Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2019 Edition

by Elizabeth Bear

  “There’s nowhere to run,” I say, as the door claps shut behind me. “You might as well give up. It’ll be easier on both of us.”

  “I don’t want to die,” she says.

  “I know. I’m sorry.” And I mean it. She is lovely, and I am truly sorry that she has to die. “But to live, a wraith needs a body to inhabit.”

  She looks over her shoulder at me. “I know,” she says sadly.

  Then she spins on her heel, her arm thrown out. Something strikes me hard and I go crashing against the door. The knife’s handle protrudes from my chest. As I watch fluid trickle down my jacket my knees lose coherence, as though their tendons have been cut. I see. The girl is clever, and I have allowed her to trick me. This is the end. My metal rod clatters to the ground.

  The girl canters over and pulls the knife from my heart, and the blood it held back spills over my shirt. “Once upon a time, I used to be a circus girl,” she says. “Once upon a time, I used to throw knives and juggle and spin fire.”

  The girl’s eyes glitter in the moonlight as though they were a distant conflagration. A forest burning. “He’s taken you,” I say. The taste of hot copper fills my mouth.

  “No,” she says. “He’s never taken me. He doesn’t follow his nature. He chose not to. That’s why I decided to save him.” She squats over me. “To live, a wraith needs a body to inhabit. You understand, don’t you?”

  I do, and yet I do not. The world is fading around me. In this half-twilight my brother stands behind the circus girl. It’s been so long since I’ve seen him, I’ve forgotten what he looks like. He’s so beautiful. We used to be so beautiful. I had forgotten.

  I flick my gaze back to the circus girl, trying to understand before my time on this watery earth runs out. “You’ll … take care of him?”

  “No, hunter,” she says. “He’ll take care of you.” She runs her fingers softly through my hair. “A borrowed life is better than none.”

  A borrowed life is better than none. Is that something I used to say? Or my brother? Maybe it was our mother, long dead and gone. My memories swim into one another and I lose them to the dark. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter anymore.

  Forgive me, Leviathan. I know not if I have failed You, only that I have tried my best. I am light as a child floating on the surface of a clear blue sea. O Great Finned One, take me into Your infinite depths, away from this salt-bitten world. I see brother’s face one last time, framed over the circus girl’s shoulder. He is smiling.

  MIRROR BOY

  I smell the sea on the air. It’s a smell I don’t remember, because I remember nothing. But a month from now, or maybe a year later, I will look back on this day and I will.

  I feel the sun upon the skin of the man who used to be my brother. It’s warm. It’s pleasant. It could burn me, if it wasn’t winter. It is my skin now, and I belong to it, as it belongs to me.

  I hear the sounds of life around me. So many notes I can hardly believe it, after so long spent hearing only one voice at a time. There’s the arguments of sea birds, the wash of water against walls, the song of boat motors, and the soft humming of someone experiencing happiness.

  I see Circus Girl perched on the roof edge, her ankles freely dangling, her hair soft and loose. The tune she hums is one her mother used to sing her to sleep with. I realize I am seeing for the first time the shape of her back, the geography of her spine.

  I taste grit in my mouth, clay and ashes and bone. Chrissa tells me it will take a few days for it to go away. A few days for my heart to settle into its new home.

  I want to tell Circus Girl how grateful I am. For hosting me. For teaching me about life. For saving me when I needed it. I want to tell her how terrified I am, now that I have been given all this, and I can do anything I want with it. I want to tell her about this happiness I feel, how new and delightful it is to me.

  Instead I say, “I think I’m hungry. Let’s go downstairs and eat.”

  END

  About the Author

  JY Yang is a Nebula finalist and the author of the Tensorate novellas from Tor.Com Publishing. Their short fiction has been published in over a dozen venues, including Uncanny Magazine, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and Strange Horizons. They live in Singapore and identify as queer and non-binary.

  Copyright © 2019 by JY Yang

  Art copyright © 2019 by Ashley Mackenzie

  Water: A History

  K. J. Kabza

  A Tom Doherty Associates Book

  New York

  Her bath is deep and steaming. Light falls from the high windows, splashing the marble with wealth. My grandmother has opened these windows a crack, and wet spring air slithers in.

