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A Native American veterinarian on a journey to Mars is woken up early from cyrosleep to deal with a canine emergency.

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This month's story is a reprint I picked from the wonderful Love Beyond Body, Space and Time anthology of Indigenous LGBT2S+ speculative fiction. I have been following Darcie Little Badger's work since her first short story publications, and I also really enjoyed Né łe! with its themes of queer relationships and women in STEM, and that it also presented Indigenous people as heterogenous, with both differences and commonalities. In space. With dogs. Good reading! - Bogi.

***

Originally published in Love Beyond Body, Space and Time: An Indigenous LGBT and two-spirit sci-fi anthology, edited by Hope Nicholson. Bedside Press, 2016.

***

Enamored with promises of red Martian canyons and a hefty pay raise, I ignored the scary part about leaving Earth until I actually had to board a starship. There's nothing too risky about interplanetary space travel. In fact, it's rather mundane; passengers relax in stasis for nine months. I just hate speed. Won't ride a roller coaster. Won't bungee jump. Won't even hop off a diving board.

No drop can outrace the ascent outta Earth.

Security wasn't making things easier. The pre-boarding screener found my pills. "What's this?" he asked, plucking a rattling tin from my jacket.

"Those? Acebenzine."

He squinted, probably skimming a list of drug names on his ocular screen. "Sorry, how do you spell that?"

"A-c-e-b-e-n-zine. It's for dogs. Often prescribed to reduce anxiety before routine checkups or grooming sessions."

"Are you smuggling a toy poodle in your jacket, too?"

"Acebenzine is effective on humans. Trust me: I'm a doctor."

He squinted again. "Passenger registration says you're a veterinarian."

"Yes. Animal doctor."

"Okay. Dottie King, DVM, you'll be unconscious during launch and won't feel a thing."

"Not necessarily. One in ten thousand people experience unintended intra-stasis awareness during the six-hour acclimation period after-"

"We can offer you human sedatives." He dropped my tin in a contraband chute and handed me a mint-sized pill.

"Much obliged." I swallowed the medicine and proceeded to my stasis pod. Tragically, it resembled a technophile coffin. An attendant secured my limbs, applied bio-monitor stickers, and snapped the lid shut, her face scowling through my porthole. It did not take long for the other passengers to settle in. The Starship Soto was first and foremost a cargo carrier. This trip, which carried thirty Earth emigrants and forty-one dogs to Mars, was probably more crowded with life-forms than all of its predecessors.

Not a tremendously comforting thought. Was the crew sufficiently trained? If something went wrong, would they know how to rescue thirty landborn civilians? More importantly, why wasn't the sedative working?

"Everybody ready?" chirped a speaker near my ear. "Stasis initiation. Ten. Nine. Eight..."

I know what you're thinking: it's safer to visit Mars than the grocery store. However, midflight disasters, albeit rare, are a special breed of terrifying. If Starship Soto exploded between Earth and Mars, I'd go gentle into the interstellar vacuum, my body and mind slipping from stasis to death. Helpless. Thoughtless. At least, during a highway fender bender, there's a chance to react, even if the only reaction is a passionately uttered "Sh-"

"Six."

I tried to focus on a pleasant memory: our chickens, a lamb, a rooster crowing. The desert warm beneath my feet. Mother's sweet tea. Father singing in the kitchen. Our collie herding sheep. Family surname-King-painted across a tin mailbox. A coyote, his muzzle wet and red. A needle and thread...

"Three."

Wait. Mail. Damn!

"Two."

I forgot to setup my forwarding address!

"One."

Sh-

*

-ucks.

Stasis pod spiritualism ain't what it used to be; at its height, SPS churches appeared in every major city, on- and off-Earth. Their leaders preached: the Sleep is sacred! Encounter long-dead relatives! Witness blinding white light, heaven and hell! Hear prophesies, threats, and undying voices! All praise the pod!

Of course, SP experiences are caused by altered brain activity during the stasis wake-up phase. Once scientists replicated the miraculous hallucinations with electrodes, SPS interest dropped. It was all over the news.

Despite that, I nearly praised the pod as I regained consciousness on Starship Soto. Through the porthole, I saw silhouettes-my parents?-standing against a brighter-than-sun light. Mom and Dad were born before nannite revolution, when itty-bitty wonderbots surged through our bodies to elongate telomeres, degrade cancers, repair DNA, and accelerate healing. In other words, my parents aged. Died.

The silhouettes waved; I tried to reach for them, but out-of-body hallucinations don't come with hands. The light intensified, and its radiance drank their bodies.
Does it always take this long? Ten to sixty minutes. This is an emergency! Throw water on her face! Horrible idea, Cora. Look! She's scowling! Are her eyes open? Bother me when that happens.
A face peered through dimming light: brown-black hair in a tight bun. Black eyes under thick, serious-looking eyebrows. Mouth pursed with watching-a-pot-boil concentration. Skin a warm ochre brown, adult-aged: could be anywhere from thirty to one hundred years old. Either ghosts resembled starship pilots, or I wasn't actually dead. "Are you awake?" she-Cora-asked.

"Working on it." My voice cracked twice. I hadn't felt so thirsty since the water crisis of '09.

"She's awake! Can I take her?"

My pod was open, my restraints unlatched. None of the other passengers had been roused from stasis; the only person there besides Cora was a peeved-looking man with a virtual reality headset around his neck. "Wait," he said. "I'm checking vitals. Get her water and explain the situation."

"Sorry," Cora said, bounding to a water dispenser across the room. "Doctor Dottie King, we're still five months away from Mars, and the dang puppy stasis pods malfunctioned, so we got forty-one dogs barking to high Pluto, and Pete-he's the engineer-can't get things working again. So-"

"Are the dogs okay?" I climbed out of the pod; Cora put a steadying hand on my arm and handed me a water bottle. I chugged the entire half liter.

"Probably," she said, "but you should double check. And... well, we don't know what to do! There are supplies in cargo-kibble cubes, beds, kennels, squeaky little toys-but this operation is one bad choice away from chaos."

"Vitals check out," the man said. "You're clear to leave."

I delicately removed Cora's hand as we walked out the door. "What's the staff situation?" I asked. "How many people can help?"

"Skeleton crew, Doc: just my copilot Lishana, Pete, and our stasis monitor, Vic'quell-you just met him."

"Can we recruit other passengers? If I recall, there are several sleeping veterinarians and med techs on board."

"Theoretically, but resources are tight-that includes space-and humans take priority."

"So the dogs will suffer if too many people wake up?"

"Right! Speaking of suffering: liquids have to be recycled. How quickly can you potty train forty-one dogs?"

"You're kidding."

"Don't worry. Pete and I will assist. Unfortunately, Vic can't be distracted. Too much of a liability."

"VR isn't distracting?"

"You noticed, huh?" She threw up her shoulders; the movement was more passionate than a mere shrug. "Blame bureaucracy. No worries. I'll do the work of two people!"

"I somehow believe you."

We turned a corner; the passage terminated at a sealed door. A thin, densely freckled man leaned against its hand wheel. The fine creases around his mouth deepened with anxiety.

"Pete," Cora said. "I told you to wait inside animal bay. What gives?"

"It's too much," he said. "Woman, the last five minutes have made me a cat person."

He turned the wheel; as the door cracked, a flood of yaps and whines swept into the corridor. The egg-shaped doggy stasis pods had opened, exposing forty wiggling Chihuahuas and a blue-eyed husky, his irises like glacial ice. The husky keened; they're a chatty breed, prone to howling, barking, and shrill vocalizations that mean everything from "pay attention to me" to "I said pay attention to me, damn it!"

"Move kennels in here," I said. "Cleaning and caring will be a full-time job; remember that dogs like routines. Playtime can happen in shifts of twenty animals-"

"I'm going to unpack supplies from storage," Pete said. "Good luck, Cora."

"Don't forget water dispensers!" I called after him. "Also, remember my medical supplies! Thanks! Hey, Pete? Can you hear me?"

From the corridor, he shouted, "Got it!"

"Cora?"

"Roger, Doc?"

"Who ordered the husky for a Martian settlement?"

"What's wrong with huskies?"

"They're an energetic breed."

"I dunno who bought him, but they paid handsomely; he's worth more than all forty chi-chis. With that money, I could purchase a house in the decent part of town."

"What town?" I asked. Cora had an accent I couldn't place; it was probably from off-Earth. Orbiting cities, with one foot in their founding nations and the other in the starry frontier, had a knack for cultivating unique phonologies.

"Any of them," she said. "I'm not picky."

"Right. Well, until we land, Blue Eyes will be your responsibility. Keep him close."

"Doc, no! I'll get attached and be really sad when we land."

"Your choice: one big dog, or forty teeny ones."

"Husky it is! What should I name him?"

"All mine will be Né łe," I said. "Dog."

"I prefer Conan. Here, boy." She unstrapped Conan lowered him to the ground. With a shrill yawn-whine combo, he affectionately leaned against Cora's legs.

"Suits him," I said. "Time for routine checkups. Sick bay?"

"Right this way!"

I plucked a black Chihuahua from his pod and followed Cora; the metal floor clanged beneath her boots and clacked under Conan's nails. In contrast, I moved silently, barefoot. Waffle-shaped ridges underfoot bit my skin. My soles had gone plush after years in compression socks and supportive clogs. I tread mindfully, afraid to stumble and traumatize the Chihuahua. He huddled against my chest, squinting at the motion-activated light strips on the walls.

"This is it," Cora said. She opened a sliding door so quickly, it clanged. Sick bay had three examination tables and a tech resource center. Sealed cabinets along the wall contained equipment and medicines. With my portable kit, I'd make do. Heartbeats are heartbeats; you can use the same stethoscope on people and dogs. It is, however, more difficult to convince a dog to sit still.

"Let the marathon begin," I said. When I carried the Chihuahua to an exam table, he kicked his legs, as if treading water in the air.

"I think he's confused," Cora said.

"Not unusual for his breed. Thermometer, please!"

Forty-one clean bills of health later, Cora, Conan, twenty dogs, and I relaxed in the observation deck. Its outer video wall projected more stars than I'd ever seen before: the view behind Starship Soto. Among them, Earth shone the faintest shade of blueish white. Born in landlocked Utah, I rarely visited the ocean. Beaches were too crowded, windy, and hot. However, from afar, I admired the radiant sea.

"Why Mars, Doctor?" Cora asked. She was doing sit-ups, despite Conan's best efforts to eat her ponytail. I'd stopped counting her reps after three hundred and fifty. How many sit-ups could a human body tolerate, anyway? Maybe Cora had cybernetic abs. It was impossible to tell under her bulky white tracksuit.

"Eh?" I asked. "Why not?" I threw a monkey-shaped toy, and four Chihuahuas latched onto its squeaky limbs.

"Where I'm from, people play the lottery for a chance to live on au naturale Earth."

"I didn't live on natural anything. Houston is a towering concrete behemoth. Might as well be in an orbiter."

"You could still travel, though. Visit parks. The Gulf."

"Sure."

"Mars is nine months away from all that."

"It's away from lots of things. I needed a change."

"Personal issues?" She paused mid-sit, all her attention focused on me and the blanket of Chihuahuas warming my lap.

"Yeah," I said. "Especially one named Addie."

It's never easy to end a ten-year relationship, but few things are more awkward than a breakup in virtual reality. The simulated bench Addie chose for our "we need to talk" moment overlooked a forest trail that shone like the Vegas Strip. Illuminated VR ads, each tailored for my career, sauntered back and forth in the guise of pedestrians wearing sandwich boards. One blinking sign caught my eye:

NO BODY KNOWS BARB ODIES LIKE WE DO! PET-PRESERVER MAKES CALICO CLONES!

Clever pun.

"Sorry, Dottie," Addie said. "This conversation can't wait." Four months earlier, her company-satellite city engineering-sent her to their swanky branch on Orbiter Lux. Ostensibly a temporary position. Sadly, she loved the off-world accommodations. Me? I didn't care how many hydroponic gardens or ambient noise generators an orbiter contained; it was a scary chunk of metal. Meteoroid deflectors malfunctioned? Radiation shield weakened? Gravity failed? Baddie carried a bomb on board? Catastrophe!

"This is almost like reality," I said. Addie's VR avatar was taller and more symmetric than her physical self; I found it disconcerting. Granted, my avatar had a pair of ram horns and feathered wings.

"Did you remember to buy ad blockers?" she asked. Clearly, Addie couldn't see the street performer twirling a sign that promised: NATURAL INGREDIENTS = HAPPIER DOGS! SHEPHARD KIBBLE DOES NOT USE GMOs OR TEST TUBE MEAT!

"Mmmhm."

"It's not easy to say this," she continued. "You're a wonderful woman, but ..."

INTUITANKS COME WITH OPTIONAL FISH CAMS!

"... you've worked in every hellhole in North America, but draw the line at an orbiter? We have different priorities ..."

LEARN PARAKEET PSYCHOLOGY.

"Goodbye, Dottie."

Neon letters, halo bright, rose over Addie's head. A VR man had lifted his sandwich board, desperate to share the message: MARS NEEDS VETERINARIANS! COMPETITIVE SALARIES, INCOMPARABLE ADVENTURE! APPLY TODAY!

Bittersweet memories-Addie sharing my cream soda, Addie strumming a lute, Addie bowling, Addie kissing, Addie, Addie, Addie!-were replaced with visions of the red frontier. I imagined visiting dome-encapsulated hostels that overlooked the empty Ophir Chasma. There'd be warm earth underfoot-not Earth-earth, but close enough. Could I manage the first animal clinic on Mars? Support a burgeoning pet population? First dogs and then cats and then potbellied pigs! Goats, bison, passenger pigeons: dense flocks migrating through engineered skies. I'd build a paradise, one better than the home I lost as a child.

"Goodbye, Darling," I agreed.

Tactfully, I explained the breakup to Cora, "Addie and I had different goals in life. She wanted to live in Orbiter Lux, and I simply can't live in Orbiter Lux. There's no work for veterinarians! The only pets allowed are self-sustaining ecosystems: bacteria, GMO fish, and plants in sealed glass terrariums. We split amicably."

"Relationships are tough," Cora said, moving to a recliner beside me. The black Chihuahua, who'd been monopolizing its plush seat, relocated to her lap. "I once dated another pilot. Great chemistry, but we were too competitive. I called it off after my third speed violation."

"That's not good for my nerves."

"They were solo missions, Doc! I'd never put a civilian at risk!"

"Just teasing." I regarded the swathe of universe projected on the wall. "You were a lot of help today. Thank you."

"Are you kidding? I'd pay to goof around with forty puppies. It's awesome! Right, Doodles?" She poked the donut-shaped Chihuahua on her lap.

"You named him?"

"I named all of them."

