Unmasked

by Kevin J. Anderson

  I turned, seeing that he now stood right next to me, and I forced a blasé laugh. “No need. I’ll come back tomorrow. I really shouldn’t be working this late anyway—”

  “No.” His eyes were serious, his gaze just a bit off. He wasn’t looking high enough, even though my façade should have been much taller than me. I blinked, subtly feeling for my magic. It was there. I was only on breath thirty. But his gaze was wrong. “I can help you.”

  I resisted the urge to feel for the diamond. Who is this man? What’s wrong with him?

  “There,” he gestured to my hidden pocket, “that necklace. It’s not the real reason you came here tonight.”

  I took an involuntary step backward, bumping my shoulders against the bookshelf.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  How does he know? Did he somehow see?

  “Don’t worry.” His voice was soothing, his eyes almost pleading. But they were still wrong. Still looking too low, as though looking at me. “I’m not here to arrest you. I can hardly arrest someone for stealing what’s theirs.”

  And then I realized. He was looking at me, despite my façade. He saw me. And only one kind of person could see through my illusions.

  His eyes widened. “Wait,” he grabbed my arm, my real arm. “Don’t go.”

  I flinched from his grip. A mind reader. He was a mind reader—the bane of every illusionist.

  “Please.” The broken word fell from his lips even as I backed toward the door, my heart pounding and my mouth dry. “I know what you want. I can help. I know who you are.”

  The room froze. I forgot which breath I was on, forgot to breathe altogether. He knew … what? Knew me? No one knew me. I didn’t even know me.

  Taking advantage of my confusion, Oliver stepped toward me, hands raised as though placating a wounded animal. I told myself to run, told myself to hurry and leave, but I couldn’t move.

  Instead, my eyes traced his shaking hands as they plucked away my mask.

  My façade slipped like water. His eyes focused on my naked face. His expression twisted into … warmth? Fear? I didn’t know.

  Run.

  The word filled my mind. And suddenly my skirts were in my hands, the door open before Oliver could react.

  “Wait!” he cried as I sprinted down the hall. I didn’t. I didn’t know this man, didn’t want this man to know me. “Please, come back!”

  His cry echoed through the corridors, scratching at that part of my mind that demanded to stop, to learn who I was and why I was left with nothing but a torn piece of royal parchment.

  I turned a corner, smacking into the hard armor of a castle guard. Hands wrapped around my arms, holding me in place.

  “Stop!” the guard called. “Why are you here?”

  I searched for an answer, a smooth lie, an escape. Something.

  This had never happened. My magic had never failed me.

  Pursuing steps stopped behind me. The guard looked over my shoulder at his captain, straightening into as much of a salute as he could manage while keeping me restrained.

  I forced back frustrated tears, twisting in the guard’s grip to look at Oliver. He stood taller, taller than he already was. His eyes were hard, and gone was the desperate, pleading man from before. This was Captain Oliver Alexander O’Hanlon.

  “Release our esteemed guest,” he ordered. I blinked, but the guard let go, sending a rush of blood through my arms.

  “Sir.” The guard did salute this time, his armor clanging as he clicked his heels together and smacked a hand against the forehead of his helm. “I apologize. It looked as if—”

  “A misunderstanding,” Captain Oliver inserted smoothly. “This woman is with me. Now, be on your way.”

  We didn’t move until the guard was around the corner. The moment he was out of sight, Oliver’s shoulders relaxed, and the desperation returned to his eyes. Please, they seemed to say. Listen to me.

  Please, I thought back at him, knowing now that he heard every word. Just let me be.

  For a moment, neither of us spoke. And then, ever so slightly, he nodded. The movement was pained. He swallowed, his lips thinning into one line.

  This night hadn’t gone as planned for either of us, or so it seemed.

  Part of me longed to stay, longed to hear what he had to say. But even as I thought it, a hope lit in his eyes, and fear filled me. This man knew me. Not only who I was, but my every waking thought.

