9781608642137txt

The Endless Reverb of a Long, Dark Night

What if you could hear death?

Around the deathbed stood four people. The first was the wife of the patient, Mrs. Meredith Tam, who wore a silver cross around her neck, a sky-blue cardigan with pearl buttons, and an expression of such utter exhaustion that Juhi was half-tempted to fetch her a coffee from the waiting lounge outside. The second individual was the patient’s son, whose eyes were red-rimmed but dry, and who sported the hardened jaw and clenched fists of a grudge-holder. Finally, there was the doctor, observing the form of his misfortunate patient with a sort of impatient sorrow; he clearly had other urgent cases to attend to. Cases where the patient had an actual chance at life.

It was a familiar tableau to Juhi. Only the players changed, but their roles remained the same: the patient, the relatives, and the physician. It was almost comfortable. A routine. Because even dying, if witnessed often enough, became routine. The same words, the same rituals, repeated over and over, like the mantras Juhi’s mother used to chant every morning while bathing miniature gods from the household shrine.

The gods were absent here. They always were, given that they were only colourful figments dreamt up to console the innocent—little brass statues clad in scraps of yellow silk and adorned with crimson threads and jasmine flowers, sweet-smelling and shrouded in incense, as if to smother the stench of death. Juhi did not, of course, ask Mrs. Tam if the cross around her neck meant that she still believed in a god. Let the widow-to-be keep her innocence.

Juhi was directed to the chair closest to Mr. Tam’s bedside. Ironic, that she was to be closer to this stranger in death than those who loved him. She opened the oblong, medium-sized case she had brought with her and lifted out her violin, pretending not to notice how Mrs. Tam flinched at the sight of the instrument. Juhi couldn’t blame the woman for flinching; to her, the appearance of the violin must seem a brutal finality, like the glint off the blade of a guillotine moments before it dropped.

Mr. Tam himself looked blissfully unaware, the frown-lines between his brows eased in sleep. His hair—what was left of it—was wispy and white, combed carefully over his scalp by a nurse or his wife, and his jowls were sweating slightly. The mask attached to his face concealed his nose and mouth, but Juhi didn’t need to see them. She only needed to listen.

Juhi dug her phone out of her pocket and set it to record on the bedside table, beside a box of tissues and a wilting bouquet of flowers. She brought her violin up to nestle under her chin and raised her bow. The sour, woodsy scent of old varnish that wafted up to her nostrils didn’t quite drown out the smell of sickness and hospital-grade disinfectant, but it was enough. It was grounding.

Mrs. Tam reached out for her husband’s hand.

At that point, Juhi tuned out. Her eyes drifted shut, blocking out all distractions. She was distantly aware of movement in the background; conversation; the beeping of the life support machines being switched off; the gasping sound of the ventilator’s suction being released; sobbing. But it was irrelevant. It wasn’t what she was listening for. It wasn’t the song.

But then, it came. So soft, so subtle, that to an ear less gifted, it might have escaped unnoticed. But Juhi was one of the gifted. She was a Witness. And to her, it was as palpable as a susurration of silk. Every hair on her body was standing on end. She had left the window of her mind wide open, and sure enough, that susurration swept in, like a wind through rushes, swaying the grasses gently as it passed. Atonal, acentric, meandering. Rising and falling as if on breaths. Rhythmic, but slowing. Mr. Tam was dying, and his life was leaving him in a series of notes.

That susurration, that whisper, rolled through Juhi, through her flesh and bones, as if she was transparent. Her hands moved without her knowing. Music filled the room. It was a quiet song with hints of light and memory, dappled like a sunlit riverbed under swift-flowing water. Flashes on the surface. Here one minute, gone the next. Evocations of experiences that would never happen again. Shapeless, nameless, but felt nonetheless.

Juhi opened her eyes long after the last note had lapsed. Her surroundings re-materialized around her, oddly surreal, like a half-forgotten dream. The overhead bulb was flickering; the wilted flowers seemed browner than before. The doctor was conversing lowly with a newly arrived nurse. Mr. Tam was much as he had been before—immobile, serene. Both Mrs. Tam and her son were weeping openly, as if their emotions had been unlocked by the music; they slumped against each other, exhausted by grief. Rather than disturb them, Juhi discreetly packed up her violin and phone, and left for the waiting lounge.

There, amid the hubbub of chattering visitors, bustling janitors and trundling trolleys stacked with foil-covered food, Juhi waited. Eventually, the nurse that had been speaking to the doctor emerged from the intensive care ward and headed towards her. Juhi straightened, chucking the Styrofoam cup she’d been sipping coffee from into the nearby bin.

The nurse stared at Juhi, looking distinctly spooked, and Juhi realized that she’d forgotten to fix her face. It tended to lapse into an unnatural blankness whenever she Witnessed, a blankness that most people found alarming. Juhi could never be bothered to explain that in hollowing herself out like a flute to let someone else’s song play through her, she had to give up her own personality, her own self. Reclaiming it was a gradual process. Doing bodily activities to revive her physical senses—such as eating a good meal, having a hot bath or making love—helped her reclaim herself in the days that followed a Witnessing. She could hardly ‘act normal’ immediately afterwards, as she was often instructed to do.

Still, Juhi adopted what she hoped was a sufficiently sorrowful mien, and saw the nurse relax. “Li-Ying,” Juhi addressed her by the name on her badge, and the nurse smiled. “Thanks for your help today.”

“No worries.” Li-Ying shook her head and her short bob bounced. She was pretty, if timid, with a pink mouth and eyes that darted away, like mice. “It’s a real pity about Mr. Tam, he’s been with us for more than a decade. I suppose his family thought it was finally time to let him rest. It must have been a difficult decision; it always is. But they asked for a Witness. For a melody to remember him by.”

“A common decision.” Juhi’s tone may have been a bit brusque. She’d performed nine such Witnessings in the past week. They had taken a toll on her, especially the ones in which Juhi’s subject was conscious and interactive to begin with. When Li-Ying blinked, however, Juhi sighed and amended, “It is only natural to wish to preserve the memory of a loved one for posterity.”

Evidently, that was a sufficiently romantic response. Li-Ying brightened and handed Juhi a clipboard holding a pen and a sheet of paper. “Yes, the family expressed their gratitude for your presence today. In their LI form, they stated that they would like you to notate the complete sonata based on your performance today, and to perform it again at Mr. Tam’s funeral in two days.”

Ah. An expensive option, but perhaps the Tams were well off. “I’ll do my best,” Juhi said, with as much sincerity as she could muster while still hollowed out, empty without Mr. Tam’s music to fill her up. She’d have to fill that emptiness soon or suffer the consequences. “Please advise them that I am amenable to performing his Life Impression at the funeral, and that I will be honored to attend.”

Li-Ying beamed. “That’s great! Um, you’ll have to sign here to indicate that you won’t use the phone recording of your playing—and of Mr. Tam’s passing—for any purpose but the requested musical notation, and that you will delete the recording as soon as the notation is complete. Should you not do so, the standard fines and penalties will apply.”

Juhi hummed in vague agreement and signed, barely aware of returning the clipboard. She was already thinking of home, of that hot bath, of calling Ben and Anya over for dinner. Li-Ying’s mouth was a similar shade of pink to Ben’s, and Li-Ying’s diffidence had Juhi missing Anya’s take-charge attitude.

People to whom she need not lie. Those were the only people whose company Juhi could tolerate right now. Lying took more energy than she had.

Back home, amongst neglected, drooping houseplants, rumpled clothing, and stacks of books, Juhi found the discount voucher she’d tucked away for the Chinese takeout joint down the block. She rang them up and placed an order for Kung Pao chicken, steamed rice and garlic prawns. Deciding she wasn’t in the mood to go out again, she texted Ben to pick up the order on his way and went for her much-awaited bath.

Juhi emerged from the bathroom to see Anya already on the couch, flipping idly through the channels. She must’ve let herself in with the key Juhi had given her ten months ago. Juhi wondered, not for the first time, when they’d all finally start cohabiting.

“Where’s Ben?” Anya muted the TV and pinned Juhi with her sharp, bright, measuring gaze. It was like being on the receiving end of a paring knife. Anya looked Juhi up and down as if cataloguing her injuries, both seen and unseen, and then murmured, “Oh, honey.”

Juhi winced. If she was eliciting that reaction from Anya, it must be really bad. Juhi wrapped her arms around herself, suddenly too cold in her bathrobe, but mercifully, Anya didn’t want to talk—unlike Ben, who preferred talking about feelings. Anya only got up and kissed Juhi on the brow, and then on the mouth, and took her hand to pull her down onto the couch. They tangled together, easy and natural, like they always had. Anya’s dark skin glowed in the low light. In the background, a rerun of M.A.S.H. ran silently on the telly.

“Ben’s getting takeaway,” Juhi mumbled into Anya’s collarbone.

“Let him. I get to have you all to myself, for a change.” Anya trailed her fingers through Juhi’s damp hair, burying her nose in it. “You smell like a jungle orchid.”

“How would you know what a jungle orchid smells like?” Juhi teased. She felt a deep unwinding within her, as of a dyed cloth, stained by death in all the places except where she’d wound herself up protectively. Those untouched spaces could finally unfurl—vulnerable, but no longer painfully so. “You’ve never been to a jungle. And you’re allergic to flowers.”

“Hush.” Anya tightened her arms around Juhi. “Have a pre-dinner nap. I’ll wake you up when Ben gets here.”

As it turned out, Anya didn’t wake Juhi up when Ben got there. Maybe she hadn’t had the heart to, or, more likely, Anya had judged Juhi in greater need of a kip than of a timely dinner.

Juhi awoke in bleary increments, groggy and dazed, to find herself sandwiched between Ben and Anya on the couch. Ben’s hair was sticking out in every direction, like he’d been yanking on it in frustration while researching his thesis on translations of the Torah. His soft, pink mouth—so like Li-Ying’s—sagged open in sleep. He was drooling. Anya, in contrast, was composed and put-together even while asleep, her legs folded primly beneath her and her neat eyeshadow not the least bit smudged. Juhi suspected there was magic involved. Her own makeup invariably ended up smeared all over her face if she ever made the mistake of sleeping with it on.

Drowsily, Juhi surveyed her home. The faint scent of cooling Kung Pao floated in from the kitchen. The shoe-rack by the door, in contrast, emanated the fusty odor of old footwear. The plastic CD tower now had a crack in it, stuffed with everything from Hendrix to Paganini. Upon the music stand was sheet music from The King and I, her most recent non-LI gig; last weekend, she’d been in the pit orchestra for the musical. Across the flat, just outside the entrance to Juhi’s sole bedroom, stood her mother’s shrine, its enamelled doors open and revealing the cast of gods within. A child Ganesha on a golden swing. A dancing Shiva with wild hair and wilder eyes. Krishna playing his flute with Radha leaning against him, utterly smitten. Lakshmi with coins flowing out of her palms.

The gods, unlike the plants, were well-looked after, even though Juhi didn’t believe in them. Her mother had. That was enough. Even as a busy single mum, she’d impressed upon Juhi the importance of tending to the gods everyday, of bathing them, dressing them and putting them to sleep at night. Like children, beloved and precious.

Once, at the age of sixteen, Juhi had been at school when her mother’s song had escaped, unheard. Juhi still reflected on it, sometimes—all right, all the time. What her mother’s soul, her life, would have sounded like had Juhi been there to hear it, and not stuck in band practice for a school concert. If that song would have suited the sarangi more than the violin. If it would have had Juhi somewhere in it, like a face glimpsed in a group photograph taken at a birthday party; if Mrs. Bakshi’s love for her daughter would be there in its notes. If it would have been better that she hadn’t died in a car accident, far from the ear of the only Witness born in the city since 1998.

Far from Juhi.

Her mother’s music had been stolen from her. That sound, that song, should have been hers to hear. Hers to remember. And instead, it was lost to the screeching of tires and the wailing of sirens.

Ben shifted as he slept, his brow furrowing, as if he could sense Juhi’s turmoil. He always could. There was magic involved there, too, Juhi was sure. Anya’s magic, and Ben’s, holding Juhi together like the lines of gold holding together a kintsugi vase. Broken, but mended. Fractured, but beautiful. Worth keeping. Worth treasuring. At least to them.

Anya nestled against Juhi, and Ben curled over them both. The couch—a lumpy, beige, stained leftover from Juhi’s college years—creaked under their collective weight.

This, too, was home. This embrace. The Kung Pao could wait.

Just before midnight, dinner was finally consumed, the takeout boxes discarded, and the dishes washed. Ben was scowling at the dishrag in his hand as if it had personally offended him, but the real cause of his ire was the letter that Anya was reading aloud from her chair at the rickety dining table.

The letter bore the blue-and-silver logo of the state’s police department. A reminiscent shape. It had also been on the letter that had borne the ruling of Juhi’s mother’s death as accidental, a decade ago. A ruling that made Juhi ill to recall, because of the fact that the police had even thought it mightn’t be accidental. That there had been evidence, however scarce, of it being suicide. That those moments in which Juhi had espied her mother staring emptily at the portrait of Juhi’s long-dead father had signified more than Juhi had thought they did. That Juhi could have done something.

Bile rose up Juhi’s gullet.

“The nerve of them.” Ben hung up the rag and rounded the table, throwing himself onto the chair between Anya and Juhi, his skinny legs crossed at the knee. “As if you don’t already have enough on your plate. You’re suffering from emotional exhaustion—”

“Can we not talk about this?” Juhi said desperately.

“No.” Ben pointed a leftover chopstick at her. “We are absolutely talking about this.”

Anya snorted. “Like talk changes anything.”

Ben glared. “It does. Juhi’s been taking on so many LIs, it’s doing her head in. She’s going numb. And we know what comes next, don’t we? The depression. We can’t let that happen. You need a break, Juhi, not more work.”

“I can’t say no,” Juhi muttered. “I mean, they’re the police. They’re saying my involvement could help catch criminals. Hopefully.”

“Hopefully?” Ben huffed. “Fuck ’em.”

Anya studied at the letter. “Maybe,” she said slowly, in her heavy, rolling West African accent, “it might be good for Juhi. To see concrete results for her work. Not just grieving families, but families to whom she can give closure.”

Ben’s lips thinned. “She already gives families closure.”

“Families to whom she can bring justice.” Anya shoved the letter at Ben. “It’s different.”

Juhi sat there, bemused, somehow both touched and insulted by their concern. “Are either of you even going to pretend that you’re consulting me?” she asked, half-seriously. “Or are you just going to make all my decisions for me?”

At that, both Ben and Anya turned to fix her with a look—a startlingly identical, yet incomprehensible, look—before Anya sighed. “Of course, it is your choice, Juhi.”

“We were just going over the options.” Ben cleared his throat. “Sorry. We can get a little… overprotective.”

That was an understatement. Juhi leaned across the table to kiss him, and quickly swiped the letter out from under his elbow.

“Oi, that’s cheating!” Ben complained, although his expression had softened, like it always did when Juhi kissed him.

“It’s my letter,” Juhi reminded him. “Addressed to me.” She flattened it out and re-read it. Some small, animal corner of her quailed at the prospect of dealing with violent deaths, but there was also a whisper, at the back of her mind, telling her that these victims—victims whose songs would otherwise be lost—might be able to leave their families a piece of themselves. What her mother hadn’t been able to leave for her.

Anya put her hand over Juhi’s. Ben did the same, on the other side.

“Whatever you choose, Juhi-girl, we’re with you,” Ben said gently. So gently.

Ben’s gentleness tugged at the stitches that held Juhi’s heart together. It hurt, but it was a sweet hurt. A warm hurt. She pretended her eyes weren’t getting moist, that she didn’t have to blink repeatedly to keep the words on the letter from blurring. “It’s just a trial program,” she said eventually, haltingly. “Three cases. They’ve never used Witnesses to catch murderers, before. Or to help determine the cause of death. It might not even work. I have no clue how to interpret music as evidence. Or if my interpretations will be admissible in court. I guess this is an experiment to figure out if they should be.”

“So you’re giving it a try?” Ben asked, with a wary sort of supportiveness.

“For now.” Juhi glanced up at them. “Is that okay?”

“Yes, it’s okay. You’re so brave, Juhi.” Anya smoothed her fingertips over Juhi’s knuckles. “We do make a motley crew, don’t we? A Nigerian immigrant, a goody two-shoes Jewish mama’s boy—”

“I’m not a mama’s boy!” Ben exclaimed, even though he was.

“—and a second-generation Indian obsessed with death.” Anya smirked. “If anybody can handle this, we can. Like the band of misfits from The Lord of the Rings.”

“Please,” Ben begged. “No Tolkien. It’s too late for Tolkien.” He frowned. “Wait. If Juhi’s Frodo, then that makes me Sam, doesn’t it? Me, not you. Frodo can’t have two Sams.”

“No,” Anya said patiently. “Juhi’s Aragorn—quiet, gorgeous, tormented. And I’m Arwen. Also gorgeous, but not quite as tormented.”

“Arwen was white.”

Anya actually stuck out her tongue. “Piss off.”

Juhi established a truce between them by inviting them both to bed.

After performing at Mr. Tam’s funeral—a very formal, very crowded event, because apparently Mr. Tam was a pillar of his community—Juhi wrote a response to the letter, detailing her preferences and needs if she was to cooperate with the program. She left her reply in the shrine overnight. Perhaps Ganesha might see fit to watch over her through it all. Whatever it was.

Within a fortnight, Juhi was given clearance by the state’s police force to be present at crime scenes. She was to be accompanied by a homicide investigator at all times. While participating in the trial, Juhi would be generously paid, enough that she wouldn’t have to take on any Witnessings. It would allow her more rest than she’d had before, more off-time to gather herself. To heal herself.

Three cases. Three tests of Juhi’s endurance, of her dedication, of her sanity.

Ben still thought she was overdoing it. Anya was reserving her judgment like the pragmatic utilitarian she was. But neither of them were there with Juhi when she crossed the black-and-yellow barricade tape around a murder scene. She was alone as she confronted the killing of a human being.

Her first case was a stabbing—a middle-aged man in a tie and suit lying dead in a residential driveway. A fresh corpse, with a shockingly huge blotch of blood on his checkered office shirt.

Juhi’s stomach heaved.

What had she been thinking? Ben had been right. She couldn’t do this. It would kill her, albeit more slowly than this poor bloke had been killed.

“Easy,” said Juhi’s police chaperone, Dave Hines. He was a rotund, laidback fellow a few inches shorter than Juhi, but not altogether lacking in presence. “Happens to all of us. You’re still new. It’ll settle.”

What would settle? Her stomach? Or her heart, which had lodged itself in her throat like a bird struggling to escape? “You already know this is a murder,” Juhi snapped, unsettled. “Why am I even here?”

“Because this is the control for our experiment.” Dave shrugged. “We know he was murdered, but do you? Can you hear it? If you can’t, then the rest of the program is moot. If you can, well… Maybe you can help us, after all.”

In the end, Juhi was able to do what she had to do; perhaps dissociation came naturally to her, now. She stilled herself, separated herself, and knelt beside the body with her violin. It was scientifically established that a person’s imprint could linger on, in increasingly smaller, scattered fragments, for up to a few hours after death. Like radioactive decay, or the carvings on ancient relics—growing more illegible and disjointed with age, until finally, there was nothing left to discern.

Juhi could catch only a few snatches of sound, but their incompleteness was not all that Juhi noticed. The concluding notes—or the notes that Juhi intuited were the conclusion—had a jarring end, jangling like an orchestra full of instruments shattered mid-concert. If Juhi attempted to follow the noise, it only ended up in an empty, boiling echo-chamber. A scream within a scream.

“It’s a murder,” she confirmed later, brusquely, after she had vomited into a spare paper bag that had been stashed in the dashboard of Dave’s car. “It… didn’t sound right. Didn’t sound like the Witnessings I’ve been doing, which were all planned in advance, even if the soon-to-be-deceased was conscious of it. Those sounds just tapered off, or ended on a note that made sense in the overall musical pattern. This—didn’t.”

Dave hummed pensively as he drove them back to headquarters. “Interesting. New York’s been conducting its own research into Witnessing as a potential forensic tool. All hush-hush, y’see, which is why the press hasn’t caught wind of it yet. But yeah, New York’s started, and it’s reported much the same results. If they prove replicable here, we can petition the federal government to have Witnessings be made admissible in court, with their own rules and regulations. We could even have a brand new Witnessing department. Or a sub-department within Forensics. This is probably the worst time to ask, given that you’ve just spewed your guts out, but would you be interested in working for us? Permanently?”

No. Juhi bit her lip rather than answer. “When’s the next case?” she asked instead.

“The next case is tomorrow, nice and early. We’re stopping by the morgue.” Dave drummed his meaty fingers on the steering wheel. “You up for the morgue?”

Who was up for a morgue? Except a necrophiliac? “No,” Juhi responded, more honestly. “But I’ll go anyway.”

Dave laughed. It was a loud bark of laughter, jiggling his belly. “That’s the spirit!” He made a moue. “No pun intended.”

It was Juhi’s turn to laugh. Awkwardly and uncomfortably, but still.

The second case was a no-show, a radio silence. The victim had been dead too long. Her limbs were ice-pale and slender, swan-like, fragile as if made of spun glass. She couldn’t have been over eighteen or nineteen. She’d vanished for a few days, then turned up dead—and undressed—by the side of the Pacific Highway.

Juhi felt a clench within herself, a fist of rage tightening in the center of her chest at the futility of it all. At her own futility. The sick, roiling heat within her clashed with the morgue’s refrigerated coolness. “I’m sorry,” she said to Dave, quietly. “I can’t hear a thing.”

The girl was rolled back into her horizontal drawer. Snow White locked in a glass casket. The last Juhi saw of her were her closed, brittle-seeming, butterfly-wing eyelids, each with a delicate tracery of veins.

The third case was a lot like Mr. Tam’s, but more tragic.

“So.” Dave led Juhi up the stairs of a local hospital in the city’s southwest. “We’ve determined that twenty-nine hours is too many hours post-mortem for a Witness to hear anything. But we’re visiting a live victim today. They’re about to shut off his life support, which entails—’

“I know what it entails,” Juhi interjected. “I’ve handled loads of those cases for LIs.”

“Yep.” Dave popped the ‘p’. “But you haven’t seen one that’s been poisoned to death.”

Juhi flinched. Okay, then. At least he’d warned her.

In a cramped private room was a man in his sixties, hooked up to a drip, a ventilator, and a dialysis machine. He looked so very small, dwarfed by the technology surrounding him. They all looked small like this, near death. That was what had most bothered Juhi about Witnessing, when she’d started out—how small and defenceless humans were. Flimsy puppets of skin and bone. Easy to rip apart.

“What’re you looking for?” Juhi asked Dave.

“Can’t say.” Dave flopped into a bedside chair and waved at Juhi to do the same. “Don’t wanna bias you. Can’t bias you, more like. Those’re the rules.”

“Wow, you’re so helpful,” Juhi deadpanned.

Dave grinned. “Thanks. I do try.”

Juhi took her seat, retrieved her violin from its case, and set to work.

This time, when the machines switched off, Juhi grasped onto the fraying, gossamer rope of the man’s breath, and followed it down into the dark. There, in the depths, was a sound like burnt honey, encrusted with shards of amber—sharp, discordant intervals spaced regularly throughout but gathering momentum at the end, which was a sudden, bright flare of agony. It was obviously cut off, jagged as a sawn-off pipe. Juhi had the irrational fear that she would slice herself open on it.

But then, the sound faded, softly as all life support cases did, where the patient slid effortlessly into death. There was a relief to it, after all that pain. The man’s soul emerged into the waiting silence like a bubble of oil rising within water—a denser, more discernable, almost tangible shape. Juhi heard it pass her, trailing its quietening, lengthening notes of music behind it. The painful jaggedness of before dwindled into faint, unpleasant pinpricks that would hang like dust motes in the air for a few hours yet.

When Juhi opened her eyes, there was a thin sheen of perspiration on her arms. “He was poisoned by someone he knew,” Juhi said, into the vacuum. There didn’t seem to be enough oxygen for her lungs. She forced herself to breathe regardless. “There was… There was a pattern there, a repeating pattern of sharpness, of—” She floundered, searching for the appropriate term. “Dislike? No, not that. Just anger. More and more of it, and it had the same texture as the last moment, the last pain, which I assume was the poisoning. So, it had to be the same person, someone who’d been with him long enough to leave permanent, regular imprints within him.” She peered at Dave. “What do you think?”

Dave was staring at her, wide-eyed, spooked. Just like that nurse of Mr. Tam’s had been. Just like everyone was, sooner or later. Everyone except Anya and Ben.

“I think,” Dave said consideringly, “that we need to hire you. Because you’re correct. We already have the victim’s son in custody; he’s the prime suspect. He lived with the victim ever since the death of the victim’s wife, and the neighbours frequently heard father and son arguing. We’ve got enough evidence to charge, but we’re waiting for Forensics to come through with a few remaining bits and bobs to tie it all up. If we hadn’t already found a prime suspect, your comments would’ve helped us narrow the search. You would’ve saved us a lot of trouble.” He sat back, satisfied. “I’d say this test run has been a success.”

Success. A strange word, not usually associated with Juhi’s work. She felt heavier and lighter all at once. A self-contradiction. “I’ll think about it,” she said, and left. The hospital was close enough to a bus stop for her to catch a ride back home. Sharing the close confines of a car with another human being—even one as pleasant as Dave—was out of the question.

Not that the bus was much better. When the passengers gave Juhi a wide berth, she remembered to fix her face. Again.

