Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

The Box Wife

Originally published by Shock Totem: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted

If you run your hands over me you’ll be pulling splinters from your palms for days.

I am in a room bare and dark.

“Melissa, oh oh,” it says, thrusting. “Kelly, my dear, my love, Kelly.” Sometimes I am one or both. Three nights ago, it called me little one, though I am bigger than it by half. I have many names. Each of them, I remember. Each of them is an identity that drapes over me like a mask.

It made me one night from boxes and springs. My joints were screwed in and locked into place with bolts. My boxes were nailed together; each hammer blow like a gunshot. I will always remember the thrill of the drill as it punched through my rough planks to make gaps for the hoses. I have painted toenails, red on the left side and black on the right. My front is covered with a woolly sheepskin. The rest of me is skinned with rubber gloves. I worry that I may crack in the cold.

My room has a window dressed with lace that restrains any errant snowflake that may fly to me. The walls are the pink of new flesh. There is something bundled up in the corner that has the colour and smell of burned hair.

“Madison,” it says, choking. “Belle, my sweet, my heart.”

It is heavy and stinks of lust. When it rolls on me I flex and shift. I turn my head but it always moves me into its preferred position. I am slick in patches and moist in others. A hank ofhair birthed from a hairdresser’s garbage bag has been slapped atop my pate and fastened with tape. The lock is of many colors and red.

It built me from flat pillows and rusted clockwork. It painted on eyes so that I may stare at it and glued in teeth so that I may smile. I contain wires that squeal when it lifts my arms. I am voiceless, but for the creak of my parts.

I am obliging.

It slows its movement and begins to oil me. I lay exposed as it pushes warmed liquid into my hollows and cranks with insistent fingertips.

“Holly,” it says, as it maintains me. “You can’t go. You are here for me, here to stay.”

There is someone below us, rattling against bricks and coughing up the water and the bread that it leaves when the pumping is steady. The pumping has to be steady for me to breathe.

I am connected by clouded tubes to something below me, far down where I can’t see. My circulatory system is squeezed by anonymous hands and this thing that might be blood flows up through the dangling tubes. My cheeks bloom, sometimes, and other times my whole cavity heaves.

The pumper grants me breath, minute by minute. I thank the pumper, silently, every time the sun rises to shine in through my window.

“Geraldine.” It names me anew as it finishes its greasing and begins to thrust once more.

It drags its fingers through the wool and grips hard with each push. “My sweet, my heart,” it calls me, quietly, then louder. “Geraldine!”

I wonder who she is; who they all are. Former lovers? Enemies? Sisters? I try to give them all faces, when I am named for them but I do not and will never know them. All I know is that I am them, for a time, until it changes the name and my identity hastens to the next.

“Jessica, I have always known that it would be you. I have waited for you forever and ever. Jessica, lovely one, Jessica!” It scrapes its cheek against my cheek and I can smell its muggy breath.

I am allowed to rock along with it, when I am being used. Sometimes I make the smallest of unnecessary movements when I think that it is too caught up to notice. It feels like a minuscule act of rebellion. I dare not even tremble when I am in my room, alone. It tells me that if I move when it isn’t around, it will come to me in the smallest hours and set me on fire—just burn me up into a crisp. It could be lying. But I don’t know anything.

I am just a box.

I could tell you a story. I could tell you about the way that it whispered me to this place, telling me how beautiful I was, oh, how perfect; all the while gouging its fingernails into the parts of me that once had feeling. I could spin you a tale of my life before it, before this room. I could tell you of the time I ran after a dragonfly and skidded through mud until I was wet up to my knees in a creek. I could recount for you the months it took me to learn how to play my favourite song, could show you the guitar-string callouses that emerged. I could count for you the number of rooms that I slept in, from the time I was small until the day that I was installed in this place.

I could tell you how it watched me, found me, took me up from the world that didn’t see me for what I was, or what I could become. I could tell you of how I was sung to this room by a poisoned voice, each note another snare to catch me and bind me tight. I could tell you of how I gently resisted, until I didn’t.

But the stories would be a lie. I have always been here.

I am a box.

I am a wife.

It screams when the pumping dies out and I fade, and its thick boots go smash smash smash on the stairs—and then on body and bones. I know that this means no more food for the pumper, stuck far down below me. No sustenance until the lesson has sunk in. And I lay back, deflated, the sheepskin sagging at the corners.

I wonder if this is the time when it won’t come back. Maybe today, the pumper will defeat it and we can both leave, together. But no, soon enough it is up and up the stairs and leaning into my corners.

“Jennifer. My sweet Jenny,” it whispers at me and my lack of ear. “Jenny, darling, you’re here.”

I imagine one up above me, hovering in this place in order to keep me safe. I wish to smile when I think of that one, the watcher. Perhaps the watcher is real and has been, always. Ican see a crack in the roof through which the watcher could observe me. I have looked and looked. Listened. I’d only need a scratch to know that the room above is occupied; just one faint drag of a nail.

Perhaps the watcher has a window, too. I hope that the watcher can see things, everything, all of the world that I do not know and will never visit. I would give anything—even my sheepskin—for the watcher to come down and whisper to me of the sights and the sounds and the taste of the world, even if it was nothing more than stories of dust and mold.

Anything.

I would also like a kiss.

Just one.

“Brenda. Glenda. Kate!” it says, hips rolling. It picks up speed, quivering around the throat. Its skin is red and wet. I wonder if this time it will shake me to pieces. If so, I am sure that I will be repaired back into usefulness.

It wriggles like something freshly caught.

“Charlene! Oh, my love, my little one!” It is louder and faster. Drips patter onto my rubber skin. One hand grips my shoulders. The other is lower, moving. I am fortunate not to bruise. I notice, idly, that today the room is fresh with morning sunshine. I wonder if it will go out and live a real life today, after it is finished with its wife.

I do not know what it does when it goes, but it often comes to me smelling of flowers and methanol. Once, it visited me in the smallest hours of the night, near to the dawn. It reeked of cheap perfume and I knew then that it had tried to be somebody else’s. It chastened itself, repeated again and again that this was its life now, that I was its world and that it would never leave me, not for anything.

It made promises to me, the kind that you should treasure. And then it started and kept going until noon.

All the while, I stayed perfectly still.

Now it shivers and shakes. It must have built me to be pretty, but I don’t know what that means.

