APEX MAGAZINE
ISSUE 85, JUNE 2016

Jason Sizemore, Editor-In-Chief

Table of Contents

EDITORIAL

Words from the Editor-in-Chief — Jason Sizemore

FICTION

Folk Hero — Mary Pletsch

Cuckoo Girls — Douglas F. Warrick

Memorials — Aliette de Bodard

The Kraken Sea (Excerpt) — E. Catherine Tobler

NONFICTION

Seeking TANIS. Runner Available — Betsy Phillips

Interview with Author Mary Pletsch — Andrea Johnson

Interview with Cover Artist Joe Badon — Russell Dickerson

POETRY

Later, they found her journal — Tina Parker

Ghost Plague — Tina Jens

By Payette Lake — Cullen Groves

Words from the Editor-in-Chief

Jason Sizemore

Welcome to issue 85!

It’s a new month and we’re pleased to bring you a new issue with new fiction. In “Folk Hero,” Mary Pletsch writes an entertaining and heartbreaking tale examining how hate, fear, and distrust manifests in society through generation after generation. Douglas F. Warrick’s “Cuckoo Girls” follows two women fighting for their lives while (literally) being chased by their demons. Both “Folk Hero” and “Cuckoo Girls” are layered with meaning and showcase two authors at the top of their games.

Our classic reprint is a novelette by Aliette de Bodard.  “Memorials” is a crime story about family and difficult choices. Rounding out our fiction is an excerpt from E. Catherine Tobler’s short novel The Kraken Sea (Apex Publications, June 2016).

Poetry this month is provided by Cullen Groves, Tina Jens, and Tina Parker. Andrea Johnson interviews author Mary Pletsch. Russell Dickerson interviews cover artist Joe Badon.

§

I’ve discovered the world of podcasts! Yes, I’m a decade late to the party. Outside of Escape Pod, Pseudopod, and the Apex Magazine podcast, until recently I had ignored this branch of media.  However, on a long drive to a convention this winter, I listened to Serial and became a radio-on-demand addict.

Lately the list of podcasts I subscribe to grows every week, including Welcome to Nightvale, Alice Isn’t Dead, Astonishing Legends, Limetown, and Lore. But my favorites, by far, are the dark docudramas TANIS and The Black Tapes. Both delve into the weird and incorporate a fair amount of dark science fiction into their plots (TANIS springboards from Scientology and golden age SF in its first episode) and as I have been listening, I couldn’t help but think that Apex Magazine’s readers would be as interested as I am. I reached out to the producers of TANIS and TBT and they agreed to a feature and interview. I hope you enjoy the piece by Betsy Phillips, and that you will check out both podcasts.

Until next month!

Jason Sizemore
Editor-in-Chief

Folk Hero

Mary Pletsch

5,200 words

Corporal Carlisle Beckett had known from the beginning that teasing the truth out of forty-six (at last count) verses about the Ardua County Sniper would permanently engrave the lyrics into his memory. Still, he hadn’t planned on the tune insinuating itself through his subconscious. The song was just so damned catchy, and right now he didn’t dare tap along to the beat. The slightest noise would give away his position, neatly tucked under a twig and leaf-covered net half a mile upslope from the ghost town.

He let his lips mouth the chorus while he stroked the sniper rifle’s trigger and watched the long grasses shine amber in the sun’s dying light, bowing in the wind as if an unseen figure were passing by.

Hail to the West, to the land of the sun,

To the Ardua Sniper, the Lord of the Gun,

Till all chains are broken and all Terrans gone,

We fight through the night and we rise like the dawn!

Corporal Mbeki was convinced that the Sundowner bards had gathered an anthology of war stories and set it to music: a sort of Separatists’ Greatest Hits. If her theory was right, the Sniper was a fiction invented to protect the guilty, to hide real-life terrorists under a cloak of mythology, and Beckett was wasting his time out here on this godforsaken hill. He did not believe it for an instant. The Ardua County Sniper was always the same man. The lyrics of the folk song were as good as a confession.

Verse twenty-nine — the Terran garrison at Rouge-Soleil sent counter-snipers into the mountains, hunting for a Separatist hero. Verse thirty — the Sniper sent them back in body bags. The garrison requested close air support; the Sniper and his compatriots retaliated with surface-to-air missiles — verses thirty-one and thirty-two. Finally the Terran military had set the whole damned mountain range afire, prompting five verses of lamentations, as though the villages of Ardua County hadn’t had anything to do with harbouring the Sniper and his associates.

And while the hills blazed and the sky rained ash, the Ardua County Sniper had gone to East Solregit, to the seat of Terran power — verses thirty-eight through forty-five — and assassinated General Carlisle Beckett, Senior, for the unspeakable crime of reuniting Solregit with the Terran Confederacy.

Beckett hoped the bards had been practicing their lamentations in the years since, because they were going to need a few more of those verses when he was through.

The town lay cradled like a baby between the crests of two hills; an infant stillborn, a casualty of war. Beckett let the crosshairs in his combat helmet’s heads-up display track down the overgrown laneways until a white gleam caught his eye. He blinked and zoomed in for a better look. The display blurred for an instant; then the image resolved itself into sun-bleached bone, lying amongst scattered shingles and crumbled brick.

He switched the helmet view to panorama and moved his head right to left. A swaybacked barn still stood on the north side of town, and some of the buildings on the south side had only one wall caved in, but most of the village had been reduced to nothing but carpets of running ivy and bird’s-eye trefoil stretching tentative tendrils over the foundations of little homes. A single blood-red flower rose out of a clump of twitch-grass lining the side of a collapsed house, the sole survivor of a long-gone flowerbed.

The Sundowners had fought off several alien incursions in the century they’d been without Terran support, but it wasn’t aliens who had taken this town off the map. The Sundowners had let it burn rather than surrender to his father. Beckett clicked his back teeth together in time with the song, hoping his lips would swallow the sound and keep it contained within his skull.

In the open patch of land that had once been the village square, a wooden pole stood twelve feet high. A plank nailed across the mid-point bore the town’s name, written in the western dialect. The town pole was a Sundowner tradition, but Beckett was certain that this was not the original. It was too brightly painted, too whole, to belong to the decomposing village that surrounded it. Beckett blinked, and his computerized scope zeroed in again.

Yes — there, nearby, was the blackened stump of the former pole, a crown of splinters above the scrub shrubs and bracken. He blinked to increase the magnification. Now he could see the pole itself, lying on its side in the long grass, half-swallowed by moss.

Beckett moved his magnified gaze up the pole, tracing the ornate carvings and impossibly detailed painting, reminiscent of scrollwork, unique to the traditional handicraft of West Solregit. Growing up in the Loyalist East had given Beckett a passing familiarity with the symbolism, enough to guess that the town pole told a story: a baby, holding a gun, crowned with the setting sun; a figure with a sword, menacing kneeling figures; the sun-blessed hero, grown to adulthood, standing over the fallen swordbearer while a child held tight to the hero’s leg. The solar rays emanating from both gunman and weapon indicated their sacred nature. A holy weapon, Beckett surmised, a single gun, as in the song …

The forty-sixth and final verse of The Ardua County Sniper contained instructions on how to bring down the wrath of the Lord of the Gun upon your foes.

The bottom two-thirds of the pole bore a collection of petitions in many forms: rolled papers, holographs, leather pouches, cipher chips, attached with screws, twine, wire, adhesives, or even rolled up and stuck into the carvings. The song’s instructions are being followed, Beckett thought with a vicious certainty. He glanced over the top portion of painted carvings and suddenly stilled at the sight in his crosshairs.

The round white dome of a human skull crowned the pole, its rear to Beckett, staring sightlessly into the setting sun. His father had been right. Leave the colonies to their own devices for a couple hundred years, and what happens? They return to savagery.

Beckett was feeling more than a little savage himself. He had been born in East Solregit; this planet was his homeland too. He had come to this town to kill a hero, and if his theory was right, all he had to do was wait for the Ardua County Sniper to come home.

§

“Targets sighted.”

The voice of Beckett’s AI spotter sounded in his ear, pulling him out of his study of the town pole. He knew the sound was wholly contained within his helmet, inaudible to a person standing next to him. It startled him anyway. Funny how his imagination had conjured the image of the Ardua County Sniper lurking behind him, watching him, smirking, composing a forty-seventh verse.

“Directions?” Beckett asked the computer in his headgear.

In reply, a blinking red arrow appeared in his heads-up display. Beckett obligingly turned his head in the direction of the arrow and a man’s head came into focus. What do you know, Beckett thought. The old barn is now the finest house in town.

While a scroll of data down the right side of his screen provided Beckett with data — distance to target, barometric pressure, wind direction and strength, temperature, everything he needed to calculate the perfect shot — the lieutenant studied his adversary skeptically. Young, tall and fit. Classically handsome, strong jaw, a day of stubble on his cheeks. If he were Terran, he would be the kind of man who could star in a recruiting holo.

In this land, he might be the kind of man who inspired a song.

The Sundowners could never afford combat armour like the type Beckett wore under his camouflage-covered ghillie suit. The man standing in the barn’s doorway wore only a thin cloth shirt under an old-fashioned, threadbare Terran military-issue field jacket dyed slate grey and hand-embroidered with rebel insignia. He carried an assault rifle on a sling over his shoulder.

The spotter had said targets, plural. Beckett let the scope trace the curve of the man’s arm towards a second target, then a third. The shadows cast by the barn rendered the targets’ edges indistinct in the waning light of the setting sun.  

If the Separatists were making a propaganda diorama, they needed a new leading lady. The woman next to the leading man was younger still — a girl, really — and very plain, her eyes too far apart, her lips too wide, her nose crooked as though it had been badly broken. She wore ill-fitting grey fatigue pants, held up by a belt, and a simple blouse patterned with native designs. A toddler clutched the flap of her thigh pocket. Even at this magnification, Barrett could not tell if the little one was a boy or a girl.

If the woman were Terran, she’d still be in school. But in West Solregit, adulthood began at thirteen, and adult responsibilities, often sooner. She was heavily pregnant. Her shoulders hefted a pack and her arms cradled a long gun swaddled in canvas.

She’s maybe my daughter’s age.

Beckett tried to imagine Carla as the head of a household — or as a mother — and his imagination failed him. Carla was smart, but unfocused and unmotivated, and her grades reflected as much. Typical sixteen-year-old. And yet, as he looked down at the leading lady, Beckett felt a strange gratitude. Youthful immaturity had been priced far too high for the rebel girl to afford it for long.

The man gestured downhill, back towards the valley to the north. There were thriving towns down there, most of them filled with rebels or rebel sympathizers. The woman shook her head. He grabbed at her hand and she tore away from him, snarling at him, gesturing towards the pole with its macabre figurehead. The toddler clung to its mother. The leading man seemed apologetic, but she was having none of it. She picked up the child and shoved it into the man’s arms; then she shouldered the long gun and turned her back on him, striding towards the center of town. He called after her, and his voice echoed from the distant hillside, but she did not look back.

Beckett had gone to war when Carla had been three. He would never forget the way she’d wailed and reached out for him when he boarded his shuttle; how his wife had tried and failed to soothe her. This little one sat perfectly still in uncanny silence, watching its mother depart. Then its head turned and met Beckett’s gaze.

There was no way the child could see him at this distance, not when his ghillie suit and netted blind rendered him all but indistinguishable from the foliage. Still, for a moment his crosshairs rested right between the toddler’s eyes, and the child stared back, unblinking. Beckett, unnerved, turned his attention to the leading man.

The man turned and headed for the tree line. Beckett settled his crosshairs on the back of the man’s skull, hoping he could make the shot without striking the child. He did not check, even for a second, to see if the toddler was still looking his way. He had only a matter of moments before the separatist disappeared into the trees, and the light was rapidly fading as the sun descended. Still, he held his fire, and not only because of the toddler.

Beckett didn’t want to go home empty-handed, but he had to shoot the right target. If he chose wrong, then perhaps one night, on her way back from having a few drinks in town, his friend Mbeki might stumble into the Ardua County Sniper’s gunsights. That, after all, was what had happened to Lieutenant Jane Cremini in verse eighteen.

With a quick movement of his eyes, he ordered his AI spotter to return his sights to the girl with the long gun. She had made her way to the town pole, where she went down slowly on one knee, using her weapon as a crutch. Beckett could see a strange harlequin pattern painted on the rifle: yellow, red, white swirls, their patterns similar to those on the pole. He blinked again, and the gun became huge in his helmet, so magnified that he could read the painted glyphs: courage, endurance, victory.

Verse three said that the Sniper carried a holy weapon. Beckett felt a spike of excitement lance through his system, bringing a wash of adrenaline in its wake. The world became hyper-real — colours brighter, scents stronger, sounds louder — and he tamped down the thrill in his chest, the excitement of a hound that had scented its prey.

Beckett held his fire while the leading man and the little child vanished into the forest. Slowly, carefully, he reoriented his weapon until it aimed at the girl’s head.

The girl used her hands to sweep back the long grass, revealing a flat stone slab at the base of the town pole. From her pack she produced a lucifer, a shallow bowl, and two fat seven-day candles encased in glass. She lit the candles, and then reached under the altar for a handful of herbs which she set to smouldering in the bowl. Beckett watched her lips mouth words that were blown away by the wind. The girl leaned forward, breathing deeply of the smoke.

Beckett had heard the same rumours as every other Terran: the Sundowners were sun-worshippers, ancestor-venerators, witches. There were several lines in The Ardua County Sniper which Beckett didn’t understand, though he suspected they might be religious references. Perhaps he should have taken the time for more research. Perhaps then he would understand what the girl was doing.

And perhaps she would have killed more of his friends while he waited.

She bowed her head. Beckett’s breath caught in his throat as a creeping sensation overtook his excitement. His family wasn’t religious, but he still felt strange about shooting a girl at prayer, a girl who could have been his daughter.

Beckett dredged his memory and stirred up other thoughts. Cremini, for one. And Jasper Wu. Poor Wu. Verse Nineteen was about Wu, and how the Ardua County Sniper had shot him while he sat in a goddamned outhouse.

He wasn’t looking at Carla. He was looking at a terrorist.

Prayer finished, the girl looked up, her eyes unfocused, and reached out her hand. A leather cord attached to a dangling leather pouch caught her searching fingers. She wrapped her fist around it and yanked down, hard, snapping the leather. She fished a tiny chip out of the pouch and snapped it into her wrist tablet.

The song in Beckett’s head obligingly began the forty-sixth verse:

O victim of tyrants, O Child of the Sun,

Tell ye your tale to the Lord of the Gun,

Tight to his pole our petitioner ties,

Prays to the gods that a Hero will Rise.

The song wound through Beckett’s brain and in between the lines he could read the verdict: guilty, guilty.

Even heroes fall, Beckett thought, and pulled the trigger.

§

Two weeks since his kill, and the girl’s blood had been washed away by rain and dew. Beckett guessed that her companion had taken her body, but he’d left the petitions behind, and, surprisingly, her long gun as well. The weapon was laid out across the stone slab like a sacrifice, in between the smoke-stained pillars of the seven-day candles, now burned down to puddles of wax.

Beckett approached the primitive altar and felt like an atheist in church. He had a hero’s medal pinned to his jacket now, and sergeant’s bars on his shoulders, and a pack on his back. His wrist tablet contained official orders posting him off world to a Terran garrison in the Oya system. Someplace where he would be in no danger of becoming part of the next folk hero’s legend.

Up close, he could see the weapon was an antique Sorcerer S-7 precision laser rifle covered in ornate swirls of paint. On Earth the thing would have been in a museum, part of an exhibit on the Terran military before the colonies were forced into independence. Here on Solregit, the Sorcerer had probably seen two centuries of service. The focusing apparatus appeared to be a homemade replacement. Its detailed paint had been touched up several times, with some of its restorers clearly more skillful than others.

Beckett was not the first visitor.

Tributes ringed the town pole: bunches of wilted blooms, platters of rodent-nibbled cakes, hand-carved wooden figurines, boxes of power cells. Beckett picked up one of the boxes and discovered to his shock that the cells within were all fully charged. There was even a container of the very expensive, very tightly restricted Terran armour-piercing ammunition that even Beckett hadn’t been able to get his hands on. On top of the container rested a single blood-red flower.

The floral fragrance could not quite cover a rancid stench that hung heavy in the air. Beckett looked up purely by coincidence and felt his stomach turn over.

The girl’s head had joined the skull at the top of the pole.

If he had felt any guilt about the blasphemy he had come here to perform, it was gone now. He was no songwriter, but he knew how to give the Sundowners some inspiration. In his left jacket pocket: nails. In his right hand: a hammer.

Beckett was over six feet tall, but even so, he had to stand on the rock altar to get enough height to do the job. The treads of his left boot bit into the still-warm wax stub that had once been a pillar candle. He hooked the hammer’s claw under the plank that bore the name of the ghost town. Beckett tugged; the town pole screamed as it gave up its sign. He repositioned the hammer, yanked again, and the plank tumbled to earth with a satisfying thud. HEROES RISE, it proclaimed in the western dialect to the unseeing sky.

Beckett steadied himself on the altar and took a new sign out of his pack. He dropped the pack, took the first nail from his pocket, and began to hammer. Soon he was hitting the nail in time to the beat of the song, the damned song that just wouldn’t get out of his head.

When he was done, the ghost town had a new name.

He took her weapon with him when he left.