  I ran. Through the halls, through the passages I’d long ago memorized. I used my planned escape route, never in my wildest dreams thinking I’d run from the very thing I’d spent years searching for.

  No one chased me. I didn’t know if Oliver’s order had made its way to the other guards or if, more likely, the few servants I passed thought I was absolutely insane. All I know is that as I made my way out into the gardens and toward freedom, I stopped.

  I stopped running, turned around, and stood there under the shadow of a new moon. Looking back at the light spilling from the ballroom windows, I felt the diamond in my pocket.

  I needed to go to the stables, give the porter his prize, and escape into the night. But I couldn’t get myself to move.

  That’s how I got here.

  I still can’t get myself to move. I’ve been out here for sixty-five breaths, staring at the castle, retracing my steps in search of what went wrong. I’m scouring every word Oliver said, looking for meaning, or a clue, or something.

  Is it better to stay out here, where it is familiar and safe? Is knowing worth the price of being Known?

  And of course, one thought rivals all others.

  I left my mask inside.

  Andi Christopher spent her childhood mapping out the rainforests of Puget Sound and will forever consider Seattle her own personal moveable feast. She wrote her first novel on a dare at the age of fifteen and fell in love with the craft. Now, when she’s not lost in a fantasy world, she works in book promotion while eagerly awaiting the publication of her debut novel. To learn more about Andi you can visit her website at andichristopher.com or follow her on Facebook or Instagram @AndiChristopherAuthor.

  Beauty Is Lifted from Its Face as a Mask

  Eric James Stone

  Luz Trunso frowned at the black circle that had appeared on her monitor, its sharp edge standing out against the fuzzy grays of the data coming in from the SMC-18’s seismophones. In the seventeen months she had been working as a mining operator on Luna, she had never seen anything like this. She rotated the image in three dimensions. The circle was a sphere. “That’s odd,” she said.

  “What is odd?” asked Takshin Zalpuri, who was playing a videogame in his bunk.

  Luz pointed to the sphere. “That. It’s like a black hole for seismic waves.”

  Takshin slid out of his bunk to take a closer look. “Could it be, like, an actual black hole?”

  “Don’t be silly. A black hole wouldn’t just be sitting there—” She glanced at the depth readout. “—twenty-seven meters below Luna’s surface.”

  “Then what is it?”

  Luz shrugged. “Most likely, a glitch. Maybe something got knocked off-kilter while we drove here. I think we should check the seismophones and the rest of the system.”

  “Whatever you say, Luz. I’ll go get my repair kit.”

  Luz shook her head. “I don’t want you tinkering around with them and breaking them. They’re my babies. We’ll just run diagnostics from here.”

  “O-kay …” said Takshin, and returned to his bunk and his videogame.

  “Sammy, activate seismophone diagnostics,” she said.

  “Activating seismophone diagnostics,” replied Sammy, the SMC-18’s computer.

  Since that would take a few minutes, Luz decided she was hungry enough to eat something. She microwaved a couple of frozen empanadas, which unfortunately tasted very little like the empanadas she had grown up eating in Buenos Aires. She should not have gotten her hopes up when she found them in the company commissary back at S
elene Mining Corporation Base as she was stocking up for this trip.

  “Seismophone diagnostics complete,” said Sammy.

  She took a final bite of a so-called empanada—she could not remember when she had last had a meal created out of actual food from real ingredients—and walked back to her monitor. All the seismophones were showing at 100% operational. The black sphere was still there.

  “Takshin,” she said, “I think it’s something real.”

  Takshin stowed his videogame and came over to look at her monitor. “Could be something natural, a geological—”

  “Selenological.”

  “—whatever, process we don’t know about. Or the metal core of an asteroid that smacked the Moon a bajillion years ago.”

  “It’s not metal. Metal wouldn’t just absorb all the seismic waves like that.”

