6
The woman in the library isn’t interesting enough to take my attention away from my book. Not many things are. Books are better than people. They’re easier and kinder and they move as fast as I want them to, letting me take my time, letting me leap ahead. Books are safe.
I’m sitting on a hard plastic chair in the adult section of the library. The chairs in the children’s section fit me better—my feet are dangling more than a foot above the floor—but the librarians don’t like it when I carry my weight in physics texts from one side of the library to the other. I’m not sure why. I don’t like to make the librarians unhappy, and so here I am, content in my nest of paper and plastic and physics. So it isn’t that unusual when the woman walks toward me, not the way it would have been if she’d been in the children’s library, where strangers aren’t supposed to be.
She drops a folded piece of paper on my book as she passes. I pick it up, intending to hand it back to her, but my eyes catch on the equations inside, and I’m lost. It’s poetry. It’s mathematics so impossibly advanced that they become a language all their own, and by the time I realize I’m looking at someone else’s work, it’s too late. When I manage to tear my eyes away from the equations, she’s gone. I didn’t really get a good look at her. I’m eleven; all adults look alike to me.
Her hair was the same color mine is. I remember that much.
“Finders keepers,” I whisper, and slide her note into my pocket. Tonight, I’ll dream of those equations.
7
This is not a story about Krypton.
8
She shows up again when I’m fifteen. This time I look up faster; this time I see the angle of her jaw, and think she looks a lot like my mother. But she’s not my mother. My mother is thinner, sharper, more worn away. This woman walks like she knows the world will step aside and let her pass.
The second equation doesn’t fit perfectly with the first, but I can see the steps between them, the places where my own work will slide in and fill the gap. So I fill the gap. I can see the underlying question she’s trying to answer now, about time and speed and the way things move. I want to understand it. I want to know why she keeps dropping her equations on my table.
I want to know.
9
The shower runs for three minutes and eight seconds, the timer outside the bathroom door counting down the usage like a condemnation. Residential water use accounts for less than three percent of wastage, but that doesn’t matter; making us account for every drop is so much easier than reigning in the people with so much money that their lives are effectively part of a different genre. We’re living true crime while they’re living science fiction, and they get to boil oceans while we count cups.
When she steps back into the bedroom, gently patting a towel against her dripping hair, the smell of strawberry shampoo comes with her, stronger than ever, and I’m in love, I’m in love all over again. I would do anything for her, anything to save her from the sun going nova, from the temperature rising as the water tables dwindle, as the economy collapses. Our ending will not be as clean as Krypton’s. This is a comet flashing through the night sky to smash the sky and bring about a winter that lasts for decades, and not the sun deciding that our story needs an ending. And maybe this is what we deserve. The people of Krypton, willingly ignorant as they were, fell prey to a natural disaster. There was no avoiding the fusion flash of a sun past its prime, no shifting the seas and the skies of their homeworld to some other, safer destination. We…we did this to ourselves. We had the warnings and we had the chances to change, and we ignored them.
But “we” is an unfair word. There are babies in the world right now, toddlers, children too young to have played any part in this inevitability. There are people who spent their whole lives fighting to reform the system, people who have worn themselves from stones into blades into stubs as they broke their hearts against the mountain. Not everyone did this. We somehow allowed ourselves to be governed by monsters, and by the time enough of us realized what was happening, it was too late.
Not for the planet. This is not a story about Krypton, because no matter what happens next, Earth endures. Unless someone presses a button and cracks the world’s crust, Earth keeps going, heals from the damage we’ve done, tries again. Dinosaurs and monkeys have had their turns—maybe the coyotes get a shot next. Maybe the crows. Not us, though. We’ll be forgotten, characters from a funny book, shaken off and swept aside.
I breathe deeply, trying to chase the shadows away. The air tastes like strawberry shampoo. I like this brand. It’s pretty new, on the market within the last five years. I’m going to miss it.
“I love you,” I say.
She smiles.
10
I recognize her when I’m eighteen, because the bones of my adult self have settled, and because I’ve been waiting for three years for her to show up again. The first equation, the second, and the pieces I’ve crafted for myself, they all tell me a story, and that story says she was always going to come back here.
When she sees me waiting, she smiles. She got our teeth fixed at some point. That broken incisor that always makes me feel a little lopsided is gone, replaced by porcelain perfection. I don’t like it. It makes our smile exactly like everyone else’s. But I’ll still do it, when I have the chance, because there’s power in anonymity.
Everything about her is geared to blend into the crowd. Her hair, her smile, even the way she does her makeup, not too much and not too little, so that she doesn’t stand out in either direction. She could disappear in an instant. She’s everything I’ve ever aspired to be, and that’s good, because she’s me. She’s always been me.
“Is this cheating?” I blurt. Maybe that’s not the most sophisticated question to ask my older self from the future, but fuck it, I’m eighteen and this is weird, even if I’ve been waiting for it since the day she dropped the second equation.
