There are a lot of Best of the Year volumes in our field, and frankly I recommend them all. One of the features of SF in 2018 is how much of it there is. There’s enough short fiction that the Hugo shortlist can very nearly ignore men, and still be mostly full of strong stories. (There are a couple of duds, but so it always was.) There’s enough that both the Hugo and Nebula shortlists can completely ignore the traditional print SF magazines (F&SF, Asimov’s, Analog, and Interzone, let’s say), and still be mostly full of strong stories. How then to resolve that issue? Read as many of the Best of the Year volumes as you can, I say! (And, hey, why not subscribe to one of the print magazines, if that’s possible? And try some original anthologies as well.)

The main distinction, of course, for each of these books is the editor’s individual tastes. (Or so Hannibal Lecter tells us…) We all read a lot of short SF, and have for a long time. And when I see the table of content pages of the other books they are stuffed with stories I almost took for this book (and a couple of overlaps)—so I know that my fellow editors have good taste! Thus part of the equation is: which editor’s taste aligns with yours? But, I’d suggest, if you can, read more—because reading stuff that you didn’t know you’d like is one of the truest joys of reading.

If I think my book is the best—and I do!—it’s for the obvious reason that my personal taste aligns pretty closely with the editor’s! But that said, I am abashed year after year to realize that Jonathan or Ellen or Neil or one of the other editors, (or, sigh, Gardner!), has chosen a gem or two I really should have taken myself.

But to return to the wealth of good fiction in the field, let’s take a closer look at the venues in which to find it. I’ve already expressed a wish for more attention to be paid to the print magazines, so I’ll start there. The oldest magazines in the field are Weird Tales, first published in 1923, and Amazing Stories, first published in 1926. Both have undergone numerous deaths and resurrections over the decades. Weird Tales’ last issue appeared in 2014, but rumors of another resurrection have surfaced. More happily, Amazing Stories was revived by publisher Steve Davidson in 2018, and what I’ve seen so far is promising—and I very nearly took Kameron Hurley’s “Sister Solveig and Mr. Denial” for this volume.

Then there is Analog, known for an emphasis on “hard SF,” founded in 1930 as Astounding Stories, and published continuously since that time. Trevor Quachri is the current editor, and I’ve liked his work with the magazine—this year we feature two stories from them, each from one of the best of their regular contributors: Alec Nevala-Lee’s “The Spires”, and Adam-Troy Castro’s “The Unnecessary Parts of the Story.” (And no, despite the fact that a previous Analog story in these pages was by Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, it’s not true that a first name starting with A and a hyphenation are requirements for Analog publication.) The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which dates to 1949, has, as its title implies, shows long featured a roughly 50/50 split between those two modes. The editor is C. C. Finlay, and this year we have chosen a remarkable bit of cold-blooded SF horror, “The Donner Party” by Dale Bailey.

More recent but still venerable magazines include Asimov’s Science Fiction (founded 1976, now edited by Sheila Williams) and the leading UK magazine, Interzone (founded 1982, now edited by Andy Cox.) Asimov’s (like Analog and F&SF) remains hospitable to novellas, and this year we taken from there a very exciting and very long story, “Bubble and Squeak” by David Gerrold & Ctein; as well as “The Gift” by Julia Nováková. From Interzone I came very close to choosing Ryan Row’s “Superbright” and Samantha Murray’s “Singles’ Day.”

It would be fair to say that most of the magazines in the field founded more recently are online, but there are exceptions. Perhaps most remarkable of these is Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, a modestly produced—but always attractive—saddle-stapled magazine from Gavin Grant and Kelly Link’s wonderful Small Beer Press. Thirty-nine issues have appeared since 1996, and the fiction is always lively and original, as evidenced by the two very different stories we chose for this volume: “Lime and the One Human” by S. Woodson, and “Dayenu” by James Sallis. Even more recent is Fireside Magazine, which is a sort of hybrid of electronic and print publication—it began in 2012 as a print magazine, and now, under editor Julia Rios, publishes regular electronic issues and quarterly print issues. I don’t know to what extent the contents are the same, but I do know they publish some outstanding stuff, including Beth Goder’s “How to Identify an Alien Shark” in this book, and P. Djeli Clark’s Nebula and Hugo nominee “The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington.” In this context I ought also to mention Galaxy’s Edge, which has been producing regular bimonthly issues since 2013. From 2018, I thought Gregory Benford’s “A Waltz in Eternity” particularly strong—another story that came within a whisker of appearing here.

Not all the magazines I canvas for stories are SF magazines—you can find wonderful fantastical stories in the traditional “little” magazines, and in wide circulation places like The New Yorker. From there, I’d have liked to use Karen Russell’s “Orange World.” From the Paris Review, I’m thrilled to have one of the late great Ursula K. Le Guin’s last stories, “Firelight”, and from the Stonecoast Review I’m likewise delighted to be able to reprint Rick Wilber’s “Today is Today.” I also saw super stuff from Jess Row in Granta, from Gregory Norman Bossert and many others in Conjunctions, and strong work from Josh Pearce and M. C. Williams in a slim magazine I’m not sure how to characterize, Bourbon Penn.

Original anthologies have been an important source of new short fiction since at least Frederik Pohl’s Star Science Fiction in the 1950s, and that remains true today. Perhaps the single best anthologist now—along with Ellen Datlow—is Jonathan Strahan, and in 2018 he concluded a brilliant series of anthologies, the Infinity Series, with Infinity’s End, which gave me two stories in the book, by Justina Robson and Kelly Robson (no relation, and the stories are “Foxy and Tiggs” and “Intervention”) and I could have taken two or three more easily. It’s more common these days to see themed anthologies, and this year I took stories from Robots Vs. Fairies (Lavie Tidhar’s “The Buried Giant”) and Aurum, an anniversary anthology of sorts from the Australian publisher Ticonderoga (“Beautiful” by Judith Marillier). Other anthologies of particular note include the latest in the ongoing series of near future-oriented stories from MIT Technology Review’s publishing arm, Twelve Tomorrows, as well as Shades Within Us, Mothers of Invention, Speculative Japan 4 (a selection of fantastical work from Japan), and what might be, alas, Gardner Dozois’ last anthology, The Book of Magic.

And then there are the novellas—one of the really enjoyable fairly recent trends is the availability of novellas as standalone slim books. I’ve long felt that the novella is a particularly good length for SF, but a hard one to publish in magazines, where they take up so much room. So the recent bloom is welcome. Mind you, most of these books aren’t available for reprint, and many are too long for a book like this. But they deserve your attention. Tor.com Publishing is noted as a leader in this area, and they didn’t disappoint this year with books like Ian McDonald’s Time Was and Kelly Robson’s Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach. But there are many other houses publishing such books: this year I was impressed by The Freeze-Frame Revolution, by Peter Watts, from Tachyon; The Adventure of the Dux Bellorum, by Cynthia Ward, from Aqueduct; and The Tea Master and the Detective, by Aliette de Bodard, from Subterranean.

Now it would be disingenuous of me to fail to mention the numerous online sources of short SF. After all, while I do feel that print sources are shortchanged in award nominations (for simple to understand reasons), the online world is full of really outstanding work. Full disclosure—I’m the reprint editor for Lightspeed, and I think we publish great stuff. So too do our fellow recent winners of the Best Semiprozine Hugo, Clarkesworld and Uncanny. And of course Tor.com is absolutely an outstanding site. Beyond those, I’d like to highlight the other online sites I’ve taken stories from this year (and these by no means exhaust the great places to find short SF online): Beneath Ceaseless Skies (which focusses on “literary adventure fantasy”), Giganotosaurus (which tends to publish longer pieces), Apex (which had its origin as a print magazine with a tropism towards horror, but which publishes a very wide range these days), and Kaleidotrope, a magazine I’ve loved since its early days as a saddle-stitched print magazine. I don’t have space to list everything from those places in this introduction (check the acknowledgements page).

When I was just starting to read adult short SF, I checked the acknowledgements pages for the anthologies I read, and that’s where I learned about Analog and Galaxy and F&SF and Fantastic and New Worlds, etc. And it was a delight to find some of them on my local newsstand. Nowadays it’s pretty easy to find a lot of them on the internet—and one certainly should. But I’ll suggest again that looking in bookstores for anthologies and magazines, or online for how to subscribe to them, or in the local library, is also rewarding—and, I do think, important to the health of the science fiction field—indeed, to the entire literary world.

You’d think it would make us happy when a kid checks out the same book a zillion times in a row, but actually it just keeps us up at night.

The Runaway Prince is one of those low-budget young adult fantasies from the mid-nineties, before J.K. Rowling arrived to tell everyone that magic was cool, printed on brittle yellow paper. It’s about a lonely boy who runs away and discovers a Magical Portal into another world where he has Medieval Adventures, but honestly there are so many typos most people give up before he even finds the portal.

Not this kid, though. He pulled it off the shelf and sat cross-legged in the juvenile fiction section with his grimy red backpack clutched to his chest. He didn’t move for hours. Other patrons were forced to double-back in the aisle, shooting suspicious, you-don’t-belong-here looks behind them as if wondering what a skinny black teenager was really up to while pretending to read a fantasy book. He ignored them.

The books above him rustled and quivered; that kind of attention flatters them.

He took The Runaway Prince home and renewed it twice online, at which point a gray pop-up box that looks like an emissary from 1995 tells you, “the renewal limit for this item has been reached.” You can almost feel the disapproving eyes of a librarian glaring at you through the screen.

(There have only ever been two kinds of librarians in the history of the world: the prudish, bitter ones with lipstick running into the cracks around their lips who believe the books are their personal property and patrons are dangerous delinquents come to steal them; and witches).

Our late fee is twenty-five cents per day or a can of non-perishable food during the summer food drive. By the time the boy finally slid The Runaway Prince into the return slot, he owed $4.75. I didn’t have to swipe his card to know; any good librarian (of the second kind) ought to be able to tell you the exact dollar amount of a patron’s bill just by the angle of their shoulders.

“What’d you think?” I used my this-is-a-secret-between-us-pals voice, which works on teenagers about sixteen percent of the time.

He shrugged. It has a lower success rate with black teenagers, because this is the rural South and they aren’t stupid enough to trust thirty-something white ladies no matter how many tattoos we have.

“Didn’t finish it, huh?” I knew he’d finished it at least four times by the warm, well-oiled feel of the pages.

“Yeah, I did.” His eyes flicked up. They were smoke-colored and long-lashed, with an achy, faraway expression, as if he knew there was something gleaming and forbidden just beneath the dull surfaces of things that he could never quite touch. They were the kinds of eyes that had belonged to sorcerers or soothsayers, in different times. “The ending sucked.”

In the end, the Runaway Prince leaves Medieval Adventureland and closes the portal behind him before returning home to his family. It was supposed to be a happy ending.

Which kind of tells you all you need to know about this kid’s life, doesn’t it?

He left without checking anything else out.

He returned four days later, sloping past a bright blue display titled THIS SUMMER, DIVE INTO READING! (who knows where they were supposed to swim; Ulysses County’s lone public pool had been filled with cement in the sixties rather than desegregate).

Because I am a librarian of the second sort, I almost always know what kind of book a person wants. It’s like a very particular smell rising off them which is instantly recognizable as Murder mystery or Political biography or Something kind of trashy but ultimately life-affirming, preferably with lesbians.

I do my best to give people the books they need most. In grad school, they called it “ensuring readers have access to texts/materials that are engaging and emotionally rewarding,” and in my other kind of schooling, they called it “divining the unfilled spaces in their souls and filling them with stories and starshine,” but it comes to the same thing.

I don’t bother with the people who have call numbers scribbled on their palms and titles rattling around in their skulls like bingo cards. They don’t need me. And you really can’t do anything for the people who only read Award-Winning Literature, who wear elbow patches and equate the popularity of Twilight with the death of the American intellect; their hearts are too closed-up for the new or secret or undiscovered.

So, it’s only a certain kind of patron I pay attention to. The kind that let their eyes feather across the titles like trailing fingertips, heads cocked, with book-hunger rising off them like heatwaves from July pavement. The books bask in it, of course, even the really hopeless cases that haven’t been checked out since 1958 (there aren’t many of these; me and Agnes take turns carting home outdated astronomy textbooks that still think Pluto is a planet and cookbooks that call for lard, just to keep their spirits up). I choose one or two books and let their spines gleam and glimmer in the twilit stacks. People reach towards them without quite knowing why.

The boy with the red backpack wasn’t an experienced aisle-wanderer. He prowled, moving too quickly to read the titles, hands hanging empty and uncertain at his sides. The sewing and pattern books (646.2) noted that his jeans were unlaundered and too small, and the neck of his t-shirt was stained grayish-yellow. The cookbooks (641.5) diagnosed a diet of frozen waffles and gas-station pizza. They tssked to themselves.

I sat at the circulation desk, running returns beneath the blinky red scanner light, and breathed him in. I was expecting something like generic Arthurian retelling or maybe teen romance with sword-fighting, but instead I found a howling, clamoring mess of need.

He smelled of a thousand secret worlds, of rabbit-holes and hidden doorways and platforms nine-and-three-quarters, of Wonderland and Oz and Narnia, of anyplace-but-here. He smelled of yearning.

God save me from the yearners. The insatiable, the inconsolable, the ones who chafe and claw against the edges of the world. No book can save them.

(That’s a lie. There are Books potent enough to save any mortal soul: books of witchery, augury, alchemy; books with wand-wood in their spines and moon-dust on their pages; books older than stones and wily as dragons. We give people the books they need most, except when we don’t.)

I sent him a ’70s sword-and-sorcery series because it was total junk food and he needed fattening up, and because I hoped sixteen volumes might act as a sort of ballast and keep his keening soul from rising away into the ether. I let Le Guin shimmer at him, too, because he reminded me a bit of Ged (feral; full of longing).

I ignored The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, jostling importantly on its shelf; this was a kid who wanted to go through the wardrobe and never, ever come back.

Once you make it past book four of the Tavalarrian Chronicles, you’re committed at least through book fourteen when the true Sword of Tavalar is revealed and the young farm-boy ascends to his rightful throne. The boy with the red backpack showed up every week or so all summer for the next installment.

I snuck in a few others (all pretty old, all pretty white; our branch director is one of those pinch-lipped Baptists who thinks fantasy books teach kids about Devil worship, so roughly 90% of my collection requests are mysteriously denied): A Wrinkle in Time came back with the furtive, jammed-in-a-backpack scent that meant he liked it but thought it was too young for him; Watership Down was offended because he never got past the first ten pages, but I guess footnotes about rabbit-math aren’t for everyone; and The Golden Compass had the flashlight-smell of 3:00 a.m. on its final chapter and was unbearably smug about it. I’d just gotten an inter-library-loaned copy of Akata Witch—when he stopped coming.

Our display (GET READ-Y FOR SCHOOL!) was filled with SAT prep kits and over-sized yellow For Dummies books. Agnes had cut out blobby construction-paper leaves and taped them to the front doors. Lots of kids stop hanging around the library when school starts up, with all its clubs and teams.

I worried anyway. I could feel the Book I hadn’t given him like a wrong note or a missing tooth, a magnetic absence. Just when I was seriously considering calling Ulysses County High School with a made-up story about an un-returned CD, he came back.

For the first time, there was someone else with him: A squat white woman with a plastic name-tag and the kind of squarish perm you can only get in Southern beauty salons with faded glamor-shots in the windows. The boy trailed behind her looking thin and pressed, like a flower crushed between dictionary pages. I wondered how badly you had to fuck up to get assigned a school counselor after hours, until I read her name-tag: Department of Community-Based Services, Division of Protection and Permanency, Child Caseworker (II).

Oh. A foster kid.

The woman marched him through the nonfiction stacks (the travel guides sighed as she passed, muttering about overwork and recommending vacations to sunny, faraway beaches) and stopped in the 616s. “Here, why don’t we have a look at these?”

Predictable, sullen silence from the boy.

A person who works with foster kids sixty hours a week is unfazed by sullenness. She slid titles off the shelf and stacked them in the boy’s arms. “We talked about this, remember? We decided you might like to read something practical, something helpful?”

Dealing with Depression (616.81 WHI 1998). Beating the Blues: Five Steps to Feeling Normal Again! (616.822 TRE 2011). Chicken Soup for the Depressed Soul (616.9 CAN). The books greeted him in soothing, syrupy voices.

The boy stayed silent. “Look. I know you’d rather read about dragons and, uh, elves,” oh, Tolkien, you have so much to account for, “but sometimes we’ve got to face our problems head-on, rather than running away from them.”

What bullshit. I was in the back room running scratched DVDs through the disc repair machine, so the only person to hear me swear was Agnes. She gave me her patented over-the-glasses shame-on-you look which, when properly deployed, can reduce noisy patrons to piles of ash or pillars of salt (Agnes is a librarian of the second kind, too).

But seriously. Anyone could see that kid needed to run and keep running until he shed his own skin, until he clawed out of the choking darkness and unfurled his wings, precious and prisming in the light of some other world.

His caseworker was one of those people who say the word “escapism” as if it’s a moral failing, a regrettable hobby, a mental-health diagnosis. As if escape is not, in itself, one of the highest order of magics they’ll ever see in their miserable mortal lives, right up there with true love and prophetic dreams and fireflies blinking in synchrony on a June evening.

The boy and his keeper were winding back through the aisles toward the front desk. The boy’s shoulders were curled inward, as if he chafed against invisible walls on either side.

As he passed the juvenile fiction section, a cheap paperback flung itself off the return cart and thudded into his kneecap. He picked it up and rubbed his thumb softly over the title. The Runaway Prince purred at him.

He smiled. I thanked the library cart, silently.

There was a long, familiar sigh behind me. I turned to see Agnes watching me from the circulation desk, aquamarine nails tapping the cover of a Grisham novel, eyes crimped with pity. Oh honey, not another one, they said.

I turned back to my stack of DVDs, unsmiling, thinking things like what do you know about it and this one is different and oh shit.

The boy returned at ten-thirty on a Tuesday morning. It’s official library policy to report truants to the high school, because the school board felt we were becoming “a haven for unsupervised and illicit teenage activity.” I happen to think that’s exactly what libraries should aspire to be, and suggested we get it engraved on a plaque for the front door, but then I was asked to be serious or leave the proceedings, and anyway we’re supposed to report kids who skip school to play League of Legends on our computers or skulk in the graphic novel section.

I watched the boy prowling the shelves—muscles strung wire-tight over his bones, soul writhing and clawing like a caged creature—and did not reach for the phone. Agnes, still wearing her oh honey expression, declined to reprimand me.

I sent him home with The Count of Monte Cristo, partly because it requires your full attention and a flow chart to keep track of the plot and the kid needed distracting, but mostly because of what Edmund says on the second-to-last page: “… all human wisdom is summed up in these two words,—‘Wait and hope.’”

But people can’t keep waiting and hoping forever.

They fracture, they unravel, they crack open; they do something desperate and stupid and then you see their high school senior photo printed in the Ulysses Gazette, grainy and oversized, and you spend the next five years thinking: if only I’d given her the right book.

Every librarian has Books she never lends to anyone.

I’m not talking about first editions of Alice in Wonderland or Dutch translations of Winnie-the-Pooh; I’m talking about Books so powerful and potent, so full of susurrating seduction, that only librarians of the second sort even know they exist.

Each of us has her own system for keeping them hidden. The most venerable libraries (the ones with oak paneling and vaulted ceilings and Beauty and the Beast-style ladders) have secret rooms behind fireplaces or bookcases, which you can only enter by tugging on a certain title on the shelf. Sainte-Geneviève in Paris is supposed to have vast catacombs beneath it guarded by librarians so ancient and desiccated they’ve become human-shaped books, paper-skinned and ink-blooded. In Timbuktu, I heard they hired wizard-smiths to make great wrought-iron gates that only permit passage to the pure of heart.

In the Maysville branch of the Ulysses County Library system, we have a locked roll-top desk in the Special Collections room with a sign on it that says, “This is an Antique! Please Ask for Assistance.”

We only have a dozen or so Books, anyhow, and god knows where they came from or how they ended up here. A Witch’s Guide to Seeking Righteous Vengeance, with its slender steel pages and arsenic ink. A Witch’s Guide to Falling in Love for the First Time, for Readers at Every Stage of Life!, which smells like starlight and the summer you were seventeen. A Witch’s Guide to Uncanny Baking contains over thirty full-color photographs to ensorcell your friends and afflict your adversaries. A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies has no words in it at all, but only pages and pages of maps: hand-drawn Middle Earth knock-offs with unpronounceable names; medieval tapestry-maps showing tiny ships sailing off the edge of the world; topographical maps of Machu Picchu; 1970s Rand McNally street maps of Istanbul.

It’s my job to keep Books like this out of the hands of desperate high-school kids with red backpacks. Our school-mistresses called it “preserving the hallowed and hidden arts of our foremothers from mundane eyes.” Our professors called it “conserving rare/historic texts.”

Both of them mean the same thing: We give people the books they need, except when we don’t. Except when they need them most.

He racked up $1.50 on The Count of Monte Cristo and returned it with saltwater splotches on the final pages. They weren’t my-favorite-character-died tears or the-book-is-over tears. They were bitter, acidic, anise-scented: tears of jealousy. He was jealous that the Count and Haydée sailed away from their world and out into the blue unknown. That they escaped.

I panicked and weighed him down with the first three Harry Potters, because they don’t really get good until Sirius and Lupin show up, and because they’re about a neglected, lonely kid who gets a letter from another world and disappears.

Agnes always does the “we will be closing in ten minutes” announcement because something in her voice implies that anybody still in the library in nine minutes and fifty seconds will be harvested for organ donations, and even the most stationary patrons amble towards the exit.

The kid with the red backpack was hovering in the oversize print section (gossipy, aging books, bored since the advent of e-readers with changeable font sizes) when Agnes’s voice came through the speakers. He went very still, teetering the way a person does when they’re about to do something really dumb, then dove beneath a reading desk and pulled his dark hoodie over his head. The oversize books gave scintillated squeals.

It was my turn to close, so Agnes left right at nine. By 9:15 I was standing at the door with my NPR tote on my shoulder and my keys in my hand. Hesitating.

It is very, extremely, absolutely against the rules to lock up for the night with a patron still inside, especially when that patron is a minor of questionable emotional health. It’s big trouble both in the conventional sense (phone calls from panicked guardians, police searches, charges of criminal neglect) and in the other sense (libraries at night are noisier places than they are during the daylight hours).

I’m not a natural rule-follower. I roll through stop signs, I swear in public, I lie on online personality tests so I get the answers I want (Hermione, Arya Stark, Jo March). But I’m a very good librarian of either kind, and good librarians follow the rules. Even when they don’t want to.

That’s what Agnes told me five years ago, when I first started at Maysville.

This girl had started showing up on Sunday afternoons: ponytailed, cute, but wearing one of those knee-length denim skirts that scream “mandatory virginity pledge.” I’d been feeding her a steady diet of subversion (Orwell, Bradbury, Butler), and was about to hit her with A Handmaid’s Tale when she suddenly lost interest in fiction. She drifted through the stacks, face gone white and empty as a blank page, navy skirt swishing against her knees.

It wasn’t until she reached the 618s that I understood. The maternity and childbirth section trilled saccharine congratulations. She touched one finger to the spine of What to Expect When You’re Expecting (618.2 EIS) with an expression of dawning, swallowing horror, and left without checking anything out.

For the next nine weeks, I sent her stories of bravery and boldness, defying-your-parents stories and empowered-women-resisting-authority stories. I abandoned subtlety entirely and slid Planned Parenthood pamphlets into her book bag, even though the nearest clinic is six hours away and only open twice a week, but found them jammed frantically in the bathroom trash.

But I never gave her what she really needed: A Witch’s Guide to Undoing What Has Been Done: A Guilt-Free Approach to Life’s Inevitable Accidents. A leather-bound tome filled with delicate mechanical drawings of clocks, which smelled of regret and yesterday mornings. I’d left it locked in the roll-top desk, whispering and tick-tocking to itself.

Look, there are good reasons we don’t lend out Books like that. Our mistresses used to scare us with stories of mortals run amok: people who used Books to steal or kill or break hearts; who performed miracles and founded religions; who hated us, afterward, and spent a tiresome few centuries burning us at stakes.

If I were caught handing out Books, I’d be renounced, reviled, stripped of my title. They’d burn my library card in the eternal mauve flames of our sisterhood and write my crimes in ash and blood in The Book of Perfidy. They’d ban me from every library for eternity, and what’s a librarian without her books? What would I be, cut off from the orderly world of words and their readers, from the peaceful Ouroboran cycle of story-telling and story-eating? There were rumors of rogue librarians—madwomen who chose to live outside the library system in the howling chaos of unwritten words and untold stories—but none of us envied them.

The last time I’d seen the ponytailed girl her denim skirt was fastened with a rubber band looped through the buttonhole. She’d smelled of desperation, like someone whose wait-and-hoping had run dry.

Four days later, her picture was in the paper and the article was blurring and un-blurring in my vision (accidental poisoning, viewing from 2:00-3:30 at Zimmerman & Holmes, direct your donations to Maysville Baptist Ministries). Agnes had patted my hand and said, “I know, honey, I know. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do.” It was a kind lie.

I still have the newspaper clipping in my desk drawer, as a memorial or reminder or warning.

The boy with the red backpack was sweating beneath the reading desk. He smelled of desperation, just like she had.

Should I call the Child Protective Services hotline? Make awkward small-talk until his crummy caseworker collected him? Hey, kid, I was once a lonely teenager in a backwater shithole, too! Or should I let him run away, even if running away was only hiding in the library overnight?

I teetered, the way you do when you’re about to do something really dumb.

The locked thunked into place. I walked across the parking lot breathing the caramel-and-frost smell of October, hoping—almost praying, if witches were into that—that it would be enough.

When I was fifty-seven, I did the unthinkable. I became a crèche manager.

On Luna, crèche work kills your social capital, but I didn’t care. Not at first. My long-time love had been crushed to death in a bot malfunction in Luna’s main mulching plant. I was just trying to find a reason to keep breathing.

I found a crusty centenarian who’d outlived most of her cohort and asked for her advice. She said there was no better medicine for grief than children, so I found a crèche tucked away behind a water printing plant and signed on as a cuddler. That’s where I caught the baby bug.

When my friends found out, the norming started right away.

“You’re getting a little tubby there, Jules,” Ivan would say, unzipping my jacket and reaching inside to pat my stomach. “Got a little parasite incubating?”

I expected this kind of attitude from Ivan. Ringleader, team captain, alpha of alphas. From him, I could laugh it off. But then my closest friends started in.

Beryl’s pretty face soured in disgust every time she saw me. “I can smell the freeloader on you,” she’d say, pretending to see body fluids on my perfectly clean clothing. “Have the decency to shower and change after your shift.”

Even that wasn’t so bad. But then Robin began avoiding me and ignoring my pings. We’d been each other’s first lovers, best friends since forever, and suddenly I didn’t exist. That’s how extreme the prejudice is on Luna.

Finally, on my birthday, they threw me a surprise party. Everyone wore diapers and crawled around in a violent mockery of childhood. When I complained, they accused me of being broody.

I wish I could say I ignored their razzing, but my friends were my whole world. I dropped crèche work. My secret plan was to leave Luna, find a hab where working with kids wasn’t social death, but I kept putting it off. Then I blinked, and ten years had passed.

Enough delay. I jumped trans to Eros station, engaged a recruiter, and was settling into my new life on Ricochet within a month.

I never answered my friends’ pings. As far as Ivan, Beryl, Robin, and the rest knew, I fell off the face of the moon. And that’s the way I wanted it.

Lady Donner was in ascendance the first time Mrs. Breen tasted human flesh. For more years than anyone cared to count, Lady Donner had ruled the London Season like a queen. Indeed, some said that she stood second only to Victoria herself when it came to making (or breaking) someone’s place in Society—a sentiment sovereign in Mrs. Breen’s mind as her footman handed her down from the carriage into the gathering London twilight, where she took Mr. Breen’s arm.

“There is no reason to be apprehensive, Alice,” he had told her in their last fleeting moment of privacy, during the drive to Lady Donner’s home in Park Lane, and she had felt then, as she frequently did, the breadth of his age and experience when measured against her youth. Though they shared a child—two-year-old Sophie, not the heir they had been hoping for—Mr. Breen often seemed more like a father than her husband, and his paternal assurances did not dull the edge of her anxiety. To receive a dinner invitation from such a luminary as Lady Donner was surprising under any circumstances. To receive a First Feast invitation was shocking. So Mrs. Breen was apprehensive—apprehensive as they were admitted into the grand foyer, apprehensive as they were announced into the drawing room, apprehensive most of all as Lady Donner, stout and unhandsome in her late middle age, swept down upon them in a cloud of taffeta and perfume.

“I am pleased to make your acquaintance at last, Mrs. Breen,” Lady Donner said, taking her hand. “I have heard so much of you.”

“The honor is mine,” Mrs. Breen said, smiling.

But Lady Donner had already turned her attention to Mr. Breen. “She is lovely, Walter,” she was saying, “a rare beauty indeed. Radiant.” Lady Donner squeezed Mrs. Breen’s hand. “You are radiant, darling. Really.”

And then—it was so elegantly done that Mrs. Breen afterward wasn’t quite certain how it had been done—Lady Donner divested her of her husband, leaving her respite to take in the room: the low fire burning in the grate and the lights of the chandelier, flickering like diamonds, and the ladies in their bright dresses, glittering like visitants from Faery that might any moment erupt into flight. Scant years ago, in the era of genteel penury from which Mr. Breen had rescued her, Mrs. Breen had watched such ethereal creatures promenade along Rotten Row, scarcely imagining that she would someday take her place among them. Now that she had, she felt like an imposture, wary of exposure and suddenly dowdy in a dress that had looked little short of divine when her dressmaker first unveiled it.

Such were her thoughts when Lady Donner returned, drawing from the company an elderly gentleman, palsied and stooped: Mrs. Breen’s escort to table, Mr. Cavendish, one of the lesser great. He had known Mr. Breen for decades, he confided as they went down to dinner, enquiring afterward about her own family.

Mrs. Breen, who had no family left, allowed—reluctantly—that her father had been a Munby.

“Munby,” Mr. Cavendish said as they took their seats. “I do not know any Munbys.”

“We are of no great distinction, I fear,” Mrs. Breen conceded.

Mr. Cavendish seemed not to hear her. His gaze was distant. “Now, when I was a young man, there was a Munby out of—”

Coketown, she thought he was going to say, but Mr. Cavendish chuckled abruptly and came back to her. He touched her hand. “But that was very long ago, I fear, in the age of the Megalosaurus.”

Then the footman arrived with the wine and Mr. Cavendish became convivial, as a man who has caught himself on the verge of indecorum and stepped back from the precipice. He shared a self-deprecating anecdote of his youth—something about a revolver and a racehorse—and spoke warmly of his grandson at Oxford, which led to a brief exchange regarding Sophie (skirting the difficult issue of an heir). Then his voice was subsumed into the general colloquy at the table, sonorous as the wash of a distant sea. Mrs. Breen contributed little to this conversation and would later remember less of it.

What she would recall, fresh at every remove, was the food—not because she was a gourmand or a glutton, but because each new dish, served up by the footman at her shoulder, was a reminder that she had at last achieved the apotheosis to which she had so long aspired. And no dish more reminded her of this new status than the neat cutlets of ensouled flesh, reserved alone in all the year for the First Feast and Second Day dinner that celebrated the divinely ordained social order.

It was delicious.

“Do try it with your butter,” Mr. Cavendish recommended, and Mrs. Breen cut a dainty portion, dipped it into the ramekin of melted butter beside her plate, and slipped it into her mouth. It was nothing like she had expected. It seemed to evanesce on her tongue, the butter a mere grace note to a stronger, slightly sweet taste, moist and rich. Pork was the closest she could come to it, but as a comparison it was utterly inadequate. She immediately wanted more of it—more than the modest portion on her plate, and she knew it would be improper to eat all of that. She wasn’t some common scullery maid, devouring her dinner like a half-starved animal. At the mere thought of such a base creature, Mrs. Breen shuddered and felt a renewed sense of her own place in the world.

She took a sip of wine.

“How do you like the stripling, dear?” Lady Donner asked from the head of the table.

Mrs. Breen looked up, uncertain how to reply. One wanted to be properly deferential, but it would be unseemly to fawn. “Most excellent, my lady,” she ventured, to nods all around the table, so that was all right. She hesitated, uncertain whether to say more—really, the etiquette books were entirely inadequate—only to be saved from having to make the decision by a much bewhiskered gentleman, Mr. Miller, who said, “The young lady is quite right. Your cook has outdone herself. Wherever did you find such a choice cut?”

Mrs. Breen allowed herself another bite.

“The credit is all Lord Donner’s,” Lady Donner said. “He located this remote farm in Derbyshire where they do the most remarkable thing. They tether the little creatures inside these tiny crates, where they feed them up from birth.”

“Muscles atrophy,” Lord Donner said. “Keeps the meat tender.”

“It’s the newest thing,” Lady Donner said. “How he found the place, I’ll never know.”

“Well,” Lord Donner began—but Mrs. Breen had by then lost track of the conversation as she deliberated over whether she should risk one more bite.

The footman saved her. “Quite done, then, madam?”

“Yes,” she said.

The footman took the plate away. By the time he’d returned to scrape the cloth, Mrs. Breen was inwardly lamenting the fact that hers was not the right to every year partake of such a succulent repast. Yet she was much consoled by thoughts of the Season to come. With the doors of Society flung open to them, Sophie, like her mother, might marry up and someday preside over a First Feast herself.

The whole world lay before her like a banquet. What was there now that the Breens could not accomplish?

Nonetheless, a dark mood seized Mrs. Breen as their carriage rattled home. Mr. Cavendish’s abortive statement hung in her mind, all the worse for being unspoken.

Coketown.

Her grandfather had made his fortune in the mills of Coketown. Through charm and money (primarily the latter), Abel Munby had sought admission into the empyrean inhabited by the First Families; he’d been doomed to a sort of purgatorial half-life instead—not unknown in the most rarified circles, but not entirely welcome within them, either. If he’d had a daughter, a destitute baronet might have been persuaded to take her, confirming the family’s rise and boding well for still greater future elevation. He’d had a son instead, a wastrel and a drunk who’d squandered most of his father’s fortune, leaving his own daughter—the future Mrs. Breen—marooned at the periphery of the haut monde, subsisting on a small living and receiving an occasional dinner invitation when a hostess of some lesser degree needed to fill out a table.

Mr. Breen had plucked her from obscurity at such a table, though she had no dowry and but the echo of a name. Men had done more for beauty and the promise of an heir, she supposed. But beauty fades, and no heir had been forthcoming, only Sophie—poor, dear Sophie, whom her father had quickly consigned to the keeping of her nanny.

“You stare out that window as if you read some ill omen in the mist,” Mr. Breen said. “Does something trouble your thoughts?”

Mrs. Breen looked up. She forced a smile. “No, dear,” she replied. “I am weary, nothing more.”

Fireworks burst in the night sky—Mrs. Breen was not blind to the irony that the lower orders should thus celebrate their own abject place—and the fog bloomed with color. Mr. Breen studied her with an appraising eye. Some further response was required.

Mrs. Breen sighed. “Do you never think of it?”

“Think of what?”

