeting in ten days. Yet most voices in the solar system expected war.

Garcia and Annike argued in their cabin; the disagreement about profit taking revealed deeper clefts in their relationship. Arguments over money and ship management leaked through the door.

The strain on board eased, though, the last day before they entered the sun, as they passed ten million miles from Earth; on Ishtar's trading floor, helium's cash price reached eight thousand. Annike and the captain smiled and touched each other in public. Too, Marqus' friendship with Raveena grew more relaxed, and he found himself glad.

A few hours before the orbital burn, Marqus looked through the ship's forward cameras as Sol grew larger. The sun washed out the background stars and soon, details resolved. Glowing gas wisps arced ten thousand miles over blotchy red sunspots. The _Coronado_ 's surface temperature climbed. Marqus sensed the hull distort as the helium collectors moved into position. Time for the orbital burn.

In the crew lounge, tanks extruded from the walls and swung up their lids. Sonoma climbed into a tank on the far side of the room. During the burn, the crew would be confined to Virtual for a day and a half; perhaps he could talk to her then. Marqus climbed into his tank. Umbilicals slithered to his face and groin to provide air, water, food, and waste removal. His attention left his body before crash gel filled the tank.

He emerged in a public Virtual simulating the ship's interior. He stepped through the gel and the lid into the Virtual lounge. Heinrich and Raveena's avatars stood there. "We're going to the stern," she said. "Join us if you want."

He thought about Sonoma, and realized she had entered a private Virtual. His mood fell. "Sure."

They drifted through the floor. The bulkhead between the crew deck and the fuel tanks crawled up their legs, torsos, heads. Marqus stuck out his tongue and grimaced at the taste.

Inside the tank, he shivered at cold vacuum. A hundred yards below lay a dark surface like a black sand beach. Deuterium pellets. Abruptly, the pellets rustled toward them. The captain had cut off the thrust.

Marqus felt queasy for a few seconds as the ship swung around and aimed its stern forward for the deceleration burn. Through the deut pellets he glimpsed the fusion drive's injector, six hundred yards across the tank. The pellets crawled over them like a thousand frozen cat tongues. Heinrich said, "I hope Garcia's right about the insulation."

Marqus remembered the specs he'd learned. "If the pellets melt, we'll be out of fuel."

"If they vaporize," Raveena said, "the pressure would tear the ship apart."

They drifted toward the drive. The deut's metallic smell made him gag – he turned it off, replaced it with hydrangea fragrance. After a minute, they neared the fuel tank's aft bulkhead. Marqus pulled himself through the hull, and it solidified under his feet. He stood on the stern and gaped.

The sun occupied half the sky, like a molten gold wall too tall to climb. A prominence arced around them. His software assistant dimmed the brightness, which made Raveena and Heinrich's avatars shadowy wraiths. Convection roiled the sun's surface, and the simulated heat made him sweat. The size of it made his breath ragged. He shut his eyes and turned his head. The inside of his eyelids blazed bright green. His software assistant steeled him against the sight, and he reopened his eyes.

A hatch opened twenty yards away, and a blur shot out. Marqus glimpsed a curved metal probe, three yards high. The probe streaked with reflected sunlight for a few seconds, and then vanished along their flight path. The probe would coast towards Neptune and transmit false telemetry to traffic controllers along the way. It should buy them a week before the Preservationists realized where the _Coronado_ had gone. Marqus watched the sun's limb for a last glimpse of the probe, but then the sun moved around the stern's rim and he felt like he'd be thrown into it. He shut his eyes again until his assistant made the feeling seem normal.

Then the fusion drive kicked in, and flung helium out the stern at ten million miles a minute; but the exhaust appeared as a pale wisp. It would take 35 hours to slow the ship to the sun's orbital velocity. Thirty-five hours? Marqus imagined for an irrational moment it would take forever, considering how weak the ship's drive seemed in comparison to the fusion reactor looming over them.

***

The burn did end on schedule, and once the crew grew accustomed to the _Coronado_ 's reorientation (instead of walking them around in a circle, the main corridor was now a treadmill, with doors on the floor and ceiling, and the furnishings in their cabins retracted and reextruded ninety degrees away), they settled into a routine. The helium collectors whined as they pulled in the sun's hot gases, mostly hydrogen and helium, and threw the hydrogen overboard. Eleven tons of helium a minute, sixteen thousand tons a day, filled the hold. A little slower than expected, but fast enough. They would top off the hold sometime on day twelve. The number popped into Marqus' head: based on the last helium price quote they'd received, he earned 22 sols per second.

To earn it, he only had to sweat. The ten thousand degree heat outside began to transfer through the ceramic, and the temperature crept up, two degrees a day. Sweat stained their shirts, and by the fourth day, Heinrich walked around shirtless. His bare belly stretched tight his shorts' waistband. By day seven, the ship's robots fumbled to put empty water bottles in their trashbags. Marqus frowned. The robots usually had good coordination. Were they heat-drunk?

That night, Marqus realized Naseem wanted to talk to the crew. The Arab had set up a Virtual inversion of the conference room, with a parquet tabletop and ebony floor. Naseem's avatar stood at the head of the table, arms folded. The others looked as puzzled as Marqus felt. —What's going on?— He asked Raveena.

She shrugged.

The room filled. The captain, Annike, and Xi apparently had not been invited, Marqus realized, as Naseem rapped his avatar's knuckles on the table. "Is it hot in here, or is it just me?" he asked. He let the question hang, then popped a chart into their minds: internal temperature after the deceleration burn. A blue line showed the captain's estimated temperature, and the observed temperature was marked in red. The red line stood higher than the blue from the start, and the gap had widened. "The captain lied to us."

Sonoma said, "So his calculations were off—"

"It's not the calculation." Naseem forced another image into their heads, the _Coronado_. Cracks marred the ceramic insulator, like wrinkles on someone overdue for telomere repair. "I've looked at the insulation the past two days. It's damaged."

"Damaged? How?" Ludmilla asked.

"Maybe turbulence during deceleration." Naseem looked at Marqus. "Or maybe the captain hired a cheap contractor at New Liberia."

Marqus stared back. "How hot will it get?"

"Too hot," Naseem said, and the chart returned to Marqus' mind. The red and blue lines climbed to the upper right. The red line topped 108° in two days, 122° in two days more. "As more heat passes, the cracks worsen."

"We'll be fine," Marqus said. "We have enough water, and the crash tanks have climate control."

"The crash tanks can't handle that much heat. In five days we'll suffer heat stroke. In six we'll be dead. If the deut pellets haven't melted first."

In a blink, Garcia and Annike manifested near Naseem. The captain glared, hands on his hips. "What's going on?"

Naseem puffed out his chest. "You damn well know. Five days from now we'll boil like lobsters."

"Based on your fictional damage assessment?"

"It's the truth!"

Garcia shook his head, then looked at the crew. "He wants you to think it's the truth."

"If Naseem's lying, why are we heating up faster than predicted?" Heinrich asked.

Garcia blinked a few times. "Predictions can be a little off. The heating rate won't get worse. Come on, have I ever endangered you?" He looked around the room, his face confident. At his side, though, Annike looked down, and pressed her lips together.

"I'm calling for a vote under the bylaws," Naseem said. "To declare an emergency over the captain's authority. Your 52% won't count," he told Garcia. "Three-fourths of the remaining shares are needed to win. Given the situation, I move for a vote at the minimum time, eight hours from now."

"I second," Ludmilla said.

Naseem pointed at the captain. "And you can't transfer shares to your supporters before then."

Garcia's eyes narrowed. "I know the rules." He faded out.

Everyone else, save Marqus and Naseem, winked out too. Naseem glanced with a smirk at the space where the captain had been. Marqus stood and propped himself with his fists on the table. "Why are you doing this?"

"Why? He's trying to kill us."

"So your numbers say. How did you calculate them?"

Naseem leaned forward. "My numbers are right. Hell, why am I trying to persuade you? You only have 2%."

"You need 36% out of 48%," Marqus said. "Just 10% more will block you. Annike holds 18%—"

Naseem laughed. "Christ, Marq, she's a lock. So's Xi."

His name wasn't _Marq_ , dammit. "We'll see if they're locks in eight hours." Marqus left the Virtual. A private one formed around him; a swank hotel room, on the lowest level of New Liberia's biggest habitat, with diamond windowpanes in the floor. The habitat rotated, carried the window away from Titan. The rings came into view, a glittering line slicing Saturn in half. Marqus slumped on a red velour sofa and thought.

Naseem must be lying. Marqus thought his way into the ship's memory and tracked down the observed temperatures so far. They agreed with Naseem's report. Marqus thought about the thermometers around the ship, but their limited memories agreed as well. Naseem couldn't have falsified all the data.

How had he extrapolated the continued overheating? Marqus' software assistant borrowed insights from the ship's library and assembled models deep in his mind. He felt the models run, but he couldn't tell what the answer would be. He'd have to wait till they finished.

Yet why would Naseem lie? Fear for his own safety, despite the evidence? Possible, yes-

Was Naseem a Preser agent?

That devious raghead – but it made no sense. If Naseem were a Preser agent, why would he want to leave so soon? The Presers didn't yet know the _Coronado_ had deviated from its flight plan. If they left now, they'd reach Venus before the Presers knew what they carried.

Unless they knew the _Coronado_ had dived the sun. But how? Every message had gone through the censor program on its way to the transmitter. No, Naseem wasn't a spy.

Marqus' models finished. They disagreed widely about how hot it would get. The disagreements revolved around how rapidly the insulation degraded. Naseem had reported the most pessimistic projection, of course, but did he have a reason to be so pessimistic?

He had said he had data about the insulation. He must have given one of the ship's robots a thermometer and guided it, probably by remote-jolting its pleasure and pain circuits, along the hull. He could've guided the robot outside, too... no, the hull was too hot now-

Marqus jolted to the edge of the sofa. The exterior hadn't been too hot before the ship entered solar orbit. Not to measure temperatures, but for something worse. Someone could have guided a robot to the radio transmitters and used it to activate the manual override. Someone could have used a robot to send a message before they dove the sun.

The Presers might have known Garcia's plan for two weeks. They could be in a more distant solar orbit right now, waiting to ambush the _Coronado_ on her way to Venus.

He took the stairs two at a time to the door. Down the hall, the Virtual melted away around him, and the floor's curve grew steeper; his attention returned to his body as he ran down the main corridor to the captain's office. His software assistant digested the transmitter access hatch's log, and popped the final result into his consciousness: eight times the hatch had opened-in four pairs of openings a few minutes apart while the ship traveled from New Liberia to the sun. He knocked on the captain's door.

"What is it, Marqus?" Garcia sounded irritated.

"It's important, sir. We may have a spy on board."

He blinked and found his awareness in his avatar seated in a Virtual of Garcia's office, across the desk from the captain. "Tell me."

"I realized someone could send a robot out to the transmitters. I checked the hatch log. Looks like a robot went out four times, for long enough each time to use the transmitter overrides to send a message."

Garcia's expression hardened. "God damn it."

"I don't know if any messages were sent, though."

"I'm sure there were. Damn traitor. But we'll find the bastard out."

Marqus frowned. "How?"

"During the refit at New Liberia, I added locator tags to the robots. Implants under their skin. It helped the ship's computers guide them through the refit process faster. Afterward I left the tags in. Don't tell anyone."

"I won't." Privacy was difficult to come by; the crew wouldn't be happy if they knew Garcia monitored their robot use. Security came first, though. "So we'll know which robots went to the transmitters."

The captain nodded. "Plus we can tell where they went inside the ship."

The spy would have tied a retransmitter on a robot to get his message sent. He would have been too smart to do that in view of the public cameras. However: "We can infer who might have met them privately." Marqus sensed his subconscious access the camera data and work on it.

"Exactly." The captain nodded. "Marqus, I'm glad you thought of this possibility. Even if no one sent messages through the transmitter override, you've proved yourself. I can't do it now, but as soon as the vote is over, I'll double your share."

Marqus' breath caught. Call it 5000 tons, at 6000 sols per ton... with that much money, he could buy a high-rise apartment in New New York! "I, sir, thank you."

Garcia smiled and waved lazily, as if thirty million sols were nothing. But then his smile melted, and his hand fell to the desk.

A strong conviction, well beyond reasonable doubt, bloomed in Marqus' mind. One robot had gone out the hatch to the transmitter three times. For a few hours before and during the robot's first trip out, Annike had remained in her cabin. Before first going out, the robot spent twenty minutes alone with her.

***

The conference room-the real one-smelled sweaty. Naseem stood near the table, and people conversed in clumps along the walls. The captain shook hands, but he looked worn and his voice sounded flat. Marqus wondered if he could cope with a lover's treachery as well as Garcia did. People noticed Garcia's demeanor, and whispered among themselves. Sonoma glanced from the captain to Annike and her eyes widened. She went to Garcia and laid her hand on his upper arm. He turned to her with surprise on his features, and the surprise soon turned pleasant.

A throat cleared behind Marqus. "How are you voting?" Ludmilla asked.

"You'll find out."

Her eyelids flashed. "For Garcia? You can't be serious."

"Why not?"

"We already have a hundred thousand tons in the hold. Why take more chances?"

"All we have are Naseem's made-up numbers—"

"Has Garcia refuted them?"

Marqus jerked his head. "No." Garcia wouldn't endanger them. He wouldn't. "But I trust him."

Naseem rapped his gavel. "This meeting is now in order." Chairs squeaked as people sat. Garcia and Sonoma took adjacent seats. The captain looked past her for a moment and caught Marqus' gaze. The gavel rapped again. "The first order of business is the vote."

"No," Marqus said. "Ship's security comes first."

"You stalling?" Naseem asked, then looked at Garcia. "This a trick?"

The captain glanced over. "Marqus?"

"I have evidence Annike Olson has betrayed us to the Presers."

Murmurs erupted. The captain shut his eyes. Olson, seated near Naseem, folded her arms and looked down her nose at Marqus. "Where did you get that idea?"

"You sent a robot out the hatch to the transmitter. Three times." The fourth time must have been a software glitch. None of the ship's robots had gone out then.

Olson shrugged. "Fine, Marqus, you found me out."

Garcia slammed his palm against the tabletop. "Goddammit, Annike! How could you? Betraying me-us-to the Preservationists!"

Her eyes narrowed. "I didn't talk to the Presers!"

Marqus leaned forward. "Of course you would say that."

She turned a sharp gaze on him, which softened when she sagged out a breath. "I'll give you access to all my personal files. You're sharp enough that you'll find if I talked to the Presers."

Garcia's face was tight with leashed anger. "If it wasn't the Presers, who'd you talk to?"

"A Venus futures broker."

The anger came out. "You risked our necks to make a profit?"

"The same profit you could've made if you'd listened to me! I sold 20,000 tons of helium for next month delivery at 6117 sols per ton. You could've sold 50,000 tons! You could have paid off your loan on the _Coronado_."

"You'll bring the Presers down on us!"

"You know I encrypted the messages. Don't get sanctimonious, you know the Preser risk didn't stop you from selling short! Greed did! 'Why sell short?'" She mimicked his voice. "'The sky's the limit! The cash price will hit 10,000!' If the bubble doesn't burst." She shook her head. "I finally realized I can't stop you from taking foolish risks. But by God I won't take those risks alongside you any more."

Marqus sensed the room's sympathies shift toward Annike, but Garcia's face stayed firm. "Didn't you tell the crew about your scheme? If the bubble burst, didn't you want anyone else to make millions?"

She spread her hands, palms-up, on the table. "I concealed myself as best I could, and you still found me out." She pointed with her chin at Marqus. "If I'd talked to people, someone would have told you. If they had, you would've shut me down. You can't know someone's loyalties, when push comes to shove." She shrugged, and sank into her chair. "Time to vote."

"If no one objects," Naseem said. "We vote in order, highest percentage first. Annike, you have 18%."

"I vote to overrule the captain and depart now."

"Xi, 10%."

"I side with the captain."

Naseem squinted. "Why?" Annike asked.

Xi blinked at her. "Wrong of you to betray your man."

The captain needed just 2% more. As Naseem, Ludmilla, and Raveena voted against the captain, people glanced at Marqus. With his 2%, he could swing the balance the captain's way, and preserve the ship from mutiny. Yet should he? Garcia had led him to suspect Annike, when her only sin had been locking in a profit. What if the helium price bubble had burst while the sun's radio output cut them off from news? What if Naseem was right? He'd trusted the captain; trusted more than he should.

"Sonoma, you have 2.3%."

She nodded, and her face furrowed. "For the captain." She puckered her mouth and frowned at Annike. "You didn't tell us because you just thought about yourself."

Garcia smiled with gratitude as he stared at the back of Sonoma's head. Marqus, though, saw her face, ugly with the worst womanish sneer he'd ever seen. His attraction for her suddenly evaporated, and he wondered why he hadn't seen her real self before.

The meeting crumbled into raised voices and private glances, until Garcia cleared his throat. "I thank the crew for its support," he said. "There do appear to be some discrepancies between the insulation's predicted performance and the actual. So, in the interests of safety, we will leave the chromosphere in 24 hours." He pushed back his chair and left. Sonoma darted after him. Voices returned to full volume, but Marqus said nothing, aware of Annike further up the table and wanting to avoid her. He slipped out.

The air grew thicker as the day passed. The crew didn't stir, and Garcia shut himself in his quarters. Everyone scorned Sonoma and Xi, and they too left the public spaces. Xi stayed in his cabin, with only bubbling solvents audible in the corridor outside. No one could find Sonoma, but when Annike moved into a cabin near the crew quarters it became clear. Sonoma had taken up with the captain.

The ship still sucked in helium; about 130,000 tons, all told. Over thirty million sols for Marqus. Sweat salted his lips and dripped from his chin. He daydreamed of an air conditioned apartment half a mile above a crowded Earth city.

When the departure time approached, the crew gathered in the main lounge to climb into the crash tanks. People joked and laughed, relieved at the impending burn. "This heat is too much," Heinrich said. "A few more minutes and I'd strip naked."

From her tank, Raveena said innocently, "Wait, captain, I've changed my mind..."

The lids closed on Heinrich's chortle and a chorus of laughs. The mask covered Marqus' face, and gel flowed over him. The captain planned a one gee burn, but turbulence could toss them around.

Marqus watched the bridge through the ship's cameras. The bridge stretched forty feet, long enough to see the floor curve up. Video monitors and speakers covered one wall, and four chairs sprouted from the other wall. The chair backs faced the floor.

Xi stood with folded arms. A monitor's glow lit his face. He wore dungarees and a baggy vest, and sweat dewed on his forehead. How could he stand the heat? Garcia and Sonoma stood in a far corner; her fingers traced the captain's ear.

"Time to burn," Garcia said. After a few seconds the floor loosed its grip on their feet. Rotation had stopped. The captain used a handhold to pull himself toward a chair. "Everyone below's in the tanks. Sonoma, Xi, strap in."

Sonoma took the chair at the left end, next to Garcia. Annike and Xi filled the chairs to the right. The straps crawled over their bodies and hooked together. Sudden weight tugged at their faces and pulled them deeper into the chairs. The _Coronado_ accelerated away from the sun.

Over the next hour, the gas around the ship thinned, and the sun's chatter over the radio grew a little quieter. Marqus looked through the ship's fore view, and his face felt cool. The ions faded to show a dark gray point sixty-five million miles away. Four days to the SPF-Infinity-

"There's radio interference," Annike said.

Garcia nodded. By now they should hear broadcasts, but instead a droning sound filled all channels. "That's artificial."

-Presers!— Raveena said. The image entered Marqus' mind: a ship resembling a lumpy pyramid of giant balls, the base lit by exhaust from a fusion drive. A Preservationist warship, course and speed so well matched with the _Coronado_ it seemed under tow. "Half a million miles away."

Garcia glared at Annike. "Goddammit, woman! They eavesdropped on your message to your broker—"

"Maybe they saw the probe! Does it matter? Let's deal with this!"

The radio drone cut off, and a man's voice boomed. "Vessel _Coronado_ , registry number November-echo-alpha-niner-eight-foxtrot, this is Jupiter Satellite Union Ship _Rachel Carson_." Marqus turned down the volume. "You are under arrest for transporting helium to the Republic of Venus. You have five minutes to surrender. Failure to do so will be construed as an admission of guilt, and the use of force will be authorized. JSUS _Rachel Carson_ out."

Silence filled the bridge, but the crew shouted through the thoughtspace. Then Garcia spoke, voice firm and cold. "No way in hell do we surrender. Traitor, whoever you are, however you warned them, you guessed wrong. If I die, so do you."

"That's crazy!" Xi said. "Better to cut our losses and live on—"

"After they rebuild our personalities?"

"At least it's living! We'd be free, we could be reunited with our families and friends."

"Xi, we're fine. We won't surrender," Garcia said. "We're fast and nimble—"

"Not as fast as a warship!"

"Fast enough. Xi, don't worry, we'll evade them. They're not that powerful. All they have are lasers and fusion bombs. We've just braved a star."

Xi reached into his vest and pulled out a homemade pistol with a dull steel muzzle and a compressed air canister. His free hand grasped his wrist, but still the muzzle shook over Garcia and Annike. "We will surrender."

-We have to do something!— Raveena said privately. —I'm going to the bridge. Who else?-

Marqus didn't hesitate. —Me.— He thought the gel to liquid and opened his tank. Raveena stood, and gel dripped from her bangs and her shorts. Marqus swung his feet to the floor. Doubt tugged him. "I can tweak the cameras between here and the bridge. We can surprise him. But then what?"

Her fists clenched, then relaxed. "One of the reasons I do martial arts—"

"Have you ever fought someone?"

"Do we have a choice?"

On the bridge, Annike's face grew pallid. The captain smirked at the pistol. "What the hell's that?"

"It shoots darts of a rapid tranquilizer. If you're both unconscious, I'll be left in command. Surrender now or I'll use it." Xi's gaze jerked to Annike. "If you try to reconfigure the command structure, I'll use it. It'll knock you out before you can reprogram anything."

Marqus ran up the corridor behind Raveena. Could he reprogram the command structure? No, Garcia had it locked up tight; Marqus needed a minute or more to fix it.

"Look, Xi," the captain said.

"Time's up! We surrender!"