  I stand at the edge of her claw-foot bathtub, its rim up to my naked chest, her glasses in my hand. I pull the stems into my fist and rake the lenses through the water, mesmerized by the ripples.

  She stands in the other room, undressing. I can see her age-mottled back in the mirror, skin discolored and papery over muscles straight and strong.

  She ties up her hair and sings.

  * * *

  Since Adrianna Fang died last year, I’m the oldest one left. I’m supposed to feel sad and alone, maybe, or at least the chill of my looming mortality, but I don’t feel that way at all. Instead, I feel wonderfully unmoored.

  I am now the only person in the colony of Isla who has any direct memories of Earth. This means that I can abuse this position at my pleasure and tell them all kinds of bullshit stories they have no way of disputing. It’s my way of getting back at them for the way they treat me now: like some kind of minor god rather than a human being.

  It’s my own fault, I guess. It’s what I get for being lucky. Someone like me, who goes outside three or four times a week, ought to have died from cancer by age thirty-five. "Your mutational load is astounding, Marie," Dr. Davies always tells me, but I have yet to get sick.

  I didn’t know I’d stay this lucky, either. I’ve been going outside that often ever since the Rex touched down—before we knew the surveyor probe had made a terrible mistake, and before we realized what this parched atmosphere would do to us. And I kept going outside even after we did know. By then, both Sadie and I had fallen in love with Quányuán’s ferocious desolation, and I figured, well, I’ve got to die sometime, and if I am to die, let it be because I held hands and took nature walks with her.

  When Sadie died, I petitioned the coroner’s office for a cremation. She was Earth-born, too, I argued, and people on Earth don’t recycle the corpses of their loved ones for biomass. But my petition was denied. Her remains were integrated into the community food supply, and now even that pompous asshole Gilberto has part of her inside of him in some way, which I can’t bear to think about.

  So when I next went outside, after her remains became thoroughly intermingled with my own chemical compounds, I peed on a rock. Now some of Sadie’s chloride will remain in the wilds of Quányuán, even if her ashes won’t.

  Unauthorized atmospheric release of water. They gave me a big fine for that one.

  * * *

  There’s a girl in Isla named Lian. She’s spontaneous, courageous, and kind, and she reminds me so much of Sadie, it makes my heart both ache and sing. I like to imagine a future time when someone will fall for Lian, and she for them, because then something like Sadie and me will be back in the world.

  Lian listens to my lies about Earth sometimes. But she isn’t intimidated by my age or position. Most people, when they’re around me and the subject of water comes up, will pause, secretly hoping I’ll offer some revealing anecdote but lacking the nerve to ask. But not Lian. She comes right out with it. "What was Earth like?"

  Her directness surprises me out of lying. "Er. Well. The footage pretty much covers it, actually."

  "That’s not what I meant."

  "Mmm," I agree. "Videos aren’t the same." I look out the window. I was sitting alone and reading in Lounge Four until Lian came in and politely asked to join me. I could tell she�
��d sought me out specifically, since nobody else likes to come to Lounge Four to hang out. The room faces the plain instead of the mountains, and the view is nothing but a sea of rock-studded dust for miles and miles. "Let’s see. You’re, what, sixteen?"

  "Yes."

  "So that means you did your internship working in the greenhouses last year, is that right?"

  "Yes."

  "So you know the smell of soil." I clear my throat. "Well, Earth was like putting your nose into fresh-watered greenhouse dirt."

  Lian closes her eyes, imagining.

  "That dirt smell was everywhere. The whole planet was wet. The oceans tasted like tears, and standing under a waterfall wasn’t like taking a shower. It felt like rocks getting dumped on your head." Lian laughs. My real stories about Earth are stupid, nothing but a bunch of disjointed details. But Lian nods for me to keep going, so I do.

  "You could take walks every day, for as long as you wanted, and never worry. That’s what I miss the most. I lived on the edge of a forest, and my father and I would go walking there, every Sunday morning. He’d tell me all about Earth and all about the stars. It’s part of the same universe, he liked to say, so every part is beautiful and worth knowing about."

