Nebula Awards Showcase 2018

EXCERPT FROM THE JEWEL AND HER LAPIDARY ^{FRAN WILDE}

Fran Wilde’s work includes the Andre Norton and Compton Crook Award–winning and Nebula-nominated novel Updraft and its sequels Cloud-bound and Horizon. Her short stories appear in Asimov’s, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Nature, and more. The Jewel and Her Lapidary has been nominated for the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Awards.

Fran’s interview series Cooking the Books—about the intersection between food and fiction—has appeared at Strange Horizons, Tor.com, iTunes, and on her blog, franwilde.wordpress.com.

She writes for publications including the Washington Post, Tor.com, Clarkesworld, io9, and GeekMom. You can find her on Twitter @fran_wilde and Facebook @franwildewrites.

Visitors to the Jeweled Valley should expect rustic accommodations and varying degrees of adventure, as the area is both remote and not under protection of any State or Commonwealth.

There are two inns of varying reputation (p. 34) and attractive scenery, including walks to the Ruins (p. 30), the Variegated Riverbank (p. 29), and the stone formation colloquially known as the Jewel and Her Lapidary (p. 32).

The best place to find a guide is at the Deaf King, a tavern by the river (p. 33).

Local guides can become verbose on matters of history and legend. Indeed, some cannot discern between the two. Many locals will gladly inform you their forebears served at the Jeweled Court long ago. More than a few will declare their ancestors were Jewels—royalty who wore the region’s ancient gems—or their assistants. This is likely untrue, as the last Jewels were murdered in a palace coup after six generations of peaceful rule.

…from A Guide to the Remote River Valleys, by M. Lankin, East Quadril

Strips of soft cloth bound the Jewel Lin’s hands behind her back, knotted as if they’d been tied in a hurry. When her head cleared enough for her to think of it, Lin slid her hands back and forth until the bindings loosened and she was able to bend her wrists and tug at the ties.

Her mouth felt dry as a stone. Her legs and feet tingled, as if she’d been sitting on them for hours at a strange angle. Sima, she thought. Where is Sima? Lin could not see anything. What happened? Sima would know. Or Aba.

An elbow pressed Lin’s side in the darkness. Lin heard her lapidary grunt and wriggle, trying to release herself. Sima’s kicking dislodged something heavy and dry that rattled like bones across the floor.

When Lin had freed her hands, she touched the cloth that covered her eyes and ears, then pulled at that knot too. The blindfold fell into her hands. It was strips from the veil Lin had worn since she was eleven.

On the rough ground nearby, the ancient bone Sima had kicked stared at them: a skull turned to opal, eye sockets stuffed with raw yellow topaz.

Lin knew where they were now. Far from her private quarters, where they’d drunk their evening tea and gone to sleep. They were below the moonstone hall, in the pit beside the throne. Where Aba had always threatened to put her as a child when she misbehaved.

Lin bit down on her fist, stifling a scream. She looked around the pit, expecting to see the rest of the Jeweled Court similarly bound. Light flickered through the grate above her head. Sima still wriggled beside her in the dark. But beyond Sima, she saw nothing but darkness and more ancient bones.

She reached for her lapidary’s hands. She felt the cloth that bound them and discovered that it had been looped around the metal cuffs and chains that marked Sima not just as a gem-speaker but as a lapidary—Lin’s own lapidary: the bound courtier to a royal Jewel. Sima had been blindfolded too, with cloth ripped from her blue lapidary’s cloak. She’d been gagged as well.

Lin worked at the knots. We have been betrayed. The court. The valley.

No one else sat in the pit with them. Above, the muffled sounds grew louder. Lin heard running feet. Shouting. Someone howled.

Lin wanted to stuff her hand back in her mouth. She wanted to go back to her room and see her father in the morning. To tell him about her nightmare. Lights flickered through the grate over her head.

“No,” Sima whimpered, panic edging her voice. “A lapidary must not—” She was looking up, through the grate. She had not addressed her words to Lin.

Must not do what? thought Lin. Which lapidary? Her thoughts were slow and muddled. The tea must have been drugged. What had happened to her family? They had ordered wine in the hall while they discussed matters of state, and she’d been told to retire.

Above them, a voice shouted, “Shattered! We are shattered. You should have listened to me!”

The voice was barely recognizable as belonging to the King’s Lapidary. Sima’s father.

“Stop,” Sima begged, climbing to her feet. Tears ran down her cheeks, turning diamond in the moonlight. She put a hand against the wall to steady herself. “Let us out, let us help you. Father.” Her last word was a wail.

The screams continued above their heads, wave after crashing wave of them.

Father. Lin called out, “Help us!” She shouted for the king while Sima called to the lapidary. Two daughters below. Two fathers above.

Sima looked at Lin with wide eyes. “He is gem-mad.”

The King’s Lapidary howled in answer. His words came faster and faster, tumbling through the grate. Their meaning was nearly drowned by his laughter. Lin caught her name. She heard “bargain” and “promise.” The lapidary’s voice rose to a high pitch and cracked.

Sharp metal struck stone. Sima grabbed her ears, holding tight to the metal bands that wrapped her earlobes. Through clenched teeth, she whispered, “A lapidary must obey their Jewel.” The first vow a new lapidary took. Sima repeated the vow like a chant as a shriek pierced the room above them. Her face was white, but she pushed Lin away from the grate, whispering, “He’s going to break the diamond; he’ll break it and death will come. Cover your ears!”

When the stone shattered it made a noise like a mineshaft collapsing, and a scream, and a fire all at once. Sima’s eyes rolled back and Lin scrambled to keep her courtier’s head from hitting the hard pit walls. “It’s all right,” she whispered. Nothing was right. Where was her father? Where were her sisters and brothers? And their lapidaries?

The pit and its metal walls seemed to protect them from the gems, and from Sima’s father. Above, a cry of pain reverberated through the hall. Then something like rain. Then weeping. She heard the clatter as the palace guard dropped their weapons en masse and tried to flee, feet pounding, across the great hall’s moonstone tiles. She heard them fall, one by one.

Metal struck again. Sima threw up at Lin’s feet.

“Father!” Lin shouted, hoping her voice would pass up through the grate. “What is happening?”

Instead of the king, the lapidary returned to kneel on the grate. His hands gripped the bars, charred black. His eyes looked bloodred in the moonlight. “Awake,” he muttered. “Awake too soon. The commander has not yet come and you must cover your ears. You will be no good to me mad.” His voice singsonged as he stood and laughed, then lurched away.

“Sima,” Lin whispered. “What is he doing?”

Her lapidary whimpered. “He is breaking his vows, my Jewel. He has broken gems. Couldn’t you hear? The Opaque Sapphire. The Death Astrion. The Steadfast Diamond. He is about to break the Star Cabochon. We have to stop him.”

The Opaque Sapphire. The Jeweled Palace was visible to attackers without that gem. And she and Sima were trapped in the pit beside the throne. The astrion and the diamond. The borders were undefended.

All her life, Aba had made Lin recite the valley’s legends. How the first gems had enslaved those who found them; how they had maddened those who could hear them. How the first Jewel, the Deaf King, had set a cabochon-cut ruby with metal and wire. How he’d bound those who heard the stones as well and named them lapidaries. Made them serve him instead of the gems. How the gems had protected the valley better than any army.

She’d made Lin learn what could happen if a lapidary broke their vows.

The screaming had quieted above them. Sima knelt and cupped her hands so that Lin could stand on them. Lin pressed on the grate with both hands. The heavy door lifted an inch, but little more. Lin climbed to Sima’s shoulders.

“Here—” Sima handed Lin a long bone from the pit floor. They wedged the grate open and Lin pulled herself out. Looking around, she could not see the King’s Lapidary. But as Sima pulled herself up using a stretch of Lin’s robe, Lin saw her own father, lying on the ground. His eyes were clouded like ruined opals. His breath bubbled in the blood-flecked foam at his mouth. An amber goblet rolled on the floor near his fingers. The bodies of the rest of the court lay scattered. Sisters. Brothers. Aba. Lin bound her heart up with the words. Saw their lips too: blackened and covered with foam. Poison.

Sima crossed the hall, following a sound. A voice. In the courtyard beyond the throne, the King’s Lapidary stood on the high wall. He pointed at Lin, before Sima moved to stand between them. “The Western Mountains are coming—I’ve promised them a powerful gem and one very fine Jewel to marry!” He began to laugh and shout again. “They are strong! Our gems are fading. Soon their only power will be to catch the eye. The Jeweled Valley must be protected. He wouldn’t listen. I protected you!”

Lapidaries’ lathes were smashed across the courtyard. Shards of the Intaglio Amethyst that mapped the valley’s mines crunched under Sima’s feet as she walked toward her father.

“You cannot betray your vows, Father. You promised.”

Metal rained down on them as the gem-mad lapidary threw the chains and bracelets that had bound his arms and ears. “No longer!”

Sima sank to her knees in the courtyard and Lin fell beside her. They watched as the madman waited for his conquering army on the wall.

Then the King’s Lapidary fell quiet for the first time since Lin woke.

The two girls listened, shaking in the cold, for the mountain army’s drums. They wondered how long the palace’s doors could hold. But no drums came. Only silence. The King’s Lapidary climbed up on the lip of the palace wall. He turned to face the courtyard. His lips were pressed tight, his eyes rolled. He spread his arms wide. His hands clutched at the air.

Sima rose to her feet. Began to run toward the wall.

Without another word, the King’s Lapidary leapt from the wall, his blue robe flapping, the chains on his wrists and ankles ringing in the air.

And before Lin could scream, the King’s Lapidary crashed to the flagstones of the courtyard.

When Lin came to her senses, Sima was whispering to her sapphires and blue topaz, the ones that lined her veil. Calm, she whispered. Calm.

The valley’s gems. In a gem-speaker’s hands, Lin knew they amplified desire. When bezel-set and held by a trained lapidary, they had to obey: to protect, calm, compel. Only without their bezels, or in the presence of a wild gem-speaker or a gem-mad lapidary, could gems do worse things.

Sima’s gems did calm Lin. She remained aware of what was happening, but they were smooth facets made out of fact; her terror was trapped within. She was the only one left. An army was coming. The court of the Jeweled Valley—which had known peace for four hundred years, since the Deaf King set the Star Cabochon—had been betrayed. Lin felt a keen rising in her chest.

“Make me stronger,” she ordered Sima.

Sima tried her best. She whispered to the small topaz and diamonds at Lin’s wrists and ears. Lin could not hear the gems, but she felt them acting on her. Compelling her to be calm. To think clearly. She took a breath. Stood.

“We will collect all the gems we can find, Sima,” she said. “All the chain mail too.”

They searched the bodies of the court for gems. Lin sewed the gems herself into one of her old gray cloaks.

When she rolled her eldest brother’s body on its side to peel the ornamental chain mail from his chest, she wept, but it was a calm, slow weeping. The gems allowed her time to act. She would have to mourn later. She moved from one body to the next. Sima followed behind, tugging cloaks, searching pockets.

Sima removed the bands and chains from the fallen lapidaries, cutting the solder points with her father’s diamond saw.

They returned to Lin’s quarters in the heart of the palace and Lin wrapped herself in all of the chains she had collected. She pointed to the metal bands, the oaths meaningless now.

“You must do the rest,” she told her lapidary.

Sima, whispering her vows, shook her head. “I cannot do this work, my Jewel. It will harm you.”

The small betrayal made the lapidary wince.

“Sima, you must.” Lin spoke calmly, and Sima pulled the cache of tools from her sleeve. She lit her torch. Attached bands at Lin’s wrists and ankles. The metal grew hot. Lin felt her skin burn and thought of her sisters and brothers. Blisters rose where Sima’s torch came too close. Lin ached for her father.

“The mountains wish a bride and a throne,” Lin said. Her voice was flat. Her new veil hung heavy against her temples.

Sima added more chains to Lin’s veil. When Lin demanded it, she spoke the binding verses she’d learned at her own father’s side.

And then Sima backed out the door, latching it behind her. Lin listened to the lapidary’s metal vows clattering and chiming on her arms as she sped away. To the river, Sima. Run.

The noises faded. The palace of the Jeweled Court fell silent.

And Lin, for the first time in her life, was completely alone.

BLOOD GRAINS SPEAK THROUGH MEMORIES ^{JASON SANFORD}

Jason Sanford is an award-winning author and an active member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Born and raised in the American South, he currently lives in the Midwestern United States with his wife and sons. His life’s adventures include work as an archaeologist and as a Peace Corps Volunteer.

Jason has published more than a dozen of his short stories in the British SF magazine Interzone, which once devoted a special issue to his fiction. His fiction has also been published in Asimov’s Science Fictiondeer, until even the fairies which flew Analog: Science Fiction and Fact, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, InterGalactic Medicine Show, Tales of the Unanticipated, the Mississippi Review Online, Diagram, The Beloit Fiction Journal, Pindeldyboz, and other places. Books containing his stories include multiple “year’s best” story collections, along with original anthologies such as Bless Your Mechanical Heart and Beyond the Sun.

A collection of Jason’s short stories, titled Never Never Stories, was published by a small press in 2011.

Morning’s song of light and warmth glowed on the horizon as the land’s anchor, Frere-Jones Roeder, stepped from her front door. The red-burn dots of fairies swirled in the river mists flowing over her recently plowed sunflower fields. Cows mooed in the barn, eager to be milked. Chickens flapped their wings as they stirred from roosts on her home’s sod-grass roof.

Even though the chilled spring day promised nothing but beauty, the grains in Frere-Jones’s body shivered to her sadness as she looked at the nearby dirt road. The day-fellows along the road were packing their caravan. Evidently her promises of safety weren’t enough for them to chance staying even a few more hours.

Frere-Jones tapped the message pad by the door, pinging her fellow anchors on other lands so they knew the caravan was departing. She then picked up her gift sack and hurried outside to say goodbye.

As Frere-Jones closed the door, a red fairy wearing her dead lifemate’s face flittered before her eyes. A flash of memory jumped into her from the fairy’s grain-created body. One of Haoquin’s memories, from a time right after they’d wed. They’d argued over something silly—like newlyweds always did—and Haoquin had grown irritated at Frere-Jones’s intransigence.

But that was all the fairy shared. The taste of Haoquin’s memory didn’t show Frere-Jones and Haoquin making up. The memory didn’t show the two of them ending the day by walking hand-in-hand along her land’s forest trails.

Frere-Jones slapped the fairy away, not caring if the land and its damned grains were irritated at her sadness. She liked the day-fellows. She’d choose them any day over the grains.

The fairy spun into an angry buzzing and flew over the sunflower fields to join the others.

Frere-Jones walked up to the caravan’s wagons to find the day-fellows detaching their power systems from her farm’s solar and wind grid. The caravan leader nodded to Frere-Jones as he harnessed a team of four horses to the lead wagon.

“We appreciate you letting us plug in,” the man said. “Our solar collectors weaken something awful when it’s overcast.”

“Anytime,” Frere-Jones said. “Pass the word to other caravans that I’m happy to help. Power or water or food, I’ll always share.”

Pleasantries done, Frere-Jones hurried down the line of wagons.

The first five wagons she passed were large multi-generational affairs with massive ceramic wheels standing as tall as she. Pasted-on red ribbons outlined the wagons’ scars from old battles. Day-fellows believed any battle they survived was a battle worth honoring.

Adults and teenagers and kids smiled at Frere-Jones as she passed, everyone hurrying to harness horses and stow baggage and deploy their solar arrays.

Frere-Jones waved at the Kameron twins, who were only seven years old and packing up their family’s honey and craft goods. Frere-Jones reached into her pocket and handed the twins tiny firefly pebbles. When thrown, the pebbles would burst into mechanical fireflies which flew in streaks of rainbow colors for a few seconds. The girls giggled—firefly pebbles were a great prank. Kids loved to toss them when adults were sitting around campfires at night, releasing bursts of fireflies to startle everyone.

Frere-Jones hugged the twins and walked on, finally stopping before the caravan’s very last wagon.

The wagon stood small, barely containing the single family inside, built not of ceramic but of a reinforced lattice of ancient metal armor. Instead of bright ribbons to honor old battles, a faded maroon paint flaked and peeled from the walls. Large impact craters shown on one side of the wagon. Long scratches surrounded the back door from superhard claws assaulting the wagon’s armored shutters.

An ugly, ugly wagon. Still, it had bent under its last attack instead of breaking. The caravan’s leader had told Frere-Jones that this family’s previous caravan had been attacked a few months ago. All that caravan’s ceramic wagons shattered, but this wagon survived.

Frere-Jones fed her final sugar cubes to the wagon’s horses, a strong pair who nickered in pleasure as the grains within their bodies pulsed in sync to her own. Horses adapted so perfectly to each land’s grains as they fed on grasses and hay. That flexibility was why horses usually survived attacks even when their caravan did not.

“Morning, Master-Anchor Frere-Jones,” a teenage girl, Alexnya, said as she curtsied, holding the sides of her leather vest out like a fancy dress. Most kids in the caravan wore flowing cotton clothes, but Alexnya preferred leather shirts and vests and pants.

“Master-Anchor Frere-Jones, you honor us with your presence,” Alexnya’s mother, Jun, said in an overly formal manner. Her husband, Takeshi, stood behind her, holding back their younger daughter and son as if Frere-Jones was someone to fear.

They’re skittish from that attack, Frere-Jones thought. A fresh scar ran the left side of Jun’s thin face while Takeshi still wore a healing pad around his neck. Their two young kids, Miya and Tufte, seemed almost in tears at being near an anchor. When Frere-Jones smiled at them, both kids bolted to hide in the wagon.

Only Alexnya stood unafraid, staring into Frere-Jones’s eyes as if confident this land’s anchor wouldn’t dare harm her.

“I’ve brought your family gifts,” Free-Jones said.

“Why?” Jun asked, suspicious.

Frere-Jones paused, unused to explaining. “I give gifts to all families who camp on my land.”

“A land which you protect,” Jun said, scratching the scar on her face. As if to remind Frere-Jones what the anchors who’d attacked their last caravan had done.

Frere-Jones nodded sadly. “I am my land’s anchor,” she said. “I wish it wasn’t so. If I could leave I would… my son…”

Frere-Jones turned to walk back to her farm to milk the cows. Work distracted her from memories. But Alexnya jumped forward and grabbed her hand.

“I’ve heard of your son,” Alexnya said. “He’s a day-fellow now, isn’t he?”

Frere-Jones grinned. “He is indeed. Travels the eastern roads in a caravan with his own lifemate and kids. I see him once every four years when the land permits his caravan to return.” Frere-Jones held the gift bag out to Alexnya. “Please take this. I admit it’s a selfish gift. I want day-fellows to watch out for my son and his family. Lend a hand when needed.”

“Day-fellows protect our own,” Jun stated in a flat voice. “No need to bribe us to do what we already do.”

Alexnya, despite her mother’s words, took the canvas gift bag and opened it, pulling out a large spool of thread and several short knives.

“The thread is reinforced with nano-armor,” Frere-Jones said, “the strongest you can find. You can weave it into the kids’ clothes. The short knives were made by a day-fellow biosmith and are supposedly unbreakable…”

Frere-Jones paused, not knowing what else to say. She thought it silly that day-fellows were prohibited from possessing more modern weapons than swords and knives to protect themselves, even if she knew why the grains demanded this.

“Thank you, Frere-Jones,” Alexnya said as she curtsied again. “My family appreciates your gifts, which will come in handy on the road.”

Unsure what else to say, Frere-Jones bowed back before walking away, refusing to dwell on the fact that she was the reason this day-fellow caravan was fleeing her land.

That night Frere-Jones lit the glow-stones in the fireplace and sat down on her favorite sofa. The stones’ flickering flames licked the weariness from her body. A few more weeks and the chilled nights would vanish as spring fully erupted across her land.

Frere-Jones didn’t embrace spring as she once had. Throughout the valley her fellow anchors celebrated the growing season with dances, feasts, and lush night-time visits to the forest with their lifemates and friends.

Frere-Jones no longer joined such festivities. Through the grains she tasted the land’s excitement—the mating urge of the animals, the budding of the trees, the growth of the new-planted seeds in her fields. She felt the cows in the fields nuzzling each other’s necks and instinctively touched her own neck in response. She sensed several does hiding in the nearby forests and touched her stomach as the fawns in their wombs kicked. She even felt the grass growing on her home’s sod-roof and walls, the roots reaching slowly down as water flowed by capillary action into the fresh-green blades.

The grains allowed Frere-Jones, as this land’s anchor, to feel everything growing and living and dying for two leagues around her. She even dimly felt the anchors on nearby lands—Jeroboam and his family ate dinner in their anchordom while Chakatie hunted deer in a forest glen on her land. Chakatie was probably gearing up for one of her family’s bloody ritualized feasts to welcome spring.

Frere-Jones sipped her warm mulled wine before glancing at her home’s message pad. Was it too soon to call her son again? She’d tried messaging Colton a few hours ago, but the connection failed. She was used to this—day-fellow caravans did slip in and out of the communication grid—but that didn’t make it any less painful. At least he was speaking to her again.

Frere-Jones downed the rest of her drink. As she heated a new mug of wine over the stove she took care to ignore the fairies dancing outside her kitchen window. Usually the fairies responded to the land’s needs and rules, but these fairies appeared to have been created by the grains merely to annoy her. The grains were well aware that Frere-Jones hated her part in the order and maintenance of this land.

Two fairies with her parents’ faces glared in the window. Other fairies stared with the faces of even more distant ancestors. Several fairies mouthed Frere-Jones’s name, as if reminding her of an anchor’s duty, while others spoke in bursts of memories copied by the grains from her ancestors’ lives.

Fuck duty, she thought as she swallowed half a mug of wine. Fuck you for what you did to Haoquin.

Thankfully her lifemate’s face wasn’t among those worn by these fairies. While the grains had no problem creating fairies with Haoquin’s face, they knew not to push Frere-Jones when she was drunk.

As Frere-Jones left the kitchen she paused before the home altar. In the stone pedestal’s basin stood three carved stone figurines—herself, her son, and Haoquin. The hand-sized statues rested on the red-glowing sand filling the basin.

In the flickering light of the glow stones the figures seemed to twitch as if alive, shadow faces accusing Frere-Jones of unknown misdeeds. Frere-Jones touched Haoquin’s face—felt his sharp cheekbones and mischievous smirk—causing the basin’s red sands to rise up, the individual grains climbing the statues until her family glowed a faint speckled red over the darker sands below.

The red grains burned her fingers where she touched Haoquin, connecting her to what remained of her lifemate. She felt his bones in the family graveyard on the edge of the forest. Felt the insects and microbes which had fed on his remains and absorbed his grains before dying and fertilizing the ground and the trees and the other plants throughout the land, where the grains had then been eaten by deer and cows and rabbits. If Frere-Jones closed her eyes she could almost feel Haoquin’s grains pulsing throughout the land. Could almost imagine him returning to her and hugging her tired body.

Except he couldn’t. He was gone. Only the echo of him lived on in the microscopic grains which had occupied his body and were now dispersed again to her land.

And her son was even farther beyond the grains’ reach, forced to forsake both the grains and her land when he turned day-fellow.

Frere-Jones sat down hard on the tile floor and cried, cradling her empty wine mug.

She was lying on the floor, passed out from the wine, when a banging woke her.

“Frere-Jones, you must help us!” a woman’s voice called. She recognized the voice—Jun, from the day-fellow family which left that morning.

Frere-Jones’s hands shook, curling like claws. The grains in her body screamed against the day-fellows for staying on her land.

No, she ordered, commanding the grains to stand down. It’s too soon. There are a few more days before they wear out this land’s welcome.

The grains rattled irritably in her body like pebbles in an empty water gourd. While they should obey her, to be safe Frere-Jones stepped across the den and lifted several ceramic tiles from the floor. She pulled Haoquin’s handmade laser pistol from the hiding spot and slid it behind her back, held by her belt. She was now ready to shoot herself in the head if need be.

Satisfied that she was ready, Frere-Jones opened the door. Jun and Takeshi stood there supporting Alexnya, who leaned on them as if drunk but stared with eyes far too awake and aware. Alexnya shook and spasmed, her muscles clenching as she moaned a low, painful hiss, unable to fully scream.