§

Ten years later, Carlisle Beckett finally came home to the planet of his birth.

Straight off the space elevator, he came to attention in front of Colonel Kumani Mbeki. Colonel. The attrition rate on Solregit had made Mbeki a colonel, while Beckett, despite his Paladin’s Cross, was only a major.

It was good to see her again. Strange how he couldn’t find the words to say so.

She greeted him with “Goddamn it, Carlisle, I can’t believe they sent you back here.”

“I’ve been requesting it since I left,” Beckett retorted as he saluted her, and then he spoke the words that had defined his whole life, like a mantra. “I was born in East Solregit. This is my planet too.”

“You’re going to die,” Mbeki said flatly. “For ten damned years, every time we lose soldiers to that goddamned Sniper, we find one of these,” she said, and thrust a scrap of leather at Beckett.

Beckett felt a chill run through his blood.

This was war. War was not supposed to be personal.

HEROES FALL, said the words burned into the leather. In the back of his mind, there was a sound like his daughter’s old music box starting up; then the first hesitant notes of a half-forgotten song rang in the back of his skull.

“I thought you didn’t believe in the Ardua County Sniper.”

Mbeki gave him a bitter look. He deserved it. Her theory had been wrong; but he had been wrong too.

The leather was proof he’d shot the wrong rebel in Heroes Rise.

“How many verses are there now?” he asked softly.

“Sixty-eight,” she whispered.

Beckett took the leather from Mbeki and tucked it into his pocket. He had only wanted to end the threat that had taken a child’s daddy away. Instead, he’d brought down the Lord of the Gun’s fury on his friend and her soldiers.

“It’s our planet,” he said firmly, as if the claim could ever justify the cost. The medal he no longer deserved pulled at his uniform, weighing him down. “I’ll …”

Mbeki’s eyes blinked; her lips pressed together into a bloodless line. He did not dare say that he would make this right. There were too many new verses in the Sniper’s song that he could not undo.

He could only make sure there would be no more.

“Are the instructions still at the end?” he asked, and his voice cracked.

Mbeki closed her eyes and recited:

“O outlaw and orphan, O Child of the Sun,

Bring ye your plea to the Lord of the Gun,

Take up the mantle when dusk tints the skies,

A hero will fall and a legend will rise.”

The verse had changed, but the gist was close enough. The same town; the same killer. “I’ll go back and finish it,” Beckett vowed. “I swear.”

§

Six days. Six days he’d been waiting out here, and nothing. Beckett frowned as he rolled onto his side under the camouflage netting and counted the nutrient bars in his left pocket in the rapidly fading dusk, even though he knew already that he had only two left, and his stomach was rumbling. And the song, that damnable song; he’d memorized all the verses they’d added while he’d been gone.

He’d been fishing for words to justify himself to Mbeki, and fearing that no such words existed, when he heard the sound of a motor making its way up the mountain trail.

In ten years nobody had rebuilt the village, or even bothered to change his sign. HEROES FALL, read the pole in the centre of town, and yet the place was not entirely abandoned. The flowers on the stone altar were fresh; when he’d arrived here, a curl of smoke had been rising from the incense bowl. The girl’s head was nothing but pale bone now, watching him with accusing sockets, and the town pole still hung heavy with petitions. A decade of silence, and the true believers kept the faith, praying for the return of the Lord of the Gun.

His AI pinged, alerting him to movement.

There. At last.

The rebel parked the truck and slid from the driver’s seat. Beckett’s throat tightened in anticipation of a holy vow made good.

Ten years of hard living hadn’t destroyed the leading man’s looks, though there were streaks of silver in the hair at his temples, and a scar across his right cheek that made him look harder, not just older. The man’s fist clasped a thick bouquet of wildflowers. The leading man had a rifle slung over his shoulder — an assault rifle, not a sniper laser — and he didn’t bother to scan the landscape with the binoculars around his neck.

It was though he wanted to be shot. He walked in perfect cadence through the long grass and brush that carpeted the main street, with the precision of a stage performer; then he knelt before the altar at the town pole and bowed his head. He reached his left hand into his pack for a seven-day candle, his right hand into his coat pocket for a lucifer, and lit a single flame against the coming night.

The whole damned time, like any professional, he never once took a look at the audience.

Beckett’s danger-sense crept over the back of his neck on little mouse-like feet. Beckett rolled onto his back, hard, fast, and the first bullet buried itself in the dirt where his neck had been.

His helmet refocused on the target. She was far too close, a pistol in her hands, and he’d never heard her approach. Small for her age, she looked about ten, but Beckett knew she was older. She’d inherited her mother’s looks, poor kid.

He needed just a second to bring his rifle to bear; but his armour did not provide it. She had armour-piercing ammunition and her mother’s aim. Her second shot did not miss.

Carla, he thought.

I was supposed to leave you a better world.

§

Lieutenant Carla Beckett found no satisfaction in we regret to inform you and his sacrifice will never be forgotten. In the decade since her father’s famous kill, she had grown up in his image: joining the Terran military, qualifying as a sniper with the cutting-edge Shadrach laser rifle. Now, she hoped she’d cultivated even a fraction of her father’s patience.

She would need every ounce of it to sit through her father’s funeral, wait for the tribute in the officer’s mess afterwards, and ply Colonel Mbeki with drinks. The information in her father’s diary, written in old-fashioned ink on old-fashioned paper, had been incomplete. It might be coldblooded to play the grieving daughter card and pump her dad’s old friend for information, but she knew he would have understood that the best way for her to mourn him was to honour him.

It wasn’t until the sixth drink that Mbeki told her how the search platoon had found her father’s body: laid out on some sort of tribal altar, a sacrifice to the Lord of the Gun.

On the seventh drink, Mbeki mumbled something about how heroes fall, and how the Ardua County Sniper was still out there, hunting. Coming for her. Coming for them all. Adding lyrics to his song.

On the eighth drink, Lieutenant Beckett asked Colonel Mbeki to sign a four-week compassionate leave pass. She held her breath when the colonel read it over, because she had lied on the form — an offense under military law. Section 9A indicated that she wanted the time off in order to attend a spiritual retreat in West Solregit. Surely it sounded plausible, given that she’d recently lost her father.

And yet, judging by the look on Mbeki’s face when she authorized the pass, it dawned on Carla Beckett that her excuse might contain a certain degree of truth after all.

§

After watching the ghost town through the night and into the next morning, Beckett was satisfied that her father’s killer was currently not in residence, and neither was anyone else. No matter. The town pole was festooned with petitions; the Ardua County Sniper would eventually return.

The wait left Beckett with precious few distractions. She set aside her Shadrach sniper laser and made a detailed examination of the village through the crosshairs of the antique Sorcerer S-7. The altar to the Lord of the Gun was just as her father had described in his diary, down to the bouquets of fresh wildflowers and the offerings of ammunition. The skulls at the top of the town pole watched her watching them, their expressions enigmatic. Beckett moved her gaze down the pole, glancing over the intricate carvings of the folk hero and his sword-bearing adversary, until suddenly words in her own language caught her eye.

The Sundowners had kept her father’s sign, all these years. Then they’d added their own sign beneath, painted on a board, written in Terran Fundamental so foreign eyes would understand.

HEROES FALL

LEGENDS RISE

Didn’t they, though. A weight settled over her chest, where a patch bearing her surname had been stitched above her heart and her father’s diary and pen hung heavy in her pocket. At the funeral, Colonel Mbeki had called Carla the Becketts’ living legacy; and the sixty-sixth verse of that Separatist song her dad had always been humming spoke of the next swordbearer. She studied the pole’s carvings and began to understand.

Throughout the afternoon, Beckett observed the skulls through the Sorcerer’s sights and thought of the Lord of the Gun and his daughter, and how somewhere to the east, two white headstones, side by side, bore the names of General Carlisle Beckett and Corporal Carlisle Beckett, Junior. She thought of the rebel her father had called the leading man, the toddler he’d held in his arms, the children she hoped to have someday, and history repeating through an endless cavalcade of verses. Her crosshairs traced the carving of the child clinging to the hero’s leg, and the tune in her head changed key. Variations on a theme, but always the same damned song.

She thought of what she’d told Mbeki and asked herself what she’d truly come here to do. When dawn had broken bloody over a village called Legends Rise, she would have said vengeance. Now, she had no answer.

In the orange glow of the setting sun, Carla Beckett climbed out of her blind and stretched her legs. She slung her Shadrach over one shoulder, her father’s trophy over the other; then she moved downslope towards the village square. Foolish, perhaps. But any pilgrimage required a certain degree of trust in the gods.

She reached deep in her pocket, digging for a lucifer, and lit the fat pillar candles at the foot of the town pole. Her back prickled, as though eyes watched her from the hills, but she knelt before the enemy’s altar regardless. Beckett took her father’s diary from her pocket, laid it on the altar, opened it, and tore out the last page, ripping out the sixty-eighth verse of The Ardua County Sniper. Turning the paper over, she flattened it on the altar before fishing her father’s pen from her pocket and pressing the tip to the page. Quickly, before she could change her mind, Beckett scribbled her petition, signed it The Swordbearer and rolled it up into a tight cylinder that she stuffed into the barrel of the Sorcerer S-7.

A New Song.

Was it too much to ask?

Beckett needed to stand on the altar in order to reach high enough to hang the holy weapon’s strap over the twin signs on the town pole. She stepped carefully, so as not to disturb the candles, the diary or the previous offerings left there. When she was done, she gave the Sorcerer a crisp salute before beginning the long walk out of Legends Rise.

Beckett had just passed the swaybacked barn on the outskirts of town when she heard the tremulous notes of a child’s voice singing.

She looked back before she could think better of it. A girl of perhaps twelve sat on the altar under the town pole, cradling the Sorcerer in her arms like a doll while she sang. Beside her, a middle-aged rebel, still handsome despite the scar on his face and the scowl on his lips, stood glaring daggers at Beckett. He was restrained, at least for the time being, by a small hand on his thigh. The girl’s hand was decorated with tattoos that matched the ornate paint on the holy weapon. She held Beckett’s petition in curled fingers.

The Lord of the Gun was not a strong singer, and the rhythm of her song was still familiar. Beckett could pick out snatches of notes cribbed from The Ardua County Sniper, as if the girl couldn’t entirely get the old tune out of her head. Still, Carlisle Beckett’s diary had not contained any verses about stolen relics returned. Carla’s heart thundered, Beckett blood, Beckett legacy, but she forced herself to keep walking.

It wasn’t quite the new song she’d asked for, but Carla Beckett turned her back anyway, trusting variations on a theme to be enough.

Mary Pletsch is a glider pilot, toy collector and graduate of the Royal Military College of Canada. She attended Superstars Writing Seminars in 2010 and has since published short stories and novellas in a variety of genres including science fiction, steampunk, fantasy, and horror. She lives in New Brunswick with Dylan Blacquiere and their four cats. Visit her online at www.fictorians.com.

Interview with Author Mary Pletsch

Andrea Johnson

Any author can tell a story with words. But one who tells it through song and rhythm and meter is building a world and an atmosphere in an entirely different way. In the generation spanning story “Folk Hero,” Mary Pletsch uses music to show the passing of time, the pain of a war, which side is winning, and how to end it all. This is a story about how important it is to follow your traditions and how important it is to forge new ones. And then, of course, there is the song that ties everything together.

Pletsch gives us only a few actual verses of the song, but what she gives us is just enough to show that this is a song with a heartbeat. It’s a song that defines the hope of an entire people, that tells them where they are and how far they have yet to go. I’m a fan of the musician Maluka, and I couldn’t help but hear her voice in my head, singing these verses alongside the melody of “Age of Aggression” (Search it on YouTube, you won’t be disappointed). I’m sure you’ll agree that the combination of song and history and tradition is a powerful elixir. This song put me in a mood for Maluka, but I want to know — what do you hear when you read the words and feel the rhythm? Whose voice do you hear? What melody? And most importantly, when you read the words of this song and this story, what do you hear?

When she’s not writing about the writer’s life and the craft of being a writer at The Fictorians, Mary enjoys writing in various genres such as science fiction, fantasy, horror, and steampunk, collecting toys, and piloting gliders. Her fiction has appeared in Shock Totem, Dark Bits, When the Hero Comes Home 2, Fossil Lake: An Anthology of the Aberrant, Tesseracts 18, and Steamed Up, among many other anthologies.

Mary was kind enough to answer my questions about everything that was happening behind the scenes in “Folk Hero,” what she sees through her character’s eyes, the business of writing, a very exciting upcoming project, and more.

APEX MAGAZINE: Another way to tell a story is through song. And the story of the Ardua County Sniper’s accomplishments is told through a folksong. Growing with the telling, and growing with time, the song gains verses as the sniper fights off more foes. Song is a fantastic way to tell a story — a catchy tune and easy meter helps people remember the words and themes, and it’s an ideal way of spreading information through a culture that may have a low literacy rate or no written method of recording their information. What can you tell us about the use of music in this story? Does music play a large role in a lot of your fiction?

MARY PLETSCH: I’m actually not very musically inclined, but when I was a little kid and I was somewhere in the truck with my dad, we would sing. Sometimes we’d sing along to the radio and sometimes we’d just sing whatever came into our heads. When I went to summer camp I’d always come home with new songs that I’d learned to sing around the fire. In both cases the songs I remember best are the ones that tell stories.

In my adult life, well, there’s a military song called “The North Atlantic Squadron” and when we ran out of verses we just started making new ones up on the fly, then everyone would join in the chorus. I’ve heard it exceed a hundred verses. We were on that bus a very long time …

The Sniper’s song draws heavily on those experiences. The Sundowner culture that passes on its history and ideals and hopes and sorrows in the form of music. Kids learn the verses when they’re too young to really understand what they mean, and they grow up learning about the world from the song. The enemy can’t destroy the song because it’s not written down and it doesn’t need instrumentation. It gets in your head and it propagates itself, verse after verse.

One of the early drafts of this story was narrated as though it were a story being told (and sung), but there’s differences between writing a work designed to be read, and writing a work designed to be performed. Writing a short story as though the narrator was an oral storyteller didn’t produce a result I was satisfied with, but I did enjoy harvesting verses from the folk song to work into the finished story.

AM: This is a multigenerational story. Carlisle wants to avenge his father’s death, and later in the story we meet Carlisle’s daughter, Carla. How has the political situation changed (if at all) during the years?

MP: It’s one of those conflicts in which tension simmers for a while, then suddenly erupts, there’s a period of fierce fighting, and then back to the uneasy peace. Neither side can maintain heavy operations all the time for decades on end; but neither side has managed to reach a definitive resolution, either. The Sundowners don’t have enough people or equipment to drive out the Terrans, and the Terrans don’t have enough troops to pacify the Sundowners for very long. I suspect there’s some Terrans (particularly those back on Earth) who see the value in a population of locals able to defend the place from aliens with minimal support, and of course, personnel and money to devote to settling this matter aren’t unlimited. For the Terrans on Solregit, it’s a matter of keeping the Sundowners as quiet as possible given the limitations of what they’ve got to work with. And from the Sundowner side, it’s been centuries since Earth abandoned its colonists in the face of the alien incursion, and that bitterness is still very much alive all these years later. It’s the fact that the hard feelings have passed on from generation to generation that makes the conflict so long-lasting, even if there isn’t open warfare all the time.

AM: Carlisle and Carla also mirror, in a way, the father and daughter we see in the abandoned village. Is the mirroring intentional? Carla does something unexpected, something her father and grandfather would never have done. Why did she choose to do something different?

MP: Yes, the mirroring’s intentional. It’s a shame I never found a place to explicitly show that the “leading lady” in the abandoned village was the daughter of the original Sniper, who actually did die when the Terrans burned the mountains. This conflict has caused generations of loss on both sides and we see three generations in the story: General Beckett and the original Sniper, Carlisle and the leading lady; Carla and the girl. By the end of the story Carla realizes that the cycle is perpetuating itself, and so does the young Sniper.

I’d say both of them choose to do something unexpected and different, and for the same reason: because they realize that re-enacting their parents’ and grandparents’ actions will not bring them victory, peace, or an ending. They have to try something else.

I wanted to be careful with the ending, in that it’s not so simple as a decision to put down the guns and be friends. Realistically there are limits as to just how “different” one can choose to be, given such factors as upbringing, culture, physical and mental ability, personal emotion, and understanding of the world. Nobody’s worldview changes entirely in a thunderclap instant. The old song can’t be forgotten at will in favour of a wholly new one.

Sometimes variations on a theme aren’t enough. But I think there’s hope to be found in the knowledge that they are even possible. That hope is a reason to try.

AM: You wrote an article at The Fictorians about how much of what you write is “semi-true.” Are any parts of “Folk Hero” based on people or places that you know, or events you’ve experienced? What do you see when you look through Carlisle and then Carla’s eyes?

MP: I set out to write a war story (partly inspired, I think, by my Irish History class at the University of Huron College), but in the end, the generational theme is what hits closest to home. I’ve been told I display mannerisms and behaviours like my grandfather — a man who died before I was born — and often not in a good way. I see people who grew up in troubled homes filled with anger at their parents and yet perpetuating similar behaviours with their children.

Carlisle frustrates me. I understand his fury, but he also believes he’s justified in doing whatever it takes in the name of righteous anger. He’s proud of his heritage, but he’s not willing to accept that his family, his culture, or his political allegiance could ever have done anything wrong. It’s very difficult trying to sort out right and wrong when love and hate are tangled up with them.