  Lian nods, her eyes still closed.

  My chest aches for her. Lian will never walk in a forest, not with anyone. "That’s how I got to Quányuán. You had to be eighteen to sign up for the colony ship, unless you came with a parent. My father was one of the engineers who designed the Rex, and the government asked him to go. I could’ve stayed on Earth with my grandmother, but I wouldn’t let him leave without me. I was nine years old." I shift in my seat, but it’s not that kind of discomfort. "Sorry. I’m rambling. You asked about Earth, not me."

  Lian opens her eyes and smiles.

  "Why are you even asking me? Is this for some kind of school project?"

  "No," says Lian. "I just wanted to talk to you. About stuff. Like—I was wondering." She looks out the window again. "I’ve never … I mean how do you … do you just go outside?"

  I don’t know what she’s asking. "On Earth? Sure. Almost every building is freestanding, and they all have doors that go directly outside. So you—"

  "No," she says. "I mean if I wanted to go outside here. Would I just—do it like you?"

  I stare at her. A goofy grin unrolls across her face, revealing gaps in her teeth. Her expression is raw with excitement. "You just … go. When you do it. Right?"

  I open my mouth. I’ve never been a mom, but a mom-like tirade comes to mind: You can’t just go, you have to save up some money, you have to pay the fee and file for a permit, you have to cover every inch of skin with two rounds of sunscreen, you have to wear long pants and long sleeves and a special hat, and even though I don’t wear gloves, I’m an idiot, so you shouldn’t do what I do. And even I still have to wear a water pack and keep the end of the hose in my mouth so I can sip from it continuously the entire time I’m out there, because while I am an idiot, I don’t have a death wish.

  But I say none of this.

  Lian turns shy. "I want to know what Quányuán smells like. And I want to feel wind."

  My chest aches again. "Quányuán smells like rock and heat. And wind just feels like a fan."

  "Stories are better than video footage," says Lian. She looks down at her hands and picks at a hangnail. "But they aren’t the same, either."

  I remember myself at her age, when Sadie and I once pressed our faces against an east-facing window, watching the xenogeologists take soil samples in search of the permafrost and water-rich aquifers our survey probe was so very wrong about. Their newest devil-may-care game was taking off their exosuit helmets to pull in deep lungfuls of alien air. My cheeks grew wet, and when Sadie asked what was wrong, all I could say was, The woods, my woods, I want to go outside and walk in the woods.

  Does Lian dream of trees?

  My throat is dry, as if I’ve just played a round of the xenogeologists’ game. "Listen," I say. "If you’ve never been outside before without an exosuit, it’s probably smart if you go with a partner."

  Lian looks up, her face hopeful and eager.

  Twelve days later, Lian and I stand together in Airlock Twenty-Three, our water tubes ready in our mouths. Her greasy bare hand is entwined in mine, and my fingers tingle with somebody’s pulse.

  * * *

  It becomes a regular thing.

  "Isn’t it heartwarming?" "Isn’t it cute?" "That poor woman—she never had any children, you know, and isn’t it just so nice of Lian to keep her company?"

  The gossips in Isla don’t know. Fools. Once again, I’m lucky. If I were fifty years younger—but I’m not. All they see is a lonely old lady and a child who never knew her grandmother. Well, that’s okay, because that’s true, too.

  I show her around. The Four Brothers (rock formation), Little Mountain (big rock formation), the Dais (rock formation you can climb on). There isn’t much "around" to show, really, without an exosuit. You can only walk so far in five minutes.

  Mostly we sit and look, sipping water between occasional sentences. Lian plays in the dust like a toddler, and sometimes, I join her. We roll pebbles across the Dais. We stack up rocks in the Graveyard, where many walkers, including my past selves, have made rock towers. I point out the ones that Sadie made. Quányuán has no storms to topple them. "This is a game from Earth," I say, from around my water tube. "I used to make these with my father."

