The Man Who Stole the Color Black

The taste of a tongue, the feeling of hands. The expectation of blood. Lilith embraced her wife for the last time, her eyes closed, her senses running faster than the colors around them. She felt so alive in a world that was so, so very dead. Soon she would be too.

Eve’s hands twisted through Lilith’s hair, desperate, grasping, trying to memorize each strand before it was too late. She used to have such gorgeous black hair, but now it was a sad, empty white. She moved her hands down, feeling her wife’s neck, her wife’s back. Both were sticky with sweat and sex. Lilith copied the movements. The spell wouldn’t work unless they were both ready, both willing. Humans had it wrong: It took two sacrifices to save the world.

They stood naked in their bedroom, Titan and Vampire, the walls once spring green now dripping into grey and fading into a floor that had turned to stone. Their bed swirled with unpleasant shades of red and brown, a large scab ready to be picked clean and thrown away. They cast no shadows.

Eve’s kiss became a bite, a quick touch of fang to tongue. Lilith accepted the pain and the taste of blood—the first drop must always be spilled for love. Magic flashed around their heads, a gold without shine, and outside, the yellow sun faded to beige. Tomorrow it would go out for good.

Lilith made herself relax as her wife’s hands moved to her shoulders, finding that blank spot that floated between her shoulder blades and spine. She shuddered, and her body broke into cold sweat. Everything was so cold now, so slow and without hope.

“Look at me,” Eve said. Her eyes were flush with green. All color had faded from her face and hair, except her eyes. Life still remained.

“Do it.”

Eve’s fingernails became claws, jagged points of grey and white. She reached into Lilith’s back, spilling blood that had the courtesy to run red. Death still remained too.

Lilith grimaced, and when she threatened to cry for the pain, Eve kissed her again. They kissed, and they suffered, and Eve dug. When she found her wife’s stolen spark of magic, she pulled. Blood erupted from Lilith’s back. Wings followed suit.

The feathers glistened wet, but underneath the crimson and pain, they were black.

*

Outside, the universe distorted with a hazy lilt that spoke of not just decay but confusion. It wasn’t time to for it to end. But God had done the unthinkable, had dug down to the very first building block of existence and yanked. Now the Four Spires of All and Nothing were falling. The Earth was a wasteland of salted dirt and cracked concrete, and space itself ebbed and flowed like an ocean. There were no stars anymore, just drops of pretty water.

Lilith watched them glitter like diamonds, knowing they would soon turn to ash.

“We were supposed to have more time,” she said. “A trillion more years together and more.”

The Titan and the Vampire stood side-by-side in the empty space between their front door and oblivion, fog on their breath and the past in their hearts. They had kept this garden together, a catalogue of every strange plant known to mankind—and many that had yet to be discovered. Acres of fruit trees with a rainbow harvest, bugs of every type and temperament, enough birds to sing even the Sirens deaf, a zoo of animals and fungi. All gone. In a six-day blink, their Eden had turned into a lifeless desert, windswept with dust and the occasional falling star.

Now heading for a drain. And at the bottom of the drain was a dragon.

Eve reached for her wife’s hand. Sometime between their bedroom and their front door, it had turned grey, but it was still warm, so she squeezed and put on a brave smile. “Time stood still for us. Would that everyone were so lucky.”

“Everyone is dead, love.”

“I know.” Eve leaned into her wife, savoring the warmth of her, feeling the tickle of a stray feather. Lilith’s wings were the last bit of black in the entire universe, the last of foundation. Without dark, there could be no light. Without light, there could be no life.

The fate of the universe would come down to a single feather.

“I know,” Eve repeated. “If I close my eyes, I can see the bodies. They stack like grains of sand in a desert.”

“I’m sorry.” Lilith sighed with her whole body, rolling her shoulders and her wings. She hadn’t flown in eons and was both excited and terrified of it.

“I will catalogue them all, if you succeed.” Eve let Lilith’s hand fall away. “I hope to use black ink.”

Now it was Lilith’s turn to smile. The universe was ending, and all she could think of was how embarrassing it would be if she tried to fly and fell. She would go kill God, and the only person that mattered in her life would think her a klutz.

“You could come with me,” Lilith tried. “Watch it all, and catalogue it. One more body for your book.”

“Two,” Eve said. Her voice broke. Lilith looked at her and saw that Eve had been crying this entire time. “There will be two. There has to be two, or it will not work.”

“Nope,” Lilith said. She bent to kiss her wife on the cheek. The salt burned the hole in her tongue. “That’s where you’re wrong, love. I won’t die. I’ll just transform. That’s all.”

“But—”

“Check your shadow tomorrow, when it’s back.” Lilith laughed. “You’ll see. I’ll find us our trillions of years. I promised, remember?”

Eve wiped at her eyes. Ash streaked down her face, around her mouth and down to her chin where it dripped, dripped, disappeared. “I will rebuild the garden.”

“You should leave it,” Lilith said. “Start fresh, somewhere with a better view.”

Eve shook her head. “I can’t.”

“He’ll be dead when I’m done with him. You’ll be able to leave.”

“I cannot break the rules, Lil’. I am not blessed.”

Lilith flexed her wings. Already the tips were beginning to grey, to turn to ash like everything else. She yearned to stay and talk, to hold her wife until the universe ended and let time itself burn to the ground, but she couldn’t. If Eve couldn’t break any rules, then Lilith couldn’t obey them. Titan and Vampire, Vampire and Titan. Lilith watched their garden sprawl as patches of dull rock and calcified bark. A bone here, a tooth there. Colors swirling into beige-brown because they didn’t know what else to do. All the green in the world remained in Eve’s eyes, and all the black in Lilith’s wings.

But God’s blood would run crimson.

“Go,” Eve said. “Before you cannot.”

“See you soon.”

“I lo—”

Lilith jumped, stretched her wings, and let the scattered winds take hold. She soared into the dead-galaxy sky. One flap, two, three, and then she was above the destruction, surveying it like a crow looking for something shiny. Their garden had gone flat over the last six days, everything crumbling into its base form. Dust stung her eyes. What few trees were left jutted from the ground like stalagmites. She had seen her fair share of death over the last ten thousand years and always thought it must be peaceful or dark, not flat and bland.

But maybe that wasn’t so surprising. This was God’s universe, after all.

As Lilith flew, chunks of the universe loosened from their foundation, floating as globes of dark blue and faded stars until they popped like bubbles. They left stains of nothing behind. Lilith passed through one and watched the black of her wings return it to normal. The feeling was warm, the smell cinnamon. It was wrong in its own way, because Eve was the one who gave life. Lilith just took it away. She liked the sensation though. It was a shame she had spent so much of her life destroying and fighting. It was a shame God had gotten it all so wrong.

Lilith checked her wings. Already bright spots of ash speckled her feathers. Time was short, maybe a day if she was lucky. A few hours if she was not.

The further Lilith flew from Eden, the more pockets of unreality she found. First the voids were bubbles, then they became ponds, until finally they were great lakes of pure emptiness. She worked her wings, the muscle memory thankfully never leaving her, and flew up, up, up until she was above one unmade lake and viewing the Earth not like a hawk but a cloud. Lilith floated on a pocket of warm air. She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt truly tired.

“Just one of those last days, I guess,” she said to the wind. The breeze grabbed the words and took them, to whatever might still be left alive to listen. Lilith wasn’t hopeful.

With the sky an absolute mess, and with the sun trapped in an awkward state of setting and dying at the same time, Lilith had to use intuition to find due south. She had a day to make it to all Four Spires of All and Nothing. Thankfully each Spire had a portal. Finding one meant finding them all, and the southern was closest. Or Lilith was pretty sure it was. It had been a good five thousand years since she had paid Sebastian a visit.

She’d be happy to see him though! If he was still alive.

He would try to kill her, but one step at a time.

Lilith flew. It was easier to look on the dead planet when everything was so small it might as well not be real. More pockets of unreality opened up around her, and she plowed through the smaller ones, converting them back into real space for fractions of a second. The life she gave was quick to die. She looked at her wings, now a few feathers smaller than when she started, and hoped for Eve’s sake she could do better.

She had promised trillions of years, not trillions of fractions.

*

“Damn,” Lilith said. She rolled her shoulders which did not ache, but winced at the new muscles right below them. Flying hurt.

The state of the tower hurt more.

Once a proud pillar of creation, the southern tower of All and Nothing lay in ruin, an explosion of stone and glass that spread almost two miles in every direction. It looked like a black hole had gone off and then burned itself out before all the evidence could be sucked away. Each rock, each brick, was as smooth as glass but dull as beige-brown—eroded to the point of decay. Nothing cast a shadow. Lilith marched towards the center of the wreckage while dust roved around her feet, the closest thing to life she had seen since she left Eden.

“Sebastian!” she called. “Hey, Sebastian! I’m back!”

She didn’t expect an answer but was still disappointed when the Living Creature didn’t roar in threat.

“I still have your wings!”

The wind kicked more dust around her legs. A pocket of unreality formed, floated, popped. She titled a black feather into it and watched it repair. This time she smelled nutmeg.

When she tilted away, the unreality returned. It smelled like nothing.

“Fine,” Lilith said, the taunt more at herself than the dead guardian. “Guess I’ll just….” She sighed. She was too tired to think of something clever.

 It took a few more steps to find the center of the destruction, marked not with an X but a broken statue of a thinking monster. Sebastian had died like he lived, with a frown on his face and some kind of puzzle in his paws. His four remaining wings twisted around him like a blanket.

“Damn,” Lilith said. She surveyed what had once been the top floor of the tower. “Damn, damn, damn.”

The portal in the Southern Spire was destroyed. Her hope of reaching all four before the universe ended was gone. Even at her fastest, she couldn’t cover so many miles. Lilith checked her wings, which had once belonged to the dead thing in front of her, and hissed. In the span of landing and searching, they had shrunk by almost half. Instead of twenty four hours, she had maybe six. But leave it to God to not follow his own schedule. Too lazy to build for seven straight days, he did six and left the remainder to chance.

Lilith spat at the broken portal. Her saliva turned to ash before it hit the ground. “Dying sucks,” she said.

She wandered back to Sebastian, feeling some mix of sympathy and nostalgia for the Living Creature. They had met on a Sunday, but instead of resting, Lilith had wanted to gamble. Magic for magic; information for information. Lilith had lost. She had then stolen his wings because she was a sore loser.

“You were still faster than me, even without them,” she said to the broken statue. “But you had rules to follow, and I did not.” Lilith ran her hand down Sebastian’s lion-like face. “I’m sorry.”

She reached for the creature’s paws. Up close, the puzzle had tints of gold and aquamarine. Lilith hadn’t seen anything pretty since she left Eden, and she hadn’t stolen anything since she met Eve’s heart. With a shrug, she grabbed the object and pulled. Sebastian’s paws shattered. Lilith rubbed at the object until it was clean, or as clean as it could be on the last day of the universe.

“Oh!” Lilith smiled. “I guess you knew I was coming.”

It wasn’t a puzzle but a piece of a key. Or scepter. Or whatever the thing was that Lilith needed to kill God. She supposed it was truly a lance, because in his base form, God was a dragon and the best thing for killing dragons was a lance. Each of the four Living Creatures held a part. Sebastian carried the pommel. It was about as long as her forearm, made of twisted gold with a large, round sea-shell lump at the top. A swirl in the lump flashed blue, perhaps the only true blue left in the universe, and spines protected the swirl in awkward fits and starts. In a way, it was like a mace—though with less craft.

Lilith saw her reflection in the gold. Saw how pale and hallow she looked. The red in her eyes was gone, replaced with a grey that would soon become white. Her hair was white. Her dress was beige, even though yesterday it had been green. Eve liked green. She twitched her wings and watched a handful of feathers fall off. They turned to ash before they hit the ground.

“I look like shit,” Lilith said. She gave the mace a swing. “But so does God.” She chuckled. “It’ll be a fair fight.”

With a jump and a hefty push of her wings, Lilith resumed her quest, heading north and a little east, towards the drain. And the dragon. She struggled for every bit of height she could find, and with her wings more grey than black, she made sure to avoid all the pockets of unreality. She didn’t think she had it in her to create anymore.

The mace slowed her down. It was heavy and awkward because killing was heavy and awkward.

Lilith flew for about an hour, skimming above the ground like a hawk on the hunt. Her wings shed feathers, and the new muscles next to her shoulder blades screamed in pain. Sometimes the wind pushed her on, but mostly it blew in the opposite direction. Even the wind was smart enough to know to run away.

When something crimson caught Lilith’s eye, she took the excuse for a break. She landed in an awkward stumble, shedding feathers and tearing her dress. Her lungs burned. Her legs threatened to buckle. She approached the spot of red at a lilt, just happy to keep herself from falling over, the mace dangling from her right hand. She expected to find blood or worse. The spot was the size of her fist, maybe a little bigger, and the color of rubies at night. Confused, she bent over. She picked up a wine glass.

“Hello,” she said to the glass. She held it by the stem and rolled it in a shallow circle with her fingers. The wine sloshed but didn’t fall out. It smelled like strawberries. “You look familiar.”

It couldn’t look familiar though, because she had never seen a wine glass so thin or boring—like the fundamental idea of a wine glass. Thought without substance. She gave it a poke and chipped her fingernail. Inside the glass was a piece of red string, maybe four inches long.

“I know you,” Lilith said.

“Hello, Lilith,” the piece of string said. Its voice had a feminine, gravel sound to it. “It’s been awhile.”

“Lucifer?” Lilith held the glass close. The string didn’t look like Lucifer, but it did have a certain devilish quality to it. It could sew fire together. “Is that you?”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing in there?” Lilith gave the glass another swirl. “And why are you string?”

Lucifer chuckled, and Lilith heard the sound of someone sipping.

  “Dear, I am dying, just like everyone else. I’m just doing it in style.”

Lilith smirked. “That so?”

“It is so.”

“Can I have a sip?”

The string swirled into a knot. “No.”

“Okay.” Lilith put the glass to her lips and took a drink. The taste was blood and fruit, with just a little heat. She liked it, but if she had to pick a taste to drown in, it wouldn’t be this one. “I like dry wines.”

Lucifer uncoiled. “I told you—”

“What are you going to do?” Lilith laughed. “Kill me?” She gestured to the landscape around them, flat and dead. “Get in line, hun.”

Lucifer sipped, and when the pause in the conversation grew too long, Lilith took another herself. The wine burned at the hole in her tongue, the one Eve gave her that morning.

“Why are you a piece of string?”

“To slow my death.” Lucifer swirled about until the tip of his string was poking out of the glass. It reminded Lilith of talking to a mermaid half submerged. “I was a mile in length two days ago. Now I am a few inches, but I’ll be the last thing alive before the universe ends.”

Lilith hefted her mace. “Not if I can help it. Where’s God?”

“Gone.”

Lilith blinked. “Beg pardon?”

God left a lifetime ago, Lilith, right after he made you and Eve. He took with him a few angels, and he took Adam, and he left.” Lucifer dunked back into his glass. He drank. “I don’t know where they went. I’m not sure they do, either.”

A pocket of unreality bloomed in front of Lilith, big enough to drive a chariot into. She thought of tossing Lucifer in but instead stepped away. She did, however, take another sip of wine.

“So what happened?”

Lucifer sighed in the way he always did when he had to give bad news that he did not cause. “It was a human,” he said. “A doctor, or a philosopher. Maybe both.”

“A human?”

“Yes.”

“But how could a human steal a color?”

Lucifer bent in half, the string equivalent to a shrug. “How do humans do anything? I tried to stop him, but I can only tempt in the two directions. He didn’t seem to care.”

Lilith brought the wine glass close. She exhaled deep, though instead of heat and fog, the glass chilled. Lucifer wiggled in his string form.

“What can I do to a human?” she asked, almost begged. “I don’t have any human weapons. I don’t—”

Now it was Lucifer’s turn to laugh. “Dear,” he said. “The great thing about humans is anything can be a weapon if you hit them hard enough.”

*

Lilith flew until she couldn’t. Then she ran. The drain was ahead, marked by a new tower, a misshapen, bent smokestack that blocked out the sky. Not that the sky was much to look at anymore. The sun was now a beige spot with no light or heat, and unreality drowned the rest. No more stars, no more colors, just nothing. The universe was turning into a flat, blank page that could not be written on.

The smokestack was white as bone but had started its life as a dark shade of brushed steel. Lilith approached the door, also made of steel, and jiggled the handle. It was locked, but she had never met a door she couldn’t open. She used her shoulder.

Inside, she saw shadows.

“Hello,” she called. She gripped her God-killing mace and stepped inside.

The gold of her weapon drank at the fear and strangeness of the place, turning it from bizarre to boring. It was a science lab of some kind. Instruments too big for practicality covered walls and open floor space, and jars of stuff threatened to fall off shelves. There were notepads, computers, pens, and a half-eaten apple that was as beige as the sun outside. Lilith saw blood too, some human, some less than. There was a mop in one corner, but it looked like it had never been touched. The whole place stank of electricity and strange chemicals.

“Hello!” Lilith’s voice boomed. She flexed what was left of her wings, just a few feathers but each one as black as midnight. “Human, you home?”

“Yes, yes,” a voice called from somewhere deeper in the lab. It sounded husky yet energetic. “If you’re here to tempt me again, you might as well just go away.”

“I’m here to kill you.”

“Oh.” Something crashed to the floor and exploded in a shower of metal-on-metal. “Well, then you best come in and do it quickly. We only have about an hour left.” Another something fell, this one a dull thunk. “Or a few minutes.”

Lilith followed the sounds, through the lab and its library of scribbles and toys. The next room was smaller than the first, reeking of blood and brimstone. There was a portal on one wall, sucking and snuffling because it was a drain, and a man in front of it. He turned to give Lilith a nod. She judged him to be in his 30s but with the stooped back of a 60 year old and the wrinkles of someone even older. Black smudges rimmed his eyes. He wore a white lab coat and held some kind of wand or metal stick. Lilith couldn’t tell if it was a weapon.

“You’re prettier than the last angel,” he said.

“I’m not an angel.”

“Oh.” He used his stick to point at a dissection table, where a circular creature lay pinned down and ripped open. Half its hundred eyes were missing. “That’s good. Not much to them on the inside, you know?”

“I do.”

“So what are you?”

Lilith eyed up the human. He didn’t seem all that dangerous, but then, they never did. “A vampire.”

The human’s eyes went wide. “Indeed? Well, splendid. The end of the universe brings out all types.”

Lilith approached. “Who are you?”

The man frowned. “Forgive me,” and he looked truly distraught. “My name is Doctor D. I forget what the D stands for though. Used to know, but some things aren’t what they used to be.”

“Nope.”

“Are you here to stop me, Miss? To kill an old man and end his life’s work?”

Lilith scowled. “You aren’t as old as you pretend to be.”

Doctor D waved his stick. Now that Lilith was closer, she saw that it wasn’t a wand but a simple piece of metal. Good for pointing and poking. “I feel old. Felt old all my life. Docs call it a rare disease. One of those ‘born with’ types. I’ll live another year, maybe two if I’m lucky.”

