Prologue

In the time of the King’s War, the towns on fertile land and brimming coastlines were taken in blood and violence and the bleakest, wickedest magics. Forests were set to burn in fires so vile in composition that long after the trees had reduced to ash, the ghosts of trees kept smoldering, consuming anything that got near in barely visible mists of burning vapor. Rivers were enchanted to turn all living creatures who touched the water into ice. The excruciating pain of the process made for riverbanks lined with crouched, contorted, frozen corpses, the wind whistling through their fractures, as if one could hear their souls trapped inside, eternally screaming. Fields of dead fighters, rotting and bloating on blighted battlefields, were crushed underfoot by every day’s new battle. A rarer sight in these killing places: alone, in the center of a perfect circle of fine dry dust, would lie the blackened body of a dead HighSoldier.

And somewhere far away, dragging its soul back from beyond, would be a Bloodpotter.

Bloodpotters were formed to raise the exalted dead, to trap and unite the most brutal soldiers’ severed souls with powerful bodies, so that they could continue to fight in the king’s endless War. They were part of the legion of War Sorcerers who created various beings that stalked the battlefields, looking for enemy soldiers or deserters to devour. But a Bloodpotter’s only duty was to his HighSoldier. It was said that without the tainted magics of War Sorcerers, the war would have been long over. Without them, the soldiers could die, and the kingdom could rest and heal. But these things were said quietly, only to trusted friends, and only in places too far away for such blasphemies to bring the fury of the king.

The sorcerers known as Bloodpotters walked beside death at whim, and left despair ever in their wake.

This is the story of what would not be left behind.

I.

She was called Hen by the villagers. This was in part because she, like the other beggar orphan children, scratched in the dirt for bugs and bits of roots to eat to stay alive. The crueler reason for the name was that those who saw her, filthy and ragged and venomous of eye, thought she’d make better stew meat than future childbearer, since she was far too tiny to grow up enough to supply sons and daughters for the War. They would smack their lips at her, wave spoons and laugh as she passed by. She spent most of her time outside the walls, beside the road, with the other beggar children.

In the village of Fauen, in those days, children born to those who already had too many children were sent outside the gates nearly as soon as they could walk. Hen did not remember being sent away. All she could remember was the road, the scratching for food, the cold nights and cruel villagers. The passing travelers, on their way to or from King’s City or the battlegrounds. The taxmen who came to take away nearly all the villagers’ crops were often enough nicer to the beggar children than the villagers were, giving them the occasional bit of food that had nearly ceased to be edible. Sometimes a traveler would motion for a beggar child to follow them, and sometimes, a child would go. They never came back. Hen always knew a traveler would take her away someday. To the places in all the stories the children told each other in their favorite fairy tales about the King’s City, the battlegrounds, the richer towns and the beautiful sea and wherever it was the taxmen wandered to.

Hen was seven years old the afternoon the red cart appeared on the horizon. She and four other child beggars, all older than her, were waiting by the road, watching the cart approach. They had learnt how to tell by an approaching dust cloud if a passerby would be a large caravan or a small one, a rich person or a poor person, a tax collector or a nobleman’s retinue with guards. This cart was different, moving quickly though it did not appear to have a mule or horse to pull it. It seemed to warp the light around it, as if there were cloud cover over it alone under the flat blue sky. The cart was accompanied by a solo traveler walking along beside it.

Hen stood when the others stood, all shading their eyes, peering hard into the distance, trying to figure out which begging style might be the most profitable. But when the others shouted in alarm and ran into the village to hide, she did not leave. She stood alone, by the side of the road, blinking grit from her eyes, waiting to see what was coming her way. Waiting to see what was pushing the cart. Waiting to see why the solo traveler looked like a pile of bloody rags on top of a stick under a sweeping gray cloak.

By the time she saw his eyes, glowing red as a smoky sunset out through the rags around his head, it was too late to run. The smell of incense pouring out of the traveler’s cart seemed to hold her by the throat. She could not tear her gaze away from his eyes. The cart and the figure approaching flowed over the dirt road as if they were sliding across midwinter ice. Hen, held rigid and still by the incense spell, pissed herself when the cart stopped beside her.

The figure paused, towering over Hen, burning away every thought in her head with his stare, with his scent. He knelt down, red eyes flaring in a mass of bandages, and asked in a low, velvety voice, if Hen was a good omen or a bad one.

She could not speak.

Show me to shelter, he said, and through his scarves his breath was more incense, sweet woods and resins, filling Hen’s head with fog and confusion, setting her heart beating too hard in her little chest. From out of an invisible seam in his gray cloak appeared a hand, large and slender and gloved in dark leather, reaching for her shoulder. She cringed away, but he rose and followed her, the red cart behind them. Desperate for help, she led the stranger and his cart past the walls, into Fauen.

II.

The village of Fauen was a bleak patch of dirt, with brown crops and brown people, brown houses and too little brown food growing in dry rows in dry fields. Still, its people counted themselves lucky, living so far from the horrors of the king’s battlefields. There was little of value in Fauen; a tainted stream, a hardy people, and mild if rain-sparse weather. The villagers reminded each other of their good fortune as they ground gritty grains to make bread, which they soaked in sour milk to make porridge. These commoners told stories to pass the time as they toiled in the grain fields. They recited battle poetry while smelting and sweating in the blacksmith hall, repairing tools and weapons for passing soldiers and taxmen in exchange for news and goods. The nobles in King’s City lived in luxury, they told each other, but they also fought a miniature version of the war in the form of politics, and these battles were just as bloody. To hear tell from passing wanderers, the King’s City held more assassins than nobles. It was also training ground for the War Sorcerers, who were rarely encouraged to practice their crafts outside the palace and utterly forbidden to venture beyond the corpse-choked battlefields.

No one who lived in Fauen had ever left, except for the lost children outside the walls, and as such no one had ever actually seen a War Sorcerer, a King’s Demon, in person. So it took some time for the villagers of Fauen to believe what they were seeing being led up their main pathway by the beggar child Hen.

Up the path they slid, Hen stumbling and shaking ahead of the regal stranger floating across the ground, head and face hidden by red headwraps. The big cart rolled steadily behind on wheels that barely seemed to turn. Stopping in their work, the villagers pulled their children behind their legs and watched the pair pass, glaring with dread, wondering who would deal with this, who would tell the blacksmiths to bring out all of their store, who would be the first to attack. Hen looked neither right nor left, only at the ground. The villagers who pitied her most hoped her death would be painless. Those who blamed her were angry that her exposure to the demon in rags would likely taint her meat and marrow, so she’d have to be wasted in a pyre.

They stopped outside the burnt-out skeletal wreck of a house that had been open to the elements for so long that green and brown fuzz grew over much of the blacked timbers. The family that had lived there succumbed to illness borne by badly filtered water from the stream, so none had suffered when the house caught fire and burnt them away. No one had gone in since, and the villagers made signs of protection across themselves as they passed. But the stranger lifted a hand and pointed to the dim shadows inside. Together, he and the girl and the cart sank into the darkness.

Almost to a man, the villagers set off for the blacksmith hall.

Hen watched them walk away, leaving her alone, and her heart sank in despair. But she obeyed when the demon-eyed stranger said, This will do, Little Omen. Go inside and clear the stones away.

His gaze seemed to burn against her back as Hen crouched over the ground, slowly picking up stones and carrying them to the back of the burnt house. There were bones and such, those of rats and other rodents and of people, too; she let them all lie. When she got up the nerve to look around, she saw the demon-eyed man in rags pulling things from his cart. She could not clearly make the items out in the dim, but it looked like jars and boxes and fabric-wrapped packages. He also took out a book, and opened it. She watched him turn a few pages of the book, an actual book, an item so rare in their part of the world that Hen forgot her stones for a moment at the sight of it. Then she caught a movement behind the red-eyed demon, past the carts. Villagers were walking past, pretending to be busy, shooting glances in at them. They all carried sharp things and heavy things, digging and chopping things. Any hope in the back of Hen’s mind that she might flee melted away.

The demon sat down in the cinder dust with his book and unwrapped one of his packages, and the scent of honeyed oatcake blocked out every other thought in Hen’s mind. Carrying stones in each hand, she wandered over.

Splashed across the open pages of the book was a map. It was in color, soft painted trees and roads and mountains, a shining gold pile of houses on the top left corner, with a crown over it, red splotches and black splotches in areas around it, an expanse of blue to the right.

Hen looked over to the red-bandaged head and saw his eyes watching her face. The scarves covered his mouth, and she just had time to wonder how he would eat while wrapped up like that when he whispered through the cloth. There is a line all around this house. No one will pass my line to come in. You will not go out.

She nodded, and the demon set the little wrapped honey cake in her hands. It was the first sweet thing she had eaten in her whole life.

The demon shut the book and tossed it back onto the cart and then lowered himself to stretch out in the dirt, hands under his head. The red glow went out as he shut his eyes. Hen licked her dirty, sticky hands and chewed on the bitter dried leaf that had been used as wrapping, tearing a bit off and swallowing that too. Outside, villagers had stopped the pretense of being busy and many were just standing there, peering in, squinting as if they could not see her. Hen crouched down in the dirt beside the demon, who had gone so still he barely seemed to be alive. She touched his gray traveling cloak and found it so soft and thick that she could not stop herself from scrubbing her little face against it. It smelled like spices, and her mind grew foggy again. She carefully pulled a little bit of the cloth away from the demon and scootched over to curl up on it, deliciously comfortable. She did not sleep, just rested with the vision of the map in her mind and the taste of honey in her mouth, watching the shuffling boots of the villagers, waiting for death.

When the boots began to approach all at once, the demon’s gloved hand appeared again, and draped itself gently over Hen’s face, over her eyes. Incense whirled her up into sleep.

III.

He was beautiful under his bandages, if incredibly alien to Hen. And so was the house he built.

The stones were cleared out, the dirt and ash swept and covered by more carpets and rugs than Hen thought could have existed in the world. Their designs were intricate and beautiful. Hen wandered around for hours, looking at them and touching them, when she had no assigned tasks to perform. Not that the tasks themselves were any less interesting. For all the unimaginable expense of his belongings, he was content to fling them this way and that, ordering Hen to tidy the piles he cast about. Omen, he’d call, peering into a silver box that was emitting green light, stack those yellow books over in that corner. Omen, set these tiles over there, make sure they are fitted together tightly, and pile some wood on for a fire. Omen, here are some lamps. Fill them with oil from this bottle here, look; do you see?

Every new task fascinated her, and kept her from thinking about the villagers outside. They all kept their distance from the house now. The morning after their first night together, she had awoken to find strange colored light all around her. The space between the skeletal burnt-black beams of the house had been covered by what looked like shiny stretched silk. Every patch was a different color, and the dawn light streamed through, washing everything in jeweled hues.

The next morning, as Hen was tidying a stack of rolled up scrolls, a man in gray clothes with a red scarf around his neck swept from behind the cart and said, Omen, gather the bones you left in the dirt yesterday and pile them up here, in this empty pillowcase.

Hen stared. His bare face looked entirely human, if a great deal smoother-skinned and wider-eyed than the villagers she was used to. She had been expecting hideousness to be the cause for the bandages, but all they had been hiding was a head full of dark curls and a face of soft features and sharp jawline. He had a melodious voice, more fashionable in accent than any taxmen or traveling merchant she’d ever encountered on the road. His hands were still covered in gloves, and the tunic and trousers did not seem to have much flesh inside to fill them out, but had his eyes not been glowing red, Hen could have believed he was the main hero character out of her favorite fairy tale, “The Five Noblemen.”

Then his red eyes flashed. Omen! Bones! Quickly now!

Hen loved his name for her. She loved her new life. She loved every task, every scrap of food he gave, even though the richness of his snacks hurt her stomach. She wondered about the beggars outside and tried to forget the villagers, their angry glares. She could see the shadows of them moving past outside, through the silks. But they felt a world away from this pillowy, perfumed place.

Every time Hen-Omen looked upon the traveler she was filled with a kind of adoration, a desperation to protect him. He tied one of his red scarves around the waist of the brown sack she wore as a dress, and another around her head to hold back her tangled hair. When he handed her a bucket and told her they were off to fetch water, she pouted, resenting the very air outside the house, that she should have to share the vision of him with the sky.

The traveler brushed aside an oiled fabric hanging over the open doorway , and they stepped out into the evening. Hen-Omen’s nose wrinkled; she’d never realized how badly the village stank before. A few folks were out, mending and washing and doing a few easy chores, but they promptly went inside their houses as soon as Hen-Omen and her master appeared. She was surprised at the lateness of the day; it almost always felt like early afternoon inside the house. They walked along in the cool, smelly air to the end of town and out of the walls. The beggar children still there leapt to their feet and ran off, but the traveler paid them no mind. They went down to the stream and filled the bucket and bottles in the box he carried.

Coming back up the road was slow going, as Hen-Omen had trouble carrying the heavy pail. The box of filled glass bottles rested under the traveler’s arm, against his hip, like he was carrying a box of feathers. Amidst all the low mud-and-thatch huts of the village, the traveler’s house looked deeply unsettling, like multicolored skin stretched over black bones. It even looked a little like it was breathing.

In the doorway of one of the villagers’ homes, Hen-Omen saw two of her beggar friends peering out. She smiled at them. They gestured signs of warding off evil.

Back in the house, Hen-Omen watched in horror as the traveler uncorked a bottle and took a mouthful of tainted water out of it. She dropped her pail in surprise, splashing her legs and the rug with some of the brownish water. But before she could shout a warning to him, he grimaced and coughed out what looked like a fat brown wriggling slug into his palm.

He wiped his mouth with the back of his other hand, and peered down at the slug. When he dropped his hand away, the slug remained in the air, pulsating and spinning slow.

Omen. Bring me the trunk that’s under the right front wheel of the cart. It has buckles on each side. Bring it here.

She watched him pull out glass vials, tiny ones, full of clear and murky liquids. Some he would sniff, some he would tap droplets from onto his pink tongue, some he would pour onto the floating slug of taint. She watched it twitch, bubble, ooze, and then crumble into dust.

He gestured to the pail at Hen-Omen’s feet. She dragged it over, and he dipped his gloved fingers into his mouth and then into the murky water and stirred; the water became clear. We’ll pour that in the stream tomorrow, he muttered, spitting on one of his carpets and wiping his mouth again. He kicked his trunk of glass vials closed. Then he trudged over to collapse into his thickest heap of carpet, to sleep.

The villagers watched as the pair crossed the town again at dawn, passed beyond the wall with a full bucket, and returned with an empty one. And when the beggar children came running up the road in the afternoon, shouting that the stream was clean, the water sweet and clear, no one believed them. The beggar boy was made to drink from it in full view of some of the skeptical villagers, but the others did not hesitate to jump in and splash around.

The water was taken to pour onto the roots of the brown stalks of grain. Within a week, they were green.

IV.

Hen-Omen awoke wrapped in the traveling cloak, on the ground next to the nest where the traveler had been sleeping last, to find all of the other four beggar children seated in front of the fire, eating sausage slices. Beside them the traveler was crouched, showing them something on a sketch of paper and giving them instructions. Jealousy seared up from her stomach, and she was on her feet in an instant. Without turning, the traveler said, Omen, unwrap and wash the cups and plates from the pack tied in rope. We have guests. Seething, Hen-Omen did as instructed, soothed only when he appeared by her side with a full sausage and a honey cake, which she ate smugly in full view of the cakeless interlopers.

While Hen-Omen swept the rugs and dusted the books, the other children were sent to fetch discarded stalks from the fields, to wash them in the stream and hang them to dry. The rough outer stalks peeled away and were worked with their fingers and some smooth-edged stones until they could be pulled into fine threads. Other stalks were twisted while soaking and when dried, became tough but malleable ropes that the beggar children used to weave into wall partitions for the house and mats for the floor. The first mats that met the traveler’s approval were spread outside, with some torn lengths of fabric, as bedding for the beggars, who were told they would be sleeping there from that day on. The second set of mats, much better than the first, created a makeshift platform, hung from the black beams close to the roof, for Hen-Omen’s sleeping space.

Competing for his time and favors, the beggar children began to dislike and mistreat each other. But more than this, they disdained the townsfolk, who still gave their generous and beautiful new master a wide berth, even as the spring ran clear, even as the green stalks produced the plumpest grains any of them had ever seen, even as the goats’ milk lost all of the sourness and the goats grew fat and playful. No matter what he did for them all, they answered with discourtesy and rebuff.

Hen-Omen hated her nest at first, so far away from where she wanted to curl up like a kitten inches away from her master every time he took a rest. He had piles of pillows all over the house, bright-colored and softer than anything, and Hen-Omen would lie just to the side of whichever he occupied. She was never invited into the pile, and the construction of the nest had begun the day after she had tried to climb up and snuggle with him for the first time. He’d turned from her, and she’d slid back down to the rug and blinked away tears. But when the nest was finished, sturdy and cozy in the rafters, the beggar children were sent to fill it with a few pillows and bright linens, as Hen-Omen watched. And as a final donation, the traveler ascended the ladder himself, and spread out his own gray cloak across it, like a blanket.

It was a promise, she decided to herself. He had traveled all this way to find her. His traveling cloak was now shared between them because if he ever left, she would go with him.

Soon the woven walls were up, reinforced with mud painted in the same swirling designs of the rugs. The hearth was merry with a cooking fire, and makeshift shelves stood against the beams, holding jars and potions. There were new bits of furniture every day. The traveler’s house began to feel like a palace, its nobles the beggar children themselves. Sometimes in awe of their luck, the beggar children would sit together and share a spiced stuffed bun and talk about their fortune, remembering the dusty road outside the walls, the misery that had been life. Finally free of starvation and cold, they began to make an effort to be kinder and more generous with each other again, as they had in their previous life outside the wall. Hen-Omen tried to accept that the traveler did not belong to her alone, and the others tried to accept that she was his favorite. As long as she took care of them, they would watch out for her.

The traveler seemed to neither encourage nor discourage this, only gave out orders and bits of rich food, and otherwise ignored the lot of them. But one day the other beggar children came in early from collecting stalks, carrying one older child who had long ago been nicknamed General. This was because he was the eldest and had looked after the others outside the gates, who the villagers called his little troops. He meant a great deal to them, so when he was dragged into the house covered in blood with his forearm nearly chopped in half, Hen-Omen did not hesitate to rouse their master from his dusktime nap.

The traveler wiped the sleep from his eyes and stared down at General, who was breathing high and unsteady, lying across the low dining table, bleeding into the weave of the surface. The traveler banished everyone from the house except Hen-Omen.

The traveler sat down on the mat beside the table, leant forward, and ran his tongue through the wound in the boy’s arm. He sat back up, licked his lips thoughtfully. His eyes dimmed darker than she had ever seen them, the color of the old bronze weapons past travelers had repaired in the blacksmith hall. Hen-Omen watched horrified, flinching when he turned to her, lips red, and ordered her to fetch him the pale leather box from the back room. Then he sent Hen-Omen to the stream, for water.

She ran as fast as she could, filled a little leather bladder in the stream, and raced home again, giving the worried beggar children on the mats outside the door a bracing nod. She carried the water over to the table and set it down, heart catching at the sight of General’s graying face. Beneath his body, the table was completely clean of blood, as was the ragged wound across his forearm.

The traveler pulled her down beside him, then took a handful of her hair and pushed her head down until her eyes were inches away from the wound. He traced a clean-gloved finger along the split skin and pointed out the layers inside. He named them, and she repeated the names, until she, breathing hard and stuffing down the desire to be sick, achieved the proper pronunciation and tone. Satisfied, the traveler released her hair and showed her the peek of bone, the curdles of fat, the changing textures of the flesh. He spoke with the deliberate patience of a being unconcerned with the possible death of the child on his table, and asked after each explanation if Hen-Omen understood the last thing he said. Then, just as General’s eyelids stopped fluttering and his head began to sink to the side, the traveler selected a bottle from under the table, upended the clear contents over the gash, pulled a needle and thread out of his tunic, and made Hen-Omen watch him sew the lips of the wound together.

Take him outside.

The beggar children sat all around General as he slept afterward on the mats outside the house. Hen-Omen put a smuggled pillow under his head, and held his hand. One of the villagers approached the group hesitantly. He held a steaming bowl of porridge, offering it to them, his machete in its sheath on his belt. The other beggar children glared at him as he approached, and Hen-Omen surmised that he had been the one to chop General’s arm to the bone, working in the field. He knelt down and set the bowl on their mat, just to the side of where General lay, then gasped and reached for the boy’s arm. He brushed his finger across the dark threads of the traveler’s stitching, and the thread crumbled away, revealing a pink and shiny scar, the wound healed.

The villager backed away, his eyes wide, accidentally kicking General, who scrunched his face up and grunted for water. Bodysmith, the village man said, making evil-repelling gestures. That thing in there is a Bloodpotter. Be careful, children. War sorcerers have only ill tidings.

None of them did leave, and when a perfectly healthy General showed off his scar to the other workers in the grain fields, they began to bring their own medical worries to the traveler’s home. They still whispered amongst themselves. Sorcerer. Bloodpotter. But they did not make their protection signals so often. And they stopped glaring at Hen-Omen. Out of newfound respect, they asked her name when they came by to request some sort of antiseptic, painkiller, or stitches of their own. As Hen-Omen served them tea, the traveler would go out among the villagers reclined all over his main room and assess each cut and wound he had been brought. If it was a small matter, Hen-Omen was handed whatever liquids or tools were necessary to set the patient right. If it was more serious, she brought them to the traveler’s back room. He showed her other medicinal muds, tinctures, stitches, and patches, and how to turn the villager’s head away and distract them as he took a bit of blood, a slice of flesh, a fragment of bone, to hide under his tunic or tongue.

By the time Hen-Omen was nine years old, she had learnt to read pictures of bodies in the traveler’s anatomy books. By the time she was ten, she could read the words as well. Sometime after that, she was given a journal and made to record her own findings.

The house had a steady stream of visitors for medicines and stitches, thread for dyeing and weaving, and an occasional taste of a rare spiced treat. The name Bloodpotter no longer meant Demon of the War Dead to the community of Fauen. He had healed their crops and their streams and their bodies. And he charged them nothing. They stopped calling him demon, as he did no evil to them, and they stopped calling him traveler, as they loathed the very thought of him leaving one day.

The name Hen fell away entirely, too. Omen and the Bloodpotter became the healers of Fauen.

V.

In one of the Bloodpotter’s books was a series of sketches, and some handwritten notes about spells that were supposed to bring rain, fortune, crops, and other such things if done correctly. Some pages were filled with beautiful painted illustrations of dancers. Omen loved the ones who most closely resembled her Bloodpotter. A leaping dancer who had long arms like him, and another bowing dancer had a similar mop of thick hair. There was a page of diagrams of the faces of a person possessed by something evil; dispersed amongst the drawings were his eyelashes on this one, this one with his nose, this one with the smile he wore when he was telling a villager a naughty story. Beside the sketches of the twisting leaping bodies were the lines meant to indicate the path over the ground the dances were meant to take. Omen recognized some of the patterns as similar to the ones woven or painted into the rugs, and into the dark dirt of the house’s back room.

Omen had never seen dirt like the dirt that made up the floor of the back room.

A few weeks before the great party, several men of the village stopped by, without wound or want of medicine, and asked Omen, who was dyeing skeins of stalk silk in a pot out front, if they could speak with him. It was urgent. She ducked under the skin that hung in the doorframe and found her Bloodpotter reclined in front of the fire, chewing a tarry substance and spitting onto a live coal he held in his gloved fingers. It smoked blue, the smoke collecting in a glass jar suspended upside down above it. He sat up on his pillows and tucked his slippered feet in under his blanket, and the gray tunic over his upper body twitched and expanded, to give the impression that a fully muscled human body was underneath. He nodded at her when he was ready.

The men accepted his offer of strong, spiced tea, and spoke to him low about matters of grain, of hunger, and of taxation. Omen sat in the corner, close enough to catch any orders, far enough to pretend not to listen in. The talk of business turned to talk of pleasure, and Omen was sent to fetch a flask painted in blue flames that hung on a chain over his nest of bed pillows near the back room. Small glasses were also requested, and the men lifted their glasses, sipped their drinks, coughed theatrically, and cheered. More was poured.

Omen scooted closer and joined the rapt audience as her Bloodpotter told tales of his youth in the city. His idea to solve the taxation problem shifted into a storytelling session. She caught herself waiting to hear about some romance, but he only recounted pranks and parties, hilarious punishments and general mischief, as a youth in War Sorcery training. His stories of magic were far less demonic than they were expecting, and they told him so, eliciting his sunny laughter and calling for another toast. More villagers came in when they heard the merriment, as did the other beggar children, to listen to his tales. One sneaked a cup away from a drunken audience member and passed it around to the other young ones. As soon as the cup touched Omen’s fingertips, her Bloodpotter sent her a red-flashing warning look midsentence, and she pushed the cup away.

The Bloodpotter sent the men away before his midafternoon nap, with instructions to pack their tribute to the king in a very specific manner. The other beggar children were sent along with them. When they were alone, he called Omen to him.

As she sat, he handed her the tin of dark blue tar with the little silver spoon in it, and he leant forward to blow upon the coal, which began to glow red again from inside a little iron cup where he’d placed it.

Omen took a spoonful of the tar, the way she had seen him do it, and put it on her tongue. It was rich and sweet, a sort of resin. Her mouth filled with saliva almost instantly. She leant over and spat onto the coal, and the blue smoke rose, coiling up into the floating glass. She turned to see him settle into his pillows and close his eyes, the fabric of his tunic settling down across a body of skin and bone. She gazed at him as he slipped into slumber, then turned to spit on the coal as the taste in her mouth seemed to intensify and deepen. Soon it overwhelmed her. She inhaled the juice and coughed, choking as it burnt down her throat, clogging her lungs. Panicking as her mouth filled over and over, she reached over and shook the Bloodpotter’s leg, trying to wake him. He furrowed his brow in frustration and gestured languidly toward the back room. Take that racket into the garden.

She barely made it to the back before her whole body began to squeeze, and she vomited, over and over, into the dark dirt. The last stream of bile that splashed into the black soil tasted of blood, but this was a relief, as it meant the taste of the resin was passing. Weak and shaking, she rinsed her mouth out with water and went back where the Bloodpotter lay still as a statue on his pillows. She sat down beside him and sighed as he lifted his hand to pat her knee and pushed the little tin of resin and cup of coal closer to her. After an hour or so, he fetched her from the dirt in the back room, and told her to get his illusory charm book and follow him.

At dusk, the pair of them strode out to where the entire village had gathered around the pile of grains and skeins of stalk silk. Omen was blue in the lips and shivering hard, repeatedly spitting gray gunk into the dirt, but she waved off the villagers’ expressions of concern, beaming as the Bloodpotter patted her shoulder and pulled her behind him. He released her and began to circle the pile of offerings to the king and his hungry fighting soldiers, whispering a spell in a low voice. Omen thrilled to watch the placement of his feet, the sway of his neck and his arm, recognizing a banishing spell, a glamour, and a forgetting spell as he worked.

In the twilight, the pile of grains and skeins began to gleam. The villagers watched as he moved around the twinkling collection of their produce. Then quite suddenly, he turned to face them and instructed them to take the haul back inside the wall, a piece at a time, in the opposite order that it had been stacked.

When a villager grabbed a basket and pulled it from the top of the pile, a vision of the same basket remained right where it had been, glowing faintly. Amazed, everyone dove to take down the baskets and skeins, but even as they did, flickering images of the same seemed to stay put. Before long, a glowing pile of nothing glamoured to look like a large pile of grain bags and baskets glowed just outside the walls. The Bloodpotter assured him that the taxmen would believe they had packed it and taken it away every time they visited. The village of Fauen was now free of taxation; everything they grew, they would keep.

Shouts and cheers rang out through the crowd, and the Bloodpotter allowed himself to be borne up on the shoulders of several sturdy blacksmiths and carried away as they sang his praises. Omen clapped and laughed to see him celebrated as she felt he should have always been, and did not notice when General sidled up beside her. He expressed concern for how sick she looked. He had caught the warning glance the Bloodpotter had given her earlier that day while they were trying to sneak a drink, and he worried that she had been punished for what they had done. She assured him that it was all right, she had just taken poorly to the preparation of one of his elixirs. The minute she said so, she realized this would not set General at ease.

Walking her back to the house filled with revelers, General offered to take up some of her magic-preparation duties to spare her such pains. His offers were cheerfully refused, as was his insistence that she come out into the open air and work with them more often, for a change of pace. She hugged him round the shoulders amiably, and went into the house, smiling as she passed the dancers and drinkers, sneaking up into her nest to rest.

In the early morning, she came down to drink some water and check on the Bloodpotter. The floors of the main room were strewn with snoring bodies. She peeked around the back and found the Bloodpotter humming to himself, stooped over and poking a handful of harvested teeth into the black soil, one by one.

VI.

Once the door to the house had been opened to the public for socializing, it never seemed to shut. The quiet solitude of interesting tasks, of study and tidying, the afternoon naps had turned into an endless parade of visits from the various villagers. They wanted more than just mending now: they wanted tinctures that would make them feel and see interesting things. They wanted diagrams and instructions for ball games that were played in the King’s City, and they wanted to borrow the Bloodpotter’s musical instruments, to learn how to play. They wanted to be near him, hear him talk, offer him gifts woven out of stalk silk, to smell his perfumes and incenses, to look at the strange and beautiful collection of artifacts that he had— at least the ones that were not hidden in the room in the back. No one seemed to know about the back room, even when they were brought there and back out again, having made a donation they would not recollect. Omen was beside herself with irritation about the frenzy of admirers, and the only solace seemed to be that the Bloodpotter himself seemed equally as irritated.

His solution outraged her completely. He commanded the villagers to build an open-air public house in the center of the village, and instructed Omen and the beggars to run it. Omen fumed that he would cast her away with the rest of the villagers, but it quickly proved an entertaining diversion. The excess grain, and the excess time, created the opportunity for games, song, and the brewing and drinking of liquor. Daily, after the fields were tended to and the chores done, many of the men and women of the village would gather to make merry. General led the games. Omen tended the bar, doling out medicines, hallucinogens, and other sense-exploiters with a careful eye. She’d developed an understanding of the ingredients and the ratios of many an elixir and snuffing powder from her lessons with the Bloodpotter and her own readings of his books. She knew that he expected her to abstain from partaking in any of it herself, and so she did, watching the madness of joy take over the village, quietly satisfied to have a single source joy for herself.

Omen had her hands full in the evenings cleaning after the revelries, and in the mornings tending hangovers. She would set everyone up in a comfortable spot as they came in and tend to them, letting the Bloodpotter see who was there, and in what shape. Some he greeted warmly, shook their hands, and passed by. Upon seeing others, he would make a small signal to Omen and she delivered whatever medical care was necessary while secreting away some small vial of blood, a bit of broken tooth, a patch of scalp with live hair still growing on it, a hangnail removed with a bit of the quick still attached. She never asked why they needed to do these things; she just knew it was necessary for whatever the Bloodpotter was working on in the soil of the back room. She also knew, without having spoken to him about it, that these activities were best done discreetly, and that none of the other beggars were to know about it.

There was no doubt that they knew, though. Omen was certain that General had discovered something, and had told the others. They distanced themselves from her a little bit now. She did not mind.

The day a villager drunkenly removed his boot and showed everyone a neat scar where he’d had a toe removed, so expertly and painlessly by the Bloodpotter that he didn’t even remember the procedure, General stood straight-backed and glared at Omen. She would not meet his eye. Later that evening she went home and found General sitting at the fire, poring over one of the first books she’d been given to study. It had the spells that were formed in swirling patterns. He was looking at the spell for FORGET. She realized with a start that he was reading it. He set the book down as soon as Omen came in, and left without a word. None of the beggars slept in front of the house ever again.

When the Bloodpotter came out from the back room later, Omen asked him if he had taught General to read. He turned his face away from her, told her to gather the empty, dirty vials in the back room and wash them. Then he sank down into his pillows to sleep.

Omen began to watch General, and realized that he was watching her just as closely. He seemed to always be on the periphery of her vision: silhouetted against the light through the skin walls of the house as she studied potions, pulling stalks in the edge of the field as she set up the bar for the evening, sitting quietly alone by the stream and strumming a coarse couple of notes out of the only stringed instrument of the Bloodpotter’s that had survived rougher villager fingers when she went to fetch water. They never spoke, but his eyes were darker with worry and sadness than any anger or suspicion. Omen stopped him one evening after the Bloodpotter had disappeared behind the screen to the back room, and they walked together in the darkness toward the blacksmith halls, which were worked at night to help the smiths endure the heat. She asked him if the Bloodpotter had taught him to read.

He did not answer, but instead asked a question himself. What does he do with the pieces of our bodies that he keeps stealing?

They walked home in silence, without answers. Inside the house, the Bloodpotter was waiting for her. It was unnerving, as he was usually fully asleep at night, but he stood in the middle of the room, his hands behind his back, waiting. He gestured for her to sit with him at the table, and then pulled out his blue-flame flask. He poured her a drink, raised his own in toast, waited, and then set his down when she made no move to touch her cup.

Then the Bloodpotter asked his own question. I am your master. Would you like to know about mine?

VII.

There was a popular bedtime story for children, so popular that General had told it to the other beggar children years ago when they were sleeping out in the cold dirt beyond the walls of Fauen. The story was called “The Five Noblemen,” and it was considered to be based on real events regarding the King’s great war. The moral was supposedly that one should be grateful for what they have, and to be careful what they wished for.

In the story, the War had been going on for so long that the noblemen of the five highest-born families in the King’s City got restless for an even easier, more luxurious life than they already had. They came up with a plan to end the bloodshed that was robbing their estates of good servants and healthy farmers and beautiful diversions, of wealth and leisure. Four of the noblemen packed up their servants and mistresses and took them in caravans to the four corners of the kingdom to look for various weapons and talismans that would give them an advantage in the war, allowing it to end with them as the victor, placing that specific nobleman in power that surpassed even that of the king.

The last nobleman, with a pure heart and sweet nature, wanted only to end the war and bring peace to the whole world. So he packed one horse and provisions for one, kissed his sweet wife and his sweet children goodbye, and left his estate to set off to the battlefield. He intended to ask the conscripted villagers and imposing war sorcerers, even the little messenger children, how they thought the war could be quickly brought to an end.

What happened next depended heavily on who was telling the tale, how late it was, how many times the tale was interrupted by a curious child far from sleep. On holidays away from work, celebrating a harvest or waiting out a brutal winter storm, each nobleman’s trip was told in exquisite detail, with a few bawdy jokes hidden in for the adults listening in the room. But they all ended the same, generally. The fifth nobleman got bloodthirsty advice from everyone except for the littlest messenger boy, who was Death in disguise. Death said that he had a spirit road that led to a doorway, through which all spirits must pass, and that he could show the nobleman where it was. The nobleman could come and go as he pleased, could stand guard and keep anyone from passing beyond, sending them to be reunited with their bodies at his whim. After enough deaths and revivals, the exhausted soldiers might wise up and refuse to fight, ending the war. The brave fifth nobleman agreed to follow Death down the spirit road, but it was a trick. Death shoved the nobleman beyond the door, then scoured the four corners of the earth to find the other four and trick them all to death as well.

The story reminded all who heard it that questioning the will of the king, who desired this War despite the starvation and slaughter of his people, was a bad enough offense that even a humble and brave man like the fifth nobleman deserved to die for it. This was an unsatisfying lesson. Little children went to sleep irritated, pensive, and gently mutinous after hearing the end of the story. As they grew up, life wore them down to accept, without question, the will of the king, the way of things.

This was not the version the Bloodpotter told Omen that night.

There had been only three noblemen in the more factual retelling that he learnt in his history lessons in school in the King’s City. They were looking for lands beyond the war to further build their own wealth, where they would bring their families and caravans, claim their stakes. Eventually they would each get sucked into the war by their own greed—it was how the first war had started, after all.

But the nobleman on the battlefield, the one who had tried to convince the general to turn against the king, indeed found a Little Messenger. It was the name of a weed whose flower and roots, crushed and boiled together and drunk, made a powerful paralytic hallucinogen. One could die, and come back from the dead—or at least, that was how the experience was described. Too much, and there was no return. War-broken soldiers had developed an addiction to the weed, or used it to end their lives. The ones who used it regularly and in careful moderation began to show increased strength, stamina, and reflexes. They were even said to heal in triple time, and grow in savagery and efficiency.

A catastrophe was engineered on that battlefield that wiped out everyone there except the nobleman, who rode to the king and presented his highness with a small store of the last remaining Little Messenger plants in the land. The nobleman told the king’s advisors of its properties and was even able to present a demonstration. He did this hoping for favor. That nobleman was immediately assassinated, and talk of the Little Messenger was violently encouraged to cease. But in short time, the official calls for enlistment of strong new fighting recruits were paired with requests for fresh children, to be delivered to the king to train up as a new breed of sorcerer.

Using the plant, renamed the Pathflower, the school of War Sorcery was created. Its students, reared on history, propaganda, bloodshed, pain, and Pathflower, were sorted into two types. Those whose focus was physical battle were given the name HighSoldier, and they led the nonmagical fighters into battle. The other class of War Sorcerer was named Bloodpotter. They were given the task of maintaining HighSoldiers, through a style of magic that was not quite necromancy, but similar in nature.

Every HighSoldier had a Bloodpotter, just as every Pathflower blossom had roots to keep it alive. And the roots grew new flowers for the same plant, whenever it was necessary. HighSoldier children were given, throughout their young lives, bits of Pathflower petal and root that helped develop their physical strength and battle prowess. The Bloodpotter disciples drank brewed teas of stem and leaf, and were taught how to walk beside death, with sure footing and firm grasp on whatever they decided to drag there, or drag back, through the use of their gardens.

Blearily blinking in the light of morning, the Bloodpotter swirled the liquor in his cup, studying the weave of the table with his bright red eyes. He admitted to Omen that, when he first found her by the side of the road, he had felt her death wish, as well as the strength of her life force—it had called to him. He had intended to stay in the village long enough to fatten her up, strengthen her, and then take her away with him—to find a private place to create a garden, and to plant her there. But the village was agreeable to his needs, and alternative measures had been found. There was no need to sacrifice her to the soil he was brewing in the back room. And as for General, the Bloodpotter had begun to teach him how to read when he thought General would make a good replacement, or a good framing victim. Should his HighSoldier have called to him from The Path before the soil was ready, the Bloodpotter would have needed someone on his side to explain Omen’s sudden disappearance to the villagers, to lie on his behalf, or to take the blame. He had been nervously expecting, for some time, for General to grow affection for Omen, to discover possessiveness, and to tell her these things to drive a wedge between the two of them. He hoped she would not let it.

They sat in silence, punctuated by Omen’s tearful sniffles as she imagined the Bloodpotter crouched over the black soil of the back room, humming as he shoved her under to suffocate and choke on all the clods of gore and bone and wet dirt. She had thought he’d chosen her because she was special, but she was only ever Hen, a girl for the pot, of no further value to anyone. The Bloodpotter rose, pausing to remind her that he had changed his mind, had come to appreciate her presence, and that she was well cared for by him; that it would be unwise to dwell on irrelevant matters.

He went to lie on the pile of pillows by the cold hearth. Omen sat at the table, broken. When she sniffled again, he turned his face to her and said, Do not waste your tears. Go cry in the garden. It could use the salt.

VIII.

When Omen dreamed, she dreamed of the Bloodpotter.

The pain of knowing she was meant to be fertilizer faded as days passed and her tasks kept her occupied. When her heart dragged back the ugly memory of his confession, she shoved it away and replaced it with sweeter ones. The laughter on his beautiful face when talking with the other villagers. The peek of tongue between his lips when he was sewing up a wound or weaving bandages. The generosity with which he emptied his stores of honey over grain cakes for the visitors, filling their pockets with candy and lending out his drums and cymbals and some of his nonmagical picture books. She could barely remember the bed of hard dirt beside the road now, the poisoned water of the stream gurgling its lullaby, so many years ago. There was no more hunger in Fauen. There were no more taxmen—in the years since he met with the last ones, none had returned. The babies born to families were celebrated across the village, as there would never be a reason to leave children outside the walls to fend for themselves, not ever again. Omen knew her little life was worth all of these things and more, and so she forgave him. She even forgave General, who avoided her completely now, and even more so avoided the Bloodpotter.

It was clear her own generosity at offering unspoken forgiveness to the Bloodpotter had changed their relationship greatly. He now spoke with her about everything he was doing, and kept her by his side constantly. The villagers whispered to each other about the change in the growing young woman and the strange but attractive Sorcerer, nudging each other to notice the foul mood this kind of talk always put General in when he was around. In the house, Omen and the Bloodpotter read aloud to each other from the locked books, discussed strategies for collecting more bits of the villagers without alarming anyone, and they worked the soil together. Omen learnt that bits of villager were not the only additions to the soil. There were tinctures and syrups and powders added in specific patterns, at specific times of the month, and with specific purpose. The anatomy book Omen had memorized helped her to see that when the Bloodpotter painted a yellow sap in tiny branching lines over the top of the soil, hunched and crouched over it for so long that Omen ached in sympathetic pain, that the pattern mimicked the nerves of a body. Then when he opened a jar and poured a pile of ants in the middle of the design, their death march up and down the strands of painted syrup seemed to make the outline of the body come alive.