Raveena tiptoed onto the bridge, and Marqus followed. Xi swept the muzzle over Garcia, Annike, and Sonoma. The latter glanced up at Marqus. He raised his finger to his lips. Raveena circled to the right. Xi wouldn't see her over the camera, but if he heard her footsteps... Sonoma's gaze flicked over them. She raised her eyebrow, then leaned toward Xi.

"Gah!" Marqus screamed and jumped at Xi from the left. The navigator spun in his chair, jerked the muzzle toward Marqus, and-

Howled in agony. Raveena's hand descended again, and this time Marqus saw the blow. Her hand slammed into Xi's. Bones cracked, and the pistol clattered to the floor. Xi howled again. His right forearm bent midway between the elbow and wrist, broken by Raveena's first blow. Then Xi cut off his screams, and unclasped himself with his good hand. His gaze locked on the pistol.

Marqus dove for it, rolled onto his side, and fired. The dart caught Xi two inches below his left clavicle. His face grew dreamy, and in moments he sagged back.

"You two have just doubled your shares," the captain said. "Everyone, stay strapped in!"

"What about—" Raveena said.

"Get Xi out. One of you take his chair. The other, shit. Not enough time to get into a crash tank."

Marqus unbuckled Xi. "It's yours," he said.

"You got us here without Xi seeing."

"You landed the blow. I'll ride it out."

Twelve seconds remained on the ultimatum, and a few seconds more would pass before they'd see the Presers' response. Marqus curled up in the corner, forearms over his head. Five seconds, zero, plus five-

Garcia gyrated the ship. The walls slammed into Marqus, and pushed against him with bruising force. The ship accelerated at four gees. He numbed his pain, and watched the ship through an external view cobbled together from internal data and educated guesswork. A few puffs of dust appeared; gamma ray laser impacts. He looked closer. Foot-deep gouges scarred the hull.

-How many shots can we take?— Marqus asked through the thoughtspace. He was short of breath and fearful of biting his tongue if he spoke aloud.

"They'd have to hit the same spot two or three times to pierce the hull." Garcia's voice labored against the acceleration. "Won't happen."

"It won't?" Annike said. She popped the math into everyone's head: if the Presers stayed with them for four days, the _Coronado_ had just a 60.03% chance to reach Venus. "They're closing," she added.

Garcia gritted his teeth. "I'm taking the engines to full power."

"We're at full power, Rey."

"Full safe power. I'll feed deut into the drive at max rate. God willing the injectors won't melt."

"That's 11 gees!" Sonoma said. "The gel can't handle that! People might have strokes."

Garcia glared at her. "We'll throw them in a medtank once we shake the Presers." An image appeared in their minds. The gamma ray laser had taken a chunk from the stern four feet from a previous hit. "Everyone get in crash gel! Everyone but me." He dropped the acceleration to two gees, but slewed the ship even more violently.

Marqus staggered to his feet. He couldn't move his right arm. Raveena unbuckled, her brows knit. "How are you?"

"A broken arm and a few bruises. I'll be fine."

"We need to get to the lounge—"

"They're breaking off!" Annike said. "They stopped firing!"

Marqus looked. The Preser ship veered off and cut acceleration. It shrank with each moment.

"Bastards!" Garcia shouted. He patched in the Preservationist ship for his next words. "You should've known better than to try catching me!"

Marqus leaned against the wall, and his heart slowed. They'd done it! They were rich!

The Preser spoke. "The Jupiter Satellite Union no longer seeks your arrest. JSUS _Rachel Carson_ out." The radio jamming ended, and silence roared in their ears. In came all the messages they had missed.

***

Premier Zhao's negotiations had yielded results: Venus and the Jupiter Satellite Union reached a settlement. The Presers returned to their traditional ban on helium mining from Jupiter's atmosphere. But Venus had compromised too. Construction on the second cooling tower ceased. The market reacted to the news before the Preser ship broke off. Marqus thought for a moment the helium price quote had lost the final digit. No. The price dropped below 500 sols per ton. Garcia frantically called a broker to sell. The order filled at 388¾.

Over the next days, creditors announced foreclosure on the ship. Sonoma moved out of Garcia's cabin, but no one showed her sympathy. "You're why we didn't leave the sun in time," Ludmilla said, and the others agreed. Xi had been dumped into a medtank and sedated, until he could be expelled from the ship when it reached the SPF-Infinity.

With the captain in isolation and Annike, he was certain, still mad at him, Marqus looked into how Xi had sent messages to the Presers. He overrode the lock on Xi's door and looked inside his cabin. To the left stood a large bed, unmade on one side. Tools and parts littered the room, and from the ceiling jutted a desk. The machinery that moved it from the rotation-wall to the thrust-wall must have jammed, and the tools all spilled. A whisking sound came from the other side of the desk. Marqus stooped under the desk, and looked up in surprise.

A small robot hung in the corner, feet splayed on the desk and the ceiling, eyes closed, with a power cable running from its belly to a wall socket. It scrambled awake and disconnected itself, then jumped to the furthest corner and peered at Marqus with a wary and confused look. Xi must have built it without anyone knowing. _That's_ what went out the hatch the fourth time. Marqus left the cabin with a smile.

The smile soon faded, though, and it took a while to realize why. He'd been ducking the real issue.

One morning, he used a checkup on his arm as an excuse to stay in the infirmary and think. The only noise came from cooling fans. Through a medtank window, Xi's face looked content. A trick of the drugs? Or did he dream of ending six months' loneliness and reuniting with his wife and daughter?

Belonging. Marqus faced the question: should he go back to New Liberia? Even with the collapse in helium prices, he had earned five million sols; the interest could pay for a five-room apartment, maybe even with a window. He'd had enough adventure. If Xi and Garcia had been his own kind, would they have fooled him?

The door slid open, and Annike walked in. Purple puffs lay under her eyes. "Marqus, how's your arm?"

"Fine." She wasn't surprised to see him here, which meant she'd sought him. He put Xi's tank between them. "I'm leaving—"

"No. Please. We need to talk. I got angry when you caught me."

He took an unsteady breath, but shrugged. "I would've been angry too." He rushed on. "At the meeting, you convinced me. I would have voted against the captain."

"Really?" She thought a moment, shrugged. "Nice to know, but it doesn't change my mind. I'm glad Rey hired you. You proved your worth to the ship."

He winced. "I should've found Xi."

"None of us would have. It's not your fault."

He tapped the navigator's tank with his fingers. "What happens when we reach Venus?"

"The mortgage company will auction off the _Coronado_."

"We'll be unemployed." Maybe he could play tourist for a week or two, before returning to Titan to face his father's gloating.

Annike smiled. "Not you. If you want a job."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm buying a ship. A passenger liner. Lower yield, but lower risk. Raveena already signed on. What do you say? You need time, I'm sure." She stepped back. "We'll have weeks at Venus—"

"I'm in."

"Seriously, take your time."

He probed it, but the sudden conviction held firm. He'd left New Liberia because he didn't belong. Five million sols wouldn't change that. "I took enough time... Captain Olson."

"Officer du Bois." They shook hands and laughed. "I'm heading to the galley. Hungry?"

He looked at a medtank. Did he want to reconfigure his mind? "Yeah, I'll go with you." Even if he needed to, it could wait until after lunch. He had plenty of time to enamor himself of women who wore baggy jumpsuits and practiced _jeet kune do._

_Ari Goelman has published about a dozen short stories, most recently in_ Strange Horizons, Daily SF, _and_ Fantasy Magazine. _He is also a past winner of the Writers of the Future competition._ Publisher's Weekly _has described his work as "outstanding" and "lovingly constructed," while_ The Harvard Crimson _has described him as a master of "sci-fi, fairies, and the urban ghetto." His latest short stories are forthcoming in_ Shimmer Magazine _and_ Daily SF. _His first novel, a middle grade fantasy titled,_ The Path of Names _, will be released by Arthur A. Levine in June 2013._

_His academic work has been published in the_ Journal of Architecture, Planning and Research _as well as_ Environment and Planning A _, and has been covered in places as diverse as the_ Brookings Institute _and_ The New York Times _. He lives in Vancouver with his family and the rain. To learn more about him, visit his website at:_ arigoelman.com

## Everyone Gets Scared Sometimes

By Ari B. Goelman

She wakes up scared in the morning. She wakes up scared almost every morning. Still, it's a nice day. Summer. Blue sky.

She walks up the hill until she's downtown. It makes her feel better, having living people all around her.

She walks up and down the busiest streets she can find until she stops feeling so scared. Eventually she feels tired and sits on the sidewalk outside her favorite bakery. Every once in a while someone drops money in her lap.

Two men in suits walk past. One of them hands her a five dollar bill. As the men are walking away she hears him say, "dead zone survivor."

Dead zone.

She wonders sometimes if it really happened. The zombies and her daddy and his axe. If it happened, it seems to her, the city would be different. There would be fewer cars on the streets. The traffic lights wouldn't work. Her favorite bakery wouldn't be there, not if all that stuff had happened.

She goes to the bakery every day. She likes the bread and she likes the big glass windows. They let her keep an eye on the outside, make sure that she doesn't get cornered. There's a back door and a front door and a stairway leading to the roof. Three exits is pretty good.

The woman at the bakery knows her and usually has some day-old bread waiting for her. Today it's her favorite kind — hard dark bread. She takes two loaves. One for now, one for later. You always keep half of your food for later. Her daddy taught her that.

She eats a few slices of the bread and drinks a glass of water, before going back out on the streets. She starts toward the park where she sleeps. It took even her daddy a while to realize it, but sleeping outside is the safest. You hear the zombies before they get to you.

Two big boys are sitting on a bench at her park. When they see her, they get up and walk over to her. They both have 'z' tattoos on their cheek. "Hey," the one with long hair says. She tries to walk around him, but his friend shifts his weight so he's right in front of her. They're a lot bigger than her. The zombies were usually bigger, too, but that was different. They were slower, and after a while you knew what they would do.

"You sure she's the one?" the short-haired one says. "She's, like, twelve."

The other big boy shakes his head. "Stunted growth because she was in the dead zone for so long. Alex tried her on and said she was all grown up where it counts."

"Alex is full of shit," the short-haired one says.

The long-haired one shrugs. "Whatever. She's a dead zone survivor. Look at how twitchy she is."

"Fuck this," his friend says. He turns and walks away.

The long-haired one steps closer to the girl. He's afraid. She knows the smell from when the zombies were everywhere. This is how everyone used to smell. She tries again to walk away from him, and he grabs her arm. She punches him hard in the chest with her other hand. If he was a zombie, his chest would have collapsed. He's not a zombie, though, so he just grunts and grabs her other arm.

He says some words, that she doesn't understand. When she gets scared, she stops understanding words. Mrs. Chariandy, her social worker, says that's okay. That everyone gets scared sometimes.

"Let me go," she says. "Or I'll call my daddy."

The big boy says some more words and pulls her closer to him.

She tries to pry his fingers off her arm, but his fingers are too strong. They're not like zombie fingers. Zombie fingers are brittle as glass. You just have to be fast with zombies. Break their fingers before they can get their mouth on you.

The big boy is squeezing her arms so tight that her biceps hurt. Then he pushes his leg between her legs. So she does it. She calls her daddy.

Afterwards, she cries. It's hard to see her daddy like that. Face gone, skin grey. Fading back into nothing after he's done with the big boy. The police come. They take the big boy away in an ambulance even though he's dead. Real dead. Her daddy isn't a zombie. He doesn't turn people into zombies.

The police are nice to her even though they're scared, too. They help her wash the blood off her hands, and they let her ride in their car. They want her to put on the handcuffs, but she says no. Handcuffs make it too hard to fight zombies. She guesses they understand, because they don't keep asking.

She closes her eyes in the back of the car. They leave it somewhere safe, an underground garage with a good view of the entrance ramp and with two other exits in the back corners. If the zombies come, she'll have plenty of time to kick the doors out and get away.

After a while a policeman comes and gives her a bottle of water and a sandwich. He passes them through the window which has been left a few inches down. They don't want to let her out of the car, she realizes, probably because they think she might turn into a zombie. She remembers that from before. People were always scared that other people were about to turn into a zombie. She's not sure why they bothered being scared, when it's so easy to tell by smelling. People start smelling like zombies at least an hour or two before they actually turn.

She drinks half the water and eats half the sandwich, saving the rest for later.

She sleeps. Wakes up and sleeps again. Eventually it's the next day. She can tell by the grey light filtering down from the garage's entrance ramp.

She hears footsteps coming towards the car — the first footsteps she's heard since the policeman brought her food. Mrs. Chariandy walks down the ramp towards the car. Mrs. Chariandy is a tall brown woman, just as tall as the police men. Two policemen are walking next to Mrs. Chariandy, one on either side. They both have guns out, which makes the girl feel better. Guns are almost as good as axes at stopping zombies.

The one on the right is in the middle of saying something to Mrs. Chariandy. "...labs say the guy was clean. She just killed him like you'd kill a zombie. Head ripped right off his body, then smashed with her boot. Self defense or not, this is—"

"What do we expect?" Mrs. Chariandy is smiling at the girl, but her voice is angry when she interrupts the policeman. "I mean leaving survivors on the street?"

Mrs. Chariandy opens the car door. The policeman shifts uneasily, pointing his gun at the girl, but Mrs. Chariandy keeps smiling. Her hair is grey, and her face is wrinkled, but she smiles a lot, which the girl likes. Zombies can't smile. "Hello, dear," Mrs. Chariandy says.

"Hi," the girl says. She smiles to show that she is not a zombie, either. The policeman doesn't know much about zombies, she guesses, because he keeps pointing his gun at her. "I had to call my Daddy," she tells the social worker. "The big boy was being bad."

Mrs. Chariandy gives the girl her hand and helps her out of the car. "I know, dear," she says. Mrs. Chariandy doesn't stop smiling, but the girl can smell that she's scared. That's okay, she wants to tell her. Everyone gets scared sometimes.

_Originally published in_ Daily SF.

Samantha Ling lives in sunny Florida where she mostly stays indoors. The heat and humidity threaten to defeat her, but as long as she has air conditioning, it will not succeed. During the day, she works with computers. In her spare time, she is learning how to play the ukulele.

_To learn more about her, visit her website:_ www.samanthaling.com

## Ruined Spa Day

by Samantha Ling

The thing about being a personal assistant is that you're always working. When you have a day off, you really don't have a day off. Your boss will inevitably call you while you're totally naked with your butt halfway into a bath. You'll have to answer the phone because he pays you more money than you know what to do with.

And wouldn't you know it? He calls me on the day that I schedule nothing but pampering and relaxation. My only spa day in, like, four months and he has to ruin it. Can you believe his nerve?

So, one of his mistresses has misbehaved and I have to go clean up the mess. Supposedly, there's a cooler and a duffle bag I have to take care of at the beach house. Since my boss' henchmen are nowhere to be found and he is on a ginormous yacht with his wife and a few friends, I'm the only one he's managed to reach. I so deserve a raise. Maybe if I hurry, I can at least get a mani-pedi and it won't be a total waste of a spa day.

***

The cooler is heavy. Probably about, oh, 110 pounds. I know because the last mistress was about that heavy. I don't bother to open it up to see if it's actually her. But I mean, when you're supposed to dump it into the ocean, you pretty much know what's inside and you totally don't even want to see that. I mean, she fits into a cooler. She can't be all neatly folded in there like a blanket. Her arms and legs have got to be at all the wrong angles. Luckily for me, it's got wheels so it's not hard for me to wheel her into the garage.

I take an electric drill and poke holes all along the top and the edges. I once saw an episode of _American Justice_ where these guys tried to dump a body into the ocean, but the cooler floated. They had to shoot it with a shotgun to make it sink. I'm not about to make the same mistake. I poke a few extra holes just in case but none near the bottom. I want to keep seepage to a minimum if you know what I mean.

The duffle bag is no bigger than an overnight bag. It's heavy though because it's filled with cash. The poor girl thought that she'd get away with a bundle. When you do something this stupid, you've got to have a fantastic plan. I mean a nearly bulletproof plan to get away. Otherwise, they're totally going to find you and your demise will be like a scene from the movie, _Hostel_.

I certainly don't want a flaming torch in my eye, so I've got a foolproof plan. I mean, you can't work for a dangerous kind of guy knowing as much as I know without a stupendously foolproof plan. I mean, yeah, he does an importing business, but not all the importing is legal. I think the nicest word for it is smuggling. Like Han Solo, but not as nice.

When I wheel the cooler outside, I make sure to check the doorway as I go. My boss is super-super-superstitious. I had tubes of brick dust (to keep anyone who wants to hurt you from entering the house) and sea salt (to keep evil spirits away) built into all the doorways and windowsills. I always check the doorways to see if the tubes have cracked. Hell, these protections keep me safe too.

It's a pretty good thing he's this paranoid because he's always got some curse or enchantment spell on him. He's got plenty of enemies and people who want to take advantage of him. I only tell him about it if the spells disrupt my life. No point in spending the time you don't have to de-spell something trivial, right?

Not everyone can see the magic, mind you. I'm quite special and I can even see the connection lines to who cast what on whom. My boss was appreciative that I told him the truth, though he doesn't know the whole truth. I've got more tricks up my sleeve.

The one thing that I've learned living among humans is that you never tell anybody all your secrets. My secrets are what has kept me alive for so long and what will also be part of my escape plan. And you can't tell people about escape plans. They will _always_ betray you.

At any rate, I load the cooler and the duffle bag into the go-fast boat and I start out to sea. Go-fast boats have a loud engine. The louder it is, the manlier you are. It's not necessarily faster. But for some reason, louder is better for these boats.

The upside of all that noise is that nobody can hear me sing. So I belt out some Shakira and shake my booty. Hell, nobody can hear me, right? I can sing whatever I want. I don't have to worry about what it'll do to other people.

I'm totally in the middle of my sexy dance, when the engine just up and stops. I mean, no sputtering, no cranking sound, no smoke. It just stops. I don't know what's going on because I totally just had this thing serviced. I use this boat enough to know that I don't want to be stuck in the middle of the ocean by myself. So I can't figure out for the life of me what's wrong with it. I flip switches then try the radio, but nothing's working on this thing. It's like the power's been cut off.

I look at the cooler and think I'm definitely not far enough out to sea to take care of this. I mean, I'm far enough out where nobody will see me, but totally not far enough out where the body won't wash back up onto the shore.

This isn't a place where sharks normally swim either, so I can't even use them to get rid of the evidence. Not that I want to open up the cooler to feed the sharks. I don't know if the girl's chopped up or just stuffed in there, but I don't want to open the lid to find out.

And then, like out of nowhere, I see this tugboat slowly chugging its way towards me. What an incredible coincidence. I mean, what are the odds? I must be the luckiest person in the world!

Not!

I wasn't born yesterday. I know bad stuff still happens out here. I saw a modern pirates special about it on the A&E channel.

I look in the compartments to see if I can find anything to defend myself with. It doesn't surprise me when I don't find anything because, as I said, I take care of this boat. But I was hoping that maybe the boss had left something here the last time he used it and I'd missed something when I cleaned it out last.

Of course there isn't. I'm pretty thorough when I clean. There is an anchor, which weighs too much to use as a weapon. There's also some rope, but unless I can lasso people like Wonder Woman, it won't be much help.

As I'm watching the tugboat ever so slowly make its way over to me, I'm trying to figure out a way to talk myself out of this situation. I've done it before. Not in this particular situation, but you know, in a lot of tough ones. Especially when it's guys who won't leave me alone.

The easiest way to get rid of guys is to talk about having babies and be über clingy. They will bolt like I've just farted rotten eggs. Which is another tactic in and of itself. If you have the fart within you, that is. Another really great tactic is after you've eaten a belly full of sushi (my favorite food). You can burp up the nastiest smelling odor and that will make them run too.

The tugboat captain looks like Skipper from Gilligan's Island complete with blue shirt and khaki pants. I don't think my burp/fart technique will work on him since he looks like he hasn't washed in a whole month. He's got to be smelling worse than anything I can produce. But what worries me the most is that he's got an aura of protection around him.

"Is everything all right, Miss?" he says. His voice is completely gravely like he's smoked since he was 12.

"Everything's fine," I say.

"Seems like your boat isn't working," he replies.

"I have a friend coming to help me. Thank you though." Okay, so I didn't say I found something clever to get me through this, I just said I was trying.

"Now, that's not true at all," he says. "We can do this the easy way or the hard way."

I roll my eyes. How come people feel the need to say that, because right after they do that, they always bust out their gun and who's going to get in a fight with someone pointing a gun right at them? And you know, Skipper totally pulls a revolver from the back of his waistband.

"Come on over here," he says. His tugboat and the go-fast boat are side by side at this point and all I have to do is step on over. I figure there's something over there I can use to free myself. From the looks of things, he's got a lot of random junk on that boat, rusty fish hooks and even a big old, seriously rusty harpoon.

When I get over there, I feel myself walking into his aura and it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. I want to run so bad, you have no idea.

Then, I notice Skipper is wearing a St. Brendan medallion around his neck. That is totally what's protecting him from harm. St. Brendan is the patron saint of sailors, which makes me snort. I don't think his protection extends to pirates or at least it shouldn't.

"What are you smirking at?"

"I got something up my nose," I say.

"Turn around," he says, grips my arm and spins me around. Why bother telling me to do it if he was going to just push me around anyway?

I could totally jump in the water and make my escape. I can, you know. But, like I said, I like my life a lot. I'd rather be here than in the ocean.

"Be a good little girl and you won't get hurt," he says. "If you're lucky, they'll just sell you to a nice pimp overseas. Okay?" I nod, though I know there's no such thing as nice pimps. Whoever dreams of a romantic hooker life has watched _Pretty Woman_ too many times. They totally beat you up and underfeed you and make you addicted to drugs so you can't run away. I've seen those specials on the A&E, I know how things work.

I also know that pirates of today are nowhere near as romantic as pirates in those bodice ripping novels. And seriously, there isn't any way I'm going to fall in love with Skipper over there. Especially since he makes a big snorting sound, hocks up a loogie and spits it into the ocean! That's just so gross! I totally swim in that ocean!