As time passed, the daily dog routine-playtime, feeding, kennel cleaning, training, playtime, feeding, bedtime-staved off cabin fever. Cora's personality helped, too. She wasn't like the other skeleton crew. Vic lived in VR, only emerging to eat or shower. Pete did help with most dog chores, but he rarely strung more than ten words together. In contrast, Cora chatted insistently, and I wondered how she would have survived the trip without my company.

On the ninth day of doggy daycare, I finally asked, "How often do you do this?"

"What?" she said. "Grooming?" Cora combed a long-haired Chihuahua, its wavy coat glistening under the tangle-proof brush.

"Interplanetary travel," I clarified.

"This is my first trip. Don't look so horrified. Lishana has nine flights under her belt. Plus, it's all autopilot until landing, and I'm great at that. See, I normally fly shuttles between Earth and Diné Orbiter."

"You're Navajo?" I said. The Diné orbiter, a spool of residential and industry modules rotating around a zero-grav core, was sovereign Navajo territory, completely inhabited by Nation citizens or their guests. Among the first space colonies, it lacked the bells and whistles of newer models. "Sturdy enough," Addie once said, "but nobody uses stacked models anymore. The gravity's unreliable. Sometimes, it's like walking on the moon, and other times, you're fifty kilograms heavier than you should be."

Cora unzipped her flight suit from neck to mid-chest; she wore a silver squash blossom necklace, its turquoise-embedded metal bright over her black tank top. "Yeah," she said. "I never mentioned it?"

"Never. Are you on the lam?"

"Nothing that exciting." She fluffed the Chihuahua's cowlick and tied a pink bow around it. "I just wanted to know what a long haul feels like. The answer is: boring. Until this happened."

"Lucky emergency." Too lucky? I could accept the stasis pod failure. Dogs had never been transported to Mars before; new technology malfunctioned sometimes. But with five veterinarians on board, Cora chose me. I'm Lipan Apache, and though my tribe is markedly less centralized and powerful than the Navajo Nation, we have a lot in common. Matrilineal roots. Respect for wisdom and family. A history rife with suffering.

My expressive face betrayed me.

"What's wrong?" Cora asked.

"It's awfully convenient that you woke me up, considering all we have in common."

"The lesbian thing? I had no idea, if that's what you're-"

"No! Our cultures."

"Doc," she said, "are you suggesting that I was motivated by a burning desire to pal around with another Native?"

"Were you?"

She squinted. "Let's review your credentials. You have forty-seven years' experience with small animal medicine. Volunteered in twenty-nine urban pounds. Patients and colleagues provided glowing recommendations. You're thoroughly familiar with nannite biotech and ER techniques. There may be other vets on this ship, but you're the most qualified. That's why I chose you. Our repartee is just a perk."

"Wow. I'm sorry."

"Don't be," Cora said. "When enough people look down on you, doubt takes root. It makes you question every accomplishment and blame success on luck or favors." She zipped up the flight suit, hiding her squash blossom. I felt a flush of appreciation. A twinge of pain.

When she drew me into a quick hug, I felt her squash blossom press against my chest.

We passed evenings in the observation deck, betting our dessert rations over checkers. When Pete felt sociable, he projected movies on the wall and half-watched our game. Sometimes, even Vic joined us. There were minor setbacks. During week four, the thermal system malfunctioned, and temperatures dropped: 21 to 18 °C. I didn't notice until the short-haired Chihuahuas began shivering and burrowing under their kennel blankies. Fortunately, there was an easy fix; we opened a crate of dog costumes-little tuxedos, dinosaur hoodies, superhero sweaters with handkerchief-sized capes-and they were the most fashionable dogs in space until Pete fixed the heat regulator.

After a few weeks, I forgot to worry.

Of course, that's when a real crisis struck.

It happened during a jog around Starship Soto. The passenger-habitable area was shaped like a spinning ring; centrifugal force grounded us. The pilot's cabin and several cargo carriers, all held steady within the gyroscope belly, were off-limits to anyone without zero-grav training.

"The simulated gravity here is just seventy percent Earth-strength," Cora said, her voice steady as we lapped the ship. "I'll be outta shape when I return home."

"Huh. No wonder I can carry so many Chihuahuas at the same time." I gulped a hungry breath, already winded after ten minutes. "Mars gravity is even weaker, right?"

"Sure is. You'll feel like superwoman. By the way, will the doggy nannites protect them from bone loss?"

"They protect them from almost everything." The nannites stopped bone degradation, cancer, tooth decay, and aging. There were no parasites on Mars. No puppies, either; all pets were sterile. That said, did Mars really need a superwoman veterinarian? It would be centuries before wildlife could survive outside the domes. I'd hoped to stake a claim on prime land, but since when did being first guarantee anything?

"No wonder the Mars dogs cost a fortune," Cora said. "The ones on my orbiter rarely live past fifteen. It's too expensive to engineer nannites for them all."

"Orbiter Diné allows dogs?"

"One per family. That's how I learned to tie a bow." She jabbed a thumb at the five bow-bedecked Chihuahuas who scampered after us; Conan was ahead, leading the jog. He moved so quickly, I couldn't see his feathered tail anymore. "What about you?" Cora asked, agilely leaping over a Chihuahua that veered in front of her path. "Obviously, you're swimming in pets, but they belong to other people. Ever had your own?"

"Once," I said. "On the family farm, we owned chickens, sheep, and a collie named Kirby. All lost after the urban relocation measure passed." Cities were efficient; during the resource crises-no water, no food, no space -very few people could afford the country life.

"The U.S. government moved your family? You didn't live on a rez?"

"My tribe never had one," I said. "I'm descended from people who fought or fled the invasion. Isn't it funny how ancient history still screws us over?"

"You don't have to talk about the farm if it's a sore spot."

"I like remembering. Say, have I ever mentioned the... shoot! Look out!"

Rounding a bend in the corridor, we nearly stumbled over Conan. He lay on his side, body taut, as if his tail, legs, and head were stretched by invisible strings. "God!" Cora said. "What's wrong? Help him, Dottie!" She dropped to her knees and cradled his head on her lap. His paws twitched, and he snapped at the air, frothing. I knew the symptoms well.

"It's a seizure," I said. "Don't move."

After a scramble down the corridor, I grabbed a diazepam injector from my emergency kit and returned, wheezing and fighting through twinges of runner's cramp. As Conan twitched in Cora's arms, I shot the medicine into his leg. His blue eyes turned to me; their dilated pupils resembled two frost-dusted pits.

"Why is this happening?" Cora asked.

"I don't know."

Once Conan stopped thrashing, we carried him to the medical bay. The Chihuahuas crowded our legs, squeak-yapping. "Oscar," I said. "Rosie! Snowball! Doodlebug! Shoo! Go find Pete!" Only Doodlebug listened.

"They know that he's dying!" Cora said, hugging Conan tenderly. "Dogs have a sixth sense!" She turned her head, hiding her tears from me.

"Nah. Chihuahuas are just pests. Put him on the table. He had a seizure; that's not a death sentence. If it happens again, we'll give him daily phenobarb. Easy treatment."

"I thought all Mars dogs are healthy. Is it something I did?"

"Animals aren't machines." I checked Conan's gums and listened to his heartbeat. His hips were aligned, his stomach felt right, and his eyes scrutinized my work, alert. "Life is complex in unpredictable ways, Cora. It changes and surprises." I scratched Conan behind his ears, pleased to see his tail wag. "He's healthy. Well. Aside from the possible epilepsy. Poor boy. Are you okay? Can I get you water?"

"No thanks. I need to visit the flight deck."

"Right now?"

"His buyers must be informed." She shook her head. "They won't be happy, Dottie. Can you watch Conan until I get back?"

"Of course," I said.

Pete and I crated the Chihuahuas-it was nearly bedtime, anyway-and I moved Conan to my closet-sized personal room for observation. Though I put his dog bed on the floor, he hopped onto my narrow bunk, curling in a furry donut at the foot. "Cora spoils you," I said. His ears perked up. "What, you miss her already? It won't be long."

Actually, a knock on my door woke us five hours later. "It's me!" Cora called. "Is Conan alive?"

"You can't hear him barking?" I slipped a robe over my pajamas and opened the door. "What's the verdict?"

Cora barely managed a half-shrug. She zombie shuffled into my room and slumped on the bed.

"Come in," I said. "Make yourself at home."

"Sorry. It's bad. The buyers requested a different pup."

I turned off the ambient cricket sounds that had been chirping through my intercom and sat between Cora and Conan. "That's what I was worried about. For his price tag, they expect perfection."

"He is perfect." She grabbed my hand firmly. A shade darker than mine, it felt noon sun warm. "What's going to happen?"

"He'll find a new home," I said, "with somebody who loves him. Like you."

Her posture straightened as we basked in contemplative silence; Cora was probably planning his homecoming on Orbiter Diné. All the kilometers they'd jog together, all the toys he'd rip apart. When she spoke, however, the subject surprised me. "Before the seizure, you were going to tell me something. What?"

It took a moment to gather my memories. "I'm not spiritual. Don't believe in gods, ghosts, or divine retribution. It's hard enough to have faith in people. But ..."

Her hand was still on mine, our fingers entwining. It took a moment, but I eventually recognized that not-quite-platonic intimacy wove our touch, and I did not want to pull away. In fact, I wanted more.

Usually, when I fell for somebody, I fell fast. Maybe that's why I hate rollercoasters. Just five minutes after Addie introduced herself, I gave her my VR ID number and thought, "If she doesn't call tonight, I'll cry!" Cora was different. Her gravity pulled me gradually, gently. Unlike the darlings in my past, I grew fond of Cora without infatuation magnifying her positive qualities. Who knows why our relationship progressed so strangely. Maybe she was special. Perhaps the yapping, needy Chihuahuas stalled our romance. Either way, Cora's warm hand felt nice.

Blushing, I continued, "...something special happened when I was a child. It makes me entertain notions like destiny."

"What?" Cora asked. So told her my story.

I was eleven years old, home alone, when I heard shrill cluck-screams, the kind chickens make as they're dying. I charged outside with my baseball bat. A coyote stood beside the coop-little coop, just enough for thirty birds-with a chicken in his mouth, a white silkie that I hand-raised from the egg. The coyote stared at me. I thought of owls: bad luck, owls. They also have yellow irises, like headlights bearing down on you, a warning or a threat.

Worried that he'd escape with Silkie, I lowered my bad and said. "Put. Her. Down." Kirby always responded to a firm tone, yet I scarcely expected the coyote to listen.

Tricksters are unpredictable.

He opened his mouth, and Silkie fell onto hard-packed dirt with a cluck-shriek. Blood matted her downy feathers; something solid and ropey dangled from her belly. I screamed. Couldn't help it. With a snort, the coyote licked his wet muzzle and trotted away.

I rushed Silkie to the kitchen and placed her in the sink. Mom sliced vegetables in the metal basin, so we kept it fastidiously clean. As if exhausted by the attack, Silkie quietly allowed me to part her wispy feathers and examine the injuries, four gashes. The most serious wound had freed a loop of intestine; gently, I tucked it back inside her body. What else could I do? My parents had no money for a veterinarian house call.

Silkie thrashed once. If she moved too quickly, her innards might fall out again. She needed stitches.

I found a needle and nylon beading thread in Mom's clutter bin. We kept bacteria-kill spray under the sink; I used it to disinfect everything: my hands, the needle, the thread, even the blood-matted feathers. Silkie didn't even cluck when I rolled her over and pinched her injury shut. "It'll hurt a little," I said. "Sorry." I could feel her fluttering pulse under my fingers, her little body's warmth. The needle reflected sunlight, a glint of silver light shooting from my fingertips. I worked quickly to spare us both anxiety. Five stitches closed the wound; just minutes later, Silkie was tottering around the kitchen, clucking and ruffling her wings

Three years later, when my parents told me that I could take just one chicken to Houston, I chose Silkie. She sat on my blanket-draped lap as we left the farm, our life-all the life we could bring with us, anyway-packed in one van and a trailer. The coyote stood alongside the dirt road, his headlight eyes trained on mine.

I waved goodbye.

"That's why you're a veterinarian," Cora said. "The coyote."

"He certainly opened my eyes." I extricated my hand and grabbed a pillow, burying my face in the cotton-wrapped foam.

"What's wrong?" Cora asked.

"I'm not sure about Mars anymore."

"Why not? The domes are gorgeous."

"Because I didn't become a doctor to twiddle my thumbs. Those nannite-hearty Chihuahuas don't need me like Silkie did. This was a mistake. Never make big decisions during emotional rebounds!"

"A mistake?" Cora asked. "Or-don't laugh-destiny?"

I lowered the pillow. "How so?"

"Animals have it rough on Orbiter Diné. We always need help."

"I'm not sure I belong there."

She threw up her shoulders in the passionate manner I knew well. "We have three weeks until landing. Plenty of time for decisions." Cora stood, trailed by Conan. "Goodnight, Dottie," she said.

That night cycle, I dreamed about the red desert, but home did not comfort me. I ached for company.

For Cora.

Landing an interplanetary starship is a gradual process. Sixty hours before touchdown, the gravity generator slowed. Six hours before touchdown, Chihuahuas were bouncing around like they had invisible rocket boosters on their backs. "It may be time to strap everyone down," Cora said, plucking Doodlebug from the air before he smacked into the wall. "We can use the stasis pod restraints."

"I'll sedate them, too," I said. "Er. What about me?"

"Rare honor, Doc! Lishana invited you and Conan to the flight room during descent! Don't worry. We land slow."

"Unless the ship crashes."

"Hey! None of that!"

We wrangled puppies left and right, securing them in open pods. I gave each Chihuahua a fond pat on the head. "Good luck," I said. "You little Martians!"

From the intercom, a voice boomed, "Three hours. Report to landing stations."

"That's us," Cora said. She hoisted Conan with one arm and helped me maneuver through Starship Soto at ten percent Earth gravity. As we passed the observation deck entrance, I paused to admire its wall. Mars, a canyon-cracked, crater-pocked ball, loomed on the projection screen. From our vantage point, there were no signs of life. No breathing green blankets over loamy continents, no white shimmer in waters thick with glinting phytoplankton.

Nothing like the view of Earth.

I made my decision.

"I want to be awake during the nine-month return trip," I said, "in case Conan has another seizure."

"And after that?" Cora asked. "Where will you go?"

"Wherever I'm needed. The orbiter sounds promising."

As we kissed, the last trace of gravity slipped away, and my feet escaped the metal ground. I felt-I was-weightless, unbound by anything but the memories I carried and the tender warmth against my lips. Cora and I parted when the intercom insisted, "Report to landing stations."

Hand in hand, we turned our backs on Mars.

***

Dr. Darcie Little Badger is a Lipan Apache scientist and writer. Her short fiction has appeared in multiple places, including Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time (Nicholson, ed.), Strange Horizons, The Dark, Mythic Delirium, Lightspeed ( POC Destroy Fantasy), Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, and Cicada Magazine. Darcie's debut comic, "Worst Bargain in Town," was published in Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection, Volume 2. She also has comics in Relational Constellation and Deer Woman: An Anthology by Native Realities. She can be reached on Twitter at @ShiningComic.