Carla and the youngest Sniper are my hopes that history is not destiny.

AM: Your writing career got off the ground with a little help from the 2010 Superstars Writing Seminar. How did that seminar change how you viewed your writing and how you viewed a career as a writer? What was the most important thing you got out of Superstars?

MP: Superstars is not a craft seminar — it will not teach you “how to write.” It’s a seminar about the business aspects of being a writer. Before I went to Superstars, I was a hobby writer who was interested in publishing my work, but I didn’t know how to conduct myself as a professional. I didn’t know what was normal in the industry. I didn’t know how royalty payments worked. I wrote “when I felt inspired,” which basically translates as “when it felt like a lot of fun,” which is perfectly fine for a hobby writer and not so fine when one’s trying to build a career.

The most important thing I got out of Superstars was the knowledge that when I’m interacting with publishers, editors, potential publishers, readers, and the general public, I know how to present myself as a professional. I’ve also gained from my connection to a network of other writers — because nobody understands like someone who’s been there themselves. I recommend this seminar to anyone who feels satisfied that they have the skills to tell stories, but don’t know how to sell those stories.

AM: You also write romance fiction. What’s the biggest difference between writing romance, and writing sci-fi/fantasy? What do the two genres have in common?

MP: I think the biggest difference is complexity of character arcs. In romance writing, readers are typically looking for a story that will evoke specific emotions and conclude with a happy ending; this is true even if the story includes speculative elements. The appeal of the story is following the characters as they struggle to realize their happiness. This is what readers want, and this is what writers in the romance genre need to deliver, without simply re-treading their previous books. When I’m writing sci-fi/fantasy, my lead characters can be involved in all manner of relationships, which may not include romance. If there is romance, it may not be the focus of the story, or it may not end happily. I feel that I have more options, because anything can happen, but that also means I have to create a satisfying story out of that wide-open field. Just because I can kill my lead character doesn’t necessarily mean I should, not unless I can deliver a satisfying story arc that makes sense for the character and provides the reader with resolution.

What both genres have in common is a sense of wonder. In romance, it’s the reader getting swept away by the dynamic between the lead characters. In speculative fiction, it’s the reader being brought into the characters’ world.

AM: What’s the best writing advice you ever received?

MP: Don’t spend your time looking in the rear-view mirror.

If you’re writing for a career, you can’t afford to spend the bulk of your writing time holding your breath waiting to hear back about a submission, or searching the Internet for reviews of your stuff, or wondering if you should’ve maybe took Project B instead of A when you didn’t have time to meet deadlines on both, or if you should’ve phrased your cover letter differently, or started writing seriously in college … No. Your attention needs to be on what you’re writing next. The past is behind you already. You want to be moving forward. That’s where your focus needs to be. By all means learn from the past, but don’t live in it.

AM: What projects do you have in the works that you can tell us about?

MP: I’m working on a novel for The Ed Greenwood Group, something with a space opera theme … Look for the official project announcement in 2017.

Andrea Johnson lives in Michigan with her husband and too many books. If she’s not walking around her day job with a coffee mug in hand, then she’s at home with a book in one hand and a craft beer in the other. She can be found online at her book review blog Little Red Reviewer and on Twitter, where her handle is @redhead5318. You wouldn’t know it from this bio, but Andrea is a very goofy person.

Cuckoo Girls

Douglas F. Warrick

5,900 words

“You never wait to see if it’s really dead,” says Samantha, leaning over the small arsenal configured in pristine rows on the linoleum. “Because, you know, it isn’t. You just put it down for however long, and you run. You try to make it to a new place before it gets back up.” Her voice is casual, conversational, friendly. She might as well be discussing a particularly esoteric hobby, trying to recruit new participants, but not trying too hard. She picks up one of the Molotov cocktails and sniffs the rag. “What, did you soak this in gasoline?”

“Well, yeah,” says Nikki. “I mean, was I not supposed to?”

Samantha shrugs. “I mean, whatever, it’ll be fine, probably.” She sets the Molotov down on the kitchen floor and starts reconstructing her field-stripped Kahr CM9, her fingers juggling the components of the handgun with precise and practiced thoughtlessness. “I’ve always soaked the rag in alcohol or kerosene. Filled the bottle with gasoline. Come to think, I’m not sure why I’ve always done it like that. Read it on the internet, probably.”

A sense of anxious uselessness blooms up from Nikki’s guts and spreads in her chest. Watching Samantha do this stuff, watching her slam together pieces of little death machines and listening to her expound on best practices when building homemade incendiaries, seeing the shiny burn scars that peek out from beneath the collar of her shirt, trophies of the times she has survived, it all makes Nikki feel like a child. This isn’t her kitchen. It’s not anybody’s kitchen. It’s a tiny kitchenette in an extended-stay hotel, another place that doesn’t belong to her. How long is she supposed to live like this?

“Now, what the pros do — I mean, not pros, exactly, but serious revolutionaries, you know—they fill the bottle with … shit, I can’t remember. Anyway, they fill the bottle with one kind of chemical and wrap the bottle in paper soaked with another kind. Can’t remember the chemicals now — ugh — so dumb. When the bottle breaks, the chemical in the bottle reacts with the chemical on the paper, and boom.” She sets the CM9 aside, picks up her sports bottle of lemonade and takes a long drink. Offers it to Nikki. Nikki wants it. She’s been parched all evening. But she says no. Some part of her doesn’t want Samantha to give her anything. Some part of her is afraid of what happens to people when they become Samantha’s friends.

Samantha’s already back at it, picking up weapons, checking them for whatever it is people who know weapons look for, setting them back down. “Oh, and if you mix the gasoline with egg whites, it’ll stick to concrete and burn longer. That’s a cool idea, I think. Really solves a problem I wouldn’t even have thought about. I love stuff like that.”

Nikki says, “We’re not throwing them at concrete.”

“Well,” says Samantha, “we’re not revolutionaries, either. And, um, my advice? Find things you like to talk about. Learn how to talk about them without stopping. It helps.”

Nikki doesn’t say anything.

§

It doesn’t happen to everyone. Not that many people even know about it. Most people who deal with it walk around their whole lives thinking they’re the only one. Sometimes, they die before they ever get a chance to form complex opinions. Sometimes, they survive for decades and never meet anyone else like them. But sometimes, they run into a thread on a message board or discover a lonely hearts ad in the back of a local weekly constructed with just the right level of esoteric specificity to mean absolutely nothing to anyone who doesn’t know what it’s like. Sometimes, someone else just recognizes the dark hollows around their eyes and the way they keep glancing at all the exits.

That was what it was like with Samantha and Nikki. There was this bar, this super high-class place where dudes wore suits and ordered clear drinks and discussed stupid boring shit in practiced newscaster tones. Nikki didn’t notice at the time just how out of place Samantha seemed in there, with her plaid shirt and the paisley bandana barricading her short hair off her forehead. Remembering it, that’s all she can think about. How conspicuous she looked.

She’d almost forgotten her name at that point. Weeks after the thing had done what it had done to her friends and family, weeks of driving, of whittling away at her meager savings, of trying and failing to sleep, of showing up in new cities and wandering aimlessly, putting herself in places filled with happy functional people in the hopes that their pristine fearlessness would inoculate her from what had happened ever happening again.

She’d sat down at a corner booth and pulled Brett’s North Face jacket close to her face, tried to inhale whatever was left of his scent.  It just smelled like sweat and gas station food. Every time glasses clinked or one of the coiffed suits laughed a little too loud, she cringed and whimpered.

And then Samantha was sitting next to her, sliding into the booth with expert gentleness, placing a bottle of beer in front of her. “Hey,” she said.

“Um,” Nikki said. “Hey.”

“Got you a drink,” said Samantha.

“Oh. Thank you.”

“You just look like you could use one.”

Nikki picked up the beer absently. Muscle memory. For a while, Samantha just sat there, nodding in time to the opulent blare of brass instruments in whatever Rat Pack tune was playing through the sound system. Glancing at Nikki, appraising her. Then, she said, “What’d yours look like?”

It took Nikki longer than it should have to process the meaning of those words. When she did, some ragged hybrid of terror and hope gripped her by the ribcage and she made eye contact with Samantha.

Samantha nodded, offered a sympathetic half-smile. I know. You’re not the only one. It’s okay.

“Skin like … I dunno, like beef jerky.” The tears. The panic hitching in her lungs, fucking with her breathing. “Tall. There were, um … always lightning bugs. Fireflies. Wore a … like, a mask.”

“They usually do,” said Samantha.

§

The Glock 19 scares Nikki. It feels so unbearably natural in her hands, a statement of purpose, a promise. She thinks of all the things she knows about guns now that she didn’t know before. The ergonomics of the grip, the debates within the firearm enthusiast community between autoloader advocates and revolver fans, recoil and the ways to minimize it, Weaver stance, isosceles stance, blah blah blah. She thinks about her stance, tries not to think about the pinch and ache of the protective earmuffs. She tries to keep her muscles loose, fails.

Firing ranges don’t look like they do on cop shows. They’re brightly lit and busy. Undramatic. But her target — a white sheet, a vague implied man-shape — is just about the same. It feels strange to be aiming at something with mundane human dimensions and trying to imagine it as the thing from which she’s running. Like training to become a surgeon by applying Band-Aids to papercuts.

She fires six shots, hits a button, watches the white sheet proceed down its ceiling track toward her. She pulls off the earmuffs.

Samantha leans against the wall of Nikki’s booth and scrolls over something on her phone. “This girl on one of the message boards,” says Samantha. “She thinks they’re some sort of gods. Listen to this: ‘Something is controlling them. Someone. They’re being summoned, they have to be. And we’re the fuel that keeps them in this dimension. Without our blood and our fear, they can’t manifest.’ How do you like that, Nikki? Purty spooky.”

Nikki examines the holes in the target. “God, I suck,” she says.

“Doesn’t make sense to me,” says Samantha. “They’re so fucking clumsy. It’s not, um … I don’t know … not clinical enough to be ritualistic.”

Three shots over the left shoulder, passing cleanly through fuck-all. One in the left shoulder. Two in the left arm. Nothing to the chest or head.

Samantha speaks again, ostensibly to Nikki but apparently to her phone. “I met this woman a couple years ago who had worked out this big elaborate theory that we were film characters. Like, each from a different franchise or property or whatever. That the reason they don’t ever stay down is because somebody keeps writing sequels. I like that one. It’s so fucking meta. I mean, whatever, who knows if it’s true, but you gotta admire that kind of abstract reasoning.”

Nikki is only half listening. It’s always like this. Nikki constantly tense and anxious, constantly waiting for everything to go to shit again, and Samantha scouring every available source for something to fill the silence with. Her voice has become a weird comfort, the third member of their partnership. When they sleep, Nikki always tries to drift off first. If she doesn’t, she won’t sleep all night. The silence feels like a sucking void.

“I don’t like that one,” she says. “I don’t like, um … being diminished like that. All this for someone else’s entertainment.”

Samantha shrugs. “It’s only a theory,” she says.

§

Most girls who survive, they’re usually the only ones. That’s how you know it’s there for you and not for your friends. The pattern is always the same the first time it comes. It saves you for last. Lets you escape a few times. Plays with you, satisfying itself with whomever you’ve surrounded yourself with in the meantime. Your parents. Your friends. Your boyfriend. And then it starts hunting you in earnest. The process sometimes lasts weeks, but typically plays out over the course of a single evening. According to the message boards, there have been a lot of incidents that seem like they fit the usual pattern in which the target dies with the rest of them, and they’re the subject of heated debate. Who was the target? Why didn’t she survive like we did? Is this really one of ours, or is it unrelated? Can we learn anything from it?

Truth is, you can’t learn anything. Ever. There aren’t any answers.

Nikki never stops smelling it. Manure, wet asphalt, baby powder, bonfire smoke, the ripe sweetness of garbage long past needing to be taken out. That scent has haunted her since the moment it loomed over her in the unfinished basement of her parents’ house, its smiling baby-doll mask so close to her face that she could see that it wasn’t a mask at all, could see the way it pulsed and rippled as alien musculature clenched and unclenched beneath it. She forgot about the fireplace poker in her hands. The stink overpowered the smell of Brett’s blood, which was all over her and had been all she’d been able to smell for hours. In retrospect, that seemed like a reprieve. In a lot of ways, she’d rather be haunted by the ghost of that thing’s scent than by the ghost of Brett’s last scent. She wants to remember the way he smelled before. Cigarettes and a little too much cologne. The way his jacket smelled before she ruined it with fear sweat.

Down in the basement, it strained its overlong neck closer to her, cocked its head to one side, like it didn’t quite understand her, like it was personally wounded by her refusal to die. A single firefly crawled out of one of its eyeholes, floated in the tiny space between them, glowed once, then flew away. Nine feet tall, all of its limbs absurdly long, hunched like a very old man to keep from scraping its head against ceiling beams, clutching her father’s big straight razor like an ape that happened upon a tool it didn’t understand. Her father had loved that razor. Kept it sharp. Took good care of it. Inherited it from mom’s dad when he passed.

She was all out of tears. All out of screams. Empty except for a panicked understanding that her life had winnowed down to a stark binary: she would either die tonight or another night. That’s all there was. All there ever would be. When it raised the absurd disproportionate fist that clutched the razor, she stabbed it in the belly with the fireplace poker. From the wound flew hundreds of fireflies.

§

The stable is on fire, the thing that hunts Samantha is on fire, and Nikki can’t stop looking at the flames, twitching, swelling, thrashing. The heat evaporates her tears before they can slide down her cheeks. At the fire’s core, the thing slumps to its knees, stops waving its thickly muscled arms above its head, falls over sideways, is still. Samantha’s monster at the climax of her latest sequel. Nikki does not look at the burning thing. She does not breathe. There is only the fire, slowly making its way up the wooden beams, consuming this evening’s hiding spot, consuming Nikki’s awareness, filling her with numb disgust. She did this. This was her.

Then Samantha’s got her by the arm, dragging her away, past the stalls, out of the stable, into the cold night. The thoroughbreds shriek and thrash in their stalls. Nikki, ever haunted by sensations, still hears the sound of the bottle shattering. Still feels the sudden rush of heat from the Molotov igniting. She is here and there. Now and then. Stuck in two instances overlaid into simultaneity.

They bee-line for the fence, ducking down and crawling through the hole Samantha cut to gain access to the stables this afternoon. There had been one more of them, then. A third girl.  Esther, whom Samantha had found on the message boards. She’d been nearby. Frightened and confused and alone. They had picked her up, promised to keep her safe. They were broke, but Esther thought that if they could get into the stables, they’d have a place to crash for free. Sleep among the horses and figure out the rest tomorrow. The thing that killed her wasn’t even hers. Samantha’s did it. Surviving doesn’t make you a survivor. You die tonight or you die another night.

They get to Samantha’s car, buckle their seatbelts, slam the doors, turn on the fucking radio, and they can still hear the horses screaming as they burn to death.

Samantha drives.

“I killed it,” says Nikki. The words escape her like air from a balloon. “I killed it.”

“No, you didn’t,” says Samantha.

“I burnt it. I killed it. It killed Esther, and I killed it.”

“No. Nikki, you need to stop.”

“But I did it, I beat it, I beat your monster, I — I — I … did it. It was me.”

“Nikki,” says Samantha, “hon, I need you to shut up right now, okay? Just shut up and let me drive, okay?”

“But, Samantha, I —”

“Nikki!” Samantha shouts. Nikki has never heard her shout. She shrinks back involuntarily. “Shut the fuck up. Now.”

They get on the highway. Drive without talking. It’s the first time since they met that Samantha has been silent. There’s a baseball game on the radio, and Nikki thinks of Brett and tries not to cry.

They stop for gas twice, depleting their already dangerously low funds. Samantha has been at this for a while, has had to make money before now, surely. Between panicked non-thoughts and flashbacks, Nikki wonders how.

The sun is starting to come up when Nikki sees Esther’s purse in the footwell. She picks it up, opens it, extracts her wallet. Fifty bucks. A debit card. Two credit cards.

“I had this theory,” says Samantha. Her voice cracks. She’s been crying. This whole drive, Samantha has been crying without making a sound. “I thought … fuck … I thought maybe the things that are after us couldn’t touch a girl that didn’t, uh …” she swallows, “align with them … like, I thought since you were hunted and I was hunted, the thing hunting me couldn’t hurt you. The thing hunting you couldn’t hurt me. Fuck, Nikki. I was wrong. Jesus.”

Nikki doesn’t say anything. She thinks about reaching over and putting her hand on Samantha’s knee, but her limbs tingle bloodlessly, and she’s not sure she can move.

Samantha pounds on the steering wheel with the flats of her hands. The tears come conspicuously now. The wall crumbles, and Samantha, scared and angry and tired of everything, is laid out in front of Nikki like a dissected frog. “You want to know what I think? Where I really think they come from? No bullshit, no meta-movie stuff or god stuff or stupid message board stuff? I think they come from us. I think it’s our fault. We … make them, somehow. They grow in our brains, and then they just sort of … hatch. Like maybe we’re not even real people, like maybe we’re just designed to look like people so that nobody notices one of those things growing in their own house. They’re cuckoo birds, and we’re their eggs, and all the fucked up shit we do or have done to us just bubbles out and turns into them. And they will come, and they’ll come, and they’ll come and come and come, and eventually, we’ll be stupid or tired or sad or weak or … or brave enough to let them kill us. Matter of time, Nikki.”

