Free of her house, Skidbladnir was a terror and wonder to behold. Her body was long and curled; her multitude of eyes gleamed in the starlight. Her tendrils waved in the warm air as if testing it. Some of the tendrils looked shrunken and unusable. Saga also saw that patches of Skidbladnir’s body weren’t as smooth as the rest of her; they were dried and crusted. Here and there, fluid oozed from long scratches in her skin.
Next to Saga, Novik made a muffled noise. He was crying.
“Go, my love,” he whispered. “Find yourself a new home.”
Skidbladnir’s tendrils felt the buildings around the plaza. Finally, they wrapped themselves around the tallest building, a gleaming thing with a spiraled roof, and Skidbladnir pulled herself up the wall. Glass tumbled to the ground as Skidbladnir’s tendrils shot through windows to pull herself up. She tore through the roof with a thunderous noise. There was a moment when she supported her whole body on her tendrils, suspended in the air; she almost toppled over the side. Then, with what sounded like a sigh, she lowered herself into the building. Saga heard the noise of collapsing concrete as Skidbladnir’s body worked to make room for itself. Eventually, the noise subsided. Skidbladnir’s arms hung down the building’s side like a crawling plant.
“What now?” Saga said.
She looked sideways at Novik. He smiled at her.
“Now she’s free,” he said. “Free to go wherever she pleases.”
“And what about us?” Saga asked. “Where do we go?”
“With her, of course,” Novik replied.
“There’s no map,” Saga said. “Nothing to navigate by. And the machinery? Your engine room?”
“That was only ever needed to make her go where we wanted her to,” Novik said. “She doesn’t need that now.”
“Wait,” Saga said. “What about me? What if I want to go home?”
Novik raised an eyebrow. “Home?”
A chill ran down Saga’s back. “Yes, home.”
Novik shrugged. “Perhaps she’ll stop by there. There’s no telling what she’ll do. Come on.”
He got up and started walking toward Skidbladnir and her new shell. Saga remained on the ground. Her body felt numb. Novik went up to the building’s front door, which slid open, and he disappeared inside.
Season 1, episode 5: Adrift.
The captain’s wife dies. She goes into space on a private shuttle to consign the body to space. While in space, the shuttle malfunctions. The captain finds herself adrift between the stars. The oxygen starts to run out. As the captain draws what she thinks are her last breaths, she records one final message to her colleagues. Forgive me for what I did and didn’t do, she says. I did what I thought was best.
* * *
Life on the new Skidbladnir was erratic. Novik spent most of his time interfaced, gazing into one of Skidbladnir’s great eyes in a hall at the heart of the building. Saga spent much of her time exploring. This had been someone’s home once, an apartment building of sorts. There were no doors or windows, only mazelike curved hallways that with regular intervals expanded into rooms. Some of them were empty, others furnished with oddly shaped tables, chairs and beds. Some wall-to-wall cabinets held knickknacks and scrolls written in a flowing, spiraled script. There were no means to cook food in any way Saga could recognize. She made a nest in one of the smaller rooms close to where Novik worked with Skidbladnir. The walls gave off a soft glow that dimmed from time to time; Saga fell into the habit of sleeping whenever that happened. Drifting off into sleep, she sometimes thought she could hear voices speaking in some vowel-rich tongue, but they faded as she listened for them.
Skidbladnir did seem concerned for Saga and Novik. She stopped at the edge of towns every now and then, where Saga could breathe and was able to trade oddities she found in the building that was now her new home for some food and tools. But mostly they were adrift between worlds. It seemed that Skidbladnir found her greatest joy in coasting the invisible eddies and waves of the void. Every time they stopped somewhere, Saga considered getting off to try her luck. There might be another ship that could take her home. But these places were too strange, too far-flung. It was as if Skidbladnir was avoiding civilization. Perhaps she sensed that Aavit and the old captain might be after them. That thought gnawed at Saga every time they stopped somewhere. But there was such a multitude of worlds out there, and no one ever seemed to recognize them.