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This month's story is a reprint I picked from the wonderful Love Beyond Body, Space and Time anthology of Indigenous LGBT2S+ speculative fiction. I have been following Darcie Little Badger's work since her first short story publications, and I also really enjoyed Né łe! with its themes of queer relationships and women in STEM, and...

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"In the beginning, June and Nat are best friends. June is not yet a swarm of honeybees and Nat is not yet a cloud of horseflies, and the king hasn’t yet decided that separating them into parts like this—June’s left pinky finger one bee, her left ring finger another—is the only surefire way to strip them of what they really are."

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In the beginning, June and Nat are best friends. June is not yet a swarm of honeybees and Nat is not yet a cloud of horseflies, and the king hasn't yet decided that separating them into parts like this-June's left pinky finger one bee, her left ring finger another-is the only surefire way to strip them of what they really are. Which, at least in the beginning, is best friends, living together on the outskirts of town, sharing a dresser full of secondhand band tees, squeezing lemon juice onto one another's hair in the summer, then sitting together on the blacktop to wait.

In the beginning, the prince is more interested in mastering a fakie heelflip than meeting girls, but his father is insistent, and the prince knows he's about one "Wrong attitude, son" away from not being allowed to stay in the castle rent-free anymore. So he says all right. All right to a casual barbecue or something, not, like, a whole thing. Not like that time the prince's dad hijacked his birthday party and dragged everyone downstairs to see his collection of hunting rifles and showed the prince's then love interest how to skin a deer. Without giving her an apron or anything, so deer blood got all over her yellow halter top. Even though nobody will admit it to his face, the prince knows everyone's kind-of scared of his dad. Like the girl, she was all animal rights before then, dog rescues, vegan menus, "I am a life, not a lunch" bumper sticker on the back of her car.

In the beginning, June is not honeybees, Nat is not horseflies, and both score jobs at the dessert shop walking distance from their apartment, which in the summer sells ice cream and the rest of the year sells pies and still a little ice cream, for people who want it à la mode. June and Nat applied for this job because it's the only one in town, apparently, that doesn't require them to freeze their butts off wearing short skirts all day in an air-conditioned mall. Rumor has it that Rebecca, who played volleyball with them back in high school, wore leggings under her skirt one day and got fired on the spot. Besides, the dessert shop is one of those old-fashioned places that spells it with an extra P-E, and June and Nat have a lot of fun shouting "Shop- ee! Shop- ee!" while twirling their fake moustaches and straightening their fake double-breasted vests.

In the beginning, the prince's dad was okay with him taking a gap year, but now it's getting a little excessive. Now it's getting a little "No son of mine." So now, two years after walking the stage at graduation, it's either go to college, Penn State preferably, and do something-clubs, grades-with your life there, or stay in town and do something-wife, kids-with your life here. The main point being, well, get on with it already. And if it's the wife/kids route, that's all right with the prince's dad, who has always wanted to teach a little slugger the ways of the world. Who passed through the toy gun section at the big retail store the other day and there was this tiny rifle, with an orange tip and a camo strap, that made him soften a little, that made him think, huh, how about that, isn't that cute?

In the beginning, when June and Nat find the invite to the barbecue stuffed in their mailbox alongside a random catalog, the kind that sells sensible women's office fashions, and a bunch of other stuff they didn't ask for, they struggle to remember who the prince is. Did they have homeroom with him? Or was he that one guy in that group of guys who always booed Mr. Lefkowitz at assembly? And does it really matter, they wonder, when clearly this invite went out to all the townies, the kids who stuck around, and they aren't those, not really. Because June's only here for as long as it takes to save up for X-ray technician school, and Nat's only here as long as June is. Which isn't long now, because they're already talking about their apartment in the city, and how since there's no way they'll be able to afford anything bigger than a studio, it'll feel like a sleepover all the time.

In the beginning, the prince is a little miffed that June and Nat don't come to the barbecue, for which his father promised to supply venison burgers but otherwise stay more or less out of the way, and which is attended not only by girls, but, well, girls are kind of the point. And people do come, and they say nice things about the music and the decor and the food, and the prince even gets to show off the skate ramp he and his dad are building in the driveway. Which is pretty much his mom's worst nightmare, but should she really get a say, considering she's always up in her office at the tippy-top of the tallest turret, the prince thinks it's called, day in and day out, doing people's taxes or whatever? So the party's a hit, Mary even makes it, and her hair looks good long, and it's not a huge deal about June and Nat. Until the prince mentions it to his father.

In the beginning, before June is a swarm of honeybees, she still gravitates toward Nat like Nat's the sweetest-smelling flower. And before Nat is a cloud of horseflies, she still charges anyone who's even remotely unkind to June, totally ready to bite. Like the guy at the dessert shop who called June a bitch for not giving him her number, who rolled his chew around the inside of his mouth like a threat and knocked the tip jar over before walking out with his strawberry cone. Then Nat ran around the counter to pick up the change and swore to June the next time she would key the motherfucker's car. And June, she wants to be an X-ray technician, right? She wants to go to school to learn to see through people. So once, when they'd had too much to drink during some TV marathon, Nat made a joke like June could practice on her if she wanted, like, Junie, bet you can see right through me. And June didn't take her up on it or anything, but looked at her for a long time, kept looking even after Nat, cheeks beer-hot, looked away.

In the beginning, when the prince tells his dad, whatever, those girls are attached at the hip, and his dad says what do you mean, the prince doesn't know what he means exactly. He means they're best friends. Are they? Ever since I can remember. And they live together? On the south side. That so? And they do everything together. Everything? Everything. And before the prince can say anything more about it, like probably they were just busy working the same shift or something, or his dad is doing that thing again where he absolutely has to have his way, like with the forced vegan deer-skinning, his dad is out the door. With his 30-30 Winchester 94, which he's nicknamed, so embarrassing, the Kingdom Defender.

In the beginning, it's supposed to be a simple wave-it-in-their-faces, scare-'em-straight situation, make sure they never stand his son up like that ever again. But then Nat gets mega protective like she does, and also sometimes, honestly, she just hates this town so bad. The way her name tag at work has to say "Natasha" instead of just Nat, manager's orders, and all the other ways she can't be completely herself. So she launches herself at the king's head in the middle of the dessert shop parking lot, June a few seconds too late out of the double doors, and wrestles him, limbs flying, to the ground. And what's the king to do then? Royal decree number one is the right to self-defense.

When Nat comes apart, it begins at her chest, at the point where the bullet enters, then spreads throughout her entire body, a near-instant dissolution of hair, skin, gritted teeth, balled fists still in food-safety gloves into a hundred thousand furious horseflies. A hundred thousand pairs of membranous wings, compound eyes.

When June comes apart, it begins with her mouth, open in a soundless scream like that painting they both know, made replicas of during a wine-and-paint class they took once for Nat's birthday. Then not soundless. Then thunderous buzzing, as the bees bloom out of her, through her, from her. Like her organs are the first to go. Like what happens when you die of heartbreak, inside-out.

Everybody talks about happy endings, like "And then all the many parts of them flew as one into the sunset," which isn't what happens at all. They don't even recognize one another. Obviously. Of course. But no one talks about the other way around. How beginnings can be beautiful, something worth lingering and lingering in. How in the beginning, June and Nat are best friends, and the lemon juice works its magic and they both have blonde streaks for the summer. The blacktop is hot but not too hot. The future is bright and not yet impossible, and they think next time they'll try fresh-squeezed lemons for a change, instead of the stuff that comes in the bottle.

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# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the beginning, June and Nat are best friends. June is not yet a swarm of honeybees and Nat is not yet a cloud of horseflies, and the king hasn't yet decided that separating them into parts like this-June's left pinky finger one bee, her left ring finger another-is the only surefire way to strip them of what they really are.

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"Graff has been keeping a big secret from his closest friends, the captain and crew of a pirate-hunting starship. He expected to die before they ever discovered what he really is. But he’s not dead, and now he has to explain."

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Graff has been keeping a big secret from his closest friends, the captain and crew of a pirate-hunting starship. He expected to die before they ever discovered what he really is. But he's not dead, and now he has to explain.

I am cut nearly in half by the accident. The surviving fibers of my suit hold me together. I am not dead.

And this is a problem. I expected to die in this job, in my little scout runner, blasted apart, incinerated, torn to pieces with nothing to recover. All that would follow would be a sad memorial service with a picture and an old set of boots on a table. That is how scout pilots usually die. But I am just cut almost in half. And the doctor on my ship, Visigoth, is very good.

My biologics are mostly shut down with shock, though I'm dutifully trying to monitor the pain. It's all-enveloping, a fist squeezing my brain. My mechanics are in full self-repair mode, overheating because there's so much to knit back together. Because of them, I have survived long enough that I will probably not die. This is going to be awkward.

From my own internal processor I send out an emergency signal to piggyback on ship comms, so that maybe someone can come and explain.

On autorecovery, my half-exploded runner manages to slam into its berth on the Visigoth and rescue crews are standing by. Once they seal all the locks, I try to help them peel me out of the cockpit but it's not really working. There are many pairs of hands and shouting voices.

"Graff, stop, lie back, you'll be fine, it's fine, it's going to be fine-"

I might laugh at this.

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The dock crew and medics are full of panic and repressed horror at what they must be looking at. Then I am horizontal, fully supported, no strain at all on my body, which feels wet and wobbly, and the pain is lead weight on every nerve. Fingers pry at my eyelids, a light flashes, and I see him, Doctor Ell, who is also my lover. He has a pale face and a shock of blond hair and intense eyes, and his whole expression is screwed up and serious. I want to pat his shoulder and say everything will be fine but nothing is working. So I look at him.

"I'm sorry," I murmur.

"Graff, no, what are you talking about?"

"You're about to find out I faked my medical scans." I try to smile.

He stares. "What?"

A medic's voice interrupts. "Doctor! God, look at this-"

Finally, happily, I pass out.

Five other people are in the room when I wake up. Ell and Captain Ransom. A support medic, standing by. Two guards at a door that has never had guards at it before.

"When will he wake up?" Ransom asks.

"He's awake now," Ell says. He must be watching a monitor.

I'm listening hard-I can hear heartbeats, if I focus. I think I can open my eyes. But I can't move anything else. There's a fog; I battle past it.

"Am I paralyzed or on medical restraints?" My voice scratches.

Some rustling as the guards flinch, like they didn't believe I was awake. The medic perks up.

"Drug-induced paralysis," Ell says.

"So both."

"Yes."

"Because of the injuries or because of everything else?"

Nothing for a long pause, then, "It would be better if you lie still for now."

"Okay." I sigh. My lungs still work but feel like they've been scrubbed out with pumice.

Ransom curses and begins to pace. He doesn't have a lot of room and his steps fall hard. His presence always seems to expand to fill whatever space he's in. It's actually a comfort right now. Ransom is here, he'll fix everything.

My processor seems to be fine. Ell didn't mess with it when he had a chance to look inside me. The self-repair has settled down; I'm still recording. I check the time; it's been two days since they pulled me out of the runner. Diagnostics say I'm . . . mending. Mechanics repaired. Biologics will need more time. I took a beating. But Ell didn't try to dig in or disconnect anything important. He could have, if he'd wanted to.

I have a lot of questions. I imagine they do, too. We try to wait one another out. My eyes open to a dimly lit ceiling in Medical. I want to see Ell but he's standing back.

Ransom and Ell finally break at the same time.

Ell says, "How did you fake the scans-"

The captain says, "You sent a signal-"

I chuckle. I can't help it. This would be funny if it weren't me. Ransom curses again.

"This isn't funny," Ell says.

"No, I know that," I reply. "I'm sorry." I would laugh outright except it hurts too much, because if I had thought about it before the accident, what Ransom would do if he ever found out about me, this is about how I'd have expected it to go. My ongoing chuckle comes out like a cough.

Ransom is losing his temper. "Graff-"

"Let it go. You know how he is," Ell says.

"I thought I did."

I stop chuckling. "Ask me. Ask me everything."

Ransom starts. "Are you dangerous?"

"Yes. I mean no. Not to any of you."

"Graff, you're not helping," the doctor says.

"What do you want me to say?" I murmur.

"What are you?" the doctor asks.

"Human."

"No, you're not-"

"I didn't fake the DNA records, just the physiological. Look at the DNA." I'm tired. But I need to get through this. I need to know what they're going to do with me.

Ell has touched every inch of me. He must have thought he knew me.

"When was all this work done? How . . ." Now Ell is pacing. "I've seen cybernetic implants, but this . . . this is extensive. This is part of your nervous system. Work this extensive should kill anyone . . . but you don't even have any scarring from it. It's all perfectly integrated. How?"

They think I'm dangerous. They think I'm going to go off like a bomb. "Can you send the kids out, please?"

The two guards, the medic. They're not kids, of course they're not. I know them all; I trained with them. But I outrank them. Another long, taut silence follows.

"I'm not going to hurt anyone," I insist. My head is throbbing. "There are more secrets than mine here. I'll tell you and the captain but no one else."

Ell comes to my shoulder, a syringe in hand. I can't flinch, I can't resist. He pumps the liquid into a tube already connected to my body somewhere that I can't see.

"For the pain," he says gently. "Your vitals are spiking."

He touches my shoulder, naked under a thin sheet. I almost start crying. My blood stops pounding quite as hard. Nerves fray a little less. Ell steps away. I want to reach for him.

"Drugs work on him at least," he says to the captain.

"Do you trust him?" Ransom asks. A question that cuts. He's always trusted me before.

"I don't know," Ell says.

I think I might start crying. I wait. We all wait, in air thick with anxiety, like trying to wade through gelatin.

"Marcel, Xun, Brown. You're dismissed," Ransom says finally.

"But sir-" He must give them a look, because no one complains further.

They leave reluctantly. Ell murmurs reassurances at them. They all take second, third looks at me. I wonder what the ship's rumor mill is saying. It will never be the same.

"All right, Graff," Ransom says. "How . . . what . . ." He waves his hand at me, shakes his head.

I've never explained this; I've never needed to. I don't regret having to do so now. It's how I'm going to survive. Assuming they believe me and trust me at the end of it.

"It's done in utero," I say. "It's grown. Artificial gestation, of course, but that's-"

"Oh starry fuck," Ell curses.

I've never heard him say 'fuck' in all the years I've known him. This is probably going to go badly for me.

"Is that even legal?" Ransom asks.

"I'm not sure. It's certainly not ethical," he says.

Except it is. It is for us.

"Why didn't you say anything?" Ransom asks calmly. I recognize the tone, the resolve, that he now knows what the problem is and is closer to figuring out what to do about it. "Why not tell us what . . . about this? Why bother hiding it with fake scans?"