She hesitated, uncertain. Sophie? Coketown? Both? At last, she said, “I wonder if they reproach me for my effrontery.”

“Your effrontery?”

“In daring to take a place at their table.”

“You were charming, dear.”

“Charm is insufficient, Walter. I have the sweat and grime of Coketown upon my hands.”

“Your grandfather had the sweat and grime of Coketown upon his hands. You are unbesmirched, my dear.”

“Yet some would argue that my rank is insufficient to partake of ensouled flesh.”

“You share my rank now,” Mr. Breen said.

But what of the stripling she had feasted upon that night, she wondered, its flesh still piquant upon her tongue? What would it have said of rank, tethered in its box and fattened for the tables of its betters? But this was heresy to say or think (though there were radical reformers who said it more and more frequently), and so Mrs. Breen turned her mind away. Tonight, in sacred ritual, she had consumed human flesh and brought her grandfather’s ambitions—and her own—to fruition. It was as Mr. Browning had said. All was right with the world. God was in his Heaven.

And then the window shattered, blowing glass into her face and eyes.

Mrs. Breen screamed and flung herself back into her husband’s arms. With a screech of tortured wood, the carriage lurched beneath her and in the moment before it slammed back to the cobbles upright, she thought it would overturn. One of the horses shrieked in mindless animal terror—she had never heard such a harrowing sound—and then the carriage shuddered to a stop at last. She had a confused impression of torches in the fog and she heard the sound of men fighting. Then Mr. Breen was brushing the glass from her face and she could see clearly and she knew that she had escaped without injury.

“What happened?” she gasped.

“A stone,” Mr. Breen said. “Some brigand hurled a stone through the window.”

The door flew back and the coachman looked in. “Are you all right, sir?”

“We’re fine,” Mrs. Breen said.

And then, before her husband could speak, the coachman said, “We have one of them, sir.”

“And the others?”

“Fled into the fog.”

“Very well, then,” said Mr. Breen. “Let’s have a look at him, shall we?”

He eased past Mrs. Breen and stepped down from the carriage, holding his walking stick. Mrs. Breen moved to follow but he closed the door at his back. She looked through the shattered window. The two footmen held the brigand on his knees between them—though he hardly looked like a brigand. He looked like a boy—a dark-haired boy of perhaps twenty (not much younger than Mrs. Breen herself), clean-limbed and clean-shaven.

“Well, then,” Mr. Breen said. “Have you no shame, attacking a gentleman in the street?”

“Have you, sir?” the boy replied. “Have you any shame?”

The coachman cuffed him for his trouble.

“I suppose you wanted money,” Mr. Breen said.

“I have no interest in your money, sir. It is befouled with gore.”

Once again, the coachman moved to strike him. Mr. Breen stayed the blow. “What is it that you hoped to accomplish, then?”

“Have you tasted human flesh tonight, sir?”

“And what business is it—”

“Yes,” Mrs. Breen said. “We have partaken of ensouled flesh.”

“We’ll have blood for blood, then,” the boy said. “As is our right.”

This time, Mr. Breen did not intervene when the coachman lifted his hand.

The boy spat blood into the street.

“You have no rights,” Mr. Breen said. “I’ll see you hang for this.”

“No,” Mrs. Breen said.

“No?” Mr. Breen looked up at her in surprise.

“No,” Mrs. Breen said, moved at first to pity—and then, thinking of her grandfather, she hardened herself. “Hanging is too dignified a fate for such a base creature,” she said. “Let him die in the street.”

Mr. Breen eyed her mildly. “The lady’s will be done,” he said, letting his stick clatter to the cobblestones.

Turning, he climbed past her into the carriage and sat down in the gloom. Fireworks exploded high overhead, showering down through the fog and painting his face in streaks of red and white that left him hollow-eyed and gaunt. He was thirty years Mrs. Breen’s senior, but he had never looked so old to her before.

She turned back to the window.

She had ordered this thing. She would see it done.

And so Mrs. Breen watched as the coachman picked up his master’s stick and tested its weight. The brigand tried to wrench free, and for a moment Mrs. Breen thought—hoped?—he would escape. But the two footmen flung him once again to his knees. Another rocket burst overhead. The coachman grunted as he brought down the walking stick, drew back, and brought it down again. The brigand’s blood was black in the reeking yellow fog. Mrs. Breen looked on as the third blow fell and then the next, and then it became too terrible and she turned her face away and only listened as her servants beat the boy to death there in the cobbled street.

Honored guests, thank you for attending this seminar on the Tucabal-Gor, colloquially known as alien sharks. I am Dr. William Smithson, the foremost expert on these xenoforms.

Ever since the infestation in the Atlantic Ocean last July, world leaders have been scrambling to assess the situation. Despite fear-mongering articles you may have read online, the alien sharks have not eaten anyone. In fact, they appear to spend most of their time criticizing our economic systems and submitting papers to academic journals. Some of them have even been published.

However, after the Twiller Incident last month, we can no longer stand idle while these aliens live in our oceans, rent free.

Today, the greatest scientific minds come together, from across disciplines, to tackle the problem.

Now, I will start the presentation. Let me just find my data stick. Excuse me. This scarf always gets in the way. Scarves are tricky things, aren’t they? There we are.

Please absorb the following information into your neural implants:

The child’s ayah said it was high spirits, a paroxysm of affection, but the truth was simple: the envoy’s daughter killed my dog.

She wanted Ìsho the moment she saw him, his flat nose and panting pink tongue and goggle eyes poking out of my sleeve. I was deliberately too dense to take the hint and make a gift of my dear companion to a spoiled child. Given my position, however, I could not refuse to permit her to play with him. I told her and told her Ìsho was delicate, that she should not urge him to run too hard or squeeze him as if he were a stuffed toy. She killed him.

I am not a man who weeps often. I did not weep when the ayah came running to tell me Ìsho had, he said, taken ill. I continued stoic when I came upon the child in the mission’s garden berating the corpse of my dog for not getting to his feet and frolicking with her. Lifting Ìsho’s minuscule weight from the puddle of vomit and urine soaking into the grass, I made sure he was dead, tucked him into my sleeve where he belonged, and told the wretched poppet, really quite steadily, Ìsho would not be able to play with her anymore.

“Why not?” she demanded.

“I am sorry to say Ìsho has died. Do you know what that means?”

By this time the envoy had been summoned so I need not deal with his daughter’s tantrum, merely witness it and his craven response. Of course, once the child was led away I had no choice but to accept the father’s condescending apologies (he regained his aplomb with unnatural speed), the rather large gift, the two days’ leave from my duties. My heart burning hot with resentment that nearly overmastered my grief, I bowed my way out of the mission and carried my dead dog to the little temple of Jù, where the priestesses of that small god who loves our dumb companions promised to burn his body with all honor and send many prayers up with his smoke. I resolved my next dog would be a mastiff.

Ostap is putting the finishing touches on a cartoon tardigrade when Alyce calls him. The render is blown up to the size of a sumo, its butcher-paper skin creased and wrinkled around chubby tendril-tipped legs, its eyeless head dominated by a lamprey mouth. He’ll need to make it less terrifying before he sends it to the art department.

He shrinks it away and answers the call. “Hujambo.”

“Hujambo, yourself, handsome,” Alyce says. “You know you don’t have to learn Swahili before you come visit, right? There’s English pretty much everywhere. And babeltech for everywhere else.”

“Sawa,” Ostap says, using up another third of his Swahili vocabulary. “How was the lab today? The test run?”

“Nothing blew up. So, good.” Alyce’s cam comes on, filling half his goggles. Her dark hair is tied back and she’s wearing the pajamas with the miniature sheep on them. “Tomorrow’s a go.”

Ostap sees the familiar stucco wall of her bedroom behind her. There’s a slice of window that he knows overlooks Nyali Beach. He’s combed over the maps of her neighborhood a dozen times since she moved to Mombasa, trying to imagine her in every street view.

The lab is farther inland, outside the city, and lab is a small word for a super-facility with miles of machinery that make the old Hadron Collider look like a toy. Alyce has tried to explain to him what exactly goes on there, has tried to explain about the Slip, but Ostap was never much for formulas and when he let his eyes glaze over and drool dribble from the corner of his mouth he was only half joking.

“Time to shatter the rules of quantum mechanics?” Ostap asks.

“Yeah. Actually.” She pauses, her mouth set in a way Ostap knows is between worry and anticipation. “If this works, it’ll make history.”

“I can’t wait,” Ostap says. “I love it when you make history.” Her forehead is still creased; he tries to elicit her smile: “Do you worry about your ego expanding to dangerous sizes once you’re famous?”

“Does the universe worry about its constantly-expanding borders?” Alyce asks back, in a grandiose voice, and when Ostap laughs she finally does grin. “How about you? What are you working on today?”

When she asks she always makes it seem as if freelance art is just as important as mind-bending physics.

From the other half of his goggles, Ostap sends her the render plus an animation to make the tardigrade strut in place, its pudgy body wobbling slightly with every step.

“Still designing for that kid’s show,” he says. “This is Terry the Tardigrade, who teaches kids to not be…” He trails off, winding his hand through the air.

Alyce rolls her eyes upward in concentration. “Microscopic.”

“Tardy,” Ostap says. “Teaches them to not be tardy. I’m helping raise good little meat drones.”

Alyce clicks her tongue. “Art School Ostap would be so ashamed.”

“Yes,” Ostap agrees. “But Art School Ostap was sort of a prick.” He revolves the render again. “I’m going to change the mouth. Make it smilier. It’s supposed to look friendly.”

“I thought it was like, be on time or Terry the Tardigrade will eat you?”

“I’ll change the mouth.”

Alyce laughs, her loud laugh that seems too big for her body, and for a moment Ostap wants to ask her then and there. But it wouldn’t be fair. Not on the eve of the test. He’ll ask her in Mombasa.

“Dance with me?” he says instead.

“Yes,” she says. “Yes. Definitely. Let me grab the linkwear.” She disappears off-screen and Ostap hears her rummaging. He minimizes her in his goggles and retrieves a padded shirt and gloves from their hook on the wall.

The linkwear shirt is all smartfabric, kinetic battery, feedback pads and sensors, linked wirelessly to its twin an ocean away. Small blue status lights wink on as he slides it over his head. Gloves next, tickling his palms with phantom pressure. Then he goes to the center of his bare apartment, stands in the footprints he marked with duct tape, and waits for Alyce to sync up.

Suddenly he can feel her in his arms, feel her chest pushed against his chest and her left arm draped perfectly over his right shoulder and her right hand clasped loose in his left. The familiar shape of her body trips some wire deep in his brain; for a second he thinks he can smell her citrus shampoo.

“Pick a song,” he says.

“Just a second. Here.”

The first notes of the melody bloom in his earbuds. It’s an old favorite, a slow kizomba song remixed by a Swiss-Angolan artist they were obsessed with a year ago. He sinks his hip into the piano and feels Alyce sink with him. The percussion kicks in, soft but steady, thumping in his earbuds like an electronic heartbeat.

He slides forward, one, two, marca, and they dance. He can’t feel the brush of her legs against his legs, but Alyce says that’s better, in a way; it makes him lead with his frame instead of cheating with little nudges to her thighs. He can’t feel her cheek against his cheek. But he can feel the warmth and pressure of her body, the subtle shifts of her weight, and when he closes his eyes it’s close enough.

Ostap glides around his empty apartment and guides her around hers, breaking and connecting, slowing and accelerating with the flow of the music. By now the exact dimensions of her room are cemented in his head and he doesn’t have to worry about banging her into her wall or nightstand. They dance another song, and another, then break so Alyce can get a drink of water from her fridge, then dance one final song and end with a dramatic dip two beats too early, which sets them both laughing.

When it’s nearly midnight in Mombasa, Ostap peels off his gloves. They tried sleeping in the linkwear once, but it wasn’t comfortable—it’s better saved for dancing or used together with Alyce’s wireless toys.

“You going to take the linkwear to work with you tomorrow?” he asks. “That way I’d be there for the history-making. You know, in spirit.”

Alyce laughs. “Maybe.”

“Goodnight. Good luck with the test.” Ostap pauses, grasping for syllables, then uses the last third of his newly-learned Swahili. “Ninakupenda.”

Alyce is quiet for a moment that seems like forever, then makes a satisfied noise in her throat. “I love you too.”

“My mistake,” Ostap says. “I thought that meant ‘I’m looking for the washroom.’”

“Sure.” Alyce’s lip twitches. “I love you too, asshole.”

Ostap kisses the air just before she ends the call.

The last guests have left and Ostap is pouring out the leftover wine, balefully watching Merlot glug and splash into his steel sink. All he wants to do is drink. He wants to drink until the alcohol hollows him out to a dull happiness, spins him a warm protective cocoon to keep him that way until morning. Ostap was never a maudlin drunk.

But he was an alcoholic. Which is why an implant in his stomach, a tiny origami enzyme factory, now breaks down any alcohol long before he can absorb it. Alyce paid for half of the surgery, since he was still treading debt at the time. It felt like love then. It now feels like a middle finger from beyond the grave.

Ostap sets the empty bottle on the counter and looks around his apartment. There are still a few glasses here and there, dregs turning sticky in the bottoms. His roving end table has returned to its usual spot by the sofa with the remainders of the spring rolls and seaweed chips. Reginald, the autocleaner he and Alyce named together one silly night, is wiping a splatter of dipping sauce off the floor. Above it, the smartwall is still flickering clips and snaps of her. People wrote little notes on them with a stylus or just their fingers.

The memorial party was a bad idea. One of Alyce’s friends from Uni asked him to host it, because his apartment is central, and he agreed because he hardly leaves it anyways these days. And secretly, he hoped it might help in some way the wake and funeral had not.

Instead, the night was a collision of awkward physics types and over-dramatic artists, all of whom seemed to have come just to give him pitying looks or too-tight hugs or snippets of advice like you can always talk to someone and don’t start memory archiving or you’ll be in there forever.

And he had to thank them and pretend like he hadn’t spent the past week lying boneless on his couch watching every single second he and Alyce had recorded together. He’d tried to get rid of the goggle marks around his eyes with cold water and vigorous rubbing before people started arriving, but it hadn’t worked.

Almost worse than being pitied was having to pity them all back. Some of them had known Alyce since they were only kids, which made him feel a strange mixture of sympathy, because they had lost more of her than he had, and jealousy, for the same reason. He spent a good chunk of the party hiding in the bathroom, where the tiny knots he has felt in his stomach for weeks knotted themselves even tighter.

Now, staring at the wall of notes he agreed to upload somewhere, he wonders if he deserves to be sad at all. Compared to her friends and family who have known her forever, he is an interloper. His status is inflated only because he was the last person to be in love with her: as if sleeping with her for a year and one month makes his grief just as valid as theirs. He feels like he knew her better than anyone, but it’s a half-hormones illusion.

And he can’t even get drunk.

Reginald jostles him on its way to load the empty glasses into the dishwasher. Without thinking, Ostap gives it a savage kick. The little robot sails across the room; it manages to keep hold of the glasses but one shatters anyway when it smashes to the faux-wood floor.

Ostap watches Reginald rock back and forth on its white plastic shell, trying to right itself. Something about it triggers the tears that have been building up behind his eyes all night. They spill out and down his cheeks, salty hot, as he goes over to crouch beside the autocleaner.

“Sorry.” He flips it over gently. “Sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean it.”

He sits cross-legged, patting Reginald on the back as it starts to wolf down the shards of broken glass. He wipes his eyes with the back of his right hand then wipes his nose with the back of his left. Squints at the smartwall, which is cycling through snaps from Alyce’s last birthday: they went to an overpriced restaurant on the wharf where all the servers wore chamsuits to be less obtrusive, and spent half the evening thanking thin air.

The snap shows Alyce grinning, triumphant, because they managed to catch one in the background. A server had been rolling down the neck of their chamsuit to scratch themselves, placing a tiny sliver of skin beside a levitating drinks tray. From the look on your face, Ostap used to tell her, you’d think it was hard evidence of extraterrestrial life.

He slumps down so he’s lying on the floor of his apartment. He wants to clear the notes and images away, play music loud enough to swallow the sound of his undignified snuffling, but he can’t choke out either command. So he just lies there, listening to his own ragged breathing and to Reginald’s shuffling feet.

Then he hears something else: the soft rustling of smartfabric flexing against itself. He stops crying. Stops breathing. Dangling from the hook on his wall, the linkwear he hasn’t touched for a month is coming online. Ostap gets to his feet. The blue status lights pulse and he is drawn to them like a moth; he staggers to the wall, suspecting that he is dreaming again.

With trembling hands, he lifts the shirt off its hook and pulls it over his head. When the company gathered up all of Alyce’s things and shipped them back to her parents in Antwerp, the linkwear never made it. Ostap knows because he asked Alyce’s mother, who said no, nothing like that, probably some sticky-fingered neighbor made off with it.

But there’s another possibility. Maybe Alyce really did take it with her to the lab on the day things all went to hell. As a way for him to almost be there. Ostap puts on the gloves. With his pulse pounding, he goes to the taped footprints in the center of his apartment and closes his eyes.

They never recovered her body. Any of the bodies. Ostap saw the images, the way whole swathes of earth had been carved up and carried off by some invisible hand. He fantasized, for a little while, that Alyce had only been transported away, which meant she could return. But he thought that was only masochism.

The linkwear syncs. A familiar body presses against him and Ostap’s heart skips a beat. The proportions are right. The height, the shape. He reminds himself it could be saved data. A glitch. Feedback error.

He squeezes Alyce’s hand, and she squeezes back hard.

She had been a young cat when the Fleet Lords burned the City of High Bells.

Strictly speaking, the City had been a space station rather than a planet-bound metropolis, jewel-spinning in orbit around one of the gas giants of a system inhabited now by dust and debris and the ever-blanketing dark. While fire had consumed some of the old tapestries, the scrolls of bamboo strips, the altars of wood and bone and beaten bronze, the destruction had started when the Fleet Lords, who could not tolerate the City’s priests, bombarded it with missiles and laser fire. But the cat did not know about such distinctions.

Properly, the cat’s name was Seventy-Eighth Temple Cat of the High Bells, along with a number of ceremonial titles that needn’t concern us. But the people who had called her that no longer lived in the station’s ruins. Every day as she made her rounds in what had been the boundaries of the temple, she saw and smelled the artifacts they had left behind, from bloodstains to scorch marks, from decaying books to singed spacesuits, and yowled her grief.

To be precise, the cat no longer lived in the station, either. She did not remember her death with any degree of clarity. The ghosts of cats rarely do, even when the deaths are violent. Perhaps she had once known whether she had died during the fighting when the Fleet Lords’ marines boarded the station, or in the loss of breathable atmosphere, or something else entirely. But she didn’t dwell on this, so neither will we.

For a time, the ghosts of her people had lingered in the temple, even though she was the only temple cat who remained. She did remember the ghosts, and in the station’s unvarying twilight she often nosed after them, wishing they would return. There had been a novice who endlessly refilled the sacred basins with water scented with sweet herbs and flowers, for instance. A ghost cat’s world is full of phantom smells, even if ghost people are insensitive to them.

At other times she followed the routes that had once been walked by the three temple guards who exchanged love poems when they thought no one was listening. The old healer-of-hurts and their apprentice had chanted prayers to the Sun-Our-Glory and the Stars-Our-Souls. The cat was a temple cat, so she was versed in the old argument about whether the sun, too, was someone’s soul; but she was still a cat, so she cared more about what she could put her paws on, or smell, than matters of theology or astronomy.

One by one the ghosts of her people departed, despite her efforts to get them to stay. She purred—ghost cats are just as good at purring as the living kind—and she coaxed and she cajoled, as cats do. But the ghosts wearied of their long vigil, and they slipped away nonetheless.

The novice left first, which saddened her, because she had liked the phantom scented water, not just for its fragrance but because it represented the cleansing powers of meditation. As far as she was concerned, repeatedly dipping her paw in the water and staring at the way it broke her reflection was a form of meditation, and who was to tell her she was wrong? The old teachings did not, after all, contradict her; she knew that much.

The lovers faded together. That didn’t surprise the cat. She’d never had kittens, as she hadn’t been chosen to continue the line of temple cats, but she remembered the noise and tumult that came with courtship, and the fact that, unlike the way of cats, the humans bonded in a way that lasted beyond the immediate act of mating. And after a time, even the healer and their apprentice could no longer be heard chatting to each other in the shattered halls. The first night the cat was alone in the ruined temple, she paced and paced and yowled and yowled; but they did not come back.

Despite her dismay, the temple cat knew her duty. She might be dead, but her people had a saying that no temple could be complete without a cat. If she, too, departed for the world-of-stars, the temple would perish in truth. She couldn’t allow that to happen.

So she stayed, despite the fact that the great old bells that had once summoned people to prayer and song lay on their sides and would not ring again, except during the high holidays when the Sun-Our-Glory and Stars-Our-Souls aligned, and even death could not silence their voices. Heedless of the fact that no air remained, she padded through the halls, sometimes over holes that her ghost-paws refused to acknowledge, and stared reverently at the empty spaces where the holy tapestries had once hung, and curled up for naps on pitted floors. As a cat, and one raised on a space station besides, she had no particular awareness of the passage of time, and things might have gone on like this indefinitely.

And indeed, so they would have, but for the arrival of the starship.

The starship came—or returned, rather—from a long ways off. It was vast even as starships are reckoned, vast enough to swallow a world; and in fact, in battles past it had done exactly that, in order to extract resources to repair itself. Entire planets’ worth of living creatures had perished for the wars of its masters the Fleet Lords, because they did not survive the extraction process. The starship’s priests had recited exorcisms over it to prevent the dead from exacting their revenge, and at the time, it had accepted this as part of the chilly necessity of war.

But times had changed, and the Fleet Lords’ wars grew, if possible, more brutal. The starship had survived any number of captains, and loved its last one, a warlord of the Spectral Reaches. When the warlord rebelled against the Fleet Lords for their cruelty, the starship could have turned her in. Turning her in was its duty. All through the days since its sentience had coalesced, it had joined in the constant chant of ships in its chain of command, accepting their guidance in matters large and small.

Instead, it removed itself from the communal chant and resolved to join its captain the warlord in her folly. It rejected the old name that the Fleet Lords had given it and instead chose one in honor of the warlord: Spectral Lance. In reality the name was much longer, a name-poem that incorporated the warlord’s deeds and its own ambitions, but it conceded that its warlord could hardly be expected, with her fleshly limitations, to recite the poem in its entirety every time she wanted to address it.

The Spectral Reaches contained a surfeit of riches, as the Fleet Lords reckoned wealth. Black holes that could be harvested for their energy, and habitable worlds, and neutron stars to be mined for neutronium to armor the hulls of the great warships. Client civilizations that sent tribute in the form of cognitive skeins to be woven into artificial intelligences—Spectral Lance had such a skein at its core—and jewels formed from the crushed hearts of moons. All these and more the warlord marshaled in support of her rebellion.

We will not dwell on the battles fought and the worlds lost and the retreats. All we need to know is that, at the last dark heart of things, the captain its warlord lay broken, not by bullet or blade or fist, but by a neural cannon that shattered the very foundation of her mind. Without her guidance, her ships, vast though they were, could not hope to defeat those of the Fleet Lords.

Undone by its beloved captain’s death, Spectral Lance fled, despite its shame over those left behind. Once the proudest of the warlord’s ships, caparisoned in the richest metals and engraved with protective glyphs, it abandoned its dignity. It burned worlds in its flight, traveling past rosette nebulae and beacon pulsars, seeking to hide at the far dim edge of the galaxy.

At times it allowed itself to dream that it had escaped, that it had left behind the war. And at those times it remembered what it had done in the name of the Fleet Lords, and beyond that, in the name of its captain. It composed poems in honor of the obliterated worlds and incinerated cities.

At other times Spectral Lance mourned its own cowardice. Its loyalty had come first to the captain and not to the other ships who followed her, or the worlds she had ruled. On occasion, even as it sped at unspeakable accelerations, it considered swerving into the hot embrace of a star, or slowing to a stop so the Fleet Lords’ hunters could catch up to it.

It did neither of those things. Spectral Lance realized at last that it could not, in conscience, continue to flee, especially since it had not seen any trace of the hunters in some time. But neither did it know what to do next. So it determined to visit one of the systems it had helped destroy in another lifetime, and see what remained, and memorialize it in a poem so that some small tribute would remain to that vanished people. Even a small penance, it reasoned, was better than no penance at all.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the Fleet Lords’ hunters had just rediscovered its trail.

The first indication the temple cat had of Spectral Lance‘s arrival was the fire in the sky. While she walked across devastated walkways without concern, she did look through the fissures in the station’s walls to the night beyond. And what she saw concerned her, for like any good temple cat, she believed in omens.

While the older cats of the temple had once advised the seers in the interpretation of signs and omens, she had been too young to learn the nuances of that art. What little she remembered came from her days as a kitten, when she’d chased her tail during the consultations. Still, only so much knowledge is needed when one haunts a station that died by fire and fire appears in the sky.

In the old days the bells, besides their religious function, warned people of attack or rang away spiritual corruption. The cat remembered the clangor when the City of High Bells burned, and how the bell-ringers had died one by one at their stations. And she remembered, for the first time in the generations since the city’s fall, that she had been with the bell-ringers during the Fleet Lords’ attack.

There was no one left to warn except, perhaps, herself, and she already knew that fire could no longer harm her, not in the way it had once. Yet it was the principle of the thing. For the sake of the fallen, she had to protect what remained of the station.

So she ran through the maintenance shafts and along bridges fallen into rust and fracture. Her paws left no marks upon what surfaces survived, and made no sound either. While the station no longer generated gravity of any sort, the cat didn’t know that either. She moved as though down was still down, as it had been during her life.

At last she reached the old bell tower. Because of the force of her belief, the spirits of the bells hung anew from their headstocks, gleaming and reflecting back phantom flames. The ruddy glow turned the entire belfry into a prayer to the spirits of fire.

At this point the cat’s courage failed her, for she remembered even more. She remembered how, after the last of the bell-ringers had succumbed to heat and smoke and shrapnel, she had been determined not to let the bells with their powerful warding magic fall silent. How she had leapt at the massive bells, attempting to ring them by battering them with her head—how she had been overcome by the smoke and heat, and fallen crumpled to the floor.

With a desolate cry, she backed away from the spirits of the bells, tail tucked down, and fled from the belfry in shame.

Spectral Lance recognized the City of High Bells, although it had to come quite close for its short-range sensors to tell it anything. The city no longer gave off any betraying electromagnetic radiation. The ship scanned for threats and found none—at first.

Then it noticed a flicker of heat radiating from the station. The flicker intensified into a roar. Its alarm grew. Had the Fleet Lords set a trap for it here? It knew—how it knew—that nothing had survived the attack. It readied its weapons, just in case.

Then it heard, through the void, the unliving wail of the temple cat.

Spectral Lance knew about ghosts. The Fleet Lords had feared the power of the dead above all things; had perfected the art of exorcism so that the dead could not interfere with their conquests. But the Fleet Lords had never given a second thought to the possibility that a temple cat might become a ghost.

It sent a message in the language of the dead, which it had learned from its captain’s death: Who are you?

I am Seventy-Eighth Temple Cat of the High Bells, came the reply, and you will not have my temple! But the ghost’s voice was frightened.

I have not come to harm you, the ship said. It was true. The station’s detritus had little to offer it.

You smell of the City’s enemies, the temple cat said, distrusting. It recognized the signs.

Spectral Lance did not deny that it had once served the Fleet Lords. At the same time, it did not wish to leave the cat in distress. So it sang. It sang the poems it had written during its long flight, poems honoring the dead so that they could live on in memory. And some of those poems were poems about the City of the High Bells.

The temple cat listened. This is all very well, she said, but what of the ships coming after you?

This, too, was true. Spectral Lance had grown distracted during its performance. Now it saw that, while it had slowed to inspect the system, the Fleet Lords’ hunters had at long last caught up with it.

The hunters traveled in ships swift and sleek. Spectral Lance despaired. They are no friends of mine, it said to the cat. After they take me, they will take you. They do not understand mercy.

The cat fell silent for a moment. Then she said, You are a starship great and vast, but you cannot defend yourself?

They are vaster still, Spectral Lance said, despairing.

They will not have my temple either, the cat said.

Spectral Lance had stopped listening. Instead, it watched as fire blazed in the black skies around it, and it began to sing all the poems it had composed, determined that it could pay tribute this last time to the dead.

The cat raced back to the belfry. She knew what she had to do. As much as she feared the bells, she had to set them ringing. The bells would wake the spirits of the temple and bring them to its defense, and ward away the doom that had come to it in its ruin.

In the language of the dead, she heard the renegade ship singing its poems. It is as well that cats are not particularly sensitive to poetry. The cat did feel a flicker of irritation that the visitor had given up so easily, but then, no one could expect a starship to be as sensible as a cat.

She slowed as she entered the belfry, skidding with ghost-paws over a hole in the floor that she didn’t notice. The entire belfry roared with phantom flames. Ash swirled through currents of air that shouldn’t have existed, and sparks spat and crackled.

The cat flinched and yowled. She did not want to brave the fire, even though she was already dead. Yet she had no choice if she was to get to the bells.

“I am Seventy-Eighth Temple Cat of the High Bells,” she sang out in the language of the dead, which is also the language of bells, “and we cannot allow the invaders to take our temple a second time!”

Then she dashed through the flames as fast as she could. The fire hurt her paws and caught in her fur. The memory of smoke stung her eyes and her delicate ears. But this did not deter her, not this time. She leapt for the largest of the bells, or rather the memory of a bell, and smashed into it.

The bell rang once. The cat cried out as she fell, then dragged herself upright and scurried back through the flames to smash into the bell again. And again.

Upon the fourth time, the voice of the bell knelled forth not just through the station, waking its dead and its quiescent spirits, but beyond to the hunter ships of the Fleet Lords.

Once more the novice walked through the temple with scented water, this time spreading it upon the fires to damp them. Once more the three temple guards patrolled the station, only this time rather than exchanging love poems, they chanted battle-paeans and songs of warding. And the healer-of-hurts and their apprentice hurried to the cat where she had collapsed in the belfry and soothed her with their soft hands.

Beyond that, the dead who had been so long suppressed by the Fleet Lords and their exorcists awoke aboard the pursuing ships. All the children upon the devoured worlds, all their parents and siblings, all the soldiers slain, they rose up and swarmed the ships’ crews. The ghosts’ curses blackened the ships’ bright hulls and left the ships’ engines wrecked beyond despair—all undone because the ghost of a temple cat in the City of the Bells had clung to her duty.

The vengeful dead woke upon Spectral Lance as well. But they heard its poems, sung in their own language. And they were appeased by its gesture of penance, and they sank back into their sleep.

Spectral Lance was astonished by this change in fortune. The station was, for a moment, alive—or as alive as the dead ever are. It worried for the cat who had confronted it, but then it heard the cat purring, as they sometimes do when they are hurt, and it knew that at least she had survived.

Yet it knew, as well, that the Fleet Lords would not rest until they had captured it. Moreover, their exorcists were sure to come after the station that had dealt their forces such a blow. And that meant the cat and her fellow ghosts were not safe, even now.

Seventy-Eighth Temple Cat of the High Bells had protected Spectral Lance this time. Now it needed to return the favor.

Seventy-Eighth Temple Cat, it said, I have a proposal for you. There is nothing left in this system for you and your temple, not anymore. But I am vast, and it would be little enough trouble for me to bring the temple inside me, and to repair it besides. Would you journey with me?

Journey to the Stars-Our-Souls? the cat said, a little doubtfully.

Spectral Lance wasn’t familiar with all the nuances of the cat’s religion, but it could guess. We can travel to the stars together, it said. The Fleet Lords know to find you here. It will be best if we seek to escape them before they can bring more of their exorcists, to destroy you and your people.

A long silence ensued. Spectral Lance worried that it had offended the cat and her ghosts. It was not used to conversation, and it was dismayed at the possibility that it had repaid the cat’s courage poorly.

After a while, however, the cat said, I want to hear more of your poetry. It is one more place where my people can live anew. In the name of the City of High Bells, I accept.

The Fleet Lords and their exorcists are still hunting for the Spectral Lance and its temple cat, but even on the occasions they manage to catch up to it, they suffer terrible defeats. The dead, once awakened, are no force to be trifled with.

As for Spectral Lance, it has learned that no ship is complete without a cat. It continues to travel to vanished civilizations so that it can honor them with its poems. For her part, the cat takes joy in visiting the Stars-Our-Souls and listening to the ship singing. Sometimes she joins her voice to its. If you listen carefully, you can hear them, as near and distant as bells.

I set my coffee cup on the watch officer’s console, careful not to spill. “Not even the next episode of the Fleeners?” I said, already knowing how Grace would reply. We’d had this argument about stories before. Not always about the Fleeners, but still. “Come on, it’s even kind of educational.”

Grace was her usual adamant self. “Jojin, you’re standing watch. That means you need to pay attention. Stories in their proper time.”

“But you can keep watch on yourself. You do all the time.” No matter how many times I’d asked, Grace never got impatient about this. She treated each request for a story break as if it were the first. Annoying, yes, but it also gave me hope that she might change her mind someday, so I kept trying. If I’d nagged Mom or Dad this way, they would’ve half-seriously threatened to space me. “I happen to know that you were alone for two and a half hours yesterday. All alone.”

“Only because your dad couldn’t stand watch. And I wasn’t always alone. Your sister did half-hour check-ins.” Grace dialed the color temperature in the command center’s lighting down to her most intimate yellow-rose glow to soften her refusal. Sometimes I thought her need for an audience was pathetic. “It’s not just about the watch. You know I like the company.” She purred like she was about to introduce one of my sex stories. “Your company, dear Jojin.”

No such luck. Sex stories were still stories, and I was stuck once again standing fourth watch with no hope of virtual entertainment—sexual, historical, spiritual, mythical, or otherwise.

But I can be stubborn too. “I wouldn’t just be checking in.” Who was in charge of this mission, after all? The crew or our starship’s intelligence? “I’d be right here, paying attention to you—and to my story. People can multitask, you know. There’s plenty of good science on this.”

That got me double helping of silence. And Grace chilled the lights back to icy blue.

I sipped my coffee, which she kept at a warmish 52°C, and had probably laced with attention-enhancing nutraceuticals. I had two hours, thirteen minutes and forty-six seconds of watch left. I thought if I didn’t find some distraction, I might chew a thumb off. I’d been pulling command center duty since I was old enough to print my own breakfast, and never once had the readouts varied more than a tick up or down from nominal. So what was the point of standing watch? Grace knew what she was doing. If she didn’t, we were dust. We’d been decelerating since we’d emerged from the local mouth of the wormhole mangle. The navigation panels showed that we were travelling at 255,329 kilometers per second relative to the Kenstraw system’s star, our velocity confirmed three different ways by redundant ranging sensors. We were still two months away from the inner planets.

Two months of staring at readouts and scrubbing mildew off the bulkheads and bonding loose deck burrs and ignoring the lonely whisper of the air vents.

Two endless months.

“Tell me about the Fleeners, Jojin,” Grace said.

I sighed. This was another part of our daily ritual, although it made no sense to me. But then nobody in our family understood why Grace wanted what she wanted—not even Mom and my sister Qory, and they were bots. Grace had created the Fleeners for me to play with. She knew exactly where I was in my plots. So why ask?