Juhi entered her flat, placing her violin case on its shelf and toeing off her shoes. She glimpsed Ben and Anya through the bedroom door, asleep on Juhi’s bed, wrapped up in each other as the ceiling fan clicked and clacked above them. Ben was down to his boxers and Anya was wearing his Mr. Bean T-shirt, even though she called it tacky. They were beautiful together. Whole. Alive. A music Juhi didn’t have to silence herself to hear—their breaths, intermingling. They’d been staying over more and more often lately, as if sensing that she needed them.

They were right. She did.

Ben uttered a snuffling little snore, and Anya frowned even in her sleep, as if disapproving of the sheer silliness of the noise.

Juhi stifled a snicker.

And just like that, the weight slid off her. The mask slid off her. As she tiptoed across to the bedroom, however, she was brought up short by an assortment of objects on the coffee table—a real estate catalogue sitting next to Ben’s and Anya’s house keys and a red ballpoint pen. Juhi leaned closer; the catalogue was flipped open to page nine. Two large rental flats were circled in red, with “Which do you prefer?” written at the bottom of the page in Anya’s crabbed, intricate handwriting.

Juhi smiled. Before continuing to the bedroom, she picked up the pen to add her reply: “Both.”

Gemini

A psychiatrist assesses a patient’s suitability for time travel.

Dr. Ramachandran’s diary:

August 18th, 2129. 08:45 p.m.

Finally, I’d seen my last patient for the day. I was just preparing to leave the office when a detective by the name of Ray Belotti gave me a call. I assumed he was from the police, as most detectives were, but no, Belotti wanted to talk about time travel. I poured myself a drink to get through the conversation.

“I’m sorry, Detective, but I’m not in the business of resurrection.” I tilted my glass of whiskey toward the window so that it caught the first rays of sunset. Orange light refracted through the patterned crystal and cast bright, geometric shapes on the walls. “And I don’t appreciate having my after-office hours impinged upon, even if it is by the Department of Temporal Law Enforcement.”

“Think about it, Doctor,” urged Detective Belotti, his holographic face flickering above my desk. He was a middle-aged, porcine man with an oily, balding pate. “Consulting for the DTLE is an honor most would jump at.”

“I’m no longer young enough to jump. My knees won’t allow it.”

“Oh, please,” Belotti scoffed. “You can’t be older than your late thirties.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere, Detective.” I set aside my glass. “Besides, the Singularity is a means of resurrection, isn’t it? Of bringing back to life those that fate has consigned to the grave?”

“You wouldn’t be saying that if it was someone you loved that you could bring back. Someone who didn’t die naturally. Someone who was murdered in cold blood.”

I paused, considering. “You’re good at pushing buttons.”

“As are you, I’d bet.” Belotti smirked. “Isn’t that kind of your job?”

I huffed. “All right, I’ll bite. Who’s the patient?”

“It’s a kid. One half of a set of orphaned twins. The other one got killed, and this one was the witness.”

That did sound tragic enough to qualify for the Singularity. As a juvenile psychiatrist, I couldn’t turn away a child in need. I’d taken on pro bono cases for Social Services, so why not assist the DTLE? “I’ll do it. My schedule’s booked for another month, though. When can you bring the patient in?”

“Actually,” said Belotti, somewhat sheepishly, “we’re already here.”

I sat up so fast that my leather chair creaked in complaint. “What?” I swiped sideways on my desk’s surface, until the live feed from my front door’s security camera sprang up. There Belotti was, talking to my hologram on his wristband, with a lean figure in a hoodie partially hidden behind him.

Belotti cleared his throat. “I reckoned you’d be booked out during working hours, so I—”

“So you thought it’d be appropriate to blindside me outside of work? Is that how the DTLE does things? It doesn’t seem very professional.”

Belotti scowled at me. “Look, this kid needs your help, and the psychiatrist we’d lined up has just had a heart attack, so they’re unavailable. We have a court deadline to meet with our psychiatric assessment and only so many weeks to do it. Are you in or are you out?”

Unexpectedly, it was something about the silhouette hovering behind the detective—some vulnerability in its posture, in the despairing slump of those thin shoulders—that pulled my answer out of me before I was ready. “I’m in,” I blurted.

Belotti grinned. “Awesome. So how about you let us in and we can get started?”

Get started. Wonderful. I should’ve been going home for a hot shower and a replicated dinner, but it appeared my workday was back in session. I disconnected Belotti’s call and indulged myself in a stretch.

“Eva?” I said into the increasing gloom. The sun had all but set, by now.

“Yes, sir?” my AI secretary asked in her usual dulcet tones, from everywhere at once.

“Brighten the lamps to full and let the people outside into the waiting room.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ten minutes and a quick tidying-up later, I received my new patient in the waiting room, under Belotti’s watchful eye. The detective wore the typical blue-and-gray badge of the department on his lapel, stating his name and designation.

He was sitting next to a slender girl with lank, shoulder-length black hair and haunted eyes. The girl glanced up at me and then away, the set of her mouth both soft and sullen, her hands shoved into the pockets of her jeans. She had a fragile air, as if she were made of spun glass—likely to shatter at any moment, and just as likely to cut those around her with her shards.

“Dr. Ravi Ramachandran.” Belotti stood and extended his hand for a handshake. “Thank you for seeing us.”

“My pleasure,” I deadpanned, like I hadn’t been ambushed. I did wish my patient hadn’t heard me nattering on about resurrection, which seemed, in retrospect, rather tasteless. Then again, I hadn’t been aware that a patient was privy to my remarks. That was all Belotti’s fault. “You’re lucky I hadn’t gone home, yet. If I had, it’d take me a while to get to the office.”

I studied the girl. She had the same air of resentful cooperation as all those who were forced into therapy by law. I had some experience in working with the police, albeit not with the DTLE.

“We were hoping you could…” Belotti coughed. “Well, this is a somewhat complex case, and without the help of a qualified psychiatrist, it’ll be difficult to conclude if what the witness is saying is the truth.”

The girl snapped, “It is the truth.”

That’s what they all say, I didn’t comment. She may believe she was telling the truth. She could be no older than her late teens. Still very much a child. “May I ask your name, Miss…?”

“Stalhberg,” she announced. “Bethany Stahlberg.”

But Belotti only coughed again. “Er,” he said as Bethany glared at him, “this… isn’t Bethany Stahlberg. It’s Bethany Stahlberg’s twin brother, Finn Stahlberg.”

I blinked.

The girl drooped as if in defeat, emanating a palpable, seething hatred for Belotti. Her every inch, every expression was conspicuously girlish. Except that now, my eye caught on the Adam’s apple in her throat, just as my ear caught on the slight, masculine huskiness of her voice. Her loose, shapeless jacket concealed much of her—his?—form, but given that her body language was so convincingly feminine, and her face so convincingly delicate, I’d missed the signs. How could I be so unobservant?

“Don’t worry about it,” Belotti hurried to say, almost apologetically. “Nobody recognizes Finn at first sight. He… well, he often presents as Bethany, but he isn’t Bethany.”

“Well, of course I couldn’t be her,” the girl muttered with a bitter twist of her lips. “She’s dead.”

At that, a strange frisson ran through me—a jolt of premonition or déjà vu, an unnameable, powerful surge of emotion, accompanied by an equally inexplicable surge of protectiveness. I did counsel children, and was about as protective of them as any decent adult would be, but there was some quality to this particular youngster that was rousing my paternal instincts.

And, for some reason, in spite of being told that “Bethany” wasn’t here, my cognitive faculties insisted on processing “Finn Stahlberg” as a girl. Despite the visible signs that contradicted it, and despite Belotti’s revelations, everything in me—every corner of my therapist’s psyche—whispered to me that this was Bethany. Not literally, perhaps, but in every way that counted.

The recommended approach to dissociative identity disorder in the DSM-VIII was to neither encourage an alter identity nor acknowledge it as real, but my intuition cautioned me against doing that. The very intuition that my colleagues would condemn as illogical was indicating to me that I’d lose this patient—and any insight into Finn’s mind—if I refused to acknowledge Bethany. At least to begin with.

So I held my hand out to the girl. “Bethany. It’s nice to meet you.”

Bethany’s eyes widened. She still didn’t take my hand, but some of her tension left her. I raised an eyebrow at Belotti, silently asking him to play along.

Belotti’s jaw had dropped during my little exchange with “Bethany,” but he swiftly recovered his composure and gave me a minute nod. “Ahem,” he fumbled, “I—uh, this is—you might want to know why we’re here in the first place, Doctor.”

“That would be useful,” I said wryly, and saw Bethany’s mouth twitch.

Belotti tapped the wristband he wore over the cuff of his wrinkled office shirt. A hologram popped up above it, displaying a glimmering, see-through photograph of a pair of nearly identical twins, a boy and a girl, standing side-by-side and smiling into the camera. It was rare for fraternal twins of opposite sexes to look identical, but not impossible, especially if the original zygote had been split in a lab to double the chances of conception for parents who couldn’t conceive naturally.

I was transfixed, but Bethany flinched from the picture as if from a blow.

“Perhaps,” I said to Belotti in an undertone, “you could explain the case to me in private, where we—”

“No,” Bethany spoke up stubbornly. “I’m fine. Go on, Detective.” She uttered the title with the sort of overwhelming sarcasm that teenagers are so proficient at.

“If you’re sure,” Belotti said blandly, unaffected by Bethany’s insulting behavior. It was as though he’d developed a callus on his ego after spending all his days around combative witnesses. “Dr. Ramachandran,” he addressed me again, “four years ago, Bethany Stahlberg was shot to death by her foster father, Geoffrey Boehner, in front of her brother, Finn Stahlberg, after which Boehner shot himself. Bethany died before the ambulance her brother had called could arrive. Finn Stahlberg was the only survivor of the incident, and hence its only witness.”

“And what did Forensics say?” I asked Belotti, with as much equanimity as I could muster upon hearing of such horrors.

Belotti shrugged. “Forensics confirmed every detail of Finn’s testimony. The residue of the gunshot, the pattern of the blood-splatters and the father’s fingerprints on the gun all reaffirmed Finn’s recounting of events, down to every minute detail.”

“Then why are we here?” I studied the holograms Belotti had cycling above his wristband—photos from the crime scene and extracts from the official reports lodged at the time of the murder. Bethany was conspicuously silent on her chair, staring at the images blankly. “Please switch that off,” I gestured at Belotti’s wristband. “I’ve seen what I need to see.”

Belotti shook his wrist to switch off the holograms. “Well, you know how the law states that none under the age of eighteen are allowed access to a Singularity, because they’re still minors. But Finn Stahlberg will be turning eighteen in two months. Based on his testimony, Finn should be able to avert the death of his sister through a Singularity. That should qualify him for access to it after he comes of age. That’s the court deadline for our application.”

I reflected on the constraints of time travel. Despite my earlier jibe about resurrections, I’d always found Singularities puzzling, given how limited they were. A Singularity permitted a witness to go back to the scene of a murder for only five seconds. Once in the past, the witness merged physically and mentally with their previous self, and therefore became their previous self for five seconds, with the added foreknowledge of what was to occur. If they went in with a plan, they could act swiftly to prevent the murder from occurring.

Ironically, if they succeeded, they wiped the murder from the timeline and erased the memories of all involved, including their own. That meant most successes went unreported, because there was nobody who remembered them being successes at all, or that there had been timelines in which lives had ended. The only recorded successes were cases in which the time traveler, in those five precious seconds of retaining knowledge of the future, mentioned being from the future. Thankfully, those cases were proof enough that the Singularities worked. And even if they didn’t, the timeline would continue just as it had before. There was nothing to lose.

If I did sign off on Finn’s petition to use a Singularity, I wouldn’t be sending him into the unknown.

As I pondered Finn’s welfare, Belotti droned on: “We need you to issue a professional opinion on whether Finn Stahlberg is of sound mind, whether his testimony is authentic, and whether he’s sane enough to use the Singularity to save his sister’s life.”

“He isn’t,” Bethany piped up, startling both Belotti and myself. “He’s a lunatic, clearly. I mean, look at me. I wouldn’t even be here if he was of sound mind.” She glowered at me. “Isn’t it obvious? You don’t even need to assess me, do you?”

“I’m afraid I must,” I answered. “I’ve been approached by the DTLE to do just that.”

Bethany crossed her arms and frowned. Her legs were crossed, too, in true girlish fashion, and the tilt of her chin made her hair swing forward, partially obscuring her face.

Belotti, however, was manifestly relieved. “Thank you, Doctor. You’ll see that Finn’s very driven to use the Singularity. You haven’t met him yet, but when he’s… himself, he insists that he can save his sister, that he can deflect the bullet headed for her with an object, or push his sister out of the bullet’s trajectory. Since the day he first testified four years ago, he’s been desperate to go back in time and save his twin’s life. Now that he’s finally turning eighteen, I’d wager he’s even more desperate to make it happen.”

“Finn’s desperate in general,” Bethany put in. “Desperately mad, that is. I wouldn’t believe a word he says.”

The irony of that statement wasn’t lost on me—or on her, given her resulting pout. Despite the seriousness of the situation, I was tempted to laugh. “Therein lies the rub,” I said to Belotti. “Does it not? Their testimonies clash. ‘Finn’ claims he can save his sister, but ‘Bethany’ claims he can’t. You need me to validate Finn’s testimony.”

“Only if it’s worth validating. If it is, he gets to use the Singularity to save his sister.” Belotti nodded toward my office. “So, you’ll take on this case?”

“Of course I will,” I replied. “It could save a girl’s life.”

“Hello?” Bethany waved at us. “The girl’s right here.”

Belotti gave her an eloquent look that said, No, you’re not. You’re dead.

And Bethany was back to glaring at him.

I sighed. So much for progress. “Please,” I held out my hand to Bethany again, to help her up from her chair, but she batted me away. “If you’d go into my office, I’ll join you shortly.”

Still giving Belotti the evil eye, Bethany got up, unfurling her skinny yet graceful frame. She trudged into my office with the grudging, plodding tread of a fed-up seventeen-year-old girl, and slammed the door vengefully behind her.

Belotti massaged his forehead, like a man with the world’s worst headache.

“Is there anything else you’d like to say, Detective?” I enquired. “Or perhaps I could fetch you a cup of tea or coffee to drink while you wait out here?”

“Nope.” Belotti stifled a yawn; without Bethany to sass him into alertness, he looked exhausted. “But I oughta tell you that lie detectors don’t work on ‘em. Or we wouldn’t have had to consult you. No offense.”

“None taken.” I couldn’t hide my amusement. “You mean the detectors don’t work on either of them?”

“According to the detectors, they’re both lying. Which leaves us cops in a bit of a pickle.” Then, as if Bethany might be eavesdropping on us, Belotti leaned in to whisper in my ear, “As per the law, his body is Finn Stahlberg’s, and only Finn Stahlberg’s. We don’t need or want Bethany’s testimony; it won’t stand up in court, because it’s the testimony of a made-up identity. What we need is confirmation from Finn Stahlberg about what happened, and your assurance that he is in his right mind to use the Singularity. That’s all. Don’t humor him with this I-am-Bethany nonsense more than you have to.”

“Thank you, Detective,” I said serenely, with no intention whatsoever of heeding his advice. My only concern was for the welfare of my patient. Patients, plural. “I’ll see that I don’t.”

When I followed Bethany into my office and shut the door behind me, I saw her slight figure outlined against the light from the large, curtainless arched window.

But there was a subtle difference in her posture, the slouch of her shoulders more pronounced and her legs slightly more knock-kneed. Even her back seemed broader; it must have to do with how she performed herself, which angles of her body she chose to emphasize.

Sure enough, when she turned around, I saw that she wasn’t Bethany anymore.

There was a boy standing where Bethany had been, his body language starkly different from hers, with his hands not shoved safely out of sight in his pockets but clenched into fists at his sides. A more open and demonstrative personality than his sister’s. Interesting.

“Hello, Finn,” I said, and smiled.

Dr. Ramachandran’s diary:

September 4th, 2129. 06:28 p.m.

It has now been three weeks since I began seeing the Stahlbergs. Yes, both of them, on an almost daily basis after school, except for the weekends. I still can’t predict which Stahlberg I’ll be seeing on any particular day, the brother or the sister. So far, there has been no overlap between the two except for that first day on which I met them. I’ve become fonder of them than I ought to be. They’re so fascinating, after all. And so innocent.

Finn is terribly young, in that youth is terrible for him, an affliction he’s eager to be cured of. Yet I find that very youth enchanting, and am drawn to Finn’s sharp edges, despite knowing that those who dare to touch them will inevitably be left with bloodied fingers.

Bethany is charming, too, whenever Finn presents as her. She gives the impression of being mousy and timid, but beneath that timidness lurks a dangerous creature, a carnivorous mermaid of the deep. Of course, the “real” Bethany is dead; it’s peculiar to be counselling a dead girl.

Today, Bethany sat on the plump armchair beside the fireplace, while I was stationed on the chair opposite, nursing a fragrant cup of tea.

She watched me through Finn’s changeling eyes. I couldn’t help but marvel at the completeness of Finn’s forgery, its absolute perfection. Finn’s impersonation of his sister was indistinguishable from the recordings of her that Belotti had shown me; it had an intricacy that was enviable, and I caught myself admiring this detail or that, as one might admire the brushstrokes of a master artist.

Finn’s body was a living, breathing canvas upon which Bethany’s expressions and mannerisms were painted. From the holos I’d seen of Bethany, I could recognize her false modesty on Finn’s features, the vulnerable quiver of her jaw, the precise angle at which she bent her arms before wrapping them around her knees, as if trying to tuck into herself and disappear. While Finn’s anger was honest, Bethany’s took many forms, like a chameleon’s, prior to revealing itself.

“You do know he’s falling in love with you,” Bethany said abruptly, after what had been a relatively harmless conversation. “Don’t you?”

Ah. So her anger had struck. “Yes,” I admitted, because to do otherwise would insult her intelligence—and, by extension, Finn’s. “And what of you?”

“What, am I in love with you, too? That would be incredibly stupid, wouldn’t it? For a dead girl to fall in love with anyone, let alone her shrink?”

“That isn’t an answer,” I pointed out evenly.

“No, it isn’t.” A characteristically mulish response. Bethany tilted her head; Finn’s curls fell to one side, baring his long, pale neck. Finn’s refusal to cut his hair after Bethany’s passing had given his already fine bone structure an androgynous cast. “Do you like him, too? You admire him, don’t you?”

“I admire his ability to forge you. He’s remarkable.”

“He is,” Bethany said, with mingled bitterness and affection and, perhaps, jealousy. “But he’s a liar.”

“Aren’t we all?”

Bethany laughed, then looked startled by her own laughter. Sobering herself up, she said, “I mean, he’s giving false testimony. When he says he can save me by going back in time through the Singularity. See, how it happened was that I took the bullet meant for him. Even if Finn does go back and push me aside at the last moment, he’ll be the one to take the bullet instead. He’ll die instead of me. That’s what he isn’t telling you.”

Oh, now we were getting somewhere. “You could be falsifying your account, too. To protect him from any potential harm, from any malfunction of the Singularity. You could be calling him a liar even though he’s telling the truth.”

“Are you saying I don’t want my life to be saved?”

“Yes, if you think it might be at the cost of your brother’s. You wouldn’t risk him, just as he wouldn’t risk you.”

“Ask him, then. You’ll be able to tell which one of us is lying.” Bethany’s eyes glittered like a cat’s. “If you’re even half the doctor you pretend to be.”

Goodness. She knew just where to poke, didn’t she? “You’re a better liar than he is, though.”

Bethany scowled. “But Finn lies all the time. Even if I’m better at it, he does it more often. Just look at me. I’m a huge lie. A huge, person-shaped lie.”

“Not to him. He’s not lying when he becomes you. To him, you are his most sacred truth.”

“He’s too much of an idiot to let me go.”

“Ah, but he has the genius to construct you.”

We exchanged a fond look, each of us dwelling on Finn. Eventually, Bethany said, “So will you tell Belotti that it’s my testimony that’s correct?”

“You do realize you’re asking me to murder you again. Because in stopping Finn from going back in time to save you, as he says he can, I’ll be condemning you to a final death. An irrevocable death.”

Bethany shrugged. “I’m not alive, anyway. Not really. I’m Finn’s phantom. He allows me to possess him, but…” Her shoulders—Finn’s shoulders—sagged. “I’m tired. I wanna sleep. Forever.”

“Do you?” I asked her, unable to keep the sharpness out of my tone. Finn’s dissociation was incomplete; it wasn’t a two-way mirror, and that gave Bethany a distinct advantage over him. “How convenient it is, that he cannot recall your consultations with me, but that you can recall his.”

“I wouldn’t be a very effective self-defense system if I didn’t,” Bethany said dryly.

“He’ll miss you fiercely when you’re gone.”

“He’ll get over it,” Bethany said, steely-voiced. “He has to, or he’ll never live his own life.”

“You love your brother a great deal.”

“It’s a pretty raw deal, actually. Dunno if it’s rawer for him or for me.” Bethany plucked at the frayed hem of Finn’s Led Zeppelin T-shirt. “He’s been having nightmares, by the way. Weird nightmares. He’ll probably bring them up when he sees you next.”

The clock chimed.

“Alas, our session is at an end.” I rose and shook Bethany’s hand, noting the roughness of Finn’s calluses and the undisguisable, masculine breadth of his hand, such a contrast to what one might expect from a young woman. “It was a pleasure, as always, Miss Stahlberg.”

Bethany snorted. “Wish I could say the same.”

And with that, she departed, leaving me in quite a fix.

Dr. Ramachandran’s diary:

September 8th, 2129. 06:26 p.m.

I don’t take notes during my sessions, as it prevents me from fully engaging with my clients. I do reflect on them in this journal, post-appointment, but even then, it is far from a dry, scholarly pursuit. It has more in common with augury. Psychiatry is an art, a type of intuition that borders on witchery, and witchery is a craft Bethany is intimately familiar with.

The straightforward diagnosis is that her death so traumatized Finn that he rejected her loss on a fundamental level and adopted her personality as his own. It is an extreme example of prosopopoeia, accompanied by dissociative identity disorder.

But I suspect there may be another layer to the Bethany phenomenon. A layer I uncovered when Finn showed up for his appointment today.

It was immediately apparent that Finn was himself, not Bethany. He walked jerkily, awkwardly, all lanky boyishness and clumsy adolescence, as if his limbs were sabotaging him. He had none of Bethany’s grace, but he must have the promise of it within himself, or he wouldn’t be capable of fabricating it for Bethany. To my eye, Finn had the potential of an untuned violin; he had yet to find the music within himself.

“Tea?” I proffered.

“No, thanks.” Finn didn’t even look at me, instead pacing back and forth restlessly. He was abuzz with an unstable energy.

I went through the meditative motions of brewing my tea. Finn’s sessions had taught me that he was best left to his own devices when he was in these moods, and that he would, at length, initiate communication on his own.

So I took my steaming cup to my chair and settled in, sipping from it, letting its faint, leafy scent waft up into my nostrils. I let my eyelids drift downward, reopening them only when Finn finally broke the silence.

“It’s been four years.” Finn’s raked his hands through his too-long hair. Bethany’s hair. “I saw that bastard shoot Bethany when we were fourteen. We’ll be eighteen, next month.”

“You mean, you’ll be eighteen,” I reminded him.

“We’ll be eighteen. Don’t give me that bullshit, Doc. You’ve met her, haven’t you? She’s here. She’s with me.”

“She might not wish to be.”

“Shut the hell up,” Finn barked. “She’s my twin. She can’t abandon me any more than I can abandon her.”

“No need to be uncouth, Finn,” I chastised him mildly. In that instant, I could see him as the delinquent who, according to his school reports, sporadically got into fistfights. He’d confessed to me that he only restrained himself from going all out with his self-destructiveness because he was protective of the body his sister also occupied. “I’m only concerned for your health.”

“You…” Finn huffed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Sorry. I… I can’t remember what you talk to Beth about, but I can feel that she’s… that she appreciates it. Whatever it is you do.”

“Does she?” What a gratifying surprise. I doubted Finn would be as conciliatory if he heard that his sister was attempting to persuade me to kill her again, to prevent Finn from going back in time to rescue her. “But what about you, Finn? You’ve plainly had an epiphany, albeit a disturbing one. Would you share it with me?”

“It’s just—I’ve been having these—dreams,” Finn said haltingly, struggling to put what was troubling him into words. “About Boehner. About what he… What he was trying to do to Bethany when I walked in on them.”

I fitted my hands around my cup, in lieu of digging my fingernails into the armrests of my chair. While Belotti’s team had no motive on record for Boehner’s murder of his foster daughter, it hadn’t taken much for me to deduce what it was, given that Bethany had spoken to me about everything but this. To have her brother raise the subject instead was either a masterful misdirection of Finn’s subconscious mind, or a breakthrough of unparalleled proportions.

I had to ensure that it was the latter. I couldn’t let on that it upset me, that it horrified me, that it made bile rise up in my gullet. Bethany had been only fourteen, then. Only fourteen.

With as much tact as I could, I stated the obvious, because I had to. “Are those dreams of a sexual nature?”

Finn whipped around to stare at me, half-accusatory and half-horrified. “How can you tell?”

“It’s my job, Finn.” I didn’t add that I’d received inside information from Bethany, who had forewarned me that her brother had been suffering from nightmares. ‘Weird’ nightmares. “Who was the sexuality directed toward?”

“Be… Bethany.” Finn went red. “But it wasn’t me, feeling that! It was—I dreamt I was Boehner, and I—” Finn growled in frustration. “I hate those dreams. Hate them. If Boehner hadn’t shot himself after shooting Beth, I’d have shot him myself. I definitely don’t want to be him.”

“Does the Boehner you inhabit in your dreams differ from how you used to perceive him?”

