The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection

PART ONE

Six weeks into her involuntary tenure on Faraday Station, Cynthia Feuerwerker needed a job. She could no longer afford to be choosy about it, either; her oxygen tax was due, and you didn’t have to be a medical doctor to understand the difficulties inherent in trying to breathe vacuum.

You didn’t have to be, but Cynthia was one. Or had been, until the allegations of malpractice and unlicensed experimentation began to catch up with her. As they had done, here at Faraday, six weeks ago. She supposed she was lucky that the crew of the boojum-ship Richard Trevithick had decided to put her off here, rather than just feeding her to their vessel—but she was having a hard time feeling the gratitude. For one thing, her medical skills had saved both the ship and several members of his crew in the wake of a pirate attack. For another, they’d confiscated her medical supplies before dumping her, and made sure the whole of the station knew the charges against her.

Which was a death sentence too, and a slower one that going down the throat of a boojum along with the rest of the trash.

So it was cold desperation that had driven Cynthia here, to the sharp side of this steel desk in a rented station office, staring into the face of a bald old Arkhamer whose jowls quivered with every word he spoke. His skin was so dark she could just about make out the patterns of tattoos against the pigment, black on black-brown.

“Your past doesn’t bother me, Doctor Feuerwerker,” he said. His sleeves were too short for his arms, so five centimeters of fleshy wrist protruded when he gestured. “I’ll be very plain with you. We have need of your skills, and there is no guarantee any of us will be returning from the task we need them for.”

Cynthia folded her hands over her knee. She had dropped a few credits on a public shower and a paper suit before the interview, but anybody could look at her haggard face and the bruises on her elbows and tell she’d been sleeping in maintenance corridors.

“You mentioned this was a salvage mission. I understand there may be competition. Pirates. Other dangers.”

“No to mention the social danger of taking up with an Arkhamer vessel.”

“If I stay here, I face the social danger of an airlock. I am a good doctor, Professor Wandrei. I wasn’t stripped of my license for any harm to a patient.”

“No-oo,” he agreed, drawing it out. She knew he must have her C.V. in his heads-up display. “But rather for seeking after forbidden knowledge.”

She shrugged and gestured around the rented office. “Galileo and Derleth and Chen sought forbidden knowledge, too. That got us this far.” Onto a creaky, leaky, Saturn-orbit station that stank of ammonia despite exterminators working double shifts to keep the toves down. She watched his eyes and decided to take a risk. “An Arkhamer Professor ought to be sympathetic to that.”

Wandrei’s lips were probably lush once, but years and exposure to the radiation that pierced inadequately shielded steelships had left them lined and dry. Despite that, and the jowls, and the droop of his eyelids, his homely face could still rearrange itself beautifully around a smile.

Cynthia waited long enough to be sure he wouldn’t speak before adding, “You know I don’t have any equipment.”

“We have some supplies. And the vessel we’re going to salvage is an ambulance ship, the Charles Dexter Ward. You should be able to procure everything you need aboard it. In my position as a senior officer of the Jarmulowicz Astronomica, I am prepared to offer you a full share of the realizations from the salvage expedition, as well as first claim on any medical goods or technology.”

Suspicion tickled Cynthia’s neck. “What else do you expect to find aboard an ambulance, Professor?”

“Data,” he said. “Research. The Jarmulowicz Astronomica is an archive ship.”

Next dicey question: “What happened to your ship’s surgeon?”

“Aneurysm,” he said. “She was terribly young, but it took her so fast—there was nothing anyone could do. She’d just risen from apprentice, and hadn’t yet taken one of her own. We’ll get another from a sister ship eventually—but there’s not another Arkhamer vessel at Faraday now, or within three days’ travel, and we’ll lose the salvage if we don’t act immediately.”

“How many shares in total?” A full share sounded good—until you found out the salvage rights were divided ten thousand ways.

“A full share is one percent,” he said.

No self-discipline in space could have kept Cynthia from rocking back in her chair—and self-discipline had never been her strong point. It was too much. This was a trap.

Even just one percent of the scrap rights of a ship like that would be enough to live on frugally for the rest of her days. With her pick of drugs and equipment—

This was a trap.

And a chance to practice medicine again. A chance to read the medical files of an Arkhamer archive ship.

She had thirteen hours to find a better offer, by the letter of the law. Then it was the Big Nothing, the breathsucker, and her eyes freezing in their tears. And there wasn’t a better offer, or she wouldn’t have been here in the first place.

“I’ll come.”

Wandrei gave her another of his beatific smiles. He slid a tablet across the rented desk. Cynthia pressed her thumb against it. A prick and a buzz, and her blood and print sealed the contract. “Get your things. You can meet us at Dock Six in thirty minutes.”

“I’ll come now,” she said.

“Oh,” he said. “One more thing—”

That creak as he stood was the spring of the trap’s jaw slamming shut. Cynthia had heard the like before. She sat and waited, prim and stiff.

“The Charles Dexter Ward?”

She nodded.

“It was a liveship.” He might have interpreted her silence as misunderstanding. “A boojum, I mean.”

“An ambulance ship and a liveship? We’re all going to die,” Cynthia said.

Wandrei smiled, standing, light on his feet in the partial gravity. “Everybody dies,” he said. “Better to die in knowledge than in ignorance.”

The sleek busy tug Veronica Lodge hauled the cumbersome, centuries-accreted monstrosity that was the Jarmulowicz Astronomica out of Saturn’s gravity well. Cynthia stood at one of the Arkhamer ship’s tiny fish-eye observation ports watching the vast misty curve of the pink-gray world beneath, hazy and serene, turning in the shadows of her moons and rings. Another steelship was putting off from Faraday Station simultaneously. She was much smaller and newer and cleaner than the Jarmulowicz Astronomica, which in turn was dwarfed by the boojums who flashed bioluminescent messages at each other around Saturn’s moons. The steelship looked like it was headed in-system, and for a moment, Cynthia wished she were on board, even knowing what would be waiting for her. The Richard Trevithick had not been not her first disaster.

She could not say, though, that she had been lured on board the Jarmulowicz Astronomica under false pretenses. The ship’s crew of scholars and their families badly needed a doctor. Uncharitably, Cynthia suspected that they needed specifically a non-Arkhamer doctor, who would keep her mind on her patients.

The lost doctor—Martha Patterson Snead had been her name, for she had come to the Jarmulowicz Astronomica from the Snead Mathematica—might have been a genius, but as the Jarmulowicz Astronomica said goodbye to the Veronica Lodge and started on her stately way toward the Charles Dexter Ward, Cynthia found herself treating a great number of chronic vitamin deficiencies and other things that a non-genius but conscientious doctor should have been able to keep on top of.

Cynthia’s patients were very polite and very grateful, but she couldn’t help being aware that they would have preferred a genius who let them die of scurvy.

Other than nutritional deficiencies, the various cancers of space, and prenatal care, the most common reason for Cynthia to see patients were the minor emergencies and industrial accidents inevitably suffered in lives spent aboard a geriatric steelship requiring constant maintenance and repair. She treated smashed fingers, sprained wrists, and quite a few minor decompression injuries. She was splinting the ankle of a steamfitter’s apprentice and undergraduate gas-giant meteorologist—many Arkhamers seemed to have two roles, one relating to ship’s maintenance and one relating to academic research—when the young man frowned at her and said, “You aren’t what I expected.”

She’d forgotten his name. She glanced at the chart; he was Jaime MacReady Burlingame, traded from the Burlingame Astrophysica Terce. He had about twenty Terran years and a shock of orange hair that would not lie down, nor observe anything resembling a part. “Because I’m not an Arkhamer?” she asked, probing the wrist joint to be sure it really was a sprain and not a cracked bone.

“Everybody knows you’re not one of us.” He twitched slightly.

She held him steady, and noted the place. But when she glanced at his face, she realized his distress was over having said something more revealing than he intended. She said, “Some people aren’t pleased about it?”

He looked away. She reached for the inflatable splint, hands gentle, and did not push. People told doctors things, if the doctors had the sense to keep quiet.

His pale, spotted fingers curled and uncurled. Finally, he answered, “Wandrei got in some trouble with the Faculty Senate, I hear. My advisor says Wandrei was high-handed, and he’s lucky he has tenure.”

Cynthia kept her head down, eyes on her work. Jaime sighed as she fitted the splint and its numbing, cooling agents began to take effect. “That should help bring the inflammation down,” she told him. But as Jaime thanked her and left, she wondered if she ought to be grateful to Wandrei or if she ought to consider him her patron.

But she wasn’t grateful—he had taken advantage of her desperation, which was not a matter for gratitude even if it had saved her life. And the Arkhamers didn’t seem to think in terms of patronage and clients. They talked about apprentices and advisors, and nobody expected Cynthia to be Wandrei’s apprentice.

She also noticed, as the days drew out into weeks, that nobody was approaching her about taking an apprentice of her own. She was just as glad, for she had no illusions about her own abilities as a teacher, and no idea how one person could go about imparting a medical school education from the ground up, but it made her feel acutely isolated—on a ship that was home to several hundred people—and she lay in her hammock during her sleep shift and worried about what would happen to the shy, solemn Arkhamer children when she was no longer on board. At other times, she reminded herself that the Jarmulowicz Astronomica was part of a network of Arkhamer ships, and—as Wandrei had said—they would acquire another doctor. They were probably in the middle of negotiating the swap or the lease or the marriage or whatever it was they did. But when she was supposed to be asleep, she worried.

