I just needed to rest.
: EPILOGUE
“So, you want to tell me which part of what you said was true?”
Sasha raises her head, a feline grin curling into place. “I remember you.”
“I bet you do.”
The restaurant is empty when I walk in, the tables cleared out, the floors swept, the chairs neatly stacked away. Sasha props herself against a counter, hands braced behind her. She cocks a hip like a challenge. “We’re closed, y’know?”
I glance outside the glass door. Even the neon sign has been switched off. The only lighting we have is the strobing of passing cars, and the orange bleed-out of the street lamps. “Not here for food.”
She smiles like she knew it already. But then again, we both did. It’s clear as day why I’m here, dripping blood and someone else’s gore, shaking like a Parkinson’s patient. “You going to answer my question?”
Sasha hops up on the counter and daintily crosses her legs, elegant and infuriating. Gone is her varsity jacket and the crinkly uniform, replaced by tank top and jeans and toned flesh, the national costume of any young adult. But it’s not her skin that catches my eye, it’s what on it.
Tattoos. Archaic symbols of fecund power, inscriptions of soil and blood and birth. Wrist up and neck down, every part of her is infused with those intricate patterns, a flood of frantic, furious spirals.
Shub-Niggurath’s marks.
The signs cut in Abel’s tongue finally made sense.
I feel the air gush out of my lungs.
Fucking hell.
Sasha lets loose a grin. “What question is that?”
“How much of what I saw is true?”
“Enough.” She shrugs and taps the side of her nose, the universal sign for secret.
“What about the thing you said about the riots? And the epidemic of altered chavs?”
“True, and also true.”
“And they’re all McKinsey’s fault then?”
Sasha cocks her head, a birdlike motion, somehow more distressing for its delicacy. “Not exactly.”
I hobble closer, careful to keep enough room between us to prevent her from getting a jump to me. What gets to me is the fact that there’s nothing to read. As far as my senses are concerned, Sasha’s human, powerless, fragile.
As far as I’m concerned, she’s clearly not.
“Not exactly how?”
She bisects her mouth with a raised index finger, and smiles and smiles, while saying nothing at all. I take the hint. Sasha isn’t going to spill.
I bite down on the urge to curse, not wanting to give her or her mistress the pleasure of seeing me squirm. Inhale. Exhale. Baby steps. My ghost shrivels further into itself.
“Back to more important business. Riddle me this: why would a dame like you let a mook like McKinsey knock you around? Unless you didn’t and were, in fact, manufacturing memories for the benefit of little old me.”
Her smile brightens.
“Funny you should say that.”
I spit black blood on the floor and grimace. “Come on, Sasha. Play it straight with me.”
“No.”
Dames.
“Do I have to bribe you with flowers? Is that what it’d take? Because I will go out and pick you some daisies, if I have to. I—”
Sasha decants from her perch, easy as a summer day, all long limbs and that sly, steady smile. “It’s not that simple, John.”
“I never told you my name.”
“We both know that doesn’t matter.”
She got me there.
I take another stab. “If you’re one of old Shubby’s cultists, why’d you need me? My kind never had anything to do with her or any of her siblings.”
Sasha’s eyes grow abstract even as the skin on the back of my forearms pimples and the hairs rise, like someone is running electromagnetic waves over me. She sighs and blinks out of her fugue, about thirty seconds later. “That answer is above your pay grade.”
“Try me.”
“Come on, John. You know you’re out of your depth here.”
Inhale. Exhale. Inhale.
I shrug. “Can’t blame a man for trying.”
She smiles the detached, reverent grin of the high or the religious, just teeth and folded-back lips, and continues her slide toward me. “No. But you understand why you’re not getting answers, right?”
“Right.” I pop a cigarette from the box, and make a big show of igniting the tip. NO SMOKING signs glare at me from around the restaurant, but given the circumstances, I’m not feeling particularly rule-abiding. Besides, Sasha isn’t kicking up a fuss.
Her mouth twitches. She stops, inches from touching, close enough that my field of vision is her, only her. In the near darkness, her face is a cipher. And much, much older than I thought she was.
“You are a fascinating creature, do you know that?”
“I’ve been told I have my charms.”
“You are the last of your kind on this planet.”
“What about it?” I exhale tobacco and defiance into her face.
“A coward.”
The truth stings less than I thought it would. I shrug and tip my skull, enumerating my options. “I’d like to think it’s more of a case of knowing what I want.”