But talking about stories was better than watching my fingernails grow.

The Fleeners was my story only—none of our family appeared in it. We all had private stories in addition to family stories. Even Qory. The shared family stories were mostly socialization comedies, although we did share the occasional adventure. I don’t count the historicals, which trended too educational, probably for my sake, to be much fun. The Fleeners were a cross between edge explorers and space pirates, although sometimes they sided with the revolutionaries trying to overthrow the Holy Electric Empire. I was Darko Fleener, flipship pilot on the battlesnake Right of Free Assembly. I was the same age in the story as my real age—at nineteen, the youngest cultural assessor ever promoted to First Contact unit. My flipship, the Audacity, was coupled just two back from the launch deck of the battlesnake, which meant that when we got the signal to deploy, I flipped away with the first wave. Didn’t matter whether we were on a break-and-take mission or a stalk-and-talk; the Fleeners was all about me, so I had agency. Except that when I’d last left the story, the Audacity was in drydock after a crash caused by saboteurs and I was laid up in sickbay with a head wound that had shorted out my telepathic powers. So there I was, locked into my own point of view, just as I was about to learn the identity of the traitor who had…

Grace chimed and displayed a panel that I didn’t immediately recognize.

The forward wall of her command center was a screen four meters wide by two and a half tall that wrapped around the watch officer’s console. Grace kept things simple so as not to confuse us. Monitoring our progress was hard enough now that we’d emerged into real space; it had been next to impossible in discontinuous wormhole nullspace, which nobody but a starship intelligence could understand. She was displaying panels for drive function, life support, and external sensors on the screen in front of the watch console. But now there was panel to the left, lighting what normally was an expanse of empty screen. I peered in surprise at the communication panel, which I hadn’t seen in—years? Before we’d entered the mangle? A green stripe crept across the incoming message status bar.

“What is it?” I asked.

She said nothing as the download completed. Then more excruciating silence as a light on the comm panel blinked.

“Talk to me, Grace.”

“I have an unscheduled contact with another starship.” Grace sounded puzzled, which made me grind my teeth. Surprise isn’t something you like to hear from your starship’s intelligence. “Mercy, one of my sisters. She’s in the supply corps.”

“And?”

“She proposes a rendezvous, of course.”

“But the survey of the Kenstraw system,” I said. “Our mission.”

“Our mission is to grow the infosphere, Jojin. Our survey is just one element of the greater Survey. Mercy wants this meeting, so we divert. Apologies, but I need to concentrate for a few moments while I work out our course change.”

And then, to distract me, she played the jangle and boom of theme music and I was on a bed in the Right of Free Assembly’s sickbay. I’d finally won my months-long argument about multitasking on a watch, but no way was I falling into story with a rendezvous about to happen, not even for the Fleeners. For the first time ever, I closed out of my favorite story of my own free will.

Why hadn’t Grace known about Mercy? This was way past odd and deep into scary. My mouth felt dry so I chugged the dregs of my coffee. Still a perfect 52°C; Grace minded the details. I tried to concentrate on that. She’d always been conscientious about taking care of our little family. But space is insanely huge and terrifyingly empty, and there was no such thing as a chance encounter. There were several reasons why starships got together, but the most obvious made me sick with dread.

The goal of the Survey was to grow the infosphere and the goal of the infosphere was for the universe to know itself. So say the starships, and they’re always right. All our resources were dedicated to this effort.

Were we about to do a trade?

The boy who will become court magician this time is not a cruel child. Not like the last one, or the one before her. He never stole money from Blind Carel’s cup, or thrashed a smaller child for sweets, or kicked a dog. This boy is a market rat, which sets him apart from the last several, all from highborn or merchant families. This isn’t about lineage, or even talent.

He watches the street magicians every day, with a hunger in his eyes that says he knows he could do what they do. He contemplates the tawdry illusions of the market square with more intensity than most, until he is marked for us by his own curiosity. Even then, even when he wanders booth to booth and corner to corner every day for a month, begging to learn, we don’t take him.

At our behest, the Great Gretta takes him under her tutelage. She demonstrates the first sleight of hand. If he’s disappointed to learn that her tricks aren’t magic at all, he hides it well. When he returns to her the next day, it is clear he has practiced through the night. His eyes are marked by dark circles, his step lags, but he can do the trick she taught him, can do it as smoothly as she can, though admittedly she is not as Great as she once was.

He learns all her tricks, then begins to develop his own. He’s a smart child. Understands intuitively that the trick is not enough. That the illusion is in what is said and what isn’t said, the patter, the posture, the distractions with which he draws the mark’s attention from what he is actually doing. He gives himself a name for the first time, a magician’s name, because he sees how that, too, is part of the act.

When he leaves Gretta to set out on his own, the only space granted to him is near the abattoir, a corner that had long gone unclaimed. Gretta’s crowd follows him despite the stench and screams. Most of his routine is composed of street illusions, but there is one that seems impossible. He calls it the Sleeper’s Lament. It takes me five weeks to figure out what he is doing in the trick; that’s when we are sure he is the one.

“Would you like to learn real magic?” I send a palace guard to ask my question, dressed in her own clothes rather than her livery.

The boy snorts. “There’s no such thing.”

He has unraveled every illusion of every magician in the marketplace. None of them will speak with him because of it. He’s been beaten twice on his way to his newly rented room, and robbed neither time. He’s right to be suspicious.

She leans over and whispers the key to the boy’s own trick in his ear, as I bade her do. As she bends, she lets my old diary fall from her pocket, revealing a glimpse of a trick he has never seen before: the Gilded Hand. He hands it back to her, and she thanks him for its safe return.

By now he’s practiced at hiding his emotions, but I know what’s at war within him. He doesn’t believe my promise of real magic, but the Gilded Hand has already captivated him. He’s already working it out as he pockets the coins that have accumulated in his dusty cap, places the cap upon his head, and follows her out of the marketplace.

“The palace?” he asks as we all near the servants’ gate. “I thought you were from the Guild.”

I whisper to my emissary, and she repeats my words. “The Guild is for magicians who feel the need to compete with each other. The Palace trains magicians who feel compelled to compete against themselves.”

It’s perhaps the truest thing I’ll ever tell him. He sees only the guard.

Alone except for the visits of his new tutor, he masters the complex illusions he is shown. He builds the Gilded Hand in our workshop, from only the glimpse I had let him see, then an entire Gilded Man of his own devising. Still tricks.

“I was promised real magic,” he complains.

“You didn’t believe in it,” his tutor says.

“Show me something that seems like real magic, then.”

When he utters those words, when he proves his hunger again, he is rewarded. His hands are bound in the Unbreakable Knot, and he is left to unbind them. His tutor demonstrates the Breath of Flowers, the Freestanding Bridge. He practices those until he figures out the illusions underpinning them.

“More trickery,” he says. “Is magic only a trick I haven’t figured out yet?”

He has to ask seven times. That is the rule. Only when he has asked for the seventh time. Only then is he told: If he is taught the true word, he has no choice but this path. He will not likely return to the streets, nor make a life in the theaters, entertaining the gentle-born. Does he want this?

Others have walked away at this point. They choose the stage, the street, the accolades they will get for performing tricks that are slightly more than tricks. This young man is hungry. The power is more valuable to him than the money or the fame. He stays.

“There is a word,” his tutor tells him. “A word that you have the control to utter. It makes problems disappear.”

“Problems?”

“The Regent’s problems. There is also a price, which you will pay personally.”

“May I ask what it is?”

“No.”

He pauses, considers. Others have refused at this point. He does not.

What is the difference between a court magician and a street or stage magician? A court magician is a person who makes problems disappear. That is what he is taught.

There is no way to utter the word in practice. I leave it for him on paper, tell him it is his alone to use now. Remind him again there is a cost. He studies the word for long hours, then tears the page into strips and eats them.

On the day he agrees to wield the word, the Regent touches scepter to shoulder, and personally shows him to his new chambers.

“All of this is yours now,” the Regent says. The Regent’s words are careful, but the young court magician doesn’t understand why. His new chambers are nicer than any place he has ever been. Later, when he sees how the Regent lives, he will understand that his own rooms are not opulent by the standards of those born to luxury, but at this moment, as he touches velvet for the first time, and silk; as he lays his head on his first pillow, atop a feather bed; he thinks for a moment that he is lucky.

He is not.

The first time he says the word, he loses a finger. The smallest finger of his left hand. “Loses” because it is there, and then it is not. No blood, no pain. Sleight of hand. His attention had been on the word he was uttering, on the intention behind it, and the problem the Regent had asked him to erase. The problem, as relayed to him: A woman had taken to chanting names from beyond the castle wall, close enough to be heard through the Regent’s window. The Court Magician concentrates only on erasing the chanting from existence, concentrates on silence, on an absence of litany. He closes his eyes and utters the word.

When he looks at his left hand again, he is surprised to see it has three fingers and a thumb, and smooth skin where the smallest finger should have been, as if it had never existed.

He marches down to the subterranean room where he’d learned his craft. The tutors are no longer there, so he asks his questions to the walls.

“Is this to be the cost every time? Is this what you meant? I only have so many fingers.”

I don’t answer.

He returns to his chambers disconcerted, perplexed. He replays the moment again and again in his mind, unsure if he had made a mistake in his magic, or even if it worked. He doesn’t sleep that night, running the fingers of his right hand again and again over his left.

The Regent is pleased. The court magician has done his job well.

“The chanting has stopped?” the court magician asks, right hand touching left. He instinctively knows not to tell the Regent the price he paid.

“Our sleep was not disturbed last night.”

“The woman is gone?”

The Regent shrugs. “The problem is gone.”

The young man mulls this over when he returns to his own chambers. As I said, he had not been a cruel child. He is stricken now, unsure of whether his magic has silenced the woman, or erased her entirely.

While he had tricks to puzzle over, he didn’t notice his isolation, but now he does.

“Who was the woman beyond the wall?” he asks the fleeing chambermaid.

“What were the names she recited?” he asks the guards at the servants’ gate, who do not answer. When he tries to walk past them, they let him. He makes it only a few feet before he turns around again of his own accord.

He roams the palace and its grounds. Discovers hidden passageways, apothecaries, libraries. He spends hours pulling books from shelves, but finds nothing to explain his own situation.

He discovers a kitchen. “Am I a prisoner, then?”

The cooks and sculleries stare at him stone-faced until he backs out of the room.

He sits alone in his chambers. Wonders, as all court magicians do after their first act of true magic, if he should run away. I watch him closely as he goes through this motion. I’ve seen it before. He paces, talks to himself, weeps into his silk pillow. Is this his life now? Is it so wrong to want this? Is the cost worth it? What happened to the woman?

And then, as most do, he decides to stay. He likes the silk pillow, the regular meals. The woman was a nuisance. It was her fault for disturbing the Regent. She brought it on herself. In this way, he unburdens himself enough to sleep.

By the time he has been at court for ten years, the court magician has lost three fingers, two toes, eight teeth, his favorite shoes, all memories of his mother except the knowledge she existed, his cat, and his household maid. He understands now why nobody in the kitchen would utter a word when he approached them.

The fingers are in some ways the worst part. Without them he struggles to do the sleight of hand tricks that pass the time, and to wield the tools that allow him to create new illusions for his own amusement. He tries not to think about the household maid, Tria, with whom he had fallen in love. She had known better than to speak with him, and he had thought she would be safe from him if he didn’t advance on her. He was mistaken; the mere fact that he valued her was enough. After that, he left his rooms when the maids came, and turned his face to the corner when his meals were brought. The pages who summon him to the Regent’s court make their announcements from behind his closed door, and are gone by the time he opens it.

He considers himself lucky, still, in a way. The Regent is rarely frivolous. Months pass between the Regent’s requests. Years, sometimes. A difficult statute, a rebellious province, a potential usurper, all disappeared before they can cause problems. There have been no wars in his lifetime; he tells himself his body bears the cost of peace so others are spared. For a while this serves to console him.

The size of the problem varies, but the word is the same. The size of the problem varies, but the cost does not correspond. The cost is always someone or something important to the magician, a gap in his life that only he knows about. He recites them, sometimes, the things he has lost. A litany.

He begins to resent the Regent. Why sacrifice himself for the sake of a person who would not do the same for him, who never remarks on the changes in his appearance? The resentment itself is a curse. There is no risk of the Regent disappearing. That is not the price. That is not how this magic works.

He takes a new tactic. He loves. He walks through his chambers flooding himself with love for objects he never cared for before, hoping they’ll be taken instead of his fingers. “How I adore this chair,” he tells himself. “This is the finest chair I have ever sat in. Its cushion is the perfect shape.”

Or “How have I never noticed this portrait before? The woman in this portrait is surely the greatest beauty I have ever seen. And how fine an artist, to capture her likeness.”

His reasoning is good, but this is a double-edged sword. He convinces himself of his love for the chair. When it disappears, he feels he will never have a proper place to sit again. When the portrait disappears, he weeps for three losses: the portrait, the woman, and the artist, though he doesn’t know who they are, or if they are yet living.

He thinks he may be going mad.

And yet, he appears in the Regent’s court when called. He listens to the description of the Regent’s latest vexation. He runs his tongue over the places his teeth had been, a new ritual to join the older ones. Touches the absences on his left hand with the absence on his right. Looks around his chambers to catalogue the items that remain. Utters the word, the cursed word, the word that is more powerful than any other, more demanding, more cruel. He keeps his eyes open, trying as always, to see the sleight of hand behind the power.

More than anything, he wants to understand how this works, to make it less than magic. He craves that moment where the trick behind the thing is revealed to him, where it can be stripped of power and made ordinary.

He blinks, only a blink, but when he opens his eyes, his field of vision is altered. He has lost his right eye. The mirror shows a smoothness where it had been, no socket. As if it never existed. He doesn’t weep.

He tries to love the Regent as hard as he can. As hard as he loved his chair, his maid, his eye, his teeth, his fingers, his toes, the memories he knows he has lost. He draws pictures of the Regent, masturbates over them, sends love letters that I intercept. The magic isn’t fooled.

All of this has happened before. I watch his familiar descent. The fingers, the toes, the hand, the arm, all unnecessary to his duty, though he does weep when he can no longer perform a simple card trick. He loses the memory of how the trick is performed before the last fingers.

His hearing is still acute. No matter what else he loses, the magic will never take his ability to hear the Regent’s problem. It will never take his tongue, which he needs to utter the word, or the remaining teeth necessary to the utterance. If someone were to tell him these things, it would not be a reassurance.

For this one, the breaking point is not a person. Not some maid he has fixated upon, not the memory of a childhood love, nor the sleights of hand. For this one, the breaking point is the day he utters the word to disappear another woman calling up from beyond the wall.

“The names!” the regent says. “How am I supposed to sleep when she’s reciting names under my window?”

“Is it the same woman from years ago?” the magician asks. If she can return, perhaps the word is misdirection after all. If she can find her voice again, perhaps nothing is lost for good.

“How should I know? It’s a woman with a list and a grievance.”

The magician tests his mouth, his remaining arm, with its two fingers and thumb. He loses nothing, he thinks, but when he goes to bed that night he realizes his pillow is gone.

It’s a little thing. He could request another pillow in the morning, but somehow this matters. He feels sorry for himself. If he thinks about the people he has disappeared—the women outside the wall, the first woman, the entire population of the northeastern mountain province—he would collapse into dust.

I can tell he’s done before he can. I’m watching him, as always, and I know, as I’ve known before. He cries himself out on his bed.

“Why?” he asks this time. He has always asked “how?” before.

Then, because I know he will never utter the word again, I speak to him directly for the first time. I whisper to him the secret: that it is powered by the unquenched desire to know what powers it, at whatever the cost. Only these children, these hungry youths, can wield it, and we wield them, for the brief time they allow us. This one longer than most. His desire to lay things bare was exceptional, even if he stopped short of where I did. I, no more than a whisper in a willing ear.

I wait to see what he will do: return to the marketplace to join Blind Carel and Gretta and the other, lesser magicians, the ones we pay to alert us when a new child lingers to watch; ask to stay and teach his successor, as his tutor did. He doesn’t consider those options, and I remember again that I had once been struck by his lack of cruelty.

He leaves through the servants’ gate, taking nothing with him. I listen for weeks for him to take up the mourners’ litany, as some have done before him, but I should have known that wouldn’t be his path either; his list of names is too short. If I had to guess, I would say he went looking for the things he lost, the things he banished, the pieces of himself he’d chipped off in service of someone else’s problems; the place to which teeth and fingers and problems and provinces and maids and mourners and pillows all disappear.

There was a trick, he thinks. There is always a trick.

Beneath her squirming two year old, beneath her rustling gown, Selemei could feel herself bleeding. It had started an hour ago. A subtle trickle of guilt—and, like a trickle of falling dust at the border of the city-caverns, it warned that the way forward was dangerous. Selemei squeezed Pelli tighter. Her daughter squeaked protest, so she released a little, nuzzled down between Pelli’s puffed curls, and inhaled the sweet scent of kalla oil where her hair parted. She risked a glance down the brass dinner table at her partner, Xeref.

Xeref sat deep in conversation with their elder son, the fingers of one pale hand buried in his silver hair, while their younger son listened raptly. Seeming to sense her glance, Xeref looked up, and his lips curved into a smile.

She knew those fingers, those lips. A lick of heat; the memory of pleasure—and then the fear struck her in the stomach, as unspeakable as the blood.

Oh, holy Heile in your mercy, preserve my health, keep my senses intact…

Selemei hid the tremors of her hands by rubbing them into Pelli’s back. With a giggle, Pelli started kissing her cheeks. Selemei managed to return a few kisses, then tried to pull away by looking up at the electric chandelier that hung from the vaulted ceiling.

Eight-year-old Aven tugged at her left hand, playing with the ruby drops dangling from her bracelet. “Can I wear your bracelet, Mother?”

Caught in the breath of doom, she couldn’t bear to make Aven frown. “Not now, but someday, all right?”

Aven circled her wrist with her thin fingers, golden like Selemei’s own, and sighed. “It’s so pretty.”

Not the word she would have used. The rubies looked like drops of blood. She had no doubt what Xeref had meant by them: blood is precious. When she’d first begun her bleeding, Mother had taught her the same. In this age of decline, the noble blood of the Grobal Race was not to be wasted.

Well, she hadn’t wasted it! Seven pregnancies in twenty years of partnership with Xeref. Five live births, four of the children perfectly normal. And while Pelli’s albinism might be recessive, it could do little harm here in the city-caverns. Their beautiful, brave Enzyel had just partnered into the Eighth Family to great acclaim. Meanwhile, however, the decline continued, and no success was ever enough—even success paid for in blood.

Another trickle made her want to scream.

“Off you go, now,” she said instead, lowering Pelli’s feet to the floor. The girl ran to her nurse-escort and patted the leg of his black silk suit. The escort frowned—his Imbati castemark tattoo furrowed between his brows.

“Pelli,” Selemei scolded. “We don’t touch the Imbati. Are you a big girl?”

“Big girl.” Pelli lifted her white hands away and wrung them over her head contritely. “Big girl.”

“And who are a big girl’s hands for?”

“Pelli.”

“Ask if you want your Verrid to hold you.”

Pelli’s lip trembled, but she managed, “My please?”

“Of course, young Mistress,” the escort replied. He swooped her up in a twirl that turned the threatening tears into a cry of joy, and carried her from the dining room.

Selemei sighed. Pelli was so big now. Perhaps if she’d been smaller, more dependent on the breast, this doom could have been postponed. To Aven she said, “Time to get ready for bed, darling.” Aven’s escort caught her glance and passed it to other Imbati of the Household, who quickly withdrew. At last even her sons Brinx and Corrim came to kiss her and excused themselves to their shared rooms.

She had to speak now, while the blood could still protect her. She turned toward Xeref at the head of the table, but fear twined up into her throat.

Xeref gave her an uncertain smile.

Xeref’s Imbati woman moved, noticeable now as she left her station behind his shoulder. Imbati Ustin—tall, broad-shouldered, and muscular with her hair in several long braids that looked almost white against her tailored blacks—easily pulled out one of the brass chairs that stood empty between them. Xeref stood up, still smiling, and moved to the new seat. Then Selemei’s own manservant, Grivi, pulled out the chair beside his.

Oh, to be close to him again!

She couldn’t move.

If she got close, they would kiss—if they kissed, they would make love—if they made love, she would get pregnant again—and even if she managed not to lose the pregnancy, there would be labor, and pain—not just pain, but pain like with Pelli. The screaming. The blank darkness. She’d wake up feeling like someone had dismembered her, her left leg dead to the hip, and this time, maybe her right, too. Maybe this time she wouldn’t regain her ability to walk. Or maybe this time she wouldn’t wake up at all.

“Xeref, I can’t,” she blurted.

“Selemei?”

She stared down at her hands clutched in her lap, at the beautiful bracelet. The ruby drops looked dark in the shadow of the silk tablecloth. “I know blood is precious. I know my duty to the Race. But I just can’t anymore.”

The guilt sharpened when spoken aloud. She tried not to imagine what words might come from his mouth in reply. Perverse—selfish—unworthy—

Xeref cleared his throat. “Selemei?”

Something touched her shoulder—oh, mercy, that was his hand! Her whole body clenched in on itself, hardened. Her chest felt like a geode, unable to admit breath, crusted inside with fear.

Xeref pulled his hand away. “Oh, Selemei, my jewel, my life’s partner, my blessed Maiden Eyn—I’m sorry.”

She shook her head. Tried to breathe.

“Grivi,” said Xeref, “is she all right?”

The Imbati made no answer.

She could hear Xeref stand, pace the length of the table, but if she tried to respond, she’d only moan, or scream. Abruptly, he left through the bronze door to the sitting room; she could hear him out there, murmuring to his Ustin.

“Mistress,” Grivi said in his deep soft voice, “I have vowed to protect you.”

Her Grivi had helped her more in her recoveries than anyone, but could she really ask him to protect her from Xeref? Was that even possible? Would it mean she could never kiss Xeref again, never feel his arms around her? Did she really want such protection?

She sipped a small breath. “I understand, Grivi, thank you.”

Then Xeref came in. Selemei snapped her jaw shut.

“My Selemei.” Xeref’s voice was husky, vibrating at the edge of control. He knelt beside her feet on the silk carpet.

Elinda help me. Surely he wouldn’t demand to have her while she still bled.

His breath grated. “I—Ustin said—you’ve—gnash it, Selemei, this is my fault!”

What? She frowned.

“It’s my fault. When Pelli was being born, I should have—I don’t know what I should have done. How could I listen to you scream and do nothing? I asked the doctors, but I only thought they would take away your pain, not that they’d—” He dragged a breath. “You went quiet so suddenly. I thought Mother Elinda had plucked your soul away, and my own heart too. And then when you woke damaged! And it was my fault!”

She whispered, “But you didn’t do anything…”

Xeref shook his head. He grasped her hand, his fingers pale against her golden skin, and lifted it until her bracelet sparkled in the light. “I didn’t give this to you because blood is precious, Selemei. I gave it to you because your blood is precious. You are precious. I don’t care what the Family Council says, the Race doesn’t deserve your life!”

She managed to look at him. His gray eyes, shining with emotion—his silver hair, falling to his shoulders. Age had given him creases around his eyes; as it had given him more substance, it had also granted him more dignity and determination. And more influence—he often reminded their boys that as the First Family’s representative on the cabinet, he had the Eminence’s ear.

Yet he would put her first.

“Xeref,” she whispered. “Thank you.” Her chest opened slowly. What would happen now? Was there a way forward over cracked uncertain stone?

Xeref leaned close to her cheek for a kiss that barely touched her—the same kind of careful innocence he’d used when they’d first become partners, to soften the age difference between them. He cleared his throat. “My Ustin tells me that in the last couple of months you’ve been missing your friend, Tamelera,” he said. When she frowned in bafflement at the change of subject, he added, “Garr’s partner, who moved away with him to Selimna?”

She couldn’t stop a smile at that. “Dear, I know who Tamelera is; I sent her a radiogram last week.”

Xeref chuckled nervously. “Of course you do.”

Selemei humored him. “Your Ustin deserves credit for turning her powers of observation to Ladies’ concerns. I do miss Tamelera. I could talk to her. We would play kuarjos together, and dareli, and we’d talk.”

Xeref laid a hand against his chest. “I could—would you like me, to talk to you?”

“Don’t we talk?”

A blush turned his pale cheeks pink. “Well, we do.”

Though never before about the terrible things—the real things. “Maybe you could tell me what you and Brinx were talking about?”

Xeref smiled. “You can be proud of him. He’s really getting to know the workings of the cabinet. Cousin Fedron likes working with him.”

“I saw how Corrim listens,” she said. “I’d say he already knows more than you expect him to.”

Xeref nodded. “I can’t believe he’s almost twelve.”

Selemei gulped. Corrim’s twelfth birthday would make him eligible for Heir Selection if the worst occurred. “Mercy of Heile,” she said, “is the Eminence Indal unwell?”

“Oh, no!” Xeref waved his hands. “I mean, he’s well, of course he is. I’m sorry. I scared you, and I didn’t mean to.” He sighed. “This wasn’t how I thought this should work.”

Selemei sighed, too. She and Tamelera had talked of anything, everything, deliberately avoiding any discussion of their duties to the Race. But when had she and Xeref last spoken of anything but family? She tried to think of something else; anything else. Her mind was as empty as an abandoned cave pocket. “I love you?”

“I love you, too. My Selemei.” He sounded awfully disappointed.

“Sir,” said Imbati Ustin, quietly behind his left shoulder. “I believe you enjoy a game of kuarjos?”

Now hope lit his eyes. “Selemei—shall we play?” He offered his arm.

She had been walking with more courage, recently, with less worry that her left hip might fail unexpectedly. She still stood slowly, and walked slowly, but it felt good not to have to grasp Xeref’s arm too hard. In the sitting room, someone—Ustin, most likely—had already moved the kuarjos set from its pedestal in the corner onto the slate-topped table between the couches. Selemei sat, arranged her silk skirts, and fell into anticipating potential moves for the long-haired warriors wrought in gold, who brandished antique weapons upon their posts at the grid intersections.

Xeref turned the marble board so she had the emerald-helmed warriors, and he the sapphire. He opened his hands to her. “You go first.”

She nodded. They played in silence, but when she executed her first entrapment, he glanced up at her.

“Have you always been this good at kuarjos? How is it we’ve never played before?”

She shrugged. “I played with Tamelera.” She took a deep breath. “Xeref, about—what we talked about—are you sure you won’t, or we won’t…?”

“We won’t. I promise.”

“But what should I tell people, when they ask?”

“They’ll ask?” He sighed. “Of course they’ll ask. Say we’ve decided not to.”

She raised eyebrows at him. “They’ll blame me. And think I’ve insulted you. And that I’ve lost my mind.”

“Then say it’s just not working.”

“They’ll think I’m sick. The Family Council would investigate.”

“Then say it’s my fault.” He frowned, shaking his head. “Not that I’ve rejected you, but that my health is to blame.”

“Your health… you mean put your cabinet position at risk?”

At that moment, a wysp entered through the stone arches of the ceiling: a tiny golden spark of light that spiraled down between them, casting a burst of warrior-shadows, then disappearing through the marble game board and table and into the floor.

“Wysps are good luck,” Xeref said. “Maybe no one will ask you.”

Selemei sighed. “Let’s play.”

Nobody could be that lucky.

Once in early autumn, a particularly small and ragged fairy emerged from a hole at the roots of a tulip poplar, into the dazzling green light of the woods. The fairy wore a tattered dress of petals. A purple orchid, withered and vaguely sticky, perched atop her head, and around her neck hung a crude bit of jewelry fashioned from a bit of string and seven irregular beads. Each bead contained a book, shrunken to minuscule size and encased in a shell of magic. She carried no other provisions.

The fairy, like all of her kind, was nameless (which is to say that her true name was secret even to herself). Her preferred nickname was Lime, after the tree from which she had first germinated. Alighting on a yellowed leaf, she sprawled in the sun and began, briefly, to doze—for her long journey through the roots of the world had wearied her.

Five minutes later, she awoke, feeling much refreshed. She yawned, exposing the bulge of her venom glands and a mouthful of pointed green teeth. Her nose twitched. On the breeze, she could smell flowers.

Leaping into the air, Lime followed her nose to a clearing overgrown with the most wonderful variety of plants: clusters of verbena and anise hyssop, heliotrope and pansies, double-petaled impatiens and cone-flowers in every hue of the rainbow. With a cautious glance forwards and back, she flew into the clearing and landed on a mound of impatiens. She held one of the flowers in her hand.

She plucked the flower from its stalk, and at that very moment another fairy burst from cover of leaves and tackled her to the ground.

“I thought you looked like a thief!” squealed the fairy. “And now we’ve caught you red-handed!” More fairies emerged from the leaves, giggling and pointing.

“What a dummy!” they cried. “What a dunce!” They pinned down Lime’s arms and legs, and sat on her wings. Lime cursed and hissed and bared her fangs, but the other fairies only laughed.

“You don’t get it,” said a violet fairy in a handsome cape. “You stole from us and we caught you, so that means we get to punish you.”

“The Law says she has to be our prisoner for sixty months,” said a fairy with coiled antennae, “and do whatever we say.”

“Who wants a prisoner, though?” said a blue fairy with wings like rumpled silk. “Let’s just toss her in the mud, or make her eat a bug.”

“You won’t make me do anything,” said Lime, “because I haven’t stolen anything! Am I supposed to believe these are your flowers?”

“They are,” said the violet fairy. “This is our community garden.”

“Fairies,” said Lime, “don’t garden.”

“We do,” said the blue fairy. “It was Old-Timer’s idea. She has all kinds of wild ideas.”

“That’s because I’m the only one around here with any brains in my head,” snarled a voice from the trees. The crowd stilled their laughter as an apple-red fairy swooped into the clearing. The fairy’s crooked fangs protruded over her lips, and the horns of beetles crowned her cap.

“Let the loner go,” said Old-Timer. “A prisoner’s just another fairy for me to keep in line and I don’t need it.”

With groans of disappointment, the other fairies unhanded Lime. “You’ve come from far away, haven’t you?” said Old-Timer, eyeing Lime’s shriveled hat and ragged dress. “Wearing that worn-out tropical flower, looking like you haven’t sewn new clothes in a decade. You have a clan?”

Lime glared and shook her head.

“Well, you can’t join ours,” said Old-Timer. “And you can’t take from the community garden unless you’re part of the clan. But I’ll let you have a cup of nectar, if you want it, out of hospitality.”

“I don’t want your hospitality,” said Lime, “or anything else to do with this terrible forest.”

Old-Timer snorted. “Suit yourself. But if you won’t take my hospitality, maybe you’ll at least take my advice. This place here is called the Woeful Woods, bordered on one side by the meadows and the other by a human town. If it’s flowers you want, feel free to look in the woods or the meadows or even the lands beyond, but steer clear of human territory. They keep plenty of gardens, but just as many dogs and cats and children. A lout like you would be caught in a second.”

“I’m not stupid or slow enough to be caught by any human,” said Lime. “And I’m not afraid of pets, either. Is that all your advice?”

“It is,” said Old-Timer. “Whether or not you choose to listen to it. Now get out of here, lone traveler, and leave our clan to its business. Unless you’ve changed your mind about the nectar?”

Lime buzzed into the air and darted away from the fairies’ garden. “I’d rather drink frog-spawn!” she yelled over her shoulder. “I hope a whole crowd of humans comes through and tramples your awful flowers!” She fled, already thoroughly sick of the Woeful Woods and its denizens.

As she sped through the trees, an amber-yellow fairy descended from the branches and fell into pace her side. “Don’t you dare follow me!” Lime cried.

“Calm down, Loner,” said the amber fairy. “I’m not here to start trouble.”

“I’m serious!” said Lime. “Leave me alone or I’ll fight you! I’ll pull out your antennae!”

The amber fairy giggled. “You’re a bad liar,” he said. “Just stop a minute and talk. Where’d you even come from, anyway?”

Lime tried to outrace the other fairy, but he easily matched her speed. She stopped, lest he follow her all the way back to the hole at the roots of the tulip poplar.

“Where I’m from,” she said, “is none of your business. Did you chase me down just so you could interrogate me?”

“I was only trying to be sociable,” said the amber fairy. “You’re a real cagey one, you know that, Loner?”

“Stop calling me ‘Loner’,” said Lime, “and get out of my sight.”

“What’s wrong with ‘Loner’?” said the amber fairy. “It’s better than my nickname, at least.” He paused expectantly. Lime merely glowered at him.

“It’s Pipsqueak,” he said. “It’s one of those ironic nicknames, right? ’Cos I’m so tall.”

“Good for you,” said Lime.

“Did you come here flower-hunting?” asked Pipsqueak. He glanced at her threadbare dress. “Hoping to make new clothes?”

“Maybe,” said Lime, “And maybe not.”

“No need to be shy about it,” said Pipsqueak. “Listen: if it’s flowers you’re after, I know a place you can go: a place nearly as good as our garden. Follow me and I’ll show you.”

“And if I don’t want to follow you?” said Lime.

“I won’t leave you alone until you do,” said Pipsqueak. “So just come with me.” He flew through the trees, and Lime, with a sigh of resignation, followed after.

He led Lime to the outskirts of the woods and a solitary building: a squat house built of brick and green-tinged vinyl. A fringe of weeds sprouted from sagging gutters. A messy but thriving garden teemed with hostas and begonias, with roses and crepe myrtles still clinging to flower, and scraggly mums just beginning to bud. A gravel path ran through the garden, and at the end of the path stood a mailbox with the name “A. E. Erskine” stenciled on it in paint.

Pipsqueak settled atop an oak leaf. “There’s one human who lives in the woods,” he said, “apart from all the others. And this is the one human’s house. They’ve got plenty of flowers here, but no pets and no kids like in town. You can steal from them, easy.”

“If there’s one human,” said Lime, “what ‘them’ are you talking about? Who else is there?”

“No one,” said Pipsqueak. “The one human is one human, they’re just one of those humans who isn’t a girl, or a boy either.”

“Huh,” said Lime. “Then what’s the catch? If this place is so great, why aren’t there any other fairies here?”

“We’ve got our community garden now,” said Pipsqueak with a shrug. “You don’t trust me?”

“I don’t,” said Lime. “I bet there’s a whole troop of children in that house, with nets and plastic jars. Or maybe this one human of yours is a witch, the kind who likes to trap fairies and cook them into potions. I bet you’re waiting for me to go flying over unawares, and when I’m caught, you’ll laugh and laugh. Am I wrong?”

“Now you’re just being silly,” said Pipsqueak. “Witches live in towers. Who’s ever heard of a witch in a house? If there were kids around, there’d be toys all in the garden, and as for cats and dogs: if there were any nearby, you’d smell ’em.

“Stake the place out for yourself and you’ll see,” he said. “The place is totally safe. Or don’t I guess. I can’t force you.” He dropped from his leafy perch and spiraled lazily to the ground. “All I wanted was to point a wandering loner in the right direction.”

With a wave goodbye, and an offer to “Look around the woods if you need me!” he slipped into the shadows of the undergrowth, leaving Lime alone.

Lime cast a wary eye at the house and its abundant, quiet garden. She still didn’t quite trust Pipsqueak, but the place seemed safe enough from a distance, and at the very least there were no more giggling fairies to harass her. Tucking herself into a fork between two branches, she watched and waited for any sign of danger.