"Because we don't tell anyone." This drops even harder than the first confession.

"We," Ransom says.

"I hope you understand what I'm trusting you with, telling you this. I'm trusting you." This is a plea. I am vulnerable. I trust them. Not that I have much choice. Or I could shut myself off. Burn out my processor, keep all the secrets. But I don't want to.

"We," the captain repeats. "You sent a signal. At least, the signal originated from your position. It tried to sneak out on ship comms."

"But you blocked it before it got out," I say. And start chuckling again. "I thought that might happen but I had to try. I . . . I wanted someone to come and download my processor in case I didn't make it."

"How many of you are there?" he asks.

"Not as many as you're afraid of," I say.

"Fuck, Graff, what am I supposed to do with you?" Captain Ransom asks.

"I don't know, sir. Right now I think I would like to sleep. But I'm a little wound up." I need to know I'll wake back up again, if I go to sleep. I'm not sure right now.

"You should be dead," he said. "If you were anyone else in a runner that blew up like that you'd be dead."

"Yeah, I was sort of thinking if I ever blew up in a runner there wouldn't be enough left for anyone to learn about any of this."

"Bad luck there," Ransom says, deadpan.

"Yeah."

"I'm about to kill you myself," Ell says. Then to Ransom: "We should let him sleep."

"Does he really need to sleep? All those wires . . ."

"Yes, I need to sleep. And eat. And everything else." Sex. I need that, too. Just maybe not right now. Where did Ell go? They're conferencing in the back of the room. Like they can't bear to look at me. I try to stay awake, so I can explain some more, but the painkiller is also a sedative and it pulls me under.

The very best thing I ever ate was ice cream with pieces of dark chocolate and brandied cherries mixed into it. Decadent and comforting at once, served at a too-fancy café with real wood furniture and paneled walls. They made everything themselves with dairy from real goats. I remember thinking, this, this is what it's all about.

I got that memory out on a previous download, at least.

I try to send out another message, masking it as a trojan and slipping it in with another signal before the comms operator notices it. But they've got the whole room jammed. I can't access anything, not even the medical computers.

This is bad. I'm not Graff anymore; I'm a thing on a table. Explaining hasn't helped.

I can't explain it, that's the problem.

The memories are pristine. I've got them all stored away, and with them the emotions that goes along with them. The flush on my skin when Ell asked if he could buy me a drink like he was making a dare. The flush on his skin when I said yes, because he hadn't thought I would. This was right after he'd come on board as ship's doctor; we'd been in a station-side tavern that was too dark and loud with lots of people dancing. Two days of leave and better make the most of it, right? Ransom had been there, rolling his eyes at the both of us flirting like it was a contest. And only a couple hours later, out in a quiet corridor, I put my hand on Ell's neck, gently pushed him against the wall, and kissed him.

That was a good night.

I write the best after-action reports because I remember. No one ever questions it. I just have a good memory, right? I can still feel the exact sensation when the reactor on the runner blew out, my gut parting like taffy as shrapnel went through it.

Leave that memory and go back to that first night with Ell. That's better. Close my eyes, slow my breathing.

Checking my processor, I know exactly when I've slept and when I haven't. I fall in and out of sleep all day. The door opens, waking me. There are footsteps. I try to look and still can't.

"Doctor?" I ask, rasping. I'm getting hydrated through a tube in a vein, but my mouth is bone dry.

Ell appears next to me. I sigh, relieved. I shouldn't be relieved.

"What's happening?" I ask. I'd meant to ask for water.

He turns away, and my heart lurches. But he's back a moment later with a bottle and straw. "Drink," he orders, and I do. "Better?"

"Yeah. What's happening?"

"Are you a spy?"

"What? No." I mean, I don't think so? Would they think I was, if I told them everything?

"Because Ransom thinks you're a spy."

"For who?"

"I don't know. For whatever you are."

"How bad am I hurt?"

"You should be dead. Your spine was severed. At least I thought it was, but then . . . it fixed itself."

"Yeah, it does that."

"You'll be on your feet in another week, and I've hardly done anything but hook you to a feeding tube." He's offended that he can't take credit for saving my life.

"I'd be dead without the feeding tube. That stuff needs calories."

Flustered, he sighs. "What are you?"

"I'm me." That will never be a good enough answer. "What is Ransom saying?"

"He suggested dissection. I think he was joking."

I chuckle.

"It's not funny," Ell says.

"No, I guess not." I look at him because I don't know how much longer I'll get to. My smile feels a bit ridiculous.

He doesn't smile. He's pursed and worried and hurt.

I can move enough to breathe. This takes a deep breath to get it all out. "I would like to be able to move, if you think I might be ready to stop with the nerve block."

"I'll have to ask the captain."

"So it isn't for medical reasons."

"No."

Yeah, this may not go well. "I'm not a spy, I'm not a danger to you or anyone, I would never hurt this ship or anyone on it. Where is Ransom, let me talk to him-"

"He doesn't trust you. Not after this. You lied -"

"I didn't!"

"The medical scans? You hacked into the ship's computers and hijacked my diagnostics systems! You always scanned out as an ideal textbook human and now I know why!"

"Yeah, okay, I guess that was sort of like lying."

"Graff." He says it as a reprimand. He's wondering if everything was a lie.

"I was raised by the ones who provided my genetic material. I have parents. Does that help?"

"It might." He gets up, puts the bottle of water on a table.

It's infuriating, not being able to see anything, except that I'm too drugged to be really furious about anything. "Captain's listening right now, isn't he? On a monitor? Is he outside the door or what? Or does he have marines ready to storm in if I do something screwy?"

"You can't do anything, you're immobilized. Unless the drugs really don't work on you and you've been faking it." He raises a brow, as if this is a question.

"Well, fuck." I seriously can't move. He knows this. I roll my eyes at the ceiling, as if I could get Ransom's attention that way. "Okay. Captain? Remember the time you had me sit in a runner out on that asteroid for two weeks waiting for those pirates to show up? And remember how you didn't tell me why you wanted me to sit on that rock, or for how long, or anything?"

"Graff-"

The door to Medical slides open, slides shut. Footsteps. And Ransom says, "So you wouldn't anticipate and launch your burn too soon and spoil the trap."

"Right!" I exclaim, excited, probably too excited, because Ell appears in my peripheral vision, looking at a monitor and frowning.

Ransom continues, "It's not that I didn't trust you-"

"No, see, that's the thing. It was a good plan, and it wasn't about you trusting me. I trusted you. I'd have sat on that rock for a year if you told me to."

"Now you're just trying to guilt me into listening to you."

"Yes. Yes, I am. Also, I want to keep on following your crazy plans. They're kind of fun. You know what I was thinking, when I was stuck on that rock?"

"How you were going to kill me for not telling you?"

"No. That I couldn't wait to see what you had planned. I knew it'd be good." And it had been. Lots of explosions. "And I was thinking of how many drinks you were going to owe me when I got back." Those had been my first words when I got back to Visigoth, sweaty and stinking from being cooped up for so long: "You owe me a drink, sir." He'd laughed. I'd known Ransom since flight school, almost right after I left home. I can't imagine what this looks like from his end. I'll never make it up to him.

The captain's voice is taut. "This might have been easier if a switch flipped and turned him into some killer robot." He's talking to Ell, who grumbles.

I ask, "Why didn't you burn out my processor when you had me open, right after the accident?"

The doctor says, "I didn't want to hurt you."

"Doctor, can we have a word?" Ransom says. I can picture him jabbing a thumb over his shoulder, but he never enters my line of sight.

Ell nods, looks at me one more time. "Do you need anything? Anything critical to your current state of health, I mean."

"You?" I ask hopefully.

He looks away. The door shuts, and I close my eyes.

I spend the next two days trying to think of exactly the right thing to tell Ell and Ransom that will make everything all right and get everything back to the way it was. Or at least have them not look at me like I'm a villain in a bad drama. And I think I've got it. I stay awake by sheer force of will. Assuming I ever get to download again, whoever gets the package is going to know every inch of this ceiling. It's got just the littlest bit of texture, like a partially worn pebble. The gray is rather pleasant once you get used to it.

The door opens. Many footsteps enter. My heart rate increases. The pain is so much less than what it was but that makes it harder to lie still. I want to sit up. I want to use my hands when I speak.

Ell appears at the side of the table. I get it all out in one go before he can say anything.

"It's the stories. The stories, the experiences. Everything. A computer could do it, but then we wouldn't get the . . . the experience. The hormones. The dopamine. The endorphins. The meat and nerves of it all, right? That's the important bit. We go out into the galaxy and collect stories, and then we bring them home. It's who we are, it's what we do. And love, we go out to find all the love we can and try to keep it . . ." This ship is full of love and I'm afraid I've broken it. "I've never had to explain it before and I know it doesn't make sense-"

Ell studies me for a long time. He seems calm. Some decision has been made.

"Love?" he says, his tone even.

"Yeah. Just like that."

He lowers his gaze, raises a syringe full of some ominous liquid.

Well. I tried. I set my jaw in what I hope is a picture of fortitude. "This is it, then."

"This is what?" he asks.

"You induce a coma and ship me off to some military R&D facility. Or is this . . . I mean, you wouldn't."

He gets this very familiar-delightfully familiar-frustrated look on his face. Like he's about to snarl. "I wouldn't what?"

"Just finish me off."

"God, Graff. No." He injects the syringe into the line. "This is probably going to hurt. At least, I think it'll hurt."

"It already hurts."

"I wasn't sure you could hurt, after I saw all that metal. Until I looked at your readings."

"You know me, Ell. You do." I finally catch his gaze. His familiar, shining gaze. He sort of looks like he's about to cry, too.

Then there's a warm rush though my veins that hits my heart and all my muscles seem to melt into a dull throb. I groan, but it's kind of a relieved groan because I can wiggle my fingers and toes now and that feels pretty good. My processor's diagnostics hum away; I'm still not optimal but stress levels are decreasing.

"Warned you," Ell says, leaning in. "Now don't move. You're still not entirely in one piece yet."

"Okay."

I reach out, touch his hand. Just brush it, then let him go because I don't want to scare him. He jumps a little. His breath catches. But he stays near.

Finally, I can turn my head to look at the rest of the room. Captain Ransom is standing there, arms crossed. And someone new is with him. She appears female, fine boned, with short-cropped red hair and a wry frown. A smirk. A judgment. I've never seen her before, but I know who she is. Tez, her name is Tez. My circuits hum in proximity to hers.

I look at Captain Ransom. "You let the signal get out after all."

"I did."

"Why?"

"To see what would happen. She showed up a day later. Do you people just hang around in deep space waiting for edge-of-death signals?"

"Yes," Tez says calmly.

"I'm not dying actually, it turns out," I say awkwardly.

"You had a close call," she says.

"Very."

"Is it a good story?"

"I'm not sure."

She comes to the table, holds out her hand. I take it. The spark of a circuit completing pinches my palm, and hers.

The download takes a few minutes. I get all of her memories as well. It's like meeting an old friend from home. We're all old friends from home. It's kind of nice. I'm not sure I can explain that part of it to Ell and Ransom.

Tez holds my gaze, and in hers is forgiveness and understanding, along with the mildest of reprimands.

You convinced them, I tell her.
No, you did or I'd never have gotten your signal. They wanted to be convinced. You know you should meet up with someone to download a little more often, don't you? Yeah, I just get distracted. But is it a good story? It is. I'm sorry I told them about us. No, you're not.
The connection breaks. She takes a breath, resettling herself into her skin. Looks around. Sees Ell with new understanding. He ducks his gaze, self-conscious.

"So. They know," she says, just to get it out in the open.

Tez can take me back home for this. If I can't keep the secret, then I can't be allowed to travel. But . . . I'm valuable. I almost start whining like a child, telling her how valuable I am, out in the universe, collecting stories.

"I trust them," I say.

"They may not want you to stay." She looks up, around. "He's afraid you won't want him to stay."

"It's a lot to take in," Ransom says flatly. "I confess, I'm not sure what to do next. I was hoping you might tell me."

But she doesn't. She asks, "Graff does a lot of good where he is?"

"He does," Ransom says. I wasn't sure he would.

"Thank you, sir," I murmur. But it's Ell's decision that matters most, and I look at him next.

He says, "I can purge all the files from the accident and recovery. Go back to the faked scans. Keep that secret. With the captain's permission." Ell looks; Ransom shrugs. I want to laugh at the back and forth but that would probably be bad so I don't.

"You want him to stay?" Tez asks Ell.

"I do. I think I do."

She looks at me. "Graff?"

"Is it going to be weird? It's going to be weird, isn't it? Me staying."

"Yes," Ell says. "But I think you should stay anyway."

We both look at Ransom. He's like a rock, his chiseled expression unmoving. He says, "Yeah, it'll be weird. For a while."

She smiles, her brow crinkling. "I like them."

"Yeah, me, too," I say.

Tez brushes off her jumpsuit. "Captain, if you can spare the time, I wondered if someone on your crew might take a look at my ship? Just a routine once-over."

It's not very subtle. He looks at her, then at me, then at Ell. He raises his brow. "All right. This way."

He actually flashes a little bit of a wry smile over his shoulder as they leave. Then Ell sits by the table and gives me the most exhausted, long-suffering, and sad look I've ever seen.

I'm also exhausted, which is frustrating. I've slept enough. "I was never going to tell you because I couldn't tell you and it didn't make a difference anyway and I'm sorry."

After a hesitation, he touches my forehead. He ruffles my short hair, looks me up and down like he's studying me. Studying his handiwork, or maybe he's really looking at me.

"I have a lot more questions," he says.

"Yeah, I know."

I open my hand. Wait for him to make the move. And he puts his hand in mine.

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Sinew and Steel and What They Told

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"Sinew and Steel and What They Told" copyright © 2020 by Carrie Vaughn
Art copyright © 2020 by Eli Minaya

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sinew and Steel and What They Told - Reactor

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Graff has been keeping a big secret from his closest friends, the captain and crew of a pirate-hunting starship. He expected to die before they ever discovered what he really is. But he's not dead, and now he has to explain.

# data[].attributes.body
"When the elitist institution of Ozymandias Academy and its headmaster, Vamon Kinctuarin, can’t find a solution to the city’s worsening drought, two self-taught magicians, Noah and his partner Manny, take it upon themselves to find a solution to the crisis."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
When the elitist institution of Ozymandias Academy and its headmaster, Vamon Kinctuarin, can't find a solution to the city's worsening drought, two self-taught magicians, Noah and his partner Manny, take it upon themselves to find a solution to the crisis.

People ask how Noah could possibly turn down the Ozymandias Academy. All they know about him is the headlines, and they think he's ungrateful. What you don't get is that attending Ozymandias was Noah's dream. Noah wanted it worse than anyone.

