by IGMS
"Buying your cooperation," he admitted happily.
"I'm not surprised. You're mean."
"Mm. And evil. Get your coat."
She gathered her boots and the fur-lined coat the bandits had given her.
Her eyes found the trestle leaning against the wall by the door, and lingered there. "You know, there's one more thing you can do to recompense me for all of the inconveniences you've put me through. I'd never bother you again after that, I swear it."
He chuckled, heart warming at the prospect of returning to his solitary life. Almost anything would be worth that price. "And what's that?"
"Smith me a death."
He sniffed. "When you first came here, you told me there was no one in particular you wanted to kill."
"I lied."
"Who is this person?"
She took a deep breath. "The only death I have ever wanted is for the man who sired me. He made me a bastard child, destined to beg and whore and scavenge. Give me that, deathsmith, then take me into town and our business will be concluded."
The thought came to him fully formed, alighting in his mind with a jolt. Cold disquiet trickled into his belly. He studied her more closely, cursing himself for a fool.
How could I not have seen it before?
She was thin and fine featured like him, with his knack for spinning coins. She'd purposefully sought him out with a view to forging some kind of bond. And she was clever, like him.
She could easily have been spawned during one his dalliances two decades before. Any one of a dozen women could have been the mother, and each one knew his identity.
Vaguely he recalled a mountain girl . . .
Her father! And she wants me dead!
For a moment, Aris felt the flicker of a blurred and nameless sentiment. And then he turned his mind to dealing with the threat she posed, to considering options.
He could simply ignore her request, drag her along to Amramak, and hope she never returned. But this girl had worked hard to put aside a lifetime's acrimony, to give him the chance to warm to her. And he had dashed her dreams of family, burned away any fledgling affection she might have felt for him.
He didn't know exactly how he might be killed, if there were some chink in the magical protection the wisps had bestowed on him. But if there were one, a spurned and vengeful daughter might just be the one to find it. The hatred would eat at her until she did, until she eventually returned.
He could try to appease her with gold, but that wouldn't work either. Even if it satisfied her for a season, her murderous intent would eventually resurface.
He might give in to her -- maintain the business association and hope it was enough to assuage her anger. But, no. He didn't really need her and that course of action sentenced him to a lifetime of her infuriating prattle.
What option did that leave him? He couldn't kill her outright, not with magick anyway. The amulet's magick couldn't be used to attack people directly for Aris' own sake. It would only protect him from attack -- Aris had become so accustomed to relying on these magical defenses that he almost missed his solution. A primitively simple solution.
Why do I need magick?
He'd found his answer before she'd finished slipping on coat and boots. She stood up. The self-assured arrogance in her stare while she awaited his reply probably mirrored his own, he thought.
He let his gaze drift past her slight figure, rested momentarily on the axe above the fireplace, then moved on. He let out a phony sigh. "Let me consider it while you saddle the horse. You do know how to saddle a horse?"
Her eyes hardened further at the questioning of her abilities.
"Well, off you go then. I'll follow shortly."
She slipped past him into the frigid outdoors. The chilled breath of Winter flowed into the room. The fire flickered and faltered in the hearth.
He took down the axe and quickly followed her outside, snow masking his footsteps. The horse shifted slightly at the sight of him but settled upon recognizing his scent. The girl's back was turned to him as he'd hoped. It would be cleanest and quickest if she didn't see the end coming. Without hesitation, Aris raised the axe and brought it down between her shoulder-blades with grim finality.
When the axe bounced out of his hands, his first thought was that she'd hidden a kind of armor beneath her clothing. He stared at her, aghast. She turned, unfazed by the blow.
How --?
Something unseen brushed his chest. The cough that welled up from the base of his ribs felt like a living thing clawing its way out. Blood erupted on the expulsion of air, staining the snow at his feet a dark crimson. He staggered back, covered his mouth with his sleeve. Expressionless, she prodded the axe with one toe.
What had she done to him?
A second cough doubled him over. Hands on his knees, seeing stars, he stared up at her in horror as a possibility occurred to him.
No!
"I haven't been entirely truthful with you, sir mage," she said. "My Winter in the College of Mages was actually only a week. And I spent the time consulting them about various kinds of magick. As well as purchasing a protective charm of my own," she added, pulling it from beneath her shirt.
"An extremely expensive week, that was. Luckily the King values your death at a hearty five hundred sovereigns. Now, despite his great fear of you and the size of this standing fee, no assassin's tried earning it since the last three dolts died in the attempt." He noticed now that her vowel sounds had shifted to those of cityfolk and her face had lost its youthfulness.
She tapped her chest. "A while ago, when this apprentice assassin heard about the exorbitant price on your head, she knew the solution was so simple, she couldn't believe nobody had ever tried it. Maybe that's because most assassins -- and mages, mind you -- are men. So direct, so simplistic. Without knowing my plan, the King agreed to pay me half the fee up front -- though he swore he would hunt me down himself if I didn't return within the year carrying proof of your death."
Aris coughed again, knees buckling, and struggled to breathe in the wake of it.
