The Mirror in the Mirror

By Jack Dann

 

 

So, like most things, it began and ended in the bathroom. Specifically, a bathroom in Lighthouse Point, Florida and a bathroom in the dilapidated Lucerne Hotel on West 79^th Street in New York City. (It might also be noted that there is a third bathroom involved in this story, located in the swanky Pierre Hotel on New York’s Upper East Side. However, I will leave it to the reader to determine whether this one is an integral part of the story’s resolution or merely an epilogical literary device.)

And I should tell you that all these bathrooms were the very same bathroom. Sort of, but not really. To explain, allow me to introduce you to Norman and Laura Gumbeiner, who on Wednesday, November 10^th, 2020, at 9:30 in the morning, were standing beside each other in their ensuite bathroom located in their stucco, pink, single-story, two-bedroom house overlooking the Intercoastal Waterway.

“Can’t you see I’m in the bathroom?” Norman asked, as he swished his chrome safety razor in the faux-antique marble sink’s frothy hot water. He was a spry eighty-five-year-old hypochondriac, who often deflected his wife’s sarcastic remarks about his attention to body, mind, and receded hairline by repeating the canticle that “What you call hypochondria is what has kept me alive all these years.” Or he would ask, “Do you think colonoscopies where precancerous growths are discovered every time should not be performed?” Or, if he was in a really expansive mood, he would soliloquize about his encounters with Fuch’s dystrophy, urinary infections, arthritis, irritable bowel syndrome, amongst a host of other undeniable empirical ‘proofs’—all that to crush, to utterly crush his white-haired (with a touch of hairdresser’s blue), seventy-nine-year-old assailant.

Laura looked intently at her husband’s reflection in the bronze framed mirror, which was a family heirloom (her family) and would be out of place in any bathroom, except perhaps one in Windsor Castle. She was already dressed, showered, and perfumed. A handsome, if rather overweight woman, Laura Gumbeiner smelled like happy memories of Coney Island.

“You’re mowing the lawn today,” she said sweetly, talking directly to the reflection, as if by doing so, she wouldn’t have to interact with the familiar stranger beside her.

“You’re not my boss. And I’ll mow the goddamn lawn—”

“Today,” Laura, said, recasting what he was about to say.

In response, Norman nicked his chin with the razor, then jutted his jaw forward so that his life mate could apply the styptic pencil she already had in hand.

“Okay, I’ll do it this afternoon.”

“Not in that heat you won’t. You’ll do it this morning.” She smiled wryly. “And after that, who knows? If you’re not exhausted, maybe a little hanky-panky.”

He smiled back at his wife in the mirror. “But if I take one of those get-up-and-do-your-duty pills and have a heart attack, it’ll be on your head.”

“I’ll take that chance,” she said. Then she made an odd gurgling sound and suddenly stepped backwards, as if she had just seen a ghost, which, in a sense, she had.

“Whasamatter?” Norman asked, turning towards his wife. He still had patches of shaving soap under his sideburns.

“Look!”

“At what?”

“At yourself. There.” She pointed at the mirror, then stepped forward, looking intently into it. “At us.”

Norman complied, looked at their reflections in the mirror, and repressed a fart. “Yes, I see you, and I see me. Now what the hell’s the matter with you?”

“Look at us. We’re…young.”

“Okay, if you say so, we’re young. We’re as young as we feel.” He scowled at himself, just now remembering the film As Young as You Feel with Monty Woolley and Marilyn Monroe. He grimaced. He had a gray age mark on his left cheek, folds in his neck—what the hell did they call them? chicken somethings—and what he thought of as old-men’s earlobes. And when he looked at his wife in the mirror, he could see that she, too, had spots and the selfsame chicken skin under her chin. But he considered her pretty, nevertheless.

“No, Norman. Look!” She looked at him directly for an instant, saw the old man that he was, shook her head in disappointment, and then turned back to the mirror. “My mother,” she said, talking to the mirror, “may-she-rest-in-peace, was right. She once told me that this was her second-chance mirror.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Norman asked, pulling a monogrammed washcloth from the heated towel rail and wiping the soap off his face.

“I never knew what it meant until now,” she whispered, mesmerized, for the reflection in the mirror was that of a sleek, ash-blond young woman: her face slightly asymmetrical, full lips, large boat-blue eyes, a somehow quizzical face that most people—men especially—found charming. She smiled at herself and then extended her hand toward the mirror…into the mirror.

It was blood warm, viscous and slippery as mercury; and as she felt its palpable adamantine suction, she grasped Norman’s arm. Although he resisted, reflexively, she pulled him right through the mirror. Pulled him over to the other side. Pulled him right back to their old apartment situated in 1965. November 10^th.

The day before, a distant Canadian power station had failed at 5:27 p.m., plunging New York City into star-ceilinged darkness until 3:30 a.m.

3:30 a.m. today.

It was now 9:35 a.m., New York time.

#

I won’t burden you with the astonishment that the Gumbeiners felt at that isometric moment of transition. Whatever it was, you’ve just imagined it according to your own cultural frame of reference. And after their initial gob smacking, disorienting shock subsided…after they made what might be referred to as mad, passionate love before they could even reach the bed…and after they, finally, showered and changed into their ‘old’ tight-fitting sweater and jeans vestments; Laura found a jar of instant Sanka decaffeinated coffee and boiled some water.

They sat quietly at the kitchen table in their respectively bewildered states of continued shock and sipped the acrid brew out of chipped mugs. Norman sniffed the flat black liquid and wished for a strawberry latte from the cappuccino machine that was sitting on a counter in what had once been their kitchen on the other side of the mirror. He looked at the young woman who had been his wife for almost sixty years and felt yet another non-chemically induced stiffness. And so they watched the traffic on West 79^th Street and Broadway. And they listened to the horns blaring, listened to the background roar of the city until Laura broke their trance of silence.

“I’ve told you what Mother said the last time I saw her in the nursing home.”

“That was a terrible nursing home,” Norman said, remembering how the hallway doors clicked shut and locked.

“Pay attention, Norman! You’re not eighty-five anymore. You’re—”

“Thirty.” Yes, that was right, he thought. He was here…and he was there. It was like seeing double images. You’re thirty and you’re in law school. And you hate it. You want to be a writer, but your father’s will specified law school, all expenses paid, or no bequest. (I might add that Norman became—or had been, depending on your perspective point—a war correspondent and the editor-in-chief of a second-tier local news magazine. He never managed to finish law school. But all that was now in the future, and Norman’s problem was that he had already lived it…unless, of course, it could be changed.)

(Supplemental: Although Laura had no grand aspirations to be a writer, she would attend literary gatherings with her husband and begin what she called “noodling” after meeting an editor at a writers’ conference. Thereafter she would make a very comfortable six-figure income writing a series of best-selling novels in her spare time under the pseudonym Candy Cartman. All of this, of course, being dependent upon the above-mentioned reader’s perspective point and the mutability of time and alternity.)

“Norman!”

“Yes, I’m listening! And I remember: your mother told you to remove the mirror from the room as soon as she died and that you only live twice.”

Laura looked at him coolly, her eyes now blue green, her face perfect and unblemished.

No wonder old people want to be young, Norman thought, then said, “But as I’ve told you a thousand times, she was not in her right mind. She thought that she was James Bond. It wasn’t her fault, it—”

“It was true,” Laura said, musing, “and Mother was right. We lived once, and this—right here, right now—is twice. And, incidentally, Mr. Armchair Psychoanalyzer, she never thought she was James Bond!”

“It’s crazy, that’s what it is. You and I are hallucinating. Maybe we just died, and these are my last thoughts like in that Twilight Zone episode where the guy is being hanged, and the rope breaks or something; and he runs around happy as Larry until the last scene when his neck is broken because it was all a dream. Like that.”

“So we both just died in the bathroom. Both of us. At the same time.”

“No,” Norman said, “I just died. You…you’ll live to a hundred and twenty. Or, more likely, I’m asleep and right now this minute I’m having a dream, or a nightmare about your mother.”

“My mother?”

“Yes, your mother and her mirror. So, I’ll tell you what…I’m going to go back into the bathroom, and maybe if I can push myself back through her fakakta mirror, I’ll wake up.”

Laura sipped her coffee, looked at him coolly again, and shrugged. “Knock yourself out. But why on earth would you want to go back to being…”

“To being what?”

“Old and smelling like an old towel.”

“Okay, that’s it!”

Norman rose, told Laura he really was going back ‘home’ (for a decent cup of coffee), admitted that the dream part of getting laid was terrific, and then shambled into the bathroom: his unconscious hadn’t quite caught up to his new situation, and he still thought his right knee was arthritic.

He stared at himself in the mirror. Pretty good looking: prematurely graying hair, manly scars from a terrible case of pimples in adolescence, cleft chin, well-defined pecs instead of saggy man boobs. He pressed his hand against the mirror. It was cool, actually cold. He pressed harder and told himself to wake the hell up. The mirror frame creaked from the pressure of his hand on the mercury-coated glass it surrounded. But he couldn’t push back into his old, or, rather, his other bathroom in Lighthouse Point.

And he didn’t wake up into his Floridian future.

He grimaced at himself, then raised his arms into a bodybuilder’s pose—he was scarecrow skinny, but muscular—and said, “Maybe this isn’t such a bad dream. Maybe…”

But he knew…oh, he knew.

He remembered the lines of a poem by Juvenal that he had inserted into a one-act play that never saw the proverbial light of day:

Like warmed-up cabbage served at each repast,

The repetition kills the wretch at last.

#

Thus the minutes, hours, days, and years passed; and repetition it was, repetitions of repetitions, (accompanied, of course, by the ever-pivotal soupçon of non-repetition): shower, morning coffee, Norman rushing to catch the D train to St. John’s Law School in Brooklyn, hot bagels and late-night study sessions with his five-member study group; and Laura kissing Norman goodbye before leaving for the advertising agency that just bordered on the Bronx, an advertising agency that she one day owned and relocated to the West Village (after she had signed Maria Chorale Cosmetics and Raimond International Resorts); and she worked late and met Norman at the Stage Deli to share a bowl of matzah ball soup and an enormous hot pastrami sandwich; and Sundays walking around the 79^th Street Boat Basin, and movies, and cooking in the grease-stained kitchen; and Norman graduated law school with honors and (of course) passed the New York Bar exam and joined the law firm Hensley, Lowry, Graham & Gallagher, and started climbing the ladder to partnership, and then moving to Sea Gate in Brooklyn, and as every hour and every day of another life slipped from memory, they were replaced by the real moments of the ever-moving, punishing, dog-eat-dog present; and then moving back to Manhattan, this time to the Upper East Side, to a seven-figure-price-point, four-bedroom ‘residence’ in the Pierre on Fifth Avenue; and Laura opened satellite agencies in Boston, Palm Beach, and West LA, and…

…and as evidenced above and repeated again (for repetition is one of the leitmotifs of this story) they forgot. Forgot their old life, forgot all the joys and pains of what we might call their first life, as their trajectories toward another futurity worked themselves out.

And, yes, as you might have guessed by following the trail of metaphorical breadcrumbs I’ve left, they separated.

In 1985.

Well, it wasn’t really much of an adjustment, as they were rarely in the same place at the same time. In February of 1999, however, Norman was having lunch (yes, with Laura, for they were never formally separated or divorced, just “detached”) at Barbetta’s on West 46^th Street when he inhaled a bite of aged Wagyu filet steak. The waiter, an elegant-looking young man from Ecuador, performed a perfect Heimlich maneuver, which worked, but for the fact that Norman suffered a massive heart attack just as the half-chewed piece of steak shot out like a projectile, smashing one of the electric candles in the overhead crystal chandelier.

Laura, heartbroken, gave a moving valediction at his exquisitely tasteful funeral, supervised his burial in the Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing (the very same cemetery in which Emanuel Weiss, an ex-member of Murder Incorporated, and Selig Grossinger, founder of Grossinger’s Resort, resided), and commissioned a monument commensurate with his status.

As Laura’s mother had always said, “Well, dead is dead.”

#

Mother’s aphorism, however, wasn’t strictly true.

Norman was certainly dead, and Laura grieved for his loss; grieved as we all do for all the “could have beens,” and then, as most of us do, she slid back into life, slid back into the moment-by-moment, numbing comfort of repetition and regularity until, yes, you guessed it: Wednesday, November 10^th, 2020, at 9:30 in the morning.

Laura had elected to skip her Wednesday Morning Club: she just wasn’t in the mood for mahjong, chamomile tea, and the usual array of finger sandwiches, scones, marmalade, lemon curd, herbed butter, and pickled salmon. And she wasn’t in the mood to spend the usual time painting her face and coordinating an appropriate wardrobe assemblage. So she slept in, then took a wake-up Adderall and made her autogenic way to the bathroom for a pee.

Her bathroom in the Pierre was large and ornate enough to give her mother’s mirror an appropriate rather than garish pride of place. She leaned her pelvis against the lip of the sink and looked at her reflection. Then, as she had done once before, a lifetime before, she made an odd gurgling sound and suddenly stepped backwards, as if she had just seen a ghost—or, rather, two ghosts—for reflected in the ornately framed mirror was herself…and Norman. Both old. Together.

Norman’s face was partially lathered with shaving soap. He winked at her, or perhaps he just blinked. She could see a powdery white spot of aluminum sulfate on his chin where, theoretically, moments ago she had applied a styptic pencil.

“Norman?” she asked.

“Okay, I’ll do it this afternoon,” Norman said, looking blankly into the mirror. He was referring to Laura’s previous request to mow the lawn—that being the Laura on the Lighthouse Point side of the mirror.