She’s silent for a long time. Then she laughs and says, “Prove me wrong.”

“It’s going to be okay,” says Nikki in a voice smaller and higher than the one she thinks of as hers.

Samantha smiles sadly. This is where Nikki realizes that something has changed. That this isn’t a temporary break, that Samantha isn’t okay. That probably nothing is or ever will be anything close to okay again, if indeed it ever was. “Nikki, you’re probably … no, you are the best friend I’ve ever had. I trust you, and I like you, and I love you, and I’m loyal to you. But … and I … hate … myself for this, but … if it comes down to you or me? I will let you die.”

She reaches over and turns off the radio. The car is filled with road sounds. The sun climbs a little higher. Then she adds, “I won’t even think about it.”

§

They always look different. Short and slender, tall and stocky, roughly humanoid, totally abstract. There’s a woman on the message boards who says hers looks a little like one of those animatronic animals at kiddy birthday restaurants. Another one says hers looks like a cloud of phosphorescent gas that occasionally coalesces into the shape of a person. Samantha’s is short and fat, exuding a slimy film all over its cave-fish pale skin, sexless, naked except for a burlap sack over its head, and its fingers are all fused together. She says it smells like her father. They almost always appear to wear masks.

Some women say that they never saw it coming. That their lives as they knew them ended like someone flipping a light switch, normal one moment and shattered the next. That’s not how it was for Nikki.

The first time she saw it, she was sitting on the porch swing rigged up in front of her parents’ house. Carrie was over. They were drinking coffee and watching the sun go down, bundled under blankets and winter coats, reliving high school slumber parties past and knowing they were staring down a sort of precipice. Their teenage selves were sliding further and further into history, and even then, hanging out with Carrie felt like putting on a favorite shirt that had grown a little too small. Things were changing. It was sad, but sort of promising, too, an implication of the women they were respectively becoming. Mousy, chubby Carrie was neither of those things anymore, had a boyfriend now, couldn’t stop talking about him. Nikki couldn’t stop talking about Brett, was equal parts terrified and elated that her parents had invited him to spend Christmas with them.

It was actually Carrie who saw it first. She did that thing people do when something weird hooks their attention, straightening her spine, craning her neck.

“What?” said Nikki.

“Nothing. This dude.”

“Wow. You forgot about David pretty quick.”

“Shut up.”

“You get hot and suddenly you’re on the hunt.”

“No, shut up, it’s not like that. Just … seriously, look at this dude.”

Nikki tried to follow Carrie’s eyes, saw nothing. “What dude?” she said. “I don’t see a dude.”

“Fucking … right there. Get your eyes checked. Whatever, it’s nothing. He’s just … he looked a little weird to me.”

Then Nikki saw it. It was … it had to be a man. Two blocks down, where the road curved away toward the high school. Almost, but not quite, standing in the cone cast by the streetlight. He hadn’t seemed suspicious. For all they knew, he could have been waiting on a ride or looking for something he’d dropped in the dark. A pang of shame pulsed in Nikki’s belly and she looked away. Just a weird-looking man minding his own business being scrutinized by a couple of shitty judgmental college girls. Poor guy.

“He’s tall,” she said. “Jesus, he’s really tall.”

“I know, right?” said Carrie. “What’s with his neck?”

“I dunno. Some people just have long necks, I guess.”

“God. I guess. Hey, look!”

In the front yard, swelling and subsiding to a rhythm they couldn’t hear, a tiny green glow. There, and then not there. There, and then not there.

“Aw,” said Nikki. “Firefly!”

“We always called them lightning bugs,” said Carrie. “Weird. Super late in the season for it.”

“It’s nice,” said Nikki. “They pack the backyard in the spring. Makes this place feel like home.”

§

The nights are impossible now that Samantha doesn’t talk as much. Nikki averages three hours of sleep per night. Some nights, she stays awake until sunlight creeps past the blinds of their motel room and sleeps only when her body forces her to do so. She sat up one night and begged, in tears, for Samantha to talk to her, employing the same phrase again and again, wishing she could think of synonyms or speak in a different language or do anything at all to break through the perception she’d developed of her own voice as some sort of terrible broken child’s toy. And when Samantha said, “I’m sleeping,” Nikki knew she meant, “I’m dying.” Sometimes, when she’s floating between consciousness and unconsciousness, she thinks she feels Samantha stroke her hair, but she can’t be sure if that’s real or just a nice dream.

They’ve been here for two weeks. The motel room looks like a crime scene waiting to happen. Nikki sometimes imagines evidence tags tied to the trigger guards of the handguns on the bathroom counter, imagines gloved hands stacking up copies of The Anarchist’s Cookbook and old issues of Guns & Ammo. She wonders what state they’ll be in, what configuration their opened and emptied bodies will comprise, what the detectives and the CSUs will think of them when they open the door and find them torn to pieces. And she knows it doesn’t matter. They aren’t going to stay. Soon, they’ll pack up all this shit and get back on the road. They’ll run Esther’s credit card dry and they’ll dump it in a garbage can and they’ll just keep going. This is their life. Run, hide, wait, fight, run, hide, wait. Endless iterations. It almost never bothers her anymore.

Until one night, while Samantha sleeps in the bed next to hers, Nikki sees something glow green and disappear. The blood in her veins turns into liquid nitrogen and freezes her. And with a certainty beyond fear, she knows.

She shakes Samantha, who sits up without protest, looks at Nikki straight on and says, “Do we need to go?”

Nikki nods. She wants to be the strong one for Samantha, wants to reverse roles and put to work everything she’s learned, to grab Samantha by the arm and lead her through the motel’s third-floor hallway toward the metal stairwell and down to the pool, past it, into the parking lot, away. She wants to give that to Samantha, a gift for all the times she kept Nikki safe and sane. But she’s scared, and all the strength Samantha instilled in her has drained away. That long-limbed thing with the fake face. It’s here. Somewhere close. Close enough that thinking is analogous to wasting time. Close enough that each heartbeat represents a moment she should have spent running. So she nods, whimpers when she should speak, tries not to cry.

Samantha’s out of bed, packing up the guns and explosives, throwing her jacket on, slipping her arms into the straps of her backpack, saying, “We need to be gone six seconds ago. Let’s move. Come on. Go.”

Nikki obeys. Readies her pack. Straps on the shoulder holster Samantha gave her, checks the clip in the G19, tucks it beneath her armpit, covers it with her jacket. Brett’s jacket. But not really. Not anymore. It smells like smoke and dirt from the stables, like cordite, like someone else’s blood. For a second, Brett’s face rises up in Nikki’s memory, but then it’s gone, and she hardly feels anything at all in response.

Samantha opens the door and steps into the hallway. She’s got her CM9 raised, ready to fire, and although she has adopted the expression of a movie heroine — furrowed eyebrows, thin lips firmly set, jaw clenched — her hands shake. Nikki follows her out. They run down the hall toward the outdoor stairs. They keep passing fireflies. “Car keys?” says Samantha, and Nikki gropes in her pocket, finds the keys, makes a wordless noise in the affirmative. Samantha doesn’t stop running. She puts her arms out and collides with the push-bar of the door. It doesn’t open. “Motherfucker,” she says, puts her weight behind it, tries again.

Somewhere, an ice machine shutters and rumbles. Something smells like baby powder.

“Fucking thing,” says Samantha, rams into the door with her shoulder, but they both know it’s not going to open. The message boards talk about this. Doors locking on their own, refusing to unlock. Cell phones malfunctioning. Car engines suddenly and without precedent becoming as responsive as bricks. These things happen. They’re to be expected. God, it’s weird how numb you can get, how analytically you begin to approach the impending end. Nikki reminds herself to breathe, feels exhausted, feels terrified, wishes she could lie down.

“Samantha, come on,” says Nikki. “Find something else.”

“Fuck,” says Samantha, charging the word with desperate defeat, a wailed and impotent protest. She turns to run toward the elevator, and the power goes out. The two of them scream. Everything is black.

In the millisecond before she begins to sense the passage of time again, Nikki thinks, I’m already dead.

Then the hallway pulses with green light. Hundreds of fireflies. Nikki watches them weaving and floating through empty space a moment at a time. Fade in: they trace idiot trajectories through empty space. Fade out. Fade in: twice as many. Fade out.

Whatever manic force was propelling Samantha has run dry, and she stands next to Nikki and inhales long and noisy draughts of musty motel air.

Fade in: crouched, too tall for the ceiling, long neck carrying its fake baby-doll face from left to right pendulously, long arm dragging Nikki’s father’s razor across the tacky wallpaper, opening a gash that either looks deeper than it is in the weird shadows or actually is deeper than it ought to be. Fade out. Samantha’s breathing sounds panicked and fragile and terribly human, and Nikki is hit with the sudden understanding that she’s in charge now, and that understanding feels like a bloodless limb, limp and tingling and not quite functional.

Fade in: it never seems to get any farther from them even though they’re running, Samantha’s bicep clamped in Nikki’s hand, Nikki dragging her backward, numb, trying to access everything Samantha taught her before Samantha herself lost the lessons. Fade out, and Nikki’s own screams (“Go, Samantha, come on, we need to fucking go, let’s go,”) turn into faraway echoes buried beneath hollow ringing.

Fade in: by the light of the fireflies, they spot a corridor and turn the corner into it, because motel hallways are labyrinths designed to get you lost, designed to trap you and keep you good and scared and fresh when your monster comes for you, and Nikki glances over her shoulder and sees it, dispassionate, peeking around the corner at them with its too-long neck, with its baby-doll un-mask, with its kindergarten-sketch proportions, and she thinks, without much strength, This is pointless. Fade out. They’re running in the dark, toward void, from void.

Fade in: it’s in front of them. No precedent, no rationale. Behind one moment and in front the next, and nobody’s surprised, but they’re both so goddamn sad. It’s reaching for them (not really, though, not for them, but for her, for Samantha, just another thing Nikki loves) with one terrible mottled arm, its skin the color and texture of old rawhide. Nikki’s seen it before. She saw the thing grab hold of her mother like this, snatching her up by the hair, whirling her around to face her screaming family as they stood on the porch and stared out into a suburban winter street suddenly swarmed by fireflies, and even though her mom must have died quickly when it slashed her throat with dad’s straight razor, the look of awful regret, of defeat, remained on her face for a long time. Instinct takes over, and Nikki turns on her heels, positions her body between Samantha and the thing that killed everyone she loved, and she feels its fingers grip a handful of her hair and lift her into the air. Fade out.

Fade in: she’s in the air, and her father’s razor is at her throat, and now, now they get to see what happens when one of these things finally catches its girl. Now they get to see what it does when its purpose is extinguished, what anything at all means after that. Samantha is staring up at her with her CM9 in her hands, not aiming, just holding, like the gun is the grip of an umbrella and she’s scared of getting wet. And Nikki knows, even before Sam turns and runs, that she won’t even try to save her. She’s said as much. That prophecy was made a long time ago, and it couldn’t help but come to pass eventually. Fuck you, Samantha, she thinks but doesn’t mean, couldn’t mean, not ever. Nikki cries, but she’s already far away. Fade out, and, slowly, the razor digs in, opens up a tiny gash, and when the pain comes it is academic, and when the blood trickles out it is a footnote. And Nikki accepts that she is about to die.

Down the hall, in the darkness, Samantha screams.

Fade in.

There are so many fireflies that the corridor glows like its under stage lights, and Nikki sees that Samantha has turned around, is running back toward her, toward Nikki’s monster as it digs its razor in a little more, takes its time. No. No, not taking its time. Stopped. Frozen. Stuck.

And behind Samantha — thick-armed, short, stocky, nude but sexless, staring eyeless out of the holes in its burlap sack, the slime on its skin reflecting the light of countless fireflies — Samantha’s monster. Mid step, its fused fingers reaching out, one foot in front of the other, but motionless. Stopped. Frozen. Stuck.

Samantha stops before Nikki’s monster and collapses into a heap on the floor. She cradles the gun like a teddy bear and sobs as Nikki dangles above her.

Nikki’s monster and Samantha’s monster stand opposite each other with their girls in between, and neither of them moves. They cock their heads, and between the blank eyeholes of their respective false masks is an invisible but rigid straight line. Neither moves.

Fade out.

Fade in.

Fade out.

Fade in.

Fade out.

§

Some girls on the message boards say that their monsters talk. Some say their monsters look, in some way more complex and upsetting than physically, like somebody they used to know. Some say they deserve their monsters, and some say they summoned their monsters on purpose, and some say their monsters are just as afraid of killing as their victims are of dying, and some say their monsters are the spirits of their neglected dead childhood pets, and some girls say the monsters are testing them to see if they’re worthy of some magnificent reward. It’s impossible to know how many people on the message boards are lying. But nobody ever accuses anyone of making shit up, no matter how much a particular post might smell like bullshit. These strangers are all you’ve got, and you can’t afford to alienate them.

Some girls — well, really, just two girls — say that if one monster meets another, they freeze. They don’t know what to do when they encounter one another. They need to kill you and everyone you love, but they both need it. And they can’t both do it. Maybe. Who knows? So they freeze. They stare at each other, and even though you can’t see past their bullshit masks, you can’t help but feel like they’re longing for one another. The girls on the boards can’t quite explain it. It’s not like they say anything to each other or cry or whimper or fold in on themselves with the weight of their own loneliness. But there’s just this sense you get when you see it. Trust us, say the girls on the message board. They’re lonely, but their purpose demands solitude. So they freeze under the pressure of their conflicting duty and their desire not to be alone anymore. There’s no answer for them. And it doesn’t mean anything. Except that you can get away, then, once you’ve pulled yourself together enough to cut off a hock of your friend’s hair. And you go.

That’s what it says on the message boards, anyway.

§

An old T-shirt held to an open wound. A rest stop bathroom and a needle and thread held by shaking hands. Amateur stitches. The sunrise.

And then the two of them standing on either side of a picnic table, waiting for the other to sit. There are a thousand angry words in Nikki’s throat, and a thousand pleas for forgiveness, and a thousand soothing reassurances, and what she wants exists at the intersection of all of them, a nonexistent point at the center of an impossible Venn diagram. She looks at Samantha, looks for the woman who found her in that bar and saved her from the deep-pressure crush of isolation and trauma. She isn’t there. She’s dead, Nikki thinks, and starts to cry. And then Samantha is crying too.

What do you do? Nikki thinks. What’s the right move when you hate someone so much for abandoning you but you love them too much to abandon them?

Dawn gives way to full-grown morning. People stop their cars, wander into the bathroom, pretend not to be staring at the two of them. And Nikki and Samantha ponder the air in between them, how badly they want to close that distance and how impossible it is to do so.

They freeze in each other’s eye line. They don’t move until the sun is high enough in the sky to evaporate the dew on the surface of the picnic table. Then Nikki says, “Okay.”

So they get back in the car and drive.

Douglas F. Warrick teaches creative writing in Dayton, Ohio. His work has appeared in such venues as Lamplight Magazine, The Drabblecast, Daily Science Fiction, Kill Screen, and the Battle Royale Slam Book, and one of his pieces will appear on Tor.com later this summer. His collection, Plow the Bones, was released by Apex Publications in 2013.

Later, they found her journal

Tina Parker

1.

June 4, 1981

I held a flashlight under my chin

Called my friends to the bathroom

We stood in front of the mirror

Bloody Mary

Bloody Mary

Bloody Mary

Nothing but our faces

Laughing back at us

2.

February 3, 2015

Go on

Say it now

Bloody Mary

Bloody Mary

Bloody Mary

You had your eyes closed

Please don’t

Do it again

Don’t make me

This time ask me

Please

Ask me about the baby

I can’t

3.

February 5, 2015

Bloody Mary         false

Pregnancy                               or

Bloody Mary         mis

Carriage

Bloody Mary can you bring

My baby back

4.

February 6, 2015

I load and unload the dishwasher. I make the beds and turn off the nightlights. I turn the nightlights on and fold down the beds, but it takes too long for my shadow to leave the room.

5.

February 10, 2015

Today I found her hair

clotted with blood

in the bathroom sink

her period panties

in the tub

I wonder how she finds

her way out to use my facilities

has she noticed

the new hand towels, the freshly bleached

countertop

I hope she’ll pitch in

perhaps I’ll leave a list

Bloody Mary load dishwasher

Bloody Mary put clothes in dryer

Bloody Mary dump bits of food clogging the kitchen strainer

her soiled bandages overflow

the trash as I lift the bag

I’m sure I see her shadow pass behind me

Enter

6.

February 17, 2015

I see her

in every

sideview

rearview

full-length

compact

I see her

in every shard

of broken glass

7.

February 25, 2015

It was a rough night

I felt so fat in my body

The heat ran and ran all night

I worried the pipes would freeze

But I knew it would not be long

Until Mary called for me

Tina Parker grew up in Bristol, Virginia, and now lives in Berea, Kentucky with her husband and two young daughters. Her poetry has received support from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and individual poems have appeared in Rattle, PMS: poemmemoirstory, Appalachian Heritage, Still: The Journal, and The Collapsar, among others. Her chapbook of poems Another Offering is available from Finishing Line Press, and her poetry collection Mother May I is available from Sibling Rivalry Press. To learn more about Tina, visit www.tina-parker.com.