Frere-Jones looked behind the family. She reached out to the grains in the land’s animals and plants and soils. She didn’t feel any other anchors on her land. If any of them found the day-fellows here… .

“Bring her inside,” she told Jun. “Takeshi, hide your wagon and horses in the barn.”

“Not until later,” Takeshi said, wanting to stay with his daughter.

Jun snapped at him. “Don’t be a fool, Tak. We can’t be seen. Not after everyone knows our caravan left.”

Frere-Jones took Alexnya in her arms, the grains powering up her strength so the teenage girl seemed to weigh no more than a baby. Takeshi hurried back to the wagon, where the family’s two youngest kids stared in fright from the open door.

Frere-Jones carried Alexnya to Colton’s old room and placed her on the bed. Alexnya continued to spasm, her muscles clenching and shivering under her drained-pale skin.

“Please,” Alexnya whimpered. “Please…”

As Jun held her daughter’s hand, Frere-Jones leaned closer to the girl. The grains jumped madly in Frere-Jones’s blood, erupting her fangs like razors ready to rip into these day-fellows’ throats. Frere-Jones breathed deep to calm herself and gagged on Alexnya’s sweaty scent. It carried the faintest glimmer of grains inside Alexnya’s body.

“She’s infected,” Frere-Jones said in shock. “With grains. My grains.”

Jun nodded, an angry look on her face as if Frere-Jones had personally caused this abomination. “The further we travelled from your land, the more pain she experienced. She didn’t stop screaming until we left the caravan and began making our way back here.”

Frere-Jones growled softly. “This is unheard of,” she said. “Grains shouldn’t infect day-fellows.”

“Day-fellow lore says it happens on rare occasions. Our lore also says each land’s anchor has medicine to cure an infection.”

Frere-Jones understood. She ran to the kitchen and grabbed her emergency bag. Inside was a glass vial half-full of powder glowing a faint red.

She hadn’t used the powder since Colton became a day-fellow. The powder’s nearly dim glow meant it had weakened severely over the years. Chakatie had taken most of her remaining medicine after Colton left, worried about Frere-Jones killing herself with an overdose. Now all that was left was a half-vial of nearly worthless medicine.

But she had nothing else to give. She held the vial over her altar—letting it sync again with the coding from her land’s grains—then mixed the powder in a mug of water and hurried back to Alexnya.

“Drink this,” she said, holding the mug to Alexnya’s lips. The girl gasped and turned her head as if being near the liquid hurt her.

“Why is it hurting her?” Jun asked, blocking Alexnya’s mouth with her hand so Frere-Jones couldn’t try again. “I thought the medicine helped.”

“It does, but the grains always resist at first,” Frere-Jones said. “When I gave it to my own son years ago he… went through some initial pain. We usually only give small doses to new anchors at puberty to calm the explosive growth of the grains in their bodies. But if we give Alexnya a full dose for the next few days, it should kill the grains.”

Jun frowned. “How much pain?”

“I… don’t know. But if we don’t do something soon there will be too many grains in her body to remove.”

Frere-Jones didn’t need to tell Jun what would happen if Alexnya became anchored to this land. The anchors from the lands surrounding Frere-Jones’s wouldn’t take kindly to a day-fellow girl becoming one of them.

“We shouldn’t have come here,” Jun said, standing up. “Maybe if we take Alexnya away from here before the grains establish themselves…”

“Taking her from the land will definitely kill her—the grains have already anchored. We need to remove them from her body. There’s no other way.”

“I’ll drink it,” Alexnya whispered in a weak voice. She glared at Frere-Jones in fury. Frere-Jones prayed the grains weren’t already sharing the land’s stored memories with this day-fellow girl. Showing Alexnya what Frere-Jones had done. Revealing secrets known by no one else except her son and Chakatie.

Despite her hesitation, Jun nodded agreement. She held her daughter’s spasming body as Frere-Jones poured the liquid through the girl’s lips. Alexnya swallowed half the medicine before screaming. Splashes and dribbles on her leather shirt and pants glowed bright red as she thrashed in the bed for a moment before passing out.

Frere-Jones and Jun tucked Alexnya under the covers and stepped into the den. Takeshi stood by the fireplace holding their youngest son and daughter.

“Will she make it?” Jun asked.

“I don’t know,” Frere-Jones said. “She’ll need another dose before the medicine wears off or she’ll be as bad as ever. And that was all I had in the house.”

Frere-Jones glanced at the altar, where the red sands squirmed in a frenzied rush, climbing over the figurines as if outraged they couldn’t eat stone. She noticed Jun staring at her back and realized the woman had seen the laser pistol she carried.

Frere-Jones handed the pistol to Jun. “Use this if needed,” she said. “Make sure none of you touch the grains in the altar—if you do, every anchor for a hundred leagues will know there’s a day-fellow family here.”

Jun nodded as Frere-Jones pulled on her leather running duster. “When will you be back?”

“I don’t know,” Frere-Jones said. “I have to find more medicine. I’ll… think of something.”

With that Frere-Jones ordered the grains to power up her legs and, for the first time in years, she ran across her land. She ran faster than any horse, faster than any deer, until even the fairies which flew after her could barely keep up.

At the land’s boundary Frere-Jones paused.

She stood by Sandy Creek, the cold waters bubbling under the overhanging oaks and willows. Fairies flew red tracers over the creek, flying as far across as they dared without crossing into the bordering land. On the other bank a handful of blue fairies hovered in the air, staring back at Frere-Jones and the red fairies.

Usually boundaries between lands were more subtle, the grains that were tied to one anchor mixing a bit with the next land’s grains in the normal back and forth of life. But with Sandy Creek as a natural land divide—combined with Frere-Jones’s isolation from the other anchors—the boundary between her and Chakatie’s lands had grown abrupt, stark.

One of Chakatie’s blue fairies stared intensely at her. Chakatie knew she was coming. Frere-Jones wished there was a caravan nearby to trade for the medicine. Day-fellow pharmacists were very discreet.

Still, of all the nearby anchors Chakatie was the only one who might still give her medicine. Chakatie was also technically family, even if her son Haoquin was now dead. And she had a large extended family. Meaning a number of kids. Meaning stocks of medicine on hand to ensure the grains didn’t overwhelm and kill those kids when they transitioned to becoming anchors.

Still, no matter how much Frere-Jones had once loved Chakatie she wouldn’t go in unprepared. She was, after all, her land’s anchor. She stripped off her clothes and stepped into the cold creek, rubbing mud and water over her skin and hair to remove the day-fellow scent. She activated the grains inside her, increasing her muscle size and bone density. Finally, for good measure, she grabbed a red fairy buzzing next to her and smashed it between her now-giant hands. She smeared the fairy’s glowing red grains in two lines down both sides of her face and body.

Battle lines. As befitted an anchor going into another’s land in the heart of the night.

Satisfied, she walked naked onto Chakatie’s anchordom.

Frere-Jones hated memories. She hated how the grains spoke to her in brief snatches of memories copied from Haoquin and her parents and grandparents and on back to the land’s very first anchor.

But despite this distaste at memories, they still swarmed her. As Frere-Jones crossed the dark forest of trees and brambles on Chakatie’s land, she wondered why the grains were showing her these memories. The grains never revealed memories randomly.

In particular, why show her Haoquin’s memories, which the grains had so rarely shared up to now? Memories from the day she met him. Memories from their selecting ceremony.

Frere-Jones tried to stop them, but the memories slipped into her as if they’d always existed within her.

Frere-Jones’s parents had died when the grains determined it was time for their child to take over. Like most anchors they’d gone happily. First they drank medicine to dull the grains’ power to rebuild their bodies. Then they slit each other’s throat in the land’s graveyard, holding hands as they bled out and their grain-copied memories flowed into the land they’d protected.

At first Frere-Jones had accepted her role in protecting the land. She safeguarded the land from those who might harm it and carefully managed the ecosystem’s plants and animals so the land was in continual balance.

But a few years after becoming anchor a small day-fellow caravan defiled her land by cutting down trees. Frere-Jones eagerly allowed the grains to seize control of her body. She called other anchors to her side and led an attack on the caravan. Memories of the pains her land had suffered before the grains had arrived flowed through her—images of clear-cut forests and poisoned soil and all the other evils of the ancient world. In her mind she became a noble warrior preventing humans from creating ecological hell just as her family had done for a hundred generations.

Only after the caravan was wiped out did she learn that a day-fellow child, gifted with a new hatchet and told to gather dead branches for a fire, had instead cut down a single pine sapling.

Outraged at what she’d done, Frere-Jones attacked the other anchors who’d helped savage the caravan. The anchors fought back, slashing at her with claw and fang until a respected older anchor, Chakatie, arrived, her three-yard-tall body powered to a mass of muscle and bone and claw.

Chakatie’s land neighbored Frere-Jones’s land, but Chakatie hadn’t aided in the attack on the caravan. Now this powerful woman had stepped among the fighting anchors, a mere glance all that was needed to stop the other anchors from attacking each other. A few even powered down their bodies.

Chakatie had paused before the remains of the caravan and breathed deeply. As the other anchors watched nervously, Chakatie leaned over and tapped the tiny child-size hatchet and examined the cut sapling. She sniffed each day-fellow body.

With a roar, Chakatie told everyone but this land’s anchor to leave. The others fled.

Once everyone was gone Chakatie bent over the dead bodies and cried.

After Chakatie finished, she stood and wiped her tears. Frere-Jones forced herself to stand still, willing to take whatever punishment Chakatie might give for this evil deed. But the older woman didn’t attack. Instead, she stepped forward until her hot breath licked Frere-Jones’s face and her fangs clicked beside her ear like knives stripping flesh from bone.

“The grains speak only in memories,” Chakatie said. “But memories only speak to the grains’ programmed goals. A good anchor never lets memory overwhelm what is right and what is wrong.”

With that Chakatie walked away, leaving Frere-Jones to bury the caravan’s dead.

Ashamed, Frere-Jones had locked herself in her home and refused to listen to the grains’ excuses. The grains tried to please her with swirls of memories from her parents and others. Memories of people apologizing and explaining and rationalizing what she’d done.

But she no longer cared. She was this land’s anchor and she’d decide what was right. Not the grains.

A few years later the grains gave her an ultimatum: marry another anchor to help manage this land, or the other anchors would kill Frere-Jones and select a new anchor to take her place.

The selecting ceremony took place on the summer solstice. Hundreds of her fellow anchors came to her home, setting up feasting tents along the dirt road and in fallow fields. Frere-Jones walked from tent to tent, meeting young anchors who spoke eagerly of duty and helping protect her land. She listened politely. Nodded to words like “ecological balance” and “heritage.” Then she walked to the next tent to hear more of the same.

Frere-Jones grew more and more depressed as she went from tent to tent. If she didn’t select a mate before the end of the day all the celebrating anchors would rip her to pieces and choose a new anchor to protect her land. She wondered if day-fellows felt this fear around anchors. The fear of knowing people who were so warm and friendly one moment might be your death in the next.

Frere-Jones was preparing for her death when she spotted a ragged tent beside her barn. The tent was almost an afterthought, a few poles stuck in the ground holding up several old and torn cotton blankets.

Frere-Jones stepped inside to see Chakatie sitting beside a young man.

“Join us in a drink?” Chakatie asked, holding a jug of what smelled like moonshine. Chakatie’s body when powered down was tiny, barely reaching Frere-Jones’s shoulder.

“Do I look like I need a drink?” Frere-Jones asked.

“Any young woman about to be slaughtered for defying the grains needs a drink,” Chakatie said.

Frere-Jones sat down hard on the ground and drank a big swallow of moonshine. “Maybe I deserve to be killed,” she thought, remembering what she’d done to that day-fellow caravan.

“Maybe,” the young man sitting next to Chakatie said. “Or maybe you deserve a chance to change things.”

Chakatie introduced the man as her son Haoquin. He leaned over and shook Frere-Jones’s hand.

“How can I change anything?” Frere-Jones asked. “The grains will force me to do what they want or they’ll order the other anchors to kill me.”

Instead of answering, Haoquin leaned over so he could see outside the tiny tent. He was a skinny man and wore a giant wool coat even in summer, as if easily chilled. Or that’s what Frere-Jones thought until he opened the coat and pulled out a small laser pistol.

Frere-Jones froze at the sight of the forbidden technology, but Chakatie merely laughed. Haoquin aimed the pistol at a nearby tent—the Jeroboam family tent, among the loudest and most rambunctious groups at the selection ceremony. Haoquin pulled the trigger and a slight buzzing like angry bees filled the tent. He shoved the pistol back in his coat as the roof of the Jeroboam tent burst into flames.

Drunken anchors, including Jeroboam himself, fled from the tent, tearing holes in the fabric walls in their panic. Other anchors howled with laughter while Jeroboam and his lifemate and kids demanded to know who had insulted their family and land with this prank.

Haoquin grinned as he patted his coat covering the hidden pistol. “A little something I made,” he said. “I’m hoping it’ll come in handy when I eventually spit at the grains’ memories.”

Frere-Jones felt a flash of memory—her parents warning her as a kid to behave. To be a good girl. She shook off the grains’ warning as she stared into Haoquin’s mischievous eyes.

Maybe Haoquin was right. Maybe there was a way to change things.

Frere-Jones leaned against a large oak tree, her powered body shaking as red and blue fairies buzzed around her. The grains had never shared such a deep stretch of Haoquin’s memories with her. The memories had been so intense and long they’d merged with her own memories of that day into something more. Almost as if Haoquin was alive once again inside her.

Frere-Jones wiped at her glowing eyes with the back of her clawed right hand. Why had the grains shared such a memory with her? What were they saying?

She pushed the memories from her thoughts as she ran on through the forest.

Frere-Jones found Chakatie in an isolated forest glen. Countless fairies rose into the dark skies from the tiny field of grass, stirring up a whirlwind of blue grains in their wake. Naked anchors jumped and howled among the blue light, their bodies powered up far beyond Frere-Jones’s own. Massive claws dug into tree trunks and soil. Bloody lips and razor fangs kissed and nipped each other. Throats howled to the stars and the night clouds above.

And throughout this orgy of light and scent swirled the memories of this land’s previous anchors. Memories of laughing and crying and killing and dying and a thousand other moments of life, all preserved by the blue grains which coursed through these trees and animals and enhanced people.

Frere-Jones stepped through the frenzied dance, daring anyone to attack her. The red lines on her face burned bright, causing the dancers to leap from her like she might scorch them. As the anchors noticed her the dance died down. They muttered and growled, shocked by Frere-Jones’s interruption.

In the middle of the glen sat two granite boulders. On the lower boulder lay a dead stag, its guts ripped out like party streamers of red meat. On the higher rock sat Chakatie, her body and muscles enlarged to the full extent of the grains’ powers, her clawed fingers digging into the dead stag beneath her. She sat naked except for a bloody stag-head and antlers draped over her head, the fresh blood dribbling down her shoulders and muscular chest.

“Welcome, my daughter!” Chakatie boomed as she jumped down and hugged Frere-Jones. “Welcome indeed. Have you come to join our festivities?”

Frere-Jones stared at the silent anchors around her. Several of them twitched their claws and fangs. But none dared attack her, remembering that she’d once been married to their blood.

“I won’t join in,” she said, the grains deepening her voice so she sounded more intimidating. “But I need speak with you. It’s urgent.”

Chakatie waved her family and relatives away.

“I need medicine,” Frere-Jones said. “Five doses.”

Chakatie glared at Frere-Jones, her happiness at seeing her vanishing as fast as a gutted deer bleeding out. “I will not have you killing yourself. If you’re seeking a painful death for what you did to my grandson, there are far better ways than overdosing on medicine.”

Chakatie raised one bloody claw as if offering to slash Frere-Jones to pieces.

Frere-Jones glared back at her mother-in-law. “It’s not for me. My land infected a new anchor.”

Chakatie lowered her claws and stared at Frere-Jones in puzzlement before a grin slowly emerged around her fangs. “I guess that’s… good news. Who is it?”

“I’d prefer to see if she survives before naming her,” Frere-Jones said, bluffing. Chakatie’s blood-and-musk scent was stomach-gagging strong in her nostrils.

“Of course.” Chakatie powered down her body slightly. “I apologize for saying that about Colton. If my land had betrayed me like yours did with Haoquin, I may have done as you.”

This was the closest Chakatie had ever come to saying she agreed with Colton becoming a day-fellow. Frere-Jones thanked her.

“Don’t thank me yet. The senior anchors have been saying you’ve lost your ability to protect your land. A few even suggest we… select a new anchor.”

Frere-Jones snarled. “And I’m sure you didn’t have someone in mind? Perhaps one of your other sons or daughters?”

Chakatie tensed at the insult before smirking with a knowing nod. “You know I want nothing but love and happiness for you. But if the other anchors become intent on killing you, I’d prefer my own benefit.”

Frere-Jones sighed at her mother-in-law’s logic. There was a reason no one ever challenged Chakatie. She was likely the mightiest anchor in this part of the world.

Chakatie waved for her oldest son, Malachi, who trotted over. “Run home and bring six vials of medicine to Frere-Jones.” She nodded to Frere-Jones. “One extra in case it’s needed.”

Frere-Jones thanked Chakatie and turned to go, but Chakatie dared to place one of her giant clawed hands on her shoulder.

“Two warnings,” Chakatie whispered. “First, don’t be lying about what the medicine is for. If you try overdosing on it, I’ll make sure the grains keep you alive long enough for me to kill you.”

Frere-Jones nodded. “And?”

“The grains on your land have become increasingly agitated since Haoquin died. I fear they’re building to something which will harm you.”

“If they do, wouldn’t that be your fault? After all, you introduced me to Haoquin.”

Even as Frere-Jones said this she regretted the words. If she’d never met Haoquin her life would have been far poorer, assuming she’d even lived past her selecting ceremony. But Chakatie had avoided Frere-Jones ever since Colton become a day-fellow. Frere-Jones still loved Chakatie but also wanted to rip the woman apart for abandoning her, a feeling influenced no doubt by her grain-powered body’s fury.

Chakatie nodded sadly. “I think every day about the paths of Haoquin’s life. Still, what else can we do? We are ingrained in the land…” she said, beginning the most sacred oath of anchors.

“… and the grains are our land,” Frere-Jones finished.

Yet afterwards as Frere-Jones ran back to her land she wanted to claw her own tongue out for uttering such a lie. If it was within her power, she’d destroy every grain in both her land and body.

Not that such dreams mattered in the real world. And if Chakatie and the other anchors learned she was sheltering a day-fellow family, her dreams—and Haoquin’s—would never have a chance to come true.

“Don’t trust my mother,” Haoquin had said one morning a few weeks after they were married. He’d been bedridden that day as the grains from his old land deactivated and Frere-Jones’s grains established themselves. She’d given him several doses of medicine, which helped, and stayed by his side the entire time.

Since they couldn’t do much else, they lay in bed and talked. Frere-Jones had forgotten the joys of hearing someone talking to her in words instead of memories.

“I like your mom,” Frere-Jones said. “I mean, she did bring us together.”

“Oh, I like her. Hell, I love her. She’s the one who taught me to be wary of the grains. But she’s also not afraid to work the grains and the other anchors to her own advantage. Never forget that.”

Frere-Jones snuggled closer to Haoquin, who hugged her back. She remembered how Chakatie had been disgusted by Frere-Jones killing the day-fellows. Which had pushed Frere-Jones into a new attitude toward the grains. Which had eventually resulted in her marrying Haoquin.

No, she thought, pushing those memories from her mind. She refused to believe her life was merely a plaything of either Chakatie or the grains.

“You okay?” Haoquin asked.

“Just thinking about memories.” Frere-Jones ran her fingers across Haoquin’s bare stomach, causing him to shiver. “Like the memory of my fingers on you. The touch of my skin on yours. Someday all that will remain of these moments are the copies of our memories stored in the grains’ matrix.”

“I can live with that, Fre,” Haoquin said, calling her by that nickname for the first time. “Can you?”

Instead of answering Frere-Jones kissed him, her lips touching lips before fading into memory.

Frere-Jones gasped as she paused outside her house with the vials of medicine in her pocket.

She could hear Alexnya screaming inside. The last dose of medicine must be wearing off.

But why were the grains still showing her all these memories from Haoquin? They’d never done that before. In fact, the grains had taken care to lock away most of Haoquin’s memories for fear that they’d influence Frere-Jones in the wrong ways. So why were the grains now sharing them?

Frere-Jones shrugged off the question and opened the door to her house. She had to focus on saving the day-fellow girl.

Remember that, she thought. Remember what’s important.

After the next dose of medicine, Alexnya slept in fits for the day, waking every few hours to drink more. But when Frere-Jones stepped into the bedroom with a new dose the following evening, she found Alexnya sitting up in bed reading an old-fashioned paper book with her mother. Alexnya looked far better, no longer shaking or in pain. Frere-Jones tasted only the barest touch of the grains still inside the girl’s body.

“Hello Fre,” Alexnya said.

Frere-Jones nearly dropped the mug of medicine. The only one who’d ever called her Fre had been Haoquin.

“Alexnya, be polite,” Jun snapped. “Call her Master-Anchor Frere-Jones.”

“But she likes being called Fre…”

Frere-Jones sat on the bed beside Alexnya. “It’s not her fault. The grains communicate using snippets of memories from previous anchors. ‘Fre’ is what my lifemate used to call me.”

Jun paled but didn’t say anything. Alexnya frowned. “I’m sorry, Fre… Master-Anchor Frere-Jones,” the girl said. “I just want you to love me again. You used to love me.”

Frere-Jones ignored the girl’s obvious confusion at having her memories mix with the memories stored within the grains’ matrix. She handed Alexnya the mug of medicine. “Drink this,” she said.

The girl swallowed half the medicine. “The grains are angry,” Alexnya whispered as she wiped the red glow from her lips. “The grains don’t like you removing them from my body. They don’t like my family overstaying our welcome.”

“They won’t hurt your family without my approval.”

Alexnya didn’t appear convinced. “They’re also angry at you,” she said as she yawned. “Why are they angry at you?”

“Let me worry about my land’s grains. You need to sleep.”

Alexnya nodded and closed her eyes. Jun and Frere-Jones shut the door and walked over to the dinner table, where Jun stared at the remaining dregs of medicine in the mug.

“She’s taken enough medicine,” Frere-Jones said. “By tomorrow her connection to the land will be weak enough to leave. She’ll have to continue taking the medicine for another few days to remove the remaining grains, but you can give it to her on the road.”

Jun glanced with relief at the den, where Takeshi lay sleeping on a sofa with Miya and Tufte.

“What memories are the grains showing Alexnya?” she asked.

“Does it matter?” Frere-Jones asked with a growl. “Any memories she’s experienced are hers now.”

As Frere-Jones said this she shook with anger at the thought of Alexnya experiencing even a taste of Haoquin’s life. She didn’t care about the stored memories of her parents and ancestors, but Haoquin… those memories were special. Damn the grains. Damn these day-fellows for intruding on the most intimate parts of her life.

Frere-Jones’s right hand spasmed as claws grew from her fingertips. She dug into the wooden table, imagining the need to go into her son’s bedroom and rip Alexnya to pieces.

“Master-Anchor Frere-Jones!” Jun shouted in a loud voice. Frere-Jones snapped back to herself and looked up to see Jun aiming the laser pistol at her head. She took a deep breath and forced her body to reabsorb the claws.

The grains were pushing her, like they had as a young anchor when she’d attacked that day-fellow caravan.

“I will sleep outside tonight,” Frere-Jones said as she stood. “Bar the door. And windows. Don’t let me in.” She grinned at Jun, who kept the pistol aimed at her. “If I do break in, make sure you end me before I do anything we’d all regret.”

Jun chuckled once but kept the pistol aimed at Frere-Jones until she walked outside and the door slammed shut.

Frere-Jones didn’t sleep that night, instead patrolling the land to ensure no one came near her house. This also kept her further away from the day-fellows. Despite the distance the grains inside her shrieked at her land being defiled by the day-fellow presence. And Alexnya was right—the grains were also furious at Frere-Jones. They knew what she’d done to her son. The grains knew she hated them and that she would destroy every trace of their existence if it was within her power.

But despite this anger the grains also continued to share Haoquin’s memories with her. She saw the birth of their son through Haoquin’s eyes. Saw Haoquin and Colton playing chase in the fields. Saw the three of them going for picnics in the deep woods.