They knew they were nearing the Charles Dexter Ward for days before he showed up on even the longest of the long-range scanners. The first sign was the cheshires, the tentacled creatures—so common on Arkhamer vessels—which patrolled the steelship’s cabins and corridors, hunting toves and similar trans-dimensional nuisances that might slip through the interstices in reality and cause a potentially deadly infestation. One reason Arkhamer ships were tolerated at stations like Faraday was because the cheshires would hunt station vermin just as heartily. Boojums took care of their own pest control.

Normally, the cheshires—dozens or hundreds of them, Cynthia never did get a good count—slept and hunted seemingly at random. One might spend hours crouched before the angle of two intersecting bulkheads, tendrils all focused intently on one seemingly random point, its soft body slowly cycling through an array of colors that could mean anything or nothing at all … only to get up and slink away after a half-day of stalking as if nothing had happened. Cynthia often had to shoo two or three out of her hammock at bunk time, and like station cats they often returned to steal body heat once she was asleep. But as the Jarmulowicz Astronomica began encountering the spacetime distortions that inevitably accompanied the violent death of a boojum, the ship’s cheshires became correspondingly agitated. They traveled in groups, and any time Cynthia encountered two sleeping, there was also one keeping watch … if a creature with sixteen eyes and no eyelids could be said to sleep. Cynthia tried not to speculate about their dreams.

The second sign was the knocking. Random, frantic banging, as if something outside the ship wanted to come in. It came at unpredictable intervals, and would sometimes be one jarring boom and sometimes go on for five minutes. It upset the cheshires even more; they couldn’t hear the headache-inducing noise, being deaf, but they could feel the vibrations. Every time Cynthia was woken in her sleep shift by that terrible knocking, she’d find at least one and usually more like three cheshires under her blankets with her, trying to hide their wedge-shaped heads between her arms and her body. She’d learned from her child patients, who lost their shy formality in talking about their playmates, how to pet the cheshires, how to use her voice in ways they could feel, and she would lie there in the dim green glow of the one working safety light and pet the trembling cheshires until she fell asleep again.

The knocking was followed by what the Arkhamers called pseudoghosts—one of them explained the phenomenon in excruciating detail while Cynthia cleaned and stitched a six-inch long gash on her forearm: not the spirits of the dead, but microbursts of previous and future time. “Or, rather, future probabilities, since the future has yet to be determined.”

“Of course,” Cynthia said. The girl’s name was Hester Ayabo Jarmulowicz; she was tall and skinny and iron-black, and she had laid her arm open trying to repair the damage done to an interior bulkhead by the percussive force of the knocking. “So the woman I almost ran into this morning before she vanished in a burst of static—was that Martha Patterson?”

“Probably,” Hester said. “Not very tall, wiry, freckled skin?”

“Yes. Keep your arm still, please.”

“That was Doctor Patterson. Before Doctor Patterson, we had Doctor Belafonte, so you may see him as well.”

“And your future doctors, whoever they may be?”

“Very likely,” Hester said.

Cynthia saw Dr. Patterson several times, and once an old man who had to be Dr. Belafonte, but the only future ghost she saw was herself—her hair longer, grayer, her clothes shabbier—standing beside the exam table with a scowl on her face that could have been used for spot-welding.

What frightened Cynthia most—aside from the nauseating, almost electric shock of walking into the medical bay and seeing herself—was the way that scowl had looked as if it had been carved into her face.

It made no sense. Why would she still be on the Jarmulowicz Astronomica? She didn’t want to stay, and the Arkhamers clearly didn’t want to keep her. But then she thought, in the middle of autoclaving her instruments, Wandrei trapped me once.

That was not a nice thought, and it brought others in its wake, about pitcher plants and the way they started digesting their prey before the unfortunate insects were dead, about the way her future self’s face had looked as if it were eroding around that scowl.

She schooled herself for being morbid and tried to focus on her patients and on her reading in the ship’s archives (Wandrei had at least kept his word about that), but she was very grateful, as well as surprised, when, a few days after their conversation about pseudoghosts, Hester Ayabo marched into the medical bay and announced, “Isolation is bad for human beings. I am going to eat lunch with you.”

Cynthia toggled off the display on the patient file she had been updating. “You are? I mean, thank you, but—”

“You can tell me about your studies,” Hester said, midway between an invitation and a command. She gave Cynthia a bright, uncertain, sidelong look—like a falcon, Cynthia thought, trying to make friends with a plow horse—and Cynthia laughed and got up and said, “Or you can tell me about yours.”

Which Hester was glad to do, volubly and at length. She was an astrobiologist—the same specialty as Wandrei, and Wandrei was in fact a member of her committee, which seemed to be a little like being a parent and a little like being a boss. Hester studied creatures like boojums and cheshires and the dreadful bandersnatches, creatures that had evolved in the cold and airless dark between the stars—or the cold and airless interstices of space-time. She was very excited by the chance to study the Charles Dexter Ward, and on their third lunch, Cynthia found the nerve to ask her, “Do you know how the Charles Dexter Ward died?”

Hester stopped in the middle of bringing a slice of hydroponically cultivated tomato to her mouth. “It is something of a mystery. But I can tell you what we do know.”

It was more than Wandrei had offered; Cynthia listened avidly.

As Wandrei had told her, the Charles Dexter Ward had been an ambulance ship—or, more accurately, a mobile hospital. He had been in service for more than ten solar, well known throughout the farther and darker reaches of the system. His captain was equally well-known for disregarding evidence of pirate status when taking patients on board; though there was no formal recognition of neutrality once you got past the sovereignty of Mars, the Charles Dexter Ward was one boojum that no pirate would attack. “Even the Mi-Go,” Hester said, “although no one knows why.”

Cynthia tried to hide the reflexive curl of her fingers, even though there had been no hint of special meaning in Hester’s tone. “What became of his crew?”

“Probably still aboard,” Hester said. “Possibly some are even alive. Although you can’t eat boojum. It’s not what we’d consider meat.”

“How did the Jarmulowicz Astronomica find out about him?”

“Another Arkhamer ship picked up a distress buoy. They couldn’t stop for her”—and Hester’s sly look told Cynthia that, friends or not (were they friends?) Hester would never tell an outsider why—“but they sent us a coded burst as closest relative. We may not beat other salvage attempts, even so. The beacon just said that the ship was moribund—no reason given. Possibly, the captain didn’t know, or if something happened to him, it might have been junior crew who sent the probe. And nobody tells us students much anyway.”

Cynthia nodded. She put her hand on her desk, about to lever herself to her feet, as Hester sucked down a length of tofu. “Huh,” Cynthia said. “Do boojums die of natural causes?”

Lips shining with broth, Hester cocked her head at her. “They have to die of something, I suppose. But our records don’t mention any that have.”

By the time they were within a hundred kilometers of the dead boojum, the banging and the manifestations were close to constant. Cynthia dodged her own shadow in Sick Bay almost reflexively, as she might a surgical nurse with whom she had established a practiced partnership. It was a waste of mental and physical energy—I could just walk through myself—but she couldn’t bring herself to stop.

Hester brought her cookies, dropping the plate between Cynthia and the work screen on which she was studying what schematics she could find of the Charles Dexter Ward—spotty—and his sister ships—wildly varying in architecture. Or growth patterns. Or whatever you called a boojum’s internal design.

“We’ll be there next watch,” Hester said. “You ought to rest.”

“It’s my work watch,” Cynthia said. The cookies were pale, crisp-soft, and fragrant with lemons and lavender. It was everything she could do to nibble one delicately, with evident pleasure, and save the others for later. Hester did not take one, though Cynthia offered.

She said, “I’ve another dozen in my locker. I like to bake on my rec watch. And you should rest: the President and the Faculty Senate have sent around a memo saying that everybody who is not on watch should be getting as much sleep as possible.”

Cynthia glanced guiltily at her wristpiece. She had a bad habit of forgetting she’d turned notifications off. Something like a giant’s fist thumped against the hull; she barely noticed. “I should be cramming boojum anatomy, is what I should be doing.”

Hester smiled at her, but did not laugh. “You’ve been studying it since we left Faraday. You have something to prove?”

“You know what I have to prove.” But she took a second cookie anyway, stared at it, and said, “Hester. If you only see one ghost … does that mean that there’s only one future?”

“An interesting question,” Hester said. “Temporal metadynamics aren’t really my field. It may mean there are futures in which there are no people in that place. It may mean that that one particular future is locked in, I guess.”

“Unavoidable?”

“Inescapable!” She grinned, plush lips a contrast to the wiry narrowness of her face and body. “I’m going to go take my mandated nap. If you have any sense you will too. You’re on the away team, you know.”

Cynthia’s startle broke the cookie in half. “Read the memo,” Hester advised, not unkindly. “And get some sleep while you can. There’s unlikely to be much time to rest once we reach the Charles Dexter Ward.”

PART TWO

The corpse of the Charles Dexter Ward hung ten degrees off the plane of the ecliptic, in a crevice of spacetime where it was very unlikely that anyone would just stumble across it. Cynthia had been called to the bridge for the first time in her tenure as ship’s surgeon aboard the Jarmulowicz Astronomica. She stood behind the President’s chair, wishing Professor Wandrei were somewhere in sight. She’d been too nervous to ask after his current whereabouts, but an overheard comment suggested he was at his instruments below. She, on the other hand, was watching the approach to the ruined liveship with her own eyes, on screens and through the biggest expanse of transparent crystal anywhere on the ship.

She rather wished she wasn’t.