She tore the Andromeda Station tapes apart and hung them like garlands over the walls, traced her finger along them, mumbled the episodes to herself, until Skidbladnir shuddered and she took cover for the next passage.
Each time Skidbladnir pushed through to another world, it was more and more violent.
“Is she going to hold?” Saga asked Novik on one of the rare occasions he came out from his engine room to eat.
Novik was quiet for a long moment. “For a time,” he said.
“What are you going to do when she dies?” Saga asked.
“We’ll go together, me and her,” he replied.
* * *
One day, improbably, Skidbladnir arrived outside a place Saga recognized. A town, not her hometown, but not so far away from it.
Novik was nowhere to be seen. He was sleeping or interfaced with the ship. Saga walked downstairs, and the front door slid open for her. Outside, a crowd had gathered. An official-looking man walked up to Saga as she came outside.
“What’s this ship?” he said. “It’s not on our schedule. Are you the captain?”
“This is Skidbladnir,” Saga said. “She’s not on anyone’s schedule. We don’t have a captain.”
“Well,” the official said. “What’s your business?”
“Just travel,” Saga said.
She looked back at Skidbladnir. This was her chance to get off, to go home. Novik would barely notice. She could return to her life. And do what, exactly? The gathered crowd was composed of humans, their faces dull, their eyes shallow.
“Do you have a permit?” the official asked.
“Probably not,” Saga said.
“I’ll have to seize this ship,” the official said. “Bring out whoever is in charge.”
Saga gestured at Skidbladnir’s walls. “She is.”
“This is unheard of,” the official said. He turned away and spoke into a comm radio.
Saga looked at the little town, the empty-faced crowd, the gray official.
“Okay. I am the captain,” she said. “And we’re leaving.”
She turned and walked back to Skidbladnir. The door slid open to admit her. The hallway inside thrummed with life. She put a hand on the wall.
“Let’s go,” she said. “Wherever you want.”
Pilot episode: One Small Step.
The new captain of Andromeda Station arrives. Everything is new and strange; the captain only has experience of Earth politics and is baffled by the various customs and rituals practiced by the other aliens on the station. A friendly janitor who happens to be cleaning the captain’s cabin offers to give her a tour of all the levels. The janitor, it turns out, has been on the station for most of his life and knows all of the station’s quirks. She’s confusing as hell at first, he says. But once you know how to speak to her, she will take good care of you.
* * *
Saga took the tapes down and rolled them up. It was time to be the captain of her own ship, now. A ship that went where it wanted to, but a ship nonetheless. She could set up proper trade. She could learn new languages. She could fix things. She was good at fixing things.
One day Skidbladnir would fail. But until then, Saga would swim through the void with her.
THE END
About the Author
Karin Tidbeck is originally from Stockholm, Sweden. She lives and works in Malmö as a freelance writer and creative writing teacher, and writes fiction and interactive stories in Swedish and English. Her English debut, the 2012 collection Jagannath, was awarded the Crawford Award 2013 and shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award. Her novel Am
atka was published in 2017 by Vintage Books.
Copyright © 2018 by Karin Tidbeck
Art copyright © 2018 by Victor Mosquera
Circus Girl, The Hunter, and Mirror Boy
JY Yang
A Tom Doherty Associates Book
New York
THE CIRCUS GIRL
I was twenty-six when I started seeing Mirror Boy again. He showed up without warning on a Monday, as I stood over the sink scrubbing sleep from my eyes and stale whiskey from my mouth. It’s one of my favorite simple pleasures: the cold metallic tang of water, the clean bitter smell of soap. I straightened up for my towel, and there was his ugly mug in the mirror instead of mine. I dropped the towel. “Fuck!”
Mirror Boy had not changed in a decade. He was still gaunt and hollow-eyed and in bad need of a haircut. Patches of discoloration bloomed under the brown of his skin. “Hello, Lynette,” he whispered in his crushed-paper voice.