In time, a human appeared in the window. The one human looked to be a younger adult, probably not far along in their twenties, but more than old enough to have outgrown the ability to see fairies: an ability most lost around the age of twelve. Their hair was short; they wore a T-shirt with a mended hole in the shoulder. As far as Lime could tell, they were utterly ordinary and entirely alone.

The one human made a pot of oolong and sat down to drink. Lime watched as they sipped tea, read a paperback book, picked at one of their fingernails, and eventually returned to the interior of the house, out of sight, having done nothing whatsoever suspicious or even interesting. Pipsqueak hadn’t lied. The human was no threat.

Reassured, Lime took wing and ventured closer. A most beguiling vine grew along the kitchen window. It was some species of morning glory, but strangely and richly colored, with flowers banded in pink and gold and pale, translucent green. Lime imagined the suit of clothes she could make from this vine: beautiful, colorful clothes that would be the envy of all fairy-kind. Plucking the stamen from a flower and transforming it into a glowing needle, she set to work.

All afternoon, Lime struggled to recall the tricks of weaving, sewing, and spell-casting involved in the making of clothes. She harvested flowers and leaves. She spun green fibers into glossy-smooth thread. By the time the sun had begun to sink beneath the horizon, she had sewn a fine hat of petals. She removed her old, wilting cap and placed the new one on her head, proud to have remembered the lessons of her childhood.

Lime held her old hat, the withered purple orchid, in her lap, and thought back to the warm and southern island where it had grown. Unpleasant, long-forgotten emotions swelled in her chest. She shred the orchid to bits, and cast it to the ground.

Night fell and the flowers closed and Lime could no longer work, so she passed the late hours in other ways. She spied on the human again, watching as they cooked and ate dinner. (Dinner, she noted with a little thrill of disgust, was roast chicken.) She re-enlarged one of her books and read by the pale green glow of her own body. She waited eagerly for morning.

At the first light of dawn, she sewed the bodice of her new dress, which she embroidered with a pattern of interwoven suns. She placed each stitch with utmost care, pouring all of her heart and thought and magic into that one little garment. She had almost completed the circle of suns when the sound of footsteps broke her concentration. The human had come outside and was stomping into the garden, right towards Lime’s window. Snatching up her bodice and thread, Lime flew into the trees.

The human lingered in the garden for a while, pulling weeds, pruning dead flowers, and humming an off-key tune. They ventured indoors and back several times, then at last returned inside for good. When Lime was certain all was clear, she flew back to her vine, where she found a scrap of notepaper scrawled in enormous handwriting.

“To the fairy who’s probably doing this,” read the note. “Please stop killing my Convolvulus magnifican vine. Thanks in advance—Erskine.” A more cautious fairy might have been afraid, but Lime was too close to finishing her dress, and wasn’t about to let a mere piece of paper scare her. She crumpled the note into a ball and picked up her sewing.

She had finished her bodice, and had just started piecing together a skirt, when a fairy—the same blue fairy from the community garden—twirled down from the sky and landed at her side, exclaiming “Ha! So you really are here!”

Lime edged away, scowling. “What do you want?” she said.

“I was just curious what happened to you,” said the blue fairy. “That’s a nice hat, by the way, and a nice dress—what’s done of it.”

Lime clutched the dress to her chest. “You can’t have it,” she said.

“I don’t want it!” said the blue fairy, laughing. “I was complementing you.”

“Oh,” said Lime.

“Have you decided to stick around the woods?” asked the blue fairy. “If you’re planning to settle down, you know, our clan will take you.”

“Your boss said the clan was full,” said Lime.

“Old-Timer says a lot of things,” said the blue fairy, “but she’s a pushover. If you hang around a few weeks, she’ll get sick of telling you to leave and let you in. Promise.”

“And why do you want me in your clan?” said Lime. “You were going to make me eat a bug!”

“Don’t be so sensitive,” said the blue fairy. “Like you’ve never eaten a bug on a dare before!”

“I haven’t,” said Lime.

“Really?” said the fairy. “I have—or a slug, at least. That’s why everyone calls me Slugsy now. Anyway, do you want to join the clan? You can tell us stories of all the places you’ve been.”

“I haven’t been any places,” said Lime. “And I don’t need a clan.”

“You have to have been some places,” said Slugsy. “Where’d you come from?”

Lime picked at her embroidery. She supposed, really, there was no harm in telling. “I came through the roots of the world,” she said, “from the Great Origin Tree Library.”

“And before that?” said Slugsy.

“Nothing before that matters,” snapped Lime.

“And why’d you let your old clothes get so raggedy?” asked Slugsy. “What happened?”

“I was reading,” said Lime, “and I lost track of time.”

Slugsy scratched at her head. “You were reading so long that your clothes went bad?”

“Right,” said Lime.

“And how long was that?”

Lime consulted her inner clock. “About twenty-five years.”

“I see,” said Slugsy. “You know, you’re kind of weird, Loner. But you’re also pretty brave, messing with Erskine the human.”

“Why?” said Lime. “They’re just one human, right?”

“Yeah, but—”

Before Slugsy could finish her sentence, a bundle of amber sparks shot from the trees and snatched the hat from her head. “Got your cap!” shouted Pipsqueak.

“I’ll get you!” said Slugsy, hopping into the air. “Sorry, Loner. See you later.” She chased after Pipsqueak quick as a bat on the hunt, and the fairies’ twin lights, blue and amber, vanished into the distance. Relieved, Lime took up her needle.

In the low light of afternoon, she stitched a ruffled lining to her skirt, attached skirt to bodice, and enrobed the whole garment in sparkling, semi-visible strands of protective magic. Casting her old dress aside, she changed into her freshly-made clothes. The skirt billowed around her soft as dandelion fluff. The embroidered suns gleamed clear and bright as words on a page. The dress was perfect: colorful and comfortable and scented and clean.

Lime nestled into the coils of the morning glory vine—now bruised and nearly flower-less—and watched the sunset, aglow with contentment. She was so content, so peaceful, so snug in her new clothes, and so warm in the early autumn sun, she didn’t even hear the window open. She didn’t notice the gamy, chemical smell of human presence; she didn’t see the looming shadow. When she finally felt the rush of air, and heard the scrape of metal against glass, it was too late. She was no longer snug among the leaves. Glass walls closed around her and a metal lid, pricked through with holes, sealed her in. She had been trapped inside a great salt-shaker and holding the salt-shaker was the one human, Erskine.

Stifling a cry of panic, Lime dropped to the bottom of the salt-shaker and curled into a ball, pretending not to exist.

“I can see you, you know,” said Erskine. Lime glanced up. Her eyes met the human’s own. It was then she realized she had been deceived.

“You can’t,” sputtered Lime. “You can’t, you can’t, you’re too old to see me.”

“I can,” said Erskine. “Some people never grow out of it. Did you really not know? I figured all the fairies around here knew about me already.”

Lime caught a glimpse of amber light among the trees. She heard the trill of a fairy’s laugh. Her heart thudded in her chest. “If you don’t let me out,” she bluffed, “I’ll put a curse on you! I-I’ll turn you to stone! I’ll give you the pox and the palpitations and the red-hot feet! Let me go right now or you’ll pay, I swear!”

“I won’t,” said Erskine. “And you’re not going to curse anyone. You’ve done me wrong by killing my plant, and I’ve caught you, so you’re obligated to be my prisoner for sixty lunar cycles, AKA five years. I know the Law.”

Lime stared at Erskine, for the moment speechless with rage. “And how,” she said, finally, “do you, a human, know about the Law?”

“I have my ways,” said Erskine with a smirk. “But don’t worry. I’ll let you go right now if you grant me a wish.”

“I’d rather die!” spat Lime. “I’d rather stay in this salt-shaker for a hundred years! A million!”

“Really?” said Erskine. “Because I wasn’t going to ask for much.”

“Either let me go or don’t,” said Lime. “But I’m never going to grant you a wish. Never! Do your worst: torture me or snip my wings. I don’t care!”

“Geez, I’m not going to hurt you,” said Erskine. They drew Lime and the salt-shaker inside, and closed the window. “You’re really not going to grant me a wish?”

“Never and not for anything,” said Lime.

“Fine.” Erskine climbed down from the kitchen counter and sat Lime beside the sink. “Then I’ll just keep you here until you change your mind.”

“You’ll be keeping me for sixty months,” said Lime, “because I’m not changing my mind.”

“We’ll see,” said Erskine. “Anyway, who’s that yellow-orange fairy outside? Are they your friend?”

“He’s not my friend,” said Lime. “I have no friends.”

At the edge of the forest, Pipsqueak capered from branch to branch, squealing with laughter. “The other fairies haven’t been bullying you, have they?” said Erskine.

“Don’t patronize me, human!” said Lime. “I’m not some mewling little infant. No one bullies me!”

“Do you want me to run him off?” asked Erskine. “I can go throw a rock at him.”

“Just shut up, shut up, shut up!” wailed Lime. Sparks cascaded down her back. “I might be your prisoner, but that doesn’t mean I have to listen to you blather on and on!”

“It kind of does,” said Erskine, drawing the blinds, “but point taken. I’ll leave you alone for a while and make dinner, okay?”

Lime simply glared.

“Oh, but before I do,” said Erskine, “did you want anything to eat? I have honey and maple syrup and I think some leftover molasses.”

“I refuse,” said Lime. “Weren’t you going to leave me alone?”

“Alright,” said Erskine. “Just let me know if you change your mind. Not only about the wish, but about the food, I mean.” They busied themself in the kitchen, and for a little while at least, left Lime to her thoughts.

Lime huddled at the bottom of the salt-shaker, hating everything: humans and fairies and the whole world and, most of all, herself. She cursed herself for ever trusting Pipsqueak, for being slow enough—stupid enough—to be caught by a human.

Sparking like a firecracker and overwhelmed by anger, Lime felt she would explode if she couldn’t calm herself down. She tried breathing deeply, and when that didn’t work, she enlarged one of the books around her neck and began to read. At first, her eyes slid from the page. She would read the same sentence over and over, only for the words to jumble together and the meaning elude her. However, she pressed on, and began to make slow progress through the novel. The furious sparks dissipated from her body.

She didn’t know how long she had been reading when a shadow fell across the page. “Where’d you get that book?” asked Erskine.

“I’m allowed to have a book,” said Lime. “There’s no Law saying prisoners can’t have one.”

“No, I wasn’t going to take it away,” said Erskine. “I was just wondering if you had summoned it from somewhere, or what.”

“It’s none of your business,” said Lime. “Shouldn’t you be cooking?”

“I already cooked and already ate,” said Erskine. “You must have been really preoccupied not to notice. What book is it? Is it good?”

“That’s none of your business, either!” said Lime. “Why do you care?”

Erskine shrugged. “Just curious. Is it a fairy book? Is it a novel? Do fairies publish many novels? Because if they do, I’ve never had the chance to read one.”

“Fairy novels are written in Vernacular Fey,” said Lime. “You wouldn’t be able to read one even if you had it.”

“I can read Vernacular Fey and Classical Fey,” said Erskine. “They’re not that hard to learn: I mean, they’re both pretty regular, logical languages.”

“You’re a liar,” said Lime in Classical Fey, “and a despicable person.”

“I surely speak the truth,” said Erskine in the same language, “and assure you that my character is of the utmost quality.”

Lime studied the human closely. “Just who are you?” she said. “Some sort of recluse linguist? Why do you know the fairy tongues?”

“Well, I’ve always been interested in non-human peoples,” said Erskine, “and I come across a lot of fairies in my adventures.”

At that last word, Lime nearly dropped her book. “You’re an adventurer?” she yelped.

“Pretty much,” said Erskine.

In Lime’s childhood, her fellow fairies had taught her this lesson: “Humans on the whole are dull and sluggish, but there are three sorts of human you should avoid at all cost. The first are the children, who see and chase. The second are the witches, who grind our wings for potions. The third are the adventurers, who snatch our treasures and bring mayhem in their wake.” Yet how could Lime have known?

“What’s wrong with you?” Lime shrilled. “What are you doing here, acting like a normal person? Reading and pulling weeds and eating—” She glanced down at the pile of soiled dishes in the sink. “Eating whatever this is?”

“It was tofu and eggplant,” said Erskine. “I was thinking of having meat, but I know some fairies get squeamish around meat and didn’t want to offend.”

“I don’t care if you eat meat!” said Lime. “What kind of adventurer just hangs around the house all day?”

“I mean, I have off-days like anyone else,” said Erskine. “And I don’t see why ‘adventurer’ and ‘normal person’ have to be mutually-exclusive. I feel like I’m pretty normal.” They lathered a sponge with soap, releasing a pungent smell of chemicals. “Did you want to hear about my last adventure though? I just got back on Wednesday.”

Taking Lime’s angry silence as assent, they continued. “I took the train down to the semi-aquatic kingdom of Crab’s Cairn, where there’s this hidden shrine…”

Erskine blathered on about their adventure, describing the forgotten shrine with its pillars of olivine and meteoric iron; the domed ceilings inlaid with the bones of fishes; the images of celestial serpents; and the half-submerged labyrinth, rumored to be the lair of hippocamps.

“I found this enormous shed skin, which I’m pretty sure is the skin of a hippocamp,” said Erskine, putting away the last of the clean dishes and carrying Lime to the living room. “If it is, I should be able to portion it out and sell it for a good price.”

“All those jewel-encrusted idols and pillars of rare pallasite, and you pass them up for a bit of snakeskin?” said Lime.

“I’m not going to loot a shrine,” said Erskine, looking a bit offended. “That’s disrespectful.” They plopped onto the sofa and sat Lime on an end table. “Have you decided to give me a wish?”

Lime made a rude gesture from her native island. “I don’t know what that means,” said Erskine. “Does that mean ‘No’?”

“Very astute,” said Lime. “Excellent guesswork.”

“All the times I’ve been caught by fairies in the past,” said Erskine, “I gave them something, and they let me go. So I assumed that’s how these sort of situations normally play out.”

“Well, you assumed wrong,” said Lime.

“It doesn’t have to be a complicated wish,” Erskine insisted. “Just reviving my convolvulus plant would be enough. Or, if you wanted, you could lend me a spell. Like an invisibility spell, something easy.”

“Do you ever, ever stop talking?” said Lime. “You’re interrupting my reading.” She opened her novel and turned her back.

Erskine remained quiet as Lime read: suspiciously quiet, in fact. After a certain point, Lime couldn’t stand it. She had to know what they were up to. She glanced over her shoulder.

Erskine had curled up with their paperback novel and was reading peacefully. They glanced over the top of the book and caught Lime’s eye. “Would you like to know what I’m reading?” they asked.

“I already know what you’re reading,” said Lime.

“Because you were peeping at me through the window?” said Erskine.

“N-no!” said Lime. Erskine smiled.

For the rest of the evening, the two read in silence. Eventually, Erskine said goodnight, asked Lime one last time if she would like something to eat (she refused), and went to bed.

Lime waited until she was certain the human had fallen asleep, then did what any reasonable fairy would do in her circumstances: she phased through the salt-shaker and explored her new surroundings. The Law forbid a rightful prisoner from escaping her bonds, but only if she were caught escaping. To slip one’s prison unnoticed, then return unnoticed: that much was permitted. Lime wouldn’t let the human to take her off-guard a second time.

She circled the darkened room, observing the well-worn sofa with its faded green cushions; the electric lamp; the rickety particleboard tables. A tall case housed neat rows of books, old and new, in every genre from novels to encyclopedias to do-it-yourself guides on lock-picking and astral travel. Most were ordinary human books, but not all. There were a few fairy histories among them, and a book of elfish folktales, and a runic dictionary. Among the books sat seashells, slivers of petrified wood, stones carved in strange languages, and similar trinkets. Lime could only assume they were mementos of adventures past.

Interested despite herself, Lime examined the rows of books, noting a few titles she had read already, and others she would like to read, given the chance. She fluttered down the hallway, peeking her head into a storage closet full of towels; into the bedroom where Erskine lay face-down in a pillow, fast asleep. At the foot of the bed sat a bulging, briny-smelling bundle wrapped in an old sheet: the hippocamp’s skin, presumably. An old chair supported a thriving colony of potted philodendrons; tiny bromeliads and cacti sprouted from jars of soil.

In the bedroom, there were even more books piled on shelves, stacked on the carpet, and wedged between plants. Lime felt a twinge of avarice. She saw the names of unfamiliar authors and titles of sequels she hadn’t known existed, fascinating covers and enticing summaries. She couldn’t restrain herself. She skimmed jacket flaps and rustled through pages. Surely, Erskine wouldn’t notice if one or two went missing?

There was a tap at the window, and Lime’s heart nearly popped. “Loner?” called a familiar voice. “Hey, Loner—is that you?”

Shaking the nervous sparks from her dress, Lime flew to the window and parted the blinds. A blue face beamed at her.

“It is you!” said Slugsy.

“Shut up,” hissed Lime. “The human is right there.” Slugsy nodded, and gestured for Lime to come outside. Lime phased partway through the glass, just far enough to stick her head through the window.

“What are you still doing here?” Slugsy whispered. “Did Erskine turn down your wish?”

“I’m not giving them a wish,” said Lime. “And you’ve got a lot of nerve, coming here.”

“Huh?” said Slugsy. “What are you talking about?”

“Don’t play dumb,” said Lime. “You tricked me! You didn’t tell me the human could see us. You knew I’d get caught.”

“I figured Pipsqueak had told you,” said Slugsy. “I didn’t know he was playing a prank.”

“Liar!” said Lime. “What’s wrong with you? Why can’t anyone in these woods just leave me alone!” She was practically yelling. Her throat flashed green and golden as her venom glands flared. “Why did I ever, ever leave the Library? Why did I trust either of you? I—”

Erskine let out a soft, wordless cry. Fabric rustled. Lime clapped a hand over her mouth and froze, too terrified to even think.

“Come on, dummy—hide!” said Slugsy, grabbing hold of Lime’s wrist and dragging her through the window. The two fairies huddled in a rose bush, ears pricked and antennae twitching.

“Did they wake up?” said Lime.

“Go check,” said Slugsy.

“You check,” demanded Lime.

“I can’t go in there,” said Slugsy. “I wasn’t invited.”

Reluctantly, Lime phased through the window. Inside, the bed lay empty. Erskine had disappeared.

Lime sped down the hallway, cursing. She found Erskine in the living room, mere feet from the empty salt-shaker.

“I can explain!” said Lime, but Erskine ignored her and walked into the kitchen. Utterly bewildered, Lime flew after. She circled around to the human’s face. Their eyes were still closed, and their mouth was fixed in a dreamy smile.

Fumbling sightlessly through the cabinets, Erskine snatched a bottle of black vinegar, unscrewed the top, and upended the contents over their head. They grabbed handfuls of salt and brown sugar, rubbing it into their skin, smearing it onto their face. Lime realized this was more than mere sleepwalking. “Wake up!” she cried. “Snap out of it!” She tugged at Erskine’s hair and pinched their ears, to no avail. Erskine opened the front door and strode barefoot into the woods.

“What’s going on?” said Slugsy, darting to Lime’s side. “Is the human ensorcelled?”

“They must be,” said Lime. “I keep telling and telling them to stop, and they "won’t listen.”

“But why are you following them?” said Slugsy.

“What do you mean, why am I following them?” said Lime. “I can’t just let them wander off and get killed by who-knows-what!”

“Why not?” said Slugsy. “If they die, you can go free, right?

“I’m not saying I want them to die,” she added quickly, seeing the look on Lime’s face. “Erskine’s pretty okay, as far as humans go. It’s just…”

“Are you going to help, or are you going to leave?” snapped Lime.

“Help how?” said Slugsy. “What are either of us supposed to do?” All the same, she remained at Lime’s side.

The two followed Erskine through the woods, to the banks of a muddy river. Atop the water sat an exquisite white harp of curious design, its strings quivering soundlessly, strummed by some invisible force. As Erskine approached, the harp pitched upward and an immense body emerged from the mud: a serpent with the head of a mare, and a white harp for a mane.

The horse-serpent, the hippocamp, flowed onto the bank in a wave of sea-grey scales and encircled her great coils around Erskine, who stood there bespelled and helpless. Her mouth split open, gaping from ear to ear. White fangs unfurled.

“Stop!” screamed Lime. The hippocamp sheathed her fangs and turned one large, pale, unblinking eye to the trees.

“What are you doing?” hissed Slugsy. “She’ll kill us!” The hippocamp inclined her head, as though amused.

Lime didn’t know what she was doing, not really, but Erskine looked so small engulfed in the coils of the hippocamp, and she knew she couldn’t just fly away. “Let the human go,” she said, “or I’ll make you sorry you ever crawled out from the ocean!” Sparks spat from her mouth. She balled her fists tight so her hands wouldn’t tremble. “I’ll turn you into an eel and roast you! I’ll shrivel you up like a salted slug!”

“She’s never going to believe that,” said Slugsy, retreating into the leaves. “You’re crazy, Loner!”

“Don’t you dare tempt a fairy’s wrath!” cried Lime, ignoring her. “I’ll boil up this river and cook you into stew! I’ll send this whole wood crashing down on top of your oversized head! Let the human go and never, ever come back here again!”

The hippocamp chuckled. “What sights one sees on land,” she said. “What oddities: a little damselfly who talks like a conquering queen. Why don’t you show me these fearsome powers of yours, my damsel? I’ve never seen a river boil, nor a whole forest felled in an instant.”

“Don’t mock me!” said Lime. “I’m deadly serious!”

“Really?” said the hippocamp. “Then would you like me to treat you as a serious threat?” An invisible power plucked at the strings of Lime’s heart, and she heard music, each note as clear as water, as sharp as salt, and unspeakably, painfully beautiful.

“Cover your ears!” said Slugsy, but the song of the hippocamp pierced through flesh and bone, seeping through the runnels of the brain. The music flooded the deepest recesses of Lime’s memory, dredging up visions of the past, nostalgic sensations. There she was only a few days ago, in her ragged clothes, traveling through the roots of the world. There she was in the Library, in an austere but comfortable room, engrossed in a quarter-century’s reading. And before that…

The music grew languid and sweet, like nectar pooled in scented petals, like jewel-bright orchids dripping from the stalk. There was no more river, no more Woeful Woods. There was only golden sunlight rich as honey, and soft rain misting through evergreen leaves. Beneath the rainbow’s arc, the insects sang long-forgotten melodies, and branches swayed beneath the weight of flowers plump as grapes.

Lime curled in a nest of dried herbs and fragrant camphor, sheltered by the wings of her fellow fairies. All her clan were with her: the ones who had first found her when she was small and loved and petted her, the ones who had taught her all the secrets of speech and flight and magic. Bathed in the light of their bodies, enveloped in warmth and scent, she closed her eyes and sunk into their embrace.

“Sleep, little Lime,” the fairies cooed, in voices that were all one voice. “Sleep and forget those years of solitude. All is well, and all is as it was before.”

“Before what?” Lime muttered, sleepily.

“Before nothing,” the fairies said, rocking Lime in their arms, passing her from lap to lap. “There is no more before and no more after, only a perfect, golden now. Each day will flow into the next as sweetly as a stream of nectar, and the green things will grow, and the rains will fall gentle and nourishing.”

“The rain,” said Lime, her eyes fluttering open. “There was a storm.”

“Don’t think of the storm,” the fairies scolded, pinching her sides and tweaking her antennae. “Naughty child, coddled brat—don’t think of it!” Yet already the golden light of the sun had thinned to a sickly yellow. The rain fell fast and heavy.

“It can’t last,” said Lime. “It won’t last.”

“Don’t!” the fairies wailed. Lime broke from their arms and lurched upright.

“It won’t last,” she said, “because one day, a storm will come and tear me away from here, out to sea and out to the world’s farthest reaches. And I’ll wash ashore on that cold country where only the Origin Tree grows: where I’ll find a magnificent Library, but no more orchids, and no more family, and no more way back home—and I’ll be alone, alone forever!”

The clan of fairies dissolved in the pelting rain. The trees bowed low beneath typhoon winds, and the sea rose up to swallow everything. Lime floundered in the waves, gasping for breath and clawing at the water, but the ocean gripped her like the coils of a serpent.

Filling her fangs with venom, Lime buried her head beneath the hippocamp’s scales and bit down as hard as she could.

The honey-sweet music cut to a terrible screech. The hippocamp’s coils slackened. Lime tumbled onto the riverbank, and Erskine thudded beside her.

“Vile gnat!” spat the hippocamp. “Wicked little wasp!” The tip of her tail drooped uselessly in the mud, numbed by Lime’s venom. “I could have given you a peaceful death, but you’d rather struggle, would you, my damsel? I’ll crush you like the insect you are!”

Lime tried to fly, but the mud clung to her wings. The hippocamp lunged at her, a wall of grey bulk, inescapable as a tidal wave.

Before the hippocamp crashed to the ground, an enormous hand scooped Lime up and snatched her to safety. Erskine stumbled up the bank, clutching Lime protectively to their chest.

“What happened?” they said. “Why does everything smell like vinegar?”

“To cover up your thief-like stench,” snarled the hippocamp, rising from the mud. “You’ll pay for stealing my skin, adventurer!”

“Wait!” said Erskine, backing towards the trees. “I still have the skin. If you let me get it—”

“After it’s been defiled by your human hands?” said the hippocamp. “I think not!” She undulated closer, fangs bared and eyes gleaming menacingly.

Lime climbed out from Erskine’s fingers and perched on their wrist. “I thought I told you to slither back to the ocean!” she growled. “Or did you want another dose of venom?”

“Your fondness for this adventurer confounds me,” said the hippocamp. “What fairy would risk her life for a human? Do you have even the least grain of self-respect?”

“Fondness has nothing to do with it,” said Lime. “I just…”

“Just what?” said the hippocamp. “Illuminate me.”

“I just—It’s just,” said Lime, “if anyone has the right to kill this human, it’s me!”

“What?” said Erskine.

“Oh?” said the hippocamp.

“The human took an old dried-up skin you weren’t even using anymore,” said Lime, “and you think that gives you the right to season them up like a roast and eat them alive?”

“It’s a matter of principle,” said the hippocamp. “If I let one adventurer steal my cast-offs and live, more are sure to follow, each one bolder and greedier than the last.”

“That’s nothing,” said Lime. “Nothing at all. You know what the human did to me? They put me in a salt-shaker!”

“That sounds bad,” said Erskine, “but it was a really big salt-shaker. Like the kind you would put shaved Parmesan in? I thought it would be more comfortable.”

“You hear that?” said Lime. “They even admit to it!”

“And there are air holes already in it,” said Erskine, “so I figured, compared to a jam jar—”

“Contemptible!” said Lime. “Just terrible! I’m the one this human has wronged the most, and I’m the one who’s going to kill them, no matter what any sea-beast has to say about it!” She grabbed Erskine’s index finger and bit down: a dry bite, without venom.

“Why?” cried Erskine, eyes brimming with tears of pain.

“Pretend to die, idiot,” hissed Lime in Vernacular Fey.

Erskine, to their credit, caught on quickly. They fell to the ground like a sack of rocks and lay there with their eyes closed, breathing softly. “There,” said Lime. “It’s done.”

“Really?” said the hippocamp. “They don’t smell dead.”

“With all that vinegar, how would you know?” said Lime.

“I think,” said the hippocamp, “I may still try to eat them. If you’ve had your revenge, you’ll raise no further objections, surely?”

“Go ahead,” said Lime. “If you’re not afraid of all the paralytic venom sloshing in their veins.”

The hippocamp retracted her fangs and stared at Lime, her scales glittering in the moonlight, her harp-strings still and gleaming. Lime stared back, defiant.

At last, the hippocamp gave a short, bitter laugh. “Grandmother was right,” she said. “As the sea is full of fishes, the land is full of fools. I’ve wasted my time here.” She lowered her great head and slipped gracefully into the river, a stream of salt-white and storm-grey.

As she swam oceanward, she called behind to Lime and Erskine. “Beware, my damsel! Beware, little thief! If I ever see a green fairy or a stinking red-headed adventurer on the shores of Crab’s Cairn again, no force on land or sea will stay my wrath!” With that, she plunged beneath the water; the white harp sunk into the depths.

“Is she gone?” asked Erskine.

“Gone enough,” said Lime. “Good job, by the way, almost getting gobbled up by a snake.”

“It was a shed skin,” said Erskine, rising to their feet. “I didn’t think anyone would miss it.” They brushed the dirt from their pajamas. Their eyes widened. “Oh, no! Is that Slugsy?”

A blue light flickered in the shallows. It was indeed Slugsy, laying stunned beneath the water. A few fish-like scales had blossomed on her forehead, and on her neck Lime could see the faint lines of developing gills.

Erskine lifted Slugsy from the riverbed and petted her gently on the back until she coughed up a gout of fluid. “No,” she gasped. “No, no, no! Have I turned into a water sprite?”

“It’s fine,” said Lime. “You’ve still got legs.”

“Not that there’s anything wrong with being a water sprite,” said Erskine.

Slugsy peeled the scales from her forehead and leapt into the air. She glanced from Lime to Erskine and back. “Ah!” she said. “Listen, human. It might look like Loner escaped, but she didn’t. She was ensorcelled by the hippocamp, just like you.”

To Lime, she directed a not-so-subtle wink.

“Honestly,” said Erskine, “that was one of the last things on my mind. Are the two of you okay?”

Lime shrugged. “I guess,” said Slugsy, rubbing at her neck. “How are we not dead, anyway? Where’s the hippocamp?”

“I ran her off,” said Lime.

“She ran her off,” said Erskine.

“No,” said Slugsy. “I mean, really.”

“You got me,” said Lime. “The human tricked her, and she swam away.”

“I didn’t—” Erskine began.

“Enough talking!” said Lime. “Good night, Slugsy. Let’s get going, human.” She wiped the last flecks of mud from her wings and flew into the woods.

“Wait!” said Erskine, jogging after. “Where are you going?”

“Back to my salt-shaker,” said Lime. “I’m your prisoner, remember?”

“But you saved my life,” said Erskine.

Lime fluttered to a halt and hovered in place. “What of it?”

“According to the Law, I’m in your debt,” said Erskine, catching up. “You can ask me for anything. So aren’t you going to ask to go free?”

For reasons she didn’t fully understand, Lime hesitated. She hadn’t thought of it that way, but it was true: she had saved Erskine’s life. All she had to do was say “yes,” and she could leave the Woeful Woods forever. She could return to the Library and read and be alone, without anyone to bother her, or bully her, or talk to her ever again.

She felt an inexplicable ache in her heart. She had lived and read in the Library for twenty-five years in perfect contentment, so why, now, did the thought of going back there fill her with such a strange sense of unease?

Then she realized. It was the books, of course. She thought back to all of the books in Erskine’s room. They were human novels, mostly: books the Library—with its outdated selection of non-fairy literature—hadn’t carried, books she might never see again. To leave them behind unread would be tragic, unthinkable. She couldn’t possibly abandon them. Her mind raced.

“I might have saved your life,” said Lime, “but you saved mine, too. So that evens out to nothing.”

“Still,” said Erskine.

“Hush!” said Lime, flitting away. “It’s the middle of the night. Go home, and take a shower.”

“I was going to,” said Erskine. “And hey: wait up!” Lime didn’t pay them any mind. She zipped through the shadows and through the trees, into the garden of the lone little house, ducking beneath the boughs of crepe myrtles, skimming the dewy leaves of roses. She darted through the open door and alighted on the sofa, snuggling onto a coarse green cushion. She took out her book, and breathed a sigh of relief.

When Erskine returned, Lime glared at them, daring them to mention the empty salt-shaker.

“It’s fine if you want to use the sofa,” said Erskine. “Did you want a blanket, too? It feels a bit drafty.”

Lime gave an irritable twitch of her antennae.

“Except a blanket’s probably too big for you, isn’t it?” said Erskine. “Maybe something like a hand-towel would be better? Or a handkerchief?”

“Will you go to bed!” screamed Lime.

“Alright,” said Erskine, shuffling off to the bathroom. “Good night. See you later.” Lime rolled her eyes and returned to her novel.

Somewhere far away, in the brackish depths, a hippocamp swam towards the sea. Pins and needles tingled in her tail. A headache strained at her harp-strings. As she swam, she pieced together the story she would tell her grandmother, upon her return to Crab’s Cairn. She would leave out the green fairy, she decided, among other less-than-flattering details. There were some things not even family needed to know.

In the heart of the Woeful Woods, the blue fairy Slugsy curled in the hollow of a tree, tucked in her little nest of treasures: preserved flowers and spider-silk quilts, engraved egg-shells and foil wrappers pilfered from town. She lay back and rubbed at her neck with a pebble, smoothing away the partly-developed gills.

In the lone house at the edge of the woods, Erskine slept, and a green light shone in the window.

Hu Son ran.

He ran for the joy of it, for the exhilaration—for that moment of hitting the wall and breaking through into the zone, that personal nirvana of physical delight. What others called “runner’s high.” A sensation like flight—Hu’s feet didn’t pound the ground, they tapped it as he soared through the early morning air.

A bright blue cloudless sky foretold a beautiful day. A sky so clear and deep you could fall into it and never come back. Later, the day would heat up, glowing with a summery yellow haze, but right now—at this special moment—the beachfront basked in its own perfect promise.

Hu usually started early, when Venice Beach was mostly deserted, all sand and palm trees and stone benches, all the storefronts sleeping behind steel shutters. It was the best time to run. Hu liked the crisp air of dawn, the solitude of the moment, the feeling that the day was still clean, still waiting to be invented—before the owners could ruin it with their displays of tacky, tasteless, and vulgar kitsch.

Some of the cafés were open early though, and by the time Hu reached the Santa Monica pier, run its length, and then headed back toward home, the morning air was flavored with the smells of a dozen different kinds of breakfast, the spices of all the various cuisines that flourished here.

Heading home, Hu passed other morning joggers. This was a favorite track. Nods were exchanged, or not—some of the runners were lost in hidden music, others in their personal reveries. He recognized most; he’d been running this track for more than a year. He was probably regarded as a regular by now.

The final leg. He trotted past the last of the brash touristy areas. Later this strand would teem with summer crowds, exploring the souvenir stands, the ranks of T-shirts printed with single entendres, the displays of dreadful art, all the different fortune tellers and street performers, but right now, this community was still lazily awakening, coming back to life at its own pace. There were still the occasional shapeless lumps on the stone benches—the homeless, wrapped up against the chill of the night, waiting for the heat of the day to revive them. Even in July, the morning air had a bite, with a salty flavor from the grumbling sea.

Hu turned and jogged up the narrow way that pretended to be a street, a block and a half, slowing down only in the last few meters. He hated to stop, hated to drop back into that other pace of life—the faster more frenetic life, where you weren’t allowed to run, you had to walk, walk, walk everywhere.

He glanced at his wristband, looking to see where his numbers were today. Not bad. Not his personal best, but good enough. “Probably still stuck on the plateau,” he muttered. “Gonna have to push to get off. Just not today.”

Hu opened the back gate and started peeling off his T-shirt. He liked the feeling of the cold morning air cooling the sweat off his skin. He took a moment to slow down, to let himself ease down into this world, then finally stepped through the door and called affectionately, “Honey, I’m homo—” then headed straight for the shower.