I realize that my hair has fallen off. The hank must be huddling on the floor like a lonely spider. It notices, shouting that I have ruined everything, and swings a hard slap. I rock to one side and I know I shouldn’t, but I tilt up my hip as I roll and I know I should have warned it with my lipless mouth, but—

The point of the spring is sharp and dips into its upper thigh with ease, cutting into its thickest blood-tube. This metallic slip is utterly silent, but it begins to scream immediately. There are no words, but there is terror. It lays about with its arms, as red comes in spurting throbs. My rubber is drenched with warmth.

It knows that I shifted and it wants to kill me. It screeches with the voice of death and brings both clenched fists down upon my face. My teeth clatter down the back of my throat. The pump of my false-breath sucks them into the dark of my belly. It hits me again, but this time the blow is weaker and I know that I will outlast it.

“Caroline,” it sobs, “I only wanted—I wish that you were…”

It dies next to me in the bed, the way a faithful lover ought to.

I lay broken for a time. I am not sure what to do or how to be. My false-breath continues to ease in and out of me, slippery and moist. I count the strands of cobwebs that are high in the corners of my room and when I am finished, I start anew. This continues, perhaps for hours, until I hear whimpering from the pumper. My breath continued, even through all of the noise, because nobody has told the one below to stop. The pumper does not know that we are both alone now, together.

I hear another cry, a hungry sound.

I know that, somehow, I must go.

Firstly, I must sit. My wired arms are extended above my head but as the cries grow louder, I swing them up so that they clatter down on either side of my sheepskin. My wires thrum as I hoist up my torso. I ease myself forward, dizzy with the tilt of the world. My sheepskin falls off and I can see the worn wool sticking up in bloody peaks.

My displaced teeth rattle in my belly as I stand on sprung legs. The tubes that carry my breath and blood to me pop off the suckers that sit along the ridge of my wooden spine. There is a leak. I lurch toward the door and cogs spill from me like dropped coins.

I realize that I will never hear its voice again.

I do not mourn. It didn’t build me to mourn, or to grieve. I was built to be silent and useful.

I move from my room and carefully turn at the top of the stairs. I know that I must go down and down and down.

So much of me has fallen off that I am nearly nothing when I reach the middle of the stairs, but every step has shown me a new thing. I go slowly, relying on stiff knees that were never meant to take weight. My painted eyes would widen if they could, even at the zigzagging strips of crackling wallpaper.

I halt at the window, a full storey lower than my own. I see a yard thick with weeds and broken glass. The sight is glorious. There are machines lying at odd angles, gutted. I wonder if I carry any of their parts within me. I am rapt, until I see the others. They are scattered about the enclosed yard with a carelessness that speaks of their failures.

Broken wives. Lost wives. My predecessors. I wonder if I hold any of their screws and nails and am all at once sure that I do. I think that I might match at least two of them for paint.

My glossy eyes show me ruins and hulks. I trace their frames and feel something that could be horror and something that may be love.

The only thing that could move me is another cry from the pumper.

“Please,” comes the call. “Please.”

I go. I go to save the only one left.

I shuffle down in to the dark and I lose more of myself with every step. I remind myself that they are only fragments and parts. Surely I have a few to spare.

I hear clanging and sobbing, but when I reach the door the pumper goes quiet, perhaps expecting punishment. My fingers scrape at the latch until the door opens. I stand in the frame, illuminated by the light of a new day. I must look a fright, for the pumper shrieks at the sight of me. With great effort, I hold up my hands.

Peace, I am here for you, here to take you away from all of this, I think, though I cannot shape the word with my empty mouth. I wonder if the watcher would say the same to me, if I were the one being rescued.

The pumper runs to me and I grind into a hunch.

I am enveloped by pale arms. They squeeze me tight and I creak.

“You came,” says the pumper, breathlessly. “I wished and hoped for you to come. I knew that you would. I knew it.”

My bloody shoulder is dampened with tears. I lean forward, pressing my rubber skin to the stark bones of the one who gave me breath. We turn and my knees pop, but I can see freedom and know that I only need to walk a few steps and then we will be outside. I begin to shake and I do not know if I will ever be able to stop.

The pumper wraps a hand around mine, whispers a secret to me and kisses me.

Just once.

That is enough.

Zip

Originally published by Bastion Science Fiction Magazine

One hour and six minutes until his boots crunched into the soil of a disputed planet. Lieutenant James Kent sat on the floor of his bare room and field-stripped his blaster methodically, relying on his years of training to find the oxygen-boosting cartridge, to correctly grease the release points, to stay steady and not look up at the empty space above his rack where the photo of his former captain and lover had been.

The mission destination flashed up on his comms tablet: a deserted jungle planet with a low combat risk rating, but all the same, the Allied Planet Military was going in with fingers on triggers. Prudent. Nobody had forgotten the Ba’Tooth scandal: two full squads bleeding into black mud under the shadow of a traditionally woven peace tapestry.

Captain Simon Albright had been assigned to that ill- fated mission and Kent had wept with relief in his rack when the zip had come through from him. Before that final message, Kent had thought him dead, but Albright had been switched out from the squad at the last minute to make room for a linguistics expert. The news of the raid had been all over the base-wide feeds. Albright found out from the feeds that it had been his squad shredded planet-side, his brothers and sisters who caught the fallout from a generational hive-war. He took it hard. I should have been with them. The last line of the zip had been free from Albright’s usual sign-off, a coded blip of love that could wriggle around a censor’s scrutiny. It should have been me.

Kent figured that Albright had found someone else to numb the pain after receiving that last, lonely message. The silence had stretched and thinned until nothing remained but a wisp, coupled with the pervasive feeling that nobody would ever speak to him with love in his voice ever again.

The LT finished up with his blaster. Every piece of Kent’s equipment was maintained and prepped: steel-silk rope coiled in its pouch, boot-toes sharpened for kicking into rock, face-shield programmed with thousands of languages and ready to take on dust, ice or jungle-sweat. Kent carried everything he needed to command the base raid—everything except the certainty that he would be mourned by the one he loved if he spun out, ate dirt, was blown away, baby. It doesn’t matter, he thought, breathing deep. I gotta go. No matter what he’d lost, he always had his squad, and their mission. They were the only two things that could get him out of his rack.

A short melody bleeped through his tablet. Time to report to the transport. The commanding officer was always first aboard, last to depart. Kent locked his face-shield into place and tucked a dog tag into the pocket on the left side of his uniform. A blank zip-film poked out from under his thin pillow. He’d figure out what to write if he lived.

Everything felt wrong in a flash. It was a teeth-grating feeling, a shiver that didn’t stop or show in gloved fingertips that gripped the handrails tight. The scientists called it transport displacement and lectured them about the shifts that occurred at a sub-atomic level. But it was perfectly safe, they said, scrawling absently onto erasable clipboards. Perfectly safe.