“Yeah, he does. I never dreamt I was him, before. I just dreamt I was me, and sometimes I was Beth, and sometimes I was the both of us. But I never… I never cared about what drove him. He was a raving psycho. What rational man would’ve wanted to kill Beth?”

“Yet your dreams are positing a new theory for what Boehner wanted from her.”

Finn hunched, as if shielding himself from attack. “I think… I think he wanted to r… rape her.” Finn’s face contorted. He ground his knuckles into his eyes, as if he would rather gouge them out than revisit what he had seen in his dreams. “He was—when I walked in on them, he had her pinned to the kitchen counter, face-down, and his hand was—god, I wanted to rip it right off—it was about to press the gun to her neck, and he—his expression was—” Finn cut himself off, clearly unwilling to relive what had happened.

So, I allowed him to escape back into my prior line of questioning, if that could be considered an escape. “And what of your recent dreams? Did Boehner assault your sister sexually in those dreams?”

“No. No, but it was there in him, like killing her was his version of f-fu… of having her.”

“You’re suggesting that his murdering her was, at least partly, a sublimation of his sexual urges.”

Finn grimaced. “That sounds crazy, doesn’t it?”

“On the contrary. It’s a popular theory in forensic psychology, especially with seemingly motiveless offenders like Boehner.”

“Jesus.” Finn clutched at his stomach. “I wanna puke. Why have I just started dreaming about this? Why not when it happened?”

“You weren’t a sexual being, at that age. You likely perceived something peculiar in his behavior, something that wormed into your subconscious, primed to hatch when you had your own sexual awakening and could empathize with an adult’s sexuality. When you witnessed the crime as a preadolescent, murder was all you could understand, but it was not all you saw. You sensed Boehner’s impure motives, but could not fathom where to place that knowledge, or how to interpret it, until you matured sexually. Forgive me for my directness, Finn, but have you been having sexual thoughts about certain acquaintances of yours? Thoughts that hadn’t featured specific individuals thus far?”

Finn’s gaze snapped away from me. His blush intensified tenfold.

“Finn?”

The boy studied his shoes as if they contained the mysteries of the universe. He scuffed a sneaker against the thick carpet. “No,” he mumbled.

“Finn, you are an awful liar.” I said it as kindly as I could, but Finn quailed regardless. Merciful as it may have been for me to ignore his unfortunate crush, I couldn’t let Finn avoid talking about it, not if I was to get honest answers from him about what had happened to Bethany.

“I… I get it, okay, Doc? Case closed. We don’t have to discuss the, um, other stuff. I’ve figured out why I’ve been having those dreams. That’s what matters.”

“Those dreams will keep haunting you until you confront your repressed sexuality, and, perhaps, your repressed gender identity.”

Finn flinched. “Who said I was repressing anything?”

I set my cup aside on the ebony-and-enamel coffee table. Finn shrank from me, but I persisted in speaking. I had to. “Finn,” I addressed him gently, trying not to frighten him more than he already was, trying not to alarm him so much that he’d disappear and replace himself with Bethany. “It’s all right.”

Finn retreated to the mantelpiece, as if putting distance between us would spare him my scrutiny. “You… you know,” Finn whispered. “You know how I feel about…”

“It has come to my attention of late.” And it wasn’t just through Bethany. It had become increasingly evident to me over the past few weeks, given Finn’s tendency to blush in my presence, a tendency largely absent from his sister.

“You’re not mad at me?”

“Do I seem angry to you, Finn?”

Finn tentatively looked up at me, only to look away, rabbit-quick. “I’m not a girl.”

That he chose the topic of his gender identity over his sexual identity was telling, but I permitted Finn that small evasion, because it was slightly more salient to this case and to the truth of what had happened to Bethany. “Maybe not,” I conceded. “That is not for me to prescribe. It’s not a medication, Finn. It’s an identity. You know who you are more than I do.”

“I’m still… I still feel like a guy.” Viciously, Finn corrected himself, “I am a guy.”

“You needn’t call yourself transgender, if you do not feel that is who you are. There are other identities. You could be bigender or genderfluid or non-binary. Or you may choose not to call yourself anything; you need not limit yourself to a social construct if it doesn’t suit you. And you can always continue being a boy. But you may already have intuited that your reenactment of Bethany is not only because you miss her, but because she gives you a means of being yourself. Being all of yourself.”

Finn’s eyes were wide and terrified. In the warm glow of the fireplace, they were the color of clear apple cider, with a hint of honeyed gold in their depths. The eyes of a sprite, of a fae and elemental creature. Finn was already holding himself differently—a subtle shift in his stance, more similar to Bethany’s bearing than Finn’s, but not entirely hers, either. An in-between shape.

I reached for my tea again. “Has that occurred to you?”

“No.” Finn shook his head. And shook his head again, more vigorously. “No.” He was lying, but it was a lie as transparent and breakable as glass. I did him the courtesy of throwing no more rocks at it.

Finn clasped his arms around himself in a childlike gesture of self-protection. Unprofessional as it was, I was gripped by the urge to comfort him, even if it was by revealing more about myself than was appropriate. “My own identity took me decades to comprehend. You needn’t rush yourself; these things take time.”

“You—” At that, Finn gaped at me, giving me his undivided attention. “You’re…?”

“I’m asexual. It’s the closest term there is to describe what I am. It means—”

“I know what it means, Doc,” Finn grumbled. “It means you don’t fancy anyone.”

“Not physically, at any rate.”

“Oh,” said Finn, oddly blank.

I peered at him. “As you can imagine, it took me years to come to terms with it. You’re only an adolescent. You have nothing but time.”

The torment returned to Finn’s features, in slow, simmering degrees. “Yeah. Time without Beth.”

“Would she be happy to have you being her at the cost of being yourself?”

Finn recoiled, as if he’d been slapped.

I barely stopped myself from wincing in sympathy, from offering him solace.

It was too late, anyhow. Finn was backtracking hastily toward the door, albeit with more grace than he usually did. He was embodying Bethany’s gracefulness, now, even if he was unaware of it. “I… I should go.”

So saying, Finn fled my office. Belotti would no doubt be waiting outside, to escort Finn back to his current foster home, where Finn had apparently been residing without any problems after Bethany’s death—well, without any problems aside from Bethany’s death.

I counted it as a victory that Finn hadn’t turned into Bethany at any time during our consultation, and that, toward the end, Bethany’s mannerisms had begun to merge with his own. It marked the beginning of Finn’s acceptance of himself, and his gradual erasure of Bethany. This was the additional layer of the Bethany phenomenon. What drove it, other than grief, was Finn’s fear of himself. Of his true nature. Her true nature. Their true nature.

I hypothesize that it is this nascent, denied identity of Finn’s that has so entrenched Bethany’s murder—and Bethany herself—in his id. The initial trauma had latched onto Finn’s childhood self-denial and had become an ingrained, undeniable aspect of him, as difficult to remove from his psyche as it was to excise a tumor from the brain. Using the liberation of Finn’s gender and sexuality to unhook his trauma from his identity will resolve a considerable portion of Finn’s psychiatric issues, including Bethany. In accepting himself, he will set his sister free.

Bethany will die so that her brother can live. Just as she had before, when she’d taken a bullet for him.

It will be a shame to lose a patient like her, who is such an erudite and entertaining conversationalist, but I must always, given the choice, believe the living.

I must believe Finn.

And in doing so, I might save another Bethany, too. Not this Bethany, from my timeline, but from another. A timeline in which they both live.

You’re getting greedy, Ravi, my long-dead mother scolds me from the dusty recesses of my consciousness.

But this isn’t me getting greedy.

How could it be, when in that new timeline, I’ll never meet them at all?

Dr. Ramachandran’s diary:

September 13th, 2129. 4:39 p.m.

Improper as it may be for me to say this as Finn’s psychiatrist, I was relieved to meet Bethany once more this afternoon. Our business would’ve felt unfinished, were I to not see her again without first having the chance to bid her farewell.

Of course, if Finn’s rescue of her goes off without a hitch, she’ll won’t be a shade, but a real girl. Though I won’t meet her, then. In that timeline, I’ll have no reason to meet her.

At today’s consultation, I found myself committing to memory every nuance of Bethany’s persona: the tilt of her neck as she studied the giant anatomy chart of the human brain that hung above my desk; the bemused quirk of her lips; the twitching of her fingers in the pockets of her jeans. She hadn’t beaten the habit of shoving her hands into her pockets.

Could I be blamed for trying to remember her, futile as the exercise was, given that I’d forget her if her murder was averted, and that she wouldn’t survive Finn’s self-actualisation even if it wasn’t? She and Finn were, after all, the most interesting patients I’d ever had. The most interesting people I’d ever met. My fascination with them was only natural.

“It’s curious,” I observed, “how you sometimes assert your own existence, and at other times deny it.”

“Well, obviously I exist,” Bethany said archly. “But I exist as a figment of my brother’s fevered imagination.” With a hint of pride, she added, “You have to admit, I’m an excellent figment.”

“You are very convincing,” I affirmed.

Bethany grinned. “Thank you.” Then she hesitated. “It’s curious how you don’t deny my existence. Everybody else does. Belotti does. Our foster parents do. So do the other kids at school.”

“You’re a part of Finn. Denying your existence would be as pointless as it would be factually incorrect. I simply hope that what defines your identity will ultimately merge with Finn’s, so that he can be himself at all times. It is not that a person cannot have a shadow, merely that they should not be their shadow.”

“I’m darkening his door, you mean,” Bethany said. “Mentally speaking.”

“Er.” I hope had the grace to sound repentant. “Yes.”

“Wow. Thanks for the insult.” But Bethany was smiling.

I stared at that smile, arrested by its unexpected sweetness. “It wasn’t intended as one.” I offered her a cup from the steaming tea-tray I had placed between us, on the coffee table. A barrier of steam, of reduced visibility. A veil between her and I. Propriety. “Would you like an Earl Gray?”

“You wouldn’t have a Diet Coke lyin’ around, would you?”

“No.” Ridiculous as it was, in that moment, I deeply regretted not stocking teenager-friendly beverages. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize, for god’s sake. I’m fine without a Coke. And I’m pretty sure Finn’s developed a Pavlovian response to the smell of your tea.” Bethany smirked. “I bet you can guess what sort of response it is.”

It didn’t escape my notice that Bethany’s demeanor, while still somewhat mischievous, was strangely tranquil. The tranquillity of those who are near death and have made peace with it. “You must know that I’ve decided to support Finn’s testimony over your own.”

“Yep.” She shrugged. “I knew it’d happen sooner or later, given that you think I’m a more expert liar than he is. It’s no wonder you trust him over me.”

“That bothered you, didn’t it? That he might go back in time to save you and end up sacrificing himself? But it doesn’t seem to bother you anymore.”

“Oh, it bothers me.” Bethany’s smile turned feral—and, frankly, petrifying. “But I’ve just realized that I’ll be right there with him. In him. And I won’t let him interfere with what happened.”

“He’ll be there, too, though. With you. And he’ll be doing everything in his power to save you.”

“Let him,” said Bethany, and it was almost a taunt. Through the vapor rising from the tea I was sipping, she appeared half-gone already, an apparition instead of a girl. “We’ll see who wins, shall we?”

“This isn’t a battle of wills, Bethany. You’re both the same person.”

“And folks can’t have battles of will with themselves?”

She had me there. “You always have the last word, don’t you?”

“Or the first,” Bethany countered. “You may not reckon that I can stop Finn, but I can. Singularity or no Singularity, I won’t let him die. Hell, I won’t even let him get hurt. So it’s a bit of a coin toss, isn’t it, who lives and who dies? Let’s see which I am, heads or tails.”

As uneasy as I was upon hearing of Bethany’s plot, I had made my decision.

And I stand by it. Finn is the primary agent, and in a situation requiring pure instinct—a situation like the one he’ll be traveling back to—he’ll default to his own personality, not Bethany’s. There won’t be enough space left for Bethany in his brain, which will be flooded with stress hormones from his limbic system. It’ll be fight or flight. Do or die. When it comes down to the wire, it’ll be all him.

I’m also reassured of my choice by Finn himself. He’s more invested in his own survival now than he was before, and he wouldn’t say he couldn’t save himself if he genuinely thought he couldn’t. He is recovering with alacrity, presenting as Bethany less often and more frequently as himself. He isn’t drawing the line between masculine and feminine as clearly as he’d done at the start, and is no longer allocating traditionally feminine body language solely to his sister.

In trusting Finn’s agency, I am helping him reclaim it, millimeter by millimeter. By all accounts—his foster parents; his teachers; Belotti—he has begun to calm down. He has fewer panic attacks, fewer fights, fewer episodes of aggression, and wakes screaming from fewer nightmares.

That’s progress in the right direction.

Isn’t it?

Dr. Ramachandran’s diary:

October 18st, 2129. 05:17 p.m.

Today, on the day Finn Stahlberg turned eighteen, I accompanied him and Detective Belotti to the DTLE headquarters. Despite Bethany’s threat of sabotage, I was confident that I’d made the right decision, and my signature on the required forms was what had led to us being here today. There had been a short pseudo-trial yesterday, in which Judge Henrietta Cortez had rubber-stamped our use of the Singularity after cross-examining Finn to her satisfaction, surveying the forensics report, and reading through my statement. We were all good to go.

The DLTLE office was buzzing with activity. Holograms hovered above every desk, tiny bots trundled by with trays of coffee cups held aloft, and many a cop waved at Belotti as he led us through the room, across a hallway and to a guarded elevator. The guards, armed with laser batons and clad in muted gray uniforms, nodded companionably at Belotti before stepping aside. The elevator dinged as it closed behind us, and down we went.

The Singularity was housed in the basement of the building, behind a series of mammoth, secured, wrought-iron vault doors that only opened after triple authentication. Belotti’s retinas, fingerprints and blood were all sampled by each door’s testing station.

Finn withdrew into himself as we passed through the doors, falling silent when the final door opened. In our previous session, he had indicated to me that he might someday identify as “them,” be it in this timeline or another, although he likely wouldn’t have my help in the other one. Nonetheless, it pleased me that Finn—this Finn, my Finn—was moving toward self-acceptance as a result of my aid. Agnostic though I am, I could only pray that even in a timeline devoid of Bethany’s murder, Finn would still eventually learn to be all of himself, and not only those facets that were patently masculine.

Finn’s gender presentation was now ambivalent and androgynous enough to be nigh indiscernible as male or female except to the most keen, closely located observer. High-collared clothing—like the turtleneck Finn was wearing today—disguised the only prominent clue, which, given his delicate physique and absence of stubble, was his Adam’s apple.

The Singularity glowed as Finn, Belotti and I approached it. It was a breathtaking blue, a shifting, undefinable substance halfway between silk and sand, an endless undulation trapped within a glass chamber. It pulsated, casting the otherwise dim room into a ghostly, bluish ocean-scape—a wave poised to take unsuspecting swimmers out to sea.

At the front of the glass chamber was a shimmering door, a silver-tinged, rectangular translucency. It would transport whoever entered it to the time specified by the attending officer, in this case, Detective Belotti. The scientists hadn’t managed to stabilize the temporal connection for a more significant interval, so a maximum of five seconds it was. Just enough of a duration to make a difference, before the connection to the future broke and the time traveler forgot everything, reverting to the person they used to be.

“The time of Bethany Stahlberg’s shooting was determined by Forensics to be 7:59:35 p.m. on the evening of June 23rd, 2125,” Belotti announced officiously, jabbing the numbers into the keypad beside the chamber. To Finn, he said, “You’ll arrive at 7:59:30 p.m., five seconds before it occurs. Do you have your game plan, Mr. Stahlberg?”

“Yeah.” Finn straightened up. “Yeah, I do. Just like we talked. I’ll push her behind the kitchen counter before the gun goes off.”

“Keep in mind,” I added, “that the Bethany you have inside of you might try to stop you.”

Finn’s mouth twisted, then untwisted. It was the exact opposite of a smile. Not like Bethany at all.

I expected Finn to race toward the Singularity, to waste no more time in bringing his sister back to life, but instead he drew closer to me and bowed his head. It struck me, suddenly, that Finn was slightly taller than me. I’d never registered that before, with all the slumping and slouching he did.

“Hey, Doc,” Finn murmured. “It’s my birthday. You didn’t wish me a happy birthday.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling both awkward and foolish as Belotti stared at us, at our utterly inappropriate proximity. Finn’s forehead was all but pressed to mine, he was standing so close. “Happy birthday, Finn.”

There was Finn’s not-smile again, a jagged hook at the corner of Finn’s lips, sharp as a hook buried in a fish’s throat. “Gonna miss you, Doc,” Finn whispered, low and urgent and fervently affectionate.

But before I could respond, he walked away from me and into the Singularity.

Belotti and I gawked as Finn vanished into the shimmering rectangle that was the entrance to the Singularity, which absorbed him without any resistance at all, as if it were made of nothing.

Or as if Finn were made of nothing.

My chest tightened, and it sank into me, with a shocking, anchor-deep sorrow, that I wouldn’t be seeing Finn or Bethany again.

“Fuck me,” Belotti swore, since apparently we were all being inappropriate today. “That’s bloody uncanny, is what it is. It’s always new to me, ‘cause I never remember it. So it spooks the crap outta me, every time.” After a pause, Belotti guffawed. “Get it? Every time?”

“Brilliant and inventive as your sense of humor is, Detective,” I drawled, despite my incriminatingly hoarse voice, “why are we still standing here? Shouldn’t history have rewritten itself and put me back in my office?”

“Eh, kinda.” Belotti made a vague, wavy gesture with his hands. “It doesn’t happen all at once. Sometimes it takes a couple of minutes for the changes to filter through the timeline, sometimes a couple of hours. There’s no equation to calculate it yet, but trust me, soon we’ll be perfect strangers.” Belotti clapped me on the shoulder and beamed. “By tonight, at the latest, you’ll be in a world where none of this ever happened, where Bethany Stahlberg never got killed. Because you erased her murder from the timeline. You helped save a life today, Dr. Ramachandran. Be proud of it.”

I was proud. I was. It was just that pride seemed a small thing in comparison to my loss. And I hadn’t even realized the magnitude of that loss, until then—a loss that was somehow all the more profound for being shapeless, for having no label on it, no fitting term. Finn and I had no defined relationship outside that of doctor and patient, not that of parent and child or mentor and pupil. Not even that of friends.

Now, the sun is setting, resting upon the steel spires of the city like Caesar upon a bed of daggers, slowly bleeding out. Its redness seeps into the semi-dark of my office from the half-open window; the lights are out, and I intend to keep them that way. I won’t be here for long after sunset, anyway. It strikes me how meaningless it is to even bother narrating this journal entry, given that it will soon vanish into the void. As will this iteration of me, along with this timeline.

Finn had said he’d miss me. Why had he said that? He wouldn’t miss someone he couldn’t recall, would he? Someone he’d never met?

Or perhaps he’d—

Dr. Ramachandran’s diary:

August 18th, 2129. 03:45 p.m.

Detective Ray Belotti of the Department of Temporal Law Enforcement contacted me this morning to recruit me for an intriguing case. I resisted at the outset, since time travel is not my area of expertise, but I couldn’t refuse the case after Belotti explained it to me.

According to Belotti, I am to help distinguish whether a potential Singularity candidate is telling the truth about a murder she witnessed—the murder of her brother, who’d taken a bullet for her, and in doing so had saved her life. Her name is Miss Stahlberg, and she is an orphan of seventeen years old who has been raised in the foster system. Belotti warned me that she is “complicated,” but refrained from sharing any further details.

I understood his circumspection as soon as I met Miss Stahlberg later that day. She is eminently difficult to describe.

Belotti brought her to my office at noon, as we’d agreed in our call. So when I heard the familiar ring from the waiting room outside my office, I assumed that it was Miss Stahlberg I would be seeing.

I was wrong.

My patient-to-be, who I saw as soon as I emerged into the waiting room, was a boy—a hunched, gangly, slender boy with aggressively shorn black hair just a smidgen longer than a crew-cut, and a pair of eerily intense, haunted eyes. He glared up at me, the set of his mouth both mutinous and stubborn, and his hands clenched around the edges of his chair. His knuckles were raw, torn and red-skinned, as if he’d been punching walls. And that wasn’t all; the skin around his knuckles was inflamed, too, as if this was a chronic condition. As if the injured tissue was never allowed to heal.

I wondered what other wound within him this boy had not permitted to heal. Violence was not a character trait that boded well for any patient seeking counsel, let alone for the counselor providing counsel.

But I had to be a consummate professional, so I maintained my composure. Some patients, like bloodhounds, can scent the slightest weakness and use it against their therapists, and my intuition told me that this boy was one of them.

“Dr. Ramachandran.” Belotti, a comparatively unremarkable, heavyset man who sat in the chair next to the boy, stood up and showed me his badge. “I’m here with Stahlberg, as promised.”

“Stahlberg,” I enunciated carefully, my eyes flickering again over the youth glowering at us from his chair. Perhaps I’d been mistaken in hearing Belotti say “Miss” Stahlberg during our call; this was, to all appearances, a teenage boy. Trying not to sound like a dunce, I clarified, “Not a Miss Stahlberg?”

“Nah, Doc,” the boy replied before Belotti had a chance to, shortening my title to a disparaging, diminutive version of itself. “Not a miss, but a mister. I’m Finn. Finn Stahlberg.”

Belotti coughed. “Actually,” he said as Finn scowled at him, “this isn’t Finn Stahlberg. It’s Bethany Stahlberg, Finn Stahlberg’s twin sister.”

I blinked.

The boy slouched again, not so much in defeat as in tightly restrained rebellion, his body curling up like a fist. He was every inch the troubled young man, his movements and expressions conspicuously boyish. Except that now, my eyes caught on the subtle softness of his limbs and his lack of an Adam’s apple, just as my ears caught on the barely perceptible lightness of his voice. His loose, shapeless jacket concealed much of his—her?—form, but given that his body language was so convincingly masculine, I’d missed the signs. How could I be so unobservant?

“Don’t worry about it,” Belotti hurried to say, almost apologetically. “Everyone’s confused by Bethany at first. She… well, she often presents as Finn, but she isn’t Finn.”

“Well, of course I couldn’t be him,” Bethany Stahlberg muttered bitterly. “He’s dead.”

Drifter

A dream telepath teeters on the brink of self-destruction.

What is known as a dream-walker,” says the priest, his face smoke-hazy, “is a trickster, a devil, a thought-stealer.”

“Yeah, ta very much. That’s a whole lot of help.” Like Jacob doesn’t already know what he is.

The priest’s features flicker; they belong to a forty-year-old woman, now. Jacob knows with flawless certainty that she is exactly forty, and has three sons, one of whom is dead, but isn’t, to her. That very child appears next to Jacob, a sudden presence of blood-scent and fabric softener and blind adoration, and he won’t have any eyes if Jacob looks at him, so he doesn’t. It’s all a load of shite, anyway.

“I am sorry,” says the priest, through the woman’s face. “I cannot help you.”

“How’d you help yourself, then?”

“There was a match,” the priest says. “I lit myself.”

“Wonderful.”

“You will soon descend into the fire. Be not afeared; you will consume it.”

“Why, thank you, Caliban. I get it. The isle is full of noises, and whatnot.” Jacob tips his head up. It’s starting to rain, from the starless sky, and the fire goes out in a puff of steam.

The priest’s gone. The woman’s gone. Only the child remains, gentle, eyeless, drawing circles in the dirt.

“Bugger this for a lark,” says Jacob, and vanishes.

So, this is brilliant. Even the guidance counsellors of yonder—the other dream-walkers—want him to burn things. And he’d thought the pyromania was all him.

It’ll be a relief, he thinks, to finally snap and go postal on everybody. To satiate his growing appetite for explosives. Rocket-propeled grenades. Home-made bombs. Fucking Molotovs, anything. Anything to burn it all down to a silent sift of ash, quiet all around him: sleeping faces, roasted and charred, skin curling off the ripe-fruit red of them like the most delicate black parchment, disintegrating at a touch. Bodies, bodies everywhere. Swollen and shiny, rolling around like pomegranates in the fucking garden of paradise, in which Jacob will sing, like a bird, in the glass-clear silence. It’ll be perfect. Like a church. Jacob will sit among the pews of silent sleepers and send his thanks up to a merciful god. Because god is only merciful when he smites your enemies. Amen.

Years of jitters, years of doing dope and crack and whatever the hell he can get his hands on to shut them all the fuck up, and he wonders why he’s even trying, anymore. Trying not to go crazy, trying to fix this, like it’s something that can be fixed, the constant drilling of this goddamn screwdriver into his head, other people’s dreams, claustrophobic nightmares, little ticky-boxes of terror that sit inside Jacob’ head like abandoned suitcases on a runaway train, and wait for just the right moment—just as soon as he’s asleep—to go ‘boom’.

Well, not all the dreams are bad. But the worst ones are the ones that start out good, and end different. He can tell right away, when those ones happen, because they start off all golden and warm with an undercurrent of cool rip-tide, a subliminal tug of movement beneath the surface, like a cold hand around a swimmer’s ankle that slowly gets colder, and in the safe kitchens and open backyards splinters begin to appear—fathers turning carnivorous, loving sisters becoming harpies with bloodied strings of tissue in their beaks, children falling off the mini-diving boards of their inflatable swimming pools and dashing their tiny skulls against rocks that should never have been there.

He wants to end it all.

He can’t bear to.

It’s worth it, sometimes. There’s some good in there—great sex, for one—scary sex, occasionally, but not always. There are places where the golden warmth stays warm, stays golden, where the children get off their swings and go home, where the woman kisses her beloved and all he does is run a broad palm down her back, where the close clasp of a mother’s embrace never gets any tighter, and where the heat of a throat envelops him with exquisite tenderness, like a lover’s would, and never hurts him, never. It’s…

It’s not enough.