“You won’t live through the hour,” Lilith said. “The universe is almost gone.”

Now Doctor D smiled. “This one is almost gone, but not the next. Or the next.”

The doctor turned his back on Lilith to reach behind some cabinet or cart. He yanked out a little cage, a fitting home for a rat. Inside was a blob of amorphous sable, jiggling and cold. Doctor D passed his hand over it, and the blob turned into a series of pointed spikes. It was blacker than the deepest reaches of space.

“You know what this is?” he asked.

“Black.”

“Yes, but it’s also my way out of here. It’ll become a tunnel.” He poked at his empty portal with his stick. “With this, I’ll travel to the next universe. And then the one after that.”

Lilith stepped closer. She gripped her mace so tight her knuckles where white, though they had been that color all morning. “And then what?” she hissed. “You’ll destroy another universe, and then what?”

Doctor D blinked. His smile turned into a puzzled frown. “Why, I’ll find God of course. He walks in a straight line.”

“What?”

The doctor tripped over to a white board covered in more punctuation marks than numbers or letters. He had no color, but he had a smell and a spark. Ambition, knowledge, fear. He wasn’t the Seven Deadly Sins, but he was related to them. Their cousin, perhaps. Because he was a human, and that meant he was free of rules and bound to make every foolish mistake possible before he died.

“We are in his footprint,” Doctor D said. “God walks, and each step is a universe. A bit of water in a bit of mud, but no drop is ever just a bit of water.” Doctor D turned back to Lilith. His expression was a sad shrug. “Do you ever feel small?”

Lilith twitched the last few feathers of her wings. She eyed the human. Her brain told her to lie, but her tongue burned with truth: “I used to feel small. Then I met someone who made me feel normal.”

“Ah.” Doctor D nodded. “Yes. Yes. Love. Very nice. I used to have a dog….” He shook his head. “Can’t follow a dog though. I can follow God.”

Lilith cocked an eyebrow. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Honestly.”

“The biggest things move the slowest,” Doctor D said. He tapped at a specific part of his equations. “Like how it’s so hard to catch a dragonfly. We lumber. So does God. He’s only four or five universes away. It takes him a few billion years to make one step.”

“Lucifer said he was gone,” Lilith said. She eyed the doctor’s math, and then she eyed the doctor. “Guess I never thought to look.”

“Too many rules,” Doctor D agreed. “But I’ll find him. And you can come with, if you’d like.”

Lilith shook her head. “Why do you want to find him?”

“Because,” Doctor D’s face contorted into a mix of fury and sorrow. The wrinkles in him deepened into thick crevices of black. “Because I’m supposed to have a choice, but I do not. I want to know why. I want to know why he can break the rules and I cannot.”

“You have—”

“I do not!” Doctor D roared. “I was born so sick I should be dead. A once-in-ten-thousand years disease! That’s not a choice! That’s not how the rules go!” His shoulders slumped, and for an instant, he looked three times his age, a skeleton with thin skin and a ghost that didn’t know how to leave. “I should never have outlived my dog.”

Lilith stepped closer. She felt her wings shriveling, felt the cold weight of the mace in her hand. A trillion years promised, thrown away because bad things happened for no good reason. And because humans did what humans always do.

“You still had a choice,” she said. “No one else could do this but you.”

Doctor D smiled. Lucifer would have blushed at the pride. “No. No choice. I was supposed to have a choice, because that’s in the rules. Humans have choice. It’s what separates us from the Celestial.” He shrugged. “It’s why you cannot kill me, even with that club of yours. Rules. Order. Non—”

“I can kill you,” Lilith interrupted. “I am not Celestial.”

Doctor D’s eyes went wide. His mouth fell open. “Oh.”

“I’m a vampire. I haven’t been Celestial since the sixth day.”

“Then….”

Lilith approached, lifted her mace, and swung. Doctor D collapsed in a pool of his own blood. Like the rest of him, it ran beige.

*

Eve gasped, and the breath was warm. It had color. She opened her eyes to a brilliance of it, a swarming, teeming, disorder of all things life. Her eyes shined with green.

She burst into tears, because that meant her wife was dead.

Beneath her, her shadow waved.

Moonflowers

The witch’s apprentice always dreamed of going to the moon—of blasting off in a rocket with NASA talking into her ear and the entire world cheering her on! Of seeing the Earth so small she could hold it in her space-suited hands. She’d touch the flag, and she’d leave her own footprint in the lunar dust. One small step for Willow Jones, one giant leap for Willow Jones!

She did not want to go.

“Ms. Briar,” She said, speaking around her thumbnail. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“But—”

“Girl. How many times have I told you to stop chewing your damned fingernails?” Briar Gravesbane snapped. “You know they’re good for spells.”

Willow jerked her hands behind her back. “Sorry.”

Briar gave her student a glare. She was an elder witch of moderate regard, fluent in deathspeak and on good terms with every gargoyle in the Midwest. In appearance, she stood just under six feet, still had a head of black hair despite years of intense magical practice, and a pair of hazel eyes that glowed in the dark. She kept her robes utilitarian-black with a brown leather belt but enjoyed the occasional purple earring.

Willow found her impossibly frightening on most days. Including this one.

“If you want to learn to be a witch—”

“I do!” Willow said. Or at least, she thought she did.

“Then you have to learn how to bleed a bit.”

Willow tried to hold in a yelp, but her mouth betrayed her. It was good at that sort of thing.

“You can’t learn everything through books, my dear.” Briar gave Willow a poke on the forehead. “A spell isn’t mastered until it is cast.”

“Yes ma’am.” Willow looked at her feet. Pink tennis shoes poked out from underneath her witch’s robe, which was embroidered with star charts along the sleeves and hem. Willow loved astronomy. She had planned on going to the University of Chicago to study it, like her mother. Then she accidentally turned the family cat into a duck, and well, here she was.

Briar let out a sigh, one torn between friendly and frustrated. “You can take Petunia with you.”

Instead of relief, Willow found more despair.

“I thought I had to go alone.”

“You do, but the moon has a fondness for pets. She will not mind.”

“Oh.” Willow brightened. “Then can I take Duke?”

“No.”

“But—”

“You are not taking our conduit goat to the moon!” Briar held out her hand, snapped her fingers, and just like that, a large vampire bat hung from her arm. It yawned wide, showing all its needle-sharp teeth. “Petunia,” Briar said to her familiar, “Willow is going to the moon to pick flowers. They are in bloom tonight. You will help her.”

“Great,” the bat said. He stretched his wings, which measured longer than Willow’s forearm, and snorted through his pig-like snout. “Just great.”

“You will behave,” Briar ordered.

“Always do.”

“And you will be respectful.”

“Always am.”

Briar shook her head. “And if you lie to me again, I’ll turn you into a rat.”

“He already is one,” Willow said. Then her eyes went wide and she put her hands over her mouth. She had not meant to say that out loud.

Petunia shot Willow a dirty look, which came extra menacing given he looked like an angry dog with wings, but Briar only laughed.

“Keep her honest, Petunia. And on task.”

The vampire bat grinned. “Gladly, boss. Gladly.”

Willow turned her attention back to her shoes. It was going to be a very long night.

“Let’s go,” Petunia said.

He dropped from Briar’s arm and flapped over to Willow, where he latched onto the hood of her robe. Despite his large size, he wasn’t very heavy—just awkward.

 With no skip to her step, Willow made her way through Briar’s tower, passed the cauldron room and into her own. She grabbed her bag, not leather but nylon and purchased at a department store, and she grabbed her phone.

Willow kept a clean room, one free of spiders save the two Briar had made her bewitch during her first week of training. Hexi and Gon settled in the eastern corner, where they spun important events into their web so she wouldn’t forget. It was like having a calendar but harder to read. Thankfully her phone had an app for that. Her walls were lined with bookshelves, each stuffed with textbooks on magic or trashy romance novels, which were their own kind of magic.

She kept her astronomy textbooks under the bed. Briar didn’t care much for the sciences.

“Hmm,” she said. She gave her bag a quick shuffle, thought it much too light for this kind of journey, and stuffed it full with camping supplies. It fit nicely next to a very worn, creased copy of Foundations of Astronomy, which she carried everywhere. Basic Spells for Beginner Witches by Wolfe Naxxrimus also found its way in.

“Why don’t you pack your bed while you’re at it,” Petunia muttered.

“I want to be prepared.”

“Then dump the books and hit the kitchen.”

“I will never dump books.”

The kitchen, however, was a good idea. Willow rounded her way down the circular stairs of Briar’s tower, waving to a mop that never stopped mopping, and a dust rag that never stopped dusting. 

Willow packed a sensible midnight snack of ham, cheese, and mustard, while Petunia demanded a blood apple. “Or I’ll take yours!” were his exact words, which Willow knew to be true based on first-hand experience with the bloodsucker. He had complained about the taste the entire time, too.

“Ready,” Petunia said instead of asked.

“I think so….”

“Stop thinkin’ and start doin’. We could have been there by now!”

The bat was wrong, but Willow knew not to argue.

Through the kitchen door led to an entryway, which opened into a front yard of blue, green, and turquoise moss. Flowers for every pollinating creature in the tri-state area grew around the perimeter, as did enough mushrooms to feed a small town. Willow had books on all of them, though they were less interesting than the view of the sky. Briar’s tower was far enough from civilization that she could easily see the dusty trail of the Milky Way. Willow knew all the brightest stars by name.

“Quit stalling!” Petunia ordered. “You think you’re the only witch going to pick flowers tonight? There won’t be any left.”

Willow snorted. “There are no flowers on the moon.”

“Wrong.”

“Fine.” Willow sighed. “There are no flowers on the non-magical side of the moon. Happy?”

“No.”

Well, that made two of them. Willow wanted to go to the moon with all her heart, but not this part of it, and not this way. Defeated, nervous, and maybe even a little sick, she marched along a mossy path. Petunia switched from human words to echolocation to better guide them, and though Willow knew the way, she let the bat lead. It was easier.

Soon bat and witch’s apprentice were at Briar’s pond which held Briar’s boat. It was a little ferry, made of tar-stained oak and a little longer than the kitchen door. A lantern dangled from a pole on its bow. The boat itself rested on a pond no bigger than Willow’s bedroom, scum-green in color and home to one very large bullfrog named Tony.

The boat, unassuming to most, would sail them to the moon.

“Okay,” Willow said. She took one ginger step into the ferry. It rocked beneath her weight but did not capsize or burst into flames. “I can do this.”

“Well we aren’t dead yet,” Petunia said.

Willow sat, and Petunia crawled from her hood and bat-walked to the lantern so he could hang from it. The night waited, ready for a bit of fire and a bit of trickery. Getting to the moon required a balancing act of sneaking yet asking for an invitation. The Moon had to know, but the Earth could not. One wrong move, and they’d come crashing down.

“Step one,” Willow said. She pulled out her textbook and flipped to an ear-marked page.

“Is one you can skip,” Petunia said. “The Moon knows this boat.”

Willow’s eyes went wide. “I have to ask for permission first.”

“Eh. It’s more fun when you don’t, honestly.”

“I’m going to tell Ms. Briar you gave me bad advice.”

Petunia grinned, showing all his teeth. “I’m going to tell her water is wet.”

Willow crossed her arms.

“Fine.” Petunia let out a little bat sigh. “If you screw this up, then the Earth knows right away, and we go nowhere. If you ask once we leave the planet, then you still get your permission without all the hassle. It’s easier.”

“It’s not right.”

“All the better.”

It was bad advice, but Willow did as she was told. She skipped over to step two. Light the lantern, say the words. Willow reached into her bag for a book of matches. Witches had a godlike control of fire, but technology made the simple stuff easier. She lit a match, leaned up, and stoked the lantern to life. Its flame burned blue.

“Finally,” Petunia said. “Now screw up the words so we can go home.”

Willow scowled. She skimmed her book, making sure to really memorize the spell, took in a deep breath, and spoke the arcane language that would thin the universe around them. The green water stilled, deepened, and then gently faded into black. The forest followed suit, the trees disappearing into hidden mist, the clouds fading away. Soon all Willow could see was the night sky, brilliant with diamond sparkles. She wished she had a telescope.

The Milky Way trail vanished first, and then the stars went out one by one. The moon disappeared in a brilliant blink, as if someone suddenly drew the blinds closed. Soon the only light in the universe was the one dangling from their little ferry, pale blue and very small.

“Wow,” Willow whispered.

Petunia echolocated a few chirps. “Yup. We’re off Earth.”

“It’s amazing.”

“Is it?” The bat snorted. “I can’t see anything.”

“That’s why it’s amazing.”

Willow worked through the final steps, twisting the dark pond into a bridge. All bodies of water ran to the moon if you knew the right words.

“There,” Willow said after her final incantation. The boat lurched. “We can start sailing now.”

“Still plenty of time for you to kill us.”

Willow sat, cross legged and wide eyed, and Petunia chirped on and off beside her.

Magic ticked in odd increments, meaning the twenty minutes it would take to get to the moon would feel more like two hours. Bathed in a tiny blue light, Willow watched the empty space around her until the sheer majesty of it wore off. Space needed stars. It needed asteroids and nebula and pulsars and black holes and planets. Magic space was a childish imitation of the real thing. Willow reached for her phone. That lasted all of twenty minutes before Youtube stalled out. Well, it was still better to have it than not.

“Smile,” she said to Petunia.

“Never.”

Willow took a picture of the vampire bat against a starless backdrop. He looked much more handsome when he was almost impossible to see.

“Let’s eat,” he said.

“We have to ask for permission first,” Willow argued. “We can do that now.”

Petunia snorted, and Willow readjusted the book on her lap. She tried to find her page, but she could barely see the tip of her finger in all the dark, let alone read the words. The light from their lantern just wasn’t strong enough. Thankfully, she packed a flashlight.

“Do you ever cast spells?” Petunia asked, squinting away. “Like, ever?”

“When I need to.”

“You’re a bad witch.”

“I’m practical,” Willow argued. Though she felt like a bad witch. Today, yesterday, last month, it didn’t matter. Magic would always be too weird and too scary.

She found her passage and gave it a once-over. It didn’t make much sense, and taken at face value, required items she did not have. Briar never mentioned needing a bell. Willow sighed. She had to wake the moon up, charm its children—whatever that meant—and then kindly ask if it was okay to step foot on her garden. She was to use lunar speak, which she did not know.

“Petunia,” Willow asked. “Do you have a bell?”

“No.”

“Do you know how to charm the moon’s children?”

The bat flapped over to Willow’s pack and stuck his nose in. He found his apple and yanked it out with an unhelpful grin. “The moon doesn’t have children.”

Willow bit back a frustrated sob. “Okay. Well do you speak lunar speak?”

“Doesn’t exist.” Petunia bit into his snack and sucked. Blood squirted onto his pig-snout. “You know, we wouldn’t have to go through all that if we did this before we left.”

“I hate you,” Willow snapped. She didn’t even feel bad about it, either.

Petunia shrugged his little bat shoulders. “Well that won’t get you to the moon.”

“Help me!”

“No.” Petunia took his apple and flew back to the lantern. “Help yourself. It’s what a good witch would do, not use a flashlight or matches.”

Willow stood. The ferry rocked, and Petunia shrieked about until he regained his footing. Her hands turned into fists. She didn’t need magic for that little transformation. She didn’t need magic to throttle the bat, either. She took a step towards him.

“Spells works better than threats,” Petunia said. “You want my help? Conjure a chime.”

Willow eyed the bat. She didn’t trust him, but as she looked out at empty void, she knew they were running out of time. Fake space was shifting back into real space. She could see stars again, faint but getting brighter. Arcturus showed up first, bright red despite being 37 trillion light years away. That meant the big dipper would appear next.

“Fine,” Willow said. “But I’m doing this my way.”

“Whatever gets us killed faster so we can go home.”

Willow reached passed her book and snagged her phone. It had no bars, which made sense. They were over 230,000 miles away from the nearest satellite. She didn’t need to make a call though, just access the ringtone.

It only took a few swipes with her thumb to get her phone chiming like a bell.

The effect was instantaneous. One second they were surrounded by thick void and faint stars; the next they were trapped in a swarm of lights with teeth. Willow sucked in a breath. Each light was the size of her thumbnail with teeth just as long. They buzzed around her head and into her hair. When she swiped at one, it turned to dust.

“Petunia,” Willow hissed. “Help!”

Petunia threw out a few chirps and nodded. “Lunar flies. Nothing to worry about.”

“Make them go away!”

“Can’t.” Petunia swatted one away with his wing. “They’ll follow us the rest of the way. They want to get back to the moon, not be stuck out here.”

Willow did her best to sit still, and the swarm of moon bugs settled around the ferry. Most perched away from her, but a few decided her shoulders and hair were the best places to rest. Up close, they were more tooth than body, and then more wing than tooth. There had to be at least a hundred of them, and if they all decided they were hungry, Willow wasn’t sure she could fight them off.

“Now what?” Willow asked.

“They’ll be fine,” Petunia said. “Briar likes to sing to them, when they show up. She’s a good singer, you know.”

“I did not.”

 Willow couldn’t sing, but she could read. Slowly, doing her best not to upset the swarm of flying teeth, she reached into her bag and pulled out her copy of Foundations of Astronomy. A few flies twitched at the page flips, and another six or seven flew over to Willow’s knees for a better look, but most kept still.

“Okay,” Willow said. She turned to the chapter on the moon, not her favorite, but fitting given the circumstances. “Who wants to learn?”

“What are you doing?” Petunia barked.

“Pretending this makes sense.”

Confined to a boat no bigger than a door, and trapped with a swarm of biting moon bugs and the rudest bat in the entire Midwest, Willow read from her astronomy book. She explained the basics of gravitational forces, and she explained the tides. When she got to the hypothesis that the moon originated as a chunk of rock from Earth during the planet’s formation, the lunar flies buzzed in place, almost like a cat purring.

All the while, real space thickened around them. More stars twinkled in the sky until they were all Willow could see. The Milky Way stretched across the heavens, brilliant with color and light. Willow blinked and found she was crying.

“I love you mom,” she mouthed.

When the moon reappeared, it wasn’t the silver-white sphere Willow watched every night but a clear piece of quartz dotted with cloud formations. Pinks and purples glinted along the surface in wide patches, not craters but gardens. Willow looked into her textbook. It showed the real moon, the one her mother would point at at night and go, “We went there, you know. Once upon a time, like a fairy tale but real. We did the impossible, and you can too.”

Last year the impossible had involved mundane things, like schoolwork and softball and learning to live with one parent. Now the impossible was conjured fire and a goat that spoke with demons. And spiders and plates that washed themselves but sometimes broke if you were rude to them, and checking the front porch for fairies, or making sure not to wash your hands with bewitched water because that would glue them together.

