The Razor's Edge

by Seanan McGuire

  It began with a single abduction, a single child who managed to fall into a place where the light didn’t reach. Does it matter if it was monster or man who stole her? “Erica’s Law” restructured the world, one solar panel and porch light at a time, and now, to crave the darkness is as good as to admit that you intend your neighbors ill. The world has changed. The world is always changing.

  A tarp falls over one of the light posts, blocking it. Sensors attached to the lights frantically catalog the interruption, sending out pulses of electricity to check the connections, verify that no circuits have been fried by an unexpected power surge, and confirm nothing is burnt out. This process will take upward of sixty seconds: plenty of time for the small group of people passing below to hurry by, their arms laden with their worldly goods, with the squares of suitcases and the bulky bodies of wide-eyed children who shy away from the remaining light with small whimpers of dismay.

  Just as the light begins to beep shrill alarm at the interruption the tarp is whisked away and the light returns, shining bright on an empty street. The people are gone. A manhole scrapes slightly as it settles back into its cut-out cradle, and everything is still.

  Everything is silent.

  * * *

  “You can’t do this. Let the other cities take a stand; it’s too dangerous here.” The fight has played out a million times before, through almost as many pairs of people. The man, yellow-eyed, with writhing serpents in place of hair, glares at the woman with lips as red as blood, with skin as white as snow.

  She glares back, eyes like daggers of winter ice. “We don’t have any other choice. We have to do something or we’re going to be destroyed. Is that what you want? Are you so eager for an ending?”

  “We’ve been forced into hiding before.” He gestures toward his hair, which hisses and snaps at his fingers. “My great-grandmother—”

  “Was the beloved of a god, and still wound up getting her head cut off when she managed to get in the way of the wrong people.” The woman’s sharpened incisors indent her lower lip as she scowls. “We need shadows. We need secrecy. They’ve finally found a way to burn us out, and it isn’t torches and pitchforks, it’s floodlights and civic zoning. This has to stop, before it’s too late for us to stop it.”

  “Maybe our time is over,” says the man.

  The woman stares at him. Then she turns, pointing down the dry sewer tunnel that has become their last and shrinking refuge.

  “Want me to march down there and tell Alfonse that it’s time to put the children out to see the sunrise? Marie only crawled out of her grave a week ago. When she catches fire, she’ll smell like rotting meat, and she’ll leave maggots and char behind instead of good grave dust, but hey, maybe it’s time, right? You’ve had centuries. I’ve had centuries. That means we get to decide for the people who’ve barely had the time to catch their breath. Shall I tell Lulu she needs to kill her own pups? Or tell the Creep that all the seedlings have to go? Or would you prefer to do the deed?”

  “You’re not being fair,” he says, mulish and sullen, looking away.

  “Speak the truth and damn the blinders,” says the woman. Her voice is soft. She knows she’s won, and if there’s one thing she’s learned in her long centuries upon the earth, it’s that no one loves a winner who gloats. “We have to do something. They turn the tree lights on tomorrow.”

  The man nods and says nothing.

  The tree lights. Without them, this would have been one more attempt to change a world that doesn’t want to change: one more passing fad that, when it faded, would have left the shadows undisturbed. But this time, the light has teeth. This time, the light has been expanding, and expanding, and expanding, until places that have always been considered safe have been torn asunder, violated, rendered unsafe.

  This, the latest affront: this, the thing that has driven them into hiding, into the shadows that sleep, restless, beneath the city streets. Lights have been hung around the edges of the forest, each designed to stand up to a hurricane, powered by solar batteries that can run for months on a single stored charge. Night is to be forbidden in the forest, blasted away in the name of progress, progress which forbids any chance of secrecy or shadow. Night is to be a thing of the past.

  Night, and all the things that dwell there.

  So they have run, these night things, so they have come together here and in a thousand similar cities, hiding in the last and least of their strongholds. Here they shiver against the coming of a terrible, unending day, and face the question they have faced a thousand times before, over twice as many years: how, when all the world is set against them, are they intended to survive? And if they do not, if this is where they fail and fall and fade away, how is the world to survive without them?

  For this is the secret the night things keep, having long since learned that it does them no good to share it: the world cannot endure without both sides of the coin. If there is to be light, there must be shadow, or the light becomes meaningless, as ignorable and ignoble as the air. Strip the air away and all that breathes will fall, yes, but the air has changed before, going from one gas to another, and all without notice until it is too late. The air cannot be seen. That means the air can easily betray.

  If there are to be people of the light, people of the sun’s brightness, of the day’s warmth, all those things must be true as well in opposition. There must be people of the dark, people of the moon’s coolness, of the night’s shadow. There must be those who run where the light will not find them, who hide themselves away and curse the technological advances which bring their opposite number ever closer to true dominion over all.

  Dragging feet scrape the length of a nearby tunnel, a smaller pipe too tight for adult creatures. Still, both woman and man tense as they turn, relaxing only when a little girl with slate-colored skin and red, red eyes shuffles hesitantly into the open. There is no light here. She moves with graceless confidence, going to the man and wrapping her arms around his middle, holding him fast. She closes her eyes and is still, so still, still as the stone she becomes between one breath and the next.