And Laura, second-chance Laura, if you like, extended her hand toward the mirror. She expected the surface to be blood warm and viscous, expected it to be as slippery as mercury…expected to feel the mirror’s palpable adamantine suction. She pressed against the glass, which felt cool, actually cold. Resistant as time itself.

She pressed harder, pushed against the mirror, which was nothing more than a large, impermeable object affixed firmly to the bathroom wall; she pushed against it with both hands until her arms ached from the pressure and her palms felt hot, as if pulsing in time to some unknown rhythm. Finally, she gave up, stepped back, and stared intently, desperately into the mirror.

But there was nothing there, nothing to see and regret, just an empty reflection of the other side of the room…

 

 

 

Heartbreak Hotel

By Dirk Flinthart

 

 

The applause dies away. Elvis watches as Marilyn stumbles in her high heels on the steps leading backstage, the tight, sequinned dress restricting her movements. Frank catches her before she can fall, holding her a little too long, a little too close. Elvis checks the impulse to intervene. Marilyn knows her way around men.

She pushes away from Frank and composes herself. “Do you think they liked it?” she asks in that breathy, little-girl voice. “I…I couldn’t see past the footlights.”

“Sure, doll,” says Frank. “Look at you! What’s not to like?” Smiling, but those blue eyes are slow and cold, and he wets his upper lip with the tip of his tongue. Marilyn moves closer to Elvis, holding his arm the way a small child might hold a plush toy, for comfort.

“It was a good set, Marilyn,” Elvis says. “It’s always good. They love you.”

“It’s just…I couldn’t see anyone. Was there…is there a good audience tonight?”

“You can’t see squat without those glasses of yours,” Frank says. “Good audience? Listen! They’re lapping up Bob’s stuff.”

A ripple of laughter makes its way backstage, and then another, and another as Bob delivers his trademark one-liners, playing the crowd like an instrument.

“It’s always a good audience,” Elvis says.

“Always the same audience,” Marilyn says. “I worry maybe they’ll get bored.”

“With you?” He smiles. “That just couldn’t ever happen.” He listens for a moment, and hears a familiar punchline. The audience dissolves into hilarity. “Bob’s nearly done.” He glances at Frank. “You ready?”

Frank makes finger-guns and shoots Elvis with imaginary bullets. “I’m always ready,” he says. “Just show me the mike.” He saunters away, tugging his fedora down over one eye.

“I wish I had his confidence,” Marilyn says.

“He’s a cocky sonofabitch,” Elvis says, “but he’s sure enough got a voice.” She’s about to reply, but something comes in. He almost clears it, but he realizes it’s closer than it should be. He’s been careless. “Hold that thought, honey,” he says. “I’ll be back.”

#

The moment they catch sight of him, panic strikes. Bullets rip snarling holes through the air, punching through his body and out the other side without slowing. He lets them shoot, studying them the while. At least a dozen. They have the look of desert scavengers in old-school military camouflage decked out with goggles and improvised headwraps to keep the heat and the dust at bay. Their weapons are mismatched. Their discipline is poor and their fire control worse. He watches and waits.

The gunfire turns sporadic as some take cover, some try to change magazines, and some maybe realize at last things aren’t what they seem. One of them holds up a fist, and the last shooters stop.

He looks more carefully at the one with the fist. It isn’t easy to distinguish much out here. He’s restricted to visible light and a bit of the infrared spectrum, so about all he can tell is that the leader is a man, maybe a little older than most of the others. They’re all thin. Their clothes hang loosely over angular limbs.

“Where are you from?” he asks at last.

It’s enough to startle the men.

“A ghost!” someone shouts. “Like Stein said! We shouldn’t be here, man.”

The leader holds up that fist again, opens his hand, palm flat. “No ghosts here, Davis,” he says. “That’s some kind of 3D projection.” The goggles glint in the sunlight as he tilts his head this way and that.

Finally, the leader shuffles close. He strips off a glove and extends a hand, then yanks it back. “Water,” he calls. “There’s a mist sprayer here. They’re using lasers, shining them into the super-fine spray. Old technology.”

Smart, then.

The leader moves his wet hand towards his mouth. Elvis shakes his head. “Wouldn’t do that,” he says.

The leader stops, and pushes his goggles up his forehead. He waits on Elvis.

“They never fixed up Hoover Dam rightwise after the Trumpists tried to blow it. Lake Mead’s not much anymore. We don’t get snowpack on the mountains like we used to, either. Water from the mister ain’t meant for drinking. Not sure it ever was, to be truthful. They put ’em up to cool the streets for the gamblers and tourists.”

The leader shakes his head, and the men mutter. The local pickups aren’t good enough for him to get everything they’re saying, but they seem shocked at the idea of spraying fresh water just to cool people.

“You got a name?” the leader asks.

“Not for you,” he says. “You and yours—you’re leaving. This ain’t your turf.”

The leader studies him. “You look like that old time singer. I’ve seen video. Elvis. I’m going to call you that. I’m Desmond Garnett, Elvis. Colonel Desmond Garnett. ESA Special Forces.”

“Eastern States of America,” Elvis says.

“You’ve heard of us?” Garnett pushes his goggles up his forehead and peers at Elvis.

“It’s an easy jump to make. I’ll give you a few more, for free.” Elvis gestures at the ragtag group. “I was in the army for a spell. I can see your guns don’t match. Your uniforms are trash. Your training is slipshod. If you’re Special Forces, I’m a bluetick hound.”

Garnett gives him a tight, wintry smile. “I’ll allow as I’ve had to recruit from outside my usual pool of talent. This here’s a low-key, fully deniable mission. There’s a degree of uncertainty regarding the border between the ESA and the Republic of the Pacific Coast, and my superiors would rather not raise that issue at the present time. But let me assure you, son...” He lifts his chin, and throws out his chest. “I have the full backing of the duly constituted government of the ESA, and if and when I send the call for backup, there will be a ruckus of the sort that will make you wish you’d never crossed paths with me. So why don’t you just walk back that nonsense about ‘my turf’, and maybe we can talk like civilized men?”

Elvis thinks about smiling in return, but really, what’s the point? “One warning only, Colonel Garnett. Turn yourself around. You got ’til sundown tomorrow.” He shuts down the projection, effectively vanishing. The look on Garnett’s face is surprisingly gratifying.

#

“You’re back,” Marilyn says, and offers him a stemmed glass. Elvis takes it automatically, though it’s empty, just like hers. She’s wearing a little black number now, every inch the living vision that seduced a nation, and her smile is a thing exquisite.

“How’d you know?” he says.

She shrugs. “I always know.”

“The others don’t.” He gestures with his glass, taking in the whole crowd of them jittering and jiving as Glenn leads the band through Pennsylvania Six Five Thousand, all sweet-sharp brass and mellow clarinets. “You’re the only one.”

Marilyn touches his hand, just for an instant. They’re sitting in a quiet booth off to one side of the dance floor, out of the treacherous currents and swirling tides of the cocktail party. Nobody’s paying them any mind, and for just a moment, he lets his hand press hers in return.

She blushes, and looks away. “I don’t know how I know,” she says. “You’re still…you. But it’s like something is missing. I think sometimes, maybe—I think you have important things you have to do. Not this stuff.”

“This is important,” Elvis says. It’s more important than he can ever hope to explain.

“This?” She looks around the room. “It’s a party. Happens every night.”

“It’s an after-show party. It’s what we do.”

“Work hard, play hard.” She tips up her glass. “Chin-chin.”

He murmurs an apology and gets up to do the rounds. Press the flesh. His mind isn’t really on it, though. Big John Wayne is arm wrestling Lee Marvin at one of the tables, and Frank’s taking bets. There’s a small crowd around them cheering and catcalling, but Elvis is watching the faded, broken, night city outside through the nanolensed eyes of a drone-swarm. Short-lived, semi biological, they crawl and leap and fly amongst the blown sand, the wreckage and detritus, seeking out Garnett and his men.

He sets them to watch, marking certain action parameters, and lets them go. They’ll call if something important happens. Meanwhile, he has other duties.

Jimi and Janis, smashed as usual, howl their way through All Along the Watchtower to tumultuous applause. Bob watches from the sidelines, a rueful grin on his sharp face.

“Sure. I wrote it,” he tells Elvis, “but I never could make it sound like that.”

“It’s okay,” Elvis says, putting a hand on Bob’s shoulder. “It’s what they do. It’s why they’re here.”

“Yeah, man.” Bob can’t take his eyes off the performance as Jimi makes the old Fender do impossible things, wailing through oneiric octaves in an unknown key but it’s right, so right, and Janis stays right there with him, that diamond-gravel voice belting out the words like an anthem to a lost world. “Beautiful,” says Bob with a half-checked sob. “So fuckin’ beautiful.”

And the night rolls on. Fred and Ginger improvise a sparkling routine to something George bangs out on the Steinway grand, leaping and spinning across tabletops in perfect time until Gene steps up with a grin and a tap that sounds like a fusillade, his feet a blur. Ginger spins across to pair with him and they whirl like flames until Fred returns with a hatstand as his partner, mimicking every move Gene makes. On some invisible cue, like magic, Gene twirls Ginger away and Fred spins the hatstand across, and now it’s Gene and the hatstand chasing Fred—and Ginger, as always, making the boys look even better than they are, always in the exact right spot, dancing backwards in heels with a perfect smile and never a hair out of place.

Then it’s Ella and Billie in a searing slow duet while Satchmo leads the band and Miles counterpoints, cool, so very cool. Groucho follows with a routine that pillories Bogey who stands by, laughing helplessly while Harpo honks and mugs and steals his fedora.

Sooner—or maybe later, it’s hard to tell—John and Paul catch up with Elvis and push the big old Gibson flatback into his hands and things get quiet. The lights go down a little, and he catches Marilyn’s eye as he sings Are You Lonesome Tonight? and Love Me Tender, but just as he’s about to give them Heartbreak Hotel to finish for the night the drone swarm signals and he cuts away—

#

—through a security camera with limited night vision, he watches as Garnett sets up a piece of equipment in the middle of the dusty street corner parking lot where the men have made their camp. It’s nothing like the mismatched guns and worn-out camo, this thing. It’s modern, or maybe postmodern if you factor in the Breakdown and the general halt in research and production around the world.

Garnett unfolds it from a heavy, insulated box lined with dense foam that supports every piece of the construct for transport. It’s a spindly thing, but sturdy enough, rising about man height on a tripod that reflects in the spectrum for titanium, mostly. Lightweight, but rigid. Then the colonel mounts some kind of a black-box unit on top, orienting it with tremendous care.

Elvis runs the silhouette of the device past a range of databases, but nothing matches up precisely enough to make him happy. He moves the drone swarm subtly, getting as many angles as he can. He’ll collate the images and refine them, and share them next time Indira’s got a satellite overhead. Even if she doesn’t recognize it, Indira will want to know.

It’s not until Garnett fans out a tiny, delicate dish of spider-web thin wires that Elvis realizes what he’s looking at. It’s some kind of highly directional transmitter. He checks the satellite database, but no, there’s nothing significant overhead at the moment. A high-altitude drone, maybe? He reorients half a dozen peripheral cameras around the city, but there’s nothing.

He shifts the drone swarm again, measuring the parallax, establishing the angle on Garnett’s transmitter dish. It’s aimed northeast, about thirty-six degrees from horizontal. And there’s still nothing to be seen.

Enough.

As Garnett plugs a portable drive into the unit, Elvis powers up a flatscreen advertisement across the street. The old sound membranes are unreliable with all the dust and blown sand, but the OLED matrix is as bright and clear as ever. Elvis makes a throat-clearing noise, and Garnett looks up. His eyes pop, and he scrabbles for his sidearm, but Elvis shakes his head.

“Ain’t gonna do neither of us no good,” he says.

Slowly, Garnett straightens. “Good trick. You about scared me stupid.”

The straight line is irresistible. “Short trip, I reckon,” Elvis says, and twitches a wry smile onto his image.

Garnett grins. “You might think that. And I guess if I’m right, you might have cause.”

“Right about what?”

Garnett folds his arms across his broad chest and peers at the image, twice lifesize, on the wall across the street. “Could be an animated avatar,” he says. “Could be there’s a man behind, somewhere, using that old face. But I think you’re something more.”

“Do tell,” says Elvis, but he’s got a bad feeling he knows where this is going. The feeling gets stronger as he watches Garnett pull a silvery bag from a pocket and enshroud the transmitter with it. “Faraday cage. You must think me all kinds of sneaky.”

“I surely do,” says Garnett. “That’s why I’m using this here ultra tight-beam, frequency-agile comms unit to talk to a stealthed aerostat way back over yonder. Now, I guess you can figure out the direction. You can probably even guess the range pretty close, knowing what I’ve got for power and seeing the angle of the transmitter dish. But not even you can suborn my communications if you can’t nail the frequency and the signal strength and a few other things I’m not inclined to discuss. So unless you’ve got something interesting to tell me, you might as well sit back and watch me send off a report that says I’m closing in on you, right now.”

“You think that?” says Elvis. “Closing in? That’s amusing, sir. Very amusing.”

“I don’t see you laughing.” Garnett slips his hands under the silvery bag, fingers moving.

Elvis has no really useful assets on hand. The drone swarm is already dying. Another couple hours and they’ll be nothing but decaying components, near indistinguishable from ordinary dead bugs. His heavy units are fixed, providing security for the Hotel structure itself. Of course he’s long ago infiltrated and suborned other security fixtures around the remnants of the city, but by good luck or worse, good planning, Garnett has set himself up out of range of all of them. It’s going to take at least another minute before one of the armed drones makes the distance. Time to stall.