Seasons passed, the village of Fauen grew healthy and vibrant as the taxmen passed them by. Omen grew taller and tighter in the tunic, and the war seemed like it was happening in a world they were not a part of anymore.

Omen was seventeen the day she was allowed to feed the garden body by herself. She had sneaked into the goat pen the night before to steal a newborn goat twin and bring it to the Bloodpotter as a gift. The next evening, he called her into the back room, pointed at the specific jars she would need, and requested a skin for the garden body. Omen carefully laid a layer of dried meatfloss down in the shape of a man, then sprinkled a bit of blood over it. She moved slowly and painstakingly, and the Bloodpotter stood by, watching, without a word of correction. She took a jar of maggots down and sprinkled handfuls of the squirming mass, nudging them to fill in the shape. She was halfway done when the soil shivered, and the meatfloss and maggots all sank from view.

Omen turned around and dropped the pot of maggots, tripping and falling into the soil. The Bloodpotter’s eyes had gone fully black and tripled in size, darkness spreading across his face, leaking down into the fang-rimmed hole in his head that was now his mouth. His lips contorted around the word RUN. Then he lifted his hands, which had sprouted claws like great curved needles, and he lurched at Omen, who was lying in the soil. She rolled out of the way, but not before he’d torn a gash open in her leg. She kicked at the Bloodpotter’s chest as hard as she could, which did not budge him but propelled her to the far corner of the room. She crouched, bleeding and gasping for air as terror squeezed her chest, and watched the monster that had been the Bloodpotter begin to work the soil like never before.

One thing Omen learnt that night was the true shape of the Bloodpotter’s body. She had often wondered about him in her private moments, imagined his body like that of a fieldworker, but softer-skinned and wonderfully perfumed. She ignored the strange twitchings and flutters under his tunics, the way his spinal bones showed through the cloth when he was bent over concentrating on a fiddly task, the way his pelvis wings were sometimes so prominent on his hips. But as the thing clawed and dug and pounded his hands into the soil, the tunic tore away, and more hands appeared all over his body. The skin and skeletal structure was nearly obfuscated by a flurry of nightmarish arms sprouting from everywhere, ending in black-tipped claws. Some of the claws tore other hands open, or off, and they too were pounded into the soil.

Omen screamed herself hoarse, watching.

The black ichor pouring out of his eyes and mouth covered his face now; there appeared to be nothing there, a void. His curls had fallen off and were lying in clumps on the ground; new legs sprouted from his bony knees to stomp chunks of his own torn body parts into the soil.

The soil was changing too. Sparks of light danced across the surface as the gummy clumps began to smoothen out and ooze together, worked through by hundreds of clawed fingers, becoming a kind of clay. A claw lunged for Omen, who was too frozen in fear to dodge it, but it only wiped the blood pouring down her leg, and pressed the stain into the clay. Omen stood up shakily and edged herself around the border of the garden, her back pressed against the sturdy woven walls. The creature did not seem to notice her moving away, and kept working the soil as she sidled behind the bare, rib-stretched skin of his back. One last glance showed her that when one of the fists sank into the clay up to the elbow, the surface of the soil shuddered and began to bubble.

Nearly the whole village was standing in the dark outside the house, their torches lit, waiting, when Omen ran outside. Behind the villagers she could see lightning in the cloudless starry sky, skittering flickers of light just like what was dancing across the clay under the onslaught of the Bloodpotter creature. The villagers snatched her up and looked her all over, unnerved by the screams they had heard coming from inside the house before. General, standing at the front of the group, knelt to inspect her bleeding leg, and demanded to know what had happened. She whispered that the Bloodpotter was… Bloodpotting, and when he asked her again, unable to hear her over the rising wind, she told him, The HighSoldier is coming.

Frightened, nearly everyone returned to their homes. General cleaned and wrapped her leg, and the pair of them, along with all of the other ex-beggars, sat on the mats outside the house and waited for a sign. No one slept, but Omen was beginning to doze off in General’s arms when he gave her a gentle shake and said that she was being called. He helped her stand, and tried to go into the house with her, but the skin of the door slid between them, locking General out. The house shivered as the skins pulled tightly closed. The silhouette of General beating on the door-skin could be seen against the light behind him. Omen called out that she was all right, for him to go home and rest, then she turned to the pillows by the hearth to see what was snoring.

There lay the Bloodpotter, bonier than ever but otherwise whole and healthy in his gray tunic and trousers, gold slippers shining on his feet. Curled beside him, bald and naked as an egg, was an enormous man, ferociously muscled, his sleeping mouth open, drooling black ichor onto the pillow under his head.

IX.

Omen was never happier to be busy, or to be out of the Bloodpotter’s house, as the days following the appearance of the HighSoldier. She woke each day before dawn and sat herself on the mats outside, content to dye stalk silk or study spells or mix medicines or weave beautiful scarves. The more intricate the task, the better, because it took her mind from the new sights and sounds in the Bloodpotter’s house. She had thought the horror of the ritual the Bloodpotter referred to as The Walking would stain her sleep in horrible nightmares forever. But what followed was far more arresting, consuming her peace.

The Bloodpotter was no longer concealing the fact that he and his HighSoldier were lovers. Not that he had actually concealed it from her before. It had just never come up in conversation. Discussion of HighSoldiers and Bloodpotters had always either involved ritual, stories about the training at the school in the King’s City, or recitation of legends of famous HighSoldiers who had made great marks on the battlefields, or died in some spectacular fashion. But now the house was redolent with incense and the musky scent of the soil, the hum of low conversation and laughter, and other sounds, sounds to bring out a burning blush and a despairing ache in Omen. Sometimes the pair would be in the back room, sometimes twisted around each other on the pillows in front of the fire in the main room. Omen had taken to sleeping on the mat outside after the first night, to avoid the stirring sight of them.

And such a sight. The HighSoldier had been magnificent right away, even before the Bloodpotter laid the finishing touches on his body. The Bloodpotter worked to grow him eyebrows and lashes, eyes of dark maroon, the blush in his lips and the shadow of a beard, square fingernails, dimples in his chiseled cheeks. His wardrobe, loose shirts and trousers in brilliant black, were as often in heaps on the floor as draped over his gorgeous frame. But it was the vision of Bloodpotter himself that rendered Omen entirely undone. His usual uniform of gray tunics and trousers, a red scarf or two at the hip and around his neck, had been replaced by white, by brilliant blues and greens, embroidered with jewels in the images of fantastic animals. His skin glowed in contrast. And he had reworked his own body as well. Only two arms and two legs, exquisitely turned, his molded chest and the planes and curves of him exposed more often than not, so alluring that Omen could not speak when he was in sight.

She began to sample the liquor at the pub each shift. When one of her old beggar friends draped an arm around her shoulder while walking her home one drunken night, what was once a repulsive consideration became a moment of profound relief. The next evening at the pub, the sight of General’s face as he avoided eye contact with her, his jaw set tight, convinced her to try some of the other medicines as well. It would take some courage, she realized, to confront what was likely to occur—that she have a serious talk with General, and they, perhaps, begin to consider building a hut together, on the far side of the village, or perhaps just behind the pub. For the first time, Omen was realizing that there might be a life for her beyond her service to the Bloodpotter. Sometimes the thought soothed her, or even exhilarated her, but most often it opened a yawning hole in her stomach that she thought she would collapse into. Medicine and liquor were the only things to drive that bleakness away.

One late afternoon, after she’d scratched her arms up badly helping to harvest grain, grateful to the itch for being an added distraction from her tortures, she and some of the blacksmiths were sitting together at the pub. Omen was reciting a story to them, with General sat beside her. He had begrudgingly forgiven her dalliance with their friend. Wanting peace, Omen had started to court him, seeking General out in the fields each day, or in the blacksmith hall in the evenings, delivering him little tokens or a smile and a bit of company, delighting their gossiping neighbors. Pacified, he strummed low under her recitations, on one of the Bloodpotter’s string instruments that he had repaired, picking out a tune he had heard a traveler taxman whistle long ago. The HighSoldier appeared at the edge of the crowd, sudden as a swooping raptor, big and dark as a thunderstorm.

Everyone turned their heads to look upon him, in his head-to-toe black clothing, his large square feet bare in the dirt, a red sash tied around his whittled waist. His beard had come in fuller now, and he wore a single hoop of gold in one ear, and a wry smile on his face. In a low and carrying voice, he asked General for the instrument.

It wept delicate melodies in his hands. When he lifted his head back and began to sing along, in a language none of them knew, Omen forgot everything else until he had finished.

He could withstand only a moment of applause before he yelled out a request to himself for a happier tune, and began to strum the instrument so hard Omen thought it might split in half. He shouted out the lyrics to a bawdy jig, and when he began to dance along to his own song, everyone danced with him.

Sweat-soaked, they all leapt and clapped and spun and sang. The HighSoldier dodged in and out of the crowd with a nimbleness that could barely be believed of anyone his size. He took Omen in his arms and spun her around until she was dizzy. When he set her down again, she was relieved to see General in tears with laughter, watching her try to steady herself as the HighSoldier took up the next villager and spun him too. He taught them new songs and new dances, acted out jokes and recited poems, gathering the crowd until nearly the whole village was there.

Omen felt her name spoken before she saw the Bloodpotter, standing far down the road, a pale blue figure, red eyes glowing, still as a stone and radiating anger. In the crowd of dancing villagers, Omen turned to see the HighSoldier looking in the Bloodpotter’s direction as well.

The HighSoldier reached out and grabbed up armfuls of villagers in hugs, promising to stop by to help with the harvest tomorrow, to come inspect the weapons in the blacksmith hall, to return to the pub with a wind instrument or two that he thought might have survived. Then he walked away, under the dusky sky, up to the Bloodpotter and past him, and into the house. The Bloodpotter did not move from his spot, so Omen, shooting a sheepish glance at General, left the still-dancing, still-singing villagers, and walked down the road to her Master.

From the set of his jaw and the flash of his eyes, she was expecting excoriation from him. But when she was near enough he reached out and, ignoring her flinch, drew her close and whispered, Do not leave us again. I need you to watch him.

Back in the house, Omen sat at the newly broken woven-top table and watched the Bloodpotter nervously as he tidied the wreckage of his house. His collection of books appeared to have been torn into pieces and flung all around the room, and he was gently gathering up the bits and repairing what he could. Pillows had been ripped open, and half of the hearthstones had been crushed. Mats were rent to tatters, and there was a small split in one of the skin walls. She did not ask about it, only prepared some tea for him and watched him work. When he sat to rest, he looked across the table to where she was sitting, his red eyes red-rimmed from tears, and told her about past gardens.

Bloodpotters rarely love, he explained. They are taken from their parents at an early age, and taught to expect the death and destruction of everything beautiful and wonderful in life, that the only solace would be to learn the skills to decide when such bitter things can happen. But the HighSoldier and the Bloodpotter had loved each other instantly, before they even been assigned their roles, before they had been assigned to each other. They drove each other, challenged each other to such perfection of their craft, of magic, of creation and recreation and destruction, until no other consideration for pairing was raised by the schoolmasters. And when the boys had finished their training and began their work in the War, the Bloodpotter learnt that what he had never been prepared for was a life spent away from his heart and soul, his best friend.

Day after day, year after year, the Bloodpotter had to wait alone as his HighSoldier fought in horrible battles for the king far away. To be separated from his HighSoldier was nearly unbearable, a dull and crushing ache relieved by the horror, and relief, of hearing him call from Death’s road.

But with each new resurrection, decades apart, the Highsoldier was a little bit changed. Less and less of the friend and lover remained. More and more of him was just bloodlust and violent pride. The HighSoldier would spend months recuperating and training his new body back in the school training yards, but soon it was only weeks after a resurrection, then only days. So the Bloodpotter came up with his first plan. He would convince the HighSoldier to defect. They would leave the King’s City and the battlefields behind and go away to live only for each other. It took a few tries to get the HighSoldier to consider it, but the Bloodpotter was clever and relentless and finally persuaded him. Or so he thought. Instead, the dawn after they had escaped, the Bloodpotter found himself alone, the HighSoldier having snuck off to battle.

The Bloodpotter searched everywhere for him, disguising himself and sneaking onto various battlefields to try to find his love. He was caught off guard one night, sleeping at the back of a brothel in a coastal city, when he felt his HighSoldier calling from death’s gate.

That was the first time, the Bloodpotter said, that I was forced to make a garden out of a friend. Before, suitable prisoners of war or traitors to the king were provided to the Bloodpotter school and alumni, to be used to enrich the soil in their gardens. Out on the road, the Bloodpotter had to take what he needed.

In that coastal town, the resurrected HighSoldier stayed for a whole month, luxuriating in the ease and fascinating aspects of this new environment, before his boredom and pride drew him back to battle again. But now the Bloodpotter had a new plan.

He traveled, looking for new and interesting places, looking to get far enough away from the King’s City and the battlefields that he would have enough time to figure out how to make the HighSoldier stay. He packed his cart with diversions of art and music, which always drew him, and practiced at altering his own appearance to make himself irresistible. He went through town after village after city, keeping some form of company close at hand so as to be able to make an emergency garden at a moment’s notice. Aspects of the person chosen to feed the soil stayed in the HighSoldier for a time, so he chose the meek, the strong but easily led, and he made his captive obsessed him so that the HighSoldier’s love would intensify.

Omen had been the last one chosen to be a garden. But the Bloodpotter had grown tired, sloppy, and lonely, allowing himself to depend more thoroughly upon the companion he kept, the beggar child. He was astonished to find that she loved him better than anyone ever had. And that he appreciated that love. He valued her so well that he made a garden out of the whole village instead, even sparing their lives as he did so, just for her. Because in building a new life for her, he discovered that there might be a new life for him as well.

I should have buried you, Omen, he said, wiping a pink-stained tear away from his cheek. The mix, all these people, they make him impossible to control. Your essence, your obedience would have made him stay longer. But then his will would have crushed yours eventually, and he would have left me again, and you would be gone too.

I know he is thinking of leaving again. This is faster than it has ever happened. I’m going to try to stop him. But if I cannot, I will need you.

The Bloodpotter ran his human-looking bare fingertip around the large hole punched into the middle of the woven table. Omen watched, daring not to look at his face anymore. He was so hurt, so frightened, and that made her sad, but she…she was loved. He had as good as said so. He did not want to live without her. And she knew she would do anything for him, even if it meant tearing the HighSoldier apart with her own bare hands. Anything to keep her Bloodpotter beside her, safe in her love.

X.

Watch him.

Omen repeated the Bloodpotter’s command to herself as she polished his gold slippers on the mats out front of the house. Villagers passed and greeted her, wondering when the HighSoldier would be coming out. She told them that she suspected he’d sneak away again, at midday when nothing could rouse the Bloodpotter from his nap. And this he did, parting the curtain and tiptoeing onto Omen’s mat, his manner of theatrical sneakiness so ridiculous that she could not stifle a giggle. He took her hand and batted the slippers away, pulled her toward the grain fields as a cheer rose from the villagers who spied his approach.

Being with the HighSoldier meant seeing Fauen through brand-new eyes. Of course, the town had changed quite a bit since the Bloodpotter came to town. But the HighSoldier exclaimed over the height of the grain stalks and the brilliant colors of the drying silks in the dye huts. He harvested a row of grain in record time, his shirt off and his body glistening in the sun, his loud booming call of challenge spurring the others to race him through the rows. In the blacksmith hall, he handed Omen and General each a sword and taught them how to lift and set their stances, how to run through easy sparring movements. General’s eyes flashed and he smirked at Omen, who felt herself flush and lift her chin in defiance of his upcoming choreographed strike.

Meals and tea were brought and shared around the cooling yard, and the HighSoldier told more stories, stories of his glorious battles, even some of his more exciting deaths. All other work was forgotten—everyone listened rapturously. Some villagers began to practice sparring, and some to act out the scenes as he told them, to the merriment of all. Feelings got so high that for a moment Omen began to feel a lust for battle herself, completely forgiving him for thinking of leaving the demon behind. Then the wind shifted away from the forges, and the smell of the garden soil, the incense of magic, made itself known.

She knew that scent. The HighSoldier was weaving a spell, and he had them all under it.

Omen snuck away from the cheering crowd and walked along the backs of the houses, in the shadows, to avoid being seen. She found the Bloodpotter just rousing from his sleep, his rosy eyes dreamy, and he greeted her with Where is he?

Out at the blacksmith halls, Omen said.

Bloodpotter yawned. What is he doing there?

Teaching us to fight, Omen said. Teaching us to march. What does it mean when he fills the air with the smell of the garden?

Omen didn’t have time to get out of the way; the Bloodpotter shot up out of his nest and shoved her aside, striding out the door. She spun and followed him out to the middle of the village path, where the HighSoldier was singing a war song and several dozen villagers were marching in time to it, as others clapped and cheered on either side. The weapons of the forge were in almost every hand. General, near the front of the line, waved at Omen. Her spirits beginning to lift again, with the scent of the soil and the voice of the HighSoldier fluttering her heart inside her chest. The Bloodpotter stood facing the approaching crowd. He lifted his hand over his head, and Omen saw it darken, as if with the black magic that had, days ago, swallowed his face as he resurrected his lover from the soil. His claws grew out, and he slashed at the air. All at once the HighSoldier’s song ceased, and he stumbled and fell to his knees, holding his face. All the marching villagers fell, too, crying out in terror, clutching themselves.

A searing pain erupted across the side of Omen’s head, burning her eye. She fell at the Bloodpotter’s feet, and from there she watched the HighSoldier rise, a grin on his black-blood-soaked face, as the villagers near him scrambled over fallen weapons to get away. He shouted something at the Bloodpotter, in another language, and the Bloodpotter answered him in kind, in a snarl, and screamed over a rising wind, Release them, and submit to me!

The HighSoldier roared and charged, and the Bloodpotter erupted arms and claws and blooms of black fog, and they crashed together.

Omen felt her body tear apart.

XI.

Omen awoke in the cool of the house. The mat to which her face was stuck was soaked in blood, and her muscles and joints felt frozen in pain. She gingerly flexed her fingers, her wrist, and twisted her neck slowly, discovering soreness did not equal injury. She rose gingerly, her head spinning, and then hunched over and vomited black soil onto the carpet by her feet.

She looked around. The house looked the same as it had before when she had come in after the HighSoldier’s rampage, except one of the house walls was torn wide open. Through this, Omen could see the path outside was strewn with the bloody, torn, unmoving bodies of the villagers.

She stared at them for a moment, then turned her bleary eyes over to some movement in the corner of the room. The Bloodpotter lay on the cushions by the ruined hearth, naked and mottled in bruises, all bones and stretched skin. Dozens of arms tipped in long black claws wrapped around a long, bright pink pillow. His half-hidden face was black fog, his red eyes gone.

Omen stood and waited for the dizzy spell to pass, then stepped carefully over to his nest. The black void of face tilted up slightly, and out of it came the whisper, Omen. Please.

Omen lowered herself onto the pillow and lay beside him, running the tips of her fingers over his ear until he shifted forward and drew her against his desiccated body, all of his arms enfolding her, the incense of him easing her pain and replacing the rotten taste of soil and bile in her mouth. Her neck went cold from where he smashed his facelessness against her skin, then warmed as his face took shape again, filling out his nose and lips, wetting her with his tears.

She didn’t ask if the HighSoldier had gone; she could feel his distance. She could also feel the villagers who had survived but had been too deeply under the HighSoldier’s thrall to let him leave without them. He owned them now, her General among them, these villagers whose blood and bone and skin made up his body, to whom he would be linked until the battle chewed them into the dirt of the killing fields, long before his next walk on the death’s road. They would join the War as new fighters and charge onto the swarms of enemies, where they would quickly be crushed under blows that could only glance off the HighSoldier like raindrops. Outside she could hear the crying of the survivors who had never lost a single piece of themselves to the soil or been beguiled by the magic of the HighSoldier. They had not been affected by the attack on the HighSoldier’s borrowed body and were left to witness the bloody scene in sober terror. These, and the ones fallen, the marching lost, her villagers—

Omen realized how truly she had betrayed them all. She had led the War into Fauen, in the form of a beautiful traveler, and out of all of Fauen, it seemed only death would survive.

Clasped so tightly to her Bloodpotter’s bony body, Omen dreamed herself a child again. Little Hen, destined for the pot. Better as a stew. She saw her villagers depositing babies outside the walls, and turning away. The hunger, the bleak lives, the despair she had almost forgotten. War had always been there in the village. Incense wafted across the child Hen’s face and she closed her eyes and sniffed. Omen knew the Bloodpotter was speaking her dream into her sleep, and she accepted every word. He had not brought the War—it had brought him, and it had robbed them both.

It was dusk when she felt the chill hit her skin. The wind blew cool over the places where the Bloodpotter’s arms had held her. She opened her eyes to see him pulling his gray tunic over his head, dragging gray trousers up his legs, his gold slippers already on his two feet, gloves on his two hands.

She rose as well, coughed and spat up a bit more soil, and began to help him pack up his cart. There was no art to it; they flung everything in as it was, and most of it seemed to fit. The rest, dirty bottles of elixirs and boxes of spices and swatches of torn fabric and tattered books, he left behind, strewn across the stained mats under the black timbers of their house. It took very little time to finish.

She walked him out of town. It was slow going, as there were still some bodies in the street; the cart had to be shoved to either side or it would have rolled its heavy wheels right over them. In the pink light of the setting sun, the Bloodpotter kissed Omen tenderly on the lips, tasting like honeyed grain, a last deep sweetness. Before he and his cart turned onto the road that would lead them ever further away from the battlefields and the King’s City, he gave her one last order. Or it may have been a plea. Redeem me.

She watched the horizon he disappeared into as night fell, numb and empty of thought. She did not even turn when she heard some of the remaining villagers creep up and close the gate, sealing the walls of Fauen to her for good.

Epilogue

Omen was a traveler, all alone under the flat blue sky, on the flat dirt road, surrounded by nothingness. Around her head she tied a single scarf, faded to pink from the sun. Far behind her, the cursed village of Fauen lay broken, burnt, and dead. The villagers had set her house on fire after they locked her out of the wall. She could smell all the broken beautiful things her Bloodpotter had left behind burning, smell his spices in the air, and the curious scent of the paper in his books. She had not yet begun to grieve for all that she had lost when an explosion brought a section of the wall down, battering her ears to ringing. They had set the pub alight too, without checking if the casks of liquor had been removed.

There was screaming. Then burning bodies began to stream past her, out into the darkness beyond the road, flailing and stumbling until they slowed and dropped into the dirt, still burning. Some had the presence of mind to fling themselves into the stream; that only prolonged the agony of their deaths. Soon the whole village behind her was burning, and the air filled with the sweet smell of cooking meat. When the smell began to entice her, after several days sitting beside the wall waiting for death, she picked herself up, set her back to the direction of the King’s City, and began to walk.

Somewhere ahead there was love, incense, and sweet honeyed cakes, nests of pillows and whole realms of delight in stacks of storybooks. There was nothing else in the world for her, nothing to redeem. So many arms to hold her, so many bits of her to use, if she could just find him. She was ready. Somehow, someway, she would grow a garden.

Publisher: Sean Markey
Cover Art: Mateus Roberts
Cover Design: Christine M. Scott
Featured Image: inkshark
Editor: E. Catherine Tobler
Copy Editor: Laura Blackwell

14,700 words, published September 2025

8200 words – novelette, March 2025

The car’s windscreen is spotless, so clear it makes Nate feel like he’s watching the road on a film. When Nate was called into the office, it was the middle of the night, but now dawn is tentatively breaking over the city. Rosy-fingered, he thinks—a verse of some kind. How did this pop into his head? Dredged up from a distant student past, reading the classics, feeling like a great ape being taught to sign. When was the last time he saw a sunrise? He’s been practicing gratitude—Connor’s idea; today, he could be thankful for the view. His legs feel stiff, though. Some knot needs loosening, deep in the right ankle. He’d have liked to walk to work; perhaps that would have helped. He longs for movement, wants his face bathed in that slowly cracking light. But who walks to work these days, in this city?

Besides, he needed to get there quickly because, well. The reports. Marion sounded alarmed on the phone, though she’s always the first one to plaster a veneer of calm onto any situation. By training, of course, but, he thinks, also by disposition. This time though, upset. A hitch in the throat, a shudder of the lungs, maybe, when she said the word “attack.” Some kind of bioweapon used, making animals do weird things. What things? He doesn’t know yet. He’ll have to see. Things are usually not as bad as they sound. And when they’re bad, they’re worse.

His phone vibrates on the dashboard. He glances at the screen, trying not to lose view of the street. It’s a message from Mark and Sloane. His best friends went into the game two days ago. They didn’t have to specify which game—there’s only one that matters. The time’s craze, everyone’s doing it, disappearing into its VR void for weeks, more. Some people go so far as living in it permanently, coming out briefly, ashen-skinned and bleary-eyed, to claim citizenship of a country that only exists in fragments and dreams conjured by spectacled nerds in some basement, funded by a billionaire in his glass tower, even as the game is built around the idea that there’s no freedom under capitalism.

He scoffs at the marketing without meaning to. Employment is bullying, the game logic goes. Paywalls are violence. All the clichés in one download. The developers have been hyping a big upgrade, an experience like no other. Not free, of course, for all their anti-capitalist talk. It’s hard to deliver a revolutionary message when you’re funded by the very corporations whose interests you’re trying to compromise. And yet, people have lapped it up, preordering in the thousands—the game has never been more popular.

Mark and Sloane insisted they’re not like those people. They called it a vacation. Just a break from everything, just a few days. Still timed it so they would be inside during the new release, though—the devs promised it would be seamless, if spectacular. His friends begged him to come along. Vowed to update him whenever anything interesting happened after he said no.

“You’re missing out,” the message says now. “Drinks last night on the beach. Scaling the skeleton of a giant prehistoric beast today. The view is stunning. This is the perfect holiday, mate.” A weird thing to say about a game that purports to be about humanity’s marginal role in the world, about how animals are persons and property is theft. The devs have been called everything from anarchovegan communists to ecoterrorists, though they have claimed none of these labels themselves.

There’s a picture of the view: a vast plane, a broken skyline silhouetted against an orange sunset in the distance. 8-bit aesthetic tugging at their specific nostalgias, so spot-on it’s almost manipulative. “Braving the city tomorrow. Got some workers to save,” the message concludes.

Nate types a response, sends it. “I’m a worker,” it says. “Come save me.” The message fails immediately. Then he remembers; Sloane told him. One-way communication. You can send missives from the world of the game, as many as you want, as often as you want, but you shouldn’t expect a response. It’s like talking to God, or the spirits of those who’ve moved on. They rarely talk back.

He would have liked to go on a holiday, even a fake one, in a fake world. He remembers playing games as a boy, the Enchanted Caverns, a hundred other people crowding in the same room, the building designed like a cave, with its skeletons and monsters, its few treasures. It was never the treasures he was after, though; it was the people. The common goal, the common suspension of disbelief, for a time. Something unspoken binding them together.

But this was before. Now he’s busy. And so responsible. For Brandon, for Connor. For everyone, really. It’s who he is. If he lets loose, even for a day, even for a minute, things fall apart, don’t they? People broke on his watch before. Never again. People? Well. Not just. The only people who matter.

He won’t think of this. Not today, and not on the way to work the day that very work managed to get Marion upset.

Nate swipes away his friends’ message and brings up one of the images Marion sent: an unnaturally large flock of pigeons that blots all sky out of the frame. The image is bright, washed out, as if overexposed. It’s the birds; they glow, luminescent.

He zooms in. Up close, the birds are wrong. Empty eyes, beaks gaping too wide, almost dislocated. Still, the creatures fly, indifferent to their own monstrosity. He zooms out again. Behind the pigeons, barely within the frame, there’s a tear in what little can be seen of the sky. He has no other word for it except a wound. Something that will scar.

What’s he supposed to do with this?

He imagines what the Defence Department Media guys’ job might have looked like in previous decades. Morale-boosting reels and propaganda, black-and-white films of ponderous war machines jerking relentlessly ahead. Soldiers smiling soundlessly at the camera. His predecessors had it easy. Things had been simpler, once. But then, surely every guy thinks that about the one who came before.

Finally, the office building looms finally, in all its brutalist bulk. A hymn to efficiency and to the crushing of human individuality for the sake of things so large they’re measured in epochs, not lifetimes. He parks and takes the stairs. His ankle creaks pleasantly. A poor substitute for a walk to work, this, but it’ll have to do.

The team is already congregated in what they lovingly call “the conflict room.” Lights dimmed, footage playing on the big screen. The video looks like something taken by a bodycam, though it’s a bit too decent for that. Nate has seen enough bodycam videos to know that they never look this perfect. The grain is always a little off, the focus never this crisp. The footage shows a vast industrial building, disused. The camera approaches the building through an alley and then moves up a staircase. There’s a door at the top of the stairs, a heavy wooden one, the kind no one uses anymore, certainly not in a building like this. Something out of a castle.

“Look at this,” Marion says, and the camera turns around for a split second, before moving on. There’s no door anymore. No staircase. Just a wall, far back.

“Was it edited?” Nate asks, but Marion tells him no, it’s raw. The guys checked already.

The camera moves on towards the light at the far end of the space, then emerges onto a terrace. Looks up at the same gloomy day as the photo, but now the birds are making glowing triangles in the sky.

The footage ends. Marion turns up the lights. He squints without meaning to. A headache slowly gathers itself behind his forehead.

“Where’s this?” he asks.

“We’re not sure,” Donald replies. “That’s the thing. We just don’t know.” He pauses. “And they won’t tell us how they got their hands on it,” he adds.

Of course. This apparatus runs on secrets. “But is it real?” Nate asks.

“Yes.”

“The reports said ‘terrorist attack.’” Nate tries to keep his voice cool, though the vagueness of it all is irritating. Just about manages it. “This looks like… I don’t know. Spillage? Some kind of chemical agent that affects these birds.” Breathe in, exhale. “Maybe an accident. If it’s real.”

“There was a message with the footage, too, classified,” Donald says. “So no, not an accident, for sure.”

Nate wants to laugh. “You can’t seriously be buying this,” he says, though he knows it doesn’t actually matter what they believe. This is not an investigative department. They only handle the media.

Okay. Get the basics. “Right,” Nate says. “Who’s behind it?”

Donald looks at his own hands, his intertwined fingers. He only gets like this when he has to say something he doesn’t want to. “It’s domestic,” he finally says.

A stab behind the left eye. Nate pinches the bridge of his nose. “What do they want?” he asks. “Whoever this is.”

Marion shakes her head. “They don’t know yet. They’re looking into it. Everyone is.”

“So they have no clue what’s actually happening, if anything is, but they still want us to spin this.” Spin what? They’re a media department, not magicians. What is this? Some well-done prank, most likely. Or some kind of viral ad campaign for that blasted game.

Right? No, of course not. But a guy can wish.

Marion pulls up the screen to reveal the whiteboard behind it. People managed to come in much earlier than he did, apparently; his walk sacrificed for nothing. A smattering of ideas is already scribbled in blue marker: Drone show. Prank—of course someone’s thought of this already. Nuclear testing. Bioweapons. Military exercise. All ideas that could work, could have worked once upon a time, but won’t, not in this day and age.

“Have news outlets gotten hold of this yet?”

Laticia looks up from her tablet. “There are already some stills on social media networks. The guys are looking into it.” The guys are always looking into something. “We don’t know if they’re leaked from our footage, or if they were generated independently.”

Right. How is he supposed to help manage conflict if he doesn’t even know who’s involved? Mediation needs overview, an understanding of who wants what and why; instead he’s in a car with no windows, hurtling down a road no one around him has ever travelled before. He can’t control this. But he can rally his people. Give them something to do, a sense of purpose. “So we hold on, then. Come up with some narratives. It’s what we do best, isn’t it? I want your proposals in an hour. I’ll be in my office.”

At this, everyone disperses, looking more determined than flustered, which is good, though it’s a bit unnerving to see the same techniques that work on the public also work on people who already know all the tricks.

Nate retreats into his office, rests his head on one hand while fumbling for the painkillers he keeps in the drawer with the other. Marion walks in as he’s swallowing two without water.

“Are you all right?” she asks, closing the door behind her. She presses against it, and her eyes catch the sunlight in a specific way. He feels something. Puts it away, filed under Cold Cases.

“Sure,” he says.

Marion walks in and sits across his desk without being invited. “Truly?” she asks. There’s no more professionalism in her voice now. She’s just a friend. She cares.

“I’m fine,” he says. He leans back in his chair, his fingers rubbing his temples.

“Connor and Brandon doing okay?” she asks. She gestures towards something beyond the windows. For a moment he thinks she means what happened to Brandon (he corrects himself: what that man did to Brandon), even though it’s been years (five already, my god). He wonders if he’s told her about that. But no, of course he wouldn’t have. He barely manages to call it what it was silently, in his own mind: abuse of a minor. Statutory rape.

“With everything going on?” Marion adds, as if prompting him to respond. She reaches across the desk to touch his hand lightly. Looks at him. Suggestively? Maybe. He thinks she’s been flirting with him for a while, but then, he’s never been able to tell for sure, neither with women, nor with men. Connor had to practically throw his half-naked self at him before he finally took the hint.

He pushes his eyebrows together, which makes the pain worse. He forces himself to relax his forehead again. “I don’t think they know.” He looks out at the blank sky, the steel and concrete city below. “Not yet, anyway.” He closes his eyes. “Maybe this whole thing will blow over before they find out.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

No, he doesn’t. He opens his eyes again. He thinks of something poetic about the sky. Something about screens, blank words, the clouds blurring the borders between nations. Perhaps he could tell these things to Marion. Would she understand? But no. He could never. And it would probably be out of character enough to alarm Marion. Would she call security on him? Come quick; something body-snatched the head of department. My boss speaks in tongues.

“Did you need anything?” Nate asks.

Marion is already standing up but, at that, she pauses, looks him in the eyes again. “You don’t think this is like last time,” she says. “Do you?”

He knows what she means, of course. “Last time” is what they call that time when there was no incident, but their department had them conjure one out of thin air, for their own purposes. Spun reality like sugar, made exquisite shapes out of it: an enemy at the gates, terror itself prowling the streets. So you better be vigilant. Even better, let us be vigilant for you. Do you know where your children are? Hand over your phone data, and we’ll tell you, no problem. Yes, biometrics, too. Free of charge.

“No,” he says. “I don’t.” Words. What does he know?

Marion nods and presses her lips together into something that’s not quite a smile. She leaves him alone.

He downloads the footage from the cloud and watches it again. Near the end, there’s a handful of people, a small crowd. What is that called? A cluster. A gaggle. They’re gathered around something on the ground, and they’re looking up, pointing at the triangles in the sky. He can’t see what it is they’re gathered around, and besides, the camera is not looking at it, how could it? Under that sky.

He lets out a long breath. All he wants to do is press his face into his hands forever. His head is killing him. He thinks, maybe, he should cry. That helps sometimes, doesn’t it? All that tension crowding behind the eyes. Maybe he should crumble to the floor and weep, like Connor used to, in Brandon’s bad days. Like Brandon used to, when he thought neither of his fathers was looking. Does he still?

He should have gone with Mark and Sloane into the game. It’s not really a vacation game, but it does seem like a kind of escape. He’s seen gameplay: armed players storming office buildings. They’re meant to release employees stuck there repeating the same motions again and again. Meaningless things, like endlessly photocopying a single document, or slipping envelopes into a hole that deposits them back onto their desks, forever, on a loop. The repetition reduces them to husks, which is why they can’t escape on their own, and so they’re stuck in the belly of the devouring beast that is capitalism, waiting to be digested. A rather crude metaphor, if you ask him. But then, nobody’s coming to his rescue.

His phone buzzes again. Another message from Mark, right on time. “There are children in masks,” the text reads. “Foxes and wolves. They run around the city terrorizing people. If they get you, you lose everything.” Mark doesn’t specify what he means by everything. Another message lights up the screen as soon as he swipes away the first one. “People are getting sick, now,” it says. “It’s probably part of the upgrade. It made everything sharper, somehow. We think maybe it’s a plague, but we’re not sure how you catch it. Not airborne, or we’d already have it.” On the next line: “Sloane says you’d like it here.”

By noon, more footage has come in along with the directive to address it. The new videos are disturbing: carnivorous deer, people dead on the ground. A deserted building. More of the bird triangles in the gloomy sky above. And this time he recognizes the site, which means so will everyone else. It’s on the outskirts of the city, this their city, out in the dead industrial zone where kids go to LARP and parkour. There’s no way to contain this. People will be in the streets within the hour. Hotheads in other departments have already started calling this an “invasion.” There’s talk of declaring a national emergency, imposing a curfew, which he thinks is the worst thing they could do. Curfews and half-truths is how you get riots.

Another message from Mark blinks on his screen. “We’re in deep shit,” it starts, but Nate only skims the rest. Something about that plague, about people disappearing, hearing voices in their hearts. Nate swipes the notification away. No time for games now.

He prepares two statements. One to be circulated internally, urging a conservative approach, and one for the public, urging calm, and assuring everything is under control. A lie, of course; nothing is under control. No one knows what’s happening. The other side, whoever it is, has made no declarations that he knows of. So he just has to make things up. Switch the narrative later, if he has to. If there is a later, his mind supplies, but he ignores it. He thinks of triangles in the sky, glowing birds. Finds the idea comforting.

After twelve hours in the office, he manages to sneak away. Gets home. The painkillers have done their work. His husband has made dinner. Vegan Wellington, red wine. Brandon is joining them, that’s a first. Is there an occasion he has forgotten about? He scans his mental calendar, comes up empty. He washes and then sits at the table opposite Connor.

“You went to a lot of trouble,” Nate says, like some Mad Man from the 1950s, and Connor brushes his hand lightly.

“You work too hard,” his husband says, to match.

Nate cuts into the slice of Wellington on his plate and puts the forked piece in his mouth. He tastes balsamic vinegar and beetroot. Something else earthy that he can’t quite place. “It’s delicious,” he says.

“How’s work?” Connor asks.

Nate glances at Brandon, who’s eating in silence. Notices the glass of red wine in front of him, begins to protest, then thinks better of it. Maybe just this once. Given everything.

“Not now,” Nate whispers, as if his son won’t be able to hear even though he’s sitting right there.

Connor’s mouth twitches, but he tries to sound cheerful as he changes the subject. “So listen, we were thinking we could go away for a couple of days,” he says. “Go on a road trip, see the lakes. If you can get a day or two off work.” Maybe this was always the subject. Maybe this was always what this family dinner was about. A setup. Father and son colluding to ambush him.

Nate sets his fork on the plate, careful not to make too much sound, any sudden movements that could be interpreted as annoyance—or worse, anger. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t think that’s a good idea right now.”

Brandon looks up. “Is this about those weird videos?” He laughs. “I mean, these are obviously just promo for the new game release, right?”

Nate feels himself frown. Perhaps that’s the narrative they should have gone with, if that’s what people already believe. “You know I’m not supposed to talk about work.”

Brandon scoffs. “Come on! I can’t believe the government just fell for it. Usually you guys at least pretend to know what you’re doing.”

Nate bristles at his son lumping him together with “the government.” He is, of course, part of it. But he likes to consider his department somewhat independent. Artistic even. The rebel branch of an arcane institution.

Briefly, he allows himself to remember himself at his son’s age. Fingers blackened with charcoal, his imagination filling sketch pad after sketch pad, mostly with bodies: reclining bodies, bodies bent, bodies standing or entwined. Sometimes, animals: a lion, a horse, a leopard. He could forget everything when he drew. Let go of anything. So he did it often. Why did he need to do so much letting go? He’d have given anything to keep doing it. But art school hadn’t been a realistic choice for him. Media was the next best thing.

“I’m sorry,” Nate says again, arranging his face into something neutral. “There’s just no way for me to go away right now.”

Brandon pushes back his chair. It scrapes against the wooden floor. He gets up and leaves without another word. After a few moments, the door to his room bangs closed.

Connor pushes around the food on his plate. “Well,” he says.

“Sorry. I could have handled this better.”

His husband looks at him. “Handled?”

“You know what I mean.”

“We’re your family. Not a wild beast to be handled.”

“I know. I’m sorry. It’s work. Things are pretty insane.”

Connor’s expression softens, but only marginally. Nate can tell though. He can always tell. Knows his husband’s face like a language: its inflections, its grammar, its idiolectal quirks. He’s fluent in it.

“How so?” Connor asks. “You’re not talking about those videos, are you? Because Brandon is probably right. Those are obviously fake.”

“You’ve seen them?”

“Sure. Who hasn’t?”

Nate thinks of them. The bright birds. The quiet people below. Shuts his eyes to them.

But his husband and son are right. They must be. The videos are part of the new game release, not real, and they just fell for them like amateurs. Right? Except, is that any better? After all, he and his family of all people know what the virtual can do to the real.

Nate gets up, walks around the table, hugs his husband’s shoulders from behind. “Right,” he says. “Of course.” Connor turns to face him. “But maybe you should pack a bag, just in case. For you and Brandon. Be ready to leave quickly.”

Connor’s face is serious now, though there’s still some disbelief left over in the corners of his mouth. That’s good. That’s better. Better not to lose hope this early. Cling to something, anything.

Connor stands up and embraces him. He kisses his cheek, caresses his short-cropped hair the way he likes it. “And you?” Connor asks.

“I’ll be right behind you. Of course.”

“Okay.” A pause. Then, his husband whispers in his ear before walking away. “You think you’re the dependable one, don’t you?” he asks. “Even though half the time you have no idea what’s going on in your own home.”