It was best if you rode the flash with your eyes closed. He couldn’t see shit through the view-plate anyway, just grey half-space: the in-between of things. The screaming slip through space manifested in fireworks that sparked behind his eyelids. Kent always saw green-blue ripples that once reminded him of a show he’d seen about aurora borealis. But that was before the mission that he and Albright had teamed up on, under the icy crust of the moon Europa. They’d been tired, cold and so far from home, in both time and space. Kent had been astounded when Albright had wrapped his hand around the back of Kent’s neck. He remembered the taste of that first kiss and the scrape of Albright’s stubble as they both gave into something that had been brewing for months. Now, every flickering light reminded him of the play of the waves above their heads and the close huddle of an anchored tent.

Flames silently bloomed around the view-plates as Kent and his squad descended through the atmosphere of the planet Kelvin. The twelve of them opened their eyes and watched the view-screens, watched one another, sending silent promises of solidarity around the interior of the shuttle. The tongues of fire were as chaotic and vibrant as the tropical flowers that had once grown around the windows of Kent’s parents’ house. Both the flowers and his parents were long dead and crumbled; they had both stubbornly clung to Earth as if it would somehow heal itself one day.

Dex, their droid, gazed at the display impassively. Corporal Sowell’s silver whiskers prickled out from the grim set of his jaw. The veteran knew better than to trust the official reports. He scowled as Malik and Hughes began to throw up roughly. Lombardi looked on, smug. The three of them, always mischievous, had been up all night drinking and playing cards. Lombardi always held her booze better than any of them. Goddamn genetics.

The squad shared a battleground comms matrix that worked like an extended warning system; a tremor of nerves that shot around emotional flashes. No secrets—nothing so well formed—but between them flooded a sense of danger or apprehension that twined around the regular comms. It could mean the difference between breathing and choking to death on your own blood.

Kent took a moment to once again mentally run through the mission stats. His orders were to land, trek to the base, and capture it. Each base, each planet was a crucial part of the Allied Planet network. Since the mass departure from a sun- blasted Earth, the military was constantly on the lookout for planets with terraforming potential. Regaining even one would be a coup.

The base on Kelvin was supposedly abandoned by the Kee, but Kent’s squad hummed with the caution of veterans. He checked the reads. The atmosphere would be negated by the bionics of their combat suits but the acidity in the air would wear them out in under twelve hours. Uncovered skin would melt down to muscle in minutes.

They landed in a patchy clearing. The automated hatch hissed open and the squad bounced out, Kent on point. He’d insisted. He barked out formations and as one, the team slipped through the black, sticky jungle that rotted around them. The planet had been torched in the Inferno Wars between the rock-like Kee and the delicate, merciless Alalani birds who were capable of flying between worlds on their smoking scarlet wings. Kent flipped himself sideways to avoid trampling a patch of green moss that marked the start of a grow-back. However hot the flames, something always grew back.

Even though they were on mission and even though he’d promised himself that he wouldn’t, Kent’s heart and head slipped back to his worries as his augmented knees flexed and propelled him over burnt and blackened trees.

Albright had slowly broken his heart, over a year or so. Each harsh word piled on top of the others until the stress was unbearable, heartbreaking. Kent didn’t know if Albright knew or cared. Try as he might, Kent couldn’t shake the memory of his eyes after that first rough kiss, nor could he forget the way that they fit together when they slept: his skin pale against Albright’s dark, muscles and angles matched and everything simply right.

But he was never coming back, and the empty space where he’d been was crushingly, unbearably large.

I would rather have every inch of my skin ripped off than feel like this. It was as if someone had shot fragments of hot metal into his chest. Something nameless squeezed him as he dashed through the jungle and dragged out tears that were whisked away by the moisture sensors in his helmet.

Even at first, Albright hadn’t been entirely sure. It had been too new, too fast. It was a game to him, an adventure into an experience. Kent had been in love with other boys since he was twelve years old, during the last math class of the rainy season when he’d noticed just how very blue Tim’s eyes were. Albright was different. He’d left a girl and their unfinished business back on his home colony, and although she was long gone, her memory kept tugging at him.

Albright had broken it off with Kent after stammering out his reasons.

The separation had lasted as long as it took for the alcohol rations to come through from Command. Kent had taken his alone in his room in an effort to privately dull the sharpness of the break. Before long, the door had boomed under the weight of Albright’s drunken fist.

I should have turned him away, but how? He knew I couldn’t. His heart and his hope had overtaken any good sense.

After that, Albright drifted in and out, capricious with his heart and his collection of imagined futures. Sometimes he left with tears, sometimes with accusations, sometimes without saying a word. On the good days, they’d built imaginary houses, arguing over the window frames and planet quadrant. The bad days scrunched up Kent’s stomach with anxiety. The last Kent had heard was that Albright was messing around with a new guy: a loudmouth colt of a rookie, fresh out of basic.

Early on, Albright had promised that Kent was his great love, the one who belonged. And then it had faded out, until even the very briefest meetings had come no more. It was one thing to suspect that Albright didn’t want him and another thing entirely to know that he didn’t need him.

Lost in thought and with three kilometers of thick jungle terrain left to navigate, everything changed.

Kent missed the rumbles under his boots. His skin-suit took action where he could not and sprang him high into the air as the ground shook and split beneath him. The squad’s shared reflex boomed. Kent leapt high, up and away from the unreliable terrain. For a moment they were all floating in the air like great dark birds, their green sensor lights flicking down and over the earth to map out a safe landing place.

There was none. They tumbled down, as everything must.

Kent’s suit stiffened with the shock as his knees and shins smashed onto broken rock. He slipped into a dark chasm. For a moment he hung from the wrist-strap of his blaster after it jammed into a cleft, but then something snapped and he was falling again, weaponless, with the squad screaming at him from eleven different directions. They were all down. Lombardi and Callis blipped out, their login replaced with white noise for a second before switching off automatically.

Kent hit a jam of rocks and finally stopped falling. His knees were in agony.

“Lieutenant, sir. Kent? LT? LT! You hearing this?” Sowell cleared up his channel first. “My leg is broke, sir. I’ve got a clamp, but it’s bleeding real bad, and the air—” Sowell’s comms channel crackled and popped.

There was something pushing on Kent’s hip and the comms channels swam around his head. The login flooded with pain and confusion and fear. He should have been able to dull it so that he was simply aware of his men and women and their circumstances and able to think of a way out, a way up. That was his duty. He’d sworn it, palm on the Articles, the day he pulled on the uniform.