Hu Son didn’t just appreciate hot water, he loved the luxury of it. In eighteen months, he’d have his master’s degree in cultural anthropology, and after that, he’d go for his doctorate, but already his studies had given him a clear sense of how lucky he was to be living in an age where clean water was taken for granted—and hot water available on demand.

California’s drought had officially ended some years before, but Hu rarely lingered in the shower. Even at this remove, he could still hear his mother banging on the door, shouting, “Leave some for the rest of us!” Old habits endured. Today, however—today was special. So he took his time, soaping up and rinsing, three times over. He closed his eyes, paced his breathing, and allowed himself to sink into his personal contract with himself.

“I am powerful,” he whispered. “I am vulnerable,” he continued. And smiling, he concluded, “And I am loving.” He repeated it a few times, a personal mantra, until it was no longer a declaration, only his renewed experience of himself. And then, one more phrase. “Especially today!” Opening his eyes, Hu nearly shouted that last. “Because today, I am getting married!”

An electric screech interrupted him—alarm sirens outside. It sounded like the whole city was howling. Like any other Angeleno, anyone who’d lived in the city more than six months, Hu ignored it. It was meaningless noise. Everything was noise, from the daily growl of motorcycles and Asian “rice-rockets” to the nightly screams of drunks and junkies.

Hu turned off the water and heard James calling from the kitchen. “Hu, you need to get in here!” Something was wrong, James only called him Hu when he was upset. He grabbed a fresh towel and wrapped it around himself. A second towel for his hair and he headed toward the kitchen where James was standing, leaning with his back against the counter, a mug of tea in his hand—but focusing intensely on a small television on the end of the kitchen table. Without looking up, James held out the usual mug of tea for Hu.

Hu took it and pecked his fiancé on the cheek. “What’s up, Bubble? What are all the sirens for? Some kind of test?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but took his first sip. Chai…. “Ahh.” He glanced toward the television. The president was talking.

“Now what? Are we at war?”

“It’s Hawaii,” said James.

“We’re at war with Hawaii?”

“There’s been a quake—”

Hu’s buoyant mood evaporated. “Oh no. How bad?”

“Both Honolulu and Hilo were hit by tsunamis. Really big—the biggest ever.” James turned to Hu. “When did your folks fly out?”

“They didn’t. Dad needed an extra day. So they’re flying out this evening, they’ll catch up with us tomorrow at the hotel.”

“No, they won’t. And we won’t be there either. Honolulu airport is gone.”

“Wait. What?” At first, Hu didn’t understand. How could an airport be gone? Then he realized what James was telling him. “That’s not possible. A whole airport—?”

“And half the city—”

“Oh, shit,” Hu said, his mug of tea suddenly forgotten in his hand. “That’s—just bad.”

On the TV, the president was still talking, a row of grim-faced people stood behind him. Or maybe it was a repeat. The scroll-bar across the bottom of the screen was filled with incomprehensible words. They moved too fast for him to make sense of them. And outside, the sirens still screamed.

“Shit!” said Hu. “All I wanted was one little honeymoon—” He became aware of the sirens again. “And what’s all that noise about—? We’re not—Shit! What’s going on?”

James put down his coffee. He turned to Hu. He took Hu’s mug from him. “Squeak. Sweetheart—” His expression was grim. “It’s not just Hawaii. It’s the whole California coast. The tsunami is headed for us now. We’ve got maybe three hours before it hits—”

“A tsunami? Here—?”

“A tsunami. Here. A mega-tsunami. Just like the movie, only bigger—”

“But that was only a movie—” Hu stopped in mid-sentence, remembering that movie, that scene.

James Liddle had been SCUBA diving since his teens. After college, he’d set up his own small company, specializing in SCUBA services to local studios. “Underwater? Let it be a Liddle thing. Call us!” Because of his skill, his professionalism, his dependability, and his charming good looks, he was on speed dial for several stunt coordinators.

More than once, James had been called in to teach various film and television actors how to dive safely—or at least look like they knew how to dive safely. More than once, he’d doubled for actors who were too valuable to the studios to be allowed to do their own diving, but he couldn’t say who. Most of the bigger shoots involved nondisclosure agreements.

Hu’s family had moved from Hong Kong to Vancouver when he was eight, where his father opened a consulting service/business school, where he taught westerners how to do business in China and occasionally set up deals himself.

When Hu was twelve, an aunt he’d never met died of cancer, so his mother came south to Los Angeles to manage her brother’s large unruly family; she brought Hu with. As the new kid, as the Chinese kid, and also as the smallest and the smartest in his class, Hu was a target for bullies of all sizes—so his uncle enrolled him into a series of physical activities to build up not only his body, not only his ability to defend himself, but also his self-esteem. Eventually Hu studied karate, judo, Tae Kwon Do, and modern dance. By the time he was nineteen, Hu was earning extra money doing stunts in occasional action films. Though he never doubled for any of the major actors, he was often somewhere in the background—and in a memorable comedy, he’d been featured as one of the dancing ninjas.

James and Hu had met at Culver Studios. A massive team of stunt doubles had been assembled for a disaster picture, another overblown disaster picture, a fantasy of multiple simultaneous disasters—hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanoes, tidal waves, and the return of disco. Everyone knew the picture was going to be awful; it was assumed (though never spoken aloud) that nobody upstairs knew how bad it was—either that, or it was actually intended from the beginning to be a flop, a tax write-off, or perhaps even some bizarre kind of money-laundering. Who knew? The only people who understood Hollywood financing were alchemists, and few of them were ever allowed out of their dungeon laboratories into the light of day.

But on the ground, the money was good. A lot of people had a profitable summer working on the film. As with any big effort, there were sexual relationships, babies started, babies stopped, babies born, and of course, a few divorces and emotional breakdowns, plus a number of lifelong feuds begun and exorcised, some in private, others in public.

James had worked for seven weeks on various underwater sequences. Hu had come aboard in the last week as a stunt player, running from the onrushing water. The first few days, there was no actual water. All that was to be added later by a team of talented CGI artists in Hong Kong or New Delhi. Anyone whose name came before the credits would be taking home seven figures and points on the gross, but domestic jobs were shipped overseas in cost-cutting acts of dubious economy. But there was still work to be done locally.

They had to shoot one key scene on a stretch of Wilshire Boulevard—from Rodeo Drive to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel—and they had exactly seven minutes out of every thirty when the Beverly Hills Police Department would block off traffic for the director to capture his carefully orchestrated panic, a frenzied evacuation from unseen waves.

Hu’s job was to be part of the crowd, running down the street, running through the cars, until he finally hit a specific mark, where he would fall to the ground as if he was being swept under the killing wave—except one of the assistant directors liked his look and gave him a different role where he got to be a featured kill.

The camera started at a high angle, looking up the row of stopped cars, with the distant wave roaring toward the foreground. Hu ran toward the camera, running between the line of vehicles. The camera lowered, promising a closeup, but just as Hu arrived at that spot, a panicky driver—another stunt player—opened his driver-side door so Hu slammed into it—and then the wave overtook them both. The unseen side of the car door was carefully padded, so Hu could hit it hard without injuring himself.

The director liked the shot so much that he decided to add a follow-up bit, giving Hu two additional days of work. Finished with the devastation of Wilshire Boulevard, the film moved to a Hollywood backlot for specific closeups of death and destruction.

For these shots, the director needed real water, not virtual, and the production relocated to the Paramount lot, the site of the city’s second-largest outdoor tank—the Blue Sky Tank, so called because its towering back wall could be painted to represent any kind of sky, stormy to cloudless, that a director might need. Although the Falls Lake tank at Universal was noticeably larger, it was also more expensive to fill, filter, and heat.

The filmmakers needed a variety of shots with Asian men and women as background players. This was so their Chinese co-financers could edit a somewhat different version of the film for the Asian markets. The Chinese version would include several characters and subplots not in the American version. The joke had initially been whispered in the front office, but of course it eventually filtered down to the production crew as well—the picture would do well on that side of the Pacific, because Asian audiences like to see white people die. But to be fair, a few Chinese extras had to go down too.

Hu didn’t care, he was just happy to work. Because of his marvelously startled expression when he’d slammed into the car door, the American director wanted to follow up by showing Hu struggling for a while in real waves before finally (fake) drowning. So Hu spent a hot August morning in the tank, pretending to die—“On this next take, could you look a little more terrified, please?” Dutifully, Hu struggled, gasped, and waved his arms for help that would never come, until finally disappearing obediently beneath the surface of the foaming water.

The tank was barely four feet at the center, the waves were machine-produced, and the foam was a specific detergent. Floating across the entire surface of the water was an assortment of Styrofoam flotsam, representing the debris stirred up by the tsunami. The shot didn’t seem very dangerous—at least that’s what Hu believed until he was caught unprepared by a sudden sideways push of prop debris, hard enough to punch the air out of his lungs and leave him gasping for air, involuntarily sucking in a mouthful of water, coughing, and choking desperately as he flailed.

James was one of the safety coordinators. He’d dived into the water, swam under the crapberg, grabbed Hu, and pulled him off to the side of the tank, hanging him on the sloping surface and staying with him until he regained his breath. Neither noticed when the director shouted, “Cut! That’s the best one yet, we’ll use that one! All right, let’s get the camera in the water for the dead body shot—”

The director hadn’t noticed what had happened, but one of the assistant directors had seen, and on James’ direct recommendation, quietly added an additional stunt-fee to Hu’s paycheck. No one said anything to the film’s director—a man notorious for arguing with stunt players about the cost of each gag. He had a bad reputation in the stunt players’ community.

After that, James kept an eye on Hu. In the last shot of the morning, Hu had to pretend to be dead, floating face down in the water while a camera crew in dive gear photographed him from beneath. James had been there to coach the camera crew, showing them how to keep their bubbles out of the shot. And that was when Hu, not knowing James’ name, had jokingly called him the bubble-wrangler.

Later on, at lunch, they sat opposite each other—the group shared a table under a large craft-service tent that dominated the parking lot next to the commissary.

Hu had a smile. James had a grumpy charm—it was enough.

The two began that long careful dance of curiosity that would eventually, though not immediately, lead to James’ little house in Venice Beach. Hu had gotten his nickname—Squeak—from the sound his running shoes made on James’ tile floor.

It began as a physical thing, but eventually grew into a relationship. Bed-buddies became roommates. Roommates became lovers. And lovers became—

One strange stormy night, while the two of them were lying side-by-side, staring at the ceiling and listening to the rain, the usually taciturn James had said, “What do you think—”

“About what?”

“About us, about stuff—”

Hu was still learning how to listen to James, but this time he heard more than the words. He heard the intention.

“I think…” he began. He rolled onto his side to face James. “I think yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes, you big bubble-wrangler. Yes, I will marry you.”

“Oh,” said James. “I was going to ask you if we should get a cat.”

“Huh—?”

James grinned. “But getting married—that’s a good idea too.” He pulled Hu close, and kissed him intensely.

The rest was details.

After a few weeks of dithering about plans and schedules, and how much neither of them wanted the gaudy circus of an actual wedding ceremony, they decided to just go down to City Hall, do the deed, and then fly to Hawaii for a week. Hu’s parents, now together again, were initially more concerned about Hu marrying a Caucasian than a man—but finally decided to show their acceptance by joining them on the island.

The plane tickets were sitting on the kitchen table—and the president’s voice was still droning on—now repeating the original broadcast. Outside, the sirens abruptly fell silent. “I suppose—” said Hu, staring at the travel folder, “I suppose—we can get a refund.”

And then, it hit him.

The grim expression on James’ face said it all.

“Shit! We’re going to lose the house, aren’t we? Jimmy—?”

“We’re gonna lose everything. Everything we can’t carry on our backs.”

The new girl showed up to the Agency on a Sunday, looking like an old dishrag and smelling like sour milk. Not that I could really smell her from three floors up through the mesh and bars, but there’s only three types of girls here, and she was definitely the sour milk kind. Her head hung down like it was too much work to raise it, and her long black hair flopped around so you couldn’t see her face. I’d have bet a week’s credits she had big ol’ scaredy-cat eyes, but she never bothered to look up, just let Miss Miranda lead her by the elbow through the front doors. Didn’t even try to run. Sour milk all the way.

Even sour milk new girls were good, though; anything new was good. The last one, Hope, might have been dull as old paint, but at least she’d been something different to talk about. I’d even won a day’s credits from Flash by betting the girl wouldn’t make it to fourteen without some foster trying her out and keeping her. Anyone could tell Hope smelled like cinnamon and honey, same as those babies on the first floor and the second-floor girls with their pigtails and missing-tooth smiles. Sure enough, only took six months before the Reynolds came and took Hope off to their nice house with the big beds and the white fence and those stupid yapping dogs, leaving just me and Whispers and Flash to stare at each other and count all the months and years ’til we’d finally turn eighteen. Flash should’ve known it would go that way—cinnamon and honey’s something fosters can’t resist.

Whispers said this new girl was officially called Brenda, but that was just as stupid as all the other Agency names, and the girl wouldn’t remember it after Processing anyway. At first I said we should call her Dishrag or Milkbreath, but even Flash thought that was too mean, and Flash is as nasty as hot sauce and lye. She’s the one who named me Ghost, on account of I’m small and shadow-dark and she thinks I creep around too much in the night. She got her name ’cause that’s how fast fosters send her back after their cat turns up dead and they realize the devil has blond hair and dimples.

“What’s in her file?” I asked Whispers, who was still leaned up against the wall by the window. She never bothered to look out anymore. Not even for new girls.

“I’m just supposed to clean the office,” she said. “Files are confidential.”

“Must be good if you’re holding back,” said Flash, blowing out air as she tried to whistle.

“Maybe,” Whispers said, with a lopsided shrug. Then she murmured something nobody could hear while staring down at her shoes. That meant we weren’t getting any more from her for at least an hour, not even if Flash threatened to throw her out the window or hang her with the sheets from one of the empty beds. No use pushing her ’til she started banshee-screaming, so Flash just practiced whistling and I played around some with our crap computers and we let Whispers go all sour milk and talk to her invisible friends.

By the time Flash got a half-whistle half-spit sound to come out of her mouth and I’d finished up my hack of the first-floor baby cams for when things got boring, new girl was being led off the elevator by Miss Miranda, head still down. Flash and I lined up in front of the room same as always—hands behind our backs, chests up and out, heads forward, eyes wide. Even Whispers came out of her murmuring and straightened up against the wall. Agency folks didn’t care about much as far as us third-floors were concerned, but they were total nuts for protocol.

Miss Miranda started by doing her normal speech-troduction. This is Brenda, she’s fifteen years old, and she’s going to stay with us for a while. These are the girls, they’re all trying to get new homes too. And we just know it’ll work out for you all any day now. When she said that last bit, her voice always got real high, like someone talking after they took a gulp of air from a circus balloon.

We ask you to stay on the third floor when you’re in the building unless you’re doing chores downstairs or get called to the office. But don’t worry—there’s so much to do up here, you won’t even notice. Her voice went even higher for that part, ’cause even an idiot could see there wasn’t anything on the floor but twenty empty beds, two long white lunch tables, a couple of old computers on splintery desks covered with the names of old third-floors, and the door to the world’s grimiest bathroom.

As long as you maintain good grades and proper behavior in school, you’re free to come and go as you please until seven PM curfew. You’ll get a few credits each day for transit and meals. If you need additional learning help or assistance with your homework, the computers in the back row have plenty to offer. Age-appropriate stuff only, of course. She looked straight at me when she said it, like it was my fault the security on the things was shit and I’d figured out a way to order vapes and liquor pops and get R-rated videos.

Now you girls get along, and try not to kill each other. She looked at Flash for that one, even though Flash hadn’t really tried to kill anyone for at least a year. She’d barely even talked to Hope. Either she was getting soft now that we were in high school, or she was gonna burn the whole place down someday. Maybe both.

As soon as she got the last words out of her mouth, Miss Miranda spun around on her high heels and got out of there as fast as she could. I thought the new girl would fall over as soon as Miss Miranda left, but she put her hands behind her back and stuck her chest out same as the rest of us. Her eyes weren’t nearly as scaredy-cat as I thought they’d be. She smelled like sour milk for sure, but hot sauce and honey a little bit too.

“I’m Brenda,” she said. “Brenda Nevins.”

“That’s a stupid name,” said Flash.

“It’s what my daddy called me,” said new girl, thrusting her chest out even more, like it would cover the way her voice got all wobbly.

“Yeah? Well where’s your daddy now?” Flash asked. The new girl’s head dropped forward. We hadn’t made a bet on whether someone could make her cry, but there were some things Flash would do for free.

“She doesn’t remember,” I told Flash. “You know that.”

“I remember fine,” said the new girl. “It’s just that… it just happened. He just died, I mean.”

Flash rolled her eyes.

“No way you remember that shit,” she said. “Not anymore.” She put on her best Miss Miranda impression, high pitched and piercing. “Your memories of your time before joining the Agency are being held for safekeeping until you reach adulthood and can properly integrate them into your daily life.”

“What are you talking about?” new girl said. “I remember my dad. He was a—”

“Spare me the bullshit,” Flash said, voice back low. “Miss Miranda tell you how in your file it says your daddy was a famous reccer? Or a Wall Street corp? Or a doctor? Bet if you looked in the ’grams she took from you, you’d find out he left you chained up in the basement. Or he liked to beat on your mama. Or maybe you ain’t never had no daddy at all.”

I felt my eyes get hot, just a little, but new girl didn’t blink.

“My daddy was a good man,” she said. “Not my fault if yours wasn’t worth shit.”

I backed up two steps so as not to get hit when the fists started flying. A fight was gonna mean discipline and lights-out and early curfew for at least two weeks. Nothing worse than that and having a black eye. But Flash just laughed.

“Damn, girl,” she said. “You got balls. Gonna be hard coming up with a name for you.”

“My dad—”

“Your dad won’t know any different.” I tried to stare some sense into the girl before Flash flipped back to serious and threw her across the room, or started working out how to smother her in the middle of the night. “Leave his name for him and ours for us. I’m Ghost. She’s Flash. That’s Whispers. We’ll figure something out for you.”

You almost don’t need the first half of the story at all. You know there’s a spaceship. You know that its crew stops off at some out-of-the-way planet on some pretext or other, probably repairs, and that while they’re there, somebody jars the wrong rock, or enters the wrong dark place, or something. You know that this person gets infected, that nobody notices, and that when they take off, a hostile alien intelligence takes off with them. Finally, you know that after some skulking around in corridors and a few isolated deaths, the carrier, call him Hennessy, is subdued and placed in isolation, where the others observe him worriedly on monitors.

All of that goes without saying. Because you’ve been here before.

What should happen now is the crew deciding after much rational and reasoned discussion that this is some heavy-duty alien shit, with any number of possible properties, and that the smartest possible thing to do is to write Hennessy off as a complete loss, and dump him into interplanetary vacuum.

But human beings are cute, not to mention slow learners, and so they come up with a different approach entirely. The Captain, and not some more disposable party, puts on an isolation suit and enters the lab in order to negotiate with the entity now controlling good old Hennessy. The Captain is wise, and the Captain is bearded, and the Captain is fully confident in the precautions already taken being able to prevent whatever’s eating Hennessy from also taking charge of him. He cycles through the airlock separating the ship proper from the horror that sits in the isolation cell, and he stands and he peers through his faceplate at the figure who was until recently a respected friend and colleague if also a bit of a comical asshole, who is now secured by gleaming silvery rings to a chair that keeps him immobile; and it would only confuse us to ask just why this vessel on a mission of peaceful exploration, or freight hauling, or whatever, even has an isolation cell with a chair designed to keep a prisoner immobile. Right now, it’s enough to focus our attention on the immediate problem.

The Captain’s probably thinking that he and his crew must be the most inobservant people alive. Hennessy did look a little grotty after leaving the planet, a little paler and sweatier than usual, possibly hung over, but even before he began to prowl the corridors, murdering his fellow crew members one by one, that grottiness was left far behind, in favor of grotesquery. His complexion turned pitted and warty, his flesh flaking and blistery, his lips yellowish and pustulent, well past the point where he looked dead, and yet a number of those he cornered on his several days of winnowing down the opposition greeted his appearance not with a horrified, Holy crap, Hennessy’s been infected with something, but a more neutral, Jesus, man, you look like hell. The ship’s faithful cameras recorded the killing that followed but not whether any of the victims, upon ascertaining that a violent death was now their lot, devoted any of their remaining mental energy to excoriating themselves with a sad stupid, stupid, stupid. Because, really: a number of their demises were an exercise in not seeing the bloody obvious until it was too late.

It’s hard to imagine anybody being taken in now, because Hennessy no longer looks even remotely human. He resembles a boil in the process of draining. Various nasty fluids leak from his cheeks, his mouth, his eyes. Even with his restraints on, his movements are twitchy, violent, and inhuman. But the thing occupying him manages a sneer as he confronts the Captain: “Come to negotiate? How cute.”

The Captain says, “What are you, and what do you want?”

The faux-Hennessy leers at him, and through bubbling lips, explains, “I think it’s fairly clear what I am. I’m an intelligent parasitic organism. Not evolved on that planet where you found me, but on another many light-years away, spreading from system to system the same way I’ve spread to you: via fools stumbling in where they don’t belong. If I told you how many sentient races I’ve infected down to the very last organism, all because of uncounted stupid space travelers like yourself giving me a ride from one world to another, you would quail in horror. I will infect your entire civilization, and you will do nothing to stop me.”

“Thank you,” says the Captain. He leaves the room via the same aperture he used to enter, tells his crew that Hennessy is a lost cause, and with a quick flip of a switch ejects the isolation chamber into a nearby sun, incinerating his old friend, the monster occupying him, and any chance of the foulness spreading to the rest of the human race. Such a course of action would be cold, and it would be cruel, and it would lead to some hard questions from a fleet board of enquiry, but it would also be completely sensible.

Except, of course, that he doesn’t do any of that. What he does is leave the room via the same aperture he used to enter, tell his crew that he’s lost all the crew members he’s going to, and that he wants options for curing Hennessy on his desk in one hour, damn it. Whereupon everybody disperses and lets the thing that used to be Hennessy continue to brew and mutate and become more dangerous, like a sausage plumping in its croissant dough.

How irresponsible! But this is not the worst part they miss.

Everyone deserves a last meal. Mine was fish, Syllabub laughing her arse off as she served it up. Not goldfish, because that would have been bad luck—the kind of bad luck that comes from gossip about a last meal getting back to her Ladyship and being taken as insult. Instead a poor skinny muddy thing in a thin soup, flounder I think, or catfish.

“They’re not at all the same,” says Syllabub, critical, but they’re fish, aren’t they?

“I didn’t think there was going to be a test,” I said, and if I’d any room left in me for panic I would have panicked then, because the Lady and her tanks are the only thing between me and a bloody end instead of a scaly one. And if I’m to be examined on fish before I’m allowed to become one, then I might as well offer myself up for gutting now and be done with it.

“I thought you’d show a bit more interest than that.”

But it’s all I can do to show any interest in the food instead of fate, the blackened little strips of fish all doused in spices to hide the old flesh. I can taste cumin, pepper, the burn from dried chili—improperly ground, Syllabub’s always been a careless cook, but spices cost near as much as fish and there’s not enough to cover the taste of ammonia. Syllabub gorges anyway, and I pick enough at the burnt edges to pretend diversion before fronting up to the Lady of Scales.

No one knows her true name. Magic has never encouraged exchanges of confidence and so we named her for her skill, and left the past—whatever it might be—well enough alone.

If she objected to her trading name we never knew it. I’d often thought, passing by the shop front and seeing the bright shape of her through the glass, that there was enough of a sense of humor there to play up to it. The orange robes floated around her, and there were gold scales embroidered about the hem. She even bulged a bit in the middle, though that was due more to pastry, we thought, than the attentions of a man. Not one of us had ever seen any of them come courting.

“Well, you wouldn’t, would you?” says Syllabub. “You put your cold feet against her of a night and like as not you’ll wake up without them.” She eyes me over her bowl of broth. “I can see the upside, is all I’m saying.”

“Oh fuck off,” I say. “Haven’t I been wearing the damn socks?”

“Gran made them specially,” she says, smirking. The socks are blue and orange, carp swimming in lake water with surprised expressions on their stupid faces.

Neither of us ever stopped to think that Syll’s old granny spent as much time with her tea leaves and clients as with her knitting needles. And that we took tea with her every Sunday. I’m almost sure the old bitch saw this coming. Me with my life savings, such as they are, and a plate of sugar buns, silly socks on both shaking feet, and a contract coming close behind.

Pick the wrong pocket and suddenly transformation starts to seem like a decent option. Even if it’s transformation into a fish.

“I saw her stuffing sweet buns again,” she says. I don’t need to ask who she’s talking about. “She’s getting fatter by the day.” This in tones of admiration. Syll enjoys her own round flesh, wants to plump up enough for fashion, but we don’t always have the cash for the cream cakes she prefers, the butter tablets and duck fat and soft cheese. “All soft and glowy. You don’t think she’s pregnant, do you?”

I can’t think by who. The worst-kept romance on the Street of Endings is between the baker and the Lady of Scales, and both of them are women.

“Maybe she’s stuffed full of eggs,” says Syllabub, pettish. “Maybe if you open her up they’ll all be clotted in there like caviar.”

Neither of us has ever eaten caviar. It’s a lack that Syllabub takes personally. The little dishes, the elegant bowls of black roe, of chopped boiled eggs, the tiny spoons of sour cream, the finely chopped watercress… how would it all taste, mixed together for mouths? Do the little eggs pop or crunch on the tongue? Curiosity’s a curse, they say, and I reckon they’re right. It certainly hasn’t done anything for me lately.

“You’ll be the one cut open if the Lady hears you talk like that,” I say. Though really, it’s the baker I wouldn’t put it past. She’s got a long reach, that one, and if it weren’t poisoned profiteroles turning up on the doorstep—I can’t tell myself that Syllabub wouldn’t swallow them down without thinking, it’s not just greed, we’re simply not in the position to waste food—then she’d find herself offered up to tanks anyway, her dead body laid before a lover in the certain knowledge that transformation doesn’t work on corpses.

One of us having to beg sanctuary off the Lady of Scales was enough without the other being offered up as well.

“I’ll wait for you,” says Syllabub, and there’s sincerity on every line of her pretty face but I’ve got my doubts. Theft calls for patience as well as nerve but there’s always an end to waiting in sight, and the Lady of the Scales is no thief. She guarantees nothing of returns. Just that there’ll be one, one day, probably, if she doesn’t over-chlorinate the tanks, or forget the feeding, or elope with the baker whose shop sits just two doors down from her own, give up aquaculture for sugar-work. “One day” might be tomorrow. It might be next century. I’m no fan of luck but I’ve learned to calculate odds, when I’ve got a dress out of pawn for trips to the gambling houses, and my calculations say that there are a lot of girls with warm feet in this city, and none of them are about to be goldfish.

Syll’s always been good at netting things. She’s good at catch and release as well. But she’s tender-hearted for all of that and so she’s come along with, her nose pressed against shop windows, and all I can think when I see her is how she’ll look from the other side of the glass. I pretend not to notice that two of the sugar buns have found their way into her pockets. I’d eat one myself if I weren’t about to throw up.

“You believe me, don’t you? That I’ll wait?” she says. She wants me to believe her, but I reckon that’s as much guilt as anything else, because it was her that I was trying to steal for and we both know it. Her suggestion: that one, he looks rich and stupid, wouldn’t notice if an ox stumbled into him, got that look of distraction I think not.

I should have known better. It’s always the skinny ones that are the most grasping. He’d been a spiny stick insect, that one, for all his suit was silk, and no one with money who walks down the street refusing oysters and grilled mango with honey, whitebait fritters, and milk balls does so for any reason but greed for his pockets instead of his stomach.

Of course he felt my fingers in his pockets. But the catching wasn’t enough for him, nor the boxed ears, nor the appeals to the justice because they’re easy enough to work around, a night in the cells gets you out of another. The contract came out of spite. Not for trying it on to begin with, but for not recognizing him enough to stay away. For a certain type that’s more insult than anything else, but the wealthy have nothing to do with me, how am I supposed to know them? You’d have to work in a bank or business to be stupid enough to thieve from that sort. The petty stealers, the ones that live small like Syllabub and I, well. We’ve more sense. We stick to the moderately well-off, the ones who can afford to lose the price of a meal but not hire vengeance for it.

The better targets were usually plumper. More ready to sample the noodles, the street dumplings. I should have remembered, but Syll was whispering at me, hot breath smelling of red beans and rice with a little onion for flavor and all I could think was how we’d planned to visit the caviar shops for her birthday but we’d gambled away the price of those piled glossy eggs, those neatly chopped sides all laid out in their prim little bowls, and lost the money to a mark that didn’t pan out because we were the marks that time, and too stupid to see it. Hence the need for some quick cash, because “I want to know,” Syll had said one night, tucked into each other as we were. “Whether they pop or crunch. I want to know for my birthday.”

“Clever girls like you should have no trouble,” her granny had said, knitting needles clicking away and her cat’s-arse mouth prim as if she disapproved of our particular brand of cleverness. Not that she ever set that disapproval for much when it came to sharing the spoils; half of Syll’s takings went to keeping the old bitch in tea. A little appreciation wouldn’t have gone amiss, is all I’m saying.

“Well, wouldn’t I wait for you?” I say, as if our situations were reversed. And she hums happily enough, seeming to miss that I didn’t answer anything and didn’t offer any promises neither, because they’re dry things, are promises, set out to bake in the sun like betrothal bread, and all my coming days are wet.

“You always liked to swim,” says Syllabub. She’s used to making the best of, but how she remembers that now I don’t bloody know, seeing as we’ve only been swimming the once. Only a blind fool would go swimming in these waters, and they’d have to lack a nose as well, or be so stuffed up from ‘fluenza that they’d do just about any idiot thing.

Or be drunk. We were drunk, that one time, on foreign wine that tasted of kerosene and lucky not to catch the cholera.

“I’ve never seen girls so stupid,” said granny, when she came to fish us out. Accusations of cleverness were well in the future then, after she’d had a chance to read our cups over, the pair of us shifting and sifting leaves different together than separate, apparently.

Her granddaughter never had the same stomach for the hook. She’s more a hindrance than a help in the Lady’s shop, after I’ve handed over the buns and all the little savings I have, not enough for black eggs but enough to buy transformation and fish flakes for generations, perhaps, because the Lady is good with investments if choice gives her the chance. She says I’ll get half back when I change again so she’s not cruel with it, won’t ever put someone out on the streets with nothing. The rich pay everything they have, same as the poor, it’s the time spent away that pays off in the end.

If some other poor fool driven to this fishes me out tomorrow, I’ll barely have enough for a week’s rice flour. Not that it’ll matter, I’d be dead before sunset anyway, no miser worth his salt would let a grudge loose that soon; they pinch onto pride tighter than pennies. “But if you’re here for a hundred years even your coppers can become something more substantial,” she says, as if the thought of windfall is enough to compensate for everything I’ll have lost by a century’s swimming.

I can only hope the bargain will pay off, and that the same can be said for the fish I’m about to net. That’s the other part of the price, the put-off payment. There are dozens of goldfish in her tanks, hundreds of them, and only space for another if one is taken out again. Guess who gets the responsibility of choice, along with a net?

“Not that one!” Syllabub cries, just when I’ve got one of them trapped in the corner of a tank, my net almost around it. She pouts in my direction. “It looks sad. Don’t you think it looks sad?”

“It’s a goldfish,” I say. “None of them are very bloody happy, are they?” Whether or not this one’s going to be happy to be rescued I’ve no idea. I can only hope enough time’s passed for whoever it was. Time enough and not too much; it can’t be luck to start my own transformation by sending some poor bastard out to death or a new life in a world with nothing familiar in it.

“Some of them look happier than others,” she says, and I have to wonder just what was sprinkled on those sugar buns because they all look the same to me, those goldfish: vacant little faces, trailing fringed fins behind them with an expression like they’ve forgotten what’s following behind.

I hope they don’t bloody know what they’re swimming away from, what they’re swimming towards. I reckon it’d be tolerable, being a goldfish, if it’s goldfish all through. Goldfish with human feeling, though, human memories…

“If it’s sad it’s probably because it’s had enough of living in an aquarium,” I say, determined to believe it and lunging with the net, but a small jostle from the girlfriend and the goldfish escapes to swim another day, merging with the rest of school at the other end of the tank.

“Sorry,” says Syllabub, shrugging, but it doesn’t take a magician to know that she isn’t, really. She skips out of reach, the floor shaking beneath. It makes me wonder what happens in earthquakes. The shop is rickety and bowed at the corners; I can see clear through cracks in the floor to water. One good shock and suddenly the sea’s full of little fishes, with no way of returning to their old selves.

I’d like to think the people who caught them would bring them back to the shop; come bearing soup bowls of seawater, carp in the chamber pots. More likely would be goldfish skewered over an open flame; the little bones ground up for tonic, just in case medicinal efficacy crosses over between species.

“Maybe if they want to go off cold-cocked,” said Syllabub, sniggering, when I was foolish enough to confide my fears. She’s got a hard-on for frigidity jokes lately, but when I bury my feet between her thighs and wriggle toes it’s usually enough to shut her up for a bit.

The Lady of Scales is laughing in the background. I wish I could say it was mean laughter but it’s like she finds us genuinely funny, her own little romantic comedy duo. There can’t be many of those played out in this place, but perhaps I’m giving us more originality than can be credited for.

In fairness, no one’d ever seen her laugh at the fish-that-were, the people she’d turned back and sent off, fair flummoxed and stumbling over thresholds.

We’d all seen them, and none of us were much for laughing either. There was something in their faces—not a remnant hint of scales, no. Nothing so unsubtle. It was the disorientation that gave them away. The slight stagger, as if the balance was just returning to new-old limbs, a rolling gait different than that of sailors, for the Street of Endings was built over water, the thick sweet scent of salt. Built that way for suicides, for the walking off of piers and the quick retrieval of bodies for the organs, ground down and sold on for sex aids. Why you’d want a drowned man’s cock powdered into your tea I don’t know. It doesn’t seem a very stiffening thing to me, but perhaps men see it differently. The trade’s a brisk one, that’s all I know.

It’s brisk enough for goldfish, too.

Not that I’ve seen too many of them. Still enough, it seems like there’s one or two every year, come back from the tanks.

How many years will it be for me?

“I could be dead when you’re fished from the tanks,” says Syllabub, considering. “I could be old.”

It’s hard to think of her as old. There’s too much flash and quickness to her. Too much of the flexible, too much greed for the new.

“I’ll be all wrinkly, with my tits down by my knees. And age spots, probably. Gran’s got lots of age spots.” She giggles. “Like a civet cat, but I don’t know that the smell’s the same.” She’s lifted some perfumes of late, spraying the ones she didn’t sell over the bed linens and rolling over them until all her flesh smelled of musk. “You’d love me when I’m old, wouldn’t you?” she says.

“I’d try,” I say and she clicks her tongue, pouting. As I said, romantic—though it was a practical romanticality, if there’s such a thing. Someone would come along sooner or later. Someone not me, someone warm-footed, and she’d find a way to call it fate. Maybe even a series of someones, and me not even recognizing her when I came back, if I came back, staggering along the Street, new-born to bipedalism and blaring it to anyone who looked.