Ghost Plague

Tina L. Jens

Passed the cemetery last night

Thought I read my name

Looked again at the stone

It didn’t read the same

Ghosts been plaguin’ my dreams

Long as I can remember

They’re tryin’ to talk to me

But I can’t understand what they say

Saw my great aunt Alma

Wearin’ a white death’s shroud

So many ghosts in my bedroom

I couldn’t get through the crowd

Saw someone I used to know

Just couldn’t place their face

Decomposition can do that

I wonder, was he from the human race?

Get tired of the ghostly whispers

Fillin’ up my ear

They don’t have nothin’ to say

That I want to hear

No prophecies of future love

No hints of ’pending doom

All I want is the ghosts

Out of my bedroom

Ghosts been plaguin’ my dreams

Long as I can remember

They’re tryin’ to talk to me

But I can’t understand what they say

All I know is, they’re scaring

All my dates away.

Tina L. Jens teaches the fantasy writing courses at Columbia College-Chicago and has a blog about writing that goes live Sunday nights at BlackGate.com. She also runs the monthly Gumbo Fiction Salon reading series. She’s had about 75 short stories published, and her first novel, The Blues Ain’t Nothin’; Tales of the Lonesome Blues Pub was a final nominee for the Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild Awards. She has a Bride of Frankenstein novella forthcoming in the anthology Gaslight Ghouls (Chaosium). When not writing or teaching, she’s usually hanging about in Blues clubs or haunting New Orleans.

Memorials

Aliette de Bodard

9,100 words

Cam finds Pham Thi Thanh Ha in her house, as she expected. By now, she doesn’t question the aunts’ knowledge or how they came by it. She does what she’s told to, an obedient daughter beholden to her elders, never raising a fuss or complaining — the shining example of filial piety extolled in the tales her girlfriend Thuy so painstakingly reconstitutes in her spare hours.

Thanh Ha is a big woman, who must tower over her extended family — though right now, her cheeks are hollowed with grief, and the black band of mourning on her sleeve seems to have sucked all joy from her. “Younger niece … Cam.” She hesitates over the name, a subtle way to make it clear that Cam had better get to the purpose of her visit quickly. “Be welcome here.”

They sit in Thanh Ha’s private rooms, away from the rest of the family — Cam has been doing this long enough to know what to pay attention to, and she’s made sure to mention private business, delicately enough that Thanh Ha has sent away inquisitive aunts and cousins, and that even the wall-screens and the implants have been turned off, all the network connections quiescent, with no spike of activity that could relate to a recording or the transmission of one.

Thanh Ha pours tea in a practised gesture, and the delicate smell of lotus flowers fills the room; Cam bows her head, acknowledging the hospitality. “My condolences on your loss, younger aunt.”

Thanh Ha bows her head, and says nothing.

Well, there’s nothing for it. Cam takes a deep breath, and says, “Heaven sends us wind and rain as it will, and we weather the storm as a family. Sometimes, however…” She pauses, then, as if questing for words. “Sometimes … the wind becomes trapped under our roof, and we must acknowledge the help of strangers to bear it away.”

Thanh Ha’s hand has stopped halfway to the cup; she raises her gaze, no doubt looking straight at Cam (Cam herself, of course, has remained properly respectful with her gaze cast down towards the table). “Your meaning,” she says, as harshly, as impolitely as a Galactic—using the familiar pronouns reserved for inferiors or servants. “In plain words.”

Not so traditional then—contaminated, as all of them, by the society they have found refuge in. Cam files the thought away for later, and says, simply, with the same brash impoliteness, “When your revered grandmother died, one of the doctors came to you — a Galactic one, with a face young enough to be one of your sons. He waited until you were alone, out of the presence of your elders. He said he was sorry, that perhaps it was inappropriate —”

She hears more than sees Thanh Ha’s sharp indrawn breath, and knows that she has her.

“— that he knew she’d refused perpetuation, but surely she’d made a mistake, that everyone wanted to live forever, and that she hadn’t been all right in the end, not in full possession of her mind …”

The noise Thanh Ha makes as she puts her cup back on its saucer is like a gunshot in the room. “I told him he was a fool. That my grandmother’s soul was in the Hell of the underworld, wending its way towards reincarnation, and that perpetuation was nothing but a record, a broken image of who she’d been, no better than a vid or a still.”

Cam puts her own cup back on the table, and leans with both elbows on the rough metal surface. “But still, you took the chip. You kept it, and breathed not a word to your elders. Not during the preparations, not during the procession or the burial, or the hundred days of burning incense for her soul.”

Thanh Ha’s hands shake, for a bare moment before she stills them. “Assuming this is true …”

Cam smiles. “Be assured that it is. I can produce the testimony of Doctor Elliott at the Marion Sims hospital, if this becomes necessary.”

Doctor Elliott meant well, Cam knows — they always do. He thought Thanh Ha would find a suitable virtual universe for her grandmother — give her a second life in which her grandsons and granddaughters could visit her, in a place where the rules are more elastic than in the physical world. For most Galactics, there is no shame in being a Perpetuate; or, indeed, much difference between Perpetuates and the living. Perpetuates hold bank accounts and run businesses; and even gather into families of their own. They can’t reproduce, or leave their host universes, but surely that’s such a small price to pay for life after death?

The problem is that Doctor Elliott isn’t a Rong — and didn’t see what someone like Cam or Thanh Ha would think.

“Fine. What is it that you want?” Than Ha asks.

She’s afraid — believing that Cam will give her away, denounce her to her elders, or hold this knowledge against her as blackmail. Cam breathes out, presents her blandest face to Thanh Ha. “You have no use for the chip.”

“You want it?” Thanh Ha’s laughter is as biting as lime juice on open wounds. “You think I’d give it up?”

“It’s a bother, isn’t it?” Cam keeps her voice pleasant, as if they were discussing the weather or their children. “You could snap it in two with a mere gesture, but that would be like tearing apart a picture of a revered ancestor — a sin that wouldn’t be forgiven. You could look for a virtual universe open to Perpetuates, and give her a new life, but you would have to admit to your elders what you have done …” And they both know, here in the sanctuary of this room, that Thanh Ha won’t do that. “Or you could give it to me.”

Thanh Ha cocks her head, watching Cam like a cock ascertaining a rival’s intentions. “I could. But I don’t know you, do I? You could take it apart as surely as I would snap it — selling memories and feelings piece by piece to eager Galactics, like bits of code or war stories.”

She doesn’t say it, but the name of Steven Carey hovers in the room like a white-garbed, unpropitiated ghost — all the interviews with Rong refugees Carey did, all the war memories he got out from elderly Rong, promising them something grand, something that would capture the experience of their loss—all that, culminating in the bitterness that is the Memorial. “I’m not like that,” Cam says, simply.

“And I’m supposed to trust you?”

She could say the truth, then; could say she doesn’t know who the aunts are, or why they direct her here and there; that she’s as beholden to them as Thanh Ha is to her deceased grandmother, except that the bonds are not of love or of filial piety, but something far coarser — greed and threats and the fear of losing everything. But the aunts pay her to lie, and so she does. “No,” Cam says. “You’re right that you can’t. But I’ll give you my word that I’m not after the chip to take it apart.”

Words mean something; they weigh, like contracts between families in the olden times. Cam uses them cheaply, for they’re the weapon by which she makes her way in life.

Thanh Ha’s hands twitch; her face contracts — but Cam is used to reading the myriad ways of the human heart, and she knows how this will go, as inevitable as a flood — that Thanh Ha will argue and make excuses, and protest about being a filial granddaughter; but that, in the end, she’ll yield to temptation, and give Cam the chip with her grandmother’s simulacrum rather than be left with her silent, unshareable guilt. That’s how it goes; how it always ends.

This is all why she hates herself.

§

Cam comes home late, with the chip wrapped up in her handbag: an unwelcome reminder of what she’s doing — of everything she’s embroiled into, the lies she keeps telling, day after day; the fear of what the aunts are doing, taking apart Perpetuates for parts, for memories. There is a healthy market for all of these, not least of which is the sim-movies Galactics so love — Perpetuates are plundered for unusual, exotic memories that can give frissons to even the most jaded of immersed viewers. It’s illegal, but until Perpetuates have joined a virtual universe and submitted to its law strictures, there’s little they can do to defend themselves. It’s almost natural, the aunts would say.

Cam knows the truth: that none of it is right—that Perpetuates might just be echoes of real people, but that nothing justifies selling them. But she likes the money too much to give it up.

She finds Thuy at her desk: her girlfriend is sitting on her haunches before the low table, delivering a staccato report to Daphne Reynolds, a Perpetuate colleague at her workplace — she speaks at a speed that seems blinding to Cam, but must surely be slow by Perpetuate standards. The flat’s bots have already cleaned the place, and the jasmine rice in the cooker has scented the air with its rich, promising fragrance — overlaid with the mingled garlic and fish sauce from the omelette in the pan.

After a while, Thuy finishes, and looks up. “Lil’ sis.”

“Big sis. How did it go?”

“I think I solved the security flaw, but I could be wrong.” Thuy grimaces.

It never ceases to amaze Cam that Thuy — who has a doctorate in Network Security — can have so little trust in herself. By most standards, Cam is the one who is the family failure: she barely went past the minimum amount of studies Galactics impose on their citizens, and went from small, ill-paid job to small, ill-paid job in Landsfall. News trawler, compartment cleaner, low-level network support: she’s done them all, and has little to show for it but a memory of how much it hurts, to live cramped in a room with three other Rong students, and never knowing where the money is coming in.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Cam says, coming closer and kissing her — drinking in deep from Thuy’s lips. “Did you see the physician?”

Thuy frees herself from Cam and shrugs. She grabs one of the two coconut water glasses on the table, and gestures to Cam to pick the other one — she’s older than Cam, and has always had a tendency to boss her around. “Of course I did. Everything is normal. You fuss too much.”

“It’s serious,” Cam protests.

“It shouldn’t be. Having a child is a natural process.” Thuy doesn’t really appear to be in a mood to discuss her pregnancy; she sips at her glass, her gaze lost towards the floor. “How did your day go?” she asks.

Cam shrugs, feigning a nonchalance she doesn’t feel. “As usual. Not much to tell.”

“You never tell anything anyway.” Thuy is convinced that Cam works for Galactic Intelligence; a lie Cam has carefully cultivated. Her other, outer cover for Mother is feeds writer, but any lie for Thuy has to be much closer to the truth. “Come on, drink your coconut water. I’m sure your day was as thrilling as usual.”

She looks at Cam with such love — with such unmitigated pride — that it makes Cam’s stomach churn. How can she tell Thuy that she does none of what her girlfriend imagines — that she’s a thief and a taker of lives, that she subsists entirely on deceiving others and taking advantage of their wrecked lives?

She can’t tell Thuy. She can’t tell the child; and she’s running out of options, as Thuy’s pregnancy becomes more and more visible, twisting every aspect of their lives like woven cloth. But still, she forces herself to smile, in a way she knows is unconvincing. “Thank you.”

§

As usual, Cam meets the aunts in the Memorial.

She doesn’t know why they insist on this meeting place; though she suspects that part of it is mocking her and the choices she makes — for, after all, what better place than the Memorial for accusation of betrayals?

She takes a circuitous route to go there, casting an eye over her shoulder for policemen. It’s absurd, but several times she’s had the feeling of being followed — of seeing the same face too many times in the crowds that brush past — and she can’t be sure, but there have been a few too many police aircars and shuttles parked near her. Or perhaps it’s simply her guilt, pointing out every police presence in Landsfall that it can see.

These days, entrance to the Memorial is free, its upkeep funded by donations from rich Galactic families. Cam joins the queue of Galactics at the entrance — not many Rong there, she might as well be the only one. It’s early morning on a day like any other; not the anniversary of any significant battle or the remembrance of any atrocities; and there are few people, all of them disinclined to make any conversation.

Good, for Cam doesn’t know if she could stand to speak.

In the physical reality, the Memorial isn’t much: a squat building crouching above the servers that keep it alive — like a toad over treasure. Inside, a long spiral wends its way to the access chambers — as the virtual reality gradually asserts itself, the Memorial reminds visitors of the war and the Rong exodus. It starts as images on wall-screens; and, by the end, has become full three-dimensional representations that presage the virtual universe. This serves two purposes: to place the Memorial in “proper” context, and to transition the visitors from physical reality to virtual universe in a soft, non-intrusive manner.

Both are failures.

The context, like everything else, has been provided by Galactics, and they so gracefully elide their own part in setting off tinder to the war between the Western and Eastern Continent, presenting themselves as heroes who failed to save the benighted locals, and deploring the exodus even as they hide their part in causing it, or the atrocities their own troops committed on Moc Hau Tinh under the pretence of keeping the peace.

The transition, if one isn’t paying attention to the context, is anything but seamless, the virtual universe replacing reality in a series of jerks; and, at the last, the slimy, cold feeling of electrodes being fitted over one’s head by bots; the uncomfortable sensation of every muscle crumpling at once, as if one were a tree that had just been felled.

And, at last, Cam stands in the Memorial, shivering and shaking and attempting to bring numbed muscles back to wakefulness. Around her, the other visitors are straightening: carrying flowers or paper cards in their hands, little keepsakes bought from the online vendors as they wended their way upstairs; offerings to honour the dead veterans, the innocent victims of the exodus — dead children, Cam’s history teachers used to say, as if dead children were somehow more worthy of remembrance and pity than everyone else who perished in the fall of Xuan Huong, in the invasion of the Eastern Continent.

Cam’s hands, as usual, are empty. She leaves the arrival area without a backward glance, heading deeper and deeper into the Memorial.

In a way, the Memorial is Xuan Huong — it’s the city on the eve before the war, its streets crisscrossed by a flood of aircars and private shuttles, its buildings rearing upwards, like gilded spears held against the Heavens — and the shadow of the orbitals overhead, the houses of the rich and powerful looking down on the planetary bustle with amusement.

In so many ways, it’s not Xuan Huong.

It’s not the city that Cam’s grandmother waxed lyrical about, not the memories that her mother carried away when she left as a child in her parents’ arms. It’s a city of fashionable, glitzy hotels frequented by the Galactic expatriates; of quaint and exotic temples, with Buddhist rituals described by someone who couldn’t understand what it means to believe in the bodhisattva Quan Am, in the weight of one’s sin and in reincarnation. Its family feasts are seen through the eyes of Galactics, who cannot comprehend the value of food or of filial piety; even its small alleyways are sordid and unclean instead of being families’ beloved homes — in every way it’s subtly and jarringly wrong, a travesty of what the Rong deem precious.

He meant well, is what the Rong will say about Steven Carey when they feel charitable. He genuinely thought that his project would help the Rong exiles, that it would bring their plight to the knowledge of the world (as if their plight wasn’t real until the world learnt all about it, all its sordid details and secrets shrouded in grief).

Cam walks up Le Loi Street, with its overblown temple to the God of War Quan Vu; and its ghostly Galactic women shadowed by their Rong attendants — towards her meeting with the aunts.

They’re always in the same place: in a small alley behind the old Galactic Ansible Station, seated on plastic chairs in the small, battered stall of a food-seller, with bowls of steaming soup in front of them — the food smells of beef and anise star, the only thing within the Memorial that doesn’t feel processed through a Galactic mindset. They’re squat and dark-skinned, with the reassuring solidity of visitors to the Memorial — not the ghostly, shimmering avatars that are part of the virtual universe.

Of course, they’re not aunts — probably not Rong, and maybe not even women. The Memorial, like all virtual universes, comes with avatar options, and it’s an easy enough thing to colour flesh differently, give a different timbre to a voice or even change one’s species entirely and appear as a winged horse or a lion, though Cam has never seen the point of any of it.

“Child,” the eldest aunt says. “Sit down.”

Cam doesn’t. It’s such a small, pathetic gesture, such a doomed attempt to assert her authority on them. “I left it in a holding box at the shuttleport. Number 868.”

“As usual.” the eldest aunt smiles, an expression that doesn’t quite reach her eyes. “Well done. You’re worth every credit we pay you, child.” She gestures again to the chair, the only one unoccupied — it’s red, the colour of good fortune and good news, an uncomfortable reminder of New Year’s Eve and family reunions. “Won’t you sit down? The soup is good, here.”

“Which can’t be said of many things here,” a younger aunt says, her face set in a frown.

“Now, now, ssh,” the eldest aunt says. “This child doesn’t need to hear old women complaining, she’s too young.”

Cam isn’t young anymore — past the age to contract a marriage, past the age to straighten her life — past the age where she’d swallow lies, unthinkingly. But she says nothing of that.

“I trust everything went well?” the eldest aunt inquires, conversationally, with the same casualness Cam’s own aunts use when asking about her work.

Cam thinks back to Pham Thi Thanh Ha — to the expression on her face as she handed over her grandmother’s chip against Cam’s payment — that face twisted halfway between guilt and fear — knowing Cam, in spite of her sweet words, couldn’t be trusted. “It went as expected. There was no particular trouble.”

“About payment …” Cam says.

They smile at this, as if they knew exactly how she felt inside — all twisted up and nauseous, taking that kind of pay because she has no choice. One of the middle-aged aunts opens her hand, presenting to her a sheaf of paper notes: the old ones with the image of the President stamped upon them — a sharp-faced man, wrinkled and bowed with the knowledge of the impending war. “All there,” the middle-aged aunt says. “A million credits, as we agreed.”