The boojum was a streamlined shape tumbling gently in the midst of its own web of tentacles. Inertia twisted them in corkscrews as the boojum rotated grandly around its center of mass, drifting farther and farther from the solar system’s common plane. It was dark, no bioluminescence revealing the details of its lines. Only the sun’s rays gently cupping the curve of the hull gave it form and mass.

Around it, where Cynthia would expect to see the familiar patterns of stars burning in the icy void of the up-and-out, the Big Empty, the sky was shattered. A great mirrored lens, wrenched loose and broken into a thousand glittering shards, cast back crazy reflections of the Jarmulowicz Astronomica, the Charles Dexter Ward, and the steelship already moored to the dead boojum, a ship so scarred and dented that all that could be deciphered of its hull markings was the word CALICO. It was a small ship—it couldn’t boast more than a two- or three-man crew—and didn’t worry Cynthia. What did worry her were all those jagged bits of mirror, all those uncalculated angles of reflection. The very things a mirror like that was meant to blind would be drawn to this jostling chaos, and with the boojum dead, neither the Jarmulowicz Astronomica nor her competition had much in the way of defense—unless the stupid stories Cynthia had been hearing all her life were true and the Arkhamers had some sort of occult weaponry that nobody else knew about.

Unfortunately, she was pretty sure they didn’t.

“All right,” said the President, loudly enough to cut through the two or three muttered discussions taking place at various points on the bridge. “We have three immediate objectives. One, obviously, is the reason we’re here”—and she nodded at the derelict before them—“the second is salvaging and neutralizing that reflecting lens, and the third is making contact with the Calico over there. We need to see if we can come to a mutually beneficial agreement. Please talk to your departments. By no later than the top of the next shift, I want a roster of volunteers for EVA. I know some departments badly need the practice.” She glanced at an elderly Arkhamer Cynthia did not know; there was clearly a story there by the way the man blushed and stammered, but Cynthia doubted she’d ever hear it.

“What about the Calico?” a voice said from the doorway. It was Wandrei, and if he was in disgrace, he didn’t seem to mind.

“Professor Wandrei,” the President said coolly. “Are you volunteering?”

“Of course,” Wandrei said, smiling at her affably. “And since I imagine they’ve docked at the most useful point of—ah—ingress, may I suggest that you send the planned away team with me?”

There was a fraught silence. Cynthia stared fixedly at the nearest of the Charles Dexter Ward’s blank, glazed eyes and cursed herself for thirty-nine kinds of fool. Finally, the President said, “Thomas, you’re plotting something.”

“I pursue knowledge, Madam President,” said Wandrei, “as we all do. Or have you forgotten that I sat on your tenure committee?”

One of the junior scholars gasped. Cynthia did not look away from the boojum’s dead eye, but she could hear the smile in the President’s voice when she said, “Very well. Take Meredith and Hester and Dr. Feuerwerker, and go find out what the Calico is doing. And remember to report back!”

The Jarmulowicz Astronomica possessed two landing craft, a lumbering scow called the T.H. White and an incongruously sporty little skimmer called the Caitlin R. Kiernan. The skimmer seated four, if nobody was too fussy about his or her personal space, and Hester knew how to fly it—which meant, Wandrei said, herding his team toward the Caitlin R. Kiernan, that they didn’t need to wait for one of the two people on board who could fly the T.H. White.

The President was right, Cynthia thought, as she strapped herself in next to Meredith. Wandrei was plotting something. He was almost bouncing with eagerness, and there was a gleam in his eye that she did not like. But she couldn’t think of anything she could do about it from here.

Hester ran through her pre-flight checks without letting Wandrei hurry her. Meredith—a big blonde Valkyrie whose specialty was what she called boojum mathematics—apologized for crowding Cynthia with her shoulders and said, “Could you see a cause of death, Dr. Feuerwerker?”

“No,” Cynthia said. “He just looked dead to me. But I don’t know if I’d recognize a fatal wound on a boojum if I saw one.”

“It probably didn’t leave a visible mark,” Wandrei said from where he was riding shotgun. “So far as our research has discovered, there are only two ways to kill a boojum. One is to cut it literally to pieces—a tactic which backfires disastrously far more often than it succeeds—the other, to deliver a systemic shock powerful enough to disrupt all of the creature’s cardio and/or synaptic nodes at once.”

“That’s one mother of a shock,” Cynthia said, feeling unease claw its way a little deeper beneath her skin.

“Yes,” said Wandrei and did not elaborate.

Hester piloted the Caitlin R. Kiernan with more verve than Cynthia’s stomach found comfortable; she gripped her safety harness and swallowed hard, and Meredith said kindly, “Hester is one of the best young pilots we have.”

“When I was a child, I wanted to jump ship on Leng Station and become a mechanic,” Hester said cheerfully. “I tried a couple of times, but they always brought me back.” She piloted the Caitlin R. Kiernan in a low swooping arc across the Charles Dexter Ward’s forward tentacles, and they could see that Wandrei’s guess had been correct; the Calico had succeeded in prying open one of the Charles Dexter Ward’s airlocks, and the ship was moored partly within the boojum.

Cynthia hoped the Arkhamers had a better way in than that.

As it turned out, they didn’t. And Cynthia was unsettled to watch Meredith and Hester strap sidearms on over their pressure suits. Were they really expecting that much trouble from the crew of the Calico? And didn’t salvage law give her first picking? Or would the Arkhamers’ earlier intercept and beacon trump that?

Cynthia had never encountered a dead boojum before, and she had braced herself with the knowledge that there would be any number of things she wasn’t expecting. But no amount of bracing or foreknowledge could ever have been sufficient for the stench of the Charles Dexter Ward—a fetor so intense Cynthia would have sworn she could pick up the scent through her helmet, and before the airlock cycled. What that said about the spaceworthiness of the Caitlin R. Kiernan, Cynthia did not care to consider.

What the cycling outer airlock door revealed was more of a shock than it might have been if she hadn’t already been dragging her tongue across her teeth in a futile effort to scrape the stench of death away. The membranes between the struts were not glossy with health, appearing dull and tacky instead, but the amazing stink that left her lightheaded and pained even within the oxygenated confines of her helmet had led her to expect—well, what course did decay take, on a boojum? Writhing infestations? Deliquescence? Suppurating lesions?

There was none of that.

Just the ridged stretch of intact-seeming corridor disappearing into the curvature of the dead ship, and the reek of putrescence. Don’t throw up in your helmet, Cynthia told herself. That would be one sure way of making things even less pleasant.

The Charles Dexter Ward retained good atmospheric pressure—though Cynthia couldn’t have attested to the air quality—and she didn’t need to tongue on her suit intercom for Wandrei and the others to hear her when she said, “Isn’t anything we salvage from this mess going to be unusable due to contamination?”

Meredith said, “Anything sealed should be fine. And we wouldn’t want unsealed medical supplies anyway.”

“I can smell it through my suit.”

Wandrei looked at her with curious intensity. “Really?” he said, brow wrinkling behind his faceplate. “I don’t smell anything.”

“Maybe your suit has a bad filter,” Meredith said. “We do our best to check them, but, well.” She shrugged—a clumsy gesture, but Cynthia understood. When everything the Arkhamers owned, from their clothes to their ship, was second-hand, salvaged, scavenged, there was only so much they could do.

“That’s probably it,” she said, although she wasn’t sure—and from the look he gave her before he turned away, Wandrei wasn’t sure, either.

“Let’s see if we can’t find the crew of the Calico,” he said.

I am walking in a dead body, Cynthia said periodically to herself, but aside from the eye-blurring stench that no one else could smell, the only sign of death was the darkness. Every boojum Cynthia had ever traveled on had used its bioluminescence to illuminate any space its human crew and passengers were using. But the Charles Dexter Ward stayed dark.

They proceeded cautiously. Cynthia remembered Hester saying the crew of the Charles Dexter Ward might still be alive somewhere in their dead ship, and there was the nagging question of the Calico’s crew—a question that got naggier and naggier the farther they went without finding a single trace of them.

“We know they weren’t on their ship,” Hester muttered. “Corinne hailed them until she was hoarse.”

“And they haven’t been salvaging,” Meredith said. “None of the doors since the airlock has been forced open.”

“My question,” Cynthia said, “is how long they’ve been here. And if they aren’t salvaging, what are they doing?”

That was two questions, and actually she had a third: what did Wandrei know that she and Hester and Meredith didn’t? He didn’t seem worried, and she had noticed after a while that, although he wasn’t in a hurry, he did seem to know where he was going. She didn’t want to be the one to mention it, though. Not a good idea for the politely tolerated outsider.

“What else can you do on a dead boojum?” Hester demanded.

“Maybe,” Cynthia said after a moment. “Maybe they weren’t here for salvage in the first place. Maybe they needed a hospital. Not all doctors are as laissez-faire as Captain Diemschuller.”

“The Calico’s too small for piracy,” Meredith said, “but I agree with your general principle. If they aren’t here for salvage—how do we find the operating theaters?”

Her question went unanswered as they came to a corridor junction and caught sight of another human being.

He was in shirtsleeves rather than a pressure suit, wearing the uniform of the Interplanetary Ambulance Corps, dark blue with red piping and CDW embroidered on his sleeve. Across his chest were blazoned a row of symbols including a caduceus, a red crescent, and the Chinese ideogram for “heart.” Despite being distracted by the medical symbols, Cynthia knew there was something wrong with him several seconds before she was able to identify why she thought so. And the man—youngish and tall, his skin fishbelly pale in their floodlights—stood and stared at them, his face so perfectly blank that Cynthia finally realized that was the problem. No relief, no anger, no fear—not even curiosity.