A skinny, shirtless, dark-skinned boy pops out from the cabin and scrambles onto my go-fast boat. The boy can't be more than 13 and he's Asiatic. He's probably from Thailand. The baht to dollar ratio is so huge that you can buy a child for only $2000US. He's then yours to do as you wish, including, you know, using them for sex. The child labor laws there are fairly lenient. Exporting them though, that's a major pain. I bet the boy doesn't have any papers. I saw that on an A&E special once too. They have the most interesting programs!

The boy wastes no time in lashing the boats together and before I know it, he's back on the tugboat and we're heading nowhere near the coast.

Skipper plunks me down in the corner of the cabin amongst a bunch of crumpled fast food wrappers. He has absolutely no respect for my new shorts. I mean, these are Gucci!

Gucci!

Now they're ruined sitting on food wrappers. There's no way I'm going to get the grease stains out. Skipper is so going to get an extra hard kick in the nads from me when I get a chance.

"What are you doing out here by yourself?" Skipper asks. He pulls out a pack of cigarettes and proceeds to light one of them. No wonder his teeth are mostly brown.

"I'm dumping a body for my boss," I say. If I don't get off this boat, they're totally going to find the girl in the cooler, so I have nothing to lose. And I'm pissed. I mean, I can't believe this is happening to me!

"No really," he says. "It's not safe out here, you know."

"You think?" I say.

He huffs at my insolence but says nothing about it.

Out of all the garbage in this tug, it's just that. Garbage. The sharpest thing I find near me is a discarded white plastic knife. That's so not going to cut my zip-tie cuffs. I see the boy at the steering wheel and I notice that he's got a knife strapped to his waist. Well, that's one knife I could use, if I could somehow get my hands on it.

"How'd you find me anyway?" I say.

"That's a trade secret," he says taking another drag from his cigarette.

"Did you have someone following me? Put something on my boat?"

Then it dawns on me. I'd taken it to get serviced and they'd put something in the boat that cut off all my power. A simple tracking beacon could have showed them where I was. It must have been someone new at the shop since I've been taking that boat there for years. Someone is totally going to regret this.

"You're too smart for your own good," Skipper says, and that's when I know I've definitely got to do something about getting off this tugboat or I'm totally dead. I really want to kick Skipper in the gut, I really do. He isn't athletically fit at all and a good kick in the gut would definitely double him over. I can't get my legs to do it though. That stupid medallion is the cause of all this trouble.

What I wouldn't do for a trained monkey right now. He could totally just rip that necklace off Skipper.

Since I don't have a trained monkey, I get my feet under me and run towards the boy, pushing him into the steering wheel. He exhales heavily and then falls to the floor, where I proceed to throw all my weight onto his stomach like a WWF wrestler. I try to grab his knife, but Skipper grabs me by the neck and throws me against the wall.

I totally see stars, but I have enough sense to make myself loop my arms under my butt and legs so that they're in front of me. When my vision clears, I see Skipper checking the boy with his back to me. I rush over to him grabbing the St. Brendan medallion and yanking as hard as I can. The chain snaps without much effort and I fall backwards onto my butt.

Skipper roars with anger and points his gun at me. And for a split second, I think the St. Brendan medallion will totally protect me. I mean, I can totally drive a boat.

When he fires his gun, the bullet grazes my side. Okay, so maybe St. Brendan doesn't like creatures like me. I run out of the cabin. Before I launch my ass overboard, I grab the rusty harpoon from its hook. I hear two more shots follow me, but only one grazes my right leg.

Can I just tell you that salt water hurts wounds like a mofo? It seriously stings worse than lemons, but because of the high salinity, it's supposed to be all antiseptic. For me, the wounds start to fizz and it hurts ten times worse as it starts to heal. I gulp a mouthful of water at the increased pain and immediately cough. I feel my body want to change, but I don't let it. I'll be trapped for 20 years if I do. And let me tell you, 20 years in the ocean just bores me to tears. The fish aren't exactly stimulating conversation and I'd miss all the lovely amenities of being human.

I go up for air to see Skipper point his gun at me.

He's like the worst shot because he shoots me and misses. I go down into the water again, swimming at least two feet below the surface. Even if he shoots me, _Mythbusters_ tells me that bullets can only travel about two feet into the water before its energy dissipates.

Or was that three feet?

I swim lower just to be sure. Lower will be good too since he won't be able to see me in the water. Light dissipates the further down I go.

Skipper runs to turn off the tugboat's engine and it slows to a stop. He returns to the side of the boat, leaning over the edge to try to find me. I swim to the other side, surfacing long enough to get a new breath of air.

When I duck down again, Skipper reappears on my side of the boat. I aim the harpoon at him, which is totally awkward since I've still got the zip ties around my wrists. But I manage to brace the harpoon against my shoulder as I pull the trigger.

Nothing happens. I'm not stunned at this fact. I mean, it is the rustiest thing I've seen besides that tugboat, which I'm surprised can even float at all. It's that rusty. Even though the piece of shit harpoon doesn't work, it's still totally pointy.

I played water polo a while back. I was so good that they asked me to join the U.S. Olympic women's team. Then I found out that they played like five days a week for five hours out of the day and then you have to work out away from the pool! I love being in the water and all, but not that much.

So all that time playing water polo has taught me how to shoot up like a dolphin from the water with just the power of my legs, which is what I do. I kick my legs as hard and fast as I can and I stab Skipper in the chest with the harpoon.

He drops his gun into the water and grabs the harpoon where it's embedded in his flesh. He knows enough not to pull it out. If he does, blood will start gushing from the wound. He'll bleed out before we get to shore. His best bet is to keep it in until he can find help.

Which will be never since I'm now in charge.

When I clamber back onto the boat, Skipper is moaning. The boy is unconscious near the wheel. I go over to the boy, take the knife and cut the zip tie from my wrists.

In the mess of the cabin, underneath a stash of discarded burger wrappers, I find a bunch of loose zip ties. I bind the boy and while I am at it, I bind Skipper too, who totally moans when I grab his arms. I bind their legs too in case they think about attacking me when I'm not looking.

I aim the tugboat towards my rendezvous point. It will take forever using this tugboat, but I have to take it with me. The boss will want to know what took me so long. Besides that, I don't know anything about the boat's electronics. I mean, I drive the thing, but I drive cars too. It doesn't mean I know how to fix them.

"Where are we going?" Skipper says. He sounds like he's having a hard time breathing. His voice is nothing more than a hoarse whisper.

"We're going to meet my boss," I say.

"No cops?"

"Nope," I say. He sighs and I think he understands that he tried stealing a boat from the wrong people. I would feel sorry for him, except that he chose to steal stuff from people out here in the ocean. And you know, you can't always tell why people are out here in the first place.

Besides that, he's totally ruined any chance I have of getting even a quick pedicure. The salons will all be closed by the time I get back to shore and there's no way I'm going to those quicky salons next to the grocery store. My poor nails. This little excursion hasn't done anything good to them either.

***

Halfway to the rendezvous point, I stop the tugboat to take care of the cooler. I mean, that's the whole point of why I'm out here.

I haul the cooler up and over the side of the go-fast boat. Coolers are totally made out of like life vest material and it floats when you put it in the water. I have to put a bunch of pressure on it to get it down to the level of the holes I've poked. But once its filled with water, it goes down right quick.

Skipper watches me the whole time. His expression changes as he realizes that I was totally not kidding before. I light one of his cigarettes and put it in his mouth. It is totally his last. "You better savor it."

The boy is watching me too. He's regained consciousness and has propped himself up on the side of the cabin. He kind of reminds me of myself in a lot of ways. I grew up without any real parents either. I never knew my Dad. My Mom, well, she was an opium addict. We lived in a pretty seedy neighborhood and I have no doubt that my mom prostituted too. I think it's why I get along so well with the criminals I work with. It's easier to handle the idea that they're doing bad things when you grew up with a suspicious moral center.

I was originally going to give the St. Brendan's medallion to my boss as a peace offering, but I decide to slip it into the boy's pocket instead. He so doesn't deserve a beating even if he helped steal the boat. I mean, it's not his fault he has no good role models.

Hey, don't be so shocked. I do have a heart, you know.

***

My boss is pissed when I finally show up. It took three hours longer than it should have and he totally kicks Skipper hard in the stomach. There's also a new aura around him and it's not a good one. It's black. Like so black, it's making my boss look like he's constantly standing in the shade. I notice that the connection line leads to his wife, who is equally as black. I told them not to get involved with curses, but would they listen? Noooooo. Well, if we get back to the mainland, I can help them get rid of the curses. And they can deal with their problems the old fashioned way.

My boss looks inside the duffle bag to make sure it's cash, which he never does. He's usually suave and controlled even when he's not happy about something.

Everyone is trying to look nonchalant, like nothing is happening. But nobody is having a good time. The women are pretending like they're trying to get a little sun, lounging on the deck in their bikinis, but their cocktails are full and the ice has melted. You know something is wrong when their drinks are getting wasted like that.

My boss takes the duffle bag to a man dressed in an expensive suit. He's sweating because of the tropical heat. My boss looks like he's about to have a panic attack. I assume this new guy is my boss's boss, the big boss. And he has a seriously bright aura of protection. I'm starting to realize that I may have to use my escape plan sometime soon. But you know, the escape plan is like plan Z. It's the last thing I want to do.

The big boss's bodyguards are armed to the armpits. I can see the telltale bulges under their jackets. None of them are brandishing weapons, but everyone can pretty much tell they'd whip them out if you looked at them funny.

Then the big boss says cheerfully that we'd all be retiring to the cabin, which is never a good sign. I have a feeling we're all going to be shot in the back of the head. I don't have any way to escape if something bad happens down there.

So I decide this is as good a time as any to implement my fool proof plan. It's not my whole plan. I had originally wanted to stow some goodies away for the future, you know, like maybe a few pieces of jewelry I've been saving and a crate of that nice champagne I read about. But under the circumstances, I think I'll just skip that part and go straight to the escape part.

I can already feel my teeth forming into two beaks. I run to the side of the boat, grabbing the largest of the men and jump off. I hear gunshots behind me, but I don't look back. Hey, when you play with fire and get burned, it's not my fault you're not wearing fire retardant clothes. From the sounds of it, there's a lot of gun fire on that boat.

I swim straight down, exhaling all my air and breathing in the salty goodness of the ocean. I don't cough this time because my lungs are changing. I can feel my arms and legs elongating, reforming into tentacles. The man in my arms struggles, but as I change, my grip becomes tighter on him. My arms form sucker cups with teeth that keep the man from breaking away. I'll need him for later. It takes a lot of energy to change.

I think you've all figured out by now that I'm not fully human. I'm not a siren either, that mythical creature that lures sailors to their death. I sing like the American Idol rejects. What I am exactly, I'm not sure either.

My mom always said that my dad came out of the ocean and enchanted her. That's how I came to be. But who would believe in that load of BS? I grew up thinking that she was just a floozy.

She'd said that my father had tentacles where his beard was supposed to be. I thought my father was a merchant marine who hadn't shaved in months. She just didn't want to admit she got pregnant out of wedlock.

I believed that nonsense until I hit puberty and I changed into a squid while I was at the beach. I was stuck that way for a good twenty years. It seems that there's some sort of penalty whenever I return to the ocean. Some fairy magic rule I don't know.

You know, if my dad stuck around to tell me what was going on, that would have been good. It's funny. When a woman comes out of the ocean and seduces a man, people write romantic stories about it. But when it happens to a woman, everybody just thinks that she's slutty. And let me tell you, being a loose woman in the 1800's isn't all that great.

All I do know is that the ocean is huge and there's absolutely nothing to do. You can't get a facial, much less a whole day at the spa. There's definitely no A&E channel down there, but at least I'm alive for the time being. Twenty years of dullness beats being dead.

And you know, I'll just come back in twenty years with a few gold doubloons I've hidden away and start a new life in a new place. And you know what I'm totally going to do first when I get back?

Have a spa day.

_Emily Mah Tippetts writes science fiction and fantasy as Emily Mah and chick lit as E.M. Tippetts. Emily Mah has made several pro sales to magazines such as_ Analog _and_ The Black Gate _and E.M. Tippetts has three novels out. This short story is the only story that she wrote at Clarion West that went on to be published._

_Originally from New Mexico, Emily now lives in London with her family. When she isn't chasing her small children or writing, she also designs book tie-in jewelry, including a collection for fellow Clarion West classmate, Stephanie Burgis, and her_ Unladylike Adventures of Kat Stephenson _series. To learn more about Emily, visit:_ www.emilymah.com _and_ www.emtippetts.com

## Coyote Discovers Mars

by Emily Mah

Coyote was born into chaos. A lone technician decanted him from his artificial womb and toweled him dry. Around them stood the ruins of the Valles Marinaris genetics lab, which had been destroyed by a rockslide a few months earlier. Nervously the technician glanced at his email alert which read, "Cydonia Base has lost its primary scout dog. Replacement required at once."

When Dr. Begay, chief ecologist for Cydonia, came to collect the animal one year later, he was very upset. "What have you done, enhancing a coyote like that?" he raged. "You make us wait a year for a replacement, and now this?"

Coyote cowered in one corner and the technician in another. "I lost most of the dog embryos in the rockslide so I took this one out of the wildlife library," the technician explained. "It's close enough."

"It is not. A coyote is already much smarter than a dog, and much more unruly too."

"Well, it's all I have," said the technician, just a touch more boldly. "Take this one or go back to having robots carry your instruments and set up your beacons."

The ecologist's broad shoulders sagged. Robots were expensive, and getting spare parts meant dealing with the bureaucracy on Earth. In the end the two struck a deal. Dr. Begay gave the technician money and the technician reluctantly handed over a small black box.

"You won't need to use this much," he said. "I've taken him out many times and tested him like any other scout animal. He obeys the voice commands just fine."

But Dr. Begay only shook his head and put the box in his pocket. "My Navajo grandparents told me all the Coyote Stories. Never trust one that pretends to be behaving."

The technician opened Coyote's cage and Coyote jumped in. Dr. Begay loaded the cage into the back of his truck and drove up and out of the Valles. Coyote watched the lab vanish into the distance and lowered his tail. Vainly he scratched at the cage door and whined. He had liked the technician. Dr. Begay seemed cruel.

The truck drove for the entire day out across a flat, dry plain before stopping at sunset. After donning an oxygen mask, Dr. Begay opened Coyote's cage and let him out to do his business and get some exercise. "It's not that I hate coyotes," Dr. Begay explained in a muffled voice. "Coyote is one of my favorite folklore characters, but for your sake I hope you're nothing like him."

Coyote cocked his head to one side and looked at the doctor. The man had a stocky frame and dark skin, very unlike the technician.

Dr. Begay noticed how Coyote peered up at him, so he squatted down and reluctantly scratched him between the ears. "How much English do you understand? Walk over there." Dr. Begay pointed.

Coyote obliged.

The doctor shook his head and laughed. "This is what happens when you give a coyote enhancements meant for a dog, a double dose of intelligence," he said. "Do you know the story of how Coyote got his cunning?"

Coyote didn't, so he sat down on the hard packed Martian dirt and hoped Dr. Begay would tell him. "Well," said Dr. Begay, adjusting his mask. "At the beginning of the world all of the animals were alike. Cougar didn't have his speed, Bear didn't have his strength, Bluebird didn't have her wings, and Coyote was just like the rest of them." Dr. Begay paused and adjusted his mask again.

Coyote put his ears forward and back. He didn't know what a bear or a cougar or a bluebird was. He had heard the term "animal", and he knew that he was an animal, so he imagined these creatures as strong, swift, or winged coyotes. Of course, the only wings Coyote had ever seen were on insects. Mars didn't support any birds. Coyote tried to hold this image in his mind as Dr. Begay went on.

"As the world was being created though, gifts were made for these animals, and First Man was to hand them out. Man decided that he would have the animals line up one morning, and give one gift to each. When Coyote heard about this, he was determined to get the best gift.

"So that night Coyote only pretended to fall asleep with the other animals. After a few hours he got up and bounded over to where Man slept. 'I will stay up all night,' thought the Coyote, 'and be the first in line.' But staying up all night is a boring business. After a few hours Coyote felt his eyelids drooping, and he thought, 'This will never do.'

"But he had an idea. He picked up a large rock from the ground and held it in his teeth. 'If I fall asleep,' he reasoned, 'I will drop this on my toe and wake up.' It was a good idea at first, but soon Coyote's jaw began to hurt. He looked down and saw a stick with a fork in it lying near by. This he stuck into the ground so he could prop his chin on it.

"'Now I can rest my jaw,' thought Coyote, and he promptly fell asleep. The next morning all the animals awoke and lined up, and you can imagine how amused they were when they found Coyote sleeping with his chin propped on a stick. They didn't dare wake him though. Instead they got their gifts and tiptoed away. Bear got strength, Cougar got speed, and so on until all the gifts were given out. Coyote awoke just as the last animals were leaving. He was so startled when he realized he'd fallen asleep that he jumped, and the stick broke. He landed right on his nose, crunch! That is why a coyote's teeth are all broken in the back.

"Man came over to Coyote and said, 'All the gifts have been given out, I'm sorry. You will have to make do with only your wits.'

"This made Coyote very sad, but there was nothing he could do. He went his own way and ignored the other animals laughing at him. To this day Coyote has had to be the most cunning of animals. He has done this so well that he's known as the Trickster."

Dr. Begay stopped talking and adjusted his mask one last time. Coyote cocked his head and put his ears back.

"It's just a story," said Dr. Begay. "There are many, many Coyote Stories. I'll tell you another one tomorrow if you like. Helps pass the time between here and the terraforming base."

Coyote decided he would like that very much, though he couldn't tell Dr. Begay in words. He sat up straight instead and put his ears forward. The ecologist didn't react but instead climbed back into the truck and went to sleep, leaving Coyote alone out on the starlit plain.

After a moment, Coyote got up to examine his surroundings. He ran and he ranged that whole night, exploring the new sights and scents, breathing the thin air. He finally found a small hollow beneath a boulder where he curled up and slept for the last few hours of the night.

In the morning a tingling feeling all over his body jolted him awake. He got up and took a step back towards the truck, then another. Only by running could he keep the tingling from driving him mad, and in a few seconds he was at Dr. Begay's feet. "There you are," he said, putting a small box back into his pocket. It was the same one the technician had given him the day before. "Back into your cage. Time to move on."

Coyote shook himself, wondering what the tingling had been, but he climbed back into his cage and the truck traveled another day over rough terrain. The air was getting even thinner and colder as they made their way up a long hill. That night when they stopped, Dr. Begay had to wear a thicker mask and an insulation suit when he went outside.

"I have a test for you," he said to Coyote as he popped open the cage. "There's a beacon planted near here, I want you to find it and bring it back to me."

Coyote pricked up his ears at that, and the corners of Dr. Begay's eyes wrinkled with a smile.

"If you'd like, I can tell you how you got your gray fur when you come back."

Without hesitation Coyote took off, swiveling his ears and sniffing the air. Soon he heard the faint, high-pitched beeping of the beacon, and so he ran over to it, dug it out of the loose dirt and carried it back to Dr. Begay. It was just like the tests he had done for the technician back at the laboratory.

"Well, that was fast. I suppose you want another story?"

Coyote sat down and put his ears forward. Dr. Begay looked at him, and after a moment he sat on the ground too. "Do you really understand what I say?" he asked.

Coyote cocked his head to one side.

"Bark if that's a yes."

Coyote barked.

Dr. Begay's eyes widened behind his mask. "Too smart for your own good, I say."

Coyote let his tail go limp.

But Dr. Begay had already unfocused his eyes and was gazing out at the deep red landscape. "Which story was it?" he asked. "How you got your gray fur?" He gave Coyote another scratch between the ears. "It's been a while since I've told these stories to anyone. But let's see . . .

"Coyote once, in his travels, met Rattlesnake and the two got along famously. Because Coyote was a gracious friend he invited Rattlesnake over to his house for tea. Only, Coyote didn't think about how small his house was or how big Rattlesnake was."

Dr. Begay paused and thought. "You must understand, many Coyote stories are told by pueblo dwellers."

Those words didn't make any sense to Coyote. He was busy wondering what a rattlesnake was. Dr. Begay scratched the side of his mask, as if he were scratching his nose and continued to explain pueblos.

"Coyote lived at the time in a pueblo style house. That means the door was in the roof and a person entered via a ladder. The firepit was set in the middle of the room." He sketched a square with a dot in the middle in the thick Martian dust to illustrate. "When Rattlesnake came over to visit he came through the door in the roof and had to wind his way around and around the room until he nearly filled it with his coils."

Coyote was more confused than ever about what a rattlesnake was, but he tried to take in the essence of the story regardless.

"Coyote was very mad about having all the space in the room taken up, but he didn't let his annoyance show. He served tea and the two friends talked for a long time. Afterwards Rattlesnake invited Coyote over to tea for the very next day. Coyote agreed of course.

"But in order to get back at his friend, Coyote got a long rope made out of jute — that's juniper fiber — and tied it to his tail. When he arrived at Rattlesnake's he came down through the door in the roof and had to run around and around, filling Rattlesnake's home with coils of jute. Between Rattlesnake and Coyote's tail, the room was very crowded indeed, but if Rattlesnake minded, he didn't say anything.

"He served tea and the two friends ate and talked. Little did Coyote realize that the jute had fallen into the firepit and caught fire. As the two talked the fire crept along the jute rope, around and around, until Coyote realized the room was filling with smoke. 'My tail!' he shouted, leaping up and clambering up through the door in the roof. He ran and ran, but still the fire caught up with him. Just as it began to singe his fur, he reached the Rio Grande and jumped in. That is why the Coyote's fur is tipped with black as if it's been singed with fire."

Coyote didn't like that story. It was the second one in a row that had him doing something foolish and inexplicable. Dr. Begay had a far off look in his eyes though, so Coyote sat still until the ecologist came to, shook himself, and got up. Before getting into the truck, though, he reached down again and stroked the long fur on Coyote's back.

That night Coyote ranged over the rocky landscape and noticed there were small pockets of life carving out a niche for themselves. Sparse grass grew in sheltered hollows and tiny insects flitted over the ground.

The next morning the jolting tingle returned, but Coyote tried to resist it. First he chewed his skin, then he rolled on the ground, but the tingle got worse and worse until Coyote found himself bolting for the truck. Dr. Begay looked satisfied to see him return, and twisted the box he held in his hand. "Into the truck," he said. "We will get to the base the day after tomorrow."