All memories from Haoquin’s life.

“What the hell are you telling me?” Frere-Jones yelled. But the grains didn’t respond.

When Jun unbolted the sod-house’s door in the morning, Frere-Jones was meditating under the oak tree in the front yard. Her body was coated in red smears from the countless fairies she’d killed during the night as she ripped apart every one of the red-glowing, grain-infused monstrosities she encountered.

Several chickens pecked at the fairies’ remaining grains in the dirt around her.

Jun stepped toward Frere-Jones with the laser pistol in her right hand.

“You okay?” Jun asked.

“Must be. You’re still alive.”

Jun shivered. Frere-Jones licked her lips before biting her tongue to silence the grains. They were easier to control during the daytime, but the longer the day-fellows stayed on the land the more demanding they would become.

“Are you safe to be around?”

“I can maintain control until you leave,” Frere-Jones said. “We’ll give Alexnya another dose of medicine after breakfast. That should be enough to enable your family to leave. You can travel well beyond this land before night falls.”

“Tak is cooking breakfast,” Jun said, gesturing to the sod-house. “Will you join us?”

Frere-Jones snorted at being invited into her own house but nodded and followed Jun in. She was pleased to see Alexnya looking even better than yesterday and sitting at the dinner table eating oatmeal.

“I missed you, Fre,” Alexnya said. Frere-Jones suppressed her irritation at the nickname and sat down in the chair next to her family altar.

The stone altar bubbled and snapped, the red sands swarming angrily over the statues of her family. Miya and Tufte stared at the flowing sands as if mesmerized until Takeshi tapped the table beside them so they returned to eating their oatmeal.

“We have to keep an eye on them constantly so they don’t touch the altar,” Takeshi said. “Did your son try to play with it all the time?”

“Yes,” Frere-Jones snapped. “But he was the child of an anchor—touching the altar wouldn’t bring death on his family.”

Jun and Takeshi stared in shock at Frere-Jones, and Jun’s hand edged toward the laser pistol before Frere-Jones sighed. “I apologize. The grains are pushing me even now. It’s… hard, being around you with them screaming in my mind.”

“That’s the price of protecting our sacred land,” Alexnya said.

Frere-Jones tapped the vials of glowing medicine on the table before her. She knew Alexnya wasn’t trying to deliberately provoke her. She remembered how confused she’d felt when she’d come of age and the grains had activated within her, and how a similar confusion almost overwhelmed Haoquin when he’d married into her anchordom. The sooner Alexnya and her family returned to the road the better.

“It must have been difficult when your son became a day-fellow,” Jun said, trying to change the subject. “You’re fortunate one of our caravans was nearby to take him in before…” Jun paused.

“You can say it,” Frere-Jones muttered. “The grains would have forced me to kill my son if he’d stayed more than a few days after becoming a day-fellow. But luck had nothing to do with it. I timed Colton’s change so a caravan was here for him.”

Jun and Takeshi stared at Frere-Jones, who shrugged. She knew she shouldn’t tell such truths to people outside her family, but she no longer cared. The grains pounded inside her at the admitted heresy. She wanted to slam her head into the table to silence them.

“Haoquin died when Colton was only twelve,” Frere-Jones whispered. “My lifemate had grown up on another land. When he married into my anchordom and accepted my grains, the grains from that other land deactivated. But my grains eventually tired of the… unsettling thoughts Haoquin expressed. His ideas for changing the world. So they reactivated his original grains, causing him to need to live on two separate lands to stay healthy. His body almost tore itself apart. There was nothing I could do.”

Frere-Jones reached out and rubbed Haoquin’s statue on the altar. The grains felt her hate and slid away from her touch. “Haoquin dreamed of a world without grains. He knew that was merely a pipe dream—we both knew it—but the grains decided even a dream without their existence was too much to tolerate.”

Frere-Jones flicked at the red grains in the altar’s basin, wishing she could throw them all away where they’d never harm another person.

“The grains calculated they didn’t need Haoquin anymore since we’d already created a son,” Frere-Jones continued. “But I refused to let them have Colton too. I waited until a caravan was on my land then gave Colton a massive overdose of the medicine, almost more than his body could handle. He turned day-fellow and had to leave.

“The anchor system is evil. To decide that a select few can live in one place while everyone else is forced to continually move from land to land… death for any unlinked human who stays too long on a land or pollutes or harms that land… to force me to enact the grains’ arbitrary needs and desires… that’s nothing but evil.”

“But the grains saved the planet,” Alexnya said. “I can see some of the old anchors’ memories. How the land was nearly destroyed and overrun with people. I can taste the chemicals and hormones and technology. Trees cut down. People dying of blight. There were so many people. Too many for the land to support. Destroying everything they touched…”

Alexnya gasped and pushed away from the table, her chair falling backward as she tumbled across the ceramic tiles. She jumped up and ran for the bathroom, where she slammed the door shut.

Frere-Jones sighed as she stared into the shocked faces of the girl’s family. “She’ll be better once you’re on the road,” Frere-Jones said. “Keep giving her the medicine twice a day and the grains will soon be completely gone.”

“But the memories…” Jun began.

“So she’ll know why anchors protect their lands. Why those without grains are forced to continually move around.”

Takeshi hugged Miya and Tufte, who had jumped into his lap because of the tension in the room. “It’s different to be on the receiving end,” Takeshi said. “Do you know why our last caravan was destroyed? We were leaving a land a hundred leagues from here when the caravan master’s wagon broke an axle. Normally not a problem—most caravans leave early in case of issues like this. But it turned out our caravan master also was smuggling forbidden chemicals and hormones. When the axle broke it stabbed into one of his smuggling tanks and contaminated the land for ten yards on either side of the road.

“We tried cleaning the land. Our caravan master even took responsibility and offered his death for everyone else’s lives. But the grains didn’t care. You could feel their anger. The ground was almost shaking, the trees and plants whipping madly as if blown by an unknown wind. Then the anchors came—dozens of them, from lands all across the region. They attacked us all night before the grains finally allowed them to calm down. Our wagon was the only one they didn’t break into and massacre everyone.”

Frere-Jones nodded. If her land became even a slightly bit contaminated the grains would force her to do the same. She picked up the remaining vials of medicine. She held the vials over the altar to encode them with her grain’s programming before handing them to Takashi.

“Have her drink another dose then take the remaining vials with you,” she told him. “Jun and I will prepare your wagon. You’ll leave by noon.”

Frere-Jones had spent decades watching day-fellow caravans, but she’d never prepared one of their wagons for travel. Harnessing the horses and securing the wagon’s cargo stirred memories of both her own life and those of the anchors who preceded her. How all of them had watched passing day-fellow caravans across thousands of years.

As a child she’d desperately wished she could travel like a day-fellow. See other lands beyond her own.

“Take the northern road through the forest,” Frere-Jones told Jun when the wagon and horses were ready. “That’s the safest route to avoid irritating the anchors on neighboring lands. Go north and you’ll be several lands away before dark.”

Jun nodded a silent thanks.

They were still waiting a half-hour later, with Frere-Jones growing increasingly irritated from the grains’ demands. “Come on Takashi,” she yelled.

“I’ll go get him,” Jun said, hurrying to the house.

When the family didn’t emerge a few minutes later, Frere-Jones cursed and smashed a powered hand into the side of the barn, breaking the inch-thick boards. She stomped into her own house—her house, on her land!—to discover glowing red medicine flowing among broken glass vials on her tile floor. Jun and Takashi stood beside the dinner table pleading with Alexnya but wouldn’t go near their daughter.

“Land’s shit!” Frere-Jones bellowed. Alexnya stood beside the stone altar, her hands immersed in the flowing red grains.

“She won’t let go of the altar,” Takashi said. “Should we yank her away?”

“No! Don’t touch the grains!” Frere-Jones accessed the grains inside her body, connecting through them with the grains in the altar and across her land. She prayed that Alexnya touching the altar hadn’t alerted any nearby anchors. She tasted the forests and plants and animals on her land, felt the nearby anchors going about their duties and work.

But no alarm. There had been no alarm raised. Which was impossible. That could only mean…

Frere-Jones screamed as she jumped forward and grabbed Alexnya. She threw the girl across the room, only at the last moment aiming for the sofa so she wouldn’t be hurt. Alexnya smashed into the cushions as Jun and Takashi grabbed their youngest kids and ran for the door, Jun again aimed the pistol at Frere-Jones.

Frere-Jones raised her hands as she bent over, panting and trying to stay in control. “Don’t shoot,” she yelled. “Kill me and your daughter will be stuck here.”

“What do you mean?” Jun asked.

“Your daughter should have set off the grains’ alarms, especially after taking that much medicine. But she didn’t. Why didn’t you, Alexnya?”

Alexnya stood up from the sofa, her eyes sparking red light, a growl escaping her snarling lips. For a moment Frere-Jones remembered herself at that age when the grains had first activated in her body. “The grains don’t like you,” Alexnya whispered. “They changed the altar’s coding so the medicine wouldn’t remove all of the grains from my body. They promised that if I didn’t tell you they’d let my family stay.”

“You can’t trust the grains,” Frere-Jones said. “No day-fellow is ever allowed to stay on a land for more than a few days. That won’t change no matter what the grains promise.”

Frere-Jones started to say more, but fell silent as she tasted an unsettling tinge in the grains. She felt Alexnya’s frustration at travelling from place to place, never settling down long enough to have a home. Frere-Jones also saw the attack which destroyed Alexnya’s last caravan. As the anchors shrieked and smashed on the outside of her family’s wagon, Alexnya swore she’d never go through this again. That one day she’d find a place to call home.

The grains, Frere-Jones realized, had found a willing partner in this young girl.

“I’m sorry,” Alexnya whispered, looking at her parents. “I want to live somewhere. I want a home. The grains said we could all stay.”

“The other anchors won’t let you be one of us,” Frere-Jones stated. “And even if they did, the grains will never let your family stay.”

“They promised.”

“They lied. The grains only want a new anchor to take my place. They’re incapable of caring for your family. They are programmed to protect this land, not to protect unlinked day-fellows without a grain in their bodies.”

Frere-Jones glanced again at the altar. She was missing something. If the grains hadn’t told her they’d changed the altar’s programming to negate the effects of Alexnya’s medicine, what else weren’t they telling her?

She heard a slight rapping on the kitchen window. Dozens of fairies buzzed outside the glass, their tiny hands tap tapping against the panes like angry snowflakes blowing on the wind.

Framed in the glass, surrounded by the fairies, was a red-tinted face.

Malachi, Chakatie’s oldest son.

Frere-Jones ran for the front door, but by the time she opened it Malachi was already running away, nearly gone from sight. She reached out to the grains, trying to power up her body so she could catch the boy, but the grains resisted her, not giving her anywhere near enough to catch him.

Instead, the grains rebutted her in flicks of angry memories. They had a new anchor. They didn’t have to obey her any more.

A few weeks after their son had been born, Frere-Jones had woken to find Haoquin standing by the altar, rocking Colton back and forth in his arms in the grains’ red-haze light.

“You okay?” she asked sleepily.

“I was thinking about all the previous anchors who raised their kids in this house,” Haoquin said. “I bet many of them stood in this very spot and let the grains’ glow soothe their babies to sleep.”

Frere smiled. “You could ask the grains to share those memories. Sometimes they’ll do that, if you ask nicely.”

Haoquin snorted. “When I first became an anchor, that’s what scared me the most—that the grains spoke to us using memories. I mean, after I’m dead is that what they’ll do with my memory of this moment? Use everything I’m experiencing now—love, exhaustion, tenderness, caring—to tell some future anchor that this is how you calm a crying baby? Is that all my memories are good for?”

Frere-Jones hugged her lifemate. “Your memories mean more to me than that. Perhaps they’ll mean more to any future anchor who experiences them.”

“Maybe,” Haoquin said as he and Frere-Jones stared down at their son. “Maybe.”

But neither one of them had sounded convinced.

The anchors came for Frere-Jones and the day-fellow family at midnight.

Frere-Jones had finally been able to power up her body after Alexnya ordered the grains to do so. The girl had still been torn, wanting to believe the grains would protect her family, but in the end her parents convinced her the grains would never protect day-fellows. “Have the grains shown you a memory,” Jun had said, “any memory across the land’s thousands of years where they protected a single day-fellow? If they do that, you can believe them. If not…”

When the grains hadn’t been able show such a memory, Alexnya broke down and cried. She ordered the grains to obey Frere-Jones.

Yet Frere-Jones knew even with her body completely powered up she couldn’t fight so many other anchors. She messaged them, saying the day-fellows would leave. The only response was laughter. She said she’d allow another anchor to be selected, if only the day-fellows were allowed to leave safely.

Again, more laughter.

Now, at midnight, the anchors were coming. They ran through the river mists. They ran across her new-plowed sunflower fields, their massive bodies and claws destroying the furrows and scattering soil and seed to the winds. They came from the road, giant feet pounding on the dirt packed by centuries of wagons. The came from the forests, knocking down trees and scattering deer and coyotes before them.

Frere-Jones sat on the sod roof of her home, the laser pistol in her hands. The grains showed her Haoquin’s memory of building the illegal weapon with parts acquired from day-fellow smugglers. How proud he’d been. His mother had said the grains wouldn’t like the pistol, but Haoquin merely laughed and said if he ever was forced to use the laser the displeasure of the grains would be the least of their worries.

As usual, Haoquin had been correct. Maybe that was why the grains had killed him.

“Here they come,” Frere-Jones yelled down the air vent into the house. Jun and Takeshi and Alexnya were inside, Jun holding the knives Frere-Jones had gifted them in case a final defense was needed.

Frere-Jones looked around her. She knew she should give the anchors a warning. She’d known these people all her life. They’d worked together. Had bonds stretching back a hundred generations.

Her land’s red fairies buzzed around her, the faces of her ancestors silently pleading with her not to do this. As long as she remained anchor the grains couldn’t warn the other anchors. But the grains were outraged at what she planned. A fairy with Haoquin’s face flew in front of her eyes, the tiny red body shaking side to side in a silent scream of “No!”

But she knew what the real Haoquin would want. On his last day, as he lay in their bed while the competing grains destroyed each other and his body, he’d told her not to be angry. “Life here was worth it,” he’d whispered in her ear as she leaned over him. “Too short, yes. But knowing you made it worthwhile.”

Why had the grains waited so long to share his memories with her? If they’d done so years before, maybe she wouldn’t have been so angry. Maybe she wouldn’t have forced her son into exile from the only land and family he’d known.

Frere-Jones tapped the cord connecting the pistol to her farm’s power grid. She aimed at the anchors running toward her. She hated the grains. Hated every memory they spoke.

Burn them all.

The laser lit the land green, the light dazzling through the river mists. The first row of anchors in the sunflower fields flashed and burned, bodies screaming and stenching like spoiled meat over bad flames. Howls of outrage rose from the remaining anchors, who split up to make less obvious targets, but they all still burned bright in Frere-Jones’s enhanced vision. She shot two next to the barn, where she heard the day-fellows’ horses whinnying in fright. She shot three others on the dirt road. She split one massive anchor in two right before the oak tree in front of her house, the laser also severing the tree’s trunk.

She shot every anchor who came near her home. And when the remaining anchors broke ranks and fled, she detached the laser from her power grid and chased after them, using the remaining charge to sear every one of them into char for the coyotes and wolves to feast on.

“Share this memory with the land’s future anchors,” she told the red fairies as they stared at her in shock. “Share this memory with the whole damn world.”

“The laser is potential,” Haoquin had told Frere-Jones the night they were married. They lay in bed after making love awkwardly, then excitedly. Afterward, Frere-Jones couldn’t help looking at the pistol on the bedside table.

“Potential for what?” she asked.

“To upset the grains. To force them to experience something they’ve never before considered.”

“So you’d burn the land?”

“That would merely set off the grains’ anger. No, I’d burn any anchor who tried to harm you or me.”

“Then you’d have even more anchors attacking.” Frere-Jones had heard stories of day-fellows who’d tried defending themselves with lasers. Eventually the anchors overwhelmed them through sheer numbers.

“Yes, we can’t defeat the anchors. There are too many of them, tied to millions of lands around the world. But what if we could use the threat of killing so many anchors to make the grains change?”

“We can’t change the grains’ programming,” Frere-Jones whispered. “That’s beyond us.”

“But what if we could change the memories they spoke with?”

“What good would that do?”

“If this land only spoke through certain memories—say yours and mine—the grains would be forced to say very different things than if they spoke through the memories of anchors who’d supported their damn work. Over time, it might change everything.”

Frere-Jones smiled at that possibility. “So you’d really kill, or threaten to kill, hundreds of anchors merely to force the grains to delete the memories they’ve stored over the centuries?”

Haoquin sighed. “You’re right. I couldn’t do that. I guess it’s a bad idea.”

Frere-Jones had kissed Haoquin, glad he wasn’t someone who would do such evil in a silly, misguided attempt to change the world.

An hour before morning’s song of light and warmth, Chakatie arrived. Frere-Jones sat on the sod roof of her home, the laser pistol in her lap, the smoldering corpses of the other anchors glowing in her land’s fields and forests.

She scented Chakatie ten minutes before her mother-in-law walked up to the house. Chakatie had deliberately come from upwind so Frere-Jones would catch the scent. She wasn’t surprised by Chakatie’s arrival. After killing the anchors Frere-Jones realized she hadn’t seen or scented any member of Chakatie’s family during the attack.

Chakatie looked nothing like the powerful being she’d been the other night in the forest. She was powered down and tiny and wore a neatly pressed three-piece suit and bowler hat. Instead of claws her hands were manicured and folded over themselves at her waist, as if to show she meant no harm.

Frere-Jones snorted and patted the grass on the roof. “You’re welcome to join me, but that suit doesn’t look like it’s made for sitting on a sod roof.”

“It’s not.” Chakatie jumped up to the other side of the roof. She grinned nervously as Frere-Jones shifted the pistol slightly so it pointed at Chakatie’s chest. “My children made me wear this. Said it’d show you I meant no harm since no one in their right mind would fight while wearing such fancy clothes.” Chakatie laughed softly. “I think they’re worried about you killing me.”

Frere-Jones wanted to laugh, which was likely Chakatie’s other intent in wearing the suit. Perhaps to catch her off-guard. “And did Malachi also suggest you wear it? Perhaps after he spied on me?”

Chakatie spat. “Malachi did that on his own. I sincerely apologize. To spy on another anchor… any punishment you wish against him will be given.”

Frere-Jones didn’t believe her mother-in-law but accepted the lie as Chakatie’s round-about means of apology. “And my punishment for killing dozens of anchors?”

“Ah, that is the question, isn’t it?”

Chakatie sat down on the roof, running her fingers through the grass. “Is the girl in the house?” she asked. “The day-fellow anchor?”

“Yes. The grains lied to her. Said her family would be able to stay if she became the new anchor.”

“That’s why it’s difficult for someone who grew up without the grains to become an anchor. You and I, we know the grains’ memories don’t always tell us the truth. We sort the memories the grains show us. Sift the wheat from the chaff. Your day-fellow girl doesn’t know this.”

“She will after today. I doubt she’ll ever again trust the grains after witnessing this massacre.”

“Then she might end up making a good anchor.”

Chakatie stretched out on the sod roof, laying on her back as she looked across the sunflower fields. “No anchor with any sense loves the grains. But most anchors also have the sense not to challenge them directly.”

“Too late for that. Now what?”

“The grains demand vengeance. You’ve upset their programmed order.”

“How about I simply burn you first?” Frere-Jones said.

“Your choice. My family would, of course, attack. And can you sense the other anchors on their way here from distant lands? The more you kill the more who will come.”

Frere-Jones sighed and pointed the laser pistol at the grass. “Funny how your family didn’t join in the attack.”

“Nothing funny about it. I raised my son, after all. He told me all about his little plans when he was younger. I knew he’d never carry out such evil. That’s why I let him build the laser pistol—it satisfied him, and I knew he’d never use it. But you… I suppose I should have seen this coming.”

Frere-Jones shrugged.

“You know, the grains wanted me to kill Haoquin when he was young, because of his dangerous ideas,” Chakatie said. “But I refused to do it. Despite what you may believe, we anchors can still ignore some of the grains’ programmed demands.”

Frere-Jones knew Chakatie was playing her. Her mother-in-law had probably known exactly what she was doing when she gave Frere-Jones the medicine for Alexnya. With so many anchors killed, Chakatie’s children would be able to go to those lands and become master-anchors in their own right.

“I can still kill a lot more anchors, including you, before I’m taken down,” Frere-Jones said. “What do you propose to avoid that?”

“Right now you have leverage with the grains,” Chakatie said. “They don’t want you to kill hundreds of new anchors when they arrive here. So offer them a bargain. Let the day-fellow girl become this land’s new anchor. The remaining anchors in the area—meaning my family—won’t oppose her.”

Frere-Jones looked at her hands. The pistol could easily cut Chakatie in two, but she really didn’t want to kill her mother-in-law. “What do I get out of that?”

“Haoquin had some interesting ideas about the grains’ use of memories. This might be your only chance to see if what he said could come true.”

The day Haoquin died, Frere-Jones and Colton had stood side by side in the cemetery as Chakatie and the other anchors shoveled dirt onto her lifemate’s body.

Frere-Jones could still feel the grains in Haoquin’s body. Worse, she could feel them already working to isolate many of Haoquin’s memories. The grains didn’t want his heretical beliefs contaminating the land, so they were locking those memories away. They would never share those memories with anyone, most of all her.

Frere-Jones hugged her son tight. She knew the grains would do the same to her memories when she died. But if she had her way, they’d not be able to use her son. She’d free him one way or another.

And then, maybe, she’d see if Haoquin’s plan could work. The plan he’d been too kindly to actually put into action.

They stood in the cemetery where Haoquin and the other anchors of this land were buried. Alexnya and her family stood on one side of the graves while Chakatie stood on the other. The rest of Chakatie’s family patrolled the boundaries of Frere-Jones’s land, keeping away the other anchors until this ceremony was completed.

Frere-Jones reached out to her land’s grains, the laser pistol still in her right hand. The grains shivered and shook, resonating in shock at both what Frere-Jones had done and the dead anchors she’d killed.

Frere-Jones, detaching herself from the grains, walked over to Alexnya and her family. “Good luck to you,” she told Alexnya. “You can trust Chakatie’s advice. I suggest you listen to her.”

Alexnya looked overwhelmed, as if just realizing the life she’d stumbled into. Her family could stay only a few more days before they’d have to travel on. But aside from suggesting Alexnya trust Chakatie, there was no other advice Frere-Jones could give. Alexnya would have to sort through the lands’ memories on her own and determine which, if any, could be trusted.

Frere-Jones laughed to herself, knowing whose memories Alexnya would soon be experiencing.

“How can you say our daughter should trust that… woman?” Jun asked, outrage almost pouring out of her lips as she glared at Chakatie. “From what you’ve told me, she caused all this.”

“Chakatie didn’t trap your daughter,” Frere-Jones said. “If anyone did, it was me, by being so stubborn that the grains sought out a new anchor.”

“But she took advantage of all this. She played everyone. She…”

“Must I really listen to this right before I die?” Frere-Jones asked.

Jun fell silent. She bowed slightly in a mix of respect and mocking.

After speaking with Chakatie and asking her mother-in-law to pass a final message to Colton, Frere-Jones reached out to hold Alexnya’s hand. Together they accessed the grains.

“Do as we’ve agreed,” Frere-Jones told the grains. “Chakatie will ensure I hold up my end.”

“Do it,” Alexnya ordered, added her voice as the land’s new anchor.

The grains screamed but, unable to see any other option, complied. Across the land they deleted the memories of every anchor who’d lived before Frere-Jones. The memories flared and shrieked, as if begging Frere-Jones and Alexnya to save them. Then they were gone.

Except for Haoquin’s. Frere-Jones dropped the laser pistol and fell to her knees as Haoquin’s memories flooded into her. All the memories the grains had copied from his life. All of him.

So many memories. Memories of everything Haoquin had felt and seen and thought and experienced worked their way into Frere-Jones’s being. Her mind could barely contain all of him.

As Frere-Jones shook and spasmed on the cold ground, she looked across the new-spring grass. She could taste the grass. Could feel it growing and reaching for the sun.

Haoquin was within her. They now shared one life.