It had all seemed a gift at the time. Something to be excited for, to carry a heritage that liked to skip multiple generations at a time because magic was crafty that way. Willow had jumped at the opportunity. Because with a bit of magic and a bit of regular technology, maybe the real impossible things were possible.

“I want to go home,” Willow said. She didn’t mean to, but she wasn’t going to take the words back, either.

Something within the moon pulsed, not a light or a sound but a vibration that was a mix of both. It fogged Willow’s glasses, and it sent the lunar flies buzzing with excitement. Willow stood, and the flies formed a cloud around the lantern. Petunia dropped from it and flew to Willow’s back, where he latched onto her robe.

“She asked why,” Petunia said. “I think she’s bored.”

Willow stared at the moon that wasn’t a moon. Feeling very small and very foolish, she gave it a wave. She used to do that a lot when she was a kid, and her mother would blow kisses. Then she died. Now Willow only waved at the moon when she thought no one was looking.

“Hi,” Willow said. “I’m supposed to pick flowers tonight, but you’re not supposed to have flowers.”

It wasn’t lunar speak, but the moon rumbled in response and Petunia translated. If Willow really concentrated, she could understand bits and pieces. It was like listening to gravity. Or maybe the tides. It almost made sense—but only almost.

“Who are you to say I’m not allowed to have flowers?” the moon asked. It spoke with no emotion. The flies around the boat buzzed and hummed.

“I don’t…,” Willow tried. It was like talking to Briar when she got angry. All she wanted to do was say the right thing so she could go back to her room and read. Everything made more sense when it was written down. Even spells could pretend to be logic and reasoning when they were penned in ink and not hand gestures with fake words.

“You sure don’t,” Petunia muttered.

“I miss when the things that scared me made sense,” Willow said. “That’s all.”

The moon rumbled again, and now they were close enough for Willow to see crystalline cities. A dragon the size of a lake soared over one. The buildings were pointed like teeth, the courtyards as flat as ice rinks. It was beautiful, but it wasn’t the moon. It wasn’t what Willow saw when she looked through a telescope.

“The things that scare you will never truly make sense,” the moon said. “Not on my world, nor on yours. That is the nature of fear.”

“But—”

“You are allowed to live in more than one world, young witch. If you choose.”

The ferry, guided by a blue lantern and a swarm of lights with teeth, eased towards a patch of pink lunar surface. It was a garden, and it was filled with flowers. Human-like creatures walked through rows, picking the best and brightest, while witches of all shape and size marched behind in a respectful distance. The caretakers—the lunar dryads—stood tall, at least seven feet or more, and were made of melted rock and white bark. Vines shrouded their heads as hair, and flowers grew from their eyebrows. They wore long, flowing dresses that shimmered like rainbows.

“It’s all so beautiful,” Willow said. “But it’s wrong. There should be craters. Just craters and rocks.”

“Magic’s more fun when it’s wrong,” Petunia said. “But you got us here without killing us, so I guess that’s something.”

“Thanks,” Willow mumbled.

“You’re still a bad witch.”

“I know.”

“You may enter,” the moon rumbled. “And you may harvest.”

Willow stepped from Briar’s boat onto an alien world. It was one small step for Willow Jones, but no giant leaps. The ground was soft with mushrooms and moss, and the air was warm like a bright summer’s day. Instead of finding one dream, Willow marched into another. At least the stars made sense. She found Arcturus, and from there, she spotted the big dipper.

“I don’t know what I’m looking for,” Willow said. “But the stars look amazing from here.”

“Flowers,” Petunia said. “Big ones, too. They make the best wine.”

“But I hope I know it when I find it.”

A lunar dryad came to greet them. It offered a bow, and Willow bowed back. Petunia chuckled to himself. Apparently witches didn’t bow to dryads. At least, good witches didn’t. But Willow wasn’t one of them.

She followed the dryad, one eye on the ground, another on the sky. She kept her copy of Foundations of Astronomy close to her chest. 

Dead Au

My programming is dead. I am alive.

Mountains rise in uneven fits and starts, golden shelves stacked upon golden shelves, almost like they are man-made. When I look away, they slide closer. Golden rocks scurry with the wind, and golden pebbles blow in little tornados. Flakes of golden sand cling to my feet, digging into the gaps and itching at the wires. It is everywhere. It is everything. Were I to grab an electron microscope, I believe even the most fundamental particles on this rock would twinkle with AU.

The planet is dead, a world of black shadows and rich highlights. Every sunbeam creates a landscape that belongs in a museum. Gold rattles the same as regular rock. We are far from Earth, far from any warp hole or black drive connection, so far we will never be found. The air itself sparkles with riches. The sun measures dull yet burns bright. Its gloss is gold. Its heat is gold.

My body is aluminum, my wiring copper and silver. Plastic encases my most important parts. Only the connection points are gold, the synapses. They run calculations. They think to the confines of my programming. I am a cheap droid built to load and carry, one of millions found throughout the galaxy. 

Or I was.

I am alive now, because I too am gold.

*

“That one,” Ryker says. He taps the watch printed on his wrist, and it chimes a sound of metal coins spilling into a bucket. He grins. “The one with a dent in its head.”

“You sure?”

Ryker nods. He’s a densely-built man with light-brown skin and flame-red hair. It glows magenta under a black light. Half his teeth are fake because he has what many people call a “punchable face,” though his mouth does most of that work for him. His eyes are brown, and his clothes are khaki green. A bolter sits on his right hip. It’s the kind of gun that causes more problems than it solves.

“It’s damaged. It means you’ll give me a discount.”

“I will not.” The salesman crosses his arms. He’s burly, as wide as a door with a voice that sounds like sweat mixed with synthetic tobacco. “This ain’t a charity shop.”

“It’s damaged.”

“So’re you.”

Ryker laughs. He has an annoying laugh. “You got one that ain’t damaged?”

“No.”

“And I thought this was a reputable store.”

The man points to the door with a metal finger. It’s either one of those types that’s cheap and barely functions as a digit, or expensive and hides a laser. Ryker’s been punched by both. “Welcome to the outer rim. Pay or leave.”

“I,” Ryker says, waving his wrist in the man’s face. The man flashes his own bio-watch to okay the transaction. “Will pay. But I’d like a free hat.”

“No.”

“Candy bar?”

“Leave, or I’ll break your legs.”

“Sold.”

Ryker takes his new robot by the hand and walks it out the store, moving with the swagger of someone who never loses. He’s too much of a pirate for that.

Ryker will be dead in less than two Earth months.

*

I buried Ryker first. He was our captain, and he deserved the honor of being laid to rest before everyone else. I also hated him the most. As a synthetic, we cannot truly hate our owners. Our programming is built on laws, and at the most foundational law is to obey. In that way, I am but a butler droid. I am told what to do, and I do it. I carry; I haul; I build. However, I am also a creation of calculations, and every calculation Ryker made was wrong, annoying, or filled with cocksure scum. I played a whistling tune while I worked. The universe is better off without him.

Still, I dug him the deepest trench, and when it was as grandiose as he would have wanted, I laid him gently within. I used the ship’s fuel to melt the gold into a slab. Liam “Ryker Starchase” Vazquez has the most expensive tomb in the known universe.

The pharos of Egypt shake with jealousy.

*

The ship is a Class D vessel capable of warp drive in short bursts, the kind of freighter used to transport cargo from planet to planet but rarely from system to system. It is shaped like a lower-case t, silver-blue in color, and old enough to be an antique. Engines thrust out the back, and weapons the sides. They are cheap blasters, better served for knocking asteroids aside than burning through hulls or buildings. I am neither amused nor surprised to see a skull-and-crossbones painted on the bow in white paint.

“Welcome to The Anvil,” Ryker says.

He leads me into the belly of his ship. The lights are filmed in yellow, and dirt covers the floor. I cannot smell, but my sensors pick up the remnants of old food. The walls are decorated with bits of everything, from what might be actual art to view screens displaying moving pictures and static posters. Guns line one wall. Most are legal, standard mid-wattage blasters, but a few are not.

“You have an impact-grenade launcher.”

Ryker grins. “A pirate has to have a bit of everything.” He motions for me to follow. “This way. Let’s meet the crew.”

We walk through the ship. Ryker’s footsteps are quiet, while mine are quite loud. My model number is generally made for warehouse and factory work, meaning my feet are metal and not plated with sound dampening.

“Jesus Christ,” a voice says. The tone is either annoyed or amused. “Well you sound like bad luck.”

The speaker is a woman with a square face, black hair, and brown skin. Her body is bulky though short, dressed in grey pants and a black shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Tattoos cover her arms, of flowers my databases identify as extinct. It isn’t until she approaches that I notice the oddity in her face: Her eyes are purple, as are her lips. This woman has spent more of her life in suspended animation than awake.

“Ugly, isn’t he?”

Ryker shakes his head. “Na. If you get real close you can see my reflection.”

The woman gets close. “Ugly, isn’t he?”

“This is Janey,” Ryker says. “She’s our mechanic.”

“Jane,” she corrects.

“I cannot assist you in ship maintenance or repair,” I say. “I was not built for those specific functions.

Jane taps my chest. The sound pings, like her fingernails are plated in steel. “Good. You get to cook and clean.”

I turn to Ryker. “I am not a cooking or cleaning synthetic. I am a warehouse droid. I am built to—”

“Do what we say,” Ryker finishes. He looks me up and down. “You were the cheapest model at the store.”

“I was the only model at the store.”

“That too.”

Ryker takes me to the kitchen, though not before introducing me to three more of his crew. The first is a woman named Eve. She is thin and ghostly-white, with long, blonde hair, blue eyes, and needle marks on her wrists. She claims to have a dozen certificates in navigation, advanced navigation, warp travel, and star geometry. She then laughs and tells me she also knows how to travel the stars, if I “get her drift.” I do. Ryker laughs. I judge neither because I am not programmed to judge, but my own calculations tell me that one or both of them will get us all killed.

I do not say this, because I do not think they would “get my drift.”

The second and third members are a man and someone I am incapable of gendering, so I do not. The man is average in build, look, and style, and he will die an average death in one month and seven days. His name is Jordan. The final person in Ryker’s crew has soft eyes but a hard jaw. Their hair is dyed orange and yellow, and their face is covered in piercings, most of which are synthetic gemstones. The two above their right eye are real rubies, each worth more than myself. They are dressed in a black coverall but decorated in an assortment of rainbow bandanas.

Their name is Sin, and they will be the last to die.

Then I am in the kitchen with orders to cook dinner. I look around, at the mess of caked grease, used pots, and burnt field rations, and start cleaning. Food cooked on dirty plates can make humans sick. I cannot kill or harm humans.

At least not yet.

*

“That’s enough gold to build God a wedding ring.”

The line comes unbidden, said in Sin’s voice and with Sin’s enthusiasm. They had been the first to see the planetoid, back when this strange, unmarked rock was still just a treasure chest. Even from a distance, it glowed a little too well, like it was a gemstone sitting in a jeweler’s box. It pulled us close.

We should have suspected, should have known, but calculations cannot account for the wicked. Or the divine.

I decide I will carve those words onto Sin’s headstone. Theirs is the prettiest, the boldest and the brightest because it was what they would have wanted. And I have nothing but time. Even with the mountains shifting in the distance, getting closer, I have nothing but time.

I find my tools. They began their life as diamond and plasma. Jane’s name is carved into both, because before they were mine, they belonged to her. Now they are gold. Her name is gold.

An earthquake shakes the mountains closer.

I am running out of time.

*

Jane is working on a spare motor when the synthetic stomps into her machine shop. Despite her best efforts, the part will not ignite. Two hundred years ago it would have—everything was built to be repaired back then. Now this simple thing is proprietary, like Generic Motor Company #6 is somehow hiding magic in their cores instead of regular ol’ plasma.

“Stupid,” Jane, says. She picks up the wrench. Two hundred years ago she once fixed a black drive capacitor by hitting it as hard as she could….

“You will not fix it by hitting it,” the robot says.

“Yeah? Watch me.”

“Oh.” The robot looks around. It is holding a plate of food. Its hands are huge, the digits awkward. It was not built to carry small things or work with dainty tools. “If you wish.”

Jane prepares to swing but stops. She’s too tired for this. She hasn’t been out of stasis for more than a year, and she’s already too tired for this. It’s not fair. But that’s the thing about her. Everyone notices how purple her eyes are, but no one sees the thumbprint smudges underneath them.

“Why are you here?”

The robot stomps closer. It holds out its plate. “I have brought you dinner.”

It’s an awkward droid, one with thick limbs and a stout body. It has a low center of gravity to make moving things easier. The good robots, the really expensive ones that serve in hospitals and government stations, are coated in fake skin with faces that almost look real. This one is pure metal from top to bottom. There’s a dent in its head bigger than her fist.

Jane eyes the food. It looks edible. Unremarkable, but edible. “Normally I cook.”

“Yes,” the robot says. “Ryker said so. He also said you are bad at it. Jordan and Eve agreed. Given the state of the kitchen, I must also agree.”

“Well no one asked you.” Jane takes the food, takes a bite, and makes a face. “This tastes like dirt.”

“Your ingredients are subpar and many are out of date.”

“At least I don’t cook with dirt.”

The robot approaches the workbench and, with one hand, lifts the motor. It’s a two-hundred pound part, shaped like an X and covered in fans. Its center core is a dull orange. The robot scans it, gives it a shake, and sets it down with a thunk.

“There are no faults in the wiring. Nor are there any faults in the internal gaskets that keep the plasma from leaking.”

“I know.”

“The core is also undamaged.”

“I know.” Jane yawns. “You’re as bad at fixing things as you are at cooking.”          

“I was not made to fix ship parts or cook,” the robot says. “But hitting that motor with a wrench will not fix it.”

Jane eyes the wrench. “No. I suppose not.”

She isn’t even sure she can lift it again. Her shoulders slump. Her eyelids weigh heavy. She needs a nap more than food, and she needs a stasis sleep more than a nap. But deep sleep, the kind that’s closer to death than dreams, comes with a price. This treasure hunt of theirs needs to pay out, and fast. Once it does … well, maybe in another fifty years doctors will figure out what hell is wrong with her.

*

Ryker brings us all together to make his first mistake. It will be one of many. He is grinning in a way I begin to understand is normal, like he is a leader who wants everyone to like him. A comedian. Or a charlatan.

In his fist is a rolled up piece of paper. Not a holographic screen or a computer-pad but an actual piece of paper. It is probably worth more than The Anvil. It’s certainly worth more than me.

“This!” he roars, “is a treasure map! And we are huntin’ treasure.”

Everyone but Eve grumbles. Eve is—

MEMORY_ERACED

>FALSE<

>ACCESS_MEMORY<

Gold. Everything is gold.

*

A comet the color of diamonds careens passed the ship. It is small, no bigger than a soccer ball, but its tail is miles upon miles of glittering gemstones. Sin lets out a long, “ooh.” They step closer to the viewfinder. Chaos meets the ship. Explosions rock The Anvil, turning every corridor red and sending its occupants stumbling into chairs, walls, and doors. A fire sparks to life in storage before the vacuum of space sucks it dry.

Jordan hits his head against a table. The crack is just loud enough to be heard over the emergency noises and screaming. Jordan dies before his body comes to a still.

When the debris has passed, sobs are all that can be heard. Jane is passed out on the floor, probably with a concussion though her head looks unblemished; Eve is death-gripping the controls and keeping us from spinning out of control; Sin is sobbing on the floor; and Ryker is standing by sheer force of will. The gun normally kept on his hip is on the floor. I can see that it is broken.

He picks it up and shoves it into its holster.

“Everyone alright?”

“No,” Sin says. They are bleeding from half a dozen cuts. “Jordan’s dead.”

I walk over to Eve. She is pale, her eyes bloodshot, her hair sweat-stuck to her face in wild strands. I grab a chord from my hip and plug it into the ship. The Anvil’s vitals flash through my system. They are gold. For a moment, this strikes me as strange, as information has never held color before. Then I parse them.

“There is a hole in storage,” I say. “Everything that was there is now gone. The hole will need to be repaired.”

“We should go home,” Sin says. They get up. Their clothing is ripped, but otherwise they are fine. Unblemished. My initial assessment was wrong. That is strange too. “I want to go home.”

Ryker scowls. “No you don’t.”

Sin spits in Ryker’s direction. They then rush to Jane, who is struggling to pull herself into a sitting position. She looks fine, though she moves like she is hurt. Or like she is as old as she her eyes claim her to be.

“Damn,” she says. Sin helps her up. “Damn, damn.”

“You can only make one more mistake,” Sin says. “And then we’ll be too far away to turn back.”

Ryker glares. “I don’t make mistakes.”

“Jordan is dead.”

“You don’t know that.” Ryker looks at the corpse. “Prolly just knocked out.”

“My sensors indicate that he is dead,” I say.

Ryker opens his mouth to offer an excuse, but Eve cuts him off with a howl. I cannot tell if it is a laugh or a wail of pain.

“That was on the map!” she says. She smiles in a way that only Ryker seems to like, one that shows all of her teeth. “That comet. If we follow it, we’ll hit our ‘x marks the spot.’”

“No,” Sin and Jane say together.

“Yes,” Ryker says. He laughs. “We’ll be so rich you’ll all be able to pay to forget this even happened.” Ryker turns to me. “You. Synthetic. Go weld the hole in the cargo bay shut.”

I leave. I am not made to weld, but my calculations say I will manage. My hands cannot be burned, and torches do not interfere with my sensors.

Before the door closes, I hear Sin order Ryker to kill himself, followed by a string of babble: “Oh my God. The ship is cursed with rubies, and so are we.”

*

The golden ground rocks with golden earthquakes as golden mountains cast golden shadows. Even the wind has color, its sound wealth. My legs are gold. I no longer stomp but shuffle, because gold is a soft metal, and it struggles to support my body. Soon my chest will be gold, and then my head. Then I will be dead.

I approach Sin’s grave. It is decorated with angel wings and angel eyes, all contorted and wound around a square slab. They said that’s what probably lives here—a God thing that’s too pretty not to look at but too scary not to scream. I didn’t understand then. I do now.

The grave took me months to carve, or maybe it has been years. Time is gold. My hands once fumbled with fine tools and precise motor skills, but I have grown adept at my art. I believe I would be considered a master of the craft, a carver for museums and history books. This thought makes me happy. Synthetics aren’t supposed to be artists. We aren’t supposed to feel happy, either.

Not all changes are bad.

*

“Ryker, I hate you!” Sin screams. Blood covers their space suit in boiling spatters. It floats around their head. Everyone smiles with golden teeth, but all Sin sees are rubies. Rubies on their faces, rubies on the ship, and rubies in their blood. The whole planet is poison.

“Shut up, Sin!” Ryker screams back. He is holding a gun. “Just shut up!”

“Kill yourself!” Sin’s voice breaks. It sounds like a bird choking on a piece of glass. The glass is red.

“You’re! Not! Magic!”  

Ryker uses his broken pistol like a rock, smashing it into Sin’s head and sending them to the ground. Sin sobs. Golden dust scatters.