“Hello!” she said, starting forward and forcing brightness into her voice as if she could compensate for his nullity. “I’m Dr. Feuerwerker with the Jarmulowicz Astronomica. Is your captain—” And then she was close enough to see him clearly, close enough to see that the shadow at his midsection was not a shadow but a hole, jagged-edged and gaping, where his stomach used to be, close enough to see the greenish tinge to his pale skin.

Her voice was thin and screechy in her own ears when she said, “He’s dead.”

“What?” said Hester

“He’s dead. He’s been dead for weeks.”

“But he’s standing up. A dead body couldn’t…” Hester’s voice dried up with a faint click as the dead man turned, giving them a good view of his disemboweled torso, and started walking down the hall away from them. His locomotion wasn’t perfect, but it was damn good for someone who’d probably been dead for three months.

Hester started to blaspheme, and Meredith ungently hushed her. This was not the place to be attracting that kind of attention.

“It might be a parasite,” Cynthia said, having run frantically through her knowledge of what could animate a corpse. “Something that got through a gap in spacetime when the Charles Dexter Ward died. We have to tell the Jarmulowicz Astronomica”—surprised, Cynthia realized her concern was not for herself, stuck here in the belly of a dead boojum, but for Jaime and the shy children and the cheshires Cynthia couldn’t count—“can we call them from here? How far back—”

“Calm yourself, Dr. Feuerwerker,” said Wandrei. “What you see is not the work of a parasite. It is the pursuit of knowledge.”

That brought her up short. She looked at him, calm and sweating behind the faceplate of his pressure suit, and swallowed against a curl of bright nausea. “You knew about this?”

The twitch at the corner of his lips was more disturbing than the dead man striding away from them. Hastily, Cynthia turned her attention forward again. There were medical-school stories of the horrors Arkhamer doctors got up to. Cynthia had never credited them, considering them part of the general anti-Arkhamer bigotry that permeated so many institutions of higher learning—and so many spacedock taverns.

Now she wondered if she had been too willing—in her conscientious open-mindedness—to assume there was no truth behind the slander. Ooh, ethics now, Dr. Feuerwerker? That’s a new look on you.

She stepped forward, following the dead man. Wandrei and the other women jogged to catch up, their pressure suits rustling with the sudden movement. As Wandrei fell back into stride beside Cynthia, she said, “So when did the Charles Dexter Ward sign on an Arkhamer doctor?” Wandrei remained silent, though she waited after each sentence before adding the next. “That’s what got the ship killed, isn’t it? That’s the real motive behind coming here.”

“Reanimation isn’t a topic we commonly pursue,” Wandrei said. “But if … if someone has made it work—think of the advance to human understanding. To medicine.”

“To shipping,” Meredith said.

“There are a number of applications,” Hester was beginning, when Cynthia almost-shouted, “Are you fucking nuts? Every scare story I’ve ever heard about raising the dead says that either dying or coming back drives people mad. Are you really suggesting—”

“Are you a scientist, Dr. Feuerwerker?” Wandrei asked. “Then I suggest you wait for the data.”

The walking cadaver did not move particularly fast. When she caught up to him, he turned to her, jaw moving. If he was trying to say something, the lack of lungs and diaphragm impeded the process. Upon closer inspection, he was a Major and a registered nurse. The name on his shirt pocket read Ngao. His eyes, dull and concave where the ship’s environment had begun dehydrating them, fastened on Cynthia’s face through the helmet.

His jaw worked again.

Was he conscious? she wondered, the chill running up her back so real that her head wrenched to one side. Did he know he was dead? Eviscerated? Did he ever try to touch his stomach and have his fingers brush his spine? She wanted to apologize, even though Major Ngao’s fate was none of her doing. But she, too, had sought after forbidden knowledge—not reanimation, at least the irony wasn’t that cruel. She’d muttered those same words about science and the pursuit of knowledge and told herself that Chen and Derleth would be pleased. That Galileo would be pleased.

Had it been a lie? She didn’t know. Chen and Derleth and Galileo had been dead for centuries. She couldn’t ask them—and even this lunatic on the Charles Dexter Ward couldn’t bring them back. She remembered her burning certainty that the truth was there, attainable and valuable beyond any price—and she remembered Captain Nwapa’s expression, too, that one flicker of horror before the captain got her game-face back. It took a lot to rattle a boojum captain, and Cynthia was not proud of the achievement.

Wandrei said crisply, “Take us to Dr. Fiorenzo,” before Cynthia could find any words that weren’t trite and false—and probably pointless, really, Dr. Feuerwerker, the man’s missing nine-tenths of his vital organs, do you think he has any attention to spare for you? And if nothing else, Cynthia thought grimly, now at least she had a name to hang the nightmare on.

The corridors of the Charles Dexter Ward were dark and silent as Cynthia followed the Arkhamers following the dead man. From time spent on the Richard Trevithick and other boojums, she knew a little about their internal architecture, and she’d done her best to stay oriented, so she was fairly sure that they were heading away from the rending plates and tearing diamond teeth of the Charles Dexter Ward’s mouth (and she couldn’t help wondering if his crew had called him Charlie, the same way the Richard Trevithick’s crew always referred to their boojum as Ricky—it was a stupid thought and wouldn’t be banished). The anatomy of boojums adhered to no principle that Terran mammals abided by, including bilateral symmetry, but if you were headed away from the mouth, you were probably headed toward the cloaca. And most ships’ systems were stuck as deep in the bulk of the boojum as the bioengineers could get them.

The Charles Dexter Ward being a hospital ship, there was not one specific area that Cynthia would have identified as the sickbay. Rather, she and the others had passed corridor after corridor of clinical chambers and wards, rooms that Cynthia was sure would have reeked of disinfectant and that eternal powdery medicinal smell were it not for the eye-watering putrescence overwhelming everything. They found the operating theaters, which looked as if they’d been the scenes of intense guerilla fighting, and Cynthia’s pace slowed automatically, trying to reconstruct what had happen, where the defenders had been, how the line of attack had run, whether that was all human blood in horrible sticky pools, or if some of it was other colors.

“Dr. Feuerwerker,” Meredith said, pointing, and she saw that farther down the corridor, in the direction that Major Ngao was plodding, uninterested in what might have been the site of his own death, there was, for the first time in hours, a gleam of light that they hadn’t brought with them from the Caitlin R. Kiernan.

And as they followed the dead man—he dripped, occasionally, an irregular trail of brownish fluid on the corridor floor—around the bend in the dead boojum’s corridor, Cynthia saw an open pressure hatch, a slice of light spilled across the floor, and a glimpse of one of the medical labs.

Within it, she could just make out some white-coated movement.

She followed Wandrei, she thought, because she had so little idea what else to do. This is how war crimes happen. People get overwhelmed and follow orders. If you were as brilliant as one of these Arkhamer doctors, you’d know what to do besides whatever Wandrei tells you.

And then she bit her lip inside the helmet and thought, If I were as brilliant as one of these Arkhamer doctors, the Richard Trevithick might be as dead as Charlie here.

That thought chilled whatever part of her the quietly guiding dead man had missed.

Something brushed Cynthia’s right glove, then grabbed it. Her throat closed with fright, and she turned as she tried to pull away, looking down to see what horrible thing had caught her. But it was a suit gauntlet, tight against her own, and when she looked up again, she met Hester’s gaze dimly, through two helmet bubbles glazed with the reflected light of the lab up ahead. She’d stopped, lost in thought. The idea of being left out here in the dark with the stars knew what made her heart jump like a ship’s rat in the claws of a cheshire.

She squeezed back and caught a flash of Hester’s teeth, bright against the darkness of her face. They moved forward together, though any comfort from the other woman’s presence was abrogated by a series of scraping sounds that Cynthia’s medical ear easily identified as metal on bone.

Five more steps brought them into the lab. Cynthia found herself fascinated by the way the light—clip-on work lighting trailing to batteries, and not biolume—caught on the scratches on Meredith’s and Wandrei’s pressure suits as they stepped out of the shadows of the corridor. She was avoiding looking past them, at whatever the lab contained, and their broad shoulders mercifully blocked most of the view.

Then Wandrei stepped to one side, to make room for her and Hester, and raised both hands to open the catches on his helmet. As he lifted it off, Cynthia had to fight the urge to reach out and slam it back into place—as if a standard, somewhat worn pressure suit was any protection in a situation like this.

Cynthia stayed on suit air anyway. It made her feel a little better, and she noticed Meredith and Hester were in no hurry to uncouple their helmets either.

“Dr. Fiorenzo,” Wandrei said pleasantly. “Allow my to introduce my colleagues. I take it you’ve had some success?”

“Limited,” Fiorenzo answered in a light contralto, turning from a dissection table upon which the twitching remains of something that couldn’t possibly still be alive were pinned. She did not seem at all surprised to see them—and that Wandrei apparently did not need to introduce himself. “I’m pleased you’re here. After the accident … Charlie dead and all the crew…”

Her face revealed grief, tension, relief. What would it be like, trapped alone parsecs off any shipping lane, inside an enormous dead creature slowly rotting around you?

The introductions were a scene of almost surreal cordiality. Fiorenzo was a narrow-shouldered, olive-skinned woman. Her face was smooth everywhere but at the corners of her eyes as she smiled, and she wasn’t old enough to be going salt-and-pepper yet, though what few strands of grey there were stood out like silver embroidery on black velvet against the darkness of her hair. She wore it in a pixyish crop, like a lot of practical-minded spacers.