Do you know where he was on his fifth birthday? Sitting in the stained passenger seat of his mom's clunker, bouncing with excitement because she was driving him to mail his application. He clutched the envelope in both hands so there was no chance of dropping it.

He asked his mom, "Did you know Vamon doesn't need a wand?"

His mom teased him, "Vamon who?"

He sounded out the syllables. "Va-mon Kinc-tu-ar-in. He saved the whole world. He teaches at Oz-y-man-di-as."

"That's a big name. Did he listen to his mom?"

Noah sat up as though she had blasphemed. "Mom. He was an orphan."

"And he became a magician but didn't need a wand?"

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Noah started wheezing, like he had crickets in his lungs. He said, "He could make daggers from nowhere, and one time he used bone magic so that all the skeletons in a graveyard fought for him. When he was too tired, he magicked his own bones to keep fighting against the Seraphs. All of it without a wand. Do you know what he used instead?"

"Honey, take a puff of your inhaler."

For a moment Noah removed a few fingertips from the envelope, wiggling them like they were shooting lightning through the windshield. "He did magic with his hands."

The next light turned yellow and his mom rolled the car to a stop. Under that yellow traffic light, Noah's wheeze became a brittle cough. It wasn't phlegm. His shoulders rocked against the seat and he hugged his application letter to his chest. Fighting through the coughing, he said, "Vamon's going to solve the drought. I'm going to help."

"Honey? Breathe. Where's your inhaler?"

"I'm going to do magic with my-" His proclamation gave way to a peal of strangled coughs.

His mom held the inhaler up for him, but he couldn't take the breath. The light turned red as she unbuckled herself to get at him. When she took him by the shoulders, he slumped into her side. That was the first time Noah blacked out.

When the paramedics got him, he was still holding his application.

#

If the Ozymandias Academy accepts you, the image of Vamon Kinctuarin visits you. He projects himself as a transparent green specter. It's tradition or something. The two of you are supposed to have an intimate conversation about the future of your education.

When he was ten, Noah had the transparent green action figure of Vamon on his person at all times. He asked it things.

"Are you proud of me?"

"Am I as brave as you were?"

"Are you fucking kidding?" his mom asked the receptionist at the clinic.

The receptionist barely moved, like this old white lady was so tired she didn't have energy left for nodding. She said, "They don't cover these tests no more. You should try St. Mary's."

"St. Mary's sent me here," his mother yelled, too angry to convince anybody, and too angry to stop being angry. "They're not accepting anyone on account of the drought. My son turned ten today and he has Cherub lung. Do you get that? Do you know what that means?"

Noah had heard it before, so he took his action figure and a pen from the nurse's station to fill out another Ozymandias Academy application. He'd already sent two that year, but there was a rumor online that they had some dropouts during spring break.

The receptionist said, "I didn't defund the plan. There's no money for anything no more. It's all going to the water crisis."

"I don't give a shit about water if my son isn't going to be here to drink it."

Their argument reminded Noah of something: The Ozymandias Academy had won a bunch of grants from the water crisis fund. He added a PS to his letter asking how their aquamancy program was going since he had some ideas for expanding it. His mind fuzzed out in the middle of writing.

The next thing he knew, he was on the prickly brown carpet, looking up at his mom. Cherub lung had made him black out again. That was getting more common.

He panicked until he found his application letter. It was underneath him. He asked, "Can we mail this wherever we're going next?"

Carrying him out of the clinic, she said, "If you want to be a wizard so bad, why don't you study that shit on your own?"

#

It was Noah's fifteenth birthday when Vamon finally visited.

It was midafternoon. Noah was in his bedroom with the blinds drawn like an appropriately pissy teenager, hunched over his concentrator rig. A concentrator is one of those "baby's first levitation" kits, a series of glass rods with minor magical charge that can float briefly in the air. Noah repurposed the kit to draw water from the air itself. After a week of tedious experiments, he had a cup one-quarter full of water. Or was that three-quarters empty?

The rest of the cup filled with green spectral presence, and there came the image of a wizened man wearing spectacles and a pointed hat. Vamon threw his arms out and bellowed, "Noah Byrne, I welcome you to this autumn's class of the Ozymandias Academy of Magic and Mystery. It is time to create what endures."

Noah held on to his desk as though to prevent himself from floating away, "Is this real?"

"It is."

Noah tried to swallow. "I got the scholarship? Really?"

Vamon's famous voice boomed, "There is very limited financial assistance for students who join the academy as late as you. The acceptance itself is a miracle."

"My mom just came off three back-to-back shifts. Please keep your voice down." Noah sure wasn't floating now. His elbow bumped a stack of bills and denial letters from health-care providers. He asked, "What did I qualify for? We're worse than broke."

Vamon folded his arms down at the fifteen-year-old boy. "Greatness requires sacrifices."

Noah felt a burn in his veins, like he was poisoned with a Seraph's venom. He gestured to the glass concentrator on his desk, and the quarter-full cup. "I made water. I used the magical processes I talked about in my application. It needs work, but it's real water. If you help me get in, I'll do whatever I can to make this fill Ozymandias's reservoirs."

The specter of his hero looked cursorily over the concentrator. "Quaint. Second-year students do better in their first week."

"Have you got water at Ozymandias?"

Vamon's voice shook the walls. "We have infinity. Are you going to turn down the invitation of a lifetime?"

"If you have infinity, can't you help me out? People helped you out when you were a kid."

"Me?" Vamon scoffed. "I got where I am by working harder than anyone else."

"Yeah, you worked hard," Noah said, an asthmatic rasp climbing in his voice. He reached for his inhaler. "But you had your inheritance, and those legendary guardians, and all your friends. With help, you stopped the Seraph. All I'm asking for is a little of the help you got."

"This is a disappointment, Noah," said his hero. "This acceptance should've gone to someone who actually wanted it."

Noah says he didn't cry, but whenever he tries to tell this story he winds up coughing until he passes out before he can finish. I know he tossed his inhaler at the specter and screamed every expletive he knew. What made him stop was hearing his mother stir in the other room, and the wave of guilt that brought on. He couldn't speak without yelling, and he couldn't yell without robbing his mom of sleep. Of course he collapsed.

He lay on the floor for hours after the phantom of his hero walked out on him.

#

You could tell Noah was a smart guy because he watched my channel. MX_POTLUCK was (and still is, thank you) your one-stop shop for practical magic tips and horror movie opinions. At that time, my channel had already been banned twice for discussing forbidden arts. I always knew I was onto something when my channel got flagged.

Noah's was one of the whopping twenty-seven views I got on my first video about Seraph bones and the composition of wands. I was really into speculation on what Ozymandias did with Seraph bones to build their magical devices, and how much angelic magic lingered after the death of an angel. Meanwhile, Noah was scraping the internet for info on how to build his own wand.

He kept getting into fights in my comment sections. You can't tell everybody's age, but the zeal he had for arguing with randos screamed "teenager with too much free time."

And he was usually right. He wouldn't let anyone shit-talk my pronouns. My favorite was, How're you going to memorize spells in dead languages if you can't even remember ze/zir?

And if they made fun of my wheelchair? He'd spew flames before I even had the chance to ban them. I still banned them, after he murdered them with words. Eventually we started DMing, sometimes about magic, sometimes anime GIFs. We spent a lot of Friday nights sending each other "bone magic" jokes. We were so bad at flirting.

#

We were going to see one of those angel-themed horror movies that boomers say are tasteless because of the war, but I just can't get enough of them. Have you ever watched one? These whirling CGI nightmares of limbs coming after people who can't act? It's hilarious.

I picked the park where we'd meet. Noah was going to wear a pirate shirt and I was still so nervous that I wouldn't recognize him. I actually recognized him by his coughing.

He was the only guy on that sidewalk on his knees. This chonky white boy, this absolute unit with Starburst-strawberry-pink cheeks as he coughed like he was trying to expel his own lungs. Noah tried to prop himself against a mailbox and pose, as though he was merely casually dying.

Do you know how cute he looked? I wanted to put him in my pocket and keep him forever.

As his breathing calmed, he asked, "You're Mx. Potluck?"

I wheeled myself up the dip on the curb and over to him. "We're in public, dude. Call me Manny."

We hung out in Danielson Memorial Park, where the first Seraph was brought down. All the wreckage has been paved over, lives replaced with sculpture gardens. On hot days like that one, the place smells inexplicably of fresh rubber. I looked at the ground, feeling nostalgic. When I was little, before my kidneys turned against me, I used to come here all the time.

I scratched the toe of my shoe against the dirt and said, "I always wanted to find Seraph bones buried somewhere around here."

Noah turned a sour expression at the grass. "Yeah, I dug here too."

I asked, "Really?"

"Then I learned that Ozymandias had stripped every bone fragment out of the city long before we were born. They don't want anyone else doing magic."

I stuck out my tongue. "Yeah, we're so irresponsible."

Noah and I sat at the picnic table under the shadow of the wing of a statue of a dead angel, in a spot where the perspective meant all we could see was the wing, and not the conquering wizard standing over it. We bullshitted there for an hour, showing off the petty magic tricks we knew. He showed me how he manipulated water movements through air using his glass rods. I levitated his used tissues into a trash can. It was that embarrassing. When he made a playing card "disappear" up his sleeve, I choked on my own spit laughing.

The showtime for the movie was drawing near. I was working up the nerve to ask if he'd ever been on a date before, which was my super sly way of figuring out if we were on a date. Galaxy-brain teenager shit, right?

Then a fire truck screeched past us. Two more followed it, and Noah asked if we could skip the movie. I was going to mock him for being paranoid when I noticed how rough he looked. His lungs were almost as bad as my kidneys, and the smoke got him before I could smell it. We couldn't see the fire and it was killing him.

My place was the best option, since it was closer. We livestreamed the fire for hours. I'd felt how achingly dry it was without considering that old buildings might go up. It took the authorities another two hours to pipe in water to that district to begin fighting it. Somebody aimed a webcam at a nearby storm drain to film all the gallons of brown water that came streaming out of those ruined buildings. When we saw people try to drink that water, I turned it off. We watched a horror movie to try to take our minds off it.

#

The next day was what set Noah off.

Our city was in the top three worst hit by the drought in the entire country. The governor arranged a deal with magical institutions from around the globe to help. We begged for somebody to come stop apartment buildings from burning down.

The lowest bidder was the Ozymandias Academy. There were so many videos of their cavalcade of black cars rolling up to the capitol. Vamon Kinctuarin held a press conference from in front of an empty dam and said, "We are here to ensure no one suffers further indignity."

The Ozymandias Academy took control of all water supplies and municipal resources. That meant everybody on my block could expect our faucets to work for one hour a day. The same on Noah's block.

I didn't hear from Noah all afternoon. His mom took his phone and shut off the Wi-Fi so he couldn't say anything public and get in trouble. She's smart as hell.

She called me over. Noah had had two attacks in one afternoon triggered by his manic anger. And how swollen was his hand? He didn't have hand problems. He'd been punching his floor, leaving his fingers in several shades of baked ham.

I'd been that mad before. That's why I knew how to be constructively mean.

I asked, "How the fuck are you going to do magic in the hospital?"

Noah muttered, "Shut up."

"Like I ever shut up," I said. "Do you think Vamon felt that? Is he hidden under the floor?"

"Shut the fuck up."

"Because you beat your hand so bad you won't jack off for a month. Vamon doesn't give one tiny, miniscule damn. The city's carrying his bags while you're here picking your fingernails off the floor."

He looked at me. "So?"

"So do you want to keep hurting yourself, or do you want to hurt them?"

#

I asked, "How do we kill a drought?"

Noah sat back, smug, on his bed. "The way I start all my research."

Noah went to one of the big forums-I won't name it, but one the neckbeards in your life probably frequent. He used my VPN and created a new account. He typed up a post with the subject line: "WHY CAN'T THEY JUST DRINK OCEAN WATER?"

His post was trash. He thought every existing pipe system could take the same volume of water. He wanted to disperse water using aquamancy that "literally everybody knows how to do." His post called the government and the wizard industry lazy for not thinking of using oceans as water supplies.

I read it between my fingers. "It's salt water, Noah. You'd die of dehydration drinking it."

He posted it anyway. Thirty-two minutes later, a mod locked his thread.

In those thirty-two minutes, he got more than six hundred comments correcting every angle of his bad assumptions. More commenters than you'd think linked to external articles. We were barraged with starting points to our research.

Noah said, "There is no educational resource in the cosmos greater than a nerd who thinks you're wrong."

Every time we hit a wall in our plan, we made another account and trolled forums pretending to be someone who believed what we actually wanted to do was impossible. We never thought we were smarter than everyone else; we just had to trick people into making us smarter.

We didn't invent the wand or Wi-Fi or the keyboard. We wanted to add something to the big pool of ideas so everybody could use it.

#

I don't know which was harder: crunching the equations, or tutoring people and selling stuff to fund our experiments. We couldn't test most of our theories since we didn't have access to a wand. It was so exhausting, I didn't realize some of my problems weren't from exhaustion. I passed out a few times. Those were warning signs.

We were so excited. By researching cutting-edge water-treatment plants and new papers on the aquamancy of water disbursement and necromancies related to killing off bacteria and neutralizing pollutants, we got close to an idea.

I fiddled with the last horror toy I hadn't sold, and I asked, "Are we close to an idea that the Ozymandias Academy already has?"

Noah said, "If they can't do better than us with the entire world bankrolling them? Then screw them."

In the months we worked, Ozymandias had scarcely provided water to anybody. A few upscale neighborhoods got some relief-the ones where Ozymandias's big donors lived. You probably saw the video of the shirtless pharma bro watering his lawn and threatening to call the cops on kids for filming him.

The same day that video went viral was the day we built our wand. A real wand. It was a beautiful piece of shit.

For the rest of our lives we'd never be able to afford an official licensed one. It had to be homebuilt. We used a hollow shaft that I won in a contest, carved from a scrap of a thousand-year-old fossilized tree that saints used to meditate under. By the time we tested our spell with it, it contained equal parts Seraph bone dust and duct tape.

Noah running around his room with the wand was the purest thing ever. He wore a welding visor and firefighter gloves just in case. He didn't even use it for magic at first. Climbing atop his bed and posing like he was shooting lightning made him so stupidly happy.

I remember all of it until I don't remember any of it. That was one of the days I passed out.

#

Trolls blame me. They say I didn't help much with the research. Sometimes I'll get asked, "If you were so important, how come you weren't in the reveal video?"

Who do you think was filming the video, genius? This movie nut. That's who. I took the time to find a spot with good lighting and to get the framing right-in landscape mode, which is a great modern discovery some wizards should make.

I parked my chair far enough away to get a good shot of Noah and anybody who passed by. He had his little table and free water sign. A surprising number of people trusted him enough to stop. More wanted a sip than wanted to talk.

They lingered, though, after he made the empty cups refill in front of their eyes.

"Where's it hidden?" asked a middle-aged woman who checked under his table for a hose. There wasn't any.