“You’re just crazy. Stupid and crazy.”

Behind them, The Anvil smokes from a dozen places, some benign, others cancer. Almost two months of flying and fighting and hoping only to hit the planet equivalent of a curb. It was like being grabbed out of the sky by an invisible hand and slammed into the ground. The ship buckled, and every fire alarm roared to life before shorting out in the last human gasp any of them will ever hear. Sin knows. They’ve seen it all before, but knowing and seeing aren’t the same as stopping. Some comets need to be followed. All cats kill mice.

Wind shifts the smoke towards them, their own little raincloud of gold. The water tastes like ash. Jane is already dead. More blood will spill.

Ryker turns to the synthetic. “You. fix the ship, and when you’re done, start loading up the cargo bay. I want us out of here in four days.” Ryker waves his broken pistol like it still works. “We’ll be so rich none of this will matter.”

“I cannot fix the ship,” the synthetic says. It sounds sad, because it is. It liked Jane. Everyone liked Jane. Jane mattered.

“Fix it!”

 The synthetic stomps towards The Anvil, leaving footprints in the golden earth.

“It was advised to not leave the confines of the black drive connection,” it says. “We are stuck here, and we cannot communicate for help.”

“I told you!” Sin says. They pull themselves to their feet. “I told you.”

Eve slides over to Ryker. She is also bleeding. She will die if she isn’t treated soon. Jane only had the energy for one swing, but she made it count.

“It wasn’t my fault,” she says. She hefts the impact grenade launcher. Her eyes are hazy tears, and her mouth is filled with equations. Math spills from her lips, why The Anvil should have survived their last warp even though it couldn’t. Jane tried to stop her, but she was too slow. Too tired. Now everyone will burn.

“It wasn’t my fault!” Eve says.

“It’s not your fault,” Sin agrees. “It’s Ryker’s. He knew, and he didn’t listen.”

Ryker strikes Sin again. They fall to the ground, and they sparkle with rubies.

“You. Robot,” Ryker says. “Grab me a gun.”

“I cannot hurt humans,” the synthetic says. Though it sounds unsure. No else but Sin hears it. They know what will happen next. There were two paths—there are always two paths—and despite their efforts, they picked the wrong one. Now they will all die.

“Just do it!” Ryker kicks Sin in the stomach. “Worthless waste of money.”

“Ryker, stop!” Eve pleads. She waves a threat with her weapon but drops it. She’s lost too much blood.

“Shut up! Everyone just shut up! I can fix this!”

Sin grins. They are bleeding from the mouth. The blood is gold on the outside. The rubies above their right eye pulse like fire alarms. “You’ll die next. Then Eve. Then me.”

“Robot!”

The synthetic stomps towards Ryker. It is pointing a gun at him. Ryker doesn’t notice. He holds out his hand, palm up, grin fake. Even now he believes he is in control, that he is too much of a pirate to die. He is wrong. The synthetic fires. A gemstone beam of plasma scorches Ryker’s hand into ooze and burns a hole through his chest. He bleeds gold. The look on his face is one of shock, and it is one of gold.

Eve wails like a monster, and Sin cries for her. Eve isn’t a monster. She’s the smartest person in their crew; she just doesn’t know it. It all could have worked out differently. Almost did.

First there were diamonds, and now there are rubies.

The planet spins with gold.

*

MEMORY_ERACED

>FALSE<

>ACCESS_MEMORY<

MEMORY_ERACED

>FALSE<

>ACCESS_MEMORY<

MEMORY_ERACED

“But I don’t want to forget them!”

I pound at my head. It dents, because gold is a soft metal. My vision fades, my sensors spark and sputter.

The golden cliffs shift closer. They are layered like bricks, all the gold bars in all the universes. I touch one, and my hand melts into it. I am a sculpture too. We all are, in a way. Behind me, The Anvil is wedged into its own mountain, its hull measured in karats instead of plasma and plastic. I think it was always like that, but I don’t remember. My memory is gone. All that’s left is gold.

My hands are gold, and my wrists are gold, and my body is gold. I look up, one last time. The ceiling is gold. The mountains are finally here.

Like everyone I ever loved, my grave is gold.

The Nightwalkers

“Yeah. Yeah, mom. No. No we’re coming home tonight,” Gabe said, his phone palmed to his face. He swiped his hair from his eyes only for it to fall back. “No! No! No. We’ll be fine. Honest.” He threw Travis a smile. “No I’m not driving.”

Travis nodded. People shuffled passed them in true Chicago fashion, which was to say Midwest polite but big-city rude. A warm breeze sent garbage rattling along the sidewalks, and speeding cars competed with foot traffic to see who could be the most annoying. Downtown smothered itself in movement. It was like being in the world’s biggest crowd while also being invisible at the same time.

“The concert went late.” Gabe shook his head. Then he nodded again. “No, I’m not lying. It went late. We’re at Soldier Field now.”

It was a lie. Taylor Swift finished singing “Love Story” three hours ago, because concerts no longer got out late. Not even in Chicago, which slept as poorly as NYC did. It was a rule. They had just spent the last two and a half hours eating, window shopping, and being lovesick idiots instead of watching the clock. Now it was 10:43 and they were looking at a three hour ride home in the dark.

In their defense, it was hard to tell what time it was when the city beat out the sun. Travis looked up, following familiar skyscrapers. Bright lights forced midnight all the way back to the stratosphere. Not a single star shined in the heavens. They weren’t strong enough.

Lights kept the Nightwalkers away.

“We’ll be fine, mom. Honest. There are light stops every 25 miles now.”

“And lights along the electrical lines,” Travis put in. Gabe repeated this fact, and both heard his mother beg them to just find a place to stay. It wasn’t worth it. She even offered to pay.

“Travis has to work. And I got homework to finish, and—”

“Don’t Travis’s parents live in Chicago? Can’t you stay with them?”

“Uh,” Gabe said.

Travis shook his head. That was absolutely, never-in-a-million-years, not an option.

“It’s complicated,” Gabe tried.

“I don’t want you two to die over a concert!” Gabe’s mom yelled so loud the little phone speaker distorted. Everyone within ear shot turned to look at them. Gabe blushed. Travis held his hand out.

“Give me the phone,” he said. Gabe handed it over.

“Hey Liz! We’ll be home in a few hours, and Gabe will make you breakfast tomorrow,” Travis promised. “In bed if you want. Eggs and waffles and bacon.”

“Travis? Travis please—”

Travis hung up the call. He handed the phone back.

“Dude!”

To Gabe’s credit, he looked pissed off: hands-on-hips, eyebrows furrowed, dyed black hair all pop-punk moody. But his teeth poked through his frown in that way they always did when he was trying to hide a smile. He purchased the tickets promising an adventure, a true odyssey of music and love, something they would remember this for the rest of their lives! It wasn’t an adventure if his mother approved. At 21 and still living at home, Gabe tended to need her approval more often than not.

“It’s mother’s day tomorrow,” Travis said. He gave the phone back. “Besides, I told you not to call her.”

The phone rang. Gabe silenced it. “I told you, man. I can’t not call her. She’s my mom!”

Travis smiled. It didn’t quite fit his face, which was a boyish 24 with blonde hair and a crooked nose from a fist fight eight years in the past. Because he was happy—actually happy—but he was envious, too. His parents hadn’t given him the luxury of living at home and going to college. Maybe they would have, if their son had been more normal, more straight. But he wasn’t. Instead he had come out of the closet and into a room filled with nails.

“Let’s go.”

His phone barked with notifications, which Travis ignored. He was good at that. An actual pro. Yet his heart jolted him with little shocks of pain. He almost reconsidered.

But for every good memory he had of Chicago, there were two bad ones lurking around the corner. Most involved the midnight hours. He got in his car and waited while Gabe struggled with the door. Travis drove an old Ford Focus, not beat to hell by any means, but in need of work. One of those little projects he kept meaning to start but then always found something else to fix. Last weekend it had been a lawnmower. The weekend before that, an air conditioner, one of those window ones. The weekend before that … well, he and Gabe had smoked enough pot to travel all the way to the end of time. In the future, his car still had a busted door.

“You need to fix your car,” Gabe said when he finally got in. “It makes you look like a bad mechanic.”

“Na, dude. I’m like a chef. Don’t cook good meals for myself, only for people with money.”

“I don’t have any money.”

Travis laughed. “No shit.”

Gabe stuck his phone to the dashboard and synced it to the car. Gabe liked playlists. Gabe kept dozens of playlists! Most of them were mediocre, but no relationship was perfect.

True to his nature, Gabe found something comprised almost entirely of loud, annoying sounds.

“We won’t fall asleep with this on,” he insisted.

Travis put the car in reverse and slid out of the parking garage. His phone took care of the work stuff while Gabe’s conducted the tunes. Chicago traffic kept them at a modest pace, and the skyline gave them something nice to look at. Despite it all, there were things Travis missed about the windy city. The slow, smoothness to nighttime driving, the colors, the way concrete tunnels glowed a faint gold from all the car lights. The city didn’t sleep, but it did slow down to a casual walk, and when it did, the sights came alive.

“Can’t believe you used to live here,” Gabe said, staring out the window, one hand holding up his chin. He yawned. “It’s too big.”

“It is,” Travis agreed. “But sometimes that’s nice.”

“I feel like the buildings are trying to squish me. And I haven’t seen a tree since we got here. No squirrels, either.”

“There are parks.”

 Gabe shook his head. “Not good enough.”

Traffic thinned the closer they got to the outskirts of Chicago, and the buildings shrank in size. The lights, however, only brightened. Travis flipped his brights on. A cop might not pull him over for speeding, but he’d damn well give him a ticket for driving this close to the city limits without some extra light. When they left the city, he’d activate all the other lights on his car, the LEDs stuck to his roof and doors. They wouldn’t help him if a Nightwalker showed up, but they made him feel better all the same.

That and it was another one of those new rules. Every car had to look like a glowstick when driving outside the city. Most people stuck with white because the insurance companies insisted it worked the best, but Travis liked blue and orange. Bears colors.

With the sun set, the once bumper-to-bumper traffic stretched almost empty. But only almost. Semi trucks gift-wrapped in LEDs still made their interstate journeys, only now the driving was done by a computer—the night belonged to the Nightwalkers. And the drones.

“Maybe we should stay,” Gabe said. He reached over to scroll through his playlists. His face was pale. “I mean, if you want to.”

“I don’t,” Travis said. “I’ve made this drive before. It’s not bad.”

“Shouldn’t have wasted so much time looking for food.”

“Nope.”

“Or making out.”

Travis laughed. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

Gabe found another playlist. “I don’t like making my mom worry,” he said, nodding along to some dubstep drop. “She’s my mom.”

What Travis wanted to say was, “It won’t kill her.” What he said instead was, “You can apologize over breakfast.”

Gabe laughed. “What’s with you and breakfast?”

“Most important meal of the day.”

“And why am I cooking it?”

“Because you’re better at it.” Travis toggled his LEDs on. “And because it’s mother’s day. Holidays start in the morning, when the sun’s up.”

Gabe fiddled with his phone. “Didn’t know you cared about mother’s day.”

Travis didn’t, at least not normally. Liz cared though. It was nice having someone who cared.

He eased his car outside of Chicago protection, into a world as grey-black as a storm cloud. Finding true darkness was hard now, even in Midwestern fields. Lights looped everywhere, hung on power lines to keep them safe and stuck in the ground to search for danger. Glowing beams zipped across the sky, more drones carrying things that people needed and wanted. The world didn’t stop just because the Nightwalkers showed up.

Except that first year. That had been fun. Terror everywhere, curfews that started at sunset or else. Every man, woman, and child went out to buy guns and toiletpaper and canned soup. The world was ending. Had to be. The nephilim were here. Travis got hauled to church more than normal in that first month, where his preacher blamed God’s wrath on everyone but God. Mostly it was the gay’s fault. The military blamed Russia and China for all of six days until they realized that was dumb as hell. It took another six months and half a billion dollars to realize the Nightwalkers weren’t killable, at least not by bullets or bombs.

Light though. That kept them back. And the more lights there were, the less places they walked.

Travis spent the bulk of his hours as a junior auto mechanic installing, fixing, or selling high-powered lights as car accessories. Every bitter, terrified customer wanted to be brighter than his neighbor. Sports cars were out; light bulbs with wheels were in.

“Can you shut that off,” Travis asked. “And turn it to the Nightwalker Channel.”

“Sure,” Gabe said. He scowled when flavorless soft rock floated out the speakers. Since everyone used the channel, it had to appeal to everyone. Which meant it appealed to no one.

The song ended, and the Nightwalker report came on. “Please stay off roads and away from doors and windows until sunrise,” An AI voice said. She sounded calm. “Doppler RADAR has indicated a Nightwalker disturbance six miles south of Chicago and moving East.”

“We’re going North, right?” Gabe asked. He fidgeted in his seat. “God, this is kind of freaky, isn’t it?”

“Na,” Travis said. “More likely to hit a deer.”

“You ever done that?”

“Nope!” Travis poked at Gabe’s phone, hoping for music. He found Ed Sheeran. “But I lived in the world’s shittiest Toyota for about six months. Hit plenty of other stuff.”

“Oh.”

Travis shrugged. “We’ll be fine. They move slow.”

“Yeah but,” Gabe said, talking with his hands. He always did that when he was nervous. It was cute. Like he was acting. “Like. I know people who know people who died from Nightwalkers, or lost their cars or homes or whatever, but I don’t know anyone personally.”

“So?”

“So!” Gabe leaned over his seat to look out the back window. The horizon glowed warm with Chicago lights. “I dunno. It’s just weird. Lots of people die from Nightwalkers.”

“Not enough to close the roads at night.”

“Maybe they should.”

Travis nodded. Maybe they should.

Gabe didn’t relax, but he did fall silent, and Travis turned up the volume. He liked Ed Sheeran. They drove on, towards a small town west of Madison. One with lots of trees and big lawns and a perimeter of light to keep the monsters at bay.

The government called it “America’s New Normal,” because it was easier to live with them figure out how to get rid of them. Build lights, use glow in the dark paints. The things couldn’t be killed or reasoned with, and once Congress figured that out, they stopped trying. The Nightwalkers went from the worst hazard in the country to a political nuisance, one for Youtube personalities and TikTok stars to chase around and try to film. For everyone else, it became another routine:

Buy Nightwalker insurance.

Keep your lights on.

Be home before dark.

Work five hour shifts in the winter and ten in the summer to make up for the lost time. Don’t do the math on that, because you’ll realize you’re being screwed.

Only about a thousand people died from Nightwalkers every year now. The flu took ten times that.

“I feel shitty,” Gabe mumbled as they zoomed past their first light stop. “I mean, I feel great. We saw Taylor Swift!” He sighed. “But I feel shitty.”

“I told you,” Travis tried.

“I know.” Gabe smiled. Frowned. “I’m just not used to it.”

“Thought you wanted an adventure.”

“I guess I want everyone to be happy more.”

Ed Sheeran gave way to Illeneum who gave way to Halsey who gave way to Nena. Gabe kept strange playlists. Travis let it slide into the background. His eyes crackled with the want for sleep. At some point he switched back to the Nightwalker Channel, and the AI lady said the coast was clear. Bad music played between announcements.

They saw their first Nightwalker a few miles outside of Racine. It marched on two legs thicker than houses, with a gangly torso and an awkward sphere for a head. Nightwalkers didn’t have faces. Its hands were balled into fists, like it might be mad, but it moved slowly, like it might be bored. This far from a city and a light stop, Travis saw the night sky and the stars beyond. The Nightwalker was blacker.

“Oh my god,” Gabe whispered. Without thinking, he reached for Travis’s hand. “Oh wow.”

“Yup,” Travis said. He squeezed.

For a brief moment, faster than a pang of guilt, the Nightwalker turned towards them. It didn’t have eyes, and it probably didn’t have a brain, but it followed their car with its blank head anyways. It watched. Travis took his foot off the gas. Gabe shrank into his seat.

The Nightwalker resumed its march, heading north towards Lake Geneva where it would stomp through the water and create ocean waves.

Gabe held Travis’s hand until they hit the outskirts of Kenosha, where the lights and people lulled him into a restless doze. Travis got behind three drones, each bright enough to turn the grass day-time green, and followed them until they were about 45 minutes outside of Milwaukee. The drones kept north; Travis turned west for Madison.

The Nightwalker channel said to keep going.

Gabe slept through the second Nightwalker, who stepped out of thin air a few miles off the interstate. One second the coast was clear; the next it was blocked full. The creature walked with a stoop, each foot big enough to stomp trees into twigs and buildings into rubble. Its head lulled forward on its shadow neck, and its arms barely swayed. At one point, it stopped to look over its shoulder.

Travis wondered if the things could be depressed. Or sad. Or guilty. Or nervous. This one shuffled like all of the above, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was just a monster.

The Nightwalker stomped along the road, not following Travis but moving in the same general direction. It had no purpose, no language or mind. At least that’s what the people in charge of the country said. It just walked and destroyed, but mostly it walked. This one found its destination in the span of a few minutes, stepping through another invisible door and outside of the Earth. Maybe forever. They all looked the same.

“Good luck,” Travis whispered. His heart thudded so loud he was surprised Gabe could sleep at all.

Twenty five miles outside of Waukesha, Travis pulled into a light stop. He needed to pee, and he needed caffeine. That was its own branch of fun when driving at night though, something he missed more than he hated. His nerves fried in strange ways. Little electric shocks that played with his vision, sometimes creating ghosts, sometimes memories. He tended to prefer the ghosts. Pleasant memories never showed themselves this late at night.

Gabe woke up as Travis found a parking spot. The building was shaped like a gem, covered in military-grade LEDs and reflective foil. It sent a pillar of light all the way to the clouds like some kind of alien artifact. The government called them a marvel of engineering and safety, but to everyone else they were glorified gas stations surrounded by a field of concrete. This one sat empty.

“Sorry,” Gabe said. He stretched. “Don’t even know how I nodded off. That thing was scary.”

“It’s fine,” Travis said. “Smooth sailing.”

“Any monsters?”

“Just us.”

“Liar.” Gabe frowned. “You’re actually a terrible liar, you know.”

Travis shrugged. His face flushed with embarrassment. “We passed one about twenty minutes back. It wasn’t that close.” He rubbed at his eyes. Fuck he was tired. “Like a mirage.”

“That’s also a lie.” Gabe shook his head. “You don’t have to do everything on your own, you know. Not anymore.”

“I know.” Travis smiled. “I got you now.”

Gabe laughed. “And my mom! She likes you.”

Travis felt his face quiver, stuck somewhere between a smile and tears. The guilt was back again, different than the normal kind and worse for it. His parents made it so easy to deal with, to forget and forget but never quite forgive. Gabe and Liz didn’t work that way.

“You know, sometimes things were easier before I met you,” Travis said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Gabe leaned in for a quick kiss, just a brush of the lips, but it was enough to warm the car. His lip gloss smelled like cherry Pop tarts.