"Proving your death." The girl frowned. "Ah, that presents a problem. I am not so stupid as to try to take any of your belongings, since they are no doubt tainted by death spells. Perhaps I will bring back some Amramak Guardsmen to view your body, that will have to suffice."
Cough!
More blood on the snow.
"You deserve this, you pitiless, selfish, ill-tempered fool. It was these flaws, rather than some oversight on the part of the wisps, that left you open to attack. I used your temper against you, and left you clues to make you think you were my father, in the hope that either strategy would lead you to try something like this." She poked the axe a second time. "But don't worry, Aris. Your art will not die with you. It's the amulet -- something that technically doesn't belong to you but to the wisps -- that holds your powers, not you."
He remembered the amulet, reached for it. But on the subject of his own impending death, it was silent. A new tightness in his throat made him think he would cough again, but his airway was choked with blood, as if a door had swung shut inside him. He clawed around him at the snow, knees sinking, world fading around the edges of his vision.
"Before you go, I want you to know that one thing I told you was true. I am a bastard child, an orphan, and no one -- not the townspeople, nor our beloved King, nor my instructors in assassination -- ever bothered to name me. But as I told you some days ago, a man should leave something of himself behind when he's gone. And since I'll soon carry your amulet with its powers undiminished . . ."
Her words traveled to him as if from a distance, a bird's song carried on the wind as the world turned black and Aris fell into a deep dark pit.
". . . I think I will call myself Arissa."
The Ghost of a Girl Who Never Lived
by Keffy R. M. Kehrli
Artwork by Nick Greenwood
* * *
I am Sara's second body.
My first memory
is of Sara's resurrection in a room that smelled of cotton balls and hydrogen peroxide.
"That's funny," a man said.
The world felt raw, sore, and new. Under my back, my butt, my fingertips, I could feel every thread in the sheets beneath me. The blanket over my stomach scratched. Padded straps crossed my arms.
"What's funny?" This voice was a woman's.
"Got another error message," the man answered. "Have you ever seen that one before?"
I felt the sheets with Sara's fingers, and the texture conjured memories I didn't have. I should have known where I was and what I was there for, but I couldn't catch hold of the fleeting thoughts. In the dim light of the room I could only see the ceiling.
"Let me see." I heard a frenzied clicking. "It failed twice?"
"Nothing copied the first time, so I started over. It got about halfway through, and then it gave me this."
"Error two-one-five-two. Copy error," the woman said. "I've never seen that before. I've never even seen an error in the middle of a transplant. Did you check the manual?"
"It didn't list this one."
The woman sighed and said, "The only thing I can think of is if we wipe everything out and start over."
Operating tables, and the anesthesiologist's face. Tissue paper examining tables, candles in a church.
"She's conscious, though," the man said. "When the machine aborted, it sent the Copy Completed code. Don't look at me like that! I don't know if I ought to mess around with it anymore, or . . ."
The woman interrupted, "You know we can't do that without contacting the parents. Come on, we might as well go see what the damage is."
They stood over me. The man was the younger of the two, and he looked down at me from behind thick glasses. He held his clipboard tight against his chest like a shield. The woman stood closer to me; her hair was light, either blond or grey. She frowned like it was my fault.
"Can you hear and understand me?" she asked.
The man wrote something on his clipboard. I could hear graphite rubbed free, caught in the paper.
My mouth felt dry, and my lips did too, as though if I tried to speak they would break apart. "Yes," I managed.
She unhooked the straps on my arms. I lifted my left arm and looked at the fingers, hand, wrist. Clean, and smooth, unmarked.
Cat-scratch scar near my first knuckle, angry red and faded pink.
"Do you know why you're here?"
I wanted to say the right thing, but I didn't know what that would be. "I don't know," I said. "I don't."
"She's coherent," the woman said. "We'll have to call the parents."
The man nodded, and he was still writing. Scratch scratch scratch. He didn't answer her.
The woman disconnected something that slid out from under the skin of my scalp, and I didn't like how it rubbed against my skull. "Make sure you tell them that we won't require the final payment until we get this sorted."
"Copy error," I said. "Is that why I don't know where we are?"
"Yes, Sara," she said. "I think."
I walk until I find a cabin in the woods, the windows broken out by tree branches, by wind and rain and thrown rocks. The door hangs far on its hinges.
Shotgun shells, wet with rain. Raccoon droppings. These are the things that litter the floor inside. I step over them in Sara's boots, into a cabin soggy and ruined from disuse. A dirty orange vest hangs on the wall over a stained and rotten mattress.
Sara has been here before. I know this the way I know so many things. They are the ghosts of objects that live in my brain.
I am alone. The house is alone. I wonder if the raccoons still come in and I wonder who owns what is left of this cabin.
I climb sagging stairs to the loft. My feet sink into the wood with each step, and water oozes out.
I realize then that I'm not trying to run away; there's nowhere to go.
Sara's mother was an angry red-faced woman with a screech-owl voice. I first saw her the day after Sara failed to copy into my brain. Sara's father was a fat man with a neatly trimmed brown beard and big sad eyes.