Coyote jumped into his cage and curled up on the floor for another day of traveling. This time the terrain was very rough and the truck had to swerve back and forth around large boulders. The air became even thinner, and the hill steeper. That night Dr. Begay had to put an even thicker suit on before going out to open the door for Coyote. When he spoke, it was through a microphone.

"Would you like me to tell you another story once we're done with our test tonight?" he asked.

Coyote decided that would be fine, so he put his ears and tail up. Dr. Begay took out the little box and Coyote's skin started to tingle. The tingling became worse and worse until finally Coyote leapt away in confusion. "That's right," said the ecologist. "I'm trying to guide you to a specific site. See how fast you can get there."

With his ears back, Coyote took off at a run, darting first this way then that. Each time he made a wrong turn his skin was on fire. Off across the landscape he ran until he came to a chalk marker on the ground. Finally the irritation stopped and he was able to pause, panting. He noticed that he was in a shallow ravine full of vegetation. Out of the corner of his eye he saw movement. He snapped his head around and saw a small, long eared animal go bounding off under a bush. It was unlike anything he'd ever seen before, but he found himself crouching down instinctively, preparing to stalk it. Suddenly the tingling returned. With a yelp he jumped up and ran back to the truck.

"Well done," said Dr. Begay. "You learn fast. Maybe the technician was right about you. Maybe El Coyote can become a good scout animal."

The ecologist patted him on the head before sitting down beside him. "I told you before that in folklore the Coyote is the Trickster. He's someone that can never be trusted, always trying to get the upper hand. There are many stories about how the Coyote tries to gain advantage, only to have it backfire on him."

Coyote laid his ears back in dismay. His skin still hurt from the tingling.

Dr. Begay put his head to one side; then said, "Of course, why tell you the bad stories about Coyote? Would you like to hear a nice one?"

That made Coyote prick his ears up. There were nice stories about him too?

Dr. Begay still didn't pay attention to him. Instead he furrowed his brow and was silent for almost a minute. Coyote paced impatiently, then sat back on his haunches. Overhead Phobos shot into view and began its orbit overhead. Seeing this, Dr. Begay smiled again. "Do you know how Coyote helped create the stars?" he asked.

Coyote lay down and put his chin on his paws.

"Well, in the beginning there was no such thing as nighttime. The sun never set and the animals soon got tired of its constant heat. They gathered together and formulated a plan to cover the sky with a dark cloth for half the time. This would enable them to cool off and even sleep. However, they decided that the cloth couldn't be all black because then it would be too dark and they wouldn't be able to see.

"So what they decided to do was gather up shiny river rocks and place them on the cloth in pretty pictures. Each animal would be allowed to put a picture of itself on the cloth so that at night these patterns would shine down on them. Of course, every animal got a picture except for Coyote. He had caused too much trouble and was too untrustworthy.

"When Coyote heard that he couldn't have a picture in the sky, he was very upset. Rather than complain about it though, he decided he would work very hard to gain the other animals' trust. He worked night and day to haul river rock up to where the animals had laid out the dark cloth, and he watched with envy as the pictures were composed.

"For ten days he hauled river rock and helped the animals put together their pictures. Finally the cloth was ready to be put in the sky. 'Friends,' said Coyote, looking as humble as possible. 'I understand why you don't want me to have my picture on the cloth, but might I have just a little corner to put a little coyote? Just a small one?'

"The animals talked it over, but they all agreed that Coyote should not get a picture of himself. This made him angry, but he was careful not to let it show. He put his head down and asked, 'Well, then might I be allowed to put one rock on the cloth? I promise not to mess up anyone else's picture. Just let me have one rock?'

"The animals consulted with each other and finally decided that yes, he could put down one rock. Coyote dashed to the river and found the biggest river rock he could carry. No one said anything when he hauled it up and made his way across the cloth to place it. He was careful not to step on anyone else's picture and he found a blank patch where he could drop his one large rock. The cloth was now ready to be put in the sky.

"Coyote made his way back to the edge, still careful not to mess up anyone's picture. Just as he was about to step off the cloth though, he reached back, grabbed it in his jaws and flung it into the sky. All of the pictures were jumbled and the river rocks made only random patterns. The animals were furious, but there was nothing they could do.

"So that is why the stars are so scattered, without logic. And on Earth there is one large rock in the sky, Luna. It's bigger than Phobos or Diemos and at night coyotes often raise their noses to it and howl."

Coyote did not raise his chin once the story was over. It was yet another one about how selfish and untrustworthy he was.

"I like that story," Dr. Begay went on. "In my line of work it has special significance. Thanks to Coyote, the cosmos is random and ever changing."

Still Coyote kept his chin on his paws and waited until Dr. Begay got up and went into the truck. Only then did he get up to make his way back to the ravine full of vegetation, which he followed for over a mile. Plants thrived on this part of Mars. Food bounded across the landscape. Coyote surveyed it, taking it all in with his nose and ears. Finally he fell asleep on a soft bed of grass and dozed until the tingling jarred him awake again.

This time he tried even harder to resist, but no matter how he rolled or chewed his skin, the tingling only got worse. Step by painful step he made his way towards the truck, breaking into a run only periodically. Once Dr. Begay came into view, Coyote cowered down to the ground and glared at the man. Today was the day they were supposed to arrive at the terraforming base.

Waves of pain washed over Coyote, causing him to twitch. He eyed the box that Dr. Begay held in his hands, and watched him twist it. The pain got even worse.

When he could stand it no longer, he got to his feet and walked forward as steadily as possible. Once Dr. Begay saw him, he twisted the device the other way and let the pain lessen. Coyote walked forward with more confidence, head high, eyes bright. He walked right up to Dr. Begay, and with one swift motion jumped up and grabbed the device in his jaws.

"Hey!" shouted the ecologist. "Bring that back."

Coyote ignored him and danced away.

Dr. Begay kicked the ground, hard, raising a cloud of dust that only seemed to annoy him more.

Coyote dropped the box onto the Martian soil and looked at the doctor impudently. He opened his mouth, let his tongue loll out, and smiled his Coyote smile. Then he picked up the device again and took off, leaving a cloud of red dust in his wake.

As the sun climbed across the pink sky, Coyote raced along the ground below. The Trickster had finally arrived on Mars.

_Originally published in_ Coyote Wild, _Summer 2007 Issue; received an Honorable Mention in_ The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror _._

Benjamin Rosenbaum either wanted to be a superhero, a scientist, or a writer. He didn't want to be the kind of scientist who carefully studies and contemplates natural phenomena, however; he wanted to be the kind who builds giant ray guns. As for being a superhero, while he does have superpowers, they are not very impressive superpowers, and I could never design a costume to his liking. He therefore decided to be a writer, and began (he was about thirteen at this point in our story) to send off stories to Amazing Science Fiction, the New Yorker, and so forth. They duly sent back rejection slips. This was sufficiently aggravating that he stopped submitting things altogether. He then gave up writing, cold turkey, in his sophomore year of college.

Then he became a computer programmer, which is really a lot like getting to build giant ray guns. Many years later, after getting married, he lived in Basel, Switzerland, where he only worked 30 hours a week, at his lovely, cushy day job. This gave him time to write again. He gave himself points every time he got a rejection slip, so they stopped being infuriating. He actually sold some stuff, and came out with a chapbook. Says Ben, "Typically, when you ask writers why they write, they look at you dourly and say, "I have to. I am driven to do so. If you do not absolutely have to write, spare yourself this misery." Not me. I don't have to write. I write because I love it. I'm grateful for every minute I get to do it. It's like being a superhero, but you don't need a costume."

_You can learn more about him on his website:_ www.benjaminrosenbaum.com

## The Guy Who Worked For Money

by Benjamin Rosenbaum

Nera waited for Malka in the big outer living room of 534a.tower5.loverslump.frankfurt.de — Jörg's place. It had been six months since Nera was last here. Four months ago, she'd forced herself to stop watching and commenting.

She used to sleep in this room. Then it was spare, full of light from the big window, vintage Ikea daybeds and electric lamps and side tables. Jörg used to scavenge them, fill cracks in the pasteboard and pine with archaic wood-goo. Now a forest of columns of fungus blocked the light. They were as wide as trees, crimson and magenta and burnt-sienna. They smelled like sausage. Tomas must be growing them, beta-testing gene splices. It was the kind of thing he'd do.

Jörg was in the library — she'd checked, scanning the party before she arrived. He was talking to some guy named Sergei Balduri. Nera's services weren't offering many predictions about whether she'd like this Sergei. No weightings available for intellectual stimulation, stabilized admiration, social usefulness, practical alliance — nothing, except that they'd be good in bed together (with 89% compatibility — hUBBUB summarized, "Run That Bunny Down!"). He was 45, three years older than Nera, rated in the 500s at Moody's and Snopes and in the 700s at hUBBUB. Nera only had a 453 at hUBBUB.

Anyway, she'd gestured that window closed. She didn't want to stand around in the middle of the party with a glazed expression, watching an ex-boyfriend in another room over in-eye. Instead she was standing around with a glazed expression trying to catch up on work. Colette had messaged her: _Sabine needs a breakdown on what the historical construction style is really going to mean for energy impact. It needs to be better than canned agent estimates, because Slow Growth and Big Frankfurt are trying to pull us into their bullshit ideological fight. Sabine has friends at the AutieGirls collective who can get us some custom-evolved estimates, but you know what they're like — they're going to have a million super-literal questions. Can you figure it out?_

It was insane, in Nera's opinion, to be doing 1990s-style artisanal re-creationist construction — steel frame and drywall — three kilometers above ground. If they just printed bamboo and carbon thread out of compost like everyone else, the rest of the project might still get slagged for showboating, but at least their energy use wouldn't be over the top. But it wasn't Nera's decision. Nera was lucky to be involved at all.

She heard Malka's theme song before she saw her. Nera had Moody's Clamor service on audio, and its theme song for Malka was a peppy, sizzling cryohaka beat — up-to-the-minute, fun, powerful, a little out of Nera's league. Moody's had their relationship pretty well down, in other words. Nera closed her in-eye windows.

"Hey," Malka said. She was in a short-sleeved ocean t-shirt (rolling waves, blues and greens) and matte black slacks. It suited her.

"Hey babe," Nera said, maybe a little too cheerful. She wondered, for the nth time, what Malka's services played in Malka's ears for Nera's theme song.

A woman in a sparkly blue chador pushed between them, followed by an old white guy in a top hat. They were arguing in Bäyerish. When Nera focused on them, Clamor played something dark, ominous, and classical: they were trouble. They threaded through the fungus columns.

"So, that guy Jörg's talking to?" Malka said.

"Yeah?" Nera said. She wondered if she was blushing — it was apparently obvious to Malka that she'd be watching Jörg. Did all her commenters know, too?

"He works for money," Malka said.

"He what?" Nera felt a hint of queasy vertigo.

"I know, weird." Malka smiled. "Come on, let's go meet him." She winked, and her fingers flickered in the air. The green of an incoming flashed in the lower right corner of Nera's vision, and with a flick of her tongue she pulled Malka's message open: _come on, princess, let's get this over with._ Malka meant seeing Jörg again.

Malka set off towards the library, and Nera followed. At the base of a deep purple column, a little blond boy stuffed strips of fungus into his mouth. He examined his hands while he chewed. For him, Clamor played turn-of-the-century pop: sweet and bouncy U.S.-Anglo music from Nera's parents' childhood. As her eyes lingered on him, her infospace started whispering: Torsten Hughes, 6 years old, born in Edinburgh, Scotland —

Nera looked away to shut it up, resisting the urge to google his parents. She took some fungus herself — soft and spongey, red as blood. It tasted like bratwurst, the texture of angel's food cake.

They paused as a flock of nine— and ten-year-old kids pushed past them, chattering in Chinese, none of them Chinese: tongue-slaved to some server. There never used to be kids at these parties. But who knew where kids went or why, nowadays? When Nera was a kid, you knew where kids were during the day. They were in school. Or with their parents. Torsten Hughes's parents were probably across town at some other party. They probably had him on a kidcam. They probably just deputized whoever was dumb enough to stop and talk to him.

When Nera and Malka were teenagers, back in the tumult of '33, they'd helped remake the world, cheering each other on long before they ever met in person. They were commenters on each other's video streams, that year when everyone was phoning in earring footage of eviction standoffs, food riots, praise-ins, convoys, patentbreaking spontos. Later, when they'd finally met in person at Uni, they'd charged across the mensa to fall into each other's arms.

"Are you following Sven?" Malka asked, as Nera caught up.

"Sven from the old days? Sven who was in the Pie Squad?" The Pie Squad happyslapped statist politicians with cream pies, assassination-style, in '33-'36. Sven was a beauty, and Malka had been sleeping with him in Berlin, when her tribe unfirewalled the national surveillance network.

"Yeah, that Sven," Malka said. "He's fallen apart since then. He gets in fights, drinks, won't work, takes things uninvited — he's in the red, nobody will feed him but the kitchens, and the Security Committee is talking about calling a vote for deportation, gang work, or dosing him on moodies..."

"Oh shit," Nera said.

"Yeah," Malka said. "It's a mess. I was commenting for a while, rooting for him, asking him to shape up, but he's so bitter — now I'm really just watching for the trainwreck value. It's sad."

Through the kitchen: Schwarzwälders at the bar, Bavarians around the fridge, and Finns and Peruvians cooking something loudly at the grill. There was a purple flash at the corner of Nera's vision. Did she want to contribute some of her energy ration to the barbecue? No. She did not.

Why had Malka brought up Sven? Was it some kind of warning, about the limits of old loyalties? An uncomfortably high proportion of Nera's ratings hinged on Malka's yes-votes. That had gotten her accepted into Cambergerstrasse project. And if _that_ would only go well, it ought to break her into the mid-500s, maybe beyond.

How was it Malka's life had kept growing after Uni, while Nera's stayed like a potted plant? At sixteen, they had both driven party shuttles, done megaphone duty, matchmaker, and groupie work with union shop stewards and farmhands, in the Work For Love campaign to keep German agribusiness from collapsing. Now, at 42, Malka was an industrial facilitator with an 803 on hUBBUB. When she posted about shortages, Frankfurt's entire ratings landscape shifted.

Nera had spent the last two decades mostly just partying, media-surfing, commenting on other people, and doing pick-up jobs pulled from the services — enough to keep her ratings out of the gutter. Couriering a package across town, stopping to help fix lunch at a buffet, visiting with some officially at-risk lonelies (work most people hated but Nera often didn't mind, so a big ratings win), getting babysitting-delegated, bit-part acting in flash dramas, gardening, or just hauling crap from place to place. That life was soothing: waking up at one party, spending the day drifting and doing whatever Frankfurt told her to do, whatever her services predicted would help her ratings (and assured others she could handle)... ending up at some other party and going to sleep in some comfortable nook — with or without some new friend vouched for by hUBBUB.

"Maximize joy," that was the old slogan of '33, the byword of the Free Society. Nera had thought that that was what she was doing.

When they entered the library, Clamor played Jörg's theme song — brassy, sexy, big-band Montevideo jazz. At two-meters-oh-five, Jörg towered over Sergei. He had shaved his skull except for a long blond queue, down to his hips. He was dressed in brown, a crisp new leather sleeveless vest — it must have come from a printer, too new to be vintage salvage, but it sure looked real — and leggings. On his hard, broad triceps there was a new lifebrand tattoo — the pyramid-eye of Illuminatus, above the steaming spoon of De Gustibus and the bicycle of Ergo. He was keeping up _three_ lifebrands! With that and neighborhood stuff and leading the rez committee for this floor of tower5, he must be clocking thirty contrib hours a week. He had to be in the 1100s by now.

Her hands were stained red from the stupid sausage mushroom.

Jörg's eyes widened. "Nera!" His broad face spread into a grin, a cascade of wrinkles. He saw her hands. "So what do you think of Tomas's garden?"

"It stinks," she said. "I'm going to smell like wurst for a week." She turned her attention decidedly to Sergei. Bristling eyebrows, dark eyes, a strong nose plummeting straight from a raised bridge — a Dravidian-Slavic mix. His hair was a black ear-length mop, his shirt flowing blue silk opening to show the softness of his throat. Maybe she _should_ run that bunny down. No predictions from Clamor, though, so no audio. When she focussed on Sergei, all she heard was the party around her.

Malka and Sergei kissed cheeks. "Nera wanted to meet the guy who works for money," she said.

"Oh, thanks, nice wingman work there, Malka," Nera said, mock-outraged. "Make me look like a total banker." Jörg and Malka simultaneously strangled a laugh. "What? Oh —"

Sergei inclined his head in a gracious nod and smiled. "You have gotten it in one."

"I didn't mean it like — you're a _banker_?" Nera sent an urgent message to her mouth to stop talking, but apparently it had to go by carrier pigeon. "Literally? Is that even legal?"

"Oh Nera, come on," Malka said, laughing. "Do you read _anyone's_ page before you meet them?"

"It's definitely legal," Jörg said, "Outlawing money exchange would lead to even more extreme distortions in our metrics than we've got." His fingers flicked, his eyes briefly on a point above her head, and more incoming green pinged at the corner of her vision, but she wasn't going to read his goddamn footnotes in the middle of the party. "The Free Society doesn't compete on force or fiat, it outperforms on joy. Wherever there's a reversion to the money economy, that's a signal of a deficit of either trust, satisfaction ability, or information flow. It's better to let that signal manifest rather than —"

"All right, all right," Malka said, patting Jörg on the shoulder. Jörg smiled his goofy grin.

Startlingly — though his theme song blared out pulse-warming and strong, and though he still had the fine glint of gold stubble on his chin, and smelled as good as ever — Jörg was a bore. Maybe it was because of the Cambergerstrasse project. Now that she finally had a hold on something solid, Nera didn't feel intimidated by Jörg's footnotes anymore, or jelly-kneed with longing. It was like a tight band around her chest had been loosened, and she could breathe.

She grinned, and turned to Sergei. "What do you even buy with money any more?"

"Are you kidding?" Sergei smiled. He cupped his hands, enclosing a swarm of mites. They glinted, swift and metallic; in the darkness, you could see tiny flares of laser communications. "These need gallium, tantalum, rubidium... delicate nano components you can only make in orbit..." He opened his hands, and the mites wisped away. "Nobody mines rubidium in the Sudan just to impress their friends or make a lifebrand quota. Right? China doesn't send up taikonauts to low orbit to get a good rating at hUBBUB..."

"I thought the metals could be salvaged out of old gear," Nera said, shocked.

"Oh no," Jörg said. "Not enough of them, not for years. Probably every pre-2030 laptop and cell phone in Europe outside of deep landfill has been recycled by now, but we're way past that point, and back to extraction. There's a robust debate in the import-export committee wiki..." More little green footnotes, flashing like the mites' lasers.

"Always need more mites," Malka said drily. "How else are we going to be sure not to miss any neighbor picking her nose..."

Nera felt the queasiness return. How had she not known this? What the hell had they had a revolution for anyway, if they were all living on the backs of wage-slaves in Africa again? Should she say that? As she hesitated, she saw the brass flash of a neutral comment in the corner of her vision. People were following this conversation; she should be careful. Nera didn't have many regular followers, and most of them were friendly mutuals, plus some contextuals (who usually were more interested in Jörg or Malka or others of her buzzier friends), and a few tourists from overseas who'd picked her at random. But there were always the inevitable drive-bys when she did something truly bloat. Her savvy rating wasn't the best anyway; all she needed was a spike in buzz on a collapse in savvy.

"Did you two see that Nera's a signer on a construction request-for-comment?" Malka asked. Nera couldn't tell if she was being supportive — trying to help Nera land Sergei in the sack — or catty, or just maneuvering off the topic of Sergei's job before Nera put her foot in it.

"Oh yeah?" Jörg said, his eyes twinkling. He honestly had no idea. These last four thrilling months, she'd been planning, facilitating, consensus-building, detail-checking — things she'd done in '33, things she'd forgotten she missed. Clearly, Jörg hadn't paid any attention. She'd had to force herself to stop following him — it had never occurred to him to follow her.

Sergei's eyes had the telltale drift-to-the-right of someone googling something. "You're building a music space on the 300th, on Cambergerstrasse..."

"Well, I'm a minor player," Nera said. "The big wheel is Sabine Heuspross, the music historian? She's a major scholar in late-twentieth-century U.S. alternative music. Originally we wanted to do it specialized on Washington, DC punk, late 1980s? But we got major flak from the Niederrad punks —"

"Oh right." Jörg nodded. "You don't want to tangle with them." It was unbelievable — all this time, she'd imagined him forced to see her in a new light, not just as this bubblehead drifter who'd wandered in at a party one night and stayed to warm his bed. She'd imagined the loverslump crowd talking about her. She'd imagined Jörg's fanboy commenters teasing him, giving him credit for her transformation: "Jörg can't even _sleep_ _with_ bubbleheads without turning them into prosocial contributors! Our brother over here _ejaculates_ impulsiveness suppressants!"

"Yeah?" asked Sergei. "A lot of clout? I don't really follow re-creationists..."

"They're not _exactly_ re-creationists," Jörg said.

"Yeah, that's the problem!" Malka said. "Punk is like a religion in Niederrad. They're the authentic inheritors of the true flame, they don't need any academic poseurs butting in..."

"So... we switched to Seattle grunge," Nera said. "Same general period, less contentious. There's an academy for original grunge ensembles and karaokists in Stuttgart, but all we've got are re-enactors up here. I mean, so far. If we get approved — it ought to change."

"The 300th, though? Isn't it a little high up for a performance space?" Sergei said. "That's quite a climb..."

"Especially for hauling steel girders," Malka said, pursing her lips.

"It's big, too," Jörg said. He stroked a hand in the air, scrolling through the plans.

"It's not all performance space, it's also party and squat," Nera said. She saw a flutter of brown flashes, three negative comments in a row, in the corner of her vision.

"Wow," Sergei said. "Are you guys going to reserve it to live in yourselves at all, or is it going straight to general squatright?"

"We don't know yet," Nera said. She felt her chest tighten again. It would be so good to live there with the project group! But they'd been accumulating disses — not that many people cared about 20th century music, and everyone cared about energy and airspace.