“I missed you Fre,” Haoquin whispered. Or maybe Frere-Jones said it to herself. Either way, she smiled.

“Life here was worth it,” they whispered to each other. “Too short, yes. But knowing you made it worthwhile.”

Frere-Jones and Haoquin saw Chakatie walk up to their body and pick up the laser pistol. Chakatie wiped at her eyes as she nodded, then she shot them in the head.

Alexnya stands silently over Frere-Jones’s burned body. The grains are still convulsing, still in chaos, but Frere-Jones’s death has calmed them.

Chakatie holds the laser pistol in both hands. Alexnya feels Chakatie’s grains powering up her body. A moment later powerful claws rip apart the pistol.

Chakatie throws the broken technology to the ground in disgust. “Your mother is right, you know,” she says. “I did manipulate all this. I knew Frere-Jones and my son would cause sparks. But I didn’t know all this would happen. I swear on the grains I didn’t know.”

Alexnya isn’t sure if she can trust Chakatie. Frere-Jones said to trust the anchor, but how can she truly know?

Yet Alexnya also understands that once her parents are forced to resume their travels, Chakatie and her family will be the only one for hundreds of leagues around who might support her.

Alexnya wants to scream at this situation. To curse at not knowing what to do. But before she does, she feels a gentle caress in her mind. She tastes memories—memories from Frere-Jones and Haoquin. She sees all the good things Chakatie has done. How Chakatie once cried over a family like hers.

“I think I’ll trust you,” Alexnya finally says. “Did you really… cry over a day-fellow family once?”

Chakatie nods, then waves for Alexnya’s parents to follow her to the sod-house to prepare an evening meal for everyone.

Alexnya stays behind and digs the grave for Frere-Jones’s body, the grains powering up her body so the shovel digs faster and deeper than she ever could have done before. She places Frere-Jones in the hole and covers her with fresh soil.

As Alexnya stands over the grave, she feels the grains churning in Frere-Jones’s body. Feels the grains already beginning to spread the memories of Frere-Jones and Haoquin across the land.

“Thank you, Fre,” Alexnya says, bowing to the grave. She then runs to the sod-house to spend time with her family before they’re forced to flee.

SOONER OR LATER EVERYTHING FALLS INTO THE SEA ^{SARAH PINSKER}

Sarah Pinsker is the author of the novelette “Our Lady of the Open Road,” winner of the Nebula Award in 2016. Her novelette “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind,” was the Sturgeon Award winner in 2014 and a Nebula finalist for 2013. Her fiction has been published in magazines including Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Daily Science Fiction, Fireside, and Uncanny, and in anthologies including Long Hidden, Fierce Family, Accessing the Future, and numerous year’s bests. Her stories have been translated into Chinese, Spanish, French, and Italian, among other languages.

Sarah’s first collection, Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea: Stories will be published by Small Beer Press in 2019.

She is also a singer/songwriter with three albums on various independent labels (the third with her rock band, the Stalking Horses) and a fourth forthcoming. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and can be found online at sarahpinsker.com and twitter/sarahpinsker.

The rock star washed ashore at high tide. Earlier in the day, Bay had seen something bobbing far out in the water. Remnant of a rowboat, perhaps, or something better. She waited until the tide ebbed, checked her traps and tidal pools among the rocks before walking toward the inlet where debris usually beached.

All kinds of things washed up if Bay waited long enough: not just glass and plastic, but personal trainers and croupiers, entertainment directors and dance teachers. This was the first time Bay recognized the face of the new arrival. She always checked the face first if there was one, just in case, hoping it wasn’t Deb.

The rock star had an entire lifeboat to herself, complete with motor, though she’d used up the gas. She’d made it in better shape than many; certainly, in better shape than those with flotation vests but no boats. They arrived in tatters of uniform. Armless, legless, sometimes headless; ragged shark refuse.

“What was that one?” Deb would have asked, if she were there. She’d never paid attention to physical details, wouldn’t have recognized a dancer’s legs, a chef’s scarred hands and arms.

“Nothing anymore,” Bay would say of a bad one, putting it on her sled.

The rock star still had all her limbs. She had stayed in the boat. She’d found the stashed water and nutrition bars, easy to tell by the wrappers and bottles strewn around her. From her bloated belly and cracked lips, Bay guessed she had run out a day or two before, maybe tried drinking ocean water. Sunburn glowed through her dark skin. She was still alive.

Deb wasn’t there; she couldn’t ask questions. If she had been, Bay would have shown her the calloused fingers of the woman’s left hand and the thumb of her right.

“How do you know she came off the ships?” Deb would have asked. She’d been skeptical that the ships even existed, couldn’t believe that so many people would just pack up and leave their lives. The only proof Bay could have given was these derelict bodies.

Inside the Music: Tell us what happened.

Gabby Robbins: A scavenger woman dragged me from the ocean, pumped water from my lungs, spoke air into me. The old films they show on the ships would call that moment romantic, but it wasn’t. I gagged. Only barely managed to roll over to retch in the sand.

She didn’t know what a rock star was. It was only when I washed in half-dead, choking seawater that she learned there were such things in the world. Our first attempts at conversation didn’t go well. We had no language in common. But I warmed my hands by her fire, and when I saw an instrument hanging on its peg, I tuned it and began to play. That was the first language we spoke between us.

A truth: I don’t remember anything between falling off the ship and washing up in this place.

There’s a lie embedded in that truth.

Maybe a couple of them.

Another lie I’ve already told: We did have language in common, the scavenger woman and me.

She did put me on her sled, did take me back to her stone-walled cottage on the cliff above the beach. I warmed myself by her woodstove. She didn’t offer me a blanket or anything to replace the thin stage clothes I still wore, so I wrapped my own arms around me and drew my knees in tight, and sat close enough to the stove’s open belly that sparks hit me when the logs collapsed inward.

She heated a small pot of soup on the stovetop and poured it into a single bowl without laying a second one out for me. My stomach growled. I didn’t remember the last time I’d eaten. I eyed her, eyed the bowl, eyed the pot.

“If you’re thinking about whether you could knock me out with the pot and take my food, it’s a bad idea. You’re taller than me, but you’re weaker than you think, and I’m stronger than I look.”

“I wouldn’t! I was just wondering if maybe you’d let me scrape whatever’s left from the pot. Please.”

She nodded after a moment. I stood over the stove and ate the few mouthfuls she had left me from the wooden stirring spoon. I tasted potatoes and seaweed, salt and land and ocean. It burned my throat going down; heated from the inside, I felt almost warm.

I looked around the room for the first time. An oar with “Home Sweet Home” burnt into it adorned the wall behind the stove. Some chipped dishes on an upturned plastic milk crate, a wall stacked high with home-canned food, clothing on pegs. A slightly warped-looking classical guitar hung on another peg by a leather strap; if I’d had any strength I’d have gone to investigate it. A double bed piled with blankets. Beside the bed, a nightstand with a framed photo of two women on a hiking trail, and a tall stack of paperback books. I had an urge to walk over and read the titles; my father used to say you could judge a person by the books on their shelves. A stronger urge to dive under the covers on the bed, but I resisted and settled back onto the ground near the stove. My energy went into shivering.

I kept my eyes on the stove, as if I could direct more heat to me with enough concentration. The woman puttered around her cabin. She might have been any age between forty and sixty; her movement was easy, but her skin was weathered and lined, her black hair streaked with gray. After a while, she climbed into bed and turned her back to me. Another moment passed before I realized she intended to leave me there for the night.

“Please, before you go to sleep. Don’t let it go out,” I said. “The fire.”

She didn’t turn. “Can’t keep it going forever. Fuel has to last all winter.”

“It’s winter?” I’d lost track of seasons on the ship. The scavenger woman wore two layers, a ragged jeans jacket over a hooded sweatshirt.

“Will be soon enough.”

“I’ll freeze to death without a fire. Can I pay you to keep it going?”

“What do you have to pay me with?”

“I have an account on the Hollywood Line. A big one.” As I said that, I realized I shouldn’t have. On multiple levels. Didn’t matter if it sounded like a brag or desperation. I was at her mercy, and it wasn’t in my interest to come across as if I thought I was any better than her.

She rolled over. “Your money doesn’t count for anything off your ships and islands. Nor credit. If you’ve got paper money, I’m happy to throw it in to keep the fire going a little longer.”

I didn’t. “I can work it off.”

“There’s nothing you can work off. Fuel is in finite supply. I use it now, I don’t get more, I freeze two months down the line.”

“Why did you save me if you’re going to let me die?”

“Pulling you from the water made sense. It’s your business now whether you live or not.”

“Can I borrow something warmer to wear at least? Or a blanket?” I sounded whiny even to my own ears.

She sighed, climbed out of bed, rummaged in a corner, and pulled out a down vest. It had a tear in the back where some stuffing had spilled out, and smelled like brine. I put it on, trying not to scream when the fabric touched my sunburned arms.

“Thank you. I’m truly grateful.”

She grunted a response and retreated to her bed again. I tucked my elbows into the vest, my hands into my armpits. It helped a little, though I still shivered. I waited a few minutes, then spoke again. She didn’t seem to want to talk, but it kept me warm. Reassured me that I was still here. Awake, alive.

“If I didn’t say so already, thank you for pulling me out of the water. My name is Gabby.”

“Fitting.”

“Are you going to ask me how I ended up in the water?”

“None of my business.”

Just as well. Anything I told her would’ve been made up.

“Do you have a name?” I asked.

“I do, but I don’t see much point in sharing it with you.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m going to kill you if you don’t shut up and let me sleep.”

I shut up.

Inside the Music: Tell us what happened.

Gabby Robbins: I remember getting drunk during a set on the Elizabeth Taylor. Making out with a bartender in the lifeboat, since neither of us had private bunks. I must have passed out there. I don’t know how it ended up adrift.

I survived the night on the floor but woke with a cough building deep in my chest. At least I didn’t have to sing. I followed the scavenger as she went about her morning, like a dog hoping for scraps. Outside, a large picked-over garden spread around two sides of the cottage. The few green plants grew low and ragged. Root vegetables, maybe.

“If you have to piss, there’s an outhouse over there,” she said, motioning toward a stand of twisted trees.

We made our way down the footpath from her cottage to the beach, a series of switchbacks trod into the cliffside. I was amazed she had managed to tow me up such an incline. Then again, if I’d rolled off the sled and fallen to my death, she probably would’ve scraped me out of my clothes and left my body to be picked clean by gulls.

“Where are we?” I had managed not to say anything since waking up, not a word since her threat the night before, so I hoped the statute of limitations had expired.

“Forty kilometers from the nearest city, last I checked.”

Better than nothing. “When was that?”

“When I walked here.”

“And that was?”

“A while ago.”

It must have been, given the lived-in look of her cabin and garden. “What city?”

“Portage.”

“Portage what?”

“Portage. Population I don’t know. Just because you haven’t heard of it doesn’t make it any less a city.” She glanced back at me like I was stupid.

“I mean, what state? Or what country? I don’t even know what country this is.”

She snorted. “How long were you on that ship?”

“A long time. I didn’t really pay attention.”

“Too rich to care.”

“No! It’s not what you think.” I didn’t know why it mattered what she thought of me, but it did. “I wasn’t on the ship because I’m rich. I’m an entertainer. I share a staff bunk with five other people.”

“You told me last night you were rich.”

I paused to hack and spit over the cliff’s edge. “I have money, it’s true. But not enough to matter. I’ll never be rich enough to be a passenger instead of entertainment. I’ll never even afford a private stateroom. So, I spend a little and let the rest build up in my account.”

Talking made me cough more. I was thirsty, too, but waited to be offered something to drink.

“What’s your name?” I knew I should shut up, but the more uncomfortable I am, the more I talk.

She didn’t answer for a minute, so by the time she did, I wasn’t even sure if it was the answer to my question at all. “Bay.”

“That’s your name? It’s lovely. Unusual.”

“How would you know? You don’t even know what country this is. Who are you to say what’s unusual here?”

“Good point. Sorry.”

“You’re lucky we even speak the same language.”

“Very.”

She pointed at a trickle of water that cut a small path down the cliff wall. “Cup your hands there. It’s potable.”

“A spring?”

She gave me a look.

“Sorry. Thank you.” I did as she said. The water was cold and clear. If there was some bacterium in it that was going to kill me, at least I wouldn’t die thirsty.

I showed my gratitude through silence and concentrated on the descent. The path was narrow, just wide enough for the sled she pulled, and the edge crumbled away to nothing. I put my feet where she put hers, squared my shoulders as she did. She drew her sweatshirt hood over her head, another discouragement to conversation.

We made it all the way down to the beach without another question busting through my chapped lips. She left the sled at the foot of the cliff and picked up a blue plastic cooler from behind a rock, the kind with cup holders built into the top. She looked in and frowned, then dumped the whole thing on the rocks. A cascade of water, two small dead fish. I realized those had probably been meant to be her dinner the day before; she had chosen to haul me up the cliff instead.

This section of beach was all broken rock, dotted everywhere with barnacles and snails and seashells. The rocks were wet and slick, the footing treacherous. I fell to my hands several times, slicing them on the tiny snails. Could you catch anything from a snail cut? At least the ship could still get us antibiotics.

“What are we doing?” I asked. “Surely the most interesting things wash out closer to the actual water.”

She kept walking, watching where she stepped. She didn’t fall. The rusted hull of an old ship jutted from the rocks down into the ocean; I imagined anything inside had long since been picked over. We clambered around it. I fell further behind her, trying to be more careful with my bleeding palms. All that rust, no more tetanus shots.

She slowed, squatted. Peered and poked at something by her feet. As I neared her, I understood. Tidal pools. She dipped the cooler into one, smiled to herself. I was selfishly glad to see the smile. Perhaps she’d be friendlier now.

Instead of following, I took a different path from hers. Peered into other pools. Some tiny fish in the first two, not worth catching, nothing in the third. In the fourth, I found a large crab.

“Bay,” I called.

She turned around, annoyance plain on her face. I waved the crab and her expression softened. “Good for you. You get to eat tonight too, with a nice find like that.”

She waited for me to catch up with her and put the crab in her cooler with the one decent-sized fish she had found.

“What is it?” I asked.

“A fish. What does it matter what kind?”

“I used to cook. I’m pretty good with fish, but I don’t recognize that one. Different fish taste better with different preparations.”

“You’re welcome to do the cooking if you’d like, but if you need lemon butter and capers, you may want to check the pools closer to the end of the rainbow.” She pointed down the beach, then laughed at her own joke.

“I’m only trying to be helpful. You don’t need to mock me.”

“No, I suppose I don’t. You found a crab, so you’re not entirely useless.”

That was the closest thing to a compliment I supposed I’d get. At least she was speaking to me like a person, not debris that had shown an unfortunate tendency toward speech.

That evening, I pan-fried our catch on the stovetop with a little bit of sea salt. The fish was oily and tasteless, but the crab was good. My hands smelled like fish and ocean and I wished for running water to wash them off. Tried to replace that smell with wood smoke.

After dinner, I looked over at her wall.

“May I?” I asked, pointing at the guitar.

She shrugged. “Dinner and entertainment—I fished the right person out of the sea. Be my guest.”

It was an old classical guitar, parlor sized, nylon-stringed. That was the first blessing, since steel strings would surely have corroded in this air. I had no pure pitch to tune to, so had to settle on tuning the strings relative to each other, all relative to the third string because its tuning peg was cracked and useless. Sent up a silent prayer that none of the strings broke, since I was fairly sure Bay would blame me for anything that went wrong in my presence. The result sounded sour, but passable.

“What music do you like?” I asked her.

“Now or then?”

“What’s the difference?”

“Then: anything political. Hip-hop, mostly.”

I looked down at the little guitar, wondered how to coax hip-hop out of it. “What about now?”

“Now? Anything you play will be the first music I’ve heard other than my own awful singing in half a dozen years. Play away.”

I nodded and looked at the guitar, waiting for it to tell me what it wanted. Fought back my strange sudden shyness. Funny how playing for thousands of people didn’t bother me, but I could find myself self-conscious in front of one. “Guitar isn’t my instrument, by the way.”

“Close enough. You’re a bassist.”

I looked up, surprised. “How do you know?”

“I’m not stupid. I know who you are.”

“Why did you ask my name, then?”

“I didn’t. You told it to me.”

“Oh, yeah.” I was glad I hadn’t lied about that particular detail.

“Let’s have the concert, then.”

I played her a few songs, stuff I never played on the ship.

“Where’d the guitar come from?” I asked when I was done.

An unreadable expression crossed her face. “Where else? It washed up.”

I let my fingers keep exploring the neck of the guitar, but turned to her. “So is this what you do full time? Pull stuff from the beach?”

“Pretty much.”

“Can you survive on that?”

“The bonuses for finding some stuff can be pretty substantial.”

“What stuff?”

“Foil. Plastic. People.”

“People?”

“People who’ve lost their ships.”

“You’re talking about me?”

“You, others. The ships don’t like to lose people, and the people don’t like to be separated from their ships. It’s a nice change to be able to return someone living for once. I’m sure you’ll be happy to get back to where you belong.”

“Yes, thank you. How do you alert them?”

“I’ve got call buttons for the three big shiplines. They send ’copters.”

I knew those copters. Sleek, repurposed military machines.

I played for a while longer, so stopping wouldn’t seem abrupt, then hung the guitar back on its peg. It kept falling out of tune anyway.

I waited until Bay was asleep before I left, though it took all my willpower not to take off running the second she mentioned the helicopters. I had nothing to pack, so I curled up by the cooling stove and waited for her breathing to slow. I would never have taken her food or clothing—other than the vest—but I grabbed the guitar from its peg on my way out the door. She wouldn’t miss it. The door squealed on its hinges, and I held my breath as I slipped through and closed it behind me.

The clifftop was bright with stars. I scanned the sky for helicopters. Nothing but stars and stars and stars. The ship’s lights made it so we barely saw stars at all, a reassurance for all of us from the cities.

I walked with my back to the cliff. The moon gave enough light to reassure me I wasn’t about to step off into nothingness if the coastline cut in, but I figured the farther I got from the ocean, the more likely I was to run into trees. Or maybe an abandoned house, if I got lucky. Someplace they wouldn’t spot me if they swept overland.

Any hope I had for stealth, I abandoned as I trudged onward. I found an old tar road and decided it had to lead toward something. I walked. The cough that had been building in my chest through the day racked me now.

The farther I went, the more I began to doubt Bay’s story. Would the ships bother to send anyone? I was popular enough, but was I worth the fuel it took to come get me? If they thought I had fallen, maybe. If they knew I had lowered the lifeboat deliberately, that I might do it again? Doubtful. Unless they wanted to punish me, or charge me for the boat, though if they docked my account now, I’d never know. And how would Bay have contacted them? She’d said they were in contact, but unless she had a solar charger—well, that seemed possible, actually.

Still, she obviously wanted me gone or she wouldn’t have said it. Or was she testing my reaction? Waiting to see if I cheered the news of my rescue?

I wondered what else she had lied about. I hoped I was walking toward the city she had mentioned. I was a fool to think I’d make it to safety anywhere. I had no water, no food, no money. Those words formed a marching song for my feet, syncopated by my cough. No water. No food. No money. No luck.

Bay set out at first light, the moment she realized the guitar had left with the stupid rock star. It wasn’t hard to figure out which way she had gone. She was feverish, stupid with the stupidity of someone still used to having things appear when she wanted them. If she really expected to survive, she should have taken more from Bay. Food. A canteen. A hat. Something to trade when she got to the city. It said something good about her character, Bay supposed, down below the blind privilege of her position. If she hadn’t taken Debra’s guitar, Bay’s opinion might have been even more favorable.

Inside the Music: Tell us what happened.

Gabby Robbins: My last night on the ship was just like three thousand nights before, up until it wasn’t. We played two sets, mostly my stuff, with requests mixed in. Some cokehead in a Hawaiian shirt offered us a thousand credits each to play “My Heart Will Go On” for his lady.

“I’ll give you ten thousand credits myself if you don’t make us do this,” Sheila said when we all leaned in over her kit to consult on whether we could fake our way through it. “That’s the one song I promised myself I would never play here.”

“What about all the Jimmy Buffet we’ve had to play?” our guitarist, Kel, asked her. “We’ve prostituted ourselves already. What difference does it make at this point?”

Sheila ignored Kel. “Dignity, Gab. Please.”

I was tired and more than a little drunk. “What does it matter? Let’s just play the song. You can mess with the tempo if you want. Swing it, maybe? Ironic cheesy lounge style? In C, since I can’t hit those diva notes?”

Sheila looked like she was going to weep as she counted off.

I ran into Hawaiian Shirt and his lady again after the set, when I stepped out on the Oprah deck for air. They were over near the gun turrets, doing the “King of the World” thing, a move that should have been outlawed before anyone got on the ship.

“You know who that is, right?” I looked over to see JP, this bartender I liked: sexy retro-Afro, sexy swimmer’s build. It had been a while since we’d hooked up. JP held out a joint.

I took it and said he looked familiar.

“He used to have one of those talk radio shows. He was the first one to suggest the ships, only his idea was religious folks, not just general rich folks. Leave the sinners behind, he said. Founded the Ark line, where all those fundamentalists spend their savings waiting for the sinners to be washed away so they can take the land back. He spent the first two years with them, then announced he was going to go on a pilgrimage to find out what was happening everywhere else. Only, instead of traveling the land like a proper pilgrim, he came on board this ship. He’s been here ever since. First time I’ve seen him at one of your shows, though. I guess he’s throwing himself into his new lifestyle.”

“Ugh. I remember him now. He boycotted my second album. At least they look happy?”

“Yeah, except that isn’t his wife. His wife and kids are still on the Ark waiting for him. Some pilgrim.”

The King of the World and his not-wife sauntered off. When the joint was finished, JP melted away as well, leaving me alone with my thoughts until some drunk kids wandered over with a magnum of champagne. I climbed over the railing into the lifeboat to get a moment alone. I could almost pretend the voices were gulls. Listened to the engine’s thrum through the hull, the waves lapping far below.

Everyone who wasn’t a paying guest—entertainers and staff—had been trained on how to release the lifeboats, and I found myself playing with the controls. How hard would it be to drop it into the water? We couldn’t be that far from some shore somewhere. The lifeboats were all equipped with stores of food and water, enough for a handful of people for a few days.

Whatever had been in my last drink must have been some form of liquid stupid. The boat was lowered now, whacking against the side of the enormous ship, and I had to smash the last tie just to keep from being wrecked against it. And then the ship was pulling away, ridiculous and huge, a foolish attempt to save something that had never been worth saving.

I wished I had kissed JP one more time, seeing as how I was probably going to die.

Gabby hadn’t gotten far at all. By luck, she had found the road in the dark, and by luck had walked in the right direction, but she was lying in the dirt like roadkill now. Bay checked that Deb’s guitar hadn’t been hurt, then watched for a moment to see if the woman was breathing, which she was, ragged but steady, her forehead hot enough to melt butter, some combination of sunburn and fever.

The woman stirred. “Are you real?” she asked.

“More real than you are,” Bay told her.

“I should have kissed JP.”

“Seems likely.” Bay offered a glass jar of water. “Drink this.”

Gabby drank half. “Thank you.”

Bay waved it away when the other woman tried to hand it back. “I’m not putting my lips to that again while you’re coughing your lungs out. It’s yours.”

“Thank you again.” Gabby held out the guitar. “You probably came for this?”

“You carried it this far, you can keep carrying it. Me, I would have brought the case.”

“It had a case?”

“Under the bed. I keep clothes in it.”

“I guess at least now you know I didn’t go through your things?”

Bay snorted. “Obviously. You’re a pretty terrible thief.”

“In my defense, I’m not a thief.”

“My guitar says otherwise.”

Gabby put the guitar on the ground. She struggled to her feet and stood for a wobbly moment before leaning down to pick it up. She looked one way, then the other, as if she couldn’t remember where she had come from or where she was going. Bay refrained from gesturing in the right direction. She picked the right way. Bay followed.

“Are you going to ask me why I left?” Even this sick, with all her effort going into putting one foot in front of the other, the rock star couldn’t stop talking.

“Wasn’t planning on it.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’ve met you before.”

“For real? Before the ships?” Gabby looked surprised.