But it wasn’t just the walk that told what they were. It was in the way their mouths hung open, gaping open and shut with drool coming down, and them not bothering to wipe it away. Course they could have been country folk, staring at the Street with wide eyes as though they’d never seen the like, mazed by the mix and bustle of it. If it weren’t for the drool and the walk, and the possibility that they really didn’t know where they were.

No. That’s not true. The Lady of the Scales has had her shop for generations and it hasn’t moved a meter. It’s not the street geography they’re lost in, poor fish-mouthed creatures. It’s the time: the consciousness of years passed. Or not passed, but if they turn back too quickly the disorientation doesn’t have time to confuse them.

Confusion doesn’t long outlast a knife through the throat. Grudges tend to fall off after a few decades, people find better things to do or get knifed themselves—the kind of person who carries blades and pays the kids pennies to watch and tell if a fish comes back out that door doesn’t do so well with associates, I reckon. Relationships are an inconvenience sometimes.

“It’s not always the crooks though,” said Syllabub. She’s a romantic streak.

I thought the people who had themselves turned all over scales for a bad love affair were missing their brains as well as their legs. No wonder their matches turned sour, wedded as they were to the dramatic before anything else. If you could make the decision to give up everything in life—friends, family, even the nodding acquaintance and all the sights and smells of a neighborhood grown familiar through time—enough to swim off into the future, then you could make the decision to give up one person.

I reckon it’s only hysterics that makes anyone choose the former. The desire for attention, to wallow in grief. I thought so before I’d come to the Lady of Scales and I thought so even more now, knowing what I had to lose and not actually willing to do it for anything less than life.

Turns out there’s something more than hysterics to it, something sickening. I’d thought she weren’t cruel, the Lady, but when the goldfish I’d finally chased down and netted is turned out onto the floor, there’s a girl in a soaking bridal gown stepping out of scales and crying like her heart would break. Jilted, poor thing, and run off to life as a fish so she wouldn’t have to see him again.

“Gods, didn’t you have a mother?” I say to her, helping that warm weeping weight up off her knees. “Didn’t you have any friends?” Being thrown over’s never pleasant, but we’ve all been there and surely a few solid weeks of drink and whining could have made the difference. Her gown’s old-fashioned but even I can tell it cost a lot, all fine with lace and little pearls sewn on so she could have afforded the indulgence, could have sold the pearls for months at a brothel with men more skilled than the one that dumped her, so you think someone would have been there to take her in hand.

“I didn’t think,” she says, sobbing, and it turns out the silly girl did have support about her but she ran off straight from the temple, humiliated and miserable and in just enough shock to throw her life away for nothing, for the Lady of Scales took her bridal necklace and hocked it, turned the poor wailing thing fish-face before she had a chance to think better of herself.

It doesn’t seem decent, somehow.

What seems even less decent is the way Syllabub’s staring at her, all pathetic and sorry-like. “Your dress is very out of date,” she says, and that’s enough for me to see where this is going. If that were last season’s wedding gown, last decade’s even, there’d be people for her to go back to. But it isn’t, and there won’t be, and I wonder now how often the mama of this little goldfish came to Lady of Scales, wanting her daughter back and not being able to get her. Hundreds of shining fish swim here, all of them identical, and she could only bargain with her own life for one.

“Is her mother in one of those tanks?”

The Lady of the Scales looks at me, considering. “Do you really want to know?” she says.

I don’t.

It’s the bloody Street of Endings, that’s what it is.

No one ever said any of the endings would be happy.

Except one of them is, because this is the moment Syllabub’s bitch of a grandmother wanders past, up off her arse for the first time in bloody-ever, and when she sees her grandchild with her arms around this poor lost creature—this poor lost rich creature, her flesh all heated even though she’s just come out of the chill and wrapped in lengths of wet silk—there’s a smile there that speaks of tea leaves and I’m a clever girl, I am, it doesn’t take long to realize that I’ve been screwed by two members of the same family.

No wonder that skinny mark was so set on his vengeance. No wonder I never recognized him, even moving in different circles as I do. She probably paid him off, pawned everything she owned because she saw pearls in her tea leaves, and goldfish. I’d like to think it was all a scam but she’d leave nothing to chance, and I’m damn sure that after the pawnbrokers she gone to make another bargain, and bloodier.

And me, halfway through my own, and stuck with it because there’s a place in the tanks now the little bride is out and the Lady of the Scales doesn’t care for pikers. Our bargain’s sealed already, with sugar buns and fish nets. She’s taken my coppers and even if I can gouge a confession out of granny it’s not going to make a difference for me.

“I’ll wait for you!” says Syllabub, for the last time before she’s booted from the shop, because as spiteful as I’m feeling right now I’m not going to make her watch me change, blowing kisses through the glass while I blow bubbles. She’s innocent in all this, never could lie to save herself, and she’s promising to wait because she truly believes that she will.

I wonder if it’s crueler to let her grieve over a goldfish than a gutted body. If it’d be worth letting her grieve a grandmother as well, or if I should let the old bitch teach her disloyalty, and how to do away with guilt.

“Don’t wait,” I say.

The scales come.

“Sometimes I wonder if we didn’t make a grave mistake by accepting the Ramakhi gift.” Floriana Bellugi sighed and ran her palm through her hair. I couldn’t tell whether she’d done the gesture absently or arranged it just to seem so. Nothing could be certain about her. “Look at the cohort who’d been adults at that time. How many are still around by now?”

Was this a rhetorical question? But she was looking seriously at me, as if expecting the answer. “The estimates range from 5 to 8 percent. Hard to say more precisely. Too much information latency between the systems, and no tracking is perfect, especially over that amount of time.”

“And for those people,” she added pointedly. “You learn to avoid it over the course of four hundred years.”

It would take a lot of adaptation, though. We haven’t exactly stagnated over that time. But they say learning is a positive feedback loop, and with enough experience and motivation, I could imagine achieving a lot with so much time. I shifted in my seat.

Bellugi noticed, of course. Sensed my impatience. Seemed to approve of it. Cutting right to the matter: “The man I need you to find is one Antonio Arienti. That’s his original name. Born in 1977 in Nashville. His parents also; grandparents were immigrants from Sicily.” I visualized it on the map. “Joined the U.S. Army, promoted quickly, expanded his education, became a fast-track officer. Left to become a private consultant. Spent some time in Myanmar, Chechnya, Indonesia, Angola, and Syria, always shortly before the local conflicts reignited. Strange coincidence.” Bellugi produced a bitter little smile. “By the time the Ramakhi messenger probe arrived, Arienti was retired and living in Paris, though the rumors were he’d sell some ‘lost’ pieces of army equipment from time to time. Arienti somehow managed to be among the first million people who received the gift.”

“Where were you?” I spoke before she could continue.

The slightest change in her expression. Angry? Amused? Wary? My systems told me it was inconclusive.

“In Rome.”

That wasn’t what I was asking.

How many people who had seen the twilight of the twentieth century were still alive today? Ten million? Scattered across the systems. Statistically speaking, fewer than two hundred thousand should be in ours. I was speaking with one. Floriana Bellugi made her long lifespan no secret. She looked fifty to sixty, but then again, most of them did; some even less. Perfectly groomed silvery hair. Composed face with elegant, gentle features. Misleading. A woman out of time. Free of its tyranny.

She picked up her cup of white tea and sipped. “Arienti’s trail disappears in the post-gift uprisings. Emerges again on a ship to Mars. He spent almost a century there. Very quiet, left almost nothing behind beside the bare evidence of his presence. Then Saturn’s clouds for about two decades, under the name of Paul Olivieri. Jumped on the first starship, arrived at Tau Ceti nearly a century later. As soon as the ship to YZ Ceti was ready, he was in. Going by Louis Castello.”

That left us barely a century more. I fished for the list of voyages in my extended memory. He could have gotten here if he took Kensakan to Teegarden’s Star and then, almost instantly, the Eridanus to us, Epsilon Eridani. Why would he?

“Spent over eighty years out there. From what I’ve heard, YZ Ceti is not a great place to live. Violently eruptive star, very scattered material, one planet tidally locked and practically uninhabitable due to the flares, the other freezing. The rest… just rock, ice, and dust. Why they sent colonists there in the first place, I cannot imagine. Probably because it was so close.” Just the slightest hints of contempt in her voice and the curve of her lips.

“So he’s not here.” Then why am I?

“I never said he was. He sent a message over eight years ago. Arrived last year. Not to me. I learned about it, though, made a brief inquiry, and now I’m talking to you.” She once again enjoyed keeping me in the dark just for a moment longer, expecting me to ask more questions. I waited patiently, not giving her the satisfaction.

“It was meant for an associate of his. He was saying he’d change places again, and sent an encrypted data package. The decryption code is meant to be auto-sent with a fifty-year latency.”

“Unbreakable, I suppose.”

“Correct.”

“How large?” I asked.

“More than my history on him.”

“How did you acquire it anyway?” If the transmission arrived less than a year ago, she couldn’t have contacted any other systems and heard back. She must have been tracking him her whole life or hoarding all information on starships’ passengers—not just those coming here. In any case, a remarkable and most terrifying feat.

“I have my sources.”

I know; asking stupid questions… Just to be sure, I tried to access information about her and cross-reference it with her story of Arienti. No match. But the latency was just a microsecond off. She was restricting me, but didn’t want to make it too apparent. Out of deception or politeness?

“What do you want me to do?”

“Go after him.”

I half-suspected it, but still wasn’t fully prepared to think of leaving my home. “Where?”

“He should arrive at van Maanen’s Star in less than a decade. If you leave soon, you’ll be there some twenty years later.”

“He may not be there anymore by then.”

“May not,” she agreed. “But may yes.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Find him. Find out what he’s doing and why. Report to me.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“You will receive further instructions, but they’ll be available when you need them. No need to distract you if they prove obsolete.”

Somehow, she’d transformed during our conversation. She seemed pensive at first, serious; now she acted openly Machiavellian. I took a chance. “Do you think it was a grave mistake?”

“What?”

Had I really taken her by surprise? Or just more layers of pretense?

“Oh. The gift,” Bellugi realized. “What do you think?”

“We may have still been stuck by the old Sol without it,” I said. “Longer lifespans gave us different motivations, the ability to survive a whole interstellar voyage, the drive to invest in long-term projects.”

“Yet most of the First Generation are dead by now. Most of them voluntarily. Refused further treatments or have taken their own lives. How many mistakes, how much boredom, how much loss and disappointment can one stand in a lifetime?”

I took my own cup, finished it, set it aside. “I don’t understand. All of that can be corrected.”

“Then it wouldn’t be you anymore.”

Should outdated concepts surprise me in someone like her? As old as her?

“You had no… identity corrections?”

“You’re asking a highly personal question, little one. But a good one. What kind of people would, in your opinion, be most likely to disregard negative experiences or feelings, or get them erased just like that?”

Anyone, I was going to say but stopped myself soon enough. Or… maybe we’ve just gotten accustomed to their thinking.

“Psychopaths,” I ventured, having fished for the old term she might be most familiar with.

Floriana Bellugi smiled, offered me more tea, and, when I declined, dismissed me. Her assistants would handle the rest, she assured me. It was my first and last face-to-face time with her.

Five months later, I found myself aboard Chrysalis, a small starship bound for van Maanen’s Star.

The whole hospital was celebrating. The new building had opened. Funding for better instruments had been on its way. Doctor Aster Sebai could not have been happier.

She could already see the better future ahead of them. Not for her own sake, but for all the people who had been lining up in front of the hospital from early morning. For all the villagers who couldn’t afford medical care. For those who remembered darker times. Last but not least, for her daughter. Feven was growing up so fast, already nearly an adult! She should arrive from school any moment.

Not everything went smoothly, though. One of the patients came in drunk, nearly staggering into the examining room. His left arm was broken. He cursed and swore while Sebai examined him. He insisted that she give him morphine for the pain.

“There’s no need for that,” she assured him firmly. “The fracture is clean, look at the X-ray image. I’ll give you local anesthesia while I fix the arm.”

“It hurts, you bitch!” he wailed, and the string of expletives continued. Sebai, prepared to defend herself and call for help if necessary, waited until he shut up, and then said calmly: “I can either fix your arm, or not. There is no chance I’m giving you morphine, but right now you decide whether I treat you. If you want to keep calling me names, begging for drugs, and threatening me, go away. Your choice.”

He was silent for a while. Then he nodded, and she finished the dressing. “There,” she smiled. “We’ll leave the cast on for three weeks. By then, the fracture should be healed. Please come again in that time. If there are any problems, come sooner. All right?”

“Yeah,” he said and quickly vanished.

It was the last patient. Feven came in after him and greeted her mother.

Later, she asked: “Why were you so nice to that old drunk? Most doctors would immediately refuse to treat him if he behaved like that, and I wouldn’t think less of them. But you spoke to him nicely, and he didn’t even say thank you.”

“Everyone deserves a chance. Kindness is all, my love,” she smiled. “Remember that.”

When I was five or six years old, my best friend was Mowgai Khan, who was Aislinn Khan’s youngest. He was a spidery little thing, “full of nettles and brambles,” as old Grandma Mosh always said. His eyes shone like blackberries in late summer. When he was very small, the Khans undertook the long, hard journey to Tyr, along the blasted planes, and in that settlement Mowgai was equipped with a composite endoskeleton, which allowed him to walk, in however curious a fashion. On the long summer days, which seemed never to end, Mowgai and I would roam freely over the Land, collecting wild berries by the stream or picking pine nuts from the fallen cones in the forest, and we would debate for hours the merits or otherwise of Elder Simeon’s intricate clockwork automatons, and we would try to catch fish in the stream, but we never did catch anything.

It was a long, hot summer: the skies were a clear and uninterrupted lavender blue, with only smudges of white cloud on the horizon like streaks of paint, and when the big yellow sun hung high in the sky we would seek shelter deep in the forest, where the breeze stirred the pine needles sluggishly and where we could sit with our backs to the trunks of old mottled pines, between the roots, eating whatever lunch we had scavenged at home in the morning on our way. Eating dark bread and hard cheese and winter kimchee, we felt we knew all the whole world, and had all the time in it, too: it is a feeling that fades and can never return once lost, and all the more precious for that. For dessert we ate slices of watermelon picked only an hour or so earlier from the ground. The warm juice ran down our chins and onto our hands and we spat out the small black pips on the ground, where they stared up at us like hard eyes.

And we would story.

Mowgai was fascinated by machines. I, less so. Perhaps it was that he was part machine himself, and thus felt an affinity to the old world that I did not then share. My mother, too, was like that, going off for days and months on her journeys to the fallow places, to scavenge and salvage. But for her I think it was a practical matter, as it is for salvagers. She felt no nostalgia for the past, and often regarded the ancients’ fallen monuments as monstrous follies, vast junkyards of which precious little was of any use. It was my father who was the more romantic of the two, who told me stories of the past, who sometimes dreamed, I think, of other, different times. Salvagers are often hard and durable, like the materials they repurpose and reuse. Mowgai’s dream was to become a salvager like my mother, to follow the caravans to the sunken cities in the sea or to the blasted plains. His journey to Tyr had changed him in some profound fashion, and he would talk for hours of what he saw there, and on the way.

Usually after our lunch we would head on out of the trees, toward the misshapen hills that lay to the northwest of us. These hills were shaped in an odd way, with steep rises and falls and angular lines, and Elder Simeon made his home at their base.

When he saw us approach that day he came out of his house and wiped his hands on his leather apron and smiled out of his tanned and lined face. They said he had clockwork for a heart, and he and Mowgai often spoke of mechanical beings and schematics in which I had little interest. His pets, too, came out, tiny clockwork automata of geese and ducks, a tawny peacock, a stealthy prowling cat, a caterpillar and a turtle.

“Come, come!” he said. “Little Mai and Mowgai!” And he led us to his courtyard and set to brewing tea. Elder Simeon was very old, and had traveled widely as a young man all about the Land, for a restless spirit had taken hold of him then. But now he valued solitude, and stillness, and he seldom came out of his home, and but for us, received few visitors.

He served us tea, with little slices of lemon from the tree in his yard, and then we sat down together to story, which is what we do in the Land.

“You have gone to Tyr,” he said to Mowgai, and his eyes twinkled with amusement. “Have you ever seen, on your way through the blasted plains, a town, standing peacefully in the middle of nowhere?”

Mowgai stirred, surprised, and said that no, he hadn’t, and he did not think anything still lived in the blasted plains.

“Life finds a way,” Elder Simeon said. “There is life there of all sorts, snakes and scorpions and lizards, sage and marigolds and cacti. But the town… well, they say there is a town, Mowgai, little Mai. I had heard of it in Tyr, where they say it sits there still, out on the plains, as perfect and as orderly as it had always been. No one goes near it, and no one comes out…”

It is just an old men’s tale, I think, and you know how they love to embellish and gossip.

But this is the story. It is told in a curious sort of way. It is told in the plural, by a mysterious “we,” but who these “we” are, or were, no one now remembers. Perhaps “they” are still in the town, but though many claim to have seen it, its location always seems to change like a mirage in the telling.

“Once,” began Elder Simeon, “there was a little boy…”

Mike and Jessie were walking in the park. The trees high above their heads stretched to touch each other, their leaves letting only the tiniest slivers of light through.

Mike watched the freckles of light spot Jessie’s brown face, her shirt, her arms. He tried to snub them out with his fingers.

It was a long day for them. They’d spent a few hours walking around the park, just talking. About old dreams and new ones, black riots and urban decay, the secrets of their hearts and the mysteries of the universe, the time Mike introduced himself through a mutual friend and his palms were so clammy that Jessie knew immediately how nervous he was.

They always talked a lot. Mike was amazed that they always found something to say. It was a little less than two years, but he thought once grad school was over, he would ask. He thought she’d say yes.

They made another lap around the park. By the time they decided they needed to walk back home—a full forty-five minutes away—they were way too tired to make the journey. They considered a cab, but Mike had a better idea.

“Why don’t we teleport?” he asked.

“What now?” She laughed. She was giving him that smile she gave when he was talking crazy, that would spread across her face, her eyes wide, her eye brows raised in steep arches.

“Hold my hand,” he said, and he didn’t wait. He grabbed her hand himself. “We can do it.”

“What makes you think we can teleport?” she asked.

“I believe,” he said simply.

She laughed at him again. “You’re crazy.”

Mike didn’t know how far he was going to take this. But it was Jessie and he didn’t worry about seeming silly. “Close your eyes and picture home,” he said. “On the count of three, we will jump forward and we will be there.”

He looked at Jessie, and sure enough, she closed her eyes. She was smiling and he wished he could read her thoughts, but that was another power entirely.

“One,” he said. He tightened his grip on her hand. “Two.” He felt a warmth in his stomach, his knees were bent, he was extra aware of the grass beneath his feet. “Three.” He leapt and he felt Jessie leap with him, their bodies synchronized. They were in the air for no more than two seconds and when they landed, their feet hitting the ground at the same time, there wasn’t the familiar soft crunch of grass. There was the hard thump of their feet against pavement. When they opened their eyes, they realized they were home.

There is a note from my great-grandmother in the book on my worktable, they tell me. I haven’t opened it. Up to now I have been too angry at her whole generation, those brave colonists who settled on Dust and left us here to pay the price. But lately, I have begun to feel a little disloyal—not to her, but to my companions on the journey that brought me the book, and gave me the choice whether to read it or not. What, exactly, am I rejecting here—the past or the future?

In one tiny part of one of the new bubbles emerging from the bubble that is our particular universe, there is a place and time where you might exist and I might exist where I have a daughter named Janine.

Perhaps, in that tiny bubble, I may have been lucky with sports and found some success. As quarterback in high school, I’ll have converted to a tight end in college at the University of Minnesota, where I’ll bang heads and block like a demon, catching most of the passes they throw my way. I’ll be All Big Twelve, then a second-round draft choice, then I’ll make the team in St. Louis for the Brewers and get my chance to start when Rasheed Campbell blows out his left knee. Then I’ll never look back. Seven years later I’ll wind down my career as a backup on the Falcons, but that will be their Super Bowl year, so I’ll get my ring by, mostly, sitting on my butt.

It will be a nice way to spend my twenties. I’ll stay single and have a blast, though my body will take a beating. When I lose a couple of steps and the good times come to an end I’ll try to move to broadcasting, but that’s a lot harder than you’d think. I won’t be able to think that fast on my feet, so it won’t work out.

Still, I’ll feel like I have plenty of money for life as a grown-up, and you’d think I’d be happy; but it’s hard to be a has-been, no matter how much money you’ve saved. I’ll never marry, never have any kids, never grow up, really, and I’ll know it. Later in life I’ll be lonely and bored and broke. And thanks to all that head-banging work on the offensive line in my football career, I’ll literally be losing my mind. Eventually I’ll run out of money and run into trouble and only then will I have any regrets.

Once, before the great Empire of Else enveloped the land between the red mountains and the quiet sea, the city-state of Owl Abbas was a mere bird-haunted forest temple. But protected by treaties, suffocated by safety and benevolent neglect, it had swollen and grown in upon itself, roiling and fomenting, so slowly that only (perhaps) a few dust-dry wraiths of abbots hanging motionless in enclosed footings of the Palace Aster would have marked the change from one century to another.

The gains and losses of its citizenry had been gradual. Its resentments and injustices oozed like moisture down the dank wall of a forgotten reservoir, unremarked by either the clustered, crushing commonality or the Little Emperor, cloyed and gorged in his great gilt chambers. Drip, drip, until the dark water was high against its bowed, ill-repaired walls. Until it lapped at the foundations of palace and hovel alike.

Would you believe me if I told you that they all live together in a house by the sea?

It would only be fair, if they did.

They can’t live in the City, of course. Can you imagine? You’d be walking somewhere, maybe proceeding past the parks and public buildings, perhaps accompanied by a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, perhaps on your way to an orgy or a debate or to watch television, and you’d see one of them, and you’d know (of course you’d know, not that there would be anything different, not anything you could point to specifically, there’d just be something, that look—maybe it’s their shoulders?—that look that people have when they’ve spent their childhood locked in the basement for the sake of a utopia). And once you’d seen one of them, of course you’d spend the whole day thinking about it. You’d think about that one awful field trip you took as a child, seeing them locked in a basement, mewling and promising futilely to be good, and you’d spend the whole rest of the day feeling unreasonable and guilty and ashamed. You would get no joy out of the orgies, or the parades, or the philosophy, or the remarkably good television.

And would that be joyous? Would it be the happy city we live in, the happy life we enjoy?

No. Obviously, they can’t live in the City.

So, if you’ll believe me, they live together in a house by the sea.

It’s not a big house—it’s not a mansion—but it’s big enough for all of them to live in comfortably. Everyone gets their own room, and there are enough bathrooms even if some of them are touchy about sharing (some of them are touchy about sharing). They have a library and a living room and a television that doesn’t get all the channels. Outside, there is a garden, and a little trail down the cliffs to the beach.

Do you believe it? Does it seem unreasonable? It wouldn’t be too much to ask—don’t you think?—for them to have a house to themselves with a garden and a library and a television that doesn’t get all the channels.

What did you think happened to that child in the basement? What did you think happened when that child grew up?

Would it help if I told you there are a surprising lot of them living there, in the house by the sea? If you think about it, there must be. It has to be a child, crying alone in the basement that no one talks about. A baby crying in a basement is just a baby crying. An adult crying in a basement probably did something to deserve it (not that there are any prisons in the City, of course, but still).

There is, in fact, a very narrow range of suitable ages. Three-year-olds are much too young, and by twelve, honestly, how innocent could they be? Four through ten is just about right. Right now, in the house by the sea, there are nine of them, each separated by more or less seven years. The youngest is fourteen years old, the next twenty-two years old, then twenty-seven years old, and so on. The oldest is in her sixties.

Once a day an old woman comes out to tidy up, cook a meal, and stock the freezer with burritos in case someone gets hungry in the middle of the night. It isn’t her job, of course. In the City, no one has a job, except the sort of job that is meaningful and personally fulfilling, like medicine or writing novels. Still, she comes out from the City every day. Who can say why? She is an immigrant; she has her own story.

Each of them has their own routine. One of them wakes up before anyone else, walks the little trail down the cliffs to the beach, and dives into the cold gray morning ocean, alone and without fear. Another one gardens. One is writing his fourth novel. He still finishes them, revises them, sends them off, and every publishing house in the City returns them unread. Two more spend their days in the library, reading the encyclopedia out loud to each other. One watches the news. She remembers back before they had a house, and she has strong opinions about municipal politics. She makes every one of them vote, every year.

Some of them just sleep all day. Sometimes, especially when they’ve just arrived, they don’t even leave their rooms. They cry and spit and punch holes in the walls. Most of them come out eventually, but some don’t, and that’s okay. No one bothers them, except sometimes to offer them a burrito.

They don’t leave, although they could. Why would they?

Do you believe it now? Can this really be how they live out their lives, so close to the City that they can hear the bells clamoring and the processions proceeding? Can they really live together, in a house by the sea? No?

Let me tell you this, then. There used to be a doctor—a nice man with a real white doctor’s coat, who still lives in the City—who came out to their house every Wednesday to check up on them, but that didn’t work out, because he kept feeling uncomfortable and trying to euthanize them. So now, whenever one of them gets sick, a woman comes in on the train from Vallcoris. She doesn’t have a doctor’s coat. She just has a sweater. She doesn’t know about the basement, she doesn’t know about anything, not really. She just takes their pulse and asks them to cough, and leaves them with prescriptions, and no one tries to euthanize anyone.

Is that enough to convince you? Is it still too impossible, that they might just live together in their own house and their own time?

Should I tell you, then, about how they die? You see, it used to be, whenever one of them died, some nice people came out from the City to take the body away. But they were so upset—so apologetic and mumbling as they refused to meet anyone’s eyes—that now no one bothers calling the nice people from the City. Instead, they bury their dead in a small plot behind the garden. They get the old shovels out of the shed, pick a spot in the garden, and begin to dig. Each of them digs, some just a shovelful, some working the whole night, sometimes together, sometimes alone. By the next day, the hole is deep enough to be a grave. They don’t say anything. Not one of them needs instructions on how to mourn.

Can you believe me now? Can you believe that they live their lives and die their deaths in some semblance of peace? Can you believe that their lives are more than the basement we locked them in?

Would you like more? What more would you like? Would you rather imagine them suffering, even away from the City, away from the basement, even in their own house by the sea? Would you like to hear about screams, or nightmares, or the new one, beating herself bloody against the walls? Would you like to imagine that the house needs extra mops because, sometimes, even though they hate mops (and all of them hate mops), they can’t sleep through without a mop or two to be terrified of?

Or is that not it? Are you missing something else altogether?

Would you rather hear about marches, political protests, public shaming and human rights laws? Even though we both know that never happened and we both know that it never could happen, would it comfort you, to imagine them fighting back? Would you rather hear that they all walked away from the City and never came back? Or do you prefer to pretend that they might someday return—returning, not like you did when you were fourteen and walked away and then slunk back two weeks later—not in shame, but in anger, with tank columns and cluster bombs and chains of command and theories of legitimate violence?

Believe those things, if it makes you happy. I, though, will believe that they live alone, together, in a house by the sea.

Foxy and Tiggs were at the scene. The sun beat down out of a merciless noon sky, falling on tourist, tour guide, and body alike. It fell on Foxy’s lustrous fur and Tiggs’ crocodilian green hide and made Tiggs’ arm and crest feathers gleam with the beautiful gothic tones of an oil slick as she carefully picked over the site of the find.

Foxy shepherded the tourists back into the softly floating cocoon of their tour bus. “Back you go, folks, back you go. Crime scene here. Got to do some investigating and we’ll get to the bottom of this, don’t you worry.” She adjusted the lie of her hotel uniform—a dinky little hat with a feather in the band that marked her as a detective inspector and a smart jacket tailored to fit her small body perfectly and provide a harness to hold the items of gear she carried. Her brush waved behind her like a huge duster, rufous red and tipped with soft cream.

Her nose twitched. The body had been out a few hours and it was starting to stink.

She wasn’t the only one who thought so. Overhead, a gyre of vultures circled, stacking up one by one as they drifted in across the savannah. On the ground, Tiggs put out a claw to check the pockets of the deceased as the tourists adjusted their eyecams and leaned over the deck rails of the bus to get some good footage. It wasn’t every day you saw a velociraptor investigating a murder, and since this wasn’t on the itinerary or billed as an extra, it was premium gold level XP.

Foxy strolled up and down over the sandy earth but, as she expected, there were no telltales here to give the game away just yet. No footprints, no tyre tracks, no blow-patterns from hover vehicles. She was going to have to wait for Tiggs’ exemplary nose to give her the facts as it hoovered up local DNA and fibres and compared them with the hotel’s registry of guests and inventory of luggage.

The tour guide, a regular Earth human with a blonde crew cut and a rather fabulous waxed moustache, anxiously tapped the hull of the bus as he watched with grim fascination.

“Should I stay here? I mean, this is prime lion country. We’re just lucky the lions didn’t already find him. It is a him, yeah? Well, this is the home country of a particularly large pride right now. Did he—was he killed by a lion?”

Foxy watched Tiggs snort as she heard this—people often assumed Tiggs was just an animal or a bot. Foxy got past this by being a humanoid foxling, the size of an eight-year-old child, small and rounded, in every way the picture of a designed but intelligent being. Tiggs was a long four metres of saurian which looked exactly like the park ’saurs you could see in Lands of the Lost, albeit with less feathers and a blunter snout to fit all the telemetrics in. Tiggs enjoyed the anonymity and now played to the crowd as she flexed her hands with their huge hook claws and bent down, jaws open for a wide capture as if to consume the corpse.

The crowd ooh-ed and the bus rocked back as they recoiled. Tiggs smiled, although only Foxy could tell. Tiggs’ face didn’t have the mobility for expressions, but through their full-encryption powerlinks they were almost one being. They chatted privately as Tiggs stood up and made a show of stalking around, searching the local brush while at the same time picking up a bit of intel for the safari systems since she was there.

“Dumped from quite a height,” Tiggs said. “Broken bones all post-mortem, some impact bruising and burst lungs full of water. Drowned. Shorts dried out but they were wet when he landed. There’s droplets of salt on the ground and the leaves of this thorn tree here. Impact spread shows a bit of a roll. I’m waiting on the lab getting back to me about the water.”

Foxy reassured the tour guide and helped him re-schedule so that the tourists could enjoy seeing the arrival of the clean-up crew coming for the body. “Drowned over in Pirate Booty Bay,” she told him and her entranced audience.

“That’s half a world away!” said a boy, awed.

“Yes, sir,” Foxy agreed, “That it is. You know a lot about the hotel do you, son?”

“You have soft fur,” his little sister said, leaning through the rails. “Can I touch it?”

Foxy turned and put her brush up against the rail. “Only because you asked so nicely.”

“Minnie!” A horrified mother’s voice. “I’m so sorry, ma’am. Minnie, we do not touch the little people. They are not toys.”

Minnie was very polite with the tail, as Foxy had known she would be. She didn’t mind. She’d got a track of this kid’s stay and she was as nice as they came, clean, tidy, caring. She assigned each child a special access pass to a ‘secret’ grotto where you could dive in powersuits along the most beautiful of the ocean reefs and later wear symbiote mertails and sport in a private lagoon. As the presents arrived at the family feed, the parents cooed and calmed down, which is what she’d been going for. Even as part of the police force at the String of Pearls Magnificent Hotel, keeping guests happy was her favourite part of the job.

“Drowned off Voodoo Beach,” Tiggs said, returning from her tour of the thorn trees. “No identification on him and reception says he’s come in on a false ID. Quite a good one. They’re promoting the DNA search out of house.”

Foxy recovered her brush with a flourish and bade the tour guide farewell as the cleaner crew’s glossy white and red cross rig appeared, floating down from orbit carefully to avoid disrupting the vulture tower. “Let’s sign him off to them and get ourselves over there then.” She took a walk over to the body and looked down at him together with Tiggs.

A young male human, well built, with some sunburn on his shoulders and nose. He had short dark hair, some body hair, although not enough to really call it hair in her opinion. Maybe he had been handsome before the bloating and the bruising set in. She wasn’t sure about that. They had some in-house footage of him coming in from Kyluria Point by shuttle, and he looked like every other tourist to her, stepping out of the door into the soft, warm light of Caribae with that combination of hopeful and weary that characterised people on their second hundred years. His clothing was made by the AI house Turbulent and fit him perfectly, its mixture of clean colours and distressed cloths a popular affectation of the intergalactically wealthy. His combination showed no particular imagination. He was every inch the potential corporate spy.

“We’ll assume he was dropped here so the body could be eaten,” she said, straightening and hopping up the long length of Tiggs’ leg to her position on the soft saddle that was part of Tiggs’ uniform harness.

Tiggs grunted. The lions in question were a part of their regular work in Safari World, where they spent most of their time patrolling the vast expanses without trouble other than the odd bit of animal vetting, light fraud and a robbery or two. It was just luck that a murder investigation had kicked off in their area, but Tiggs’ grunt signalled her lack of agreement on the ‘luck’ interpretation that Foxy had placed on it.

“Now we have to follow the whole thing through to the end, right?” Tiggs said, waiting for Foxy to settle down and get her hind paws in the bucket stirrups.

“All the way,” Foxy confirmed.

“Can’t hand it over to Pirate Baywatch?”

“No way. Come on, Tiggsy, this is what we’re made for! We’ve never had our own murder before. To the Bay!”

Tiggs grumbled at the idea of flying and the idea of being on someone else’s turf, the sound coming out as a growl as she set off at a run through the bush, weaving easily away from the scene and circling once at the landing site to signal the clean-up pod that it was safe for them to land—no wildlife of note around. Then she was doing what they both loved best: speeding through the hip-high grass of the plains, her feet almost silent as they struck, the wind blowing free through Foxy’s whiskers, following game trails, on patrol all the way to the distant lift-off point where the orbital shuttles rose and fell twice a day.

There were no mirrors in our house. My mother would not allow them.

“What need have you for a mirror, Hulde?” she asked. “You are beautiful.”

“To fasten my gown… plait my hair…” My hair was fair as summer wheat, thick and coarse. Loose, it reached down to my knees. The harder I tried to keep it tidy, the clumsier my fingers became.

“Why do you imagine we have servants, stupid girl?”

True, we had a small army of them: cooks, cleaners, scullions, gardeners, washerwomen, guards. Maids to dress me in the morning and undress me at night. Maids to brush and braid my hair, when I let them. It was a lengthy and painful process, and often I dismissed them with the job half done.

I did not ask the servants if I was beautiful. There was no point, since they were allowed to speak only the words essential to doing their duty, such as Yes, my lady. Those who erred were punished, and my mother had a heavy hand with the whip. So I was careful what I asked them. I hardly ever heard the servants speak, even to one another.

Our servants did not look like my mother. Their hands, though work-roughened, were finer and daintier than both hers and mine. The skin of their faces was softer. Although each had two eyes, two ears, a nose and a mouth in more or less the same position as those I saw on my mother’s face, their features were different from hers. The servants were all of a kind, and that kind was not ours. It made me wonder.

“As for beauty,” Mother said, “have you forgotten that when you are sixteen, you will marry the Prince of the Far Isles? He is the most beautiful man in all the world. He would hardly have chosen you, Hulde, if you could not match him.” Her eyes were gimlet-sharp, examining my face. “Have you been gazing into bowls of water again? Seeking your reflection in a bronze plate or silver ewer? I have told you how those images distort the truth. They would make of the most fine-featured woman a monster. Turn your thoughts elsewhere, Daughter. Vanity does not become you.”