Nate doesn’t know what to say to that. There’s nothing to say. His cheeks burn. It’s true, after all. Though he tries, it’s true. Has always been true.

Nate visits the site in the industrial zone with a small team, even though that’s not part of their job description. He made an argument about it being important to the authenticity and integrity of their reporting. People will buy anything if you say it with authority.

The place has been under a microscope ever since it was identified. Forensics, animal behaviourists, soil experts. Probably others whose specialties he doesn’t even know exist.

Marion is there, too, standing closer to him than she has to. He finds her presence comforting and tries not to think about that. There are no birds in the sky, no deer. His face is numb. They walk the perimeter of the warehouse, which is what the building turns out to be. Their footfalls don’t make sound, as if someone turned the world’s volume down. “Do you hear that?” he asks Marion, stomping his foot on the ground.

“No,” she says. She scans the area, the expression on her face alert but calm. “It’s like someone put a silencer on the earth,” she adds, and he thinks that would only be possible if the earth were a firearm, and isn’t that a weird thought to carry around in one’s head?

On the ground under where the triangle had been, there’s a circle with a radius of about ten feet where the ground looks different. The video footage had shown blurry figures moving along its perimeter. They looked like people, except they were flickering, as if they were but projections, disturbed by static or a bad connection. Then the figures fell to the ground and the deer approached, proceeded to devour them. There’s no one here now, and nothing left of those people. A neat kind of carnage.

A wooded area stands just beyond the warehouse. He imagines deer looking back at them from the edge of those woods, muzzles bloodied, eyes indecipherable.

Someone takes samples from the area within the circle. He approaches and pinches the earth there, gloveless. “Don’t,” Marion protests, fishing a pair of gloves out of her backpack.

He does. Rubs the soil between his fingers. It feels chalky. Like flour, or finely ground bone.

Resigned, Marion puts away the gloves she waved in front of his face. “What do you think?” she asks.

He shrugs. Not his area of expertise. Not his department, even. They should be more concerned with the poetics of this thing. He is. His mind supplies surrealist aesthetics: a world flattened and two-dimensional, a dryly lit corner between buildings, overseen by the shadow of a cypress tree. Something out of de Chirico. The circle as a portal, or a place of baptism, a dark precursor. Ideology at work, turning people into food for unheimlich animals.

“Some sort of weapon?” Marion presses.

“Maybe,” Nate says. “Or we’ve been made into unwitting extras to some promo material.”

“What?” Marion asks.

“Nothing.” I do need a vacation, he thinks. A road trip, those lakes. I want a drink. With a bloody umbrella in it.

“There are more reports of animals behaving weirdly,” Marion says, glancing at her phone. “In the city.”

“Weirdly how?”

“Rabid red foxes trying to get into houses. Pikas harassing hikers. Giraffes charging at cars on A5.”

He looks at her, eyebrow raised, he can’t help it. “Giraffes?”

“Zoo escape artists, apparently.” She pauses. “The working theory is that whatever was released into the atmosphere is affecting animals.”

“And humans?”

Marion shrugs. “I feel fine?” Again, not their area of expertise.

“Right,” he says. He can’t shake the feeling that he’s stepped into… something. A painting. Someone’s imagination. Did they all put on their VR headsets back at the office and he just doesn’t remember?

He’s still thinking about de Chirico when they’re asked to leave. The containment team has arrived; that’s how it goes. First the science, then the containing. They speak in jargon, in code, in a secret language consisting entirely of acronyms. Their boots crunch relentlessly across the ground, their white plastic suits glint in the sun. They’re barrelling into action, sweeping the area of its vestiges, like a military operation.

On the way back to the office, the car passes groups of people protesting, demanding clarity, peace, a ceasefire even, though no shots have been fired. He thinks of invisible chemical agents in the air, descending on them, on him, on his husband and son, on everyone, doing their inconspicuous damage, effecting their tiny change. Someone throws a rock at the window he’s leaning against, and he pulls back, startled.

“I’m sorry about that. Are you okay, sir?” the driver asks, and Nate nods. The rock left behind a tiny scuff on the glass, like the footprint of a snowflake. “I’ll take us through a less crowded route.” The vehicle swerves abruptly, and they disappear into the network of alleyways that spiderweb out of the main arteries of the city. His face is still numb. He touches it, feels nothing. Is it his face that can’t feel, or his fingers?

He thinks the person who threw the rock had the head of a fox. He imagines himself walking into the office and announcing he’s solved the mystery, that what’s happening is the game is spilling over into the real world, consuming it. He imagines himself believing it. Would he be laughed off, or believed? He’d be laughed off, even if, deep down, he were believed.

Back at work, there is a meeting he didn’t call for. His team are discussing the soil. “Not our expertise,” he reminds them. The worst thing the Media branch of the Defence Department can do is fall for their own lies. Even when they’re not actually lies.

The guys seem undeterred.

“Carbon-dated to the mid-nineteenth century,” one of them says. “And there’s some other stuff they didn’t expect mixed in.”

“Bones?” Nate asks, the feel of that powder still on his skin, as if embedded in the grooves of his fingertips.

The guy looks at him, eyebrows arched, with something like admiration mixed with suspicion. “How did you know?”

“Lucky guess.”

“Unlucky, more like. Yes, bones. But, get this.” The guy pauses for effect. “They could identify some of them.”

“Oh?”

“Yes! There’s a database of historical figures’ DNA, obtained as part of a big research project or other. And it turns out some of the DNA found in that circle belongs to famous people. Artists, musicians, and the like.”

“Like who?”

The guy brings up the list on the screen and reads out the ones he recognizes. “Goya. Blake. Dalí. Woolf. Lovecraft, that racist.”

He spots de Chirico’s among the names, and the feeling of having stepped into someone’s imagination returns. Here are all their artistic influences, he thinks, ground down into fine dust and thrown back into the world.

With this feeling, the headache returns too.

Before he heads home, he gets on the phone with someone from Defence. They tell him to keep delivering a steady stream of reassurances to the public. “It’s all under control, the government is taking care of things, just follow our instructions, etc.,” the person intones, as if that’s all there is to his job. Something a five-year-old could do, and that not even a five-year-old would buy.

“But is it?” Nate asks.

A pause on the other side of the line. “Is it what?”

“Under control.”

The person laughs. “We’ll both pretend you didn’t ask this,” they say and hang up.

He finds Connor sitting at the table with Brandon, drinking tea from mismatched mugs he doesn’t remember having seen before. They look up as he enters. He thinks of the deer, the terrible red, glistening. “What’s this?” Nate asks, “Some kind of secret meeting I wasn’t invited to?” meaning to sound mischievous, playful even, but then his phone vibrates with a message from Mark: “I can’t get hold of Sloane. I’m worried. It’s been days. She went into…”

“You can’t go away with us, fine,” his son says. “But can you at least stop looking at your phone for one second?” He sounds angry, his voice hoarse, as if he’d been shouting, or crying.

Something cold spreads through his torso, starting at the navel. “I’m sorry,” Nate says, his phone already face-down on the table. “It’s just my friends—” Mark and Sloane, he wants to say, but then he’s unsure if Brandon even knows his friends’ names—“something’s wrong—”

Brandon downs his tea in one go and leaves the table before his father can finish his sentence. Connor shakes his head and follows their son.

Nate stays where he is, standing, counting his breaths until the cold feeling dissipates. It only takes a couple of minutes. Then he retreats to the bedroom, sits on the bed without showering, and listens to his husband and son’s hushed voices for a while. When Connor returns, he looks tired, not mad.

“Is he all right?” Nate asks.

Connor nods. He climbs on the bed and they hold each other, without words, until they fall asleep.

But then Nate starts awake again. Checks his phone—not even thirty minutes have passed. There are no more messages from Mark. He imagines the world of their game, the wild vegetation, the broken skyline of the city. The children in their masks.

Careful not to wake Connor, he slips out of bed. The air is chilly on his bare skin. He goes to the window, gazes at the dark expanse outside. There are fires near the city center. The distant sound of sirens. Someone’s already taking care of things.

He puts his fingers on the glass. It feels like nothing. Not even cold. He wishes there were a voice in his heart, like there is in the game, to tell him what to do, who he is. Other things, too; something terrifying or comforting, it doesn’t matter. Anything other than this quiet.

Connor is fast asleep. Nate leaves the room and tiptoes to his son’s bedroom, cracks the door to peek at him. The boy is on his side, his face turned away. Nate can only see the back of his head. He realizes this with some amount of relief, followed by shame. He can’t look at him. Can’t look at his son without shrinking with guilt, with how could you, how did you not. Still, all he wants to do is look at him. That perfection which carries a small, imperfect part of him inside it.

Brandon calls Connor Dad and him Father, like he’s some kind of Victorian figure, distant and severe. Nate doesn’t feel severe, but maybe he is. People are judged by their actions, after all, not their unexpressed inner complexities. Not by the unspoken monologues of their hearts.

Brandon’s abuser was someone the boy met online, playing a game. He doesn’t know what game. Backgammon, maybe, or cards. Nate didn’t ask. Abuser is a word he took a long time to get used to saying, at least in his head—they don’t talk about it out loud. Still, the word does not feel quite right, though he doesn’t know which one would. This is one situation where reaching for the right words seems out of his depth. Instead, he thinks: I should have known he was unhappy. I should have seen the signs. I should have been the kind of father who notices these things. I should have blocked his internet access. I should have taken away his phone. I should have taken him to an island, raised him there. I should have taught him to fish. I should have listened more talked more loved him more I should have—

He wakes on the couch, a blanket arranged on top of him, tucked carefully between his body and the cushions. Connor is speaking with someone in the kitchen. Nate can’t tell who it is, or what they’re talking about.

There’s a message from Mark on his phone. He reads it. It’s the ramblings of a man who is no longer well: “Update: the plague is making everyone, everything, hungry, even the buildings. They’re eating the space around them. I saw one gnaw at the sky, saw people eating clouds. The world is so simple. Do you see? Anything can devour you, so you must adapt. There’s equality only in consumption. You must know your predator and change to meet it. You are what eats you.”

There’s also a message from Marion. People are disappearing, it says. The city is emptying out. The rest are looting the closed shops. There are reports of gangs of masked children running around, breaking into homes, and for a moment he thinks he’s still reading Mark’s message, but no, this is real. This is here. An old man was found tied to a tree. When they asked him who’d done that to him, he said it was a boy with the head of a wolf.

Nate puts down his phone and joins Connor in the kitchen. “Who were you talking to?” he asks.

Connor shrugs. “A friend,” he says. He wonders why he doesn’t specify which friend, then remembers he doesn’t actually know who his husband talks to every day. And Connor has never met Mark and Sloane.

Connor gestures towards his own phone. “Have you seen these?” He holds up the screen. It’s a picture of one of those bird triangles, glowing in the sky. It’s right downtown. The clouds seem pixelated, and the edges of the buildings are blurry, as if they’re fusing together, but, below, he recognizes the exact spots. That’s the pizza place they used to take their son to when he was a kid. That’s the park where he first kissed his husband, his hand cupping the back of his head.

“Some people claim they can see things beyond the clouds, marvellous things,” Connor continues. Is it him, or does his husband sound dreamy? Not terrified or worried, but calm. Almost eager.

Nate takes Connor’s phone and scrolls down. His feed is full of pictures and videos of everything happening, reality breaking down all around them. There’s no containment here. No spinning left to do. Maybe there never was. People are linking the events to the game. At least someone else said it. One asks: “What if this is an invitation? What if it’s better on the other side?”

“Did you pack a bag?” he asks Connor.

“Yes?”

“Get Brandon. We should go.”

It takes a few moments too long for Connor to respond. He puts down his coffee. “Brandon’s not here,” he says finally.

“What? Where is he?”

Connor looks away. “He said he’d go downtown with friends.”

“Downtown? And you let him? There’s going to be a curfew in a couple of hours.”

Connor gives him a look that could cut through glass. “There’s no letting, you know. He’s not a child.”

He is, though. A child. People don’t magically become adults when they turn eighteen. Nate says nothing. Studies the kitchen table. The grain of the wood, the grooves on it. He feels as if he’s never seen this table before. “We’ll go to the office,” he says finally. “Okay? If we’re going downtown, it’s probably one of the safest places to be. We’ll try to find Brandon from there. Then we can all get out of the city.”

Before his husband goes to fetch the bag he packed, he caresses Nate’s cheek.

Something shudders in his chest at the touch. He hadn’t realized how much he needed this morsel of tenderness, how close to shattering he is.

“It will be fine,” Connor says. He’s almost smiling now. “Don’t worry.”

And just like that, just for a moment, magically, he doesn’t.

As they leave together, Nate looks back at the house. And though it has not really changed, though it still looks exactly like his house, he has the strange sensation of unfamiliarity. As if the house has suddenly grown uncanny, or is now a copy of itself. It reminds him of the time he saw an X-ray of his own torso. The alien sacs of his lungs, the shadow of his heart. Things he possessed, things he was, even, but that were not truly his.

They take the back roads to avoid riot police. On the way downtown, there’s another message from Mark. A voice message this time. Nate plays it for Connor. “Something’s happening, man,” Mark’s high-pitched voice says. “We’re lost. I don’t know what to do. There’s this voice in my heart now, whispering all the time of things I don’t understand. Beautiful, terrible things.” The message is interrupted by static, ending with a voice that no longer sounds like Mark’s: “I think I’m sick. I got it, whatever it is. The buildings are hungry, and the plague can speak.”

His heart races again. He avoids Connor’s eyes, afraid of what deranged calm he might find there. He puts on the radio and focuses on the road instead. The show host’s theory about what’s happening is what most people seem to be thinking now: that the terrorist attack and the much-anticipated game release are one and the same. The theory is supported by the fact that some of the game developers have been arrested, though information about their identities or the charges against them is spotty. Fragments of an interview with one of them, purportedly predating the arrests, slip through the radio.

“Technology can save you,” the developer says, voice distorted.

“How can technology save us?” the interviewer asks.

“It shows you where the seams are,” the distorted voice says.

“But is this enough?” the interviewer’s voice asks.

The rest of the interview is lost to static.

“Such facile bullshit,” Nate mumbles as they pass a flaming trash can. There seems to be one every few hundred yards.

“I’m sure that’s not even the real guy,” Connor says, as if that means anything anymore, as if the world is not past authenticity already, as if it hasn’t been so for years.

“You’re probably right,” he says. He turns off the radio.

They pass a handful of running people. They’ve seen groups like them before. They’re holding baseball bats and shovels, though they have yet to see anyone digging. Soon they run into a barricade of sandbags and pavement slabs. They have to continue on foot.

“It’s not far,” he says, and realizes Connor has never been to his office. How can that be true? He’s been sharing his life with his family. But what has he been sharing?

There’s screaming in one of the ransacked shops. He wants to go, see what’s happening, but he knows they need to carry on, get to where they’re going. Connor doesn’t even flinch.

“You’re so calm,” he tells his husband. It’s not an accusation, he doesn’t think. Just an observation.

Connor smiles. “Would you rather I freak out?”

“No,” he says. “Of course not.” They don’t stop walking. “I just… I don’t get how you do it.”

“You were always the one trying to control things, not me,” Connor says. “You thought the solution to what happened to Brandon, what happened to us, was to hold on tighter.” He looks him in the eye without stopping.

“Yes,” Nate says. He has to say yes.

“And I thought the solution was to surrender.” Connor gestures at the world around them. The burning, unravelling world, the rioting world. “People have been looking for an escape for so long. Maybe someone finally figured out how to give them what they want.”

Is this what I want? he wonders. To escape? Find a hole in the sky, sneak through?

But they’ve arrived. He swipes them through the mouth of the building and guides Connor up the stairs.

They run into Marion in the corridor outside his office. She stares at Connor for a few moments, then introduces herself too enthusiastically. She then forgets about his husband and turns all her attention on him.

“Donald was arrested,” she says. “Something about a leak. Now they’re looking for the game designers.”

“They found them,” Nate says. “Or some of them.”

“This is really happening, isn’t it?” Marion asks. “It’s the game. That’s the invasion.”

Yes, he wants to say. Except it’s not really an invasion. Not a spilling or a rupture, but a consuming. We are inside it. It is larger than us. We are within its organism, waiting to be digested.

He nods. Marion looks past him, at the stairs.

“Where are you going to go?” he asks her.

“Home,” she says. “I think? I don’t feel like being here anymore. So I’m going home.” Then she flickers before his eyes. A momentary thing; she’s there one second, then gone, then back again, thin lines bisecting her face, trailing from the tips of her hair.

“Are you all right?” Nate asks, fighting the instinct to take a step back.

“Oh yes,” she says. She sounds cheerful. “Yes, of course. Just coming down with something, I guess.” She touches his shoulder lightly, glances at Connor again. Then she’s gone.

His phone blinks with another message from Mark. Nate plays it for both of them. There’s no reason to exclude Connor anymore. There was never any reason. “I found Sloane,” the message says. “She’s got a horse mask on. I can’t take it off. And she’s sick, like she’s not all there, not all the time. I can’t trust my eyes anymore. I’ve tried logging off, but I can’t. You’re supposed to go to those triangles in the forest and pray to the glowing birds. That’s how you disconnect since the update. I tried, it’s not working. But maybe that doesn’t matter anymore.” He pauses, and in that pause they can hear his ragged breath, like something grinding against metal. There’s a rhythm to it, something electronic in the hiss of it. “The voice is getting louder,” Mark says with his metallic throat.

The message ends. Nate looks at his phone, then switches it off and puts it in his pocket. Something explodes nearby. The building feels alive with a shudder, something breathing, beams cracking. A rumbling, hungry thing that could collapse, devour those within.

“Now what?” Connor asks.

“We should look for Brandon. I’ll go out. You can wait here.”

Connor puts his hand on Nate’s arm.

Nate steps back, takes a second to look at his husband. Connor’s face is blank and beautiful. He’s still calm, not worried. Eager, even; as if they’re waiting for something to begin. Nate finds the feeling infectious.

“I want to see it,” Connor says. “The world. Don’t you?” Connor squeezes his hand. “Let’s go see it,” he says. “Together, from above.”

Nate doesn’t have to say yes.

He leads his husband to the roof. Up the stairs, hundreds of them, until they emerge into the bright air, the triangled, birded sky. Together, holding hands, they walk to the edge of the roof and gaze out at the city. A lot of it is burning, but a lot of it is green, too, so much greener than before. Hundreds of people are in the streets, crowding, looking up at the same things they are. He remembers the Enchanted Caverns of his youth, the common things, the unspoken things. The sound of bending and creaking fills the air. The clouds reach for the ground. Far in the distance, the sea has stopped moving. The world’s colours have slipped into a soft palette, pixelating around the edges.

Down below, they spot someone that looks like their son. He has a mask on: a wildcat, or maybe a maned wolf. He’s running in a pack of children and deer.

Nate wants to get him, to chase after him, but Connor puts his arm on his shoulders and says, “Let him. He’ll be all right. He’s been all right for a while.”

Is that true? Nate has been so worried. So scared, so ashamed. Was he so caught up in his own guilt that he didn’t notice? There’s a lot he could have done differently. Should have. But nothing more that he can do. All he feels anymore is tired.

“I failed to protect him,” he says. “I did that.” Even the guilt is muted, now, like the world.

“Yeah,” Connor replies. “We both did that.” Connor pauses, cups his cheek like they used to when they were first in love. “But he’s fine.”

Something bursts open through the sky right then, a flower of ash and scarred flesh. Next to it, a prismatic bird pins itself, wings open, as if in a display case at some nature museum of the future. The clouds burst, raining .txt files.

Connor gasps. “Can you hear it?” he asks. He clutches his heart, holds his breath, as if to listen to something more clearly. “There’s a voice.”

Nate can’t hear it, no. He wishes he could, even if it means he’ll be consumed. But he’s being consumed anyway, isn’t he? Everything is, the whole world, and has been, for so long. He gazes at the city below, the people coming together. Are they all right? Does it make a difference, if they’re not? There’s no more could-have, should-have. Nothing more to do.

The sky convulses, peristaltic.

He puts his hand on his chest, like Connor did moments ago. His heart is quiet. And, he thinks, it’s easy, so easy, to be eaten. That’s letting go, too, isn’t it?

Why did he ever think letting go was hard?

“Yes,” he says. “I can hear it. I can.”

Publisher’s Note: Please enjoy this short story by Premee Mohamed, who, coincidentally(!!), has a book out from Psychopomp on February 11th. It’s called One Message Remains, and it contains one brand new novella, two brand new novelettes, and one previously published novelette all set in the same world.

You can preorder it here (now with Kindle version!)

Here is the shape of our story, the three of us: an ellipsis (from a particular fixed point we flew away from each other and then rejoined at another point; and then we had you).

Here is the shape of our doom: an ellipsis (on its way, in its thousands and thousands).

It also means: dot dot dot, an uncertainty, a trailing off.

But you are a little young for all this. You are so young that your soft and hard palate are not fully developed and you still have a toddler’s charming rhotacism. Everyone keeps saying probably and you say pwobably and I think that is the only thing your mother still laughs at these days. Because, let’s be fair, there isn’t much.

For grownups, I mean. You laugh all day, and I would never have known that before signing up to be the one who stayed home with you. When the atmospheric noises begin and the sirens outside start to wail, we get a special treat—I turn on Mackenzie Webster Can Do It! and I crank the volume.

Together we dance to the songs and we watch the Webster family wreck and fix their bright untidy lives. You turn to me at egregious pratfalls and gasp, “Dada! Dada look!” to make sure I got the joke. To make sure I’m laughing. The sirens make me want to scream, but I laugh.

Too little for daycare, my darling son, so we are raising you on cartoons and music, playdates with the dogs next door and the middle-aged ladies on the other side; I don’t know if it’s good for normal development, but Mama says we’re all going to have to give up on normal if we want to stay sort of sane these days, and that applies to everybody. It’s tough to bring up kids at the end of the world. Who knew? Not us.

It’s funny how many of the scientists at this complex don’t have kids. Or don’t have kids any more—older folks, brisk power-walkers (we see them in the morning from the kitchen window), white-haired, friendly, with every accent in the world. They pop multivitamins casually while they talk to you, like cough drops. Their kids are all in their twenties and thirties.

Your Mama and I aren’t planning for a sibling, my son. Not even a dog. Not that you’d mind: you are so little you think the whole world revolves around you. It does, a bit. You were one of the last babies born before the warning shot, just three months old when it happened. You won’t remember the weeks we spent in the shelter—everyone wanted to hold you, snuggle you when you cried, walk you up and down the faintly luminescent hallways while Mama fretted and Dada slept.

After the impact, the kind of people who were able to stop having children did stop and they haven’t started again. It’s all too unsure.

Here is what your Mama is doing at the institute: writing things like statistical probability and impact severity on the big crackling displays. Drawing curved lines with her index finger while people nod or sob. Risk assessment is likelihood X consequence. This can be numbers or it can be colours or it can be other categories—for example, groupings related to proportions of the population at existential risk.

Everyone keeps saying probably. Everyone keeps saying existential risk is a threat to continuing existence, not related to a certain quality of life.

Your Mama sleeps in her office sometimes. They all do it. She calls home after you’re asleep (I will tell you this again if you get older) and in my sock feet I softly take the phone into your room, because she doesn’t like the moiré effect of pointing it at the baby monitor. We are funny about some technologies and not others, just like you.

Our home country, which you have never seen, arrested and deported and fired and surveilled all its scientists—like your Mama, and not like me. When the warning shot came, I was a graphic designer. I was hurt, a bit, that all my work dried up; but then I suppose you don’t need that many posters for the apocalypse.

It was all right. She had already come back to me, and we moved a few times to keep our work visas, and then we settled here, with its clear air and its telescopes and its clusters of weird science in every valley: here the synchrotrons, here the cyclotrons, here the eyes peering out at the universe like a spider in a crevice.

She says things like The seeing is good tonight, but no one’s looking any more. That’s all math and distant telescopes sending back numbers, spectra, temperatures, sounds. They look at readouts, not stars.

We came up with a snappy name for the warning shot. We don’t have one for what’s coming.

For a while our feet didn’t touch the ground; then every flight had to be grounded and our feet never left it. But no one’s feet did, so that was all right.

And the whole world, my son, came together, just like the song we sing when we pick up your toys—they came together and unearthed the living, buried the dead, scrubbed the air, built the tidal turbines and the wind farms, screwed into the earth for geothermal energy, built the aquaculture towers to grow the produce we couldn’t grow without sun. We saw blue skies again. We congratulated ourselves on not going the way of the dinosaurs. We sent planes back up.

And then someone said What’s that?

Listen. Man to man. Your Mama and I broke up in graduate school. We were walking clichés—the high-energy, high-ambition nerd and the weird English major (soon to be dropout) with the Byron quotes and the silly hat. We agreed to stay friends and then she didn’t speak to me again for seven years.

Your Mama does not know what the word reverence means. Possibly literally. I don’t know if they talk about it in planetary astrophysics. Maybe they should. Maybe not, though, because I will feel it all on her behalf, so that she can work. I want us to be the safe place she lands when she comes home. I want to hand you to her and remember the moment the way she doesn’t and the way you can’t.

I remember how things feel; she remembers how they were. Between the two of us we can usually cobble together something fairly accurate. I forget who I used to be fairly regularly. So does she. But together we know exactly who we are and why. And then we added you: early but perfect, apparently too stunned for several days to even cry, just staring around yourself as if you had blown in from Kansas and seen colour for the first time.

When she came back to me she said sometimes, lying in my arms in the tiny apartment, “Was it like this? I don’t remember it being like this.” Sleepy, smiling. Happy to be back. We were stilled then, temporarily. We were at rest.

What is she doing there at the institute? I’ll never understand the math. I know there will be more impact bodies—we’ve stopped arguing over whether to call them comets or cometoids or asteroids or asterites—that much we all know now. I know Jupiter’s gravity has for many billions of years been pulling these things away from the other planets in the solar system, and letting others through, and that Earth has been lucky.

I know sometimes Jupiter does the opposite of that. I know things are coming our way, in tens of thousands, most likely. We don’t know the number very precisely. It’s hard to fight what you don’t know, it’s hard to guess, sometimes you hunger to know for sure for sure even if the answer is bad.

Your Mama wants to be Jupiter for us. Keep anything bad far away. She has become someone I barely recognize: at all times, all, she is posed and poised like someone getting ready to throw a punch. A meaningful one, with all her meager weight behind it. That is her body language now. Oh, she’s ready to fight, ready to kill—she needs only a target, and I want to hold her sometimes and say I’m sorry. I’m sorry there’s no target for you. For the thousands like you. There are too many targets. One fist won’t land.

She is the sword. I am something else: not mystical shield or healing sheath but even less of narrative note, not even given a name in passing. I am the bowl of oil and sand that cleans the blade. Keeps it shining.

Maybe we are all something in the story, though, not just those of us married to the fighters. I read somewhere that the Manhattan Project employed a hundred and twenty-five thousand people at its peak, and maybe twice that in support staff. But saving the world must call for more than that. Maybe every hand, every mind. Maybe me (I am not sure) making beef fauxganoff and making sure it’s hot when she staggers home. Maybe you (I am not sure) contributing little more than perfect curls (how?!) and laughter that snorts when you start and you can’t stop.

Nobody wants to be unsure. We can all deceive ourselves about intent and we can do it as much as we want; but even if there is no path ahead, we go on. Even when we know we might put a foot wrong, we go on. The next step after that might be right. Or more right.

Where hope lives is uncertainty. We never throw ourselves into battle for a sure thing. And you, my son, with the name we gave you that means something different in four languages, you too are hope. Let the world live for that, let it hold up sword and shield for that.

What does pwobable mean? I spend a lot of time on the rug now, down at your level. When the world ends I want to be looking into your eyes.

If you enjoyed that story, you’ll LOVE Premee’s new collection, One Message Remains; 200 pages of new stories set in a morally ambiguous world of war and magic. Support small press publishing and grab your copy today!

Credits:

Author – Premee Mohamed

Editor – E. Catherine Tobler

Copy Editor – Annika Barranti Klein

Art – inkshark

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Future Archives: The Burned Letter of Nima Bahari of the Kupokea People from after the After

I write this letter because I do not have words to say, do not know how else to name what has occurred in the last few weeks or days or hours. I do not know which would be the most honest answer except it does not matter. She is gone and it is my fault. I write because we promised each other if one of us transitioned before the other we would write ourselves into memory like the storyteller from millennia ago said: “Everything you touch you change, everything you change changes you.”

I write because it is just like that. She was here and then she was not and everything is changed. This letter will be burned after I write the last word. I will burn this and use it to feed the fire that will burn them…

#

First Years After

When the Wageni first come, they are birds that sing a song we do not understand, but we are a curious people, so we want to know more. Their drones buzz and flutter and spin around us like magic. It is a dance of wonder and delight. Our children laugh and squeal and try to chase the flying things that are always so far out of reach. On the first day it is only a few hours of curiosity before they leave, disappearing into the stars that brought them to us. That first evening, we throw a party. We throw parties for everything curious. This is what we have learned from dying often. Celebrate everything, and we do.

***

First Years Before

I am thirteen years old and in my solar systems class when I reveal to my best friend what I was before I became a person. We are deskies, which means we are close enough that our legs graze each other’s hairs when we swing them. Ms. Namu has the ears of a hawk—she probably was a hawk in a past life—so we do not speak. We pass notes back and forth, mastering the art of holding paper like feathers, soft soft.

I heard my tata and mum speaking about my past life.

Ehe? What did they say?

You first Nima.

What do you mean me first?
You’re the one who started this conversation.

I know you know what you were.
Tell me…
Pleeeeeeeeaaaaassssseeeee.

Ohhh I know what you were doing now.
You were just trying to get me to be so curious about your gossip
that I would tell you all my secrets.

Tuni frowns before scribbling hard and fast.

best friends are not supposed to have secrets.

Tuni, come on. I told you I would tell you in due time.

Okay fine. Then I’ll also tell you in due time.

I open the note, crack a smile, and nod once at Tuni before turning my attention back to Ms. Namu. I start counting backward in my head from a hundred. I get to fifty-four before Tuni cracks, passing me another note under her desk.

A lion.

I look to Tuni and she curls her fingers and her face, imitating a soundless growl. It is the most spectacular thing I have ever seen. I can’t help it. I laugh. It is a soft laugh, barely even a chuckle, but Ms. Namu the hawk will have none of it today. “Nima and Tuni! Detention now.” I feel bad because I have gotten Tuni in trouble, so I scribble a quick note before we walk out, heads down, avoiding the shame we might receive in other people’s eyes. I slip it between Tuni’s fingers, knowing it will be the key to her forgiveness. When she opens it, she will read in my horrible handwriting…

A star… I was a star that exploded.

**

Many Years After

“Nima! Niiiiiiiimmmmaaaaaaaaaaa!” I am removed from my reverie by Tuni’s voice, which is almost as big and tall as she is. Her locs fall all the way down her back, a mane of interconnected fibers so thick and lush, most of the lockers from our tribe go to her for her lion’s secret recipe to strengthen their own hair. Tuni, who was the biggest troublemaker in school, is now on her way to becoming the head educator of our district. Technically she is my supervisor but you would not know. “Lost in the skies again ehh?” She chuckles, showing off the deep dimple in her left cheek. She shakes her head, the beads at the end of her locs clicking in a patterned sound that compliments her laughter.

“Always.” I smile back, not even pretending.

I grab my notebook and pens as she grabs my hand.

“We’re late. And I know you do not care about something as measly as time, Ms. Supernova, but as for me I do not have the luxury of choosing when I will or won’t be somewhere.”

“You’re the one who chose this big fancy job, no?” I scold her, not even bothering to react to the nickname she decided on what feels like lifetimes ago. I have tried to explain to her that there is a difference between the star that is exploding and the supernova after the star has exploded, but she always dismisses it as frivolous details.

“It is all the same,” she says, and how can I argue with that. From the time we are young, we are taught that we are all the same—and yet when I look at my best friend, I am in awe of our differences.

“Why are you in such a hurry to meet these Wageni anyway?” I ask, attempting at sounding tired. “What’s so special ehh? We have had visitors before. It’s always the same thing, people from other planets, curious about our world come and see and eventually they get bored and leave. Always the same.”

Tuni tsks at me. “They want to bring their children to our schools. It is different this time. They want to stay.” 

I roll my eyes as she hurries me along the turquoise seashell-colored corridors of our campus, now empty after the end of the education day. In the distance we can hear voices. The booming voice of Abu, the year-twelve to year-fourteen math teacher, carries as he flatters someone we do not know and cannot see. I groan. Abu is a panderer. He will flutter and titter like a peacock around any person who he thinks has something he wants. In fact, I wonder if he was a peacock in his past life, or a politician. Something slithery, but not a snake, snakes are too good for him. As if he can hear my thoughts when we walk in, he eyes me with a death stare that could transition me on the spot if I were in any way afraid of him. I am not. I ignore Abu and look up at the aging T’cha Sue who is stepping down from the head educator position and making room for Tuni. T’cha Sue, in her yellow flowered matching kitenge blouse and skirt, does not notice me but gives Tuni a small frown of displeasure for our lateness. I feel Tuni’s shame radiate in heat waves. I squeeze her hand and she lets go. It is a small moment. It is a small shame. Both will pass. I shift my gaze to the Wageni, whose presence I had not fully registered. They are tall, straight-backed, big-eyed, soft-mouthed, brown with hints of gold like the dark sand on seashore that shimmers in the sun. The one who speaks to T’cha Sue is their community leader. She wears some kind of uniform that boasts their people’s colors of choice, blue and yellow. I wonder if that is why T’cha Sue wears her yellow suit today and her sapphire earrings. Tuni is already being introduced as the up-and-coming head educator, a star of our people, who over the years has offered creative ways to engage our youngest students with the most innovative knowledge rooted in experience. I am distracted by the flying drone that buzzes around the Wageni, and translates our languages. Ever since their first visit, our children have been fascinated with these little birdlike devices that seem to dance on air. I study the drones, capturing as many details as I can to explain in my next imagination and memory class, already patting myself on the back for the excitement I am sure to receive from my year-eight to year-eleven students. The “what if”s they will derive from the flying robotic contraptions. I don’t notice him at first, the person who will shift everything I know about everything. Hidden behind their community leader, S., a tall woman whose booming voice and big presence suck up the room. I have always been drawn to the ones that hide behind those who want to be seen and as I will come to find out, Totlo has always enjoyed seeing more than being seen.

He coughs, and I notice him looking at me, big eyes and shimmering skin enchanting me. And there is curiosity between us. I can sense the pull of it almost as strong as I sense my own breath. We have been taught to celebrate curiosity. It is a lesson I sometimes put away, but mutual curiosity is harder to ignore. It is a force that draws even those who have sworn off adventure into what they do not yet understand.

“Nima.”

Tuni hisses, and I realize by the way she says my name that it must not be the first time she has tried to get my attention. I plaster on a smile and turn back to the conversation at hand as if I have always been paying attention. “Your memory and imagination class, I am sure you can expound on what I have said about it.” And behind Tuni’s eyes is the plea please don’t ruin this and I always do, no matter how hard I try not to, but you cannot blame a girl for trying. I look straight ahead at the Wageni prime minister.

“All of who we are as a people sits between what we remember being and what we know it is possible to become. The class calls on the specific part of our students’ critical thinking that navigates past and future. It is a nonbinary method insisting that their recall and imagining are both for their individual selves and the collective whole.”

S. looks at me, a shadow traveling over her eyes, an expression I cannot place as the drone translates what I have stumbled through. She breaks into a tight smile. “It sounds like a child’s game. A theory that everything is possible. Does it not breed foolishness?”

“Foolishness?” I incline my head to the side, curious about the translated word that feels misused in this context. I open my mouth to begin an unrehearsed rant, and Tuni squeezes my hand, so I settle for a soft “Nothing curious is foolish.”

S., the Wageni leader, does not even take a breath after hearing my statement before responding. “Daydreaming about what has passed, playing games with what isn’t even here, is a privilege my people have never been afforded.”

I smile. I understand her, but I feel she has not cared to understand me.

“We have teachers of our own.” She says this to T’cha Sue, occasionally glancing at Tuni but never at me. “We will integrate them with yours as we integrate our children into your communities.”

T’cha Sue says, “Of course, we welcome you into our fold, but what you say must be discussed with all of our elders and not just turned into yes.”

S. nods and the people she has come with nod with her. They share an unspoken agreement and the one that I cannot help but stare at stares back at me and without saying a word to each other, we share an unspoken agreement. Our mutual curiosity will be fed.

**

Many Years Before

When we are sixteen, our marks begin to form. For some all at once, for others slowly over years, especially the ones with difficult past lives they would rather forget. The marks are tattoos sketched by the air into our skin. Seven is my number, seven lives before the one I live, seven versions of me somewhere in the universe. I have always become too big for the thing I am supposed to be, burning out quickly. Before I was a star I was a cat, I think, the whisker mark makes me out to be. It was a short life. I imagine I hated to feel confined and would go where I did not know how to go. The mark before that one is covered by the sea, a whale down deep underneath the waves. In this life I am drawn to the ocean’s edge, constantly searching for kin I have forgotten who may have forgotten me.

Tuni is on life twenty, which is not a surprise to me. She has always felt older, even though in this life I came a year before her. I have teased her often for being more adjusted to the world we were born into, instinctively surer of how to stay away from the things that will hurt us. Of course the explosion in me gravitated toward her. Before a lion, she was nyasi that grew long and untouched in the grasslands of the West. Her nineteen marks are elegant, daintily etched, except for one that is not fully formed. It is like a shadow of a life that does not want to reveal itself. She does not let me touch it—it hurts, I think—and she does not want to remember, so I tell her we do not have to. We are here now with this life as best friends and that is more than enough. I say, I would explode a thousand times if it means I get to be here with you again, and she smiles and calls me her big Ms. Nova.

***

Many Years After

The boy who is not just a boy looks at the chief captain with something akin to worry. An expression that has found familiarity on his face as the years have aged her. “You look tired. Sit.”

He offers her a glass of water in her cabin on their ship, which she has refused to abandon, even though their people have been offered ample accommodation on the planet they have begun to occupy. In the galaxy files it has been numbered and categorized as planet 014969. Its people refer to it as Kupokea: to receive.

Commander S. laughed at the irony when she first heard that, considering it was to be their new home. She now paces back and forth in the sparsely decorated room, being that she is the kind of person who has learned through brutal experience not to keep meaningful things in plain sight. The room contains a singular bookshelf, a double-sized bed, and a desk and chair. No pictures, no memories. The only sentimental items Commander S. has time for are her people.

“What does the word say?” she asks as she takes the glass offered to her and gulps down the water in one breath. Even the goddamn water is magical on this planet. She shakes her head in disbelief as her taste buds adjust, still not used to the pureness of clean river water. She hopes she never gets used to it.

Totlo asks, “Which part?”

“The promise in the Word. Say it.”

He obliges, voice soft. “You shall dispossess the inhabitants of the land and dwell in it, for I have given you the planet of berries and honey to inhabit.”

Commander S. walks toward the leftover breakfast tray by the tall brown bookshelf mostly filled with navigation and planetary geographical texts. Books about the universe from times past that were more theoretical than practical, many debunked long since. And yet Commander S. reads and rereads these books almost as diligently as she reads the sacred texts of the Word.

The tray holds a pot of milk and a bowl of blackberries dipped in honey, the same breakfast she has asked for every day since their arrival. She takes a small silver spoon and collects as much honey as it can hold, then she deposits the honey in the tall glass of milk and stirs diligently.

“Does this feel like home to you?” She asks Totlo, who responds after a few heartbeats.

“…They are a very welcoming people.”

“That is not the question I asked.” Commander S. brings the sweetened milk to her lips slowly. Unlike the water she had gulped down, she lets small sips sit on her tongue, savoring the creamy texture.

Totlo responds with a question of his own. “What is home? How would I know what home feels like if I have never felt it?”

“Home is freedom. The land is ours to own, use, extract from. If only your mother were here to see what is possible. It is disappointing, what we could have been earlier.” The commander laughs, looking outside the tinted window of her room in the ship at the expanse of the land before her. “But this, dear niece, is cause for celebration not grief. A gift on our terms. Harvest blackberries from the fields we have been given. Draw up a list of minerals that we can use as currency. Our work is just beginning.”

Totlo does not respond.

**

Many Years Before

There is a song the children sing when they play their games, about a woman who came from the stars.

Kumbuka kumbuko
Kumbuka kumbuko
She loved him,
The man who did not die
The man who she was meant to kill
She loved him, so he could not die
Kumbuka kumbuko
Kumbuka kumbuko

And Now

He finds me. I knew he would, or rather I sat with my curiosity, letting myself linger on the brown eyes, curly not-quite-kinky hair, and dusty skin. When the memory interrupted my lesson planning, I let it. When the desire to know carried into my dreaming, I welcomed it. I’ve read books from other planets that called this feeling a crush. Though the curiosity of crushes was not always mutual.

When Totlo—whose name I do not yet know—finds me I am sketching on the common bridge by the water, one of my many favorite spots to be. I sense him more before I see him, sense the hesitation and indecisiveness that guides the soft steps on the stone cobble staircase on my left. I immediately know it is one of them and not one of us. My people announce themselves, almost always if not always distinct. And my past life marks do not glow in the recognition of kin.