  Takshin shrugged. “Who knows? Remember when they started mining industrial-grade silicon on the Moon, and they ended up digging up a significant deposit of boron? Nobody knew there was that much boron buried under the surface. It’s possible something else might be buried down there, something new … Let’s call it ‘new-tronium.’” He grinned at her.

  Luz rolled her eyes. “It’s forty meters in diameter. If that were real neutronium, we’d be crushed by its gravity.”

  “So it’s something newer—newer-tronium. Or maybe they’ll name it after you since you discovered it: Luzium? Trunsonium?”

  “Get real. Anything we find is property of SMC.”

  “Ah, of course! Smackium!”

  “I ought to smack you,” Luz said. She did not really mind that he kept getting on her case about being a company drone, but some days she was in a better mood for that than others. She tapped the black sphere on her monitor. “I’m going to call it in. Maybe someone at Base has seen something like this before.”

  “Huh.” The face of Pyotr Gerasimov, SMC’s chief seismologist, frowned out at Luz from a small window on the bottom left of her monitor.

  “Do you have any idea what it is?” she said. “Is it possible this is natural, some sort of vibration-absorbent material?”

  “Is possible, sure,” Pyotr said, “but not very likely.”

  “So it’s artificial?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  Luz bit back a reply about how helpful that was. But it must have shown in her expression, because Pyotr said, “Apologies. Not to get hopes up, but it could be human-made structure.”

  Luz looked at the black sphere on her monitor. “Human-made? We’re the first to survey this area.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. China keeps lips tight about where they deploy resources on the Moon. Could be something they built. This ‘black hole’ maybe is for stealth.”

  “You think they buried, what, a base or a mine?”

  “Could be.”

  “But why bury it? Why not just file a mining claim and do it out in the open?”

  “Something extremely rare, maybe,” said Pyotr. “Something extremely valuable.”

  “Something worth hazard pay and a major bonus for us to drill down and see what it is?” asked Takshin over Luz’s shoulder.

  Pyotr grimaced, then gave a curt nod. “I will get approval.”

  Approval came three hours later.

  Just to be sure, Luz ran through the diagnostics and got the same results as she had earlier. The black sphere was real, not a recording error or the like. She had Sammy analyze the seismic waves again, this time looking for changes in frequency caused by reflections off a curved surface. Nothing.

  She triple-checked the mining path she had programmed. It would create a circular shaft two meters in diameter, with a 45-degree slope leading down to the edge of the black sphere.

  “I am going to start mining,” she told Takshin.

  Takshin stopped whistling the annoying tune he had been repeating for a while and looked over her shoulder. “Are you sure? What if it’s something valuable and we break it?”

  “You’re the one who wanted hazard pay and a bonus.”

  “What if it’s aliens?”

  “What would aliens be doing twenty-seven meters under Luna’s surface?”

  “Alien things. Who knows what their motivations are?”

  “Unless you’ve got a real objection, I’m going to proceed.”

  Takshin grinned, then went back to whistling his tune.

  Luz sighed. “Sammy, execute the mining program.”

  “Executing mining program,” replied Sammy.

  She sat at her monitor watching the feed from the miniature camera on the mining head. A high-pitched whine carried through the SMC-18’s frame as the diamond-encrusted drill bits quickly chewed their way through the compacted dust of the regolith until hitting bedrock at 7.3 meters. The mining head slowed, and the whine dropped down to an almost subaudible rumble as the grinding converted bedrock to dust, which was then pumped up into the heart of SMC-18 to separate out the usable minerals.

  Experience told her that mining through bedrock could take up to an hour per meter. The SMC-18 was much more efficient at extracting the minerals from regolith. But sometimes there was something worth drilling down for. She hoped that was the case this time.

  “Probably won’t get there for about twenty to thirty hours,” she told Takshin. “I’m going to take a shower and then call it a night.”

  Twenty-two hours later, Luz and Takshin both had their eyes glued to the screen as the mining head ground through the last few centimeters toward the black sphere. Pyotr was watching remotely from Base.