I thought you’d be older, Cynthia didn’t say, in the hellish mundanity of pleasantries carried out while the relic of Major Ngao stood against the far bulkhead, arms folded across his chest, watching cloudy-eyed but seemingly intent, as if he were following the conversation. She was spared from having to shake hands because Fiorenzo was gloved, and she was spared from having to come up with something else to say when Fiorenzo paused at her name, frowned, and said, “Feuerwerker. They threw you off the Richard Trevithick just before—Damned shame. That was good research. It’s about time somebody found out what’s in one of those biosuspension canisters!”

Cynthia managed not to step back, rocked by a peculiar combination of the warmth of a fellow scientist’s regard and the horror of who, exactly, was praising her. Her jaw was still working on an answer when Fiorenzo continued, “Well, you’re welcome here now. We’ll find some things out, you and I! Maybe even a thing or two about the Mi-Go!”

“Thank you,” Cynthia said weakly. She let Fiorenzo, Meredith, and Wandrei step away. Hester crowded close and leaned their helmets together in order to whisper: “What did you do?”

“I thought everybody knew already.”

“Tell me anyway.”

Cynthia couldn’t quite figure out where to start. She was still fumbling when Hester broke and asked outright, “You were trying to reverse engineer a Mi-Go canister?”

“A vacant one,” Cynthia said in weak protest. “Not one with somebody inside.”

“Sweet breathsucker,” Hester said. “Haven’t you heard about what happened to the Lavinia Whateley?”

A boojum privateer. Vanished without a trace after pirating a cargo of the Mi-Go’s canisters of disembodied brains. Rumor was that all hands and even the ship herself had wound up disassembled and carted off to the outer reaches of the solar system, living brains forever locked in metal tins, going immortally mad.

Cynthia nodded tersely, lips thin. “I didn’t say it was a good idea.”

Hester looked like she wanted to say something else, but Wandrei called her over. Cynthia stayed where she was, not wanting to intrude on an Arkhamer conversation.

Although … was Fiorenzo an Arkhamer? Cynthia’d learned enough to recognize the names of the Arkhamer ships—all of them named for one of the nine which originally set out from Earth—and Fiorenzo wasn’t one of them. But Wandrei called her Doctor Fiorenzo, and she’d introduced herself the same way—Julia Filomela Fiorenzo. No “Jarmulowicz” or “Burlingame” or “Dubois.” So either she wasn’t a Arkhamer—whom the Arkhamers treated like an Arkhamer, and Cynthia wasn’t buying that for a second—or she was an Arkhamer and her ship had disowned her.

Well, gosh, Dr. Feuerwerker. I wonder why.

Her ship had disowned her, but Wandrei hadn’t—and Cynthia remembered the comments about Wandrei getting in trouble, remembered the President’s suspicions, and knew that, yes, Wandrei had brought them out here, not on a mission of mercy, but to check in on Fiorenzo’s experiments. Experiments which the rest of the Jarmulowicz Astronomica did not know about, or at least did not know were still on-going.

Sweet merciful Buddha of the Breathsucker, Cynthia thought and looked down to discover that she’d wandered over much closer than she’d meant to get to the dissection table where Fiorenzo had been working when they came in.

The creature on it had once been human. It should not still be alive.

Or possibly it wasn’t. She twisted her head, forcing her gaze away from the wet holes where the thing’s face had been, and found Major Ngao watching her. Watching? Staring at? Staring through? She had to squeeze her eyes shut and bite down hard on her lip to keep the bubble of hysteria from escaping, and when she opened her eyes again, she was staring down at the dead, twitching creature’s chest.

Where, under the blood, the words Free Ship Calico Jack were still, just barely, legible on the scraps of its uniform.

Cynthia stepped back, a big over-dramatic step that caught everyone’s attention, Fiorenzo’s voice dying in the middle of a sentence: “the bodies just aren’t fresh enough. I need—”

“Dr. Feuerwerker?” Wandrei said, with that nasty snide tone that every teacher in the universe used when they’d caught you not paying attention in class.

Cynthia opened her mouth, without the least idea what was going to come out—and more than half convinced it was going to be, There’s nothing to ensure freshness like harvesting them yourself, is there, Dr. Fiorenzo? But some remnant of self-preservation interfered, and what she said was:

“How did the Charles Dexter Ward die?”

“What?” Fiorenzo said; Wandrei was frowning. Cynthia repeated the question.

“Oh. There was … the mirror broke,” Fiorenzo said with a vague gesture. “And the doppelkinder came. They killed the crew and the ship.”

“How did you escape?” Meredith asked, wide-eyed.

“Luck, I think,” Fiorenzo said with a shrug that almost looked like a spasm, and a bitter laugh. “I was the pathologist, and I was in the morgue when it happened. I think they just couldn’t smell me. And you know they don’t last very long.”

Yes, like homicidal mayflies. They rarely lasted more than a few hours after they’d killed their primary host. Cynthia nodded and did not—did not—look at the dissection table. “And you’ve been here ever since?”

Fiorenzo offered a sad, slanted little smile. “There’s been nowhere I can go.”

Fiorenzo wanted, she said, to transfer her most promising experiments to the Jarmulowicz Astronomica. As she and Wandrei and Meredith started a discussion of how that might be accomplished, Hester caught Cynthia by the arm and dragged her grimly out into the hallway, still within the light of Fiorenzo’s rigged operating theater, but well out of earshot.

There Hester stopped and leaned into Cynthia’s helmet again. “She’s lying.”

“About what?” Cynthia said, her mind still stuck blankly on that poor twitching thing strapped down on Fiorenzo’s operating table.

“Doppelkinder can’t kill a boojum. They won’t even go after one. Boojums don’t recognize their own reflections.”

“Wait. What?”

“Doppelkinder hunt in mirrors,” Hester began with exaggerated patience.

“Not that,” Cynthia said. She’d been terrified of doppelkinder since her first Civil Defense class when she was five. “Boojums don’t see themselves in mirrors?”

“Two-dimensional representations don’t mean anything to them. Cheshires are the same way.” Hester managed a smile, although it wasn’t a very good one. “That’s why there’s that folk saying about how you can’t fool a cheshire. The most cunning optical illusion ever created won’t even make them twitch.”

“And doppelkinder are dependent on optical illusions,” Cynthia said, finally catching up to what Hester was trying to say.

“They don’t eat people’s eyes for the nutritional value.”

“Right. But if the doppelkinder didn’t kill the Charles Dexter Ward, what did?”

Hester folded her arms and gave Cynthia a flat obdurate stare. “I think she did.”

“Fiorenzo?” Cynthia spluttered a little, then caught herself and regrouped. “Not that I don’t believe she would do it in a heartbeat, but why? Why the boojum, I mean? And for the love of little fishy gods, how?”

Hester’s gaze dropped. “You were supposed to talk me out of it. It’s a crazy idea, and I know it’s because I’m jealous.”

“Jealous?”

“If Professor Wandrei had even once shown this kind of interest in my work…” She trailed off, her face twisting.

“I understand,” Cynthia said and dared to offer Hester’s shoulder a clumsy pat. “But, Hester, I don’t think you’re wrong. I’m pretty sure she killed the crew of that little scavenger ship.” And she told Hester about the uniform.

“We have to tell Professor Wandrei,” Hester said, taking a step back toward Fiorenzo’s little island of lunatic light.

This time it was Cynthia who caught hold of Hester’s arm. “Do you really think he doesn’t know?”

She hated herself a little for the sick expression on Hester’s face, the knowledge that she, Cynthia Feuerwerker, had just opened her mouth and killed something irreplaceable.

Hester said, barely whispering even though they were still helmet-to-helmet, “What should we do?”

Cynthia opened her mouth to say, What CAN we do? and all but physically choked on her own words. Because that was how war crimes happened. That was how you ended up a future-ghost on a Arkhamer ship with the lines of a scowl bitten so deep in your face you never really stopped frowning.

And Hester was watching her hopefully. Hester, knowing what she’d done, was still willing to believe that Cynthia would do the right thing.

Cynthia took a deep breath. “If she killed the Charles Dexter Ward, how did she do it? I mean, you and Wandrei said there were only two ways, and she clearly didn’t cut him to pieces, so…?”

“She must have rigged some kind of galvanic motor,” Hester said. “If she hooked it up to the UPS—and a hospital ship would have to have one, even a liveship—that would take care of the power requirements…”

Cynthia got a good look at the wideness of Hester’s eyes before she realized that here in the dark corridor, even with their helmets leaned up together, she shouldn’t have been able to make out the details of her friend’s expression. Hester stepped back slowly, her features revealed more plainly as Cynthia’s shadow no longer fell across her face. Cynthia forced her gaze to the right.

All along the passageway, bioluminescent runners were crawling with unexpected brilliance. Fiorenzo had reanimated the Charles Dexter Ward.

“Aw, shitballs,” Hester said.

PART THREE

Looking away from the light that showed the Charles Dexter Ward was no longer entirely dead was as hard as opening a rusted zipper. But Cynthia did it, and didn’t let herself look back. She pulled Hester a little further down the corridor and said, “Now we really need to know how she killed him. And whether it’ll work a second time.”

“It should,” Hester said. “Whatever force is animating him, a big enough shock should disrupt it. We just have to find her machine.”

“I like your use of the word ‘just.’ Something like that—would it be portable or not?” The Charles Dexter Ward’s bioluminescence was continuing to ripple and pulse in an arrhythmic not-quite-pattern that was like nothing Cynthia had ever see a boojum do before. It was already giving her the mother of all headaches, and if it was a reflection of the Charles Dexter Ward’s state of mind, then she couldn’t believe it was a good auspice.