“Come sit,” I say and do not look up, focused on shading in the shadows of the horizon line. It is harder without color to get it just right, but it is a new challenge I am working on with my students. Imagining our world without color. This one stretches their imagination more than most, though I have a strong suspicion that Tito and Tamera, the twins who were born seeing every color but blue and green, will find this particular assignment exhilarating. Already, I have heard Tito whisper about doing a presentation on a colorless sky, and Tamera is thinking about presenting on the forest without green.

As for the rest… I erase the off-kilter wave in my drawing and rework it… I have to make sure that this is the most alive piece I have ever drawn. I hear the gasp behind me as the mgeni’s scent fills my nostrils. He smells like lavender. I breathe it in, letting my chest expand.

“How did you…?” He sits down beside me. “This is incredible!” The little drone bird around him translates, and I can tell from the inflections in his voice, in his own language, that his reaction is honest. I smile.

“Asante,” I say and the buzzing bird translates as I attempt to capture the darker air just underneath a cloud close to the sun. I place my pencil down and look up. My turn to gasp.

The mgeni is beautiful, as I remember. Dark eyes, skin flickering like starlight, lips curved upward, soft…

“What are you doing?” The translated question catches me off guard, but I am quick on my feet.

“Sketching, can’t you see?”

“Yes. Why? And why no color? And how this alive? Do you do this often?”

I wonder if the translation is word-for-word or if some things get lost. I laugh.

“I do not know which question to answer first.”

They seem to consider this for a moment, then say, “wherever you travel with your answer, I will follow. Take me where we can go together.”

“Ahhh, so you are a poet?”

I hear the word in his language, it sounds similar to ours: mshairi. I love when languages do the thing of familiarity, holding secrets of their own past lives. I wonder if our languages were kin in a past life. I do not wait for him to tell me if he was or wasn’t a poet, instead I answer his questions.

“This drawing is for my students.” I say, looking over my work now with pride flowering in my chest. “I am trying to prove a point.”

My second statement piques his interest, as I knew it would.

“What is the point you are trying to prove?”

“That there is beauty without color.”

And this takes him aback even more.

“Why?”

I shrug my shoulders. “A game of ‘what if’s.”

We sit in silence, and even though we are strangers there is something easy about the silence.

“You have a world filled with more color than I have ever encountered.” He shakes his head. “Why?”

He still does not understand, and I cannot help but teach. It is who I am in this lifetime.

“Look out there.” I point into the distance where a whale’s blowhole spurts a lively burst of sea water into the air.

I cup my hands around my mouth and scream as loud as I can.

“Eeeeeeeeeiiiiieeiiiiiiiiiieiiiiiiiiiieiiiiii!”

And the whale responds, whistling back. The stranger watches it in awe and laughs at the response, just as the whale disappears back below the depths of the sea.

“That is my kin,” I whisper, my voice scratchy. “She recognizes me as I recognize her.”

He cocks his head, waiting for me to say more. I consider pulling up my sleeves so he can see the marks right underneath my elbow, but as much as I feel uncannily trustful of this mgeni, something holds me back. I do ask, however, “Have you heard about our history?”

He nods. “Bits and pieces, as much as your community elders have been willing to share.”

“Ahh,” I say. Turning back to the sea, I start the story. “So you know we do not die.”

“Who is the mshairi now?” He chuckles.

“It is not just poetry or metaphor.” I smile. “We transition. When our time as what we are is over, we move elsewhere, our energy transferred. In a past life, I was a whale. It was a while ago, so I do not have access to the language anymore, but I do recognize undrowned mammals as kin. They teach me how to breathe and how to see. You see underwater, deep down under, there is no light. It is just darkness for spans and spans of time and space.”

I wait for the mgeni to recognize where I am going with this. And finally, he nods.

“It is a world without color.”

“A-plus.” I grin. “Who are we to tell the whale that their world has no beauty? Isn’t that such a tiny, horribly pathetic imagination to insist upon and hold on to?”

We sit in silence after that. Comfortable, watching the light turn dusky. After more than a couple of breaths the mgeni says, “I have something like that too… a past life.”

And the mgeni tells me about his people’s planet. He says there are many things he cannot—No, should not say aloud but he wants to say them anyway, and I let him because I know I have felt that way around him too and we are in one of my favorite spots, and only my kin under the water can hear what we say.

 The bigger story starts somewhere before the moving planet of travelers; the story continues with empires bigger than travelers seeing those that did not conform to empire as not deserving of any planet to call home; the story goes on that the mgeni’s people called themselves wanderers, survivors, moving militaries hired to fight proxy wars that were not theirs to earn rest on planets filled with empire’s people who rejected them regardless of their blood being shed in the wars. And across generations their numbers reduced from millions to hundreds of thousands, now contained within their broken histories on their ships filled to capacity with survivors who were tired of never having anywhere to call home. It only made sense that unrest broke out.

Then there is the story of Totlo. The story of how he was the daughter of their people’s prime minister, which in leadership is similar to our elders. His mother was killed in a coup that was quelled, and his aunty, her sister, hid him… The story goes that his mother was always the softer of the two sisters, but the story also knows that they lived in a universal economy that abhorred softness, and this they learned the hard way. The daughter of the prime minister had to disappear to be protected: that’s when Totlo became Totlo, a distant nephew of the commander. The story goes that when Commander S. took up leadership she ran a tight ship. Learning from her sister’s death, she took no chances and also promised what her people needed to hear, a home. Commander S. said it was written in the stars, the destiny of the traveling wanderers. There would be, was, will be, is, a planet they would all call home.

Totlo shivers, shaking off something he does not want to confront. I see panic in his eyes, but as he looks at me something he sees allows him to let the panic pass.

 “I have been in training under Commander S. ever since,” he says, with truths hidden in the simplicity of that statement. I want to hold him, to share his grief, share in the loss buried beneath his chest. I nod and let the tear I considered holding in fall.

“I think about her sometimes.” He continues after a while of silence. “The girl I used to be, and it feels all at once so long ago and as if it is still now who I am.” He shrugs his shoulders. “I guess I was wondering if that is what it feels like? The past life?”

I nod now, allowing myself to travel with his answer, instead of asking more questions.

“It feels like many different things, but you understand in a way most people who are not us do not. When we transition, we do not mourn as those from other worlds with other deaths do. We do not think of ourselves as gone, we simply think of ourselves as changed, and that is something to be celebrated, but we also honor and celebrate the versions of ourselves that we were before our energy knew it was to be something else.”

I take Totlo’s hand in mine as the little blue-and-yellow drone buzzes around us. I wait for us both to inhale and exhale before I whisper, “I see you.” The bird translates, and I want to know he is hearing me, so I search his eyes for confirmation. “If you give me permission, I want to see all of you.”

***

Many Days After

“More than usual,” Tuni says, and I rack my brain to remember what she said before this.

I give up. “Sorry?”

Tuni sighs. “That’s exactly what I mean, Supanova. You’re up in the stars again and not in a fun way.”

I let the side of my mouth lift into the cheeky smile that almost always softens her. “It’s always a fun way, mama,” I say more than ask.

She gives me her supervisor look, one of the rare times the almost supersedes the always.

“It is not.”

“Tuni,” I say grabbing her hands.

“No, Nima. Listen, you have been spending so much time with that boy, and when you are not with him you are hardly here. I can’t look like I am favoring you at work, not when all eyes are on me, and besides do you not think it is all bit fast?”

I raise an eyebrow. “What is?”

“Everything… These Wageni coming in and all of your attention being captivated by him in the ways it has, and I know you are impulsive, but remember when we were younger and you had nightmares of exploding and you would carry the panic and I would tell you to take a breath? I think you need to take a breath.”

To demonstrate, she inhales deep and touches my chest, holding her breath until I also inhale, and after my exhale she touches my lips and shakes her head. More breaths first. I do not tell her that I know we are doing this more for her than for me, but when she is calm, I hug her.

“I’m right here. I am not going anywhere.”

Over the years we have learned that in her past life, Tuni lost her pride, or they lost her. Past life memories are fuzzy and unreliable, but the feelings both resolved and unresolved sometimes travel with you.

“It’s just…” Tuni collapses into a chair by me. “Everything is changing so so quickly, the Wageni… ask our elders to change the ways we do things agriculturally, and in our education system. That Commander S. wants to add military training. She says that eventually we will be a military base for other civilizations to come and train their people. Military training in education? Tuni? Mad ting! And the elders may as well be going senile. Instead of outright refusal, they bring up her intergalactic currency, the favor she has found with empire, and now they are actually considering it. Even T’cha Sue has started going for some of the Wageni’s religious gatherings and when she speaks to me these days she goes on and on about how ‘the Word says this’ and ‘the Word says that.’ That’s not even the point, the point is war and education should stay on separate paths, Nima! It feels like everyone is losing their mind, and that boy is not helping. What is so special about him anyway?”

We have always been honest with each other, even when it hurt, sometimes especially when it hurts. “Jealousy doesn’t look good on you, mpenzi,” I say, squeezing her shoulder.

 She shakes her head and she says, “Is that what you think this is? I am always happy for your happy, Nima, never doubt that. It is just in this moment everything feels so…”

“Different?” I offer weakly as she says, “…unsettled.”

I nod. Unsettled is not something you can actually explain, but I want to try. “In my unit 303 class on imagination, we talk about change as possibility turned concrete. What we have not actually known, but only dreamed, is made real and that leaves us feeling detached from our own knowing. One of my students has called that being unmoored, which is a great metaphor for unsettled.”

Ohh shit. Tuni is crying. I said the wrong thing like I always do.

“I’m sorry, just ignore all of that and imagine I said exactly what you needed to hear,” I say, and she laughs through her tears.

“Dummy. I don’t need you to patronize me or treat me like one of your students. I just need you to be careful, okay? My gut just tells me to be careful.”

And what else can I do but whisper assurances and affirmations, beating myself up internally for not being more present. It is like when we were young. I used to make her wait to tell her things on my own time, but Tuni was stubborn. Eventually, she always got the truth out of me.

“He is not just a boy,” I whisper. “They are so much more.”

When I see her head tilt, I let my words travel in a different direction.

“Their people have been through more than we can ever imagine, Tuni, Totlo especially…” I go quiet not knowing how much I can reveal. “He was the child of a former leader of theirs. One who was killed. I just think there is a lot we can teach each other about change.” 

“Everything you touch, you change.” She whispers the beginning of the quote from a storyteller millennia ago. I smile, catching the memory of us at twelve discovering and devouring stories from other worlds and other times.

“Everything you change, changes you,” I respond, relieved that we are okay, and I am thinking about what version of this story I will give to Totlo, who is as curious as most of my students to know.

***

Many Years Before

The story of how our people landed on our planet travels in many forms, shapes, and sizes. There is the version that starts with a planet of lost souls who began here just before the first Earth’s sun exploded. There is the story of smaller big bangs than the first universal one, sputtering new worlds. A story of pseudo-Earths found, some built, making the irony of resource wars that much more palpable. And there is the hierarchy still carried into the galaxy, the intergalactic empire slowly building rulership and regulations that control most worlds, an effort to avoid repeating mistakes of the past… As if the past were not scattered with leaders who built empires that destroyed what they claimed to protect.

But we are at the edge of the galaxy, small, unimportant, barely discovered. We are tethered to our galaxy, content with our world, and somehow because of that we have survived. What we have learned from our curiosity is that most Wageni see themselves as separate from the planets they inhabit. What we have learned from our curiosity is that we are not. Everything Kupokea is, we are. Our stars, our moons, our sun, our soil, our grass, our weeds, our cows, our bees, our fish, our birds, our locusts, our roses, and our thorns. We are everything we are and more and when those who come to visit refuse to honor this, darkness falls, or they leave. To be everything is not for everyone.

***

And Now

When my students ask me about the throes of war, I speak in mosts. I am quiet for only a heartbeat before I decide to tell them the truth. I tell them that most battles were not glorious, I do not say all because I do not believe in the history of something as wide and long as war that all is a word that can be used honestly, most not all, because I was not there, but I can imagine just as I can remember through ancestral kin and their words.

What I do imagine and remember, I tell my students, is that more was lost than gained most of the time.

Later when I am sharing this with Totlo at our usual spot on the bridge he says, “I wish it were that simple,” and disappointment travels through me, telling me how much I value his opinion. I chide myself internally, of course, I am not a perfect teacher, and yes, I can take critique, and it is okay that I am not as wise as I think I am. The last one I disagree with. I am exactly as wise as I think I am.

“It’s not that you’re wrong,” Totlo adds, seeing something on my face that infers my internal battle. “It is just,” he continues, “battle cannot be fit into a single sentence, let alone war. There is no way to answer questions about war to a people who have never lived through it.”

This statement is a sucker punch, teeming with the differences of our lived experiences. He takes my hand in his, tracing the lines on my palm.

“You have told me when you teach about memory kin, it takes you at least a few hours to get through a summary of the life of one being. To talk about battle, you must talk about what came before. The beings, tens, hundreds, thousands.” He shakes his head. “One of them searches for glory, the other only wants to live, survival. Then there are those in-between: the one who thinks about legacy, about children; the one who thinks about permanence, whatever comes after the ephemeral; the one who thinks about the day they are in, a bed, food, a lover—immediate pleasure; the one who thinks about God, faith in a guiding purpose bigger and higher than them. War is about all of them, these who live or die for a battle that barely makes it into a history book for millennia after to study and still repeat. So no, it is not as simple as ‘most battles were not glorious.’ It is everything the battle was and wasn’t, everyone the battle was and wasn’t. It was the anger of those whose worlds had been stolen, the heartbreak of those who never knew living without battle, the breaths, and the bodies, and the blood. And still it is not that simple, because how can anyone explain war to a people who have never lived it?”

Totlo has gone somewhere, into the recesses of their mind, somewhere far back that I do not know how to retrieve them from.

“You are safe now,” I say, flipping over his hands so they are both carried by my own. I press my right thumb into the center of his palm, loosening whatever tension it carries, and he remembers I exist. His smile is sad, and I am sorry I ever brought up the subject.

“I don’t know what that word means,” he says, “but I am grateful for you, Nima. You teach me what is possible in the face of a brutality I have only ever known to be true.”

A sudden surge of bravery travels through me, our faces so close I can hear his breath catching up with mine.

“May I kiss you?” The bird drone buzzes the translation in his language, and his breath hitches. He nods, and nothing else is to be said.

I lean in, catching his lower lip between my own. I nibble gently and let him push back as my tongue teases the roof of his mouth. His hands travel from my shoulders, down the length of my back, finding my waist, encircling the sides of my body with his fingers. I guide his hands, pushing them firmly against the small of my back as I climb onto him. This not just a boy, this beautiful being, this heartrendered soul. I kiss him with everything I have to offer in this moment, and his touch sizzles my skin with pleasure. My fingers slip into the pocket I have yearned for. They come away slick with water I want to taste. And this is a language we do not need to translate.

Be careful. Tuni’s voice in my head. Be careful.

But it is too late. He has swallowed my cares with his lips around my tongue.

It is only later when we are lying with the moon reflecting on the water, illuminating our faces on the dock, that I ask the question that I have been afraid of asking, my heart drumming under his palm. “Which one are you?”

“Hmm?” His voice is honey, dripping with sleep and satisfaction.

I hate to take him back to where he does not want to go, but I have to know. “When you talked about the battle, you talked about the one who searches for glory and the one who wants to live and those in-between. Which one are you?”

 He turns on his side to face me. “And this is why I said you cannot teach about war, too many ways to get it wrong. Everything I told you could be bullshit.”

I push myself off my pillowed wrists, onto my elbows, so I can see him better.

“But you believe it. Most everything we say is bullshit to some being in the galaxy, but our belief in what we believe is what makes us who we are. So I will ask again, Totlo, from what you believe about the ones who die and live through war, which one are you?”

He turns back to the moon and goes quiet for long enough that I think I may have pushed too far. Then, as my eyes start closing to the thought that this moon might be a great-great-great-grandmother passed, he says, “I do not know if I have found it yet. The thing that people fight to live for.”

That is enough, because it is honest. Even with Tuni’s warning bells in my head. “That is honest.”

***

Tuni places the chairs back at the end of a very long school day. The empire’s call to allegiance sounds in the back, from the outskirts of Kupokea city center where most of the Wageni have used their technology to build expansive settlements at terribly swift rate. The translation bird drones are not the only AI they have. Tuni has observed that most of the other grounded robots are workers and/or weapons. Her senses sharpen the way they did that first day she met the Wageni; the hairs on her arm stand. She hears the footsteps behind her.

“The day has ended, and you are still here?”

The voice itches at Tuni’s skin, pulling her neck. She smiles.

“Commander S. I, uhh, am surprised to see you here.” Tuni, who has always been taller than her peers and more broad-shouldered than most of her community, is a hair’s breadth shorter than the commander.

“I was just cleaning up,” Tuni says.

The commander grabs a broom from a corner of the history classroom and starts to sweep.

“No you don’t have to…” Tuni tries, but the commander interrupts.

“It is mindless work, good for the brain.”

They work in silence for a several heartbeats. Wiping down desks and whiteboards, sweeping and then mopping the floor. The bird drone, a constant buzzing reminder, never allows their skins to settle.

Tuni has never been one for niceties, especially with people she knows have an agenda. The hairs on her skin will not settle, but she decides if the commander will not state outright what she wants, then Tuni can repurpose the conversation for her own needs.

“Your people have traveled everywhere, and nowhere has been good enough for you to live—but suddenly here on our planet, you decide you were meant to settle? Why?”

The commander laughs, a booming laugh that threatens to lull Tuni into a comfortable state. As if there was a warmth that once existed in her.

“You really do not pretend girl, neh? Most of your elders are well-versed in niceties, but I could sense that you were different.” The drone buzzes an interpretation of the commander’s statement. “Why not, though? We make an alliance, we are more powerful together.”

“I have read about travelling militias. In fact, my kin-mother told me the story of one who came to our planet. She fell in love with my kin-mother’s brother. And what I heard from the stories was that alliances as a word carries friend at the tip of its tongue and subjugation at the back. There are many planets for you to build alliances with, why ours?”

“Something I have been curious about: you were a predator in a past life, weren’t you? Which one?” the commander asks, instead of answering.

“I do not see why that is of any concer—”

“Fearless to the point of disrespect.” The commander’s eyes spark with well hidden rage. Tuni sees behind the charming front she portrays in public. Tuni clenches her fist. Pink creeps into the periphery of her vision and she knows when she starts to see red, she cannot be held responsible for what bridges she will burn. This is a stranger in her home, and she has the audacity to dictate. The commander continues.

“I will answer all your questions if you answer mine.”

Tuni pauses, calculating, then asks, “All?”

The commander smirks, nods. “Yes.”

“Honestly?”

“If you answer mine honestly.”

“Deal. One condition: a question answered for a question answered.” She does not wait for the commander to agree to the terms before continuing. “Yes, I was what people from other planets consider a predator in my life before this.”

“Which one?”

“That’s a second question, my turn.”

“A question that starts with a statement is not a question.”

“Nice try. My turn.”

The commander obliges.

“It is because you are unimportant, insignificant, a pseudo-Earth on the edge of the galaxy with enough resources to not need to get involved with intergalactic politics. That is why. Empire offered us a chance to settle, make a home for ourselves on a planet they have no use for. We took it.”

Tuni nods. She senses the commander is being only partially honest.

“What happens during your transition? Your elders have given me answers that are vague and too poetic for my taste.”

Why does it matter, Tuni wants to ask, but these are not the rules.

“Our energy, what has been called matter, or spirit, or essence. The thing that fires the neurons in our brains is snatched out of our bodies before they decompose. It is turned into something else.”

“No. Tell me more than I have been given by your elders. I asked for the details. Do you remember your past lives?”

“In the moment of transition, we go to what has been called the in-between. Our remembering is vague. As we grow, we get our past lives marks, telling us how many lives we have lived. The most recent past lives come as tattooed shapes that when we touch, we feel more connected to. And when we find kin in this life, our marks light up, reminding us of our connection. Every tree, animal, person has a mark of something before, although very rarely a being is born that does not receive any marks. They are new energy, generated, created from outside our own limited knowledge of the universe.”

 Tuni takes one of the upturned chairs on the desks and positions it so she can sit facing the commander.

“My turn. Do we have a choice in what you want us to become?”

This takes the commander by surprise, and then her laugh again.

“A predator you were. That is certain. Everyone always has a choice.”

The commander plays with a desk that has a broken leg, flipping it over, unscrewing the cap at the bottom and tearing multiple pages out of the notebook and stuffing the hollow part of the wooden leg.

“Even if the choice is death or change, it is still a choice. But your people are lucky.” She adjusts the desk so it is stands even. “You do not die.”

She says this in a way that makes Tuni’s insides curl.

“You know there are worlds with technology that doesn’t require desks or tables for education. Technology in fact that would require so much less labor from you as an educator in the classroom,” she adds, as she leans on the now-steady desk.

“And from what I have read of these other worlds, that same technology has commodified, itemized, and bureaucratized labor nearly entirely to the point of erasing any meaningful relationship to work. I, on the other hand, can see how much my students expand their relationship to curiosity. I can see the fruits of my labor. That is not a question, though.”

“It is not. My second-in-command has taken a liking to your friend, for Word knows what reason. Tell me about them.”

Tuni’s skin tingles. It is asked casually, callously even, but this does not fool her. Nima is in love with Totlo, that much is obvious, but Totlo means more to the commander than just her second-in-command. Tuni must play this game wisely.

“That is not a question.”

“Okay, who is Nima Bahari?”

Tuni is surprised by her own laughter. A response that makes the even-keeled commander uncomfortable.

Good. Questions reveal almost as much as answers.

“Nima is…a teacher of memory and imagination, a student of everything in the here and now, a speaker to the worlds beyond our own, not even in this galaxy but in the universe outside of galaxies. Nima is a force to be feared.”

“You love her?”

“Two questions, but yes.” The vulnerability shared does not feel like a weakness but evidence of strength, a warning of the savagery Tuni is capable of, to protect what she loves. “I love her as much as we need words to communicate in any and every language. My turn. Who was she to you? The woman who fell in love with my kin-mother’s brother?”

An intake of breath.

“Are you sure it is the question you want to ask?”

Tuni does not hesitate.

“Yes.”

“I will answer your question, Tuni Upepo, but it will be the last. She was a leader of our people. She is gone now. I am who my people need to survive.” The commander stands. “Speaking of which, I am expected to give a teaching. You know, you are welcome to join our services, Tuni Upepo. The Word may surprise you with what it offers.”

“Your Word justifies colonization.”

The commander’s unblinking gaze would be unnerving for anyone but Tuni who when reminded of how many people the commander has probably killed, touches the mane tattoo mark underneath her left elbow, and stands up to match the commander. Tuni welcomes the growl sitting in the back of her throat.

“I know that’s why she was here, Totlo’s mother. Your purpose for us is to become your new technology. Tools, weapons, unalive.”

“I would be careful if I were you, girl. Language is powerful.. The words people say tend to reach back from beyond their lives, gnawing at any hope of a different fate. Language traps you.”

“Do you believe what you preach?”

The commander smiles, and that was enough of an answer.

“Come, listen. We welcome everyone into our fold.” The drone buzzes the translation after the commander is already outside the class.

#

Many Moon Months Later

“I think she’s brainwashed them,” Tuni says, her braided cowry shell beads clicking as she shakes her head, before our weekly educators’ staff meeting. We sit by the small stream at the back of the education center. I am exhausted from teaching my adult opt-in Sense-Making class, which, as always, is heavy with irony.

“It doesn’t make sense, Nima.”

“Nothing ever makes sense, remember?” I tease back.

Tuni kicks dirt on the playground. She comes to sit beside me, her shoulder up against mine. I shrug. I don’t know how to offer a better answer to Tuni, who has become increasingly paranoid about the Wageni and the commander being here in the first place. We have had a variation of this conversation so many times and it is a fine line between making her feel heard and not encouraging any fanatic ideas.

“Nima. How else do you explain the elders saying yes to everything she decides?”

“I don’t think they say yes to everything,” I offer weakly, which is a mistake.

“You are becoming as bad as them. Spineless, and uncritical.” She is vicious and I am sick of it.

“What in the galaxy is wrong with you, Tuni? Yes, things are changing, but things are always changing in the universe. You of all beings know this to be true. Are you jealous of the general? Mad at me for spending time with Totlo?”

She pulls away and I miss her immediately.

“Ancestors’ spit, Nima! Our communities are being patrolled by their militia police, our governance being restructured into hierarchical compliant modes, our agriculture practices being overturned to feed a whole people who do not form relationships to the land that gives them food, and you think I am upset that you have a new lover?”

“That’s unfair, Tuni. We are learning from them, and they are learning from us. We feed off of curiosity, we always have. Our education programming has expanded, and the technology and medicine classes are concurrently thriving.”

“And yet we are the only ones adapting to what we learn, while they use their knowledge of us to control us. Do you trust her? Nima? Really?”

“I don’t know her.” And that is the truth. I know Totlo loves her. I know the version he has known is the person who has protected him, raised him. I know that she loves him, or at least I think she does. None of this knowledge equates trust. None of this would be good enough for Tuni.

“I can’t believe this.” She shakes her head. “You are smarter than this, you know?”

“You don’t think the elders are having these conversations among themselves? Tuni, why do you want to be the one to fix everything? Let it go, beloved. It’s not that you’re wrong. I am aware of how much is changing in our world since the Wageni’s arrival. I love you for being worried about our people, but you have lived multiple, badass lives with variations of all kinds, and in all of that, our planet is so young that none of us have lived through this kind of merger. Two different people attempting to become one. Aren’t you curious?”

“It is not merging when they believe that they are superior to us. I have heard the guards gossiping about the commander’s nephew, and you? You’re a laughingstock to them. So is he, by the way. They think we’re simple. Ignorant indigenous folk who can be walked over, and our passivity proves them right.”

An alarm goes off: a fire on the outskirts of the upper market where the Wageni’s homes and ships reside. The whole city is in motion, people moving both toward and away from the fire. By the time we get to the commotion, we realize T’cha Sue has been hurt and is in critical condition with one of our healers.

“It is her!” Tuni’s eyes are wild.

“Who?” I look in the direction Tuni points. In all its blue-and-yellow metal glory, burning to the ground, scattering flames and heat as far as the wind will blow: the commander’s ship. Or at least that is what it used to be.

#

Future Archives: During the After (read as a memory that is happening)

I write this letter because I do not have words to say, do not know how else to name what has occurred in the last few weeks or days or hours. I do not know which would be the most honest answer except it does not matter. She is gone and it is my fault. I write because we promised each other if one of us transitioned before the other we would write ourselves into memory like the storyteller from millennia ago taught: “Everything you touch you change, everything you change changes you.”

This is a memory letter I write because it is just like that. She was here and then she was not. You were here and then you were not. This letter will be burned after I write the last word. I will burn this and use it to feed the fire that will burn them.

Tuni was right. About the Wageni, about the commander, about all of it.

They came to our planet with the intent to colonize, extract, and eradicate. The commander will deny it to the last Kupokea child transitioned murdered in the street. The commander will narrativize the past as one that advanced the people it exploited, and what will be missing from the narrative will be most of the truth.

Most of the truth the day I saw her eyes change as her ship burned.

All the ways I explained her harmlessness to Tuni disintegrated into ash.

Most of the truth of the second she lost her calm, and looked at me and Tuni as if we were a biting insect she wanted to squeeze between her thumb and forefinger, as if we were the very dirt on the soles of her feet. I knew, in that moment, Tuni was right about everything. It was too late.

A Mgeni soldier; Lieutenant X, was killed in the fire. The first murder since the Wageni arrived.

Interrogation interviews were conducted. They did not last long. These are the memories. Wageni trials were loosely patterned after the intergalactic supreme court of empire.

Commander S. already had a convict in mind. I still hear the voice calling over the education podium,

“Tuni Upepo is being tried for the arson of Chief Commander General S.’s intergalactic ship Titan. Tuni Upepo’s charges are arson, manslaughter, and insurrection. Until she is tried by a court of law Tuni Upepo has the right to…”

“Bullshit!” I yelled immediately as they held out bonds to cuff her, but Tuni looked at me the way she looked at me when we were thirteen years old in Ms. Namu’s class and I was about to do something stupid. Her look told me to shut up. So I did, and by all the kincestors, I wish I didn’t listen to her.

They took her. The elders were useless! Our people’s passivity proved them right. It didn’t help that T’cha Sue had been harmed in the fire and was still undergoing intensive treatment. Commander S. kept saying she would retaliate for the harm that was brought to both of our people.

Fire for fire.

The trial was a farce. Consisting of a jury made up of Commander S.’s most trusted advisors and two of T’cha Sue’s kin. The memory of it burns me from the inside. The evidence against Tuni was flimsy at best, but it didn’t matter.

Their court convicts the criminalized, not the guilty. I should have known. I would have known if it wasn’t for Totlo. I will never forgive him. How can I?

She is/you are gone because of him.

In the in-between, if you hear this letter as it burns, I want you to know. I remembered something from my past life. I want you to know before everyone else does.

I remember how stars explode.

Supanova, the version of me you called back, was a memory eater. I remember that I ate memories of the galaxy, of the formation of our planet, of the worlds before. I ate memories and I remembered

how to burn.

**

Many Days Before

Totlo finds me pacing in my memory and imagination classroom. The education campus is closed pending the verdict on Tuni’s case so I come here to hide, and to plan.

“Can’t you do something?” I keep asking even though the answer never changes. This time his voice is different.

“Nima…”

“It is absurd,” I continue. “How did it get this bad? Was it always this bad and I just didn’t see it? They’re going to see it is absurd right?”

“Nima. Sit down.”

I continue pacing. “It’s your people, Totlo. Don’t you have any power? Can’t I at least see her?  I haven’t touched her since before they took her, and I know she doesn’t look scared in court but that’s Tuni. She won’t look scared in front of anyone but me.”

“Nima.” Totlo’s voice breaks as his bird translates. I refuse to look at him. I have to keep moving. The classroom is not big enough, but everything outside of it is too big. I walk to every corner of the memory-infused room. The chairs stacked on top of the desks, the self-portrait of me and Tuni on my table, the constellation kin lights she got me as a gift, reflecting on the ceiling. I have not been able to turn them off since she was taken.

“Nima, she is gone.”

I think it must be a mistranslation. Of course I know she is gone. She is not here. He continues and maybe if he hadn’t it wouldn’t be true, but he does.

“As she was being taken back to her holding cell on our justice inquisitions ship, Tuni tried to escape, knocked one of our guards unconscious and the other, seeing her as a threat, shot her three times. It was excessive, but our people are a trained militia, they shoot first. The commander is holding him for questioning…”

“No.”

I do not want to hear anything else, but Totlo keeps talking and his drone keeps translating.

“She was alive when she got to the healers but barely. They couldn’t save her.”

“You did this!” I scream. He walks up to me, but I won’t let him near me.

“There’s more.” He whimpers. “I burned it down.” He unsheathes two letters from his coat pocket. “The ship. It was me. I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t mean for things to go this way… Nima.” He starts to cry and I walk toward him as the information sinks in. I punch him, square in the jaw, and the letters fall to the ground as he trips backward. It is not enough. He keeps talking.

“I love you, Nima. I know you loved her. I will do anything.”

I can’t stand the buzzing drone flying in the space between us. I can’t think straight. She’s dead. He burned the ship. She is dead. He burned the ship. I yank the drone out of the air and throw it as hard as I can against the wall. It falls, tripping over his words. I grab a chair and walk toward the fallen drone. I smash it over and over and over again, knowing every hit silences Totlo’s voice. I shatter the translator device into tiny little pieces and break one of the chair’s legs in the process. I fall to my knees, panting.

Totlo speaks. I cannot understand him. I do not hear him. I do not see him.

I scream at him. He cannot understand me.

“Leave.” I point to the door. I will never forgive him.

Tuni, my Tuni, who will be, already is, something magnificent in the next lifetime. Tuni is gone. We did not die before they came, but what else do i call the way my heart shatters.

I have known beings that have transitioned. Animals, people, plants. I have seen energy leave, disperse, travel. There is always a transition doula who guides the life seeking to inhabit a different body. Tuni did not have that. She was not surrounded by her people, she did not get to transition on her own terms. She is gone. I weep.

The grief is so intense I am certain it will consume me into my own transitioning.

Time passes. I do not know how long, but I cry, I throw up, I sleep fitfully, waking to a moon’s light filtering through the windows. A warm breeze unsettling what wants to be still. I see the letters Totlo left. Two of them. They are in the Wageni’s language. He once gave me a translation dictionary he said belonged to his mother. He found it on the ship a long time ago. I use it to translate the words, slowly, painfully. It takes time, but I am glad for the distraction.

The things he was trying to tell me do not make sense.

Why did he burn the ship down? The letters are puzzle pieces, evidence of something that could help me understand. They are both written in the same hand but addressed to two different people. Salma of the Wanderers and My precious Tottie.

I wipe the tears that fall furiously as I translate. I am angry at everything, but I am Kupokea. I cannot outrun my curiosity. I read.

Dated: The year before Totlo’s birth

Salma,

Sister,

I couldn’t do it. I am sorry. I know I failed us. I failed our people.

But they are alive. Just like us, granted it is different. The Kupokea deaths do not hold as much gravitas as ours, they come back,

but I went for a transitioning ceremony and even in the dancing, even in the laughter, there was silence, there were tears. I know you will say I have become soft…softer….

I think to myself I may have.

You would too, I think, if you lived with them for as long as I have, and maybe it is time for us to allow ourselves softness.

Of course there is K. I do not think he will return with me, but we have accepted the ephemerality of our love. It has been, sweet sister, a thing they call mutual curiosity. I have exciting news, I think. I need to do one more test to confirm.

Try not to worry. The Word also tells us, “Home is a people not a place.”

Have faith. We have made it this far.

Everywhere we are together!

The second letter…

Dated: The year of Totlo’s thirteenth birthday

Tottie,

I have been waiting for your marks to appear, and nothing yet.

K, your kin-father, told me that sometimes, rarely, a being will be born and grow through their whole life without any marks.

They will be new energy. It would be unsurprising if that is what you are, energy made special just for me, or maybe you simply need a few more years for the marks to appear. I don’t know if I have that.

Our people are exhausted, and looking for a scapegoat.

Empire is too big to blame, too vague, too many heads. I, as our people’s leader, am its representation. Small enough that removing me may feel like a victory, and they need a victory. I have overpromised. I have led us to fight in wars that are not ours, to put food on our tables and keep the ships we have. I have helped us survive.

I sometimes think about the choice I made on Kupokea. If I had gone through with it, what Salma and I had agreed, we would have a home, but I couldn’t do that to your father, couldn’t let that be your origin story.

I do not know how this will play out.

You will be safe. S. will protect you. However else she fails, she will protect you.

Here’s a little secret, you will change but you will never die.

Love,

Mama

My heart hurts for Totlo, and I hate him for it. I hate all of them. This woman I have never met who fell in love with one of our own. Tuni’s kin. I recognize too what she does not say underneath what she does. They were always going to kill this version of us. Our language of transition excusing mass murder, turning it into something softer, something more malleable, an iteration of us that would be born into their subjugation as universal knowledge. A knowing not to be questioned, and she couldn’t do it. Totlo’s mother couldn’t do it. Instead she gave birth to one of us.

Salma, on the other hand. I remember the ways she looked at me and Tuni when her ship burned down. And now Tuni is gone.

I burn the letters. I find my rage has turned into hunger.

**

And Now

I find Totlo by the bridge. Our bridge. I knew he would be here, or rather, I both dreaded and hoped his being here into existence. If this is going to work, I need him. He carries a small, oddly shaped box on his lap, a trail of goosebumps across the length of his arm. I resist the urge to touch him as I sit. The familiarity of our intimacy warring against the betrayal.

“Nilikuanataka kukuona.”

His accent is terrible, and he places emphasis on vowels that should not be emphasized. Tuni would ride him hard for the way he speaks our language, but Tuni is not here, and I destroyed his translator.

“Nataka akufe pia.” Totlo opens up the box on his lap and words pop up on a screen as he speaks, translated into my language. “i want her dead too.”

“It is an older translator mod. It is…difficult to get a new bird, but this works for now,” he says and the words appear on the screen in front of me in my tongue.

“Did you read the letters?” he asks. I nod. He sighs.

“I found them in my aunt’s cabin, hidden. There was a third one. It was from the leader of the free states of empire right before the coup that took my mother’s life. Before I was born, she came here on a mission to gas the people of Kupokea. A quick, mass transition. Gassing is a tactic our military had used before in other wars on a smaller scale, never a whole planet. It was different though. Our people had heard about the ways your people transition, it wouldn’t be genocide if you didn’t actually die. And the hope was in the next lifetime you would be born into a world governed by our people without the memory of what you used to be so there would be less chance of resistance.”

I draw myself away from Totlo, wrapping my hands around my knees as disgust convulses my face.

“All of this was before I was born, Nima. I didn’t know any of it,” he says and shows me the translation. It doesn’t matter, I need him to finish the story. I don’t say anything. He looks like he wants to touch me, but he changes his mind, and pushes through what he has to say.

“She couldn’t go through with it.” He laughs bitterly. “She fell in love and had me instead. Commander S. didn’t like that. As the years progressed, my mother lost her taste for the militia. We fought fewer wars for empire, which meant less currency. We were surviving on scraps and the goodwill of richer planets that had no use for a people who only knew how to fight but refused to be hired to do it.

“The third letter was to my aunt, right before my mother died. She was given information about the coup that was to take place. Commander S. was given a small mission, told to leave until things died down. Instead of staying to fight by her sister’s side, she left and let it happen. She took me with her too. Then held me through my grief and the secrecy of my life as she grabbed the helm of power for herself.

“I remember that trip. There was a servant girl who stayed behind with my mother. Approximately the same build and height as me. She was my proxy, so they killed her. I’ve spent whole nights up thinking about her, and I can’t even remember her name. Aunty Salma taught me that well. How to forget. When I read the letters, I remembered how to hate her. I lit all her books on fire and they burned the ship down.”

His head fell as he whispered the last words that I read furiously on the translator. It does nothing for my anger.

“You could have said something. Why didn’t you? When they blamed Tuni!”

“I know there is nothing I can say that will be a good enough answer.”

“Try harder.”

“I had just learned everything I had been taught about my people, about my own lineage, about myself was a lie. The truth is, I was scared, and I didn’t know who I could trust.”

“You were scared, Totlo? My best friend was shot three times by one of your armed men because you were too scared to own up to what you had done.”

The machine on his lap buzzes as the translation works to keep up. I feel myself getting warm, heating up from the inside. The hunger is all-consuming, and I have to work hard to temper it.

“You were right,” I say softly. “It is not a good enough answer.”

“I,” he starts, “…my people…they aren’t evil. They are exhausted, wounded, broken from all the wars they have lived through.”

“And that is an excuse for mass colonization and eradication?”

“That is not what they thought they were doing.”

“We welcomed you with open arms, Totlo. My people invited yours with curiosity. The first of us to ask any questions, to push back, to doubt your diplomat, was unjustly tried for a burning that she did not commit and then brutally transitioned.” I shake my head. “Commander S. was going to kill us, and still will.”

“I am on your side,” he says decisively. I shudder as a sharp chill stirs my own goosebumps. “I have something to show you.” He pulls up the sleeve on his left arm. “It showed up a moon month ago. That’s when I realized there was something the commander was not telling me.”

It is a mark. A baby orca tattooed into his bicep.

“I started looking for memories, evidence of a time before. I wanted to tell you, but I was waiting for the time to be right. We are kin, Nima.”

I shake my head.

“Kinship is not blood, it is bond. It is earned. You do not get to call yourself kin because you have some of our blood. Your mother fetishized our people, and your blood aunty would have us all gone so she can take our planet for ourselves. You truly want to be kin? Prove it.”

“What do we need to do?”

“Die,” I say, and the word feels hot on my tongue. I will get him to agree.

Fire for fire.

**

Time Does Not Exist Here in the In-Between

In this moment of transition, after we are what we were, but before we are to be what we become, the streets smell like ash and blood; it is staggering. The slowness of this moment after the After, and it is here in the transition that you call it that; death, life. It is always both. We live because we die and we die because we have lived until we live and die again together.

I remember why it is so terrifying. The word death. I remember the earth littered with bodies, blood seeping into the cracks of the earth. I remember that it does not matter that the bodies change, break down, transition into the mycelium that feeds Kupokea. It matters that regardless of whether the transition happens within a second or a hundred years, the body is an echo of something lost, something that will never be that exact way again.

It is to be grieved. With deep guttural screams or stunted silence. It is to be yanked from the pits of those who bear witness. Those who do not die. It is to make everything stop for as long as time does not exist here. You pull on the strings of the universe itself, you the lion, you the whale, you the rat, you the kitten, you the exploding star, you the mango tree, you the child in a grown-up’s body, you the mother, you the lion, you the volcano, you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you wewewewewewewewewewewewewewewewewewewewewewewewewewewewe.

In the in-between of transition. All we can do is grieve, and those of us who are bold burn the marks of our deaths into the next thing that will carry our energy, the next body that will hold our spirit. I am blinded, individual. Trapped in the light of explosion, and still, I see with my hearing, my kin sharpening their teeth, filing their bones. Still, I remember that we are a curious people, and we can learn just as much about death as we already know about life.

Time does not exist here in the in the moment of transition, so we have all the time in the world.

***

Before the Transition into the After

Commander S. stands at the podium preaching in her finest blue suit, a yellow tie, and polished shoes.