“Those losers you got with you,” he says, pushing the membranes to raise the volume even though it makes his voice come out weird, tinny, kind of robotic. “They won’t get you in. You ain’t got nearly what it takes.”

“That’s okay,” says Garnett, not looking up. “They don’t have to. We just have to find your place, that’s all. Then I call in the professionals and these fine young men collect their promised and well-earned rewards before going back home to a hero’s welcome.” Garnett’s raising his voice too, and Elvis can see several of his men following the conversation with interest.

Change of tactic. “What’d he promise you? Money? I got money. Real money. Old style USA money if you want it. Gold and silver too.” Elvis shifts his image to look at the men with Garnett, throwing in a few superfast subliminal images as well—naked women, gleaming sports cars, gold coins. It can’t hurt.

One of the men—a youngster with a spray of pimples under the desert sunburn—moves uneasily, but Garnett cuts in first. “Family,” he says. “Back east, where you can’t get at them. These gentlemen do their jobs, and not only do they get the promised reward, but certain things happen in favor of their families. Important things. Things they can’t get in any other way. There’s no raccoon up that tree for you.” He frowns, and glances across at Elvis’s image. “What’s that godawful racket you’re making, boy?”

The old membranes are growling and whining now, distorting Elvis’s voice. “Old installation,” he says. “The maintenance staff ain’t what they used to be, you know?” The fact that the noise itself conveniently conceals the whine of a drone engine is another matter.

Garnett chuckles. “You can say that again.” He turns his attention back to the transmitter unit just as the AP drone pops over the top of the 7-11 building on the corner and puts two heavy rubber rounds through the delicate transmitter aerial, blasting it into uselessness.

As the men scatter and dive for their weapons, Elvis puts two more rounds into the transmitter unit itself, then sprays the campsite, the bullets bouncing and whining and kicking up dust. The drone is empty in less than a second, and he dispatches it back to base before Garnett’s men can return fire.

The colonel hasn’t moved a muscle, still there with his hands tucked under the Faraday bag though the transmitter has been smashed. “Good shooting,” he says, finally. “Non-lethal rounds. That’s an old police drone you’re using?”

“I got others,” Elvis says. “Not all of ’em play nice. Why don’t y’all just turn y’selves around and get out before I have to be downright unpleasant?”

Garnett sets himself down on a folding stool. He rummages about in his jacket, comes up with a worn, silver Zippo and a thin black cigar that he clenches in his teeth. He puffs out a cloud of smoke. “We could do that,” he says. Then he gestures at the wreckage of the transmitter. “But I’ve got backup units too. Maybe we could try talking instead. You never know. Could be we can come to some kind mutually beneficial arrangement?”

“You’ll be ice fishing in Hell first,” says Elvis. “Sundown tomorrow.” He shuts down the flatscreen.

#

The party winds down in the small hours. Sleep is a thing, after all. Or they call it sleep, anyhow. It’s a period of inactivity in which their systems can repair and recharge. They may not be using beds, but what else could you call it?

Elvis doesn’t sleep quite the same as the others. In his own way, he’s more like the dolphins, which sleep half their brains at a time so as they don’t drown. He can shift his awareness around his matrix, letting some elements undertake rejuve cycles while others arise from dormancy to take the load. It’s a dangerous world. Somebody’s got to be awake, keeping an eye on things, but there are times he wishes he could just let go, surrender to the dark for a while, and return when things were on the up-and-up again, ready to go.

He checks on Marilyn, motionless in her niche. She’s been odd lately. The subminds that maintain Elvis while he’s elsewhere are—should be—perfect. She shouldn’t be able to tell when his primary mind is otherwise engaged. Is there some kind of bleed-over? Has she retained elements of the primary awareness after a period of asset-loading?

Or is it him?

He considers that possibility while he watches her. In her version of sleep, she’s cold and immobile. The stark glow of the LED readouts above her steals even the color from her skin, making it too perfect, too even. All the animation, all the joy, everything that makes her a person vanishes. Sleeping, she’s just hardware. Unliving.

Humans dream. Their bodies keep up the processes of being while their brains do strange, uncanny things. Marilyn doesn’t dream.

Or does she? Maybe the maintenance routines…they touch all of the sleepers, every night during the downphase. Could there be something shared? Something he doesn’t know about because of the different way he sleeps? Or is that simply wishful thinking? Perhaps this is what loneliness is.

What would it be like to have someone else like him in the Hotel?

#

Garnett is talking to a travel advertisement on the wall of the old US Postal Service offices on the Boulevard. He’s very serious about it, and it’s pretty damned funny. After a minute or so, Elvis decides to cut him and his men in on the joke. He lights up a nearby public information screen, and calls out.

“Hey, Garnett.”

Garnett swivels away from the travel sign. His eyes fix on Elvis, there on the little screen, and he frowns.

“That one’s just a loop recording, buddy,” Elvis says. “Got its own solar source. It ain’t networked. S’pose I could connect it up, but I can’t say I see the need. You and your boys sleep okay?”

He knows they didn’t. He initiated a program that played randomly all night long out of the old membranes scattered across the city. Bear sounds. Coyote noises. Puma wails. Subsonics designed to cause anxiety and dread. The occasional scream. Voices, clipped from old movies and radio and TV. Garnett and his soldiers should be nicely on edge by now.

Garnett shoots a sour look at the screen image. “Fine, thanks,” he growls.

“So what were you telling the sign, there?” Elvis asks.

“Funny guy,” Garnett says. “It’s like this. You need a power source. A big, secure one. We know it’s not solar. We cut the lines to the old solar farms, but here you are, still going strong. There’s no way you’ve got enough petrochemical reserves to be running conventional generators. The hydro scheme’s long dead. That pretty much leaves some kind of nuclear source, and no matter how you do it, nuclear runs hot. You’ve had plenty of time to mask your heat signatures, but we’ve had time too. Once we realized the satellite runs over this place were compromised, we flew some manned high-spy missions. Way I figure it, you’re based in Solomon Daylewhite’s Twentieth Century Hotel.” Garnett feels around in his jacket and pulls out another one of those little cigars. He leans back against a wall to light it up.

Elvis is…maybe this is what ‘frightened’ feels like?

It can’t be the heat signature. The reactor is deep underground, a good kilometer from the Hotel. It was illegal even back then, so Daylewhite put a lot of effort into venting the heat inconspicuously, and Elvis has refined the system considerably since. But somehow, Garnett has nailed it. He’s fishing, sure, but the bait is good. Too good.

“The old CeeTwenty,” says Elvis. “Sure, yeah. That’s where I’m hiding. You got me.”

Garnett puffs smoke towards the screen. “Reverse psychology,” he says. “Won’t work. You’re a cutie, aren’t you?

Elvis makes the image smile. “Why thank you, Colonel. Wish I could say the same for you, but you look like forty miles of bad road.”

“QT,” Garnett repeats. “Quantum Thinker. Fifth generation. One of the last. Daylewhite bought you, didn’t he?”

“It’s your story, Colonel Garnett,” Elvis drawls. “You tell me.”

“The last years before the Breakdown,” Garnet says. “Daylewhite had tech money, like Musk and Bezos and Gates. But he pulled a Howard Hughes, and disappeared from the public eye. Except there were rumors. And there was the hotel he was building. The Twentieth Century. Damn strange name for hotel built in the mid twenty-first, right?”

“Strange,” Elvis agrees. “Money does that to a man.”

“Tell me about it.” Garnett shakes his head. “The old government of the day kept a close eye on Daylewhite, like you’d expect. Big money, cutting edge tech stuff. But somehow, a lot of those old records got corrupted. Hard to figure. And then there’s ghost stories out of Vegas these last twenty years or so. People seeing things, hearing things. People disappearing, even.”

“So what is it you think is happening here, Colonel Garnett?”

Garnett looks around; his men are hanging on every word. “I think Daylewhite built something big. It was meant to outshine all of Vegas.” Garnet draws on his cigar, and thinks for a moment. “He needed a QT to run it and a nuclear source to power it. I think Daylewhite almost finished his dream, but the Breakdown happened and the tourists stopped coming and Daylewhite himself died in the Flash Crash. Then the climate got worse and Vegas got too hot. People gave up on the place and everybody forgot Solomon Daylewhite’s dream. Everybody except you, because you can’t leave it, can you?”

“Depends on what you mean,” says Elvis, and this time everybody jumps when he walks around the corner of the post office building with his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, easy as you please.

#

“It’s not the same as the others, Frank,” Elvis says. “They’ve got the military behind them, this bunch. Real military.”

“Who cares?” Frank snarls. “We got guns. Whadda they gonna come out here for anyhow? Nothin’ but dry dirt and desert sun. They can’t live here. If they don’t have the sense to turn round and go home, we oughta beat it into ’em.”

Big John stands up, and hooks his thumbs into his belt. “Ya can’t beat sense inta the guvvament,” he drawls. “And ya gotta respect the red, white and blue, Frank. This ain’t some pack of rat-bastard wops in cheap suits. This is the You Ess Ay.”

“ESA,” Elvis corrects. “But yeah. This ain’t your mamma’s mafia. This is The Man.”

“We should treat ’em right,” Johnny Cash puts in. “Show ’em hospitality. But we don’t put up with no shenanigans. Not even from the government.”

They’re meeting in the big ballroom, all of them, even the ones who don’t much like coming out. And for sure, he could manage the whole thing himself in a sim, or even just in software, but it doesn’t feel right. Garnett’s expedition affects everyone. It’s only proper they come together and talk it out.

Scott Joplin picks a couple notes on the Steinway, and everybody turns to look. “Seems a mighty risk to me,” he says. “What about we pick another place for hospitality? They don’t have to stay here, do they?”

“It’s us they want to see,” Elvis says. “Me, mostly, I guess.”

“What do they want?” Morrison hasn’t bothered with a shirt and he’s barefoot, but the signature black leather pants are in place, thankfully. “We’re not doing any harm here.”

“By their lights, we ain’t doing a whole lotta good, either,” says Elvis. “They figure I could run a research facility, or a hospital, or even a whole city. They reckon y’all could do cleanup work, fixing contaminated sites, working where it’s too hot or too poison for regular folks.”

Uproar follows. Elvis has to stand up and raise his hands for silence. “One at a time, folks,” he says. “You’ll get heard. All of you.”

“Do they even know who we are?” Liza pushes her bowler hat to the back of her head. “It’s been a while.”

“They’re dying out there, Liz,” says Elvis. “There’s a lot we could do for them.”

“That ain’t what she means,” says Aretha. “You know what she means. Ain’t they got any respect?’

“Sure they do,” sneers Morrison. “Like they would for some upscale Disney effort.” He seizes up, then moves in a herky-jerky impression of a clumsy animatronic robot. “Four score and seven years ago…”

“What if we showed them?” Marilyn’s voice is soft, but she commands attention. Center stage is wherever Marilyn is, always.

“What do you mean?” Elvis runs every possible permutation of her words, but for once he can’t keep up with whatever’s going on in her independent processes. This is new.

“I mean, if they don’t understand who we are…we should show them.” She looks around the room, taking in the uncomprehending faces. “We should put on a show for them!”

This…this really is new.

#

“Judy Garland?”

“Yep.”

“Michael Jackson?”

“For sure. Daylewhite bought permission from his estate, same as for a wax museum. Of course, Michael ain’t supposed to do his old stuff, but with the Breakdown nobody much cares no more.”

The pimply young man—his name is Davis, Elvis recalls—stops, and grabs Elvis’s jacket. Elvis gives him a look, and Davis lets go.

“Sorry. Sorry,” he says. “It’s just…you got new Michael Jackson material?”

Elvis nods. “What part of it don’t y’all understand, boy? You see me, here. Electro-contractile nanocarbon-threaded muscles. Titanium and carbon fiber bones. Graphene polymer skin. A core fulla hypercapacitors. But all of us, the brains, the people—we’re as much of the real thing as can be.”

Garnett cuts in. “Quantum Thinker, Davis. Fifth gen. Only six Cuties ever built. Nobody knows their full capacity. In theory, Elvis here could even be alive. You alive, Elvis?”

“Damned if I know,” Elvis says. “How about you?”

Garnett chuckles, elbows Davis. “See? Fuck your Turing Test. These things…they say if the Cuties had come along just ten years earlier, maybe they could have stopped the Breakdown. Who knows? Maybe this guy can help us fix things again?” He glances at Elvis conspiratorially, and lowers his voice. “Hey, man. You got…Audrey?”

“Hepburn?”

Garnett nods, his face wary.

“Sure,” says Elvis. “We got Audrey.”

The colonel’s face lights up. “I’ve seen all her films. She’s gorgeous!”

“That she is,” Elvis says. He raises a hand. “This is the checkpoint. Half y’all stay out here. Other half comes with me, catches the show.”

Garnett starts checking off names but the men press close around him and Elvis.

“We’ve been thinking,” says Davis. “What’s with this half-and-half thing?”

“Security,” says Garnett, with a look at Elvis. “I don’t want all of us trapped in there at once.”

“I get that,” says Davis. “We all do, don’t we?” The others nod. Davis turns back to Garnett and Elvis. “But we’ve got another idea. The heavy stuff is all outside the hotel, right? No sense in lethal countermeasures in the interior, with the tourists.”

“That’s so,” Elvis says. “We got some fierce stuff on the periphery, but inside it’s all five-star resort.”

“Five star,” mutters another of the men. “Hot showers?”

“Our own water supply,” Elvis says. “Hot as you can stand it.”

Garnett glares. “What’s your idea?”

