by Phoebe North
and this time, when the pirates toss me overboard again, my body comes to rest on a stony shore. As I come to, I see how the dunes are marked with towers: one, two, a dozen more. Stones left by childish hands. I remember this place, this shore, this land, and the strange creatures who live here. Once, I was a child among them, telling myself I was not a child. Once I was a boy who claimed to be a prince. I see the shadows in the underbrush and know the feral children will soon come to claim me. I struggle against the ropes that bind me, hoping to free myself before they can carve my body out for supper. But the shadow who draws closer is no child at all but an adult, or nearly one, a luminescent beast with fine, curled hair and a trembling smile.
“Jay, are you okay?”
“Jay, are you okay?”
and i stumble to my feet giving my head a shake and i go down the hall to the bathroom and get myself a water and come back to sit at the foot of their bed to drink it while my heart still pounds out a Savage War Song, “Flashbacks,” i say, and i shake my head again because always when i wake up in the dead of night i’m there for a moment in His bed in His apartment and it used to be that Shelley would scream at me for waking her but they are not Shelley and they are not Him either—they are someone new, a Brand New Luminescent Beast—and they only sit beside me and rest their head on my shoulder and in the darkness we wait for the memory to pass
They help me untie the ropes from my body. Our hands, working in synchronicity, in harmony, in chorus, and soon, I’m free from these ropes, sitting naked on a rocky shore and looking at this strange new creature, who looks at me with clear, kind eyes, and I realize that this is a new path, a new story, one that no one has written yet.
“I should head home soon,” i say even as my head hits their pillow and Travis laughs a little and presses a hand against my cheek and kisses me because we met twelve days ago and already we have spent eleven nights together because when they are not at work and i am not at the hospital we are here talking in Low Tones to one another and doing nothing together and doing everything together and i’m not sure i’ve ever been In Love Before but i am most certainly and deliciously In Love Now
“There’s something I’m supposed to do,” I tell them, glancing at the hazy sunrise over this island like it holds an answer as precious as any coin, and they take off their overdress to give to me. It billows out around me in the warm island air.
“What am I going to do,” i say softly, that question i’ve been asking since that First Night when i got that Awful Call and got to the hospital and there was this Luminescent Beast there before me telling me what had happened to my mother because i never expected one of the Worst Nights of My Life would also be the Best and Travis lets out a sigh and kisses me again and we’re kissing for a moment for a long long moment and i think this is not like what i shared with Neal when i was a child or even Vidya this is not a Love that Lives in Darkness
“There’s someone you can speak to,” they say, smoothing the cloth over my body, and I look into their eyes, anticipating their words before they say them.
“About what?” they ask because we’ve talked about so many things like how i’d like to go to college someday and read debord or how my mother might heal and be changed and how my father still confounds me and how there is a Jagged Line that connects me to my sister even in the Worst of Times and how i was once cruel to her and told her she was the archivist like she couldn’t even make her own stories when really we were Treasurers both i mean it was right there in our name and we lived half our lives in Other Places and squirreling the stories away for later which my therapist says i might always do even if i never write them down because for me these fantasies are a Coping Mechanism
“I’ve tried before,” I tell them, willing them not to say her name. But they shake their head.
“About my family,” i tell them vaguely because i know i cannot hide them anymore and i don’t want to either
“You should try again,” they urge me, and we look toward the jungle in the distance, and the ramshackle, crooked houses that live within it. I know that she’s waiting for me in the tallest tree in the grandest house on the whole damned island. The Emperata’s got a quill pen tucked behind her ear and her hands are stained with ink, and she’s waiting for me, still—like she’s always been waiting.
“If I were you,” they say carefully, “I would start with my sister.”
Silence stretches out between us.
silence stretches out between us
Across the Vast Salt Sea
Cetus Books, Inc.
Beatrix Ian
Publisher
cetusbooks.com
Copyright © 2051 by Anne M. James
All Rights Reserved
Cover art by Petyr Murray
Cetus Books are distributed by Astomi Group (USA)
All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
All resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the internet or any other means without permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
First printing, June 2051
4 5 6 7 8 9
Printed in the USA
For my brother,
for his help on this story
and every story.