  The feed from the camera flickered, then cut out. The mining vibrations ceased.

  “What was that?” asked Pyotr.

  “Not sure,” Luz said.

  “Contact with the mining head terminated,” said Sammy.

  Luz bit her lower lip, then said, “Sammy, restart the mining head.”

  “Unable to comply. There is no contact with the mining head.”

  “Run diagnostics on the mining head.”

  “Unable to comply. There is no contact with the mining head.”

  “Run diagnostics on the fiber-optic cable to the mining head.”

  “Running diagnostics.” After a few seconds, Sammy said, “The fiber-optic cable has been severed near the drill head.”

  Takshin chuckled. “Guess it’s time for me to earn my hazard pay. Start bringing the head back up. I’ll suit up and go fix it.”

  Fortunately, retracting the mining head to the surface only took twenty-two minutes. Luz watched an outside camera feed as Takshin approached the drill head. Pyotr was still conferenced in.

  Takshin swore in Hindi.

  “What’s that?” asked Pyotr.

  “Uh, sorry, sir. The drill bits look awful, like chunks of them have fallen off. What I can see of the fiber-optic cable looks fine, though.”

  Luz sighed. “I guess you’ll need to get started on replacing the drill bits.”

  “Are you kidding?” Takshin said. “We drilled to the edge of that sphere. We need to check it out.”

  Luz was about to say she did not think that was a good idea, but Pyotr spoke first. “Activate your helmet camera first. We need to know what is down there.”

  Luz activated a private channel to Pyotr. “It could be dangerous to let him go down there.”

  Pyotr shrugged. “That is how one earns hazard pay.”

  A moment later, the feed from Takshin’s camera popped up on Luz’s monitor. He headed toward the opening of the shaft.

  “At least hook your suit to a winch cable first,” Luz told him.

  “Yes, Mom.” His tone was sarcastic, but he complied, connecting the winch to a carabiner on his spacesuit. He stopped as he reached the two-meter-wide hole in the ground. Beyond the opening, the mining head had fused the regolith into a solid mass in order to provide a wall for the shaft. “Everything looks good here. I’m going in.”

  Luz brought up the winch controls on her monitor. “I’ll pull you back up if anything goes wrong
.”

  Takshin chuckled. “Always the optimist, Luz.”

  On Takshin’s helmet camera, Luz could see the color of the walls become slightly darker as the shaft shifted from fused regolith to bedrock. Takshin continued down the shaft.

  “The outside temperature is dropping,” he said. “Suit insulation is good, though, so I’m still cozy.”

  That sparked a thought. She switched back to the outside camera feed that showed the mining head. “Sammy, switch this camera feed to infrared.”

  “Switching to infrared.”

  The drill bits showed solid black on the screen. After only twenty minutes, they should still be glowing white in the infrared view.

  “Takshin,” she said, “stop where you are.”

  His camera feed stopped moving. “Why?”

  “The drill bits are cold. And not just lunar-night cold—they’ve got to be close to absolute zero.”

  “Are you sure?” asked Pyotr. “Those bits get up to 300 C when they’re drilling.”

  “Heat is vibration,” Luz said. “That black sphere absorbs—”

  The monitor flickered and died. Over the next three seconds, all the lights in SMC-18 dimmed and went out. It was pitch black.

  Luz counted off fifteen seconds for backup power to come on. It did not.

  “Sammy?”

  No response.

  She fumbled her way to the emergency supply locker and found a flashlight hanging in a charger, but it would not turn on. A minute later, she located a glowstick by touch. She bent it to activate, and relief flooded through her as its green glow lit up the SMC-18’s main cabin.

  Had it been some sort of electromagnetic pulse? That might explain power being knocked out for everything with a circuit.

  At least Base would know something was wrong because Pyotr’s call would have disconnected, and they would not be able to re-establish contact. They would send out a rescue vehicle.

  Unless the pulse had hit them, too.