“Hey,” says somebody, and Jacob jerks his head up—looks around him—it’s a damned supermarket, and he’s standing there with a basket full of Cheerios and beer.

He isn’t dreaming. The girl that just spoke to him is in her teens, all subtle punk with the way she’s streaked her hair. Those earrings, god, her girlfriend must love tugging on them. With her teeth.

“Your change, sir?” she asks him, like he’s a moron.

He blinks down at the counter; a couple of quarters glitter on its surface, reflecting the blazing tube-light like a constellation of blinding, miniature suns.

Three things occur to Jacob, all at once:

He’s still holding his basket.

He still hasn’t bought the stuff; it isn’t in a handy plastic bag.

This girl should not be offering him change.

“Sir, I’m asking you to collect your change,” the girl says, and her teeth are sharper than before. The coins are sinking into the counter, as if burning right through it, but not like suns—like pools of acid. Flames lick up along the corners of them, dark tongues. Coquettish mouths.

Fuck. He’s dreaming. He’s still—

He wakes up, staggers to the bathroom, and throws up.

Two days and counting, and he hasn’t gone back to sleep. He’s out of beer.

He doesn’t go anywhere to buy it.

When he shows up for the night-shift, the other workers look at him like he’s a junkie or a psycho-in-waiting, which, heh, isn’t far off the mark. It’s a miracle that he’s even managed to drive to the factory without crashing his trashy car into a pole or a hydrant; he’s creaking under the weight of what feels like unending insomnia, and he’s twitchy, jacked up on stimulants to keep him awake, to keep him quiet, in the quiet, for a bit longer. Just a bit longer. One more day. One more day without dreams, and he’ll—

“¿Qué onda, güey?” Perez, the shift supervisor, gapes at him. “Your eyes look like they’ve been punched out, man.”

“I’m fine,” mumbles Jacob, and heads over to the stacks. No heavy lifting, yeah. Not with what he’s on. Good thing he’s taken a lightweight job, a simple job, taping things and packaging things and watching his hands move through cellophane, distant as fish in an aquarium, clumsy behind a pane of glass.

He’s been working nightshifts longer than he can remember. Better to work at night and sleep during the day, when there are fewer dreams, fewer sleepers. It’s quieter, then. Marginally. Except for the old minds, in retirement homes, grown vicious and weary with habit—or the young ones, in hospitals and school nurseries and crack-dealing hotspots, open and unpredictable and centrifugal, like whirlwinds would be, if they were made of horrors.

Well. It’s quieter. Relatively.

After he signs off and gets back in his car, he considers taking more stims from the dashboard, then decides to get breakfast, first. There’s a tidy diner beside the laundromat; it opens earlier than anything else on his block, except for the tacky newspaper-and-porn stand, which never closes, anyway. Jacob is almost sure the bloke working there is some kind of pimp, or maybe just a front-man for a certain sort of business. A decade or so ago, a newly-orphaned Jacob might’ve himself been one of the ‘live-action’ pornographic materials on sale—but things are different now that he’s bigger and broader and can work in factories, so that’s all right. Doesn’t make him as much money, admittedly, but it’s not like Jacob expects to save up for a grand retirement, at the rate he’s going—doing drugs and alcohol and letting his pathetic body soak it all up until it falls apart, like one of those tired old sponges in kitchen basins.

One more day. He’ll give himself one more day. He’ll sleep after that.

He wakes up on a charcoal floor.

Linoleum’s melted onto the singed carpet, burned right through to the boards in large patches, leaving the floor looking mangy and infected, like the back of a sick dog.

A barely indistinguishable pattern of wood nymphs curls along the heat-faded scrap of wallpaper next to Jacob’s face; it drifts, a sole leaf in the chill wind.

Of course it’s chill. The roof’s gone, now. Or almost gone. Nothing but white sky above him, wiped clean, and the silence. The silence he’s wanted for so long.

Jacob sits up, feeling a slow jolt of shock run through him—a familiar, bone-deep ache, because he knows this place. The wallpaper. The linoleum. The exact shape of this emptiness.

It’s been fourteen years since Jacob last saw this house. Fourteen years, eight months, and three days. His mind hands the number to him, like an eager secretary, and he smiles.

It’s beautiful, the pale silence, as much as it is horrifying. He’d wept here, once. Dragged his nails along the floorboards. Retched.

“I’m dreaming,” he says, wondering at it—he’s dreaming, and not somebody else’s dream. His own. From his own memory.

“Yes,” answers a voice, and Jacob turns.

There’s a man standing behind him, in a perfectly-pressed suit and polished shoes, holding a briefcase, looking every inch the court clerk. A skinny little bloke with a pencil-pusher’s face—the face of a square, fine-featured and pretty enough, but dull.

The eyes are nice, though. Dark eyes. Calm.

And the waistcoat, well. It adds a very nice touch. Perhaps there’s a certain appeal to all that neatly-packaged repression.

The man sets down his briefcase, and suddenly, the entire scene seems so strangely reminiscent—the suit, the wasteland, the befuddled dreamer—that Jacob grins. The only thing missing is the red pill, really.

“Why, hello, Agent Smith,” says Jacob, and the man’s mouth opens automatically.

“Mr. Anderson,” he says—then looks surprised, then discomfited, then impressed. “Please, don’t put words in my mouth.”

Ah. So he’s familiar with telepathic projection. “Did I do that?”

“Don’t play coy, either.”

“But that’s what I do, darling.” Jacob leans back on his hands, like a boy at the beach looking up a girl’s skirt, nursing thoughts inappropriate for public spaces. “Surely you know that, whoever you are.”

The man inclines his head; his calm has returned, like an ever-present mist upon a deep, still sea. “My name is Naveen.”

“Naveen. So nice to have a guest, at long last. Usually, I’m the one that gets dragged along to other people’s parties. Gate-crashing isn’t nearly as fun if it’s involuntary.”

“So I gather.” The accent is educated, North American, but not precisely upper-class. The fondness for suits is a fondness for better things, perhaps. A bright mind, overcoming dark circumstances. An erstwhile scholarship student, then. Berkeley? Harvard? Probably with a gorgeous, coffee connoisseur of a girlfriend. The ladies do love over-achievers. But then—Jacob drags his eyes up that well-fitted waistcoat—so do the gents.

“Do I have you to thank for this scenic trip down memory lane?” And Jacob is grateful, to have something of his own again, away from the shit-storms of other people’s lives, but perhaps Naveen misunderstands, because his brow twitches.

“I’m sorry. I—we have done extensive research on you. It seemed that this… incident… would be likely to act as a focal point in your psyche, and given how difficult it is to isolate you from the dreams of others, we believed that this memory would be the most effective insulation, in order to stabilize your mind and establish a connection.”

We. The word is vaguely disappointing. “Research, hm?” Jacob murmurs, and studies the angle of the shadow Naveen’s cuff casts on his inner wrist. Sharp as a paper-cut.

Naveen gestures towards the briefcase. “Please,” he says, “open it. It contains every file we have on you, classified or unclassified. I offer it to you as a show of good faith.”

“Shows of good faith are entirely meaningless without parameters, my dear. There is no guarantee that these are all the files you have on me.”

“I could let you into my mind,” Naveen says, quietly.

Such a very pretty offer, and yet… “You think I’d believe that your mind isn’t capable of subterfuge, either? Agent Smith?”

Naveen falls silent.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. I’ll read them later, if you want me to. I’ll read the sodding files later, if you want me to.” Jacob rolls his shoulders, his neck. “Sit down, though. Peering up at you is giving me a crick in the bloody neck, and I’d rather not suffer through one of those unless it’s for a far more pleasurable reason.”

Naveen doesn’t blush. It feels like a near thing, though, given the way he stiffens, and then—after surveying the dirty, ash-strewn floor with something too polite to be disdain—sits down. With his legs crossed. There is a habitual, practiced ease in how he flows into the position.

“You meditate, don’t you?”

“It’s a necessity, in my profession.”

“And what is your profession? I know that you’re an agent, but an agent of… what?”

“Of dreams.” A strange, rueful smile—startlingly lovely—flits across Naveen’s face. “I am an Anchor. I must be bound to a Drifter.”

Jacob hasn’t heard those terms before, but their meanings are self-evident. “Allow me to guess. You’ve been sent to, ah, ‘secure’ me?”

“To ask you to join us, yes. We can—we can offer you silence. Dreamless sleep. In exchange for partnering with me and accompanying me on dream missions.”

“You’re offering to close the floodgates. For, what, the sake of my sanity?” Jacob lets his eyes dip, in that lazy, comfortable way that he knows implies a degree of menace. “And do you think that’ll fix me? Make me less crazy? Less likely to kill someone?”

“No,” says Naveen, eventually. “But you haven’t killed anyone.”

Jacob barks out a laugh. He doesn’t mean to; it just scrapes its way out of him, raw as a wound, filled with old puss and rotten to the core. “So you say. You’ve done your research. You know about this house. Tell me, what happened here?”

The walls around them waver, but hold. Naveen looks uncomfortable in the way someone looks uncomfortable when they must intrude on another’s misery. Or, worse, when they’re invited to. “Your family… died.”

“Died.” Jacob’s mouth twists; he knows it’s an ugly expression, but right now, he doesn’t care. “How?”

“They…”

“They burned alive. Each one of them. My brother, my father, my mother and my younger sister. Evie. The skin melted off her in the flames. They found—”

“Jacob—”

“They found her like that. They couldn’t—couldn’t save her, although she was the only one alive when they—”

“Jacob.”

“Who set the fire?”

“Your… your mother did. But—”

“But what? I wasn’t responsible, just because I happened to be somewhere else—in a madhouse they put me in? I wasn’t responsible, even though I planted the idea in her mind?”

“You didn’t mean to. It was the first documented case of involuntary projection. A sign of overwhelming talent.”

“Talent. Talent? That’s what you—”

“You… were going mad. You were inundated by the dreams, nightmares and hallucinations of others; you couldn’t sleep without becoming someone else, without dreaming someone else’s dreams. You had no control over your Drifting. You didn’t even know what it was.”

“Oh, I knew. I just didn’t know what to do about it.”

“Exactly. You were helpless.” Naveen takes a deep breath, and fixes Jacob with a deep, searching look—a serious look, so earnest and fucking honest that it makes Jacob want to hurt him, just to make it stop, to make Naveen look at him like—like his parents had. “Jacob. Your family thought you were psychotic. They didn’t believe you.”

“They tried to save me!”

“By dosing you on more anti-psychotics than are recommended for most adults. You were almost catatonic.”

“I was the son of the bloody British ambassador, what did you expect? I was a political liability, a—a—”

“You were their son. They should not have abandoned you. Your siblings loved you, but were frightened by you. Your father despised you. Your mother—”

“Don’t—”

“Your mother couldn’t care less. She was an alcoholic, driven to despair by your father’s affairs. He didn’t think they were a political liability.”

“Stop—”

“And in your dreamtime journeys, you stumbled upon her mind. All you wanted was silence; little did you know that your thirst for it would plant a seed in her mind, a mind already unstable and warped by self-hatred. Little did you know that, a few days later, she would seek to silence her own demons—her husband, her children—in a fire that would consume your home.”

“I killed them.”

“No.” Naveen’s eyes are calm, so damnably calm. “You did not.”

Jacob breathes. That’s about all he can manage, at the moment, and the memories… seem unbelievably distant, even here, in the very house where they belong. He needs to stop talking about them. Thinking about them. And he has a charming young man to distract him; it’s remiss of him, really, to let himself brood. Not unless he has a Molotov to throw at something. “How,” he asks, instead, “can you offer me silence?”

Naveen shifts. He rests his hands on his knees, palms up, in a perfect lotus position. “Through me.”

“My dear, I’m truly flattered, but I don’t believe astonishingly athletic love-making with you will exhaust me to that extent.”

Naveen’s expression is sour. Delightfully sour.

“Mm. No?”

“No.”

“That’s unfortunate. Disastrous, even. How, precisely, are you an Anchor?”

“I do not dream.”

Jacob stares at him. “What?”

“I do not dream.”

“Everyone dreams. Monkeys dream.”

“I don’t.”

“Are you a sociopath?”

Naveen blinks. “No,” he says. “I do, in fact, have an overwhelmingly strict moral code.”

“That you’d kill for?”

Naveen doesn’t say anything.

“Oh, my. You are a sociopath.”

Naveen sighs. “Jacob—”

“No, no, I find that devastatingly attractive. Do go on.”

“I don’t dream. My mind is… quiet.”

“Sociopathic.”

Naveen looks at him.

“Sorry. Continue.”

“I need to keep it quiet while I’m awake—hence the meditating—but I seem to lack the natural ability to dream. I should, by rights, be clinically insane.”

“Or sociopathic? No, wait, psychopathic. Not that I’m entirely sure which—”

“Jacob,” says Naveen, and Jacob spares a moment to marvel at how beautifully patient the man is, “please, don’t pretend that you haven’t read every book on psychology that you could find. Several times over. And that you don’t already know that dreaming—or the lack of it—has little to do with the diagnosis of either sociopathy or psychopathy.”

Jacob—there is no other word for it—gapes at him.

“Never pretend ignorance with me.”

Beautiful. “Have sex with me.”

“No. As I was saying, I have failed to display the usual signs of mental instability that might be statistically—and atavistically—expected in a non-dreamer. Instead, I have the special ability to create and maintain a sleep-state that is both aware and dreamless.”

“A waking dream that isn’t a dream.”

“Yes. A non-dream.”

“And you’ll… grant me shelter. In it. In you?”

Naveen smiles. Not rueful at all, this time. “Yes.”

“Yes,” Jacob echoes, dumbly, stunned by that smile. It’s transforming, to say the least, and obviously not sociopathic, unless, of course, Naveen’s a very convincing actor. He shakes himself. “And you’re… not concerned about your privacy?”

The man looks at him like he’s ridiculous. “This world is full of Drifters, both trained and untrained, sane and insane. You might be the most powerful one yet, Jacob, but I have no illusions that my dreams—if I had any—wouldn’t be there for the taking. By anyone that happened past.”

“You don’t shield yourself?”

Naveen raises an eyebrow. “I have nothing to shield.”

Well. That’s—that’s certainly something, and Jacob is almost terrified to believe in it, to believe that what he’s longed for all his life is here, finally here, in the form of this strict, slender man.

Silence.

He wants.

He wants—

“What,” Jacob rasps, his voice dry, his dream-hands suddenly shaking, “will you have me do?”

“Nothing that results in active harm to other people.”

Like that’s an assurance. “What about passive harm?”

“No harm is truly passive, Jacob.”

“You’re not answering my question.”

“I’m amazed that you still have a conscience. That you’re still able to call on it, after all you’ve been through. Clearly, despite your own beliefs, you never were, nor will you ever be, a killer.”

“Answer. The. Question. Naveen.”

“We will have you enter people’s dreamscapes and tell us what you see, so that you might assist us in extracting or implanting ideas that may—”

“—cause mothers to burn their houses down, with their children still in them?”

“No. We only focus on criminals and threats to national security that would do greater harm if they were not stopped.”

“Are you a law-keeping agency?”

“For certain definitions of the terms ‘law’ and ‘agency’, yes.”

“You’re absolutely determined not to provide me anything remotely acceptable as an answer.”

“You can do a lot of good, Jacob. Is that an acceptable answer?”

“You’re doing good. Is that what you tell yourself?”

Naveen rears back. Clenches his jaw. “You’re… just as stubborn as your file said you were.”

“Again, I’m flattered. I’ll be even more flattered when you have sex with me.”

“No. Jacob, I believe you know enough to make an informed decision.”

“For certain definitions of the words ‘informed’ and ‘decision’?”

Naveen growls.

Oh. Not that patient, after all. But still beautiful. Even more beautiful. “Do I get to decide? Am I going to wake up at all, if I disagree?”

“We don’t actually kill anyone, Jacob.”

“Actually. Is a dream actual? Do you kill people in dreams?”

“Only their dream selves. Jacob—”

“Yes.”

Naveen inhales sharply.

“Yes, Naveen. I accept.”

Naveen unclenches his hands; Jacob takes note of them, and wonders when he’d clenched them, at all. “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. Please. I haven’t done anything. I’ve only roamed the streets, doing small-time jobs and going slowly insane. And, if I don’t regret this decision in the short- or the long-term, I believe I will be thanking you.”

“I.” Naveen swallows. His throat is distracting, but so is the look of—gratification? Relief?—on his face. It’s definitely some variety of powerful emotion. “I will. I will do my best to ensure that you do not regret it.”

“Well, good. When will I be able to sleep without dreaming?”

“As soon as you join us. Tomorrow, at four in the afternoon, you’ll find a man named Elias waiting for you at the entrance to the Dunbar Hotel.”

“My factory job—”

“—is no longer required.”

No longer required. Right. “I don’t know whether to be desperately relieved or to wonder whether I’ve finally started hallucinating a solution to all this.”

Naveen gets up and stands over him again. “You’ll stop wondering,” he says, “tomorrow.”

“Will I?” Jacob’s been on fire for so long…

And Naveen’s eyes are so kind. “Wake up, Jacob,” Naveen says, and reaches out to touch him. To touch his face, and it’s—

Silence.

The walls bulge inwards, as if under an unimaginable weight of water.

Jacob closes his eyes, and lets it put the fire out.

Acts of God

A temporal agent from the future attempts to save the world from a plague.

You’re back.” The hotel clerk peered at me from behind his pitted, bullet-riddled desk. None of those bullets were mine, which made him rather fond of me. That, and the money I regularly pumped into this disreputable establishment like crack into an addict’s veins.

It was my hideout in this century, after all. I couldn’t let it close down.

I grunted as I hauled my duffel bag onto the desk. It thunked heavily, packed with period-appropriate weaponry as it was. I missed my thumb-sized disintegrator; this artillery crap weighed a ton.

“Where else would I go?” I grabbed the key dangling from his hand. Room 73, as always. “It’s here or the grave.”

He actually chortled, the morbid bastard. “Well said, buddy. Well said.”

“Speaking of the grave…” I eyed him warily. His condition had worsened since I’d last seen him. His sagging skin was peppered with Stage 4 pustules. He’d be dead within months. He knew it, too—he definitely drank like a doomed man, if the half-dozen liquor bottles arrayed along the desk were anything to go by—but he, like most folks in this dying city, was resigned to it. “You okay, George? Those sores ain’t drying up.”

“Eh,” he said noncommittally. “Not like I expected a long lifespan, choosing to stay back in this godforsaken dump.” He shrugged. “At least my wife and kids are out of the city. Permanently. I got them out the moment we caught whiff of the plague startin’ up again.”

“And you stayed behind because, what, the captain goes down with the ship?” I gestured at the peeling walls, at the moth-eaten lace curtains that George’s mother had installed with great pride, decades before. She’d been a pretty girl. “It isn’t much of a ship, man.”

George stared at me. Suddenly, he seemed somber, ancient, all-knowing. “Isn’t it?” His gaze was piercing. “I’d say this hotel has a legacy all its own. Say, how come my grandpappy had a photo of you in his safe? I found it when he died. You looked exactly the same. In sepia print, but still.”

I tensed. I liked George, but the law was the law. My palm grazed the handle of the shotgun strapped to my waist.

“’Course,” George said quietly, “it couldn’t have been you. That’d make me certifiable. All I know is that, when your uncannily similar grandma or whoever the heck she was visited this hotel, the last plague stopped in its tracks. And if you can save us from this plague, then it’s my goddamn civic duty to give you a place to stay.”

I sighed. And lifted my index finger off the gun’s safety lock. “You’re a saint, George. Or a madman. Or both. Aren’t most saints madmen, anyway?”

He snorted. “Yeah, yeah, flatter a dead man.”

“You’re not dead yet.” And you won’t be, if I and my trusty anachronistic firepower have a say in it. “Just don’t be a dumbass and get shot before it’s time.”

He gave the gun in my holster a pointed glower.

I grinned.

Soon, he’d be free of the plague. He wouldn’t even remember having it. It was only a matter of days. All I had to do after executing my mission was to go raid a safe and destroy a certain photograph. That asshole, Jeb, hadn’t told me he’d snapped a picture of me. He was ten times the sneak his grandson would ever be.

“G’night, dead man.” I tapped his desk. “You’ll find another quarter’s rent in your account.”

“Funny how it just appears in there. And how you show up unannounced several times a year, with no notice in-between of whether you’re alive.” There was a gently rebuking quality to that last observation. Huh. So, George did give a shit about me.

“Aw, you love me, admit it.” I retrieved my bag and slung it over my shoulder. “You still got that porn channel?”

“It’s this hotel’s biggest draw card,” George deadpanned. He was right. This decrepit building had no other attractions, except perhaps for George’s sparkling wit. And once, more than fifty years ago, his momma’s beautiful eyes.

My grin widened. “Awesome.”

I lugged my bag up the stairs to good ol’ Room 73, with the three dangling upside-down from a loose nail. So, they hadn’t fixed that yet. No matter; they’d be fixing it after the plague was gone and George had regained a steady stream of clientele. Currently, the hotel was all but vacant; there was the muted murmuring of a TV news anchor from somewhere down the corridor, but that was it.

My room was untouched since I’d last accessed it, as it should be. George had kept his promise. I scanned the room with my left eye, the inhuman one, to pick up any organic or inorganic traces of interference, any fingerprints, strands of hair, soil residue from shoes, or signs of hidden explosives. There were none but for the explosives I myself had in my bag. The rest, I’d be cooking up in here.

I switched on the small, miserly television, flipped it to the porn channel, and let the accompanying sound effects mask the unpacking of my bag. Clink, clunk, thud, bang. Nonexistent though my immediate neighbours might be, there was no point in taking chances. What if George or whoever else had that TV on decided to take a stroll down the hallway and overheard some distinctly suspicious noises?

I was all sweaty thanks to dragging my bag around, and that was no way for a lady to go about some bomb-making. I decided to shower first. Actual showers with actual water were the best part of this century; too soon we’d be stuck with sonic showers, and bathing in water would be an emperor’s dream.

I slumped under the shower, almost spiritually transported by the sensation of scalding water pouring hot as blood down my back. It occurred to me to take stock of my body. I still had my eye. I’d lost it the last time I’d ventured into the 1990s, but not this time. Doc Efner wouldn’t be giving me that snippy lecture she’d subjected me to when she’d last had to replace the thing. Cybernetics are expensive, she’d griped at me. As if I’d volunteered to have it gouged out of its socket by an inquisitive mob boss. A mob boss I’d killed instantly upon recovering my consciousness, of course.

I still had my bionic legs, and the faint surgical scars under my breasts were comfortingly familiar, pale and glossy against my dark skin. But the painful, reddish line zigzagging across my scalp, and all-too-visible under my buzzcut, was new. A souvenir from the previous plague I’d managed to stop. Technically, George himself was a souvenir; he wouldn’t even be here if I’d let his “grandpappy” die before reproducing.

This accursed city was always the ground zero of the plague. Always. Whether it be in the 1800s or the 1900s or the 2000s. Doc theorized that the initial mutation was localized to a limited portion of the city’s population, but we could never identify who the original mutant was until after the plague had begun. I had to wait for the plague to start infecting people, follow Doc’s triangulator to the infection’s source, and then go back in time and eliminate the source—sometimes sources, plural—before the plague ever started. Before the mutation ever arose. I had to blow up the whole city block surrounding the source, a detonative net to catch nearby plague-causing mutants who might’ve gone undetected, or witnesses who might remember a mysterious person popping in and out of thin air. True, I was also erasing their descendants from the future, but what choice did I have?

It was still mass murder, but it saved more lives than it took. That was worth it, wasn’t it? Better a few hundred than a few million. The plague would be unstoppable if it mutated and spread any further. History had proven that.

Or the future. The future had proven that.

My future.

I got out of the shower and wrapped myself in a worn terrycloth towel. I didn’t bother putting on my clothes; they’d soon be stained with grease and gunpowder, anyhow. I padded to the rickety table, curled my bare toes into the rough carpet, and laid out row after row of ingredients on the tabletop: reactive putty, bottled nitrous oxide from the chemical plant two townships over, wiring ripped out of telephone booths, and denuded circuit boards that gleamed dully in the room’s low light, requisitioned as they were from abandoned computer stores. Everything I needed to set off a respectable blast. The artillery was just backup in case the bombs failed, or in case I was confronted by what remained of the city’s security force.

Time to get to work.

Heh. Time.

Five days later and several bombs heavier, I tracked the original mutation down to a woman on the city’s east side. She didn’t have any pustules; she was a carrier and was immune to her own disease.

However, everyone around her was dying, some faster than others. Hookers, homeless guys and children who sat on porches, wasting away because they’d been infected and their families had fled without them. Even if the kids’ parents changed their minds, they wouldn’t be able to get back into the city, post-quarantine. Most of the public had left after the first hints of contagion, booking it for the highways before the roads were sealed. The city had been closed off by the government and left to die—nothing but a procession of sick, sad people marching toward death, subsisting off the scant smattering of shops that remained open and an ever-dwindling supply of food. I wondered how bad it would have to get before the cannibalism started. I couldn’t stomach that again.

The reminder made me feel marginally better about blowing up civilians. It was either that or condemn the planet to ruination, because the government hadn’t realized yet that all it would take would be another couple of mutations before even a quarantine wouldn’t contain the plague. Before every bird, mammal and fish was infected. Before the very air became poison.

This block had to go up in flames. A funeral pyre, a purifying fire. A sacrificial altar for the future.