He waggled his wand. "It's not a trick. It's a brand-new spell."

People drank. A couple of old chess players split a cup to cool their brows. One guy in a blue three-piece suit literally tossed an entire cup of water onto himself and ran away cheering. This city was thirsty.

Soon I wasn't the only one filming him. I'm just a little bitter that he went viral on somebody else's channel. And their video was in portrait mode and missed half of it. The internet has no taste.

#

For two weeks, Noah Byrne was the most famous wizard in America. He had more Google hits than any Ozymandias alumni. We were petty enough to check.

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Everybody wanted the secret. The federal government sent us scary-sounding letters. We got an equal number of offers from agents and lawyers. Every major wizard association called, including the Ozymandias Academy.

Ozymandias didn't just want to know the secret. They wanted to own it. It's why we rushed our patent claim-so they couldn't snoop the discovery and try to steal it from under us. Neither of us could afford to go to the places they gatekept. We weren't letting the secret of potable water become some company's premium feature.

Noah asked me, "How do we get it to everybody? How do we distribute this everywhere?"

I snarked, "We could tell the internet it's impossible and see if they fix the problem for us. Think you can be annoying enough to fool them into altruism?"

He gave me a hug and nuzzled into my shoulder for a bit. Most couples would've kissed there and ridden off into the sunset. We weren't into allosexual stuff. I preferred a good hug.

I should've realized something was wrong when his hug hurt my side so badly.

#

It's funny that the internet blames me for everything, since I don't remember most of what happened next. I was conscious for less than half of it.

TL;DR: My kidneys shut down, and that caused a cascade of compromised organs to also fail. I woke up with tubes everywhere and machines blinking over me. I was too weak to move my head. All I could think about was that old story of wizards using bone magic to move themselves when their bodies were failing.

I lay there under Noah's mournful gaze, like he was at my wake instead of my bedside. My aunts had definitely talked to him. We were behind on payments for my previous treatments. There was no way we could afford what was going to come next.

Looking up at him, I said, "Maybe we should've studied bone magic instead."

"Come on, Manny. You're going to be fine."

"Think of the cool skeleton friends you'd have."

"Can I do anything for you? I could put on a scary movie. It can be as trashy as you want."

My eyes were so tired that I closed them. "If you really want to do something for me . . ." I trailed off, leading him.

"Yeah? What do you want?"

"Can you magic me a glass of water?"

I know he would've elbow dropped me to death if I wasn't already dying. It felt so good to get on someone's nerves. I laughed until I drooled, and I drooled so much it got in my left ear.

All the warmth that brought me drained away when a green specter materialized. It was Vamon Kinctuarin. His specter made him look taller than he really is and improved his complexion. He stood outside the door of my hospital room, like a vampire that needed to be invited in.

Noah stormed out of the room, meeting him in the hall. He didn't want Vamon anywhere near me. He was a real sweetheart.

The first thing I remember hearing was Vamon saying, "I'm here to help."

Between every breath, cricket sounds raged in Noah's chest. "We didn't invite you here. Get out."

"You're a driven young man. You applied to the academy again and again. You know Ozymandias can help your friend."

"Manny is more than a friend. And ze doesn't trust you, and neither do I."

"The money the Ozymandias Academy is offering will let you hire whoever you do trust to help."

There was a pause. I strained to listen.

Noah said, "What are you asking me?"

"To help us achieve the greater good."

"You have people in the patent offices. You know the secret by now. Go use it."

"The Ozymandias Academy does not spy."

Noah made a crackly half-cough, half-laugh. He gestured with his inhaler. "Everybody knows you do. But I won't sue if you use it. That's what you want, yeah?"

"We need more than that."

"I don't get it. I already said you can use our spell. What is it you want?"

Vamon's voice deepened. "No organization in the world does more good through owning patents than the Ozymandias Academy."

"You want to own our fucking patent? No. I'll fucking die first."

"It's not your death that you're concerned about."

That's why those motherfuckers from the Ozymandias Academy show up as phantoms. When Noah threw his inhaler at him, it passed right through his emerald green image. Noah threw that, then my lunch tray, then the table it had sat on. Things clattered and rained down on the linoleum floor, and if I could've sat up, I would've handed him my IV stand to throw too.

The next thing on the floor was Noah, sinking to his knees in a coughing fit. The cricket-chirp sounds of his breathing swarmed. He couldn't fight Vamon and the Ozymandias Academy. He could barely fight for breath.

We had to sign.

#

The morning I was discharged was the hottest on record. Just looking at the sliding glass doors felt like it'd burn my fingertips. Under my gown, I felt like a bunch of steaks somebody stapled together that the doctors had mistaken for a survivor. Maybe the heat out there would cook me.

Noah said, "Don't look at the internet. It'll make it worse."

I looked. That same morning, Ozymandias had released a statement saying they'd cracked the water crisis while "working with ambitious amateurs." Full water supplies were restored to a limited number of counties around our state. Videos showed sprinklers in rich neighborhoods, few of them actually in our city.

The Ozymandias Academy helped a water park reopen. That was the greater good our breakthrough went to. To "give everyone a place they can be refreshed"-at a public business that charged $99.99 per admission.

I went back to my aunts' apartment, where the taps were all dry. Noah came with me. Legally, I'm going to say we dwelled in our defeat and did absolutely nothing.

Legally, I'm going to say it wasn't us. I was half dead. We were just ambitious amateurs. How could what happened next have been us?

#

Whoever did it was fucking brilliant, though.

Somebody took our patented spell-now it was the Ozymandias Academy's patented spell-and posted every detail about it on one of the biggest forums on the internet. They used a VPN and a new account so there was no tracing who did it.

By the time the Ozymandias Academy's lawyers got the forum to delete it, the information had been downloaded 13,642 times.

After that, there was no squashing it. Those people downloading it weren't just corporations that Ozymandias could sue into submission. Every wizarding enthusiast in the world could access this information. When Ozymandias complained about it, more people looked it up. It spread to thousands of other places, some in countries that don't care about intellectual property rights. The internet became an army of cool necromancied skeletons, rising over and over to keep the fight going.

The Ozymandias Academy threatened to sue Noah and me.

Noah told them, "Our work was contributed to by countless of other aspiring wizards across the internet. Any of them could have done this. I didn't send shit. Manny, did you?"

I was too busy snickering. A few hours earlier I'd wiped my hard drive, for totally unrelated reasons. Totally unrelated.

As I finished reformatting, Noah said, "Manny, come see this."

He popped open my window and stuck his head outside to stare.

I wheeled my way over to him. Through the window, crisp air swirled in through my room, like the first breath you take after a nightmare. It was a damn sight less hot than anything in the forecast for today. It was downright humid. I didn't understand until I saw the gray clouds.

There were people on every roof I could see from the window, and others running along the street. It was like spontaneous block party, with everybody looking up at the sky. Little pinpricks appeared along my windowsill, and the car roofs and awnings across the street. Folks carried empty pitchers and cups to catch what fell. Something cool spattered against the back of my right hand.

The people of this city took our secret and used it to make rain. It went on for hours and hours, one of which became a viral phenomenon. Viral rainfall. Thousands of people pooled whatever scraps of magic they had so that everybody, no matter how special they were supposed to be, would have enough to drink.

It was smarter than anything Noah or I ever thought to do. Something you could only do as a vast group. All of you really taught us.

"D.I.Y." copyright © 2022 by John Wiswell
Art copyright © 2022 J Yang

Buy the Book

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When the the elitist institution of Ozymandias Academy and its headmaster, Vamon Kinctuarin, can't find a solution to the city's worsening drought, 2 self-taught magicians, Noah and his partner Manny, take it upon themselves to find a solution to the crisis.

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"As an ex-smuggler and two-time reluctant revolutionary, Alyssa is used to staring into the razor-sharp jaws of death. But now she’s embarking on the most terrifying adventure of her life—journeying into the darkness to become a new type of being, one who can help humanity to survive. And deep at the heart of the city in the middle of the night, the price of transformation could be higher, and more terrible, than Alyssa ever expected."

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As an ex-smuggler and two-time reluctant revolutionary, Alyssa is used to staring into the razor-sharp jaws of death. But now she’s embarking on the most terrifying adventure of her life—journeying into the darkness to become a new type of being, one who can help humanity to survive. And deep at the heart of the city in the middle of the night, the price of transformation could be higher, and more terrible, than Alyssa ever expected.

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"In a Paris that never was, a city of magicians, alchemists and Fallen angels struggling to recover from a devastating magical war…

Once each year, the House of Hawthorn tests the Houseless: for those chosen, success means the difference between a safe life and the devastation of the streets. However, for Thuan and his friend Kim Cuc, — dragons in human shapes and envoys from the dying underwater kingdom of the Seine — the stakes are entirely different. Charged with infiltrating a House that keeps encroaching on the Seine, if they are caught, they face a painful death.

Worse, mysterious children of thorns stalk the candidates through Hawthorn’s corridors. Will Thuan and Kim Cuc survive and succeed?"

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Children of Thorns, Children of Water - Uncanny Magazine

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With thanks to Stephanie Burgis, Fran Wilde and Kate Elliott It was a large, magnificent room with intricate patterns of ivy branches on the tiles, and a large mirror above a marble fireplace, the mantlepiece crammed with curios from delicate silver bowls to Chinese blue-and-white porcelain figures: a clear statement of casual power, to leave […]

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A trans woman has a conversation on twitter with a version of herself from another universe.

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[I don't usually preface writing with this, but given the format it seems prudent in this case:

This thread is a work of fiction]

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[I don't usually preface writing with this, but given the format it seems prudent in this case:

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[I don't usually preface writing with this, but given the format it seems prudent in this case:

This thread is a work of fiction]
— Bi Dyke Energy (@Azure_Husky) July 28, 2021

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[I don't usually preface writing with this, but given the format it seems prudent in this case:

This thread is a work of fiction]

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[I don't usually preface writing with this, but given the format it seems prudent in this case:

This thread is a work of fiction]

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[I don't usually preface writing with this, but given the format it seems prudent in this case:

This thread is a work of fiction]

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Jamie’s a non-binary teenager in a small town, but they remember at least a dozen past lives, one of which relates to a forty-year-old murder.

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I seem to make an outcast of myself every time I'm a teenager. Which is fine, I guess. I'll take one good dog and one good friend over being a phony and fitting in.

Alicia points. "There he is, Jamie!"

A couple hundred feet away, our trailer park's newest resident grabs a box from the van parked in front of his single-wide. He's gray-haired and buff, like if The Rock were an old man.

Alicia and I are sprawled on top of a wooden picnic table in the park's rusted old playground.

She frowns, her eyebrows coming together to form a tiny crease above her nose. "I've never known anybody who killed someone before."

I shrug.

"I mean, maybe I have, I guess, but I've never known I've known them. Know what I mean?"

"No."

I don't really care about the new guy, even if he did murder someone once. I'm mostly just out here to not have to listen to old Mrs. Francis concern-trolling my mom. When I was a kid who sometimes acted like a boy and sometimes like a girl, it was "just a phase." Now that I'm sixteen, it's "worrying" and "not safe for the younger children" and something we should "talk to a therapist about."

What Mrs. Francis doesn't know is that I remember every life I've lived for nearly four hundred years-not in detail, but like a book I read once and have a few hazy recollections about. In over a dozen lifetimes I can recall, I've been male and female enough times for those words to mean little more to me than a particular shirt-not who I am.

My mom's too polite to tell a neighbor what she can do with her un-asked-for parenting advice. Trailer walls are thin, though, and if I have to hear it too . . . well, Sabal Palms Trailer Park might end up with two murderers living in it.

Next to me, my dog Meetu nudges my hand with her head, asking for more scritches. She's supposed to protect me from people who are as bothered by me as Mrs. Francis is, but would rather use their fists to try and fix me. People like Connor Haines, the biggest asshole in the eleventh grade. But the reality is that Meetu is basically a teddy bear trapped in a pit bull's body.

Alicia shifts on the table. "I can't believe my mom let him rent here." Her mother manages the park, so I guess she could have blocked him if she'd wanted to.

"Even ex-murderers gotta live somewhere."

She gives me her patented don't-be-an-idiot combination eye roll and headshake that I've never seen anybody else quite match. Even when it's directed at me, I can't help but grin.

"There's no such thing as an 'ex-murderer,'" she says. "Once you kill someone, you're a murderer."

I brush my hair out of my face. "He went to jail. He did his time, right? They let him out, so where else is he gonna live?" We've certainly had other people with checkered pasts here.

"They shouldn't have let him out. You take somebody's life, you ought to rot for the rest of yours."

Meetu shoves her giant head under my arm and rests it on my lap. Guess I'm not going anywhere for a while.

"There's no heaven," Alicia declares. "The Jesus freaks are wrong about that. There's nothing but this. If people realized that, they'd take this life more seriously. You only get one."

She's wrong, but I can't explain to her how I know, so I don't bother trying.

A woman about my mom's age helps the man unpack, while a toddler stumbles around the grassy area in front of the trailer. He seems kind of old to have a little kid, but maybe he's making up for lost time.

"I can't understand what kind of woman would want to live with a killer, much less have a child with him." She peers at the table beneath her and runs a fingernail along a carved heart that's older than we are. "Not that I get wanting to be with any man."

The new neighbor comes out for another load. He glances our way, and even at this distance, our eyes lock, and a cold itch runs from the small of my back to the top of my scalp.

I know him. I know him from before.

I don't mean I know his soul. I know him.

Alicia gives me a little shove, and I realize she's been talking at me for a while.

"Are you okay?"

I blink. Even Meetu looks concerned, her muscular head cocked.

"I'm fine."

"Are you sure?"

I nod, but she doesn't stop staring and looking worried, so I add, "You're right. It's weird living next to a murderer."

Her face softens. "I didn't hurt your feelings, did I? When I said . . . that? I wasn't talking about you."

"Nah," I say. "I know you weren't."

The new guy goes back into his trailer.

"What did you say his name was?" I ask.

"Benjamin," she answers softly. After a few quiet seconds, she adds, "You did a really nice job on your nails."

I glance down at my newly red nails. She's painted them for me a couple times before, but this is the first time I've done them myself. I'm grateful that she doesn't qualify the compliment. Doesn't add, for a guy. But of course she wouldn't-that's why I-that's why she's my best friend.

* * * *

I try to let it go. So I've got a neighbor that I knew in a past life. So he's a convict. The past is dead. Who cares.

Over the next couple days, though, my mind keeps returning to Benjamin. I feel like he was important for some reason. By the middle of the week, I admit to myself that I'm not going to move on until I figure out what role he played in my life.

I'm not quite sure how to do that, though. I could ask Alicia for help. She's got a laptop and internet. I don't even have a smartphone. I don't want to open up the can of worms that is my past lives, though, so instead I decide to see what I can find out at the library.

