The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2015

by Paula Guran

  “Nah, I’m not going to tell him where you are. I got something of his I need to give back is all. Nothing you have to worry about.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Erich said, ashamed of the whine in his voice.

  “I’ll leave you the good boat,” Timmy said, turning toward the darkness.

  “Will you be back?” Lydia said. She hadn’t meant to, because she knew in her heart, in her bones, and deeper than that what the answer was. Timmy smiled at her for the last time. I take it back, she thought. Kill him. Kill the boy. Kill everyone else in the world. Shoot babies in the head and dance on their bodies. Any atrocity, any evil, is justified if it keeps you from leaving me.

  “Eh,” Timmy said. “You never know.”

  The darkness folded around him as he walked away. Her hands were made of lead and tungsten. Her belly felt hurt and empty as a miscarriage. And underneath the hurt and the horror, the betrayal and the pleasure she took in her distress, something else stirred and lifted its head. It took her time to recognize it as pride, and even then she couldn’t have said who or what she was proud of. Only that she was.

  The boat splashed once in the water, her almost-son and sometime-lover leaving the shore for the last time. Her lifetime was a fabric woven of losses, and she saw now that all of them had been practice, training her to teach her how to bear this pain like a boxer bloodying knuckles to make them strong and numb. All her life had been preparation for bearing this single, unbearable moment.

  “Shit,” Erich said. “Were there only two dinners? What am I going to eat?”

  Lydia plucked up the fork that had been Timmy’s, gripping the stem in her fist like holding his hand again, one last time. Touching what he had touched, because she would never touch him again. Here this object had opened his lips, felt the softness of his tongue, and been left behind. It held traces of him.

  “What’s the matter?” Erich said. “Are you all right?”

  I stopped being all right before you were born, she thought. What she said was, “There’s something I’d like you to do for me.”

  The streets of Baltimore didn’t notice him pass through them this one last time. More than three million people lived and breathed, loved and lost, hoped and failed to hope that night, just as any other. A young woman hurrying home later than her father’s curfew dodged around a tall man with thinning hair and pants wet to the knee at the corner of South and Lombard, muttering obscenities and curses at him that spoke more of her own dread and fear than anything the man had done. Four Star Helix security employees, out of uniform and off-shift, paused at the entrance to an Italian restaurant to watch a civilian pass. None of them could have said what it was about him that caught their attention, and it might only have been that they’d operated on high alert for so many days at once. The civilian went on, minding his own business, keeping himself to himself, and they went into the building’s garlic and onion smells and forgot him. A bus driver stopped, let two old women, a thin-faced man, and a broad-shouldered amiable fellow come on board. Bus service was part of basic, and the machine followed its route automatically. No one paid, no one spoke, and the driver went back to watching the entertainment feeds as soon as the bus pulled back into traffic.

  Nearer Oestra’s safe house, things changed. There were more eyes, more of them alert. The catastrophe of the churn hung thick in the air, the sense that doom might come at any moment in the shape of security vans and riot gear and voices shouting to keep hands visible. Nothing like it had happened that day or the one before, but no one was taking comfort in that yet. The guards who stopped Timmy were different than the ones he’d seen earlier, but their placement on the street was the same. They stopped him, took the pistol that Burton had given him, scanned him for tracking devices, firearms, explosives, chemical agents, and when they found he was clean, they called in. Oestra’s voice through their earpieces was less than a mosquito but still perfectly recognizable, a familiar buzz and whine. They waved Timmy on.

  Oestra opened the door to him, automatic shotgun still in the lieutenant’s hand, as if he hadn’t put it down all day. Probably, he hadn’t.

  Timmy stepped into the main room, looking around pleasantly. The newsfeeds flickered silently on their screens: a street view from sometime earlier in the day with five security vans lined up outside a burning apartment building, a serious-faced Indian woman speaking into the camera with a dour expression, an ad with seven bouncing monkeys reaching for a box of banana-flavored cakes. The world cast its shadows on the bare brick wall and threw stories into the gray mortar. The churn, running itself to exhaustion. New stories from around the world and above it filling in the void.