Kent switched off his comms, instead. He wasn’t in silence—the rocks around him groaned and shuddered, shifting into new positions. Pops echoed above him as his squad shot up distress flares. He rolled so that his torso was flat on a rock ledge and he braced his feet. The crag jutted above him, an impossible climb.

Maybe it was better this way: lost on mission. Dead, somewhere quiet. If he didn’t log back in again and they didn’t find him, it would all be over. It could all stop. The blank zip under his pillow would stay safely empty. Kent had written and sent and burned countless pleas, apologies for all manner of imagined slights. But the words couldn’t sink in the right way, even if Albright did actually read them.

Kent exhaled slowly.

It had been too painful to look at directly, back on the base. The pain was hot and bright and acknowledging it as fact was like looking right into the sun.

It was just that Albright wasn’t coming back. Not ever. He’d removed himself. First he’d killed the love. Then he’d crushed any hope of it ever blooming again.

And so what was left?

Kent thumbed his helmet lock. His squad would survive without him. Just a few minutes of planet-side air savaging his lungs and it’d be done. No more remembered kisses. All of the tenderness erased, the invisible fingerprints scrubbed off.

Kent pressed down and his helmet hissed. He was so broken that he might as well be dead.

“LT? You got me? This coming through?” Sowell’s second- in-command clearance overrode Kent’s block. The reconnected comms channel was a whisper in the dark. “Sir. Are you there? We need you.”

His brothers. His sisters. They had sworn their oaths together.

Lieutenant James Kent of the United Allied Military had given up on love and happiness for himself. But he could not and would not give up on the uniform, and the squad who wore the same cloth.

Kent pushed his face-plate back into lock position and rolled over. Sowell was still breathing and Lombardi might still be out there. Her hanger-deck card game had been running a whole year. Sowell always carried a wrinkled envelope of photos with him when he was off duty. He’d cried when he’d gotten news of his Mars-born daughter.

If that was all there was, it was enough.

“Sowell? You getting me? You out there, buddy?” Kent’s throat was sore as he croaked to his squad. “I’m coming, Sowell. Just hang on.”

Kent got to his feet, shaking out his hands until the contact webbing came online. Automatically, the strip of boot under the balls of his feet turned tacky. A booster pill fell out the front of his helmet and into his mouth. He crunched down on it. Adrenalin buzzed through him and everything felt light and quick.

The squad network picked up his resolve and bounced around a signal to the dropped squad. They stirred then, all of them, slapping flesh-knits over their wounds and beaming back the message that they were OK, that they were coming if they could.

The cleft wall was at an angle that bent him backward to climb, but his hands and feet stuck, enclosed as they were in combat-ready boots and gloves. These are my people, and I’ll get them home. His shoulders burned as he clambered.

Lombardi was waiting at the top of the crag with an emergency patch wrapped around her middle, her usual grin missing. Dex was with her, hir cool smile illuminated by the blue lighting from within hir helmet. Dex’s hand had been ripped off in the fall, but ze would have a replacement screwed back on again in the lab. It was the android’s second mission with the squad, a second appendage lost.

“We mess you up every time, Dex.” Kent’s face shield did a quick scan of every torn wire and lost coupling while his eyes drank in the sight of his teammates.

“Pay it no mind, sir. The other works just as well.” The android flexed hir left hand, which was encased in living skin-metal.

“Ropes,” said Kent. Lombardi and the android nodded and unslung hir steel-silk. Kent expanded his login to pick up locations as his squad members began the slow and tricky process of hauling their wounded companions out of danger.

“Can’t get up, LT. I’m sorry.” Sowell’s beam was faint. “Just go. We need that base.”

“Don’t move. I’ll come to you.” Kent nodded to Dex, who dug through hir pack. The android hesitated before ze passed over the bulky enhancement tech.

“I could go, sir. I’m still functioning at 74 percent, and—”

“Absolutely not. You’re missing a hand. You’d never get back up if you were carrying him, too. Besides, Command would gut me if we broke you up any more. Stay here, hold my rope.”

Kent wriggled his feet into the joint-strengthening knee- braces. He turned his back on the droid and shrugged on the shoulder pack. It merged into his suit, seamlessly, and ran down the back of his arms to his elbows.

The green laser of his targeting computer flickered as it mapped out the cleft. Kent clipped on his rope and dropped down into the dark. The suit matched the directions of his targeting computer and bounced him down automatically until his feet stuck to a near-diagonal shelf of rock just above Sowell.

It was bad. Sowell was only semi-conscious, having bled through the flesh-knit that he’d somehow managed to wrap around his shattered thigh. Kent spread another layer of flesh-knit over the first. It hardened, holding the broken bones in place.

Kent used his command override to prompt a heavy-duty painkiller to release into Sowell’s mouthpiece.

“Come on buddy, take this. I’m going to get you outta here.” Kent waited as the soldier weakly bit down.

“You shouldn’t have…I’m okay, really.” Sowell’s jaw was loose.

“Take this one, too.” Kent silently blessed the medics who had invented battlefield plasma pills. Sowell would be weeks in recovery, but if they made it up to the surface, the artificial cells flocking through his bloodstream would keep him alive.

It was difficult to shift him into position without tugging at the flesh-knits, but Kent finally managed to get Sowell into a piggy-back position. Their suits merged as he wriggled into place.

The enhancement tech was the only thing that got them up the walls. Kent’s hands were stickier than usual to compensate for the extra weight and his wrists ached at the effort of yanking his gloves off the rock.

Kent and Sowell were nearly out of the hole when the login started to max out with surprise and shock.

The Alalani screamed as they dropped in from the black heights. Flames licked along their immense wings.

“Switch to freezers! Everyone, get down!” Kent hauled himself over the last lip and yanked Sowell under the shallow cover of a wet, rotting log. At least it wouldn’t catch. Kent’s blaster was buried deep underground by now, but Sowell’s still dangled off the fallen soldier’s shoulder. Kent overrode the ID lock on the blaster and crouched, flicking at the gun’s command pad to start shooting balls of chemical- laden spit.

The alien birds swooped, flicking their flaming wings at the soldiers and snapping with their iron-hard beaks. Freezer balls arced up, exploding onto burned out trees where they missed the Alalani. Lombardi got off a lucky shot and the largest of the birds fell, shattering to pieces after the freezer bullet encapsulated it with crunchy, quick-setting ice.