Malka looked sour. Maybe she regretted bringing the topic up. "What do _you_ think?" she asked Jörg.

Jörg nodded. "It's good, it's good. People should take risks. Good to see you stretching, Nera."

Nera felt a stab of anger. She slid open a message tray with her tongue and fingered a message to Malka: _Porky_ _jesus_ _, he's patronizing!_

Malka shrugged, looked away. "Back to the banker thing, Sergei," she said, "since Nera did bring it up. I get why you work _with_ money — it still makes a lot of the world go round. You take Frankfurt's various exports and patents and Swiss bank accounts and whatever, and buy us whatever we can't make here. I get that, and I get why it would be a high-rep job; we need it, and most people would find it boring. But you told me you worked _for_ money — not just _with_ money." She crossed her arms beneath her breasts, where her top shimmered electric blue. "Why?"

Sergei smiled the long-lipped, eyebrow-cocked smile of someone who is amused in advance at the reaction they're about to get. "I like money," he said.

"What, you mean, like, physical money?" Malka said. "Like you collect coins and bills? That's cool, I guess."

"No," Sergei said. "I mean I like _money_. I like exchange. Abstracted exchange. Simplicity. You give me something, I give you something. We're quits. You don't have to decide what kind of person I am, if you like me, how distant I am from you in social space. We could be masked strangers in a privacy zone. You want something from me, you give me money. I don't care who you are. I don't care what you want it for."

Comments were flashing in, but Nera didn't stop to read them. Queasy, she thought of the hunch of her father's shoulders in his starched white uniform and red tie, behind the florist counter at the supermarket. She recalled the burn of tear gas at the back of her throat, the sound of shattering windows.

Jörg looked like he was the proud owner of a performing dog; Malka, like she was equally disgusted and turned on. Or maybe a little more turned on.

"Huh," Malka said. "'Masked strangers in a privacy zone'...? You know the 'raw swingers'? They hook up with strangers for sex with their services totally turned off. No peeking at comments or reviews or social map — so they have _no idea_ if it's going to be a total nightmare, right? That's the point, I guess, part of the thrill. They've got this whole thing about how it's so much better when it does work, because of the risk and the authenticity and whatever. So are you saying this is like that, Sergei? You do stuff just for a marker of hoarded value... you don't even know why. You don't know what the effect of your actions are, what you're contributing towards, or what people will say..."

"All you know is you want the money," Nera said.

Malka nodded. "Pure greed, no connections, heedless of consequences. That's it? It's a kink? Like a... sick thrill?"

Sergei laughed. To his credit, he looked a little discomfited. "I guess you could look at it like that."

"Oh, don't underplay it," Jörg said. "Sergei — you've written about this. It's a philosophy." Nera glanced at him, and she recognized his expression. A year ago she would have called it an eager openness — his fascination with the unending variety of people and ideas Frankfurt's flow brought bobbing to his door. But she'd been in his collection of flotsam. Drifter Nera, banker Sergei, autie-genius Tomas, the Finns and Peruvians grilling in the kitchen; they all ended up part of Jörg's menagerie, and by means of them all, he somehow ended up rating as a life-artist instead of a pompous, lecturing do-gooder.

"Well," said Sergei. "Okay. I think it's more than just kinky." He glanced sidelong at Malka. "Money is... clean. It severs connections. That's not always a bad thing. You _say_ you know what the effect of your actions are. But you don't really know — you don't trace them all in detail. You don't have time. You just go with the consensus. With fashion."

"Sure, sure, ratings and fashion are all we have," Malka said. "That's not a new argument or anything, and we are all concerned, I'm sure, with the plight of the low-rated. Nera has done quite a bit of visiting with at-risk lonelies, did you know that? But _money_ seems like a weird solution to that problem, doesn't it?"

"No," he said, and there was a little bit of a quiver in his voice that made Nera wonder what history it pointed to, "no, it doesn't. With money, poverty is empty of meaning. It's not a judgement on your life and works. It doesn't mean no one likes you, that you're obnoxious or boring. If you're poor in a money economy, you know what you need to do: make money. It's not as... wounding."

"That's stupid," Nera said. Jörg and Malka turned to look at her, eyebrows raised — her voice was too loud, too harsh. Her heart was beating fast. "It's dead easy to get your ratings up when they fall. Your services tell you how."

"Your services tell _you_ how," Sergei retorted. "You have skills, you're charming. You're rated as trustworthy. People want you to babysit their kids. Carry their packages. Cook their food. It's not that easy for everyone."

"Well I don't understand what you're saying," Nera said, flushing. "If people, or the networks, don't trust someone to watch kids or cook _food_ — well, there's probably a good fucking reason for that, then! There are other things they can do instead that are contributive. This is ridiculous. You want to return to a world where you can — I don't know, push people off bridges and as long as you can steal some jewelry and convert it into cash, you get to have everything you want?"

"I don't think that's quite what Sergei means," Jörg said. The zookeeper interposing himself between two fighting animals.

"I'm not saying we should go back to just having money," Sergei said, smiling uncertainty. "Not only. But it's — freeing. It's like — maybe sometimes you don't need to know what something's for. You don't always need to be beholden to people, to have all these tribes and affiliations. All these people arguing about what to do, imposing on you. Don't you get tired of the politics? Of being second-guessed, of... positioning everything? Maybe it's just that I've travelled quite a bit, and the world beyond Frankfurt and the Free Society Zone is different. Not maybe better, but... yeah, _freer_ , in some ways. In China and the 'Stans, you know..."

"Yeah, I know," Nera said, "you can get baby hookers there with your precious _money_ , and plenty of privacy."

There was a beat. Sergei's smile vanished. Jörg lost his patronizing zookeeper look.

Malka looked as if she'd bitten into something rotten. "Nera, cool it. That's an awful thing to say."

"Well how do you know?" Nera said, her blood pounding in her ears. "How do you know what he does with his freedom, with his rubidium, out there where people have to work or die..." A flurry of brown flashes in the corner of her vision. The vultures descending on her comment space. Then a few gold, positive comments.

"He's doing all that for Frankfurt — " Malka said.

"Fuck that," Nera said.

Sergei raised his eyebrows, tried a smile. Malka and Jörg exchanged a glance. Their fingers twitched. Discussing what to do with problem Nera.

Her ears burned. Fine. She'd lost her cool.

She was quivering with anger, and she couldn't open her jaw to say hey, I'm sorry, I know you don't mean it like that, I've had a bad day. The comments were splotching into her vision like shit bombs. But she couldn't open her mouth.

The cryohaka beat hissed and rumbled, repetitive, slick, and meaningless. Malka put her hand on Sergei's shoulder.

Nera turned and walked away.

***

Nera's dad was a florist. Her mom was a pharmacist, who moved up to managing process architecture generation for a chain of drugstores. They'd immigrated as kids, from the Balkans, to a rich, safe, First World, EU country: Germany. For _their_ parents — Nera's grandparents — Germany was a hard and lonely heaven. Long hours, disapproving looks from the neighbors, the officious and unmusical language, refugee paperwork. But safe. No snipers on the rooftops, no land mines in the soil. Computers in every house, fresh fruit from South America and New Zealand in the shop on the corner. Fitness clubs and GPS cell phones, and softly humming BMWs in the streets.

Nera's father used to tell her about their summer trips back to the Balkans: fields of sunflowers, dappled forests, bomb craters from the last century, villages of half-built houses. Parties long into the night, rich homemade food and aunts fussing over you. But he never took Nera back there.

He worked long hours. Her mother, once Nera was in school, worked even longer hours. Nera's prototypical memory of her: hunched over a tablet, late at night, in a curvy, designer orange leather chair by the front parlor window.

Her father, at least, had the flowers, which you could touch and smell, and the customers, who were sometimes — rarely — enthralled by the flowers' beauty. But those were brief moments in a day filled with sneers; with bitching coworkers and an angry, disapproving boss. His German was perfect, he was punctual and polite, he cheered the Frankfurter Fussballclub and drank Hefeweizen. But they acted as if he didn't understand, couldn't think, and didn't belong. He kept arriving every day to cut and bundle and ring up flowers, through an ulcer and graying hair and a permanent, heartbreaking, conciliatory flinch-smile. Because it was his job.

Nera's mother was more assertive, slicker, better at claiming her place in Germany. She rose through the ranks. She was rewarded with weekends shuffling numbers, running simulations, and playing office politics over instant messaging. She was proud of her work. She was glad when she could prove that her candidate process had evolved better than her rivals'. It was all ephemeral. At best, it meant a few more shoppers loaded a few more plastic tubes and bottles of chemicals into their shopping carts in a few more narrow, fluorescent-lighted aisles. She gave her life over to that.

That, and money, and a place in the system promised by the state. The state would educate their child. It would care for them when they were sick, when they were old. If they could not find work, it would feed and clothe them for a while, while they looked for work. The state would defend them from violence. It would protect from theft all the things they acquired: the tablet computers and phones and leather chairs, the shapely anodized aluminum pans hanging above the induction stove in their beautiful open-plan kitchen/living room. In exchange for these protections, they would feed the state with taxes. And for food, for electricity, for clothes, for videos, for the internet, for rented cars and ice skates and piano lessons, they would feed the market a constant stream of money.

It was a bargain. We will give you our lives; we will spend our lives obediently doing things we wouldn't choose, things that probably do not really matter to anyone. And in return we will get money. And money will take care of us.

The United States of America defaulted on its debt in 2026, destroying the dollar. The Euro Zone bet on propping up its banks the following year, and lost its bet. Martial law kept the shaken house in order another year, until the pandemics hit, and the soldiers fled the cities. Nera was ten the hungry year that super-resistant TB and goose flu kept everyone home. She was already on Tribes then. She already had people around the world and around the block who she could count on for help even if they'd never met, even though it was all guesswork and the crudest of relational metrics on Tribes, not predictive at all. Her parents, who had never made the transition from Facebook and LinkedIn, did not understand why strangers were dropping off food.

Nera's parents knew that the state had betrayed them. They knew that their savings had vanished, that the promises of health care and support in old age had turned out to be lies. They never understood that the market had betrayed them as well. Even though their money had stopped being worth anything, they kept looking for a money that would be worth something: yuan, or Swiss francs, or real solid gold, or the virtual-gold currencies of fantasy games which briefly, perversely, served as the world's lingua-franca medium of exchange.

They never understood what their grandparents had known: that the only thing you could trust was people.

They didn't understand why Nera was in the streets in '33.

They died looking for jobs and money, trying to find a way back, trying to find someone to sell their lives to.

***

Flashes of brown, brown, brass, brown. One last consoling flash of gold.

Back in the kitchen, dry-mouthed, Nera forced herself to send an answer: _I'm sorry, I just needed to get away from that bullshit banker._

Malka's response was a long time coming. Nera pulled open a window and watched the three of them. Jörg leaned towards Sergei, laughed his abrupt booming laugh. Sergei smiled. Malka stood a little stiff, but intent, listening, her hands twitching. Clamor had a theme song now for Sergei — harsh, almost atonal, like grunge guitars playing Schönberg. Apparently she'd given it enough data, now, to figure her and Sergei out.

Finally, among the brown flashes, Malka's green: _Nera, I'm really sorry. I'm pulling my support on reliability and trust. I care about you, but you keep doing things like this — attacking poor Sergei, who's doing important work... wallowing in glory from the good old days... risking my rep on Sabine Heuspross's ego-splurge. It's ridiculous. I liked it better when you were just drifting. Let's not talk for a while._

On hUBBUB, Nera's aggregate rating was now 358.

In her queue: messages from drive-by ratings advisors, attracted by her sharp plunge. They'd have suggestions for her; probably they'd want her to shift her friendships around, invest in relationships with other narrow-minded ideological assholes like herself. That would improve her numbers. Also in her queue: a lot of private messages from friends worried about her behavior, and a couple of random gig offers. She scrolled to the gold comments in her comment stream. They were from drunk losers who liked the idea of baby hookers, or conspiracy-theory ravings from incoherent, bitter old Thirty-three'ers.

Incoming, from Colette:

Um, Nera, I don't know how to say this so I'll just say it. We all know it's really important to keep ratings up when the project's in such a risky place. It doesn't really cohere for us, to have RFC signers who are under 400 at hUBBUB. I'm sorry, I know it's a pile-on, but it's really best if you take a break. You've done good work and we'll still vouch for that. Maybe later when things are more stable, you can get involved again. I'll find someone else to talk to the Autie Girls. Really sorry.

She checked hUBBUB again: still 358, and for a few crazy seconds she thought that getting booted from the Cambergerstrasse team would have no effect — maybe people hated the project that much? But it was just lag. Soon she was down to 302 on hUBBUB, 288 on Moody's, 268 on Snopes.

Tears stung in her eyes, so that the crisp in-eye windows were overlaid on a a blurry world. She rubbed her eyes, angry. Now the Schadenfreude voyeurs who got off on watching the tragic, weeping de-rated would swarm.

She scrolled to the last gold comment in her comment stream.

I read what you said on a kidfilter so maybe I don't understand it all. But I agree with you. Money was dumb. People shouldn't be able to make other people play with them just because they have points in that kind of game. I'm asking my parents to delegate you. I'm in the fungus room if you want to play.

Sure enough, one of the gig offers was a babysitting offer from Torsten's parents.

***

"Hi Torsten," she said brightly, squatting down. "What do you want to play?"

He was slouched against a fungus pillar, his eyes blank, whole body twitching — shoulders, chin, elbows jerking — playing some in-eye game. He blinked, his vision cleared, and he looked at her cautiously. His cheeks were stained red from sausage mushroom.

She wiped her palms on her knees. There was a kid's version of Clamor, he could probably hear that she was less trustworthy than before. "We could play tag, or I could tell you a story..."

"Are you really sad?" he said. "I'd be sad if that happened to me."

She blinked. He was looking at her as if he was wondering if she was about to lose it. Should she shrug it off, reassure him? Who wanted a sad babysitter?

But they used to say, in the revolution: we take our allies where we find them.

"Yeah," she said. "I'm sad."

Torsten stood up. "Why did they do that? Weren't they your friends?"

She shrugged. "I said some dumb things."

He frowned, and nodded. A grim expression. She remembered her mother, looking up from the orange leather chair when Nera wanted to play, smiling falsely, returning to her tablet. "Nera, I have to work." She remembered knowing that that was what adult life was like.

Any ratings consultant would tell her she needed to sound apologetic now, not defiant, or she was going to get de-rated further.

But she could see Torsten bracing himself to live in this world they'd made.

"What happened to me, Torsten... it wasn't okay," she said. "My friends made a mistake. Your friends should stick by you always."

Torsten looked up and grinned. He looked enormously relieved. He reached out and took her hand. "I'm hungry," he said.

"You've been eating the mushrooms though," she said.

"They're kind of yucky."

"I know a yummy soup place straight up from here, if you can climb."

Torsten puffed his chest out. "I can climb _great_."

She smiled. His small hand folded in hers, warm and confident. "Let's go play," she said.

_Originally published on_ www.shareable.net/blog/the-guy-who-worked-for-money.

_For most of his adult life, Allan Rousselle has lived and worked at either one end of US Interstate 90 (Boston) or the other (Seattle), but he allegedly grew up in one of the towns in between (Buffalo). His career has been long and varied, including academic work in history, political science, and "sovietology"; a journalism career in both print and radio; software engineering; product marketing; the manufacturing of plastic doohickeys; and editing a humor publication or two. His published work ranges from in depth news articles to science fiction (you knew that had to be here somewhere) to limericks about why all poetry festivals should be held in Nantucket. For more of Allan's writing, visit his personal website at:_ www.rousselle.com/allan

## Everybody Stops at Boston's

by Allan Rousselle

Here's your scotch. I promise you, it's replicated from the real thing – single malt, aged thirty-five years, and scanned unopened into a genuine Ericson back on Earth before the quarantine. You have never had a drink quite like it before, my friend, and you never will again. Not in this lifetime.

Now take a look around before you have your first taste. Smell the popcorn in the basket in front of you. That's real replicated butter. You don't even notice the recycled air of the station. Knock on this wooden counter — me and my boy took thousands of little replicated dark mahogany tiles, glued them together, and then sanded and shellacked the whole thing by hand. Four meters long by half a meter wide was a lot of work. A labor of love.

It's quiet here for now, just you and me and that poor fellow down at the other end of the bar, but it'll be busy as hell once the afternoon ferry from Io arrives. Funny thing about that guy, drinking like he won't see another planet-rise...

Yes, I'm the proprietor, and no, my name's not Boston. I hand painted that "Boston's Pub" permasign in the outside hall over a century ago when I first built this place. I had to name it _something_ , and I wanted to commemorate the place of my birth somehow – yes, I'm actually from Earth. No, I wasn't one of the evacuees. I had left about a dozen or so years before the nano-plague hit.

Most people were desperate to stay Earthside during those years before that outbreak, but I wasn't the only fellow who felt the itch to cast off and find my fortunes elsewhere.

I left with two main advantages. The first was my background as a history major. You can laugh — most of the prospectors who've passed through this station en route to or from the Jovian mines have done as much. But while they keep coming and going, they all leave some of their money with me, just as you're doing now.

You see, the person who pays attention to history knows that some prospectors strike it rich, while the overwhelming majority don't. Yet those who supply the goods – air, tools, booze, hookers, food – well, they've always got a steady supply of customers who'll pay just a little bit more than retail. Hell, a lot more than retail.

The Jovian Trail is littered with engineers, mineralogists, astrophysicists, medical doctors, and the like. There aren't so many of us social scientists. And yet, who does most of the heavy lifting? Those engineers. And who enjoys a more leisurely lifestyle by anticipating the needs of those heavy lifters? Me.

So that was one advantage. Understanding history. Understanding people, more like. The other advantage was more tangible. I owned – and still own – an Ericson, and had the connections to help me smuggle it off Earth.

Most people think of Ericsons as being these unusually precise replicators, but that's not it by far. Replicator technology is easy: all you need are the right kind of nanites and a box that can shield them while they do their work. At least half a dozen shops here at the station have faster nanites or larger cases than mine.

The advantage that mine has is the memory capacity. Disassembling and reassembling molecules is easy enough for the little worker nanites. But storing and retrieving the maps is another matter.

Think about it this way. There's something like three times ten to the twenty-second power atoms in one cubic centimeter of water. Pure water, that is. That number will go up or down depending upon the molecular composition of the impurities floating around in there. The amount of memory needed just to store a molecular map of, say, a shot of whiskey is outrageous. That bottle of scotch? Outrageous to the nth power.

But Ericson's compression algorithms and memory management techniques were light years ahead of their time, which is why the Ericson machines are the only replicators that are, in any practical sense, user programmable.

Bring me a shot of your favorite beverage, and I can scan it into a ceramic memory brick and then reproduce a glass of it for you any time you drop by.

Not for free, of course, but you get the idea.

That's why there will never be a tavern on Copernicus Station that will stand up even one week against me. All taverns have replicators. But none have a library of drinks like mine. I go all the way back to Earth, remember, and my stock keeps growing.

Let me tell you something. I thought I'd seen and heard it all, making my way from Earth to Harriman Station to Mars and on out to here. I was on Mars when the Samphire elevator crashed. I was tending bar on the _Sagan_ when Lambert discovered life on Europa. Truly, I thought I'd seen it all.

But it's quiet times like this that get to me, make me think of the weirdest thing I've ever seen. And the worst.

Do you believe that time travel is possible? Don't look so startled; of course, you do. Everybody does, even if they pretend they don't. But that guy down at the end of the bar? He says he's celebrating _because_ of time travel. Says he's actually invented a time machine. And so he's drinking like there's no tomorrow.

One time I had a customer come in and order scotch – replicated from the very same bottle as yours – who had this look, this pall, that was disquieting as all hell. Death and solitude seemed to cling to this poor soul's space suit like moon dust. One drink led to another and then another and then, well ... you know how alcohol can loosen the tongue.

This stranger claimed to be an assassin. A killer-for-hire of the literal sort. Had killed maybe a dozen or so people, usually because of some threat they had posed to some big corporate interests. People with unlimited credit and a lot to lose.

I've tended bar for more decades than I care to count, and I've heard a lot of stories. I have no doubts that some of my clientele have been killers. A few have even claimed as much to my face, and it's possible that one or two were telling some version of the truth. I'm inclined to believe as much.

But this was different. This person didn't have the I-dare-you eyes of a ruthless thug. This wasn't bragging or boasting, like our friend down at the end of the bar with the time machine. This was the cold, matter-of-fact confession of a professional killer.

"I've eliminated people who needed to be taken care of," the assassin told me, "but today is my last job."

At this point, as I'm sure you can imagine, I didn't want to ask for clarification. And Hubbard as my witness, I was pretty sure this wasn't the assassin's first time in my bar. Like, maybe there had already been a contract quietly carried out on my premises once before. I'm sure you can understand why I'd keep that to myself just then, too. The wise bartender knows when to show discretion.

But I didn't have to wait very long to find out what "today is my last job" meant. And as you can tell by me standing here right now, the last job in question wasn't me.

"This place looks pretty much the same as the last time I was here, except almost all of the pictures along that wall aren't there yet."

An odd thing to say, but I know you're already ahead of me. This single photo hanging above the cash register is my son. And yet, this person says that there used to be more photos above my cash register. You and I both know that I'm only going to add photos over time, not take them down. Likewise, any proprietors who might come after me.

But I'm a patient listener, and I let the assassin tell the story. Sure enough, the killer claimed to be from the future and was sent back in time to take care of – get this – the inventor of the time machine. Not only that, but the assassination had to take place before the first time jump took place. In essence, the job was to go back in time to prevent the possibility of going back in time. And the presumed inventor of time travel was sitting in my bar on that particular day, at that table over there by the wall, even as we spoke.

As I said, I studied history, not physics or engineering, and I'm not quite sure how or whether a causal loop can be created in order to prevent itself. It just doesn't make sense to me.

But a good listener knows when to ask questions, so I asked this killer from the future, "What happens to you if you succeed? Do you disappear? Do you stay stuck here?" And the killer downed what was left in the glass and asked for more scotch.

"We'll know pretty soon."

It was contact poison, some kind of eight hour deal that hadn't even been invented yet and for which there wasn't – or isn't – a cure. The assassin favored contact poison, and had already casually bumped into the target as they were entering my establishment, and then ditched the poisoned glove even before sitting down at the bar.