Bay shook her head. “No. Your type. You think you’re the first one to wash ashore? To step away from that approximation of life? You’re just the first one who made it alive.”

“If you don’t like the ships, why did you call them to come get me?” Gabby paused. “Or you didn’t. You just wanted me to leave. Why?”

“I can barely feed myself. And you aren’t the type to be satisfied with that life anyhow. Might as well leave now as later.”

“Except I’m probably going to die of this fever because I walked all night in the cold, you psychopath.”

Bay shrugged. “That was your choice.”

They walked in silence for a while. The rock star was either contemplating her choices or too sick to talk.

“Why?” Bay asked, taking pity.

Gabby whipped her head around. “Why what?”

“Why did you sign up for the ship?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“Sounds like an epitaph fitting for half the people in this world.”

Gabby gave a half smile, then continued. “New York was a mess, and the Gulf states had just tried to secede. The bookers for the Hollywood Line made a persuasive argument for a glamorous life at sea. Everything was so well planned, too. They bought entire island nations to provide food and fuel.”

“I’m sure the island nations appreciated that,” said Bay.

The other woman gave a wry smile. “I know, right? Fucked up. But they offered good money, and it was obvious no bands would be touring the country for a while.

“At first it was just like any other tour. We played our own stuff. There were women to sleep with, drugs if we wanted them, restaurants and clubs and gyms. All the good parts of touring without the actual travel part. Sleeping in the same bed every night, even if it was still a bunk with my band, like on the bus. But then it didn’t stop, and then they started making us take requests, and it started closing in, you know? If there was somebody you wanted to avoid, you couldn’t. It was hard to find anyplace to be alone to write or think.

“Then the internet went off completely. We didn’t get news from land at all, even when we docked on the islands. They stopped letting us off when we docked. Management said things had gotten real bad here, that there was for real nothing to come back to anymore. The passengers all walked around like they didn’t care, like a closed system, and the world was so fucking far away. How was I supposed to write anything when the world was so far away? The entire world might’ve drowned, and we’d just float around oblivious until we ran out of something that wasn’t even important to begin with. Somebody would freak out because there was no more mascara or ecstasy or rosemary, and then all those beautiful people would turn on each other.”

“So that’s why you jumped?”

Gabby rubbed her head. “Sort of. I guess that also seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“What about now?”

“I could’ve done with a massage when I woke up today, but I’m still alive.”

Bay snorted. “You wouldn’t have lasted two seconds in a massage with that sunburn.”

Gabby looked down at her forearms and winced.

They walked. Gabby was sweating, her eyes bright. Bay slowed her own pace, in an effort to slow the other woman down. “Where are you hurrying to, now that I’ve told you there’s nobody coming after you?”

“You said there was a city out here somewhere. I want to get there before I have to sleep another night on this road. And before I starve.”

Bay reached into a jacket pocket. She pulled out a protein bar and offered it to Gabby.

“Where’d you get that? It looks like the ones I ate in the lifeboat.”

“It is.”

Gabby groaned. “I didn’t have to starve those last two days? I could’ve sworn I looked every place.”

“You missed a stash inside the radio console.”

“Huh.”

They kept walking, footsteps punctuated by Gabby’s ragged breath.

“We used to drive out here to picnic on the cliff when my wife and I first got married,” Bay said. “There were always turtles trying to cross. We would stop and help them, because there were teenagers around who thought driving over them was a sport. Now if I saw a turtle I’d probably have to think about eating it.”

“I’ve never eaten a turtle.”

“Me neither. Haven’t seen one in years.”

Gabby stopped. “You know, I have no clue when I last saw a turtle. At a zoo? No clue at all. I wonder if they’re gone. Funny how you don’t realize the last time you see something is going to be the last time.”

Bay didn’t say anything.

The rock star held Deb’s guitar up to her chest, started picking out a repetitive tune as she walked. Same lick over and over, like it was keeping her going, driving her feet. “So when you said you traded things like aluminum foil and people, you were lying to me, right? You don’t trade anything.”

Bay shook her head. “Nobody to trade with.”

“So, you’ve been here all alone? You said something about your wife.”

Bay kicked a stone down the road in front of her, kicked it again when she caught up with it.

The rock star handed her the guitar and dropped to the ground. She took off her left shoe, then peeled the sock off. A huge blister was rising on her big toe. “Fuck.”

Bay sighed. “You can use some of the stuffing from your vest to build some space around it.”

Gabby bent to pick a seam.

“No need. There’s a tear in the back. Anyhow, maybe it’s time to stop for the night.”

“Sorry. I saw the tear when you first gave me the vest, but I forgot about it. How far have we traveled?”

“Hard to say. We’re still on the park road.”

“Park road?”

“This is a protected wilderness area. Or it was. Once we hit asphalt, we’re halfway there. Then a little farther to a junction. Left at the T used to be vacation homes, but a hurricane took them twenty years ago. Right takes you to the city.”

Gabby groaned. She squinted at the setting sun. “Not even halfway.”

“But you’re still alive, and you’re complaining about a blister, not the cough or the sunburn.”

“I didn’t complain.”

“I don’t see you walking any farther, either.” Bay dropped her knapsack and untied a sleeping bag from the bottom.

“I don’t suppose you have two?”

Bay gave Gabby her most withering look. What kind of fool set out on this walk sick and unprepared? Then again, she had been the one who had driven the woman out, too afraid to interact with an actual person instead of the ghosts in her head.

“We’ll both fit,” she said. “Body heat’ll keep us warm, too.”

It was warmer than if they hadn’t shared, lying back to back squeezed into the sleeping bag. Not as warm as home, if she hadn’t set out to follow. The cold still seeped into her. Bay felt every inch of her left side, as if the bones themselves were in contact with the ground. Aware, too, of her back against the other woman, of the fact that she couldn’t remember the last time she had come in physical contact with a living person. The heat of Gabby’s fever burned through the layers of clothing, but she still shivered.

“Why are you living out there all alone?” Gabby asked.

Bay considered pretending she was asleep, but then she wanted to answer. “I said already we used to picnic out here, my wife and I. We always said this was where we’d spend our old age. I’d get a job as a ranger, we’d live out our days in the ranger’s cabin. I pictured having electricity, mind.”

She paused. She felt the tension in the other woman’s back as she suppressed a cough. “Debra was in California on a business trip when everything started going bad at a faster rate than it’d been going bad before. We never even found out what it was that messed up the electronics. Things just stopped working. We’d been living in a high-rise. I couldn’t stay in our building with no heat or water, but we couldn’t contact each other, and I wanted to be someplace Debra would find me. So when I didn’t hear from her for three months, I packed what I thought I might need into some kid’s wagon I found in the lobby and started walking. I knew she’d know to find me out here if she could.”

“How bad was it? The cities? We were already on the ship.”

“I can only speak for the one I was living in, but it wasn’t like those scare movies where everyone turns on one another. People helped each other. We got some electricity up and running again in a couple weeks’ time, on a much smaller scale. If anything, I’d say we had more community than we’d ever had. But it didn’t feel right for me. I didn’t want other people; I wanted Deb.”

“They told us people were rioting and looting. Breaking into mansions, moving dozens of people in.”

“Would you blame them? Your passengers redirected all the gas to their ships and abandoned perfectly good houses. But again, I can only speak to what I saw, which was folks figuring out the new order and making it work as best they could.”

Gabby stayed silent for a while, and Bay started to drift. Then one more question. “Did Debra ever find you? I mean I’m guessing no, but…”

“No. Now let me sleep.”

Inside the Music: Tell us what happened.

Gabby Robbins: You know what happened. There is no you anymore. No reality television, no celebrity gossip, no music industry. Only an echo playing itself out on the ships and in the heads of those of us who can’t quite let it go.

Bay was already out of the sleeping bag when I woke. She sat on a rock playing a simple fingerpicking pattern on her guitar.

“I thought you didn’t play,” I called to her.

“Never said that. Said I’m a lousy singer, but didn’t say anything about playing the guitar. We should get moving. I’d rather get to the city earlier than late.”

I stood up and stretched, letting the sleeping bag pool around my feet. The sun had only just risen, low and red. I could hear water lapping on both sides now, beyond a thick growth of brush. I coughed so deep it bent me in two.

“Why are you in a hurry?” I asked when I could speak.

She gave me a look that probably could have killed me at closer range. “Because I didn’t bring enough food to feed both of us for much longer, and you didn’t bring any. Because I haven’t been there in years and I don’t know if they shoot strangers who ride in at night.”

“Oh.” There wasn’t much to say to that, but I tried anyway. “So basically, you’re putting yourself in danger because I put myself in danger because you made me think I was in danger.”

“You put yourself in danger in the first place by jumping off your damn boat.”

True. I sat back down on the sleeping bag and inspected my foot. The blister looked awful. I nearly wept as I packed vest-stuffing around it.

I stood again to indicate my readiness, and she walked back over. She handed me the guitar, then shook out the sleeping bag, rolled it and tied it to her pack. She produced two vaguely edible-looking sticks from somewhere on her person. I took the one offered to me.

I sniffed it. “Fish jerky?”

She nodded.

“I really would’ve starved out here on my own.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Thank you. I mean it. I’d never have guessed I’d have to walk so long without finding anything to eat.”

“There’s plenty to eat, but you don’t know where to look. You could fish if you had gear. You might find another crab. And there are bugs. Berries and plants, too, in better seasons, if you knew what to look for.”

As we walked she meandered off the road to show me what was edible. Cattail roots, watercress. Neither tasted fantastic raw, but chewing took time and gave an excuse to walk slower.

“I’m guessing you were a city kid?” she asked.

“Yeah. Grew up in Detroit. Ran away when I was sixteen to Pittsburgh because everyone else ran away to New York. Put together a decent band, got noticed. When you’re a good bass player, people take you out. I’d release an album with my band, tour that, then tour with Gaga or Trillium or some flavor of the month.”

I realized that was more than she had asked for, but she hadn’t told me to shut up yet, so I kept going. “The funny thing about being on a ship with all those celebrities and debutantes is how much attention they need. They throw parties or they stage big collapses and recoveries. They produce documentaries about themselves, upload to the ship entertainment systems. They act as audience for each other, taking turns with their dramas.

“I thought they’d treat me as a peer, but then I realized I was just a hired gun and they all thought they were bigger deals than me. There were a few other entertainers who realized the same thing and dropped down to the working decks to teach rich kids to dance or sing or whatever. I hung onto the idea longer than most that my music still meant something. I still kinda hope so.”

A coughing spell turned me inside out.

“That’s why you took my guitar?” Bay asked when I stopped gagging.

“Yeah. They must still need music out here, right?”

“I’d like to think so.”

I had something else to say, but a change in the landscape up ahead distracted me. Two white towers jutted into the sky, one vertical, the other at a deep curve. “That’s a weird looking bridge.”

Bay picked up her pace. I limped after her. As we got closer, I saw the bridge wasn’t purposefully skewed. The tower on the near end still stood, but the road between the two had crumbled into the water. Heavy cables trailed from the far tower like hair. We walked to the edge, looked down at the concrete bergs below us, then out at the long gap to the other side. Bay sat down, her feet dangling over the edge.

I tried to keep things light. “I didn’t realize we were on an island.”

“Your grasp of geography hasn’t proven to be outstanding.”

“How long do you think it’s been out?”

“How the hell should I know?” she snapped.

I left her to herself and went exploring. When I returned, the tears that smudged her face looked dry.

“It must’ve been one of the hurricanes. I haven’t been out here in years.” Her tone was dry and impersonal again. “Just goes to show, sooner or later everything falls into the sea.”

“She didn’t give up on you,” I said.

“You don’t know that.”

“No.”

I was quiet a minute. Tried to see it all from her eyes. “Anyway, I walked around. You can climb down the embankment. It doesn’t look like there’s much current. Maybe a mile’s swim?”

She looked up at me. “A mile’s swim, in clothes, in winter, with a guitar. Then we still have to walk the rest of the way, dripping wet. You’re joking.”

“I’m not joking. I’m only trying to help.”

“There’s no way. Not now. Maybe when the water and the air are both warmer.”

She was probably right. She’d been right about everything else. I sat down next to her and looked at the twisted tower. I tried to imagine what Detroit or Pittsburgh was like now, if they were all twisted towers and broken bridges, or if newer, better communities had grown, like the one Bay had left.

“I’ve got a boat,” I said. “There’s no fuel but you have an oar on your wall. We can line it full of snacks when the weather is better, and come around the coast instead of over land.”

“If I don’t kill you before then. You talk an awful lot.”

“But I can play decent guitar,” I said. “And I found a crab once, so I’m not entirely useless.”

“Not entirely,” she said.

Inside the Music: Tell us what happened.

Gabby Robbins: I was nearly lost, out on the ocean, but somebody rescued me. It’s a different life, a smaller life. I’m writing again. People seem to like my new stuff.

Bay took a while getting to her feet. She slung her bag over her shoulder, and waited while Gabby picked up Deb’s guitar. She played as they walked back toward Bay’s cottage, some little riff Bay didn’t recognize. Bay made up her own words to it in her head, about how sooner or later everything falls into the sea, but some things crawl back out again and turn into something new.

THE ORANGERY ^{BONNIE JO STUFFLEBEAM}

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s fiction and poetry has appeared in over fifty magazines and anthologies both literary and speculative, including Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Fairy Tale Review, and numerous times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She has also been a finalist for Selected Short’s Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Award. Her audio fiction-jazz collaborative album, Strange Monsters, explored the theme of women living unconventional lives. She’s been reprinted in French and Polish, for numerous podcasts, and on io9. She created and coordinates the annual Art & Words Collaborative Show in Fort Worth, Texas.

I’d held my position as guardian of the Orangery for twenty years when our first intruder broke his way in through the stone wall.

I walked among the Orangery, watching for roots reaching up from the soil like begging hands. These trees I’d oblige with stream water poured from a basin of pure gold. Then I walked the path with my great pair of shears. From the words of my ancestors, I knew to hold the shears poised at my own heart as I went, so as not to frighten the trees and set them about producing their poison. If a tree wished to be trimmed, she would rattle her branches. I trimmed until she stopped her shaking.

After my rounds I paced the grounds thrice before retiring to my cottage beside the greenhouse to read stories I knew by heart. Little room in the Orangery meant the guardian’s library was limited. The books on my shelves I had chosen as a young woman: stories of adventure and romance, stories that left me with a pitted longing. They weren’t the books I would have chosen in my middle age. Still, I not only read them but ran my hands along their covers, rooting my fingers in their engraved spines and decorated binding. They’d been bound with the skin of beautiful people, the only skin I’d ever touched. Their pages were formed of delicate reed paper. I was lying back in my reading chair with one hand across the book spread against my chest and the other between my legs when I heard the trees’ startled shrieking.

I jumped to my feet and grabbed my spear from the mantle and ran from the cottage through the woods and along the wall until I found the place the intruder had entered: a large swath of stone wall, toppled since I’d last checked it. The wall had never before failed. I made note of the number of strides it had taken for me to reach it and then darted off through the woods, searching for the intruder.

I didn’t find him that night, though I searched until my legs throbbed and my eyes ached from squinting in the dark, for though the seasons didn’t touch the Orangery, night and day still folded the woods in their embrace. When my legs refused to carry me any longer, I rested against the wall, guarding the break from which I thought any intruder might, having realized the lack of treasures inside the Orangery, escape.

From here you see perhaps only a forest. But come, let’s step along the path through the woods, and I’ll show you. Do you see? Their shapes, the curve of their trunks? Some were of a flowering age when they changed. These show their differences more keenly: three knots, one for the breasts, two for the hips. No, no, there are no nipples. Trees reproduce by dropping seed.

This one is called Lotis. See there the bronze plaque half-buried in her trunk. She’s one of our oldest. Over the years she has swallowed her name, as though she wishes to forget that she ever held a form of skin-and-bone, of blood. Our books tell us that she enjoyed the drink, the drug, the dance. Our books tell us that she loved no man twice.

If you read your guidebooks, you’ll find a story of her transformation. You’ll find a warning: don’t eat of her flowers. The story is a lie. The warning, though, is true. She’s here surrounded by those who didn’t follow it. See their shapes, too: women, men, and children. They may look the same as our dear Lotis, but they do not flower. If you look closely, you’ll see that they are hollow. These are not trees but shells. Besides, the Lotis’ blooms are said to taste of your mother’s perfume, bitter to the tongue.

I’ll give you the real story, if you’re ready to hear it. If you prefer to follow your guidebooks, please move up along the trail. You’ll find plaques beneath, or inside, each of our Main Attractions. Those who wish to know the world for what it is, please leave your books in this basket here. Listen, then, to the story of Lotis, and follow me and truth along the path.

Rowdy girls are always the first to go. Some men think they can tame them. Lotis’ men thought this. She had them once and let them go, no matter how they begged her to marry them beneath the lotus tree in the center of town.

The farm boy was no different. He bred his father’s sheep, milked his father’s cows, and slaughtered his father’s pigs. He tended his mother’s apple orchard and harvested her vegetable garden. Lotis found his quaintness endearing when he asked her, with a dip from his waist, to dance. He wasn’t terrible to lay, but a rowdy girl only settles when she’s good and ready, and Lotis was not, no matter how sorely satisfied she was after their lengthy encounter.

She expected to see him again at the festivals. After all, his farmer father sold his pigs and wool there. Sometimes she bought a leg of tender lamb from his mother to line her empty stomach before coating her throat with wine. She didn’t expect to see him standing over her in the grass where she slept one morning after an uneventful evening of lackluster socials. She had gone to the field to take in the shock of sunrise, alone. He straddled her waist, stinking of pig shit. In the distance a donkey brayed five minutes too late.

She wrapped her hand around his ankle and dug her nails into the flesh until it bled. When he jerked his leg away, she struggled to her feet and ran across the grass, down the hill, to the center of town where Apollo played his music and mixed his potions.

“Give me a weapon,” she cried. “Priapus has tried to take me.”

Apollo looked up from the crafting of his new lyre and sneered. Everyone knew his story: a god on vacation in the world. An immortal who had fallen for the mundanities of mortals. Everyone knew, too, his magic. “I’ve seen you with Priapus,” he said.

“Please. He could be coming this way.”

“He’s told us all of his intention to marry you. Beneath the lotus tree.”

“I don’t want to marry him.”

“Why not? He’s good to his family. He’s handsome and healthy. He’s said to be good with his spear.” Apollo winked. “You’re running out of time.”

Lotis grabbed his wrist with both her hands and twisted the skin in opposite directions.

“Stop, that hurts,” said Apollo, too calmly.

“I won’t stop unless you help me.”

“Yes, fine.” Lotis let go. Apollo’s wrists bore the imprint of Lotis’ fingers. He uncorked three bottles and poured the contents into a golden bowl. “Drink this.”

She gulped the syrup down like wine. Her legs fused into a trunk. Her fingers split and split and split until they were fans of green leaves. Her eyes popped out of her tree-skull and bloomed into the beautiful white flowers of the lotus.

The townspeople were overjoyed at the appearance of another lotus under which to marry. They erected a statue of Priapus beside the tree.

I knew him first from his music, the haunting voice that came to me through the air. I followed it until I saw him leaning against one of the trees as though he hadn’t given chase all night and still possessed all the energy of a well-rested child. His fingers trespassed in a blur across the strings of his lyre. He’d draped his blue button-down over one shoulder, but his chest was bare. I approached, spear at the ready though I didn’t want to pierce him, for doing so would stop his singing, or at least change it irretrievably into a ghastly moan of death.

“Oh, guardian, guardian, where has she gone?” he sang. “I’ve journeyed long but my girl won’t come out to accept her song.”

“Who have you come for?” I said, pushing the spear’s point into his navel. He didn’t have to tell me his name; one of the books I’d brought with me to the Orangery told the tales of old gods and men and names I’d seen etched in our plaques at the bases of our named trees.

“You know who I’m here for.”

“I do not. As I understand it, you’ve had your fill of many women, perhaps half of our named. How am I supposed to tell from the stories which maiden you really had your heart set on?” I pushed until a drop of red blood dripped from the button hole; it traveled down the shaved trail and disappeared beneath the waist of his overalls. “Tell me her name and I’ll show you her resting place.”

“Daphne,” he whispered, boring his eyes into mine. He let the lyre fall to the ground. He grasped the point of the spear with both hands and pulled it further into his belly. “I’ll die before I leave without her.”

I’d dreamt of him as I had dreamt of all men who graced the reed pages in my books, deprived of the company of men for the whole of a life and feverous with curiosity. If only the spear were my hands digging into his flesh, I would pull his stomach out and make of his body a new book. Instead I pulled back my weapon.

“I’ll take you to her in the morning,” I said. “Until then you’ll go to my cabin and wait for me while I mend the mess you made in my wall.”

“I don’t want to be alone. I’ll go with you.”

“You’ll do no such thing. I know where your Daphne sleeps. Either you go to my cabin and wait until I come back for you, or you taste the point of my spear.”

“I don’t know the way,” he said, but already he bent to gather his lyre into his arms.

“Follow the path,” I said.

He hesitated then nodded and turned to follow the path. I watched him walk until I could no longer see him.

“Daphne,” I whispered. “Show me where you’re hidden.”

In the distance I heard her rustling. I walked the path until I came to a grove of stumps with a single laurel queening over the dead. Unlike Lotis, Daphne did not tempt with poison blossoms, but still those trees that dared to drink from her soil perished before her terrible beauty; her virgin innocence sucked too much sustenance. I touched my palm against the rough of her bark.

“It’s not a sin not to want the way other women want,” I said. Across my chest I could still feel the weight of a book against my skin. I thought of how she’d rejected the man whose skin surely felt as good, or better, than those long-dead books’ skins. “It’s okay to want, too.”

I removed the plaque submerged at her roots, prying it from the place where she had begun to wrap her wood around it. I traveled deeper into the trees until I found one of the nameless, a dwarf of a laurel. I placed the new plaque at her feet, kicking dirt over the name so that Apollo might think it had been there long before he had burst through my wall. I buried her original plaque ten strides from her base. I patched the wall as best I could with spit and stone and dirt until the evening returned and I could no longer see the hole for the darkness behind it. Then I followed the shelter path and found, in my bed, a naked man with both hands drawn beneath his head.

This space here, see, this empty hole where once roots reached deep into the soil, once held a tree with the wounds of a mother upon her bark: a scar near her roots where she tore between the legs. Dryope wasn’t like the first we saw. She loved only two men. The first, her husband, had already fathered her child when she stumbled upon Apollo with his lyre. Her husband was good to her; he cooked the meat he hunted, fed the child so that Dryope might claim a moment to sleep or weave or lay with Apollo in their secret glade.

An artist, Apollo had little to offer Dryope when his clothes cloaked his body, but when he removed them he offered her what she could not weave: a pair of eyes that didn’t know her in her worst moments. Astride him she was invincible and untouchable, though she did allow him to run his hands across the stretch marks that streaked her hips like constellations. Her husband named the marks; Apollo didn’t notice them. When he asked her to leave her husband, she refused.

“What good will that do me?” she said, gathering her clothes. It was time for her to return to her family in the hut they’d built upon land that was once the center of a bustling town, empty now of all but a lotus tree and a crumbling statue of a man with a cock that cast a shadow larger than the statue’s height. She and her husband mocked the statue when they were light with drink.

Each time she left Apollo, she told herself it was the last. Then his song called her across the river, and her husband would know the wild look in her eye. He would take the child from her breast and tell her, go, go. Disappear. We’ll be here when you return.

The night of her transformation she asked Apollo for a dance. He obliged. He wore the leather she’d brought for him, made by her mother. He allowed her to tie his hands with reeds. When the drizzle had ended, leaving only dew across the grass, she stood to leave but was pulled back into the dirt by an insistent hand.

“You’ll stay with me,” Apollo said, digging his nails into her wrist.

She wrenched her wrist away. Apollo grabbed her hands. She tried to leave, to roll away, to run, but he wrapped a reed around her wrist, around her feet.

“I’ll make you stay.”

She squeezed her eyes shut and waited for her life to end, for the devastation of losing control of her body, but she heard only the sound of feet sloshing through mud then nothing. When she opened her eyes, Apollo was gone.

When finally she broke the reeds and ran back to her family, she found her husband’s bags gathered, the baby strapped to his chest.

“You should have told me it was him,” he said. “I only ever wanted you to be happy.”