It’s good money — very good money, when Rong struggle to make even a hundredth of this — when so many of them hold dingy restaurants in dingy parts of Prime, or work as private cooks for the richer exiles, saving every single credit to make their children’s lives better than their own. It’s hers, under two conditions: that she do her job, and keep her mouth shut about the aunts.

Both of which, of course, are getting harder and harder.

Cam reaches out for it, closes her hand over it — feeling, for a second, the coolness of the aunt’s skin against her own, as dry as the scales of a snake. The notes melt like sugar onto her skin, and she doesn’t need to connect to the network to know it’s gone into her bank account.

“Don’t thank us.” The middle-aged aunt sounds amused. “Now, we have another job coming up, but it won’t be for a week at least, which should please you. Time for you and your girlfriend to enjoy yourselves with your family.”

Cam isn’t surprised — of course they would keep a tight watch on her and her life. Of course they have other agents, to pick up the chips from the holding boxes. Of course they’ll know about Thuy; that the day after tomorrow is her grandmother’s death anniversary; that, like every year, Cam and Thuy are headed towards her family’s home in Greenhaven, to pay their respects at the ancestral altar.

What comes next, though …

“And the baby,” one of the younger aunts says. “Don’t forget the baby!”

The baby. How do they know —? The baby is a secret; something not even Cam’s mother knows about, a fragile promise, a prayer for a better future. Cam’s hands clench, a movement she can’t control. “How — how do you know?”

“It’s all in your files, dearie,” the middle-aged aunt says. “Don’t worry, we won’t tell anyone.”

They’ll hold this, hoard it like a tool they might use — they’ll feed on anything, any scrap of Cam’s life that they can turn against her. “I know you won’t tell,” Cam says, drily, fighting back anger.

The middle-aged aunt laughs, a rasping sound like leather tearing itself apart. She gestures towards the soup. “You should eat that, before it grows cold.” Another of the aunts is noisily slurping noodles from her bowl, with an expression of satisfaction; it would make Cam hungry herself, in other circumstances.

“I don’t want soup,” Cam says.

“Oh yes, I forget,” the middle-aged aunt says. “You’re always angry after your jobs.”

“I’m not angry,” Cam says.

“Leave the child alone.” The eldest aunt frowns. “Forgive us. You know the old can be … intrusive. Of course, we have no lives of our own anymore, so we take what distractions we can, child.”

“I see.”

A ghostly waiter brings three-colour dessert pudding in glass cups — the mixture sports a lurid, aggressive green, nothing like the appetising colour of pandanus leaves, and even its red beans are the dark colour of blood. The smell is … off, somehow, though Cam would be hard pressed to pinpoint why; and, as the bowls of soup are swept up, only that sense of wrongness remains.

Not for the first time, she curses Steven Carey and all his work.

The eldest aunt dips a spoon in the cup, twirls it around an invisible axis. Cam hears a sound like ice cubes crushed together, though it’s impossible anyone could have such strength. “You don’t see,” the eldest aunt says. The colours of the pudding are melding and running together, the green fracturing into a dozen disharmonious threads, reminding Cam of nothing so much as network cables cut off at the root. “But never mind, child. I’ll tell you about this next job, it’ll keep your mind nice and sharp.”

“I don’t —” Cam starts, and then stops, aghast at what words might come out of her mouth. I don’t want my mind sharp. I don’t want to hear about this next job. I want to be rid of you.

The eldest aunt is watching her; and so are the others — cruelly amused, like birds of prey watching a mortally wounded tiger stumble and pick itself up, time and time again.

No. She can’t afford to antagonise them. Slowly, carefully, she says, “Fine. Tell me about the next job.”

§

Cam leaves late for Greenhaven — not a surprise, as the meeting with the aunts took more time than expected. She’d expected Thuy to still be around in the flat; but she’s gone, leaving a message on the console that she hitched a ride with Cam’s mother, and telling Cam not to forget the basket of fruit they special-ordered from the spaceport.

Cam is past the Lynbrook Bridge and into Westborough province before she notices the police shuttle trailing her. At first, she thinks nothing of it; traffic is dense, and the police are everywhere. As she veers upwards, onto the high-speed lane, Cam sees the shuttle do the same; and when she lowers her altitude again, to catch a bite at a rest area halfway up a skyscraper, the shuttle is still there.

It’s nothing unusual — Cam has been stopped more times than she can count, simply because she looks different, because she’s driving a new, expensive car that most Rong shouldn’t be able to afford. Mother always hunched over when that happened — speaking in short, heavily accented sentences; consumed by the fear that Prime would send her back. Cam isn’t afraid; or she wouldn’t be, if she was at ease. If she didn’t know in her heart of hearts that she walks enshrouded in lies, every word that she utters lengthening the shadows under her feet.

She sits at the terrace of the skyscraper, watching the dance of aircars below her — dense traffic towards Landfall, as always, people going to their jobs, to the Festival of Arts in Lynbrook, to white-walled, disinfectant-clean supermarkets where the smell of bleach overpowers that of meat or fish.

“Excuse me, miss?”

Towering over her is the figure of a police officer — one and a half times her size, easily, with flaming hair and a spattering of freckles, with skin so pale and translucent it’s tinged with the red of blood vessels. Her heart leaps in her throat — remains stuck halfway there, beating at a frantic rhythm. “Yes, Officer?”

The policewoman — who introduces herself as Lieutenant George — sits down, putting her coffee cup by Cam’s right hand. Cam inhales the sickening, bitter smell of the coffee at the table, stifling an urge to retch or run away.

“What do you want, Lieutenant George?”

“To speak of Perpetuates.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” Cam has been lying for long enough not to let anything she feels show on her face.

Lieutenant George’s eyes narrow. “Let’s not be coy with each other, Miss Nguyen. I am speaking of Rong Perpetuates — rare and precious by the standards of those who trade in memories.” She smiles. “I’m sure you know what I’m speaking of.”

It’s a dance that’s all too familiar to Cam — she’s done it so many times she knows it all by heart. But knowing doesn’t help, doesn’t do anything save make the ending more inevitable — for, in the end, this is no bluff — this is all about who holds power over whom.

She forces herself to sip at her tea — sip after sip after sip, burning her lips and her tongue, the bitter taste sliding down her stomach.

Lieutenant George says, “Rong Perpetuates, as you can imagine, are eagerly sought after — they fetch high prices on the black market, and I’m sure you’re well aware many of the recent releases in sim-vids were enhanced by Rong, especially the older generation. There’s something about the anguish of war that makes them … irresistible.”

The anguish of war — how casually she dismisses everything that Cam’s family went through, in a single, weaselly Galactic word that means nothing. “I don’t watch sim-vids,” Cam says. She forces herself to remain still in her chair, but she sees Lieutenant George smile — showing her teeth like a shark that has sighted prey.

“You don’t say.” Lieutenant George pauses, nudging her coffee cup out of the way — as if imparting a secret confidence to Cam. “Anyway, there have been … rumours in the black market. Rong Perpetuates being harder and harder to find — which leads to my presence here; and to you, Miss Nguyen.”

Cam says nothing. She’s seen the trap; perhaps, if she holds still for long enough, she might dodge its jaws — perhaps … Foolish, Thuy would say, but Thuy isn’t there no matter how desperately Cam wishes for the weight of her presence.

“I’ll be blunt,” Lieutenant George says — as if she weren’t blunt enough already, with all the subtlety of a bomb. “You run errands for a well-organised gang, Miss Nguyen, and I have enough evidence to send you to Active Re-education for a while.”

But she won’t. An icy clarity descends over Cam’s world, each thought as clear and as brittle as pulled sugar. “What do you want, Lieutenant?”

Lieutenant George smiles. “I have no interest in the riffraff. I want the people who pay you; and you’ll help me.”

This is a dance Cam has done often enough, with so many other people — enough to know every one of its steps by heart. “Why should I help you? I’ll end up in Active Re-education anyway, and it’ll be far less danger to me. As you said — they are a well organised gang. I doubt they are fools.”

Lieutenant George shakes her head, drily amused — she’s not stupid, else they wouldn’t have sent her. “There are … dispensations that can be made. Ways and means of acknowledging your help to the Galactic police.”

“Immunity,” Cam says, putting both elbows on the table.

“I can’t offer immunity. As I said — I have evidence. You can’t erase that.”

A bluff. “A police lieutenant is a powerful individual. I’m sure you can arrange things.” Cam keeps her voice even. “Evidence — assuming there is any — can be lost. Destroyed.” If it were just her, she’d give herself up, to atone for what she’s done — but there is Thuy. There is the unborn child.

Lieutenant George grimaces. “Six months in Active Re-education.”

“Two months,” Cam says, reckless — and, when silence stretches, knows she’s gone too far.

“Three months. Far less than you deserve, Miss Nguyen.” Lieutenant George’s voice is filled with disgust. “The offer is as it stands.”

Three months. It’s not so much, all things considered — three months on some deserted planet, away from all communications—from Thuy, from the baby. But it’s still time that will appear on her papers; that will hamper her in her search for another job — of course, supposing the aunts don’t take her down with them. She wouldn’t be surprised to know they have a contingency plan for everything from sickness to betrayal.

When Cam doesn’t answer, Lieutenant George shakes her head. “Think on it. Three months, and some risk to your precious person. Or five years without risk — that’s the minimum you’d get for trafficking in Perpetuates, and I would be pushing for more than this, personally.” She rises, cradling her coffee cup against her chest. “I’ve left you my contact details. Tell me within the week what your life will look like in the next few years, Nguyen Thi Cam.”

§

Cam arrives late, and finds the family gathered in the kitchen. Mother is putting the last of the rice cakes into boiling water with Father by her side, who interjects advice and reproaches as she slides each cake into the huge cooking pot. Thuy and Cousin Hanh are rolling up the twine that served them to wrap the cakes, while Cousin Vien is putting plates and bowls into the automatic washer. The uncles and aunts are nowhere to be seen — probably they’re in the living room, tidying up offerings on the ancestral altar.

“Lil’ sis.” Thuy nods to Cam. “Sorry for not waiting.”

Cam shakes her head. “No, it’s me. I had an appointment I couldn’t put off.” She puts the basket of fruit on the table, and greets her mother and father, and then the cousins in order of age. “Sorry for arriving late.”

Mother snorts. “Plenty of hands to help with the cooking, even though most of them are rather clumsy.” She peers at the basket, curious. “What did you girls get?”

Dragon fruit, and mangoes — fruit that have grown ever so expensive as the years pass, making the exodus a distant memory in the minds of the elders. None of them grow well on Landfall, and it takes a dedicated environment and a crew of biologists to make sure the other crops don’t cannibalise them before they have a chance to grow. “Oh, you shouldn’t have. It’s too expensive, children,” Mother says. Cam knows she’s well pleased in spite of her protests, to see her daughters and nieces cajoling her with delicacies; all the signs of happiness that Heaven has decreed, the rewards of old age.

Father peers at the fruit, and nods, gruffly. “Go put a few in a plate, would you? Your grandmother could use nice things.”

After Cam has left her offerings on the ancestral altar, everything seems to dissolve in a whirl of activities: she walks the gardens with Mother, seeing how the bots prune the trees and collect herbs from the hothouses; she and Cousin Vien help Father install his newest network connection, and get a membership into a virtual universe for Encirclement fanatics. And, all the while, she skirts around the truth, jokingly speaking of security contracts to Mother, just as she does with Thuy — lies, every word out of her mouth, every rivet in the wall of her life.

On the second day, they hold the remembrance of Xuan Huong.

They stand in silence, bowed before the altar — watching the holo of Grandmother’s face, the furrows of grief traced on her skin; the bowed shoulders, as if she still labours under the weight of exile even among the ancestors. “We thank you for your blessings,” Mother says, lighting a stick of incense and bowing three times. “For the gift of food, which we took with us to a new planet. For the gift of money, which gathered us all to escape the war. For the gift of love, which did not die with Xuan Huong.”

They’re meant to meditate on Xuan Huong: Mother and Father and Cam’s aunts and uncles all have tears in their eyes, thinking of a city they knew that is now cut off from them; and of all the dead littering the streets like rice shoots cut off before they could bear food.

Cam finds her mind drifting to the Memorial; to the aunts and the sound of ice being crushed against a glass, faster and more casually than should be humanly possible … She wonders what Grandmother would have thought of her, of what she does; if she’d have forgiveness in her heart for her wayward granddaughter. But, of course, there’s only the darkness of her own thoughts, and her own worries about the future.

On the last evening of the death anniversary, Cam and Thuy find themselves alone in the living room, scraping food off plates before piling them into the kitchen.

She wants to tell Thuy about Lieutenant George, about the choice between flood and fire; but she can’t — she’s trapped by her own lies, by the weight of her own failures.

Thuy, though, is nothing but observant. “Is anything wrong?”

“It’s work-related,” Cam says — and watches as the words dry up in Thuy’s mouth.

“Oh. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“No, it’s all right.” Cam hesitates. “Only — I might have to go away for a while.”

“On a mission?” Thuy’s eyes gleam with that painful, earnest enthusiasm that Cam finds hard to bear.

“Of a kind.” Cam sighs. Nothing will be pleasant in the future, no matter how she turns it. “I — It might be a long while. The child —”

Thuy’s hand strays to her belly, rubs it as if for luck. “You won’t be back for the birth.”

“I don’t know.” Cam feels as if she wants to cry, but all water seems to have been wrung out of her. “Ancestors, I don’t know.” Her hands are shaking, so hard that the plates she’s carrying chink against each other.

“I see.” Thuy says nothing for a while; she doesn’t look happy.

As they take the last of the plates out, Cam steals a glance at the ancestral altar — Grandmother’s gaze seems to follow her, wherever she goes. “Do you think —” she pauses, hesitating. Grandmother scrapped and begged and did what she had to, to get her family out of Moc Hau Tinh before war made the planet inaccessible — in so many ways, they know that they’ll never be as worthy as her. “Do you think she’d approve of us?”

Thuy gathers chopsticks in her clenched hand, weighs them, thoughtfully. “Of what we’ve grown into? Every generation is less than the one who came before them; and more, too. Every chain of hands, reaching back to the beginning of time …” She frowns, rubs her belly again. “Lil’ sis …”

“Yes?”

“About the birth — we’ll talk about it later. I know it’s not easy.”

You don’t know anything, Cam thinks, and blinks furiously, to make the world clearer. “I’m sorry.” The plates are wobbling in her hands; carefully, she sets them on the ground, and stares at the ancestral altar, seeking words that have deserted her.

“Oh, Cam.” Thuy covers the space that separates them in a heartbeat, and kisses her, hard. “You’re a fool.”

“So are you,” Cam says, struggling to smile.

They finish the rest of the cleaning in silence, and tiptoe back to their room. Later, Cam lies in bed by Thuy’s side, staring at the ceiling, and thinks of what lies ahead. She thinks of Lieutenant George; of the Memorial and the aunts — and it all slides with her into sleep, melds and merges into a confused jumble, with the noise of bombs and the sound of spaceships lifting from the spaceport, instants before the Western Continent soldiers march through the streets of Xuan Huong — into Grandmother’s face, the old woman staring at her as if weighing her worth; before she turns away, and walks ahead into darkness …

Cam wakes up with a start, shaking her head to dismiss the last of her nightmare. Outside, it’s still night, and she can smell the just-cooked rice porridge from the kitchen, and hear Mother shuffle about, no doubt looking for a bowl and a spoon. She’ll get up and go into the kitchen, and say more lies about coming back home for work, that she has an important job to do at her company, that they need her to save the project …

Lies.

But not for long; not anymore.

§

It’s all the same, the same as it ever was: Cam walks down the streets of Xuan Huong, breathing in the sweet, sharp smell of apricot trees — garlands of Tet yellow flowers drape the streets, and the year is that of the Yin Wood Tiger, the year of the fall. She brushes past young girls in five-panel costumes, giggling at Galactics in shirts and trousers: the streets are pristine, not even stained by flower petals, unreal — as ghostly as the artificial intelligences populating them.

She can’t help but glance at her hands as she walks: the sniffer Lieutenant George has given her is invisible in the Memorial, though it glowed red against her skin when George injected it into her palm. Transfer it with a thought sequence, George had said — running through the steps of it with Cam, over and over again. It’ll embed itself in the target’s hand, and start emitting—we’ll be able to follow them wherever they go. We’ll arrest them when they exit the Memorial.

She didn’t tell Cam to be careful, or to come back safe — of course she wouldn’t. Of course she doesn’t care, one way or another.

In the alleyway behind the Ansible Station, the aunts are waiting for her, though there are no bowls of steaming soup in front of them. They’re dressed differently, too — wearing what looks like Galactic garb, long flowing dresses that hug their frail bodies, outlining curves they ought not to have. It feels …

Wrong, Cam wants to say, but the words don’t get past her lips. Instead she wonders, for a heart-stopping moment, if she’s given herself away; if George’s sniffer can be detected on her, if that’s the reason why the aunts have changed their behaviour. But no, that is impossible; she hasn’t activated it yet. The aunts can’t know …

She pulls a chair; hearing it scrape against the pavement. “No soup today?” she asks, keeping her voice light.

“It’s too early for soup, child.” The eldest aunt smiles, as toothy as a tiger on the prowl. “Tell me how it went with Nguyen Thi Sao.”

Cam shrugs. “There isn’t much to say. I left you the chip in the shuttleport. Holding box 121.”