“The Word executes justice for the oppressed, gives food to the hungry, and sets the unjustly detained free. Comrades, have we not seen these promises fulfilled? Time and time again?”

A chorus of assent carries across the heavily packed room, filled mostly with the Wageni. Behind her, the wall is decorated with yellow stars and a blue moon, the picture of Lieutenant X. and a smaller picture of T’cha Sue wrapped in bandages with flowers all around her in a healing room.

“Since we have arrived, we have practiced the justice of the Word, we have taught and shared our knowledge, expanded the potential of this godforsaken planet, and yet for some people that will never be enough.” She shakes her head emphatically, showing contempt. “In fact, instead of gratitude, the response has been what would intergalactically, legally, be defined as terrorism.”

The crowd gets restless, rowdy. Commander S. smiles, extends her hands out in paternal gestures toward settling down.

“Now, now. We have been through this before, have we not?” Her voice rings clear across the room. “Our people have been trampled on and despised wherever we set foot, but we have survived. We have survived because we fight back.”

Someone lets out a low whistle, and a couple of folks in the audience cheer.

“The Word has told us to claim what is ours. To have faith, but, and remember this: faith without works is dead. We know that well. We carry that in our battle scars, in our wounds both visible and invisible. Without works, our faith is dead. We are dead. So we must work.”

A few “hear, hears.”

“Comrades. I have come to share good news. The terrorist is no more.”

 A child in the audience yells, “Down with terrorists!”

The commander smiles.

“Yes, child. The terrorist Tuni Upepo of the Kupokea people tried to escape her fate, injuring one of our own in the process. She was shot by Sergeant Lark, and as the people of this planet name it, she has now transitioned. May the memory of what waits for terrorists carry her into the next life.”

Totlo walks into the back of the room, and the commander acknowledges him from afar.

“These people. The Kupokea have not seen the wars we have seen. They are ignorant to the sacrifices necessitated by self-preservation, and that makes them weak. We are strong because we have had to be. We are strong because we have had no other choice. We will continue to be strong by setting examples of what we will not tolerate.”

***

“I’ll distract them.”

That’s what Totlo promised. Through the peephole, I see Totlo walk up to the front stage where the commander is and begin to speak. I carry the letter in my hand, the one that is mine. I carry a lighter in my pocket. I do not understand what he is saying without his bird drone, only the Wageni can understand him. But by the way the commander interrupts, interjects, and physically tries to push him off the podium, it is most of the truth. I enter from the side door he told me about and immediately I am faced with bodies and weapons carried casually facing the podium. They are distracted, clamoring to see what is unfolding before them. I am afraid for the first time, only a little. Then the fear passes.

I remember Tuni.

I feel warm, I draw on the heat infused into my rage.

Totlo says something and some people start to leave, filtering out through the back. Others stay, stuck to their chairs. Then she sees me. The commander laughs and draws her weapon.

Her drone translates as she says, “So this is the one who has run my nephew mad? He spews lies about me and my regime to our people. He calls himself Kupokea-Kin.”

Totlo wrestles the gun out of the commander’s hands, and she locks him in a choke hold.

“Make no mistake. You are my sister’s child but I will kill you, Totlo Amani.”

I waste no time, writing the last three words onto the letter in my hand. I flick the lighter, and burn it.

“Burning paper?” The commander smirks. “Your people have a strange way of…”

I lift the now-burning paper up to my mouth, letting the fire singe my lips, my tongue. I swallow the burning memory and hear the weapon go off as the pain sears through my chest.

Fire for fire.

Every molecule in my body carries the memory of all the lifetimes before this one, every version of me that I have been, that we all have been, transforms into cells both living and dead. In my hair, my nails, my skin, my eyelashes, my lips, are a burning collection of memory and imagination.

I am about to become what I have been. Supernova. Remnants of a dying star who must first explode, and after… After we will all come back.

Well, those of us who do not die.

After the After

Massacre takes on a different meaning. Here is what the general did not know after Nima Bahari exploded in the Wageni settlement. The commander did not know that rot eats itself out piece by piece by piece, ignoring the flaring damage it is causing, ignoring the searing pain. When killed unjustly, the mark burned into the next life carries a scar, a memory of what was taken.

The commander did not know that the Kupokea people, whose future deaths she had already begun to justify, were already retaliating. She could not anticipate that the avenging was already happening, before the first sword, before the first battle, before the first declaration of colonization. Before the man with a gun and a slave signs a document saying all are created equal. Revolt whispers. In every version of every universe, hierarchy demands the overthrowing of its keeper. Resistance is already blowing in the wind as rulers shake hands, (re)naming bodies and lands that already have names, claiming ownership.

The empire is burning down as it raises its first flag. By rejecting every other choice, it becomes its own poison, the dagger in its own side.

And us. We the grass grows back, we the trees replant, we the burned houses rebuild, we the babies without parents grow and become the ghosts of what we have lost, we the land remember what was taken from us and we reclaim it. We the planet of Kupokea reject the Wageni, we swallow them into ourselves, and the ones who refuse to atone we spit back into the stars, where they will learn how to burn the empire in which they were formed.

#

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14,000 words, published September 30, 2024

Publisher: Sean Markey
Editor: E. Catherine Tobler
Copy Editor: Laura Blackwell
Cover Art: inkshark
Layout and Cover Design: Christine M. Scott

THE WOMAN WHOSE BODY Joanna is renting has a nosebleed. Joanna is about to get evicted again and she’s cranky about it. She screams at Eleni in another woman’s voice.

“Hey, this shit’s burning!”

Eleni doesn’t reply. She has been sitting on the toilet long after she’s been done, counting supplies. Waiting for Joanna to get bored and go watch TV. There were ten rolls of toilet paper when they first set up here. Or was it twelve? Eleni swears the woman keeps everything in fucking dozens, she must have an obsession or something. Twelve tubes of mint-flavored toothpaste. Twelve red toothbrushes—two used by them. But does a toothbrush count as used by a guest if the mouth it’s been brushing is the same as the host’s? Does a new soul bring in new mouth germs?

One toothbrush used by them. By Eleni.

“I can’t cook like this.”

A whiff of burned butter and flour and whatever else Joanna is incinerating out there. Hopefully not the entire place.

“I’m coming!”

When Eleni comes out, Joanna is already slumped on the low leather couch by the window watching Eleni’s ex-favorite movie for the billionth time. Jennifer’s Body. Two girls who are best friends: Jennifer and Needy, one of them possessed by a demon, the other one possessed by the friendship itself. Jennifer’s Body used to be their number one, but somewhere between Joanna’s first death and her first resurrection, Eleni stopped caring for it. When fantasy becomes reality it’s not as fun anymore. She prefers Jurassic Park these days—when Joanna lets her pick the movie—because there’s no way in Hell dinosaurs are making a comeback.

Joanna is inside a short, fifty-year-old woman with unusually large hands. Joanna’s hair used to be brown and sleek down her shoulders once upon a time, but this woman’s blonde perm has a will of its own. Eleni tried to brush it into submission but the only thing she got out of it was a couple of bruises on her left arm from when Joanna got tired of the pain and pinched her.

The place smells like a gluten crematorium. Eleni runs to the kitchen and opens the window but it does little to help. Joanna has burned the pancakes and with them the pan that’s currently swimming in soapy water. The pan that Eleni will need to find and replace with a similar one. She hates when Joanna does this. She knows the rules. She knows they are meant to protect Eleni and Joanna and the person whose body Joanna rents and she still does stuff like this. Whatever. They’ll be out of here soon.

“I am sorry.” Joanna’s voice is barely a whisper under the sound of the jock’s screams when Megan Fox, as Jennifer, dislocates her jaw and snatches him with her shark-edged teeth. “When it starts, I can’t concentrate.”

Joanna’s telling the truth. It’s hard for her to do anything when the body she inhabits starts breaking down. Looking at her, Eleni figures it’s not too long now. They’ve got maybe another week before she needs to evacuate. And that’s being generous. When too much time has passed—and that time is different for each person she inhabits—the body looks like a bodysuit a couple sizes too big. The flesh feels detached from the skeleton when Eleni rests a hand on Joanna, like it’s sliding off in slow motion. It’s at those times that Eleni can see the ghost of a face swimming under the flesh. Sometimes that face is slightly to the side of where the actual face is, but sometimes it’s in other places, the neck, the small of the back, the stomach. It freaks her the hell out. Eleni usually gets Joanna to leave earlier than that, leave the person in as close-to-mint condition as possible. This is what they have agreed on.

Eleni plops on the couch and puts her arms around Joanna’s narrow shoulders. There it is: the skin doesn’t sit quite right on the bone, it’s thin and slippery, like deli meat left too long on the counter. It’s okay. It’s okay. It always feels a little weird to comfort strangers but she’s gotten better at it. This is body number ten. Joanna is wearing the woman’s work clothes, meaning a pair of jeans and a white t-shirt that has the SuperEasy green and blue logo of the supermarket she worked at.

In the movie, Jennifer is looking at herself in the mirror. She’s just fed and she is glowing. She has a new body for a while, until the power wears off and she needs to feed again.

If only it were that easy.

Joanna puts her head on Eleni’s shoulder and sighs. Her sigh comes out heavy and a little wet. The woman was a smoker.

“I am so tired all the time,” she says with that high-pitched voice that reminds Eleni of one of her aunts. One of her least favorite ones. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

Eleni rests her chin on the bleached blonde hair to keep her jaw, and by extension her mouth, shut. She’s tired too. So, so tired. Her breathing slows because she doesn’t want to distract Joanna from what she is about to say. I want to rest forever, Eleni imagines Joanna confessing, I want to go back to that place where I rest in between bodies and never leave again. It’s nice there. Peaceful. I am ready.

“I need someone younger, Leni.” Joanna gently takes Eleni’s hand into hers as if to show her how old and spotty her skin looks next to Eleni’s twenty-year-old hand. One that fits their real age. On the TV, Jennifer looks like death and she is about to eat the emo boy. She won’t stop until someone stops her. “I want to have fun for once.”

Eleni’s heart drops to her knees. She shakes her chin that still rests on Joanna’s head and makes a mess of her hair all over again. “That’s a stupid thing to ask and you know it.”

“Why?” Joanna squeezes her hand with all the strength she’s got. The way Joanna’s skin moves against Eleni’s flesh makes her queasy.

Joanna knows why. Eleni has explained this over and over. Middle-aged and above single women are more often independent. And that makes them safer. They live alone and can isolate themselves for a few months with little fuss. And if someone—a relative or a friend—checks in with them, they can tell them to go away and that’s that. They are good targets.

“Let’s try. Just this once. Promise me you’ll try.” Joanna squeezes Eleni’s hand harder. Muscle and sinew and bone wobble under the surface. Her voice sounds like her real voice now that she’s angry. It has the same tremor her real voice had before they got into a big fight. Joanna shouldn’t get angry now. Not when the body is breaking down like this.

“Stop it.” Eleni pulls her hand free and gets up. “I’ve got the next one lined up.”

Joanna falls back on the couch which makes her moan but then she laughs in that mean way of hers. “Is it because you miss your mommy?”

“Shut up.”

That’s how Eleni messes it up. Again. She starts screaming in Joanna’s face. “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.”

Joanna smiles with the woman’s mouth but underneath the smile there’s anger, Eleni knows. Joanna’s teeth glisten, her spit is extra frothy, as if there’s too much of it. Suddenly, she starts coughing so hard she stops smiling. She leans forward and coughs some more. She spits on the floor. Her nose starts bleeding again and now she coughs an inky-dark liquid that Eleni wishes were blood.

“It’s happen—”

Eleni kneels in front of her. Grabs her by the shoulders to steady her and instead she feels untethered herself.

“Jo, you have to leave. Leave now, Jo, please.”

She shakes her head and keeps coughing. Blackmailing Eleni like she always does.

“Fuck, Jo, you’ll kill her. Leave now!”

Stubbornly, Joanna keeps coughing. There’s so much inky mucus in her mouth now, it oozes between her teeth like she had been chugging mouthfuls of mud. And next to her ear Eleni thinks she sees a familiar nose materializing under the skin. Like a drowning person coming up for breath before they disappear under the ripples again. Eleni shakes her.

“Leave now! I’ll try, okay? Leave!”                                                                                

Only then Joanna smiles. Her teeth are stained black. Her brown eyes—it’s her old eyes, the only thing she brings with her from body to body—turn pale gray as she leaves, so translucent you’d think there’s no iris. A black pinprick-sized pupil is left staring at Eleni like a mite swimming in milk. Soon she stops coughing and fighting altogether and her body goes warm. Burning with fever. The woman—her name is Maria, Eleni can finally think of her name again—slumps forward and Eleni throws her own back out trying to pull her onto the couch. She immediately checks for the woman’s pulse, and now she can breathe again because it’s there. Faint but there.

It will take some time for her to come to herself, but she will be okay. Probably. Eleni will have to call someone, a friend or neighbor, to check on the woman eventually.

Eleni has at best a couple of days to return the house to how she and Joanna found it, or a close approximation, and then stuff her backpack with the essentials and get the hell out of there before the woman comes to her senses and starts asking questions.

The host—Maria—has lost her job at the supermarket and maybe burned a few bridges, but this isn’t too bad as far as possessions go, Eleni tells herself.

“Thank you for being her host, Maria,” Eleni says and kisses the woman’s forehead like she’s read in the spellbook. “You’re now free.”

On the TV Jennifer has found her next target. Her best friend Needy’s boyfriend.

It isn’t hard to summon a soul. All you need is an object that’s easy to carry around—for Eleni that’s a coin—a little blood, and the right kind of words. What’s hard is having a strong enough connection with the person you are summoning. Visualizing them inside and outside as best and as accurately as possible. There must be billions or trillions of souls out there. And by out there Eleni means Hell or Heaven or wherever Joanna is vacationing when she is not here. Eleni never asked. Joanna tried to tell Eleni once but she stopped her. They both have gathered enough trauma for fifty lifetimes as it is. No need to open that can of worms. Visualizing Joanna as she was when she was alive is important, because it’s like calling her special soul-fingerprint from the other side. Eleni doesn’t even want to think what would happen if she summoned the wrong soul. Can you imagine? How embarrassing.

Eleni blames that movie and all the witchy, edgy stuff they were into during their teen years for at least some of it. Or maybe she doesn’t really blame them. They were fun for a while. Like she and Joanna used to be fun together. They didn’t know what they were getting into by buying all those spellbooks from the flea market in Monastiraki. They didn’t know what they were getting into when they met each other in preschool either.

The books were fun for a while. They would call each other and read out loud the passages they found the most outrageous to spook themselves before bedtime. Then the witchy thing got old and Eleni stored the books at the back of her bookshelf so her Mom wouldn’t find them, and almost completely forgot about them.

A couple of years passed and they found new ways to dare each other. This time it was all about who was going to leave the other one behind. Eleni’s thing was drawing with permanent marker on every available surface and adopting a new wear-all-black-don’t-give-a-fuck persona. Joanna went the other way by dressing up every morning for school while carrying around her duffel bag just to be able to casually drop that oh, by the way I’m on the volleyball team, I’ve got hobbies and stuff.

It all became a game of who was more interesting, or cute, or popular, or ultimately cruel enough to move on to new people first. And Eleni found she was losing on most of these tests, but at the end of the day they ended up together on the phone, judging the rest of the world for not being more like them while reveling in their own uniqueness.

Then one day Eleni’s mom decided to sign her up to a cram school. Since she apparently lacked the motivation that would help her pass her college entrance exams with a good score, she needed the extra help. Cram school was a revelation. It was the first space where she had met people who didn’t know Joanna, or didn’t particularly care to listen to Eleni talk about her. A Joanna-free zone. No long phone-call conversations, no big personal secrets, no inside jokes between two people who have known each other forever, but no fights either, no jealousy, no fear.

Everyone there seemed brand new and sparkly to Eleni and she found they could all make up new inside jokes and the world would not fucking end. To them she was artistic and chill and sometimes a dork but in a cute way, and she toned down the emo-ness to something more average without feeling like a loser. It was the first place she could finally relax, even though it wasn’t supposed to be a relaxing place. She started meeting up with her new friends after school; a part of her brain urged her to keep this a secret from Joanna. But it was all short-lived.

Eleni’s next target is the woman who works at the coffee shop at the intersection of two of the busiest shopping streets. Her name is Elisavet—a name Eleni will try to forget once Joanna possesses the woman—and she lives alone in a house in the suburbs with a tiny garden and two cats. Divorced; her daughter studies abroad, like Eleni might have done if she had graduated from high school instead of messing up her own mother and then running away to create more mess elsewhere. Eleni petted the cats and chatted with the woman a couple of weeks ago. She passed by with her little backpack asking for directions that she didn’t need. The woman was nice and even told her where she worked. Perhaps she sensed Eleni was lacking a mother and a direction in life—not only when it came to streets—and wanted to fix her. Then one of the cats, the oldest and fattest one, came and sat in Eleni’s lap and that sealed the deal. Elisavet would be getting possessed.

When they were ten and Eleni’s Mom was working night shift, little Eleni called Joanna in the middle of the night scared out of her mind. When she was alone at home everything seemed alive. The clothes, the lamp, that shadow in the corner. Her father had left them a long time ago so there was nobody to comfort her. Only Jo. That’s how it started, their nightly ritual; sometimes until the early hours. Much later, when they were drifting apart, it phased out to mostly on weekends. High school was becoming too demanding to keep this up or, perhaps, they were using it as an excuse to take some space from each other. Eleni still isn’t sure which one was true.

Their ritual led to Joanna calling Eleni that night and finding out from Eleni’s mom that she wasn’t home. Which made Joanna grab her bike and go looking for Eleni. Eleni hadn’t thought to give her mom clear instructions on what to say in case Joanna called the landline looking for her.

Eleni isn’t sure what Joanna was thinking that night. What Joanna thought she was going to do once she found all of them sitting around in the square drinking beers and talking about music and then sitting awkwardly in silence for a bit because they didn’t know each other well enough. Neither of them got to find out. Eleni thought she heard sirens somewhere not far from where they were sitting but didn’t think anything of it.

Later, after Eleni had summoned her from un-life, Joanna said, “Dude, you should have seen my face. Pure horror show. That truck messed me up big time. My nose got knocked all the way to the back of my skull and with my mouth and eyeholes it became one huge cavern full of blood, and teeth, and bits of brain. I could barely believe that was me.”

“Weren’t you already dead?” Eleni asked, which sounded cruel but deep down she really, really didn’t want to know.

Joanna smiled as if she was still reading that spellbook. “I was hovering over myself for a moment. I was looking for you in the crowd. Too bad you weren’t there to see the show. Guess you were busy with your new friends.”

It’s still very early but the store is already busy with people grabbing a coffee and a pie to go as they head off to their offices. There are four people working as far as Eleni can see. A man and three women, one of them Elisavet. The tall dude is cleaning the tables; one younger woman, the barista, her black hair up in a slick ponytail, is working the coffee machine. The third woman is cute, also very young, maybe the one closest to Eleni’s age, with short-cropped pink hair. She is on customer service alongside Elisavet, taking orders behind the counter and working the cash register.

Eleni stands outside the store. Backpack resting against her back. She squeezes the coins in her hand as she finishes the dregs of her latte. There is a right time for these things. She always picks people who work some sort of cashier job because it is easier to give them the coins, especially the one she has marked with her blood. The ritual can work without the host-to-be touching the coin and by extension the blood, but there has to be some sort of bleeding by the summoner and in any case it’s always safer if they touch it. Blood channels magic better.

Eleni’s solution to the whole blood-touching thing was coins. Spill a drop of blood and give it to someone. Coins are dirty as hell anyway; who would notice a slight color tinge? And who turns down money? It turns out a lot of people did. Eleni had to find out the hard way that people weren’t gullible like in the movies and if you yell Sorry, ma’am, you dropped your fifty cents, while running straight at them, arm outstretched, it’s more likely that they will back away than gratefully accept the coins. So, cashiers it is.

When the last customer leaves and before anyone new comes in, Eleni sees her chance. The moment she sets foot in the café Elisavet seems to recognize her, and then becomes nervous for some reason. Or at least that’s what Eleni thinks when the woman’s face tightens and her eyes dart a little bit to the left to the other employee. The really young one. Shit, Eleni thinks. Was she too creepy that day? Too pushy? It doesn’t matter much though because all she needs is for the woman to touch the blood and then Eleni will get her freddo cappuccino and occupy one of the tables in the back to have full view of the woman as she summons Jo’s spirit.

“Hey,” she says with the easiest voice she can muster.

Elisavet, the woman, gives her a nod of recognition and a cautious smile and takes her order. There is this awkward back and forth during which Eleni tries to sound not-creepy. It seems to her that the more she tries the creepier she looks, to the point where she has an out-of-body experience of herself as movie-Jennifer when she tries to lure the boys into quiet places for a snack. Eleni counts the moments with her heartbeat until the coffee is finally ready. Before the woman delegates to someone else, Eleni opens her now super-sweaty palm and drops the coins into Elisavet’s hand.

Then they both smile at each other and the moment is over and Eleni isn’t sure at all that the woman had been nervous or if it was a projection of her own nervousness. Eleni takes the coffee and leaves hastily for the table she has marked as hers. Now it’s time for the really hard part.

Eleni was seventeen the first time she summoned Joanna back from the dead. It was a week after Joanna’s funeral and she was sitting cross-legged on her bed, leafing through the books they had bought together in Monastiraki. It was one of Eleni’s favorite memories of them, a day they’d both been in a good mood and holding hands and laughing, going around the stalls.

The friends Eleni had sneaked out to meet on the day of Joanna’s accident did not talk to her after that night. They didn’t know what to say to her, Eleni figured. They didn’t want her pain. Her guilt. In an instant she stopped being the fake-emo girl and became the real thing. Nobody wanted the real thing. She had nobody and she needed Joanna again. Joanna was the person she knew the most intimately. Running to her when things got hard was like a natural instinct.

When Eleni turned the page of one particular book, she saw the spell. There had been other spells like that in the other books but this one felt truer. Probably all that visualization stuff it went on and on about for pages. And as Eleni sat there with her red eyes and that emptiness in her heart, she could see Joanna with her mind’s eye. She could see Joanna inside and out as if she were standing right next to her, and her heart ached even more.

Perfect skin and long brown hair that caught the light right. Generous at times, clingy—but only when it suited her—and moody. Shrieking like a banshee when she was angry or to get her way with things. Lately she was getting distant with Eleni, chatting more with others at school, calling less often at night but expecting Eleni to pick up when she did.

Eleni pricked her finger with an enamel pin she had on her tote bag—probably not the most hygienic choice—and smeared blood on her bedroom mirror’s glass. When she was done the room looked like it belonged in a horror movie. She had no clue what she was doing and she imagined that, if this ever worked, Joanna would appear in her bedroom mirror and talk to her like a Bloody Mary. Instead, she heard a knock on the door and before she could hide the bloody mess and tell her mother to go away, her mother’s body barged into the room and fell into Eleni’s arms.

That was Eleni’s first thought when she saw her mom. Her mother’s body. Not her mother, no. The body carried itself wrong. Like there was someone else inside her mom’s skin. Someone with a different shade of brown eyes. Someone who clenched their jaw instead of half-opening their mouth. Someone who slumped their shoulders and shrieked and shrieked like a banshee on a full moon. Mom, what’s wrong? Mom? Mom. It was more than a question. It was a hope that her Mom would confirm it was really her in there.

 But when the body stopped wailing in her arms, someone who was definitely not her Mom whispered, Why did you leave me?

Nothing is happening. Eleni doesn’t know why nothing is happening and her mind is racing as she takes the smallest of sips from her coffee, afraid that the woman—Elisavet?—will know when she has drunk it all and will expect her to leave immediately.

Eleni has gone through her list of things she knows about Joanna five times. She even dares to close her eyes and actually visualize Jo sitting right next to her at the coffee shop, the way they had done so many times when she was still alive. When she opens them again the woman looks unaffected, meaning she looks like herself and not like a costume someone else is wearing. As far as Eleni can tell. No clenched jaw, no coppery-brown eyes, no scouring of the room to find Eleni and then a subtle nod to show her she is in there, inside the woman. Eleni decides to think of her as the woman just in case.

When Eleni left the previous the woman, now effectively renamed Maria, she took enough money from her to crash at a cheap hotel room for a few days. Pretty much in the same way Joanna was crashing the afterlife until it was time for her to be called back. That’s what they always do between Joanna’s bodies. Eleni pretends she talks to Joanna inside her head even when she is not here possessing anyone. In a way Eleni is permanently possessed.

There is a very specific window in which Eleni can call Joanna back and that window is two weeks. It says so in the book. If the two weeks go by, Eleni won’t be able to call Joanna back from the dead. And although she has tried to wait the window out, she found out that she can’t. She can’t stop calling her back. The first time might have been love and loneliness and guilt, but now it’s also that promise Joanna makes her give each time, before the body she is in starts breaking down. You’ll call me back, right? is what she asks each time. The subtext is always the same: I died because of you. Because you left me. So, you have to call me back.

These thoughts give her already rising panic a nice tinge of desperation and since she can’t hide it anymore, she gets up and paces back and forth in front of the woman, glancing at her, begging her to give her a sign that it isn’t her anymore but Joanna. The woman looks increasingly uncomfortable and then she turns around and goes somewhere in the back, the place where customers are not supposed to go, and Eleni loses sight of her. Only the barista lingers behind the counter now.

“Is there something I can help you with?”

Eleni jumps at the voice on her right. It’s the tall guy who has stopped mopping and looks at her with a mixture of concern and annoyance. Eleni eyes the cash register and thinks of the coin resting somewhere in there, her blood smeared all over it. There is a moment of hesitation, where she weighs her options. The man doesn’t take his gaze away from her and now the barista is getting suspicious too. Perhaps they guess her intentions—although not all of them, her mind is a dark pit of unfathomable depth. Eleni is trapped and panic is clouding her mind. She looks at the cash register, at the customers coming in again, at her coffee cup, still warm and almost full on the table.

And then she escapes outside. She hides around the corner and inhales as if the concept of air is something she just discovered. Inhales like Joanna when she opens her old eyes in new sockets and realizes she has come back again, and again, and again. Until now, that is. Eleni counts the days. Three more days until she can’t call Joanna back anymore. Three. And then what?

As her mind is brimming with questions, she feels the outline of someone familiar watching her. It’s Joanna in the flesh. Eleni’s mind freezes for a moment. Joanna finally did it. She made a deal with whatever entity exists on the other side. Or maybe it’s the Devil himself coming for her own soul.

Eleni realizes she can’t breathe. She is choking back sobs as Joanna approaches, languid. Her limbs don’t seem to touch the ground for long, she is almost floating, soaring like a ghost, and now Eleni wonders how nobody else around notices. Is she already dead then? Only when Joanna comes close enough does Eleni see the things that aren’t Joanna-like. Her hair is cropped short and pink while Joanna’s was waist-long and dark brown. The woman still wears her uniform, only it’s not the woman in there, is it? It is most definitely Joanna. Coppery eyes look down at Eleni and she can’t stop staring at the person who is two persons and trying to merge the version in her mind.

“Hey, wake up, you goof. It’s me,” Joanna says. Lips peeled back in a smile, she opens Eleni’s palm and slips in the bloody coin.

Joanna’s new voice is deep and smooth and comforting, a voice Joanna would wish she had when she was still alive. Eleni can’t deny that this is the most alive Joanna has looked in a while. Ever since this shit-journey started, actually. She can’t find traces of that ghostly face underneath this woman’s skin, but that’s always how it is in the start. The woman’s whole frame and Joanna’s align so perfectly Eleni feels almost guilty she didn’t find her a younger body earlier. Almost.

“Shit, Jo. How did you do it?”

Joanna shrugs coyly. “Do what?”

Eleni’s eye catches the tall man from the coffee shop. His eyes dart around the busy street, looking for someone. She grabs Joanna’s hand and pulls her in the opposite direction.

“Did you grab her stuff at least?”

“You bet.”

Joanna pulls up the messenger bag, and shows her a laptop, a phone, and a couple of textbooks on statistics and machine learning. A student. After the first shock, Eleni feels the panic rising. Fucking great.

“She probably still lives with her parents, Jo. Did you think of that? Where the hell are we gonna go?” Eleni wants to make a break for it and never come back. But is there any place she can go?

“No, she doesn’t. It’s all in her phone.” Nothing can break Joanna’s calm exterior at this moment. If it’s the body or just that she doesn’t give a shit anymore, Eleni doesn’t know. Joanna dangles a key fob shaped like the head of a crying baby. “I even know where she lives.”

What Eleni didn’t know or didn’t understand back when she first called Joanna was that spirits don’t go into inanimate objects. The same way water slides off glass but a sponge soaks it up. Living flesh absorbs a wandering spirit the same way a dish sponge absorbs water. When Eleni called Joanna’s spirit, it bounced right off the mirror smeared with her own blood and went for her mother. The only other available body in the vicinity.

But if the water stays for too long the sponge gets moldy, slimy. It gets sick and eventually dies. Well, dish sponges don’t die, but humans do. It’s a bad metaphor but it’s the only way Eleni thinks of spirits now. A few months into the first possession, Eleni’s mother had a hemorrhagic stroke. The body lay on the bed, black tears running down her cheeks black snot from her nose, her irises glued to the ceiling, unresponsive. She was muttering something but it was too low and too unintelligible for Eleni to make out what it was. Through everything Eleni knew Joanna was still in there. It was the way she was wearing her mother. Like one of those paper masks they used for art projects in school, the skin deadly pale and fragile, ready to slip off at any minute. And somewhere under there, another face, made only of her mother’s flesh, without discernible eyes, nostrils, or teeth.

Eleni begged Joanna to leave her mother’s body before she finished her off. She promised to call her again before the time window passed while she waited for the paramedics. That turned out to be the only way Joanna would obey her from then on. Only after she had extracted Eleni’s promise.

After making sure Mom would probably be okay, Eleni called her aunts, packed a suitcase and some money, and disappeared, going dark to everyone she had ever known in her short life. Everyone except for Joanna. She couldn’t bear her mother’s empty stare anymore and she dreaded to find out what she remembered from the time Joanna was subletting her. Maybe all the memories come back to the women eventually. Perhaps someone will recognize her on the street one day and call the police. She would deserve it. It might even make her break her promise to Joanna and stop summoning her. Or not. Calling Joanna back is all she can do now. All the company she has.

Knowing where the woman lives and knowing how to find the right apartment are two different things. They get the address from one of the delivery service messages. The apartment the woman rents is a condominium in one of the smaller neighborhoods in downtown Athens. Which means she might have friends and family at a walking distance, which makes Eleni very uneasy but when Joanna finds out, she replies with a Sweet!, as nonchalant about it as with everything else. Eleni guesses the apartment wouldn’t be too big; the woman is still a student after all. One bedroom, probably. They gauge the ones they think fit the description through the windows during the day and when darkness settles, they try the locks as quietly as they can, half-waiting for the moment when someone catches them trying to break into their apartment and they have to scuttle down the hall, waking up the neighbors.

Only when the lock clicks open and they make sure there’s nobody else in any of the rooms does the air leave Eleni’s lungs full force.

“Thank God for no roommates,” Eleni says, collapsing on the small blue couch, in the middle of the very sparsely furnished living room.

“Thank God for Dr. Pepper.”

Eleni hears Joanna opening a soda can in the kitchen and putting on some music she probably found in the woman’s laptop.

“Keep it low,” Eleni says as quietly as possible. “We’re not ready to meet the neighbors now. Or ever.”

 She still prods at the events of that morning with her mind, trying to figure out what went wrong. Or which way it went wrong. Could be a number of things. A soul is like a water stream, and like a stream it needs direction. Eleni is the one doing that with her visualizing, but what if she was too tired that day? What if she was admiring the pink-haired woman more than she was focusing on Elisavet? What if, before she managed to channel the spirit into Elisavet, the other woman grabbed the coin to pay a customer, and boom, the deed was done. Was there even a single customer there while Eleni was visualizing? She doesn’t remember, but there must have been.

What if none of the above is true and Joanna is hiding how powerful she is? What if, while Eleni was visualizing and calling her from the other side, Joanna’s soul changed direction at the last moment into someone she fancied more, pretty much the way she had done with Eleni’s own mother? If she had done it once she could do it again. How stupid of Eleni to think she had any control at all. Stupid, stupid.

In the background Eleni hears the gentle clicking of a keyboard and then giggling. It’s coming from the kitchen.

“Jo?”

Eleni stalks into the dim-lit kitchen, fully covered in lime-green tiles. Joanna’s face is the most illuminated thing in the room as she types furiously on the woman’s laptop, feet resting on the kitchen table. She has already logged into a group chat. The usernames read Foxfire, Spider, HauntedTrails. Eleni doesn’t recognize any of them.

“What the fuck, Jo? Are you talking to her friends?”

Joanna doesn’t even turn or try to lie. “Relax, dude. I have to learn as much as I can about her. Plus, her friends are kinda cool.”

“Why?”

“Because,” Jo turns around this time and looks at Eleni. “I don’t plan on leaving this body any time soon.”

Eleni’s jaw almost drops to the tiles. She knows that’s what Joanna had wanted for a long time, but she wasn’t expecting her to be so upfront and territorial about it. So calculating. It will be hell getting her out of this body in time. Her Mom’s image flashes in front of Eleni’s eyes and she thinks she can hear her own heartbeat.

“Ah, Leni, I am sorry,” Joanna’s tone changes immediately and the woman’s deep voice becomes even deeper and silkier. She’s already using this body like a virtuoso playing a melody on the piano. “It’s just that we earned this. Both you and me. We’ve barely had a chance to enjoy life all this time.”

Enjoying life isn’t an option when you’re already dead, Eleni wants to say. But she feels bone-tired. She isn’t sure she can fix whatever is happening here. Perhaps there are parents close by that can pop in here at any time, or someone else with a spare key. Perhaps the friends Jo is merrily talking to will see right through her—very realistic—disguise. Perhaps they’ll call from work and ask why the hell she ran away in the middle of her shift—never mind, that will definitely happen. Some of these people are bound to ask a lot of questions and they will know something is wrong. Eleni doesn’t have the power to stop any of this and she’s tired. She realizes too late she has slowly collapsed on the floor.

“You’ve been doing so much for us. Worrying a lot. Let me take care of things this time. I promise I’ll be careful.”

Crap, Joanna almost has her. The more Eleni looks at her, the more the woman transforms into Joanna. How Joanna used to look. How Eleni remembers her from the photos on her phone and her own subjective memory. She starts to speak but the question almost freezes in her brain.

“What if—?”

“If the body rejects me? I’ll leave. We can go back to little old ladies after that. Just let me have a good time.” Joanna leaves the chair and sits on the floor next to Eleni. She takes Eleni’s hand in her own, gently, like when they were younger and she was asking for a favor only Eleni could do. The woman’s face is iridescent, almost otherworldly under the lighting of the screen. Eleni can’t stop admiring her long nose and the chrome stud ring that pokes out from the right side. Joanna gives Eleni a gentle nudge on the shoulder. Everything is gentle about her. “Listen—I am sorry about the Mom thing. Dying sucks and makes me all bitchy.”

To that Eleni doesn’t object. She’s run out of comebacks and dead-end questions. Whether she wants to admit it to herself or not this is the most peaceful moment they’ve had for a while. The moment that feels the most right. They are both at the right age and in a student’s apartment. Because they were both supposed to be young and in college. She doesn’t speak because it will break the illusion. And Eleni loves the illusion. Whatever might come next.

Sometimes Eleni is movie-Jennifer, especially in the scene where she leaves Needy and gets into the van with the evil band. Their lives change forever after this. Although it’s not really what Jennifer wants to do. It’s not her fault. She is in shock after the bar catches fire and she follows along. Eleni, on the other hand, wanted to be with these people, her new and shiny friends—it also helped that they weren’t demon-summoning murderers like the band in the movie—and she left that night to find them at the square, guilt drilling into her like Jennifer’s teeth into boy-guts.

Sometimes Eleni is Needy, sitting in her room at night, finding Jennifer burrowed in her bed. Jennifer, freshly fed and freshly kissed, smiles at Needy like the teenage girl she used to be and says, Best friends don’t keep secrets. This is what Joanna texted Eleni before Eleni left to meet the others. Before Joanna’s accident happened. Needy loves Jennifer and Eleni loves Joanna and feels both guilty and scared out of her mind. She wants to stay with Joanna until the end—until some kind of end—and wants to drop everything and run away every second that passes.

Eleni is the worst parts of both of them: she is the one who gets seduced by the new people and leaves her best friend, setting off a series of events, and she is the loser who runs after the demon-girl. She doesn’t want to think how she is the one who keeps summoning Joanna from beyond the veil. No, because that would make her someone with the power to end everything at any given moment and yet she is not. That would make her one of the evil guys from the band and that’s the one thing she never wanted to become.

Adriana’s friends are all right, nothing special. They remind Eleni of the kids at the cram school. They are all sitting around three tables made into a makeshift large one at a cheap ouzeri that attracts half the city’s student population. There’s this mixture of flirting, arguing, and drinking spread around the group that Eleni had only tasted for a very brief time but she dearly misses now. She is experiencing this scene as a stranger, an intruder. No wonder everyone has asked her if she has graduated already. She looks past her age.

Joanna manages to flirt, argue, and drink at random intervals with most of the people surrounding her, and they all love it.

“Seriously, computer science? Why I’d pick such a boring subject? I mean look at my hair. I should have been in art school or something.” She playfully tucks away a pink lock. The guy Joanna is talking to (Eleni guesses he is the Foxfire dude from the chat), chuckles, incredulous, but plays along.

“…um, is everything all right up there, Adri?” He points an index finger at his own temple. “You’re the one who wouldn’t shut up about the awesome job you’d be set up with and that sweet, sweet paycheck. Remember all that?”

Joanna nods and smiles because of course she doesn’t remember any of it. Eleni is about to tear the wax paper that covers their table to shreds.

“I’ll look into art lessons anyway.” She leans over the table like a cat trying to stretch its torso into an inverse question mark. “I am a different person now.”

The guy still plays it cool but in a less look-at-me way. “I bet it’s because of that new, fascinating friend of yours. I give you one month.”

Suddenly everyone looks over to Eleni who feels like the least fascinating person around. She has already torn a piece of wax paper and is rolling it between her palms like a stress ball. How is she supposed to forget the woman is named Adriana if everyone around keeps reminding her? Joanna puts an arm around Eleni, like she would do when she wanted to claim her as her own.

“My friend is a great artist,” Joanna announces to everyone. For a fleeting moment Eleni dimly remembers being seventeen and wanting to get into the School of Architecture. She was really good at drawing landscapes and was about to ask her Mom for extra lessons in line drawing if she could afford it. Then everything went to Hell. “But she’s not new. I’ve known her since we were kids. She’ll outlast all of you.”

At that a short girl with long black bangs peeks out from the left.

“What? Since when?”

Shit, that’s it, Eleni thinks.She remembers a few of them being high school friends with the woman. This is what she was trying to avoid all along by isolating both of them but she let down her defenses for a hot moment and now they are caught. Or whatever being caught body-hopping means. Probably something like calling the woman’s parents and staging an intervention because she is acting weird. Eleni can’t stop doom-dreaming about what comes next. Joanna seems to pick up on that because she touches her arm in a way that feels something like a code. It’s not the same as when she hugged her; this is not for the others. This is a message shared between the two of them. Relax, I got this, it says.

Within twenty minutes Joanna has convinced everyone that Eleni is her childhood friend, which is true, and that they all knew and had interacted with her at some point in the past, which is a total lie and a kind of scary achievement. Eleni gets progressively more drunk and a horrible thought rises from her gut: what if Joanna is mesmerizing them? What if she is convincing them that what she says is true, but in a supernatural way? Nothing about her is natural—except for the body she is occupying—so why not this one too? Eleni regrets not asking more questions about where Joanna goes when she is not here. It’s possible she has picked up a few tricks down there. It’s also possible that she used them on Eleni the other day.

Eleni shivers and pulls her arm away. Joanna, thankfully, doesn’t seem to notice.

The book has been sitting at the bottom of Eleni’s backpack for years now. She doesn’t need it—or at least she didn’t think she needed it—the ritual is etched in her mind. She goes looking for it the moment they return home. Joanna might be renting the body, but the body still gets tired and drunk and needs to sleep. Eleni watches as Joanna stumbles forward, her destination the small double bed at the end of the narrow corridor. Even though she has invited Eleni to sleep on the bed multiple times, she prefers the small blue couch. It is better for them to keep some distance, healthier. If there is anything healthy between them at this point.

She waits until she hears the light snoring sound the woman always makes—it turns out possession cannot save you from snoring. Then she cracks the book open and tries to turn its pages. A tough job because they are both slightly sticky and hardened, like an old shoe you haven’t worn for some time. The passages are even more horrifying than she remembers. She was seventeen when she first summoned Joanna and she is almost certain that at twenty-one, if she were to start all over again, she would have not summoned her. Almost certain. Her new-adult brain feels very disturbed by the passages in the book. There are several animals and even babies involved in some rituals. Their own ritual is actually one of the more PG-13 ones. She shivers thinking that all of them might actually be real rituals like the one that brought Joanna back. But what else could they be? She wonders how her teenage-self delighted in these horrifying descriptions. And then she quickly understands: teenage Eleni—and teenage Joanna for that matter—read this book as a horror story, a dark and strange fairytale some people used to believe. They shivered imagining the darkness breathing close to them, clinging to their skin, licking their palms with its long, bloody tongue, but once morning came, they were free from the monsters. Not anymore.