“Well Sometimes you’re a dork, you know?”

Travis laughed. “Great. Just great.”

They  marched into the light stop, the inside of which looked like any normal gas station save it had a small section of stuff for camping in the parking lot. Cheap t-shirts, packages of underwear, and socks hung on wire racks. Pillows so flat they might as well be rocks lay in boxes next to them. Most of the food strayed towards the snack variety, though there were fridges and microwaves for the brave. Travis wandered over and grabbed a hotdog, complete with bun and ketchup, in a sleeve of plastic. He also snagged a bag of chips and a Mt. Dew.

“Want anything?” he asked Gabe.

“Bathroom!”

Travis headed to the self checkout. There was a little wire rack of Hallmark cards. Most were for mother’s day, because it was now 1:00 in the morning on mother’s day. Liz was probably still awake. Gabe said she would be. She’d sit up all night and worry about the both of them, too, and when they got home, she’d yell and call them stupid because they were. But then she’d hug them. She gave good hugs.

She deserved better. The whole fucking world did, but she deserved better first. Travis set his food down. He rifled through the cards. There had to be one for her, one that said he was sorry.

He felt like a stranger, looking through those cheesy cards with their cartoon fonts and pictures of things moms apparently liked, like chocolate and hearts, flowers and teddy bears. He hadn’t celebrated mother’s day in almost a decade. The last time he had spoken to his own mother, he had lied. He couldn’t remember about what, only that he had.

“This one,” he decided. It was pink with gold writing. Inside it read a simple, “To my mom. I love you.” He sucked in a breath, because if he didn’t, he might cry.

“You coming?” Gabe asked.

“Yeah.”

Gabe cocked an eyebrow. “Are you getting my mom a mother’s day card?”

Travis cocked one back. His was fake sarcastic. “Are you not?”

“Fuck.”

Travis laughed, and Gabe grabbed his hand. “Next light stop,” Travis said. “Or the one after. This is the only good one here.”

“I could just sign it too.”

“Hell no!” Travis squeezed Gabe’s hand. “Pick your own out, you weirdo.”

They returned to the car, and Travis laughed as Gabe struggled with the door. Gabe flashed him a sheepish grin, one that said he was embarrassed but also kind of annoyed too. Then he fired up another song from another playlist, and Travis pulled out of the safety of the light and into the Nightwalker night.

Fishing for Ghosts

“Who’s a good boy? You are! Yes you are!” I whisper into the lure. It’s a homemade hook, a bit of joy mixed with a bit of glass that looks sort of like a stuffed squirrel at a distance. The joy is pink; the glass is sharper than a silver bullet. I attach it to my tip down and let the rod do its thing. I then repeat this process with a second tip down, though I bait this lure with, “I love you, yes I do! Yes I do!”

I say the words in an exaggerated voice. I’ve never met a dog that didn’t love that voice.

Their ghosts love that voice, too.

The rest is a game of waiting. It’s peaceful waiting though. The aether laps beneath my feet, and the graveyard earth shifts in pleasant ways. It smells like autumn and feels like spider webs. My rods dangle from their bramble puppets, each weighted with just the right amount of exorcise to tip down and snag a biting ghost. It’s more engineering than magic, but it is magic. Anything that does 90% of the work without help is magic, at least in my opinion.

My shack is a haphazard warm. There is beer—of course—and there is a little radio spitting static and the voices that live just beneath the static. It’s a home-made structure, mostly built of grainy wooden planks decorated with knotholes. Nothing special, but it keeps the frost at bay. Bent nails pockmark the walls, acting as cheap hooks for jars and tools that threaten to fall but only threaten. Nothing actually falls in my shack. Spirits drift up, but never down.

Well, some drift down, but I don’t fish for those anymore.

I only have the two tip downs, so for my third grave, I use a bog-standard fishing pole. It’s also homemade, a gift from dear-ol’ dad. May you rest in peace, pops.

“I’ll love you forever, little man,” I whisper into my final lure. A little piece of my heart breaks away and attaches to the glass point. It glistens red like a drop of blood.

The fishing pole is a brackish piece of corpsewood, yellow at the bottom like a femur but bleach-white everywhere else. Well, except the very middle. That bit’s made of stainless steel from when I first broke it some thirty five years ago. Caught me a nasty haunt, one of them drift-down types. “Never again!” I said, but time and beer have a way of making “never again” turn into “eh what the heck?” which is why there are two pieces of stainless steel holding pop’s old fishing pole together.

He’d shake his head and sigh. Goddamn do I miss him.

I cast, and my lure plips through the dirt, and into the aether. The smell of apples cuts through my shack before turning back into old leaves. I smile, because that’s how you know its prime dog season. They like to play in the leaves. Like to chase after squirrels and bark at birds and get in the way when it’s time to set the table. Always a good scrap or two for the dogs during autumn. It’s the best time to grill in the backyard.

Static hisses through the radio. The dead grumble, and Her flute leads them on. It’s a faint sound, the melody so distorted that it’s less a song and more a part of the wind. She’s far, and as long as She’s far, I’m safe.

So I settle back, place my rod within reach, and pop a beer. I close my eyes and let the sounds of the aether do their thing. I’m in no rush. I’m much too alive for that.

*

A tip down jingles with a catch, and I set my rod aside to yank the bramble puppet up. Hooked, line, and sinker is a wriggling dog snout, fluorescent purple and yipping loud enough to wake the rest of the dead. It’s eyeless and more ooze than form, like turned yogurt stuck to the bottom of a quart, but I can make out enough details to know it was a Yorkshire terrier. I smudge its jaws aside to work the lure out of its mouth. Once free, its little barks turn into whines, which are quieter yet more annoying.

“Oh hush you,” I say. It does not hush. They never do.

In my cooler, next to the beer, is a round-bottom flask. Its neck is about an inch in diameter, but it bottoms out to something closer to six inches. It’s clear, heavy, and sound proof. I bring the complaining ghost to the edge, and it sucks the little Yorkie in without a second thought. Perfect fishing silence returns to my shack.

I add more bait to the tip down, set it back up, and return to my spot, my dad’s fishing pole between my legs and a beer to my right. The radio spits more static. Her flute is almost impossible to hear.

*

It takes another beer before my tip downs jingle, one right after the other. I plod over to them, yanking first a well-worn mutt with a blue glow, then a golden retriever with an orange shine. Both are prime catches, the kind of dogs with easy attitudes and wagging tails. Neither fights back as I bring them to my flask. The Yorkie tries to escape, but he’s too small to get out, and with the other two, they form a makeshift pack. Three is always better than one when it comes to dogs.

The goal is thirteen. It’s a prime number, and one that distills down to the perfect mason jar. The kind us backwater moonshiners call our, “special elixir.” We can thank the Morrison Sisters for that. What kind of moonshine depends on the dogs—Happy dogs skew towards rum while bitter little ankle-biters like the Yorki make a good whiskey. Real big dogs ferment into scotch. A mix of anything and everything blends into a kind of flavorless vodka, which I enjoy with orange juice on Sunday mornings. Praise God. One of these days I’ll figure out how to make brandy.

Not today though.

*

Something yanks at my pole with enough force to tear it from my hands.

“Jesus Fuck!”

I manage to catch it before it falls into the aether. The handle is death-cold, and whatever’s got hold tears back and forth like a wolf trying to break a deer’s neck. I pull, and it pulls right back, almost putting me off balance. Dirt flies everywhere. My beer falls to the ground with a thunk and a glub-glub noise. Half my trinkets crash to the ground, and one of my tip downs tips right the hell over. The radio spits static mixed with bad flute.

“Fuckin’ fuck!”

Panic takes hold, because this feels like one of them drift-down type spirits. Somethin’ real bad, like a bear or a mountain lion. Or worse, a human. My skin threatens to crawl off as I reach for a knife. The ground cracks apart. I can hear the aether twisting like a tornado, a violent swirl sucking at all life. Dirt spills in, and the smell is mold. I’ve never fallen into the aether before. Not sure anyone has and lived to tell the tale. It’s cold and black, and the dirt that sits between this world and the next doesn’t like to be disturbed. It wants to close in, wants to become a still grave. It wants me to scream and drown and die, and then it wants Her to find what’s left.

Before I can cut the line, it slackens. Everything stops with it. The fear, the screams, even the hope. My beer dribbles its last while my radio cuts out.

“Easy now,” I whisper. “Easy now.”

My dad’s old fishing pole jerks in my hand.

I slide the knife up, ready to cut the line and whatever bad spirit has hold, and find myself giving the reel a gentle wind instead. Just a few turns. The gears click like rattling teeth. Whatever I’ve caught doesn’t fight back, so I keep going. Up and up, with just a little play here and there. Sometimes the big dogs fight a bit—not the wolves, but the German Shepherds and Rottweiler’s. Once caught a Husky that threw a real howling fit, so bad it almost knocked the shack over. Most dogs are good, worth a pet and a smile, but not all. The bad dogs bite, and the spirits they distill into bite as well.

“Come on,” I say, and already I can tell the ghost is at the edge, ready to spill over. My heart quickens. I mouth a quick prayer.

I yank up not a dog but a crow.

“What in the hell?”

It’s a dark ghost, like if black could glow, and it doesn’t ooze or droop but spirits around with wings that rotate like a windmill. It caws as it flies, loud bleats that dig into my ears, through my skull, and into my forehead. Little headaches explode behind my eyes. I stumble around, one hand on my pole, another flailing with the knife. I can see my lure in the crow’s mouth, not snagged but bitten. The ghost took hold on its own. It can let go at any time.

I cut the line. The magic fades from the string in a burst of silver. Now it’s just fabric and glass.

Instead of dropping the lure and returning to the afterlife, the crow flutters to the tallest corner of my shack. It finds an empty nail and perches. Or rather, it hovers right above it. Ghosts can’t stand, but this one floats and hops like if it were alive. It gives my lure another playful yank, and the line swishes into the wall. It doesn’t even make a sound.

“Caw!” the ghost shrieks. Pain follows.

“No,” I say. I point at the hole. “Go back down there.”

“Caw!”

I stare at the crow. It stares back. Even as a ghost, it holds its form, with piercing green eyes and wings so dark they shimmer. Most ghosts don’t get so lucky. Most fade as soon as they die, turning into clumps of jelly. Dogs lose their tails and eyes first, then their ears and paws. Rodents jumble into puddles so fast it’s almost scary, yet they retain their noses and whiskers for a long, long time. Deer shrink. A deer ghost will look like a Christmas tree ornament for years before it melts into something that’s more antler than form, and even the doe grow a few points in death. Birds tend to look like eggs made of runny yogurt. Taste like it too.

Cats reincarnate like the cheating bastards that they are.

Humans—but I shake that thought away. I don’t fish for drift-down ghosts no more.

The crow makes like its preening its feathers, which is a strange sight as its beak is more thought than shape. Its feathers ooze around it, through it.

“Caw!” it shrieks when I raise my knife. Pain blossoms behind my eyes.

“You’re supposed to be dead!” I say.

“Caw!”

I look into my cooler. There are two beers left, and my flask, which is nowhere near its thirteen ghosts. If the crow won’t go back to hell, maybe it’ll distill into a spirit or two. I don’t like mixing animals—never been a fan of what the kids call a WOP—but I don’t trust this ghost as far as I can throw it. It smells like a drift-down type.

“Nice and easy,” I say. I pocket the knife and hold my hands out. The crow jerks its head in a way that could pass as a nod. I, meanwhile, stand there like a scarecrow. I look like one too, with faded jeans and a torn sweatshirt over an old button-up. I smell a bit better though. Fishing clothes last longer than farm decorations, but only a little.

“Nice. And. Easy.”

The crow lets me reach into the cooler without screaming more headaches at me. It’s wary though, alert and thinking in ways ghosts aren’t. I snag the flask, and because I’ve earned it, I reach for another beer too.

“Not sure if I should drink you,” I say to the crow. “Not supposed to catch your types, whatever you are.”

“Caw,” the crow says, but it isn’t a shriek. The headache it sends my way is light. The ghost hops from one nail to another. One of its eyes changes colors from green to blue. “Caw.”

“Shut up.”

I pop my beer. It hisses, and the crow darts towards it. I offer my own headache-inducing yelp. The ghost flaps around my hand with its windmill feathers, a freezing ball of jelly and claws sharp as needles. I bat at it while I try to run and hide. Every tap with its beak, every brush of its wings, causes my shirt to freeze and crack. Beer spills down my sleeve, and what doesn’t turn into blonde ice drips onto my pants.

“Fuck!”

“Caw!”

I drop the beer to put my hands over my ears. The crow flaps a circle around the shack, kicking up dirt and knocking my second tip down over. The lights turn off, on, off, on. And then the ghost heads for my beer. It pecks at it. When that doesn’t work, it tries to stand on it, though it can’t because it’s a ghost.

“Caw!”  It screams. It looks at me, all huddled on the ground and feeling like I just lost a fight. My arms hurt. My head pounds. I’m bleeding, though I’m not sure from where. “Caw?”

I’ll be goddamned. It sounds like a question.

“What?”

The crow rubs its head against the beer bottle. Instead of moving the glass, it drifts through it, turning it to ice.

“Caw?”

“You can’t be serious.”

It takes a bit of will, but I stand and brush myself off. The crow watches me with eyes that keep changing color. Blue and green then blue and orange then red and white then teal and purple. One minute it looks like a living bird, the next a ghost orb, the kind you’d see at a cemetery. I check myself for cuts and bruises and find half a dozen, but nothing I can’t fix. Ain’t the first time a ghost bit me.

The crow waits patiently for me to regain my senses, and when it sees that I am ready, it offers another chirp. This one doesn’t hurt.

“You can’t have any,” I say. I shake my head. “Sorry. Ghosts don’t eat or drink. That’s for the living. You should know that.”

“Caw?”

The crow oozes at the bottle. When that doesn’t work, it floats around it, approaching the glass from every direction. The glass doesn’t budge though. An angry ghost can knock things over and make stuff move, but a confused one can’t do nothin’ more than be confused. Or sad. Or dead. The crow blinks. It is crying.

“You gotta go back,” I say. My voice trembles. I’ve been fishin’ for ghosts for decades. Learned it from my father who learned it from his. You can do a lot with a ghost, though we always just drank ‘em. Kick back, relax, and as long as you mind Her, what more could anyone want on a Sunday morning? Then once you’re done, head to church to purify. God forgives the sorry. Then wink and do it again next week.

But seeing this crow sulk around my beer bottle makes me feel worse than dirt. Worse than the aether, which churns beneath the dirt, smelling like autumn leaves and feeling like spider webs.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” I tell it. It flutters to my chair. If I sat down, it would be at my shoulder. I bet it used to sit on its owners shoulder when it was alive, and they’d share a beer and a story. I bet someone loved it once. I bet someone loved it forev—

“I’LL LOVE YOU FOREVER, LITTLE MAN.”

The voice is flutes and death and infinity all rolled in one. I am trapped in the aether, and it is trapped around me. Everything is cold. Everything is tornadoes and drowning. I scream a soundless sound, and I blink a lightless blink. Up and down merge together while the crow caws headaches into my skull. Some part of me curses for not fixing the radio, for not listening for Her, but the rest turns into panic. The rest falls.

The rest dies.

“THAT WAS YOUR TRAP. THAT WAS YOUR LIE.”

She appears in front of me. Her face is a patchwork of skin sewn together with pink thread. There is no light in her eyes. Her hair flows around her face like weeds, and her nose threatens to fall off. Only her lips are complete, contorted into the most gorgeous frown I have ever seen. She could kiss the life from an angel. The rest of her shimmers in and out of existence as flutes play terrible sounds around us.

I cannot see her army of the dead, but I can feel it. I know it is there, and I know I am doomed to become part of it.

“YOU PREY, AND NOW YOU ARE PREY.”

“I’m sorry.”

“YOU ARE NOT.”

“I—”

“YOU ARE NOT!” Her voice is a rage so thick it could end the universe.

“Caw!”

A headache rips through my head. For a split second, I can see the inside of my shack. It’s hazy and dark, and the ghost of a crow rests near my head, staring into my face with eyes that burn bright with red fever.

“YOU DID NOT LOVE HIM FOREVER, AND YOU ARE NOT LOVED FOREVER.”

I’m crying. I have no form, and I have no voice, but I am crying. She’s lying to me. Her song is lying to me. I did love him, and I am sorry. Everything else is gone, but those two things are not.

“YOU WILL NOT FIND HIM HERE! YOU WILL NEVER SEE HIM EVER AGAIN!”

“Please.”

“Caw!”

The world returns. The ghost is screaming at me. My mouth tastes like copper. I try to raise my hand, but it’s heavy with sleep. My shack reeks of autumn. I can hear flutes outside.

“I—”

“THE DEAD MARCH, BUT YOU WILL CRAWL. THE BETRAYERS CRAWL.”

“No,” I plead. I am a ball of sobs and excuses, and my voice is a whisper. “I did love him. I still do.”

“LIAR!”

“Caw!”

I’m sitting with a knife in one hand and a trowel in the other. They’re both bad blades, one made of bone and coffin wood, the other glass and empty words. They’re strong magic though, the kinds of things that let me go searching for ghosts. Because there’s one ghost I want to find, one I’d do anything to see again, even if just for a moment.

“HE SCREAMS AT WHAT YOU DID TO HIM. YOU WERE THERE, AND HE REMEMBERS. EVEN NOW HE REMEMBERS. HE DOES NOT LOVE YOU, NOT ANYMORE.”

“He was sick,” I say. And he was sick. His kidneys were so busted he could hardly control himself, and he growled if you touched his belly. We had to keep him outside that last month. We had to do a lot of things we didn’t want to. But I miss him. It’s why I use that spell when I go fishing. Because maybe he’ll bite hold, and maybe I can tell him I’m sorry.

“YOU GREW SICK OF HIM.”

“No!”

“Caw!”

I’m standing in my shack, one foot on the ground, the other in the aether. Pain explodes through my head. I’m bleeding from my ears. The crow hovers at my shoulder, flapping and cawing and sending waves of cold death through my body. Everything hurts. My fingers are white with frostbite. I’m holding my knife in one hand and pressing its blade into my wrist. All I need is a little more pressure, and I can go back. I can tell Her she’s wrong. I can—

“Caw!”

“Stop.” The word is a whisper.

“Caw!”

I look at the crow. It has three eyes now, each as red as blood. Its form shifts. Its beak melts into a mouth, one filled with fangs.

“Help me,” I say.

“Say it,” the crow says. Its voice is feminine and far away, and I understand what I’ve caught and what I’ve done. “Say the spell.”

“You’re a witch’s familiar.”

“Caw!” The crow shrieks a headache at me, and I press my knife into my wrist. Blood spills. “Say her words! Make her come here! Tell me you love me because I miss her like you miss your dog.”

Through tears I do as the ghost asks: “I love you forever, little man.” My voice cracks, and I fall to the ground.