“Maybe,” she says. “I don’t know. I gave me the first equation when I was you, and if there was someone at the beginning of the chain, someone who actually did the work, I haven’t met that version of us yet. But you had to do enough of the work yourself to understand it when you get to the point of being this version of ourselves. You have to be able to make it work.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Because,” she says. “This isn’t a story about Krypton.”
11
There are no good times for women like us, for girls like the girl I was. I always thought, when I was younger, that the good times were inevitable; that humanity would keep on getting better, would find a way to accept itself, in all its variations, in all its complex wonder. But we fell prey to monsters before we could get there, and I no longer believe that humanity is going to become any better than it is right now. This is it. We’ll burn or we’ll drown, but either way, we’ll be over.
Krypton is always destroyed. That’s the purpose of the planet. It’s a place to be from, a place to remember, a place to mourn. All those little funny book people who existed only to appear in the background of a few panels, watching as their sky caught fire—all those lives that never made the cover.
There’s no rocket for us. I don’t know if there’s going to be a rocket for anyone. Maybe someone will find a way; maybe a ship will throw itself into the void, filled with our best and brightest, or filled with our richest and rottenest, but either way, we’re a middle-aged physicist with bad eyesight and no stomach for heights, and her equally middle-aged concert cellist lover. We’re not going to find a berth. The people who care about humanity will send the young, and the people who care about themselves will send the old, and we’ll be stuck in the middle. People like us…
We’re the background characters on Krypton. We were always only here to go.
There are no good times for us. The world turns, history repeats, humanity eats its young. But there are places where we can disappear, where we’ll be those nice women who keep to themsel
ves and never married, so sad, what a waste. It will be a life lived in hiding, a life lived as sisters, or close friends, or companion widowers. But it will be a life. And in our bedroom, there will be the smell of strawberry shampoo, and the tangle of sheets, and her hands, warm in mine, her body, long as a life sentence, stretched out beside me in the bed.
This is not a story about Krypton. This is a story about comets.
This is a story about getting out of the way.
12
She thought I was kidding when I told her what I was working on. But the tests have been getting more and more successful; the reach has extended further and further back. I can do this. We can do this.
Yesterday I visited myself in the library. I dropped the first piece I’d need, and walked away, priming the paradox that would bring me here, to this moment, to this time.
She looks at me. She lowers the towel.
“Are you ready?” she asks.
“If you are,” I reply.
Our bags are packed. Vintage clothes and vintage cash and maps older than either one of us. There is no good time for women like us, but there will be time, there will be long summer afternoons and longer winter nights. There will be time, and if it’s not good, it will still be sweet, like strawberry shampoo. It will be enough. We will be enough.
Her smile is like the comet, crashing through the atmosphere, ready to wipe the world away. It’s the sun shining on Krypton on the last morning before it ceased to be the planet’s lover, and became its greatest enemy.
“All right,” she says. “Let’s go.”
13
There is no rocket for us. There is no press of acceleration, no ozone burn. There is a box, and there is a flash of light, like a fire consuming everything that exists, and then there is silence, and empty darkness. She reaches for my hand in the dark, the weight of decades pushing down on us, holding us in place.
The air tastes different. Our vaccinations are up to date, but we may be responsible for a new, novel outbreak of the flu. I’d be sorry about that, except we’re already a paradox. This has all happened before. This will all happen again.
I hope someone breaks this cycle. I hope someone sees the stars. But I can see her smiling, dimly, through the dark, and this is enough. This is enough.
This is not a story about Krypton.
This is a story about going home.
About Seanan
Seanan McGuire was born in Martinez, California, and raised in a wide variety of locations, most of which boasted some sort of dangerous native wildlife. Despite her almost magnetic attraction to anything venomous, she somehow managed to survive long enough to acquire a typewriter, a reasonable grasp of the English language, and the desire to combine the two. The fact that she wasn’t killed for using her typewriter at three o’clock in the morning is probably more impressive than her lack of death by spider-bite.
Often described as a vortex of the surreal, many of Seanan’s anecdotes end with things like “and then we got the anti-venom” or “but it’s okay, because it turned out the water wasn’t that deep.” She has yet to be defeated in a game of “Who here was bitten by the strangest thing?,” and can be amused for hours by almost anything.
Seanan is the author of the October Daye urban fantasies, the InCryptid urban fantasies, and several other works both stand-alone and in trilogies or duologies. In case that wasn’t enough, she also writes under the pseudonym “Mira Grant.” For details on her work as Mira, check out MiraGrant.com.
Seanan was the winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her novel Feed (as Mira Grant) was named as one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2010. In 2013 she became the first person ever to appear five times on the same Hugo Ballot.
Succubus Blues
A Grimm Brotherhood Short Story
Kel Carpenter & Meg Anne
Tamsin
“Since you’re technically dead, when you fuck, does it count as necrophilia?” I mused, running my thumb over my bottom lip.