Never blow up an area in a timeframe with materials obtained from that same timeframe, Doc had instructed me, ages ago, upon my recruitment. It’ll be far too traceable. We want what happened to be absolutely random, absolutely undetectable, absolutely unpredictable. An act of god.

Did that make me a god, then? It sure was an improvement over an increasingly jaded chroner.

I focused on the woman, the mutant, who was morosely watering a bonsai tree on her windowsill, four storeys up. She had lackluster brown hair pulled up in an untidy bun, with frizzy curls springing free behind her ears. She was in her thirties and had wrinkles around her eyes. She seemed like she was kind.

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and… phased.

When I opened my eyes, I was on the same street corner eleven months prior. It was a crisp autumn morning. Doc’s scanner confirmed that the mutation hadn’t yet cropped up, but I had a target, now. My cyber-eye allowed me to follow the eventual mutant’s biosignature into the apartment tower where she lived; she was, as it happened, stepping out of the elevator just as I was stepping into the lobby. Her hair wasn’t as unkempt as before (after); it was neatly pinned up, and she was wearing a business suit, about to go to work. A bunch of kids giggled as they tumbled out with her, clad in school uniforms, racing each other to the exit. Where I stood.

I knelt on the floor, as if in worship, and took out my bombs. They were augmented with Doc’s “special sauce,” a mutation-suppressing exploding agent that I carried with me everywhere, and that left no trace of itself.

I didn’t look up to see if the kids had noticed me, or if they were curious about my gadgets, or if the woman was opening her mouth to wish me a good morning. I set off the bombs, and before the blistering shockwave could hit me, I phased out again.

Mission accomplished.

Room 73 was as dim as ever. I’d phased directly into it, the requisite eleven months later. I would’ve preferred to verify my mission’s success in the real world, but I was dizzy enough to careen into a dusty lamp and almost concuss myself against the wall, so sleep it was. I’d been phasing non-stop for the past fortnight, collecting resources and intel from various times, and it had taken its toll. My body had finally crossed its limit. The pulse in my right eye—my human eye—beat in surges of purple-black, like it was about to burst. My vision swam. The furniture in the room appeared to be floating, wavering before me like heat rising off a desert. My toes and the soles of my feet tingled with a weird static electricity. It was like I’d stepped on a tripwire. While I was no longer compelled to default back to my own time, like I’d had to as a child, I still felt… over-stretched.

I weaved unsteadily over to the bed, which, as always, smelled of stale sweat and the chalky scent of dust. These sheets hadn’t been laundered in decades; I’d banned George from ever coming in here or letting anybody else do the same. This room was mine. This peace was mine. Just once, just here, just for a while—

I didn’t even register lying down on the mattress. I was out.

I woke up in a dream. I was on the walkway outside Central, the same translucent, crystalline walkway I’d taken into the City of the Blessed when I’d first been adopted. The giant gates were open before me, a miracle and a curse, shining gold and aquamarine like the gates of heaven. They were beautiful, pristine, as though innocents weren’t dying in droves outside them. Blue gems set in gold-veined marble. Obscene.

I knew it was a dream, because I always dreamed after missions. It was due to second-hand trauma or lingering PTSD, according to the shrinks Doc forced on me every now and then. Funny, that. How could I be traumatized when I’d been the one doing the killing?
I’d expected a nightmare, but this was just a memory. I wasn’t sure which was worse. This was back when I was twelve, and my body wasn’t my own but a scrawny, starving boy’s. An animal’s, half-feral and half-mad. I was tamed only by the promise of a meal. Several meals. I hoped I wouldn’t have to whore myself out for them, like my mother must’ve done. I couldn’t quite remember her. I couldn’t remember anything but hunger. And phasing, on those rare occasions when I had enough energy to try and get away from my life. Pity I was always pulled back to this time, like an elastic band snapping back into shape. I couldn’t stay away indefinitely. I’d tried.

Doc Efner walked next to me, tall and confident. She had her arm wrapped around my shoulders protectively, but I didn’t trust her. She was too clean for that. Light glinted off her unnecessary spectacles, which were likely just a rich person’s fashion statement. Who even wore spectacles nowadays, except for those outside the city walls? Those with faulty genes? To the genetic elite, myopia—or any other imperfection—was obsolete.

There was a cohort of guards standing outside the gates. They weren’t the usual bots that you could see from a distance, in flawless titanium suits that gleamed like well-oiled knives, their mechanized eyes glinting a deadly red. No, these were human guards, in full uniform, with black helmets and black gloves and the traditional billowing sleeves that concealed weapons. In their midst stood a man even taller than Doc, with an artificially handsome face that, because of or in spite of its awful symmetry, gave the impression of belonging to a hyena. There was that same hunger, that same carnivorousness in him, but he had no cause to be hungry. Not like I did.

I lurched to a halt.

“It’s okay, sweetheart,” Doc reassured me, and I flinched at the endearment. Endearments weren’t honest, when directed at a streetkid. They meant things. Scary things.

The man with the face of a hyena smiled at me. With all his teeth.

I began edging away.

“Rodolphus,” said Doc Efner exasperatedly as the man ambled forward, still accompanied by his guards, “I thought I advised you not to make your entrance until I’d brought the child in. You’re terribly off-putting.”

“At least I’m human,” he said, silky as an eel. “Unlike this creature.” He looked me up and down, and his teeth seemed to sharpen. “Where oh where did our dear Sylvia find you, boy? In the sewers, with the other rats?”

“Rodolphus!” exclaimed Doc Efner, shocked, but I could speak for myself.

“I’m not a boy.” I glared at Rodolphus, and then at Doc. I didn’t even feel betrayed. It wasn’t like strangers promised food for free. “I’m going back.”

“Are you?” Rodolphus hooked his fingers, and the guards around him parted, like a river of black, only to coalesce around me. Blocking my path. “You’re coming with us, I’m afraid. As much as I’d rather leave you out here with your unwashed brethren, our esteemed sage, Doctor Efner, has seen fit to adopt you. You are aware, I assume, of the reason for your adoption? She isn’t your parent, boy,” he sneered, relishing in calling me what I was not, like all cruel people did. “She’s your scientist. And you’re her subject. Her labrat, which, I must say, is a step up from a sewer rat.”

“Rodolphus,” Doc Efner said evenly, “you are going to turn around, this very instant, and go back to your office. And you’ll take your guards with you. If I ever see you attempting to speak to this child again, alone or in company, I will leave the City of the Blessed. Forever. And I’ll take the child with me, which means you’ll never know what I discover, and you’ll never profit from it.” She inclined her head mock-respectfully. “Then again, you are the Minister of the Blessed. I await your wisdom.”

I stared at Doc Efner. I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard so much sarcasm packed into just four words. That, more than Doc’s rankling protectiveness, kindled a flicker of affection within me.

The Minister—Minister of the Blessed? Wasn’t that the most powerful title on earth?—looked at the doctor like he wanted her dead. That she wasn’t already dead was, I guessed, because she was useful to him somehow, a hunch that was borne out when he replied. “Sylvia,” he murmured softly, “were it not for your remarkable genius, which has proven impossible to replicate with mere genetics, I would be deeply offended.”

“And I,” she curled her arm back around my shoulders, “were it not for your remarkable power, which has proven impossible to resist with mere democracy, would be deeply flattered by your regard.”

There was a silence.

They smiled at each other. Was this how the wealthy fought? With courteous but unfulfilled murderous intent? It was hilarious. And way more ineffective than the simple punch-and-kick routine the poor engaged in. Despite Rodolphus’s rictus of a smile, his aura was downright furious. I pictured steam coming out of his ears, and grinned.

He grimaced at my grin, as if it didn’t meet the standard for acceptable facial expressions in polite company. With a swirl of his shimmering, silver-lined cape, he whipped around. His guards filed after him wordlessly as he strode back into the gates and presumably to his “office,” wherever that was. What luxury he was enjoying, to be guarded by human beings rather than lifeless bots who could not bleed! Still, as Rodolphus vanished behind the gates, it dawned on me that his show of dominance had fizzled.

Doc Efner had made the Minister retreat. She was a badass.

She didn’t act like a badass, though. The second Rodolphus was gone, she knelt before me. I boggled, stunned that one of the Blessed would Naveen before a gutter-dweller. Rodolphus, while mean, had been accurate; I did sleep in the sewers during winter, just to shelter myself from the freezing rain. I must stink like a cesspool. But Doc didn’t even bat an eye. Her hand brushed my cheek without hesitation, and with a tenderness that frightened me.

“I am so, so sorry you had to hear such nonsense,” she said urgently, “and from that monster, too. We aren’t all horrible, I swear to you. You must be wary of me, because I’ve been—” she blanched “—oh, god, I’ve been grooming you, haven’t I? Feeding you and being kind to you, and—he’s correct, I do require something from you.” She drew in a breath. “I mentioned… I mentioned giving you work, and a lifelong source of income, and regular meals. If you accompanied me. But the work is…” Doc trailed off and closed her eyes.

I hated her, then. Hated her for having a conscience, for feeling guilt. I hated her as I would never hate that bastard, the Minister, because at least he’d been truthful with me from the start. But hey, it wasn’t like I hadn’t predicted this would happen. An exchange of goods. Except I was the goods.

“I don’t want you to despise me,” Doc confessed. Could she read my mind? Maybe she could. Mutants were rare in the City of the Blesssed, with its tightly-controlled genetic profiles and reduced chance of evolutionary anomalies, but she could be a telepath. Or just very intuitive.

“I think,” I suggested, “that what’s more important than me hating you is you telling me the truth.”

She opened her eyes. They were wide behind her fake spectacles, and full of an annoying self-reproach. Why bother having scruples if you were gonna ignore them anyway? “I…” She shook herself. “I’m sorry. I’m acting like Rodolphus, aren’t I? Making my image more important than the truth? I apologize.”

“Don’t.” Her apologies sickened me. She’d withdrawn her hand from me, perhaps because she was too decent to show fondness for a child she was about to exploit.

“I see,” Doc said helplessly. Then, she straightened her spine and nodded at me. “The work,” she explained, in a calm, measured tone, “is a lifelong commitment to the government—not to the Minister, who is only its current leader, you understand—to let us study your phasing, to let us experiment on you when you become an adult at eighteen, and for you to phase in service of the greater good.”

Greater good? Why was she talking like a politician when she was a scientist? “What does that mean? What greater good?”

“You could fight the plague,” she said with a fierce conviction, leaning closer to me. “The epidemic that hits us every seventy to ninety years, worse every time. The same epidemic that doubtless killed y-your…” She stuttered, then continued. “Your family. Do you recall your family?”

“No.” I shrugged. “And I’m fine with that. But the plague only hits us in Central, outside the walls, ‘cause our genes don’t make us resistant to illness.” I couldn’t keep the resentment out of my words; they emerged jagged, as sharp as broken glass. “You’re Blessed. You’re immune. Why would you care about the rest of us? Why would you wanna stop the plague?”

“Because it’s the right thing to do. And it’s official government policy.” After peering around her as if the Minister was hiding somewhere, Doc leaned in to whisper, “Besides, we mightn’t even have the City of the Blessed if there were enough citizens outside of it to resist it. If they weren’t dying en masse and then recouping their losses every century.”

I gawked at her. “You’re insane.” After all, I was a kid, but I wasn’t daft. Doc wasn’t that different from Rodolphus. She intended to acquire me as a political pawn. Get me to save enough lives to spark a revolution. This was some convoluted bullshit, and I wasn’t buying it. “But you’ll let me phase? And you’ll pay me for it? Feed me for it?”

“Of course,” she said.

“And the experiments won’t be painful?”

“No, not at all,” she hastened to assure me. “They’ll be entirely non-invasive. Just scans and external tests, unless you yourself request cybernetic augmentation, as so many of the government’s agents do. Besides, if you ever object to what I’m doing, you can simply phase out and never come back.”

“You know I always have to come back to this time and place,” I pointed out, “even if it’s not the exact same location.”

“That will likely change as you mature, and as you gain experience. Most mutants develop more versatility with their abilities as they age. You won’t be stuck here for long.”

“Wow,” I said dryly. “You’re an expert on mutants, aren’t you? I bet you’ve been watching me ever since you found out I was a mutant. How’d you even find out?”

“The Ministry compels me to… do a regular survey of Central, with aerial spy bots, to monitor the general populace for mutations. The rationale behind the monitoring is that the plagues themselves are caused by infective immune mutations. Um,” she clarified at my confusion, “by harmful mutations. But occasionally, I pick up other mutants. Most aren’t useful enough to attract my notice, and even if they are, I try to ignore them, or underplay their numbers in my reports. You, however…” She looked sad. “I couldn’t ignore you. You—you hold too much potential. For all of us. For the world.”

“Cut the spiel and gimme some burgers,” I commanded, deciding all of a sudden, like I tended to do. I marched toward the gates, which were still, amazingly, open. Beyond them I caught glimpses of glittering spires that caught the midday sun. The bots had resumed their posts, and their red eyes tracked me as I drew closer. I jutted my chin out at them. They were just glorified tin cans. Tin cans with ammunition, but still. “I demand that you pay me in burgers.”

Doc Efner trotted to catch up with me, and when she did, I saw she was smiling. Not the false simper she’d worn around the Minister, but a small smile, an honest smile.

I glanced away, at the spires, because they were easier to look at than Doc’s honesty. It was dangerous, her honesty, because it was convincing. More convincing than her save-the-world speech had been. The affection I’d felt before resurged, or tried to, but I stamped it out.

A scientist and her labrat. That’s all we’d ever be.

I awoke with a sour taste in my mouth. I loathed those dreams. They were unpleasant reminders of my past, a past in which I was less gullible than I was now. Perhaps it was all these years of being fattened up on nutritious food, being domesticated into complacency. I’d feared Doc, then. That’d been the smart thing to do. But I loved her now. How couldn’t I? She was my mother. My scientist, yes, just as Rodolphus had delighted in saying. But my mother nonetheless. She’d given me my true body, my female body, when I’d turned sixteen and requested it; she hadn’t demeaned me or told me I was unnatural for wanting to be a woman. She’d just done it. No questions asked.

I sat up in bed. Well, if nothing else, the room had stopped spinning. I could be thankful for that. My belly rumbled, and tempted as I was to ignore it and keep sleeping, I knew that I needed to fuel up. Phasing really took it out of me, and I’d have to phase forward by a whopping three-hundred years, next time. I needed my calories. Doc compared phasing to marathon running, in terms of the effect it had on my body. The farther I phased, the more drained I was. Until I got back to my time, I’d have to make do with a not-so-nutritious frozen dinner, scrounged up from George’s grimy fridge.

So I crept out. The corridor outside my room was as quiet as before—even quieter, because the other TV had been switched off. I frowned. There should be a lot more noise. Many more patrons. I’d changed the timeline, hadn’t I? There was no plague, now. There shouldn’t be any reason for George’s hotel to be as draughty and deserted as a mortuary.

I bounded down the stairs, two at a time. I wouldn’t, couldn’t admit to the cold dread gathering in my chest. If I was lucky, George would be in perfect health, and wouldn’t recall my checking in during the plague, since the plague had never happened. Instead, he’d be demanding to know how the heck I’d gotten up to the room without even checking in.

When I got to the front desk, George wasn’t there. Some of his bottles were missing, so I ducked under the counter and into the back office. There George was, motionless on a wicker chair, amid overflowing filing cabinets and yet more bottles of liquor. Alcohol was the best pain relief when all other forms of pain relief ran out, and there weren’t enough pharmacists left alive in the city.

George shouldn’t need pain relief at all.

“Hey, dead man,” I said unironically. If my eye hadn’t told me he was alive, with a beating heart, I wouldn’t have bothered addressing him.

George’s eyelids cracked open. He rasped, “You…?”

“Yeah, me.”

George blinked at me owlishly. “It’s only been, what, a couple of hours since you went up to your room? Whaddaya need?”

“Dinner, but let’s forget about that for now. What’s up? You look as waxy as a Madame Tussaud statue.” I’d seen the exhibition in the 1980s, out of curiosity. My eyes flickered down to George’s collar, which was irritating one of the pustules on his neck. “And you’re oozing bloody pus onto your shirt.”

“I’m just as pathetic as I was when you met me this afternoon.” George sat up and winced, dabbing at his neck with an awful stained handkerchief. “You knew I was dying then. I’m still dying now. So what’s new?”

I staggered backward. When I got to the window, I shoved it open, and—

The night-time streets were as barren as before. More barren, if that were possible. The plague had clearly advanced faster than it had before. If I wasn’t in the business of death, I would’ve found the stench disgusting. There was a perpetual aroma of decomposing meat lingering in the now-empty streets, the open gutters clotted with putrid blood and sloughed-off tissue. The muted, ever-present hum of flies surrounded the overfull dumpsters, stuffed with corpses that survivors like George must’ve shoved in there. All the streetlights were off. The government must’ve stopped supplying electricity and water. Why power a city of the dead?

Because the city was dying. My cyber-eye hooked up with the satellites overhead, far above the earth, and downloaded images of absolute devastation. There was hardly anybody left. The neighbouring cities, when I interfaced with their databases, were also dying. The plague was advancing like an aggressive cancer over the United States, and from there, it would advance upon the planet.

Acid crawled up my gullet. My mind flashed back to the mutant, to the curls she’d tried so hard to tame for work, to the schoolkids who probably shared part of her daily commute. Schoolkids I’d murdered, and for what?

It hadn’t worked.

It. Hadn’t. Worked. Seventeen subjective years of time-travelling as an agent of the government, and for the first time ever, it hadn’t worked. The blast I’d engineered would’ve shown up on the news, eleven months earlier; George might even remember it if I asked, but I couldn’t bring myself to. What if George had known someone who’d perished? What if he cared?

Jaded chroner, my ass. I was still as sentimental as a rookie.

I remained frozen by the window, gazing out into the night. Thinking. Thinking. Think, genius.

George came up next to me, yawning. “How come you never fall sick?”

“I dunno,” I muttered distractedly, “because I’m a mutant cyborg from a technologically advanced future where they’ve made me immune to pretty much everything?”

George gaped at me.

I snapped back to awareness. “Just kidding,” I said faintly. Shit. That sort of slip was not allowed. Not even as a joke. I must be more shaken than I’d thought. Definitely too shaken and guilt-ridden to shoot George for my own idiocy.

George gaped at me a moment more, then burst out laughing. Loud, hacking coughs of laughter. He sounded like he was about to die right then and there. “That’s—ha!—that’s great, that’s—” He shook his head, wheezing. The scabs over some of his facial pustules had broken open. “Oh, ouch.” He patted his cheeks with his handkerchief. “You made me laugh hard enough to bleed, you mutant cyborg, you.”

“Quit it.” I could feel myself going red. “And lemme at your refrigerator.”

George huffed. “All we’ve got is frozen tacos. Not to be sexist or anything, but if my wife was here, we’d have proper food.”

“And I’d have improper thoughts.”

“Ah-ha!” George meandered over to his fridge, dug out a carton of frozen tacos, and popped it into the microwave. “I figured you were a dyke.”

“Well,” I said after a pause in which my eye looked up and interpreted that bit of slang. I was an expert on twentieth-century vernacular, but it wasn’t like I didn’t still have things to learn. “You’re not wrong.”

“Just don’t go after Bella, pal.” George smiled sweetly. “I’d hate to have to kill ya.”

“You just implied your wife might be into me. You get that, right?”

“Shaddap. Eat your damn tacos and go save the world, or whatever it is you do, our mutant cyborg overlord.”
I groaned. “You’re never gonna let me live that down, are you?”

“Nope. I’ll be happy if you live at all.”

“Anyhow,” I argued, because I couldn’t let myself dwell on the emotions George’s words evoked in me, “overlords don’t save the world. They ruin the world.”

“Have a lot of experience with overlords, do you?”

I took the carton out of the microwave, stabbed its plastic film with the fork George handed to me, and put the carton back in for another minute. Ancient technology was ridiculous. “Yep,” I said shortly. I’d assassinated a tyrant back (forth?) in the year 2239. “But seriously, George, quit joking about this.”

George’s lips quirked. “My mouth is sealed,” he said solemnly.

I scoffed. “Yeah, right.”

George went back to his chair and resumed drinking as I perched on a stool across from him and scarfed down my tacos. My guilt throbbed within me like a fresh wound, but I knew I’d get it sorted out. I could travel through time, for god’s sake. I would fix this. The world would be set back on its ideal path.

But first, I’d have to go back to my own time and ask Doc what the hell had happened. It should’ve worked. It always worked.

What, precisely, had failed?

Three-hundred years later, I phased in directly next to Doc. I’d tethered myself to her when I was a kid; she was the only other person I knew who was outside time, like me, and would remember all the timelines we’d changed, all the plagues we’d stopped. I’d tried phasing with her, once, just to test whether I could take a non-chroner along with me. It had been a disaster. She’d been seriously sick afterward and had nearly died, but the advantage of it had been that her time-travelling had ripped her mind from the linear timeline, too. She’d been pleased about that, even pale and fragile as she had been for weeks. This way, I’ll be of greater help to you, she’d said. I will share the burden of your memories. You won’t be alone.

But it turned out that it was she who wasn’t alone, when I phased in beside her. She was at a party. It was one of the Minister’s sumptuous dinner parties, where the attendance of all government officials was compulsory. This party was being held in his colossal, champagne-colored hall, with giant, floor-to-ceiling windows outside which holographic renditions of the Northern Lights danced in sinuous, filmy ribbons of red and violet and green. We were in the heart of the City of the Blessed, at the top of its highest tower, so high that only the glimmering night sky could be seen beyond the semi-transparent holograms.

I immediately saw what was wrong. Or rather, what wasn’t wrong, and what should’ve been. All the Blessed present at the party were recognisable, and there weren’t any fewer of them. The plague that had killed millions in George’s time miraculously hadn’t struck any of their ancestors. How come there was no effect of the plague at all on what should’ve been a random selection of our species? I peered out, through the windows, my eye connecting to the satellites again, although the connection was a lot faster with our latest tech, practically instantaneous.

And I saw what else was wrong.

There were no towering walls, no looming gates.

There was no Central.

There was no boundary between the City of the Blessed and the wretched outside world, because there was no outside world. The City stood proud and undefended in the midst of a lush, overgrown forest. While there was a thin ring of shanties skirting the forest’s edge, housing approximately ten thousand poor, they were the only other people there.

Had I even been born, in this new timeline with a nigh-extinct population? No, I must’ve been, or Doc wouldn’t have picked me up, and she wouldn’t be smiling at me now, with recognition and fondness and exhaustion.

“My dear,” she said. “I suppose you can see that we have failed.”

It was an echo of my own thoughts, and her guilt was as palpable as mine. I ached to comfort her, just as she had comforted me before my gender confirmation surgery. But it’d only draw attention to her vulnerability, and she couldn’t afford any vulnerability in this snake pit. I couldn’t take her hands, wrinkled and spotted with age as they were. Doc hadn’t bothered with the cosmetic enhancements of youth that so enamoured most of the Blessed; she was strong and free of illness or infirmity, and she was satisfied with that.

There were startled gasps from the crowd around us as the guests noted my abrupt appearance; here, in my time, I was a known public servant and my identity wasn’t classified, so I didn’t have to avoid phasing out in the open. The Minister wove through the crowd toward me, beaming. His wife Ilyana hung off his arm, looking twenty-five years old, as she must’ve been seven or eight decades ago. They were indeed Blessed.

“My boy! Or girl,” the Minister greeted me with uncharacteristic enthusiasm, perhaps a little tipsy. But it wasn’t an accurate impression; my right eye notified me that he wasn’t as inebriated as he was behaving, a diagnosis that was confirmed when his shark-like smile stretched across his unnaturally youthful face, a tad too sharp for a drunkard’s. “What a pleasure to see you back from your world-saving adventures through time.” He took in my jeans and T-shirt with a smirk. “Those primitive fashions do suit you. Such a pity, however, that the Great Plague of the twentieth century proved unstoppable, even for a skilled and devoted agent like yourself. Our only temporal agent, what’s more. Nature has not graced us with your mutation twice.”

“Yes,” said Doc coolly, folding her silk-sleeved arms. “The Great Plague was truly a tragedy.”

“Not that most of us remember a thing about your brave work,” Rodolphus nattered on, belying the predatory gleam in his eyes. “Sylvia does, of course, after subjecting herself to that ludicrous temporal experiment with you, and she accords you the respect you deserve. But I’m afraid we can only appreciate your efforts through abstractions and field reports. In fact, should we not award you a medal for all the dangers you have endured for the greater good?”

Greater good. I flinched. Doc flinched. It must be a coincidence, that the Minister had used the very words Doc had used on me, when I was adopted.

But what if it wasn’t?

“No,” I answered him steadily. “I don’t believe I deserve a medal for not stopping the plague.”

“No matter.” He waved my reply aside. “The plague must’ve been an act of god, to cleanse this planet of the vermin overpopulating it. Now, we don’t have to share our natural wealth with those who are undeserving of it. There is a village of beggars on the outskirts of our grand city, but we tolerate their presence only out of compassion, and in the knowledge that soon, they too will die out. But we Blessed have naught to fear. The plague has never hurt us, after all. Nor will it ever hurt us. Age and death dare not strike us.”

“Rodolphus,” chided Ilyana, tugging petulantly on her husband’s arm. “Please, no talk of death on this wonderful night. We’re celebrating your twentieth re-election. Surely there are pleasanter topics than the horrid tragedies of the distant past?”

Distant. The past was distant to these people.

A foreboding chill took root in me as a distinctly smug Rodolphus allowed his wife to take him for a spin on the ballroom floor. I glanced at Doc. She was staring after the Minister in undisguised horror. He’d uttered the phrase “act of god,” too. Another phrase that was vintage Doc. It couldn’t be a coincidence. Not in such quick succession.

