A CHILD WEPT in the garden.
Peach-pink Dr. Seuss trees rose beneath a blushing sky. Diamond waterfalls birthed winding rivers clear as glass and tumbling with purple fish. Dragonfly wings shed rainbow shadows. People hung fetus-curled in translucent fleshy sacs from those pink trees, and they shifted and turned as if in the depths of dream.
Paradise stank of lilac.
And still, somewhere out of sight, a child wept.
Hong moved first, while Viv marveled, while Zanj sniffed the air, claws ready, on guard. He ran through soft blue-green grass, footfalls quiet, leapt over the river and around a flowering bush that settled Viv’s earlier question as to whether there were still roses in the future; Viv protested, “Hey!” but followed him, and she heard Zanj’s sigh as she matched pace.
The kid might have been eight at most, slender, hair short, all over pale, eyes large as Xiara’s, barefoot, wearing scraps of dirty multicolored cloth. He (Viv was guessing) hugged his knees, stared at Hong, at Viv, at Zanj, then at the vine-trailed forest and the perfect sky, then back, gaze shifting with the speed of fear. Viv, for whom kids were something that happened to other people, wanted to help, but drew up short, uncertain how to start with a child who’d been stuck in this strange place. Hong didn’t wait: he walked over, hands out, and sat beside the kid on the log. “Hello.” He didn’t touch the kid, didn’t sound particularly interested in him even—and yet the sobbing slowed. Some magic in that, Viv thought. Not the far-future kind, just the not-being-awful-with-children kind. “Are you lost?”
The kid looked up, sniffed, wiped his tears with the back of his hand. Nodded once.
“Us, too.” It wasn’t totally a lie. “Have you been here long?”
The kid shook his head, but the shake traveled down his neck into his ribs, his belly. He pointed up to the sky: no sun, no stars, no moon, just pink velvet twilight. Viv looked away. Watching him she saw a part of herself that looked just like that, staring wide-eyed at a large and terrifying world. She wanted to forget that part of her, ignore it, but this kid remained stubbornly in place. It wasn’t his fault. She made herself look.
Hong, meanwhile, was still talking. “Did you come here with your family?”
A nod turned into another shake of head; he hugged his knees, bent double. Knobs of vertebrae jutted from his back.
Zanj leaned against a tree and crossed her arms. “Ask him where the Gray is.”
The boy’s wide eyes snapped to her, and he started shivering again.
“Thing’s probably at the center of this mess. You know, kid? Big monster, huge teeth?”
“It’s fine,” Hong said, his voice kind, but with a glare at Zanj to clarify that while the situation in general might be fine, her behavior wasn’t. “We’re here to free you, and your family. But we need to find the monster. So we can stop it.”
The boy’s face squinched together, curious, suspicious.
“Can you help us?”
Viv saw the decision process tick behind his eyes. He trembled with the effort of thought, then stilled, a sign of solution every bit as obvious as if he’d actually gone ding. Then, without warning, he rose and scrambled off through purple bushes into the forest.
With a trade of looks—are we doing this, I think so, are we sure it’s a good idea, the time to ask that question was, really, before we stepped into the glowing dome—they ran after.
Even running felt wonderful here, the air crisp and flowerthick as new spring. Viv’s muscles stretched and her feet in their new boots loved the grass and the springy earth. The kid led them down narrow paths between full bushes, but there were no thorns, and the leaves brushed her skin like silk, like feathers. Her heart sang. She leapt creeks, she took hard corners easy, she let herself forget, almost, the monster. Just focus on the kid’s pale, flashing soles, on his back, on the fact that—
Wait. What happened to the others?
The kid ran on ahead, the narrow path unspooled before him, and more path lay behind Viv, bare of friends. From the bushes to her left, she heard Hong cry out, and a crash of breaking wood.
Damn damn damn.
She dove off the path, through the bushes, toward the cry.
She expected breaking twigs, thorns, sharp edges catching clothes, but she slid through the underbrush as if through a feather thicket, past leaves so fine they did not scrape, did not cut, but slid into her mouth, her nose. She tried to slap them away but the ground caught her and she fell:
—into twilight and open arms.
She fought at first, but Xiara’s voice said, it’s okay, and, I’ve got you, and she was held, and turned in her arms—Xiara clutching her close, skin warm, though Viv was shaking.
“We have to help them,” Viv said, and “They need me,” but Xiara’s eyes were large, near, and her finger settled over Viv’s lips, and then her mouth followed.
Paradise.