“Good.” the eldest aunt frowns, and the air around her seems to tighten in menace. “That certainly was fast. I expected you to have more difficulties.”

Cam shakes her head, not trusting herself to speak. It was hard, in truth — harder than it’s ever been, to sit in a chair and lie and cajole, knowing that all she had to do was wait a few more days, a few more hours — and that she would finally be free of them.

“About payment,” she says — and waits, her heart hammering in her chest, for the eldest aunt to extend her hand across the table, for the exchange of money to take place. She doesn’t glance at her own hand.

The eldest aunt does not move. That’s it, then; she’s overplayed it; been too flippant, too confident — she’s given the game away. She shouldn’t have …

Finally, the eldest aunt shakes her head, and slowly extends her hand to her, with old-fashioned notes on her palm. Bracing herself, Cam reaches out — there’s a tingle as the money changes hand, and another tingle as the sniffer leaves her and attaches itself to its target.

The eldest aunt is frowning, looking at her hand as if something were bothersome — there’s nothing here, she can’t possibly see it — it’s impossible …

“Mmm.” The eldest aunt compresses her lips — tightens her hand hard enough to crush whatever is inside it. “Is there anything else you want to tell us, child?”

Cam clamps down the first flippant response that comes to mind; and says, instead, “No. What about the next assignment?”

“We’ll contact you.” The eldest aunt is still staring at her hand, as if she could actually detect the sniffer; which is impossible. She and her companions rise, and walk away without a backward glance.

Cam remains behind, struggling to control the mad drum beats of her heart. They haven’t seen anything, they can’t possibly have seen anything …

She waits for the aunts to drop out of sight — then she takes a deep breath, and activates the sniffer.

Nothing happens — at least, nothing that she can see, but she knows that outside the Memorial, something has come online in Lieutenant George’s van — that her team is now assembling, ready to track the aunts; to make the arrest George hungers for, the one that will make the world a little safer for Perpetuates. Cam has done her part. She can turn back, and leave the Memorial much as she came into it — empty-handed, braced for the worst to happen to her. 

And yet …

And yet she has to know. And yet, somehow, she finds herself walking after the aunts — hearing the same litany echo in her skull until it takes the place of everything else. She’s in the Memorial. In a virtual universe with no set rules for death. There’s nothing they can do to her; nothing that will terminate her existence or harm her for more than a few transitory moments. Nothing. Unless …

Unless they’ve managed to hack into it.

No. That’s impossible. No one can …

But they’re the aunts — whoever they are, they know everything, have access to all the files, to all the details of Cam’s life. Surely, hacking into a virtual universe, even one so tightly circumscribed as the Memorial, isn’t beyond their powers?

She walks in sunlight, into little alleyways filled with compartments — with houses that advertise their wares on battered holo-screens, past bots that scuttle into bolt-holes. A sleek aircar zooms by, stopping briefly to extrude a counter and dispense some crab noodle soup to a middle-aged woman.

This far into the simulation, Galactics are not there at all — there are only Rong, from the mechanic who carries bots slung over his shoulder to the seller of barbecued pork sandwiches; from the young man lost in his virtual games, to the old woman descending from an aircar, attended by her whole family.

The smell of food is overwhelming — of steamed rice and garlic and fish sauce, of broth simmering away in the myriad restaurants she walks by. Cam should be on her knees by now, gagging with the wrongness of it — but she’s not.

Cam turns a corner, still struggling to work out what is wrong, what she’s not seeing — and all but bumps into the aunts.

They have stopped — are waiting for her, their arms crossed over their chests. The eldest aunt is a little apart from them, holding out her hand, in which flashes a red light — George’s tracker made manifest.

It’s impossible — they shouldn’t …

“Did you think we wouldn’t see, child?” The eldest aunt asks. Her voice is deceptively mild; she might have been talking about the weather.

Cam stops — no use waiting for help, for it won’t come. She’s alone now, and in spite of the innocuous environment she’s never been so frightened in her life. “I had no choice. I could come down with you, or I could follow their orders.”

The eldest aunt peers into her hand, thoughtfully. “I see. Galactic police coding. Shoddy work — you can tell, it’s full of corrupt packages.”

Abruptly she’s standing by Cam’s side, pressing down on her shoulder with what seems like little strength; but it feels as though something is tearing inside her. The eldest aunt is only a small, diminutive woman; how can she be so strong — how can she —?

“You know I can’t stand on your side.” Cam forces the words out between clenched teeth — the eldest aunt is still pressing on her, and gradually her body is buckling, her knees giving way, bowing her closer to the ground. “For Heaven’s sake, you buy Perpetuates to take them apart!”

“And you’re nothing.” The eldest aunt’s voice is contemptuous. “You were happy enough to take our money, and ask no questions, and all of a sudden you decide to betray us? That won’t do, child.”

Cam is kneeling on the ground now, brought down by the weight of the eldest aunt’s hands on her shoulder; and her breath comes in gasps and shudders. She’s truly, desperately alone — Lieutenant George, even if she suspects something is wrong, won’t react, won’t do anything to save her—she’s made it clear enough what she thinks of Cam’s acts.

As Cam struggles for breath, for words, she sees everything with preternatural clarity — every detail of her surroundings, the bystanders throwing curious glances at the group stuck in the middle of the wide, paved street — the eldest aunt’s robes, billowing in the breeze; every little stitch of the cloth, every cut of the scissors and every little embroidery on the hem of the sleeves — they’re not Galactic patterns, but rather a thin chain of lotus flowers, going all the way around the hem like prayer beads.

Rong. They’re Rong patterns.

And she sees, then — not with her eyes, but with her heart and mind. She sees that the aunts are wearing the clothes her grandmother wore, every day of her life — a melding of Galactic and Rong influences. Those are the clothes her friends’ grandparents wore, the ones they brought from Moc Hau Tinh when the planet burnt in civil war.

And, around her …

She doesn’t look around her. She doesn’t need to. She knows that everyone she saw-the noodle soup seller, the seller of sandwiches, the housewives in the aircar — they all have the solidity of real, living people.

“You’re Rong,” she says. “You’re all Rong.”

“Of course we’re Rong,” the eldest aunt says. “What did you think we were, child?”

Cam kneels, breathing in the smell of garlic and fish sauce and all the myriad things of home. Everyone in the street seems to have gathered around them, a circle of pressed people that is making her dizzy — she catches bits and pieces, fragments of faces that look familiar and yet are not —

No.

She sees them. She sees all of them, clustered at the back of the crowd — Thanh Ha’s grandmother, and Pham Huu Hieu’s brother, and Le Thi Quoc’s mother, and all the others she’s bargained away from their families, given flesh and blood in the Memorial, a feat that should have been impossible.

“Perpetuates,” she breathes, knowing that this, too, is true. “You’re all Perpetuates.”

“This is our home,” the eldest aunt says. “The place we have made for ourselves.” She’s withdrawn from Cam; stands staring at the streets around her. Cam sucks in breath through burning lungs, struggling to make sense of what she’s seen.

They… they have hacked the Memorial from within. They have hidden themselves in its codes and processes, and built their own enclave. They have …

They’re not supposed to be here at all. No wonder they hide; no wonder they tell no one what they are or what they are doing. The Memorial is not a virtual universe open to Perpetuates. It is a museum: a place to visit, not a place to live in or be hosted — not a place where you’re allowed to painstakingly build your own home city within the city, year after year —

The enormity of it shocks her — that Perpetuates should have the power and desire to take the Memorial back; to expand, layer after layer, into Steven Carey’s masterwork, and claim it back for themselves … That she should have helped in that, all the while thinking that she was helping the aunts taking Perpetuates apart. That she …

That she sold the aunts out, just as she sold off the chips; gave them away with scarcely a thought to ensure her own, selfish future …

It’s too much to take in all at once.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers — in Rong, using the pronoun reserved for young, ignorant, children. “I didn’t know.”

One of the middle-aunts speaks, in the growing silence, “Not so easy, is it, to find out what you have done?”

“I’m sorry,” Cam says, again, knowing the words to be meaningless — cheaply bandied weapons, promises as brittle as burnt clay.

She stands, shivering, in bright sunlight in the city of Xuan Huong — not the quaint place of Steven Carey’s fantasies, not the poverty-ridden, powerless victim of the war seen through Galactic eyes; but the home of Mother and Grandmother and all her ancestors; the bustling, multifaceted city that shaped her people and her family, the continuation of the history that she and Thuy carry with them, words and images carved into the grooves of their hearts.

And she knows, then, with a certainty she’s never felt before in her life — she knows that she’ll pay whatever price needs to be paid to preserve this; to make sure that the Memorial still contains that corner of living history; the thread, elusive and thin and yet more solid than any steel, which still binds the Rong to their homeland — the thread which is the truth of the war and the truth of their past.

Cam holds out her hand to the eldest aunt. “Let me make this right.”

The eldest aunt turns; the sniffer glowing in the palm of her hand — the colour of maple leaves and New Year’s lanterns. “Let me help,” Cam says, again. “If I take it from you —”

“Why should we trust you?” the eldest aunt asks. “You’ve amply demonstrated that you’ll betray us, time and time again, when your own life hangs in the balance.”

Betrayals — of the Rong, of the Rong Perpetuates, not once but many, many times — selling her people to what she thought was a criminal ring, time and time again — betrayals, and selfishness, and greed …

Cam spreads her hands — speechless, for once.

“What do you advocate?” the middle-aged aunt says.

“Isn’t it obvious?” The eldest aunt is standing once more by Cam’s side, one hand casually raised, only a few inches from her throat. With a mere gesture, she could crush Cam’s windpipe — this deep into the Memorial, Cam doesn’t doubt that she’d die for real. That Thuy would wait and wait, and raise a child on her own — and be unable to tell that child anything, anything at all about Cam that would be meaningful. “Silence is gold; and the only silence we can trust is that of the grave.”

“She’s Rong,” the middle-aged aunt says.

“She’s nothing. She lies and cheats for a living.”

“We all do, don’t we? We all lie and deceive and cheat, elder sister — as we did to this child.”

“Not for selfish motives.”

“Our own survival, you mean?” The middle-aged aunt’s smile is bitter. “Tell me that’s not selfish. Look me in the eye and tell me it’s not.”

The eldest aunt says nothing.

“Please,” Cam says. “Else they’ll come in and find you.”

The eldest aunt’s gaze turns to her; and its Grandmother’s gaze, dark and unfathomable, weighing every inch of Cam’s life from beginning to end. “Do you know what you’re asking for, child?”

Cam thinks of Lieutenant George; of re-education — and of Thuy and their child, and of each generation being less and more than the one that came after them. She had so many ideas of what she wanted; and all of them, after all, turned out to be wrong. For, when she does this — when she walks out of the Memorial with the sniffer still in the palm of her hand, looking properly downcast and ashamed and afraid for Lieutenant George — her life will once again revolve on lies; once again be shrouded in the half-truths and evasions she’s become so good at. 

What matters is this: they won’t be the shadow lies, the worms eating at her from within, but the other kind of lies — the ones that give weight and heft and meaning to the secret part of her life.

“Yes. Of course I know what I’m doing.” And, reaching out, she takes the eldest aunt’s hand in her own; and stands in sunlight on the eve of the war, in the city of her ancestors — feeling the dried, gnarled flesh against hers like a fount of strength for the future.

Aliette de Bodard lives and works in Paris, where she has a day job as a System Engineer. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Obsidian and Blood trilogy of Aztec noir fantasies, as well as numerous short stories. Recent works include The House of Shattered Wings (Roc/Gollancz, 2015 British Science Fiction Association Award), a novel set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, and The Citadel of Weeping Pearls (Asimov’s Oct/Nov 2015), a novella set in the same universe as her Vietnamese space opera On a Red Station Drifting.

Interview with Cover Artist Joe Badon

Russell Dickerson

This month’s Apex Magazine cover artist is Joe Badon, a freelance comic book artist from Slidell, Louisiana. His cover piece evokes a sense of mystery and a unique vision of reworking older works into new and interesting pieces.

APEX MAGAZINE: Your cover piece for this month’s Apex Magazine, “Girl Skull Wing,” is a digital illustration that started with vintage public domain images. What it is about an old photo that jumps out at you, that sparks an interest in changing it? Are you typically looking to completely change the photo, or simply enhance it into a new reality of sorts?

JOE BADON: I love the idea of nostalgia, and old photos trigger those emotions even if we’re not realizing it. Also, I love repurposing/recycling things. I definitely want to change the original photo as much as possible, to create something brand new.

AM: The Kickstarter project for your surrealist comic, The Man with Ten Thousand Eyes, was very successful. Other than the funding itself, what was your takeaway from the whole process? Are there things you might have changed, or didn’t expect out of the process?

JB: This will be my fourth or fifth Kickstarter. At this point, it’s fairly normal territory. One thing I’ve learned is that Kickstarter campaigns are A LOT of work and you have to prepare yourself for a month of full time/40 hours a week fundraising.

AM: When you are working with movie and pop culture images, such as your piece based on Oldboy, how much of the literal scene are you trying to capture, versus your interpretation of what happened onscreen? Do those images strike you as you are watching a film, thinking, “I just have to paint that”?

JB: Basically, after having watched a movie that I’ve really loved, I’ll think about that one scene that really blew me away. I’ll then try to capture that moment in my own style. I’m definitely trying to capture the scene emotionally and artistically rather than realistically.

AM: Your YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/user/joebadon) features interesting music, and seems well in tune with your style of art. Is creating music an extension of your visual style, or does it represent a fully different part of your creative side?

JB: I think that my music and my art are both equal extensions of the same creative source. Since my music is more for my own enjoyment, I’ll create audibly for my own pleasure as opposed to my visual art which I usually will have a client or customer in mind.

I usually keep my visual art on the more accessible side and my music on the more experimental side.

Both my music and my art are influenced from the same sources though.

Musicians such as John Zorn and Sufjan Stevens and artists such as Jackson Pollock and Marc Hansen influence my music and my visual art equally. The more you delve into an artist (whether that artist is an illustrator, painter, director, sculptor, musician or composer), you’ll find that each “artist” has an artistic philosophy that can be translated to any type of creative endeavor, visual, audible or otherwise.

Pollock has a philosophy of “automatic painting” which can be translated into improvisational music or stream-of-consciousness writing.

Sufjan has a philosophy of influence layering (taking different genres and musical ideas and layering them on top of one another) which is something that I try to achieve with my visual art.

Also, I feel like I just need to be creative. If I wasn’t able to draw or play music then it would leak out somewhere. I’d probably be making paper crafts or toys or movies or noodle sculptures or something. It would have to spill out somehow.

AM: In creating a comic like Terra Kaiju, how much of the comic is planned versus changing and adapting as you create it? Does the story get fleshed out first, or the art first, or do they evolve together?

JB: I’m sure that I’m doing it all wrong, but when I’m create my own comics, this is how I usually work: I’ll write a quick outline of the story. I’ll then illustrate the comic based on that outline. Lastly, I’ll add words, dialogue and narration after the comic is fully illustrated.

Joe Badon has been working as a full time freelance illustrator since 2009. He has worked on such comics as The Man with Ten Thousand Eyes, Terra Kaiju, Memoirs of the Mysterious, Frankenbabe and on many other commercial and private commissions. Visit his website at joebadon.blogspot.com, and listen to some of his music at thebandthatwouldntdie.bandcamp.com.

Photo by John Urbancik

Russell Dickerson has been a published illustrator and designer since the previous millennium, creating works for many genre publications and authors. He has also written many articles for various organizations in that time, including Apex, and his work can be found on his website at www.darkstormcreative.com.

Seeking Tanis. Runner Available.

Betsy Phillips

I can’t remember where I first heard about The Black Tapes, the creepy X-Files meets Serial podcast produced by Pacific Northwest Stories, but I can distinctly remember finishing the first episode and then having to immediately replay it because I could not believe what I had just heard. Not in the sense of “Is this real or not?” — though that was a question I initially had — but in the sense of “Who are these people? How did they pull this off?”

In a world full of podcasts that strives to be frightening, The Black Tapes stands out for actually achieving those scares.

The host of the podcast is Alex Reagan, who, along with her producer, Nic Silver, is investigating supernatural incidents centered around the mysterious black video tapes collected by the enigmatic skeptic, Dr. Richard Strand. The stories range from unsettling — a father and son are both followed by a large indistinct smudge — to the spookily fascinating — a high-school bullying incident transforms into a legend of a woman with an upside-down face — to the downright terrifying — The Unsound (For those of you who know what I’m talking about, no more is necessary. For those of you who don’t, I won’t spoil it.).

At the end of the first season, listeners were introduced to another Pacific Northwest Stories podcast, Tanis. Tanis is Nic Silver’s baby, his exploration of a strange place that may or may not exist, a cross between Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy and that old Christian Slater movie, Pump Up the Volume, with the best hacker in pop culture this side of Mr. Robot in MeerKatnip.

Tanis is, perhaps, harder to explain than The Black Tapes, but I like it better. Don’t get me wrong. I love The Black Tapes, but Tanis feels more like a story told for people raised in a time when things still could be kept secret. If you have H.P. Lovecraft, Jack Parsons, old cassettes, Christian Slater, long, perhaps pot-fueled, philosophical discussions, and ambivalence about large corporations in your personal constellation of meaningful things, Tanis is going to blow your mind.