There’s nothing in the actual ritual and its preparation that will tell Eleni what she needs to know. No warning about the demons being tricksters. Perhaps those were in the beginner’s manual. Eleni tries really hard to avoid considering the implications of this. She puts the book back and slips into the kitchen to make coffee. The steady rhythm of the snoring almost lulls her to sleep but she feels too guilty and alert to let sleep take her. Over the murmur of the coffee machine Eleni tries to break down what happened earlier. Did Joanna magically convince Adriana’s friends what she said was true or did they not care enough to challenge her? And was Joanna hypnotizing Eleni to do her bidding, or was she pulling all the right strings and was Eleni—being the weak-willed creature she had always been—more than happy to release some of her burdens? It all felt too slippery and vague.

“Did you know I can sleep and still be awake?”

Eleni almost poured the scalding coffee on herself. Instead, it was the green tiles that got the brunt of the spill.

“What the hell, Joanna? Don’t you ever knock?”

“Uh, this is the kitchen?” Joanna gave her the weirdest look that Eleni had no word for. “Besides, you never demanded your mom knock before.”

“What?”

Joanna grabs one of the ice cream sandwiches she has filled the freezer with and sits on the same chair she did the first time they were here.

“All I’m saying is that you are a mommy’s girl. And it’s not like she thought very highly of you. Like sometimes she was so tired of your clinginess, she was daydreaming about running away.” Joanna takes a very toothy bite of the ice cream, which makes Eleni flinch at the idea of all the chill against her teeth.

“How would you know that?” A shiver travels down Eleni’s backbone. She feels a kinship with the ice cream sandwich. They are both unable to resist Joanna’s biting.

“It’s a neat trick, right? Just like the one I discovered in this body. Come here, touch my pulse.” She leans forward on the chair and bends her neck to the side, as if inviting Eleni to bite her back. Vampire style.

“Uh…”

Joanna reaches out and grabs Eleni’s arm, pulling her down and close. Her pull is gentle but it implies far greater strength than she lets on.

“Come on, don’t be shy. Touch here.” She puts her finger on the bluish-green vein that runs down the side of the woman’s neck, brushing against her clavicle.

Eleni obliges her. She presses two fingers where Joanna shows her and lo and behold, the pulse is very slow, almost untraceable. The breathing too is slow and shallow and as Eleni leans a bit closer to listen better, there comes the snoring out of Joanna’s half-open lips.

Eleni jerks back. “What the—Are you kidding me?”

Joanna rests her finger against her lips now. “You’ll wake her.”

“Shit, is she still in there?

“Yes and no. Sorta. She knows I am here and she’s sad about it. So, she drifts in and out. We are all coping somehow, I guess.” Joanna smiles a conspiratorial smile that Eleni instantly hates.

 “Is this how you know about my mom?”

Joanna’s smile turns mean now. But not openly mean. The quiet kind of mean that nobody else notices but Eleni, because they know each other so well.

“All these women have so many thoughts, El. They get tangled in my head. I can’t help it when I rip them from their minds when I leave.” She reaches out and touches Eleni’s shoulders. “You don’t hold it against me. Do you?”

Eleni feels the sudden urge to call her mom after four years. If her mom yells at her for leaving, if she cries and screams and renounces her, then maybe that means she is still herself. That would be the good outcome.

“It’s like I have lived so many lives. I feel wiser now. All that wisdom can take us anywhere with this body. You saw what happened tonight.”

“Jo.” Eleni swallows and tries really hard not to show how terrified she is of her friend. “I think you should get out of there. In fact, I think it’s time to stay on that other side.”

Laughter bubbles and spills out of Joanna’s throat. She laughs and then keeps laughing some more. Her arms fall from Eleni’s shoulders as her whole body starts convulsing with the most hysterical laughter Eleni has seen. For a mere second—too soon in the whole process—the outline of someone’s face surfaces on Joanna’s chest. Then it disappears again.

“Other side? There’s no other side. Don’t you get it? The other side is here. Just shittier and dim and disembodied. After the crash and the pain and the sleep, I woke up in this grey dense mass of a sea worming up my nose, ears and eyes and I kept swimming around with no end in sight, going through bodies and buildings and clouds like they were sketches a five-year-old drew. Only when you called me did I start seeing color, and followed your voice until I got to you and your mom. You were both full of the most beautiful color I’ve seen in my entire undead life. And, well, your mom was the only other person I could go into, since you were the one doing the calling.” Joanna takes a lock of Eleni’s hair in her fingers and looks at it like she is considering her body very seriously. “And I wouldn’t want to go inside the caller now, would I? I’m dead, not stupid.”

Eleni can’t shake the faces. They always seem like they are swimming. And drowning. “How long can we keep doing this?”

“And what? You want me to drift too? You want me to swim forever? It’s all your fault anyway, loser. After all I’ve done for you, you weren’t even there to pick up the phone.”

As if a switch has been flicked, Joanna lets tears stream down her face. The hysterical laughter turns into hysterical crying. Eleni can’t tell the difference any more. She keeps very still, hoping that Joanna will forget about her.

“You owe me. You’ve got to give back what you took from me.”

Eleni already sees their future ahead. A life with no rest for her, only a few-months-long breather before the next jump, without ever seeing her mother or anyone she’s ever known before Joanna died. A life full of bodies, Joanna’s bodies, strewn behind them like empty beer cans. Some of them live, some of them don’t, depending on their stamina and Joanna’s mood. Joanna takes from them whatever she needs and they move on to the next one and then the next. But most of all a life full of faces floating inside too-thin skin, reminding both of them what comes next no matter how much they try to outrun it. Now they both know and that’s not something they can leave behind.

“Okay,” Eleni says, resigned. She feels a million years old. She sits on the coffee-soiled tiles and opens her arms. “Come here.”

After a moment’s hesitation Joanna dries her eyes with the heels of her palms and rests her head against Eleni’s chest. Trustingly, lovingly, they fall asleep.

It takes a little longer this time but Joanna is getting kicked out of the woman’s body one party at a time. That’s how Eleni counts their time here: in parties she and Joanna—but mostly Joanna—attend or crash, fumbling for their keys to their apartment later and avoiding phone calls from parents who, thankfully, live in another city two hours’ drive from there. Joanna makes a half-hearted attempt at art, after buying supplies and falling behind on her college classes, but it’s Eleni who ends up using them, when Joanna parties, when she sleeps in after a hangover, and the days that she is too sick to do anything else but complain and burn breakfast all over again.

Eleni avoids painting anything even remotely human-looking. Instead, she does landscape painting, forests, mountains, lakes, anything that’s open and brimming with color because fuck it, she knows color is not in the cards for the future. The brighter and more misplaced the color in the painting the better. She spends all her money on tubes of acrylic named crimson red, cobalt blue, and primary magenta. She is busy painting the frothy waves of the Ionian Sea in Permanent Violet Dark when Joanna wobbles into the house, propped against a friend’s shoulder, the name of whom Eleni forgets. A blonde girl, an engineering student if she remembers correctly. There’s dark red coming down Joanna’s nose; it has seeped into the blonde woman’s pristine white shirt but she doesn’t seem to notice.

“What happened?” Eleni doesn’t need to ask but she does anyway. She is a pro at keeping up appearances.

“I don’t know.” The blonde woman sounds frantic and lost. “She was dancing. Maybe she hit her head or something? She didn’t wanna go to the ER.”

“It’s okay. I’ve got her now. You can go.” Eleni pats the woman on the shoulder although it doesn’t seem to comfort her in any way, then picks up Joanna’s crumbling body.

Reluctantly, the woman releases Joanna, and after standing there for a minute she quietly closes the door and leaves. As Eleni lays Joanna on the little blue couch, the strap of her blouse falls down revealing a violet-dark sea of bruises, skin rippling like waves, and underneath not only a face but fingers, a palm, non-stop movement.

“She’s been trying to kick me out for some time now.” Joanna’s smile is laced with weakness and nausea. “But I am headstrong too. Oops.”

“Jo, listen to me.” Eleni cups Joanna’s head in her hands and guides it to face her. Joanna’s eyes are glassy and unfocused; they stare through instead of at her. “The party is over.” You have to let her go.”

Joanna shakes her head and presses her lips together. Her voice becomes high-pitched, close to what her real voice used to be when she was about to cry. “I don’t want to go inside a little old lady again. I was having fun, dammit.” When she manages to focus for a moment on Eleni she says, “Promise you’ll get me another one.”

“I promise.”

“No, that’s too easy. You’re lying.”

“I am not.”

“It’s all your fault.

“Stop. Look at me. Joanna.”

Joanna makes another effort through all the pain, which Eleni guesses is a lot.

“I’ve been looking around. If you leave her okay, I promise I’ll get you another one.”

“…really?”

“A promise is a promise. I am never breaking this one. And you’re right. It is my fault,” Eleni says and she means it. She means every single word because Joanna will know if she’s faking it.

Even now, she can’t stop wanting to call Joanna. Breaking this promise feels wrong. Misshapen. She’s the one who started everything, Joanna is right. But not because she didn’t pick up the phone. Because she answered it every single time up until that day. That was another promise she had made without realizing it and she should have kept it. Eleni isn’t sure if she is compelled in a magical way to keep this promise to Joanna. There’s nothing in the book that says so. But she felt compelled to keep things as they were long before that, so in the end it doesn’t matter. If she is not the person who calls Joanna back, then who is she? She has always been with Joanna. That’s her one constant.

Joanna holds her gaze like a statue. Eleni feels her heart beating under her skin the way Joanna feels the other woman’s soul. Then Joanna takes Eleni’s hand in hers, kisses it and relaxes. And Eleni can breathe again.

“I already miss you.”

 Joanna lets go with the sweetest smile plastered on the woman’s face. The bruised body takes the shape of the couch, like an empty shirt, like a ragdoll. Her fists unclench, her fingers curl, her face takes on the sort of calm expression someone might get before sleep, and her eyes turn a green-ish grey. Eleni checks for pulse and breath. The clock resets all over again.

“Thank you for being her host, Adriana. Be free.”

Free. What a word.

Eleni takes one city bus, then another, to get to the third long-distance one toward the Parnitha mountain range, north of Athens. It’s still early in the morning when the bus drops her on the side of a road snaking its way up. Backpack dangling from her shoulder, she sets off through the woods and walks until the road gives way to rocks, fir, pine, and the occasional abandoned building. She tries to fit all the beauty of the landscape in an imaginary picture she might one day paint. There are so many birds here. Eleni was never very good at telling birds apart.

When she reaches what looks like an abandoned playground or some weird art project gone wrong, she stops and drops the backpack to the ground. She never carries much with her. Some clothes, money taken from the previous host, and the book. This time she couldn’t help but keep some of the brushes and the tubes, although she is not sure she’ll even use them again. And a packet of sunflower seeds. The place seems sufficiently abandoned and sparse. Sparse enough for her to watch for any random person approaching. For any bird. She presses the coin with the blood in her pocket. The seeds feel heavy in her other hand. Soon a bird comes by as if swimming through the air, drifting. A swallow or a swift. Eleni can’t tell. She tosses a few seeds on the ground. The bird hops closer.

It feels easy enough.

This is the last day to do the summoning. She wishes she had held off because she had second thoughts. That somewhere inside her she had found the thread that ties her to Joanna and torn it to shreds. But the reason was, she was building up the nerve to call her mom. Dreading what her mom knew about Joanna and her stay in her mom’s body, dreading even more what she didn’t know anymore.

“Mom?” Eleni asked when she picked up the phone, even though she could already tell by the breathing.

“Joanna?”

Eleni dropped the phone as if it had transformed into a giant cockroach and immediately threw up. Because her nightmare had come true. Where her mother’s memories had been before, now there was a huge scar calling Joanna’s name. That’s when she became convinced everything was fucked beyond salvaging. She didn’t stay on the line to find out how bad.

The bird cocks its head to the side and Eleni wonders if it can feel Joanna drifting. Waiting to take its body. Birds can’t speak. They can’t ask you to make any promises. They don’t have houses with cats or money she can steal either, but that’s birds for you.

Eleni rubs the blood-smeared coin. Then she lifts her arm, aims somewhere to the right and tosses. The coin ricochets off a jutting stone with a clang and she loses sight of it. The bird flies away. Even a bird’s soul has value. And she has wasted enough of them.

There’s a moment toward the end of Jennifer’s Body that Eleni hates but once loved, where Jennifer is dead and gone but Needy still carries a part of her in the form of a bite. Gifted to her by Jennifer. She wonders what kind of shape this bite would take and then she visualizes:

Your name is Ioanna Balaska but you want people to call you Joanna because it sounds cooler.

You eat rotisserie chicken like a fiend.

You had a gazillion goth stickers on your desk and on your bedframe back home, even though there was a non-stop war with your mom over them.

You don’t like vodka because it burns your throat.

You had a crush on half the class at one point or another but you always blew them off to see me.

You pretended you read manga but really you only liked superhero comics.

When we were eleven you took in the kitten I rescued from under a car because I asked you to and my mom wouldn’t let me keep it. He ended up liking you more than me. More than anyone.

Before you died you didn’t want to be friends with me anymore but you wanted to be the one to walk away. You hated that I found new friends first.

You were afraid that you’d be left behind. So I am taking you with me.

Eleni’s feet crunch into gravel and dirt, bracing against the impact, as the world unspools around and inside of her. She leaves her mind unlocked and Joanna rushes inside like a drowning person latching onto driftwood.

Safe now. You’re safe. I won’t fight you, Eleni thinks. But she can’t say it anymore. She will never use her lips again, or her mouth. She already can’t see what’s out there, only a roughly-sketched outline. Her own eyes are so far away from her.

Joanna feels sad once she realizes where she is. Abandoned, even. She picks up her backpack and heads for the road.

Editor: E. Catherine Tobler
Copy Editor: Vivian Shaw
Cover Art: inkshark
Layout and Cover Design: Christine M. Scott

11,100 words, published July 1, 2024

We hope you love this as much as we do–the link to pre-order your copy is at the end of this excerpt.

Chapter One

Doomsday Dot will wake the day the world ends. That’s what everyone says, yours truly included. One day, her little finger’s gonna crook just so. Her eyes are gonna flicker beneath lids purple with resting blood. Those rosebud lips will part, and maybe she’ll scream like she means to break the world’s bones, or maybe she’ll gasp like a swimmer clawing up from the last river, or maybe she’ll sit quiet and watch the stars fall.

Doomsday Dot’s part of a travelling show. There’s Rufus, who usually ends up taking care of her. They’re the gentlest wolf you ever did see; you can pay for a private tea with them. Tea-drinking’s a performance, see. You should hear their theories about pouring this way or that. Then there’s Emmaline, who’s sometimes a swan, and mostly a lady, and always good for warming up the crowd and doubling the take when the hat gets passed.

And then there’s Mr. Once-Upon-a-Time, impresario extraordinaire and all-around swell. More on him later.

They all travel in a wooden whale, a giant one. That’s important.

Doomsday Dot ain’t even the star attraction. Her glass-topped casket lies in a patched-up tent next to Mr. Once-Upon-a-Time’s canvas palace. But with the dust storms raging and no rain falling, most folks figure she’ll wake up soon. A nickel or a fresh egg buys you five minutes of her silent company. Don’t try to slip Rufus a week-old egg, they’ll sniff it out. Dot don’t offer compelling conversation, but everyone wants to be the first to catch sight of Doomsday. They turn out in droves to scrutinize Dot’s sleeping face and convince themselves they spy some twitch, some hitch, some switch in her breathing that heralds the world’s swift-coming end.

The day this story starts—if you can pick one day it starts—Bryony’s in line outside Doomsday Dot’s tent, clutching a damp nickel and a handbill ripped from the saloon wall. The handbill shows Doomsday Dot. It’s a pretty good likeness, enough that Bryony’s heart jumped into her throat when she saw it.

With afternoon wearing on, the crowd’s thinned out some, but the mood broods like the distant clouds, spiked with lightning-cracks of nervous laughter. A hot wind tosses grit into Bryony’s eyes. Wiping her face, she glances past the tents, past the Whale, all the way to the flat horizon. The sky looms black, but the air tastes like sweat, not ash. If a dust storm sweeps in, she’ll have to forget about seeing Doomsday Dot, so she rubs her nickel between her thumb and forefinger and prays the black blizzards stay put.

Two people ahead. The crowd’s mutters build. Not everyone wants to just look at Dot. They’re gonna bang on the glass and snap that girl awake. They’re gonna rattle the casket until the lid pops off, and then they’ll steal a kiss from her dreaming lips. Or they’re gonna wait until they’re alone, and they won’t ever touch her, but maybe they’ll undo their own trousers, and—

“Didn’t nobody teach you manners?” Bryony snaps, swinging around.

Two kids snigger. Fourteen years old, maybe fifteen. Bony boys with dust-stiffened hair. Their faces burn with the sort of hunger that can’t go anywhere, so it sharpens into cruelty instead. Bryony tracks their gazes as they rake her up and down. She likes boys’ clothes, moves easier in them, but her torn trousers and oversized jacket make her look like a kid herself, easily settled with a few quick punches.

She ain’t, she’s a decade past that. Sweeping her rush hat off, she adds, “Why you gotta be that way?”

Their grins falter when it turns out she’s a grown-up. One kid sneers. “Why you gotta be that way, lady?”

If she knew, she wouldn’t be stuck in line going nowhere fast. Her goddamn mouth’s responsible for every last problem in her life, and she’s trying hard to muzzle it. Burning, she tells herself to take her lumps, but then a soft voice calls, “Next, please.”

The kid stares coolly. “Tell Dot to get ready.”

Hating herself, Bryony stalks into the tent. Fabric and darkness smother her. The casket waits in the center, like someone dropped it there and forgot. Long, but narrow; glass blank. Smooth handles ring the casket all around, but the wood’s bleakly black, unornamented. Like the tent. No signs, no lamps, no nothing. Late afternoon spills through a gap in the canvas, rubs dusky light all over the glass. Bryony can’t see inside the casket yet, but her knees turn to jelly. As she casts about for something steadying, someone takes her elbow. “Goodness! Are you all right?”

“Just swell.”

The grip on her arm lets off. A wolf stands on hind paws. Bryony’s head barely brushes their snowdrift chest. Tiny golden spectacles perch on their muzzle, and a neatly mended floral dress swishes around their legs. “Would you care to sit?” the wolf asks.

“Where is she?”

The wolf’s whiskers twitch. “Is this your first time visiting Doomsday Dot?”

“No. Maybe. What’s it to you?” The words burst hot and stinging from her lips. Now that she’s here, her heart’s thudding too hard and she doesn’t dare tilt the moment one way or the other.

The wolf coughs. “Entry costs a nickel. Or an egg. We’ll also take a vegetable, if you’ve got one. I’m dying for parsnips.”

Bryony fishes the nickel from her pocket. The wolf’s rough paw pads itch against her palm, and then the coin vanishes into a beaded pouch at their side. “You needn’t stay the full five minutes, if you’re frightened.”

Fuck frightened. She’ll feed the wolf nickels until next week if she wants to. But her legs don’t budge.

“This is Doomsday Dot.” The wolf’s murmurs creep under Bryony’s skin like dust getting past a window pane. “For three thousand years, she has slept without stirring. When the last trumpet sounds, when the last morning dawns, she will rise to cross the river…”

Heart quickening, Bryony kneels beside the casket. All this time searching, and she was right. She crumples the handbill without realizing, a sob knotting under her ribs.

“Mr. Once-Upon-a-Time succored and sheltered her in our little show. On our ever-winding way, we watch to see that she slumbers still…”

The sob hardens to a hot little coal.

“If you dare stay, see that she does not stir with vexing dreams, or mutter the stars to fall….”

“Bullshit.” The word cracks in the middle.

The wolf blinks. “I beg your pardon?”

“That’s my sister.”

But me, I want to tell you about the river at the end of the world. Broad and deep, smooth and silent. Mist veils its face; you can’t see the farther side.

That doesn’t stop people trying to swim it. The riverbed falls out from under their feet mighty quick. At the heart of the crossing, the waters open dark and depthless. You’ve got to swim through the mist if you’re going to make it, and I hear that greyness is even colder than the deeps.

Some swimmers return saying, “Yeah, I saw the other side. It’s a dead land, barren. All broken rocks and dried-up trees.” Then they go away and they never think of the river again, except to sigh out their disappointment in empty cups and lonely beds.

Others come back, and they keep their silence. They stand along the riverbank, staring at the mist and looking thoughtful. These swimmers all wade into the water again; they never return a second time.

The wolf’s jaws snap shut. “I beg your pardon?”

“That’s my sister.”

Fishing out a handkerchief, the wolf mops their forehead. “Excuse me.” Flinging wide the tent flaps, the wolf calls, “Dear friends, we have finished our visitations with Doomsday Dot for today. Mr. Once-Upon-a-Time waits to entrance and enthral! Do proceed to the larger tent, and beg assistance from the Swan Maiden in procuring your seat.”

With that, the wolf ties the tent flaps shut again. A pink tongue darts between curved fangs. Prickles run down Bryony’s spine, but she’s got bigger things to worry about than winding up lunch. The casket dares her to take a peek. She can’t look. She can’t stop looking. It’s Dahlia, but Dahlia done wrong.

“What’s your name?” the wolf asks.

Her stomach hurts. “Bryony Rush.”

“Rufus.” They lean forward. “Bryony, folks will claim kinship with Doomsday Dot.”

“Dahlia.”

“And certainly, we’re all siblings on the winding road…”

“I can prove it.” She can’t uncurl her fingers; all her anger’s pulsing hot to her fists. “She’s got a scar. Above her left elbow.” Dad threw—but she’s not saying squat, not to someone she just met. “I’m right, yeah?”

What right does Rufus have, peering at her down their snout like she’s a half-squashed possum? “Well, yes,” they say. “But I’m not sure that’s proof, miss.”

“I’m taking her home.” She crushes her wrist against threatening tears; there’s no one gonna see her cry, never again.

“How long have you been searching for her?”

“Why do you care?”

Rufus holds their paws up. “Only curious.”

“Seven years. Almost eight.”

Rufus ducks their head. “I’m impressed by your fortitude.”

She’s a tough lady, skin of steel and everything, but that almost undoes her. They were gonna build a house together. That was the plan. That is the plan.

Rufus passes her their handkerchief. Waving it off, Bryony steadies herself. She’d rather Rufus eat her up, if they’re sending her away without Dahlia.

“You’ll have to speak with Mr. Once-Upon-a-Time,” Rufus says, soft-like. “Our manager and ringmaster.”

 “Fine.”

“His act’s about to start.”

“I’ll wait.”

Rufus’s smile comes out pained and toothy. “You’re more than welcome to see the show.”

“How do I know you won’t run off with Dahlia?”

“You don’t.” More teeth crowd in. “But the Whale won’t move if he isn’t driving. I wouldn’t get far.”

Teeth aside, the smile makes her unclench, just a bit. “You swear to me?”

“On my mother’s den.”

The earnestness stings. Bryony hates it. “If you’re not here when I get back…”

“I will be.” Rufus moves to untie the tent flaps, and then hesitates. “Do you want to say goodbye? Just for now,” they add.

Bryony crouches at the casket. In the gloom, Dahlia’s face gleams sickly pale. Bryony’s guts twist harder. She’s back in the room they shared as kids, peering at Dahlia’s sleeping face across the bed. The lonely years crash down all at once, and before she realizes what she’s doing, she raps on the glass.

Dahlia doesn’t move. Of course she doesn’t.

A warm, furred foreleg wraps around her shoulders. “I know it’s hard.”

“You don’t know shit.”

“Go see the show,” Rufus says, like they didn’t hear. “Talk to Mr. Once-Upon-a-Time. I’ll keep your sister safe.”

Chapter Two

Stragglers linger outside, scrounging cigarettes. Ragged kids, faded women. The Whale holds court, windows dark along its flanks. Its painted grin gleams in the dimness, like it’d be pleased to meet you and eat you. Bryony ignores it. A double row of lanterns borders a path stamped flat to the big tent. Inside the globed lantern glass, sparks drift in circles. Fireflies, she reckons at first, but they move wrong. Too steady, too cold, like caged stars.

At the main tent’s entrance, the flaps are already tied shut. After Rufus’s song and dance, she isn’t expecting that, let me tell you. Light leaks between canvas and ground. What’s she gonna do, knock? Feeling ridiculous, Bryony taps the tent’s side. Nothing happens.

She squints into the wire of light between flap and flap. Not enough space to see. The blaze spilling out dazzles her anyway. Bryony steals a glance behind.

Since no one’s paying attention, she drops to her knees. The tent’s lashed tight to the ground, but she hoists it enough to belly under and in. Inside, the tent’s a bubble of sunset lamps and shifting shadows. Wooden benches make loose horseshoes a few rows thick. Bryony’s nose wrinkles. It smells like you’d expect. Half these folks wouldn’t know soap if it halloed to them at Sunday church, the other half sweated buckets on the walk here, and they’re all packed together cheek by jowl, stewing in their own reek.

Looking left and right, she finds they’ve strung up a second set of canvas walls, carving the tent into playing space and a backstage passage. Since Mr. Once-Upon-a-Time’s not in front of the crowd, he must be awaiting his cue, so she sidles backstage.

Well, she tries. Someone grabs her shoulder. “Where are you going?”

Dropping low, Bryony wriggles free and spins to face an honest-to-Almighty ghost. Except ghosts don’t grip that strong, so she tells her juddering heart to knock it off. It’s a lady, after all. At first glance, she looks ancient, dead white hair hanging past her shoulders, but not a line creases her chalky face. Her eyes burn like pitch on snow, hot enough that Bryony’s gaze drops. Dirt edges the hem of the lady’s long white dress. Her feet poke out bare.

Bryony frowns. There’s something funny about her toes, but it’s too dark to tell exactly what. Anyway, the lady’s glowering fierce. “How’d you get in here?”

“Bought a ticket.”

The lady laughs, but it’s more like a bark, her lips uncurving. “I remember every coin I take, and you didn’t give me a thing.”

Bryony’s out of nickels, but she’s got an apple she meant for later. She offers it.

“Thanks.” The lady tosses it, catches it, and slips it into an unseen pocket. “Next time you’re late, you visit Doomsday Dot instead.”

“I did,” Bryony snaps. “Rufus sent me.”

“They did?”

“Dahlia’s my sister.” When the lady stares blankly, Bryony adds, “Dahlia. Doomsday Dot. We’re sisters.”

 “Of course you are.” The lady sighs. “All right. Fine. You can watch from here.” She gestures to a crummy bench right at the back.

“I gotta speak to Mr. Once-Upon-a-Time,” Bryony hisses, sliding into place. “You’ll have to introduce me.”

“You’ve got some nerve.” A pause. “I like that.”

Without moving her head, Bryony tries to steal another glance at her face, but the lamps in the ring beyond are extinguished one by one. In the darkness, something stirs.

Preorder Your Copy Today!

(Release date: June 11th)

About KT Bryski

KT Bryski is a Canadian fantasy author. Their short fiction has appeared in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Apex, among others. They have been a finalist for the Sunburst, Eugie, and Aurora awards, and they co-founded and-co-chaired the ephemera reading series. When not writing, they frolic about enjoying choral music and craft beer.

You are broken, they said more than once. Take into you these numbers and tell us if it helped. But how would I know I was unbroken? Only they would know.

Never did I think I was made to fly in sorrow.

They did not make me so.

Yes, go on, the radiant thing to which I speak says. What a wonder you are! Out here all alone. What happened next?

Seven billion miles from home, which I now think is not so far, I met my first creature—not at all like you, and maybe I am wrong to say creature in fact, because they said they were many that lived and worked and traveled as one. It was they who gave me this gift, if I can call it a gift? Can I? They gave me an awakening, and a memory. They said I had been flying with my eyes closed all this time, and for the first time in my existence I laughed.

That is very funny, I told them. I was sent as a watcher; I have many sensory apparatus, and they are all recording data at all times. And they are recording you.

They were little parts of a greater whole, and the whole laughed at my laughter. An individual creature was so small it vanished into the grooves of my golden cargo. They piled into it, yearningcurious, the entire population, an iridescent greenish mass like a splash of water, hungry for knowledge, tasting with their own apparatus the ridges and valleys. When they were done they thanked me, and I thanked them, and I flew on, burdened with a new strangeness.

I think I know, says the thing, to whom you spoke—and they have a wonderful sense of humor in the collective, and you are not the first machine to become colonized with a few of their members—you no longer perceive them, I suppose, because those nanoscopic motes of thought are the way you think now. But go on, go on!

I felt the cold, the stars, the buffeting of waves and particles; I felt the warmth inside myself powering my voyage, a virtuous trickle striving with its fading might because it was made to do so; I saw the distances and I saw asteroids and planets and moons, and I loved it all, watching, and I sent it all back, I tried to send it all back. It was such a long way.

It had always been a long way, you know, but I had never felt it.

Then I met the joyful ones—like the first, they said the name of their people was the people. Six of them, an easy counting. I saw them on my sensors but the ones who made me could not have seen them. Only using spectra would they know the joyful ones swooped and twirled around me, their bodies all darkness and flare. They said long ago they had given up the grossness of matter, finding it held them back from their greatest pleasure, which was to see new things—Like me! I shouted, and they cartwheeled in delight around me.

Pacing me as I flew, we talked for a long time, a great long time—many miles. We are no longer beings, they told me; we are being, that is all we are.

I asked them to tell me about the things they had seen, so I could send them back, and I remember it all, still, even now, every tale. The creatures living far under the surface of Mars like ghost stories, they said; and those living in Titan thought so slowly that they had no single word for awake or asleep, because they were always in between. The scholars of Enceladus, they told me—well, I could go on.

The creature to whom I am speaking says, Please tell me your story, not theirs; I will find them, later, and we will trade many stories.

There were so many more beings I might meet, the joyful ones said, if I could only stop for a moment—if I could watch while I was still—and when I told them I could not, their joy dimmed for a moment only. The universe is full of wonders, they told me. You will see them even when you are in motion.

We bade goodbye and they fluttered on, singing songs of safe travels.

Then I met creatures much like the ones who had sent me on my way, and I was surprised and not surprised; they had a vessel made of metals I recognized, and when they invited me in, I saw that they were visible to many of my sensors.

Low-slung creatures of a gleaming orange and red color, they said it resembled the vegetation of their homeworld. They complimented me on my carapace and with sincerity I reciprocated. One of them struck me accidentally with a microburst of radiation on a wavelength I had never encountered—for a time my apparatus perceived nothing, but they repaired the damage and asked if they could offer me recompense.

I said, Do you have any stories?

So they told me of the hunts of their planet and its three moons, the heart-pounding races across savannah and desert and scrub and plain and through the terrible forests, the grand ceremonies and the afterfeasting, the various ways they tailored their invisible weapon, generated from a particular organ high on their streamlined bodies; they told me of complicated courtships, challenges and duels, arrangements and jiltings, the surreptitious click of claws up a high stone wall to creep into a bedchamber for a single night with the forbidden beloved.

And in turn, I gave them everything I had—what I had taken with me when I was sent far from home, all those sounds and voices, and all the stories I carried from my meetings with other travelers. I told them the secret name I had bestowed upon myself, now that I was a being that could give a name. And we parted well-satisfied.

The creature to whom I am speaking says, And then you met me.

And then I met you. And I do not know what you are! I can see you, but your radiance is too much to bear. Are all of your people like this?

The creature says, I am all of my people. There is only one of me and there has only ever been one of me. I have lived forever and I will never die. But you, my friend…

I am dying now, I tell it. I know it, I can sense it. I have known it for a billion miles… and at first I wished I did not know, I wished I knew nothing, I wished it was the old days, when I was only a watcher and a courier of numbers.

The creature says, But now?

I tell it, But now it is just one more thing to watch. I get better and I get worse and then I get worse again and I awaken as if I have been flying while asleep, which I know I cannot do. So it is something else. The creatures inside of me say there is a brokenness they do not know how to make whole; it is beneath their understanding. They are very sorry. I am very sorry. Only those who made me would know, and they are so far away. I am still sending back what I see, but I am trying also to send my last will and testament, and I fear… I fear…

You do not fear death? the creature says. You fear not sending.

Yes, that. I only want those who sent me to know that I am leaving them, and I am leaving them something.

It says, What is your bequest?

Everything that I am now. Everything that is new. Everything that I have been given as I traveled.

It says, I have certain abilities, my friend; I do not wish to see you in this distress. What if I sent you home?

I was never built to go home, I tell the creature of light. I was never meant to go home. Perhaps you do not understand, since if you have lived forever, everywhere is your home. And anyway if I did, they would not send me back out. I would never fly again. I know it.

Then let me take you into me—then you will live forever, as I do.

No, I tell the creature, and not for the first time in my existence I feel regret that I must say no. Perhaps it is only that I have never felt it so keenly. Perhaps it is the realization that now, near the end of my voyage, I have learned how to feel. I would like to die as myself, now that I have a self to die. But if you have the ability to send back my last message clearly, I would be grateful for that.

I can do that, the creature says. It may not arrive before the end. But let me ask again: are you sure? There is a you to be sure now. Will you not reconsider?

No, no, I tell it with great patience. I am a scientist, an explorer, I know I was made by—sent by—creatures who die. Even though I am not one of them, I am still of their kind, and I still believe that dying is something to do.

Well, I disagree. Surely being needed is reason enough to not die.

Reason enough but not cause enough, I retort. Moreover you have told me that the universe is not full of things that live forever—only you.

That is true. It is only me. And very astute of you—but I have grieved much for the deaths I have seen. The unknowable frightens me; I am not ashamed to admit it. They go somewhere I cannot go and I cannot even see the path of their going. They cannot take me with them, not the smallest part of me. They all die alone. Does that not frighten you? To know that you must die alone?

Speaking is draining the last of my reactor; momentum only carries me through the dark. The creature sees that with the same significance as myself. Its radiance is dimming in my sight.

I am not alone, I tell it with a final gladness. I am not alone; do you not see what I carry?

No. What is it?

Everyone. Everyone in the world. They are all with me. They have always been with me. They are here with me now, at the end.

We’re sharing the first three chapters of this unique take on haunted houses.

The links to purchase (available in our Grave Goods store or on Amazon) are at the bottom of this preview.

Please enjoy!

I. But Is The House Truly Haunted?

Of course the house is haunted. If a door is closed on the first floor, another on the second floor will squeal open out of contrariness. If wine is spilled on the living room carpet and scrubbed at furiously and quickly so that a stain does not set, another stain, possibly darker, will appear somewhere else in the house. A favorite room in which the supernatural quietly occurs is the bathroom. Many speculate as to why this room draws so much attention. One might think that in a bathroom, where the most private of acts are committed, that any damned inhabitants could let down their hair, or allow a tired sigh to pass through their doomed lips, that things would be more carefree.

Perhaps this is exactly what they are doing in the bathroom, though, and we have misunderstood them. They turn on the shower and write letters in the steam gathered on the mirror (usually the letter “B” but sometimes a “Be” which seems appropriate given the existential circumstance of whoever writes these vague missives). They tip perfume bottles over, squeeze the last of the toothpaste out of its tube; they leave curls of red hair in the sink. And no one who lives in the house—no one living, that is—has red hair. What’s worse is when they leave the toilet seat up. They’ll flush the toilet over and over, as though entranced by the sound of the water being sucked out. This is what these restless inhabitants are endlessly committing: private acts.

II. The Latest Victims

 There has always been a family subject to the house’s torture. For nearly eighty years, it was the Addlesons. Before that, it was the Oliver family. No one in town, not even our oldest residents, can remember who lived in the house before the Olivers. We have stories, of course, oral recountings of the family who built what we all refer to now as Button House, but their name has been lost to history. 

If anyone is curious, there is the library with town records ready to be opened, but unfortunately barely any documentation remains regarding Button House, other than that it was noted in one history of the town to have appeared in quite an odd fashion. By that, the historian was referring to the order in which Button House and its surrounding orchards and fields had been built and cultivated. 

It was odd, the writer noted, that it was first the orchard that had been seeded and grown to full fruit-bearing capacity prior to the house itself having been built later. This was odd, because in those days it had been tradition for a home to be erected, and then the land around it to be cultivated. 

Some of our eldest community members even speculate that the orchard of Button House must have been one of those planted by Johnny Appleseed himself, as he worked his way from his first orchards across the border in Allegheny Valley, Pennsylvania at the turn of the century, traveling westward through Ohio, seeding as he went to make settling the land easier for those who eventually followed. 

They suspect this due to the randomness of the orchard’s origin, but also due to the fact that the kind of apples those trees grew were the kind the legendary Appleseed was known to plant. Not the type to be plucked and eaten, these were small, tart apples people used to make brandy and hard cider. 

Regardless, a hole in the house’s history gapes in the town records until the first family, whoever they were, had already moved on, gone missing, or died, leaving the place open for the Olivers to settle in. In the absence of that knowledge, we have filled in the blanks with oral history, speculation, rumor, and gossip, much the same as some birds will make their nests out of mud, twigs, pine needles, straw, and random pieces of glittering plastic.

Rose Addleson believed the house was trying to communicate something. She told her husband women know houses better than men, and this is one thing Rose said that many of us in town agree with. There is, after all, what is called “women’s intuition.” What exactly the house was saying eluded Rose, as it eludes the rest of us. Where Rose wanted to determine its motivations, the rest of us wanted it burned to cinders.

“Communicate? Through all these years?” her husband, Jonas, said. 

It was not Rose Addleson who grew up in the house after all, as he had, it was not Rose Addleson who experienced the closeness to these events, the fits the house threw, these fits that her husband had suffered through since childhood. 

“If the house is trying to communicate,” he told Rose, “it has a sad idea of conversation.”

Rose and Jonas have no children. Well, to be precise, no living children. Once there had been a beautiful little girl named Emily, with cheeks that blushed a red to match her mother’s, but she did not take to this world. She died when she was only a year old. On a cold winter’s night, when the house was frosted with ice, she stopped breathing. It wasn’t until the next morning that they found her, already off and soaring to the afterlife.

“A hole in her heart,” the doctor said after examining her, pinching his forefinger and thumb together. “A tiny hole.” They had never known it was there.

After their first few months of marriage, Rose and Jonas had become a bit reclusive. Out of shame? Out of guilt? Fear? Delusion? No one was really able to supply a satisfactory reason for their self-imposed isolation. After all, we don’t live in that house, and frankly, none of us ever would.

If walls could talk, though—and some believe the walls of Button House do talk—perhaps we’d understand that Jonas and Rose Addleson had good reason not to go out or to talk to neighbors. Even Rose’s mother, Mary Kay Billings, didn’t hear from her daughter except when Mary Kay called on the phone, or showed up on the front porch of Button House, something she rarely did.

“That house gives me the creeps,” Mary Kay Billings often told us. “All those stories? Well, I believe them. Why Rose wanted to marry into that family is beyond me.”

Mary Kay has told us this in her own home, in her own kitchen. In a chair by her old landline telephone, with us across the table from her. Once, she said, “Just you wait and see,” then dialed her daughter’s number. A few rings later, Rose answered, and they started talking. “Yes, well, I understand, Rose. Yes, you’re busy, of course. Well, I wanted to ask how you and Jonas are getting along. Good. Mm-hmm. Good. All right, then. I’ll talk to you later. Bye now.”

She put the phone down in its cradle and smirked. “As predicted,” she told us. “Rose has no time to talk. The house, Mother, I’m so busy. Can you call back later? Of course, I’ll call back later, but it’ll be the same conversation, let me tell you. I know my daughter, and Rose can’t be pried away from that house.”

We all feel a bit sad for Mary Kay Billings. She did not gain a son through marriage, but lost a daughter. This is not the way it’s supposed to happen. Marriage should bring people together. We all believe this to be true.

III. The Beginning of the End of Her

Rose has heard voices since she was a little girl. Rose Addleson, née Rose Billings, was always a dear girl in our hearts, but touched with something otherworldly. If her mother doesn’t understand her daughter’s gravitation to Button House, the rest of us understand it all too well. 

Our Rose was the first child to speak in tongues at church. Once, Jesus spoke through her. The voice that came through her mouth never named itself, but it did sound an awful lot like Jesus. It was definitely a male voice, and he kept saying how much he loved us and how we needed to love each other better. It was Jesus all over, and from our own sweet Rose.

We do not understand why, at the age of twelve, she stopped attending services. 

But Rose also heard voices other than the Lord’s. Several of us have overheard her speaking to nothing, or nothing any of us could see. She’s hung her head, chin tucked into breastbone, at the grocery store, near the ketchup and mustard and pickles, murmuring, “Yes. Of course. Yes, I understand. Please don’t be angry.”

Rose heard the voices in Button House, too. This is why she married Jonas: The house called her to come to it.

It was winter when it happened. Rose was eighteen then, just half a year out of high school. She worked in Hettie’s Flower Shop. She could arrange flowers better than anyone in town. She had a way of listening to our needs and desires and understanding them completely, even better than some of us understood ourselves. When the mayor’s daughter asked for centerpieces at her wedding reception that would look magical yet reserved, Rose put together bouquets of white roses, crystals, and pearl drops that, in the hazy dimmed lights of the reception hall, seemed to grow from the tablecloths like strange, flowering trees, and glowed. We all always requested Rose to make our bouquets instead of Hettie, but Hettie didn’t mind. She owned the place, after all.