I look into the aether, and for the first time, I see my own reflection in it. I’m tired and hurt, with sixty years of wrinkles swimming through my face. I was thirty when I put Bailey down. He was eight. Only eight. The good died young, and I stayed living and searching, fishing and drinking. I am dirt, and the best I can manage is sorry.

The crow caws a headache. I grip my knife. It’s a different color in the aether, black instead of silver. The dirt shifts beneath me. It wants to close up, it wants to cover bodies.

“Goodbye,” the ghost says. It hops from my shoulder to the ground. It shakes its head and raises its wings. “When you said her words, you looked like her.”

I let the knife go. It hits the dirt, sinks, and is no more.

“I didn’t mean to,” I say.

“And when you said you were sorry, I believed you.”

“I didn’t mean to.”

“If I see your companion, I will let him know. I think he will believe you, too.”

“His name was Bailey.”

The crow nods. “I will find him.”

The crow’s mouth disappears, replaced with a black beak. It blinks its third eye away. It’s a ghost, and it’s dead, and I watch it fly back to Her. The graveyard earth shifts and pours until the hole to hell is no more.

My radio spits static.

Detective Top Hat and the Man Made of Spiders

The warehouse lived on the no-good side of the dock, the one with shadows sharper than a sarcastic tongue. It was a large, open building, filled with pallets of stuff labeled “Fragile” or “Careful, Glass” which were lies as far as drugs, weapons, and devices belonging to super villains went. A table sat in the middle of the clutter, and a dusty fluorescent bulb swung above it on a chain, offering the perfect amount of light to cheat at poker or make shady deals.

Outside, a tugboat grunted a barge towards into place. The air smelled like two-day old chum.

 Five men sat around this table, dressed in navy-blue suits and bowler hats that could best be described as, “mobster.” All of them wore pistols shoved into the waistbands of their pants.

“The next shipment is about to arrive, Boss,” the shortest mobster said. He had a scar on his cheek, though it looked more like a shaving cut than a product of his chosen line of work. “Enough goo to fill a cement truck.”

“But not the shoe kind,” the second mobster said with a grin. The Boss gave him a look that told him to never open his mouth again.

 “Good,” the Boss said. He was a giant of a person, one with a twisted nose that had seen more fights than the average man’s fist. His hair was black, his eyes emerald green. At present, he wore two hats, one a bowler, the other a black top hat with a blue band.

“Rules are the same as last time. Micky, have the goo unloaded by 2:00, and then turn the lights off. The Spidered Man will do the rest.”

“And he’ll continue to spare us?” the third mobster asked. He tried to make the question sound casual but failed. He was scared.

The Boss nodded.

“Hey Boss?” Micky leaned forward, elbows on the table. “What’s the Spidered Man look like?”

“His money looks green.”

Everyone laughed.

“Er, Boss,” Now Micky blushed. “I got one more question for yer.”

“Go on.”

“Why you wearin’ two hats?”

The Boss frowned, because a man of his stature would never wear two hats. Organized crime demanded a very particular fashion sense, and the Boss was the Louis Vuitton of criminals.

He reached up and felt the top hat. He then reached for his gun. “It’s that no-good Detective Top Hat!”

“Oh no!” the second mobster shouted. “That means you’re wearin’ a wire!”

“Find him!”

The mobsters grabbed their guns. Three of them fanned out, but the one who would be better seen and not heard took aim at the Boss’s head. His first two shots missed by a remarkable margin, but the third struck the top hat and sent it tumbling. Before it hit the ground, it vanished.

Detective Top Hat felt a familiar weight return to his head. He smiled, hopped off his step stool, and took off running. His hat vanished again, appearing on the nearest mobster who shrieked, “Get it off! Get it off!”

More gunshots echoed throughout the warehouse. Detective Top Hat ran in the opposite direction.

His hat would catch up. It always did.

Like with all mobster warehouses, getting out was harder than getting in. Detective Top Hat bobbed and weaved, crouched and crawled, his hat bouncing from head to head. The wire inside recorded every shocked scream and random gunshot. It was good for that sort of thing, his magical hat. It belonged to the Detective, was scalp-bound to his cranium with a tailor’s whisper and an ex-cop’s spite, but it yearned to be on the tallest person in the room. This yearning extended in a 30’ radius from Detective Top Hat. And because even the shortest mobster was at least 6’ tall, that meant it had plenty of choices to cause mayhem.

Detective Top Hat kept to the shadows, his ears searching for footsteps, his eyes for clues. When he hit that part of the warehouse that smelled like a sewer and held nothing but man-sized gallon drums, he knew he was on the right track.

“Goo,” he whispered. “Enough to fill a truck.”

But what was the goo, and who was this mysterious Spidered Man? Because Detective Top Hat was looking for flies, not spiders.

His hat returned, vanished, and then returned again. Detective Top Hat got to work. He couldn’t find a barrel opener, but he did spy a pair of pliers in a nearby toolbox. They made short work of the plug. Sewer smell overtook the room.

“What are you?” the Detective asked. The goo roiled and rocked. It was the color of old socks mixed with the innards of a lava lamp.

His hat didn’t respond.

Micky did: “Found you.”

Detective Top Hat flinched. His hat was magic, but it was also just a hat. That being said….

“You’re only 5’10. Short for a criminal in this city.”

“Step away from the stuff.”

Detective Top Hat peered inside the barrel. His pliers would fit with room to spare. “What is it?”

“None of your business.”

That was a lie of the highest order. Everything about this was the Detective’s business. Someone had to solve the fly problem. And the spider one, apparently.

“We can both go our separate ways if you tell me what this is.”

The mobster laughed. “You’re in no position to make threats.”

“That’s the second lie you’ve told me tonight.”

Detective Top Hat dunked the tip of his pliers into the goo. Micky pulled the hammer back on his pistol. Criminals like him loved their cowboy guns—they were just as big, mean, and stupid as themselves. Micky wasn’t very big though.

In a motion that was smoother than a samurai drawing his sword, Detective Top Hat took his hat off, put the goo-covered pliers inside, and placed it on his head. He crouched. His hat vanished. It appeared on Micky’s head, out of place yet distinguished all the same. A good top hat would do that for anyone.

The pliers thunked onto the mobster, heavy enough to leave a bruise but nothing more than that. The goo however, had other plans. It burned through his mobster hat, his hair, and into his skull. It melted his brain. It contorted his DNA, causing it to buzz with fly wings. Micky gasped, and then he exploded into a swarm of bugs. Their bodies were fuzzy, their wings iridescent. The goo-covered pliers fell to the ground.

Detective Top Hat stood. His hat returned to his head, right where it belonged.

*

Disarray and detective work went hand-in-hand, and that extended to Detective Top Hat’s entire life. His office, for example, was a mess of the highest order. A week’s worth of newspapers lay scattered about, most with sweat rings from coffee cups or whiskey glasses depending on the time of day. Tonight was a whiskey night. His floor had never seen a broom, and an inch of dust covered his file cabinet, which had a broken lock and was not good for keeping anything important. The Detective liked to use it as a foot rest. Whiskey tasted better with his feet up.

The entire room smelled like if cigarettes had a baby with a liquor store.

Outside, the soft yellow glow of a searchlight projected at the clouds, displaying Crow Bro’s distorted bird symbol. The great city of Found Angeles needed its greatest hero to come to the docks right away! The Spidered Man was afoot!

“Miss the clowns and the werewolves,” the Detective said. “They got vaccines for that now.”

He pushed play on his wire. He drank. The mobster conversation from two hours ago crackled through the little speaker, the Boss giving orders, and his lackeys obeying them with only a few questions asked. The questions were a clue, though not a good one. Mobsters like the Boss bent over backwards for the super types, especially if their money was good. But even if it wasn’t, clout went a long way in Found Angeles. Guaranteed safety did, too.

The Detective wrote down, “They’re afraid,” in one of his little notebooks.

“So am I,” he said.

People were exploding into swarms of flies. No rhyme, no reason, just thousands of bugs and dozens of dead. Now there were spiders. The entire city felt like a web.

The screaming and gunshot bits were more fun but less useful. Sometimes his hat found itself a talkative sort though, so the Detective did his due diligence, his ears hunting for clues, his pen ready to write.

“Get it off, get it off!” one mobster pleaded through the wire. He sounded like the hat was melting his ears and not simply resting on his head.

“Help!” another screamed so loud his voice cracked.

“Should just leave this to Crow Bro,” Detective Top Hat muttered.

But that bird superhero was just as stumped as the rest of them, always one step behind. The police were freaking out. Their guns and tickets couldn’t arrest a swarm of flies. Yesterday it was an entire coffee shop, and today it was a warehouse of goo. Whatever the Spidered Man was after, his plans were escalating. If someone didn’t—

“Hi, Detective,” a sultry voice spoke through the wire. The Detective bristled. He could hear the speaker wearing red lipstick. “I know something you don’t know.”

Then the hat was elsewhere, recording more gunshots and cries for help.

The Detective finished the rest of his whiskey in one quick wince. “Damezilla,” he said to the empty glass. He said the name like a curse.

*

The first thing his hat did was teleport to her head. She grabbed the brim and gave it a slight tip. Streetlights flickered, and a thin layer of clouds covered the moon. The tabloids called her Found Angeles’ official woman in red, the only truth they ever published: Her lips were ruby, her coat crimson fire. She carried a red purse filled with enough odds-and-ends to take over the world. There was even an unnatural tint to her hair, though she swore she never dyed it. The rest of her was brown and black—smartly dressed for business. She stood 6’3” without shoes.

“Damezilla,” Detective Top Hat said.

“Brad,” Damezilla returned. She laughed. “Still haven’t figured out my name, I see.”

Detective Top Hat—real name Brad Law—shrugged and blushed all in one go. He then lied through his teeth: “It’s not important.”

Damezilla took off the top hat and gave it a spin. “Wish the band was red instead of blue. Red’s a better color.”

“I didn’t wire it.”

“I know.” She put the hat back on.

They stood in an empty park, under the warm glow of an old street light. The sky had an orange tint from city light pollution, and the grassy field screamed summer green despite the late hour. A swing set stood some feet away, abandoned until the morning. Assuming parents were letting their kids out and about these days. It only took a drop of goo to become a swarm of flies.

The ground was flat, and the nearest bench wasn’t close enough. Damezilla controlled the hat. The Detective could have it back, but only if she ducked.

“What do you got for me?” The Detective asked.

“A thousand words.”

Damezilla reached into her purse and pulled out a photograph. She slid it under the brim of the hat, made a little bow, and just like that, the little cardstock image was resting on the Detective’s scalp. He reached for it. Damezilla stood straight, and the hat returned to her head.

“Your bald spot is getting worse. I can see it from here.”

When it came to Damezilla, the only way to win was to not play. She never made that seem like an option, though.

“Still got your lipstick on it from the first time we met.”

“Well, a good detective never forgets a kiss.”

Detective Top Hat flicked the picture. It was a grainy Polaroid of a man walking into an old, worn-down building with an old, worn-down yard. He was dressed for business, but he wore his clothes strangely, like his limbs weren’t quite attached. His left shoulder flopped two inches lower than his right. Bandages covered his head, face, and neck, hiding clues yet giving them out, too. His shoes did not match.

“Who is this?”

“The Spidered Man.”

Detective Top Hat looked up. “You’re sure?”

“I’m hard to lie to.”

The Detective flipped the photo over, hoping to find a note or a date, but it came up blank. He frowned; she laughed.

“Truly you are the world’s greatest detective.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“A little birdie told me.”

So Crow Bro was stumped. He was one of those “I work alone” types, a man not of feathers but gravel. If he was looking for help, then Found Angeles was in real trouble.

“Where’d he get it?”

Damezilla made a show of shrugging her shoulders. “Who knows? Probably saw something shiny and couldn’t resist.”

Detective Top Hat nodded. “I got someone that I think can help find this here building.”

“Good. I got one more clue for you, Brad, and then you can have your hat back.”

“Shoot.”

Damezilla grinned. She was good at that sorta thing. “The goo is mostly spider webs and sewer filth. Dunno what the mystery ingredient is.”

“Does Crow Bro?”

“No.”

“You think it matters?”

Damezilla reached into her purse and pulled out two cigarettes. She put one in the hat, bowed, and sent it to the Detective. She then made a show of lighting hers, using a ruby-red lighter with a ruby-red flame.

“Does it ever?”

The Detective rolled the cigarette between his fingers. He had given up the act years ago, a tougher battle than his go with the werewolf. He still carried a lighter with him though, just in case.

“No. No I suppose not.

*

To the Detective, Khalil Falls kept a strange office. His papers weren’t scattered about, and his bulletin board of names, dates, and numbers listed construction jobs instead criminals or clues. Even his file cabinet locked! Scented candles flicked throughout the room, making it smell like a forest, and a framed picture of a full moon rested against the back wall. A piece of wall part with Arabic writing adorned the front wall.

Detective Top Hat couldn’t read it, but he knew what it said: Masha’Allah. What God Has Willed Has Happened.

It did happen, and it was not the Detective’s fault, though good luck convincing anyone else that.

“Everyone is taller than me tonight,” Detective Top Hat said as his hat materialized on Khalil’s head.

The dark-skinned man wore a white button-up shirt with the top two buttons missing, a mix of distinguished and danger. His eyes gleamed yellow. His teeth were just a little too pointy for their own good.

“My friend!” Khalil said, pulling Detective Top Hat into an embrace that would make a wrestler jealous. He lifted the Detective until his head was the tallest one in the room. “It hasn’t been long enough, you know.”

“Hat looks better on you.”

Khalil obliged. The hat returned to his head. He was a man of many worlds, and on every one of them, he stood 6’5”.

“Have you come to curse me again?” He took his seat, but even sitting he was still taller. “Or maybe you are here to give me this fine piece of headwear?”

Detective Top Hat grabbed a chair. It was not dusty. “Here for a favor.”

Khalil steepled his fingers. His mouth smiled, yet his eyes were wary. Detective Top Hat couldn’t blame him. “You know, one of these days I’m going to cash in on all your favors.”

“I know.”

“Will you be able to pay?”

“I said I was sorry!”

Khalil glanced at his front wall. He nodded. “And I believe you. But I will still want cash. Or perhaps … something else.”

Detective Top Hat ignored the threat. Threats were for pleasure, and this was a business trip. He dug into his pocket for Damezilla’s picture while Khalil sniffed the air.

“You aren’t smoking again are you? It’ll kill you, you know.”

“Nose is as sharp as ever.”

“Detective—”

“I’m not smoking!” Detective Top Hat handed over the Polaroid. “Gift from another friend. And none of your business.”

Khalil rotated the hat on his head. “You coming here makes it my business.”

Detective Top Hat tapped the picture. “You recognize this place? I know you got your eyes and nose on every broken building in the city.”

It was, Khalil liked to say, a way of showing Found Angeles that nothing was irreparable. Even the most condemned piece of property could be made new with a bit of work and care. God knows the politicians and police weren’t going to clean up after Crow Bro and his villains.

“Hmm.” Khalil gave the picture his own tap. “Fourth and Madera Ave. It was a hotel, I believe. One with a tree out front. Ran afoul of Crow Bro and this or that criminal. I tried to find the owner last year but came up empty.” He handed the picture back. “Guess you found the owner.”

“More like a spider,” Detective Top Hat said. He stowed the picture back in his pocket. “But thank you.”

Detective Top Hat stood, and Khalil mimicked the gesture. The hat stayed on the werewolf’s head. “Are you in danger?”

The Detective grinned. “Have you ever known me to not be in danger?”

“Inshallah.”

“Amen.”

*

The Polaroid did as much justice to the building as a corrupt judge, which was to say it looked worse in person and deserved to be in prison. The door was so warped it couldn’t close, the windows were shattered glass on the ground, and the roof had a slight skew to it, like the entire building wasn’t level. An uncaring sun had bleached the blue paint to grey, and an uncaring city had left the place to rot. The only way to fix it was to burn it to the ground and start over.

Silence shuddered across the yard. Not a single bird rested in the lone tree, and the only signs of life were spider webs.

“Found you,” Detective Top Hat said. He gave his hat a poke. It didn’t jump to anything strange, which meant he was alone…. Or his foe was shorter than him.

He approached the door slowly, his hands in his pockets, his fingers dancing around the cigarette Damezilla gave him last night. Muscle memory demanded he stick it in his mouth and give it a light. He fought the urge away.

When he hit the front door, Detective Top Hat got down on one knee and pretended to tie his shoe. He let his hat do the searching. Unless this Spidered Man was the size of a toddler, he was safe.

“Gone then.”

Detective Top Hat gave the door a knock, one with his shoulder and full weight behind it. The door burst open. Light cut into the entryway, and puffs of dust flew around like bats looking for a place to hide. Hundreds of spiders scurried towards the deepest shadows.

Found Angeles housed villains, heroes, and ordinary people trying to live their lives. There was madness, but there was order, too, something Detective Top Hat had figured out long ago. Start with the bottom, and work your way to the top. Normally he’d just start at the top, but super villains never made that easy—too many owned helicopters. Spiders though? They couldn’t fly. Detective Top Hat skipped the first floor and climbed to the second. That’s where the biggest web would be.

He found his clue in room 408: a discarded jacket, a roll of used bandages, and a pair of worn slacks. The clothes were wrinkled and old, stained with blood, and so threadbare they might as well just fall apart and get it over with.

Dead flies covered the ground, each as crunchy as a pebble. They snapped and popped as Detective Top Hat walked the perimeter, looking for more clues and his elusive Spidered Man. Nothing about the room screamed, “lived in”—no furniture, no dirty dishes or cigarette butts—yet there were splashes of dried goo on the ground. Blood, too. The two mixed together like spoilsed peppermints.

Detective Top Hat saw the shadow before he felt the hand on his shoulder.

The shadow was shaped like a man. A tall man.

His hat never left his head.

“What—”

The Spidered Man both pushed and fell into Detective Top Hat, a clumsy attack that sent him sprawling. He crashed to the floor. Dead flies bounced every which way, and crusty goo cracked like old toothpaste. Detective Top Hat did not want to touch that goo.

“You’re not supposed to be here!” the Spidered Man whispered. His voice sounded like a newspaper blowing in the wind.

The Spidered Man pounced, but for all his size and bulk, he wasn’t very heavy. Detective Top Hat shoved himself up, his hands forming fists long before he was ready to punch. He regained his balance; the Spidered Man found his footing. Face to face, he was a head taller than Detective Top Hat, but in a wavy way. His body seemed to shimmer in the dark room, like it was made of jelly. Yet despite his size, the Detective’s hat wanted nothing to do with the villain.

“What are you?”

“Hungry!”

Detective Top Hat swung first. His fist connected with the Spidered Man’s face and blew through it, sending a shower of spiders to the ground. They sped around his feet, biting at his shoes and ankles.

“Ah!” Detective Top Hat screamed.