“I don’t want him,” she said. “He doesn’t know my constellations.”

But her husband no longer trusted the words from her mouth, too tainted were they with the spit of a god-man.

Dryope wove until her fingers bled. She sunk her fingers into the place her daughter had first glimpsed the world until she slept. She dreamt until Apollo came for her.

“I don’t want you here,” she said.

“I don’t want to be here. I brought you a gift.”

“What is it?”

“To ease your pain.”

“I don’t want anything you have to give.” She pulled a blade from her bedside table. “Leave.”

When he went, he left the vial beside the place from which she had pulled the blade.

Hours passed. Days drifted like wayward clouds. One month without her family made of her a waif without the will to hunt on her own. She had asked the gods for freedom and had been granted an excess. She had asked to be looked at and now faced the sorry stone gaze of each villager she passed any time she left her hut. No one helped her. No one spoke her name when she was there.

She drank the syrup. Her branches broke through the thatched roof of her hut. Her roots broke through the stone of the floor, sending cracks like lines drawn to indicate the dreamy shapes of constellations. For years no trees grew around her, until her name had been forgotten and her legend erased. We uncovered it, of course. We uncover all such legends and bring them here to the Orangery where they might live again.

And what of the roots, the empty hole? She did not die in her tree-form. No, she was cured. Yes, there is a cure, or was. There is one man who knew it. One man who brought it here, who thought to use it to fuel his own long-lost desire. But should we name it cure or curse? Who’s to say that the trees don’t prefer being trees, that the burden of womanhood is too much for some to bear?

You understand. I see the way you touch these trees. There is no coming back from it. There is no escape that erases all the memory from your bones, even when you no longer have bones, even when you no longer have memory. There and back again. I still feel his hands, burned like imprints in my skin.

To say I didn’t long for him would be a lie, for I ached deep in my belly to feel the prick of that spear. But it could have been any man, any skin so much like the skin of my books but warmer and softer to the touch.

“Come here.” Apollo beckoned with one long finger.

I stood beneath the cabin ceiling so low it brushed the top of my head. Cracks in the wall zigzagged like lightning bolts. The trees held this place together while tearing it apart. Through those cracks I glimpsed the limbs of trees poking through, more insistent than a single man’s finger.

“I will not,” I said, crossing my arms to cover my chest.

“Why not?” Apollo propped himself up on one bent arm. “The looks you’ve been giving me.”

I looked from crack to crack, tree to tree. “Aren’t you here for someone in particular?”

He raised a single eyebrow, a pirate villain, a lothario, a lion in man’s clothing. The books, at least, had prepared me for men like him, if my lack of contact with them hadn’t.

“You’ll take me to her? Even without my offering?”

“What else can I do? You’ve come all this way.”

He stood from the bed and slipped on his blue shirt, pulled on his overalls. Through his belt loop he wore a tiny ax. How had I failed to see it before?

“I didn’t come a long way,” he said. “Don’t think I’ve been missing her my whole life or anything. Had a job near here is all. Thought it’d be silly not to look her up, see how she’s been.”

“I think you’ll find her less than communicative about her life since you.” I gathered my shawl to cover as much of my body as I could, to protect against both the cold and the man. “What’s your work?” I held the door open for him to pass. He brushed against me as he exited the cabin.

“Lumberjack,” he said. “Well, I operate the lumber company.”

I stopped and gripped harder the knife at my hilt.

As he turned to me, the shadows fled from his face. “That’s not what I’m here for. It’s just another strange job for a strange life. To stay in the mortal world, one must play the mortal game.”

I loosened the grip but didn’t let go. “If you try to hurt her, I’m obligated to slice your throat open.”

The man smirked. “Specificity may be your strongest suit. I’ll keep your threat in mind.” He gestured at the long, dark path before us. “I don’t know the way.”

“Of course.” I stepped before him. I led us past the grove of Dante’s suicide trees, men who’d died for love or shame or the numb that gripped so many by the throat. This, too, I knew from books: men were also delicate, some with skin so thin you could tear it if you bit too hard. I longed to tell him of the treasured trees, to point to and tell her story so that she might be known again by someone more than me. It had been years since the Orangery had seen a tourist.

“There are so many,” he said as we passed a grove thick as the porridge congealed on my stove. “Why do you women fear men so much that you would rather be tree than give a kiss?”

“I am not a tree,” I said. The shadows reached across our path. I waited for them to recede before passing. “And I do not fear you.”

“Well, these women feared us. You can’t tell me they didn’t.”

“These are not all the changed women of the world. All forests are filled with them. You think of that next time you steady your ax. The women here are the lucky ones. The poorer women, women of lesser fame, aren’t so lucky.”

“We use saws now,” he said.

I eyed the ax.

“Just for show.” He ran his finger along the blade. “See? It’s dull.”

When we came to the grove where I had christened the new Daphne earlier that evening, I slowed. Would he sense the true Daphne out there, farther along the trail?

“Why have we stopped?” He squared his arms on his hips and glanced about us. “Is it safe to stop here?”

The trees mumbled. I worried that they might release their potent poison and kill us both, but these trees were older, less apt to react to human presence. Besides, the trees of the Orangery had grown fond of me, and I of them. My stomach turned at the thought of my betrayal: to lead such a dangerous creature into their midst. But he couldn’t harm them with me there, my hand against the hilt of my blade. My presence was the reason no rabbits bounded along the paths, no insects dared to feast upon the trees’ succulent leaves.

“Do you not sense her here?” I said. “We’re in her presence as we speak.”

Apollo the lumberjack looked madly about, as though his franticness might call her forward from the darkness rather than send her slithering back into it as frightened trees may do.

“No, no,” he said. “Which is she? It’s been so long.”

“Over there.” I pointed to the tree with Daphne’s plate at her roots.

“How little she has changed.” He wrapped his arms around the mislabeled tree, rubbed his cheek upon her, and caressed a low-hanging leaf. “She’s better than I remember her.”

“Yes, she has flourished here.”

“I never intended to take her,” he said. “But I wonder if she might be allowed to come if persuaded?”

“You may try, but you will fail.”

“Would you like to come with me?” he asked the tree. She didn’t speak in return. Likely the warmth of such a stranger did nothing to impress or provoke her. I wanted to laugh with the other trees whose branches began to rustle.

“They speak,” he said. “But she doesn’t.”

“She doesn’t.”

“What do they say?”

“We don’t love our strangers here,” I lied. “They ask when you will leave.”

“Daphne?” said Apollo. “Perhaps if I sing?” He sang three lines of an ancient song. The trees’ branches rustled faster, stronger.

“We best go now,” I said. “She’s given her answer.”

“She has said nothing!”

“Then you must accept that she’s forgotten you.”

“I won’t,” he said. He reached into his pocket and pulled from it a vial. I drew my blade and moved forward. But he had turned the vial upside down, the clear liquid already soaked into the dirt at her roots. I couldn’t kill him until I knew the consequence of his actions, and any possible remedy.

“What was that?” I asked, for it looked like the very syrup we kept locked away at the Orangery: the changing syrup.

“You know what it was,” he said, dropping the glass. “I thought perhaps a second dose would reverse it.”

“You know that’s not how it works.” I dropped my blade but pulled a rope from my deep pocket, the same rope I used sometimes to train the trees’ limbs, when they asked to be trained. “Your hands.” He obliged me this, allowed me to tie his hands behind his back.

“Worth a shot,” he said, his voice shaking. “I can’t go on living without her. I’ve spent all my life looking for her. You must understand what it is to have loved and to have such love taken from you.”

“Guardians of the Orangery do not love.” I picked up the blade, pressed it again into his flesh. “Walk.” I pushed him until he did so, led him back along the trail the way we had come. I didn’t expel him from the Orangery in case his syrup wasn’t as he had described it. In the morning I would lead him from the Orangery so he would never again find his way back.

I didn’t have that chance, for when I returned in the morning to the tree I found there a woman, naked and shivering in the dirt, her eyes still sealed with sleep. I didn’t know her by name, and I knew that upon awakening she wouldn’t be able to tell me. The women of the trees forgot their names when the bark encased them. Few ever remembered. I bent and brushed the long brown hair from her face. Her blue lips tremored.

“Are you alive?” I asked. She didn’t stir until I pressed my fingers to the pulse point at her neck, where a faint beating could be heard beneath the skin. “Apollo, what did you do?”

I carried her limp body in my arms back to the cabin. I fixed a bed of leaves and grass on the floor of the greenhouse and placed her upon it. I went inside my hut to Apollo, who slept on the hard dirt floor where I’d left him after checking his pockets for more of his poison. They were empty.

“What did you find out there?” he said, sitting up to face me. I’d left his hands tied behind his back.

“You know what I found,” I said. “Change her back.”

“I want to see her.”

I knew he would and wanted him to. Would he finally recognize that she was not the woman for whom he had come? I led him to the greenhouse and watched as his lips contorted with understanding.

“This is your doing, then,” he said.

“Change her back.”

He shrugged his broad shoulders. Though I had imagined the pressure of his lyre, the handle of his ax, looking upon him as he looked lustful upon even this stranger woman, I had nothing but contempt for him. To want a man was not to love him. To want a man was not to give in to him, either.

“I’m bored of you,” I said. “Change her back now or I’ll gut you.”

“You won’t,” he said. “Because then you won’t know where I came upon the syrup, or how to reverse it. Which I will tell you, of course, but I want to see her, the real Daphne. I want to kiss her goodbye.”

I shoved him back into my hut and locked the door so that he could not escape. I went into the greenhouse and looked upon the woman, barely breathing in the dirt. She, a woman of the woods, might know better than a Guardian what needed to be done. I breathed breath into her mouth, careful not to place my hands upon her skin. She fluttered to life, gasping and clawing at herself. Her breathing sounded like the rustling of leaves.

“What have you done to me?” She scurried into a corner behind a pot filled with herb seeds. “Take it off.” She scratched first at her cheeks then down her torso, her legs, until quick as the swing of an ax lines of blood trailed a map of fear down her body.

“Stop, stop.” I rushed to her, pried her hands from herself. There was no escaping skin, except by way of bark. But even then it was still trapped beneath, never gone, as easily accessed as by a syrup poured on the roots. No matter how deep they ran, they could be fooled in an instant. I held her hands too hard, fearful of cracking the fragile bones but more fearful that she might unravel herself on my watch, before I had a chance to know her, the only one of my watch that had ever changed back. For that, and even though it wasn’t her choice, I knew her to be strong. One can learn from strong women. “If you kill yourself, we won’t have a chance to speak. And I want to speak with you. I will help you, but please don’t leave me yet.”

She calmed, or at least her body stopped its thrashing, though now it leaked sap from its eyes, and I saw that the blood down her legs was not blood but a red thick as sap.

“What am I?” she said. “What have you made me?”

“I did nothing to you.” I let go her hands, which fell to her sides in the dirt. I tore strips from the frost covers that lay along the greenhouse shelves and went about wrapping her from her ankles up her legs. “There. You’ll bleed less. You won’t scratch beneath them, will you?”

“If not you, then how did I get like this?”

“You were like this once.” I squeezed her hand. It was limp in mine. “Do you remember?”

She shook her head, slow at first then more rapidly, until her hair swayed about her shoulders.

“Change me back.” She gripped my arm with all her returned strength. “I don’t want this.”

I fixed her a bed in the dirt and locked her within the greenhouse. “Block this door,” I told her. “And let no one but me through.”

I walked along the dirt paths until I came upon the true Daphne. I knelt at her roots. There were many reasons I was hesitant to allow the changed Dryope to use the last remaining syrup we had locked away: I didn’t want to use our only syrup, the only remnant of a time when women could change should they need to. I didn’t want to reach a time when I needed the syrup but couldn’t use it. I’d always imagined myself joining the Orangery in the end of my days, when another Guardian came to take over my post. And then, buried, another reason: a fascination I had with her, a loneliness I longed to discard, a desire to know the life of these women from the inside out.

Even for all that, I didn’t want, either, to bring the man to his victim, to allow him that which he desired. I’d give up the syrup, that much I knew. I would change her back because it was the right thing to do. That was what she desired, and to give in to the women of the woods was my one and only lot in life.

I laid my palm upon the ridges of her roots.

“You are safe,” I said. “I won’t bring him here.”

And here, my friends, we have our belle of the woods. Please remain calm. Don’t touch her, no. Don’t speak too loudly. Don’t speak her name. She’ll go if startled, though it will take you a moment to realize. You’ll look where there was tree and see only shadow. That’s the way of a virgin. Don’t hold hands in her presence. The chaste don’t approve of skin on skin.

She, friends, is called Daphne. No longer does she bear her plaque. We only know her by the scar, here, in her breast, where Apollo found her once again and, in his rage, tried to cut her down. The very same man, yes, from the stories. The very same man who burst in through these walls uninvited. I have told you what we do to uninvited guests. We did that to him. So do not touch.

Daphne hated Apollo straightaway upon meeting him, and who could blame her? Daphne the water girl had gone into the woods to fetch a jug for the young sporting kids in town, as was her daily task. She watched the children because she didn’t long for her own, because she was impartial enough to their begging mouths not to give in to every whim. She was walking along the path to the winding river that cut through her father’s vast swath of land when she came upon Apollo entwined with a woman upon the roots of my own tree. She saw them but passed without comment, for sex didn’t bother her but also didn’t interest her in any of its forms. She didn’t, like her mother, tend a garden. She didn’t, like her sister, lie with fools when she ran out of songs to sing.

On her way back up the trail, she found Apollo waiting for her, sprawled nude across the dirt like an egotist. The nameless naked woman was nowhere to be found.

“Beautiful girl,” said Apollo. “But so stern. What do you have to be upset about, stern girl? You know they say laughter is the best medicine. You’ll find me a funny, funny man.”

“Where’s that woman who was wrapped around you a moment ago?” Daphne searched the shadows, for she had heard of lover pairs tricking strangers into the woods. “I don’t have any money if that’s what you’re after.”

“Don’t you worry about her. She had elsewhere to be.” He rose and offered her an acorn in his palm. “I don’t want to take from you. I want to give.”

“I’m in need of nothing.” She shifted her water jug from one hip to the other. “Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

She hadn’t been taught to be a rude girl, but she needed a man’s excusing like she needed a knife in her eye, so she went on past him without awaiting his reply. He gave none, nor did he shout across the woods to her as she walked away.

Instead, the next day when she woke, she found he had penetrated the only weakness in her walls; her father at their breakfast table sat with the man, sharing the seeds of a pomegranate. Daphne’s typically still heart hammered with fear.

“What is he doing here?” she said, gathering her robe around herself. Never before had she felt the need to cover herself in her own kitchen. Never before had she felt the need to run and never look back. She stayed where she stood, however, and her father patted the seat beside him.

“This, Daphne, is the mighty Apollo.” He looked to the man. “Forgive her behavior the other evening. She is uninterested in the goings-on of our city and doesn’t know the faces of our heroes. That’s one of the reasons I love her so. She is her own world.”

“I don’t know the name Apollo.” Unwilling to be inconvenienced, she grabbed a handful of seeds from her father’s bowl and shoved them in her mouth. They stained her hands. She wiped the red down the front of her robe.

“Her own little world,” her father said again.

Apollo leered at the red where she’d left it. “Yes, I see that. I would still like to offer my hand.”

Daphne knew these words; she had known their time might come, though always she had hoped that her father would not ask this of her. She shook her head and backed into the hall.

“You haven’t, father,” she said.

Her father beamed. “Daphne, dear, aren’t you thrilled? The day all girls dream of.”

But he knew, didn’t he, that she was not most girls, that she hadn’t dreamt of it. She had thought she made it clear when, at night, she followed him outside to name the constellations instead of staying in with her mother and sister content to laugh over their baking and coo over the neighborhood children. She had thought it was clear when she didn’t attend the dances with her sisters but stayed home to help her father chop wood for their fire, when she asked him to teach her how to make a home all on one’s own. Never before had he mentioned a husband. Never before had he mentioned that she would one day have one.

She ran back to her room and escaped through her window. Her robe blew out behind her as she ran. She didn’t get far before they found her.

She was married in a private ceremony in their kitchen, where Apollo slipped a ring of wood around her finger. It left splinters in her skin when she tried to remove it. They didn’t sleep in the same bed, a courtesy Apollo said he would grant her for their first year of marriage.

“You will love me,” he said. “I’m sure of it.”

Each night he played one of his famous tunes on his lyre. Each night he replaced the names of other women with hers and sang of her beauty, and when that didn’t work he sang of her intelligence, then her kindness. But she was cold toward him.

The men in the local tavern laughed when she entered with Apollo, hand-in-hand, for he asked her each day if she would grant him the pleasure of her flesh, but her fingers laced in his were all she gave. The men at the bar elbowed Apollo for stories of the ice queen’s body. “Is her hair down there frosted?” they asked. “Does she make your cock cold?”

“We haven’t made love,” he told them, proud of this, his latest wickedness. “I haven’t touched a woman since we married.”

“What point is there to that, then?” said the men. “Ay, well, perhaps she needs another man to warm her up.”

Apollo fought the men and won his brawl. He was a brute, after all, even if he didn’t look it. They didn’t go back to the tavern. At home he grew impatient; he demanded that she bring him things to fill the void the lack of her body left: food, blankets, drink. Sometimes she did. Sometimes she didn’t. That she could still say no left her with the last vestige of hope she had in her gut. At night she repeated the word: no, no, no. In the morning she practiced saying it, to everyone, until eventually she no longer visited any family at all.

Like all women in her town, Daphne carried a particular syrup close to her breast. Like all women of her time and place, she had been given this concoction upon her thirteenth birthday. There are some fates, her mother said, better than growing up.

One year of marriage brought Daphne no more fondness for her husband. She felt no despair for her lack of love. Love was a frivolous thing, fine for others but wholly uninteresting to her. Sometimes, in her bed at night, as naïve as we all once were, she considered that her marriage to Apollo might not be the worst fate life could have given her. Other men might have demanded her care instead of her cooking. Other men might have bruised her bodily. Other men might have disallowed her the small pleasures of morning walks, evening sweets, the secret space of her own bedroom.

But he had promised her a year and only a year, and no matter how sweet his treacly song, he was a man of his word.

He came into her room without requesting permission. Daphne sat carving notches into the wood of the desk where she did her sketching; she drew the woods where once she had fetched water, to which she would no longer return for their bad luck. After all, it had been those woods that had brought her Apollo. He touched her face without asking, drawing one long nail along her chin. The point left a red almost-scratch behind. She wished it were a cut deep as death, for then she could hate him. The syrup itched her skin where it lay against it. He kissed her rigid mouth.

When his hands undid the first of her buttons, only then did she stand and go, running through the door of her once-secret-space of a bedroom and then through the front door of a house she hadn’t called home no matter how her husband insisted. Along the path she ran until she came to the woods’ threshold. As she went, she shed her clothes. A woman of the woods needed no clothes.

At the river she stopped. She closed her fist and pounded the tree where first she had seen Apollo and his lover entwined. Her knuckles bled when she pulled them away. She cradled the vial of syrup in her palm, the way we all did, the way you hold both a blessing and a curse.

“Go ahead and do it,” Apollo said, advancing toward her. His voice cracked under the strain of its want. “You all do it. Be like the rest of them. Leave me alone.”

Daphne knew that other women might comfort him. Other women might pull him close and pretend to love him to stop the flow of tears from his eyes. But men needed to cry the same as women. She wouldn’t comfort him like I tried to comfort him, those days we spent in the woods. She swallowed the syrup in one deep gulp.

Though I promised not to bring Apollo back to Daphne, I couldn’t control his desire to see her again. I turned and found him standing before me. In his arms Dryope the girl struggled to escape. He held the blade of his lumberjack’s ax to her throat. In her hands she held a vial of changing syrup, the very one I kept locked in the curio.

“If you let me take Daphne, I’ll let the girl go.”

“But your vial is empty.” I raised my hands in the air, conceded to victim-hood in the name of saving a girl’s life. “You have more?”

“I’ll take her wood,” he said.

“But she’ll die. She can’t change back if she’s dead.”

“She’ll be better that way. She’ll be mine that way.”

“And what do you intend to do with this other vial? The one you stole from me?”

“I’ll return it.” He grinned. “I brought that one for you. I know how failure makes a woman desperate.”

I tensed not from anger but from guilt. I didn’t want to give Apollo what he wanted, but it seemed I had little choice; Daphne couldn’t speak, couldn’t beg me to save her. Plus, if I let him go with what he wanted, I had a better chance of coming out alive. If I didn’t barter, if I gave nothing, he might kill the girl, kill me, kill Daphne: all of us. I was of a logical mind. Logic told me to take as few chances as possible. With the syrup, I could give the girl back the body she had chosen for herself, all those years ago. Without it, without the woman, we might all be no more than fodder for the swollen earth.

“You may have Daphne,” I said. “You have the word of a Guardian of the Orangery.”

Apollo let the woman loose. She ran to me, and I pried the syrup from her hands. Better to wait until Apollo had finished his deed. Better to wait until the monsters had gone before I let myself be alone once more.

He didn’t speak to Daphne but wrapped both hands tight around the handle of his ax the moment he was near enough. The woman beside me tensed and looked away. I didn’t look elsewhere. It was my burden to watch what I didn’t stop. In so many years, had the world not changed?

Apollo had claimed himself a lumberjack; what I knew of him, then, was that he, and others like him, had made a profession of hunting wood. And to what end? My hut was strong and warm and contained no wood of which to speak. Though the Orangery had not changed, the world had surely grown around it, Apollo evidence enough of that.

Apollo struck. I uncorked the syrup and advanced upon him. He struggled to yank the dulled ax from wood grown thick with time, one hand pushing against the bark while the other worked at freeing the ax. With my knife, I pinned his hand to the bark. I pulled his head back with his hair and poured the syrup down his throat. He didn’t struggle, shocked, I think, to taste a liquid so rancid on the tongue, the bitterest medicine there ever was.

He stumbled from Daphne, roots forming their armor around his feet then up his legs, encasing his cock, his torso, the arm that still held tight to its ax, his face, its mouth hanging wide as though to wish liquid out. His tree was no more gnarled, no less beautiful, than any others in the Orangery.

I left him unmarked.

Without the syrup, I could not help the girl pursue her highest of desires—to change back—but I taught her to read, to write, to care for the trees. The wind outside the Orangery whispered through the cracks in the hurried patching I’d completed for the wall. I’d looked too long at Apollo’s naked body. I knew enough to understand that it wasn’t the thrill of a monster that so intrigued me but the thrill plain and simple, and if within the Orangery’s walls the tides could turn, why could a Guardian not leave her post to pursue a life of which she’d only read?

I went to find a man worthy of my skin, to sate the curiosity of my body. I went to experience stories with a different ending than the trees’. Perhaps, I thought, the women of the wood would like to hear them. Perhaps it would call them forth once more.

And this one, you ask? He was no one: an admirer of Daphne. We don’t even celebrate his name.

I watched the guide return to the cabin that once was mine, so many years ago. The roof was gone, given way to the sky.

“What happens when it rains?” I asked, stepping out from the shadows.

At first, Dryope did not recognize me. I’d changed, that much was certain. I’d hated and loved. Outside these walls, there was so much love to go with the hate. After a breath, Dryope smiled. “You,” she said. She stepped into the light so that I saw her face weathered only slightly by age. “Were you here the whole time?”

“No, no, I heard your tour. I hid behind a woman and her daughter. I’ve gotten good at blending in.” I stood so that I, too, caught the light. Time had not been as kind to me, for I’d lived the kind of life some would be ashamed of. I’d known a hundred men, women too. I’d embraced Dionysus and explored other states of reality. I’d exhausted many of the world’s possibilities. I wasn’t ashamed. “I’m impressed with the amount of people on your tour. We never had so many. I did tell people about this place, in the hopes that you wouldn’t stay too lonely, but I suspect it’s your lively storytelling that’s drawing them in.”

“Thank you,” Dryope said.

I motioned up. “You didn’t answer my question, about the rain.”

“I like the rain,” she said.