Dex was on fire. The android rolled around on the black dirt, venting chemical powder from hir wrists. Lombardi shouted, throwing panic through the login—her blaster was fixing its jam, but it would take a few seconds and the birds kept coming. Kent took a knee and shot up at the attackers, hitting one just above the wing-joint. It sailed to the ground and smashed on a rock. Oily blood spewed out, smoldering. His tracking computer confirmed its death but he shot methodically while he sent formation signals through his login.

“Sir! They’re jamming me!” Dex’s task was to report back to base in case of heavy fire or unexpected attack. Kent looked up and saw that one of the Alalani had a signal blocker looped around one spindly foot. It was tech stolen from the Kee and fitted by one of the Alalani’s humanoid allies.

“Defensive fire! Target the blocker!” Kent waved Lombardi and Hughes back to a covered position. They’d never make the base now, but command needed to know that the Alalani were still present as a force on this planet.

An Alalani drove its talons into Hughes’s chest and picked him up, clacking at his face-shield as the soldier burned and screamed. The bird screeched and shook him off, whirling up to join its flock-mates. Hughes tumbled to the ground, his suit punctured and melted.

“Lombardi, with me!” Kent ran forward with his squad-mate at his elbow. She flicked to him via the login that her blaster was fully functional, though Kent had already seen the stat glowing on the inside of his mask. Malik joined them, too, his long legs crossing the distance from his cover to their bulwark in seconds. The login synched them together and the three of them began to shoot in coordinated bursts. The Alalani wheeled and ducked through their fire. The targeting computers mapped the alien’s flight paths and adjusted the squad’s aim. It made all the difference as the freezers began to hit their targets.

Lombardi’s slender fingers tapped out a manual field code on the side of her blaster and started following her freezer shots with a bullet. The Alalani exploded like chill fireworks. Among the first to fall was the bird carrying the signal blocker. Dex picked off the tech from a sprawled position, holding the blaster in hir burned but functional left hand.

“I’m through!” hir call flicked through the login. The data packet, filled with surface reads and combat reports, had been assembled at faster-than-human speeds, even in the middle of battlefield chaos.

With a precision shot, Lombardi dropped the last of the Alalani within range. Two of the great flaming birds arced up in a spiral to the upper atmosphere and vanished from view. Kent could only hope that they would retreat and leave them free to shuttle back to the command ship.

“Squad, check in.” Kent knelt beside Hughes and draped his last flesh-knit over the horrific wound in his chest. Perhaps it was futile, but the medics on ship had been known to work miracles before, and atmosphere-based infection would not help.

One by one the squad sent through their status and position. Despite burns and broken bones they were all alive—even Hughes, for now. Kent gave the all-clear to set up a temporary battlefield fortification as they dug in to wait for the rescue shuttle.

Kent took a moment to look around his room before he collapsed in a mess of medical tape and drug-dulled flesh. From his rack, he could see his personal zip-drop propped up against his lamp.

Empty.

It was all over the base that the Alalani were expanding their territory and that his unfortunate squad had been ambushed. Surely, Albright had heard. And yet there was nothing. No zip.

Kent curled into a ball, knees high, with a blank zip- film crumpled in his fist. His thumb stroked Albright’s old dog tag out of habit.

“Gotta save myself from now on. That’s how it is,” he whispered into his thin pillow. He wept then, great choking sobs, replaying all of the moments that he would remember forever, saying goodbye to each of them once and for all.

A fist crashed against his door. Kent’s stomach dropped and his heart pounded loudly in his ears.

“Hey, you in there?” It was not the voice that he was expecting. Kent levered himself up on his elbows, pushed off his narrow rack and limped to the door. He knuckled the tears from his eyes. Lombardi and Malik were just as battered as he was, but their tired smiles still shone. Wordlessly, Malik held up a large metal flask. His spiced rum was barracks legend.

“I can’t believe you’re drinking again after last night.” Kent grinned a little, despite himself.

“After a day like that? Fuck, man. You kidding?” said Malik, pushing his way in.

The three of them eased themselves onto the floor of Kent’s room and passed the flask from hand to hand.

Kent felt the beginnings of a tiny glow flickering in his chest. Rum rolled through his blood and eased the stiffness of his shoulders. He found himself nursing the beginnings of a smile, of hope.

The zip-drop beeped and Kent looked at it reflexively.

Are you alright? Can I see you? - A.

For the first time in a long time, Kent did not leap to tear the zip from the drop.

“Who’s that?” Lombardi asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” Kent said, reaching up only to push the delete key. “It’s nobody important.”

She nodded and hoisted the flask up in a toast.

Kent took the rum and drank deep, safe amongst his family.

Clean Hands, Dirty Hands

Originally published by Aurealis

Breaking camp was as easy as tipping out the last handful of worn tea leaves and bundling the empty flour sack into his swag. Evan pushed dirt over the glowing embers within his fire pit. There was nothing left of his supplies, not even salt. Last night’s damper was a heavy memory. Food meant dealing with people and towns. It meant the possibility of broken knuckles, of slaps and cursing and hunger, of belonging to someone else. Perhaps it was better to starve in safety, but his belly cramped and it drove him up and onwards. All of his water was gone and the dams were low. Yesterday’s tea had been half-mud.

Evan stretched out his shoulders and packed up his tools. His load was a spade and a short-handled pick, a hammer, a dented billy and a bundle containing a blanket, an oilcloth and a spare shirt. He wriggled from the shelter of the fallen gum into the blue- sky morning. The tree’s downturned limbs were as thick as a strong man’s waist and as white as his ribs.

Evan walked through the knee-length grass, his thin shoes crackling over the nodding stalks. His tools jangled together as he strode. Castlemaine was six miles north. It was where he could trade for the supplies he needed: tea, salt and flour. He could draw a bucket of water and drink his fill, maybe trade for a skin. Besides that, Evan had no use for what the markets carried. He had no house to tack up with sharp iron nails, nor a wife to eye off the printed cloth from Melbourne.

Four or so miles before town, Evan left the paddock and followed the glowing tickle in his chest to a clump of gum trees close to the road. The soil there had not been worked over as carefully as that closer to the settlement, but much of it had still been turned by pick and shovel. It was easier for him, working alone, when the ground had been broken. If he had men that he trusted, with strong arms and the right tools…No. That way led to trouble. No good had ever come of him sharing his sense. No good at all. It was better for everyone if he kept his secrets close and faithful.

The bush was still and quiet enough for him to feel the warmth of gold, though it took him an hour of searching before he found a deposit close enough to the surface. Evan knelt, brushing aside dead grey sticks and piling up the sweet, crisp eucalyptus leaves. He sank his hands into the earth and pulled in a breath that coated his throat with dust.