“No,” I said, and walked right out of the bathroom, my face still dripping wet.
“Did something happen?” asked my roommate, Shane, as I stomped into the kitchen, wiping myself dry on the cotton of my nightgown sleeve. “I heard you shouting.” She stood unwashed and uncombed over the counter, a ladle in one hand and curious concern etched on her thin features. Coffee sub boiled on the stove and the smell of fried egg lingered.
“I cut myself shaving,” I said. In my chest my heartbeat with the rhythm of a rail carriage, passing by.
“Ooooookay,” she said, and went back to spooning bean goop onto plates. Shane was an angel, used to the oceanic swing of my moods. She put up with far too much from me.
A dresser cabinet stood by the main door, marking the transition between the kitchen and living areas. Its top was choked with detritus: keyholders, loose coins, half-curdled tins of lip balm. On it sat an oval mirror, framed by a mosaic of recycled bottle glass. I went up to it, not straight on, but cautiously and sideways—as though flanking an enemy—and leaned until it caught my reflection. I prayed it would show my untamable curls and the eyebags I knew and loathed.
“I need to talk to you,” Mirror Boy said.
“Fuck off,” I said, to which Shane went, “Uh, what?”
“Nothing.” I shuffled away from the mirror and flounced down next to the dining table, trying not to breathe too harshly. After ten years spread over the tumult of late adolescence and early adulthood, I had thoroughly convinced myself that my year with Mirror Boy was all made up, an artifact of a traumatized mind. A coping mechanism. But I was better now. The broken girl I used to be had grown up into a functional adult. Why had he come back?
The boiling kettle whistled as Shane thumped breakfast in front of me, gelatinous and greasy. She poured the steaming sub into two oversized enamel mugs. “Here,” she said. “You look like you could use an extra helping.”
We ate. Or at least, Shane ate, while I mixed bean and egg into a brownish slurry on my plate. All was quiet except for the chittering of the newsprinter, spooling its thin scroll onto the dining table. When it stopped, Shane tore off the printout and scanned its fuss-less, tiny text. “Great squid. There’s been another murder.”
“Murder?” I said, not really processing the words.
“Yes. In Darlingfort. Probably that same serial killer that’s been going around.” She turned the chit towards me. “Here, look. Seem like anyone you know?”
I squinted at the victim’s picture, monochrome and pixelated, only slightly larger than a toenail. It looked vaguely like a man, possibly brown-haired, maybe thirty, probably white. I shrugged.
Shane’s expression softened. “You used to live in Darlingfort, didn’t you?”
“That was a long time back.” When I used to be a circus girl. When I last had Mirror Boy as my reflection. I shifted uneasily in my chair. The glare of the mirror on the dresser had a weight to it, as though the kid was trying to claw his way out. “Listen, I’d better get going.”
“What, to work?” Shane looked at the kitchen clock. “Is the salon even open?”
“Yeah,” I mumbled, pushing my chair back.
“You haven’t eaten anything.”
“I’m not hungry.”
Shane’s worry peaked. “Hey. Is something wrong?”
“I’m fine,” I said. It was a lie, and it sounded like a lie.
I had to stand by the dresser while I put on my boots. “Why are you avoiding me?” Mirror Boy asked from his corner. “You know I’m here.”
“Shut up,” I hissed, soft enough to keep it from Shane. “Shut up shut up shut up.”
It was clear outside, the air as crisp as winters ever get anymore. A soft breeze teased hair and fabrics. I took the midlevel network, high enough above the water the reflections wouldn’t bother me. Back in Darlingfort the canals were sludge, so I never had this problem.
Back in Darlingfort, my relationship with Mirror Boy was different.
Once upon a time I was a circus girl, just like my mother. Once upon a time I had an apple-cheeked face and an easy, gap-toothed smile. Once upon a time I used to throw knives and juggle and spin fire.