I wore one of Sara's dresses, and I sat in a little chair. I listened to their conversation and I wondered what it meant for me. They called me Sara, but the word slid off my soul like water off glass. I made fists with my hands when I thought of that, and remembered that even the little things I knew, that birds sing and wolves howl, I knew because Sara knew them.
The adults around me spoke to one another as though the twelve-year-old girl in question was not even there. In a way they were right, because Sara was still dead, and I was not.
"You said there wouldn't be complications," Sara's mother said. Her voice was low and dangerous.
Doctor Camille was calm, even though she was faced with the fury of a mother who thought -- as she had said three times already -- that she was losing her daughter for the second time.
"As I already told you, ma'am, we've never had this issue before. We're running a check on the mem files now. There are a few possibilities. The mem could be corru--"
"It had better not be! This is my daughter's life."
"Honey." Sara's father put his hand on her arm. He only met my eye for a moment.
Doctor Camille cleared her throat. "We're checking our system for corrupted mem files. I suggest you take your daughter home for a few days. She is functioning."
"She doesn't even know who she is," Sara's mother sobbed. "She might as well still be dead."
Doctor Camille looked at me. "The brain isn't a computer," she said. "It's also possible enough of the files transfered that she'll fill in the rest on her own. We'll run another assessment in a week, and then discuss your options."
Sara's brother Benjamin was not a twin any longer, and he didn't say a word to me for three days. Sara's room was left untouched after she died two years before, and I spent most of my time going through it. These were the objects that should have brought me memories, but all it did was make me feel like an intruder.
No matter that the face I saw in the mirror was the same as the one in the picture frames. I was still not the girl who'd carefully lined up her shoes, sorted by color. I was not the girl who loved extinct sea life enough to cover my bed with stuffed versions of creatures now lost.
On the third day, I sat on Sara's light blue bedspread, with her computer in my lap. I used it to look for other people like me, for clones or failed memory saves. I found nothing.
I shouldn't exist at all, I gathered. It would be easier for everybody. I am nobody, and nobody says, "I am the clone of a dead girl, and I think . . ."
"Mom cries every night because of you."
Benjamin stood in the open doorway, watching me with the same brown eyes I saw in the mirror. Brother. I ought to have looked at him and thought of that, and remembered what we'd done together, even if it was only a fight or an argument sometime long in the past. I knew this because I knew what a brother was, but I couldn't feel it.
A cold knot of anxiety tightened in my stomach.
He crossed his arms and leaned on the door jamb. I didn't know what he wanted me to say. He knew what came before Sara's death, and I didn't.
"I'm sorry," I said. The words were like myself, small and unwanted.
His face went funny, sank into impotent fourteen-year-old anger. "No you're not," he said. "You don't even know what that means. You're broken."
I held on tight to the computer. I said, "No."
I flinched when Benjamin entered the room; he was like cold air. "You still don't remember anything, do you?"
"You're my brother," I said. My. Mine. The words were only sounds, devoid of meaning.
"They'll send you back if you can't remember," he said. "If you don't start acting like yourself again, Sara."
"Get out of my room," I said.
Doctor Camille is here. She stands down under the loft in this ruined house.
"Go away," I say. "Leave me alone. I want to stay here. I don't want to be Sara."
I hold onto termite-gnawed balusters like cage bars and look down at her. She's wearing a clean black suit. She doesn't look much like a doctor now, but then, she's not at the hospital.
"Please come down," she says. "I'm sorry for the past week. We're going to help you remember who you are, and then this will all be easier to handle."
She looks at the stairs like she thinks maybe she can climb them to me. Like she thinks she can save me despite myself.
I don't belong here, and I cannot stay.
"I'm not Sara," I say, again. I don't know how to make her understand. "If I become Sara, then I won't be me."
Doctor Camille frowns.
I found Sara's diary on the fourth day I lived in her room. She'd hidden it up on the top shelf of her closet, under a unicorn quilt. I pulled it down in a cloud of dust that made me sneeze. Patterned and blue, with a sparkle green gel pen clipped into the rings. If anything in the room were going to remind me of the life I was meant to claim as my own, it would be that.
It frightened me.
I climbed into the back corner of the closet, shoved shoes out of my way, let the clothing fall into place between me and the rest of the room. It was dark, but I could still read.
Reading the diary felt like I was reading the story of somebody else's life. No part of it made me feel that I was reading about me. I tried. Even though I already thought that I was not Sara, I needed to try. Maybe Sara was there, deep inside my head, waiting to come back out.
I tried to think of the events in the diary as things that had happened to me. It didn't work. Old crushes on boys who had been in her class at school, who would now be several years older than us. Nothing. They were nobody to me.
I held the book open on my lap and traced my fingers along the words, feeling the indentations that ballpoint pen made on paper. Paper and pen, and not electronic; Sara left behind a tangible mark of having been here.
I flipped through the pages as though some truth was hidden between them, and I could find it that easily. So much of Sara rested in the pages of this book. Not all of her, but the parts that she'd thought were important. I could memorize the events that Sara wrote down; I could pretend.