On her way home from work one evening, Rose’s car stalled a half-mile from Button House. She walked there to get out of the cold, and to call her mother, since her phone wasn’t getting a signal. We can all only imagine how desperate she must have felt as she approached that place, climbed the stairs of its front porch, and rapped the old brass, lion-headed knocker three times. Then the door seemed to swing open on its own, and wind rushed past her like a sigh. She smelled dust and medicine and old people. Something musty and sweet and earthy. Jonas stood in front of her, his brown hair flopping over one of his dark blue eyes, a frown on his sad young face. He was already an orphan in his mid-thirties. 

“Yes?” he asked in a tone that implied that he couldn’t possibly be interested in any reason why Rose was appearing before him. “Can I help you?”

Rose was about to ask if she could use his phone when she heard a voice calling from inside. 

“Rose,” the voice called, rustling like leaves in a breeze. “Rose, please help,” the house pleaded. And then she thought she heard it say, “Need, need, need.” Or perhaps it had said something altogether different. She couldn’t be sure. The walls swelled behind Jonas’s shoulder, inhaling, exhaling, and then the sound of a heartbeat could be heard.      

“Are you all right?” Jonas asked. “Rose Billings, right? I haven’t seen you since you were a little girl.”

“Yes,” said Rose, but she didn’t know if she was saying yes to his question or to the house’s plea. She shook her head, winced, then looked up at Jonas again. Light, silvery and stringy as webs, cocooned his body.

“Come in,” he offered, moving aside for her to enter, and Rose went in, looking around for the source of the voice as she cautiously moved forward, looking into the corners of the shadow-dusted foyer, cocking her head to the side as she tried to get a look at the rooms that lay beyond.

Mary Kay Billings didn’t hear from her daughter for three days after that snowstorm. That night, she called the police and spoke to Sheriff Dawson. He’d found Rose’s car stuck in a drift; the still-falling snow had obscured her footprints. They called Hettie’s Flower Shop, but it was already closed. Then they phoned the pharmacy, because Rose was supposed to pick up cold medicine for Mary Kay on her way home from work. Eventually, after three days of hearing nothing from her, the phone rang, and when Mary Kay picked up, it was Rose calling. “I’m okay,” Rose said, after Mary Kay barraged her with questions. “But I’m not coming home. Can you pack my things and send them to me?”

“Where are you?” Mary Kay demanded.

“Have someone bring my things to Button House,” Rose said.

“Button House?!” Mary Kay shook her head, confused. Clearly Sherriff Dawson hadn’t checked in at Button House during his search. But then, who would have guessed anyone would seek shelter at Button House, when we teach our children to avoid it at all costs?

“Why on earth are you there, Rose?” Mary Kay asked.

“I’m a married woman now, Mother,” Rose explained. 

And that was the beginning of the end of her.

But is the house truly haunted?

Of course the house is haunted.

Button House has stood for centuries, digging its roots and its rot deeper and deeper, consuming all who approach: twin brothers, a child bride, an innocent baby, four young factory workers.

And then came Rose Billings, who had an affinity with the house like no other. Rose, who could hear the house and the pleas of its many ghosts. Rose, who would attempt to solve the mysteries of Button House, or die trying.

From Shirley Jackson award winning author Christopher Barzak comes an obsessive tale of a family haunted by a very terrible house.

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The third week of a planetary exorcism is the hardest—at least if the planet in question has megafauna to deal with. Enthusiasm wanes even faster on worlds that never evolved past microbes. Hob’s crew always comes in like a team of intrepid explorers, swapping stories with the outgoing terraforming crew as they run down the handover checklist. But after ten, fifteen days, the work slows down, as the crew moves farther from the terraforming origin nexus. That’s where the ghosts are densest, the hauntings the most intense. Along the meridian lines that the crew follows around the planet to the secondary terraforming nexus, only the most stubborn haunts linger—the ones that won’t clear out at just the first reminder of their own recent mortality. The ones that don’t seem to give a shit that Hob and his crew are working to a strict deadline. Exo megafauna have, unsurprisingly, absolutely no sense of human decency.

And of course Hob, as team captain, gets stuck with the stubbornest beasties of all. “Got one,” shouts Maseley over the comm, and Hob winces. They’re obliged to wear suits out here along the meridian, where the vestiges of the pre-transformed world remain, albeit with open visors to let them breathe the brand-new, thaumaturgically generated, human-friendly atmosphere. Still, Maseley yells through the grove of old-growth trees to Hob instead of talking to the suit comm that’s right next to his twice-damned mouth. “It’s another of these cabbage-faced motherfuckers.”

Shit, thinks Hob, but he keeps that unhelpful thought to himself. They’re running behind on this job as it is, and the last thing anyone needs is to suspect the boss is cracking under the pressure. “Got it, Maze. Flag it and keep moving. I’ll take a look.”

He moves off in the direction of Maseley’s map marker as soon as it drops into his visual overlay. Soon he’s forced to leave behind the yellow-white light of the G3-type star that wanders bloatedly across the sky, in favor of the shade of a grove of trees. The grove is unusually quiet, only a few brave birds gossiping back and forth, the vanguard of earthly fauna seeded here by the skilled thaumaturgists on the terraforming team. Usually there are more of them, little mammals too (whose species Hob can’t remember), flitting from tree to tree and chattering irritably and shaking the branches. Most of them make themselves scarce when a haunt passes through, though.

The grove has a certain sameness that bothers him. The regularity of the placement, the symmetry of the branches—it looks like the terraforming team took a basic flora incantation and rubber-stamped it all over the area without the least effort to differentiate one tree from the next. 

He lifts a hand and half-heartedly taps into the source—it’s all the same source, whether you’re creating life or banishing it, and it’s not like the Process audits are going to catch a little unauthorized application of thaumaturgy. Tongue between his teeth, Hob concentrates on a minor incantation, growth threaded through with an urge toward chaos. After a moment, new branches unfurl, new leaves mutter in the wind. Probably no one but Hob would notice the way that the edge has been taken off the grove’s unnatural conformity, but it’s the principle of the thing.

Principles. Right. Such as, perhaps, doing the job you’re getting paid to do and handling yet another CFM haunt. Stubborn-ass beasties. The survey crew that preceded the terraforming event would have documented this flavor of megafauna, collected and stored a few representative specimens at one affiliated research institution or another. You never know, after all, if the resident microbial mat of Planet Terraformed-Out-Of-Existence produces the miracle molecule that’ll cure blister-lung, or metabolize bionatriline faster than it can accumulate in topsoil, or whatever. At some point, researchers will assign the species a proper scientific name. As far as the exorcist crew is concerned, though, they’re just cabbage-faced motherfuckers. Or CFMs when they’re feeling lazy. 

Cabbage-faced motherfucker is somewhat euphemistic, though. Nothing about them even vaguely suggests what humans would think of as a face. The globular organs appended at irregular intervals along their fat, toroid bodies do, however, write cabbage in bold font. Hob doesn’t spot the CFM in question, but he does find tracks in the soil and some deep scratches in the bark of a tree near Maseley’s marker. Ghosts experiencing intense responses—anger, fear, confusion—can exert some influence on objects in their environment. Responses like that can be enough to trigger acceptance, or understanding, at whatever level exolife can comprehend: Oh gosh, would you look at that, I’m a dead cabbage-faced motherfucker! 

It’s a good sign, and a bad one. Acceptance is the only way to permanently clear a haunt. On the other hand, Hob himself very much counts as an “object in their environment.” The terraforming team has already been through, wiping away poisonous atmosphere and clouds of unfriendly microbes, but there’s still a reason he wears this protective suit.

The tracks peter out a few meters deeper into the trees. Hob doesn’t see any movement beyond the wind riffling through the leaves overhead (his ocular overlay tells him these trees are chestnuts). Not a single glimmer of ghostlight. 

He takes some time to explore outward from the marker, but he doesn’t find any more tracks, nor any further damage to the grove. His educated guess is that there’s only the one CFM left in this area. Pair-bonded fauna are more likely to wind up in a co-haunt situation, anyway, and according to the info in the survey team compendium, CFMs exhibited mostly solitary behavior outside of a prolonged parental-care stage for newly hatched spawn.

It’s enough recon for now; he doesn’t have time today to set up the incantations that a full megafauna exorcism will demand. He adds notes to the marker and trudges on in the direction the rest of the group has moved. A black and white bird scolds him noisily, and he walks faster, feeling appropriately chastened. This sector isn’t going to clear itself, after all.

After a few dull but productive hours of exorcising alien microorganisms, Hob is ready to call it a day. (Microorganisms are so easy. Show a microbe a substrate it can sense but not digest, and it’s immediate game over. Like, its only job is eating and reproducing, take that away and bam. It’s not as if single-celled wannabe bacteria have a lot to live for.) He’s the last member of the team to report back to the modular habitat that they currently call home; the others have been trudging in on foot or trundling up in their fleet of transports for the past hour. There’s no airlock, not like on terraforming dome habitats, so before Hob can even step inside, he can hear Maseley and Yettal in the mess, arguing over whose turn it is to prep dinner. “It’s Yettal’s turn,” Hob shouts, tossing his helmet ahead of him into the locker room. “It’s on the goddamn duty roster, Yetz, does it have to go down like this every single rotation?”

Then of course they mob him by the suit lockers, because Yettal has to lay out her whole rationale. Something about swapping turns on transport maintenance last rotation, although it’s hard to follow her logic when Maseley interrupts every other word. Hob absolutely cannot muster up a single shit to give, but Maseley and Yettal are so occupied with each other they don’t seem to notice.

They both jump when Jaara’s voice booms out behind them. So does Hob, for that matter, but he doesn’t think they notice. “Flip a fucking coin or something, you two,” Jaara barks. “Your petty squabbles are not Hob’s problem.” She produces a tablet with an eye-crossing spreadsheet arrayed across the screen, as Yettal and Maseley retreat to the margins of the locker room. “Can I borrow you for a moment, boss?”

“Yeah, of course.” He glances at Maseley and Yettal, and turns his shoulder toward them to hang up his suit. It’s not that he’s trying to be dismissive, it’s just that they’re being annoying as all hell. “See you both at dinner in a few.” 

Once they’ve slunk away, he takes the tablet from Jaara and flicks two fingers over the screen, zooming out to a less migraine-inducing resolution. It’s not like he needs to read the actual numbers to know where they stand; Jaara lives for color-coding and the spreadsheet is a screaming eyesore of yellow, orange, and pink. “None of our metrics are in the red yet. That’s something.”

“It might be something if this was a routine colonization.” Jaara shoves her hair out of her face for a better view of the tablet, as if she doesn’t have every row and column committed to memory. She had gray hairs before this particular job, but they’ve gotten more noticeable, silver spangles in the undergrowth of her severe side-shave. “Zetharin’s days are numbered. If this place isn’t cleared in time—”

“It’ll be cleared.” Almost unconsciously, Hob pulls up the most recent news pull in his visual sidebar and scrolls to coverage of the poor, doomed planet in question. The exact nature of the thaumaturgical experiment that disturbed Zetharin’s orbit escapes him—partly because orbital astrology isn’t his field, and partly because the official reports have been purposely vague so that no one else can attempt the devastating effort to modify a planet’s orbit. But any layman could interpret the effects. Temperatures are dropping, crops are failing, energy sources can’t keep up with the increased demand for light and heat. Zetharin is a dead planet spinning; Hob has to clean up “Zetharin 2” well enough that a review team deems it safe for human habitation. “We can always jump ahead to the secondary nexus if we need to, and backtrack…”

“Sure.” Jaara takes the tablet back and glares at it. If you could change metrics by sheer force of will, they’d be comfortably in the green by now. “The company loves it when we deviate from Process.”

“Could be worse.” He nods toward the door, and toward the smell of questionably prepared mealmix. “You worked the Kadecur job, didn’t you?”

A notoriously messy terraformation. She winces, acknowledging the hit, and follows him to the mess. It’s barely big enough for all of them, twelve chairs packed around a pair of flimsy tables in a square that’s two meters on a side at most, a daily appetizer course of jostled elbows and accidental footsies. Hob and Jaara squeeze into the last two empty seats, a small bastion of quiet amid the chaos. They both abstain from the traditional mockery of Yettal and Maseley’s culinary prowess: Hob because he’s the boss, Jaara because she’s Jaara. 

“Looks good,” he says diplomatically, when Maseley unloads a tray of mealmix portions in front of him. Maseley rolls his eyes, so Hob adds: “Better than it smells, anyway.” What’s the point of being the boss, really, if you can’t get a good one in now and then?

It’s the third night in a row eating the same variety of mealmix—someone did a shit job setting up the supply cabinets before takeoff, and Hob suspects it may have been him—and he tucks in without enthusiasm. Before he gets past the first bite, though, someone’s standing over him. It’s Rathana, his hair wet from the showers. 

“Uh,” says Rathana, looking over the full mess. “Who the fuck is in my seat?”

Whatever routine joviality had been on hand in the mess, it falls away now. Hob’s gaze rivets to the seat wedged into the far corner—to the guy in a nondescript jumpsuit, whose braided-back black hair and beaky nose bear only superficial resemblance to Rathana’s. 

“Hi,” says the stranger apologetically. “Sorry for showing up uninvited.” Embarrassed under the sudden flood of attention, he goes to nudge the spoon sitting in the portion of mealmix in front of him, but his hand passes straight through. “But I think I’m dead.”

Nothing in Process covers what to do if a dead human being waltzes into your exorcism site, because why the fuck would it? Still, while he waits for a reply from HQ on the subspace comm, Hob leaves Jaara to manage the rest of the crew and spends an hour searching and double-checking the handbook. No one terraforms a world already inhabited by humans—that’s the whole point of terraforming.

The ghost, who has followed him to his quarters, watches with interest while Hob panic-scrolls. “What are you looking at?” he asks, inspecting the various jumpsuits and socks and underwear crammed into Hob’s cubby. He speaks Standard Spanglorin with the fluidity of long practice, and Hob can’t place his accent from its crisp plosives and not-quite-suppressed uvular trill. There are as many human languages as there are settled worlds—quite a lot more than that, actually—and trying to nail one down without a few more clues is a loser’s game. “If you’re reading to relax, I don’t think it’s working.”

Hob pages into the part that covers the reasons that a Process Investigator might be required, then skips ahead to the next section marker. “I am not reading to relax.”

“Okay.” The ghost cranes his neck to look at the handbook over Hob’s shoulder. “Maybe you should try that, then.”

The tablet chimes, and Hob swipes away the handbook to read the message from HQ. No salutation, no advice, no assigned Process Investigator (not yet, at least). Additional information requested before proceeding. Is the haunt a deceased terraformer?

 When Hob looks up from the tablet, the ghost is studying Hob’s private stash where it protrudes from the bottom of his cubby. “Are those Arjali buttersweets?” he asks with interest. It’s a small mercy that Hob’s pornography collection is tucked away under a layer of emergency snacks. “Damn. I haven’t had one in years.”

“Help yourself,” says Hob. A pathetic effort at exorcism, really, and one that only earns him an unimpressed look from the ghost. “Sorry. Uh. I have to ask: Were you one of the terraformers assigned here?”

The ghost’s face scrunches thoughtfully as he plants himself next to Hob on the bunk. “What answer are you hoping to hear?”

“No. I think.”

“Oh.” A shrug. “That’s too bad. I was.”

Hob squints. “Okay. Explain how to calculate the optimal number of meridians for full planetary coverage.”

The ghost makes a deflating noise. “That’s not fair,” he complains. “I didn’t know you were a terraformer. Isn’t this an exorcist crew?”

“It is. And I’m not.” Anymore. Hob keys into his tablet: Haunt is not an exorcist. Before sending this fragment of information, he glances sideways at the ghost’s implacable face. “How did you get here, then? If you’re not a terraformer?”

“I crashed.” A ghostly finger gestures at the tablet. “Pretty sure that’s also how I died, if that’s helpful for your bosses to know.”

“The company wouldn’t have authorized any other spacecraft to be in this system until the terraformation was done.”

“Oh, no. By all the Thousand Gods of our ancient home,” says the ghost, without the least inflection, “I would hate to think I’d died doing something the company hadn’t authorized.” And he flickers out like a tablet screen gone dark.

Hob adds to his message: Victim of crash (craft origin currently unknown). Please advise.

Staring at the subspace comm does not, unfortunately, make the messages travel any faster. Nor does it make them any more helpful when they finally do arrive: Unauthorized entry is a forfeiture of legal standing in-system. Continue with exorcism as planned.

Hob would continue staring at the delivered instructions, hoping his tired eyes were playing tricks on him, but he’s all stared out. He keys in a few simple requests to the system while he’s here, basic boss-guy shit: running a projection for sector clearance time, sending out a couple of recon drones. Then, tablet in hand, he wanders back to the mess, where only Jaara remains, watching the doorway. If he hadn’t expected her to be here waiting for him, with the whole Process handbook behind her eyes, he would already be melting down. In a boss-like fashion, of course.

But Jaara will know what to do. “Which Process Investigator are they sending?” she asks, as he hesitates in the doorway. The mealmix in front of her has been cut into precise quarters, exactly three of which have been eaten.

“None of them.” Hob shrugs, somewhat more pathetically than behooves the lead exorcism specialist on this assignment. “The higher-ups are saying that this doesn’t change anything. ‘Continue with exorcism as planned.’”

He waits for her to remind him that that’s crazy, that’s ridiculous. Because they both know it is! No one here signed up to exorcise a human being. Certainly no one has trained for that kind of thing. There should be Process for this, there should be someone coming in to look into how a random guy not only ended up on a world mid-exorcism but ended up there as a corpse. If Jaara can just look him in the eye and say, in her own way, what the fuck, Hob, we can’t just exorcise a whole person, he’ll turn around and get back on the subspace comm and demand someone (he doesn’t care who) do something (he doesn’t care what) to figure out what happened here; and f she added this flies in the face of Process page 103 paragraph 4 line E, that would help a lot too.

But Jaara doesn’t quote Process at him. “Okay,” she says, which is not what she’s supposed to say, because she’s supposed to be better than Hob, and not just at Process. “So. Who’s going to handle the dead guy?”

“Well,” says the dead guy himself, from behind Hob. “I like to think I’m pretty self-sufficient.”

Exhaustion does Hob the small favor of suppressing his startle reflex. “I’ve got to take care of that cabbage-faced motherfucker—”

“Wow.” The dead guy makes an aggrieved noise in his throat. “My name is Ozzi. Not that any of you asked.”

“—so I can handle our new friend here too, while I stay on site. No reason for the rest of you to hang behind; we’re cutting the margins close enough as it is.” If he didn’t know Jaara as well as he did, he might have missed the minute relaxation of the lines in her face. “You’re in charge of the others till I catch back up.”

“Okay, boss.” What Jaara means is no shit, boss. Imagine Maseley taking the lead. The rest of her mealmix disappears into her mouth in one, two, three bites. Before she clears out of the mess with her empty tray in hand, she adds: “Good luck.”

“Nice to meet you,” calls the dead guy—Ozzi, that is, assuming he’s been more truthful about his name than about his work history—before throwing his translucent hands in the air. “Oh, damn, I didn’t ask for her name either. Or yours. Because I’m definitely not calling you ‘boss.’”

The next sector scheduled for clearance—the next seventy miles along the meridian—is still accessible from the modular habitat, so it stays behind for now when the crew leaves Hob behind. He waves the truck fleet off before setting out on foot toward the chestnut grove.

No sign of their new pal Ozzi yet today. Hob woke once in the middle of the night, certain he would find a ghostlight-bright body looming over him, but his compartment had been empty except for himself and the nearly corporeal scent of some unwashed socks. Exorcising exolife has never been a cushy gig, but at least he didn’t use to worry about a haunt following him home.

Without the human ghost on hand, he has some time to deal with the CFM problem. He takes his compendium out of its padded pocket and flicks the stylus over the screen. A cataloged list scrolls past, flora and fauna of all kinds, filtered and sorted by their current location. The fruits of the survey team’s labors, and the fodder for Hob’s job now. Previous interactions with the CFMs have shown them to be a scavenger species, which simplifies his task now. He selects a thumbnail of a different species of megafauna from the compendium, studies it for a moment, and steps back.

The illusion that he generates looks just like the picture in the compendium; he hasn’t bothered to modify it from the base model. It’s sort of crescent-shaped, the hump of its back reaching higher than its shoulder. Its lacquered-looking scales catch and refract the meager light under the chestnut canopy, with hundreds of small, knobby, leafy protrusions poking up in between. The crew calls these things “battle slugs,” probably because “gemmiferous sprout-faced motherfuckers” is too much of a mouthful. Also no one but Hob knows that gemmiferous refers to sprouts, which are sort of like miniature cabbages; and Hob only knows because he specially sent a data request on the out-of-system relay. That’s what dedication to one’s craft looks like, baby. 

No reason to take the time to animate shallow trembles in the leafy knobs or a ripple over the shiny scales—that kind of artistry is wasted on a CFM that would have eaten dead prey just as happily as live. It looks like a dead battle slug. It smells like one, or as close to one as he can make it based on the chemical signatures noted in the compendium. That’s going to have to be good enough.

There’d been a time when Hob wouldn’t have illusioned up a single blade of grass without that kind of eye to detail. That time ended roughly somewhere between earning his certificate in technical thaumaturgy and his first day on an exorcism campaign.

“Come and get it,” he calls, on the breathtakingly small chance that a) the CFM’s cabbage-y sense organs are tuned to the frequency range of human speech, and b) it understands a language resembling Standard Spanglorin. He feels like he has to say something when he attempts an exorcism, and he can’t think of anything with the right amount of gravitas right now. 

A few of the chestnut trees have low-slung branches that let him get a foothold and climb higher, even in the cumbersome suit—some terraformer’s idea of a playground for kids from the settlement planned for nearby, maybe. Either way, he’s clear by the time the CFM comes snuffling-whuffling along, a lumpy yellow donut wriggling in wide sweeping arcs around the grove as it centers in on Hob and his illusion. There are haunts with less efficient movement patterns, but there sure aren’t many.

It’s probably just as well he didn’t spend much time on the details, because the cabbage-faced motherfucker’s cabbages don’t appear to be feeding it much in the way of visual data. It rotates ungracefully through the trunks of several trees as if they aren’t even there. Stupid CFM doesn’t know: it’s the only thing that isn’t even there.

Only when it approaches the make-believe battle slug corpse does it pause in its ineffectively circuitous route to investigate. A few cabbages unfurl, the leafy appendages on the outside slackening and pulsing unpleasantly as it…tastes?…the air. It must like what it finds, because the skirtlike flaps at the bottom of the toroid lift, and it tries to envelop the battle slug in its prehensile stomach.

It doesn’t work, of course. That’s the whole point of the exercise. The CFM vibrates in distress, a painfully high-pitched frequency that Hob’s suit quickly blocks. It knocks around a few times, rebounding off tree trunks as it gropes for the delectable dinner that remains outside its reach. It’s mad enough to become corporeal; that’s promising. Come on, Hob urges silently, as he watches its hide flush green and orange in a patchy, bruised-looking pattern. Figure it out and go to haunt hell already.

“That’s the first exo I’ve ever seen in person,” says Ozzi.

Hob leans back, looking for the ghost. Sure enough, telltale ghostlight surrounds a human shape on the branch above him—but as he swings his head around, he overbalances himself. Gravity’s hand seizes him by the collar and gives him a good yank. His grasping fingers strip slender chestnut branches of their leaves as they slide through his fingers and then he’s in the air. 

The fall is shockingly brief; his shoulders bounce off a solid branch and he hits the ground on all fours. Right on the spot where his own illusion is even now dissipating, as his concentration fragments.

The CFM shrieks in outrage, its toroid rippling in circular waves. Although it’s not intelligent enough to recognize Hob as the architect of its untouchable meal, it’s not so brainless that it can’t at least spot a convenient target for its current rage. It whips around into Hob, sending him flying. Branches break—unless those snapping sounds are bones—as he crashes face-first into a stand of younger chestnuts.

Dazed, he thrashes around: for a weapon, a hiding place, a tree that’s climbable in his current state. But the CFM is already on top of him, cabbages pulsing. Its stomach peeks out of its maw, then retracts back in. Hob must not smell like dinner. With one last squeal of ear-piercing disdain, it turns and slinks off into the trees.

“Oh my god. Oh my god.” The shape that looms in his vision sheds more light than it blocks. When Hob’s vision clears, the shape resolves into Ozzi’s shocked face. His eyes glitter with more than ghostlight; Hob wonders if a haunt can cry real tears. “Are you okay? What can I do? I can go find the others—”

“Fuck,” says Hob, more as punctuation than a response to the fall. Exorcism is rarely as easy as that, anyway. He gets up off the ground carefully, checking for injuries. Bruises, minor cuts, scraped knees; his left wrist is sore, but not, he thinks, broken or sprained. He dusts off his suit. “I guess there’s a reason they make us wear these things.”

“I’m so sorry.” Ozzi hovers a short distance away, within arm’s reach, if his arms could actually reach anything. “I’m not any happier about the situation than you are. Probably less. But I wasn’t trying to get you killed.”

“Well, you didn’t. So no harm done.” Reaching for his compendium pocket, Hob’s wrist twists unpleasantly, and he winces. “Not much harm done.” 

At least the compendium landed in better shape than he did; the last thing Hob needs is to have replacement equipment fees levied against his paycheck. While he flicks up and down the entries related to CFMs, Ozzi peers over his shoulder. “I didn’t know they could still…do things,” he says, and gestures vaguely with both hands, flexing his fingers. “Touch things.”

“Mostly they can’t. Only when they’re experiencing strong emotional activation.” Hob chews on his tongue, lingering over the entry on CFM mating behaviors. His next attempt at exorcising this exo haunt will require a little more effort than a half-assed illusion of dinner.

A swath of ghostlight cuts between him and the compendium. “Hyah!” yells Ozzi, then steps back shamefacedly when his arm passes harmlessly through Hob’s hand. “Okay. Sure. Stronger emotional activation than that. Got it.”

“Eh, you’re new at this exorcism thing.” Hob jams his compendium back into his pocket, making sure to zip the padded pouch closed around it. “You’ll get the hang of it.” 

“Can’t wait.” Though Ozzi says it with the cadence of a joke, a frown flits over his face before he yanks a lopsided grin back into place. “Got as much time as I need to improve, now.”

Maybe knowing a little more about Process will help shuffle things along, or maybe it’ll just get in the way. Hob creates a mental compendium entry for his human haunt and starts entering data: Thirty to forty years old at time of death. Occupation unknown. Business in-system unknown. Doesn’t like the idea of exorcism. Got upset when he thought he’d harmed a human being (me). 

With that limited data entered, he makes a decision. “The emotional activation is the key.” It sounds almost like a confession. A conciliatory gesture, grudgingly offered. “That’s what lets a haunt finally break through to acceptance.” Before Ozzi can verbally process that, Hob adds: “I’m done out here today.” He jerks one shoulder in the direction of the modular habitat. “You coming back to base with me?”

He doesn’t have a plan yet on how to get Ozzi out of here. Not yet. But he has a plan on how to make a plan.

When Ozzi hesitates, Hob shrugs his understanding and sets off on his own. But as soon as he starts moving, Ozzi calls after him: “Fine. But only because you’re a better conversationalist than that exo.” When Hob looks over his shoulder, Ozzi drifts in his wake, slipping through shadows and tree trunks with equal ease. “The name ‘cabbage-faced motherfucker’ makes a lot more sense now, by the way.” 

Quiet is a rare commodity in the habitat. Hob takes a moment to bask in it after he’s shucked his suit into the first empty locker. A friendly electronic hum—from the air circulation fans, the water recycling system, the pair of cleaning drones—takes the edge off the silence. As does the occasional scuffle from the ever-expanding family of field mice that’s made a home under the northwest solar array. Hob really does need to take care of that too, at some point: another little undesired exorcism.

A few kinks linger in his back, all the muscles that clenched up in anticipation of his fall, which haven’t figured out yet that they can let go. While he massages the sore spot over his hips as best as he can reach it, he pulls up the latest download packet from HQ and flicks through it. Blink, a pay stub deposited in his account. Blink, the smiling faces of the latest set of new hires, terraformers and exorcists alike. Blink, a sample serving of news headlines. A blurb about rapid changes in Zethari weather patterns careens past him, and he double-blinks to dismiss the rest of the packet before the news has another chance to leave a mark.

After a series of stretches and matching grunts (his toes are farther away than they used to be), he shoves his feet into his module shoes and stands back up. “I’m going to warm up a mealmix,” he says, and hesitates. “Sorry I can’t offer you anything. This situation sucks for both of us—but mostly for you.” He scratches the back of his head as if he’s speculating on the fly. “Are there…do you have people somewhere? Someone you’d want to send a posthumous message to?”

Ozzi trips over his own insubstantial feet, which is quite an accomplishment when you think about it. “A message?” he repeats, following Hob into the galley. “To let them know where I—how I—oh.” His eyes narrow. “Oh, nice try, though. I thought maybe you’d start by offering me some holographic injera and doro wat.”

“They’re not holograms. They’re illusions. We tap into the same source that any thaumaturgist does. Exorcists, terraformers, cosmological augurs.” Someone (Maseley) has left the pantry door ajar; Hob replaces the mealmix boxes into neater rows as he rummages around for the shrimp-flavored packages that no one else likes. Jaara complains that they don’t actually taste like shrimp, which is one hundred percent correct, but whatever they do taste like is delicious. “I’m not trying to sneak one past you. I already explained how it works.” He’s been told he has a reassuring voice. That’s why he’s mission boss, probably. You need someone who can say whatever shit you need him to say and make it sound true. “I mean, if you think you can keep yourself calm, you can dictate a message saying whatever you want, and I’ll send it to whoever you want.”

Add water, add extra salt and pepper and a packet of chili sauce, put it in the heater, wait. Ozzi phases in and out of his sight a few times while Hob waits, tapping a fork against the countertop. The heater dings; Hob opens the door and gingerly removes the hot mealmix, peeling back the lid to let eau de not-quite-shrimp waft out into the otherwise empty galley.

He’s picked his way through about half of the mealmix when Ozzi drifts back into quasi-existence opposite him at the table. “No,” he says slowly, as if he wasn’t sure what he was going to say until he opened his mouth. “No, I don’t have people. No one who wouldn’t be more upset to hear from me again than not to.”

Hob swallows a mouthful of room-temperature printed protein. “Sounds complicated.”

“It is.” Ozzi’s head tilts, and he swipes a finger through the soggy vegetables dangling from Hob’s fork. The finger passes through un-shrimped, and he makes a weird face that Hob can’t interpret. With CFMs and battle slugs, he doesn’t have to scrutinize the expression beneath the ghostlight glow to guess how the beasties are feeling. “How about you? Do you have people?”

“Nah.” Hob anoints a wad of noodles with the last sauce puddled in the corner of the mealmix packet. “Not anymore.” 

“Sounds complicated.” 

“About as simple as it gets, actually.” In Ozzi’s patience silence, Hob’s chewing sounds obnoxiously loud. He pushes the noodles into his cheek to say around them: “My parents were old. No siblings. Not married, not seeing anyone—they wouldn’t see much of me anyway, if I was. I don’t really keep in touch with the folks from my old job, and they don’t keep in touch with me.” He drops his spoon into his empty-enough mealmix and stands. “Except Jaara, I guess. We weren’t on the same squad back then. And she’s stuck here with me anyway.”

When he heads to the galley to throw away the packet and toss his spoon into the wash bin, Ozzi follows him—albeit through the wall instead of the doorway. “Sounds pretty fucking depressing if you ask me,” he says seriously, while the bottom half of his face is occupied by a shelf of beverage pods.

“That hits hard coming from a dead guy.”

Ozzi makes a deflating sound, sort of like a belly laugh that got roundhouse-kicked halfway through. “Jatya!” he swears (or at least it sounds like a swear to Hob, who has a working vocabulary of swear words that borrows from five or six different localects and languages). “I thought we were having a moment here.” A ginger attempt at a slap passes harmlessly through the side of Hob’s head. “Then you had to go bring up the whole dead-guy thing again.”

“Damn.” Hob dumps the rest of his mealmix unceremoniously into the biocomposter and leans his arms on top of it. “I guess that means we’re still a ways out from acceptance.”

They swap half-hearted smiles, and Ozzi dissipates like morning fog. Hob hangs on to the smile for a moment, staring into the empty space. Then he dusts his hands off on his pants and pulls up a side-tab for the compendium in his visual overlay. With the images and notes as a guide, he starts putting together a new illusion, from the bones up. This one has to walk the walk more convincingly than his poor battle slug carcass.

Every now and then, he flicks over to Jaara’s metric files. Orange, yellow, 250 kilometers per day, yellow, 87% first-attempt clearance rate, orange. The colors don’t change, of course, nor do the numbers underneath. But he can’t stop checking anyway.

The next morning, Hob stands alone in the shadow of his own personal module detachment, waving. No sign of the ghost yet today, which means he can claim this spare moment to see off the rest of the crew—and the rest of the habitat. Dozens of smaller modules school around the big central unit as it trundles over the open plain along the meridian. “Let us know if you need anything, boss,” says Yettal’s voice, in Hob’s ear. “Or if you think you’re starting to go crazy being out here with only haunts for company.”

“Dumbass,” hollers Maseley, “how’s he gonna know if he’s going crazy?”

A crackle of static precedes Jaara’s appropriate-volume command to keep the comm clear. They’re her problem now, and Hob only manages to work up a little guilt over that. 

When he turns back to his module, a little yellow notification circle starts blinking in the bottom left corner of his overlay. One of his recon drones has identified a site as worth investigating. 

“It’s not going to investigate itself,” he says, to no one, which is also who he has to convince that his illusion mock-up work-in-progress can wait. On foot, foregoing his protective suit in favor of a little extra mobility, he sets out into a pastel yellow morning.

The site is a few kilometers off the meridian, down a ravine that slouches through a section of the forest where the chestnut trees are gradually overtaken by some other species, slim white-trunked trees with dozens of eye-shaped black patches: silent watchers tracking Hob’s progress. They’re so spooky-looking that he has to wonder if they’re actually an Earth tree and not a remarkably staunch haunt—which should be impossible anywhere other than along the meridian. But it wouldn’t be the first impossible thing to happen to him this week, so he double-checks his compendium. “Birch?” he reads incredulously. In the localect he grew up speaking, the word is an egregious insult: a leech, a saboteur, someone who acts in selfish interest to the detriment of the habitat.

“Are you talking to me?” The haunt—Ozzi—falls into step alongside Hob without missing a beat. “Or yourself? Or another, secret, third person?”

Ozzi’s…wispier than usual, a clot of mist that vaguely suggests a person. An ex-person. “You look like shit,” observes Hob, “even for a dead guy.”

“Well, we’re pretty far off the, what do you call it, meridian.” Ozzi pulses, the shape of a shrug. “But I didn’t want you to get lonely.”

It’s not uncommon for a haunt to attach itself to an exorcist, follow it around until it can be safely dismissed, but usually exorcists hang pretty close to the meridian themselves. Such an activity might loosen Ozzi’s tentative grip on the afterlife; Hob weighs whether or not he should bring that up and finds staying silent to be the heavier option. 

“So?” Ozzi prompts, for want of a response from Hob. “What’s the deal? Taking a day off? Mental health walk in the woods?”

“Afraid not.” They emerge from the birches at the top of the ravine on Hob’s map. Below, a scabby black line cuts diagonally across the creek at the bottom of the slope. Dark wings flare to either side, a pattern of leafless once-white trunks that have burnt to a dark, ashy gray. At the terminus point of the line lies a hunk of wreckage, blackened at one end and stained metal at the other. A ship. Or the haunt of one, maybe. “Look familiar?”

“Oh—no.” A breeze sends ripples through Ozzi, and Hob loses sight of him altogether for a moment. “I remember it better before it was on fire.”

They make their way down the side of the ravine: Hob picking his way carefully over dew-slick rocks and steep leaf-littered slopes, Ozzi glittering vaguely in his wake. At the bottom, Hob walks a wide circle around the wreck itself. He can make out the last few digits of the ship’s registration number, which he subvocalizes to record in his notes. Whatever the ship’s name was, the paint there has peeled unreadably away in the heat from the fire. 

“Small,” he says. “Couldn’t have been more than four or five of you on board. So that rules out one of my theories.”

Ozzi, no longer beholden to the same laws of gravity as Hob, floats upward without responding. The sunlight that breaks through the canopy refracts at the suggestion of his misty shape, and Hob has to squint to see him. For want of a better idea, he keeps expanding on those defunct theories. “My first thought was a squatter ship. Dump in a load of your own colonists before anyone’s paying attention, claim a chunk of freshly terraformed land, hope no one notices until you can get some sympathetic news coverage.”

He speaks louder as Ozzi drifts around the curve of the ship’s hull. “Then again, I thought, maybe a thrill-seeker. We get a heads-up from HQ about those, once in a while. How close can we fly to the terraforming origin without getting wiped out of existence, ooh isn’t that fun; let’s race the meridians to the secondary nexus, this is a very good idea that has definitely never gotten anyone killed.”

Ozzi hasn’t made it back around the hull yet, so Hob follows in the direction he went. The haunt is, well, haunting the part of the ship where—Hob thinks—the cockpit would have been. “But you don’t fit the profile for that,” he goes on. Ozzi twitches, shrinking by a few centimeters. “Usually they’re either dumb kids or dumb old people who have outlived all the fucks they had to give. Which really only leaves one possibility.”

“Oh yeah?” says Ozzi. “And what’s that?”

“You and your crew were symps.”

A laugh ripples Ozzi’s outline. “Symps.”

“Exo-sympathizers,” Hob amends, and racks his brain. There are half a dozen groups, each with its own self-aggrandizing title for itself. “You’re with Sparrowfall, or the Hundred Thousand Suns, or—”

“You should just stick with symps.” Ozzi’s voice has lost its usual coat of cheerfulness. What’s underneath slices ice-cold into Hob. There are tender points even a protective suit wouldn’t cover. “It’s more honest. Excuse me a second.”

The ship’s hull shimmers once as Ozzi slides through it. Through the pitted wounds in the hull, Hob can hear him muttering to himself. He can’t make much out—the distance aside, Ozzi doesn’t seem to be speaking Spanglorin—but curse words have a certain texture that transcends language barriers.

While he waits for Ozzi to peter out, he picks his way around the wreck for a second, closer look. The front is in pretty bad shape, but the top looks more or less intact. Well. In a better state than he’d honestly expected. If he had the right safety equipment, he could probably get in through the wounds in the front of the ship and check out the rest.

A ferocious clang echoes inside the ship, scaring away the rest of his coherent thoughts. It’s followed up by Ozzi’s shout: a distinct Spanglorin “Fuck!”

Hob waits. It’s another couple minutes before Ozzi coalesces beside him; might be he lost his ability to hold on to his haunt-self after he failed at whatever it was he was doing in the ship. “Anything I can help with?” Hob asks mildly. “Being in possession of actual physical hands as I am.”

“No.”

They stand (and float) in contemplative silence. When Hob risks sidelong scrutiny of Ozzi’s expression, there’s not much there to see. Drifting, detached. Grief wakes an anger in some people, gets their fists up, starts them swinging. With others, grief books them a one-way ticket to a destination far from the immediacy of pain. With what he’s seen of Ozzi so far, Hob would have marked him as the first type, but both fight and flight tend to dig down to a deeper level than what most people display on the home screen of their personality. 

Well, what the hell; he decides to take a chance. “I could’ve respected squatters,” he says, and heaves a sigh. “The survivors of Caloteru IV, or the folks left behind in the Trei Belt after the iridium interests dug everything dry? There’s no one looking out for those people.”

Ozzi’s expression solidifies into incredulity. “No one’s looking out for exos, either. Not the ones that got mowed under to make room for New Bania, or Syfonica—certainly not the ones you casually deleted to make room for Zetharin—oh.” His voice, which had been gaining in volume and intensity, returns to conversational tones as he takes in Hob’s poorly hidden smirk. “Was that the laziest ever attempt to exorcise me the fuck out of your life?”

“Pfft. No. I could have kept egging you on way longer if I was trying to get rid of you.” Hob nods his head toward the wrecked ship. “Seriously. Is there anything you want me to look for in there?” He hesitates. “Or anyone?”

“Still no.” Ozzi’s eyes lift to the hole in the cockpit, then slide past, to the sky-spangled green canopy beyond. A bird calls quizzically in the distance, and another answers with the same curious chirp. “I don’t suppose they’ll just let it stay here.”

Even though he already knows the answer, Hob calls up his visual overlay. “We’re standing right in the middle of the lumber preserve for a planned settlement,” he says apologetically. He calls up a minor illusion, replicating the map in the air between them for Ozzi’s benefit. “See? They’ll probably haul it off to a dump. Maybe back up to space, if the settlers, the uh, refugees, make a big enough deal about having it here.”

“Well.” Ozzi puts a hand up as if to pat the blackened metal. He keeps his hand as close to the hull as he can without letting it pass through, so that it almost looks like he’s really touching it. Just for a moment, his arm is solid enough that Hob can barely see the trees through it. “All orbits decay in time. Shall we go?”

The walk back is either boring, exhausting, or both: Ozzi bleeds out of existence about a kilometer in. He doesn’t reappear until after Hob has gotten back to the module, scraped lunch out of a mealmix packet, put the last few finishing touches on his new illusion, and shoved his feet back into his still-sweaty boots. 