Then my mother died when I was fourteen, and I was like a dinghy cast out into an icy ocean. The other women in the circus tried to protect me as much as they could, but I eventually found out what people were willing to do to young girls when they no longer had the protection of a lion tamer.
There was an escape artist, Alfous: almost forty, with a slow-growing belly and a grease-slicked moustache. He tried to hold himself up as a gentleman around me, but I tried not to be around him at all. Until one day the desire burst from him like a swollen river, turbulent and inescapable. He chased me down in the damp of night when the others had gone out to get drunk, and pinned me against the knifeboard.
But I was stronger than I looked, and I kicked and screamed and cracked a cheekbone with my heel. So he clubbed me over the head, slapped me in chains, and threw me in the water tank. I woke with my lungs burning and a wall of green murk crushing me. I thought I was going to die, until I saw that there was a boy in the water. He looked my age, with dark eyes and dark hair and skin yellow as the moon. “You can do it,” he said. I didn’t know him, but seeing I wasn’t alone calmed my panic. It was then I found out how far I could bend my elbows, and how easy it was, with my thin wrists, to slip from the vise of the chains. I got my hands free, I got out of the tank, and I survived.
I survived, and a week later Alfous mysteriously disappeared. No notes left behind, nor any evidence. The rumor around the circus was that he’d been sent to feed Kraken, hungry in the sludgy deep. If anyone suspected the scrawny girl with the purpling across her forehead might have been involved, they said nothing. I volunteered to be the new escape artist, because it turns out I had a natural talent for it. I was sixteen.
Anyway, that’s how I met Mirror Boy. When I climbed out of that tank, furious and dripping and bruised in the head, I found that my reflection had disappeared entirely. In its place was the boy who had been in the water with me. Every mirror or glass pane I looked at was graced by his presence, narrow and morose and slightly misshapen. I bled from the palms stealing a shard of factory window for my room, and in that sacred space where no one else was allowed—or no one else dared to go—I spent hours with Mirror Boy. I would sit by the cold glass in the afternoons, in between rehearsals and the start of the night’s performances, and I would let spill all the petty grievances of the day. Who had looked at me the wrong way, who had wounded me with cutting words. Mirror Boy never said much. He listened and told me I was right, or that he agreed with me. And I needed that. As time went on I started talking about my hopes for the future, about how I wanted to leave the circus and leave Darlingfort before it broke me like it broke everyone else. And he would just smile and nod and say he believed I could do it.
Some days, I missed knowing what my face looked like. Some days, I was glad I didn’t have to.
But I got older, and I got out of the circus. Escaping was my fo
rte, after all, and I found I could bend my mind and will as easily as I could my body. People were willing to pay a lot of money to spend nights with me. I saved that money and used it to find a new and better place to live. To buy a new name and history. I got out of Darlingfort. Slowly—or perhaps all at once, I don’t remember anymore— Mirror Boy left me. I got my reflection back. I became a whole person again.
Until now.
The salon wasn’t open, and it wouldn’t be open until eleven. On the edge of posh Helbride, it was party to a stream of older women, powdered and primped, who delicately sashayed in from rooflevel with all the confidence I wished I was born with. They came to get their hair done and their faces done and their nails done while they filled the air with stories of their expensive vacations and expensive heliships and expensive children. They had names and, arguably, personalities, and I recognized most of the regulars by sight, but I could not tell them apart. As a lowly beauty technician, I hadn’t been given the salon keys, but the toilets in the building weren’t locked. They were fancy and empty, appointed in gilt and upholstery and soft underlighting.
Mirror Boy was waiting for me there, pacing between columns of dark marble in the looking-glass toilet, the one that had a copy of him and didn’t have a copy of me. “I want my reflection back,” I told him.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see him. Honestly, I’d missed him, and I hadn’t realized how much until now. His familiar shape and hunch sent ambient warmth through odd corners of my chest. At one point in my life, his existence—just for me, and me alone—had brought great comfort. But the truth was, I no longer needed him. And I didn’t want to go back to being that child who did.
Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2019 Edition Page 45