I feed Meetu an early dinner while Mom's still at work, grab my backpack and bus pass, and head out.

Once I'm there, I have to face the fact that I don't have the first idea how to research anything about this guy. I don't even know his full name.

What's B's last name? I text Alicia.
Avery. Why?
What do I say that won't make her ask a thousand questions I don't want to answer? Just wondering.
UR totally gonna snoop arent you?
I consider possible deflections. Lying to Alicia feels scuzzy, though, and anyway, I can't think of any lies to tell. maybe just a little

I stare at my tiny screen, worried that she's going to offer to join me. After a minute her reply shows up, though, and it's just haha well lmk what you dig up.

I sigh, feeling both relieved and ashamed of my relief.

Even with his last name, I struggle. I don't know how to weed out other people named Benjamin, other people named Avery, other murderers. I don't even know when he went to jail-how long is a sentence for murder, anyway?

Finally I stumble across what I'm looking for-a news archive from the 1970s, with a grainy black and white photo of a man that looks a lot younger, but that's definitely him.

A Vietnam War veteran, possibly shell-shocked and deranged since coming back. A crime of passion-the victim, his best friend's wife. A body dug up by the shore of Peace Creek, not far away at all. Then I come across a photo of the formerly happy couple: Larry Dearborn and his wife Jamie.

Janie. Not Jamie. Janie. But the name doesn't matter.

It's me.

* * * *

It's raining when I stagger out of the library. On the bus ride home, I lean my head against the window and watch the torrents sheeting down the glass.

Janie would be in her sixties, if she'd lived. I don't remember ever being old. I always seem to die young. I don't remember dying. End-of-life memories are hazy, same as beginning-of-life memories.

I glance away from the window and notice a little girl staring at me from the seat across the aisle. Her father sits next to her, but he's focused on his phone.

"Are you a boy or a girl?" she asks.

Before I can catch myself, my stock answer comes out. "No."

She tilts her head in confusion.

I imagine how I must look to her. Rain-soaked long hair, purple V-neck, red nails. Hell, she's just a kid. "I'm a little of both," I add.

Her eyes widen. "Oh!"

I turn back toward the window. Now that I've seen the photos and read the articles, bits and pieces of that life are coming back to me.

Benjamin looks like I imagine a murderer would-big and tough and unhappy. The newspaper says he killed me.

So why does that feel wrong?

* * * *

The next day, school drags on more than usual. I can't focus on Henry James or rational functions when my alleged murderer just moved into the neighborhood.

My walk home is the vulnerable spot in my routine, because Meetu's not with me. So of course that's when Connor Haines ambushes me.

He's sitting on the concrete Sabal Palms sign outside the trailer park. His sycophant friend Eddie stands by his side.

A spike of fear travels through my body.

"What's up, Jimmy," he calls.

I don't bother correcting him. I was "Jimmy" when he met me-it was only four years ago that I decided "Jamie" fit better. More importantly, Connor doesn't care.

I consider my options. I could turn around. Go inside the Steak 'n Shake one block down and wait him out. Or I could run and try to reach my trailer ahead of him, and hide out there. But if I wanted to hide, my hair would be shorter and my nails wouldn't be red. It may cost me, but I won't start running or hiding now.

They fall in step with me as I pass the sign.

"Where's your dress, Jimmy?" Eddie asks.

Eddie is smaller than I am. I'm not a fighter, though, and he can be brave knowing he's got Connor backing his play.

"It was too ugly for me, so I gave it to Connor's mom."

I barely see Connor's fist before it hits my face. I stagger sideways, tasting blood.

"Why you gotta be such a freak, Jimmy?" Connor asks. "I don't care if you like guys, but why you gotta act like a girl?"

My clothes aren't particularly girlish today: blue jeans and a teal polo. And I'm neither a gay boy nor a trans girl. Trying to explain is a losing game, though, so I just try to push past.

Eddie's fist lands in my stomach, driving the air out of me.

Connor grabs my arm. "Don't walk away when we're talking to you, Jimmy. It's rude. A real lady would know better."

"What's going on, fellas?"

Benjamin's standing a dozen feet away. His arms are crossed, his sleeves barely making it halfway down his bulging biceps.

"We're just talking to our friend," Connor says.

"You've talked enough. Unless you want me to talk too."

Connor releases my arm and backs away. "See you at school tomorrow, Jimmy," he sneers.

"Yeah," Eddie adds. "Don't forget to wear your dress."

I watch them walk away. I understand what they're saying-sooner or later they'll find me when I have nobody to protect me.

"You're bleeding," Benjamin says. "Is your mom home?"

"She's at work."

I probably shouldn't say that to the convicted murderer.

"Why don't you let me help you?"

My instinct is to mumble some excuse, but I don't believe he's a murderer. Anyway, I want to know how he fit into my old life and why everybody thought he killed me, so I follow him.

His trailer's one of the first ones, and I see his windows are open. Probably how he noticed Connor and Eddie harassing me.

I've seen dumpier trailers, but not often.

The previous tenant had been a hoarder. When she died in her trailer last year, Alicia and her mom had to clean the place out, and I helped. The place had been full of arts and crafts junk and half-eaten containers of food. We'd worn masks, and no amount of vacuuming and Lysol had made it tolerable inside.

Just goes to show there's always somebody desperate enough to settle for anything.

I don't smell the death smell anymore-what I smell is about a half dozen Plug-Ins, all churning away at once. I guess that's an improvement.

Benjamin and his family don't have much furniture. A worn futon backs up against one wall of the living room, and a rickety table leans awkwardly under the kitchen light. A makeshift bookshelf sags with paperbacks and magazines. I wonder if they're his wife's-girlfriend's?-and then my face heats up. I'm the last person who should be making assumptions.

His toddler lies in a playpen, her thumb in her mouth, snoring gently. I almost comment on him leaving her unsupervised-then I remember that he did it to save my judgmental ass from getting beaten even worse.

"I'll grab some cotton and peroxide. They split your lip."

I follow him to the table and sit on the edge of a vinyl chair. I will myself to keep still as he approaches, dripping cotton in hand. He's a heavy breather, and his thick fingers smell like peanut butter. Lucky I'm not allergic. This time.

My shoulder blades tingle as he sits across from me and begins dabbing at the blood on my face. His fingers are rough but his touch is gentle.

"Some people are just driven to destroy what they don't understand," he says. He gets up and runs a washcloth under the tap. "Hold this against your lip until the bleeding stops."

I feel silly having him take care of me; I can clean a cut for myself. It's not like I haven't been beat up before.

"Anyway," he adds, "I'm Benjamin."

"Yeah," I blurt out. Crap.

He glances up. "You know?"

"Sorry. My best friend's mom manages this place."

"What else do you know?"

I swallow, and it's all the confirmation he needs.

He sighs.

"I'm so sorry," I say. "Please don't tell? She wasn't supposed to say anything to me, but that's the kind of thing that's hard to keep to yourself."

Benjamin just grunts and sweeps up the bloody cotton balls.

"Anyway," I add, "I know you're not guilty."

He raises his eyebrows. "You what now?"

I study my fingers. "I can tell things about people."

He snorts.

I shrug. "Anyway, I'm Jamie."

"Short for James?"

"No. Short for Jamie."

"Well, I'm glad to meet you, Jamie."

I press the rag to my lip for a couple minutes, and then, to break the silence, I ask, "Who did do it?"

He frowns. "Not something I wanna go into, kid."

"Sorry."

"It's funny though. You remind me of her. You look like you could be her kid. I mean, if she'd ever had one." Another awkward moment passes, and he clears his throat. "So the landlady's kid . . ."

"Yeah?"

"I saw the two of you sitting together. The way you look at her. She your girlfriend?"

"We're just friends."

"Ah."

"We can be friends, you know. You can just be friends with people you're-you can be friends with people without dating them."

"'Course you can."

I bite my lip, and flinch when I catch the split part. "Anyway, I don't think she sees me that way."

"Fair enough."

"Right."

"Right." He gets up from the table and begins washing some dishes while I continue putting pressure on my lip.

My mind wanders, trying to stitch together the bits of my last life that I remember. Being a little girl. Going to college. Dropping out to get married.

And I remember my husband turning mean. I remember going to our best man over and over again for advice-the only man Larry trusted me with. I remember deciding that I had to leave. I remember Larry-

Oh God. Larry did it. Larry was the killer.

Benjamin knocks a glass off the counter. He's not paying attention to the glass, though. He's staring at me, and he looks like he's glanced into hell itself.

Did I say that out loud?

"How do you know about him?"

Oops. Apparently I did. "Uh, lucky guess?"

"Right." He takes the rag from my hand, ignoring the still-running water. "Well, the bleeding's pretty much stopped now. It was good to meet you. You'd probably best be getting on home now."

He doesn't seem to breathe at all as he talks, and before I fully realize what happens I am escorted out the door.

"You take care, now," he says, once I'm safely outside.

"Thanks, Benjamin," I say, but the door closes before the last syllable leaves my mouth.

Making my way home, I feel like I can hear all my past selves in my head, and they're all furious. That bastard Larry killed me, and he got away with it.

I want to punch something. I want to scream. I want to take my notebook out of my backpack and rip out every sheet of paper and crumple each one up. I want to break some pencils. I want to scream.

I want to cry.

What does it say about me if I was murdered and nobody cared enough to find out who really did it? They just found the handiest fall guy to pin it on and went on with their lives, and Larry Dearborn lived happily ever after.

I run through imaginary confrontations with Larry as I walk up to my trailer. I've never been violent-not in any of the lives I can recall-but right now I wish I had the talent for it.

Meetu wants to play when I open up the door-Meetu always wants to play. "Not now," I say, snapping the leash onto her collar. She understands lots of things, but "Not now" isn't one of them. Still, she's happy enough to go out for her walk.

I daydream about running into Connor and Eddie again while I'm out with Meetu. See how they like being threatened. Then I play out the rest of that scenario in my head-Meetu's fifty-eight pounds of love, but all anybody sees when they look at her is a scary, vicious killer dog. I imagine how people would react to another story about a pit bull attack. I imagine them calling for her to be destroyed.

No, if I do see those guys, I'll keep a tight grip on Meetu's leash, even if they're messing with me, because I don't want to lose her.

That's what pisses me off-me and Janie and the other voices in my head. The Connors and the Larrys of the world always get away with the things they do.

There must be some way to make Larry pay. He doesn't know I exist. Has no idea that I know what he did. That I keep remembering more and more with each step I take.

He'll never see me coming.

"Watch your back, Larry," I murmur. "I'm coming for you."

Meetu thumps my knees with her tail. She doesn't know what I'm talking about, but she's game. She's always game.

* * * *

"I'm telling you, he didn't do it!"

Alicia snorts. "You know this how? Because he told you?"

We're sitting on her bed. I avoid her eyes by focusing on her posters. Harley Quinn. Black Widow. Imperator Furiosa.

Alicia is into kick-ass women. I'm into her-something I'm better off keeping to myself.

"Listen," I say, "I'm pretty good at reading people. I believe him. He's already done his time, so he has no real reason to lie."

"His reason is to get people like you to trust him. Jesus, you went into his trailer?"

"I was bleeding."

"So?"

I pull my legs under me and face her. "Listen, enough people think I'm a flake. That both of us are. I've always had your back. Will you just go with me on this?"

She chews her lip. After a moment she sighs and says, "I'm not sure what you want me to do."

"You've got a computer. Do a search for this Dearborn guy. See what you can find out about him."

"What for?"

I smooth a wrinkle on her bedspread. Any answer would be impossible to explain. "I don't know yet."

She rolls her eyes, but she pulls her laptop off the nightstand and begins clicking around. For several minutes she makes random frustrated sounds as she repeats the same research I already did at the library. I don't want to admit to how much I've already obsessed about this, so I let her retrace my steps.

Finally she chuckles ruefully. "Good luck."

"What?"

"Larry Dearborn is the Dearborn in Dearborn Automotive. He owns that huge car lot out on Auburndale Highway. The football stadium at Lakeside High is named after him. He's loaded."

I frown. So he's rich, too. Must be nice to literally get away with murder.

"Let's go see him," I say.

She scowls. "And do what?"

"We can pretend one of us is buying a car."

"Look, if you're right, then Dearborn's the dangerous one."

"He was dangerous forty years ago."

She shakes her head.

I try a different tack. "You're always saying you're bored here, surrounded by people who aren't going anywhere. You always say you want to do something adventurous, like join the Air Force. Well fine: let's have an adventure. I'm not saying to confront him or anything. I just want to see my-I just want to see Janie Dearborn's killer with my own eyes. He won't know that we know, so there's no reason to be afraid of him."

She narrows her eyes. Before she can raise an objection, I spit out, "What would Furiosa do?"

She makes a face. "I'm not twelve, Jamie."

"Sorry." I get up from her bed.

"Where are you going?"

"I'll go on my own," I say. "I'll take the bus."

"Don't," she says. "I think you're nuts, but I'll drive."

We tell her mom we're going to the library and breeze out before she can question us. Once on the road, we roll down the windows and turn north on state road seventeen. Alicia's mom's car is a beat up Saturn station wagon that's almost old enough to go to bars. It's sticky and hot and I almost think I should've gone by bus, except then I would have been alone.

The car salesmen close in like hyenas when we park, and immediately lose interest when we step out. I guess without an adult with us, they figure we're not car shopping.

I lead the way into an over-cooled lobby and cast about until I find a receptionist's desk.

"Hi," I say to the lady on the other side. "Is Mr. Dearborn here by any chance?"

She inclines her head. "And you are?"

"We are, uh . . ."

"We go to Lakeside High School," Alicia blurts out. "And, uh, we're on the yearbook staff. And since Mr. Dearborn's been so generous to our school in the past, we were wondering if he maybe wanted to take out a page in this year's edition."

I fight the urge to stare at Alicia. We actually are in yearbook, but at Pickens High, not at Lakeside. They've been leaning on us to sell advertising, and the last thing I've wanted to do is cold call on a bunch of local businesses so they can all treat me like some kind of freak. So here we are instead doing it for an entirely different high school.

I have to give her credit, though-that was some quick thinking.

The receptionist's expression softens. "Ah, yes. Well, he doesn't really come in to the showroom anymore, but you're right, he might want to sponsor a page." She takes a random salesperson's card from a holder on the counter, turns it over, and writes something on the back. "You can visit him here. I'm sure he'd be thrilled to have visitors from Lakeside."

Something about the way she said that feels off to me, but I can't quite figure it out until twenty minutes later, when Alicia pulls up in front of the address on the card: Landmark Hospice.

"What's a hospice?" Alicia asks. "Isn't that like a cheap hotel for backpackers?"

"No, it's a place where people go to die."

"Oh."

We park for several minutes under the shade of an oak tree, until Alicia asks, "Can we go home now?"

I nod dully, staring out the window.