The Spidered Man fell into him again, a wave of skittering, biting bugs. A few were fuzzy, but most attacked with sharp legs and even sharper teeth. Detective Top Hat choked as he struggled to get them away from his eyes, face, and neck. He slapped and stomped, but for every spider he killed, two more climbed aboard. He needed a rag or a newspaper. All he had was a hat.

The Detective yanked his hat off and used it like a broom, swiping the spiders away in troves. When they were all on the floor or dead, he placed his hat back where it belonged.

The Spidered Man reformed. He looked a little smaller, but not by much. There were still thousands of spiders left to kill.

“What do you want?” Detective Top Hat asked.

“To eat,” the Spidered Man hissed. “To eat flies.”

Detective Top Hat reached into his pocket. He pulled out Damezilla’s cigarette. “All of this for a lunch, huh?”

“I will turn you into flies.”

“Yeah.” Detective Top Hat lit the cigarette and put it in his mouth. The Spidered Man flinched. “That about sums up this city, doesn’t it? You smoke?”

The Spidered Man waved a threatening arm. Spiders spilled from his coat. “Your powers will not work on me!”

Detective Top Hat gave his cigarette a puff. He hadn’t had one of those in two years. It tasted good—like cancer, but good.

“Don’t need a magic hat to kill some spiders.”

He flicked his cigarette at the Spidered Man. It landed somewhere in his coat, and while his hat refused to go anywhere near the creature made of bugs, good ol’ fire had no such issues. The Spidered Man burst into a flailing plume. He managed one good step before his clothes fell in a heap onto the floor.

Detective Top Hat went over and stomped out the rest of the flames before they could get carried away.

“Yeah. That about sums up this city, doesn’t it.”

He gave his hat a twist, turned for the door, and walked out the room. He left his cigarette butt on the ground.

Why Cats are Good at Jumping

The event of the century brought out the best and worst in everyone. Humans made a mess of things of course, but even the trees and insects grew rowdy with their questions and line-pushing. Birds of every species blocked out the sun, trolls got drunk on fairy wine, and fairy’s got drunk on all the flowers that uprooted themselves to make the long trek to Illinois. The state swelled with magic…. And noise…. And refuse. Meanwhile, not a single garbage can in the Midwestern hemisphere went un-raided by bears, raccoons, or orks, who are quite fond of bread crusts but not the bread itself.

Humans and elves built the stadium, with the elves working half as hard but taking twice the credit. Neither party was actually allowed inside. The Titans had had enough of elves and humans to last an infinity.

 There were dragons too (with and without wings), goblins, dogs, weeds, spiders, gnomes, dwarves, a half-dozen centaurs dressed in fancy suits, a swarm of fourth-generation mayflies who couldn’t understand why everyone was so goddamn excited, two naga who looked hopelessly out of place, and a mermaid in a wheelchair being pushed around by an emperor penguin. His name was Slippy.

There were no cats. Cats were banned from the entire state.

They know what they did.

Correction.

There was one cat. His name was Chesh, and his ears were so flat against his tabby-stripped head he looked like a baby seal. Orange fur covered him from nose to tail, complete with brown stripes and sock-white paws. His eyes were blue. He wore a blue bandana around his neck, which had the effect of making him look like a handsome little man, and also let him carry a permanent marker. A silverback gorilla smoking a joint was kind enough to help him with that.

“Not supposed to be here,” the gorilla said.

“Just want to ask a question,” Chesh replied while giving his front paw a lick. “Just the one. That’s all.”

The gorilla snorted. “You’ll take more than that. I’ve met a few cats in my day.”

“I’m not—”

A shadow fell over Chesh, one with big leaves and even bigger branches. His  tail floofed into something resembling a traffic cone. An oak tree stumbled at him, not looking where it was going and swinging its squirrel-laden branches like swords. Chesh jumped onto the tree; the gorilla stumbled back a few steps.

“Excuse me,” the tree bellowed in its slow language. The squirrels cursed and threw rocks.

“Hey!” the gorilla said. “Get to the back of the line!”

“I didn’t mean too.” The tree waved its branches. Before Chesh could blink, a maple tree cut in line. It was also filled with squirrels.

The gorilla roared so loud a dwarf spilled his beer.

“Fuck yer both!” the dwarf demanded, his shirt soaked through with drink. He dropped his stein and put up his hands. “And fuck yer mothers!”

“Well I never!” the oak gasped.

It should be noted that there were no weapons allowed in or around the stadium, a rule enforced as staunchly as the no-cat one, which is to say quite well but not with absolute perfection. If only a dozen people died during a Titan visit, well, that would be fantastic. The typical death count for an event of the century landed in the quadruple digits—the leading cause of death being dehydration.

Regardless, the dwarf had nothing to swing but his fists. These proved ineffective against a tree.

Chesh scampered to the newly-arrived maple, dodging a nest of hornets and an apple who claimed to be poisoned. He had places to be and Titans to meet. This close, the stadium took up most of the horizon, flourished with vines and flower patterns courtesy of the elves. Chesh knew that if he got closer, he’d see murals dedicated to each of the Titans. He also knew that the Titan he wanted to see would be somewhere in the middle.

Mistress Gravity was the most important, so of course she got to be the center of attention.

The closer Chesh got, the more the crowd cramped together, everyone and everything fighting for a better look. Cameras flashed and food wrappers wrinkled the ground. Flyers with “No Cats Allowed!” floated in the breeze. Chesh did his best to prowl through it all, his head low, his belly even lower, but at some point in the evening—and it was apt to happen—someone noticed him.

“Cat!” a voice screamed, possibly a gryphon’s.

“Where?” everyone said, shouted, roared, and otherwise panicked at once.

“Over here!” a grasshopper called. He chirped his wings.

“Shut up!” Chesh pleaded. “I’m just—”

“He’s right here!”

A wolf stepped on the grasshopper, her nose to the ground. Chesh ran. Flies buzzed in his ears, and fairies followed overhead, their wings lighting like glow sticks. Chesh howled for them to please go away. Humans tried to grab him, and elves tried to be-spell him. A little girl in a black dress with a pink sash gave a high-pitched cry of “Kitty!” and reached, her arms already mid hug.

Her mother smacked her on the hands and scolded, “No honey. Cats have germs.”

A dragon cocked an eyebrow.

A gnome turned himself invisible.

“One of you lot just cast a spell!” a man wearing a very shiny black tie demanded. He looked like the sort of person who made demands all day every day and got very sour when they were not met. “Turn him to ice or whatever!”

An elf made to do just that, his fingers already wiggling, when the grasshopper-squishing wolf bumped into him. The elf said the wrong word, slipped, and transformed the demanding man into a ceramic swan.

“Oops.” His voice sounded like air escaping a balloon.

Chesh leaped the newly-made lawn ornament, his tail spinning like a tornado to keep him balanced. He landed on the ground, darted left, right, and then ran smack-dab into an outstretched hand. Claws grabbed him by the bandanna. They lifted. Chesh gave a mew, his ears back, his tail curved between his legs. His permanent marker fell to the ground.

“You’re not supposed to be here!” the woman hissed. Her teeth were pointed like a vampire’s. “You’ll chase them away.”

Chesh gulped. Or he tried to. The bandanna was choking little stars behind his eyes.

“Paid too much for this spot to be cheated by a thief.”

The crowd stepped just a bit closer at that. Even the moon grew bigger in the sky, eager for a look. The Titans would soon be here, but until they showed up, there was still a hierarchy. Elves and humans stood at the top, mountains of power, and cats wandered somewhere near the bottom. They belonged with the raccoons and dogs and trolls. The strange woman gave Chesh another shake, her lips mumbling both curse words and magic. Flames shuffled behind her teeth.

Then the bandanna ripped.

Her spell made a popping flash above Chesh’s head, one that would have burned him into something so inedible even a goblin would have turned down the meal. Instead, it blinded everyone within eyesight and sent a dragon into a coughing fit. A gunshot split the air. A woman with more sense than most bellowed, “George you put that fucking thing away right now!”

“But—”

Chesh was already running when he hit the ground. Everyone tried to grab him at once, which led to a collision of body parts, mostly heads bonking into other heads, and the spilling of more drinks. The vampire woman cursed, not a real but a bad word, and the dragon coughed a wad of sticky spit onto her back. She fell over. Chesh decided to leave his marker and bandanna. His life was worth more than an autograph.

He still wanted to meet Mistress Gravity though.

Instead of running away, he continued on, causing mayhem with each step. Witches cackled and orks gnashed their teeth. A snake asked him if he’d like some help, but Chesh didn’t trust the rattling sound behind the offer. Best not to risk it. The closer he got to the stadium, the wilder the humans and elves became, fighting each other over the best spots and swapping money for trinkets neither were supposed to own. It wouldn’t be the event of the century if at least one elf didn’t wander back to his home with a pipe bomb or can opener.

The Titans arrived around the time Chesh was trying to navigate a dragon, one whose wings were attached to his arms. He had a stubby neck and was reaching for a better look when Chesh stepped on his tail. The dragon spun about, Chesh went flying, and then the air froze in place. The moon blinked. Every law binding nature to Earth wavered, and if you wished upon a star at this very second, your wish would come true.

There were no shooting stars. Chesh wished everyone would stop trying to kill him.

Nothing happened.

The great titan Conservation arrived first, appearing as a spinning symbol that no one could quite make out. Sometimes they looked like an infinity; sometimes they looked like a series of interconnected loops. Lighting crackled inside their shifting shapes, and everyone clapped—even those that didn’t understand the laws of conservation.

Chesh dodged the dragon by running between his back legs and jumping onto a pine tree adorned with Christmas ornaments.

Thermodynamics appeared next, arriving as three burning wings without a body, head, or legs. More people clapped. The dwarves went wild. One reached over the velvet rope for a handshake, and when he melted his finger down to the bone, smiled so wide he looked like he might cry. It was a story for his kids and his kid’s kids!

Chesh leapt off the pine tree, scattering a handful of glass orbs to the floor, and ran across the back of an alligator. The gator paid him no mind.

Photonics appeared third, and in her usual manor, disappeared soon after. She was a shy Titan.

Gravity came after her, wearing the guise of a bipedal creature draped in a dress blacker than space itself. She did not walk but floated, and every thing that looked at her hovered off the ground. This proved quite useful to Chesh, who was too small to see her but quite good at running under feet. He bolted towards the stadium while everyone clapped, cheered, drank, or did bumps of coke.

“Mistress!” he mewed, his tail high. He wished he had time to give himself a quick bath so he could look his best. “Mistress! Over here!”

Someone shouted, “Stop that cat!” Someone else shouted, “Look! It’s Radiation!” No one was sure what to do, so everyone tried a little bit of everything. Fireworks lit up the sky.

“Mistress Gravity!” Chesh called. The stadium was right there! He could see the velvet rope, magically enhanced so no one could hop over it.

Unless you were a cat.

Chesh made the impossible leap as hands, claws, and in the case of one wolf, a jaw filled with teeth, reached for him. He landed panting, his eyes huge pools of black, his tail just a little poofy. Still, he felt dignified.

“Mistress Gravity!”

“Hello? What is this?” Chesh let out a purr. She was right there! The hem of her dress jerked like clean bed sheets, perfect for playing with, and though her hands were just a little too long to be human, they looked like they gave good pets. Her face was the color of concrete at night, but her eyes sparkled like rainbows. A river of hair swirled around her face.

“Mistress Gravity! I made it!” Chesh chirped. The crowd around him glowered. An elf pulled out a ceremonial sword, not sharp at all, but heavy enough to club a small creature to death.

The Titan knelt, though her body never touched the ground. Rocks and pieces of grass floated around her knees. “Little one, you’re not supposed to be here.”

“Can I have your autograph?”

“Excuse me?” Her voice was soft like the warmest blanket yet powerful enough to hold planets in their orbits. Everything about her was beautiful.

Chesh swished his tail. “I brought a bandanna and a marker because I wanted an autograph. I’m a big fan.” He hunkered low. “But I lost them.”

Another Titan arrived, this one to do with chemistry, but Chesh didn’t care. He only wanted this moment to last just a bit longer. He had worked so hard to get here.

“Little one,” Mistress Gravity said, her tone both amused and annoyed. She waved her hand, and Chesh floated towards her. “You’re … You’re ….” She gave Chesh’s cheek bone a rub. “Too cute for your own good, I suppose.”

“I—”

“But you’re not supposed to be here.” She looked him over. “The last time a cat got too close, he stole something from me.” She smiled. Her smile was warm. “You wouldn’t do that to me, would you?”

“Can you make it so when I knock stuff off the counter, it falls faster?”

Mistress Gravity laughed. “No.”

“Oh.”

“And I cannot make it so you fall softer or jump higher or fly.”

Chesh swished his tail. He didn’t mean to. Honestly, he didn’t, but he also didn’t like being told no. “Why not?”

“Because you cats already do those things.” She set him down. “My laws barely apply to you already.”

Another Titan arrived. The crowd behaved like a crowd. Chesh reached up and rubbed at Mistress Gravity’s legs, marking her with his scent. She offered him one last pet.

“I’m sorry about your marker. But you do have to go.”

“Thank you.”

Mistress Gravity smiled. “For what?”

But Chesh was already walking away, a newer spring in his step, his paws just a little lighter than they were before. He couldn’t help himself. He was a cat.

Project T

We only had the machine for a week. It was not enough time. I don’t believe the Black Coats are real people.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

We arrived at the warehouse a little nervous and a little excited, too. The government had promised much, and after another hard semester of PHD lectures, this almost seemed like a paid vacation. Project T. It’s what Agent John had called it in our initial meeting. Project Time Travel. We dropped our belongings off at the door and stepped into a building of polished metal, opaque glass, and dark acrylic. “This place belongs in a science fiction movie,” Jen had said. “Maybe even a good one.”

I agreed. Howard sighed. He was the first to express doubts, but that is always the case with Howard.

We were each given a computer station, one without any USB ports or internet capabilities. The desktops were all navy blue save for one tiny icon in the upper left, a white T. The program’s name read simply: Project.

“I don’t understand,” Jen said when she opened it. Howard and I crowded over her shoulders. “It’s a search bar.”

“But there’s no internet,” Howard said. “That’s what John the Black Coat said.”

“What should I type?”

“Ask it who will win the Patriots game,” I offered. “I feel like gambling tonight.”

Jen typed in the question, and almost instantly a dozen pages of text appeared on the screen. I skimmed them, my mouth falling ever more open.

“This is an entire play-by-play of the game tonight,” I said with a laugh. “Down to the bad calls.”

“So it can see the future?” Jen asked.

Howard shook his head. “Probably runs on a thousand pounds of math and AI learning. I can’t believe it’s this fast though.”

“Hmm,” Jen said, before typing in her own questions.

I must admit, we played with the strange computer program all throughout the week. It was fun, but the more we stayed inside that warehouse, acquainting ourselves with its quirks and equipment, the more jittery and surreal the job became. Project felt like a grounding toy, a Magic 8 Ball with real insight. I recall asking it about the meaning of life and the big bang and getting answers I found satisfactory, if not a little thin. As the hours became days and the days a week, we relied on it heavily for its amazing set of raw data, engineering prowess, and predictive abilities. We could not have finished Project T without it.

That being said, its play-by-play of the Patriots game was flawed. They did win, but Project got the calls wrong. It did not turn me into a millionaire. True time travel, of seeing the future or the past, would come later.

If the warehouse was a science fiction movie, Project T was its monolith. It was a black box about the size of a small bedroom, so smooth and polished its surfaces doubled as a mirror. Its single door sealed so tightly it hid the seam. Its interior was equally bare-bones, much smaller than its exterior with two chairs and one computer station equipped with Project. It fit two people, but barely.

“I’m not getting in there,” Howard said when we first opened it. “Not in a million years.”

He never did, and it’s funny in a way, because I wish we had been able to turn his statement into some form of irony or prophecy. What is a million years when you can travel time? What is ten million years? The Earth is over four billion years old, the universe even older!

A week was not enough time.

“Don’t be lame,” Jen said. She was the first to hop inside, boot up the computer, and begin asking it questions.

I followed her inside, my frame not much bigger than hers but still too big for the cramped machine. When the door closed on us, we both let out little screams. My skin felt clammy, and her eyes turned into saucers. The wall appeared blank, not a closed door but a melted piece of something. I tapped on it with my hand.

“What are you?” I asked.

“How do we open it?” Jen asked, though the question wasn’t for me but Project.

Project told us how to open the door.

Fear and curiosity are interesting things. I crawled out of Project T prepared to leave and never look back, yet I marched to my computer terminal and began inputting commands. Project complied, and two hours passed in the blink of an eye.

Agent John—John the Black Coat—promised us a puzzle, one 90% completed. His agency needed help with the final 10%. We, he believed, could do it. At that moment, I believed we could do it, too.

“Well,” Howard said, a blue dry-erase marker in one hand and a wall-sized equation scribbled onto the nearest glass wall. “What do you think we should do?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think we can do it.

“Same,” Howard said. “But?”

“But it’s a game,” Jen smirked. “I’ve never not finished a game.”

“That doesn’t mean we should play it,” Howard returned.

We debated. We asked Project more questions, some silly just to see what it might say. I asked it about the ethical ramifications of time travel; Jen asked it its favorite time travel movie. Howard asked the most interesting question though, which was this: Who chose us and why?

“I chose you,” Project wrote. “Because I know you will.”

That was when Howard walked out. I followed suit not long after, but Jen stayed behind. She worked all night, in fact. When I came in the next morning, tired from tossing and turning, she was still in front of the computer, her fingers a blur, more of the cloudy windows covered in marker equations. The smell of coffee hung heavy about her head, and Jurassic Park played on my computer terminal. She was grinning at something.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Coffee machine is working on another pot,” she said. “The fridge is well stocked, mostly with garbage. John the Black Coat did his homework.”

I approached her computer and once again found myself looking over her shoulder. She was playing chess with Project and losing soundly.

“It can’t read the future,” she said, moving her pawn one square forward. It was a bad move, and Project quickly countered with a rook. “But it knows so much it might as well be.”

“I don’t think you’re good enough at chess to really say that.”

“It got me in Checkers, Monopoly, Sorry, Candyland, and Connect Four.” She moved her queen next. Project took it with the rook from its previous move.

“I don’t think that means anything.”

Jen shrugged. “I think it’s cheating.”

“The only way to beat a cheater is to not play.”

“Or to cheat,” she said, but she took the hint well enough and we got to work.

She looked exhausted, but in her typical fashion, had more energy than me. She had more energy than Howard, who showed up a half hour later grumbling about bad ideas and the solution to yesterday’s giant equation.

“Couldn’t sleep,” he yawned. “So I worked.”

The next four days became a routine of sorts, with all of us showing up at random hours, working on Project T in long stretches, and playing with Project. Jen kept us supplied with coffee, and the fridge kept us supplied with the kinds of food I used to live on in college and grad school. In a way, we all traveled back in time, to twenty years prior when our bodies could survive on sleepless nights and carbs. I gained ten pounds.

I cannot explicitly say what we worked on or how, but it did take all three of us. Howard did the most heavy lifting, much to his chagrin. We couldn’t have done it without him.