  “You’re back,” Oestra said.

  “Yup.”

  “You do the thing?”

  “It got a little complicated,” Timmy said. “The man still here?”

  “Wait. I’ll get him.”

  Oestra walked to the back, one set of footsteps fading into the safe house, then a long pause made rich by the murmur of voices, then two sets of footsteps coming back. The timestamp beside the dour Indian woman read 21:42. Timmy considered the curtains. Blue-dyed cotton with cords of woven nylon. The chair Oestra had been sitting on before, leather stretched over a light metal frame. A kitchen in through a wide brickwork archway. The bedroom in the back with its futon, and a bathroom somewhere behind that.

  “Tiny,” Burton said. “What’s the news, little man?”

  Burton’s white shirt caught the light from the screens, dancing in a hundred colors. His slacks were dark and beautifully cut. Timmy turned to him like he was an old friend. Oestra walked past them both, taking his place by the window. Timmy glanced back at him only a few feet away, a shotgun across his thighs.

  “Well,” Timmy said. “Truth is, I ran into a little hiccup.”

  Burton crossed his arms, squared his shoulders and hips. “Something you couldn’t handle?” he asked, his voice hard with disapproval.

  “I’m waiting to see,” Timmy said.

  “Waiting to see if you can handle it?”

  “Well, yeah,” Timmy said with a wide, open smile. “Actually, it’s kind of funny you put it that way.”

  When the big man stepped back toward the window, the movement was so casual, so relaxed, that neither Oestra nor Burton recognized what was happening. Timmy’s thick fingers grabbed the back of the leather chair, pulling back and down fast and hard. Oestra twisted trying to keep from falling and also bring the shotgun to bear at the same time, managing neither. He spilled to the floor, Timmy’s knee coming down hard on his neck. Oestra’s muffled roar was equal parts outrage and pain. Timmy reached down and ripped the man’s right ear off, then punched down twice, three times, four. Burton ran for the back bedroom. There wasn’t much time.

  Unable to use it with Timmy on his neck, Oestra dropped the shotgun and twisted, trying to get his arms and legs under himself, trying to get the leverage to push Timmy back. Timmy reached down and hooked his finger into the gunman’s left eye, bracing the head with his knee and turning his wrist until he felt the eyeball pop. Oestra’s screams were wilder now, panic and pain taking over. Timmy let the pressure up, scooted to the left, and picked up the abandoned shotgun. He fired once into Oestra’s head and the man stopped screaming.

  Timmy trotted across the room, shotgun in one hand. Burton boiled out of the bedroom, pistols in either fist and teeth bared like a dog’s. The front window shattered. Timmy ducked through the brick archway into the kitchen, shifted his grip on the shotgun, and swung it hard and low, leading with the elbow like a cricket player at the bat as Burton roared in after him. The sound of the connection was like a piece of raw steak being dropped on concrete. Burton’s feet flew out from under him, but the momentum of his rush carried him stumbling into the space beyond. Timmy lowered the shotgun toward the man’s head, but Burton whirled, dropping his own guns and grabbing the shotgun’s barrel. The smell of burning skin was instantaneous. Timmy tried to pull back, but Burton kic
ked out. His right foot hit Timmy’s knee like he’d kicked a fire hydrant, but Timmy still stumbled. The shotgun roared again, and the refrigerator sprouted pocks of twisted metal and plastic. Burton twisted, pulling himself in close. Too close for the shotgun’s long barrel. He hammered his elbow into Timmy’s ribs twice and felt something give the third time. Timmy dropped the shotgun, and then they were both down on the floor.

  They grappled, caught in each other’s arms, each man shifting for the position that would destroy the other in a parody of intimate love. The fingers of Burton’s left hand worked their way under Timmy’s chin, digging at his neck, pushing into the hard cartilage of his throat. Timmy choked, gagged, pulled back the centimeter that was all Burton needed. He pulled his right arm up into the gap, braced himself, twisted, and now Timmy’s arm and head were locked. Burton gasped out a chuckle.