A fly buzzed around his mouth. Evan swatted at it and let his sense creep down his fingertips and into the soil. He kept his breathing even as he felt his way deep and down, skipping around chunks of rock until he nudged the nugget with his mind. It was nestled in quartz like a blob of butter in mash. There.

Evan steadied himself and wiped the sweat off his forehead. He took up his spade and dug. The feeling of warmth grew stronger as he shifted aside the dross. It took him a score of heavy minutes to dig deep enough to reach his prize and longer still to ease up the quartz lump. It felt as if the sun was rising as he lifted it out of the ground. Evan smashed apart the milk-white rock. The thumbnail-sized slug of gold within would do well enough for trade. In truth, he wished it was smaller. Best get rid of it quickly and be on his way out of town again before questions were asked. Questions led to gossip, no matter what answers he gave and gossip could easily be whispered into the wrong ears. He left the shade of the gums and turned to the road to town.

“In and out, that’s all,” Evan muttered, matching the beat of the words to his footfall. “No stopping and no talking, just in and out and back to safety.”

A stage-coach with its snorting team clattered past as Evan walked down the packed dirt road. His hands were damp with nervous sweat and the nugget burned like a lit coal in his pocket. The sun was high overhead by now and he was parched. He spotted a dam in the paddock next to the road, but it barely held a cupful of water. Evan could find what he needed, that was his curse, and what he needed now was a sweet rain. He pushed his sense up into the sky, searching with his mind for full clouds. They felt different to anything else, soft and icy at the same time. They were far, but booming this way.

He sighed with relief. Evan hoped that he would have found a dry place to sleep before the rain came, but there was always the oilcloth in his bag that kept the worst of it off.

It had been raining the night he’d fallen. Evan had been just a boy, six or seven, when he’d run off into the bush after a thrashing. He’d jumped into a depression, not knowing that the layer of sticks and rubble would collapse and send him rattling down into the old shaft. He’d broken something in his ankle and waited, feverish and terrified, for hours. His parent’s voices had come near, but not near enough to hear his wail. The choking blackness had pressed in on him until he was pushing it away, pushing into the earth with his hands and his mind. As a boy, he’d always had a knack for finding his mother’s lost buttons or for turning up carelessly-dropped coins on his rare trips into town with his father. There in the gloom Evan had reached with his sense and felt hot light hiding in the rocks. Like a lamp in the dark, it had comforted him. They’d hauled him out, eventually, on the end of a rope. Evan balled his fists to settle his nerves as he made his way through the crowded camps on the edge of town. Dirty men like him spat and mended tools or shook out their blankets as dogs tousled for scraps under their feet.

He heard a fiddle and a flute duelling in the distance and suddenly, somewhere close, the crack of a pistol. Evan checked each new face carefully. A few of the cleaner folk were burning green wood. It was good to hear talk again, even though the accents rang strangely in his ears. The Irish boys were usually companionable and would share a song or two if the mood took them. The Americans drawled their way around camp and laughed at everything. Evan did not trust the Easterners. They smelled all wrong and their campsites always made his skin itch. Something about the charms that they hung from their tents increased the flutter of panic through his chest. Besides, the smoke that drifted from their camps muffled his senses and rendered his seeking useless.

A smile might have earned him a better trade at the store, crowded as it was with barrels of flour and salt and stacked with pannikins. Twisted paper cones held Barnes’ Rock, a bright yellow peppermint sweet. Picks and shovels with gleaming blades sat up against the tools of the dead, dusted with rust and forlorn with their cracked handles.

Evan eyed a stout pair of mining boots with heavy soles, remembering when he’d owned such a fine pair. The family had once wanted for nothing, but that was before people had started asking questions. It was simple supplies he was after, for his solitary life. Hot tea and lumpy damper kept him moving. Kept him alive, in a manner of speaking.

The shopkeep was in no mood for barter, busy as he was with a delivery of bacon and eggs. Such goods were snagged by only the wealthiest miners. Even a single yoke was out of Evan’s reach, unless he spent more than was safe. An egg wasn’t worth his life.

Evan traded for his staples and added chunk of ripening mutton to restore some of the fat to his body. He added a few potatoes and an onion. The shopkeep had some greens from the Easterner’s gardens that were half dead and cheap, so Evan took those too. All of that and he still walked out into the cool afternoon air with a tiny pouch of gold dust. He would make it last. The less seeking he did, the safer he was.

He’d gone two steps into thoughts of dinner when a fist cracked down over his cheekbone. Stunned, he slipped and bit his tongue. His mouth filled with spit and blood. A kick slammed against his ribs and he lost every bit of breath that he’d ever sucked into his lungs.

“Found you, didn’t we?” The shaggy beard parted an inch away from Evan’s swelling eye-socket. “The deal was good,” the voice continued. “Your life for your help. Simple. But you gave us the slip, eh?”

All Evan could do was gasp in the dust, his chest crushing down on the contents of his newly-filled swag. He couldn’t seem to catch hold of any air. A drop of rain fell into his ear. Others chased it. Thunder brooded overhead.

“We’d like your help again, Evan. Oh, we would. So you’ll come with us, and we’ll eat and we’ll set you up nice and close to a fire. We’ll head out in the morning, just you and Mully and I.”

Evan curled around his swag, just trying to be smaller, trying to be not there.

The last time he’d heard Bobby Cole’s voice had been just before he’d fled. Your life for your help, Bobby had said. It had been Mully who’d seen Evan using his gift one careless afternoon. They’d beaten Evan senseless before proposing their deal. And so Evan had lived, and used his gift for Cole and his boys. He’d worked until he was exhausted and wasting away, but it wasn’t enough. Evan could seek all he pleased, and found plenty, but it didn’t make the gold any more accessible or the rock any softer. Bobby and Mully beat him all the same, ringing slaps to his ears and boots to the knees. One night he’d stolen away, intending to return to his family’s house on the outskirts of town when things had calmed down some.

Maggie and Kate had suffered for his cowardice.

“Come on, now,” Bobby crooned, yanking Evan to his feet. “We need you back, laddie.”

The rain was drumming down now. Evan’s wet shoes creaked as he swung out wildly with a bony fist. Bobby was ready for the blow but it still clipped him just under the ear. They were in the mud in a moment, rolling and kicking and jabbing at each other. Bobby was muscled and wiry from the digs but Evan fought him, fist and elbow. He would have bitten and hammered and wrestled until Bobby killed him if they hadn’t caught the attention of the Joes.