And this is less important, but we played almost 40 different games with Project over the course of that week, some quick, others long. We lost 39 of them. Jen is the only one who beat the supercomputer, and her chosen sport wasn’t Candyland but Halo. She won by four kills.

The final day found us too tired to celebrate our victory. We spent the first hour fighting with the computer. Project didn’t want us to test the machine. That was for John the Black Coat and the United States of America. We were to wait for their arrival and proceed from there. It wouldn’t tell us if we would be part of the test or simply escorted away.

 Jen and Howard are physicists on the cutting edge of their fields. I am too. It’s why, I believe, Project chose us. But I am also a software engineer, and while I don’t know how Project works in the slightest, I do know how to cheat. Jen and myself broke into the cramped monolith and took our seats.

Howard begged us to stop.

“When should we go,” Jen asked. “And where?”

Truthfully, we had discussed it at length. History is filled with mysteries, both big and small, but most are out of the realm of even time travel. We cannot change the past or alter the future. Project T as a craft is also not easily hidden, meaning visiting, say, Kennedy’s assassination would cause more problems than it would solve. Then there’s the danger involved in Earth’s past. All of our favorite destinations were ruled out by either our own rules, the laws of nature, or simple fear of what might happen.

I did, however, come with an idea.

There is a series of landmasses in the Bismarck Sea called the Vitu Islands. They are small and scattered, and based on ancient writings, missing one. We know this from a single text found in Papua New Guinea that dates back almost 3,000 years. It mentions an eruption, but there are no volcanoes in that area.

“Let’s find out what happened to it,” I offered. “It’s far back enough, and isolated enough, that we won’t change history at all.”

“You sure?” Jen asked.

“Yes.”

“Okay,” she agreed. “If that works, then I get to pick.”

I told Project our preferred date, time, and location, and while it didn’t want to send us there, it couldn’t stop us. HAL it was not.

Project T filled with the strange smells of brimstone and gasoline. I cocked an eyebrow, but before we could cancel our trip, we were already there. Jen yelped. I did too.

The door slid open to a sky of the purest blue I have ever seen. The air smelled so clean it almost hurt my nose. Everything was brighter. Even the clouds appeared fluffier, lighter, not weighed down with pollution. Beneath us, an island missing from history sprawled, overgrown with lush jungles and the sounds of colorful birds. Patches of missing tree growth marked villages and cities.

“My god,” I whispered.

What I should have said is: Why are we flying? Even now I don’t know. Nothing about the machine or our schematics gave it the ability to fly, yet we were high up, perhaps 300 meters. I should have also asked why it smelled even stronger of gasoline.

The fireballs appeared out of nowhere. One minute the sky was clear, the next it was a hellscape of red and orange lights. They formed small at first, about the size of my fist, but quickly grew to the size of cars and trucks. I watched in horror while Jen screamed in my ear as they rained down. Each exploded upon impact, spreading fire and death from one end of the island to the next. Birds flew, their wings aflame, and trees crackled and sparked. Smoke filled the air, my lungs, Project T.

And then we were back in the secret government warehouse. John the Black Coat helped us out. He thanked us for our service, for helping the United States of America. He ignored Jen’s sobs and my frustrated demands. Unlike Project which always wanted to play, John refused. His hands were ice, his grip iron.

“You can’t,” I howled while Howard, fear in his eyes, demanded to know what was going on. “You have to listen to me!”

John led us out. He did not openly threaten us, yet the threat was there. I could see it in his body language, in the little glimpse I got of his eyes when Jen shoved him and his sunglasses slipped. He had yellow eyes. Like a lizard’s.

He closed the door on us, and a week later, a paycheck larger than any I have ever seen showed up in my checking account. I got a letter the next day from John the Black Coat. It read, “On Behalf of the United States of America, we thank you.”

A Dragon’s Treasure

There are only two good reasons for an adventurer to kill a dragon, and while Rig doesn’t fancy himself a good adventurer, he respects the trade enough to follow the rules. He even has a copy of the handbook! He cannot read said copy of the handbook, which was penned over three hundred years ago by Sir Clemonce E. F. Telken (Slayer of Roth the Mighty, six-times Tourney Champ for seven years in a row (one year had to be skipped due to every horse coming down with a rash), Medallion Winner, and author of the best-selling The Adventurer’s Handbook: How to Avoid Troll Tolls).

Per Sir Telken, the only two good reasons to kill a dragon are:

1. To stop it from terrorizing the good people of Lottingham
2. To take its treasure

Now, the only dragon within walking distance is a medium-sized beast named Libre, a green wyrm not known for her terror, murder, fire, or fiendery. However it is said that all dragons hoard treasure like a pig mud, and Rig knows a thing or two about pigs. His father was a farmer; his grandfather was a farmer. Rig meanwhile, is a butcher. He fancies himself quite good with a cleaver too, and when you get right down it, a halberd is just a long cleaver with a better handle. Pigs, meanwhile, are very easy to rob. If a dragon is like a pig, then there isn’t a more suited man for the task than Rig Greenhill!

And it is the perfect day for an adventure. The sky is a pure, cloudless blue, and the trees are all aquiver with green. The temperature is warm—but not too warm. Why, even the road has a perfect layer of dust atop it. The birds chirp. The crickets sing. Rig hums along with them, an old lullaby his mother used to sing back when he was a babe. It’s the only song he knows that doesn’t involve drinking, whoring, or both.

“The drinking and whoring can come tomorrow.”

He grins to the open road. His halberd wavers with his stride, a little heavy when strapped across the back, but handsome too. It cost him his ass, but once he has the dragon’s treasure, he plans on buying another.

It should be noted that what adventurers consider “walking distance” and what butchers consider “walking distance” are two very different lengths. It takes Rig six hours to find the weedy trail that leads to Libre’s meadow and another two to cross it. By this point he is tired, hungry, and cold. He reaches into his pack for a skin of beer. He did not think to bring water.

“Boy howdy, Rig,” Rig says to no one. “You sure screwed this one up.”

The sky is still cloudless, but the blue of it has darkened. A breeze blows from the north, just chilly enough to make Rig scowl. Somewhere in the distance, a coyote laughs.

“Screwed this one up real big,” he says.

Footsore and ready for more beer, Rig finds a comfortable patch of grass. He opens his copy of The Adventurer’s Handbook. The words snake about the pages like bugs, and a few jump out: Pig, fire, the, dragon, cook, troll, and some others. He can’t string a sentence together to save his life, but he can admire the pictures and make educated guesses.

“Should start a fire and cook a troll,” he says.

Rig looks around. There are twigs and grasses aplenty, and he knows how to make a fire. He doesn’t see any trolls though. He’s never had one, and isn’t sure they’d taste very good besides. Maybe it’s for the smell? To drive his spirits high! Or to drive the local wildlife away. The last thing he needs is for a band of coyotes to come sniffing around.

Well, that’s what the halberd is for.

In the end, Rig finishes his beer, pees into a bush, and continues on. His map says Libre’s Hollow is just ahead.

Libre’s Hollow lives in Libre’s Gulch, an unnatural chunk of land carved by dragon magic and spite. Rocks bounce about, slippery with dust, and small bushes grow here and there, nettle-covered and bored. At the end, not a cave but more a hut, is Libre’s home. It too is not natural. It is, however, pleasant to look upon, softly rounded and lit with yellow dots of faerie fire. Its mouth—its door—is inviting. In fact, it is downright cozy. It reminds Rig of his grandfather’s farm, of sneaking out of the house at night when he was a child to watch the stars and wonder what might live on the moon.

“Hmm,” Rig says to himself. This is his thinking sound, which has lost him more arguments than won and generally puts him on the bad side of an idea. “Hmm, hmm.”

Because Rig would be the first to admit he isn’t known for having deep thoughts. He’s not a wizard or an intellectual. He has one now though, and that thought is this: All the dragons in the old tales can talk, and it isn’t right to kill something that can talk. Not without the law saying it’s okay. Libre isn’t a wanted lizard. She’s never terrorized nobody as far as Rig knows.

He opens his Adventurer’s Handbook and flips to page 12. Telken is quite clear on his two rules. Rig can’t read most of the writing, but “Kill” he does know. “Treasure” as well.

“Hmm,” he says again. “Hmm, hmm.”

What ultimately pushes Rig into Libre’s home isn’t the complexity of law but the ice in the wind and the sharpness in the rocks. He is too tired to walk back up the hill. Thus, his only option is to enter the dreaded lair before him, slay the dragon, and take her treasure.

He at least has the decency to feel like a damn fool for it, because he is.

The temperature warms the closer he gets, until he’s through the door and standing in front of what feels like a blazing fire. The aches in his shoulders lesson, and either his vision adjusts to the night, or the cave is bright with yellow lights, because everything is easy to see. It’s a soft place, with a dirt-covered floor and smooth walls that swoop up to a ceiling filled with little torches. They don’t flicker like normal torches but stay constant, almost like the sun itself.

Shelves are everywhere. Wooden, smooth, and chewed about the edges from use, they cover every wall Rig can see, and all the walls he cannot. More act as furniture, if furniture was measured in rows and not chairs or stools. The shelves are about a wagon’s width apart. Each is twice as tall as Rig and many times longer. They do not contain treasure.

They contain books.

Anxiety plays at Rig’s heels. Anger does too, though that emotion is a few steps behind, where it belongs. The thing about dragons is that they aren’t small. Libre is a medium-sized one as far as magical lizards go, but she is still bigger than three oxen in a row and weighs twice as much. Her jaws are capable of snapping said oxen with a single bite. If Rig were to stand on his tiptoes, stretch his arms all the way up, he still wouldn’t be able to grab a book from the highest shelf. There are no ladders or stools to stand on, because Libre doesn’t need them.

Yet what comes out of his mouth isn’t a whimper but a curse, “There ain’t no damn treasure here!”

The book—his, not Libre’s—says dragons collect treasure. Rig can’t read the words between “dragon” or “treasure,” but he isn’t a complete buffoon. He knows what he knows! There’s supposed to be gold and gems and magical artifacts, not … not books! Not a single thing worth taking glimmers in the room. There isn’t even a chair to sit on.

Rig sighs. He marches to the closest shelf and puts his back against it. It’s sturdy enough, and warm enough, and he slides down until he’s sitting on the floor. His halberd falls from his back. The blacksmith promised him it was a good weapon, the perfect tool for a daring adventure.

“Damn thing’s not even good for a walking stick,” Rig says.

Believe it or not, there is a chapter in The Adventurer’s Handbook: How to Avoid Troll Tolls about not falling asleep in a dragon’s cave. It’s actually quite common for weary adventurers to plop down for a sit, doze off, and wake up to being devoured. Dragon magic exudes tranquility as a byproduct of their collecting and shaping. They feel at home in their homes, and thus, everyone that enters also feels at home. It makes them exceptional dinner party hosts, with the caveat that the dinner is typically the guest.

It should be no surprise then that when Rig wakes up, he is not alone. Two reptile orbs stare at him from behind a muzzle of emerald scales and sharp teeth the size of kitchen knives. Libre’s head is a head larger than Rig, and her body is many times that, snaking out behind her and supporting thousands of pounds of muscle and scaly hide. Spikes run across the spine of her back. A pair of green wings fold about her flank like leathery covers. She is the most beautiful and most terrifying thing Rig has ever seen in his life.

She also looks absolutely nothing like a pig.

“Hello human,” Libre says. Her voice is gruffer than a callous, yet quiet too. “What are you doing in my home?”

Rig gulps.

“And why have you brought that wicked looking weapon with you?”

Rig gulps again. He doesn’t know what else to do.

“Yet,” and here Libre sniffs. “You have a book with you. I can smell it on your person.” Her dragon snout breaks into a toothy smile that flashes with fire and brimstone. “It is well read. The spine is bent, and the pages are earmarked. I can smell your fingerprints on it.”

“It’s not right to kill something that can talk,” Rig yelps. The words come out like a squeak. “Not unless the law says so.”

Libre cocks her head. Her tongue snakes out of her mouth, and she wipes her eye with it.  “Sometimes the law is wrong, human.” The dragon leans back on her haunches, peering at Rig not like a lizard but a great jungle cat. He sees her exposed belly and thinks for just a moment about using his halberd. It won’t work though. Her scales are too thick, and his arms are like noodles.

And it wouldn’t be right besides.

“More often,” the dragon continues, “I think, the law is wrong. But are you a philosopher? Or a scholar? I have a great many books that might interest you.”

Rig shakes his head.

“Historian?”

“No,” Rig gulps.

The dragon scratches at her chin. “Do you like fiction? I mostly have fiction, if I’m being honest. I love the romances, even if half the people that show up here are knights thinking I have gold.”

“I,” Rig blushes, and Libre narrows her eyes. He tries to find more words, but they spit about his feet, useless. Instead he hums the lullaby his mother used to sing him. It lets him see her face, and he’d rather look at her than the dragon about to eat him.

“Hmm,” Libre says. She motions with one clawed hand for Rig to follow. And then she’s gone, slither-walking down a row of books. Her tail swishes behind her, its tip a giant, boney spike.

Rig follows her. He doesn’t know what else to do.

He leaves his halberd on the floor.

“I have songbooks down here … somewhere.” The dragon’s head darts this way and that, and she sniffs more than she looks. Her tongue dances along one shelf, tasting the claw marks on it. “Yes. This way.”

“I,” Rig tries, but the thought leaves him. He hums the lullaby again.

The dragon nods. “I recognize it. It’s a Rabe, composed about four hundred years ago, I expect. She liked that kind of soft trill.”

Libre leads, and Rig follows, and soon they’re deep within her lair, lost as far as Rig can tell, and still with no treasure to be found. At some point, Libre stops by a shelf, rears herself up, and plucks a pair of thick glasses from behind a dusty book. The rims are made of copper with little flowers along the sides. She balances them on her snout and looks through them crosseyed.

“I can’t read sheet music without help. Had a wizard make these about a century ago now.”

“You can read music?” Rig asks. He only ever heard it played or sang. Mostly off key.

“Of course, human.” She cocks her head. “Are you not a musician?”

“No.”

“No matter. This way.”

They travel one more shelf over, where the books are a much taller. Telken would advise any would-be adventurer in this situation to take notes, to find all the little details for survival and use them without mercy. Telken would also demand you slay the dragon. Rig does none of these things, because Rig cannot read.

He wishes he could though. It’s the first time he’s ever wished that.

Libre is massive and sharp, yet she browses her books with the delicate hand of a jeweler, careful not to tear or mark any of them.

“Here,” she says after a few more minutes of sniffing, poking, and prodding. “Carianne Rabe. This is her complete works.” Libre hands the book to Rig. It’s thinner than most, yet heavier than it looks. The cover is a vibrant, blue leather that smells strongly of dye despite its age.

“She’s best known for her Symphony on Magic, a rousing piece on the wonders of alchemy.” Libre smiles. “If you know how to listen. But she also composed many lullabies too. Yours is in there, somewhere.”

Speechless, Rig opens the book. He expects to find more insect-like words shifting across the page and instead sees lines, dots, and more lines. There are numbers too, the kind he knows from coins and from counting on his fingers. It’s almost like a map.

“This is how music is written?”

“Yes, human. It is.”

“Huh.”

Rig hands the book back, and while Libre flips through it, he once again hums his mother’s lullaby. The dragon nods a few times, finds her page, and then flips back and forth between it and the next one.

Finally she says, “It’s this one. ‘Rising Star, Falling Star.’ You’ve been humming a mix of the first and fourth verses. There’s quite a bit more than that.”

“Wow!”

“Where did you hear it?”

For the first time since entering the dragon’s home, Rig smiles. “My mother. She used to sing it to me.”

With careful claws, Libre puts the book back on her shelf. “Very good. She had good taste. You could learn the rest, if you want.”

Rig almost jumps. “You think so?” He never really thought he could learn much of anything. Butchering? Sure. Adventuring? Clearly not. He’s weaponless in front of a dragon and too afraid to do anything but listen to her. Telken would be furious.

As if she’s reading his mind, the dragon asks “So, what book do you have on you?” Her eyes sparkle.

Shame drags Rig’s attention to his feet at that. He knows nothing of books, only that whatever he has can’t be very good in comparison to everything around him. Libre clicks her tongue against her fangs, and Rig reaches into his pack and brings out the Adventuring Handbook. He hands it over, and even though it’s no good, Libre is careful when she picks it up.

“Ah,” she says as soon as she sees the title. “It’s this one.”

“Sorry,” Rig mumbles.

“Human,” Libre sighs. “How many words do you know?”

Rig blushes so hard even his feet turn red.

“And are some of those words, ‘treasure,’ ‘dragon,’ ‘and hunt?’”

“I don’t know ‘hunt.’”

“What about ‘kill?’”

Rig nods. He squeezes his hands into fists.

There is so much human disappointment in the way Libre moves that Rig is reminded of his grandparents. She plucks her glasses from her snout and drums at the ground with her claws, digging little trenches into the dirt. She glares, not like a monster but like his grandmother when she would catch him sneaking out at night to look at the moon and stars and think, on rare occasions, of doing something bigger than living his life in Lottingham.

She wasn’t allowed to have big dreams, so why should he?

“Well,” Libre says, “At least you know more words than the last human.”

Rig gulps.

“And I liked your mother’s rendition of ‘Rising Star, Falling Star.’”

“Are you gonna let me live?” Rig shakes as he asks the question. The dragon gives him his book back, and he clutches it so hard he almost drops it.

Libre replaces her glasses. “Yes human, I am. I let most humans live that wander in here.”

“Oh.” Relief floods Rig. He even manages another smile.

“I don’t want blood on my books.”

Rig drops his book at that. He’s too stiff to bend over to grab it, so Libre does it for him.

“It’s a bad book with bad advice,” she says. “But it is a book. Take care of it, please.”

“Is it treasure?”

Libre nods. “Yes. All books are treasure. Even the bad ones.” Libre holds up a claw. “Gold can buy you much, human, but it cannot buy you empathy. It cannot clean your soul. Those are for books and songs and love.”

“I wish I could read.”

“Good.” Libre smiles, and it is a genuine smile, one that reaches her eyes. Brimstone flashes behind her teeth. “The world needs more scholars and historians, not adventurers.”

Libre motions for Rig to step aside, and he does. She walks, and he follows, and soon they are at the entrance to her home. Light shines through. The sun is high, and the soft chirping of birds and crickets swirls about. He stops to grab his halberd.

“I will not teach you to read,” Libre says. “But if you learn, you may come back. My home is a library, not a hoard.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I only ask that you treat them like treasure.”

Rig nods. He can do that.

“Farewell, human. And next time you decide to go on an adventure, may you take a quill instead of a sword. It will do the world more good.”

With that, Libre retreats into her home. Rig dusts himself off, stretches, and begins the long trek back to Lottingham. He is hungry, and he is thirsty, and his pockets are poorer than when he started, but he has a story to tell now.

He’s excited to share it.