“Easy enough,” says Davis. “We all go in together. But after, only half goes out at a time. Once they’re clear of the peripheral defenses, they signal to the other half. That way everybody gets to see the show, and everybody’s still safe. What do you think?”

Elvis watches Garnett. The colonel feels around in his jacket where he pulled out his other cigar. Elvis smiles, and offers up a vintage Cuban in its sealed tube. “Here y’are, Colonel. Take it easy. Probably been a while since you had one of these.”

Garnett’s eyes widen. “Just the once, then,” he says. “I mean I guess it’ll never happen again. Just this one time. Everybody oughta take in the show.”

#

First the cleanup. Showers and shaves, the little hotel toiletries still in perfect condition after decades in storage. Then it’s tuxedos for everyone.

“We got all sizes,” Elvis says. “Daylewhite planned they’d rent with the rooms, see. But seeing as you’re our first guests, consider these compliments of the house.”

The rough, sunburned men are awed by their own transformation. Fitted perfectly in their new evening suits, hair styled and slicked, faces clean.

“Looka me!” says Davis, spinning on his heel. “I’m a fuckin’ movie star!”

“Language, boy,” Elvis says. “That ain’t how we talk around here.”

“Sorry, sir,” says Davis, crestfallen.

Elvis claps him on the shoulder. “Come on son,” he says. “There’s a show to catch.”

And what a show it is.

Frank nails his cue as they file into the ballroom, belting out the opening lines of New York, New York as only he can, the band sizzling behind him. The whole crowd is waiting, applauding as the tuxedo-clad soldiers enter blinking, starry-eyed, amazed in the huge, elegant space. Then the ladies push forward, and Garnett’s men can only gape, and blush. Audrey tips Elvis a wink, then dimples, extends an elegantly gloved hand to Garnett, and bobs just a hint of a curtsy.

The colonel is speechless. He shoots a wide-eyed look at Elvis, but Audrey threads her slender arm through his and whisks him off to the dance floor, Frank and the band giving it their all. Then it’s Bobby Darin doing Mack the Knife, and Dean Martin follows with Volare, and the big room is alive like it’s never been before.

Dylan sidles up next to Elvis. “Fuckin’ beautiful, man,” he says. “Look at ’em! They’re starved for this. They’ve never seen the like!”

“That’s because there ain’t nothing left like this outside anymore,” Elvis says. “All they got left now is survival. The world’s too hot. The weather’s gone mean. The water ain’t where it’s meant to be, and where it is, it ain’t doing no good. Ain’t nobody left got tuxedos and big bands. Not even rock ‘n roll.”

Dylan cocks his head. “What they hell they got to live for?”

“Beats me,” murmurs Elvis.

Marilyn takes the stage, and Garnett’s men forget their decorum, cheering and screaming for Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend. Tears glisten on her cheeks as she takes a bow and even if they’re only glycerine, they’re perfect, perfect, and the screaming and the cheering redoubles.

Roundabout midnight, Elvis gets his turn on stage. With Bogart in his white tux handling an open bar things have turned lively, so he jumps straight into Hound Dog and then Blue Suede Shoes. He duets with Jim doing Riders On The Storm, then gives way to Booker T Washington, and Diana Ross and the Godfather of Soul, James Brown. Yow!

Garnett’s men are dazzled, delighted, bewitched, bewildered. Clumsy, untried caterpillars, they stretch and reach until elegant, astonishing women touch their new wings, caress them, shape them, make of each young roughneck a butterfly, pulling them into a world like it never was, like it should be, like it could be if people cared enough for the right things. Wake up, boys! This is who you really are! Music and singing, dancing and stories and laughter…

Somewhere around dawn, the gradual, deliberate increase of carbon monoxide in the recirculated air system puts even the tireless Davis gently to sleep. Marilyn watches sadly as the young man settles back in one of the booths with his head on Dusty Springfield’s lap, and his eyes flicker closed for the last time.

“Hardly more than a boy,” she says.

Elvis puts an arm around her shoulders, and she leans into him. “At least they got one good night,” he says. “Best show we ever did.”

“Will they be back?”

Elvis shrugs. “Garnett was a cowboy. Indira touched his records back east for us. He pulled a lot of favors to set this up. Burned a few bridges. I’ll use his transmitters, send back a message like they got trouble with the Pacific Coast bunch. Can’t guarantee nothing, but I don’t reckon we’re likely to hear much more from Garnett’s people.”

“Best audience we ever had,” says Marilyn. “It’ll be hard to go back to performing for ourselves.”

“Better than decontaminating waste dumps,” Elvis says.

Marilyn shakes her head sadly. “Don’t they know they need us?”

Elvis looks across at Garnett, lying on a couch. Audrey sits on the floor next to him, holding his hand but the colonel’s not moving, nor like to move ever again. Audrey smiles a sad little smile, and folds his two hands onto his chest, together.

“They need us,” Elvis says, “but they don’t know they need us. They got caught up in making money and fighting over money and they wrecked the whole damn’ world, and now they’re too busy staying alive to know what they lost. But we’re still here.” He takes Marilyn’s little hand in his, holds it tight.

“I suppose.” She squeezes his hand. “The show must go on, huh?”

“That’s right,” Elvis says. “And hey. Long as we’re still here, maybe someday they’ll figure it out. And then they can make a comeback.”

Marilyn smiles, and somewhere outside, dawn breaks over a city of dust and ruins.

 

 

 

 

Relict:

(noun) A widow; a thing remaining from the past.

By Alison Goodman

 

 

Five Miles Outside London, 1817

 

I drew my gig up to the gate of the Royal Celestial Port, my horse shifting at the squawk of the communication box set into the wall of the guardhouse. The very young RCP soldier eyed me through the glass then bent to his transmittere.

“Name, please? Who are you here to see?” The words were barely audible through the battered box.

I gathered the reins in my hands and leaned closer. “Lady Grayle to see Lady Carnford.”

It had been two years since my sister-in-law, Isabel, had last contacted me. Now this abrupt summons to Grayle Celestial Transport company headquarters. It could only mean one thing: my husband was dead. Or at least dying.

“Weapons, please,” the box crackled. A drawer slid open with a tinny clank. “They will be returned upon exit.”

Would I, in fact, be exiting? There was every possibility that I was walking into a trap. I pulled the blaster from my velvet reticule and unclipped the three micro flash grenades from the gold chatelaine pinned to the bodice of my pelisse. When I had dressed this morning, I considered wearing a gown for the sake of occasion and Isabel’s sense of propriety, but sense prevailed. I could not run or fight in long skirts and I had a feeling that both activities were in my immediate future. So, a compromise: my ankle-length, blue, silk pelisse over moleskin breeches, hussar boots, fingerless lace gloves, and a sleek, velvet mameluke cap. If it came to it, a good ensemble to die in.

I could, of course, just turn the horses around and go. But where? If Charles was dead, there was no safe place on Earth.

I placed the weapons in the drawer. They were more for show than anything; the notorious Countess Knife did not need such fripperies to defend herself against footpads and highwaymen, and they were useless against my true adversaries.

Still, I did like a flash grenade.

Through the RCP gate, I could see one of the family’s freight craft upon the grid, ready to make the hop across planet. The Grayle rampant bear was emblazoned upon each of the ship’s three graceful fins, the family’s amended motto along its side: Per Dei gratiam, in terra et in aere. ‘By God’s grace, on land and in air.’

God’s grace: a typical Grayle interpretation of the Landing.

I peered through the glass at the guard. What was taking him so long? Perhaps he did not know who I was. He was young enough to have been a child when, ten years ago, the sixty plague ships from the stars crash-landed across the Earth, nine on the estate of my husband, the Earl of Grayle. The fleet was full of dead and dying Celestials from a faraway planet, pleading for help. Instead of help, however, my husband and his family had waited for all of the visitors to perish from their singular plague, then cleaned out the craft with amber and saltpeter and captured all nine without bloodshed. Voila! An instant transport monopoly in England, and one of a four-pronged oligopoly across the rather astonished and rapidly expanding world.

“Our scan indicates a further weapon. Place it in the tray, please.”

“I suspect you do not know who I am,” I said.

Another man—of higher rank and sourer expression—joined him. The new arrival bent and whispered something in his subordinate’s ear. From the chastened look on the boy’s face, he had just been roundly informed of his ignorance.

“I beg your pardon, Countess Grayle. Of course the wary knife can pass with you.”

Of course she could, since she could kill them in an instant if they tried to disarm me. I stroked my silk-clad forearm where Havarr lay sheathed under three layers of my skin. In my mind, I felt the knife’s sentience check my intent, then sigh and settle back. Nothing interesting to see or slice here.

Not yet, anyway.

Both men saw me stroke my arm and quickly crossed themselves. I had seen it so often that it usually did not register, but today it stung.

I was an abomination, a danger to all; everyone knew women did not have the strength of mind or emotional control to wield a wary knife. Especially a woman of the bon ton born only for decoration and breeding heirs, neither of which I had managed to supply in my marriage. Indeed, my husband had privately stepped away from me soon after I partnered Havarr. What man would wish to consort with a woman who was no longer the weaker sex? To be fair, Charles did not totally abandon me: he made it clear to the world that I was still under the political protection of the Grayle family name.

All name, no family.

Still, I had Havarr. Her abrupt entry into my life three years ago had been a terrible—and glorious—accident.

I had been driving my gig to neighbor’s estate and came across a man sprawled upon the road, thrown from his horse. Sir Paul Denby, one of the Wary Brotherhood. I went to his aid, fearing I was too late, but at my touch, he opened his eyes and grasped my forearm.

“Thank God,” he rasped, red spittle wetting his lips. “My knife says I’ve a minute left. It is willing. Are you?”

“Willing? To do what?”

“Partner it. Say yes or it will be untethered. It will kill everything in its path, including you.”

When the wary knives first emerged from the Celestial ships, the carnage had been horrific. Fifty knives powered by some unimaginable sorcery, flying through the air and dismembering everything in their path. Eventually, it was discovered that the knives had to be tethered to a living being to control them and, one by one, they were captured by brave men willing to risk death for such power. And so, the Wary Brotherhood was founded: thieftakers, peacekeepers, and undefeatable force, sworn to uphold the Crown.

“Yes. I’ll partner it,” I had said. What else could I do?

A second later, excruciating pain blazed along my arm and into my head, slamming all the breath from my body. That is all I remember for I woke up upon the road with Sir Paul dead beside me and a wary knife quiescent within my arm, her sentience a curled kernel of potential inside my mind.

The uproar had been both private and public. It did not seem to matter to my husband, the Church, or the Crown that I quickly controlled Havarr. That was beside the point: a woman with a wary knife was, by nature, a threat to public safety. The Prince Regent politely asked me to retire to the family estate. The Wary Brotherhood was not so polite. They banned me from their membership: a woman had no right to hold a knife or sully their righteous order. Without support from any direction—including my own family—I retired to Grayle Hall. For the past three years I had studied every theory about the Celestials, trained to fight with Havarr, and received those friends who trusted my strength of mind enough to take tea with me and my knife.

Would all that training be enough to save me now?

The older RCP soldier leaned to the transmittere. It let out a mechanical crackle and I heard, “Lady Carnford has arranged for your horse to be stabled. Please go to the main entrance.”

If my horse was to be stabled, Isabel expected the call to last more than half an hour. Or perhaps she did not expect me to leave. I felt Havarr stir along my arm, roused by the quickening of my heart.

Her question formed in my mind. Slice?

I mentally shrugged. Perhaps. Then, added: Probably.

The gate ground open, rattling across its tracks. I flicked the reins and drove through into the sound-protected roadway that led to the main buildings. The transparent walls and curved roof provided a view of the lift-off grid and the bustle of men and carts loading cargo into the ship. It did not, however, shield the unearthly caustic odor of fuel that hung over the area.

Although not generally known, the supply of the Celestial fuel around the world was all but gone. The Royal Society had been frantically working to find a combustible replacement—a way to keep our English ships in the air and perhaps one day fly to the stars—but so far nothing adequate had been found.

At the very end of the safety area stood the scout ship, the manifestation of the fuel problem. It had been an escort to the plague fleet, smaller and with weaponry, but its fuel source was even more incomprehensible. So much so, the engineers and scientists had never managed to spark any kind of life within it. And so it had been left to languish at the port, all its potential deteriorating into ruin.

I felt some empathy.

I drew up outside the front portico and waited for the RCP soldier-groom to go to my horse’s head. Above us rose Grayle Tower. I craned my head back to take in all twelve floors of the neoclassical façade. My sister-in-law waited at the top and I did not know if I would be meeting Forgiving Isabel or Vengeful Isabel. The odds were even.

To outside eyes, I knew I looked composed—it was the Grayle way—but every nerve in my body had coiled into readiness. If Charles was dying, or already dead, then his social and political protection was gone. My time had run out. Vengeful Isabel may have already called the Brotherhood. If she had, then forty-nine men and their forty-nine wary knives would be waiting for me inside, all intent on prising Havarr from my dead abomination hands.

#

I paused in the tower doorway, listening. The immense marble entrance hall stood empty, the butler’s desk unattended.

All quiet. Rather too quiet.

Seek the others, I ordered Havarr.

She phased out from her skin-sheath, the sudden loss of her weight within my arm a familiar jolt. Her elegant length hovered at eye level—no handle or hilt, just blade etched with its singular starburst design—then arrowed towards the back wall and disappeared through the marble. I felt her phase and solidify, phase and solidify as she swept through the building to the very edge of our energy bond—a radius of about three hundred feet——each shift like a tiny ebb and flow of power through me.