Shrill whistles cut through the noise of the storm. Fights were common but the police had no fondness for dealing with dead miners. Time filling out papers could be better spent in the pub. The attack stopped long enough for Evan to suck in a shallow breath. His copper hair was plastered to his face and he was wet to his skin.

“I’ll take him. Come on, Evan.” Another voice from the past, but this one a saviour. “It’s all about a woman, if you can believe it.” Not far from the truth. Evan heard Bobby snarl a curse as he was shepherded off. He would not go far with the rain and the prospect of reclaiming Evan’s services.

Tom Hopkins had a gap in his teeth that whistled when he spoke but nobody dared to tease given that success in his stride and the hulk of muscle that shifted under his shirt. He had once been a neighbour and a friend. His eldest boy Davey had been Kate’s favourite. They’d run up and down the slag- heaps together and made houses out of branches and bark. Kate had been light and fair where Davey was dark and curly, but they made a fine pair with their toothy smiles and well-made shirts. Tom and his wife had looked after Maggie as best he could when Evan was out at work for Bobby and his crew.

“Come on, get in here.” Tom steered Evan into a pub, “You’re thinner than Death. Eat something.” Tom ordered and paid for both of them.

The low smoke swirled and clung to Evan as he gratefully spooned up a plateful of gravy with a chunk of bread. Miners squeezed into the pub around them, slinking like wet cats. They crowded around the fire, filling the air with the smell of damp, greasy sweat. Somebody was playing a harmonica. The song was sad and slow. Evan looked up at Tom only when the tin plate was clean.

“You’ve been out by yourself, then?” Tom sipped at his lager. Evan nodded. “We thought so, when we found the place abandoned, but for poor Maggie. I saw to her arrangements…Bobby Cole, that bastard! I’m sorry, Evan.”

Evan just stared. After a moment, he started to check on his supplies. Thankfully, nothing had spilled but the tea and it was mostly gathered up in a fold at the bottom of his swag. He’d sift it into a pouch later.

“It was Katie, too, wasn’t it? We couldn’t find her, though we looked for days.” Tom’s voice was low and thick. “Goddamn it, Evan.”

It was hearing the name that broke him. Evan’s face crumpled into a sob, tears and spit mingling as they ran down his bruised face. The wooden table soaked up his tears as he pounded on it. Splinters dug into his fist. Men stared, though some of them pretended not to. Evan’s chest felt as if someone was driving a pick into the cavity and lifting out the pieces with a shovel.

He’d not been able to carry them both, but Evan had buried his little girl with his own dirty hands, in the dark, in the hills of Pennyweight Flats. They were truly named—no more than a pennyweight of gold could be found in the ground thereabouts. It was poor land for mining but it was suited for burying their young ones, dead on the fields from measles and whooping cough and scarlet fever. For hours, he had hacked away at the earth, ignoring pinpoints of warmth that sat within the soil below. It wasn’t enough to warm Katie up again. He’d not had time to go back for Maggie, though his heart had broken with the shame of leaving her for the neighbours.

When Evan had finally dug deep enough to lay Katie down in an old nailed-up box, he’d discovered that the corners of the makeshift coffin were too big to fit. So he’d had to take up his tools and widen the grave, chipping and clawing away at the earth so that he could just be done with it. It was for her that he stayed, when he could have fled into New South Wales and tried his luck there. He’d left his girl behind in life and couldn’t abandon her again.

Bobby Cole had drowned her in the water barrel.

“Goddamn it,” Tom repeated.

“Daddy?” Both men started. Jill. Tom’s youngest, a little shy of seven. “Daddy, I can’t find Davey.”

“He knows to be back before dark,” Tom said, rising. The storm was over them now, flinging down rain like it was revenge. “Was he out with the baker’s boys again?”

“One of them beat him and took his stick. The one he’d pretend was a sword. He cried, but he didn’t want me to see, so he ran off in the rain.”

The roof was shaking now. Everyone inside moved closer to the fire.

“That boy…go home, Jilly, love. Tell Ma that I’ll be back with Davey soon.” Tom madeto leave. “I’m sorry, Evan, I’ve got to look for him.”

Something that he couldn’t name pushed Evan to speak. “I’ll come,” he said. “Maybe I can find him.”

Tom looked at him sharply. “Aye. Maybe you can.”

Evan’s clothes were nowhere near dry, but he cringed back from the rain all the same. A wind had picked up and was blowing the droplets this way and that. It wasn’t yet sunset but the storm had bought on darkness. Evan squinted through the downpour but didn’t see a trace of Bobby, nor his man Mully. A few men who couldn’t afford a plate or a beer were huddled on the pub porch, hands tucked under arms. The area was notorious for unpredictable weather but they were grumbling all the same.

It was no use asking around aimlessly for a lost boy. Kids were as common as dogs around the town, scrapping and stealing and shouting at the chase. Tom blustered over to the rear of the bakery. The three baker’s boys scowled in turns and made a show of beating flour from their trousers.

“Could have gone to the fort,” one of them said, sullenly. All three had short-cropped hair and burns on their hands from hot trays. “We didn’t let him in, but sometimes he’d climb up anyway.”

“And where is that?” Tom pressed. “Come on, lads. I’m in no mood for games.”

“Out near Anderson’s bottom dam,” said the youngest and meekest. Tom frowned at the boys and tugged Evan along with him.

The earthen streets were slippery and shining in the light of the oil-lamps that hung from poles at every crossroad. Only the unfortunates were out in the weather now. Everyone with a canvas to huddle under was stripping off wet clothes by candlelight and cursing the sudden deluge.

Tom strode purposefully, his face set. Davey was in for a whipping, that was a fact. It grew darker as they left the oil-lamp light of the main streets and darker still as they wove through the shanty town at the outskirts. Evan passed an abandoned boot, laces askew, stuck deep in the mud. Its broken sole leaked rainwater. He stumbled, kicking through puddles, trying to see over his shoulder and into the gloom. Bobby was there, somewhere, waiting, with Mully whispering in his ear of untouched veins and riches beyond any miner’s dreams.

“He’ll not be back tonight. Come on, Evan.” Tom cupped his hands to his mouth. “Davey! Da-vey!” There was a note of fear in Tom’s voice that Evan had never heard before. “Davey! If you can hear me, get here, now!”

There was no reply as they arrived at Anderson’s property.

“See it?” Tom gestured, dashing the wet from his face. “The baker’s boys built it last summer.” His hair was stuck flat to his scalp. “So it was them who stole the door off my kitchen to use as a floor, the bastards. I was in the front and never heard nothing.”