  When three hundred seconds elapse, the issued alarms on our wrists beep, and it’s time to go back. Alone in our rooms, we recover from dehydration, coping with headaches, irritability, and exhaustion. Dr. Davies warns me that I’m way too old for this. Under the guise of argument, I tell her a long and passionate lie about hiking the Appalachian Trail at age fifteen with nothing but a buck knife, a compass, and a half-liter water bottle, but the art is lost on her. Nobody on Quányuán remembers Appalachia.

  One day, Lian and I sit on a rock and look north. We’re by Airlock Twenty-One, which is next to the middle school. A handful of kids are crammed against the windows and snickering at us, but I’ll get back at them when the school asks me to speak there on History Day. "I’ve switched my career track," says Lian.

  "Hmm?"

  "I’m going to be a miner."

  I smile. "How exciting."

  "Thank god somebody thinks so." Lian sips her water. "My mom says it’s a waste of my talent."

  "Your mom would do well to remember that if it weren’t for the miners, we’d all be dead."

  "I know, right?" Lian squints north, as if she can see across twenty miles of nothing to the entrance to the nearest ice mine. "And they need people now more than ever. Did you hear about the—"

  I wave my hand to both acknowledge and silence. Fifty years of news stories about another depleted subsurface ice vein and everyone on Quányuán someday dying of thirst get tiresome. "You’ll make a great miner," I say. "And with an exosuit on, you’ll get to stay outside for hours."

  Lian nods and sips. "Have you done it? Taken walks around here in an exosuit? The permit’s much cheaper."

  "I know. And I did, for a while, in the beginning." I sip, too. "But not for a long time now. It’s not the same."

  Lian smiles around her tube. She reaches down and scoops up a handful of fine, powdery dust. It floats through her fingers like a cloud, staining her palms and making us both laugh and cough by turns. "Not the same at all," she agrees.

  On my next visit to Dr. Davies, a routine follow-up for some labs, she folds her hands and gives me the Look. It’s a funny kind of relief to finally receive it, after waiting so long.

  The cancer has come at last.

  Damn.

  * * *

  I talk about it at length with Sadie’s nonexistent ghost that night, before we fall asleep. I’m troubled. For over a decade, we had it all planned out: assuming it was cancer, I’d go outside for one final walk, lie down by Sadie’s tallest rock tower (and her chloride), and die a fitting an
d deliciously romantic death.

  But lovestruck notions, while heady, are delicate. The littlest whiff of reality pops them. In my mind, Sadie’s voice points out that, as soon as my wrist alarm went off and failed to show me moving on a homeward trajectory, the Office of Exodus would dispatch a rescue team, and that would be the end of my dramatic gesture.

  And then there’s the matter of my nutrient-rich biomass. I’m not as sentimental as I once was, and if I went outside to die, I’d be depriving a number of living people (whom I might not like very much—but that’s beside the point) of my body’s minerals. I’m no heroic ice-miner-to-be, like Lian, and if I’m honest with myself, I haven’t done very much for Isla, either. When I worked, I was a clerk in the city records department; now that I don’t, I tell lies about a planet we cannot return to. The least I can do is not rob my brethren of my literal pound of flesh.

  Sadie says it doesn’t matter how I die, because she’ll be with me wherever I go.

  I tell her I’m glad.

  * * *

  When she binds up her hair and sings, my grandmother’s voice is clear. Years later, when I recall my childhood on Earth in a jumble of steaming bathwater and golden light, I’ll remember, too, the clarity of her voice, clean and hot like water, deep and pure like water. I swear to god, I’ll go swimming in the north Atlantic at age nine with my cousins, the summer before my father and I board the Rex, and when I look down through that green-glass sea right to the bottom, I will think of her.

  Earth is wet. The whole planet is wet, and the oceans taste of tears.

  * * *

  "I’m dying," I say.

  Lian and I are inside, for once, sitting in Greenhouse Eight. The smells of plants envelop us. It’s night, and up above, past whatever complicated synthetic comprises the ceiling, blaze the stars. With no clouds to soften the blow, the night sky of Quányuán is frightening in its intensity and color.