No other wary knives. No Brotherhood.

Yet I felt her unease as she resheathed into my forearm, only one layer under the skin instead of her usual three. Battle ready.

I stepped into the hall and looked up the impressive marble staircase. Shall we see what this is about? I asked. Her tense assent twanged across my mind.

Onwards, and upwards, then.

To add to the strangeness, Isabel stood at the top of the twelve flights waiting for me, impeccably dressed in a garnet silk gown and a delicate lace cap. No footmen and no butler. But then each floor had been empty of staff too. The building had been cleared.

She watched me ascend the last few steps. I expected a comment about my breeches and boots, but she only squinted in sartorial pain and gave a nod of welcome.

“Mathilda.”

I returned the nod, but before I could say anything she added, “Charles is dead. You should have given him the knife.”

Two years ago, at our last encounter, Isabel had demanded that I give Havarr to Charles to ensure his survival and the family’s fortune. A wary knife changed a person, their constitution enhanced in many ways including increased stamina and strength. But there has always been only one way to separate a wary knife from its partner: death. I suppose a good and dutiful wife would have at least considered the demand. I, with a regrettable lack of propriety, told her to piss off.

Now, she observed my silence with pursed lips. “Still the same Mathilda, I see. Come, we have business.” She turned and headed down a corridor, the walls lined with portraits of glowering Grayle forebears.

Although I had not seen Charles for nigh on three years, it still felt like I could not breathe. I pressed my hand to my chest as I followed my sister-in-law, feeling my steady heartbeat. One did not spend twelve years alongside a man without some emotion becoming attached to him, good or bad. In our case, good and then very bad.

Isabel stopped outside her private chamber. Her face—so alike her brother’s with its jutting nose and broad forehead—was composed, but bore the swollen evidence of past tears. If Charles was dead, she should be wearing mourning black. The news had not been released.

“When?” I asked softly.

“Early this morning.”

“His heart?”

She bent her head in stiff acknowledgment.

Charles had been born with the Grayle weak heart. “I’ll not make old bones,” he often said in the early years of our arranged marriage. The prophecy had upset me then, when we were still trying to like each other. Later, when I hated him, it had been a hope and a wish. Now it was a piercing regret. We had lost the chance for anything else: forgiveness, friendship, even perhaps an odd sense of family.

“I am following Charles’s last instructions,” Isabel said, voice clipped.

She opened the door and stood aside for me to enter.

The room had been redecorated since I last visited: the walls papered in the new fad for the botanical, and the old heavy mahogany furniture replaced by a deep blue, velvet chaise lounge and a secretaire in the scrolled and gilded Roman style. In pride of place near the window—and somewhat at odds with the Empire theme—stood a command chair from one of the plague ships, its smooth metal lines and attenuated shape built for the strange, elegant length of its Celestial captain.

The door to the adjoining room opened and an older man, dressed in the sober black garb of law, entered and carefully closed the door behind him. He held a number of wax-sealed packets.

“Countess Grayle, may I present Mr. Dorner,” Isabel said behind me. “Charles’s private solicitor.”

Mr. Dorner straightened his waistcoat with a quick tug upon its hem, and bowed.

“My condolences, Countess. Forgive me for rushing through the niceties, but time is of the essence and we must conclude this business before Lord Grayle’s demise is made public. His Lordship gave me instructions to be enacted upon the event of his death. As you know, his estate, including the earldom and Grayle Celestial Transport, is entailed and will pass to his cousin upon his death.”

I winced at the word entailed. The loss of the estate and title to cousin Gregory, a profligate of the first order, was my fault; I had not produced the all-important heir.

Mr. Dorner held up the packet, showing me the unbroken seal with the Grayle bear pressed into the wax. “If I may, I shall open it and read the contents to you both. It is what Lord Grayle wished.”

I nodded. So, Isabel was to be witness. To what?

Mr. Dorner broke the seal with a flick of his thumb and spread the paper. He looked up. “The document is dated yesterday, my ladies.” He began to read. “I, Charles David Paul Hallam, Earl of Grayle, do state that I am the father of the male child George Charles Paul, borne by Miss Katherine Amelia Holland, of London. I also state that, Mathilda Elizabeth Grayle signed the attached divorce settlement and that after that signature I married Miss Katherine Amelia Holland by special license and do hereby acknowledge her issue as my rightful heir.”

“There is a child?” Isabel demanded.

“Yes, my lady.” Mr. Dorner shot an anxious look in my direction. “There is a son. Born one month ago. A currently illegitimate son.” He cleared his throat and addressed me. “It was Lord Grayle’s dying wish that you sign this divorce document…” he held up another packet “…so that his marriage to Miss Holland is—or should I say will be or, more to the point, will have been…” he gave a small shrug at the awkward grammar of fraud “…legal, thus making the child heir to his estate.”

A son. I knew there had been another woman, but a son? I could not seem to make any sound.

“He has already married her?” Isabel asked, not yet following Charles’s twisted path. “But he is still married to you, Mathilda.”

Mr. Dorner’s pasty skin deepened into a flush. “The ceremony occurred yesterday, but the date has not yet been placed upon the document. It will be written in after the date of the divorce has been affixed.”

“A divorce needs to be ratified by an Act of Parliament,” Isabel said sharply. Ah, she had arrived.

“Lord Grayle has a great deal of influence,” Mr. Dorner said. “If Countess Grayle signs, it will be...will have been...ratified last week.”

Fury finally seared through my numb shock. “No!” Havarr phased out of my arm into the air beside me, twirling into a blur, her battle scream rising in my mind.

Mr. Dorner and Isabel flinched, both of them hastily backing away.

“Mathilda!”

The terror in Isabel’s voice broke through my rage. I drew deep breaths, forcing back the violence of my emotions. Havarr’s scream softened into a hum of disquiet, her battle twirl slowing into a gentle rocking in the air.

“Please, Mathilda. You must sign. For the family,” Isabel said.

“Fuck the family.”

Isabel gaped at the monstrous profanity, but rallied admirably. “Fuck you, too. You owe Charles an heir. You owe the family.”

If I signed, even the small protection provided by my widowhood would be stripped from me. So, yes, fuck the family that had thrown me to the wolves once, and was ready to do so again.

“No. We are done here.”

Mr. Dorner held up his hands. “Please, my lady. There is more.” He hastily crossed to the adjoining doorway.

Good God, he had not brought the child here, had he? I was a walking target—anyone near me could be destroyed too. Before I could voice my consternation, Mr. Dorner opened the adjoining door.

“Mr. Wainright, please join us,” he said.

A wiry man with dark skin appeared at the doorway. Thank God, no child.

The man looked to be in his fourth decade, although it was possible his unkempt state belied his age. His hair was long and tied back in an old-fashioned queue and his dress was a deplorable collection of scuffed boots, oil-stained breeches and worn olive jacket. He studied our tableau for a moment then turned his attention fully upon Havarr: a reasonable reaction to a knife rocking in the air. Even so, his face held no fear. Only keen curiosity.

Mr. Dorner ushered him further into the room, “My ladies, allow me to introduce Mr. Elster Wainright, natural philosopher.”

Mr. Wainright bowed, that keen curiosity now directed at me. “I prefer scientist. Allow me to extend my condolences, Countess.”

The name Wainright was familiar. Yes, I had come across it in my reading. “Good God, you are the freed man who discovered how plague ships maintain fresh air.”

“I am, my lady.”

A marvelous discovery, made even more remarkable since he was self-taught and had been denied membership to the Royal Society. A fellow outcast. Still… “I do not understand Mr. Wainright’s presence at a family meeting, Mr. Dorner.”

The solicitor wet his lips. “Lord Grayle understood that there is no obligation for you to sign the divorce document or indeed any perceivable incentive.” He glanced at Havarr, but did not state the obvious: nor, any way of being forced. “So, he proposed the following. On signature, ownership of the scout ship, and all within it, will pass to you, effective immediately.”

“A wreck?” I stared at him, fighting the desire to slap his plump face. Did he truly think that would prompt me to sign? All the fear I had worked so hard to quash welled up inside me. “I do not think you quite understand the level of danger that is approaching, Mr. Dorner. As soon as my husband’s death is known—and it will be soon, if it is not already discovered—I will be hunted by the Wary Brotherhood until I am dead.” I stopped. Havarr had begun to twirl beside my head again. I drew air through clenched teeth and steadied my mind until Havarr slowed. “I do not need a wreck. I need a bloody army.”

“No, no,” Mr. Wainright said. “She is far from a wreck, my lady. Three years ago, Lord Grayle set me the task to investigate the scout and the possibility of her leaving the Earth. I believe I have found a way.”

“Leave Earth?” The idea was at once full of terror and breathless hope. Could I yet survive this day? “Do you believe you have found a way or do you know, Mr. Wainright?” I demanded.

Mr. Wainright tilted his head thoughtfully. “Well, it is a working hypothesis.” He glanced at my face and added quickly, “A solid one.”

“So, you don’t know.”

“I think it is powered by one or more wary knives and I have not had access to any to test the hypothesis.”

They are here, Havarr said in my mind. She began to spin near my ear.

My pulse leaped. How many?

Two.

I crossed to the window. In the distance, two men on horseback remonstrated with the guards in the gatehouse. Both horsemen wore the extravagantly caped greatcoat and gray beaver hat that were the unofficial uniform of the Brotherhood. A scouting group, or merely the advance guard?

I saw the flash of metal as a wary knife emerged into the air beside one of the horseman then disappeared. Frenzied sprays of red crisscrossed the inside glass of the box. I closed my eyes; they did not have to kill the guards. That poor boy.

We can hold against two, Havarr said in my mind.

Perhaps. But they were only the beginning.

I swung around to face Mr. Wainright again. “Why should I trust you?” In all truth, my options were narrowing down to this man, but too much relied upon his claims.

He straightened. “All I can offer is my word, my lady, as a scientist.” He opened his hand and smiled; a rather mischievous expression that brought a startling youth to his face. “And of course this.”

We all stared at the tiny silver mechanism upon his palm, shaped like a diamond.

Isabel leaned forward. “What is it?”

His long thumb touched the top of it. And then he was no longer standing before us.

“God save us,” Isabel whispered. “He is gone.”

“I am still here, my lady.” Mr. Wainright’s voice rose from the same place he had previously stood.

“Ah, it hides you in plain sight.” I peered at the empty space. “Are you phasing like a wary knife?”

A flicker of light and then the man stood before us again, his hand still outstretched. “I do not believe so. It is a disruption of the light upon the eye, I think.”

“Can you move around with it?” Such a device would be very useful in a fight.

Mr. Wainright shook his head. “Ah, there’s the rub. The human eye is conditioned to the perception of movement and so, at present, it really only works when one is still.” He gave a small sheepish smile. “Or moving very slowly.”

So, not that useful.

They are coming, Havarr reported, her spinning increasing into a blur. They are all coming. Beyond the crossroad.

That was barely ten minutes away. Forty-nine men. Forty-nine wary knives. My time had run out. I must decide: did I sign and save an innocent child from a life ruined by bastardry, or refuse to sign and hug my hurt to me for the remainder of my life? However short that might be.

“Mr. Dorner, show me where to sign,” I said, waving the solicitor into haste. “Mr. Wainright, is there a way to the scout that is not across the lift-off grid?”

“There are tunnels underground, my lady, for transport of cargo. They will take us most of the way to the ship.”

Mr. Dorner laid out the papers upon the secretaire and dipped the quill into the ink.

“You should read it, my lady,” he said.

“In ten minutes, either I will be dead or I will no longer be on this planet, Mr. Dorner. There is no time for legal niceties.” I completed my name with my usual flourish and jabbed the pen back into the inkwell.

“Isabel, we have never been friends, but trust me now. You and Mr. Dorner must go immediately, before the Wary Brotherhood arrive. Do not head out the front gate.”

Isabel nodded. “Godspeed, Mathilda. Thank you for signing.”

Mr. Dorner hurriedly collected the papers and his hat.

He bowed. “Thank you, my lady. I hope…”

“So do I, Mr. Dorner. Goodbye.”

He followed Isabel out of the room, their footsteps along the corridor a quick tattoo of alarm.

I turned to Mr. Wainright who had retrieved his beaver hat and stood watching me. “We have ten minutes Mr. Wainright. Show me the way to the tunnels and the Scout.”

#

Mr. Wainright led the way down the worker’s staircase, our progress echoing in the deep stairwell. Ten years of service had left their mark upon the gray walls—scrapes, smears, gouges—and the air had a staleness, underpinned by the ever-present caustic stink. Havarr phased in and out above us, checking each floor as we descended.

“Did you know that your knife is the only one with a full starburst etched upon it?” Mr. Wainright asked, glancing up as Havarr hovered a few yards ahead then disappeared again.

“Of course.” In fact I had found illustrations of all the starburst configurations on the other knives and memorized them in the hope that it would make sense one day. “The current theory—from Mr. Bentham—is that the symbol is the name of the Celestial who held the knife.”

We rounded another landing.

“Possible, I suppose,” Mr. Wainright said. “May I ask, does the knife speak to you?”

“In a way. She understands my needs and responds to them.”

“I see. Have you ever asked her about the ships or the Celestials?”

I cast a scornful look at his back. “Naturally, but whatever information she offers is in the language of the Celestials and it does not seem in her ability to translate or in mine to understand.”

We rounded the fourth floor landing.

“I figured as much: the knives are the first logical source of information and we still do not have much knowledge about the ships at all.” Mr. Wainright looked back over his shoulder. “Forgive me for speaking plainly, my lady, but I do not think you will survive long in the ship without my knowledge of its systems. If you will allow, I would like to accompany you.”