“One that could kill a boojum? Definitely not.”

“So wherever she built it, that’s where it is. But how do we find it? It’s a boojum—how do we even look?”

“Um,” said Hester and tugged Cynthia another few steps away from Fiorenzo’s lab. “The closed stacks have a schematic. Professor Wandrei said not to share it with—”

“Outsiders,” Cynthia finished wearily, and Hester ducked her head like a reproved child. And of course the Arkhamers had a second, inner archive to which Cynthia had not been given access. It was their secrets that kept them alive and independent. “It’s okay. You don’t have to—”

“No, at this point it’s only stupid and self-destructive,” Hester said. “Here.”

Cynthia’s heads-up was filled with a spidery green constellation: the human-scale paths through the Charles Dexter Ward. She had only a moment to appreciate them before her pressure suit ballooned taut and a sudden sharp pressure in her ear canals distracted her. Reflexively, she opened her mouth and closed her eyes—every spacer knew and feared that sensation—but it was just a pressure fluctuation, not a hull breach. She closed her mouth again and blew until her ears popped.

When she opened her eyes, Hester was looking at her, head swaying in relief. “Good idea, staying suited.”

Cynthia took a tentative breath and gagged. The reek of putrescence that had poisoned every breath since she stepped through Charlie’s airlock was thick enough to taste now, and she wasted thirty seconds re-checking her perfectly functioning suit seals. “By Dodgson’s blessed camera,” she swore, then belatedly realized she didn’t know how Hester felt about taking sacred names in vain. “I think that took a year off my life.”

“So long as it’s just one,” Hester said. She ran a gloved hand up one of Charlie’s dead interior bulkheads, tracing the rippling patterns of necroluminescence. Her fingers found an indentation, and Cynthia could see her face screw up with disgust through the bubble of the helmet. When she pushed in, her glove vanished to the knuckles. Charlie’s flesh made a squelching sound.

Hester hooked and ripped; mucilaginous strings of meat stretched and rent. She tossed a panel to the deck; it rang like ceramic. Behind, a cavity lined with readouts and conduits lay revealed. Hester, wincing, reached for a small rack of what Cynthia recognized as wireless connectors. She tugged one loose, made a face, and—before Cynthia could decide that she really ought to stop her—slotted it into a jack on her suit.

“Hester—”

“Shush,” Hester said. “I spend enough time researching the damned things. A dead one shouldn’t bo—oh.”

“What?”

“Run.”

They ran. Suits rustling and rasping, booted feet thudding dully on the decking. Off to the left, something scurried. Cynthia’s head snapped around, but Hester put a hand on her arm and pulled.

“Tove,” she said.

Normally, you would never see a tove on a boojum, but Charlie’s death had strained the fabric of space-time, making inter-dimensional slippage easier, and a dead boojum could not eat its own parasites as was their usual habit. Cynthia thought about the shattered ward-mirror, intended to defend against nastier creatures than toves: doppelkinder, raths, and other predators. It worked because it reflected nothing but the Big Empty—even at dock, those warped enormous mirrors wouldn’t reflect on a human scale and thus could not be exploited by doppelkinder, just as they blinded raths. Mirrors were not standard equipment on all ships, but for a hospital ship like Charlie they were an extra line of safety. Charlie broke it dying, she guessed. Fiorenzo had invented the doppelkinder—who didn’t hunt boojums and who would never have left Major Ngao’s eyes intact—as an alibi.

Then she heard something else, not the scuttling of a tove, but a wetter sound, a bigger sound. She didn’t have the strength of will not to glance back, and there, barely illuminated by Charlie’s twitchy necroluminescence, she saw human silhouettes, a reaching arm with the remains of an Ambulance Corps uniform, the glare of an eyeball in a half-skinned face.

Hester swung through a hatchway, pulling Cynthia with her, and slammed the emergency plate located behind glass on the other side. A blast door dropped with decapitating force. If the Charles Dexter Ward were to be hulled, it was in the interests of crew and ship that pressure doors should guillotine any unfortunate they caught. It was a case of one life for many, and spacers learned not to stand in doorways.

“That won’t keep them for long,” Hester panted. “But we can stop for a second.”

Cynthia tried to slow her breathing, to get more use out of her canned air. “Where in the nine names of Hell did they come from?”

“Charlie opened a door,” Hester said.

Cynthia squinted, but that didn’t make what Hester was saying make any more sense. “I’m missing some context—”

Hester tapped Charlie’s connector, plugged into her opposite forearm jack. “I’ve got access to his logs, and I think … I think he didn’t like Fiorenzo killing his crew, because it’s pretty clear from the logs that she was. I think that’s why she electrocuted him. But the reanimated crew was killing the living crew, and she doesn’t seem to be able to control what she makes. So she lured them into a vacuum bay and sealed the door—”

But vacuum can’t kill things that are already dead.

“Charlie let his crew out,” Cynthia said.

Hester nodded, the boojum’s crawling green and violet necroluminescence rippling across her corneas and the bubble of her suit. “He can open any door I override. And they’re probably not very … safe. Anymore.”

“No,” Cynthia agreed. “Not safe.” Her throat hurt. She made herself stop swallowing and worked enough spit into her mouth to say, “We’d better keep moving. We have to find Fiorenzo’s device. Before her mistakes find us.”

PART FOUR

“She said she was in the morgue,” Cynthia muttered.

“What?” Hester said, distracted by shooting the rotting hand off their lead pursuer.

“Dr. Fiorenzo. She said when it happened, she was in the morgue. And she was the pathologist. If she was going to hide something anywhere, she’d hide it there.”

“I imagine you didn’t get too many people dropping in for a friendly chat,” Hester said. “So where’s the morgue from here?”

By the time Cynthia had enough breath to reply—running in a pressure suit was no picnic, and although Fiorenzo’s reanimated corpses weren’t very fast, they were undistractable and relentless—Hester had found the answer herself. “One up and two over. Okay then.”

Cynthia had spent time on a handful of boojums—as passenger, as crew, that last nasty week on the Richard Trevithick as a prisoner—and there was no standard system of orientation. Some boojums had no internal signposts at all; unless the captain gave you the schematic, you were dependent on a crew member to guide you around. The Charles Dexter Ward was probably the best and most thoughtfully labeled boojum Cynthia had ever seen, and even so it was essentially markers to help you plot your position on a gigantic imaginary three-dimensional graph, onto which Charlie only problematically mapped.

But it was better than nothing.

And it was better than being torn apart by these mindless, malevolent things that Fiorenzo had created out of what had once been men and women. And surely, Cynthia thought, remembering the row of symbols on Major Ngao’s uniform, the men and women who deserved it least. She had been appalled by Fiorenzo and afraid of her and a little (admit it, Cynthia) envious, but now she began to be truly angry. Not at the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, but at the wanton destructiveness.

“Up is good,” Hester panted beside her. “The ladder’ll take them longer.”

“I just wish it would stop them,” Cynthia said. “Or that anything would.” Thus far, though they’d kept ahead of the reanimated, they hadn’t managed to lose them—certainly not to stop them.

“Here,” Hester said. The ladder was stainless steel dulled with Charlie’s slow decomposition; Hester had to override the hatch at the top with Cynthia crammed against her lower legs to avoid the frustrated grabs of the reanimated beneath them.

Hester helped Cynthia through the hatch and they slammed it closed again. Then they took off running—two shambling scientists pursued by more shambling corpses than they could stop to count.

The morgue, when they found it, was long and low and cold—and all too obviously the right place. It crawled with the same decayed-looking light as the rest of the Charles Dexter Ward, but here that light limned empty body bags and open lockers. Cynthia was careful to close and dog the door behind them before they proceeded down the length. Her skin crawled at the idea of locking herself in here, blocking her own route of escape … but what waited outside was worse. They’d managed to leave the reanimated behind, but Cynthia had no confidence that that would last.

They came around a corner to find Doctor Fiorenzo crouched behind an autopsy table, huddling with Professor Wandrei over a gaping hole in the decking. The ragged, ichorous edges framed something that looked like an exposed boojum neural cluster. The former Major Ngao was silently handing Fiorenzo tools. Fiorenzo had a veterinary syringe in her hand, a medieval-looking device with a needle easily four inches long. It was filled with some colorless fluid. Cynthia could make out two more empties on the floor.

Meredith … Cynthia didn’t have to get close to see the lines of black stitchery holding the crushed edges of her neck together. Her head lolled to one side, tongue drooping from her slack mouth, and her eyes were half-lidded and beginning to glaze.

Cynthia wondered how Fiorenzo had arranged to have one of the pressure doors catch Meredith, and how long it would be before she got around to Wandrei. And how he could be so blind as not to see that he would be Fiorenzo’s next experiment.

Hester raised and aimed her pistol. Wandrei must have glanced up just then, because he made a warning sound.

Fiorenzo rose to her feet and turned. Light shivered along the needle of the syringe as she lowered it to a non-threatening position beside her thigh.

The thing that had been Meredith took a shuffling step closer and Cynthia hid her cringe. For a moment, Cynthia waited, searching for words. Wondering why Hester hadn’t pulled the trigger.

“Doctor Feuerwerker—” Wandrei began.

Somehow, Cynthia silenced him with a glance. It must have been scathing; even her eyes felt scorched by it.

Fiorenzo’s eyes met Cynthia’s. “You’re a doctor. A researcher. You should understand!”

“I understand that you’re a mass-murderer, and you’re putting everyone in this sector of space at risk. Your monsters—your victims—aren’t far behind us. What are you going to do when Charlie lets them in here?”