She was naked, they both were, falling soft and autumn slow to pillowing grass, to earth that molded to their bodies, to blush skies overhead; nails dragged down her back, fingers cradled her crotch; she breathed in but her throat stopped and her eyes went soft; she clutched the curve of her, explored her body, wanted it, needed it, and as she needed felt it change, and at each change her own hunger grew, the fire of that touch transformed, her leg now between her legs, rising, riding—
—changing—
—the hand that climbed her side, that caught her wrist, that pinned it back over her head, was not Xiara’s hand, those green eyes mocking over her belonged to Adrienne, but now they were black like Susan Cho’s, the teeth in that mouth sharp as no one’s she’d ever lain with, sharp as in fantasies she’d only ever confessed to search fields in incognito mode through a VPN, and she was lying in a pickup truck bed and she was wearing clothes she’d never worn and a body that was not her own and everything was all so stupid dumb glorious normal like she’d never ever had and scorned and wanted even as she scorned it, and she reached up and the woman over her caught her neck and closed her hand around it and closing her hand closed a collar gripped her slammed her down jammed mouth against mouth so hungry and the taste of that skin on her tongue and her own throat beneath her hand and her submission, mastery building higher ever higher, and always. Not. Quite. There.
Like induction. Like an algorithm. Oh.
—christ—
Think about Facebook. Think about Acsiom.
—onward and onward and why would you ever stop or even look away—
Pleasure-seeking math. The model watches you. Learns what you want. Offers.
—yes there and somehow inside, and worse, and better, she conquers, she is broken—
Shapes itself to your desire. Lets you act. Picks you—a hairpin
—hairpins, clips, pigtails, lips, lipstick, a gag—
scraping tumblers of a lock. Tumblrs. Christ.
—jesus—
It wants you to want. It needs you to need. Your hunger fuels your hunger. As you reach, it grasps you. So: think deeper. Watch yourself want. Learn your demons, your needs. See them arise. See them fall.
Breathe. Nothing you want can stay.
Air cools; skin withers, ages, rots, leaving bone. Viv herself passed on. She felt slickness beneath her palms, dug her fingers into claws, peeled back the skin. The lavender scent filled her, choked her.
She fell into the real.
Struck grass hard, and it hurt. That helped, that was a sign. Some kinds of pain at least were real—not the grand overmastering sort, but the shitty stubbed-my-toe aches no one could fetish over. She was soaked, sticky, covered in some sort of sap. It dried fast, flaked off as she turned and groaned amid ropy roots. Opened her eyes, saw the twilit sky, a spreading peach-pink tree. Somewhere nearby, that kid wailed. Overhead, dangling from branches, in translucent sacs, hung Zanj and Hong.
She forced herself to stand. Her muscles obeyed reluctantly; the kid fell silent—he had been wailing beneath Hong, but now he looked at her, awed. “It’s okay,” she said. “Give me a second.”
She broke off a branch, ignored the maple-cedar sweetness of its sap, and jabbed the sharp end into the sac that held Hong. On her third try it pierced and he spilled to the earth in a sick heap. “What?” His voice peaked and rough, for once uncomposed.
“It got us,” she said, and stabbed Zanj. This sac she got in a single blow—practice, plus she didn’t feel as worried about hurting Zanj. She had a tough hide, and she deserved it. “Now let’s get it back.”
Zanj was cursing already as she fell, half-awake, and landed on her feet, slick-furred, sharp-eyed, and furious. “Motherfucker’s gonna pay for that.”
“It’s okay. We’re out.”
“Okay? Do you have any idea how long we were in there? Hours!”
Hong, still shaking, gasping, accepted Viv’s hand up. “I don’t—I—”
“Fucking kama trap. Fuck!” Zanj punched the tree. The boom of her fist breaking the sound barrier overwhelmed the crack of the trunk snapping in two. The tree fell with a hammerthud. “Desire algorithm magic bullshit. Hate it. Hate everything. First the stupid crown, now this—nobody snags me in nonsense and gets away with it.” She knelt, wrapped her arms around the fallen trunk, and lifted it easily. Her eyes were murderous and wild. “Someone’s going to die.” The kid, slack-jawed with awe, ran to her, waving, follow me, but Zanj shook her head. “No way, kid. I am done sneaking around. I want this asshole to hear me coming.”
Viv ducked before she spun the tree, as did Hong—and a good thing, too, because the trunk shattered the surrounding grove. Trees dominoed into other trees; Zanj chose a direction, seemingly at random, marched forward, swinging the tree like a scythe. When the first trunk broke she chose another, and swung again.
“Zanj.”
Crash.
“Zanj!”
She halted her tree-swinging with a roar. “What?”
Viv pointed.
There, beyond the splintered forest, crouched the monster.