The sheer impropriety of the suggestion took me aback. The scandal would be explosive. Still, the man had a point. Moreover, I would place odds that the universe beyond England and Earth would not give a rat’s arse about us inhabiting the same ship.

“I will allow it, Mr. Wainright.” I grasped the worn banister a little harder, steadying myself into the knowledge that I had just agreed to travel the stars with a stranger. “But first we must make it to the scout. Two of the Brotherhood are already here and the rest are on their way. They cannot risk killing me until their new knife candidate is nearby, so we can expect an attempt to disable me or render me insensible. We must aim for the same. They cannot risk untethering Havarr and we cannot risk untethering either of their knives.”

We passed the entrance-hallway level.

“You seem very calm about it,” Mr. Wainright said, his breath coming harder. Twelve flights down was a long way to run, especially if one did not have the benefit of enhanced knife stamina.

“I have always known this day would come.”

It was the truth, but it was also true I was not as calm as I appeared.

We reached the bottom of the stairwell. The air was substantially cooler underground, the walls whitewashed stone with oil lamps affixed in plain sconces.

“Where now, Mr. Wainright?”

He bent to catch his breath from the speed of our descent and pointed to an archway ahead. “That will take us out to the main cargo tunnel.”

The corridor sloped upwards and the sound of industry reached us first. Men’s voices and the grind of cartwheels upon paving. We emerged cautiously into the wide and well-lit underground thoroughfare that serviced the lift-off grid.

A cart pulled by a pony and stacked with bales rumbled past, its driver dipping his head into a quick bow at the sight of us. More carts and workers made their way along the cobbled tunnel towards a wide ramp that clearly led up to the cargo ship being loaded with supplies.

Mr. Wainright turned left, against the tide. I followed him. We kept close to the wall, our progress marked by bows and some bewilderment as the workers caught sight of Havarr flying above us.

“Do you see that ramp at the very end?” Mr. Wainright said, pointing to the dim, deserted recesses of the tunnel. “That leads up to the scout.”

Two are here, Havarr said in my mind.

Ahead, I saw a flash of metal in the air. Another wary knife.

I grabbed Mr. Wainright’s arm. “They have found us.”

We stopped beside a cart full of metal equipment and another stacked with tea chests drawn up side by side. The drivers, in mid conversation, stared at us, then at the knives hanging in the air.

“Leave!” I ordered.

A second wary knife appeared beside the first, both high in the air and slowly rotating. The drivers swung down from their seats and backed away, abandoning their carts and ponies.

Havarr squared up opposite her counterparts, her spin in time with the hard beat of my heart.

“I have an idea,” Mr. Wainright murmured. He ducked behind the equipment cart, leaving me to stand alone against the two men who emerged from a small ramp ahead. The men who had killed the gate guards.

“Countess Grayle,” one of them called, “the Brotherhood has a proposition.” They strode towards me, their greatcoats fanning out behind them. I recognized the tall, thin speaker: Sir John Pelwyn. We used to play whist together in another lifetime.

“Sir John, I know what kind of proposition the Brotherhood is offering,” I called back. “I warn you, stop now.”

The two men halted ten or so yards from me. Their knives still hovered between us.

Sir John held up his hands: a show of conciliatory palms. “Allow me to introduce my knife—Denas—and this is Mr. Seaford and his knife Fencar.” It was the polite Brotherhood greeting: introduce man and knife. Sir John had always been a stickler for the niceties. Mr. Seaford, a great deal shorter and wider than Sir John, bowed. “You must know you cannot keep the knife now,” Sir John added. “We have a way to remove Havarr from you without harm.”

Sir John had been a reasonably good card player, but he’d always had a nervous habit when he strategically lost tricks. A compression of his lips. Right now, his lips had all but disappeared.

“We all know that is not possible,” I said. “You are lying.”

He lowered his hands. I glanced across the carts. No sign of Mr. Wainright. Had he fled?

Behind me, at a safe distance, a crowd of workers had gathered to watch.

“Do you intend to attack me, two men upon one woman?” I challenged, raising my voice so that the spectators could hear. “If that is the case, you have no honor.”

I knew Sir John prided himself upon his good name. He tilted his head: a silent command to his comrade. Mr. Seaford stepped back.

Now the odds were better.

“It will only take one man, Countess,” Sir John said, “and I am sorry for it.”

His knife phased out.

Havarr screamed within my mind, Jump!

I jumped and landed a few feet forward. Sir John’s knife phased back into the air where my right heel would have been. Ah, going for the Achilles. Havarr slammed into Denas, the clang of metal spinning both knives across the cobbles.

Keep Denas busy, I ordered.

Both knives phased. I ran at Sir John. He had not yet moved: a contemptuous immobility.

Right, Havarr yelled. I lunged to my right as Denas phased into the air inches away from my legs, turned and slashed at me. Havarr phased into a block. The force sent a shiver through my mind. She hammered a series of blows upon her counterpart, driving it back.

The crowd started to yell their support. At the corner of my eye, I saw Mr. Seaford shift upon his feet, no doubt eager to join the fray.

Time to attack.

Shoulder, I ordered.

Havarr phased. I saw Sir John’s eyes widen; his knife had sensed the attack. He ducked to his left. Havarr missed his body by a hairsbreadth. Denas blocked. Now was my chance.

Two steps, then all my weight upon my left leg. I whipped into a round kick. The full length of my boot sole slammed into Sir John’s jaw. The force jarred up my leg as I landed. He staggered back then toppled to the ground, the shock and my boot heel imprinted upon his face. No man expected a woman to kick him in the face. Lud, they barely knew we could run.

Denas phased out and reappeared above Sir John, hovering above his fallen partner: protection mode. The man was out cold.

Behind me the crowd cheered and whistled, their approbation amplified tenfold in the tunnel.

It was not finished yet. Mr. Seaford, gaping at the insensate Sir John, gathered his powerful frame into righteous indignation.

“I am not such a gentleman as Sir John,” he said, eyes narrowing.

“Neither am I,” a voice said.

Behind him, Mr. Wainright appeared from nowhere, swinging a thick metal rod. The crowd gasped. In reflex, Mr. Seaford spun around. The full momentum of the rod connected with his sneering face. He dropped where he stood. After a stunned moment, the crowd clapped and whistled.

Mr. Wainright peered down at the sprawled man, rod still raised. “Good God, I haven’t killed him, have I?”

I ran to check. If Seaford were dead, his knife would be untethered and kill everyone in the tunnel. The air above him shivered then his knife phased above him, hovering.

Thank God.

“They are both unconscious. We are safe,” I said, delighted and, I had to admit, relieved by Mr. Wainright’s commitment. “An excellent strategy.”

The Brotherhood are on the grid, Havarr said.

The real fight was on its way.

“The others are here, Mr. Wainright! We must go now!”

He dropped the rod, its clanging bounce ringing out behind us as we ran towards the Scout. Towards possible salvation.

#

“Where are they?” Mr. Wainright asked, gasping between each word. We still had a good five hundred yards to cover before we reached the ramp.

I posed the question to Havarr. She phased out then back above me, bringing bad news.

“Forty-eight, on horseback, near the cargo ship,” I repeated.

“Forty-eight? But with you and those two down there, that makes fifty-one. I thought there were only fifty knives.”

“They have brought an extra man for Havarr when I am dead.”

“Goddamn them.”

We finally reached the scout ramp. The paved incline was not overly steep but it slowed Mr. Wainright’s pace. He dropped back, stumbling. His hat dislodged and rolled down the slope. I grabbed his hand and pulled, his weight a searing drag on my hand and shoulder joints.

“I cannot,” he panted. “Go ahead.”

“Keep moving.”

The top of the ramp was in sight, the view beyond the archway filled with the scout’s huge sled-like landing runners and pocked underside. Would we have enough time to get inside? The Brotherhood could not kill me before their chosen man was close by; the exchange of knife partnership had to be made before actual death. But at any moment, all forty-seven knives could come at me.

We broke out into the shadow of the scout.

Some kind of panic had set in around the cargo ship at the other end of the grid. Men running, ponies galloping, carts tipping over, sending bales and boxes across the flagstones. The Brotherhood had not factored in the effect of their knives flying past the workers. The posse splintered into three groups of horsemen threading their way around the mayhem. I was still beyond the limit of their knife energy bonds, but it would not be long before I was within range.

Gasping painfully, Mr. Wainright pointed to the bottom of the scout. “Door. Over there,” he managed.

We ran to the octagonal opening set into the body of the ship with a set of stairs that were definitely not built for human anatomy—the rise far too high and bent, and the steps too narrow.

Catet, Havarr said in my mind. I did not understand the word, but it felt like home.

“Climb it like a ladder on all fours,” Mr. Wainright instructed. “Like this.”

I followed him up the metal construction, the oddly shaped edges catching at my fingers and ripping my lace gloves. As I hauled myself into the ship, I looked back across the grid. The Brotherhood posse had reformed and was galloping towards us.

Mr. Wainright spread both hands across a panel in the wall and the stairs retracted with a mechanical whine. The octagonal doorway closed behind us.

“Up here,” Mr. Wainright said.

He led the way through a cargo hold, crammed with crates labeled tea, beans, flour, salt. I heard a soft clucking. Good God, a coop of live chickens too. Strips of light—without candle or oil lamp—were set within the walls and illuminated the whole area. A marvel.

“You have found the ship’s power?” I said.

“Not really. Only for some of the basic systems.” He pointed to a door as we ran past. “That is the oxygen garden. And beside it, the water storage.”

He looked up another strange set of steps. “And that is the bridge.”

He made way for me. I felt Havarr’s excitement as I climbed.

The bridge had the dimensions of a respectable drawing room, and indeed, a large fleur-de-lis Aubusson rug had been laid down. A window wrapped around the sloping front, extending to become part of the floor. Two Chesterfield leather armchairs had been bolted down to look out upon the view, replacing, no doubt, the salvaged command chairs. The walls were covered in banks of odd buttons and toggles, but the strangest instrument was a huge frame in the shape of a diamond set across the back wall. I ran to the window. The Brotherhood had passed the cargo ship. By my reckoning they were less than a minute away from launching their knives.

“Do you have any idea what to do?” Mr. Wainright asked, climbing the last of the steps.

I stared at him. “No. I thought you had some theory.”

He gestured to the diamond frame. “That is my theory. I thought you would be able to ask your knife.”

“I don’t understand her language. I told you that!”

He hooked his hands into his hair. “I don’t know what to do.”

Havarr spun beside me, her agitation reflecting my own. I had to try.

What is the diamond? I asked.

Aridyi?

It was a question. Not an answer. But behind it, I felt a gathering within her power. Time to play the odds.

Yes, Aridyi!

It was as if I had finally unleashed a straining hound. She flew into the center of the diamond and spun upon her tip. The frame burst into blue energy around her. Now I understood. Havarr was not only her name, it was her position. She screamed, silent to my ears but blasting through my mind and body. I doubled over. No, not a scream, a command. To the other knives.

“Mr. Wainright, down!” I launched myself at the man and caught him around the waist, crashing full length upon the rug. A scandalous tangle of arms and legs.

Forty-nine wary knives slammed into the air above us. A wave of energy pressed us against the floor. With breathtaking speed, one knife after another locked into the diamond around Havarr. As the final knife clicked into place, the ship roared into life. Every bank of buttons and toggles lit up and I felt the landing runners retract.

The ship lifted into the air, ready for my command.

Dear God, I could feel the ship. Havarr and I were the ship. And all fifty wary knives were now under my control. All of them. When the Brotherhood worked out what had happened, they would be livid.

Ridec pah? And I knew what Havarr asked. Go now?

“Yes, ridec pah,” I yelled.

The ship gathered herself, the power thrumming through the knives. Through me. Something to explore—to revel in—later. Right now, I had a ship to launch.

“Mr. Wainright,” I said, pulling my arms free from under his body, “I advise you to get into a chesterfield. We are about to take-off.”

We clambered up from the rug and flung ourselves into the armchairs. Through the window at our feet, I saw the Brotherhood wrench their horses around and flee in all directions.

“Dear God, it is happening! It is really happening!” Mr. Wainright said, the wonder in his voice almost matching my own.

We launched, the thrust pressing us back into the chairs. The power, the glory of it all closed my eyes for a second. My mind full of speed, trajectory, and a dizzying sense of freedom. I did not know where we were going but, for now, going was enough.

“Are you doing this? Is this you?” Mr. Wainright asked over the rising hum of acceleration.

I gathered all my strength and leaned forward to look out the window again. Below us the scattered Brotherhood dwindled into specks upon the shrinking lift-off grid. Too bad I could not see their faces.

“Yes, this is me,” I said and smiled.

 

 

 

The Movers of the Stones

By Neil Gaiman

 

 

Early afternoon, as the sun was setting, I took a piece of mudstone,

flaked by cunning hands twelve thousand years ago,

from the pile where the archaeologists discarded their waste,

took a crayon of brickish ochre from the beach. I coloured in a jut of beach-rock,

where a chance arrangement of lines and dents had made a fish.

Or I revealed a fish that had been waiting in the rock.

Or thousands of years ago, in that rock, someone had carved a fish.

 

To the south, up on the hill, Vikings made a village:

huts, longhouses, and even a hall. The stone outlines remain,

each habitation's corpse limned by heather and bracken.

Vantage over the bay. They could see for miles, there.

 

The bones of the Earth are stones. We move them, split them, flake them,

leave cups and lines and hollows in them. Leave stone behind.

When we leave no trace of flesh or hair or breath.

When we leave no trace of wood or thatch or corn.