It's all so unfair. Larry Dearborn killed his wife-killed me -and he'll never face judgment for it. Never spend a day in prison. He made a ton of money, lived out his life, and got to the end without any consequences. Even if I found some way to prove he did it, nobody would prosecute him. Why bother?

* * * *

The riverbed where the news said my body was discovered is just over a mile away. I take Meetu out after school a couple days later and wander around. Meetu runs back and forth between the creek and me, getting all muddy and messy.

I guess I have this idea that Meetu might dig up some bit of evidence, or I'll remember something about how I died that would lead me to discover something. Meetu's not that kind of dog, though, and anyway the police already went over this area when they found the body. What could I hope to uncover all these decades later?

And what would I do with it if I found it?

I don't actually have any memories of this place. I was probably dead or unconscious before Larry ever brought me here. I do remember more and more about our relationship. How his dark moods got darker and more frequent and how even getting promotions at work only made him happy for a day before he'd brood again. I remember the only place I felt safe being with his buddy Benjamin, and I remember Benjamin convincing me I needed to leave, and helping me pack. I remember taking my suitcases to his house one night, and trying to figure out where to go next.

I remember Larry showing up at Benjamin's place, enraged, and that's about all I remember. He must have killed me there, leaving plenty of evidence pointing at Benjamin.

Benjamin.

In all of my fury at Larry killing me and getting to live out his life without ever paying for his crime, I've hardly given thought to the man who did pay for it. I've been so focused on the unfairness of my death that I haven't thought about the unfairness of his life. I can't do anything about Larry, but can I do something for Benjamin?

I call Meetu to me and we start to walk back home. About halfway there, Alicia's Saturn shows up and pulls off the road on the grassy shoulder.

"I had a feeling you might have gone out this way. You're obsessed, Jamie. I'm worried about you."

She helps me get Meetu into the back of the station wagon. There's one thing to be said about having a piece of crap car-you don't much care if it gets dirty anymore.

"I think I have an idea for how to clear Benjamin's record," I say.

She doesn't take her eyes off the road. "Oh?"

"Yeah. Can I borrow a dress?"

* * * *

Alicia doesn't wear dresses much, and her fashion style is not quite what I'm looking for. She is close to my size, though, and she's willing to help, which counts for a lot.

She opens up her laptop and brings up a picture of Janie Dearborn-of her and Larry in better times. She's wearing a long denim skirt and a turtleneck and throwing her head back and laughing. I think I can remember that day.

"Freaky," Alicia murmurs. "She could be your older sister."

"Do you have anything like what she's wearing here?"

"Janie seems like the wholesome type. That's not me."

"Do you have anything that might be kind of close?"

She frowns, then straightens. "Actually, I might."

She heads not for her closet, but for the chest at the foot of her bed. She digs inside and tugs out a balled up wad of cloth.

"It's from my Aunt Hilda," she says, as if that explains everything.

She unrolls the bundle on her bed. It turns out to be a brown dress, with little pink flowers and ivory accents. It's nothing like the outfit in the news photo, but I understand why Alicia picked it. It's equal parts Brady Bunch and Sunday brunch.

"My aunt doesn't really get me," she says.

"No kidding."

"Mom made me wear it last time Aunt Hilda visited and then I dumped it here and haven't thought about it again." She holds the dress up to my shoulders and cocks her head appraisingly.

I quirk my lip. "It's . . . really ugly."

Alicia giggles. "You asked for a dress. You didn't say it had to look good."

I go to her bathroom to try it on. I stare at the mirror, trying to form my own opinion before I ask Alicia for hers. I worried that the dress was going to bulge and gap in the wrong places, but it's a modest cut, so it pretty much works.

I remember looking like this before. It looks like me in the mirror. Just a different me.

I try to imagine how Connor Haines would react if he ran into me like this. He and Eddie would probably go berserk.

Well, fuck them. They don't get a vote.

I pull the door open and cross the hall back into Alicia's room. She paces all the way around me, nodding slowly.

"Now let's add some makeup," she says.

When I've worn makeup before, I've always gone for subtle. Some foundation, a touch of eyeliner. Not trying to look like I have makeup on. After some false starts, Alicia and I manage to get a more blatantly feminine style that I'm satisfied with.

"Stand up," she says. "Let me see."

I stand by her dresser, suddenly self-conscious.

She raises her eyebrows. "I still hate that dress, but damn, you-" She bites her lip. "You're really pretty."

My neck and face heat at that. I know she doesn't mean . . . I know she's just trying to build me up. It's nice to imagine that she's serious, though.

The moment is interrupted by her mom coming home. When I see her car pulling into the gravel driveway outside, I want to grab my own clothes and hide in her bathroom until the danger passes. But I steel myself and stay right where I am. I've always figured that once you start hiding, it's hard to stop.

Alicia makes eye contact as the front door clicks unlocked, and I wonder if what I'm thinking is plastered all over my face.

"I'm home," her mom calls out, as if that weren't obvious.

A moment later she passes by the open door. "Oh, hey, I didn't realize you had somebody-" She blinks a couple times. "Oh. Hi, Jamie. Alicia, can I talk to you?"

Alicia follows her to the master bedroom and closes the door. I pad out to the hallway in my bare feet. Sound carries pretty clearly through the thin walls of a trailer, and I don't have to put my ear up to the door or anything to listen to their conversation, even though her mom is obviously trying to keep it down.

"Honey, I know you like girls and not boys, and I know Jamie's confused about his gender anyway, but I'm not comfortable with a boy playing dress-up in your bedroom."

"Jamie's not confused about a thing," Alicia replies. "And anyway, they changed in the bathroom."

I step back into her room and close the door behind me, because I really don't want to hear the rest. I don't want to hear Alicia reassure her mom that she doesn't think of me "that way." I don't want to hear Alicia's mom-who has always been cool to me-say something I won't be able to forgive.

Some people have a hard time adjusting to me-I get that. I don't care what their process of working things out looks like if in the end they treat me like a person. But I don't want to test that resolution by knowing too much.

Alicia doesn't ask me to leave when she returns; she doesn't talk about the conversation at all. I don't either. I figure everything's fine until somebody tells me otherwise.

"We ought to buy you some shoes to go with that, instead of those flip-flops. I could drive you to the mall in Sebring. It would be fun."

I meet her eyes, wondering where she's coming from. Alicia's not usually into shopping.

"It would," I agree. "But I don't think anybody's going to be looking at my shoes where I'm going. Some other time?"

She smiles. "Definitely." She raises both her eyebrows. "You gonna tell me what your plan is?"

If I did, I'd have to explain all sorts of things I'm not ready to. I shake my head. "You might try to talk me out of it."

She chews her lip; I can't tell if she's suspicious or hurt.

"I really appreciate your help," I say. When she doesn't reply, I add, "I better get on with this."

She finally meets my eye, and pulls me into a hug. "Be careful, whatever you're planning."

"I will," I say, and then I head out the door.

I should have asked for a ride-it would make things easier than taking public transportation dressed like this. But riding the bus will give me time to get used to the way I'm presenting.

All the way to Larry's street, I keep waiting for somebody to say or do something either because they've clocked me or because they think I am a girl. I wish I'd brought my ear buds, so I could block out the sounds of traffic and random conversation going on around me. That's stupid, though-what it would actually do is make me less likely to hear trouble coming.

Somehow I manage both legs of the ride and the transfer between. Everybody's too wrapped up in their own phones and music and worries to bother me.

At the hospice, I use the same story at the front desk that we used at the dealership. They give me directions to his room, and I walk past a courtyard garden, a nurse's station, and about a dozen doors with patient names written next to them in dry-erase ink.

I almost pass the door with Larry's name. I turn abruptly when I spot it, trying to project confidence, like I've been here before. I quietly close the door as I enter, and then blink as my eyes adjust to the darkness inside.

The curtains are drawn to block the low-hanging sun. Apart from the dim light slipping around the edges, the only illumination comes from a flat-screen television on the wall, bathing the room in a blueish glow. Flowers on a dresser cast sinister shadows that move with every flicker of the screen. In the center of the room, an oversized hospital bed dominates the space, undercutting the semblance of ordinary life somebody went through a lot of effort to create with the decor.

Larry lies on the bed, his head lolling to the side. I take in my first sight of him this lifetime. In my memories, he is a giant, angry and frightening, out of control. He appears so weak and emaciated here that I can almost pity him-until I think about the lives he's destroyed. Mine. Benjamin's. Who else? Somebody like Larry probably didn't stop at one victim.

I walk up to the edge of the bed. I could take my revenge right now; nobody could stop me. I don't think it would make me feel better, though, and it wouldn't do anything for Benjamin.

And I didn't come here for revenge.

A television remote and call device is tethered to his bedsheet with an alligator clip. I loosen it, turn the sound down, and place it on the floor.

"Larry," I call out.

He makes a gross snot-clearing sound, but doesn't wake up.

"Larry!"

He blinks awake and looks at me, wild-eyed.

"Who the hell are you?" he croaks, scratchy and barely intelligible. More memories come flooding back-Larry suspicious, Larry dismissive, Larry belligerent. I feel this weird contrast, like a double-exposed photograph. Part of me remembers that I'm supposed to be scared when Larry's voice takes this dangerous tone, but he's not scaring anyone anymore.

"You don't remember me, Larry? I'm hurt. I remember you."

"I've never met you in my life," he says, and starts patting around where his controller used to be.

"I remember that night at Peace Creek. You, me, and Benjamin. I bet he remembers it, too."

He pauses in his search and stares at me again. Shaking his head, he gasps. "You can't be."

I stand over the bed. "Look at me."

"Janie," he whispers. His gaze flicks between me and the edge of his bed. Probably still looking for his call button. Then he reaches for something on the other side of him, which I hadn't noticed before. For a moment I think it's some kind of back-up call device and my heart seizes, but it doesn't have a speaker or anything that appears to be a microphone.

I pluck the object out of his reach; it looks like some kind of self-dosing painkiller.

"Nuh uh, Larry. I'm talking to you. It wouldn't be very polite of you to check out."

"You're dead," he croaks.

"That's right. Soon you will be, too, and I'll be waiting for you."

He stiffens, and I have this momentary worry that I will inadvertently cause a fatal heart attack or something right here.

I lean in a little closer. "I promise you it won't be pleasant. You let an innocent man pay the price for my death, but there'll be nobody to pay for you in the afterlife."

This seems to spark some fight back into him. "Benjamin wasn't innocent! He betrayed me! He had an affair with you!"

"Benjamin and I never had an affair," I say. I'm pretty sure that's true. "He tried to convince me to go back to you on the day you killed me." That part's definitely not true.

He clutches the bed railing. "What are you talking about?"

"I hitched a ride to the Greyhound station in Winter Haven, because I was afraid of you, Larry. Then I had second thoughts, so I called Benjamin from a payphone. He told me you were a good man, that you were just going through a hard time. He told me I should give you another chance, and he drove all the way out there to bring me back."

Larry sinks back in the bed and his face seems to cloud over.

"Listen to me!" I command. Then I remember that there are all sorts of nurses and other patients around, and lower my voice. "He wasn't taking me away from you. He was bringing me back."

Larry moans, his expression stricken.

"He was your friend right up until the end, and you took his life for it, as surely as you took mine. He deserved better, Larry. So did I."

He grips my wrist; his skin is soft as tissue paper, but his grip is hard and a little painful. "You look so beautiful, Janie. Please don't leave me again!"

"I can't stay. My time is past, and you can't give me back what you took from me." I glare, and he tries to edge back from me. "But you can give Benjamin back some of what you took from him. You can talk to the police and recant. Tell them Benjamin didn't kill me. Tell them, Larry, or you'll see me every night in hell. I'll make you sorry. Believe me."

He raises a hand in front of his face. "Stop! I'll tell them! Please, Janie!"

I take the phone from the bedside table and dial. As soon as I navigate my way to a human being, I pass the handset over.

"Don't let me down," I say, "I'm watching you."

He's sobbing as I give it to him, but he's coherent enough once he starts talking. When he does, I make my way from the room before anybody can show up and start asking me awkward questions.

* * * *

I'm walking Meetu a week later when I pass Benjamin out in front of his trailer with his little girl, planting flowers, of all things. He waves, and I wave back before realizing he's actually calling me over.

"Damnedest thing happened," he says, getting up and brushing his hands on his jeans. "I got a call from my parole officer today. Larry Dearborn recanted. One of those deathbed confession things. They say that's how a lot of false convictions are overturned."

I do my best to feign surprise. "That's terrific!"

Meetu's tail thumps like Benjamin's a long lost friend.

"Yeah," he says. He pets Meetu, but his eyes stay on me. Looking hard, like he's trying to peer into me.

I'm not sure what to do, so I just shrug and say, "I'm glad you're finally getting some justice." The words feel stupid as they leave my mouth. He already served the sentence for this crime, and nothing can give that back to him.

As if he's read my mind, Benjamin says, "It'll make it easier to find work. Lot of people wouldn't look beyond that one line on a job application, before. Once people get a word for you-like convict -they think that word is all there is to know."

I nod.

His little girl makes mud pies in the dirt, and I think about how clearing her father's name will affect her future.

"I could watch her for you," I blurt out. "While you look for work." My face heats up. He may treat me like a person, but that doesn't mean he wants me watching his kid.

"That would be great."

I scratch Meetu, trying to act like it's no big deal.

"So." He nods toward Alicia's trailer. "You gonna ask that girl out? Don't tell me you're not interested."

"I'm . . . not un interested." I take a slow breath. "I guess I'm afraid."

"Afraid she sees you different from how you see yourself."

I sag. "Yes."

"I hear you," he says. "But if you don't take a chance on somebody disappointing you, you never give them a chance to surprise you either."

When I don't respond, he adds, "Will you stop being her friend if she says no?"

I shake my head.

"Then there's no sense wanting something and not at least trying."

I glance at the trailer. At the rainbow blinds that mark her bedroom window. "Maybe I will."

He claps a hand on my shoulder. "Good luck."

It feels more like a command than anything else, and I take a couple automatic steps toward her trailer. By the time my brain figures out what my feet have done, it seems more awkward to stop than to keep going.

Anyway, Benjamin's right. He sees right through me, the same way I know the real him.

The same way Alicia has always seen the real me, I realize. My pace picks up a bit, and Meetu responds by bounding forward, dragging me along, like everybody's figured out my destination before me.

She comes to the door as soon as I knock. "Hey," she says.

"You doing anything?"

She shrugs. "Watching TV."

"Wanna come for a walk?"

"Sure," she says, stepping out onto the deck. "Did something happen? Is something wrong?"

"Nope," I say, leading her down the steps. "Nothing's wrong at all."

We head down the street, quiet, like we don't need to babble to fill the space between us. To anybody watching us, we probably look like we're already a couple. Maybe by the time we come back, we will be. Maybe we won't.

Either way, we'll be okay.

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