“I’m getting close!”

“No, you’re not.” Cynthia waved a little wildly at Major Ngao. “Maybe you’ve made him not-dead, but you haven’t made him alive. You can’t. You can’t make Meredith alive and you can’t make that poor bastard off the Calico alive. You can animate the meat, but that’s not the same thing and you know it. This boojum isn’t alive. What it is, is wrong.”

The Charles Dexter Ward shuddered beneath their feet, as if in agreement. Cynthia lurched into Hester, Wandrei and the two dead people went down, and even Fiorenzo had to grab at a safety-bar to keep her feet. Cynthia was reaching for Hester’s arm, to lift her sidearm back on target—

Fiorenzo slammed the syringe with which she had been about to inject the Charles Dexter Ward through lab coat and trousers and into her own thigh.

Cynthia stared, disbelieving. Fiorenzo straightened, smiling, and was starting to say something when she seized, crashing to the deck as stiff and solid as a bar of iron. Cynthia said over her to Wandrei, “We have to stop this.”

“Science, Dr. Feuerwerker,” Wandrei began, and Cynthia shouted, “Science schmience!” which startled him into shutting up.

Cynthia was a little startled herself, but she plunged on while she had the initiative, “Fiorenzo’s leavings out there aren’t science. They’re walking nuclear waste. And what she did to Meredith is murder.”

“That was an accident,” Wandrei said.

Hester made a bitter noise that wasn’t a laugh. “Do you really believe that?”

Wandrei didn’t answer her. He said, “Dr. Fiorenzo has achieved a remarkable—” and that was when he made the mistake of letting Meredith get too close.

Cynthia and Hester had not stopped to ponder the intentions of their reanimated pursuers, not with Charlie’s stuttering necroluminescence all around them and the carnage everywhere they looked. But if they had wondered, any last niggling doubt would have been unequivocally dispelled.

Meredith tore Wandrei to pieces, starting with his mandible.

Hester screamed; so did Wandrei, for a while. By the Queen of Hearts, is that his endocardium? Cynthia dragged Hester back, both of them sprayed with Wandrei’s blood like stationer graffiti, and said, her voice low and frantic, “We have to find the machine. Now. While the door’s still closed and Meredith is … distracted.”

Hester’s gulp might have been a sob or a hysterical laugh, but she nodded.

They looked around, trying to ignore the gory welter in the center of the room. There wasn’t much there beyond dissection tables and refrigeration units. A microscope locked down on a stand, a centrifuge …

“Why would you have so many refrigeration units when the universe’s biggest refrigerator is right outside your door?” Cynthia muttered. “One, sure, for samples and emergencies, but…”

They skirted the edges of the room, both keeping an uneasy eye on their roommate, but Meredith seemed to have forgotten about them, which was all to the good. The first refrigerator unit was just that, a nice Tohiro-Nikkonen that now needed very badly to be cleaned out. The second was a jury-rigged something—from the look on Hester’s face, she had no more idea than Cynthia did. But next to that, back in the corner where it was awkward to reach, lower and bulkier—“That’s it,” Hester said. “Has to be.”

“Can you figure out how to turn it on?” Cynthia said. She stole a glance at Fiorenzo—still seizing—and Meredith. Still … busy.

“Watch me,” Hester said confidently and wiggled into the cramped space. “Or rather, don’t watch me. Watch for company.” And she passed Cynthia her pistol.

“You got it,” Cynthia said, although it wasn’t clear that the pistol would be any more use than a wedding bouquet if the reanimated found them and Charlie decided to open the doors.

Pursuant to that thought, she asked, “Can you communicate with him at all? Charlie, I mean?”

“I’ve tried,” Hester said. “I don’t know if it’s just that I can’t or that he doesn’t recognize me as crew.”

“Rats,” Cynthia said. “Because it occurred to me that the best way to get rid of the reanimated would be for Charlie to eat them.”

“Oh,” said Hester. “Well. That would certainly be tidy. Although I’m not entirely sure that he could. It doesn’t look to me as if Fiorenzo’s reanimated can actually digest anything.”

“Well, there goes that idea,” Cynthia said. “But he could still chew on them, couldn’t he?”

“If they went to his mouth. But he probably can’t just … reabsorb them.”

The Charles Dexter Ward shuddered again; Hester was knocked against the wall, and Cynthia ended up in a drunken sprawl against the galvanic motor.

“I think,” Hester said dryly, “that something isn’t quite right.”

“Do you think that’s what the second dose of serum was for?”

“Probably.”

“Do you think without it, he’ll die again?” Horrible, to sound so hopeful. Horrible, to be in a situation where that was the optimum outcome.

“Ngao hasn’t,” Hester said.

Cynthia was trying to think of an answer that was neither obscene nor dangerously blasphemous when motion caught her eye. She jerked around, but it wasn’t Meredith or Ngao; it was a tove.

“There weren’t any toves in here, were there?” They’d encountered a tove colony several corridors away from the morgue, thick on the ceiling and walls, and starting to creep across the floor. The smell cut through even the stench in Cynthia’s nostrils, and she and Hester both had to fight not to gag at the crunch and lingering squish of toves under their boots.

“No,” Hester said. “Why?”

Cynthia aimed carefully and shot the tove. “Just hurry up, okay?” All by themselves, toves weren’t much more than a nuisance—at least, not to a healthy adult. But where toves went, raths were sure to follow, and raths were dangerous. And where raths went, would surely come bandersnatches, and while a bandersnatch could probably deal with Fiorenzo’s mistakes, it would happily annihilate the rest of them as well.

“Fiorenzo’s got it backwards, you know,” Hester said in a would-be-casual voice, instead of calling Cynthia on the evasion.

“Oh?” Cynthia said warily. Hester was under tremendous pressure and had just watched one member of her family murder another at extremely close range. Cynthia wouldn’t blame her in the slightest for falling apart, but they desperately needed it not to be right now.

“The fresher the body, the worse the results,” Hester said. “Meredith being Exhibit A. She must have reanimated Meredith within minutes.”

Only as long as it takes to sew a head back on, Cynthia thought. Aloud, she said, “I see what you mean.”

“So she’s wrong,” Hester said fiercely. “I had to say it to someone. The odds of having the opportunity to refute her theories in print…”

Cynthia wanted to close her eyes, but she had to keep watch on Meredith, Fiorenzo, Ngao … and everything else. She said, “I understand.”

“Okay,” Hester said, scrambling back to Cynthia’s side. “The machine is drawing power, and I’ve started it cycling. Now we just have to attach the leads to Charlie’s nervous system.” She brandished a thick double-handful of cables, and Cynthia followed her gaze to the hole Fiorenzo had dug in the deck of the morgue, with Wandrei’s remains on one side and Fiorenzo’s rigor-stiff figure on the other. Ngao was standing patiently where Fiorenzo had left him. Meredith had moved to the door, which she was pawing at with obvious confusion. But she wasn’t Charlie’s crew; he wasn’t opening it for her.

“Can’t we just, I don’t know, rip him open ourselves?”

“It would take too long,” Hester said with a crispness that betrayed her own reluctance. “Besides, I don’t have the specialized diagnostic equipment we’d need to find a node, and Fiorenzo must have cannibalized hers—or maybe left it somewhere.”

Cynthia swallowed her arguments. “Okay. Will the cables reach?”

“I suspect that node is where she attached them the first time,” Hester said. “But let’s find out.”

Hester paid the cables out carefully; Cynthia kept pace, trying to keep her attention on far too many threats at once. A cheshire’s sixteen eyes had never sounded so good. Cynthia and Hester’s movement attracted Meredith’s attention, and she started in their direction, not in the all-out berserker charge of the other reanimated, but in that slow-seeming sidle that had lethally fooled Wandrei.

Cynthia shot her, aiming as best she could for the knee. They had learned, by the good old scientific method of try-it-and-find-out, that the pistol could not damage a reanimated corpse enough to unanimate it. But it could cripple one. The trick was to make sure any bits you knocked off were too small to do any damage when they kept coming after you.

At this range, even Cynthia couldn’t miss. Meredith didn’t make a sound—she couldn’t, with severed vocal cords—but the silent rictus of shock (pain? Cynthia wondered bleakly, betrayal?) was almost worse. She went down, and continued dragging herself forward—but her hands couldn’t get much purchase on the deck plates protecting the Charles Dexter Ward’s tissue, especially slick as they were with Wandrei’s fluids.

Hester had reached the dark and wetly shining hole. She knelt clumsily, then looked up, a brave if not very convincing effort at a smile on her face. “You’d better,” she started; then voice and smile failed together, her face going slack with an emotion Cynthia couldn’t identify—until a voice behind her, a grating, hollow snarl said, “Stop.”

And then she knew, because she could feel her own face mirroring Hester’s: it was horror.

Cynthia turned. Dr. Fiorenzo was struggling to her feet. She stretched. She examined her hands. She took a carotid pulse.

She smiled. “All it took,” she said calmly, “was a fresh enough specimen. Really, Dr. Feuerwerker, you of all people should appreciate my success.”

Cynthia stepped backward. Once, twice. She worried about stepping into the pit, about tripping over Hester. About edging too close to Meredith and her undead strength. But she couldn’t take her eyes away from Fiorenzo. And she couldn’t—viscerally couldn’t—let Fiorenzo close the gap between them. No matter how sweet and reasonable she sounded.

Something brushed Cynthia’s ankle. She almost squeezed off a shot—the last in the pistol—before realizing that it was Hester, mutely offering up the power cables. They were too thick to manage one-handed. Cynthia would have to let go of the gun.