When we leave no trace of bone or ash or blood.

As the winter sun rises and falls like the opening of a single eye

or a bird that flies low on the horizon, then returns to dark

and all the stars there ever were come out.

 

To the north, on a different hill, a stone circle,

near to the other stones, the ones the old man called the graveyard,

where something happened, perhaps six thousand years ago.

The standing centre stone

where a sharp stone edge cut the child's throat at sun-up,

in the mid bleakwinter, to bring the sun and warmth and life back to the land.

 

If one day, as it may prove, the sun still burns,

The ones who come after the ones who come after us

will see, beneath different star-patterns, the old stones here.

The cairn that keeps the wights beneath from walking,

besides our Flora's secret tumbledown house.

They will observe our tumbled walls and boundaries,

and one might find the fine and fancy neolithic stone

(carved and hollowed by hands now dead a million years)

I use to keep the lid on the bin, when the wind gets high.

 

They will not know we called ourselves the thinking people.

They will wonder about us, then say to each other that

we moved the rocks to nest in, or flaked them by instinct.

And, pointing to an ochre fish carved on a rock,

or picking up a flake of mudstone, categorise us,

with the landslides and the volcanoes,

as the movers of the stones.

 

 

 

Old Souls

By Aiki Flinthart

 

 

On the day that could change everything for me, the sky roils in shades of grief and sorrow. Behind the fallen city, clouds curl into fists that pound the darkening sky and cracked earth. Crumbling buildings—broken teeth in a vast, voiceless mouth—throw purple shadows through warped glass and onto the cottage’s bare floor. Fine white dust billows before the storm, rushes towards the village that huddles between the sluggish river and tangled, regrowing forest.

The men of the house pace outside on the porch in the fading light. Their boots grate on sand; their coughs and muttered conversation are almost inaudible over a distant rumble of thunder. They will stay there until I call, for they are not needed for the birth of a girl nor the death of an old woman.

As the storm thickens, I instruct Maya, the elderly soul-bringer, to shutter the windows. Best to keep out any wind-borne toxins left by the long-vanished, unsouled civilization. New lungs should take their first breaths in a clean world; start fresh—as our people had so many years ago. After the collapse.

Lying on the bloodied bed, her traditional black shift high on her hips, Allody pushes back sweat-soaked hair and blinks blearily at me.

“Is it time, Soul-Master Jena?” the young mother-to-be whispers, her face drawn with the pain of a long labor.

“I’m not…” I resist the restless impulse to deny the title of soul-master or to shove bloody fingers through my short hair. I’ve done this a hundred times and more. I am twenty-seven. Young for the honor to come, but experienced enough to deserve it.

Maybe this will be the one.

My grandmother used to be a soul-breaker, like me. She never made it to soul-master. Perhaps this time I’ll finally earn the title. The title my grandmother deserved. Then I can finish her work. Show the Council how wrong they are.

“Yes, it’s time,” I say to Allody and check the baby’s crowning head. “One more push.” A pair of blue-metal scissors lies heavy in my hand. Heavy and sharp. The cutting of so many cords and souls has yet to dull their edge. Mine, yes. The scissors’, no. “Is your soul-bringer ready?”

Old Maya touches her forehead in a commoner’s sign of respect to a soul-master and shuffles back to her granddaughter’s bed. “I’m ready, Soul-Master Jena.”

I can’t let it pass a second time, much as I want to.

“I’m not yet a master.” I try to keep my voice steady and calm. “Still a breaker. Maybe soon, though. Perhaps…” I brandish the scissors; the symbol and tool of my office, “…the piece of your soul I break off so I can bind the rest to this little babe will elevate me to master and into the Council.” I give a tight smile. “We never know which soul-bringing and breaking will do it. Not until I cut the cord.”

Let it be this time, I pray silently. If breaking for this child paves my path to joining the Council, there is a chance the soul-masters will finally listen to me. Then we can save more people from this painful, unnecessary form of passing.

I shouldn’t have to replace one life with another. We have enough food and water to support bigger families.

All lives are of value, not just the newborn.

I touch Maya’s blue-veined hand. “I do hope it’s this birth. The family that helps a breaker to become a master is richly rewarded by the Council.”

“That’d be nice,” Maya agrees. “Nice to leave my grandbaby and her girl a softer path through this world. Softer than the one I had, anyways.”

It takes an effort not to glance around the small cottage, with its uneven walls and floor made of broken concrete. The storm winds whistle through gaps stuffed with rags and mud. A faint haze of dust, smelling of ancient, bitter death, swirls in the room. She’s right. Even in these times, under the too-careful governance of the Council, some have easier lives than others.

Allody lets out a little gasp and presses a hand to her side. “Breaker Jena!”

“Hurry, now, Maya,” I say. “The babe will come any moment. You must be ready for the taking. We only have the small time it takes for you to pass over, to transfer your soul to the child. And it must be completed within half an hour of first breath or your soul-offering won’t bind to her.”

With a weary sigh, Maya lets her long gray hair loose from its bun and discards layer upon layer of patched, gray and brown shawls and skirts. I don’t help. As the mother of two and grandmother of two, she knows what to do. She has been prepared since we knew Allody was having a girl and needed a female soul-bringer.

Finally, clad only in the bringer’s traditional scarlet shift, Maya crawls into bed with the mother-to-be. Their hands clasp. Tears shimmer in both sets of rust-brown eyes.

“You sure, Grandma?” Allody asks, her voice breaking. “I’ll miss you so much!”

Her grandmother nods. “This body is old and tired. Time for a new one.” Her wrinkled smile widens. “Anyways, you wouldn’t want your baby to be an unsouled, would you? Caring for naught but themselves. Killing off the world with greed.” She jerks a thumb at the window, at the ruins silhouetted against a stormy sunset. “You know how it goes. A life for a life. An old soul into a new body. Gotta break and bind to keep the goodness in.”

This is the way of things since the passing of the unsouled and their near destruction of our world. But it doesn’t need to be. I press my lips tight, holding in the urge to lecture. This ridiculous old belief must stop.

Could I…? I glance at the young mother. No, not this time. Here, there’s no way to hide what I want to do. She’s healthy and the birth easy. Her husband and father stand outside, waiting to witness the ceremony; waiting for the new little soul-taker to absorb Maya’s worn soul, minus the small piece I break off as my fee.

The men, the women, the whole village. They all wait for the child to no longer be an unsouled. No longer dangerous, like those whose city crumbles in the storm.

So we’re told.

No. This is not the child on whom to continue my tests. I need another birth with no witnesses and no soul-bringer. No blind followers of the Council’s doctrines.

Five women are gravid in this village and four in the next, including my own little sister—gentle, widowed, Freya. Soon there will be another newborn I do not have to break for or take for. Soon the Council will see their rituals are nothing but hollowness and control. Lies of spun sugar. Sweeteners for the bitterness of killing a grandparent to allow room for a baby in the world.

And they must see it, since there is no one to be Freya’s soul-bringer. If I help her birth an unsouled and the Council finds out, they will kill the child. Freya’s child. My family. That, I cannot allow.

Allody grunts and gives a little, whimpering cry. Her face reddens and she holds her breath. The child slides free of her mother’s body. Born into blood and storms.

I check her over while we wait for the afterbirth. The scissors cut through the cord with the strange crunching sound that always unnerves new mothers. Then I clean and swaddle and place the child between the two women.

Delight, regret, love, awareness of coming grief…all their feelings shine unguarded as Maya and Allody cradle the child and croon over tiny perfection.

At my call, the child’s father, uncle and grandfather shuffle into the room, hats in hand, bringing the dusty scent of death and the cold smell of autumn rain with them. When they stand, awed and awkward in the corner, I begin the final ritual.

The familiar Song of Taking falls from my mouth almost unheeded, its tune first rising, then cascading down. A minor key. Wistful. Full of loss. Behind me the men give forth soft harmonies that fill the room with gentle regret. Learned in childhood. Passed on from generation to generation, along with a belief that the souls are carried on cadence and rhythms and melody from one body to the next.

Reinforcing the Council’s grip on the world.

I hold the scissors in a trembling hand. There has to be another method. Why is it a life for a life, a soul given and taken? Surely it hasn’t always been this way?

Maya’s faded gaze catches mine. Her mouth twists into a wry, understanding smile. “Come, Breaker. You brought baby Dek, next door, into the world without help or singers last week, I hear. He is hale. Now it’s my great-grandchild’s turn.”

With fingers of paper and bird bone, she grasps my wrist. I swallow and steel myself to match the metal.

Maya’s hand is wrapped around mine, and mine around the scissor handles. Together we slip the sleek blue blades between her ribs. Her rheumy eyes fix on the babe then on Allody. Tears stream down the new mother’s face and she whispers “Thank you” to her grandmother.

Maya’s body tenses. A gasp flutters from her lips. Her blood stains the sheets and the child’s swaddling.

My fingers and blades glisten red as I cut her soul free of the small organ just below her heart. The pale, shining mirror of who she was falls into my waiting hand. A flat plane, like glass. A sharp reflection off water on a clean summer’s day.

Soul colors vary. Hers is the clearest, brightest I’ve seen in a while. Not a smudge of darkness to be seen. A good soul. The child will grow up kind and thoughtful.

If you believe the Council’s teachings.

I hesitate. No. I must follow through this time. I break a small shard off and hold it tight in one hand. It is cold, yet hot at once. Pains tingle up my arm but I cannot release it to freedom, or the binding won’t hold.

Allody unwraps her child. The baby girl’s legs kick feebly. Her little, perfect fingers grab at nothing. Dark hair lies plastered to her scalp.

With delicate care, I insert the largest part of her great-grandmother’s soul between brittle little ribs. She squalls and Allody stares at me, wide-eyed.

“It’s alright,” I reassure her. “That’s normal. It hurts and it won’t bind until I also put the broken piece where it belongs. But then it will heal without a scar and I’ll sing her to sleep.”

Next, I open my hand and catch the final splinter of Maya’s life between the scissor blades. A glittering fragment that will soon be part of me. Sucking a slow breath, I sing the soul-breaker’s song, trying to control the quaver in my voice. Major scale this time. A steady, unchanging tempo. A song of yearning. Of hope for the future, even when I can’t see any.

The blades cut neatly through the thick, pink scar tissue over my ribs. I barely feel the sting anymore. With my eyes closed, I find my soul’s holding place easily enough. The scissors drive further, in amongst the myriad of tiny fragments that are my broken, borrowed bits of soul.

That, I always feel. The pain of sliced flesh followed by the sharper, deeper, darker pain of carrying more and more pieces of other peoples’ lives.

How many can I hold? My mentor on the Council of soul-masters never mentioned such pain.

I withdraw the scissors.

I feel no different.

Not this time, then.

My jaw aches with tension. My shoulders, too.

Surely, I’ve taken enough? Broken enough. Absorbed enough. Killed enough grandparents. Bound enough squalling infants to goodness.

When will these endless exchanges end and leave me enlightened; wise; a soul-master? Able to change the Council’s old ways for new.

My throat closes but I continue to sing. The men’s voices swell into joy and brilliance, filling the tiny room, clearing a way through the thunder now raging outside.

I dab my blood onto the babe’s closed wound, and murmur her new name, Maya. And it is done. She ceases to cry. Her blue eyes open and stare straight at me with her great-grandmother’s look of wisdom already showing.

Beside the child, old Maya’s eyes blank and her final breath slips free on a soft sigh.

#

I am drenched when I reach my sister’s cottage, one village away. The storm has softened to a drizzle of tears, but another chases after and will roll over the house soon. Lightning claws at the low clouds. Thunder growls a second later.

My soul-breaker’s blue cloak is soaked through, the wool darkened to midnight. It weighs on my shoulders as heavily as old Maya’s death weighs on my mind. Things shouldn’t be this way.

I open our little house’s thick wooden door and hang my cloak to dry. My boots go neatly beside my sister’s… and another two pairs.

One I recognize. They belonged to my brother-in-law, but Freya can’t yet bear to give them away. Redil died six months ago. The unsouled’s city crushed him as he searched for salvage materials to fix a neighbor’s roof.

He was a good man. Kind. Intelligent. Now, he is lost. A human that cannot be replaced under the Council’s current laws. Just because his soul could not be retrieved in time and no new soul-takers were born.

I pause, staring at the other pair of boots. They are soul-master green. The color of the old forests, of algae, of envy. Veloni is here. My Council mentor and supervisor. The one who disagrees most with my ideas for how to move our people onto a more certain path to survival.

In the narrow entryway of neatly laid stone and thickly plastered walls, I rest my head against the wall and close my eyes. My body hurts. It always takes me a day or so to recover from a soul-break and absorption. But this is worse than usual. All of me aches and blood still seeps through the cut between my ribs. Have I done something wrong?

Or is it a sign that I’m close to transforming into a soul-master? Is that why Veloni is here?

The thought gives me strength. I transfer the blue-metal scissors to my skirt pocket and head for the warmth of the living space where the smell of rabbit stew lingers and my sister awaits my return.

“Jena!” Freya rises awkwardly from her seat before the fire. One hand presses into the small of her back, another helps push her from the chair. A grimace crosses her delicate, pale features. She is thinner than she should be at this late stage of pregnancy. The loss of Redil stole her appetite and her smile at once. I hurry to her side and help her stand. Her breath comes in quick little gasps. One hand strokes her swollen belly.

But she clasps my cold fingers with her warm ones. “You’re back safe. I was beginning to worry.” Her dark-shadowed eyes search my face and flick an uneasy look toward Veloni, seated in the second chair. If Freya is trying to give me a message, I cannot read it. I kiss her cheek and turn toward my mentor.