“Ah.” I remembered, then, that before she became human again she had not lived under a roof for over a thousand years. It is strange the things you forget for an instant, as though you could make the world disappear by forgetting it. I smiled to myself; one of my lovers and I used to play that game, forgetting pieces of the world, seeing if we could make them stay gone. We never could. I tried to forget the horrible things that happened to Dryope. But how can you forget things you never knew? “So there has been no relief for you?” I meant the memory of bark, the memory of hands of which she spoke. “I thought you said you didn’t remember the skin. But in your tour—”

“I remember.” She pursed her lips, a human habit she must have picked up from those who visited the Orangery. “Sometimes I don’t know if they’re memories I’ve embellished, or if they’re true. But they feel true, when they come at me in nightmares. I never used to have nightmares, before…”

“I’m sorry.” I stepped forward. “May I?” I held out my palm. She nodded. I grasped her hand. “I’ve brought you something. I searched for them everywhere. I destroyed them all, except this one.” I slipped the vial into her palm. “For you, I thought an exception should be made. After all, I’ve learned that it is more painful to lose something than to never have known it at all. And I am responsible. I never should have led him to you, never should have offered you in Daphne’s place.”

She looked down at the vial. Then in one fluid motion she tossed it into the fire at the room’s center. The liquid poured into ash.

“Are you back for good?” she said. “Are you here to replace me?” She pursed her lips again. “I don’t want to go.”

I had intended, yes, to take back my old post. To free Dryope. After all, the Orangery needed someone, for once, who knew the world in all its shades of grey. Too long had the guides told terrible stories and known only the world’s terrible truths. Too long had we subjected the trees to their grief retold and nothing more. I had brought with me stories of light to soothe the dark.

But she had thrown the vial into the fire. It had been her choice to stay in her skin, and now it was her choice to remain in the Orangery. Why shouldn’t she? I could build a bed of leaves for myself, could even make a new cabin if she did not wish to share. As I had learned outside the Orangery walls, light came in many shapes, including the shape of a companion, a friend to hold your hand and quell your nightmare shaking. I would do this for her, if she wanted me to.

“No,” I said. “I’m here to join. Should you wish it.”

YOU’LL SURELY DROWN HERE IF YOU STAY ^{ALYSSA WONG}

Alyssa Wong lives in Chapel Hill, NC, and really, really likes crows. Her stories have won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story, the World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction, and the Locus Award for Best Novelette. She was a finalist for the 2016 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her fiction has been shortlisted for the Hugo Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her work has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Nightmare Magazine, Black Static, and Tor.com, among others. Alyssa can be found on Twitter as @crashwong.

When the desert finally lets you go, naked and stumbling, your body humming with raw power and the song of dead things coiled under your tongue, you find Marisol waiting for you at the edge of the bluffs. She’s dressed in long sleeves and a skirt over her boots, her black hair tucked under a hat and a blanket wrapped around her shoulders against the night cold. Madam Lettie’s bony horse whuffs at you in the glow of the lantern as you approach.

“You were gone longer than usual,” says Marisol. “I got worried.”

Human speech is always slow to return on the nights when the desert calls you. You nod in reply.

Marisol sets the lantern down and pulls off her blanket to wrap around you. Most girls her age would flinch away from touching a naked boy’s skin, but her fingers brush yours indifferently. She’s seen your body as many times as you’ve seen hers, in all of its pitiful states: bruised and scratched; bramble-bled from running through the thorns with the coyotes; finger-marked by rough hands. ”Did you step on any scorpions?”

You turn your head and spit a brown, dusty gob into the dirt. You hope she doesn’t notice the fur and tiny bone fragments caught in it. “Who do you take me for?”

A wan grin spreads across her face, and she almost looks like the kid she is—that you both are. “Check ’em anyway.”

You glance at Madam Lettie’s horse instead of at your battered bare feet. “She’ll be furious when she finds out that you took Belle.”

“She’s always furious,” says Marisol. She swings onto the horse, and the animal shivers as you climb up behind her. “Besides. She pretends otherwise, but she knows how you get home every night. She’s never raised a hand to me about it.”

“Good. If she does, tell me. I don’t want you to get in trouble.”

“Just hold the lantern,” says Marisol. She nudges Belle forward and the three of you turn toward the road leading to the Bisden mines. A few pinpricks of lamplight glimmer along the ridge from the town beyond, and the path snakes through the sand like a pale sidewinder.

The horse’s back rolls beneath you like dirt in a goldrusher’s pan, and you practice breathing. In, out, with the rhythm of the hooves and Marisol’s heartbeat.

“Some of the men from the big mining company out east visited the house while you were gone,” Marisol says. “The city folk who rode in on the California-bound train yesterday. They’re staying across the street.”

Oh. “Which did you have?” you say.

“The tall one. The one with dark brown hair and the Yankee accent. He speaks pretty enough, but he’s not… kind.” She shrugs. “But then, who is to a whore?”

You hold her tighter.

“One of them asked for you.”

“For me?” you say. No one notices you, not you, the small and half-feral boy kept in the back to clean the kitchen. Bless Madam Lettie’s heart for taking you in, you poor soul, with your dead witch-father and propensity to make discarded bones quiver and shake like living things. Poor souls, both.

“He looked like some kind of preacher. But there was something off about him.” She won’t look at you, not while she’s guiding the horse back to town, but when you press your face against the back of her neck, strands of hair tickling your cheek, you can feel her breathing relax. “I don’t know why, but he reminded me of you.”

“How so?”

“I’m not sure,” Marisol says. “But the city folk are planning to hold a party at Madam Lettie’s in a few days, so he’ll probably be back tomorrow with the rest. You can see for yourself then.”

You’ve witnessed a few parties at Madam Lettie’s, and mostly that means a rough night for Marisol and the rest of the girls at the brothel. Madam Lettie will probably have you attend the guests, too. Just thinking about it makes you wince.

The town is quiet, the sound of Belle’s hooves muffled against the sand. Madam Lettie’s is the only building with candles still burning in the windows, and the empty, boarded up buildings littering the stretch remind you of when the town was still lively, before the silver dried up, before the desert’s call grew too loud for you to ignore.

Marisol helps you up the stairs, past the bar, and together you stumble into her room. It stinks of sweat and musk, but probably no worse than you do. The two of you collapse into Marisol’s bed. It’s barely big enough for one person and your own cot is down the hall, but everything in your body aches, and Marisol feels so human against your bones. You need that right now.

“I saw my pa tonight,” you say into Marisol’s hair. Her dark braids smell like smoke, and you bury your face into them, just behind her ear. ”Walking among the brush with the rest of the dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t find your folks, though. I heard their voices, but I couldn’t dig a path deeper into the mine.” You’d torn your hands to pieces, ripped the skin and flesh down to the bone, and the desert had built you back out of sand and briars, then pushed you rudely away from the entrance to the collapsed mineshaft. The wandering skeletons of slain cattle and men had stopped their nighttime shambling to watch through ant-eaten eyes. Stay away from this, child.

She sucks in a breath. “If you found them, could you bring them back?”

You close your eyes. “No. Not like you want. I could make their bodies move, but it wouldn’t be real.”

She nods and holds your hand tight. It’s a conversation you’ve had a few times, ever since the desert started pulling you away from Madam Lettie’s every night and you started being able to coax dead things into dancing for you. This time, Marisol says, very softly, “Sometimes I wonder if that would be enough, just seeing them again.”

It wouldn’t, but you don’t need to tell her that. Her grip on your hand means that she knows.

One of the company men appears on the doorstep in the morning, black hair slicked away from his naked face, too young and too nervous to be standing in front of a saloon-turned-cathouse in broad daylight. Madam Lettie, who is lean and tough like rawhide, lets him in, and as they pace the ground floor and talk about plans for Saturday night, you and Marisol sneak peeks from behind the kitchen door.

“That’s not the preacher man, is it?” you say. Marisol shakes her head. She’s helping you with laundry today, and the filthy sheets bunch up between you, muffling the sounds of your bodies moving.

“I figured it out,” she says, “the preacher man’s strangeness. He walked like his feet didn’t touch the ground, and he stank. God, he was foul.”

“You’ve said the same about me,” you say. And it’s true; usually you’re so much dirt that you could grow plants in the creases of your arms and fingers, if the sullen clouds over Bisden ever gave water. But when she glances at you, there’s no humor in her eyes.

“Ellis, I’m telling you. That man reeked like a body left bloating in the sun at high noon. I never smelled something so bad in my life, even from across the room.”

The familiarity of it builds a sense of relief and dread in you. Almost every one of the customers Madam Lettie demanded you take had said something similar. They’d never lasted long; the last rancher who’d slipped his hands into your trousers had bitten your neck, then turned and vomited off the edge of the bed.

Lettie had kept his money and made you clean the floor, which you had done patiently, without complaint. By then it had become a system between you two, and you’ve seen and done worse beneath this roof. Though she cannot stop you from wandering the desert at night with the dead things, just as she could not stop your father before you, she can at least turn a profit off of your peculiarities.

The saloon doors swing open and a group of men walk in. The one at the front is immaculate and fair-skinned, like he’s never spent a day sweating under the sun. His pale blond hair is combed back in a smooth wave, and he walks with the easy confidence of a wealthy man. Behind him is the tallest man you’ve ever seen, a gaunt, bent figure in priest’s robes. A dizzying rush of power—the call of the desert, the urge to shed your clothes and run with the coyotes through the brush, to dig up the dead to dance with—hits you down to your bones.

The preacher man turns his head and looks straight at you, grinning past the bar with empty eyes.

Marisol grabs your hand so tight it hurts. “Stop that,” she says, quiet and sharp. “You’re doing it again.”

Harriet, the girl on kitchen duty today, is backing away from the sink, knife held high in shaking hands. The sound of bones rattling against metal fills your ears, and you turn to look; the chicken she’d been preparing for dinner staggers back to its feet, half-skinned, half-butchered. Its flesh hangs in open, swaying flaps. The discarded pile of plucked feathers begins to swirl around it like an obscene snowfall.

“Witchcraft,” Harriet whispers. She’s new; she’s never seen you do this before. The rest of the girls have some inkling of your strangeness; they cross themselves when they pass you, and they stay well away from you at night, when the dust in your skin begins to prickle with electrifying power.

“Stop that,” Marisol snaps, at her, at you, at both of you. “Ellis, breathe. Bring it down.”

You can feel each movement the dead chicken takes, your blood pounding in time with its footsteps.

“Ellis!”

You focus, breathe out, and force your fists to unclench. The chicken’s headless neck whips toward you, snakelike, its ragged circle of severed bone and muscle gleaming at you like a malevolent eye. Its toenails rasp against the sink. Calm down, you think, and it sways, sinking to its knees. Go back to sleep.

“What is going on here?” Madam Lettie demands from the kitchen door. Her body fills the entrance, arms outstretched and resting on the doorframe to keep anyone from coming in behind her. At her back are the company men, the pale one who looks like a prince and his nervous, dark-haired retainer. And the preacher man, gaunt and grinning. He nods at you the way a man would a lady, as if he’d just doffed his hat.

The desert’s voice screams through your body, an unfiltered torrent of power tearing at you like the most vicious of dust storms. Any control you have over the bird evaporates in its wake. The chicken launches itself from the sink—no feathers, no gravity, no sense but magic to keep it aloft—and flies at Madam Lettie, talons extended. She screams and beats it away. The company men behind her are shouting, and there is blood and meat everywhere. You barely hear Marisol yell your name before you’re out the back door, running blind and fast, back towards the bluffs. Come, the desert sings, come home my son, and you scarcely make it past the town’s border before your human form falls away and you are wild, uncontainable, raw, free.

Time passes differently for you when you aren’t human. Animals operate on cycles of eat-sleep-hide-stalk, and although you are not quite an animal like this, you’ve found that the land, which beats in your blood, operates on similar principles. Cycles of heat-burn-cool-dark, the wind blowing balefully over the baked, cracked earth. Now is heat-burn, and though the ground sears your feet, you barely notice.

Your father’s grave is marked by a pair of yucca trees, their straggly branches clawing toward the heavens. There is no tombstone. A cluster of scorched stones lie scattered at the feet of the trees, marred by some mysterious immolation, and the coyotes have taken to leaving small gifts of bones there as well.

You pace before the grave, listening for your mother’s voice. Her sighs are in the scuttle of desert rats in their hiding holes, the scratch-scratch of burrowing owls’ claws against the dirt as they run, stick-legged, chasing the shade. She’s called you here for a reason, you’re sure, but in this form you have no voice with which to answer her, and so you must wait.

Instead of the desert’s comforting murmur, the words of your father’s favorite lullaby trickle down around you, sung in a raspy human voice:

All of the animal bones lying on his grave begin to tremble, shivering and crying clack-clack clack. Dread bites you deep in the stomach, and you snarl with all of your mouths, the sand swirling at your feet.

The bones on the ground snap together into a single line pointing to the trunk of the biggest yucca. High above you perches the preacher man, contorted into a shape with his knees raised to his ears. His black clothing seems to glimmer in the heat, and the way his neck arcs makes him look like a giant vulture, begrudgingly fitted into human form. His shadow stretches long and thin across the ground like a single, accusing finger.

“I was the one who taught him that song, you know.” The preacher man blinks at you and smiles again. “A prayer to bring down the rain. And this town could use some resurrection, couldn’t it?”

The branch he’s sitting on doesn’t look strong enough to hold a man of his size, but that doesn’t bother the preacher man. In a blink, he’s gone from the tree, and in another blink, he’s standing over you, hunched shoulders blocking out the moonlight. The moon, you realize, is out, a pale sliver cutting the night sky.

Marisol is right. The preacher man smells like death.

“You truly are the spitting image of him,” he murmurs. “I suppose he was your father, wasn’t he. You have the same hair, the color of the clay deep in the earth. And the same talent for making sleeping things rise up when they shouldn’t.” The preacher man cocks his head, adjusting his wide-brimmed hat. “I taught him that, too. He was mine before he came to seek his fortune out west, with all the rest of his brothers. Before he turned his back on me for my sister.”

The desert hisses in you, and you can feel your body humming with her rage, her resentment, her regret. Coyotes slink out of the darkness to flank you, their eyes glinting like rough-cut gems. But the preacher man just laughs, his mouth too wide.

“Twice-blessed, twice-cursed. You got my gift, and hers.” The preacher man leans in, his dry, fetid breath ghosting across your face. “But I didn’t come out here just to scare you. There is a storm brewing, little one. Something bigger than you can understand, brought here by the men who came on the train.”

That gives the desert pause and she coils in you like a waiting snake. Your heart is beating so fast that if you were still human, you would worry about passing out. But before you can try to force words out, to ask him what he means, a voice rings across the plain.

“Ellis?”

There’s a small figure in the distance, one arm raised to shield their eyes. It’s Marisol, her bandana tied around her face, pulled over her nose to protect her from the dust. No horse this time; she must have run after you on foot.

No, no, you don’t want her to see you like this. Your dust storm kicks up into a twisting column, sending howling gusts to buffet her slight form. Marisol staggers back.

“Dammit, Ellis! Stop!” You can barely hear her over the storm, and the preacher man chuckles.

“What a loyal friend. But remember, child—bad things happen to men who marry the desert. Don’t forget what they did to your father, out on your mother’s territory, when they thought no one could see.” The preacher man touches your forehead with one long, thin hand, and his fingers are stiff and ice cold. “People fear what they don’t understand. That’s why, no matter what you choose, you will always end up alone.”

“Ellis!” Marisol is struggling, fighting her way through the blinding gale. When you glance back, the preacher man has vanished. “Ellis, please, get a hold of yourself!”

The power roars through your veins still, but with the preacher man gone, so is some of the intense pressure in your head. No, you think, tamping it down forcefully. If he is right, then this power is yours—a gift from your mother and from your father, to do with as you please. You will make it obey.

And for the first time in your life, for the first time since your father died and the desert began to cast its madness on you in his stead, you can feel your mother’s power bend to your will, into a shape you can control. You clench your fist, and the winds die down to a quiet whisper. At the same time, you search back through yourself for the human frame that feels familiar to you, a boy with a small, bony body and earth-dark skin. A shape to fit your own power into.

No sooner have you slipped back into your own body than Marisol’s arms are around you, clutching you tight. “Lord. I thought I’d lost you.”

You sag into her embrace, feeling drained but so full. You’ve never come back to yourself like this before, not until your mother was ready to let you go. “I thought so too,” you murmur against her cheek. “But I’m here. I’m not leaving.”

“Chrissakes, I’m always cleaning up your messes.” The bite in her voice makes you flinch, but her arms are gentle around you. Her footprints have been wiped away behind her, but even the wind can’t scour away the deep, sharp divots her heels carved out of the ground as she fought her way to you.

“I’m sorry,” you say. God, you love her so much. And not the way so many men desire women; you’ve never felt that, for anyone, in all your life. But Marisol has never touched you that way, and the warmth of her body here, now, is more than enough.

Still, the preacher man’s words ring in your ears. You will always end up alone.

“It’s all right.” She begins to tug you away, back toward the direction of the town. “I’m used to it by now.”

“Wait.” You hold her hand, and she looks back at you, her braids framed in the scant light. “Marisol… you saw me. Like that.”

“Yes.”

You suck in a breath. “Weren’t you scared?”

Her grip on your hand tightens. “I’ve seen worse.” And she has; you both have, from the cave-in that orphaned the both of you, in different ways, to the haunted look in her eyes as you help her tighten her corset strings every evening, her hand shaking as she unstoppers the tiny bottle of laudanum she keeps behind the vanity mirror.

But she has never seen you as desert-wild as you were tonight, a mad creature stripped down to the bone. And there is some comfort in knowing that she has witnessed you, and that she can still look at you without turning her face away.

“Let’s go back,” Marisol says, very gently. She doesn’t say home, and you’re grateful for that.

Madam Lettie’s hand cracks hard against your face. “Where have you been?” she hisses. You don’t answer her—she knows already where you’ve been, you smell like the coyotes and animal piss and dried blood—and she hits you again. “I told you not to run off like that. You shamed me in front of our guests, fleeing past them like some mad, filthy creature. Thank the Lord they still want to use the saloon on Saturday.” Lettie wipes her hand on her skirt like she’s touched the most disgusting thing she’s ever seen. You remember the times, when you were little and your father was still alive, when she used to touch your face with kind, gentle hands. When she held you because she wanted to, not because she had to. You remember the soft look in her eyes. You remember when she still used your name.

You think she might have loved you, once, before she learned to fear you.

“Now, now, Lettie.” She starts—it seems she hadn’t heard the two company men walk up behind her. It’s the pale, princely one and his nervous, dark-haired companion. You wonder, briefly, if the latter is the one who had spent that first night with Marisol. The princely man has a cultured accent; you can tell by the way Madam Lettie straightens her shoulders unconsciously when he speaks to her. “It’s quite all right. I don’t think we’ve had proper introductions, though.” He looks straight at you, not through you the way so many people do. “My name is William Lacombe. And your name is?”

Madam Lettie’s lips purse. “The girls call him Ellis.”

He barely looks at her. “Are you Ellis, then?”

“Yes,” you say, very quietly. The preacher man is not with them, and you can’t sense his presence any more. You’re not fool enough to think he’s gone, though.

William’s gaze travels to Marisol, who is standing silently behind you, and stops. “And the brave girl who ran out after our new friend. Who might you be?”

“Marisol,” she says. William reaches out and takes her hand; then he brings it to his lips and kisses the back of it. Madam Lettie’s expression goes sour enough to pickle a jar of vegetables. William’s companion’s brow tightens.

“Marisol.” He says her name the way the desert says yours, like the heat crackling across the rocks. Marisol. Heat crackles across your face, too, at the sound of it in his mouth. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance. Has Lettie told you why I’m here?”

“No, sir.” She withdraws her hand, uncertainty flickering through her eyes, and takes a step back. William only smiles and straightens up, looking from Marisol to you.

“Well, the Lacombe Mining Company owns the land that this town is built on. We developed the mine just outside the bluffs. It took a few months to hear of the tragic news of the collapsed shaft—so many good men were lost, and for that, I offer my deepest condolences.” His eyes look sad, and he holds his hat to his chest. This gesture makes you trust him exactly as much as you did before, if not less. “Of course, the vein of silver was blocked off as well. Samuel—my companion here—and I have been sent to evaluate the damages to the mine and draw up the appropriate compensation for the families of the lost miners.”

“When did the fits start?” Samuel says abruptly, staring at you. It seems he isn’t one for pleasantries. “The thing with the bones.”

“The boy’s done this since his father died.” Madam Lettie won’t even say his name, for all he’d adored her. You’d adored her too, then, even if she was your father’s second wife.

“Is he yours?”

“Heavens, no. He was his father’s child and came to me as such.”

William coughs and shoots Samuel a sharp glance. “We’ve never seen anything like this out east. Is this a common… phenomenon in your town?”

“I hear you burn your witches out east,” says Madam Lettie. You stare at the floor and try to disappear. The place where she slapped you aches, a sensation that won’t go away, and your heart feels like it’s been scratched deep by acacia thorns. “No, he’s the only one, since his father died. Small mercies. In spite of his bedevilments, I’ve kept him under my roof ever since.”

“I see.” A hand slips under your chin to tilt your face up, and you find yourself looking into William’s eyes. “Ellis, it seems you have a rare and unique gift. It may well be devils’ work, but I am a God-fearing man who has seen many things, and I have no fear of you. I would like you to accompany us to survey the mine tomorrow morning.”

“Sirs, that would be a terrible inconvenience—”

“We can compensate you for his time, of course.”

“He doesn’t have a horse,” says Madam Lettie. Her fists are knotted in her skirt, and there is something in her voice—a tinge of panic, perhaps—that reminds you of Marisol. It makes you think again. Maybe it’s your imagination, but you haven’t heard her talk about you like this since… well. “It’s a dangerous area, gentlemen. Surely you would be better served by taking some of the men displaced by the cave-in. They have their own firearms as well.”

“We have our own men. What we don’t have is someone who can talk to the dead.” Your breath catches in your throat. He had seen you, after all. Out of the corner of your vision, Marisol looks scared as well, her shoulders tense like she’s ready to grab you and run.

William releases your face. “We ride at dawn. Pack accordingly, Ellis.”

“You can’t take him.” To your surprise, it’s not Marisol who says this, but Madam Lettie, stepping between the two of you. “I won’t allow it.”

William turns a beautiful smile on her. “My dear Lettie, it isn’t a request.”

As he sweeps out the doors and into the night, Samuel stalking at his heels, you realize that William is humming something under his breath. It takes you a moment to recognize that it is your father’s song.

You leave the town on a borrowed horse as the sun begins to stretch over the horizon, Marisol’s stained red bandana wrapped around your throat. Marisol is up to see you off, her shawl wrapped around her to protect her from the cold night.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” she says as you ready your horse, her voice pitched low enough to carry to your ears alone. “If you see any of those walking things, gallop the hell out of there. These city folk be damned.”

She is so fierce, such a survivor, your Marisol. Each of you is the other’s only friend, and so much more. You open your mouth to tell her how you feel, but what comes out instead is, “The prince can’t take his eyes off of you. This could be your ticket out, Marisol.”

She kisses your cheek so she doesn’t have to look at your face, and that’s how you know that she knows, too. William, with his money and his fondness for her. With his life a cross-continental train ride away from this terrible, dying town, away from the saloons where tiny bottles are hidden behind mirrors and men with rough hands prowl the corridors, some new place where a person like you or Marisol could start over.

When Marisol pulls back, her dark curls tickling your cheek, her eyes are hard. “Don’t pin your hopes on dreams. Just get back to me in one piece, Ellis.”

You kiss her cheek and swing up onto the horse. “I will.” I won’t leave you alone.

“Come, boy,” orders Samuel. He and the rest of the company men are already mounted and ready to go, with William at the head of the party. All of them are cloaked in ponchos or jackets to ward off the sun, when it arrives. There is no sign of the preacher man.

Obedient, you follow, the coyotes howling in your head, your head down and hands tight on the reins. You don’t look back at Marisol, but you can feel her growing smaller and smaller in the distance, the distance of the land between you stretching with each new step.

The company men ride all day with little conversation, and the sun rises in a slow arc, glaring overhead like a malignant eye. It’s hard to stay on the horse; you don’t have much practice riding, and the horse is fidgety, as if it can smell the feralness on you.