“He remembers,” Doc whispered to me. “And he knows. He knows it all. He must’ve been spying on our lab for years.”

“But how can he remember, even if he did spy on us? The timeline’s been reset with this newest plague, and there’s no other chroner in existence. The only way he could remember other timelines, like you do, was if I’d taken him phasing with me at some point, but I never did. Unless…” I halted, my eyes going round.

“Unless there’s another chroner. A chroner in his employ.” Doc squeezed her eyes shut. “A chroner he’s illegally concealed from me, and from the government. A chroner of whom there is no record, and who must’ve been doing his bidding during this last mission of yours. You couldn’t have failed under any other circumstances. You must have been sabotaged.”

“Sabotaged how? And what if Rodolphus is listening in on us now?”

Doc adjusted her spectacles. “Go eat some food. You need to recharge after phasing. And I… I need to think.” She walked off, with some determination, to the scarlet curtains beyond which the gold-inlaid portrait gallery lay.

I hovered uselessly, at a bit of a loss, before I did what came naturally and followed Doc’s orders. I slunk up to the banquet table, piled with genetically enlarged lobsters, silver goblets of misty synth, pomegranates spilling their seeds like rubies, and smoking shanks of meat that rotated on antique spits.

I gagged at the smell of cooking meat; it reminded me of festering bodies. Still, Doc was right, and I wouldn’t be of any service to the “greater good,” damned thing that it was, if I didn’t feed myself. My inner streetkid had never developed the capacity to turn down a free meal, anyway, even if it came with nausea-inducing flashbacks.

So I filled my plate—a delicate, flowery cross between Ming-dynasty crockery and high-grade polymetal—with fruit and fish and fowl, and forced it all down my craw as I headed out of the hall and onto a balcony. I couldn’t eat with all these eyes on me. None of the Blessed engaged me in conversation; they never had, because the Minister’s displeasure with me was plain to all, despite his veneer of courtesy.

Out on the balcony, the air was temperate, as it always was in the City of the Blessed. There were no punishing winters, here, no searing summers. Just a pleasant warmth that never waxed or waned. I found it stifling. The dancing Northern Lights, artificial though they were, cast sweeps of moving, illuminated color across the otherwise impenetrable darkness of the balcony.

My stomach roiled, over-full, and I finally set my empty plate aside on the curving marble balustrade. I leaned against it, breathing in and trying to compose myself. I’d acquired the habit of meditating between missions, just to maintain my sanity, although the success of that endeavour was questionable.

“Hello,” came a cordial greeting from behind me.

I whirled around, reaching for my gun, but it wasn’t there. I’d left it back in the 1990s, in Room 73. Nor did I have my disintegrator, as I would if I were armed for a mission in this time. I was defenseless.

Quiet laughter sounded from within the curtains, as if the stranger found my helplessness amusing. I squinted into the shadows, seeking the source of that voice, a masculine voice that seemed somehow both familiar and unfamiliar to me. I was positive there hadn’t been anybody else on the balcony when I’d escaped onto it; my eye would’ve alerted me to another biosignature. Nor had I sensed the approach of a foreign body.

Which meant—

The owner of that unnerving voice had just phased in.

I was talking to the Minister’s pet chroner.

I refused to just stand there like a fool. Straightening my shoulders, I flowed into a fighting stance, raising my hands in the starting pose of karate.

“Oh, you’re adorable,” said the stranger, and stepped out onto the balcony.

I gawked at him, stunned.

Because his face, lit by the shifting colors of the Northern Lights, was shockingly identical to my own. The bone structure was subtly different, as was the slight protuberance of an Adam’s apple from his throat, but details aside, that was my face. My face on a man’s body.

Before I could even think, I’d snatched up my plate and smashed it against the balustrade, wielding the largest shard as a makeshift blade. It sliced into my palm, but I let it. The pain grounded me.

“Now, now.” The clone held up his hands. “Is that how you treat your twin? Father likes to think he has me tamed, that I’ll kill you if he asks. But you’re my sister, sweetling, my soul’s other half. Only you can understand what it is to move through time. Only you,” he breathed almost worshipfully, “can understand me.”

I inched backward, resuming my fighter’s pose, but with the added benefit of a weapon. I didn’t ask who this “Father” was. It was obviously the Minister, who must’ve phased with this impostor at least once to retain the memories he currently did. Rodolphus must’ve cloned me, must’ve stolen and replicated my cell samples from Doc’s lab. That was the only explanation. My mind raced ahead of me, putting the pieces together.

“You’re younger than I am,” I blurted, because although I was thirty-five in subjective years, this abomination was more than a decade younger.

He quirked an eyebrow. “Of course I am. You were twelve when Doc took you in, and fourteen when Father deigned you worthy of cloning. So, I’m twenty-one, sixteen years younger than you. I was born as science’s only phase-capable infant clone. Father raised me with a singular devotion until I was old enough to phase, and after I was sufficiently trained and,” he sneered, disturbingly like the Minister, “conditioned, I was deployed on my first mission as a chroner. You have to admit, it was a resounding success. Father made me a carrier for a customized version of the plague, keyed to omit any of the Blessed’s genetic predecessors, including yours and mine. So as soon as you killed the mutant who was supposed to launch the plague, I went to the same time-point and unleashed Father’s more advanced pathogen, instead.” He lifted his chin in pride. “I changed the course of human history forever.”

“Not forever,” I growled. “I’ll fix what you’ve ruined. I have to.”

“Come, now. Do you not tire of phasing again and again, of leaving bits and pieces of your life in irretrievable abysses of time? Of not being remembered by those you grow to love, whenever you reset the timeline?”

“Like you love anyone,” I taunted.

He merely gazed at me serenely. “I love Father, after a fashion. He did raise me, just as Doctor Efner raised you.”

“Yeah, but Doc didn’t raise me in absolute secrecy. She didn’t hate me enough to reduce me to nothing but an experiment.”

“But you were an experiment.” Then the clone confessed, with alarming ease, “And I love you. Precisely because of that. Because you’d understand. I’ve been watching you for a long time. Or Father’s been watching you, and I’ve read every mission report he’s passed on to me, studied every recording of you phasing in and out of the City of the Blessed. I’ve memorized your every movement and every strategy, listened in on every debriefing you gave to Doctor Efner. I’m your perfect copy, don’t you see? I’m your perfect match.”

“But you never accepted who you are, did you? Not like I did. You’re still in that… body. A man’s body.”

The clone shrugged. “Father convinced me I’d be of more use like this, especially in more conservative eras, where my womanhood might compromise my efforts. And I don’t mind. This form, though ill-fitting, is mine. I’ve chosen to keep it. It’s the one choice I had. The one thing to set myself apart from you, while still honoring your childhood. The one thing to make myself your complement, instead of your duplicate.”

“So, you chose to imprison yourself to impress me?” I shook my head. “I don’t get it. And I doubt your daddy would approve of you speaking to me.”

My clone smiled, and it was even more terrible than Rodolphus’s smiles. It was the smile of a madman who’d been raised by a madman. “Like I said, I’m not as tame as I pretend to be. And neither are you.” He stepped forward, his timbre low and cajoling, like a seducer’s. “We needn’t phase for anyone else, you know. Only for each other. We could go to any period of history we’d enjoy, before the 1800s, when the plagues began. We could live forever. We could go to Vienna, when Mozart composed his music. We could attend his concerts. We could visit the Globe, where Shakespeare staged his plays. Or ancient Rome, where we could, with our foreknowledge, embed ourselves as prophets in Augustus’s court. We could do anything, sister. Anything. We could be gods.”

“I hate to say this,” I said slowly, twirling the shard, “but I never thought any clone of mine would be such a creep.”

He stiffened.

“I can’t just ignore the extinction of most humans and hide in safe pockets of history. Because, unlike you,” I spat, “I’m not a coward.”

I lunged. He dodged gracefully, and his skill was an insult, a forgery, a faultless mimicry of my own style.

“You can’t kill me,” he coaxed, evidently not having given up on recruiting me for… whatever he was recruiting me for. Treason? Pseudo-incestuous elopement? Too bad I preferred women. “Or you can, but Father will just clone me again. You can’t win this game. Accept my offer, sister. We could be happy together.” His tone darkened with a strange, terrifying conviction. “We will be happy together.”

It was then that the solution coalesced in my mind. The only solution. Ironically, I wouldn’t have been able to come up with it if it weren’t for my clone.

I was here, and he was here, which meant that my ancestors had survived the Minister’s engineered plague and that I’d still been born, that I’d still been picked up by Doc and cloned by the Minister. Going back in time and killing my baby self before any of that happened wouldn’t help, because the un-engineered plague would still rip through the human population without me to stop it, even if, with my clone, the Minister would eventually accelerate its progress and ensure that it wouldn’t affect the Blessed. That it wouldn’t effect me, the foundation of his plans, which was why he’d keyed my ancestors to survive it, too.

I couldn’t kill myself. I couldn’t kill my clone. I couldn’t even kill the Minister, who had funded Doc’s research into the plagues and into the very technology that eradicated them. Yes, he’d gone on to pervert that technology, but he’d also led to its manufacture.

So I couldn’t kill any of us, but I still had to complete my mission. And the only way to do that was to…

Oh. Oh.

I dropped my shard and abandoned my combative stance. “You’re right, brother,” I said, though the word burned like poison on my lips. “Perhaps we shouldn’t phase for anyone else. Perhaps we should only phase for ourselves.”

A peculiar mixture of triumph and hope blossomed on my clone’s disconcerting face, so like but so unlike my own. I almost pitied him, then, this son who didn’t want to be a son, this experiment who didn’t want to be a experiment. A caged bird dreaming of flight.

So I took his expression with me when I phased, because it was all I would have to remember him by. He would soon cease to exist.

Twenty-four years earlier, I materialized in the village of shanties that used to be Central in my original timeline. It didn’t take much to find her, given how small and vacant the village was; there she crouched, huddled under a broken bridge, a tiny eleven-year-old as bony and insubstantial as a ghost with skin. Starving and wild, just like I used to be. Untouched by either the Minister’s machinations, or Doc’s.

She recognized me instantly. She’d started phasing already, after all, and she could tell who I was. I looked like the woman she yearned to be, the woman she saw emerging in her own features, reflected back at her in the village pond, just as they’d been reflected back at me in the sewers. She was clearly still an orphan, since she had no hut to shelter her. I knew how that felt.

I knelt before her, like Doc had knelt before me, and extended my hand. The hand that didn’t have a bleeding, shard-shaped cut on it.

“We have to phase together,” I told her patiently, as she gaped at me wide-eyed. “We have to go to the past, away from here. If you turn twelve in this village, you’ll catch the notice of folks you’d rather not catch the notice of. You have to come with me, or someone else will come for you, and you’ll regret it, in time.”

At that, she giggled, then flushed in embarrassment at her giggling. “You just said in time.”

“Yeah, it was a terrible pun.” I couldn’t help chuckling, too. “I’ll teach you what you need to know, and we’ll stop awful things from happening. We’ll stop all the plagues that ever were. Including the plague that killed the world.”

“But not the Blessed,” she piped up. God, had I ever sounded so like a newborn chick? She had a boy’s voice, but still. “Nothing kills them.”

“Nothing,” I agreed. “But not for long.”

A light appeared in her eyes. I might’ve called it unholy if she weren’t only a child. “Really?”

“Really. They’ll share the fate of humanity, from now on. We’ll just have to ensure it’s a good fate, you and me. I’ve got all the tech we need hidden away in a hotel room centuries ago. Even if we ever run out of it, I know where to find new tech.” In Doc’s labs, which I’ll phase in and out of before either Doc or the Minister can catch me. And if the labs stop existing, well, we’ll have achieved our goal of equalizing humanity and preventing the City of the Blessed from ever being established. “Are you interested?”

The girl inclined her head and scrutinized me. She must’ve found what she was searching for, because she nodded. “Will there be burgers?” she asked.

I laughed outright as I took her hand. “There will definitely be burgers.”

We phased out.

Corvus

In the year 1889, a disenfranchised priest meets a pagan god.

Out here, in rural Ayre, the sky has the cut-glass brightness of a cathedral window. Supernaturally blue and utterly cloudless, it is somehow both a surface and a curve of infinite depth, like a great glass dome lowered onto the world. Heat reverberates within it, stifling, a transparent flame wavering above the earth. The fields stretch out across the hills, tawny as a lion’s hide and just as deceptively soft, for no matter that the grass seems like the richest fur from a distance, it is rough and stubborn to the touch. The famine four decades ago had robbed it of its lushness, leaving it dry and parched. Much like Kay’s heart.

Kay loves this land. And it, in return, loves him. It’s an absolute vacuum of architecture, a void within which he can dream anything into being, at least within his own mind, if not without. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ inscape, incarnate.

When Kay had first arrived here in the summer of 1889 and had been shown to his little hut, there had been a large raven perched on the sole, threadbare tree in the yard, watching him with diamond-sharp eyes.

He’d known, at once, what it was. Who it was.

Or perhaps he’d simply taken leave of his mind.

His family certainly seemed to think him a madman, to have given up on a stellar career as a trainee doctor to join “the sodding priesthood” (his father’s words, not his), and doubly mad for leaving the safety of their sprawling estate in Britain in favour of the Ayre’s wilderness, particularly in the aftermath of the devastating famine.

Kay couldn’t tell them what he was running from. He couldn’t tell them that he wasn’t seeking God, but escaping his own shadow, his own death—and yet even here it had found him, black-feathered and black-voiced, cawing from a tree on his very doorstep.

That first night, he’d sat out on the porch with a dented tin cup of tea in his hands, and had laughed until he’d cried.

He hasn’t laughed, since then. Or cried.

He likes it here. The villagers are kind, or have been once they’ve moved past their initial mistrust of the new missionary—one more mouth to feed in their recovery from the famine. Kay has written back to the Anglican Church to inform them that, in his humble opinion, these people are as much in the grace of God as any other group of human beings, and do not require “conversion,” “education” or “salvation.” It is Kay’s firm belief that God had not been punishing the local Catholics with the famine, but that it was a natural disaster, and that conversion to Anglicanism will not save them, but material aid will.

Unsurprisingly, his letters are ill-received. He’s been recalled. Thrice. And threatened with excommunication. Twice.

He isn’t leaving, though, and the Church can’t very well publicly humiliate itself by revealing that one of its most high-born priests has no zeal whatsoever for missionary work, and, moreover, feels that such work is an invasion of the villagers’ rights. Consequently, the Church seems to have abandoned him, and has given up on replacing him with another missionary.

The bi-monthly stipend from the Church has long stopped coming, and it’s been eight months since he’s heard from them, at all.

He isn’t disappointed. And he doesn’t feel abandoned, nor is he starved, given that he offers his services (medicinal knowledge; tool-making) to the villagers in exchange for meat and clothing, and can grow several basic vegetables himself, stunted and scrawny though they may be. He isn’t especially uncomfortable; life in the priesthood has accustomed him to simplicity, and there’s a profound, bone-deep satisfaction to collapsing onto his thin pallet at night, skin roughened by work and muscles aching, only to slip into a thoughtless sleep.

He realizes, objectively, that he has no place in the world. That he’s alone, far from what was once his home, with no contact whatsoever with his family or with his Church.

But neither of those things were ‘his,’ were they? Nor was he ever theirs.

He talks to the raven, for it has stationed itself semi-permanently on the scraggly tree, and has recently started making its way into the house, too, claws clattering on the window-sill and then on the back of Kay’s only chair, leaving tiny gouges in the wood.

That the raven talks back is a fact Kay doesn’t feel the need to share with anyone, not only because he’d rather keep his insanity to himself, but also because the raven is—well, his. His secret. His companion. This, and only this, is his.

“But are you mine?” the raven asks, tilting its head. It’s been reading Kay’s thoughts again.

“I told you not to do that,” Kay scolds distractedly, knife slipping along the toy he’s trying—and, so far, failing—to make. It’s supposed to be a lion, but it looks more like a house-cat. A deformed house-cat. With one ear, because he’s just managed to lop off the other one. Damn.

The raven chuckles, the sound odd from an avian throat, jagged and cruel-seeming, even though the raven isn’t (as far as Kay can tell) all that cruel. An agent of death, yes, but not cruel. “I’m not sure the children will enjoy playing with that, Kay,” it says, and Kay scowls down at his handiwork.

“They will, once I fit wheels onto it. And a tiny rope.”

“To hang itself with? In shame?”

“Ha bloody ha. Get out of here, Raven.”

“Have a nice day, then, Human,” the raven retorts, and hops out the window, vanishing into the distance somewhat faster than an ordinary bird ought to be able to.

But Raven isn’t an ordinary bird, of course. Raven is a god.

For only a god can return from the dead to claim what is rightly his—Kay’s life. The life Kay should’ve lost, long ago.

Eventually, Kay stops thinking of Raven as an ‘it’ and starts thinking of him as a ‘he’. It’s just odd, otherwise, and this friendship is strange enough as it is.

“I know who you think I am,” says the raven, one night, when Kay is sitting up in bed, sketching in his journal by the guttering light of an oil-lamp.

“Hm?” Kay finishes shading in a leaf; he’s keeping an account of every herb he finds in the Ayre’s plains, along with the uses the locals have for it. He no longer has a pencil to sketch with, but that’s all right, because he has chunks of coal that he’s sharpened and inserted into slender cylinders of tree-bark. “And who is that?”

Raven flutters his wings and shifts his perch on Kay’s bedstead. “It’s the boy, isn’t it? You think I’m him. Or a remnant of him.”

Kay’s fingers pause. And resume drawing. If Kay’s skin has abruptly broken out in a terrified sweat, that’s neither here nor there. “You promised you wouldn’t do that.”

“Read your mind? Your dreams? But you dream so loudly, sweetling. And they’re such delicious dreams. I eat dreams, you know. I can’t help it. It’s in my nature.”

Kay grits his teeth, refusing to look away from his journal.

“You are right that I am a god. Which one, I cannot remember. It has been millennia. Perhaps I am Bran the Blessed, a Welsh king returned as a raven. Perhaps I am Odin the Wise. Perhaps I am Loki, so deep in disguise that I have become my disguise, and have forgotten who I once was. Perhaps I am the demon-god, Raum. Perhaps I am a pagan deity so ancient that I no longer have a name. But I am not this boy of yours, this cowardly creature who abandoned you.”

Kay swallowed. “He… He didn’t abandon me.”

“Yes, he did. Is that why you want to die? Why you came out here to die? Because this boy you once loved destroyed himself, and you couldn’t destroy yourself with him?”

“I didn’t come here to die, don’t be absurd, nor did I—”

“Don’t lie to me.” There’s something new and frightening in the raven’s voice, some sonorous note of command that makes the very air tremble, that seems to be coming not only from this world but from a world beyond, an echo amplified and returned. “You think I am your death. But I am not your death. You think I am your memory. But I am not your memory.”

“You—I know that. I know—”

“But you don’t believe it.” Raven’s claws tighten, digging into the bedstead, and his normally black eyes gleam gold. “You’re a fool, child. That boy could not live with the truth of what he was, and hadn’t the courage to touch you as you both wanted. That boy drowned himself. You need not.”

“He didn’t—it was an accident, his family said—”

“It wasn’t an accident.” Raven’s statement is as final as an execution. “You know it. And I have seen it.”

“You…” Kay’s breath rattles in his lungs. His eyes are suddenly hot and swollen, though, by some miracle, they remain dry. “You’ve… have you seen him?”

“I have seen his past. His present no longer exists. He is dead.”

Kay’s heart stops.

It literally stops, because he can’t—

He can’t.

“I should’ve died with him,” Kay whispers, and each of his limbs feel heavy, infused with a poison-dark paralysis. His blood feels sluggish in his veins. “I should’ve…”

“No.” The raven’s eyes glitter, and there isn’t anything but malice in him, now. He seems like he’s smiling, a feral, carnivorous smile, and his beak looks ready to rip and shred and rend. “Stop waiting for your death with your legs spread, like a common whore. If you want to be taken that badly, I—”

Kay’s journal hits the wall.

It takes Kay a moment to realize that he’s thrown it, at Raven, although of course it’s gone right through him, because—

Because Raven isn’t real.

“Get out,” Kay says, like he’s always said it, but this time, he means it. Each word shakes its way out of him like a quake, an upheaval, an eruption of bile. “Get. Out.”

And Raven disappears.

Just like that.

No pretense at flying away, no pretense at reality, no pretense at—

At friendship, at—

“You should’ve just killed me,” Kay says, into the silence. “Like you were supposed to.”

If Kay expects to be left alone after that, he’s proven wrong.

The raven returns, every day and every night, and acts as though none of what happened actually happened, as shameless as a trickster ought to be. There’s a new, hungry intent in the raven’s gaze, however, that Kay pretends to ignore, because—

Because it’s better to have someone to talk to than nobody, at all.

Well, technically, Raven isn’t the only one he talks to. Kay’s picked up key phrases in the local dialect, and can conduct everyday conversations with ease. He doesn’t live with the village, because he feels that it would be an intrusion, and he still feels a peculiar stab of panic at the thought of surrounding himself with that many human beings, with people who can see and think and judge, and for all that it’s an irrational fear, it’s one that has dogged him ever since Charles—the boy Raven had taunted him with—died.

Kay can think about it, now. Before, his mind had shied away from the memory, the grief, as a once-burned hand flinches away from a fire. But he finds himself remembering, the memories mostly dulled by time, surprisingly distant, as if viewed through a telescope. His days in Oxford, before the priesthood. Studying together in the dorm. Anatomical charts unrolled and pinned by chess-pieces, biological diagrams leaving ink-stains on their hands, Melinda and Stephen hovering inquisitively over their shoulders, Charles’s timid smile.

They’d never even kissed each other. They’d never dared.

But it’s too late for all that, isn’t it? Charles is dead, and Kay is a dead man walking. No matter what Raven says. The knowledge of his own nothingness settles in Kay’s bones, calm and soft as a sift of ash. Kay’s body is merely the site of a cremation. An urn offered up to God.

“I haven’t met your god,” says Raven, when Kay returns from the village with two cured furs and a rabbit, which he guts quickly and neatly before spitting it on the fireplace. “What’s his name, again?”

“He doesn’t have a name,” Kay replies, patiently, enjoying the crackles and pops of roasting meat, the smoke savory and welcoming. His little hut finally feels like a home.

“Well, that’s just silly. How do the other gods know what to call him?”

“There are no other gods.”

“I beg to differ,” Raven says, wryly. “I am a god. I can warp time and truth itself. I don’t control the entire universe, admittedly, but that’s just a minor detail.”

“The devil’s in the details.”

“I thought the devil was in hell. That burning realm you speak of.”

“Raven. We are not having a theological argument.”

“Because we’ll just have to ‘agree to disagree’?”

“Precisely.”

“You’re pretty.”

Kay nearly drops the poker. “What?”

“What d’you mean, what? I was just finding a conversational topic we could both agree on.”

“I don’t—” Kay’s blushing, which is daft, because he’s just being admired by a glorified crow. “I’m not—”

“You know you are. Some of the girls in the village have been making eyes at you, haven’t they?”

“They haven’t,” Kay lies, blush darkening.

“Oh, they have. Of course they have. Are you thinking of going along with any of them? Enjoying their talented hands?”

“Raven!” Kay uses more force than is entirely necessary to yank the spit off the fire, and Raven laughs.

“But you don’t like girls, do you? What about the lads?” Raven’s feathers seem blacker than before, his claws sharper. “There’ve been one or two that’ve approached you, I’d wager.”

Kay blinks. “I—no. I wouldn’t—I only—”

“Only for the phantom-boy?”

And Kay had thought they were done talking about this—

“Or only for me?”

Kay stares. “You’re a bird, Raven.”

“I’m a god. Well. Demigod. But that’s just a minor—”

“—detail, I know, but… Raven. Be serious.”

“I’m very serious. I read that story you left lying around, as a hint for me.”

“You—what? What story?”

“The god that became a swan.”

“Leda and the… you read that? Wait, you can read?”

“You needn’t be coy, Kay.”

“I’m not being coy. And I’m fairly certain that a raven and a swan are at opposite ends of the bird-spectrum, if birds had a spectrum, which they don’t, because that would be even more insane than I apparently am—”

“I’m not a bird.”

“No, you’re a bird-god. Congratulations. I’m never going to attempt coitus with—”

“Coitus?” Raven chortles.

And Kay’s blushing again. “Shut up. I’ve never—not with anyone. Especially not a… whatever you are. Not that you’re a swan, or that I’m Leda. My name doesn’t start with an ‘L’ and end with an ‘a,’ in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“That could be arranged.”

“That—are you suggesting that you could change my sex? On a whim?”

“I am a transformative agent. A hundred years from now, there will be many academics who will tout the psychological symbol for transformation that I once was—for they’ll think me dead, but I won’t be. Obviously.”

“Obviously,” Kay echoes. “How old are you?”

“You’ve often wondered about that. I’ve heard you wondering. Why is it that it takes you so long to ask questions with your mouth that your mind has already asked?”

“Why is it that you seem incapable of keeping your promise to stay out of my bloody head?”

“You’re prettier when you’re angry.”

“What—”

“That’s why. That’s the reason.”

And Kay’s back to staring.

“You did ask.”

“You’re a liar and a lecher.”

“I’m a liar and a lecher and a god, be accurate, Kay. I thought accuracy mattered to you.”

“Demigod. And it does. You still haven’t said how old you are.”

The raven remains nonchalant. “Old. Young. Past. Future. What does it matter? I’ve been to the future with those academics. That’s how I know I’m still alive, then. I’ve seen your past and your childhood, so I know I was alive, then. And I’m here, now. I’m always here.”