The damage was already done; an unstoppable chain of events had already been set into motion. It might be four hours before the first symptoms would appear; the remaining hours would be excruciating. But the point, I was told, wasn't the pain; the point was that the target died. That man sitting at that table was already dead. He just didn't know it yet.

I don't mind saying that it's rather disquieting to be talking matter-of-factly to a killer who has just murdered someone in plain sight, while nobody noticed. Not even the victim.

"If what you say is true, then it's all a done deal. The inventor is guaranteed to die before testing his time travel machine, which means he doesn't invent or discover time travel, which means your employer will have no need nor means to send you back here, which means you're not here."

"And yet," said the assassin, "here I am."

The killer bought a round for the inventor and his friends, I guess the way an executioner might order a last meal to his intended victim.

Sure enough, the inventor started to clutch his stomach and he looked a little pale, and then he and his buddies got up and left soon thereafter.

The assassin, who didn't look so good either, stood up and started to pay for the last drink.

"Forget about that last one," I said. "It's on me. Just don't come back." I got a grim smile in return, and the killer walked out.

Later that day, my customer did indeed die, and the station cops never could figure out what it was that killed him. My other customer, who claimed to be from the future, never got any attention that I heard about after walking out of my establishment.

But that's not the end of the story.

Here, let me pour you another. This one's on me. And don't even dare to think about offering to buy a round for our friend at the end of the bar. My sense of humor has dried up on that particular topic.

Now, then. I told you how I had been a student of history. Anyone who takes a look at history recognizes that the big inventions and discoveries happened with multiple people in multiple locations, all at about the same time. Certain ideas just seem to pop up out of nowhere and suddenly they're everywhere. The steam engine, for example. Interchangeable parts for firearms. The internal combustion engine. Harnessing electricity. Audio recording. Video recording. Thought recording.

But while several different folks might come up with similar ideas at the same time, they nonetheless had to start within similar cultural milieus... Now there's a word for social scientists like myself. "Milieu." No astrophysicist ever had use for a word like that.

My point is, the engines that drove the industrial revolution came from the minds of Europeans and Americans at around the same time; they did not come from Eskimos or Bushmen of that era. Likewise, the space race, the information age, and the nano age were all propelled by like-minded inventors from different but comparable societies.

So it did not completely surprise me the second time a fellow came into my bar and, after a drink or two, told me that he had discovered the principles of moving backward and forward through time. Nor was I shocked the third time it happened. Nor all the times after that. All separated by several years, of course, but close enough as historical ages go. There's something about Copernicus Station and its unique location near the asteroid belt, I think, that combines with this particular period of history to produce a breakthrough in time travel.

So I wasn't expecting it, but I wasn't surprised by it. What _did_ surprise me was that before I encountered another inventor of a time machine, I saw that assassin come walking in again. The very same one as before. I forgot to breathe at first. Looked younger. Same haunted eyes. Same aura of death and solitude. Same sense of purpose. But definitely younger.

The assassin did not recognize me, however. I forced myself to breathe; to move; to tend my customers. While delivering a round of pilsners to three young bucks at the table by the entrance, I learned that one in particular was celebrating his recent invention. He was going to travel through time, he said, and things were going to be different from here on out.

Again, that inability to breathe. My mouth went as dry as Europa ice. I managed to nod my congratulations, and then darted back behind my refuge. Four meters by one half meter of well tended wood.

The assassin sat at the bar and, after a few drinks, eventually told me about being a killer, about how this was the last job. About coming back in time to kill the very person who made it possible to come back through time.

Was there anything I could do to stop it? No, of course not. The job was already done. Contact poison. "Have you ever been on a job like this before?" I asked.

No, again, of course not.

What will happen to the killer after the inventor dies?

"We'll know pretty soon."

Only, soon after the inventor walks out, the killer walks out, never to be heard from again.

The first time this had happened, it shook me in ways I can't possibly describe. Emotionally, more than anything else. Screwed me up for years. But after it happened a second time, I lost a lot of sleep doing a lot of thinking, more than anything else.

Mostly, I asked myself those imponderable questions. Like, how was it that you could have different guys invent their respective time machines, but it was always the same guy who got sent back to stop him? Who was it that hired this assassin? And how could they possibly propose to compensate the assassin once the job was done?

This last one bothered me for a long time until I realized that I had been thinking along the wrong lines.

If you want to send somebody back in time to change something, then you would never have to pay for the favor. Either the change took place, in which case the thing that motivated you to send back your hired gun never happened in the first place, so it would never occur to you to follow through on any payment plans to rectify something that never happened. _Or_ the change _didn't_ take place, so you wouldn't have to pay, because the job wasn't completed.

So if the hired gun could never be paid for a job well done, the only other possibility, it seemed to me, was that the killer was escaping something terrible in the future by taking this job. Even the uncertainty of what would happen to the assassin after a successful hit must have been preferable to the certainty of what would happen in the killer's "current" timeline by staying in the future.

At least, that was all I could think of.

I came to believe that this terrible fate, whatever it must be, combined with the assassin's capabilities in that particular line of work, made for an inevitable choice of who must be picked to carry out the job. The timing of arriving at that inevitable conclusion might vary, but the conclusion itself was foregone.

Of course, the only way to test this hypothesis would be to see what happened if another time machine inventor happened to announce himself or herself to me at my establishment. And how many time machine inventors would have to show up at my doorstep to comprise a statistically significant sample size?

I'm not a scientist, as I've said, but it seems to me that having two inventors of a time machine is already pretty damned statistically significant.

That said, I wasn't really shocked the third time the assassin showed up. Followed by a third time machine inventor, who would eventually have to leave my pub with stomach pains.

The third assassin was the same person, only this time not as young as the second, but maybe still a bit younger than the first. The inventor, on the other hand, was completely different from her two predecessors. But of course that made sense. Her two predecessors had already predeceased her.

But getting back to the returning assassin who had no memory of ever having been here: after a little bit of lubrication courtesy of Scotland's finest, the topic of being a killer and being on the last job came up, plus the unavoidable topic of the intended target and the method being employed, etc.

"Why did you take this job? You can't possibly stand to receive a reward, so what penalty are you escaping?" I didn't get an answer, but I did get a grimace that convinced me I was on the right track.

I learned a little bit more about the assassin's history. About getting into the field, about becoming a contact poison expert. I'd already learned a little bit from the first time around, but this time the conversation had more depth because, quite frankly, I had a better sense of what kinds of questions to ask.

I found out an answer to another question: why my tavern?

"This is the only pub on Copernicus. Even for people who don't drink, everyone at the station will eventually end up here. History doesn't record the daily activities of an inventor, even one as important as this one, but we knew where the first jump would begin. Copernicus. It's easier for me to stake out a pub in a major spoke of the station rather than trying to sneak around private quarters. QED."

I may be merely a bartending history buff, but I know enough geek-speak to know that QED is short for a Latin phrase that means: "I'm one methodical sonofabitch."

If I were a killer, I don't know if I'd have come to the same conclusion as my assassin friend about the best place for a stakeout, but the reasons for making the choice aren't important. Maybe there's some piece of information that I'm not privy to. What's important is that, once this same person is given this particular job, this person's training and method of operation ultimately and necessarily lead to the same choices every time. Stake out my pub, and zap the target while entering. Ditch the murder weapon, and QED.

So victim number three eventually develops stomach cramps and limps out of Boston's Pub, next to be seen in the obituary section. The killer's not looking so hot either, and leaves not too long after.

Speaking of which, there goes our friend the inventor who's been enjoying his celebratory drink – thanks for dropping by!

Between you and me, I think he's not feeling well.

Okay, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be cavalier like that. I guess I've become a little bit jaded over these many decades. Humor is a coping mechanism, right? Even if it is gallows humor.

So, as you've figured out by now, that third time wasn't the last time I met the assassin, and it certainly wasn't the last time I had an aspiring time traveler sit at one of my tables. In fact, I figure that scenario has played itself out over a dozen times, now.

I guess time travel very much wants to be discovered. And yet, there can be no shortage of people who stand to lose something important to them if time travel is allowed to exist. People with means. People who can find just the right assassin with just the right motivation for the job, whatever that motivation might be.

So if inventing time travel is inevitable, it would appear that it also contains the seeds of its own prevention. Any society capable of producing time travel is also capable of going back in time to prevent it from happening. Nature's self-correcting mechanism for keeping time moving forward, I suppose.

But what happens to the person sent back in time to prevent time travel from being possible?

Before you go, I want you to know that I have at least half an answer, my friend. And I can tell from your shallow breathing and your white-knuckle grip on the bar that you'll be leaving quite soon.

You see that photo hanging on the wall behind me? That's my son. He was the first person that I am aware of to have discovered the principles of traveling back and forth through time. He's the one who told me about how Copernicus's unique orbit made that discovery possible.

I don't think the first assassin who came through here realized that Boston's Pub was not named for the proprietor, nor that the proprietor was his intended victim's father.

Nor do I think the assassin imagined that a simple bartender would, during those few hours of our acquaintance, locate the poisoned glove with the last remaining traces of a very toxic contact poison on it and very carefully bring it into my back room where my Ericson resides.

Did I mention that the Ericson is unique in that it is the only replicator that is, in any practical sense, user programmable? Bring me a shot of your favorite whiskey, and I'll be glad to produce a glassful soon afterward. Not for free, of course, but you get the idea.

You get the idea.

I recognized you as soon as you came in, even though you didn't recognize me. And I knew what that meant for my only other customer here this afternoon. I feel bad for him, I really do.

But as to what happens to you now that his fate is sealed, I want you to know that at least part of the answer is certain. The assassin who has traveled through here so many times without ever being the wiser has never been heard from again after leaving. Neither dead nor alive. But even though no inexplicable corpse of someone from a near-future generation has ever been found, I assure you that the assassin could never be found alive, either.

Killing you won't bring my son back. It certainly hasn't so far. But as long as you keep giving me the opportunity, I see no reason to stop.

And I'll keep telling you this story until you figure out how it ends. You'll have to stop me next time, of course, if you've heard it before.

_Kiini Ibura Salaam is a writer, painter, and traveler from New Orleans, Louisiana. Her work is rooted in eroticism, speculative events and worlds, and women's perspectives. Her fiction has been included in such publications as_ Dark Matter, Mojo: Conjure Stories _, and_ Dark Eros _._

_Kiini's creative nonfiction speaks to her two passions: the freedom of women and the freedom of the creative spirit. Her essays have been published in_ Essence, Ms., _and_ Colonize This! _Her work has been included in college curricula in the areas of women's studies, anthropology, history, and English, and has garnered a personal commentary award from the National Association of Black Journalists._

_Kiini's blog, the KIS.list, explores the writing life and encourages readers to fulfill their dreams. You can read more of her work in her Tiptree Award winning collection of short stories,_ Ancient, Ancient _, and on her website_ www.kiiniibura.com.

## Rosamojo

by Kiini Ibura Salaam

Eyes half closed, I see the dark of daddy's pants. My bedroom door swings open. Light rips into my room, then disappears. I am alone now. Daddy's footsteps get softer and softer. I can't relax 'til I can't hear him no more. I turn my face to the wall. My neck is sore, but that's better than it being broke. My breath goes from fast to slow. Then I start to notice other things. Like the moon glowing outside my window. My leg shaking so hard I can't stop it. My fists clenched tight.

I open one hand. It's empty. I hold my fingers up to my face. It's dark in my room, but I can see two white marks my fingernails made when they were digging into my skin. I squeeze the other hand tighter. A soft springy clump of daddy's hair shifts in my palm. It would tickle if I let it. But I don't. I can't laugh while I still hear daddy's voice whispering that I'm his favorite.

Sunlight creeps under my eyelids, climbs into my eyes. I curl over on my side and draw my knees up to my chest. Don't want to move, not ever. I hear mama screaming at Lola to hurry up in the bathroom, and my heart catches in my throat. Benny is crying at the top of his lungs. I know I better get up, unless I want mama to know. I jump up and pull my nightgown over my head. At first I go to throw it in the dirty clothes hamper, then I stop and shove it under my mattress instead. My head feels dizzy, but when I hear mama's voice in the hall, I know I gotta make everything look right.

I stumble over to my dresser and pick out a clean nightgown. The new nightgown is soft on my skin. It smells like soap powder. I wanna go lie down again and close my eyes. I wanna sleep with the fresh smell, but I don't. I yank the edges of my sheets and tuck the corners under the mattress. I climb on top of the bed and throw the top sheet high up so it'll fall down flat. Before the sheet reaches the bed, I see them: two dark streaks — one short, one long. I go to pull them dirty sheets from the bed, but then I start thinking 'bout how far away the clean sheets are. Be smarter to hide the stains from mama, than try to get some fresh ones from the hall closet. I grip the edges of the top sheet and pull it smooth. If mama comes to check on me now, she'll be real happy with how tight I made the bed. She'll be so proud, she'll never even see the stains.

When I peek out into the hall, nobody's looking. I run straight to the bathroom and shut the door behind me. Before washing up, I wipe a warm washcloth between my legs. When I look at it, I see the same dark red streaks that were on the sheets. I rinse the washcloth and wipe 'til it shows no more red. Then I wash my face and brush my teeth.

Mama is already at the stove when I sit at the table.

"No kiss for me this morning?" she say.

I don't move. I just sit at the table still as a stone.

"Rosamojo, you wake up on the wrong side of the bed?" mama laughs. Then she comes and kisses my cheeks.

Daddy kisses me on top of my head like normal. I sit on my hands because if I didn't, I'd scratch his face and mama would know something's wrong. Mama drops my plate down in front of me. The two huge yolks of my eggs is still jiggling from their journey from the stove. I don't say nothing. Not even when Benny start to tease me 'bout how long it take me to get out of bed. Not even when Lola steal two pieces of bacon from my plate while looking me dead in the face. Not even when mama says "Rosamojo's having a bad day," and puts cheese on only my grits. Lola look at me and squint her eyes. When mama go back to the stove and daddy go to the coffee pot, she ball up her fist and say, "You better not be doing no magic."

I shake my head. "I didn't do no magic, I swear."

"What you said, sweetheart?" daddy ask when he hear my flat voice.

"Nothing, daddy," I say and stir the cheese into my grits.

***

Benny and Lola are loud in the backyard. Daddy and mama been left, but I'm still sitting at the table, dirty dishes spread all over the tabletop. Lola runs into the kitchen with a knobby piece of branch. Benny comes in right behind her carrying two sticks. Lola bangs the branch on the floor.

"Wanna go scare some neutra rats?" she ask.

I just shake my head no.

"We got you a stick," Benny say.

I shrug my shoulders.

"We goin then," she say. "And I don't wanna hear nothin 'bout them dishes."

I shrug my shoulders again.

Lola looks close at me. "What's wrong with you?" she ask.

I don't say nothing. Lola bang her stick on the floor, suck her teeth, and turn away.

"Come on, Benny, let's go to the canal. Rosa's actin all funny today."

***

It feel like the air around me is thick and I gotta move real slow. My favorite overalls be the only thing I can think of to make me feel better. I put them on before I jeck the sheets from my bed. In the tub, I wash out the dark spots. I bring the sheets down the hall, down the stairs, through the living room, through the kitchen to the back door. Just when I'm 'bout to step outside, I see nosy ole Mrs. Roberts looking into our yard. I back up, arms still full of sheets. If Mrs. Roberts see me hanging up a sheet with a few wet spots, she gonna ask mama if I got my cycle. And mama gonna come asking me questions like she did Lola. So I go back upstairs to my room. I let the sheets fall out of my arms onto my bare mattress. Then I sit on my bed a while, thinking and staring out the window. Real quick like, I get an idea. I jump up onto the mattress with my slippers on. I strain to lift the windows and struggle to get the screens out. I hang the flat sheet out one window and the fitted sheet out the other. Them wet spots should dry real quick. I just know I better get them screens back in before mama gets home.

In mama and daddy's room everything is cool and quiet. It's like they room ain't part of the rest of the house. It's so dark in there I can't see my reflection in neither of mama and daddy's two mirrors. I get real close on them, but I can barely make out my face. Then I start snooping around. I don't even know what I'm looking for until I see it: daddy's favorite harmonica sitting on top the dresser with mama's combs and jewelry. I slip the harmonica into my side pocket. On the floor next to daddy's side of the bed is the sports section. I crouch down and look at it. It's all marked up with inky black fingerprints. I roll it up and stick it in my back pocket. I go down the hall to the bathroom and stand on the step stool. In the medicine cabinet, I see lots of little bottles with words I can't read. Then I see daddy's toothpicks. I put a handful in my front pocket and go to the kitchen with my pockets loaded.

Beneath the sink is a burlap bag full of daddy's favorite coffee. I grab the bag by the edges and drag it out the kitchen, through the living room to the front porch. Back in the kitchen, I find the metal bowl mama uses to soak burnt pots and pans — I bring that to the porch too. I stick the toothpicks in the harmonica holes and wrap the harmonica in the newspaper. My hand twitches. I look at it and suddenly remember — daddy's hair! I run upstairs and scoop up the hair from my dresser drawer. On the porch, I unwrap the newspaper and stick daddy's hair into the harmonica holes too. Then I wrap the whole thing up again. I put it in mama's metal bowl and set the whole thing on fire. As I squat, watching it burn, my lips begin to move. Words come spilling out of my mouth, spelling out a protection prayer I never even knew I had in my head.

When the fire burns out, the whole porch is cloudy with smoke. I use a dishrag to pick up daddy's burnt things and shove them deep into the coffee beans. It seem like it take forever for me to drag that bag of coffee upstairs, but I do it. By the time I stuff the bag under my bed, my arms are wet with sweat.

When Lola and Benny come home, all the smoke from the fire is gone. I'm back sitting at the kitchen table, looking like I didn't move. My pockets are stuffed with cotton balls I took from under the bathroom sink.

When Lola sees the dirty dishes still spread over the table, she punches me hard.

"Why you didn't clean the dishes, stupid?"

I give her the same evil look she give me this morning, and she backs off. She hates my magic. She liked it better when she could beat me up. Now she be a bit more careful.

"Come on, Benny, let's do the dishes," Lola says.

"Yeah," Benny says, like doing the dishes is a treat.

***

After mama tucks me in and turns out my light, I grab the cotton balls and put them under my pillow. Then I sit on top, and those prayers start coming out of me again. This time, they come so fast, it's scary. I sit there for hours, mumbling to myself, waiting for daddy to come home. When I hear daddy's car creep into the driveway, I jump out of bed and drop down to my hands and knees. As the front door opens, I grab hold of the burlap bag and yank it hard.

Daddy's footsteps are on the stairs. I'm tugging on the bag, but it don't come free. I got to get it unstuck somehow. I catch a tighter hold of the burlap, but it still won't come loose. I hear daddy's footsteps at the top of the stairs, and I just panic. I run to my desk and snatch my scissors from the desk drawer. I stab the scissors into the bag. The bag splits and coffee beans spill out. I jam my hand into the coffee and make wild grabs, feeling around for daddy's stuff. He's so close now, I can almost feel him breathing down my neck. 'Stead of my door, I hear mama and daddy's door squeak open. I let out a little sigh, but I don't relax. I keep searching 'til my fingers touch something hard. Then I grab it — the burnt bundle of daddy's stuff.

Mama and daddy's door squeaks again. I listen for a second, thinking maybe daddy just got in bed, but no, I can hear the clunk clunk of his footsteps. I stick my hand under my mattress and feel around for my magic pouch. Daddy's footsteps stop in front of my door, and it feel like my heart stops. I turn the pouch upside down and shake it wildly. Marbles, gum, and a picture of Ronald, the boy I have a crush on, spill to the floor. Daddy's turning the doorknob now. My fingers are shaking as I reach for the cotton. I stuff a little cotton into the bottom of the pouch and drop the bundle of daddy's things on top. I turn to face daddy as I fill the pouch up with cotton and a handful of coffee beans.

Daddy's face is confused. He stands in the doorway as I tie the pouch closed and hang it around my neck. When I am finally still, he starts to walk toward me.

"Don't be scared, baby," daddy says.

I put my hand out in front of me and daddy stops short. I turn my palm up to the ceiling and imagine daddy's heart resting in my grasp. The second I feel the weight of his heart in my hand, I snap my fingers shut. Daddy gasps and bends over. I squeeze until the thing stops beating. Daddy stumbles away.

***

The next morning, mama's not in the kitchen. Me, Lola, and Benny go to mama and daddy's room. Lola pushes the door open, and me and Benny creep in behind her. Mama is sitting on the bed crying. She don't ask about the missing bag of coffee or her burnt metal bowl. She don't even notice how I bent the screens. The only thing she notice is daddy. He's lying next to her breathing heavy. His hands are shaking. His skin looks gray.

"Lola, honey, go call a ambulance. Your daddy is sick. Benny, come with me downstairs. Help me make daddy some tea. Rosa, stay here with your daddy. Call me if he starts to lookin worse."

I nod my head, but I can't speak. When everyone leaves I'm too frightened to move. I stay with my back against the wall, close to the door.

"Rosamojo," I hear daddy whisper. "Rosamojo."

I don't say a word.

"Rosa, make me well."

Tears start to drip out my eyes, but I don't make a sound.

"I won't do it again, Rosa, give me my heart back."

"I didn't mean to, daddy," I whisper.

"Can't you see how upset you makin your mama?"

I put my hands over my ears.

"Daddy, I didn't mean to," I say a little louder.

"Take the hex off me, Rosa, please," daddy says.

But I can't. My mind is blank. Nothing comes. Not like the protection prayer that just spilled out my lips. Not like I knew exactly what to do to grab hold of daddy's heart. I can't think of anything at all. When mama gets back, I'm crying hard.

Mama kisses me. "Don't cry sweet baby, daddy will be fine."

But I just cry harder because I know he won't.

Mama hugs me. "Go downstairs with your sister and brother, sweetie. Let me talk to daddy."

But I don't move. I'm terrified daddy will tell. Mama pushes me toward the door, but my body is stiff as a old oak.

"Go 'head, honey," she says. "Go on downstairs."

"Can I tell daddy something first, mama?"

"Go ahead, Rosa."

I force myself to walk close to the bed.