  The woman quirks the shadow of a smile. “Looks like Io has spoken. You’re staying here. Defend the others. If anyone comes, keep them safe.”

  “When you say ‘defend’…”

  The woman’s smile remains, but her eyes are cold as chips of winter ice. “Kill them. Kill them all. They were the ones who wanted a war. You don’t get to declare hostilities only when you think you’re going to win. If they come here, if they pursue us past the point of no return, you make sure they never go home to their families. Do you understand?”

  He nods, because he does; because they all do. This is the inevitable end of such collisions. When the winners send their troops into the narrow places, the last, lost places, they do so because they believe themselves to be untouchable. They have forgotten the simple truth of war, which states that no force with a single soul still standing has been truly defeated. Even the last and least of a cornered, conquered people can fight back.

  The woman walks away. Where her bare feet strike the stone they leave trails of glimmering frost behind, as delicate as lace, as cold as the heart of winter. It will not melt for days, this reminder of her passage, and even once it does, the chill will linger for weeks, months, years. She could chill the world if left unchecked. She has always needed to be checked, to be kept from becoming the storm her bones ache to be. Balance in all things, after all.

  But there is no balance here, not anymore. The balance has been broken by people who thought they were better than the superstitions of their ancestors, who thought that monsters belonged in storybooks and old wives’ tales, not in the shadows, not in the cities, and certainly not in the streets. When the balance is broken, so many things that might have been forbidden become permissible.

  When the balance is broken, the monsters will have their say.

  She walks as silent as a sigh, and when she leaves the safety of the sewers for the harsh, we
ll-lit streets—the light, how it hates her, how it struggles to burn—she shivers, as if brightness were her bones’ bane. The frost collects more thinly in the light, melts more quickly, but collect it does, and so long as she can cradle the chill around her, she endures.

  All around her, curtains remain drawn, the residents of the surrounding homes content in their isolation from the night. No one looks outside. They have cut themselves off, believing that only the light matters. Believing that, if they deny the dark long and loudly enough, they will finally be free of it.

  The dark doesn’t work like that. She walks and flowers die, leaves turn colors early and birds find their eggs frozen in their nests, no longer dreaming of the day they’ll split their shells and be freed into the world. She walks and the air remembers what it is to be slow and cold and terrible, filled with promises yet to be kept and stories yet to be told. The light beats against her skin, shattering the sheets of ice encasing her, but she freezes again as quickly as they thaw. She will do this. She must do this.

  She has done this before, in other times, other towns, other terrible illuminations. Nothing is truly new. It is only a repetition of an old refrain, echoing through the song that birthed it, refusing to be forgotten. The cycle, which is turning even now, has turned before and will turn again.

  She remembers other battlefields, times when the light rose up against the dark in terrible, torturous defiance. She remembers times when hers was the castle and theirs the mire, when it seemed that all that was bright and warm in the world must be stomped out, extinguished by the clutching hand of coldness and sorrow. All this has come before. All this will come again.

  And if she hopes, in her cold, quiet way, that some hero will find the cave where she has concealed her frozen heart before the cycle makes another turn and another war is at hand; if she hopes she will be ice and ashes before she must raise blizzard and frost against another score of innocents whose only crime is being born to the wrong side of an ancient divide; if she hopes for the peace that comes only ever in the grave, can she truly be blamed? The war is short and fierce and blazing for the forces of humanity, who fight and burn in the day’s hot light. The war is long and slow and bitter for the forces of the shadow, who fight only when the air is still and the wind whispers secrets best forgotten. She has been here so many times. There is still fight in her. But oh, how she wishes she could set it gently—so gently—to the side, and sleep.

  She walks through the streets, and the streets do not move to stop her, even as the lights beat down, even as she burns from within and without, charred by both righteous anger and targeted assault. She walks in a world that has been remade in the image of her opposition, and she does not dare to hesitate or turn aside. This is the only chance she’ll have at striking back. The clock has not yet reached midnight, but it is close, so very close, and once it does…

  Once it does, there will be no turning back. What’s done is done, and not even the cold can change it.

  All over the world, she knows, others are making their final stands in cities just like this one, cities that have been brightened and barricaded and turned into citadels to defeat an enemy that so few will admit was ever real. The short memories of mankind lead to them forgetting, over and over, that they fear the dark for a reason; that they cower in their beds from the crack of thunder because there is something to fear, not merely because their grandparents told them scary stories.

  The scary stories are more than happy to tell themselves, given time to do so, given an audience to listen.

  All over the world, this is happening, and if some of them fail, others will succeed; if some of them end tonight, they will still have tried. They will still have struck back against an enemy who can barely conceive of their reality. That will be enough. That will have to be enough.

  The wall between the city center and the illuminated outskirts is tall and sturdy, built from some unnatural stone that has never known the quarry, nor the touch of the mason’s hammer. She brushes her fingers against it, leaving trails of frost behind, tracing out the limits of its nature. Stone is stone, no matter what its origins, and stone is porous. Stone…cracks.