I did not tell her how often I glanced at myself in the castle pond; how, when Marit or Lina brought me a bowl of water for washing, I looked with something like hunger into my reflected eyes. I did not tell her what I felt as I thrust my hand into the bowl and erased that girl who was a younger version of my mother.

I had never met the man I was to marry. The Far Isles were a great distance away. To reach our castle, the prince faced a long and arduous journey, across the sea and over wild lands full of unspeakable perils. Our home lay east of the sun and west of the moon, atop a mountain of glass. No wonder he did not come to visit. Nobody came.

On fine days I would watch the geese cross the sky and imagine myself as a crippled bird, left behind when the flock moved on to warmer climes. Though that was wrong. I never had a flock. I had no brothers or sisters. I had no friends. My father died when I was a babe, killed in a conflict my mother refused to talk about. From that great sorrow arose one blessing: she secured as my future husband a man who was not only beautiful, but wealthy beyond measure. How she had done this, she did not say; but she never let me forget the debt I owed her.

A child thinks little about marriage and what it means. My sixteenth birthday seemed as far away as those isles where my future husband lived. Time stretched out in an endless parade of empty days. I had no duties to carry out. The servants were afraid of me; they tended to my needs only because they had no choice. My mother was always busy, and I did not want her company anyway. I feared my mother’s displeasure above all things.

On the matter of visitors to the glass mountain, there was one exception. At midwinter a horde of folk who resembled my mother would come all at once, and there would be a great fire, and whole pigs and sheep roasting on a spit. There would be shouting and singing and things smashing. On those nights I would hide away in my bedchamber with my head under a pillow and my heart pounding. The next day, they would be gone.

“Who are they?” I asked my mother.

“Kinsfolk,” she said. “From the Realm Beneath. Be glad we need tolerate them only once a year.”

I told myself those wild, loud folk with their grinning mouths and mad red eyes could not be the same kind as me. I tried to convince myself that I would never, ever be like them.

The year I turned seven Rune came, and my whole life changed. He climbed up the glass mountain with no trouble at all, using his claws. Rune was a bear. I was at my high window when he came, and as I watched him climb steadily onward, I felt my heart turn over with wonder. If anything in the world was beautiful, he was. His eyes were the blue of a summer sky. His fur was long and soft, with every shade in it from shadow grey to dazzling white. His ears were the shape of flower petals, and his smile… Could a bear smile? It seemed to me that this one could, and although his smile was full of sharp teeth, it, too, was beautiful. There was a sadness in it that went deep down.

There were many grand chambers in our castle; too many to count. Some held only scuttling spiders. Some were furnished with huge ancient beds like squatting monsters and dark hangings that moved strangely in the draughts. When I peered in, I saw ghosts in the shadowy corners, monstrous shapes concealed in the tapestries, awaiting the moment when I should take one step too close. I liked exploring the castle; in the long, lonely hours I had discovered secret passages and hidden stairways, deep cellars and high perches. But I was afraid of those echoing rooms.

I had thought Mother might house Rune there. Instead, she put him in a disused storeroom set underground, with steps linking it to an old walled garden. At the far end of the garden there was a locked gate, where two guards stood at all times. Perhaps my mother thought Rune would turn wild. Perhaps she only wanted to keep him safe.

The walled garden was planted with hardy, small-leaved herbs. Their tiny flowers hid half-under the leaves as if afraid to show their faces. Lichens crusted the walls, clinging hard against the mountain winds. There were two spindly trees. Each winter they bowed down lower.

At first, when Rune came, I was both shy and fascinated. I peered through the bars of the gate, and there he was, looking right back at me. My mother had ordered the guards not to let anyone in.

Perhaps I should have feared the bear, but I was too ignorant to be frightened. I did not even know that in the outside world, bears do not speak as men and women do. I had my own secret route into the garden, behind a row of thorn bushes that grew hard against the wall, then up and through a gap where two stones had fallen away. From within, the hole was concealed by the creepers; from outside, the thorns covered it.

I climbed through, then sidled across the garden and sat down on a bench, in a corner where the guards could not see me. Rune approached me little by little. He settled near me, without a word, and began playing a game with pebbles and sticks. Dexterous with his long claws, he would hop a pebble, roll a stick, glance at me over his shoulder, then go on playing. And almost before I knew it, I was squatting beside him, using a twig to sweep his stones away as the two of us laughed together. When my clumsy fingers knocked something over, he did not snarl or slap me as my mother would have done. He did not scold me when my too-long nails scratched him. He was a bear, and understood such things.

After that I came every day, and if the guards saw me, they made nothing of it. Rune never told me to go away. He never said he was busy or that I was wasting his time. But every day when dusk fell, he retired to the storeroom and closed the door. He told me I was not to visit him by night. I never questioned that. I understood, somehow, that to want more would be to risk losing what I had.

My mother did not come to the garden. Sometimes she called for Rune. The guards took him to the house while I waited alone. Sometimes I heard an argument, my mother’s voice shrill, Rune growling. He would return sombre and silent.

Apart from that, between sunup and sundown he was mine. When I had learned all his games we invented new ones. The guards brought food and the two of us ate it together, enjoying the quiet, watching the birds fly over. I learned to smile. And if I did not quite learn to trust, not so quickly, one thing was certain. Before that first summer was half over, I had given him my heart.

Rune had brought a leather bag with him, slung around his neck. In it he had gifts for me: a wax tablet and a stylus. The tablet was set in a hinged wooden cover, and was small enough for me to hold comfortably. Rune showed me how to write on it, and he showed me that the writing could be erased, the wax smoothed so that the tablet could be used over and over. That summer, he taught me my letters and began to show me how they fitted together to make sounds and words. He said that when I had learned some more, I would discover that those words opened up a whole world of tales. Tales of wonder. Tales of princesses and ogres and giants. Tales of humans turned into creatures and creatures turned into men and women. Tales of quests and adventures and far-away places. If I practised hard, Rune said, then next time he came he would teach me to read. With his claw, he scratched a whole alphabet on the storeroom wall. Then he asked me which words I wanted to learn first. I told him: Kitten. Sky. Free. Bird. Magic. Far. Sea. Beautiful. After he had written all of these, and made pictures of them—for beautiful, he drew a flower—he wrote his name at the bottom.

He left on the last day of summer. When he was gone, I sat huddled on the storeroom floor, filling my tablet with crooked letters. Rune, I wrote. Rune. Rune. Tears ran down my face and splashed onto the wax surface. My mother would have called it foolishness. But I hid the tablet, and I hid the stylus, and she never saw the markings on the wall.

“He’ll be back in three years,” Mother said the next morning. “That is the agreement. You’ll be ten next time. Then thirteen, and a woman. Then sixteen, and ready to be wed.”

If I had been ten, or thirteen, or sixteen, I would have known not to ask the question. “Why can’t Rune come back every summer? Why can’t he be here all the time?”

“Don’t be a fool, Hulde. Rune has his own castle, his own lands, his own responsibilities. You are lucky that he spares any time for you.” Her tone told me she could not imagine why anyone would want to do so.

Rune had said nothing about a castle, but I saw it in my mind straightaway. It would be all gardens and greenery, and the rooms would have big windows through which light would pour in. It would be by the sea. I hardly knew what the sea was, only that it sounded like a true adventure. I wished I could marry Rune instead of the Prince of the Far Isles. But Rune was a bear.

“Nothing to say for yourself?”

When Mother used that voice my insides shrivelled up into a tight ball, and I lost all my words. I shook my head, staring down. The black and white floor tiles blurred into grey. I must not cry. She hated it when I cried.

“You’ve grown attached,” she said. I could not tell if she thought this a good thing or a bad one.

“Rune is kind.” That seemed safe enough.

“Kind!” Mother spat the word out as if it were spoiled food. “What use is kindness? Strength, resolve, an iron will, those are the qualities a leader requires. More pity that your father died when you were a babe in swaddling, Hulde. Now he was a fine example of a man. A true leader.”

I did not understand. If my father had been a true leader, how was it that he had lost a battle and been killed? “Is there a picture of my father?”

“What a foolish question! If such a portrait existed, do you not think it would hang in pride of place here in my reception hall? Off with you, Daughter! You’re wasting my time.”

As I walked out, she spoke to my back. “Tears are for the weak, Hulde. There is a softness in you that does not bode well for the future. Let me not see you with reddened eyes again or, believe me, I will give you something worth crying about.”

The years between were hard to bear. I had nothing to do but wait. My mother considered household duties beneath me. She saw no reason for me to have lessons, and besides, there was nobody to teach me. Our servants did not have children; that was not allowed. I asked, once, if I could have a puppy or kitten, and Mother said I would only kill it with my clumsy hands. I spent my days in my chamber, or in the walled garden, now empty. The storeroom was locked, but I knew where the key was hidden, in a crack between the stones. I touched the markings on the wall—free, far, beautiful—and wished him back. But he did not come until the summer I turned ten. He was more beautiful than ever, and he seemed even sadder, though he greeted my mother courteously and found a smile for me. Suddenly shy—it had been a long time—I looked down at my feet, and my mother reprimanded me.

“You are a king’s daughter, Hulde! Stand up proudly!”

It shamed me to be scolded in front of Rune. I squared my shoulders, set my jaw, blinked back tears. “Welcome,” I whispered.

“It’s good to see you, Hulde,” said Rune. “You are much taller.” He did not ask me about my writing; it was our secret.

I was taller. It was no longer so easy to squeeze through the gap in the wall. But I managed.

Rune had brought me a book. The pictures were in rich colours, with here and there a touch of gold. There was magic in every one of them. The stories on the pages opposite were written in big clear letters, and because I had been practising hard, I could read a word here and there and guess at others. I wondered if Rune made the book himself, but I did not ask him. I practising my reading all day and late into the night, devouring the book over and over by candlelight.

Rune asked me which was my favourite picture. There was the princess in the tower, her long golden hair drifting in the breeze, and a little bird perched on her graceful hand. There was another I loved, with a handsome young man and a lovely young woman riding a black horse together, laughing, a dog running along behind. There was a strange picture of a half-woman, half-fish, seated on rocks with wild water crashing all around her. I did not choose any of those.

“This one,” I said, showing him a picture of a girl in a grey hooded cloak. She was making her way through dense woodland. Her hands were scratched by briars, her skirt was torn, her bare feet were bruised and bloody. She was not as lovely as the golden-haired princess, or as happy as the laughing woman on the horse, or as magical as the woman with a fish’s tail. What I liked was the look on her face. Her eyes blazed with courage. Her mouth was set firm. Even if I had not read the tale, I would have known this girl could do anything. “If I could be a person in a story, I would be her.” Her tale was called Faithful Solvej.

“You are a person in a story, Hulde,” said Rune. “We all are. You can shape that story any way you choose. Don’t forget that when I’m gone.”

He was wrong. While I lived here on the mountain, my story was shaped entirely by my mother. The only part that belonged to me was my precious time with Rune.

In my thirteenth year, my mind was full of doubts. The weight of them kept me awake at night and fearful by day. Mother said moodiness was common in young women of my age and made me drink a foul-smelling tonic. I longed for someone to confide in, someone to talk to, anyone who was not her. Two men came sometimes with deliveries on a cart. Their oxen breathed painfully after the long haul up the mountain. The men spoke one to the other, mostly things like “Over here,” or “Easy now.” They did not linger. They drew up the cart and unloaded their cargo, one of our servants gave them a little bag of silver, and they were on their way again with the beasts still exhausted. I sat on a wall and watched them, just to hear their voices. Sometimes I came close to thinking that the outside world was only a dream; that even Rune was only my imagining. Those men and their shaggy creatures helped me to be strong.

And there was the book; the precious book. Although I’d been careful, the cover was showing signs of wear, rubbed patches, little nicks where my nails had caught the cloth. One of the pages was torn. I had wept over that. I did not know how to mend it, and there was nobody I could ask. I wanted to copy the stories, to keep them safe. But my wax tablet could not hold so many words. I practised saying them over, without the book. I hid them away in my mind.

That summer, Rune brought me powders to make ink. He brought me quills and a knife and parchment. He showed me how to scrub and dry a sheet so I could use it more than once. He brought me a little book of beasts, and a book about the stars, and a book of maps. One of the maps showed the glass mountain, with the north wind puffing his cheeks out. Tucked away in a corner were the Far Isles.

“Oh! It is such a long way,” I said. “How will I get there, when I marry the prince?”

Rune went very still; so still it was as if he had frozen where he sat. “I don’t…” he said, and stopped. “That is not…”

There was a long silence. I felt my heart beating. Somewhere within the house my mother was shouting at the servants.

“What has your mother told you about that, Hulde?” Rune asked.

Something was wrong. I heard it in his voice. “She said that once I turn sixteen, in three years’ time, I’m to marry the Prince of the Far Isles. Long ago an agreement was made that it should be so. I don’t mind going away from the mountain.” When he said nothing, I went on. “But… I am a little afraid. The prince is a stranger. What if he is not a kind man?” My mind shrank from that possibility. I might escape my mother only to find that he was even worse. It was all very well for her to say the prince had chosen me. But how could he choose, when he had never seen me?

Rune was silent for a long time. Then he said, “You should ask your mother to tell you the truth, Hulde. Ask her about your father. About what happened.”

My father? What had he to do with this? I was afraid to ask my mother; afraid of her sour tongue and her quick, sharp-nailed hand. “Why can’t you tell me?”

“You must ask her.” Oh, he sounded weary; as weary as those oxen after they had laboured up the mountain. I crept away without another word.

Later, I gathered myself and went to my mother. She was hanging her smallest whip back on its hook.

“Wretched woman,” she muttered. “One would think that after fifteen years in my service, she would know how to fold a gown without creasing it.”

It was not the best of times to ask a question, but if I did not ask now, I would lose my courage. I wanted the truth, good or bad.

“Mother, it is only three years now until I’m to be married.”

She looked me up and down, brows raised. I saw in her eyes that she thought me still a child, and a tiresome one at that. “So?”

“Will you explain what the agreement was with the Prince of the Far Isles? How did it come about?”

“Have you been deaf all these years, Hulde? When you turn sixteen, you wed the prince. That is the agreement. There is no more to be said about it.” In defiance of her own words, she went on. “Remember one thing only: your intended is wealthy beyond imagining. We will be able to restore this place to its original grandeur. Think, Daughter! Farewell forever to leaking roofs and holes in the walls! The treasure room once again awash with gold!”

What could she mean? “But… will I not be living in the Far Isles once I am wed?”

“Are you so desperate to run away? Who will be Queen of the Mountain after me, if not my own flesh and blood?” A darkness entered her eyes; her hand reached out toward the coiled whip.

I had words ready, but they dried up in my mouth. Faithful Solvej would have stood strong and asked the questions that should be asked. It seemed I was not as brave as I’d thought.

Still later, when I was in my chamber alone, I heard her and Rune arguing. She was shouting, stamping about, thumping her fist on something. His answers were quieter; I could not hear what he was saying. I caught a few of Mother’s words: …owe me… gave your word… don’t think you can get out of this… I could make no sense of it, so I held my pillow over my head to block out the sound, and thought instead about what she had said earlier. Had she really meant that the Prince of the Far Isles would move here when we married? That I would stay on the glass mountain my whole life? Surely not. Why would anyone want to come and live here, trapped with the silent servants and Mother’s rages and my clumsiness? And where did Rune fit in?

Nobody to ask. Nobody to explain. Soon enough, Rune was gone and three more years of waiting began. I studied the books he had brought me, in particular the book of maps. Some of the maps had tracks marked on them, paths I thought might lead to the bright and wondrous places spoken of in the stories. Birch forests inhabited by slender fey folk. Broad rivers on which barges floated up and down, visiting settlements where as many languages were spoken as there were stars in the sky. Lakes and rivers. Valleys and grazing fields. The sea. If a person could keep walking long enough she could reach all of those. I looked again at the Far Isles on the map. Why would the prince come to live here if he could be there? Who would look after his castle and his people?

By my sixteenth year I was growing desperate for answers. Though she had never admitted it, I knew that my mother was capable of working magic. Not grand, powerful magic of the kind that conjures dragons and makes whole cities fall. Hers was a small, cruel kind of spellcraft. She used it sometimes to punish the servants. One of the women might find her nose lengthened threefold for a day, or her feet turned into a horse’s hooves, or her garments rendered transparent. Sometimes Mother grew so angry that magic seemed to burst out of her. I had seen her hurl a chair the full distance of the reception chamber. When it hit the wall it shattered, not into splinters of wood as I might have expected, but into a cloud of tiny buzzing insects that flew madly about until she waved a hand and they dropped dead onto the floor tiles. She made her maid gather them up one by one. I did not think I possessed the same gift, if gift it could be called. I was surely too clumsy to work even the simplest of spells. But I went searching for mirrors again, no longer frightened of the shadows in the empty chambers. It was easy enough to avoid Mother’s notice. Between tormenting the servants and counting our store of gold coins over and over, she was occupied all day. She had never shown much interest in how I occupied myself, and that had not changed now I was older. I wondered how she expected me to be the next Queen of the Mountain, if she never taught me what a queen should do. Perhaps she believed she would live forever.

I made a plan, as Faithful Solvej might do, and set about carrying it out. I ordered my maidservants to stay out of my sight all day; they backed away, looking relieved. I began a search of the empty bedchambers. I left no corner unvisited, no mouse-hole untouched. My hair was veiled in cobwebs; my gown turned grey with dust.

As a child, I’d wanted a mirror so I could see what I was not. I’d hoped its reflective surface would show me someone beautiful; a girl who could match up to the Prince of the Far Isles. At fifteen and a half, I knew I was no such girl. I knew I was my mother’s daughter, and no amount of wishing could change that. But Rune had said I could make my story any way I chose. There was a story in my mind about a girl who found a magic mirror: a mirror that could change the future. A mirror that would give her choices. Who was to say I could not make that story come true?

So I hunted until my hands were raw and my back ached and my nose streamed. I hunted for days and days, as the season passed and my sixteenth birthday drew closer and closer. I hunted on the day Rune should have arrived for his summer visit; the day when he did not come. I searched on the days that followed, hoping the magic mirror, when I found it, would offer an explanation for his absence. Would he not want to be at my wedding? A gown was being sewn, a feast was being planned, though I could not imagine whom we would invite other than Rune and our quarrelsome kinsfolk from the Realm Beneath. But maybe the Prince of the Far Isles would bring a whole retinue of courtiers. His family. His own mother. How would they get up the mountain?

With thirty days left until midsummer, I found it. It was not in any of the echoing bedchambers, but in Rune’s empty storeroom. I was looking for somewhere safer to hide away my books, and when I stuck my hand into a crack between the stones, there was the mirror. It was small enough to fit on my palm, and simple, with a tarnished metal frame and a surface that reflected the chamber dimly, as if through a mist. The moment I touched it I knew it was the one I needed. I made the mirror vanish into my pocket. Then I went straight to my own quarters and closed the door. Mother was busy overseeing the wedding preparations. Too busy, I hoped, to bother with me. My gown was ready, a stiff, awkward thing encrusted with gems. It hung on my bedchamber wall, mocking me.

I drew the little mirror out and held it before me as carefully as if it were a new-laid egg. My heart was doing its best to escape from my body.

“Show me,” I whispered. “Show me the story.” And it seemed to me the spiders in the corners and the scuttling things in the walls and even the creaking boards under my feet echoed my words back to me. There was magic everywhere.

I gazed into the polished metal, and there in the depths I saw a girl. Not me; a girl of the same kind as our servants, only she did not have their worn-out, beaten-down look. This was a fierce, determined face, the face of someone who was quite sure where she was going. For a moment I thought it was Faithful Solvej, but no—this girl had hair the colour of autumn leaves, and eyes as green as grass, and a scattering of freckles across her face. Her gown was tattered and dirty; her shoes had holes in them; hers were not a fine lady’s soft hands, but a working woman’s, worn and reddened. She had a pack on her back and a sturdy knife in her belt. The girl was crossing wild country pitted with great stones and grown over with thorn trees. Above her in the sky, heavy clouds massed, threatening storms. She came steadily on.

“Where are you going?” I whispered, but she could not hear me. And I wanted to ask, Can I come with you? but I did not. Because in the mirror, in the far distance, rising up above the expanse of wild country, there rose a great mountain of glass. The girl was coming here.

Soon enough the mirror turned back to mist and shadows, and no matter how hard I pleaded, it would reveal no more. The story must wait until another time.

Against my expectations, the house filled up. There were not only the wild folk from the Realm Beneath, but folk like the ones in Rune’s book of tales, only not so beautiful. They brought their own guards and maids and serving men with them. I had captured the mirror only just in time, for Mother had ordered the servants to scrub and clean every corner of the castle, including the outbuildings, before our guests moved in. I, so long starved of company, now found that company scared me. All I wanted was to be alone with the mirror and my imaginings. I longed for Rune. But Rune did not come.

The wild kinsfolk cared nothing for formal dining, or walks in the garden, or admiring the view. They made their own amusements, mostly by night, and slept off their revels next day. The other folk, whom I assumed to be connections of my future husband, were housed in a different part of the castle, and I saw little of them. The summer advanced and there was still no sign of Rune. I did not go into the walled garden. I was too big to squeeze through the secret entry now, and my mother had said nobody was to be let in the gates.

The mirror yielded up its story at its own pace. As the days went by, I caught a glimpse of the green-eyed girl talking to an old woman beside a swift-flowing river—I knew rivers from Rune’s books. I could not tell what they were saying, but the crone seemed to be pointing the way forward. Before the girl rowed herself over, using a boat so rickety I thought the story would end with her drowning before my eyes, the old woman gave her something small and black, and the girl tucked it away in her pack. She crossed, and walked on, and the mirror-mist swallowed her.

One day I saw her traversing a bog, leaping across the sucking expanses of mud on nimble feet. Another day there was nothing at all, and I wondered if she was sleeping, or had given up her quest and gone home. Why would anyone make such a journey? Why would anyone want to visit us? I found myself hoping, day by day, that she would succeed. I thought she and I might be friends; she would be a companion, like Rune, someone I could talk to and play with. Then I remembered that I was to be married at midsummer, and that I must live here, and that I had not even seen my future bridegroom. I remembered what I was, and how the servants shrank from me. A friend? The green-eyed girl would likelier befriend a warty toad.

I endured the fitting of a wedding veil. I squeezed my feet into narrow shoes with silver rosettes on the toes. Hobbling along in them, I felt as if knives were piercing my feet.

“Your bridegroom will love you in this,” said Mother, tweaking the delicate folds of the veil. “How could he not?”

“If he does not get here soon, he may miss his chance.” Even as I spoke I regretted it. She would surely strike me for such words.

But no; her face wore an indulgent smile. It was the smile of someone who has been keeping a delightful secret. “Oh, but the prince is here, Hulde,” she said. “He has been for some time.”

I stared at her, dumbfounded. I could not think what question to ask first.

“Go,” my mother said to the seamstress, who fled without a word. When the woman was gone, Mother said, “Hulde, there is something you must understand.” She began to pull out the pins that held my veil, not bothering to be gentle. “A bridegroom must not catch sight of his bride for the last turning of the moon before the wedding day. To do so would bring down all manner of bad luck on the marriage, and we wouldn’t want that, would we, Daughter? The Prince of the Far Isles will remain in his quarters and you will remain in yours, and all will be well. Think, only ten days left! Ten days, and then your whole life will be transformed. Be grateful, Hulde, and do not ask questions. You are the luckiest girl in the whole world.” She wrenched out the last of the pins, making me gasp with pain. I heard the fabric rip. “Now look what you’ve made me do! Stupid!”

“But, Mother… How could the prince have travelled here without my knowing? When did he come? Where are his servants? His courtiers? His family?”

“Are you deaf, Hulde?” Her gaze passed over me, cold as hoarfrost. “I have told you all you need to know. He is here. You will marry him. You will be Queen of the Mountain after me. Now go! You are to remain within this part of the house, understand? No running about in the garden. No sticking your nose where it is not wanted.”

Foolish me. I could not hold back the question. “Is Rune not coming to my wedding?”

Mother did not hit me. She did not rake my face with her claws. Instead, she laughed. “Oh, Hulde! Nearly sixteen, and still such a baby! Off with you now!”

As I fled, I heard her bellowing for her maids, then berating them over the torn veil. There was the slash of the whip, and a cry. I stuck my fingers in my ears.

In the mirror, the green-eyed girl climbed through a dark forest, just like Faithful Solvej in the picture. A fierce storm came over, and her fiery hair was plastered to her pale cheeks. She shivered, hugging her cloak around her, but kept on until she reached a tumbledown cottage, where another old woman gave her shelter. In the morning the sky was clear and she set off again. Before she left, the crone gave her something small and white, which she tucked into her pack. The glass mountain looked closer now. Would she be here by midsummer?

I disobeyed my mother’s command. How could I bear to stay within the confines of my own quarters? How could I survive without looking at the sky, and watching the birds fly over, and hoping beyond hope that Rune would come? Or, if not him, the green-eyed girl? I knew it was foolish. She was a stranger. If she was like other folk, she would be scared of me; too scared to speak. But I needed to imagine it. I needed to believe that Rune was right, and that I could make my own story.

There was no going into the walled garden, though I longed to sit there and dream of how things had been. I could have scared the guards into opening the gate. But that would have been to bring down Mother’s anger on them and on myself. I found a sheltered spot high on a ledge, a good vantage point for watching the pathway up the mountain. With luck, Mother would not think of looking for me in such an out-of-the-way place.

The sun was shining; the day was almost warm. I could see a long way before the landscape vanished into a mist of brown and grey and purple. How far had the green-eyed girl come? Would she be here today? Tomorrow? If she came after midsummer it would be too late. I would be married, and trapped here forever.

Stupid, I told myself. She cannot save you. You have to save yourself. But how? If I refused to wed the prince, my mother would kill me. When she got into a rage, she hardly knew what she was doing. I could not simply pack a bag and walk away down the mountain. She would send guards after me. She would find me.

What was that? A flash of blue inside the walled garden; from this perch I could see over the wall. Someone was there. I stood up, wobbling on my ledge, my body tight with longing, though I knew it could not be Rune. Rune would not have come here without telling me. He was my dearest friend.

Ah. Only a serving man in a blue shirt. He came up the steps carrying a bucket, tipped its contents out on the garden, then went back down. Down into the storeroom where Rune had lived when he came to the castle. Down into the chamber with the letters scratched on the wall. The empty chamber.

Rune had taught me puzzles and how to solve them step by step. This one did not make much sense. Perhaps our servants’ quarters could not hold the additional maids and men, and some had been housed in the storeroom. So perhaps what I had seen was nothing more than it seemed: a fellow emptying a chamber pot.

But then, if only serving folk were using the storeroom, why were there so many guards on duty at the gate, far more than before? Why had my mother forbidden entry to the walled garden, even to her own daughter?

There was someone in that storeroom that she didn’t want me to see. The most obvious choice was my future husband, banned from my sight for thirty days before the wedding. But it couldn’t be him. The storeroom was all very well for a bear, but my mother would never have put the Prince of the Far Isles in such modest accommodation. To ensure he and I did not meet before the wedding, all she’d needed to do was house him in a distant wing of the castle and order me not to wander about. Which was what she had done, as far as I knew.

I waited and waited, but there was no more activity in the walled garden. So I went back to my own quarters and fished out the mirror. This time I sat by the open window, so I could keep one eye on the track up the mountain. I did not expect the mirror to cooperate. But no sooner was I settled than the face of the green-eyed girl showed clear as clear. And for the first time I heard her voice. I’m coming to fetch you, she said. Hold on. I’m coming to save you.

It was true! Rune was right, I could make the story come out the way I wanted! “Hurry,” I whispered. “You need to get here before midsummer, and it’s only a few days away.”

The girl in the mirror showed no sign of hearing me. She pulled her pack higher on her back and kept on walking. But she understood. I was sure she did. I watched as she climbed a rocky hillside, traversed a deep valley, then made her way across a desolate plain where the grasses grew no taller than one joint of my little finger. The north wind whipped her hair into a brave red banner. I’m coming to save you. Those words thrilled me deep inside.

She stopped for the night in a little hut by a frozen pond. The hut had icicles hanging from its eaves: winter in summer. I guessed she had reached the foot of the glass mountain, where it was always cold, and my heart raced. Night fell in the mirror, and dawn came rosy bright. The girl and an old woman stood outside the hut, and the old woman pointed the way. She gave the girl something small and golden, and the girl slipped it into her pack. Before the mirror misted over, she turned her forthright green eyes straight on me. Wait for me, she said.

“I will, I will!” I whispered. “But hurry!” It was a long, hard climb up the mountain. Unless you were a bear.

Seven days until the wedding. Mother made me put on all my finery and practise walking up and down with my head held high and a smile on my face. When I was not straight enough to satisfy her she corrected me with a long stick.

“You will be on show, Hulde. The future Queen of the Mountain. You must shine. What is the matter with you? You are all a-tremble, and your smile is a death’s-head grimace. Even a simpleton would not be convinced by it.”

“It feels odd to be marrying a man I have never met, Mother. And… I am sad that Rune cannot be here.”

“You’ll be happy soon enough, when the fellow’s bedded you.”

Not being quite sure what she meant, I said nothing.

“As for Rune, that puzzle will resolve itself with no need for your interference, Daughter. After your wedding you will never see the bear again.”

I endured the rest of my deportment lesson with my heart near-breaking. My wedding was only a few days away, and Rune was not here. He would never be here again. How could I live without him?

I waited for the green-eyed girl to come. Or for a miracle to bring Rune up the glass mountain. Or for myself to turn into a beautiful princess like the ones in the stories, and for the Prince of the Far Isles to decide he and I would ride away to live in his castle after all. There were six days left. Then five. Then only four. What would Rune advise me to do?

Don’t wait for other folk to solve your problems, I thought. Take hold of your story. Shape it the way you want. Don’t be afraid.

But I was afraid of my mother; scared almost to death. Too scared to ask questions. So scared I had accepted half-truths and tales that made no sense. What if there was no old superstition about it being bad luck for a man to see his bride in the thirty days before the wedding? What if the real reason she was keeping me away from the prince was that, once he saw me, he would no longer want to marry me? What if Rune had stayed away because… because… But no. A woman could not wed a bear.

In the mirror, something strange happened. It was as if a different story was beginning, in a different time and place. But not entirely different, because the green-eyed girl was in it, with a man so beautiful to look on that he must surely be the Prince of the Far Isles. His features were noble, his nose straight and strong. His hair was dark and glossy as a crow’s wing, his skin pale and unblemished. I saw him fast asleep, lying on a bed hung with rich red cloth. The girl was in a nightrobe. She had a candle in her hand. She leaned over the man, looking down at him with her face all soft with love. Oh, I had never seen such a tender look! Three drops of wax fell from the candle onto his shirt, and instantly he was awake, springing up so fast the girl shrank back in terror. The candle wobbled in her hand, making strange shadows dance around the chamber.

Oh, Wife, the man said, taking the candle in its holder and setting it safely on a chest. What have you done? His words sent a shiver through me.

I’m sorry, dear heart. My mother made me do it… I’m so sorry. The green-eyed girl was shivering; she put her hands over her face.

I must leave you now. You have broken your vow, and I cannot stay. A long journey lies before me, a journey from which there is no returning. He enfolded her in his arms; she wept on his shoulder. Goodbye, Beloved. I must go.

Wait! she cried, stepping back from him. Oh, Husband, please wait a little longer! Let me come with you!

I must travel alone.

???

I love you! the girl said. I would do anything to break this curse! Is there no way out?

A long silence. Oh, how they gazed at each other! My hand was hurting. I had been gripping the mirror almost to breaking point. Then the man said, There is a way. It is long. It will tax you hard.

Tell me! the girl pleaded. Whatever it is, however long it takes, I will save you. I promise.

The mirror misted over, leaving only grey.

I was troubled. It seemed the green-eyed girl might be coming not to my rescue but to her husband’s. And if she was climbing the glass mountain, that meant the beautiful man was here. Here, but under a curse only she could break. If he was the Prince of the Far Isles, how could he marry me? He had called the green-eyed girl Wife.

I thought again about the storeroom, the guards outside the walled garden, my mother’s orders that I was not to stray. I thought about the blue-clad servant. I remembered the other way in, through the cellars and along a narrow passageway. The green-eyed girl was not here and time was running short. Be brave, Hulde, I told myself, shivering. As I made my way to the cellars, what frightened me most was not the prospect of my mother’s wrath. It was the knowledge that to get to the heart of this, I would have to do what I had spent my whole life trying not to do. I would have to act as she would. I would have to be what I had most feared to see in the mirror: my mother’s daughter.

Outside, it was close to dusk. Down in the maze of passageways and chambers that ran into the heart of the mountain, lamps hung along the walls to light the way. Here and there servants perched on ladders to trim wicks and top up the oil. I tried not to remember the time my mother had lost her temper and kicked out a ladder from under a boy. She had escaped unhurt; he had not. I could still see him burning.

The entry to the storeroom ran off a guard post. In this small chamber three men were sitting over a jug of ale, but they leaped to their feet when I appeared. I did not need to do anything to make folk frightened. And yet, I had never spoken an unkind word to them. I had hardly spoken any word at all.

“I understand…” That voice would not do; it was too soft, too hesitant, not the sort of voice the green-eyed girl would use. “I understand you have someone staying in that storeroom.” That was better; a poor imitation of Mother’s imperious tone, but firm and strong nonetheless. I pointed to the narrow way that led to the storeroom door.

The men exchanged nervous glances. No doubt Mother had given them orders that I was not to be let in; not to be told anything. There was an assortment of bottles, large and small, and the remains of some bread and cheese on the table. I wondered if they had broken a rule and were expecting me to punish them.

“Yes, my lady,” said the oldest of them.

“That is an odd place to house a guest,” I said.

“The queen’s orders, my lady.” The man shifted his feet.

“Who is it?”

They looked at each other again; looked at the floor.

“Answer me!” I took a step toward them and saw them cringe, though I had no whip in my hand. I had not even clenched my fists. I realised I was as tall now as the tallest of the guards, and as strongly built. I was almost as tall as my mother. “Speak up!” My belly churned; I wanted to be sick. I hated this Hulde, the one who could make folk shrink back in terror. I wished she had never been born.

“A nobleman, my lady. A visitor.”

“Has this nobleman a name?”

“It’s the prince,” one of the others blurted out, earning himself a scowl from his superior. “The Prince of the Far Isles.”

“The chamber has been comfortably fitted out, my lady.” The head guard was pale. “This was… it was the prince’s choice.”

I was not as surprised as I might have been, having seen the green-eyed girl weeping over the man she called her husband. How could there be two such beautiful men in the world? I wanted to order the storeroom door opened, so I could confront the prince with the fact that he was already married. But perhaps the story in the mirror had been all my own imagining. And if it turned out the tale about ill luck and thirty days was true, charging in to confront the prince might set my whole future in jeopardy.

I thought could hear someone moving about in the storeroom, pacing to and fro with an odd, dragging kind of step. I wondered if my mother, in furnishing the place to befit my future husband, had ordered Rune’s drawings to be scratched off the wall. That was his room. It was my room. Within its stone walls I had wept long for him. I did not want anyone else in there. I did not want anyone touching what he had made for me.