"Don't tell, daddy. Don't tell mama and I promise, I'll fix it."

Daddy grunts. He can't see my fingers crossed behind my back. It's not that I don't want to fix it, it's that I can't. If daddy dies, things are gonna get real bad. But I can't let mama find out what I did. Not ever.

I go downstairs and sit between Benny and Lola on the couch. Benny is crying, Lola is picking a scab on her knee.

"You think Daddy's gonna die?" Lola asks.

When I don't answer, she shoves me, but I still don't say nothing. When the ambulance sirens get close, Benny stops crying. Before they even pull up in the yard, I feel a fire burn inside me. I don't say nothing to Lola, but that's how I know daddy died. Mama screams loud and we all tense up. When mama comes downstairs, she don't say nothing. She points the ambulance people to the stairs and sits on the couch with us. She spreads her arms wide and squeezes us tight.

***

That night I dream of mama. Her face close to my face, we giggling and talking girl talk. But then I feel the string of my pouch pulling at my neck. My eyes fly open. Mama's face _is_ close to my face, but ain't no giggle in her eyes. She's hanging over my bed, and her hairline is all sweaty. She looking at me like she don't know me — like I'm not me, not a girl even, just some stubborn piece of meat she's tugging on.

My hands fly up and I grab my pouch. Mama hiss out some air before she speak.

"Be sleep time, Rosa," she say.

"I know, mama, but I can't sleep with you wrenchin on my neck."

"Take it off, then," mama say, like she daring me or something.

"Mama you know I always sleep with my pouch."

Mama closes her eyes like she can't look at me while she's talking. Silence hang between us for so long, I think I'm dreaming again. Then mama open her eyes. She look at me like she searching for the truth.

"You just a child," she say. Then she blink all the pity out her eyes, and her voice get hard again.

"Empty out the pouch, Rosa."

My heart starts beating double time. I start to cry.

"Why you want me to do that, mama?"

"I can't survive no more bad news, Rosa," she say with her teeth all clenched up. "It all got to come out tonight, so when the sun rise tomorrow, it's done."

I start crying harder then. Mama stop talking and lick her lips. One second, she look like she want to love me, the next second she look like she want to kill me. Her hands are shaking like she been wrestling with the Devil himself.

"Rosa, there's some things in life that's too troublin to understand and too wicked to look straight in the eye. You just a baby, and God knows I don't want to witness to this, but I can't lie to myself no more."

Mama gives me a soft look, then evil steal back into her eyes. "You shoulda stayed asleep, Rosa, and let me find out on my own."

My legs start twitching cuz they wanna run right out the room. But they trapped in the twisted up sheets. Besides, there's no way I could get past mama. Not tonight. I take a big ole gulp of air trying to slow down the hurt rushing out my chest.

"I can't," I whisper, and I look at the wall 'steada at mama. I wanna say — _"Mama_ , I can't" — but I don't know if she still be my mama after what I done to daddy.

Mama rise up to her feet then. I can feel the anger crackling off her like lightning. "I never had no cause to hit you before, Rosa, and tonight is not the night to start. Now hush up and empty out that pouch."

I don't want her to be mad at me, but it's like my whole body is yelling "No!" I hunch my shoulders over and cover the pouch with my hands. Next thing I know, mama is on me. She's scratching my face and neck trying to rip off the pouch. When mama finally get a good grip on the pouch, it don't make no noise. All the protest is coming from the draw of my breath and the thump of my heart.

Soon as the pouch leave my body, I gets to shaking. I'm shaking so hard it feels like the whole house is trembling with me. I don't know who starts to wailing first, and I don't know who is the loudest. All I know is when daddy burnt harmonica hit the floor, me and mama turn inside out. All our hurts like to drown us in that room. I go hot, I shiver with chills, I get ate up by fear — wild, hungry fear — worse than when daddy was coming to my room that second time. When I can't take it no more, I just start to yelling. I yell so hard my throat start to close up on me. Then mama voice break through all that noise. I can hear her screaming, "Why? Why? Whyyyyyyyyy?"

I'd do anything to make mama understand, but my mouth is numb. I can't tell her the truth. If I tried to explain, the words would rip me right down the middle and break mama into a million tiny pieces.

"Ask daddy why," I whisper and my whisper cut through all that screaming and wire up the air with electricity.

Mama's chest is heaving like something evil is truly inside her. Sweat is pouring off her like the wet on a jelly jar fresh out the icebox. The rhythm of my breath scatter all over the place. My throat feel like roadkill, and I can't gather up enough air to keep my lungs going. The last thing I remember is mama staring at me with a look I don't ever want to see again. Then my eyes roll back in my head and my body just give out.

***

Next time I see mama is at daddy's funeral. First time I'm seeing Benny and Lola, too. Soon as mama see me, she look at me real hard. Not mean or scared, but just studying real serious. Maw-Maw's been fattening me up with pound cake and gumbo, but I don't think that's why mama's staring. I think she trying to peel me open with her eyes, trying to figure out if her little girl is still inside me. I want her to see I'm still me, I want her to love me like before — but if she don't, I won't fall to pieces like I thought I would before Maw-Maw got her hands on me. Maw-Maw give me peace and trust and plenty of hugs and kisses. She never look at me funny or make me feel like she suspect me of harboring the Devil. She told me all God's children got they miracles and they struggles, and sometimes those two be the same thing. Then she brush my hair and tell me not to trouble myself with worry.

After the funeral, Lola and Benny sit there gobbling up big plates of fried chicken with red beans and rice. They act like they don't miss me at all, but I catch them staring at me when they think I ain't looking.

After the eating's done, Maw-Maw unwrap three cakes. I snatch up a piece of one and sneak off. I can't take mama's stares or Benny and Lola's looks no more. Don't know who else know I ain't been home, but I don't want to feel nobody's prying eyes picking me apart.

I find a corner next to the china cabinet in Maw-Maw's sitting room. Ain't supposed to carry no food in here at all, but I mean to eat private, even if it gets me in trouble. Before I take my first bite, I feel somebody hit me on the shoulder. I look up, but I'm scared to look back. If I'm leaning on the wall, can't nobody hit me from behind, can they?

I wait awhile, but nothing happens. I break off a chunk of cake. That's when I feel that tap tap on my shoulder again. This time I turn and look back. Ain't nobody there. I get up and move to the other side of the room. I settle down and bite into Maw-Maw's cake real quick before that ole tapping can stop me. While I'm chewing, I hear daddy's voice inside my head.

"It good Rosa?" he say.

I jump and look around. Daddy laugh.

"You can't see the dead, Rosa."

"Daddy that you?" I whisper.

Daddy don't say nothing. I take a sad look at my cake. Look like don't nobody wanna let me eat in peace. I get up and take my cake to the backyard. Soon as I get outside, daddy start talking again.

"Rosa, you have to forgive me."

I slam my plate down on the picnic table.

"Me? Forgive you?"

"Yeah, I wanna go where my soul supposed to go, but..."

Daddy fall silent. My lip starts to poke out like it does when I'm feeling prickly.

"Rosa, you holdin me back."

"That's why you sneakin around here tappin on my shoulder at your own funeral?"

"Rosa, I need you to forgive me so I can go where I need to go."

I go quiet on that one. Me forgiving him make it seem like he didn't do nothing wrong.

"You gotta tell mama what happened," I say and cross my arms.

"How I'mma do that, Rosa? You the only one that could hear me."

A big knot of sobs is welling up in my throat, but I choke it down.

"You ain't the only one can't go where you supposed to. I ain't been home since you left. Mama don't even want me no more."

"But Maw-Maw takin good care of you, Rosa. I'm _nowhere."_

I turn my back to daddy, which I realize is stupid real quick because daddy is everywhere and nowhere at once.

"I can't help you 'til you make mama know I'm not the Devil's child."

"Once I make your mama know the truth, then you'll forgive me?"

I sit down on the picnic bench in a heap. I feel like all the air done left my body.

Finally I say, "Daddy, can I forgive you even if I'm glad you dead?"

Daddy go real quiet. After while I figure he's gone.

"Daddy?"

Daddy clears his throat. "Did daddy hurt you that bad, Rosa?"

I nod my head.

"And you was gonna keep doing it."

Then daddy quiet again. Finally he say, "Sometimes right and wrong not so easy to sort out, Rosa."

"I'm a child, daddy," I wail. "I'm not ready for grown up things." My voice starts shaking, before I know it I'm bawling.

"It's alright, Rosa," daddy say. "I can see you not ready to forgive me. I'm terrible sorry you hurtin so bad. I never meant to do you wrong. I'm gonna go now, but I'll be back. I'm not gonna push you, but you can't make me stay here forever. You gonna have to forgive me and let me go where I need to go."

I don't answer, I just sniff real hard. It take me awhile to pull myself together. I look at the tops of the trees. I stare up under some birds as they fly by. I watch a stretch of raggedy-looking clouds float on by. When my tears finally dry up, I wipe off my face and head back to the house.

When I grab hold of the door, I hear daddy again.

"Rosa, honey, please promise me you'll at least think about forgiving me."

"I will," I say tiredly. I ain't got no more fight left in me.

"You promise?"

"I promise."

And I'm still keeping that promise to this very day.

_Originally published in_ Mojo: Conjure Stories _, edited by Nalo Hopkinson, Warner Books, 2003. Revised from first publication for Kiini Ibura Salaam's short story collection,_ Ancient, Ancient, _from Aqueduct Press in May 2012._

_Patrick Samphire has published seventeen short stories in magazines and anthologies such as_ Realms of Fantasy, Interzone, Strange Horizons _and_ the Year's Best Fantasy _. Most of these are now available on Amazon as ebooks, including his collection of nine fantasy stories,_ Bone Roads _. You can find out more about his writing at_ www.patricksamphire.com _._

_He lives with his wife, the writer Stephanie Burgis, their son, and their dog in Wales, U.K. When he's not writing, he designs websites and ebook covers. You can see his design work at_ www.50secondsnorth.com _._

## Lavender's Blue, Lavender's Green

by Patrick Samphire

"I didn't think Mum had any family," Bonnie said.

I swung the car around the outcropping of rock that jutted out into the loch, keeping my eyes on the narrow road.

"We never really talked about it."

"Oh, _Dad."_

I smiled. "This is your mum we're talking about."

I wasn't watching her, but I knew Bonnie would be rolling her eyes at that.

"Didn't you ever ask her?" she said.

"Once."

"And?"

My voice dropped to a whisper that was almost lost behind the grumble of the car's engine. "She told me she was the queen of the fairies. I believed her."

Another impatient roll of the eyes. Didn't kids believe in anything these days? We had believed everything. That had made it true, in every way that mattered.

The woods thinned and drew away from the loch. The road began to rise away from the shore.

"Wasn't there anyone?" Bonnie asked. "No family? You met Mum at Uni. How about at graduation? Didn't anyone come for her?"

Both of my parents had been there, Dad dressed up like he was at a wedding or a funeral, his pride all buttoned into his one suit and almost bursting out. For once, he hadn't even said anything about the length of my hair. We'd all gone out for dinner together, me, my parents, Angela. Her parents, if she'd had them, weren't there.

"There was someone," I said. "A brother." I had almost forgotten him. In fact, I had until now.

"Does the queen of the fairies have a brother?" Bonnie asked. There was a touch of derision in her voice. She was upset. I didn't blame her. Her mum had just disappeared, without warning, only leaving a note.

"We were young," I said.

"Not that young."

Bonnie was younger than Angela and I had been when we had met. She seemed so much older. We had been such kids.

The road curved up to meet clouds and a spattering of drizzle that was enough to dirty the windscreen but not enough to wipe clean.

Bonnie slumped down further into the passenger seat and fumbled for a CD.

"Jeez, Dad, didn't you bring anything decent?"

"Just put one in," I said.

She flipped open a case and slid the CD into the player.

"What is this?" she said as the music started.

"Marillion," I said. "Misplaced Childhood." A good choice.

"Don't you have anything from the last thirty years?"

"Doubt it." I could have told her that Misplaced Childhood came out in 1985. She would have said I was proving her point. It didn't seem worth it.

We didn't talk all the way up to the junction at Crianlarich. After ten minutes, I switched the windscreen wipers on and squirted water until they could clean the glass. I slid the car under the bridge, paused at the junction then pulled out left.

"Penny for your thoughts?" I said.

"You are so sad."

I blinked. "Okay..."

"You still believe it, don't you?"

"What?"

"That Mum was the queen of the fairies."

I shifted gear.

"Yes," I said. "I do."

"She isn't," Bonnie said. "She's just Mum."

***

My generation had dreamed. We had dreamed that the world might be a better place. We had dreamed of miracles. Sometimes I thought we had taken all the dreams and left nothing for these new generations. We were the selfish generation. We had wanted it all, so we had taken it, and we held onto it jealously.

We pulled into the Green Welly Stop at Tyndrum in the grey drizzle for a break and petrol.

"Stupid name," Bonnie grumbled, but she went in anyway.

I loitered by the sandwich counter until Bonnie had disappeared to the bathroom, then pulled out Angela's note again. _I have to go,_ it read. _There are some things I need to sort out. I will come back._ Then there was an address.

I flipped the paper like I had a dozen times. There was nothing else on it. Not even my name.

I bought a couple of cheese sandwiches and, on a whim, a small bundle of dried lavender for the car. Then we set out again.

***

"Tell me about Mum's brother," Bonnie said.

"I don't remember much," I said. "I only met him that once. He was...tall. Black hair, like your mum's. Quiet."

"What did he do?"

"He was an engineer, I think," I said.

"An engineer."

"Yeah. On an oil platform." I smiled. He'd been big, solid, his skin hardened and reddened by the sea winds. Not exactly fairy material. "Anything else?" I asked.

"Yeah," she said. "The dead flowers stink."

***

We finally reached Tobermory at around six. The weather had cleared during the ferry trip over from Oban, leaving patches of sunshine racing across the sound. We had driven slowly up the island, watching the liquid dapples of green-tinted gold slip across Mull's mountains and hills.

The address on Angela's note was at the back of the town, up the hill near where the fields began.

I had expected something old, a low stone house, perhaps, with a thatch or slate roof. Instead, it was a late forties, maybe early fifties, concrete creation, its paint fresh but with a long crack down the front that had been patched with a smear of concrete that didn't match.

"Are we just going to walk in without any warning or anything?" Bonnie said, hunching her shoulders.

"Yep," I said. I turned off the engine and let the silence and stillness rest against my skin for a moment.

"That's so rude," Bonnie said.

I opened the door and climbed out, stretching my back. There was a light, damp wind that smelled faintly of salt and seaweed.

"Come on."

I started up the path to the gate in the hedge and heard Bonnie following.

The front door opened before we reached it. A slightly overweight but still beautiful older woman stepped out. I stopped, peering at her. Bonnie came to a halt beside me.

I could see Angela in this woman. She had the same liveliness of face, and although her hair was white, I could tell it would once have been as black and lush as Angela's.

She smiled as she saw us. "You must be Ralph and Bonnie. Come in. We've been expecting you."

I frowned. "Expecting us?"

"For years. Come on in. Eric's putting tea on."

***

"Angela told us so much about you both." Angela's mum poured tea into a series of small, floral, china cups. "It's wonderful to see you at last."

Bonnie and I exchanged a glance.

"She did?" I said.

"Oh, yes. Milk?"

"Thanks." I took my cup. "When? Sorry."

Angela's mum smiled. "Every Wednesday."

"Never missed a week," her dad said. "Not our Angie."

Bonnie was staring down at her tea. "We didn't know," she whispered.

"Angela always kept things to herself," her dad said.

I took a sip of my tea. Bonnie kept staring into hers, swirling it gently. We'd come all this way to-what?-find out about Angela, I guessed, but now I couldn't think of a thing to say. I didn't know these people. Angela and I had been married for twenty years and there was this whole vista of her life that I knew nothing about. I hadn't ever asked her about it, except that first time. Maybe I hadn't wanted to know, hadn't wanted the baggage.

"She's gone," I said.

"We thought she might have," Angela's mum said.

My fingers tightened on the delicate china.

Bonnie looked up. "Do you know where she went?" The hope in her voice was painful.

"No. We're sorry."

"Oh." Bonnie looked down into her tea again.

"You look like her," Angela's dad said. "Like she did when she went off to University."

Silence again. It made me want to get up and stride around, turn on a radio or something. I didn't know why the hell we were here.

I put the tea down. "I'm sorry," I said. "This was a mistake."

Angela's parents looked at each other. Her mother couldn't keep the disappointment from her face.

"Look, it's not that we..." I started. "It's just..." I shook my head. "You know, this is a bad time. We didn't know anything." I stopped again.

"When Angie went away," Angela's dad said, "we knew she'd never come back. We knew she'd meet someone and that would be her life. She's all or nothing. She always has been, ever since she was a little girl. Just like her brother."

"I guess," I said.

Angela's mum got up. "It's true. When she was only five she decided she was a fairy." She pulled open a drawer in the dark-wood chest of drawers that stood opposite the window. "I made her these." She reached in and took out what seemed to be two small sheets of muslin stretched over frames of bent sticks. It took me a moment to realise what they must have been. "Fairy wings," her mum said. "She wore them every evening until she left home, even though the wood had snapped." She stared down at them and shook her head. "Our little girl."

***

They gave Bonnie Angela's old room. When she was done unpacking-in all of thirty seconds; I guessed she'd just emptied her bag onto the bed-she came and helped me.

"They're sweet," she said as she took one of my shirts and put it on a hanger. "Gran and Grandad. How come we don't know them?"

"I don't know," I said.

"We should have."

"I know."

I closed my suitcase and sat on the bed. Bonnie came and sat next to me.

"None of this feels real," I said. "I know your mum must have come from somewhere. She must have had a family, friends, people she hated, a history. It's just-I never believed it. Now I'm here, and I still don't know if I believe it."

Bonnie looked at me for a long while. I couldn't tell what she was thinking. Then she said, "It's late, Dad. We should get some sleep."

After she had gone, I turned out the light and got undressed. I went to the window. It was a clear night, but there was no moon, so the fields and the stark hills that rose beyond them were dark. To the left, just beyond my line of sight, a yellow glow rose from the harbour and town.

Angela would have seen this view every night. It was passive, still, peaceful. A view to grow an imagination. How had she populated this view? Here was where she had dreamed and grown and become the woman I had married but never really known. The queen of the fairies, or just a girl who dreamed in the still darkness.

The house door cracked open below. I leaned further forward to peer down.

Bonnie stepped out into the star-lit blackness. She was carrying something. I squinted. Angela's broken fairy wings. They hung loose, diffidently from Bonnie's hand.

She stood in the darkness for several minutes, staring ahead. Then she turned and came back into the house. As she closed the door, I saw a glint of purple light like the edge of glass beyond the hedge.

I watched the night for a long time. The light didn't return.

***

"I'm going for a walk around town," I told Bonnie after breakfast. "Do you want to come?"

"Nah," she said. "I'm going to hang out and talk to Gran and Grandad."

"Okay," I said. It was good for her to know her grandparents. Me, I wasn't sure I was ready for that. I wasn't even sure I wanted to believe in them.

Before we left Kent, everyone told us it rained all the time in Scotland. Not today. Today was blisteringly hot. I walked through Tobermory's steep, twisted streets, feeling the sweat soak into my T-shirt, trying to imagine Angela as a kid walking or running through these streets, laughing or shouting. Whenever I passed someone middle-aged I couldn't help but stare at them and wonder if they had known Angela. There could be pieces of her in them, stories and memories and touches, things that would make her past real. As I walked, I was building a solidity to the Angela-that-had-been that she had never had in my mind before. It made me sad and happy at the same time. The queen of fairies was slipping away and a girl was taking her place, like a dream fading into tangible reality when you wake.

About midday, I slipped into the cool darkness of a hotel on the harbour and ordered a glass of Laphroaig fifteen-year-old. It was slightly oaky with a lingering taste of the sea and a hint of peat smoke. I sipped it in an armchair in front of the cold fireplace.

When I was done, I crossed to the waterfront, sat on the quay, and watched the boats rock gently on the sun-silvered water.

I still didn't know what we were doing here.

***

I got back home in the middle of the afternoon. I'd been out in the sun too long. I could feel the prickle of sunburn above my collar and on my scalp.

Bonnie was sitting on a bench under an apple tree at the other end of the garden, talking to a tall lad who was leaning on a lawnmower. She had a book open on her lap but was making no move to read it. Angela's mother and father were weeding the flower border by the path together.

I nodded as I came in. "Who's he?" Trying not to sound like an overprotective father. Bonnie was seventeen.

"Jack," Angela's mum said. "He does odd jobs for us. Don't worry about him. He's a good boy. Not terribly bright, but a good boy."

"Angela and his father were sweet on each other at school," Angela's dad said.

"It didn't come to anything," her mum said. "They weren't meant to be together."

"It's okay," I said. "I'm not about to get jealous."

***

Angela's parents went to bed at around nine again that night.

"We're old," her father said. "Can't keep up with you kids anymore." Bonnie rolled her eyes at me, and I tried not to glare at her.

She followed me up to my room.

"I saw you'd made a friend," I said, then cursed myself for sounding prying.

Bonnie shrugged. She crossed the room to the window and stood looking out. Evenings lasted long this far north. The last of the sunlight was casting vast elongated shadows across the fields and trees.

"I used to hear you and Mum arguing," Bonnie said, not looking at me. "I used to turn my music up and put my head under my pillow, but I could still hear you."

"Bonnie..."

"I knew she'd go. I knew it every day."

"It wasn't like that."

She turned abruptly. The light behind her was so bright I had to squint.

"Then what was it like?"

I lowered my gaze from the blaze of light. "Sometimes we got stressed. Work. Bills. You know."

"And you didn't even know about her family. You didn't know she talked to them every week. You didn't know where she came from."

"I knew she was from Mull—"

"You didn't know where she came from."

I dropped onto the bed.

"She didn't tell me."

"You didn't _ask."_

"I did."

"Once. Just once."

"She'll come back," I said. "Her note said so. You saw it."

Bonnie came across the room and lowered herself into a crouch before me. "But she has to have a reason to stay, Dad."

***

I heard the outside door open then close again as I lay in bed that night. I didn't get out of bed to look.

If there were lights again, I didn't see them.