“And what do you want, Mr. Persons?”
Sasha—the body strains to think of her as “the dame,” “the skirt,” or any of the other metaphors familiar to noir, but nothing fits the understated gravity of her person—plants a slim hand on my chest. The presence of the All-Mother permeates through the contact, sex-sweat, black woods, cold mountains, and grave soil.
And curiosity.
I feel a trill of ice barrel through my nervous system. This is a new and unwelcome development. It’s one thing to mouth off at a cultist; it’s another to have Shub-Niggurath’s personal attention.
“I want what the body wants: to live.”
“But your people are doing exactly that ninety-seven million years into the future.”
“Yeah, well. I don’t like bugs.”
“What an ironic thing for you to say.”
“You know me, Sasha.” I gingerly lace my fingers with hers, and then push her hand away. She doesn’t resist, but she doesn’t let go either, tightening her grip. “I’m full of clever words.”
“Indeed.”
And then She speaks.
Shub-Niggurath doesn’t bother taking over Sasha’s mouth. Too mundane, I guess. Instead, she circulates the words through the young woman’s cells, a chorus of fifty billion transmitted through the exchange of air and the throb of Sasha’s pulse, the sloughing of epidermal layers. It isn’t so much a sound as it is a blunt force.
The truth.
I shiver. You don’t say no to dames of that caliber. I close my eyes and try not to think about the All-Mother, black as pitch and bigger than worlds, Her Many Eyes blinking like headlamps between the tree line.
Watching me.
Listening.
Waiting.
“Because I like this place. Because this body’s a dead man walking. Because I can’t imagine existing in a world of endless darkness, dirt, and Yithian academics. Do you know how boring it gets? The pursuit of knowledge ain’t all it’s cracked up to—” The words become a desperate babble, a twenty-syllable pileup on the highway of truth. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t have been able to stop the deluge. “So much talking. Like you would not believe, sister. Endless hypotheses. No matter how much we discuss a subject, no Yith ever seems capable of—”
Cease.
I shut up.
“Life is cyclic,” Sasha intones, backing away, her voice swaying with the cadence of revelation. “With every death comes a thousand new beginnings, and with every fresh start comes the demise of something old. You know this.
“Should know this, at least.” Sasha purses her lips. “But it’s clear that you’re, how we say, a bit mawkish. Sentimental.”
The body. She meant the body and
its broken mind, curled up in the cup of my skull. I bristle but I don’t say anything. For one, I can’t make heads or tails of her taunting, whether she’s angling to get a rise or just Shub-crazy. None of what she’s saying connects. They’re facts, pieces of the truth. Without order or context, they might as well be a mad saint’s gibbering, or the vestiges of a dead man’s compassion.
And two, Shub-Niggurath hadn’t greenlit vocal expression yet.
“You can talk.”
There we go.
“What exactly are you doing with the kid? Contrary to the biblical name, Abel doesn’t look like the religious type. Sure, he’s kind of young—”
Sasha cracks an amused grin. A shimmer of memory pulsates through her skin: men and women draped in fresh skins, still beaded with a patina of blood; a living fire, alive with the voice of the All-Mother, a thunder of bacchanal affection. “Something that will be good for him. I can promise you that.”
The vision wrenches at my insides like a hook. The body isn’t happy with this development, and neither am I. But what can we do but nod mutely? The silence doesn’t last, though. Foolhardy courage, or maybe it takes me a moment to gather my thoughts and my courage. “And his brother?”
“If he obeys Abel, certainly.”
“Too bad about their mom, eh?”
“Casualties happen.” Sasha dips her head and I am almost, almost fooled into believing she cares.
Still, there’s rarely anything else to say once a skirt drops a bombshell like that. “Fine. In that case, I’ll be going then. I’ve got a piggy bank to redeem.”
Sasha dips into a fluid, mocking curtsey as she spins on her heel and hops away, like a little bird stretched out tall, fingers slipping from mine. Her laughter rings out, sweet and knowing. “One last thing before you go, Mr. Persons.”
I am almost at the door when she speaks, rain already speckling my face. Outside, the world is cold and black, an abyss of bad decisions, stirred up by the encroaching rain. “And what’s that?”
“If you know what’s good for you, don’t come back to London.”
I freeze. That was a threat if I ever heard one. Not direct from Shub-Niggurath’s mouth, sure, but definitely a significant threat, given that Sasha appears authorized to carry her warnings. I rake my eyes over her carefree, enigmatic expression, full of playful, darting shadows.