“Not live,” she said.

Hester said, “I’ll worry about that.”

Carefully, watching Fiorenzo the whole time, Cynthia handed Hester the gun and took the cables. They were heavy. How had Hester handled them so easily?

“Dr. Fiorenzo,” she said. “Stop.”

Fiorenzo took another step, but she was eyeing the cables cautiously. Cynthia was at the limit of their length, and the pit was behind her. She could retreat no farther.

“I assure you, I’m no threat,” Fiorenzo said. “This process will save lives.”

Cynthia heard Hester scrambling. Did she intend to get past Fiorenzo somehow? No, she was edging to the side, still keeping Cynthia as her buffer. Thanks a lot. But if their positions were reversed, would Cynthia be doing any differently?

“It will save your life,” Fiorenzo said.

And lunged.

Her strength was incredible. Cynthia swung the cables against her head, again and again, until Fiorenzo pinioned her arms. They rolled to the floor. Fiorenzo landed on top. Fiorenzo’s teeth worried at the seam of Cynthia’s pressure suit; Cynthia got a foot up and kicked, but couldn’t knock her off.

“Incoming!” Hester yelled. Fiorenzo’s head jerked up, and Cynthia thought, What damned good is—

The report of the pistol would have been deafening in the confined space of the morgue, if not for Cynthia’s suit filters. Fiorenzo thrashed for a second, the left side of her skull blossoming into a cratered exit wound. Cynthia threw herself free and rolled across the decking.

“Cables!” Hester yelled.

Cynthia grabbed them from the middle and yanked. The ends came slithering toward her, sparking against the deck. Heavy yellow sparks. Cynthia grabbed them by the insulation and lifted.

Fiorenzo rolled to a crouch, then stood. She laughed, one eye bobbing gently on the end of its optic nerve against her cheek. She sprang forward like a racer—

Cynthia jabbed the cables into her chest.

Fiorenzo arched back as the current went through her, hands splayed and clawing. She didn’t scream; there was no other sound to cover the crack of electricity, the hiss of cooking flesh.

She slumped. Cynthia jumped backward, but Fiorenzo’s outflung hand still fell across her boot. She turned wildly; Meredith was still crawling toward her. Hester crouched by the controls, sliding the master switch back to off.

“Decomp tie-ins,” Hester said. “You use the bolt nearest the panel.” She stepped over Fiorenzo’s corpse, her boot disturbing the gentle wisps of steam still rising, and dropped into the hole again. “And hand me the fucking cables again, would you please?”

Following orders was the easiest, most pleasant thing that Cynthia had ever done. She clipped and locked her safety line to the bolt. She slid the power control back to full.

“Do it!” she shouted to Hester.

And Hester must have done it, because the Charles Dexter Ward convulsed. Cynthia was jerked hard against her tether and then slammed back into the machine—and that was with only enough slack to attach the line. Everything unanchored went flying; she heard the crunch as Meredith hit a bulkhead, and then she was jerked forward again and blacked out.

She couldn’t have been out for more than a minute, she reckoned later; she could hear things still cascading in thumps and crunches. But the ship himself was not moving, and more importantly, more tellingly, his necroluminescence was gone. The only light was Hester’s suit lamp, and Cynthia fumbled her own on.

“Thank the ancient powers and the Buddha,” Hester said in a thin fervent voice. “I thought you were dead.”

Cynthia swallowed bright copper where she’d bitten the inside of her mouth. “Ow.”

“Yes.” Hester was undoing her safety line and dragging herself upright. Cynthia undid her own line with shaky fingers, and then her head cleared and she made it to her feet in one adrenaline-sour jerk. She twisted around, scanning, but Meredith was nowhere within the limited range of her light. She saw one of Ngao’s legs and part of his spine; he had been torn apart by the force of Charlie’s convulsions. As she watched, the foot twitched.

“Do you think we can make it back to the Caitlin R. Kiernan alive?” Hester said.

Cynthia squared her shoulders, wincing a little, and answered: “I think we can try.”

EPILOGUE

In his (second) death throes, the Charles Dexter Ward had taken a chunk out of the Jarmulowicz Astronomica, like a kid biting a chunk out of an apple. The casualties were five dead and thirteen injured, and they would have been worse except that everyone possible had been press-ganged into helping with the broken ward-mirror. The medical bay was gone, and now Cynthia knew why she’d only ever seen the one future-ghost, because there had only been one future path in which there was still a medical bay—the future path, she knew with cold uncomfortable certainty, in which she had not stood up to Wandrei and Fiorenzo, in which the Charles Dexter Ward had not died twice.

Cynthia patched up the crew as best she could with bandages made of cloth and splints repurposed from any number of functions, and the crew patched up the Jarmulowicz Astronomica. The mass funeral was devastating; Cynthia stood with Hester and let Hester’s grip leave bruises on her hand.

She bunked in with Hester, which was tight but doable. On her first sleep shift, after she finished brushing what she hoped was the last of the Charles Dexter Ward’s death stench out of her mouth, she came into Hester’s room and found two smug cheshires in the hammock slung crossways above Hester’s bunk. She surprised herself by bursting into tears.

“I’m okay, I’m okay,” she said, fending off Hester’s concern. “I just didn’t expect them to find me.”

“They know you,” Hester said, as if it were all that simple.

The Jarmulowicz Astronomica sent out a distress signal, and before leaving the Charles Dexter Ward, they set warning beacons around the boojum’s carcass. The Universal Code didn’t have an entry for REANIMATED; Hester told Cynthia that the Faculty Senate passed a motion to submit a proposal to add it before agreeing that the best they could do for now was EPIDEMIC alternating with BANDERSNATCH, and trust that it would be dire enough to warn people away.

And there was always the story, Cynthia thought, and that would do more good than a hundred beacons. Their distress call was answered, less than a week out, by a liveship, the Judith Merrill, and her crew lost nearly all their native distrust of Arkhamers in their desire for the details—Cynthia, as a non-Arkhamer, was pestered nearly to death. But she was willing to tell the story as often as necessary to make people believe it, and she knew perfectly well that half the reason she got so many questions was the Judith Merrill’s crew double-checking what the Arkhamers told them. Everyone knew Arkhamers lied.

She was amused, though, and also touched that their greatest concern was for what Fiorenzo had done to the Charles Dexter Ward. They were fiercely protective of their ship, and while they were horrified by the idea of Fiorenzo reanimating the dead, it was Charlie they wanted to lynch her for. It was the wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward that was going to make the story, and Fiorenzo would be merely its villain, not a scientist striving—however wrong-headedly—for knowledge.

With the Jarmulowicz Astronomica in a cargo bay, Cynthia and Hester (and a random assortment of cheshires) were sharing a dormitory cubicle somewhere under the Judith Merrill’s left front fin. The purser had offered to put her somewhere else, but Cynthia had turned him down. Until they reached Faraday Station, her contract bound her to the Jarmulowicz Astronomica. And even after that, friendship would bind her to Hester.

And, the bare truth was, she didn’t want to try to sleep alone.

When Cynthia reached their cubicle at the start of her next sleep shift, she said, “What makes forbidden knowledge forbidden, anyway?”

Hester looked up with visible alarm.

“No, I haven’t found another Mi-Go canister,” Cynthia said, amazed to find that she was able to joke about it. “I was just thinking about Fiorenzo and, well, how do you figure out where to draw the line? Because apparently I don’t know.”

“You do know,” Hester said. “You knew Fiorenzo was wrong before I did.”

“I knew Fiorenzo was suicidal. That’s not quite the same thing.”

“No,” Hester said. “You looked at Ngao and you knew it was wrong. You saw the person suffering first, not the scientific achievement.”

Cynthia winced. She had looked up Major Ngao—Major Kirawat Ngao, R.N. M.Sc.—but had had to draw back from attempting to contact his next of kin. What could she say? I’m sorry your loved one was murdered and reanimated by an unscrupulous scientist, and is still animate and possibly conscious—though in pieces—in the belly of a dead boojum. That was rank cruelty.

It was Ngao and the rest of the Charles Dexter Ward’s crew that she still felt worst about; Charlie himself was at least peacefully dead—even the pseudoghosts had faded out before the Jarmulowicz Astronomica was picked up by the Judith Merrill, showing that the spacetime disruptions were healing. But the reanimated were trapped in their dead ship, and the best that could be hoped for was that Fiorenzo’s serum might someday wear off.

“Someday,” which might just be another word for “never.”

“You said yourself,” Hester continued, pursuing the argument and jarring Cynthia out of a sad and pointless spiral of thought, “that you wouldn’t put anyone in a canister, and I suspect you wouldn’t have experimented at all if it had still had a brain in it.”

“No,” Cynthia said, then muttered rebelliously, “I still think we could find really valuable applications for the knowledge.”

“Which is exactly what we told you about Fiorenzo,” Hester said.

“Ouch,” Cynthia said. She swung into her hammock and rearranged the cheshires to give her space.

“Mostly, I’ve always thought ‘forbidden knowledge’ was another way of saying, ‘don’t do that or the bandersnatches will get you,’” Hester pursued thoughtfully. “Or, I suppose, the Mi-Go.”

“Which is frequently true,” Cynthia said.

“Yes, but it never stops us.” Hester looked up at Cynthia, her eyes dark. “Maybe that’s the worst part of human nature. Nothing ever stops us. Not for long.”

“Not for long,” Cynthia agreed and petted the tentacled horror on her lap until it cuddled close and began to purr.