“Always… But you weren’t here before. And you won’t be here again.”

“Nonsense. Why can’t I be here all the time? With you? For eternity?”

“Because I’m not eternal, Raven.”

“Aren’t you?”

Kay’s hands grow damp; he wipes them on his trousers. “Don’t be ridiculous.” If Kay is eternal, then so is Charles. And that’s intolerable, to think that Charles has been there all along, alive even in death, but has never bothered to visit him, to talk to him.

“No, honestly, Kay. I don’t understand this time-passing thing. I exist out of time. Or in time. Possibly, I am time. I’m not very sure about any of that, but it’s irrelevant, because I can be anywhere I please and anytime I please for as long as I please. And you please me.”

“Nothing you’re saying makes any sense. Evidently, even my hallucinations have lost their minds.”

“Hallucination. Single. I don’t see any other pagan gods lurking in the rafters. And I’m not a hallucination, in any case.”

“Exactly what a hallucination would say.”

“Hah. Yes. But think about it. Are you truly so pathetic as to create a hallucination only for it to desire you?”

Raven doesn’t—Raven doesn’t desire anything. He can’t. He isn’t even—

“You’re the only living being that’s ever recognised me in my true form, did you know that? Immediately. And without assistance.”

“What assistance?”

“Ah, you know. Mushrooms.”

“Mushrooms.”

“Magic ones. By which I mean, mind-altering herbs. And other things, but they aren’t available, yet. Won’t be, for another half a century or so.”

“You’re saying that you find me desirable because I don’t require mind-altering substances to alter my mind. In other words, you find me desirable because I’m mad.”

It’s Raven’s turn to blink. “When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound very flattering, I’ll admit—”

“Raven. Either go home to your celestial nest, wherever that is, or help yourself to some of this rabbit and then go home to your celestial nest.”

“The rabbit does look rather nice.”

“Good, then,” and Kay sets about carving it, although it’s cooler than he prefers, thanks to the pointless delay that was this frivolous conversation, and—and the meat’s markedly warmer than it was just an instant ago. Kay casts an incredulous glance at Raven.

“I told you,” Raven says, cheekily. “Anything can be arranged.”

Raven’s cheap parlor tricks aside, the episode passes, and it’s just another eccentricity of Raven’s that Kay pays no mind to, for that way lies the sort of derangement that even the extraordinarily tolerant villagers will begin to notice.

At least those other unfortunates who had seen Raven had the herbs to explain their altered states of mind. Kay has nothing except for a youthful tragedy about a lost love that does nothing but prove Kay’s essential unfitness for life. His weakness. His delicacy, for all that Raven makes it sound like a delicacy—

No. Kay won’t work himself up over Raven’s pranks. He should rather deal with real people. In the real world.

Siobhan, the village chief’s third daughter, was widowed during the famine. She’s taken a liking to Kay, and sometimes visits him in his hut—a rare occurrence for the villagers, since, despite his having gained their trust, they still view him as an outsider.

Although Siobhan is a widow, she’s very young—even younger than Kay—and is possessed of a pleasant, dignified disposition that occasionally breaks into a charming curiosity about Kay’s drawings and his descriptions of the circulation system within humans and animals. She reminds Kay of Karen, Charles’s younger sister, who’d also liked Kay, and who had made him wonder, sometimes, if he might’ve be able to love a woman, after all.

But the old Kay is gone, and Karen is likely wed to some pompous braggart that caters to all her needs except the intellectual. Siobhan is not Karen, blue-eyed and generous though she may be.

This time, she’s ostensibly here to trade woolen blankets for toys for her children, and leather gloves for a few doses of Kay’s burdock root tincture. But the red silk ribbon around her hair—a luxury in these spare times—and her fine clothes all point to the real reason for her visit. Courtship. Kay can’t help the way his welcoming smile freezes into a formal rictus, a rictus that Siobhan recognizes as a signal of his discomfort, because she sighs.

“Kay,” she says, “you have lived more than two years, here. Does it not make sense for you to move into the village? With us?”

Kay’s dry tongue unsticks itself from the roof of his mouth. “I… prefer my solitude, sister,” he says, and her eyes narrow. There. That ought to do it. He’s just called her ‘sister,’ which ought to avoid any further confusion.

“Your solitude,” she says. “I see.”

Damn. He hadn’t meant to wound her. Only reject her.

“Perhaps, one day, you will stop mourning for the lover you lost.” When Kay startles, she smiles, a sweetly brittle smile. “I know that look upon your face. I myself wore it, for many years. It is the face of one whose soul has already left for the afterlife, in search of the departed.”

“I’m… I’m sorry,” Kay says, because he doesn’t know what else to say.

“But you will return from the afterlife, for it is not yet your time, just as I returned, unwilling as I was to do so.”

“Are you still unwilling?” Kay blurts, then curses himself; he shouldn’t be giving her the impression that things will change between them.

But Siobhan seems to understand, for her smile grows kinder. “No. And neither, if you are honest with yourself, are you.”

“But—”

“Perhaps not for me, Kay, as I have now realized, but the colors are returning to your world. You have been smiling—”

“I’m not—”

“You are. Not right now, yes, and not for me. But you have been rediscovering joy. Do not fight it.”

“As you did?”

“As I no longer do.” She grins, dimpled and mischievous, and it’s such a startlingly girlish expression that Kay gapes at it. Then, as if remembering her original purpose, Siobhan scoops up her handful of toys and the small water-skin containing the tincture, and gets up. “I must go. My children wait for me. Do not keep your beloved waiting, either!”

“There’s no such—”

“Hush,” she says, and swoops down to press a kiss upon his brow, affectionate and sisterly, before giggling at his face and ducking out of the hut.

Kay just sits there, and reflects on the fact that Raven and Siobhan both have one thing in common—the ability to render him incapable of completing his sentences.

A knot seems to untie itself in him, strand by strand, over the next few weeks. Here, he need not marry a woman in order to be accepted; indeed, the chief seems distinctly relieved that Kay isn’t making overtures towards any of his daughters, Siobhan included. In the aftermath of the famine, Kay’s knowledge of healing herbs and basic medicine is worth enough to the villagers that he need not marry into them to earn a place among them, and being a priest, they don’t find his penchant for solitude surprising. For all they know, he made a vow of chastity. So, Kay begins to spend more time with the villagers—still keeping to his hut at night, of course—and finds that once he presents no threat to the villagers’ religious persuasions, or to their women, he is more or less accepted.

It dawns on him, with time, that he need not hide himself, here. He hadn’t realized that, before, because he’d been too busy shrinking away from the villagers to take note of the finer nuances of who they were. All he had feared was the implication of condemnation, when, in reality, there was nothing of the sort.

He marvels at it—the vastness of the sky, and the vastness of people’s hearts, under it.

This is why you came here, murmurs a light-haired boy to him, in his dreams. The boy’s features are faded and indistinct, as are his words, as if he’s speaking underwater, or from a great distance. This is why I brought you here.

Not to kill you, Kay. But to free you.

Kay’s carved toys have become unexpectedly popular, perhaps because they resemble toys, now, instead of lumps of misshapen wood. Trading in them has brought him many furs to keep him warm, and the nights are growing chillier, although Kay scarcely feels them, curled snugly in his bed with Raven perched nearby, telling stories.

“You’ve been getting out more,” says Raven, when Kay stumbles in from the rain, sodden and muddy and chilled to the bone. Winter is almost upon them, and the once-tawny prairie now resembles a snow-leopard’s fur more than it does a lion’s. It’s still breathtaking, but it’s also breath-freezing, and Kay is shivering even as he strips the wet clothes off of himself.

“‘Course I h-have, there’s th-things to do, where’s the—oh, thank you,” he says, when the basin of water he’d left out on the table abruptly begins steaming, without his having to put it on the fire, first. It’s handy, having a demigod around.

“Have you thought about it?” Raven asks, from behind him, but Kay doesn’t turn, plunging his numb, blue-tipped hands into the basin repeatedly until the unbearable prickle of pine-needles begins to fade.

“Thought about what?” Kay dips the washcloth in the water and slides it over his chest, shuddering, delighting in the broad, boiling stripe painting its way across his cold skin. For a moment, Kay wishes fervently for a proper tub to soak in, rather than a measly basin—but no, wait, he shouldn’t think it, or Raven might actually do it, and Kay’s not sure that anything Raven gives him won’t be nicked from someone else. All the tales about trickster gods are about seductions and thefts and wicked promises. Kay doesn’t want any favors that someone else has to pay for.

Raven’s voice seems hoarser than usual. “About whether you’d prefer being Leda, or the swan.”

Kay huffs. “I’m not in the mood for your…”

But then, Kay trails off, because he has made the mistake of turning around, and Raven is—

Raven is—

Raven is no longer a bird.

“…oh. God,” says Kay, faintly, and stumbles back against the basin. Water splashes out of it and onto his feet.

“Demigod, if we’re being specific.” Raven lounges back against the wall, completely nude and unselfconscious, and it’s—it’s Raven, because those eyes haven’t changed, still trickster-bright and cleverer-than-thou, but his shoulders are obscenely broad and his thighs obscenely strong, and he’s gold-limned in the dim light, like a temple statue brought to life, and he’s—

He’s—

“Your appreciation is certainly gratifying,” Raven smirks, and stalks toward him. There’s no other word for it—he stalks, and his gaze, as he surveys Kay’s nakedness, is as hot as the flat of a surgeon’s blade. Meant to cauterize.

Kay stumbles back another step, and another, heart hammering. His legs are unsteady.

This isn’t—

“This is a d-dream,” Kay stutters, mind completely blank, pulse roaring in his ears.

“Such stuff as dreams are made on, yes, I’ve also read that other book of yours. Very interesting. Like you.”

“Raven,” says Kay, helplessly, and the inevitability of it all hits him like a tide, sudden and overpowering, and he can feel himself going under, his resolve stolen from him like the breath from his lungs, because Raven is here, and Raven is touching him, and his fingers are too human to be human, too perfectly callused, a conglomeration of every one of Kay’s most denied, most deeply-buried fantasies.

“You mustn’t be afraid to desire what you desire.” Raven takes Kay’s hands and places them on his shoulders, his frankly unbelievable shoulders, and it’s all Kay can do to hang onto them when his knees threaten to give way. “I copied these from a dockworker that caught your eye when you got on the ship from England,” Raven says, “and these,” he shifts Kay’s grip down to his forearms, which makes Kay gasp, “from a muscular bellboy at the Ritz, that you kept surreptitiously eyeing from the lobby, when you were fifteen.”

“You can’t just… fabricate a body, Raven, that’s ridiculous.”

“I can, and I have, and you like it.”

“But you’re Frankenstein!”

“Who’s Frankenstein? Ah,” says Raven, after Kay feels a quiet shuffle in his mind, as of pages being flipped. “Another book.”

“Raven! You can’t—”

“Read you? Own you? Too late, dearest,” and then, Raven is kissing him.

Kay was right, it’s exactly like an undertow, leaving him desperate and breathless, his chin wet with spit and his lashes clumping together with tears he can’t remember shedding. Raven turns him gently to face the wall and runs proprietary hands all over him, until Kay shakes so hard that he almost falls apart.

“It’s all right,” Raven is whispering, and he’s there, he’s right there, pressed against Kay’s back, real as anything, solid as a wall, sweat-moist muscle and movement and—and pain, a deep, lancing pain that makes more tears spring to Kay’s eyes. “It’s all right, Kay, look at me.”

But he can’t, he can’t, weightless with the strange agony that flashes through him like lightning through a thundercloud, for he is as insubstantial as a cloud, anchored only by Raven’s hands on him, anchored only by a dream.

“I’m real,” Raven says, and he sounds ragged, wrecked. “Kay, I’m real—”

That’s what all the phantoms say, Kay thinks, and a rush surges through him, throbs through him, a shock of red sparks that makes Kay arch and twist like a cinder struck from a flint. There’s a rustle loud in his ears and feathers sharp against his skin, black wings rising around him and closing him in, and Raven’s hands on his hips sharpen into claws, cutting into him and drawing blood, and Kay’s screaming, and he’s—

He’s waking up.

I’m sorry, says the raven, as Kay perches next to him, high on the branches of a silvery tree. The moon is full and round, and in the distance, Kay can hear the wolf’s howl, calling to the moon as if it were its lover, a lover that it can never reach. I didn’t eat you, I promise. I was just—I was starving, and I—

“Shut up,” answers Kay, and pulls Raven down into a kiss.

They’re on the pallet, although Kay can’t quite remember how they got there, and Raven still has his human form. The cuts on Kay’s hips are shallow, which shows Raven for a liar, for if he’d truly not wanted to hurt Kay, he’d have healed those cuts already.

But he hasn’t. He wants to mark Kay, even if it means hurting him, and that—

That shouldn’t please Kay. It shouldn’t thrill him that Raven is a predator, driven by hunger above all else.

“Don’t,” says Kay, when Raven opens his mouth, because there are better uses for it than lying, and it’s far more truthful on Kay’s skin than it is anywhere else.

“Clever boy,” says Raven, sliding his palms up under Kay’s knees, and Kay lets each roll of Raven’s hips move him, lift him, and in his mind, he’s a white sail, somewhere on the sea, a triangle of fabric rising and falling on the waves.

Kay still goes out to trade, and comes back, and goes out again. The only difference is that in-between those errands, he and Raven are entwined in bed, and even though Kay doesn’t know whether he’s awake or asleep when it happens, he can’t bring himself to be bothered by it.

In fact, when is he ever awake? The crystalline sky, Siobhan’s scarlet ribbon—which of them is real? Neither? Both? Is he asleep in a sanitarium in Britain, wept over by his mother while Karen sits by his bedside, pale-faced and somber, insisting on visiting him despite her husband’s strict orders that she not disgrace herself by visiting her dead brother’s lunatic friend?

“Kay,” says Raven, and he, of all people, has no right to look concerned.

“You’re prettier than I am,” Kay replies, because that, at least, is the truth.

“I could be a farmer, here,” Raven says, apropos of nothing. “I could become one. We could be real. The both of us.”

“But would the world around us be real?”

Raven’s eyes widen.

“I’m starting to understand how you see things, Raven. How time doesn’t pass. How things don’t change, even when they do, even when they do and don’t. I’m starting to—”

“No. No, Kay, that isn’t for you. Don’t try to understand me; it will break you. Make medicines out of herbs. Draw in your sketchbook. That is for you—”

“You are for me,” Kay says, and turns over onto his stomach, angling his neck back to watch Raven from under his lashes, to see Raven’s breath catch at the sight of him. Kay feels loose-limbed and lush and powerful, like a drenched rainforest, heady with his own scent. “And I want you to have me.”

So Raven has him—again, when Kay begs him to, and again and again, until Raven’s hair turns sable-black and feathers sprout from his skin, and Kay laughs at how Raven loses control, at how badly Raven wants to devour him, at how Raven’s talons rip into the pallet and his beak snaps in the air and he keens, his half-human body more perfect than any illusion, more lovely, and when Kay hears himself laughing, it sounds both joyous and mad.

***

The letter is from London. From Stephen and Melinda.

They’ve just moved to London, where they’re opening their own medical practice, and they want him to join them.

It’s—

To say that it’s a surprise doesn’t even begin to describe it.

It’s real, or the first bit of reality Kay can remember in a long while. The handwriting is Melinda’s and so is the mildly chiding tone hiding her customary worry. And then there’s Stephen’s sturdy postscript, so very him, so very stern with his demands that Kay help them with their practice, like he’d trained to do before running off to join the priesthood, that he come back to civilization.

Civilization.

Where the barbarians live.

Barbarians who make young men hate themselves enough to kill themselves.

“I don’t want to hide who I am,” Kay says, leaning back against Raven’s chest.

“Then don’t.” Raven makes it sound so simple.

And maybe it is.

Maybe it is.

“Will you come with me?”

“There are only two possibilities,” says Raven. “Either I am the god of this land, bound to this land, and I won’t be able to come with you. Or I am your madness, in which case, yes, I’ll come with you.”

“Will you miss me, if you can’t follow me?”

Raven shrugs. “Time need not pass for me, lest I want it to. You can be here, even if you are elsewhere. You can be with me, always.”

“Raven, that doesn’t make any—”

“I thought we agreed that sense doesn’t make any sense?”

“Not when you’re involved, no.”

Raven’s hands are gentle as they stroke Kay’s arms. Raven is always gentle, nowadays; too gentle, like Kay is a fragile thing that might shatter at a touch. It gives the lie to what Raven says, that he can always have Kay; no one treats an always-possession with such care. It is the exquisite care given to temporary things, to things that perish and pass.

Raven is a liar. Perhaps even this letter, from London, is a lie. For all that it seems real, it could be Raven’s last effort to protect him, his last effort to return Kay to the land of the living, the only sacrifice the pagan god has ever made.

Or this could all be a ruse to earn Kay’s pity, to make him stay, and—

“You think too much,” Raven observes, and tips Kay’s face up to kiss him.

Yes, well. Over-thinking. That’s what Kay does.

“Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look,” quotes Raven, the thief. “He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.”

“Who am I dangerous to?” Other than himself, of course.

Raven’s eyes crinkle, and they seem almost human, for once, though they’re as savage as ever. “Me.”

Three months and six letters later, Kay’s single bag is packed, and he’s said his farewells to Siobhan, her children, the village chief, his remaining two daughters and the few friends Kay had made after emerging from his self-imposed shell. They’re all astonishingly sad to see him go; he hadn’t realized how much he’d become a part of their lives, or how much they’d become a part of his own. He feels a wrench within himself, too, when he wraps his arms around Siobhan and sweeps her off the ground—but when he sets her down, she only gives him a package of homemade bread and smiles tremulously. She doesn’t cry.

“It will be good for you,” Siobhan says, “to leave this place. To no longer run from whatever you were running from. You will be happy, now.”

Then, she and the villagers leave him to tend to their farms.

The sun pounds the fields like a golden fist, rid of all pretenses at hiding its tyranny, now that winter’s over. It’ll be a broiling, exhausting horse-ride to the port, from where he’ll take a steamboat to London—but Kay has enough dried meat and water-skins for a whole week, and he’ll scavenge for the remaining few days.

The raven watches him from the tree in the yard. Kay prays, for both their sakes, because this is the final test, the final gamble. He wants to know which way Raven has placed his bets, because Kay knows where he’s placed his.

“You’ll look handsome in a waistcoat,” Kay calls out, because he has to, because Raven can trick his way out of any rules that might bind him, and Kay needs to remind himself of that. “Or a pearl-grey suit. Not black, do you hear me?”

The raven caws, indignant and amused, and flits away.

Kay watches it go, no faster and no slower than any ordinary bird—just another raven in a land of ravens, a shard of dark glass glittering in the sky.

The horse that was arranged for him is waiting, and Kay hoists himself onto its back.

Time to wake up.

(To dream another dream.)

Carte Blanche

A retelling of the fairytale, “Snow White,” from the villain’s point of view.

My daughter, snow-white and impervious, has always known how to charm a man. Even as a child, she had simply to curve her faery smile for the Ritz bellboys to stutter and flush. I told myself, then, that she was innocent. That the evil lay not in her but in those that desired her; that her flirtations were girlish games and would fade with time. I was certain that she would grow as my hands moulded her, and that she would blossom within my care, young and soft and entirely mine.

What a fool I was.

My Blanche is no white rose. She is, instead, an evening orchid—wild and dark-scented, drawing many a collector’s eye. Witness tonight, for example. A Friday night at our holiday mansion, with the chandeliers polished and lit. It’s her father’s re-election party. I mingle with the society ladies, as expected, and Blanche wanders carelessly among the sharks. Never too far from me; I’ve trained her to stay within reach, always, where I can glide in and retrieve her if necessary.

I watch from the sidelines, which I’ve been relegated to since Blanche’s debut. That was two years ago; she’s rather skilled now, no longer floundering at over-eager compliments, no longer blushing when dignitaries forget their poise. She’s stunning. Media moguls and politicians make fools of themselves, hanging helplessly on her every word. Such glittering things they promise her—front-page appearances on their magazines and intimate dinners with movie stars. All perfectly appropriate, of course—this old man has a niece who needs the company, and that journalist has a viable excuse to interview the senator’s daughter. But their eyes are hungry, and Blanche knows it. Her hands curl into loose little fists, and she dips her lashes and purses her mouth.

Mouth. That mouth.

Sheer witchery.

I herd her away from them, as planned, when the casual questions (“Will you follow your father into politics?”) become rather more personal (“So do you have a boyfriend, Blanche?”). She clings to me and dares to look grateful. As if she didn’t want—as if she—

Their eyes, eyes that had once lingered on me, now see only her. I’m the senator’s missus, nothing more. The painted shadow at her daughter’s gleaming shoulder. The black star to Blanche’s sun.

“Mother,” she whispers, while we’re still in the hall, and when I pull her onto the balcony, “Mama.”

“What is it, dear?” I make as if to fix her hair, to smooth her dress. The heat of young skin through satin.

“Thank you for rescuing me.” Her lovely smile turns wry. “You know I hate it when they do that.”

“Of course you do.” Lying little nymph. My hand finds the curve of her cheek and fits to it, as perfectly as it used to when she was five. “You do know that if anyone gives you trouble, you’re to call for me?”

“I’ll always call for you.” Wide eyes, luminous and infinitely trusting. Surely this is mere preteens. I’m not her real mother. She knows that. “Just you, Mama.”

I stand still in the night breeze, listening to the hum of voices from within the hall, muted by the heavy curtains that hide the balcony. I listen, also, to the deceit in her voice—she’s still too young to have mastered it, although she’s had years to imitate me.

Her seductions are as yet imperfect. They may work on the starving hounds that are her father’s friends, but they won’t quite work on me. Not yet.

When I return her smile and tilt her chin up to kiss her, she thinks she’s won. She allows me to taste her, as she always does, with a hint of condescension in her smile—it moves against my mouth, complacent, but fades when my tasting turns earnest.

Ah, that vanishing smile. She’s frightened. Perhaps aroused. She doesn’t quail, but then, she never did—she’s danced this dance many times, with myself as her tutor, and she’s never balked or cried.

Her shoulders are bare under my palms. A strapless dress. Much too adult for one so young; I’ll have to have a word with her tailor.

“Mama,” she says again, when I draw away. Her voice is hushed. Her eyes are dark, like put-out lamps.

Good. This is how I like her—honest, hesitant, without the veneer of composure to hide her faults. “The second sentence,” I tell her, because I must. “You overdid it.”

“What?”

Adorable. Adolescent and baffled—has she forgotten that this is a lesson? “Just you, Mama,” I echo, and bring my fingers to her face. Still warm, still flushed. “You overdid it, darling. Some things are best left unsaid.”

She really should have realized this on her own. I remember reading her the story of The Magic Paintbrush, a few years ago—a seduction, like a painting, must be left one brushstroke away from completion. Too much perfection spoils it, and the subject (of the painting, of one’s lust) flees, brought to life and self-awareness and the need to escape.

Perhaps I’ll tell her later. Once the party ends.

“Yes, Mother,” Blanche says, and it’s Mother now, not Mama, because she’s remembered her place.

I almost regret it. Almost, but not quite. It’s Blanche’s fault, after all; she grew up to be an orchid, made for the harvest of many hands, and I had to prime her for the plucking.

She must be accustomed to it. It shouldn’t surprise her, or unnerve her, or affect her deeper thoughts—those she must keep within herself, tight as a bud, untouched.

Her thoughts are untouched now—shielded again, beneath the fall of her hair as she bends her head, as she presses her own hand to her mouth. Not rubbing, not wiping. Better than she was a year ago.

When we re-enter the hall, the patina of her charm is flawless once more, and the sharks turn to her as if scenting blood, their smiles widening over too-even teeth. I release my grip on her elbow and she steps into the crowd, looking clear and pearl-pure and perfect. Not at all overwhelmed by the fact that she’s under siege.

My pretty little fortress. I’ve armed her well.

When one of the waiters walks past me, I help myself to the wine; even the waiter’s eyes are fixed on her, poor hapless fool, and my lips twitch against the rim of my glass. The wine is nearly as soft as her mouth. I close my eyes to savour it. Thinking back. Remembering, because it seems important.

What did my Blanche taste like? The sweetness of youth, of course, laced with something bitter…

Poison.

Oh, yes. Poison. Finally. How many years have I fostered it? Laced my words with it, and my touches, until she saw only me? My sapling child, still in her first bloom, was growing too fond of others. Naturally, I had to keep her from them. Had to teach her who she belonged to.

That bitterness is where I’ve staked my claim. My own dark territory in Blanche’s mirror-bright mind—there, I am still the fairest of them all, the most perfect, the most sublime.

At least to her. If only to her.

When I open my eyes, it’s to a flood of laughter and light—with Blanche at the center of it, glowing, too young for her strapless dress.

Snow-white. Impervious.

Just as she used to be.

Wings of Air

What if Peter Pan had stopped by another window?

The Hazaris were a glorious family, by all accounts. Noble and wealthy and reticent in that particular way that suggested a self-conscious superiority. Their house crouched like a great and very pensive gargoyle in the midst of a leafy street in Knightsbridge, surrounded by similarly imposing buildings that, nonetheless, seemed lesser creatures by comparison. Mr. Hazari (whose first name was Mahesh, not that anyone dared to call him by it), was a banker and the illustrious owner of Hazari Holdings, among whose clients were aristocrats and royal families from around the world—including Great Britain, of course. Many a count or a duke or a pampered heiress had had tea in the lavishly appointed office that Mr. Hazari kept in his home; indeed, so long did he stay in his office that he rarely ventured to any other part of the house, and sometimes, it passed that he only ever saw his children at dinner, during which they had to straighten their shoulders and display the utmost respect and decorum, or risk not having dinner at all.