  The wall is eager to share its secrets with someone. The wall knows nothing of enemies or allies, cares nothing for the long slow war its builders have fought against the children of the moon. The wall knows only that it has things to say, and no one has ever listened, not before now. So it speaks. It shares, it sighs, and when it is finished, the woman with the skin as white as snow presses a single bloody kiss to its body, leaving the print of her lips behind.

  “Thank you, friend,” she whispers, and is gone, dissolving into mist which dives into the stone like a swimmer into the sea. The wall welcomes her into its body, shivering with delight at the sensation.

  The lights are very bright here, leaving nothing unseen, leaving nothing concealed. That, too, is a form of concealment, for when it is assumed that everything is visible, then no one looks as hard as they ought. They have forgotten that they are at war, even as they lead a brutal and ceaseless campaign against their enemies. The mist pours into the wall, and no one notices. The mist trickles from the stone on the other side, in the deepest, most well-protected part of the city, and no one sees.

  Bit by bit, the mist reassembles itself into the shape of a woman. Color bleeds back into its foggy structure, the black of hair, the red of lips, the unforgiving blue of eyes. Still no one sees, or if they do, they say nothing. This is an impossible thing in this bright, brave new world of lights and open spaces. This is a thing that belongs to the old, dark days, and everyone knows those days were never real. They’re stories to frighten children, nothing less and nothing more. They’re a lie draped in pretty sparkles to attract the eye. Look away and they’re forgotten. Look away and they’re not real.

  When the woman stands where the mist once was, she sags, catching herself against the wall with a single shaking hand. There was a time when going from one shape to another wouldn’t have taken so much out of her, when she could have walked the world as a cloud, or a cat, or any number of other wonderful, terrible things without fear of losing herself. That time is gone. It may come again, and she may even be here to see it. Here and now, she is tired, so tired, tired like she has never been in all the long centuries of her life. She yearns to rest.

  Perhaps soon, she can.

  The streets here are dimmer, although they are still as bright as a summer’s day. There are gradations in light, even as there are gradations in darkness. Perhaps the people this far from the forest’s edge feel no more need to respect the shadows, and in losing their respect, they have begun to lose their fear. The darkness is a relic of a bygone time, nothing more nor less; it is deserving of neither awe nor observation, but merely of pity. It will be forgotten soon enough. When the lights around the forest come on for the first and last time, it will all be swept away, and no more time need be spent in consideration of its mysteries.

  Even dimmed, even diffused, the light is enough to peel away another layer of ice comfort. The woman shudders as she straightens, refusing to be bowed by such a petty trick, played by creatures who are little more to her than children. She is almost there. She will succeed.

  She walks on, and when she finds the men—men with guns, men in clever uniforms, insulated against blades and bullets and, most of all, the cold—standing in a loose ring around her final destination, she almost smiles. Someone remembers that this is a war after all. Someone has not forgotten the way the cycle turns.

  “Identify yourself,” calls one of the men.

  “I am the cold north wind and the gales of November,” she replies, her voice as sweet and beguiling as a snowbank. Come to me, that voice says; come to me and rest forever. “I am what you would forget, if only you were allowed, and what you must remember, else how would you know to bundle yourself tight against the chill?”

  The men exchange glances of confusion and frustration. There is a script to these encounters,
a pattern that should be followed. She is refusing to play by the rules they have set, and they don’t know how to handle that, what to say or what should be done.

  One lowers his gun. “What’s your name, lady?” he calls.

  Her smile is a hungry one. Sometimes, it is necessary to feed if one is to proceed. Her own mother taught her this, a very long time ago, when the wood was the world and the world was the wood, and the thought of chasing away the shadows was a foolish nightmare for an untried child. Sometimes, for the cold to grow, it must remember what it is to freeze.

  “Let me show you,” she says, and she spreads her hands, and the cold comes.

  Cold is a part of darkness, for it is in darkness that cold opens its wings and wraps the world with ice. This does not mean that cold is confined to the dark, nor that it is forbidden to step into the light. She spreads her hands and everything is frost; she smiles, and everything is frozen. The men stop where they are, some with guns half-raised, their skins rimed in white, like they have been wrapped in lacy shrouds.

  “Once upon a time,” she says, and steps forward. The frost grows thicker, sapping the light from their eyes, stealing the breath from their bodies. “There was a girl with skin as white as snow, and lips as red as blood, and hair as black as a raven’s wing.”

  Another step, and the skin beneath the frost is blossoming blue, frozen all the way to the shivering core of the still-beating heart. They are still alive, these men, even as their sight goes dim and their breath grows shallow, unable to fight against the bitter weight of winter.

  “Her mother was a queen, they say, and she looked upon her child, and was afraid of the story she saw starting in the infant’s eyes. She called for her dearest handmaid, and said, ‘Take my daughter to the forest. Leave her there. Let the winter have her. I will tell my husband the king that she died in her cradle, and he will forgive me, for he has always been a fair man, and he loves me best of all.’”