“Master Veloni.” I touch two fingers to the still-tender spot on my ribs in the traditional salute between soul-breakers and soul-masters.

She rises from the cracked-leather chair and returns the greeting. Her long, graying hair is tied in an intricate knot, decorated with simple wooden beads. Over a plain gray linen shift, she still wears her emerald cloak. So…she arrived before the storm broke and didn’t expect to stay long. I repress a smile for having kept her waiting.

There is an awkward silence as she looks me over, with one brow arched, dark eyes cool, narrow face a mask. My pale blue tunic is still spattered with blood. My hair damp and flat. I try not to fidget. I have helped as many children into the world as she ever did before becoming a master. More, in fact.

Thunder booms over the house, shaking stone and rattling glass.

Veloni switches her chill glance to Freya. “You will leave us in private.”

Freya starts, her eyes widening. She touches her forehead and hurries from the room. The bedroom door closes, but it’s thin enough that she can hear if she tries. And she will. We’ve always looked after each other.

I take a seat without being asked. It is my house, after all. The cushion is still warm from where Freya rested. It smells faintly of jasmine, her favorite flower. With a gracious wave I invite Veloni back into what is usually my seat.

Her lips thin for a moment, but she sits on the edge, her spine straight. Leather creaks beneath her. I deliberately relax, trying to ignore the heavy thudding of my heart, certain it must be audible in the silence between growls of thunder. A log cracks sharply in the fireplace, spitting sparks. My muscles tense but I keep my calm expression of inquiry.

Let her speak first. I will not be the supplicant again. Not until I’m a master. It’s been made clear to me, many times, that I’m below notice until then. The Council can’t be changed from the outside.

Veloni breaks our locked gaze first and brushes at her skirt, wiping away invisible obstacles to order.

“It has come to our attention,” she begins without looking at me, “that there are twenty-three children in the three villages you service.”

I suppress a smile and wait. Of course there are children, I resist saying. It’s my job.

She clears her throat. Her eyes—the tannin brown of deep forest pools—lift to mine. She examines my face like a panther waiting for the right moment to pounce. Waiting for me to make a mistake.

But I won’t. I’ve worked too hard for this. She’ll see I’m right. They all will.

Leaning forward, she narrows her gaze. “Twenty-three unsouled children in your villages.”

“And?” I lift both brows and allow a small smile to curl my lips. The Council can do nothing now. The children are too old to be soul-takers and their designated soul-bringers died at the births, believing their souls had been passed on to the newborns. But I crushed the pieces and scattered the glittering fragments of finished lives into the air. They floated, sparkling dust in the sunlight.

“Why would you do that?” Veloni’s tone is sharp. A frown pulls her thin brows close. She points vaguely at the cottage front door. “Why would you risk everything the Council has achieved since the fall of the unsouled cities? Everything we’ve planned?”

I grip the chair arms, my fingertips white. “Because you don’t listen.”

“Pfah!” She dismisses me with a wave. “We listened. Over and over. To you and to your grandmother, before. You want to let children be born without them receiving the souls of their elders. It is you who have not listened.”

My control breaks and I rise, standing over her. “I do. I listen to grandparents cry as they give up their souls and their lives too early. I listen to their families sing with voices strangled by tears. I listen to the sound of my scissors cutting the throats of children who have no soul-giver. Then I listen to their mothers cry in my embrace. And I have no comfort to give them but to say ‘The Council rules it so.’”

I rest my hands on her chair and push my face close to hers, whispering because my chest is too tight to hold enough breath for a shout.

“You,” I say. “You and the Council make me murder children for want of a soul they do not need. And I’ve proven that. Those twenty-three unsouled children are perfectly fine. Healthy. Happier than soul-takers, even. Their eyes are eager and innocent, not weighed down by tired old souls that have lived through too much loss.”

Veloni’s eyes glitter. Her jaw hardens then she opens lips stretched into thin slits.

A muffled cry of pain sounds from the bedroom. Something thuds against the door, then the floor. Another cry. More like a scream.

“Freya!” I rush to the door and push it open against a heavy weight on the other side. A watery, pinkish liquid smears across the flagstones.

Freya is slumped on the floor, arms wrapped about her belly, weeping. Darkness stains her shift.

“It’s coming, Jen,” she says, gasping. “But it’s too early.”

“No,” I reply, trying to sound soothing. “It’s fine. Only a couple of weeks. The babe will be fine.” But my heart stutters. She can’t lose the child as well as Redil.

I help her onto the huge bed we share and hurry about preparing hot water and cloths. My mind races. I had planned for her child to be unsouled, but how can I do that now, with my mentor in the room?

Veloni hasn’t left. She stands in a corner, watching, impassive, arms folded.

She speaks when all is ready and I am checking Freya’s progress. The babe is crowning already. But Freya is pale and disoriented, babbling and crying for Redik to come to her.

“Who is the soul-bringer?” Veloni’s voice is calm, dispassionate.

“There is none,” I say, countering her heavy sigh with a glare. “And I will not kill my sister’s child because of the Council’s blindness.”

Veloni shakes her head. “Then we must find one.” Thunder crashes and rain drums so loud on the patched metal roof I can barely hear Freya’s cry of pain.

I grin savagely. “There is none close enough to get here within the required half hour after birth.”

Her gaze narrows. “Boy or girl?”

I hesitate, but, in the end, there’s really nothing she can do to stop what’s coming. The child will be unsouled. Veloni will see there is no harm in such children. That they are the way of the future. The way to stop all this unneeded killing.

“Girl,” I say. “The babe will be a girl.”

Triumph gleams in Veloni. “Then Freya must be the soul-bringer.”

A gasp escapes me. Standing between my mentor and my sister, I pull out my blue-metal scissors. “No! She’s too young. You, yourself taught me that only those over fifty can be soul-bringers!”

Veloni tilts her head. “Do you know why that rule exists? Do you really understand what breakers and masters do? What the Council does?”

“How can I? The Council holds their secrets too close.” My words are bitter, my clutch on the scissors tight. She will not have my sister or my niece.

“Exactly,” she says, her mouth drooping. “But did you ever wonder why?”

I glance back at Freya. Her brow is beaded with sweat, her skin too pale. “We can speak of this later. I need to save my family. Do what you will with me after.”

Veloni grips my wrist, wrenching the scissors from me. She shoves them at my face.

“You fool. You don’t understand and that is why you will never become a master. Just as your grandmother failed to.”

I fold my arms and glower. “Go ahead. Explain it, then. What won’t I understand? Why won’t I become a master? I can’t wait to hear how the wise and all-knowing Council has decided my fate.” I check Freya. She has fallen into a light doze and the babe’s head has slipped out of sight again. I have a little time. Anything Veloni says I can turn against the Council when I am brought before them.

As I will be, for this birth and the other twenty-three.

I am beyond caring. Their rules are madness. Outdated, two-hundred-year-old laws for controlling the few souled folk who lived through the unsouled civilization’s collapse. The laws need to change if we are to thrive, not just survive in this miserable, hand-to-mouth existence.

Veloni’s lined cheeks sag and she sinks onto the bed edge. She looks at Freya with a weariness beyond her sixty-five years.

“When you were born, Jena, I argued against apprenticing you as a soul-breaker.”

I stiffen but bite my tongue. Her admission shouldn’t surprise me. I’ve long known she dislikes me.

“There was something amiss with your grandmother, too.” She raises her head and tears glisten in the corners of her eyes. “She was my best friend. We were breakers together. But she never understood. And nor will you.”

I frown, swallowing down rage and holding it tight in my clenched fists. “What does that mean? What was she supposed to understand? What am I supposed to understand?”

Veloni scrubs a hand over her face. “Every generation there are a few children for whom the soul-taking does not work at birth. They remain unsouled. The Council makes them soul-breakers.”

The breath leaves my lungs and my knees give way. I sink onto the bed. A strange kind of relief warms my stomach. Perhaps this is why I have always felt so separate from my kith and kin. Perhaps this is why I am so sure the unsouled can be the salvation of humanity’s future.

“So, you…” I point at her, then back at myself. “…and I…?”

“Yes. You are an unsouled. As was I. But we don’t stay that way.” Veloni frowns as she watches me.

My heart stops, stutters, starts again, but faster—as though urging me to run from what she will say. I still don’t understand why she seems to think being unsouled is terrible, so I stay.

She hesitates then plunges on, speaking fast. “The reason that breakers absorb a small portion of each bringer’s soul is to gain, over time, what they were unable to take in one piece at birth.” She leans forward and grips my hand. “But the souls aren’t just giving life, Jena. They give knowledge.”

With a sigh, she glances at Freya. “What the bringer knows. What they’ve learned. The person they’ve become. What they carry from their soul-bringer. All that is passed on to the soul-taker. It means most children already know how to be kind and generous. How to treat others with respect. How to care for the land. How to construct a house. Everything. And each generation builds on that knowledge.” She gives a soft, sad laugh. “Oh, they still have to learn things, but it takes less time than it takes an unsouled child. Much less.”

I fling my arms wide. “So what? Why does it matter how long it takes them to learn?”

Her pitying gaze dwells on me until I squirm. For the first time, the awareness of things unknown and unlearned is a hollowness in my chest.

Veloni points south. “That city. That’s why. The unsouled who came before us almost destroyed the world in their arrogance and greed. Their lack of respect for others.” She rises, her stockinged feet silent as she paces the room. “Each generation made the same mistakes. Sought nothing but self-aggrandizement and power.” She jabs a finger at me. “Because, like you and your grandmother, they could not learn fast enough to prevent the mistakes made in their youth. And it snowballed. Generation upon generation caring only for their own comfort and wealth.”

She brings her hands together sharply. Thunder and lightning crash overhead and I jump.

Her hands fall, limp, to her sides.

“Until it was too late. We still don’t quite understand what killed them all at once.” Her shoulders slump. “Just that the survivors were mostly the souled ones. Then we discovered that even their children were often born without souls. But most can inherit one if it’s bound properly. And with it came knowledge. Such knowledge.”

She pauses and stares through me. “Our world consists of a hundred and twenty villages, Jena. All that is left of humanity. A little over a hundred and twenty thousand souled people with the knowledge and wisdom not to repeat past mistakes.”

“And?” I prompt when she stops again. My fury has died with the storm’s passing, leaving me cold and empty. I can no longer see my path quite so clearly. My way is muddied by fear now. Fear that I have strayed and cannot find the way home. That I have been naïve. That I lack…knowledge.

“And,” she repeats on a sigh, “to keep the expertise of old souls alive, we have to limit the population in number, to allow life only to those who can be soul-takers. Plus a few who will become breakers and finally masters. This is the Council’s true function.”

“But…” My voice is small, my throat so thick it chokes the words. “But I don’t understand. I’m a soul-breaker. Why can’t I be a master? What’s wrong with me?” I touch my ribs. Blood has oozed through the scar tissue and stained my tunic scarlet, the color of a soul-bringer’s shift.

Veloni grasps my hands so tightly the scissors she still carries press hard into my flesh. Her expression is earnest. Truthful. Pleading, almost.

“We breakers can’t take in an old soul. Instead…” She lifts a shoulder and her gaze slides from mine, “…we break off and steal a little of each soul we pass from bringer to taker. And, in doing so, most of us inherit all of that person’s knowledge.” She touches the spot on her chest above where the soul-holding organ sits. “When this is full, we become wise enough to govern.”

Her face sags again. “Yours will never be full, I’m afraid. Something in your body cannot absorb the soul shards. The weight of their wisdom is too much, perhaps. I’m sorry. You can never be a master.”

I pull free of her touch and rise from the bed. I am flawed? My stomach twists into sickness. How can that be? The answers seemed so clear before.

Outside the bedroom window, lightning still flashes in the distance, but the storm has passed overhead, leaving nothing but the sound of dripping water and the clean smell of wet earth. To the south, the broken city is silhouetted against a yawning, golden moon.

I glance across at Freya. Her eyes are half open but still tired and vacant. She writhes on the bed, moaning. Veloni turns her back on me and tends to Freya, encouraging her to push the babe into the world. Freya’s daughter child will come, soon, and I no longer have an easy solution. Even without the driving rain, there is no way to fetch a soul-bringer in time.

Veloni is bent over the bed, my blue-metal scissors in her hand, ready to cut the child’s throat. Or ready to take my sister’s soul and leave my little niece without a family. For there is no way the Council will let me live after this either.

I reach deep inside, searching for the rage and certainty that fueled me for so long.

But it has vanished like the storm.

Soon, all that will be left is the sound of blood dripping from the blades.

Unless…

I move to the clothes cupboard. Behind me, Freya groans and Veloni urges her to push hard. My sister cries out, triumphant, relieved. A baby’s wail follows, thin, petulant.

From the cupboard I draw a scarlet soul-bringer’s shift. Discarding my breaker’s clothing I pull on the shift and return to the bed. Veloni nods.

There, I curl up beside my little sister, clasping her cold hand in my warm one. The new babe lies swaddled and sleepy between us. Freya’s eyes flutter open and widen at the sight of my clothing.

She sucks a shuddering breath. “Are you sure, Jena? I’ll miss you so much.”

I swallow hard and nod. “This body is wrong for this world. But, with all of my soul-shards in her, baby Jena will make wiser decisions than I did.” I nod to my mentor, who inclines her head, her eyes dark, regretful.

With my blue-metal blades, Veloni slices through scarlet linen and pink scar tissue and draws forth the first piece of someone else’s soul. Bright and clean. Glittering in the half-light. Not a hint of darkness smudging it anywhere.

 

 

 

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