Though the two podcasts share the same crew, you can listen to one without having to listen to the other. I think it’s worth your time to listen to both, since they seem to be trying to get at the same thing — not a literal thing, but a narrative concern — from two different directions. The Black Tapes is about Alex’s wish that she could find among the ordinary things of life — the birthday parties, the rock bands we like, the coffee shops, the places we might hike — proof of something supernatural and legendary, definitive proof. Tanis is about Nic’s attempt to take a legend, a supernatural phenomenon, and find ordinary, mundane traces of it in real life.

Both shows are asking us to consider how we might locate the uncanny and how a direct experience of it might change us. The tension between their very different approaches is a necessary part of that consideration, I think.

Executive producers Paul Bae and Terry Miles were kind enough to answer some of my questions and some questions from other Apex readers who are fans of the podcasts.

APEX MAGAZINE: Both The Black Tapes and Tanis can be quite frightening. For me, as a listener, I’ve always comforted myself with the knowledge that whatever’s happening in a particular episode, obviously, Alex and Nic must be okay because the episode exists (later Tanis developments aside). With that in mind, I’m wondering if we can talk about what was, for me, hands down the most terrifying moment of The Black Tapes. In Episode 4 of Season 2, the first time I listened to it, Alex messes up one of the Squarespace ads. That screw-up unsettled me so much I had to stop listening and get up and do something else for a minute. It seemed that Alex was so unwell that her problems were leaking over into the framework of the show. It was so unexpected and so scary. The ad’s not messed up anymore, though. Why did you choose to fix it?

PNWS: We didn’t even notice it before it was uploaded. We get into a work groove here at PNWS studios and when we hear an ad, we kind of skip forward knowing what it’s going to be. It wasn’t until it was public that one of our staff members asked us about it. That’s when we started thinking Alex might seriously need some time off. We fixed it as soon as we could for that reason. It wasn’t intentional.

AM: When we’re first introduced to Dr. Strand on The Black Tapes, it’s pretty clear he’s universally loathed by the people who know him and he, in return, is less than excited about the rest of humanity. He has now become something of a sex symbol in certain corners of The Black Tapes fandom. It must feel to him like the world’s opinion of him has flip-flopped. Is that strange for him? Is he even aware of this phenomenon? Does Dr. Strand now have groupies? Would he notice if he did?

PNWS: As far as we know, he has no idea any of that’s going on. He’s a very focused individual and rarely takes time away from his work. In fact, now that you mention it, we don’t remember ever having social time with him. No dinners, drinks, potluck … nothing. We think he’d be confused by the whole thing if we told him.

AM: On Tanis, Nic mentions being heavily influenced by Hard Harry from Pump Up the Volume and his DIY ethos comes through on the show. Is this podcast enough for him, though? For any of you guys? Welcome to Nightvale has the traveling show and the books. Limetown recently announced that it’s not returning until the creators see if they can make a go of a TV show and they’ll also have a book. Aaron Mahnke from Lore has a television deal. Any chance that The Black Tapes or Tanis might outgrow their podcast roots, too?

PNWS: Podcasting is our first love. We made a covenant with our fans who have committed to us and our stories. By creating and releasing these shows, we are asking them to trust us and come along for the ride. We will never break that trust. So, we are hard at work on The Black Tapes, Tanis, and some new shows that we plan on launching soon. We can say that, we are involved in other mediums, and have been working on all of them from very early on, so stay tuned!

AM: On the Pacific Northwest Stories website, you say, “As most of you have probably already discovered, our former host removed all of our past work from the internet.” On Episode 1 of Season 2 of Tanis, Nic makes a vague reference to threats being part of the reason he had MeerKatnip remove most traces of him from the internet. For those of us not from the Pacific Northwest and thus who didn’t hear the terrestrial radio version of PNWS, could you fill us in on what happened with your former host? This former host isn’t the source of some of the threats against Nic, is she or he?

PNWS: By “host” we mean our former bosses, and no, they are definitely not threatening Nic. They are actually notoriously hard to track down and a lot of them are out of the industry, and the former content is owned or co-owned and controlled by a web of corporations and entities. We’re trying to gather up as much content and permission(s) as we can, but that process is mired in red tape. We are hoping to get some of that material. We think some of those older shows could make for great podcast series.

AM: Apex has selected two questions from our readers:

Darcy Little Badger (@shiningcomic) asks the following — The Black Tapes and Tanis have amassed a fun online community of fans. Personally, I enjoy reading episode discussions on the PNWS subreddit. Has listener feedback/community participation affected the direction PNWS podcasts in any significant way?

PNWS: Our executive producers avoid going to Reddit unless doing an AMA only because they’re too busy trying to grow PNWS. As far as we know, no one here does anything more than dip their toes into the discussions there. But we can’t be sure about everyone. We love that the community is vibrant, smart and incredibly passionate.

AM: Varo Stiglitz (@alvaromateu) asks the following — Will we see more of Charlie Strand soon? Seems like she just vanished from the series.

PNWS: We can’t say …

Don’t hesitate. Go listen to TANIS and The Black Tapes now!

TANIS: www.tanispodcast.com/
The Black Tapes: theblacktapespodcast.com/

Betsy Phillips is a writer who lives in Whites Creek, Tennessee. Her fiction has appeared in Apex, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and other places. Whenever anything strange happens, her first thought is “Oh, a ghost!” It is almost never a ghost.

By Payette Lake

Cullen Groves

I stood on the shore of the lake and became a tree,

Gave up my heart for heartwood,

Gave up my nerves for needles,

Thrust my tangled veins into the wet sand,

And wove them into roots for a strong, tall tree

Like the ponderosas looming around me,

I abandoned thoughts and hurts,

Felt the gentle wavelets

Roll striated sands over my toes,

Over the arches of my feet,

Burying my ankles,

And I thought that I could stand there eternally

Until the waters otherthrew me, buried me,

Like the drowned old pines that sometimes peer

From the dark waters like ill-remembered dreams,

And I sang rhymeless verses to myself

In the timeless nothingness between matter and mattering,

And the wide dark waters murmured before me

But I heard my father calling to me, distantly,

Calling me away to work,

To be a man — could I refuse?

Returning after to the shore,

I could not find where I had stood,

For I had thrust my roots in sand

Cullen Groves is an aspiring writer who lives in Moscow, Idaho, where he studied at the University of Idaho. He has had poetry published by Asimov's, and several works by Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, including the story, “The Madness of the Mansa,” as well as a forthcoming epic in heroic couplets.

The Kraken Sea (Excerpt)

E. Catherine Tobler

It began with a dragon in the pouring rain, the beast barely held at bay, balanced upon two thin steel rails. Steam poured from its black mouth and guts, billowing through the damp gloom. A brief spark of after-rain sunlight caught within its glassy green eye, against sharp metal tooth, and when the steam gave way, young Jackson could see it was no dragon, but a train. The train was headed as far west as it could go and Jackson, aged fifteen-and-one-half, in the Year of Our Lord 1893, would be on it.

The ill-fitting wool coat wrapping him hung to his knees, gray sleeves rucked to his elbows. The coat’s wide collar served as a perch for the pinned paper bearing his name (lifted from a box of discarded daffodils in an alley) and his pedigree (none). No parent had given him his name, that party having only the decency to leave him in the box, partly sheltering him from the snow of a winter’s night. The much-worn box sat on a shelf in the foundling hospital, filled with penny dreadfuls above the narrow, squeaky bed Jackson had once occupied.

Jackson served as first and last name both, the nuns never having time to decide which it was and provide another. Other children suggested “Francis,” for his affinity with the rooftop pigeons. Jackson corrected them at every opportunity, be it with words or fists or solid shoe heels. He liked Saint Francis well enough, but it was not his name.

The nuns ensured he had three meals a day and shoes on his feet, even when every week these things became an increasing challenge. But the nuns told him someone was waiting for him in San Francisco — someone who had asked for a boy of his kind. A boy who was brown-haired and strong, a boy who was not afraid of water. Jackson didn’t know anyone in San Francisco, hardly knew anyone in New York, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter he was the oldest of the group, that those who had come to the foundling hospital with him were long gone. It didn’t matter that no family had wanted him before now. The train mattered.

The sisters nudged him up the steps into the passenger car. His fingers moved over the green velveteen seats, polished boots thumping on the faded violet carpet between the seats. Other children already packed those seats, wrapped in coats similar to his, names pinned to collars. Their faces were all the same to him, wide-eyed, lips near chewed to bloodiness because they were so worried.

He became aware of Sister Jerome Grace’s absence then, even if he thought he could hear her voice. She had not been chosen to join the orphan train across the country. He pictured her soft hand in his as he walked to the end of the car and crawled onto an empty bench near a window where he could look out at the people who bustled through the station. Where he could look at —

“Sister Jerome Grace?”

Her face tipped up, smiling at him from the platform. He imagined her hair was dark, though he had never seen it for the veil she wore, eyebrows the indiscriminate color of shadows hastily dropped. Rain pearled on her veil now, transforming the flat black fabric into a field of diamonds. When the sister walked toward the train, the rain slid off in a crystal curtain that hovered in the humid, fogged air. She was damp when she settled beside Jackson.

“A change of plans,” was all she said, and smiled at him before beginning to count the children in the car and the sisters assigned to wrangle them. Her pale hand hovered in the air, her first finger pointing at each child counted, tallies made.

Sister Jerome Grace was twenty-five, married to God for always and ever. She had never told him the name she was born with. Jackson turned his flushed face back to the window, chewing the inside of his cheek much as those other children chewed their lips. He swallowed the blood when he tasted it. He pulled the cuffs of his coat down to make certain his arms were covered, even though the sister knew all there was to know about him. She would not be surprised by a gleam of scale even if it often terrified him. What was inside him that made him so?

When, at the shriek of the train’s whistle, he stood up on the velveteen seat and cried out, he shuddered. It wasn’t human, the sound the train whistle pulled from his guts. He sang a duet with the whistle, a high lingering note that said he was as ready as the train. Ready to go. Clear the tracks.

Sister Jerome Grace’s voice reached him, but he couldn’t answer her when she asked what was wrong. His mouth tightened up, tongue pressed to teeth. He knew the children were looking at him as though he were mad, but he was long-used to such looks.

One hand pressed to the window and the other pressed to his chest, where he could feel the resonating whistle. His fingers tensed against the window and when the whistle sounded a second time, he cried out again. It wasn’t alarm, only utter joy. Who knew the beast had such a voice? The sound crawled inside him, deep down into his gut where nothing but Sister Jerome Grace had lodged before. Only her and now the dragon’s call. His hand thumped against the window, leaving a smudge.

“Get down, Jackson. Ssstoppit!”

Someone tugged on the hem of his coat. Jackson smacked the hand away and it never came again. By the time the train pulled out of the station, Jackson had the length of bench to himself but for Sister Jerome Grace. When Sister Mary Luke suggested other children spread out and join Jackson, they shook their heads. He was oldest; he was strangest.

A little girl thrashed in Sister Mary Luke’s grip when the nun attempted to move her, throwing herself to the floor rather than sit beside Jackson. He watched, impassive, content with Sister Jerome Grace nearby and the rumble of the train in his bones. His hand stayed pressed to the window as the city retreated into his past.

His past was a place he didn’t know well, but a place the sisters had always speculated about. They told him he’d come to the foundling hospital as many children did, a tiny thing inside a tiny box. “A Christmas gift,” Jackson had said, making the sisters laugh. None of them minded the gift of him, even though it was another body to clothe, another mouth to feed.

The rain returned outside the window, so Jackson turned his attention to the other children. He watched the way they spoke to one another, the way two heads bent together over a shared book, the way they poked and teased when the sisters were outside of earshot or arm reach. It was peculiar to him, friendship; he hadn’t made peace with himself and couldn’t see how to make it with anyone else Jackson missed the pigeons and their aviary on the roof, though Sister Jerome Grace promised San Francisco had birds.

The sleeping compartments were small and narrow. Jackson vanished into his without complaint when the time came, wondering if it was because the space resembled that long-ago daffodil box. The sisters told him he couldn’t possibly remember the box, but he knew its neatly made walls, smooth wood to keep tender blossoms from bruising in transit. Only Sister Jerome Grace asked him about it. It was cold that night, he’d told her. The first snow of the season, and she said yes, yes, remembering too. He disliked being cold even now.

“How long will it take us?” he asked the next day, the train continuing along endless tracks. The country spooled out along side them, always changing. Houses gave way to cities that gave way to plains until there were more houses, more cities. The buildings fascinated him, in hues of brown and sepia, ivory and black.

“Just over a week.”

The sister’s answer was thrilling and disappointing both. Being on the train for an entire week was something he meant to take advantage of. He wanted to learn its ways — her ways — how she was put together, how she moved over the rails. But disappointment was quick to follow. It was only a week and part of him wanted to stay on the train wherever she might go, even if she only snaked back and forth over the same east-west track.

It was with relief he discovered there would be stops along the way. Sister Jerome Grace offered him the map of the rails before she vanished in a flurry of black skirts to chase after a pair of children who had broken Sister Mary Luke’s rosary.

The journey and its many pauses made sense, train depots and cities scattered along the way. Refueling, taking on more food. Jackson traced the lines on the map with careful fingers, realizing not all of the children would reach the coast with him, having been chosen by families closer than San Francisco.

Families who had asked for them.

He turned the map over then looked to his reflection in the train’s window. A common boy at first glance, he imagined his paperwork said; do not be alarmed by the discoloration of his skin, nor the way he may shed. Surely his papers said no such thing, and yet. A finger strayed to his wrist, rubbing until he saw an iridescent gleam where his pulse beat.

“Jackson.”

He looked at the sister, allowing her to take his hand and examine both fingertip and wrist. Her hands were warm from running after children. Jackson’s wrist gleamed with scale, a snakeskin pattern revealed. He thought hard about unbroken skin and slowly his own settled back to ordinary flesh. Sometimes control came easily, though he could not say why. He suspected Sister Jerome Grace was of help. She had never shied over his strangeness and that was a comfort.

“There is a place I want to show you in Chicago,” she said and eased her hold on him. She lifted the map from where it had fallen and turned it to the side containing the train’s stops. “Here.” She touched a city resting against the edge of a large lake.

“What place?” Jackson asked. Every place outside the windows called to him.

“We will have an afternoon there, and you will see.”

The Kraken Sea — a new novel by E. Catherine Tobler available from Apex Publications

E. Catherine Tobler has never run away to join the circus — but she thinks about doing so every day. Among others, her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and on the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award ballot. Her first novel, Rings of Anubis, launched the Folley & Mallory Adventures. Senior editor of Shimmer Magazine, you can find her online at www.ecatherine.com and @ecthetwit.

Apex Magazine Issue 86 Preview

Next month in Apex Magazine, we will have original fiction by Jennifer Geisbrecht (“Lazarus and the Amazing Kid Phoenix”), and Christopher Shultz (“Starpower”). Our poetry is by David Jibson, Rodney Gomez, Jon Olsen, and Chris Phillips. Our reprint is a novelette by C.S.E. Cooney (“The Big Bah-Ha”). Cover art will be by Sunny Ray. Look for this and more in Apex Magazine issue 85 coming in July, 2016.

Copyrights and Acknowledgments

“Words from the Editor-in-Chief” Copyright © 2016 by Jason Sizemore
“Folk Hero” Copyright © 2016 by Mary Pletsch
“Interview with Author Mary Pletsch” Copyright © 2016 by Andrea Johnson
“Cuckoo Girls” Copyright © 2016 by Douglas F. Warrick
“Memorials” Copyright © 2014 by Aliette de Bodard (originally appeared in Asimov’s, February, 2014, Dell Magazines)
“The Kraken Sea (Excerpt)” Copyright © 2016 by E. Catherine Tobler (Apex Publications, June 2016)
“Later, they found her journal” Copyright © 2016 by Tina Parker
“Ghost Plague” Copyright © 2016 by Tina Jens
“By Payette Lake” Copyright © 2016 by Cullen Groves
“Seeking TANIS. Runner Wanted.” Copyright © 2016 by Betsy Phillips
“Interview with Cover Artist Joe Badon” Copyright © 2016 by Russell Dickerson

Publisher/Editor-in-Chief—Jason Sizemore
Managing Editor—Lesley Conner
Poetry Editor—Bianca Spriggs
Assistant Editor—McKenzie Johnston

Slush Editors—Andrea Johnson, Anna Middleton, Beth Sutherland, Beverly McPherson, Carolyn Charron, Dawn Griffin, Eileen Maksym, Gabrielle Harbowy, Jessica Nelson, Joshua Cowell, Joshua P’ng, Kate Dollarhyde, Lauren Smith, Lia Swope Mitchell, Lindsay Anderson, Lisa Bolekaja, Mandy Johnson-Parker, Mike Baldwin, Rebecca Hurley, Reese Menezes, Samantha Williams, Stephanie Harris, and Tacoma Tomilson.

Graphic Designer—Justin Stewart

ISSN: 2157-1406

Apex Publications
PO Box 24323
Lexington, KY 40524

Please visit our website at www.apex-magazine.com.

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Table of Contents

Words from the Editor-in-Chief

Folk Hero

Interview with Author Mary Pletsch

Cuckoo Girls

Later, they found her journal

Ghost Plague

Memorials

Interview with Cover Artist Joe Badon

Seeking Tanis. Runner Available.

By Payette Lake

The Kraken Sea (Excerpt)

Copyrights and Acknowledgments