  “You just fucked the wrong asshole,” he hissed as Timmy bucked and struggled. “Your little cripple boyfriend? I’m gonna burn him down for days. I’m gonna find everyone you ever loved and kill them all slow.”

  Timmy grunted and pushed back, but the effort only made Burton’s lock on him tighter.

  “You thought you could take me, you dumbfuck piece of shit?” Burton spat into Timmy’s ear. “You thought you were tougher than me? I owned your momma, boy. You’re just second-generation property.”

  All along their paired bodies, Burton felt Timmy tense and then, with a vast exhalation, relax, melting into the hold. Burton pulled tighter, squeezing. There was a report like a pistol shot when Timmy’s shoulder dislocated and the resistance stuttered. Burton’s grip broke. Timmy rolled, cocked back his fist and brought it down on the bridge of Burton’s nose. The pain was bright. The volume of the world faded. The fist came down again, jostling the kitchen. The light seemed strange, reducing the red of the bricks and the yellow of the stove to shades of gray. Burton tried to bring his arms up to cover his face, to shield him from the violence, but they were a very long way away, and he kept losing track of them. He had them up, but they were numb and boneless. The attacks easily brushed them aside. The fist hit his nose again, and he didn’t know if it was for the third time or the fourth.

  Shit, he thought. This is just going to keep going on until that fucker decides to stop.

  The impact came again, and Burton tried to say something, to scream. The impact came again, and afterward followed a few seconds of darkness and silence and calm. Burton felt very sleepy. The impact came again. Calm. The impact came again and again and again. Each time, the violence felt more distant and the emptiness between more profound until a kind of forgetfulness came over him.

  Once Timmy was sure that he was alone in the apartment, he rolled onto his back. His left arm hung from the socket, limp, useless, and disconnected. He levered himself up to his knees, breathing hard between clenched teeth. Then stood. He took the automatic shotgun in his one good hand and stepped out to the main room. On the screen, the Indian woman was still speaking, wagging a finger at the camera to make a point. The timestamp beside her read 21:44. Two minutes. Maybe a little less. Timmy walked to the front window. The guards from the street weren’t at their posts. He nodded to himself and went to stand by the front door. When the knob turned, he waited. The door flew open, and he fired three times, once straight ahead, and then angling to the left and right. Someone started screaming and the door banged closed again.

  Timmy went back to the kitchen. He flipped on the burners, pulled down the roll of cheap paper towels from the wall. He found a bottle of peanut oil in the cabinet and doused the towels with half of it before he put them directly on the heating element. A flurry of footsteps came from the front and he fired the shotgun again, not aiming at anything. They retreated. The oil-soaked paper caught fire, and Timmy picked up the burning roll, trotted to the bedroom, and threw the flaming mass into the bunched covers. By the time he was back in the kitchen, the flame shadows were already dancing in the archway behind him. Timmy put the half-full bottle of oil directly onto the heating element and walked to the back of the safe house. The stairway leading to the alley was narrow and white. He didn’t see anyone, but he fired the shotgun twice anyway then tossed the gun back into the fire. If there had been a guard there, they’d fled. Timmy walked out into the night.

  He moved slowly, but with purpose. When his path crossed with other people’s he smiled and nodded. Once, when he had almost reached his destination, an old man in a black coat had stopped and stared at his bruised and bloody hand. Timmy smiled ruefully, shrugged, and didn’t break stride. The old man didn’t raise an alarm. Around here, a muscle-bound thug with blood on his cuffs and skinned knuckles didn’t warrant anything more than a disapproving look.

  The security forces had put a fresh lock on Lydia’s door, but Timmy knew the back way in. He slid through the window into the bathroom he’d known so well over the last few years. It still smelled like her. They’d gone through everything. Her towels and the shower curtain were on the floor. Bottles of medications littered the sink. He dug through until he found some painkillers and dry swallowed three. In the kitchen, he wrapped his shoulder in ice, then waited motionless until the swelling was down as far as it was going to go. Putting his shoulder back in its socket was a question of lying on the bed, his grip on the mattress bottom hard and unforgiving, and then pulling back slowly, relaxing into the pain, until it slid back into place with a wet, angry pop. He stripped, washed himself with wet hand towels, and changed into a fresh set of his clothes. Ones that didn’t have anybody’s blood on them.