First among the Hazari children was Raj, the eldest son who had had bred into him the very superiority his father embodied. Raj was a solemn boy, upon whose adolescent shoulders rested the weight of a heavy inheritance—not only an inheritance of the monetary kind, but an inheritance of responsibility, of good behavior and right conduct. If he had a certain flair for swordplay and silly adventures involving flights of (very manly) imagination, that side of himself was one that he kept well-hidden, as one might keep hidden a tiny little firefly in a tight-lidded jar.

The second child was Mira, much-beloved to Mr. Hazari even though she was not, by blood, his daughter. She was instead the daughter of a close friend of Mr. Hazari’s—a major shareholder and partner of yore—who had passed away when Mira was very young. Mr. Hazari had immediately adopted her. Despite his natural tendency to discipline his children in favor of showing them affection, he was known to bring back from his travels girlish and fanciful things, such as dolls and ribbons, that he then bestowed upon Mira in an awkward way. (“Awkward,” in the sense that he quickly escaped to his office before she could give him—in all his stiff-backed terror—one of her alarmingly sweet hugs.) From Mira, Mr. Hazari could tolerate a trifle more disobedience than he could from his son; perhaps for that reason, Raj never truly got along with Mira, and Mira, in turn, took every available opportunity to tease Raj for his bad humor.

The third child in the Hazari household was not a Hazari at all, neither by blood nor by adoption. Her name was Gabby, and she was a mousy little thing that lived below-stairs with her father, the footman, who doted on her and often envied Mr. Hazari his ability to buy Mira the fineries that he, as a footman, could never acquire for Gabby. But Gabby was not one to want fineries, in any case; she was the sort that thought friendship a far greater treasure, and Mira was her greatest treasure of all. Mira, in turn, cherished Gabby’s honest, maidenly companionship—and had, after performing a very convincing drama about being a lonely orphan in desperate need of a friend—managed to convince Mr. Hazari to make Gabby her playmate. As such, it was not uncommon for Gabby to be permitted to join them for dinner, albeit in much plainer clothes, or for Gabby to spend the occasional night giggling and whispering in Mira’s room. Raj rather thought that girls grew sillier when they were put together, like daisies grew sillier when strung together in daisy chains. Whenever Gabby was playing with Mira, Raj would slink away to brood manfully and to reflect upon the sad state of affairs that was his life.

There was one last person who lived with the Hazaris, and he was very dear to them all. He was Wandsworth, the nursemaid-cum-butler that had all but raised the Hazari children. He was crotchety and strange and had a left eyebrow that was perpetually raised, but he was also more soft-hearted than a thousand candied pears. (“A candied square,” Mira called him, affectionately.) Indeed, so devoted was Wandsworth to the Hazari family, and to Mr. Hazari in particular, that among the business associates that frequented the house, he was known as the honorary Mrs. Hazari. Nobody would have said this aloud, of course, on pain of death (by Hazari glare); but it was common knowledge that after his wife’s death, Mr. Hazari had not shown more trust or affection for anyone than he had for Wandsworth himself. True, Mr. Hazari’s expressions of affection came only in the form of implacable orders and grudging gratitude, but Wandsworth had developed an uncanny ability to read his surly master’s moods. It was not unusual to see Wandsworth, with his perpetually-raised eyebrow, glowing joyfully at what seemed—to guests that did not yet know Mr. Hazari—a very thorny commentary on Wandsworth’s work.

Such was the Hazari house. And Raj, as the only heir to Hazari Holdings, was perhaps the loneliest Hazari of all. It occurred to him that his father was lonely, too, but Mr. Hazari was a man, a man with business to occupy him when friends and family failed. As he neared the age of fifteen, became increasingly aware of how important it was to become a man. Men, Raj knew after having observed his father, needed work to keep them sane. Boys were not trusted with work; therefore, if Raj wanted anything at all to furnish the barren solitude of his life, he had to become a man as soon as possible and be given sufficient work to occupy his mind. As it was, Raj occupied himself with his studies (at which he was very good), with his athletics (at which he was even better), and with his brooding (at which he was best of all).

And so it happened that, one night, Raj was brooding as the clock struck twelve. The murmurs and giggles from the neighboring room—Mira’s—had long faded, and Raj reminded himself that it was dishonorable for a man to envy the bosom-friendship of girls—or to deplore the fact that, as a teenager, he had been deported from the nursery that was now the girls’ domain alone. It was shameful to want to go back to the nursery, of all things, and even that, just for company. It wasn’t like Raj didn’t have company. He did have friends, though none were as honest with him as Gabby was with Mira; at Eton, most of his classmates were either pink-nosed sycophants who cared more for the Hazari name than they did for Raj, or pale-faced worms that slithered quickly out of sight, as if the Hazari heir were a bird of prey in disguise.

No. Not friends, then. Not really. But it wasn’t that Raj needed a friend; he was a man, after all, and men didn’t need anything but the righteousness of their conduct and the clarity of their consciences. Or so Mr. Hazari said. (Liar, Raj thought whenever he was feeling uncharitable. You have Wandsworth.) But Raj wasn’t feeling uncharitable tonight; he was enjoying the heroic martyrdom of his loneliness, and was imagining—not that he’d ever admit it to anyone else—that he was the solitary prince of a distant land, a prince of golden character and impeccable record, that would soon win the devotion of his kingdom and therefore the companionship of all within it. There would be no more loneliness, then. When he ran Hazari Holdings, Raj vowed, he would win the devotion of his workers in a similar fashion. He would be both just and gentle; unlike his father, Raj did not believe that justice and gentleness were mutually opposed.

Yes, that was right. Raj would temper his father’s more draconian punishments and would encourage greater cooperation between the management levels and those below. Transparency; accountability; the restoration of humanity to corporate culture. These things, Raj would achieve. He even had the fanciful idea, in the back of his mind, that he might one day put a Round Table in the boardroom—that he might build such a culture of equality and mutual respect within the company that he could gather the best minds around him and allow them to speak for themselves. Father was right about the importance of authority, of course, but Raj was beginning to suspect that authority wasn’t authority at all if people didn’t freely choose to obey it.

Such thoughts would probably be sacrilege, if voiced in the presence of Mr. Hazari. So, Raj kept them close, as close to him as a handful of Aces at a terribly important card game. One day, he hoped to show his father the cards he held. But he would have to wait for that. He’d have to become a man, first. He was only fifteen, as it was; there were a few years yet before he reached the age of majority.

Bemoaning his youth once more, Raj grumbled, turned over in his bed—

—and froze.

A pair of eyes was staring at him.

A pair of gleaming, sea-dark, attentive eyes.

For a beat of silence, Raj had the incredulous thought that one of his father’s business rivals had finally sent an agent to steal their documents—or, slightly less terrifying, that a crime syndicate had sent an operative to kidnap Raj and demand a ransom for him. (Raj realized that he was far less concerned about his own personal safety than he was for the safety of the Hazari documents. He felt a moment of reflexive pride for that.) But then, just as Raj was about to shout—to summon the useless guards at the gate, or to call Wandsworth for help—a hand clamped down on his mouth.

A very dirty hand.

“Mmph!” said Raj, indignantly.

“Shh,” whispered a voice, equally indignantly. “No need to cause a stir, you idiot.”

Raj blinked. Firstly—idiot? And secondly—idiot? Did this person not know that he was Raj Hazari, top scorer in the national exams and about as far a thing as there was from an idiot? Obviously, these crime syndicates sent filthy, ignorant loons to do their kidnappings. The hand over Raj’s mouth was grassy and sweaty and smelled of water and sun. It smelled like a summer forest rather than an autumn city—which was what London was, right now. Definitely a loon. He probably wandered the public parks all day, and was hired to do this for a bottle of grog. Very clever, really, hiring a homeless person; it would be that much harder to trace the syndicate.

Except that, unexpectedly, owner of the voice sounded very young. “Where is it?” A sharp glint in the dark made Raj flinch, and sure enough, there was a dagger pressed to his throat at the next second. “Tell me when I lift my hand. And don’t you dare scream.”

Not a kidnapper, then; he was after the documents. Raj didn’t care about the knife. If this was the sort of coward he was dealing with, he wouldn’t cave at all. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he replied as blandly as he could, the moment the hand lifted away.

“Don’t lie to me!” The boy—it was a boy, not a man, wasn’t it?—insisted. “I know you hid it somewhere. You took it from me, you thief!”

The audacity of this knave! “Now, look here.” Raj sat up and jabbed a finger at what, in the dark, must’ve been the other boy’s chest. That—what—were those leaves his finger brushed? What on earth was the buffoon wearing? “You’re the one that crept into my house. I couldn’t have stolen anything from you.”

“But you did,” the rascal continued, mulishly. “It’s not like my shadow enjoys being dragged around behind me, but it’s never left me before.”

“Your.” Raj blinked again. “Your what?”

“My shadow, you prat. You stole it from me.”

“I didn’t steal anything from you.” Shadow, as in, assistant? He had an accomplice? No, that couldn’t be; one wouldn’t normally call an accomplice an ‘it,’ now, would one? But he couldn’t mean a real shadow, surely. Who an earth could—or would—steal a shadow? This trespasser, whoever he was, must be drugged out of his mind. “You’re high on something, aren’t you?” Raj accused, realizing that the knife had been put away and that this drugged lunatic obviously couldn’t even be bothered threatening him properly. He couldn’t be from a business rival or a crime syndicate, then; he must, very simply, be a bum. “What are you on?”

“Pixie dust,” the boy said, and moved away from the bed. “Why? What are you on, that you’re so solidly pinned to the ground?”

“I walk on the ground,” Raj replied, wondering why he wasn’t already calling for help, and was instead having an insane conversation with an insane intruder who apparently thought that Raj was some species of pathetic butterfly pinned to a lepidopterist’s board. “I’m not pinned to it.”

“Yes, you are.” There were sounds of shuffling as the interloper roamed around the room—searching for his shadow, it seemed. “You know, it’s your fault I entered your house, anyway.”

“It’s my fault?”

“You’re the most miserable boy I’ve ever seen. It’s actually funny, watching you. The way you growl and sulk and always wear a sour face, like the pirates stole your treasure. I started coming over to watch you every night. You’re hilarious. But last night, you left the window open—and I flew in. And then my shadow disappeared.”

“You’re not making any sense.” Raj could feel a headache coming on. He’d never been called miserable and hilarious and an idiot and a prat and a thief—not by anyone, ever, let alone all at once and in such quick succession. “First—wait, you’ve been watching me?” The thought was disconcerting. And… strange, in quite another way that Raj couldn’t quite put a finger on. And he definitely would have to report this to the police.

“Well, of course I was watching you. There aren’t very many interesting things, this side of the sky. But I still come down here, from time to time. Just in case there’s something new.”

“Down here from where? Another planet?” Raj couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of his voice.

“No,” answered the boy, without any hint of sarcasm at all. “A star. Second to the right, and straight on till morning.”

“I see.” Raj had to figure out what to do with this crackpot; he didn’t seem malicious, despite the dagger that he’d briefly flashed. He’d put it away right quickly, which meant that he hadn’t meant to use it, after all—that, and there was just something… not angry. About this boy. He’d seemed angry, at the start, but it was like the anger of a young child; it didn’t have much staying power.

Perhaps I’ll keep chatting to him. Lull him into a sense of security. Then I’ll tackle him to the floor, wrest his dagger from him, and call for the guards. They’ll hold him down until the police get here, and when they do, they’ll take the sod back to whichever mental institution he escaped from.

“I swear upon my honor,” Raj continued, smoothly, “that I didn’t steal your shadow. Maybe it got stuck somewhere. And if you’re really looking for it, you might as well open the curtains. Let in some light. You’ll only be able to see it in the light, won’t you?”

The boy turned to stare at him. Or at least, Raj presumed the fellow was staring at him, since the elongated outline of his body had turned towards Raj in the dark. “You know,” he said, slowly, “you’re right. I forgot that you need light to see your shadow, here.”

“What, you don’t need light to see shadows, where you live? On the—the star?”

“’Course not. My eyes work differently, there. I go all golden-eyed when it turns dark. Like a cat. I can see almost everything.”

Like a—cat?

Raj felt a sudden urge to snicker. He contained it, of course; it would be inappropriate in such a situation. And cruel, besides, to laugh at a lunatic.

Still, this was. This was rather entertaining. Raj wasn’t sure he could recall having had such a nonsensical exchange of words with anyone, not in his entire life, not even as a five-year-old. Raj couldn’t predict anything this boy was going to say; it was like a game of wits, almost, except that this poor fool didn’t have any. “The curtains, then,” Raj said, waving lazily at the window. “Open them. I want to see you, too. You’ve been seeing me, haven’t you? Fair’s fair.”

“I don’t like being told what to do,” the brat complained, but went to the window anyway. “This is your world, though. You’d know more about it. And you’re not a bad sort, if you swear on your honor and everything.”

How naïve! As if swearing on one’s honor was enough to guarantee anything—well, in Raj’s case it was, but the politicians his father banked and invested for often weren’t as honorable as they claimed to be. “You ought to be more careful,” Raj said, although he wasn’t sure why he was bothering to give this twit advice. “Honor isn’t something you can just—” But then Raj fell silent, suddenly, because the boy had pulled the curtains open.

He’d thrown them open. And Raj saw—Raj saw—

So he is wearing leaves, Raj thought, as moonlight flooded the room. And that’s… all he’s wearing.

Raj—for possibly the first time in his life, barring that incident when he was seven and he’d fallen off a tree and concussed himself—for the first time since then, anyway, he felt dizzy.

He’d never… seen someone like this. Someone so strange, so luminous—like they weren’t even real. Like they might not even, in this bewitching light, be human.

What Raj saw by the window was a boy, yes, a boy who seemed Raj’s age, and whose height was also comparable to Raj’s, except that he was more slender of build. But that was where his ordinariness ended.

His limbs were long and gangly, but still possessed of a fey, animal grace. There were miles and miles of moonlit skin, covered—in intricate, wrangling and all too occasional patches—by a cloth of leaves. Leaves interwoven with twine, or so Raj deduced, because it didn’t make sense that those leaves would stick so cooperatively to human skin. Raj thought he glimpsed a glimmer of tree-juice, too, sparkling like stardust on the boy’s thighs and belly. It certainly wasn’t decent, to gad about so scantily clad. The boy’s ears were larger than normal, and had little elfin peaks to them; his hair was a wilderness of dark, wet-seeming curls, each polished by the moon until it shone. His face was triangular and stubborn and somehow very vital, very vibrant and unthinking and complete, like the faces of infants or madmen or people in love.

Maybe he really is an alien from a distant star, Raj’s stunned psyche reflected, for a moment.

“What?” He eyed Raj warily. “Why’re you gawking at me like that?”

“Nothing,” croaked Raj, and wondered why his voice was inexplicably hoarse. He cleared his throat. “This—this star you come from. It doesn’t happen to have men in coats, does it? Great big white coats? With pills in their pockets?”

“The pirates wear black, not white. And if by pills you mean crackers—of course they carry those. What else would they feed the parrots with?”

“You’re not a parrot, are you?”

“What?” The boy looked startled—then amused. “Ha. Don’t be daft.”

You’re the one who’s daft! Raj wanted to shout, but just then, he saw a quick, black shape flit from one corner of the room to another.

“There!” yelled the boy, lunging at it. It slipped out of his grasp, and made its way—like a panicked, cornered beast—to Raj. “There it is!” the boy cried. “That’s my shadow! Catch it! Catch it, Raj!”

How did he know Raj’s—no, never mind. He’d been spying on Raj for how long, exactly? Something—possibly Raj’s polo-sharpened instincts—made Raj pounce on the shape as it fled his way. There was a brief struggle, in which Raj was very sure that this ‘shadow’ was simply a small animal wrapped in cloth—a pet of some sort—but then he had it pinned to the bed, and it was…

It was…

Not an animal.

Nor a cloth.

Nor an animal wrapped in a cloth.

It was—oh, god. Raj couldn’t believe it, but it was—it really was—

It was a shadow.

“I can’t believe this,” Raj said, faintly.

“Good job, my man!” The boy appeared at Raj’s side, as swift as a djinn, and clapped him on the shoulder. “Now all I have to do is slip it on.”

Raj gaped. The thing in his hands… was silky, gauzy, but oddly insubstantial at the same time; it seemed to have a life of its own, because it tried to stretch desperately away from Raj’s grasp, somehow giving the impression of being bedraggled and tired and put-upon. “I don’t think it wants to go back to you,” Raj said, and marveled at what he was saying.

“It’s as sullen as usual,” the shadow’s owner huffed. “Silly thing. Like it’s actually good for anything, without me. Oi!” he said to the shadow, and Raj watched with wide eyes as he shook his finger at it. “Listen to me. I know that you like this world, but we don’t belong here. You’re coming with me, and you’re staying with me. I’m never letting you out of my sight again.”

The shadow slumped.

“Here,” said the boy to Raj, “hold it for me, would you? I’m just going to—” So saying, the boy plopped down on the bed in front of Raj, stretched out one of his ludicrously naked legs, and began to slip the shadow on as if it were a stocking. First one leg, then another; Raj watched with the distinct feeling of disconnection one usually felt in the midst of a very surreal, very unreal dream. Maybe he truly was dreaming. Although he’d never dreamt of leaf-clad boys, before.

Finally, only a little bit of the shadow remained in Raj’s hands, and he released it so that the boy could pull it up the rest of the way.

“There,” said the alien—for Raj was sure he was an alien, at this point—and sighed in relief. “Now I won’t look like a fool when I go back to Neverland. And shadows are very useful, you know. Especially when you’re flying aboveground, and you’re looking for a place to land; a shadow’s shape on the surface can show you whether the ground is rocky or smooth. It’s a safety requirement in Neverland, I can tell you that. Wouldn’t want to try a landing on the Salty Cliffs and splitting open my head!”

Flying. Cliffs. Neverland. “You’re splitting my head,” Raj muttered. “With a headache.”

“Am I?” The boy leaned very close, apparently at peace with Raj now that he knew Raj wasn’t a shadow-thief. “I’m sorry. I woke you up from your nap, didn’t I?”

“Now you apologize to me.” There it was, again—that scent of water and earth and sun. Raj felt an odd flush start up in his skin, like a very quiet fever; he wished the imp would just take his bare arms and his bare legs and his animal scent and go away. “You break into my house, blame it on me, get me to catch your shadow for you and what do I get? A headache. You haven’t even thanked me. It’s dishonorable not to thank someone who’s helped you, you know.”

“I really am sorry.” In the moonlight, the boy looked genuinely contrite—but it was a child’s contrition, and it was very strange seeing such an expression on a face that was, by all appearances, the same age as Raj’s. “But what should I do to thank you?”

“Well,” said Raj, unaccountably uncomfortable with those wide, earnest eyes gazing into his, “you could just say that you’re—”

“Oh!” the boy exclaimed. “I have it! I’ll take you with me to Neverland!”

“Take—what? No! I can’t—”

“Well, not tonight, obviously. You have a headache, and nobody can fly with a headache. You’re supposed to think happy thoughts.”

“Er.” Raj couldn’t even begin to unpack the ridiculous implications of that sentence.

“I’ll come back,” the boy promised. “I swear. Tomorrow night, I’ll be here—just leave your window open for me. I’ll come back, and I’ll take you with me. You hate it here, anyway, and you’re quite quick, aren’t you? You’ll make a good Lost Boy. You’ll like it in Neverland, trust me.”

“Look,” said Raj, feeling that he had to clear this up, “I don’t hate it here.”

“Yes, you do.”

“No, I do not! And secondly, I am not lost. And thirdly, I’m not coming with you to your—your—star. Neverland, or whatever it’s called. I can’t go; I have a duty to stay here.”

“What’s a duty?” The boy was leaning even closer, now; Raj could see the moon-limned curve of every fey eyelash.

“A duty,” Raj said, determined not to be distracted by someone’s eyelashes, of all things, “is a task you must do without fail, whether it gives you pleasure or not.”

The boy made a face. “Sounds like an awful waste of time.”

Raj bristled. “It is not! It’s something that must be done for the greater good. Haven’t you ever done anything like that?”

“Hm,” the alien thought for a moment. “I suppose I have. Like that time I didn’t eat the last of the cake, because I thought the younger ones might like it.”

Raj dropped his head onto his hands. “I give up,” he said. “I just—give up. Go away.”

“All right,” said the boy, brightly. “But I’ll be back! You won’t have to stay in Neverland if you really don’t want to; but you ought to visit, just to make up your mind. I’ll take you there.”

“Fine,” said Raj, positive that the boy would never return, because Raj was going to tell the police about this and, alien or not, this wild creature with silver eyelashes and sandalwood skin wouldn’t be coming here to distract him again. “If you come again, I’ll go with you. All right? Just—go. Now.” And then, realizing that he had to be absolutely clear with this dunce: “By yourself,” he added.

“It’s a promise, then!” The boy hopped off the bed, landing lightly on his feet, and cocked his head as he looked down at Raj. “I’ll give you a thimble,” he said, “as proof of our promise. So you know that I’ll return.”

“I don’t need a—” Raj began, but stopped at the stubborn jut of the boy’s jaw. “Oh, all right,” he conceded, feeling as though he were indulging a toddler that was absorbed in some arcane childhood game. “Give me your thimble, then.” He held out his hand.

But the boy didn’t put anything in Raj’s hand. Ignoring it completely, he instead reached out a palm of his own to cup Raj’s face—and Raj, startled by the sudden brush of a calloused thumb against his lips, did nothing at all as the boy swooped down for a kiss.

It was—this was—what—

“Mmph,” said Raj, for the second time that night. So stunned was he by this particular development that he just sat there, in the midst of the soft clinging of mouth against mouth, and felt the quiet fever of before return with a fiery, almost terrifying force. His cheeks flushed; his breath burned; he felt himself go red.

The boy pulled away, and Raj stared at him as one might at a wizard, or a sorcerer, or someone that had just performed the most incomprehensible magic.

“What did you just do?” Raj asked, weakly. It seemed unfair, somehow, that Raj should be so affected when all the boy wore was a look of calm satisfaction—the sort of satisfaction that Raj was more used to equating with the signing of official documents.

“Gave you a thimble, o’ course. That’s how you people make promises, here, isn’t it? I’ve seen it done lots of times. Flying past windows and things. When you leave, you have to give the other person a thimble. Just to prove that you’ll return. Everyone here does it. Nobody in Neverland does, though.” Then, a trace of doubt crept into the boy’s voice. “I didn’t do it wrong, did I?”

“No,” said Raj, still feeling quite disembodied and feverish. “That’s. I don’t. I think you did all right.”

“Oh, good! I’ll be going, then. Remember, keep your window open!”

“Wait,” called Raj—suddenly certain that he wouldn’t be able to call the police after this, and that he had to tell this boy not to come again, had to, had to, because if he ever came back—“What’s your name?” he found himself asking, instead.

“Peter,” grinned the boy. He was perched on the window-sill, now, between the billowing curtains. “See you tomorrow, then?”

“No,” Raj said, “you can’t—”

But the boy was gone.

He’d vanished, just like that, between one heartbeat and the next. And Raj seemed to be having a lot of those, right now. A great many heartbeats, following quick upon each other, like lemmings jumping off the Salty Cliffs.

Raj leaped out of bed, rushing to the window and looking outside—but his strange visitor—Peter, as he’d called himself—was nowhere to be seen. Not on the lawns, not on the walls, climbing down as surely anyone had to. He was just… gone.

“Can’t be,” Raj murmured, eyes scanning the grounds. “He talked about flying, but he couldn’t have been…” He couldn’t have been serious. Could he?

He was serious about the shadow, Raj’s brain pointed out, obligingly. Didn’t that turn out to be true?

Raj’s knees gave way. He sagged against the window-sill, with only his chin propped up on it, and felt the curtains brush his ears.

His blood was pounding in his veins. The night air was cool, but he felt feverish, still…

Everything real, everything practical, everything solid and true and grown-up—all of it had washed away after this single meeting with Peter. All of Raj’s plans about Round Tables and boardrooms seemed suddenly insubstantial; even his father’s scowl, or Raj’s responsibilities, or his national score, or his inheritance. All those things felt very far away, like watery illusions of another world, as if they were the things that weren’t real. As if, somehow, that leaf-clad boy and his thimble-kiss were more real than any of them.

It’s just because you haven’t been kissed before, Raj’s mind supplied again. That’s why you’re all addle-brained. Calm down. Think about it. This probably wasn’t real. Of course it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. Raj must’ve had—some sort of nervous fit, or a bout of hysteria, like the ones they talked about in the Medical seminars at Eton. He was merely under mental strain; his duties weighed heavily upon him, and it had been too long since he had last breathed the clean country air of the Hazari summer cottage. Yes, that was it. He ought to get some sleep. And when he woke up tomorrow, he’d be fine again. Nobody—not Mr. Hazari, not Mira, not Gabby, not Wandsworth—nobody needed to know that he’d gone barmy for a night.

That was the logical conclusion. The reasonable conclusion. Because if what Peter said was true, then everything Raj believed—about Duty and Honor and Work—was false. And that was unbearable.

Nevertheless, Raj couldn’t bring himself to move from the window; despite the fact that his skin grew chilly and pebbled in the midnight breeze, and despite the fact that Peter, being the hallucination of a troubled mind, couldn’t possibly return.

That’s how you people make promises, here, isn’t it?

“Shut up,” Raj growled into his arm, burying his head in its crook. “I don’t want you to come back, anyway…”

And so, Raj finally fell asleep, loose-limbed at last against the window-sill, with the stars shining above him and one star in particular—the second to the right—shining brighter than ever before.