Evan followed Tom’s point. He made out a dark spot in the split of a ponderous gum. A dam pooled near the base, banks slick and grasping. A piece of bark tore itself off the fort’s makeshift roof and flapped to the ground. Evan couldn’t be sure with the poor light and storm, but he couldn’t feel a body in there.

There was something, though. A human pulse and flicker that was somewhere else, somewhere lower. The essence skipped and wavered like a guttering candle until Evan remembered the way that Davey’s dark hair curled in the front and the way he’d laugh when Katie pushed him down the slag hill.

There. Evan had him. All was gasping, thrashing. Evan pushed past Tom, peering through the undergrowth with his eyes as well as his heart.

The rain had churned the dam and its bank into a soup of rock and mud. It wasn’t until Evan saw the slippery furrow leading from the base of the tree that he noticed the writhing and roiling of a small body in the water.

“Tommy, there!” Evan pulled Tom’s sleeve. “Can you see him?”

“Davey!” Tom ran for the dam. “I’m coming!” A snapped-off limb snagged him as he bashed toward his son. A streak of blood ran down his left arm.

Evan watched, clinging to Davey’s spark. His boots were full of rain but it could have been liquid lead pooling about his toes. He couldn’t so much as bend his knee to take a single step forward. Is this how Katie had felt at the end? Delicate as a tadpole’s flutter, growing softer as the water engulfed her? A shiver jumped from toes to nose, clattering his jaw as it went. Tom was at the dam’s softening edge now.

“Evan! Evan, I can’t swim…God!” Tom couldn’t reach Davey without flinging himself into the water. He howled and staggered back up toward the gums, wrenching a dead branch off a fallen tree. Tom probed the bank, shoulders shaking.

The tackle came from nowhere, snapping Evan’s head back and ploughing his body into the sodden leaves and bark. Mully wrapped his arms around Evan’s, clamping them to his waist. The two men tangled their way forward, lumps of exposed rock thumping them as they rolled. Bobby’s hoarse shouts echoed over their fight.

“Get him, Mulligan! Get his hands!”

Evan tore at the dirty skin of Mully’s shoulder with his teeth and spat blood. The lanky man swore and wrenched himself away.

“Bastard.” He slapped Evan hard across the mouth. Evan scrabbled toward Tom who was, helplessly, still easing his way into the turgid water.

“Help me! Please, I can’t reach him, I can’t…” Tom was waist-deep now. “Davey, please, I’m coming, I’m coming.”

Mully stood over Evan, ignoring Tom.

“Stay down!” Bobby’s broken teeth jutted from the split in his beard. “We’re taking you with us tonight, Evan.” Bobby’s gun was pointed at Evan’s head. It was a grandfather of a piece, but it was still young enough to drive a bullet into his skull.

“No.” Evan shook his head. He shook all over. “I can’t.”

“You can, or we’ll end this now.” Bobby drew closer, the barrel of his gun an inch away from Evan’s eye. A droplet hung off the end like a tear. Thunder rumbled, twice, thrice.

“Help, please…I’ve nearly got him, I just need…” Tom splashed, so close now. “God he’s not moving. God! Help me, you bastards!”

Davey’s light flared and then went out.

Evan said, “No more. Just kill me.” He backed up and eased himself onto a knee. “You’ll get nothing if you do, but you’re not taking me. Not again.”

It was too dark to make out the colour of Bobby’s eyes, but Evan held his gaze. Bloody dirt crunched under his teeth as he tightened his aching jaw.

“Are you going to kill me, Bobby?” Evan’s voice was only as loud as it needed to be. “Do it. Kill me.”

“You fucking bastard.” The tip of the gun wavered and dipped. There was no fear in the tremble, only rage. “We could be rich. You fucking bastard.”

“Kill whoever you want, I won’t help you. I won’t.” Evan lifted his chin, fearless for the first time in months.

Bobby roared and threw down his gun. He locked his hands around Evan’s throat and rammed his body to the ground.

Evan rolled so that he was atop the man who had held him captive, who had killed his wife and drowned his daughter. Evan screamed and hit and hit; he raged like a bonfire. Bobby hit back but each blow was weaker than the last. There was a flicker within Bobby’s body, something that Evan could see as he punched. It was the basic element of who Bobby was: his spark. Evan punched one more time and heard the crack of bone. As he hauled in a breath, the spark ran out of Bobby and flooded into Evan, crackling down his arms and legs like lightning.

Evan rose, jittering, and left the shell of Bobby bleeding in the muddy grass. Mully’s feet slapped the wet dirt as he ran for town, though not to the law. The Joes knew him well enough not to trust his word.

Let him run. Evan had a boy to save.

“I’m coming, Tommy!” Evan staggered and slid his way down the dam bank. Tom was wide-eyed and neck-deep. One arm was wrapped around Davey. The boy was still. Evan perched on the most solid piece of clay that he could find.

“Bring him here, Tom. Come on.” Evan held the same stick that Tom had used to poke the mud. It was bent and too short, but Tom half-swam, half-stepped closer until his large hand wrapped around it. They were heavy, the pair of them, and saturated.

Between the two of them, Evan and Tom strained and swore and pulled themselves and Davey out of the dam and onto flat ground. The boy’s lips were blue. His eyes were open but he didn’t blink away the rain that sprinkled, lighter now, over his face.

“Got to get the water out,” Tom said, turning the boy. “Push, come on.” He shoved at Davey’s ribs. Nothing happened. “Come on.”

“Here, give him to me.” Evan took the boy. The life that he’d taken from Bobby flickered through his veins, too much for one man to hold.

Evan took in a lungful of air. He pushed into Davey’s chest the way he did with dirt. He flooded the boy with fire, with breath, with life. He heard a wet noise but didn’t open his eyes. Tom was praying but he kept forgetting the words.

Evan felt a lick of flame rising within Davey. It grew slowly, until it was burning on its own, filling up the boy and bringing him back from the dark.

Davey hacked and coughed and spewed out the rest of the water that had filled him. He cried along with his father. Tom rubbed his hands over Davey’s arms and chest, chasing away the cold.

“Thank you, Lord, thank you. We’ll get you to a fire, Davey, don’t worry. We’ve got you now, we’ve got you.” The gap in Tom’s teeth whistled.

A life saved didn’t begin clear the balance, but it helped. Evan stood and carefully wiped his hands clean on his wet shirt.

Evan coughed. His whole body felt wrung-out like an old cloth. He wouldn’t be able to travel far for at least a day, maybe two, though it no longer mattered. He was where he belonged. Home.

Evan stood and carefully wiped his hands clean on his wet shirt.