“Tam,” Salem, my best friend, groaned. “Not this again.”
“What?” I dropped my hand and shrugged, settling it over my hip. Beside her, Graves, her boyfriend for life, slammed the SUV door shut and walked over. He threw his arm over her shoulder and she looped hers around his back, tucking her hand in his pocket.
They were disgustingly adorable these days.
“Necrophilia is fucking a corpse, so no,” Graves said, answering my question without batting an eye.
I snickered. Graves tossed the keys, but before I could grab them, a dark brown hand swiped them out of the air beside me.
I turned, my grin drying up.
“But—” I started.
“Oh my god,” Salem sighed. “Dude, stop distracting me with jokes about sex. It’ll be fine. We can watch Farrow’s Square for one weekend. I mean, if anyone dies, I can just bring them back, anyway.” Salem shrugged, and Graves rolled his eyes.
“The reason we’re leaving you in charge is so that no one dies,” the voice beside me piped up.
Dominick fucking Soul.
Otherwise known as the head of the reapers, the biggest pain in the ass on the council we both sit on, and the one man I couldn’t get out of my head.
Probably because I couldn’t ‘get’ him.
He was quickly becoming the bane of my very glorified and sexual existence.
“Yeah, well, beggars can’t be choosers,” Salem quipped.
On the other side of the parking lot, Nocturna, the head of the fae, pressed her lips together. The vampire head, Rembrandt, put his hand on her shoulder and said, “She’s our best option.”
“That’s like saying hotdogs are good for you because you have nothing else to eat,” Nocturna grumbled.
“Hey!” Salem snapped. “You guys were the ones who asked me. I could be on a beach in Fiji right now, but instead I’m babysitting the town so you can have your ‘Council Team Building Weekend’. Or whatever kinky shit it is you got planned.”
Graves ran a hand down his face, acting as though he were embarrassed by her.
But I knew the truth.
He was so into it.
I wiggled my eyebrows at him when he dropped his hand, and he made a face like he’d bit into a lemon.
“Annnnd that’s my cue for us to leave,” Dom said, stepping around me, careful not to make contact. It was well known that a single brush of a succubus’ skin could drive men mad with desire.
Dom didn’t seem to do desire, though.
Word had it that he didn’t date anyone. He was so committed to his reapers and the Grimm Brotherhood that he didn’t have time for anyone or anything else.
At least, that’s what the rumors said.
Something about his strong, silent demeanor called to me, like a lush to wine. For someone to be so focused on their work, it made me wonder what he was like when focused on other things. Workaholics tended to be the best in bed.
“Tamsin,” Salem said. Her voice jarred me back to reality where she was snapping her fingers in front of my face. “Earth to Tamsin, it’s time to load up, babe.”
I eyed the two large suitcases, duffle bag, and oversized purse at my feet, wondering if it was an abuse of my power to have one of the others deal with them.
“You do know we’re only going to be gone for three days, right?” Dom asked, following my gaze.
“Your point?”
“What the hell do you need all that luggage for?”
I turned to him, my hands on my hips.
“Here they go again,” Salem said, not even bothering to be quiet.
“Whose side are you on?” I asked her.
“Graves’. Sometimes yours. Definitely not his,” she added, tilting her head toward Dom.
I narrowed my eyes at her, knowing she’d understand that was my way of telling her that her answer was acceptable, but only just.
“Listen,” I started, s
winging my attention back around to the six-foot-plus piece of sexy reaper currently throwing off all kinds of attitude. “Just because you’re dragging me—against my will, I might add—to bumfuck nowhere, doesn’t mean I’m just going to slum it. Every single item in those bags is a necessity. You’re lucky I managed to pare down that much.”
“I highly doubt that. I’m willing to bet you’d be perfectly fine with just one of these bags.”
Considering one suitcase was filled with shoes, the other with my clothes, and the duffle filled with toiletries and sex toys, I most definitely would not be. I was fully aware I was bringing more than I strictly needed, but since I wasn’t sure there’d be electricity, let alone running water, I wasn’t taking any chances.
You could take the succubus out of the city, but she would still be a badass bitch.
“Oh? I take it you’d rather I go with your approach and pack one T-shirt and a spare pair of jeans and call it a day?” I scoffed. “Sorry. Not gonna happen. I have standards.”
“Is that what you call it?”
Dom’s eyes traveled the length of my body, and I found myself searching his expression for some sign as to what was running through his head as he did. When his gaze hit mine again, it was blank.
I fought hard to contain my disappointment. Succubi were used to men falling at our feet. It was a real blow to the lady bits to have one remain so constantly unaffected. For half a second, I wondered if he might bat for the other team, but immediately dismissed it. He was fully team vagina.
So, what was his deal?
With my experience, I basically had a doctorate when it came to sex and seduction, but Dom made me feel like I was back in elementary school writing my first, “do you like me? check yes or no” note.
It was infuriating.
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