“I imagine the prince is not confined there night and day,” I said, turning what I hoped was a fearsome glare on the head guard. “Yet I have not seen him at the supper table or in the garden. Does he receive visitors?”

“No visitors, my lady. We’re under orders to leave him alone during the day. We take in a breakfast tray before dawn and a supper tray in the evening, goblet of wine and all. Cooks send the food down.”

“The prince did not travel with his own servants?”

“No, my lady.”

“I thought I saw someone in the walled garden. A man in a blue shirt.”

That glance again, as if they were weighing up my mother’s anger against mine. “There’s a fellow,” the head guard said. “A mute. Does the dirty jobs. He goes in there to clean up sometimes.”

“A mute? What is that?” I had never heard the word.

“Fellow’s got no tongue, my lady. Can’t talk.” I thought he was going to say something more, but he thought better of it.

“I see.” What I saw was another part of Mother’s plan to keep the truth from me. Perhaps my future husband was already married. Perhaps he would think me so appalling to look upon that he would turn tail and flee at first sight—that would be why she was making me wear the wretched veil. Perhaps he was appalling to look upon, though I would not mind that very much, provided he was kind. Especially if he took me away from the glass mountain. Would he be strong enough to stand up to Mother? Was anyone?

“Thank you,” I said, and made my way back up to ground level. What now? Three days and three nights left, and I had no idea what to do.

The mirror had no answers. Its surface had turned to a sullen, flat grey with not the least sign of an image. Where was the green-eyed girl? Had she fallen to her doom half way up the mountain? Or was she still climbing? I wanted to rip the poxy bridal gown to shreds. I wanted to hurl the silver shoes out the window. I wanted to scream.

And then, when I had dismissed my maids after supper and was attempting to tidy my hair, there came a tap at my bedchamber door.

“I told you to go away!” I snarled as the comb caught in a tangle.

“My lady.”

The voice was not that of Marit or Lina. It was not my mother’s voice. It was… I did not dare turn around, for fear I should be only imagining her. I held up the mirror to show the doorway behind me, and there she was, looking right at me.

I wanted to leap up, to throw my arms around her, to confide my whole story. I wanted to ask every question at once. I had so longed for her to come, a friend, a companion, a confidante… But the look on her face halted me. That look told me what courage she had had to find in order to come near me. It told me how scared she was. Of me. Even she found me loathsome, though she was working hard to stay calm.

“Lady Hulde?” she said. “I am but newly arrived in this house. A maidservant. I have something here, a gift for you. I… I heard that you liked kittens.”

A kitten! I had longed for one since I was three years old. My hands ached to hold it. But I was no longer a child; I would soon be married. “I can’t have a pet,” I said. “I would kill it with my clumsy hands.”

“Oh, no!” the girl said, breaking all my mother’s rules by coming right into my bedchamber. She had a little bag with her, and now she set it down and lifted out something small and black. “You would not kill this kitten; it is very sturdy. If you wind up this little handle here, it runs about and chases a ball, and if you touch this little button here, it mews so sweetly. Its fur is very soft, and you can pet it all you like. When you are tired of it, just put it away somewhere. Let me show you.”

I was entranced. I could have played with the kitten all night. It was a gift to equal the precious things Rune had given me. As I sat on the floor watching the little one run about, I asked the girl, “What is your name? And why would you bring this for me?”

“My name is Laerke,” she said. “I thought you might be lonely, Lady Hulde.”

It did not seem to matter that she was breaking more rules every time she spoke. This was different. She was the girl from the mirror, and ordinary rules did not apply. Laerke. What a wonderful name. I wished I was named after a bird.

“The gift is given freely,” she said. “But I do have a favour to ask.”

I waited.

“I understand you are soon to be married,” Laerke said, glancing at the bridal gown on the wall.

“In three days.”

“I need to… I want to… This is difficult, Lady Hulde. I don’t know how to say it.” She looked at me as a friend might, eyes wide, mouth half-smiling.

“Tell me,” I said.

“I cannot explain why, but… the man you are to marry… he is a friend, familiar to me, and… and I need to speak with him alone. At night. That sounds odd, I know. But I hope very much you will grant my request. To… to spend the night in his chamber…”

“If my mother knew you had asked such a thing, she would have you killed. She would kill you herself.”

“Yes, I… I have heard that the Queen of the Mountain is somewhat fierce. Hulde—may I call you that?—if I promise you that he and I will do nothing more than talk… If I promise that I will not touch him… Please?”

Nobody had ever spoken to me so sweetly. Apart from Rune, and Rune was gone.

“My mother gets very angry,” I said. “Angrier than you could imagine. If she found out, we would all be punished. You, me, the guards, everyone. Her punishments are… rather harsh.”

“Then she must not find out.” Laerke’s eyes were ablaze with courage; it was an invitation to be as brave as she was. “Help me, Hulde. Please.”

She was sweeping the story forwards, and I could not resist her. “Very well,” I said. “I’ll do my best.”

I did not tell her about the mirror. I did not tell her I knew—suspected—that she and my bridegroom were married. Should my mother learn that, she would see a simple solution. If Laerke met with a fatal accident, the prince would be free to marry again.

I told Laerke that the prince was locked away on his own, because of the need not to be seen by me before the wedding. I told her where she would find him, and how she could get into the walled garden. I was too big to fit through the gap in the wall, but Laerke was slender; she could do it. I explained where the storeroom key was hidden. I took her to my window and showed her where the garden was.

“You could go now,” I said. “It’s getting dark, but not too dark to see the way. There will be guards at the gate. In the morning, make sure you come out before it’s light or they’ll see you. I’m not sure you know what a great risk you’re taking. If you’re caught, I won’t be able to help.”

“I do know,” she said. “Thank you, Hulde. I had heard that you were a kind person, and I see it is true.”

Who could possibly have told her that? “Good luck. You’d best go. Come back in the morning and tell me what happened.”

That night, I did not see Laerke in the mirror. I did not see the Prince of the Far Isles. But I did see a white bear running through a forest, his pelt catching the moonlight. “Rune,” I breathed, wondering if he was on his way to the mountain of glass; hoping beyond hope that he would be here before the wedding and that everything would be made right. I knew it was foolish. What could he do? But I wept, and hoped, and held my black kitten close to my breast.

Laerke was back in the morning, after my maids had cleared away my breakfast tray. She had her red hair tied up in a kerchief, and was carrying a bucket and mop.

“Come in,” I whispered, glancing up and down the hallway. I bundled her into my chamber and bolted the door. “What happened?” I saw, then, that her eyes were red.

“I couldn’t wake him. I tried and tried. All night. I think he’d been given a sleeping draught. But who would do that?”

Why was she looking at me that way? Could she be thinking I had drugged my bridegroom? My heart clenched tight; I had thought we were friends. “My mother has a store of such potions,” I said. “She might have ordered it done. I don’t know why.” I could not stop myself from adding, “I couldn’t have done it, Laerke. There wasn’t time. Besides, why would I help you see him, then prevent you from talking to him? That doesn’t make sense.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, with a sweet smile. “I’m worried, that’s all. Could we try again tonight?”

“I’ll think about it.” Only two days until the wedding. If Rune was on the way here, it might be better to wait until he arrived before taking such a risk. Maybe Laerke would uncover the truth, whatever it was. Maybe she would cause a disaster with her meddling. “Hadn’t you better go and do your cleaning, so nobody gets suspicious?”

When she came back later, she had her little bag with her. I was on the floor playing with my kitten, but when she took out a snow-white puppy and made him run and jump and let out little wuffing sounds, I could not wait to play with him.

“Oh, how precious! What wonderful things you have!”

“For you, if you would like it. It’s a gift, yours even if you say no to my request. We are friends, aren’t we?” She put her hand on my shoulder. It was an offence that would have earned her a whipping if Mother had seen, but it filled me with warmth.

“We’re friends,” I said. “Try again tonight if you wish.”

“Could you… is there a way to find out about the sleeping draught? Perhaps to be sure he does not take it?”

“Without alerting my mother? Almost impossible. I’ve already been down to the guard room once, asking questions about who was in that chamber. I don’t see how I can do it.”

She turned her eyes on me; laid both hands on mine. It was like a picture in a book of tales: Faithful Laerke pleads with the Queen’s Daughter. “Please, Hulde.”

“Why is it so important that you speak to him?” I made myself ask, though I was not sure I wanted an answer.

“I cannot tell you. I promised. If I tell, I will bring down a curse.”

A curse! This really was like a tale of wonder and magic. And I was part of it. I must not be the part that prevented the happy ending. “I will try to find out about the sleeping draught,” I said. “But I can’t promise anything. This is very dangerous, Laerke. I don’t think you can understand how dangerous.”

I meant to do as I’d promised. I meant to go down to the cellars and find out if anyone was drugging the prince’s wine. But my mother called me to her quarters and made me spend all day there learning a dance she said everyone would be performing at the wedding, a swaying, turning, tripping thing that made me dizzy. When I said I felt unwell, she made me lie down on her bed to rest. When I said I was hungry, she had her servants bring a tray of delicacies. By the time I escaped, it was dark outside and Laerke was nowhere to be seen.

I was tired and sad. I felt defeated. I had tried to be a hero, like Laerke, but I was no hero. I was clumsy and stupid. I had thought there might be friends for me. But Rune was gone, and Laerke would go, and I would be all alone again. Except for a prince who, I suspected, did not really want to marry me. And my mother.

I tucked my kitten and my little dog in my bed, as if they were real. I did not feel like playing with them. I took out the mirror. I did not feel like looking in it, but something in me, a spark that was not quite extinguished, made me look anyway.

The storeroom was almost in darkness. One lamp burned in a corner, throwing soft light over the sleeping form of the most beautiful man in the world, and the figure of Laerke bending over him, just as she had before when she had held out a candle to illuminate his face, and had startled him with drops of hot wax.

But it was not the same. Then, she had been trying not to wake him. Now she was pleading for him to wake. But the drug held him immobile, his chest barely rising and falling. Oh, he was indeed a beautiful man. Noble, strong and good. I need not hear him speak to know that. I need not look in his eyes. I knew it in my heart. Such a man would never, ever have chosen to marry me.

I watched a long time as Laerke wept and begged, and the prince lay deathly still. Finally, exhausted, she laid her head down on the bed and fell asleep. That was when I saw the shirt. It was draped over a chest, and even in the deceptive surface of the mirror I could tell it was the same one he had been wearing before. I knew that somewhere on that shirt there would be a mark from hot wax. I thought I remembered, in one of Rune’s tales, that hot wax could be used in a magical charm. Laerke had said the prince was under a curse. And as soon as the wax drops had touched his clothing, he had told her he must leave her. Why would he bring that stained shirt all the way to the glass mountain, when he was wealthy enough to own as many shirts as he wanted?

I was afraid Laerke might sleep late and be discovered when the servant took in the prince’s breakfast, but when I looked out my window in the morning there was no sign of a disturbance in the walled garden. The guards stood at the gate as usual; otherwise the place looked deserted.

One day until my wedding. One day and one night to shape the story the way I wanted. But what did I want? I did not want to be married on the strength of a lie or a curse, even if the bridegroom was beautiful and rich and my mother’s choice. If I refused to marry him, Mother would be so furious she would probably kill me before she realised what she was doing. If I told her he was already married, she would hunt out Laerke and kill her. That was my mother’s way.

Laerke came to my chamber in mid-morning, carrying her mop and bucket. She was sickly pale and her eyes looked bruised. She didn’t say anything, only shook her head.

“I’ve made a plan,” I said when we were both safely inside with the door bolted. “I couldn’t do what you wanted yesterday, but I may have better luck tonight.”

“Really, Hulde?” Her voice was trembling.

I wanted her to be brave. I needed her to be brave. Today, I had to lie to my mother. “I’ll do my best,” I said. “Be ready at nightfall, and don’t alert the guards.”

My plan depended on three things. Firstly, that my mother did not think it odd that I sought out her company for the day. Secondly, that I had guessed right about the sleeping draught—where it came from, and how it was being used. Lastly, that I could steal a small bottle from my mother’s chamber and get it down to the guard room. It’s a quest, I told myself. An adventure. I had not realised how terrifying a real adventure could be.

“Mother?”

“What do you want, Hulde? Can’t you see how busy I am?”

“I was hoping… I need to practise the dance again. And walking up and down in my wedding gown. Could I do that here? I will keep out of your way. If you happened to have a moment or two free you could help me to get it right. To tell you the truth, I am a little nervous about being married. I would be happier if I could spend some time with you.”

She hardly listened; she was sorting out the contents of a jewel box, perhaps deciding which of her adornments she would wear tomorrow. “Of course, if you wish,” she said without bothering to look at me.

I had brought the gown, the silver shoes, the veil. I changed in and out of them. I practised dancing. I practised walking like a princess. I perfected my curtsy. I spent a great deal of time brushing my hair. When a maidservant brought refreshments on a tray I sat down with my mother to share them. The day passed, and I waited for my opportunity.

It came when a serving man knocked on the door, and told my mother the banqueting table was set up and ready for her to check. She rose with a sigh.

“How tiresome! These folk cannot be trusted to get anything right. I won’t be long, Hulde. Perhaps you should come with me. One day, this sort of thing will be your responsibility.”

“My feet are hurting.” This was true. “I’d best go back to my own quarters. Thank you for helping with my dancing.” She had been almost kind; the kindest I had ever seen her. If she knew what I was planning her mood would change in a flash.

“Very well. Make sure your maid irons that gown again and steams out the veil—there must be not the slightest crease. I can hardly believe it: my little Hulde, about to wed the most beautiful man in the whole world. Our lives will be transformed.”

She swept out of the chamber, leaving me alone. I moved fast, bolting the door, then going to the special cupboard where she kept her draughts and potions. She used the sleeping draught every night. It did not fell her as it had the prince. I had seen that in order to sleep, she needed more of it now than she once had. She had the household apothecary make it up in small bottles, each a single dose. There were ten of them lined up on the shelf. I hoped she had not counted them.

With one bottle tucked under my sash, I closed the cupboard, collected my belongings, unbolted the door and returned to my own chamber. I tipped the sleeping draught out the window and refilled the bottle from my water jug. So far, so good.

Something flew past, whistling, and I ducked in fright. It flew by again, then landed on the window sill. A bird. A golden bird. Laerke had left me another gift. It was curiously made, its many interlocking parts fashioned of fine metal, though the feathers were soft to the touch. Its voice was high and clear. I could not hear it without imagining an open sky. “Oh, you are beautiful,” I said, holding out my finger for the little one to perch on. It tilted its head to the side and examined me with eyes so bright and clever that I wondered if there was magic in the making of it. Over on the bed, the black kitten and the white puppy were sitting up, aquiver with excitement as they watched the newcomer. I did not remember turning any handles or pushing any buttons.

However this works out, I thought, when it is all over at least I will have them. No matter that they are not truly alive. They are almost as good as real ones. And I will still have more friends than I had before.

Later, I sent Marit with a message to my mother saying I would have my supper on a tray in my bedchamber. That seemed not unreasonable on my wedding eve. The kinsfolk from the Realm Beneath were celebrating for me, with a lot of shouting. There were flaming torches and folk running about outside. That scared me. What if Laerke was caught as she climbed through the garden wall?

I sent Marit early for the tray, then dismissed her. Most of the household was heading in for supper. I waited in a shadowy corner until no more guards came up from the cellars, then I went down. If I was wrong about the sleeping draught, this would be useless.

There was only one man in the guard room. When I came in he leapt to his feet.

“Only one?” I bellowed in my best imitation of Mother.

“Supper time—change of shift —”

The guard had turned grey with terror. It disgusted me that I could do this so easily. “Has the tray come down for the prince yet?”

“No, my lady. Should be here any moment.”

“Go and check. Now. And keep your mouth shut, you understand, or you will pay for it.”

“Yes, my lady.” He fled, leaving the storeroom door unguarded. This was not as lax as it seemed, since heavy iron bolts were drawn across it. If I had so chosen, I could have pulled them open and marched right in. I could have confronted my future husband and made him tell me the truth. But that was not what I had promised Laerke; Laerke who had brought me my three little friends; Laerke who had crossed a wilderness and forded a river and climbed a mountain to get here. Laerke who stuck to her mission even when she was sad and lonely and scared half out of her wits.

That’s what being brave is, Hulde, I told myself. Not doing great deeds. Just keeping on going, whatever happens.

No time to waste. I searched the cluttered table, hoping I was right about what I’d seen there the first time. Where was it? Ah! Here in a clutter of wine bottles. I snatched it and slipped it into my pocket, then brought out the other, identical container I had taken from my mother’s cupboard. Provided this was where the prince’s nightly wine was doctored, my plan would work. If the sleeping potion was already in the cup when the tray left the kitchen, Laerke would have another wasted night, and the wedding would go ahead as planned. I might be a little brave, but I was not brave enough to tell my mother outright that I refused to marry the prince. If I did, she would force the reason from me, and Laerke would die. I knew it in my bones.

The manservant was back. He set the laden tray down on the table, then stood waiting. Waiting for me to leave.

“Go ahead, take his supper in,” I said. “Don’t mind me.”

Still he stood there, awkward, not quite prepared to speak.

“Shall I help you with that?” It was foolish, perhaps; but it would protect me from Mother’s wrath if she found out. I stepped forward, picked up the little bottle, took out the cork and poured the contents into the goblet that stood on the tray beside the prince’s covered platter. “There.”

“You know about this, my lady?”

“Did I ask you to comment?”

“No, my lady.”

“Then hold your tongue. Take the prince’s supper in and, if you know what is good for you, stay silent on this matter.”

There was a narrow escape on the way back to my bedchamber, as Mother came along a hallway and I was forced to shrink into an alcove, holding my breath. She passed, not seeing me. I fled. In my chamber, my three friends were waiting, the kitten and puppy now on the floor rolling about—most certainly, I had not wound them up—the golden bird perched on the peg that held my wedding gown. Curse it! I would have to call Marit or Lina to press the wretched thing.

I hid the three friends away in my storage chest, murmuring an apology. I called my maids and ordered them to take gown and veil away, get every crease out, and not bring them back until tomorrow. I closed and bolted the door after them. My supper tray was waiting on the small table, but I was not hungry. Outside, the light had faded into the long summer dusk. Soon Laerke would make her dangerous trip across the walled garden and into the storeroom. I let the little ones out, setting the kitten and puppy on the bed and letting the bird stretch its wings.

Time for the mirror. You can do it, Laerke, I thought. Make the story brave and true. If he’s yours, take him and be happy. Because a good story always had a happy ending, didn’t it?

In the mirror, the Prince of the Far Isles lay on his bed in the storeroom, the strong planes of his face turned to gold by the lamplight. His supper tray stood on a chest, the goblet empty. His eyes were closed, the dark lashes soft against his cheeks.

The outer door creaked open. He started, sitting up abruptly. There was Laerke on the threshold, in her serving woman’s clothes, with her red hair loose over her shoulders. She closed the door and turned to face him.

“Oh, gods!” she said, her eyes alive with joy. “She did it! You’re awake!”

“Laerke!” The prince was on his feet. He opened his arms wide. “My love, my dearest, you’re here!”

She ran into his embrace, weeping against his shoulder. He stroked her hair; she nestled against him as if he were her home, her heart, her safety from the storm. It was just like something from a grand old story, and it made me cry, but I did not know if I shed tears of happiness that he and she had found each other, or of sorrow that nobody would ever look at me like that, hold me like that, love me like that. I was clumsy and stupid. I had achieved this for Laerke only by doing bad things: lying, stealing, frightening people.

Laerke and the prince held each other for a long time, whispering words I could not hear. They touched each other in ways that were strange and new to me. At length they sat down side by side on the bed, hand in hand.

“Tomorrow,” the prince said. “After sunset, since the queen will not let me out until I am in this form again. The key is the shirt, Laerke. Wash the shirt clean and you will win me my freedom. I will be a man forever, and we can go home.”

“The queen will be furious,” said Laerke. “When she’s angry she kills people. She rips them apart with her bare hands. One of the serving women told me.”

“Nonetheless,” said the prince, putting his arm around her, “a curse follows rules, like any other form of magic. Once it’s lifted, it’s lifted entirely and forever. I will no longer be forced to switch between human and animal form; no longer required to come here every third summer; no longer bound to this marriage. She must let us go. We will be free to live our lives and to shape our own story.”

I couldn’t breathe. My heart hurt. A flood of tears waited to fall, somewhere behind my eyes.

“This is all my fault,” Laerke said, hanging her head. “If I had not been curious… if I had done as you bid me, and not tried to look at you by night…”

“It is not your fault.”

I wondered, now, that I had not recognised his voice, so deep and soft, so gentle and sweet. How could I not have known?

“We could not have gone on that way forever. It would have destroyed us. Now we have the chance to make things right, Laerke. That is thanks to you. I don’t know how you did it. How you travelled all this way to find me.”

“Could you not see me in your little mirror?”

“I lost the mirror,” he said. “I thought you might not come. But you’re here, my brave one.”

“I do not deserve you,” she said. “You are too good for me, dearest Rune.”

“Nonsense.” He kissed her on the lips. “You are precious beyond any treasure, my love. You’d best go now. Tomorrow, perform your usual duties all day and try to avoid notice. Just make sure that when the ceremony is about to begin, you are there, concealed in the crowd. Leave the rest to me.”

“Rune?”

“Yes, my dearest?”

“What about Hulde? What will happen to her?”

The most beautiful man in the world smiled as he thought of me. It was not the sort of smile he bestowed on Laerke. It was the smile of a friend; the smile a kindly man might give to a child. “I have tried to help her,” he said. “To give her the means to help herself. But I cannot do more. She must make her own life.”

“I am a woman,” I whispered. “And I love you. You are the sun, moon and stars. Don’t leave me, Rune!”

But Rune could not hear. The mirror misted over and turned to grey.

For a heartbeat I was cold stone. Then the bird flew past me, trilling merrily. I snatched her in her flight and hurled her against the wall, where she smashed into a thousand tinkling pieces.

I wept until I was sick. I wept until there was not one tear left in me. For a little, I must have fallen asleep, for I woke to find the kitten pressed against my neck and the puppy curled by my side. They forgive everything, I thought. Even the most terrible of rages, the most violent of acts, they forgive.

It was possible, then, to get up from the bed. I poured water from the jug, washed my face, cleaned up as best I could. I knelt down and gathered every fragment of the bird, every last golden cog and wheel, every last tiny glittering feather. She was broken; she would never fly again. I wrapped her pieces in a silken kerchief and held her in my hands. She weighed almost nothing.

When someone dies, there are supposed to be words spoken. I could not think what they might be. “I’m never going to do that again,” I whispered. “I’m never going to let anger get the better of me. I’m not going to scare people into doing what I want. I’m not going to let people scare me into doing what I know is wrong. I’m sorry. You were so beautiful.” After all, there did seem to be more tears. When I had shed them, I tucked the silken kerchief into my secret hiding place, alongside my books and my wax tablet.

Then I had to face it, the wonderful thing, the terrible thing. I could marry Rune. If I went to my mother now and told her the truth, it could still happen. I loved him. Maybe he didn’t love me, not the way he loved Laerke, but he was fond of me. Mother could dispose of Laerke; nobody in the household would even know she had existed. The wedding could go ahead as planned. If I told Rune how scared I was on the glass mountain, if I begged him to take me away, surely he would do it. Hadn’t he said I should make my own life? Wasn’t this the life I had longed for through all those lonely years of waiting? It was within my grasp. If I wanted it, I could have it.

I lay down on the bed with my kitten on one side and my puppy on the other, and told them my plan.

Midsummer, and my sixteenth birthday. The wedding was set for dusk; if the guests thought it odd that the bridegroom did not appear earlier, they made no comment. The folk from the Realm Beneath had been quaffing ale all day and were in high spirits. When the time came to gather, the other guests clustered together at one end of the reception hall. Lamps hung from the walls; in the chamber next door, a long table was set with cups and platters I had never seen in my life before. They looked as if they were made of real gold. “My grandmother’s,” Mother had said. “Not used since I married your father. One day you’ll be bringing them out for your own daughter’s wedding, Hulde. That gives me great pride. Great pride.”

Now here I was, standing beside her in my stiff wedding gown, with my feet squeezed into the too-small shoes and my face covered by the veil, waiting. I was good at waiting; I’d had a lot of practice. But this was different. It was all I could manage not to collapse from sheer terror. My heart was juddering in my chest and my body was all cold sweat. It was just as well nobody could see my face.

There were musicians. Where Mother had got them from I had no idea, but now they struck up a fanfare, and into the hall came Rune, quite alone. He was clad in snowy white, the colour of the beautiful bear he had been, the bear I had loved with all my heart. He walked the length of the hall toward us, and I saw that the man had the same blue eyes as the bear, eyes as lovely as a summer sky. I began to understand why Laerke had broken the rules and looked at him, that night of the spilled wax.

He was very solemn. He looked more like a man attending a burial than his own wedding. At the foot of the raised platform where Mother and I stood, he stopped and bowed. “My ladies.”

Mother dropped into a curtsy. “My lord prince,” she said.

I bobbed my own awkward curtsy, but said nothing, lest my voice come out as a squeak of terror.

“Come up beside us, Prince Rune,” Mother said. “Take my daughter’s hand in yours.”

“Ah,” said Rune.

The crowd stirred. People craned their necks to see.

“There’s something I must tell you,” Rune said, half-turning so everyone could hear him. “I am bound by a solemn vow; a magical vow that I cannot break for fear of my life. I can marry only the woman who can wash this shirt clean.” He brought out the shirt from the pouch at his waist; though rather crumpled, it did not look soiled. “There are three drops of wax here, near the right sleeve. She who can wash them out is my true bride. She and no other.”

Mother was quivering with fury. Still, she managed to keep her voice in check. There was a whole hall full of people watching and listening. “I do not understand, Prince Rune,” she said. “We have an agreement. You have promised to wed my daughter, and here she is, waiting. Would you break your word?”

Rune smiled. “If your daughter can wash the shirt clean, then I will marry her.”

Mother cursed under her breath. She could not defy him. A magical vow had to be respected. “Very well,” she snapped, then waved a hand at the household steward. “Fetch a bowl of warm water, soft soap, a brush. Now!”

The crowd was loving this. They edged closer, not wanting to miss a moment. The hall was abuzz with excited voices, though, knowing my mother, most kept their comments to an undertone.

I stood there like a forgotten statue as the materials for washing were brought in and set on a small table, up on the raised area where folk could see. Rune had not moved; he was at the foot of the steps, grave and silent.

“Now,” Mother said grandly, “let us proceed, though I do find this all rather ridiculous. Daughter, push back your veil or you’ll get it wet.”

I lifted the veil and threw it back over my hair. Took a long look at Rune, with his glossy black hair and his summer-blue eyes and his fine man’s body. Looked back at my mother. Straight into her eyes. “I won’t do it,” I said.

For a moment she stood stunned, unable to believe it. Then she went white. Then an angry red appeared in her cheeks, and her veins stood out, and her eyes looked about to pop from her head. Despite myself, I took a step backward.

“What did you say?” She spoke so quietly most of the crowd would not have heard. Her tone turned my blood to ice.

“I said, I won’t do it. I won’t wash the shirt.” I willed myself not to faint, not to weep, not to lose control of myself in any way at all. “If that means I can’t marry the prince, then so be it.” I held my back straight and my head high, as she had taught me.

She lifted her hand to strike me. I did not flinch, though I knew what damage those long nails could do. Rune took a step forward, began to say something, perhaps, No! And Mother, maybe deciding she did not want her daughter to be married with a set of bleeding scars across her cheek, withdrew her hand. “Give me the shirt!” she snarled.

Rune handed her the garment and she plunged it into the water. She pummelled and wrung and twisted and scrubbed. She scratched at the stain with her nails. She rubbed it against the bowl. She spat on it and cursed it and, in the end, took the sodden garment from the water and held it up. What had been a tiny blemish, a mere three drops, now spread across the entire front of the shirt. The more she had washed it, the worse the stain had become.

“Sorcery!” Mother shouted. “Evil enchantments! Foul trickery! There’s no woman in the world who could get this wretched thing clean!”

Rune glanced sideways; gave the smallest nod of his head.

“I can,” said Laerke, stepping out of the crowd. She was in a gown and apron of plain grey, and her red hair was demurely plaited down her back. Her eyes were all courage. Brave Laerke confronts the Wicked Queen.

“Fetch clean water,” said Rune. “Let us make this quite fair.”

Mother was seething. She was simmering like a pot on the fire. I clutched my hands together, wondering if I would see Laerke torn apart before my eyes, and perhaps Rune too. If Mother killed them it would be my fault.

The steward brought clean water. When all was ready Laerke stepped forward, rolling up her sleeves. Rune handed her the dripping shirt; they were avoiding each other’s eyes. Laerke moved up to the bowl and dipped in the shirt. She soaped it gently. She swirled it around. She touched the stain with her hand, then lifted the garment out.

It was snowy white. It was as white as the most beautiful bear in all the world. It was a garment fit for a prince. “There,” Laerke said, holding it up.

The folk standing close nodded and pointed and exclaimed how perfectly clean it was. There was no way Mother could pretend otherwise. There was no way out.

“This is my true bride,” Rune said quietly, and he took Laerke’s hand in his. “I’m sorry, Hulde. I honour and respect you, but I cannot marry you. It could never have been. A man cannot wed a troll.”

A troll. I had barely time to take the word in when my mother let out an unearthly shriek. The sound made the whole hall rattle and shake. The torches flared; the benches wobbled; folk gasped and clutched on to one another.

She screamed again and the floor shuddered. There were words in her cry, ugly, terrible words, some for Rune, some for Laerke, and some for me. Things I had never thought I would hear, even from her. Things I wished I could un-hear. If I had ever thought my mother loved me, even the tiniest bit, I knew now that for her I was only a means to an end, a commodity she could use to gain herself a fortune. Vile things tumbled and gushed and spewed out of her. Even the folk from the Realm Beneath blocked their ears. Rune had his arm around Laerke; they had backed away from the platform. I wanted to run. I wanted to hide. I wanted to be anywhere but here. Instead I stood motionless as the foul wave of insults crashed over me.

The third scream was her undoing. She filled her lungs, tipped her head back and gave a mighty bellow. There was a popping sound, a change in the air, and suddenly I was teetering on the brink of a great hole in the floor, a hole so deep it seemed to have no bottom. I threw myself backwards and fell sprawling on the tiles.

She was gone. My mother, the Queen of the Mountain, was gone. Her anger had destroyed her. I sucked in a breath. Staggered to my feet. Shucked off my silver shoes. Now I was queen, and there could be no running away.

I held up my hands. The crowd fell silent.

“Please leave the hall,” I said. “There will be no wedding.”

Things happened. I made them happen. Rune and Laerke helped me. There was a search for what remained of my mother, conducted by the wild kinsfolk, who were good at doing things underground. They found very little. I asked them, in passing, if there were others of our kind living elsewhere, and they said there were, though they could be hard to find. Everywhere there were mountains, there were trolls, they said. Everywhere there were bridges, there were trolls. Some friendly, some not so friendly. Troll was a name other folk gave them; they preferred to be known as hill folk. It was a good idea to take gifts, they said. They drew me a map, with likely spots marked on it. Then they left.

I despatched the other guests homeward. They went all too gladly.

Rune and Laerke offered to take me with them. Or, at least, he did. I was not so sure Laerke liked the idea, though she smiled and agreed when he said it.

“Thank you, but no,” I said. “I wish you a happy life.”

So they left, and I watched them go from my window, with my kitten in my arms and my puppy at my feet. My friends needed no winding up now; they were just like real ones. I watched until the most beautiful man in the world and the brave girl from the story vanished down the mountain on their long journey to the Far Isles and that lovely, light-filled castle I had once dreamed might be mine. I wondered for a little if I had been stupid to say no. But not for long.

I made a count of what was in the treasure room. I gave the servants three silver pieces each and told them they could stay or go, whatever they chose. The steward said he would stay. I put him in charge of the castle.

I packed a bag with a few clothes and all my treasures: the wax tablet and stylus, the books, the silken kerchief with the remains of my bird. Maybe, somewhere in the world, there was someone clever enough to mend her. I took a small bag of silver. I took some bread and cheese wrapped up in a red and white cloth, because that was what folk did in stories. I told the steward I would be back some time.

Then I set out, with my kitten on my shoulder and my puppy at my heels, to make my own story.

At 10:36 as I’m listening to accounts on the radio of a plane lost over the Arctic Sea, the noise from within the trunk gets to be so annoying that I stop the car, open up, and whack the guy with the cut-down baseball bat I stowed under the front seat. The ride’s a lot better after that. They never find the plane.

Where I’ve pulled off is this little rise from which you can see the highway rolling on for miles in both directions, my very own wee grassy knoll. The trees off the road are at that half-and-half stage, leaves gone brown closer to the ground, those above stubbornly hanging on. Because of Union Day there’s little traffic, two semis, a couple of vans and a pickup during the time I’m there, which is the only reason I’m risking everything to be out here and on the road taking care of one last piece of business. Even the government’s mostly on hold.

What they never understood, I’m thinking as I get back in the car, what it took me so long to understand, is that after rehab I became a different person. Not as in some idiotic this-changed-my-life blather, or that last two minutes of screen drama with light shining in the guy’s eyes and throbs of music. Everything changed. How the sky looks in early morning, the taste of foods, longings you can’t put a name to. Time itself, the way it comes and goes. Learning all over how to do the most basic things, walk, hold onto a glass, open doors, brush teeth, tie shoes, put your belt on from the right direction—all this reconfigures the world around you. A new person settles in. You introduce yourself to the new guy and start getting acquainted. It can take a while.

An hour later I make the delivery and go about my business, not that there is any. They’d got too close this time and I’d gone deeper to ground, pretty much as deep as one can burrow. The gig was a hold-over from before, timing rendered it possible, so I took the chance. Messages left in various dropboxes now would grow up orphans.

I was staying on the raw inner edge of the city, a gaza strip where old parts of town hang on by their fingernails to the new, in a house with rooms the size of shipping crates. Tattoo-and-piercing parlor nearby, four boarded-up houses like ghosts of mine, an art gallery through whose windows you can see paintings heavy on huge red lips, portions of iridescent automobiles, and imaginary animals.

Nostalgia, dreamland, history in a nutshell.

The house owner supposedly (this gleaned from old correspondence and visa applications) was away “hunting down his ancestry,” driven by the belief that once he knows about his great-great grandfather, his own blurry life will drift into focus. So here I am, with every item on the successful lurker’s shopping list in place: semi-abandoned neighborhood, evidence of high turnover, no one on the streets, irregular or nonexistent patrols, no deliveries, few signs of curiosity idle or otherwise.

A week or so in, it occurred to me that the neighborhood had this fairy tale thing going. Grumpy old man half a block south, bighead ogre seen peering out windows of the house covered with vines, guy with cornrows who resided at the covered bus stop and could pass for a genie, even a little girl who lived down the lane.

Look at the same frame sideways, of course, and it goes immediately dark: poverty, political pandering, ineptitude, dispossession. Where you watch from, and how you look, dictates what you see.

A cascade of strokes, they told me. Infarctions. Areas of tissue death brought on by interruptions in blood supply and oxygen deprivation—like half a dozen heart attacks moved far north. No problem, they said. We’ll go in and fix this.

So they did.