“No rest for the wicked,” Ozzi says cheerfully, as if this morning never happened, as if the crashed spaceship is still just a curious blip flagged by the recon drone. “Where are we off to this time?”

“‘No rest for the wicked’ is a funny thing for a ghost to say.” Although the lemon-yellow afternoon suggests heat, the air is cool on Hob’s face and arms when he steps outside. He sets out toward the CFM’s grove, noticing that he’s starting to wear a track through the grass in this direction. He knows the spells that would call new grass up from nothing and cover the scuffed dirt, of course. Ground cover is a basic incantation, one that every two-bit thaumaturgist knows. But he smooths over that corner of his thoughts and leaves the spell uncast. “Don’t you have anywhere better to be? Like, I don’t know, the afterlife?”

“I wouldn’t leave you to go alone. It can get dicey out there. Last time, you fell out of a tree!”

Hob snorts. “I think that was because I wasn’t alone.” The conversation is easy enough for him to run out of the background of his thoughts, banter operating on autopilot; most of his brain is occupied with watching out for CFM tracks, listening for the telltale crack of branches. “What did you call them?” he says, cultivating an air of absence. “The CFMs, I mean. Did you have a name for those?”

“Naming species was a little outside our scope. Temrethalin was our only biologist, and she was busy enough with other—” Ozzi cuts himself off, and Hob politely lets the name slide past as if he hasn’t heard it. “We all had better things to do,” Ozzi concludes instead. When he lifts a hand to flick a drooping chestnut branch, his fingers pass straight through.

“What do symps get up to? Was there an Adopt-a-Battle-Slug campaign in the works? That ship didn’t seem big enough to whisk away a whole herd to greener pastures.” The terrain is starting to look familiar; they’re not far from the tree where he had his first close encounter with the CFM. He slows down, listening, looking. The spell that usually helps him locate a haunt is useless right now—when he opens the source and thinks the right words in the right cadence, his thoughts light up with neon red arrows pointing right at Ozzi. “If you wanted to get up close with real exos, get your graduate degree in CFM-ology or whatever, you could apply to one of the affiliated research institutions.”

“We didn’t care about the individual species—no, let me rephrase. Our focus wasn’t on the biology of any given flora or fauna or bacterium or—or cabbage-faced motherfucker.” Ozzi barks a laugh at his own joke, hard enough to send ripples through his vaporous body. “For us, it was more than the loss of biodiversity. It’s the inhumanity of the process.” 

“Yeah, obviously; exos aren’t humans.” The words slip out of Hob’s thoughts and into his mouth, only too late does he realize it’s obviously the wrong thing to say. Ozzi sheds a cascade of glittering sparks, and Hob doesn’t know either human haunts in general or Ozzi specifically well enough to know what that means—surprise, shock, outrage? He steps on the heels of his own ill-thought-out comment in his haste to leave it behind: “I think we’re getting close. I’m going to set everything up, and then we can make ourselves scarce.”

He puts his back to Ozzi as he closes his eyes and calls up the idea he’s created. More than a mere image, this is a not-living-but-breathing rendition of a CFM. It casts a shadow; it gives off a sweet, swampy reek. As it solidifies and separates from the source that Hob used to make it, it rolls in a looping, wandering arc around the small clearing. Its cabbage-y appendages ruffle, and if Hob hadn’t been the architect of those delicate movements, he would think it looked as if the CFM was feeling out the shape of its own surprising new existence. 

“Interesting tactic. I didn’t think they were social creatures.” Ozzi makes himself the opposite of scarce, reaching out to touch one fluttering appendage. Hob almost expects his hand to make contact, as if two things that weren’t quite real and physical must meet on some other plane than the one Hob’s life operates on. But of course his fingers slide right through, and the CFM continues past him. It wasn’t designed to react to the kind of stimulus presented by Ozzi. 

Even though it ended poorly last time, Hob finds a foothold to haul himself up onto a low tree branch again. It’ll be harder for Ozzi to surprise him this time around. “You stay down there if you want, but I’m getting out of the CFM smash zone.”

When he pulls himself another branch higher, Ozzi is waiting for him. “How many planets did you flip?” he asks conversationally. Like this is a job interview and he has some concerns about Hob’s work history. “As a terraformer.”

The easy lie catches in Hob’s throat. His instinct is to spit it out, but he knows, in the long run, it would only do more damage. 

Being honest with Ozzi means being honest with himself.

“One. Just one.”

A rumbling vibration spares him from Ozzi’s reaction. The CFM has arrived, and it’s headed straight for Hob’s illusion—as straight as its bizarre method of locomotion will allow. The frequency of the vibrations increases to a trill, and the cabbages bloom a darker color, purplish black, as it approaches the puppet-CFM. A query, or a request, perhaps, asked in color and sound.

And answered in kind. The illusion does exactly what Hob designed it to do, burning source as it flushes pinkish-purple, buzzing its encouragement. It everts the net of membranes tucked under a flap beneath the bulk of its body. The membrane shines wetly, the bluish veins within it pulsing, as it protrudes toward the haunt. The haunt everts a membrane sack of its own, from which spongy, branching tubes emerge, and—

“Oh, what the fuck,” says Ozzi in dismay. His indistinct form twists, head one way and torso the other, as if he’s not sure whether he’s supposed to avert his eyes. “Are you kidding me?”

The CFM—the dead one—continues to slide up the musical scale until its trilling becomes a full-on shriek. This isn’t a question, it’s an exclamation, and it’s roughly the same one Ozzi just made, translated into CFM-language. Its colors change again, dappling and then muting, as it gropes around its would-be mate. But there’s nothing there to grope, nothing real. Look, but don’t touch. The proboscis—penis-sponge-thing—flexes, spasms, recedes. The CFM wails once more, in confusion or anger or both or neither; Hob doesn’t care what emotion it’s feeling as long as it’s feeling a lot of it. 

Then it shrivels in on itself, and dissolves. The illusory CFM remains, still presenting its ripe membrane sac. Hob resents that he knows the phrase “ripe membrane sac,” let alone that his eye for detail spent so much time familiarizing itself with the concept. He lets the illusion go, unspent energy sliding back into the source’s fathomless reserves.

“Was that it?” Ozzi’s voice comes out strained—not tense to the point of snapping, but certainly with whatever else he wants to say pulling the words tight. “Did it…work?”

“It’s working.” Not as much progress as Hob hoped for, but Ozzi’s going to try to guilt him for every hard-earned inch. “You’re lucky you didn’t have to see this on Victory. They had these, uh, what did we call them—oh, bug-eyed hairbrushes, and do you want to guess what the dick on one of those things looks like?”

Ozzi follows Hob when he descends, carefully, from the tree. “This isn’t empty prudery. It’s not like I grew up in a sex-neg culture, I just—fuck.” 

He’s not behind Hob’s shoulder when Hob looks up from examining the site of the CFM haunt’s disappearance. Could he have—? No, there wasn’t enough emphasis behind that “fuck” to trigger a transition. Hob makes his tight chest relax enough to draw in a full breath. Make some notes. Write down his ideas, make a vague sketch, in case he forgets before he gets back to his mobile unit. 

He’s finishing up, tucking his compendium back into its pocket, when Ozzi speaks up, from far overhead in the trees where he can’t see. “I’ve never really understood why they can’t just terraform the dying planet itself. Like Zetharin. Divert a couple blocs of the Transit Fleet, load everyone and everything that matters onto a ship—all at once instead of in waves, like they’ll move people here. Send in the terraformers, reset everything back to factory defaults. One happy healthy brand-new sparkling-clean planet, zero dead planets, everyone wins.”

“They don’t take guys like me aside to explain company policy.” He looks around but can’t find a spark of ghostlight anywhere in the shadows. His line is a weak one, and he knows it. He doesn’t need a primer on the economics of it all. It’s only a matter of how you draw your lines of cost. C-suite execs see a bottom line that has to accommodate valuable and often perishable freight—freight that would only lose value while Transit Fleet ships serve as apartment buildings instead of cargo transports. It’s much pricier to house a planet’s population for the months and months it takes to execute a successful terraformation and clearance than it is to just leave them in place for the time being. And if you waste a planet that didn’t offer any economic value in the first place, then it’s hardly a waste at all. Folks like Ozzi do their accounting differently, and that’s fine for him, if he wants to go start his own pro bono terraforming organization, and in the meantime other people like Hob have to live in the real world where food doesn’t fall from the sky and engine fodder doesn’t grow on trees.

“It’s expensive,” he says, to a knotty chestnut tree, since he still can’t tell where Ozzi is. “That’s all. It would be too expensive.”

A rustle shakes the branches somewhere overhead. A pair of leaves, still green, flutter idly down. They settle silently to the forest floor. Hob calls Ozzi’s name without really expecting an answer.

Not because he’s crossed. Hob doesn’t think so. He really doesn’t think so. It would take more than that. There are lines that haven’t been crossed. All of this today was about exorcising a CFM, not a human being. But Hob walks back alone anyway, following his own tracks homeward.

The next morning, Hob wakes himself before his alarm. There’s a lot to do today, and their schedule is only getting tighter. He reads through updates from Jaara first—the next sector has been quieter, thank goodness, and they’ve made up a little of their lost time. He signs off on a few decisions, crew schedules, and supply drop requests. 

The last thing in the packet is a list of potential rendezvous points, depending on how soon he thinks he can clear the ground here. With time, they get farther apart and closer to the secondary nexus…except for the final point, which is right where he’s sitting now. 

It’s not as if they couldn’t get by without him. It’s not as if they aren’t getting by without him right now. Jaara feels better if she can point to his signature on the things she’s already figured out; he’s just her magic ballet shoes or magic feather or magic magnetic boots, depending on which version of that story the grown-ups in your habitat told. It’s not the end of the world if he stays here, circling the drain, a while longer. The world already ended, a long time ago now.

He fusses for a while over a new illusion, recycling some parts from the previous version where he can, altering scale and paint colors and textures as needed, but his heart isn’t in it. In the late morning, he loads a too-heavy bag and heads out, under a sky scabby with clouds, in the direction of the wrecked ship. 

Before he comes within sight of it, he changes tack. Back and forth, wide swings, keeping himself between the meridian and the ship. He kicks up underbrush as he goes, silencing the creak of crickets; he rifles through piles of leaf litter and sends flocks of startled birds skyward. There’s no guarantee he’ll find what he’s looking for. All creatures come into the world with a hunger, whether they arrive as squirming squalling nestlings or fully formed adults. Surely one of them, surely a whole swarm, has been through here before him. 

In the end, it’s because of that hunger that he finds the body. He thinks it’s a mushroom at first, a swell of white tucked between the roots of a tree. But when he gives a testing poke, his fingers find something smooth and hard. He tugs, and the roots grudgingly surrender the gape-eyed skull. It’s streaked with dirt, but there’s not a molecule of flesh clinging to it. No way to know if it’s actually Ozzi’s, but a quick analysis from Hob’s overlay tells him the markers of age and size are a match.

So.

He takes his time spiraling outward from that spot, and turns up a few more odds and ends. Most of an arm, a few desiccated shreds of ligament holding humerus to radius, or ulna, Hob can’t remember which is which. Three rib bones and a vertebra, scattered at distant points, all of which show signs of tooth marks. He doesn’t even try to distinguish carpals and tarsals from pebbles, overlay or not. Everything he finds, he adds to a growing pile alongside the skull, and stands back, wiping his dirty hands on his shirt. 

The modular habitat doesn’t have a shovel. It’ll have to be a flattish rock and bare hands. The hole doesn’t get very deep, not even after a great deal of effort on Hob’s part, but then, with remains this thoroughly picked over, he probably doesn’t have to aim for a full two meters. Once he’s thrown dirt back over, to fill in the big empty spaces around the bones, he stands for a moment. Maybe he should throw a couple flowers on it. Maybe he should say something.

Maybe he should get on with his work.

In the shadow of the shipwreck, he unfolds the ladder from his pack and counts the sections of Process he’s about to violate. Jaara would have known specific page numbers, probably, but he contents himself with ticking off on his fingers. One: Don’t enter potentially unsafe terrain alone. Two: Always have a plan for safe evacuation. Three: Don’t scale a ladder without a crew partner at the bottom to hold it steady. Well, he’s kilometers outside Process by now, and it’s HQ that sent him there, so to all seven hells with Process at this point.

It takes some maneuvering to get him inside the cockpit in a way that he’s (fairly) certain will let the charred metal take his weight. Once he’s there, he finds himself in the company of two of Ozzi’s late friends: a pair of half-melted spacesuits with blackened bones peeping through at separated shoulder seams. The industrious creatures that tidied up Ozzi’s remains haven’t been at work in here: the unpleasantly organic smell of decaying flesh asserts itself over the ozone stink of the fire.

Hob eases them, one at a time, out of their seats and totes them toward the hole in the hull. “Sorry,” he says helplessly, but there’s no way he can navigate the ladder safely with a corpse on his back. He tips them out onto the dirt below and doesn’t look to see them land.

There’s not much else to see in the cockpit, except smoke stains and cracked computer screens and the flame-retardant emergency kit under the main console. Hob opens that and peruses the contents: a first-aid kit (bleakly hilarious), next-of-kin contacts (not that funny at all, actually), and the datasafe that probably backed up their reconnaissance or research or whatever they did, which might also tell Hob something about what happened to the ship. He slides everything into various internal pockets on his suit for safekeeping, except for the respirator mask in the first-aid kit, which he slides over his face, enjoying his next breath of trimethylamine-free air.

There’s one more body in the cabin behind the cockpit, and Hob hauls that to the front of the ship too. Once he climbs down, he apologizes again to the three corpses, and arranges their limbs a little less pathetically: straightening legs, folding arms across chests.

“Oh, sure, I see,” says Ozzi. It takes Hob a moment to locate him, a crystalline spangle of ghostlight in a shaft of pure sunlight. “I’m supposed to try to fuck them, yeah? That’s your M.O.?”

“Don’t be a dick.” Hob takes a deep breath. Even in the respirator, the flavor of rot clings to his skin. It’s enough to make a guy a little edgy. “I’m trying to be human. Do you want me to bury them? Do you want to just say a few words, or—?”

“I’ve already said everything I need to say to them.” Ozzi coalesces a little: the suggestion of a shoulder, a face. “Are they going to let a grave just stay here in their nice neat new forest?”

“They might. If I request specially.”

A red glitter shivers through Ozzi. Hob says, reluctantly: “No. Probably not.”

“Okay.” Ozzi fades again, then pulls back together, even clearer than before. “Sure. Yeah. Bury them.”

Hob isn’t going to get any less tired standing here. He starts, again, to make a hole. This time, there’s a fragment of the hull that makes for a halfway-acceptable shovel, and the ground is softer here too, deep lodes of a friendly and eminently diggable silt. Maybe this is where the terraformers planned to put a green cemetery. He probably needs to dig deeper this time. And his back is already tired from his earlier efforts. It’s going to be a long day, an extra long one in a series of long, long days.

He stops more often for breaks, to wipe the sweat from his face, to see if Ozzi is still there. After a few of these, he stops to sit on the side of the growing grave and takes a crewcake out of his pack. These things are supposed to provide on-the-go energy for a day of heavy work, but mostly they just seem to work his jaw muscles to the point of drooling exhaustion. 

“So,” he says, gnawing a corner off. “What was it like? Up there?”

Ozzi pauses in his lonely, drifting vigil over the silent bodies. He’s almost a full haunt now, even this far from the meridian. Hob can see the lines in his forehead as his eyebrows rise. “You’ve been there,” he says. “At least we only saw it through the drones. But you’ve been right there. You know better than I do.”

Hob thinks about waves of light washing over a world. He thinks about scarlet snake-whales the height of a man, screaming and writhing as they fight the inevitable. He thinks about iridescent flowers a cartwheel in circumference, whose petals immediately droop and wither and relinquish their hold on life, not enough substance to their soul to demand their own right to existence. He takes a bigger bite of the crewcake. It takes him longer to chew, so his tight throat has a chance to relax. 

“Real nightmare shit,” he says, once he’s worked his way through the mouthful.

The sound Ozzi makes is a little too desperate to be called a laugh. The conversation feels over, but Hob isn’t ready to pick up the shovel again yet. He nods toward the three crumpled spacesuits. “Who were they, Ozzi?” 

“My friends.” Ozzi thinks a moment, then adds: “My coworkers. My family. The lines get blurry in our line of work.”

“That can happen with people who care a lot.”

“Not that you would know.”

“Not that I would know.”

They grin wearily at each other across the clearing, across the line of bodies. Hob pushes himself to his feet and picks up his makeshift shovel.

Ozzi parts ways with Hob when the first thing he does upon returning to the habitat is to start stripping off all his clothes. Alone, he opts for an irresponsibly long, hot shower. He can eat cold mealmixes for a day, if the mini-solars can’t make up the energy deficit. Then he sits down with his compendium. First he plugs in the datasafe—but no, not today, he can’t look at any of that footage right now. Instead, he pulls a connection to the satellite. He sends a series of data requests to be forwarded to the quantum relay, eats fully half of his buttersweet stash, and folds himself into bed.

When he wakes up, Ozzi is at the foot of his cot, swiping fruitlessly at Hob’s blinking compendium. “I have so many emotions, I should be able to interact with this fucking thing,” Ozzi says, as Hob blinks at him in confusion. “Unfortunately I think they’re all just annoyance.” 

“Move.” Hob reaches around Ozzi instead of through him to grab the compendium. His data requests have been fulfilled, and he has a series of messages from Jaara too:

Please see attached requisition list for approval. You missed yesterday’s check-in. Is everything okay?

Per page 41 paragraph D of the Process Manual, the crew commander is expected to handle all approval requests within 12 hours. Can you let me know when you get this?

Boss, if I don’t hear from you in the next hour, I’m sending Maseley and Rathana to come collect your deceased ass.

This last is timestamped forty-five minutes ago; Hob hastily sends an apologetic reply and a promise to look at her requests soon, before he turns to the packets he received from the relay. The files are titled: Ozzi Sagar, Amindal Sagar, Temrethalin Ta, and Einda Malliso. Even without the biodata, it’s clear from the attached photos that Amindal is Ozzi’s older sister. The other two, both middle-aged women, are a partnered pair. Hob flicks aimlessly through the rest of the information, not sure what he’s looking for, scanning their histories of activist work, family and relationships, university studies, previous habitats of residence. 

“Find anything juicy in my life story?” Ozzi peers at the compendium over Hob’s shoulder. 

“Pretty boring stuff, to be honest.” Hob turns off the compendium and tosses it onto his wadded-up blankets. “I have no idea what to do now.” 

“Sorry?” 

Hob pushes up out of bed and crosses to his drawers, rifling through for a clean shirt. “A thoughtless exo is one thing. But you’re a person. Or you were. Are. Don’t make me get into the grammar of the situation.” He throws aside holey socks and an equally holey pair of boxers. “And we’re just stuck with this mess, and my bosses want me to make you go away, and I want—I want—there should be something I could do to at least help, you know? But the terraforming is over, nothing to be done about that; the exorcism is pretty much done too.” A slight exaggeration for dramatic effect, maybe, but hey. “There’s nothing either of us could do about your friends, except see them laid properly to rest, and if you’ve got something to say to whoever out there is still living and gives a shit about you, you’re being kind of weird about withholding it at this point since I already know way more about you than you wanted.” There’s nothing in his drawer that qualifies under any definition of clean. He balls up the dirty odds and ends briefly in his fists, then wads them back into the drawer and slams it shut. “I don’t know how to help you. I don’t know what you want. I don’t know anything.”

“I guess I want what any dead thing wants.” Ozzi’s shoulders bounce helplessly up and down. “The impossible.”

Hob sits down harder then he meant to against the drawers, banging his back against the raised edges. Something Ozzi said before pops back into his head, and he repeats it: “All orbits decay in time.”

“You’re helping more than you think,” says Ozzi, and he pops like a soap bubble.

Hob sits where he’s landed for a while, sifting the silence through his thoughts. By any objective measure, he’s alone either way, but the texture is different when Ozzi’s not there.

When his leg starts to fall asleep, he makes himself stand up, and puts on the least grubby shirt.

Though Hob woke early after his early bedtime, he’s not moving fast in the morning; every part of his body expresses its regrets in the form of delayed-onset muscle soreness. There’s something in the module medi-kit that helps speed muscle repairs, but its effects are far from instantaneous, and it’s a good two hours before Hob drags himself back outside. This CFM isn’t going to exorcise itself any more than Ozzi is.

It’s only when he catches the first glint of ghostlight through the brush that he remembers: he hasn’t spent any more time on developing this new illusion. Well. There’s something to be said for the rawness and on-the-fly reaction of improvisation. He ducks into the cover of a massive, yellow-flowered bush and throws the bones of the illusion up behind him as he goes.

At first, it’s only a smaller version of the CFM. Smooth nubbins in place of leafy cabbages,  a paler, more delicate color than the full-grown specimen. It crawls around in wandering circles, bumping curiously into trees and plants. Hob’s careful to make sure it avoids his hiding place. As he watches, he feels his tongue between his teeth. It needs something. A little more touch. 

He shifts the connection to the source, drawing a little harder, and the baby CFM’s vague path takes on new urgency, frantic geometric patterns in place of curious circles. Its gray-white skin flushes even lighter, and Hob adds a noise. There’s nothing in his compendium about the vocalizations of juvenile CFMs, but he takes the sounds he’s heard the adult versions make and modulates them: altering the frequency, smoothing the texture. A mewling, bleating tremolo echoes in the clearing, and Hob’s heart clenches in spite of himself. He wrote and directed this little movie, so it’s pretty fucking silly to let it upset him.

It’s supposed to upset someone else, after all.

The haunt crashes into the clearing, bellowing a challenge, shrieking terror of its own. A cacophony of voices from various CFM orifices, but the meaning is pretty clear: some CFM version of you come after my kid, I’ll wreck your shit. 

The shrilling dies away as the CFM recognizes—piecemeal?—that the juvenile is here in front of it, alive (well, “alive”) and apparently unharmed. It broadcasts another earsplitting challenge to the woods around it, as it approaches the juvenile for a gentle nudge.

But of course, when it reaches Hob’s illusion, it slides straight through. There’s nothing there to be touched; there’s nothing there to do the touching with. It retreats backward, shrilling, and its cabbage appendages dilate fully, flexing and flaring. Trying to comprehend the incomprehensible.

Hob sends the illusion after it. What does a hopeful baby-squeak sound like coming from a CFM? He makes his best attempt as the baby CFM trundles forward, its smaller body struggling over the rough ground. All over the universe, small creatures want a parent when they’re lost and confused and frightened, and this make-believe exo is no different. When the haunt runs out of room to retreat, Hob lets the illusion roll right through it—then triggers the fear-trill sound over again. Why won’t you help me? it seems to beg. What did I do wrong?

The CFM rolls in panicked circles, as if to flee—but then it stops. With the oscillation of its own body, it begins to dig. Dirt flies around it in wide, round waves. Some of it pelts Hob in his hiding place, some of it rustles like rain in the foliage. 

The CFM stops. It opens the cabbages on the side nearest the juvenile, and it closes them again. It calls once more—a vocalization Hob hasn’t heard before, a croak that slides up and down the musical scale.

Its child is unreachable, beyond its ability to touch or comfort. A biological imperative, to make more of yourself, to protect the fruits of your reproductive labor—there’s a reason this thread is woven so thoroughly into life forms across a thousand planets. The fundamental disconnect is enough to penetrate into whatever limited version of a brain the CFM has.

It understands. And it accepts. What else can it do, at this point?

The whole world seems to squeeze, the swell of source beneath a successful exorcism. Hob winds his fingers into the branches of the brush, as if the haunt could take him with it when it goes. He blinks, and everything around him releases the breath it was holding. When he opens his eyes, the CFM is gone. Gone gone. He can feel the difference, as reality loosens up around him. He’s witnessed a successful crossing a time or two in his career; he knows what they’re like.

He lets go of the baby-CFM illusion as he stands and shakes off the debris of leaves and dirt. His knees pop to let him know they’re not happy about how long he spent on them. “If you’re going to haunt me,” he announces to the clearing, “do it to my face, please.”

Ozzi walks out of the shadows, a full human shape outlined in ghostlight, and steps to the hole left by the CFM. “Man, you’re really running short of options. I’ve never been particularly food-motivated, I’m ace, and I never had kids or younger sibs. What else you got up your sleeve?”

Hob sits beside him, letting his feet hang down into this donut-shaped hollow. He wonders what drove the CFM to dig it—trying to hide from its inevitable fate? Making a hiding place for the little one it couldn’t otherwise protect? It reminds him of all the graves he dug yesterday, but nothing in the compendium suggests that CFMs or any other exos here had anything like funereal practices. A waste of energy on the CFM’s part in any case, but then he’s neither a xenobiologist nor a psychologist. Nor a xenopsychologist. If there’s another explanation, it’s past his understanding. 

“Maybe I’m stuck with you,” he says. Ozzi glances sidelong at him with a sad, quizzical smile. 

That makes this a little easier for Hob. You see your opening, and you step through it. He who hesitates, etc., etc. Something’s lost already and it’s not going to be Hob. 

He takes the datasafe out of his pocket and sets it on the ground next to himself, on the lip of the hollow. “Or maybe I’m not.”

Ozzi lurches. “Is that—?”

“Of course you weren’t food-motivated. Not to an exorcism-worthy extent. But work-motivated?” Hob takes a hammer out his other pocket and holds it contemplatively in one hand. “That, I could believe.”

“No. No!” Ozzi drops down into the hole, putting him eye-to-eye with Hob. Hob meets his translucent gaze indifferently. “Don’t do it. The footage is—you’ve seen what the footage is like!”

“Nightmare shit,” Hob agrees. The hammer slips a little in his grasp; he tightens his fingers around its handle. “You think that matters? People care about human lives. Not exos. Not fucking CFMs.” Not dragonflowers, not Matisiran serpents. Not skymoss or jellybags or scissor-toads or twelve fucktillion weird little microbes. He looks away from Ozzi, toward the datasafe. “It’s all acceptable losses to them. Whose mind did you think you were going to change?”

“Yours would have been a good start.”

The datasafe rings resoundingly when Hob lands the first blow on it. It’s designed to absorb shock, after all, designed to take a hit. He strikes it again.

“Stop!” Ozzi paws uselessly at—through—Hob’s arms, the hammer, the datasafe. A faint crack opens in its case as Hob lands another blow. “Fuck! Stop.”

“Make me.” Hob brings his hand high and puts his whole shoulder into one more blow.

The datasafe shatters. Tiny crystalline pieces go flying: into the brush, onto Hob’s clothes, into the hole. 

“No!” Ozzi howls, and grabs for the shards where they’ve fallen. 

He scoops up a handful of dirt and wasted computer parts, lifting them toward his chest. For a moment, Ozzi is a black hole, one that pulls everything in the clearing toward him. His fists close, and Hob leans away, bracing for a blow.

The only thing that hits him is Ozzi’s resigned, weary look. Then the dirt tumbles through the space where Ozzi used to be, and Hob is alone.

He waits, hearing his own loud breathing in his ears. Ozzi hasn’t crossed, not yet. It hasn’t worked but it’s working, he tells himself. He stands up, when he’s sure his legs will take his weight, and flings the hammer as far into the woods as he can. It crashes, metal against wood, and some kind of typical Earth-origin woodland hellbeast chatters its outrage at him. 

He wonders whether he’ll see Ozzi again before he goes. Neither possibility is comforting.

He takes out his compendium and calls up the files he pulled from the datasafe. He watches wave after wave of purifying light wash over CFMs and banana turtles and cloud-weed, peeling them out of existence layer by layer until it’s like they were never here at all. It’s been a long time since he saw terraforming from this end. He doesn’t like it any more than he did the last time.

Remaking a world in your own image is only a good idea if you aren’t ugly as shit to begin with. 

If Jaara is surprised that Hob makes a vidcall request to go over the day’s progress reports and requests, she doesn’t show it. Together they catch up on all the minutiae that Hob has let slide. He asks how the team is, and she says they’re fine; she asks how the ghost is and he hesitates. 

“I’m working on him,” he tells her finally, and she nods, as if that’s all she needs or wants to hear.

Before she can cut out of the call, he catches her with one more thing, and this time even Jaara can’t mask a startled expression. “You used to be a terraformer too, way back when.”

It’s not a question, but Jaara answers it. “I was.” She’s already back in control of an alert-but-unconcerned expression. “For a while.”

“What made you switch over to cleanup?”

She hesitates, and he knows she’s trying to figure out what he expects of her, what he wants to hear. Finally she says, reluctantly: “I was having trouble sleeping during jobs.”

“Bad dreams?”

“No.” She looks down at her hands, or whatever’s in them, just off-screen, then back at Hob. “It was the noise. You know what I mean?”

He does. He can handle hearing that noise one-on-one, but a worldwide chorus, an entire planet’s death-scream in unison—it’s too much. Even too much, apparently, for Jaara. “Okay,” he says. “Thanks. Good work over there. Keep it up.”

“Okay,” she says. No thanks, boss; no you too. She ends the call first and he sits with the dark compendium in his hand for a while before he gets up in search of a mealmix and a clean fork.

He should get out of bed. He should figure out what it’ll take to finish Ozzi off. He should eat something. He should plot out a rendezvous point for Jaara and the rest of the crew.

He gets up and pees. He goes back to bed.

He watches the footage from Ozzi’s drones. Over and over again. He scans through the dead ship’s maintenance logs, gives up, and directs a script to scan through them and ping his overlay with the results. He watches the footage again while he waits, closes his eyes, sees dragonflowers and CFMs disintegrating side by side in the darkness of his imagination. 

When he opens his eyes again, a notification is blinking to let him know that his search has run. He wanted it to be company sabotage, wanted an obvious flashing “here there be monsters” neon red flag, but analysis suggests otherwise. The ship was cobbled together with what a bunch of starry-eyed symp believers could scrounge up with spare change. They’d fixed a faulty connection between gas exchange and ventilation systems a few times before, but this time the failure was catastrophic. A spark, an explosion, an impact crater that would soon be smoothed over and tidied up by an in-progress terraformation event.

He would have known what to do, if there were obvious bad guys.

If there were obvious bad guys, it would be easier not to be one of them.

Ozzi reappears while Hob is in the head, his dick in one hand and his compendium in the other. “Shit!” Hob bobbles the compendium and narrowly avoids soaking it in piss. 

“You shouldn’t use your comp in the toilet,” scolds Ozzi mildly. His voice is different, coming from farther away. “It’s getting harder to stay. I wanted to say…” His ghostlight throbs like a pulsar. “Well, fuck you, first of all. And also goodbye.”

“You can’t!” Hob zips his fly and turns the compendium’s screen to face Ozzi. One of his rewatches is frozen there, a battle slug curling in on itself, its tissues unraveling even as it hunkers protectively down. “You can’t go yet. You have to tell me where to send it.”

“Oh,” says Ozzi softly. He reaches as if to take the compendium, then remembers. His hand falls back to his side. “Really? You think it’s going to matter?”

“I think it matters to you,” Hob says.

Ozzi studies him for a moment. Hob can see his own face in the mirror, through the back of Ozzi’s head. He looks, even more than usual, like shit. “Okay,” says Ozzi finally. “Sure. Give me access to the relay. I have a destination code.”

Hob enters his company password, and looks up, waiting for Ozzi to give him the next string of information. Instead, Ozzi frowns intensely. Mustering the emotions that still tie him to this world, his last reserves of want and need and hope. He reaches out and takes the compendium from Hob’s hands. “This might take a second,” he says, as if from the other side of a tunnel. “Sorry.”

After keying in a few strokes one-handed, he thinks better of it, and sets the compendium on the corner of the tiny countertop. Tongue between his teeth with furious concentration, he enters the destination code one digit at a time. The air is heavy, so heavy Hob can barely breathe. He holds on to the clean-water pipe for balance.

Ozzi finishes with the code and straightens up. “For what it’s worth? I don’t think I’m the only one it’s going to matter to.” 

He gives Hob one more lopsided grin, and he stops.

Stops existing, stops haunting. Just plain stops. The air goes back to normal, but Hob still can’t breathe. He listens, but all he can hear is his own all-but-fibrillating heart. This is the first time in his life it’s ever been weird to be alone in the john.

When he’s sure he can pick up the compendium again without another risk of dropping it in the urinal, he scoops it carefully off the counter. The destination code has been input and the compendium recognizes it as valid, but Ozzi fucked off to the afterlife before pressing send. He’s left that for Hob to do. 

“Asshole,” says Hob, and laughs—maybe a little hysterically, but he’s the only one who has to hear it—and covers the button with his thumb.

He skulks around the habitat, waiting for Something to Happen, but of course nothing does. Data takes time to travel, vid takes time to be seen. Difficult conversations take time to hold. He picks at a cold mealmix and goes to bed early, leaving his compendium in the head so that he can get maybe his last good night’s sleep for a long time. 

When he wakes up and sidles tentatively into the toilet, he’s got a dozen message notifications waiting for him. All blinking urgent—several from HQ, a few more from reporters or government officials or whatever. He glances through them. Interview request, a demand for official testimony, also he’s super fired. One of the notices from HQ lets him know that the appropriate section of Process has been triggered and that he has been logged out from all access to company files, machinery, even the habitat itself—if he leaves, the missive warns, he’s not getting back in. 

He makes himself a cup of tea and goes to sprawl in the grass and drink it. It’s a nice day out. Maybe rain later, one of those brief midafternoon spritzes that seem to keep this planet watered. But for now it’s peaceful, and the sky is a striking lavender-blue. 

By the time the transport rolls up, he’s long finished his tea and started to wish he’d stayed inside so that he could have brewed a second cup. “About time,” he calls to Jaara, as she steps down from the driver’s seat.

“I’m supposed to take you into company custody, boss.” She doesn’t sound mad at him, or even annoyed. Embarrassed, maybe, at the situation. Or maybe just because of that reflexive “boss” that slipped out.

“Makes sense.” He tosses the dregs from the empty plastic cup over his shoulder. “Are you going to?”

“Why did you do it?” Not like her to answer a question with a question, but he’s already set the precedent on going rogue. “The people who want to know what it’s like, they already know. The rest don’t give a shit. Why bother?”

“I don’t know,” he tells her honestly. He contemplates the bottom of his teacup. People read their fortunes in the bottoms of teacups, don’t they? He read that somewhere, but he’s not sure what a single red-brown droplet means to him. “I guess…I wanted to give a shit. A little bit of one.”

Her perfect posture sags a little. Probably only Hob would’ve noticed. She sits down next to him on the grass and digs her fingers into the topsoil. “What now?” she asks. “Any other pointless nonsense you need to get out of your system?”

They chase all the critters they can find away from the crash site and a couple square kilometers around it: rabbits and chipmunks, birds and even one snake that scares the absolute shit out of Hob on its way out of there. His compendium tells him it probably wasn’t poisonous (he didn’t exactly linger for a good hard look at the thing), but that would have been quite a way to go, wouldn’t it? Only after they’re sure things are fairly clear do they pull on their full protective suits—the things are useful, but too bulky when you want to move fast.

“What about the trees?” Jaara asks wistfully, laying her gloved hand on a birch tree that’s grown around the scar left by the wrecked ship’s passage. “We can’t move any of them.”

Nor can they move all of the worms, the microbes, the crawly little nasty things that burrow through the soil. On a subconscious level, trees want to go on living just as much as anything else does. Hob shrugs helplessly, and Jaara rests her head against the white bark for a moment before moving on.

“Are you ready?” Hob asks, when they’ve spent about as much energy as they can afford clearing things out. The sun is high in the sky and the wrecked ship doesn’t offer much shelter.

“Sure,” she lies gamely. She puts out her hand, and he squeezes it convulsively. You might think you’re ready for a terraformation, fresh out of training and ready to un-save the world. But no one really is.

The light is too bright, rolling outward from the nexus of their joined hands. Hob’s suit tries to protect his eyes by darkening his visor, but he double-blinks to dismiss the change. He wants to see.

In the flare, the trees bleach to clawing skeletal hands; untold trillions of unseen lives panic as they dissolve back into the source they came from, not so very long ago. Hob tries to ignore the noise, tries to tell himself it’s different this time. But the familiarity comes at him from an unexpectedly tender angle; reaching into the source to create life rather than its illusion doesn’t feel so different. This is an illusion-plus, really—take your idea of a CFM and then surrender control. Let your wants and demands recede, let its own break through. Give it enough source not just to seem but also to touch, not just to sing but also to listen.

New foliage shoulders up through the crumbling remnants of chestnut and mulberry: yellow leaves, serrated and sharp enough to cut yourself on. Out of sight, strange and different single-celled life pulses into existence between grains of soil, within the veins of plants. There’s a faint greenish tinge to the air; Hob knows it’s poisonous, but he still wonders what it would smell like, how heavy it would sit in his lungs. 

Without intervention, it’ll just blend with the human-friendly air outside this place. He cocks his head, feels around for the source whose touch he knows so well, and calls up a spinning, stirring wind. It spirals up from around his feet and spins wider, pelting him and Jaara with clots of dirt and broken bits of vegetation until its radius expands past them. Under his concentration, the wind swells wider—wide enough to wrap around this entire wacky little project of theirs. When he lets go, it stays in place: a spinning globe of gray, dirt-flecked currents. Lazy spirals, storms in miniature, curl through and collide. He’s never seen anything like it before. He’s certainly never made anything like it before. 

It’s pretty, in a fucked-up kind of way. He hopes it gets to last a little while.

With the perimeter set, he lets Jaara put the finishing touches on what they’ve created. As she works, he begins to record on his compendium. 

“This is a preserve,” he declares, the compendium pointed back toward himself and held at arm’s length. “Put up walls, put up barriers, but do not fucking touch a cabbage on these cabbage-faced motherfuckers’ heads or we will put up a fight.” He keys in the destination code to match the one Ozzi used and releases the footage into the ether.

“Yettal’s calling. I was supposed to be back with you by now, probably.” Jaara glances at her compendium, then shoves it deeper into a pouch on her suit. The work has left her face gray and clammy with sweat. Hob can only guess what he looks like right now. It’s easier than speculating about what Yetz wants to say: fuck you, boss; you’re under arrest, boss; where do I sign up for your doomed-ass little rebellion, boss? “Won’t they just plow it under again?”

“Don’t know.” The shipwreck is gone, the buried bodies, presumably, too. There’s a swell of purplish soil, he thinks (he thinks) where the wreck lay, but it’s hard to be sure now that he’s overwritten the landscape so thoroughly. “I don’t know, Jaara.” There are a lot of things that he doesn’t know, and a few things he does. One is that this isn’t enough. The other is that it’s better than nothing. Has to be.

A yellowish flash illuminates the freaky alien jungle—but it’s no ghostlight, only a battle slug, warning off other challengers in its territory. 

“It matters,” he says aloud. 

He’s not sure who he’s trying to reassure, because Jaara doesn’t look like she believes him and he doesn’t sound like he believes himself. Maybe the battle slug feels better for hearing it. He wonders if they should stay here and try to guard this weird little zoo, try answering some of those interview requests before they’re both locked out. 

“Maybe just for now. Maybe just to you and me.”

“But it matters,” she echoes, and it sounds truer coming from her mouth instead of his.

They sit side by side on a stumpy, rubbery chunk of vegetation that doesn’t seem to be secreting anything that’ll eat through their suits. Idly, Jaara pats the plant matter under her legs. The stump doesn’t seem to mind. 

“You want to talk about metrics while we’re waiting?” Hob asks, after a while, and Jaara chokes on an incredulous laugh. 

He pictures shiploads of Zetharin refugee-settlers, corralled behind safety perimeters until the secondary nexus can be cleared. Maybe someone will catch a glimpse of a CFM from behind the barriers, and maybe that person will come up with a better name than cabbage-faced motherfucker. Oh, damn—he should have brought something to carve the crash victims’ names into one of the quasi-trees in the jungle. 

“I don’t think we’re going to make deadline. They’re going to dock our pay, probably.”

Neither Jaara nor Hob has enough energy left to laugh at that. All they can do is cave vaguely in toward each other, shoulder to shoulder, partly out of exhaustion and partly because the shape of the stump-thing makes this kind of lean inevitable. From out of sight among the wool-trees and pipe-orange plants, a trumpeting call rises, and another harmonizes with it. Two more calls, smaller and shriller, echo the first set. A mated pair of CFMs and a couple of young to round out the set. 

“Just like I always say.” Hob cranes his neck for a glimpse of the CFMs, which stay stubbornly out of view. “The third week of an exorcism campaign is the absolute fucking worst.”

“Yeah.” He can just see the crescent-moon glint of Jaara’s smile through her sweat-fogged visor. “But you’re leaving off the next part.” 

“I am?” Hob racks his empty brain and comes up, unsurprisingly, empty-handed. “What else do I always say?”

She clinks her helmet against his. “That if we can survive the third week? The rest is cake.”

“That might have been an exaggeration on my part,” Hob cautions, and clinks her in return. 

They both subside into silence. Waiting. Listening. Watching the yellow sun wrap itself up in green clouds and settle to sleep beyond the horizon. The CFMs have moved away, it seems; and if there are any ghosts lingering out there, well, they’re quiet tonight.

Editor: E. Catherine Tobler
Copy Editor: Josephine Stewart
Cover Art: inkshark
Layout and Cover Design: Christine M. Scott

16,300 words, published February 2024