***

"Jack's going to show me around," Bonnie said at breakfast. She looked at me. "If that's okay?"

"Of course," I said, not knowing if I meant it.

"Cool," Bonnie said. "Then I'm going to get changed."

"Just like her mum," Angela's mother said when Bonnie had gone.

"Really?" I said.

"Oh, yes," her father said. "She was always running around with her friends. We hardly saw her some summers."

"Off with the fairies, we used to say," her mum said.

I frowned. "The fairies?"

"Our joke. She and her friends used to gather down by the water, at the end of town, when the weather was fine. Otherwise, they'd be in someone's house. They were good kids."

"Right," I said. More pieces of reality sliding in, nudging my dreams aside.

"You never came to visit us," I said.

Angela's mum shrugged. "Eric doesn't travel well. And it's a long way."

"So," Angela's dad said, pushing aside his cup of tea. "What will you do today?"

"I think I'll take a walk again," I said. "It's a beautiful place."

***

I went down to the harbour again and waited there until the hotel bar opened. It was empty this early. I took a stool at the bar.

"Did you know Angela MacEachern?" I asked the barman.

His eyes focused on me. "I did."

"What was she like?"

He squinted at the question. "She was...fine. Normal." He smiled. "She was in the year below me. I asked her to a dance once. She said she didn't dance. It was kind of her, but I knew she was sweet on another."

I nodded. _Normal._

"Tell me," I said, and took a mouthful of whisky. "Do you have stories about fairies here?"

The barman nodded. "Of course. All the islands have stories." He shrugged. "I'm the wrong generation to ask about them. The old folk know the stories better."

"How was one supposed to see them?"

"See them?" The barman wiped his cloth along the bar, cleaning away the ring my glass had left. "A gift, I think. You had to bring them a gift."

***

I waited until Angela's parents had gone into the house to make dinner. Then I went to the car and took out the dried lavender. I sat on the bench under the apple tree and crumbled the flowers.

"A gift," I whispered, as I scattered the flowers. "A gift."

No one came. Eventually, I went in for dinner.

***

Bonnie sat on the edge of my bed. "What's up, Dad?"

I turned to her. My face felt numb.

"Your mum was never the queen of the fairies," I said.

"I know."

"Why did she go away?" The words squeezed up my throat like stones.

"When she told you that," Bonnie said. "When she told you she was the queen of the fairies, it was just a joke, just a childhood game. You treated her like it was true. I think she just wanted to be treated like a normal woman."

"She never said."

"Yes, she did," Bonnie said. "That's why we're here. This is her saying it in a way that you would believe."

I swallowed, felt the stones sink away. Normal. That was fine. That was just fine.

***

From my darkened room, I watched out the window. The stars were high, sharp points in a depthless sky. The fields were pooled with blackness.

Below, the door cracked open. In the denseness of the night, Bonnie came out of the house and waited, broken wings in her hand, staring away over the hedge and the fields and the hills. Shattered purple lights gathered in a firefly swirl around her, and she began to walk forwards.

The boy, Jack, stepped out of the shadow of the hedge. The lights rushed to surround him. In their sharp light, the king of the fairies took my daughter's hand. Even in my bedroom, I smelled lavender.

***

We left the next morning, promising to return soon. It was early and I was tired, but we had a long way to drive and I wanted to be back when Angela came home.

In the seat next to me, Bonnie hummed a bright tune.

_Originally published in_ Realms of Fantasy _, December, 2005._

_Ibi Zoboi was born in Haiti and is a graduate of the Clarion West and VONA workshops. Her stories have been published in_ Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, Haiti Noir, Crossed Genres _, and_ Expanded Horizons _, among others. She's the recent winner of the Gulliver Travel Grant from the Speculative Literature Foundation and she's an MFA candidate in Writing for Children & Young Adults at Vermont College of Fine Arts. You can learn more about her work at_ www.ibizoboi.com.

## The Fire in Your Sky

by Ibi Zoboi

The pang of hunger is bitter, sharp, hot – familiar even. I don't sleep. My feet and right hip ache from carrying the child up and down the sidewalks of this unforgiving city – this city that was supposed to take me within its bosom, cradle and rear me until I became its fully grown citizen. Imelba from down the hall has showed me her claim to this place – a card bearing a melancholy photograph of her, her name and some random numbers. It is the word PERMANENT that I notice most.

There is no need for the Creole translation of the English word I've spent my whole life running from. Taking with me what little I have to this village and that valley in my native country. Escaping the sleepless ones, the curious ones, the accusatory ones whose only evidence was the dawning sun and crowing rooster greeting their lifeless infant. In rural Haiti where hospitals are like the mountains beyond the mountains, and herbalists are a mix of scientific superstition, my sudden relocation from wherever I came to such a remote and destitute corner of the country gives way to suspicion and blame for the death of a newborn.

So I move, always. The brim of my large straw hat shields the deathly whiteness of my eyes days after I've had my fill.

It is morning again and my soul clings to my bones like a Fort Dimanche political prisoner at mercy's gate. The child sleeps peacefully atop the folded clothes inside a very large suitcase – my only possession, save for the child. Imelba has offered me an old foam mattress. "Please, _mija_ ," she pleads in her Dominican Spanish. "What are you going to sleep on?"

I only engage her with just a few Spanish words, not allowing her to know that I can hold a full conversation. That would only remind me of the months I spent on one of the bateyes, a cane field and sugar factory town in the Dominican Republic. It was not the promise of work in the more stable country that enticed me, but the many new cursed souls born to bodies with hungry mouths and weary, overworked mothers and bandit fathers who shirk blame like thieves in a crowded Port-au-Prince outdoor market. In the batey, death of an infant is a guilt-laden reprieve. With my smooth Spanish words rolling off my tongue, I would not want Imelba to know that the batey had not sufficed and with my aversion to permanence, I made my way to the wealthy parts of Santo Domingo and Santiago to satiate my hunger with the more European stock of new souls. I didn't know then that with each soul gone missing in the night, one innocuous Haitian immigrant woman paid the heavy price.

"Lourdes, Lourdes!" I hear Imelba yelling from down the hall. "Don't go into the toilet. There's no hot water. We have to call 311 on that bastard slum lord. _Mierda!"_

I loathe the way she says my name, rolling the 'r' and emphasizing the 's' that is supposed to be silent – LORD ESS. I've corrected her once, letting her know the French pronunciation – LOOD. I've always liked the weight of the sound of my name whispered softly in the dark of night like an invocation. But Imelba and the other Dominicans make it sound as if I am the other kind of woman of the night. Still, I allow her that one infraction. She, after all, has insisted that the child and I stay in the unfurnished back room of her fifth floor apartment.

The sound of Imelba's grating voice wakes the child. I had hoped that she would sleep a bit longer allowing me the time to think of how I would feed her for the day, but my strength and acumen are waning with each passing night in this place. I glance at the bare walls with chipping white paint, the wooden crown molding, and the high ceiling that would have been perfect for spreading my flamed wings before planting my soul within my human skin left on the floor. The coppery color would've blended well with the hard wood. But there are no windows in the room from which to make my nightly escapes.

The child whimpers and I clench my jaw and grind my teeth wishing that I could leave this place right then and there. But Imelba has taken a liking to me and I want so very much to be like her – the English words obey the movement of her tongue, she is given a job to do and is paid enough money to send some extra to relatives in Santo Domingo. It was not the promise of work that made me come here either. When my sister had managed to get me a visa and insisted that I come stay with her in Brooklyn, I realized that leaving my skin anywhere in Port-au-Prince at night while I roam the skies in search of newness was a sentence to permanence – the perpetual burning flame that I'd become was too painful of an existence to bear. After the parting earth shook loose the many hundreds of thousands of souls from their bodies, skin lying around was an assured temptation.

Imelba flings open the door and she is already dressed in ill-fitting jeans and a sweater. " _Mija_ , you haven't given the baby... _Dios mio!_ Why do you have her sleeping in a suitcase? You want them to call ACS on me? This is not Haiti, _pobrecita_. You give those _maricóns_ any little clue that you are hurting your baby and they will ship you back to Haiti and give your little _princesa_ to a barren _blanca_ in Park Slope."

The child's eyes are open now, wandering and bloodshot – a tell tale sign of hunger. I shield my own red-tinged eyes from Imelba by casting them down, the way I had learned to do as a young restavek working in wealthy Haitians' homes for the broken promise of an elite education.

" _Estupido,"_ Imelba chides. "You don't understand a word I'm telling. How are you going to make it in this country? You overstayed your visa, you have no money, and your sister, your only family, is married to a piece of shit she doesn't want to leave. You have to grow some balls, _pobrecita_. Because if you make it here, honey, you can make it anywhere." She turns and walks away, leaving the door open. Her large ass moves to the faint sound of reggaeton playing in the apartment below.

***

"Her name is Imelba and she owes me a favor after I worked pro bono to stop her brother's deportation. That's the most I'm going to do for you, Lourdes," my sister had said after she'd thrown me and the child out of her four-story Brownstone that only housed her and her sickly doctor husband. There'd been more than enough room for me and the child – plenty windows, high ceilings, and open space to morph back from my fireball self. With her six bedrooms, three baths, and Haitian heritage, my sister, the immigration lawyer, threw me a party on the day I arrived to show her friends the earthquake survivor and her baby.

I was asked to recount the story. How had the child and I managed to survive beneath the rubble for so long? How had I come out unscathed with no broken bones or bruises? Such a miracle it was to not have died of hunger or thirst after fourteen days.

"God is good," I said in my broken English. Then, _"Gloire a Jesus!"_ in French. These words had saved me on many occasions. When by chance a grieving mother caught a glimpse of my glaring white eyes and yelled, "Loogaroo! Soucouyant!", I had only the memorized words of the Bible as my defender. I let the villagers know that I am a woman of God and am prepared to die in the name of Jesus rather than be blasphemed with the name of a soul-sucking, fireball witch.

I do the same here in _Nuyok_ where my half-sister, born of the same father but not of the same womb, had searched the Port-au-Prince hospitals for a Lourdes Mia Cantave, daughter of a peasant market woman and a wealthy, philandering businessman. She's always known of me because my mother let it be known that she, a poor tar-black woman from the countryside, had managed to seduce the sunlight-colored, curly-haired mulatto from the affluent hills of Petionville. She is not like me, my half-sister. She and her friends would not understand that it was only my and my daughter's skins trapped beneath the rubble. The Americans with their NGOs and their claims of donations to Haiti's poor would not have believed me if I told them that the child and I had felt the shift rising from the earth's hot core to the surface minutes before the streets cracked. So we left the skins behind to watch the chaos from the sky for fourteen whole days.

And she, my sister, could not have understood that I am like my mother – that men lose all forms of moral restraint when around me.

He'd been kind and genuine, my sister's husband. Engaging me in conversations about Haitian politics, helping me with English words, offering to check my blood pressure. He could not have known that on one of the many nights his wife worked late and he'd been tired and needed some company, that he'd walk into my bedroom and be greeted by the overwhelming stench of burning flesh and stumble upon our copper brown skin. He had stood there, mouth agape, eyes widened as I flew back through the large floor-to-ceiling window as a whirling fireball with a smaller flame tagging along behind me. I had quickly slipped back into my skin, relieved that this Haitian, who was one generation removed from his culture, knew nothing of pouring salt onto skin lying around without its soul to rid the world of the likes of me.

It was the child that had been fed, sleeping soundly in her skin, and not me. So with the pang of hunger still burning at my core, I could not resist the soul of this man who stared at my naked body, panting, erect, and forgetful of the wife who was just minutes away in a taxi cab. I wrapped my long, thin arms around his neck. And as he caressed my back, kissed my breasts, slipped himself into me, and cried out in agony, I inhaled his being, drew in bits of his soul to feed my soucouyant self.

I had not averted my now glowing white eyes when my sister walked in and saw her husband on top of me, drained and listless. She had yelled, cried, pounded her fists on his back – not even noticing my loogaroo eyes. I had left him with enough energy to painfully get up from on top of me, bypass his raging wife to return to his bed, and wait for the days to pass as he slowly deteriorated.

It was not the fresh life I'd been accustomed to, but in this unfamiliar city with its perpetual night lights and sleepless dwellers, I take what I can as soon as it presents itself. I have the onus of having to feed the child now, and keeping her immortality intact takes precedence.

***

"I have to go in for surgery to remove my fibroids," Imelba says as she pours colorful cereal into a plastic bowl for the child. "The longer I stay from my beloved Santo Domingo, the sicker I get with all the shit in this city. So I need somebody to take my place while I'm recovering so the family doesn't go out and hire somebody else. _Entiendes?"_

"Sí," I say, quietly seated at the small table, keeping the child on my lap and allowing her to rest her head on my chest so that the woman cannot see her eyes.

"There is some bacalao and green banana on the stove, but I can't keep this up anymore, Lourdes. I can't afford to feed two other mouths and send money to my poor mother in Santo Domingo," Imelba says as she moves about in the tiny kitchen reeking of the dried salt fish. "You shoulda cried rape at the top of your lungs. And the police woulda came and thrown that _marícon_ in jail. But with money coming out of her coño, that bitch woulda bought his freedom and he woulda been back in the house in no time. And that's when the party woulda started. Do you even hear what I'm telling you, _míja?"_

"I understand," I manage to say. The English words I can decipher, but they weigh heavy on my tongue like molasses. So I simply listen.

"That's when you woulda ran out into the streets yelling rape and the people woulda came out of their houses like cockroaches because they love that kind of stuff. Sex slave operation with earthquake survivor, they woulda accused your sister and her husband, and no amount of money coulda get them out of that shit hole. And you, _pobrecita_ , woulda been sent to a decent shelter just for women in domestic violence and they woulda showered you with all sorts of government programs – WIC, food stamps, Section 8, free daycare. Hell, maybe even one of those brand new condos in one of those fancy buildings Downtown they gotta reserve for poor _miserables_ like us. Do you hear what I am telling you, _morena?_ This is how you're gonna make it in this place!

"But because you are a little _Haitiana_ from that hell hole on the other side of my island, you were not smart enough," she says, poking at her temple. "So for now, you take over for a few weeks for me. I'll pay you half of my salary. You can bring your baby to keep the old lady company."

I smile at the prospect of food. This, I would enjoy slowly like sipping a cup of hot brewed bitter leaves to allow each gulp to satisfy every corner of my soul. Again, this is not the newness I am accustomed to, but it is life nonetheless, regardless of its proximity to death. It is the difference between fresh lamb and dry, salted fish – nourishment just the same. It will sustain me until I've reserved enough energy to explore the lay of the sky in this place.

***

The child does not go to her, this Mrs. Kowalski, who at seventy-five looked much older than the centenarians I knew back home. Though the child is lethargic and cranky, and hunger rages like the flame within her, she prefers her quenching to come from fledgling souls — I point to the cat that lazily roams the shiny hardwood floors of Mrs. Kowalski's apartment, but she shakes her head – picky child, she is. So I instead help myself to this Lucy.

Mrs. Kowalski asks me to braid her hair like mine – two shoulder length plaits. Mine are midnight black, coarse, and thick. Hers are a thin, paper white. I rest each of my fingertips on her scalp. This is how I take my first sip.

"My son's wife doesn't let him come see me," Mrs. Kowalski complains. Her voice is deep and raspy from decades of cigarettes. "I bet when I die, she'll be all over this apartment."

I don't respond to any of her gossip, only cleaning the heavily furnished apartment, answering the doorbell when her gourmet meals arrive, changing her adult undergarments, and allowing the child to lie languidly in front of the wide flat screen TV. Each time I lay a finger on the old woman's grayish creased flesh, I am renewed from within – doing my coveted job with more verve and a newfound sense of purpose.

"You're not like the other girl," Mrs. Kowalski says of Imelba who is twenty years my senior, and with much less vigor than in the days when I first started. "She's too sassy and lazy."

So, Mrs. Kowalski asks me to stay. When I tell her that Imelba has thrown me out of her house, she offers me a guest bedroom with a large window facing the East River. I can see the whole island of this Manhattan with its buildings teasing the sky. I'd have to soar much higher than I'm used to in this place.

"I'll have to come over, say good-bye, and give her my middle finger," Imelba says. "Eight years I worked for that _punta._ Wiping her ass, painting her crusty toenails – shit her own damn son will never do. But don't worry, _pobrecita._ You'll learn. You are now officially a Home Attendant. You'll always have work because they'll always be old people rich enough to be away from their own children; old people rich enough to have families who wait for them to die so they can have their money and apartment or whatever." She sucks her teeth long and hard.

On the first night of my stay, the child and I slip out of our loogaroo skin, allowing our fireball selves to ease beneath the opened window and roam the city's night sky. Souls are abundant in this place, but hardly as accessible as in my beloved Haiti. They are safe behind barred windows, bolt-locked doors, and smoke detectors. Still, the child finds her sustenance. She's more lenient than I am, only nibbling and not swallowing whole the lives of her victims. Triggering only a sudden bout of faintness in a young child or a passing seizure in a toddler. Enough for the whiteness of her loogaroo eyes to shine dimly. I worry that it isn't enough. We must adapt to other ways.

I sense Imelba's presence in Mrs. Kowalski's apartment upon our return just before the breaking of dawn.

"Mrs. Kowalski, you've been so good to me. I'm glad Lourdes is working for you now. She's young and sharp, just what you need. Makes no sense for a sick lady like me to take care of you," Imelba says.

"But what the hell are you doing here so early, Imelba," Mrs. Kowalski responds groggily, having been woken up out of her sleep. "You hardly came on time when you did work for me."

The child enters her skin, climbs into the fancily dressed bed – our very first bed ever – and sleeps, satiated. But my skin is nowhere to be found. I circle the room as a firelight, searching for the human covering until I spot it in a dark corner of the room – shrunken and withered by sea salt.

Imelba barges into the room, shielding her face. "Don't you dare touch me, _chupacabra!_ You think I didn't see those _Diablo_ eyes?"

I shift within my fiery self first, morphing into the last animal form I consumed – the cat, thin, long, and caramel brown. With my keen feline olfaction, I know that death awaits just outside the room. Imelba swings a broom at my newfound body and I move quickly enough to run out, jump and land on Mrs. Kowalski's lap as she sits on her rocking chair.

"Oh!" Mrs. Kowalsi exclaims. "Lucy, you've come back to me!"

She strokes my fur-covered back and I purr, sated with each touch.

"Mrs. Kowalski, you should get rid of that stupid cat. It has rabies or something," Imelba says, staring at me.

Mrs. Kowalski sighs feebly. Her life force is slowly diminishing the longer she holds me on her lap. "I think you should go now, Imelba. Please wake Lourdes for me so she can make me a cup of coffee. I'm not feeling so well."

Imelba steps back. "I'll make it for you, Mrs. Kowalski. No need to wake her."

She goes back into the bedroom and I jump off Mrs. Kowalski's lap and run in after Imelba to find her picking up the still sleeping child. I cry out, jump at her leg, but she flings me away. Before I could become my fireball self, she is out of the apartment with the child, closing the door behind her.

My mother's instinct knows that the child will have her feed. It is inevitable when human life is so close to a loogaroo soul.

My original form, Lourdes, is gone forever. No matter, because her young body only attracted men whose souls I did not care for very much.

I climb back onto Mrs. Kowalski's lap. She is sound asleep now, but within minutes her soul will make its passage out of her body to roam the ethers. I can sense the glowing whiteness of my eyes now – full. But this feline existence will not suit my purpose in this new place. I've heard the stories of the bitterness of life as a Haitian immigrant in _Étas-Unis_. As the young and beautiful Lourdes, I was given the advice of first starting out as a Home Attendant, going to school at night to learn English, then in a few years' time move up to a Nurse's Aide, with the ultimate goal of becoming a Registered Nurse and buying a modest home somewhere on the outskirts of the city. My sister would've paid for my education.

But I look around at Mrs. Kowalski's huge apartment with her fancy belongings and expensive collections from all her years as an art collector and gallery owner. English words are not foreign to her tongue and she will continue to make money even in death – she has no card to remind her of her claim to this place. There is a shift within me again, a burning rage to move. This time, there is no need to take my skin along with me. I leave the feline coating behind and ease into Mrs. Kowalski's body. I settle comfortably, the aged skin fits me like a perfectly tailored dress. I will her body to move with agility and grace. Only seventy-five years, her body was. But with me in it, she can outlive her selfish son and his greedy wife. Though I'll have to be careful of where I leave her skin when I need my nightly fill.

I dial Imelba's number. "Imelba, hon. That girl you sent me is nowhere to be found," I say, relishing in the melody of my English words. "I need you to come back."

She pauses. Then, "What'd you do with that stupid cat, Mrs. Kowalski? I can't work for you if that cat is around. I think I'm allergic or something."

"Lucy's gone, too," I say. "Everybody's leaving me. I ain't got nobody, Imelba. Why don't you come and make me a cup of coffee?"

"Mrs. Kowalski, that girl left the baby with me. I can't support a child on what you've been paying me."

"Oh, that cute little girl? How could anybody do that? Bring her with you, Imelba, until you can get day care. I can pay you much more."

If I taught the child well, she will know that in this new place, she must take what she can when it presents itself. I shake my head. Imelba, fifteen years removed from the shared stories of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, knows nothing of the new ways in which the loogaroo and soucouyant must survive. We move always. This is how we will make it in this place.

I wear Mrs. Kowalski's vintage designer sunglasses to shield the deathly whiteness of my eyes.

Originally published in _Crossed Genres Quarterly_ _Villains Issue #33_.

## Authors' Note

Thank you very much for reading. All of the authors you have read have other works published in other venues. You can find out more about each individual on their site. If you enjoyed this anthology, please consider leaving us a review on Amazon, Goodreads, and any other site that you feel is appropriate.

## Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank our Clarion West instructors: Octavia Butler, Bradley Denton, Nalo Hopkinson, Connie Willis, Ellen Datlow, and Jack Womack for all that they taught is in the six most writing intensive weeks of our lives. We'd also like to thank the workshop staff: Les Howle, Neile Graham, and Nisi Shawl, along with the rest of the executive board, volunteers, and donors who make this workshop happen, and Mary Mah, our copyeditor for this anthology. We are also most grateful for the members of the Critical Mass writers group gave us our title for this anthology.