  The churn, the crackdown, the catastrophe. The cycle of boom and bust. The turn of the seasons. Whatever name was applied to it, the inevitable cascade of events in the city rolled on just the same. When the fire trucks came and put out the blaze, they identified the two bodies as Feivel Oestra and an unregistered man. The unregistered was a small, compact, dark-skinned man in an expensive shirt and tailored slacks. He had no tattoos, and a wide birthmark on his right shoulder blade in the shape of a rough triangle. Both men had died by violence. If the fire had been meant to conceal that, it failed. If it was only meant to foul any trace DNA or fingerprint evidence, it did well enough. Add to that the fact that Oestra was on the Star Helix lists as someone to bring in for questioning, and the broad strokes of the story came clear.

  The same night, fifteen men loyal to the Loca Griega were surrounded in a nightclub. The hostage situation that rose out of it left two people dead and ten in custody, and the attendant lawsuits against Star Helix and the owners of the nightclub were the top of the local and regional newsfeeds. Oestra’s death was little more than a footnote, something mentioned and then moved on from. Other things—smaller things—fell even below that level of obscurity. A woman selling illicit painkillers out of her apartment beside the arcology had a screaming fight with one of her clients, called security, and was taken away for questioning. A sweep of the ruins on the bay islands found a small squatters’ camp with an LED lamp, an emergency prep sleeping bag, and an exhausted chemical stove, but anyone who had been living there was gone. An art dealer contacted with a request for assistance with an investigation killed himself rather than come in. None of those events raised any notice at all.

  Soon, the paroxysm of violence, legal and otherwise, would thin back down to the normal background radiation of human vice. Very serious people would argue about whether the program had worked. Some would argue that crime had gone down, others that it had actually risen. Star Helix would take its payment from the government and settle out of court most of the complaints made against it. One of the remaining lieutenants would rise to the top, or the whole criminal apparatus would turn over to a new organization, a new generation. Within a year, there would be a new working normal that would run more or less gracefully until the next time. People of little importance would survive and make names for themselves. The mighty would fall, the meek would rise up in their places and become mighty. But all that would come later.

 
In the pearly light that came before the dawn, one other thing happened that went unnoticed, meaningless to anyone but those involved.

  It was on a street down near the water’s edge. The eastern sky was brightening with the coming dawn, the western sky still boasted a scattering of stars. Traffic on the street was thick, but not yet the immobile crush that would come with the light. Sea and rot perfumed the air, but the cool made the scent seem almost pleasant. A tea-and-coffee stand was opening, sporting the blue-and-pink logo of a popular chain and a tray of baked goods just the same as a million other trays on five continents and two worlds. Old men and women on basic huffed down the sidewalk, getting in the day’s exercise before the sun came up. Young men and women staggered home from long nights at the street clubs and rairai joints, exhausted from hours of dancing, drinking, sex, and frustrated hope. Soon, the streets and tube stations would thicken with the traffic of those who had jobs to go to, and then be released to the masses for whom basic was a way of life.

  A boy on the verge of manhood stood on a corner near the tea-and-coffee stand. He was taller than average, and muscular. His close-cropped reddish-brown hair was receding, though he was young. His expression was blank, and he held himself in a tight, guarded way that could have been grief or the protecting of some physical injury. His right hand was swollen, the knuckles skinned. If it hadn’t been for that last detail, the security team might have passed him by. Three women and two men, all in the ballistic armor and helmets of Star Helix.

  “Morning,” the team lead said, and half a beat later the tall man smiled and nodded. He turned to walk away, but the other personnel shifted to block his path.

  The man tensed, then made the visible decision to relax. His smile was rueful. “Sorry. I was just heading out.”

  “I respect that, sir. We appreciate you taking a moment,” the team lead said, placing a hand on the butt of his pistol. “Really did a number on your hand.”