After last night, your grip on your wild, brittle, real self is firmer, but being away from town and heading into the heartland of your mother’s territory slowly erodes your self-control. At Madam Lettie’s, you drift like a ghost through the halls, sweeping floors, cooking meals, disappearing into the shadows. But here, as the mountains cup the sky with deep brown hands, the call to bound away, howling, with the coyotes in the brush becomes almost unbearable. Your skin itches, as if your clothes are too tight, and you ache to be among the yucca and wild honeysuckle, the fields of bones where the mesas rise in strange bestial shapes from the flat ground.

The company men have few words for you, although Samuel keeps a distrustful eye on you, always placing himself between your horse and William’s. William, as gracious as he’d been in town, seems to have retreated into himself, watching the horizon silently.

The first of the dead things stumbles across your path when your party is a few miles away from the mine. It looks like the corpse of a bull, an unlucky casualty of a careless, ambitious rustler, judging by the bullet holes punched in its ragged hide. The men pull up short, and Samuel hauls your horse up to the front, your reins fisted in his hand. The bull stares at you both with ponderous, sightless eyes and paws the ground.

“Can you stop it?” demands Samuel. Behind him, the men murmur among themselves. Cursed and possessed and devil work catch your ears.

“I don’t know,” you murmur.

“You best figure it out fast,” says Samuel, and he’s right; the dead bull, mostly bones and empty skin, has thrown its head down, ready to charge. It has no lungs, no voice, and its silence is unnerving. “Guns aren’t going to help against something like that.”

You swallow and focus. The desert’s power curls in your palm, the way it had behaved for you the night before, but it feels jagged, uneven. Still, you hold out your hand. Stop.

The animal skeleton quivers and lifts its head tentatively. Then it takes a step toward you. Then another, and another, until it breaks into a gallop. The horses behind you begin to panic, and so do their riders.

“Kill it!” hisses Samuel. Sweat beads his dark brow. “Dammit, boy, you’re the only one who can put it down!”

“Ellis!” shouts William. “Do it!”

“I can’t!” you cry. Stop! Stop! But it’s not listening. You’ve never taken a dead thing apart before, only made them come together, and then only by accident. And then William is beside you, gripping your shoulder. Power spikes through you—

Shake, shake, silver and rain over me—

—and the desert, your mother, screams through you. Lightning strikes through your vision, and when you blink, gasping for breath, there are visible threads of power running through the undead animal, bright as silver. You close your fist and pull on those strings. STOP.

The bull stops in its tracks, frozen, only a few yards from you. And then it spasms and collapses into a heap of bones and sun-weathered skin.

There is a moment of utter stillness. And then William laughs, clapping you hard on the shoulder. Your concentration shatters, and you fight to keep your power, your human shape, contained. “Well done!”

Your head is full of the screams of dying cattle, your nose the acrid scent of gunpowder, and you sway on your horse, trying to hold on.

The rest of the men stay away from you, huddling together. Only Samuel rides up to you and William, reining his horse in as close as he can get.

“What were you thinking?” he snaps. But he’s not asking you, he’s asking William, who just grins. “You could have gotten yourself killed!”

You realize it then. He looks at William the way you look at Marisol. He looks at William like he would do anything for him, even die, unquestioning, for him, his name on his lips.

“It worked, Sam,” says William. He sounds giddy. “He took it apart. Did you see that?” He turns to you almost feverishly. “If he can wake the dead, why can’t he put them back to sleep? I knew it, I was right!” His hand is still on your shoulder, but you have the feeling that, as he stares into your face, he’s looking through you. “Ellis, you’re our chance to get to the mine safely. That’s why we need you.”

“One time isn’t a pattern,” says Samuel. “It’s not safe. And the boy looks like he’s about to fall over. Assuming this… witchcraft works again, how long can he keep this up?”

Witchcraft. You swallow past the knot in your throat as William and Samuel argue in low voices. Witchcraft is what got your father killed. His songs to bring down the rain and his nighttime journeys to visit your mother, to worship her on her soil.

People fear what they don’t understand.

A flask bumps your hand, and you find Samuel looking at you with dark eyes. Behind him, William has galloped to join the rest of the men, waving them in. “Drink,” Samuel says quietly. “You’re parched, aren’t you.”

You take his flask uncertainly. But the water is good, tinny and warm on your tongue.

“Can you get us to the mine?” he asks. He lets you drink as much as you want, and you appreciate that small kindness.

“I don’t know,” you say, staring at your hands. “I didn’t know I could make the dead… stop. Not until now.”

“You best learn.” Samuel stops you when you try to hand his flask back. “Once William makes up his fool mind about something, it’s impossible to change it. We’ll get to the mine or we’ll die trying.” He tilts his chin up at you. “I would prefer not to die. And I hope to deliver every one of our men safely home. That includes you.”

The sun beats down as he rides away, motioning to William. As you shade your eyes, clutching his canteen and squinting past the acacias in the direction of the mine, you can still taste gunpowder. And although you see nothing on the flat horizon beyond the mesas, you swear you can hear the preacher man’s soft chuckle rolling with the chollas across the sands.

The sky over the mine is as cloudless as it has been since the night your father was murdered. Dead men and animals pace the grounds in tattered skins; skeletal owls and sparrows perch on the broken wooden beams that used to frame the entrance to the mine, chattering their empty beaks. It smells worse than rancid, and your mother’s displeasure boils through you as too-hot power, the compulsion to slough off your skin, to turn around and flee into the brush and never come back.

But you do not leave. Instead, you hold your ground in front of the company of men and call the dead down, one by one, forcing them to their knees, then to their faces. Their deaths wash over you as you lay them to rest

stabbed eaten whole my mouth is so dry will I never see my children again suffocating bleeding broken neck teeth tearing at me I don’t want to die

and they go peacefully. You, though, do not; after only a few of these anti-resurrections, you’re shaking and howling and barely able to stay on your horse for it. The men watch fearfully from a distance, and the horse almost bucks you off before Samuel catches its head, whispering soothing words into its ear. The only other person who comes close is William, his hair glittering bright as a newly unearthed vein of silver.

“You can do it, Ellis,” William says in a low voice. Samuel watches you wordlessly, his hand at his hip, thumb resting on the handle of his pistol.

No one else has been able to come close to the mine in the three months since the collapse. You force the dead things into order, their wild disarray of energy into something malleable, and send them back into stillness.

hurts bleeding starving my mouth is so dry ripped to pieces I can’t feel my legs don’t let me die like this please lantern flickering out oh god someone save me

The miners’ voices flood your mind, and you scream, your vision darkening. You are underground, crushed and unable to move, your ribs splintering with the weight of immovable rock. Last thoughts flicker through your head: a woman’s face, a dog left tied to a post outside with no one to let it free, Marisol standing on the street in threadbare clothes, looking up at the sign for Madam Lettie’s establishment.

STOP.

And then the darkness is different, and so is the body you’re in; it is nighttime, and pinpricks of starlight shine through the burlap sack over your head. The rough bark of a yucca tree digs into your back, and your wrists are bound behind you. There are so many voices, some the same as the miners’. There is a sharp sound, like steel against rock, and then flame springs to being at your feet, licking at your legs. Bright red flames, and you think Lettie, and Ellis, and then there are no more thoughts, only pain.

STOP STOP STOP STOP

“Don’t shoot!” William shouts. Rough hands shove you, and the visions break, along with your grip on the dead things. You land hard in the red dirt. William dismounts and stands over you, an arm extended to shield you from the rest of the men.

Samuel’s pistol is cocked and pointed at your head. It’s not the only gun aimed at you among the company.

“You caught on fire,” Samuel says. His voice is bland, and there’s an indiscernible look on his face.

Your skin seems intact, no burn marks in sight. But you know what you felt, and for a moment, you know that you’d lost yourself to your father the way you’d lost yourself to your mother so many times before. “Are they gone?” you rasp.

“Not quite,” says William. Sweat sheens his face and his hair is disheveled as he pushes it back with his fingers.

Heaps of bones cover the ground, collapsed amidst the brittlebrush that crawls across the sand. Most of your mother’s handiwork destroyed, her curse unraveled, not gone. But there are still a few meandering about, gathered in front of the mine’s entrance. They don’t look like proper animals; they’ve been cobbled together from the large, abandoned bones of many different bodies, some human, some beast. By now, you feel much the same.

You’re so tired, and your limbs are trembling. You’ve pulled so much power into yourself that it aches. And the desert is not pleased; the searing heat of her anger boils in you, demanding the change, demanding you leave, demanding, demanding.

“Just a few more,” says William, reaching down to clasp your shoulder. As his skin touches yours, you flinch—that same explosive rush of energy hits you, the way it had in the kitchen, and with the first dead bull. But this time, the flashback of another death takes over your vision

Samuel, sweet, stupid Samuel, blood on his shirt, holding your hand, calling your name frantically, and the dry laughter of the preacher man, an offer you wouldn’t refuse even if you could. An offer of power, an image of the dead working the mines across the country, tireless, without pay, without complaint. And of you, watching the numbers tick upward in the newspapers. You laugh, too, with your last breath, and seal the preacher man’s deal with a trembling finger smeared in your own blood

and you stagger back.

“You can do it,” says William. Pale, immaculate, cold to the touch. He smells of expensive cologne, but under that, a sickly, fetid stink.

“So can you,” you say. He stills. “Can’t you.”

He blinks once, his eyes clear and colorless, and flicks a finger at the skeletons. They collapse in a rainfall of bones. “Good job, Ellis,” he says in a voice that carries to his men. But he’s not looking at them.

“Why did you need me?”

“This goddamn desert,” he says in a voice that is only for you. At the same time, he reaches for you, and you shrink back. “In the past few months, we’ve sent so many men to scout out the mines in this area. Not a single one who traveled south of the Rio de Lino and west of the Rio Grande made it back, even the ones who could bid the dead do their bidding. Devoured by this goddamn desert, torn apart by the coyotes, sent wandering in circles until they collapsed and died. But when I heard about your father’s death, and about you, it all clicked into place.”

The preacher man’s words echo back. He was mine before he came to seek his fortune out west, with all the rest of his brothers. Before he turned his back on me for my sister.

William smiles. “She has no love for men like us. But she wouldn’t dare hurt you. Not her own child, and his.” He hauls you to your feet, his grip tight on your arm. “Come, Ellis. Walk with me, and stay close. Let’s get a good look at the mine.” He gestures, and the rest of the men approach cautiously, treading among the fallen bodies, leaving a wide berth around you and occasionally making the sign against evil as they pass.

This man doesn’t care about the town. None of his pretty words to Madam Lettie about recompense, or about reopening the mine to reestablish commerce, matter. The town is just a field of bodies to use as he pleases. And he will use you, too. As a shield against your mother’s wrath, as a hostage to make the desert behave.

But his power is different from yours. He has only the preacher man’s blessing, and you have something else.

The desert change roars through you like a tide, a demand you can’t ignore to undo your skin and let your real self run free. This time, you embrace it.

COME, demands the desert, and you shatter, finally, fully.

One of the other men is the first to see what is happening to you, your skin peeling off in long slabs, shedding your human form for something uncontainable, something lightning-legged, bent-backed, and wild. All of the desert’s power you’d pulled into yourself courses through your limbs, back into the ground, silvered lines darting across the baked earth. All around, the piles of bones tremble and quiver, then rise slowly into the air, taking their forms once again.

“Monster!” he screams. Damn you, for there is only relief in your heart that he did not call you witch.

The desert rides you, and you are no longer your own. The winds kick up, blowing sheets of dust into the men’s faces. If your mother has her way, and you yours, you will bury them all here, deep in the mine, with the rest of the humans.

What about Marisol? a small part of you asks, but it is drowned out by your mother’s and your combined fury.

William has stumbled away, his hands out, and you can feel him fighting you for control of the dead. He’s much stronger than you, much more experienced. But your mother pours more power into you, and you fight back. The sandstorm grows, blinding the company men who are fumbling for their guns.

The desert’s dead are approaching when Samuel steps between you and William, his pistol leveled at you. There is fear, but his arm is steady.

“Samuel, no!” roars William, but there is no hesitation in Samuel’s eyes.

His pistol cracks, and you think of Marisol in that split second before impact, and then there is nothing.

The clack-clack clack of bones all around you. The preacher man’s voice is creaky, parched as he sings, his hands brushing over your stone-still chest. Another, familiar voice joins his, a woman’s voice like the whisper of scorpions’ legs through the bone fields, a gentle tickle laced with the promise of poison. The ground hums under you with your mother’s grief.

Your eyes are open, the evening sun glaring into your eyes, but you can’t blink. Every muscle is frozen in place, and it takes great effort to open your mouth.

“Am I dead?” you croak. You can’t feel your chest moving.

“Very,” says the preacher man. “But that’s nothing new.”

Slowly, you force your fingers to clench. “How long have I been… gone?”

“A few days. They tried to burn your body, but I wasn’t about to lose another like that.” His mouth twists into a parody of a smile. “When the flame wouldn’t take, they left you to the vultures.”

Fools, says your mother. The desert herself, the heat and mercilessness, wrapped like a vice around your heart. You wonder if you’ve been dead since the first night she called you into herself, that first time you gave up your body to become something more. As if I would let my creatures hurt you. Would that you could say the same of yours, brother.

The preacher man winces. It looks strange, with his empty sockets. “I indulged that boy too much. I thought I could keep him east, out of your territory. But his ambition overgrew his sense—”

He murdered my son!

“This child is my kin, too,” hisses the preacher man. “Don’t deny me that, sister. You’re the one who let them flee back to their town, with not a scratch on them to pay for their misdeeds.”

I would have those who harmed him pay accordingly.

“So would I. That may be the first matter we’ve agreed on in centuries.”

“Whose side are you on?” you say. The preacher man cocks his head.

“Mine. And yours, though you may not believe it.” He offers you his hand, and you take it, your body moving slowly. “I always was too fond of your father,” he says in a low voice. “And your mother never let me forget it.”

You wonder whose power is making this possible, his or your mother’s. You are hyperaware of the dead things around you, their potential energy, just as you are of all the creatures skittering and prowling the earth, and the ancient hum of the ground.

The preacher man leads you to the entrance of the mine, where boulders and broken beams cluster tight, blocking the way. “What do you see?”

You place your hands on the boulders and close your eyes, focusing. The lines of your mother’s power spread like a net through your mind’s eye. And far beneath, pockets of the dead, of fallen men.

It has been three months since your unforgiving mother, in her grief, took your father’s burnt body into her own and spat out every dead desert thing for miles around, sent them haunting the mine, the roads, until there was nowhere safe to go but down, down, down into the earth. And when the mineshaft collapsed, suffocating the miners in the tunnels, she still would not forgive, and held the rainclouds three months away from the town so that nothing would grow.

You open your eyes. “I see potential.”

The preacher man cackles, and even your mother gives a pleased crackle. I told you he was clever.

The men from out east, even William with all of his power, could not move the boulders on their own. They would be back with proper mining equipment, maybe even fancy machines from their waterside cities, but likely not for months.

You don’t need months. Not with the preacher man on one side of you and your mother all around, her presence like that of an oncoming monsoon.

“Lend me your power,” you say. For something this big, you’ll need more than what you have. More control, more finesse.

Pledge yourself to us. And we will pledge ourselves to you. Both of us. The preacher man nods.

You’re already dead, and you can’t go back like this, even if you wanted to. You have nothing to lose; nothing to lose except Marisol, and by now, surely news of your death has reached her. In dying, you have lost her, too.

You hold your hands out to both of them in assent. “Yes,” you say simply.

Your name in your mother’s voice is like the rush of the monsoon rains, water licking the parched ground, the promise of life and destruction at the same time. The preacher man leans in, places his dry forehead against yours, and breathes your name in a whisper that promises rest, peace, the passing of time in the cold, dark earth.

You hum, swaying. The preacher man unbuttons his coat and drapes it across your shoulders. His desiccated torso, open from sternum to belly, houses small, dark-furred fruit bats in its hollow. They hang upside down from the battered, broken ribs, their eyes glimmering at you like little embers.

“Shake, shake, yucca tree, rain and silver over me,” you sing softly. The purr of your mother’s power in you, her pleasure and approval, fills your hands. You see the pattern of the boulders, and you ease them free, one by one. They glide along the lines of your mother’s power, smooth as oil.

The miners come next, their broken, insect-eaten bodies beginning to stir. The preacher man hums along with you, his movements matching yours. “Stormclouds, gather in the sky, oh mockingbird and quail, fly.” With each insistent pull of your power, the miners stumble free into the dying light, into the empty air. You take each one in hand, and you focus, and the signs of death melt away. Their bodies are still cold, but the insect damage, the shattered limbs, are gone. You know, somehow, that this is only temporary and cannot last. But one night will be enough.

You think of Marisol and your cold chest tightens. It will have to be enough.

The movements of every desert creature buzz at the edge of your consciousness. The beating of owls’ wings as they stalk their prey, the soft-tailed mice that creep beyond the rocks to howl at the moon in voices like tiny wolves. The slow unfurling of saguaro blossoms, petals parting against the inquisitive noses of tiny bats. The snakes twining in their burrows, tongues flicking out to taste for moisture in the air. And your coyotes, padding to meet you, glittering finery stolen from dead men clutched tight in their mouths, finery that is just your size.

You let the rail-thin crows lift the preacher’s coat from your shoulders and shrug on the new jacket. It shimmers like moonlight. The desert creatures dress you as the coyotes pace, brushing against the preacher man and barking their devotion aloud. He smiles, knowing that devotion isn’t for him.

When you are clad in the glittering suit, as fine as any prince from Marisol’s books, a bird made of bones brings you a single honeysuckle blossom. You tuck the stem into a neat bullet hole in the jacket, right above at your chest.

“Come, then, my dear Ellis,” says the preacher man. “Don’t be late to your own party.”

Indeed, your mother says. She sounds almost pleased. Go show them a night they’ll never forget.

You grin, baring your teeth. Something almost like a horse trots up to you, its skeletal hooves clacking against the hard ground. As you swing atop it and turn towards the road, the miners begin to follow, not with slow and shambling steps, but with the pace of confident men. High above you, the beginnings of dark clouds slink across the sky, something unseen for months.

The moon rises high and sharp, like a glittering mouth, as you descend upon the town. Your mount tosses its head, and if it had any lungs, or anything else inside its ragged bones, it might have whickered.

Banjos and fiddles brighten the air in Madam Lettie’s saloon. The band stutters in confusion as you push the doors open, the dead men at your back. It is crowded inside, and as people take in the scene, gasps rise around you. Some gasps of fear, some gasps of joy at an apparent miracle. But you only have eyes for one person, and you stalk through the mass of townsfolk reaching for their loved ones, pushing them out of your way.

There she is, dancing with William amidst a circle of company men. He is immaculate once again, dressed in a fine-tailored suit. Her hair is done up, her corset laced (albeit clumsily; perhaps Harriet helped her in your stead), a smile painted on her face. You recognize the set of her jaw, the way she holds her mouth when she’s fighting back sorrow.

“Marisol,” you say, and her head snaps toward you, eyes widening. You pace towards her and she lets go of William, stepping to meet you. William doesn’t try to stop her. Even if you weren’t risen from the dead, you know he can see something new in your face, something as feral and bleak as the desert.

He backs away, fearful, and you offer Marisol your hand. “Dance with me,” you say in a voice like the wind whipping through a dead man’s bones.

“Ellis,” she breathes, and then she’s in your arms. Other cold, pale arms reach out behind you, grasping William tight; he yelps, but they yank him away and he’s swallowed by the crush of bodies in their best, ragtag finery. You catch sight of Samuel, but he, too, is pulled into the masses before he can reach you. Dance, you think viciously, and they will, clasped tight in desert magic, until their bodies are torn to pieces.

Marisol is the one who taught you how to dance, on the groaning floorboards of her tiny room, and you hold her close as you sway to the music. She smells like she always does in the evenings, like perfume and dust. She can’t take her eyes off of you, and you wonder what you look like to her, whether the glamor cast over the miners has lent you your old appearance back, or if you have been transformed into something wholly different.

“Let’s get out of here,” you whisper, and Marisol mouths Yes. Grasping her tight, you elbow your way through the crowd of people reuniting with their family members, their brothers, their husbands. Some have taken to dancing again, those lost to them clutched tight.

You glance over your shoulder for Madam Lettie, but she’s standing stock still, gaze locked on the figure of a man who had joined you halfway across the flats, rising from the shade of a pair of yucca trees. As he draws closer, Lettie’s face fills with impossible hope.

“Robert,” she sobs, dashing forward and holding him close. His hair is the same color as yours, red like the earth, veined with silver, and his skin is dark as the dust. He holds her gently, his arms around her waist. Whatever words they have for each other are swallowed by the sound of the band and the crush of bodies around them.

Marisol’s slipper is lost in the rush, but the two of you flee from the lights and whirling skirts into the dust outside, the starlight bearing down on you like a thousand icy stares. Her hand in yours is the warmest thing you’ve ever touched.

“Ellis, you crazy bastard. They told me you were dead.” She laughs, too wild, tinged with grief. “Why didn’t you come back sooner?”

You are silent, turning her hands over in yours. “They weren’t wrong,” you say at last.

“I don’t understand,” says Marisol, but you can see by the sinking hope in her eyes that she does.

“I did die.” She shakes her head vigorously. “I’m still dead, Marisol. But I couldn’t rest without saying goodbye to you.” It’s mostly true, and it will do for now.

“I’m sorry, Ellis.” She’s crying, and your heart sinks. Marisol rarely cries, and seeing her waste water on you is more than you can take. “I should have stopped them from taking you, I should have fought harder—”

“This isn’t your fault,” you say into her hair. “Not at all.” A gentle tug of your power, and your bone and brittlebrush horse trots up to meet you. You drape your glittering coat over its back to make a seat for Marisol as she watches, unable to keep the fear and awe from her face.

“I didn’t know you could do that.”

You smile crookedly. “There are a lot of new things about me now. Come, get on.”

She swings up on the mount and scoots forward, holding her hand out to help you up. But you don’t take it. Instead, you reach into your pocket and press her stained red bandanna into her palm. It’s heavy with coins taken from the bodies of the dead, enough to buy a one-way train ticket out east. You know; you counted it yourself.

“No,” she breathes.

“You need to let me go,” you say gently.

“I can’t.” She grabs for you; you step back out of her reach. “Ellis, no! Get on the goddamn horse! We’re in this together, or not at all!”

“I can’t go with you,” you say. “I wish I could. God, I wish I could. But I belong to the desert now. I can’t leave.”

“Then I won’t either.”

“Don’t be a fool,” you snap, and she recoils. “Marisol, one of us needs to escape this place. And I can’t any more.” You gentle your voice. “Please.”

In the end, you give her your boots to wear in place of her single slipper. Your dark, naked feet stand out against the sand, but whether the sand is bearable because of the nighttime cool or because you no longer feel the desert’s burn, you don’t know.

Marisol promises to buy a ticket, but she also promises to come back for you when she can. You hope she will forget the second promise, but you know her too well to believe it.

“I love you,” she says, her eyes hard. “That’s the only reason I’m leaving. For you, Ellis. If you forget everything else, don’t forget that.” She digs her heels into the horse’s sides and it gallops away, your coat glittering under her skirt as she rides east.

“Well done,” murmurs the preacher man. He stands behind you, his coat flapping in the growing wind.

Well done, echoes the desert.

“Keep her safe,” you murmur. “Both of you, until she passes out of your realms.”

We know you will, says your mother, and the preacher man nods in agreement.

You watch Marisol’s horse until she passes out of sight, but you can still feel each hoofbeat strike against the baked clay, a staccato at the edge of your consciousness. You flex your fingers and look over your shoulder at the saloon. The windows are bright, and the chatter and music leaks from the doorway.

Nothing is permanent, but maybe Marisol was right. Maybe seeing a miracle and the ones you love, even for just one night, for one last time, will be enough.

The desert hums in your throat, and the language of the dead things coats your teeth. Back, then, towards the bluffs and the mesas, to the wilds where the coyotes cry over the yucca and the bodies of fallen men. Your kingdom lies out there among the wide, desolate plains, waiting for you to lay claim to its whispering bones.

The rising sun sears long red marks into the cloudy sky, and behind, you can hear the dead dancing themselves into a frenzy, long-lost miners with their wives and friends held close, spinning inhuman wild, as if afraid a spell will break.

You straighten your borrowed shirt and begin walking. Overhead, the sky rumbles with the promise of rain.