Prologue
ANNIT AND JAMIN watched their home burn.
It was the most beautiful thing they’d ever seen, the way the flames licked the redbrick walls like enormous tongues, turning the woodwork bright, then black. From their space beneath the wide front porch of Master Edon’s house, they clutched hands and observed their belongings turn into a tower of gray. The twins had never been particularly materialistic, unlike their older sister, Corinth, but it still filled them with a fascinating mixture of excitement and dread to watch their toys, their beds, their father’s work all go up in flames.
The townfolke did what they could to beat back the conflagration. They hauled bucket after bucket up from the creek’s edge, until their hands were splintered and their faces black from smoke. It was all for naught. The home was meant to burn, and all the belongings inside it. Father and Corinth had barely escaped, eyes red and weeping and lungs full of acrid wind.
Thank the goddess Mother is already dead, said the twins, in their shared chorus of thought. Before she had caught the wasting disease, Mother had fallen off a ladder in the back larder. Only three steps, a freak accident, surely, for her bone had broken in four places and never quite mended right. She limped everywhere, loping steps, always trailing well behind her youngest children. She never would have made it out of the fire on time, had she not already died.
By the time the daylight had turned to purple gray, starless after the smoke, the fire had begun to die, too. The home was destroyed, though the townfolkes’ work had saved the other finely built merchants’ homes from burning. From the mud beneath the porch steps, the twins were unsure whether to be relieved or angry. After all, the other merchants were hardly any better than Father, with their fine clothes and their noses in the air. Or perhaps they were even worse. It had been Jin the Miller who had told their father to separate the children. “Not natural for a boy and girl to spend s’much time together,” they’d heard him say when he had delivered Father’s fine feathered hat to their parlor. Their father had grumbled, the frog in his throat twitching.
“Been together since the womb,” he’d told Jin. But then the next morning, he pulled Jamin right out of bed at dawn, before Annit was even awake.
“Time for you to learn a trade, boy,” he said. “Time for you to be useful.”
When Annit had awoken, she was alone for the first time. She walked through the echoing hallways of their home, finding no one. It was only when she stepped into her father’s work
shop that she realized the reason for her solitude. There was Jamin, bending wires around a stone, his face a mask of concentration.
“Leave us, Annit,” their father said without so much as lifting his head to see her. “Your woman’s filth will interfere with our magic.”
So Annit went to the creek. She walked through the forest. She tried to play hopscotch with the other girls, but they wouldn’t let her. She tried to fill her day, but there was no filling it, not without Jamin.
Father’s magic was a falsehood, anyway. Even Jamin said so.
That night when they tucked themselves in their straw bed together, Annit drew her brother close. Together, they made plans. Only Mother had ever suspected the power that the twins possessed—and once they’d had their way with her, she never spoke a word of it to Father.
“I don’t want to hurt him,” he said faintly.
“No one will get hurt,” said Annit. “Besides, hasn’t he hurt us? Separating us like he has?”
“He didn’t mean to, though. He was only doing what the other merchants said he should.”
“Still a cruelty.”
They argued like that, round and round in circles, for hours. But in the end, Annit won—as she knew she would. After all, she and her brother had one heart, one soul. They wanted the same things, even if she was the only one who was ever brave enough to take them. At last, near dawn, he consented. Annit gripped his hands in hers and delineated her plan.
Two days later, the children, soot-covered and weary, crouched beneath the neighbor’s porch as their home became a cinder. Their sister walked through the rubble, calling for them. They did not answer. Soon, they heard their father’s voice yelling, too. Still, they uttered not a word, holding their breath together. When the night came on, deep and lovely and black as velvet, they finally crawled out, first Jamin, then Annit, just as they had from their mother’s body thirteen years ago.
Annit watched as Jamin walked to the smoldering ruin that had been their home.
“What are you doing?” she asked in a whisper, worried they’d be found. But he didn’t answer her at first. He only kicked through the soggy piles of detritus, searching. At last, he found an emerald, wrapped up with copper wire.
“Father said that this was a dragonstone,” he told her. She watched as he hung it around his neck. “He said it would summon dragons.”
“Father’s a liar,” she replied sourly. “Besides, what would you want with dragons?”
He looked at her, his eyes gone bright in the double moonlight. For a moment, she thought he resembled some sort of sharp-eyed hare.
“The same thing you want,” he said. “Escape.”
With that, her brother walked away from her, toward the forest’s edge. She stood there, hands trembling at her sides. In that moment, she saw their future stretching out like a tangled ribbon. Perhaps it would be as she hoped, and they’d end at the same place. But in that moment she knew that the roads they chose to take them there would be very, very different. After all, she’d been the one to burn down their home. Jamin had been too afraid to light the wick. But not Annit.
Still, after a moment, his voice—as warm and familiar as her own voice inside her head—called out to her.
“Hey, are you coming?”
She hesitated only a moment before she went to join her brother, scrambling after him in the yawning darkness.
Dramatis Personae
(Latin: “the Masks of the Drama”)
Robert Foerster
the Boy in the Woods
Jeffrey Krachun
the Runner
Kenneth Kidd
the Scholar
Sean Wills and Nathanial Merrill
the Queer Fellows
Rachel Hartman
the Oracle
Melissa Sarno
the First Reader
Nova Ren Suma
the Mentor
Stephanie Kuehn
the Wise Counsel
Christine Heppermann
the Poet
Jennifer Castle
the Gentlewoman
Alysa Wishingrad
the Friend
Anna Conlan, Elizabeth Brown, and Sara Walton
Noble Countrywomen
Erica Beckman
a Thaumaturge
John Darnielle
a Lutist in the Court
Tiara Kittrell
the Individual Friday
Alexandra Rakaczki
a Shepherd
Chris Kwon, Jenna Stempel-Lobell, and Alison Donalty
Three Master Artists
Shannon Cox
a Gifted Purveyor of Fine Volumes
Jessica White
a Brilliant Tinker
Alessandra Balzer and Donna Bray
Two Generous Gutenbergs
Victoria Marini
the Faithful Psychopomp
Jordan Brown
Old Sawbones, Our Merciful Surgeon
Sampson and Vincent
the Warlock’s Familiars
Jordan Ian
a Handsome Socialist
Molly Beatrix
the Hero of Another Volume Entirely
About the Author
Photo credit Erica Beckman
PHOEBE NORTH is the critically acclaimed author of the novels Starglass and Starbreak. They were a Sustainable Arts Foundation finalist, and their short fiction and critical work has appeared in Analog, Flash Fiction, the YA Review Network, Umbrella Journal, and Strange Horizons, among others. Phoebe lives in the Hudson Valley, where they enjoy gardening, spending time with their family, and listening to music on outdated audio formats.
They can be found online at www.phoebenorth.com.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Books by Phoebe North
Starglass
Starbreak
Strange Creatures
Back Ad
DISCOVER
your next favorite read
MEET
new authors to love
WIN
free books
SHARE
infographics, playlists, quizzes, and more
WATCH
the latest videos
www.epicreads.com
Copyright
Balzer + Bray is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
“Errata” from Frail-Craft, by Jessica Fisher, published by Yale University Press. Copyright © 2007 Yale University Press. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press.
STRANGE CREATURES. Copyright © 2021 by Phoebe North. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
www.epicreads.com
COVER ART © 2021 BY JAMES T. EGAN/BOOKFLY DESIGN
COVER DESIGN BY CHRIS KWON
Digital Edition JUNE 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-284118-6
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-284115-5
2122232425PC/LSCH10987654321
FIRST EDITION
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Bay Adelaide Centre, East Tower
22 Adelaide Street West, 41st Floor
Toronto, Ontario, M5H 4E3
www.harpercollins.ca
India
HarperCollins India
A 75, Sector 57
Noida
Uttar Pradesh 201 301
www.harpercollins.co.in
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers New Zealand
Unit D1, 63 Apollo Drive
Rosedale 0632
Auckland, New Zealand
www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF, UK
www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
www.harpercollins.com