Fuck. This.
A wet, wheezing laugh jumpstarts in my throat, before cresting into a full-fledged guffaw. It whoops upward, full of hysteria, even as I bend over double from the effort. After all this, after the betrayal and the double-crossing, the machinations. After all this madness, do they still expect me to bow?
The sound keeps boiling through the silent restaurant, Sasha watching quietly on, before it finally trickles into a wobbling halt. I straighten and meet Sasha’s gaze, wiping the tears from my eyes, even as she tilts her head slow.
I flick the cigarette at her like a last word.
“Don’t count on it.”
Her laughter, hyena-shrill and strange, stalks my long walk back home.
• • • •
I stand in the bathroom of my office and stare into the mirror, thumbs threaded through belt loops like a gunslinger at high noon. The bruised, torn-up visage in the mirror regards me solemnly in return, its mouth pulled into a line.
“We did good,” I announce to the emptiness.
My ghost doesn’t reply.
Abel’s piggy bank sits on the sink between my toothbrush cup and hand lotion, its dead-eyed grin and dead black eyes pregnant with judgment. The kid’s word was good. Better than many grown men. He’d come to my office the very next day, holding the damn porcelain boar in one hand and James in the other. Without saying a word, he placed it down on my desk. No fuss, no muss. A clean transaction.
I’d expected him to ask about their mother. To yell at me, to hit me, to do or say something. The coroners would have found the bullet lodged in her brain. But he didn’t. Only stared at me with those huge, old-man eyes for what felt like an eternity before they left, hand in hand, grave as marriage, silent as ghosts.
“We did good,” I repeat, but again, the body doesn’t answer.
Then, a knocking strikes up on the front door, a confident rat-ta-ta-ta, like the music of hammers on bone.
* * *
CASSANDRA KHAW writes a lot. Sometimes, she writes press releases and excited emails for Singaporean micropublisher Ysbryd Games. Sometimes, she writes for technology and video-game outlets such as Eurogamer, Ars Technica, The Verge, and Engadget. Mostly, though, she writes about the intersection between nightmares and truth, drawing inspiration from Southeast Asian mythology and stories from people she has met. She occasionally spends time in a Muay Thai gym punching people and pads.
Runtime
By S.B. Divya
The wall behind Marmeg thrummed with the muffled impact of bass beats. A line of girls in heels mixed with boys in lacy shirts, both interspersed with androgynous moots wearing whatever they wanted. Blue light spilled from the club’s doorway onto cuffs and bracelets but mostly on bare skin.
The host was a moot with minimal curves of breast and hip, draped in a sheath of satin gray. Candy-colored red hair in two long curls framed zir face. This host wanted to be seen, and Marmeg had a hard time not looking.
Her own body tended toward her mother’s build—no hiding the mammary glands and rounded buttocks. She mitigated it with the torso shell and a neutral haircut while dreaming of moot surgery.
Marmeg glanced at her cuff. Another twenty minutes until the end of her shift. The line drifted forward and two new people came into view. A nat male with waves of silky brown hair and a translucent suit stood near Marmeg, his gaze fixed on the screen in his hands.
“Unbelievable,” he crowed. “Last round. Canter’s winning!”
His friend was a moot with a rainbow ‘hawk and a bored expression.
“Fights? Last century much?” Zir red lips curled. “Races be where’s at.”
Zir friend looked up from his screen. “Minerva starts tomorrow.”
Marmeg’s heart pounded. The Minerva Sierra Challenge would be the first race of her life. She was a long shot with her outdated, refurbished embed gear, but one dark horse usually made it to the top five. She planned to be this year’s surprise element.
“Be following that, sure,” said Rainbow Hair. “Minerva’s winner trumps the BP International.”
“Not always. Two years ago, remember that? Topsy-turvy all over,” the friend countered.
Their voices faded as the host let them in. Marmeg checked her cuff—fifteen more minutes—and shifted her weight. The host shot her a dirty look. Be invisible: that was Marmeg’s role. Here at the club or out in the world, nobody wanted to see the likes of her, but she would be worth noticing soon.
The second-shift bouncers came out on time. Marmeg walked to the bus stop in full gear, drawing surprised glances from the small crowd waiting at the signpost. A faint star forced its light past the competing glow of Los Angeles. Tomorrow night, she would be out in the middle of nothing and nowhere, and then she’d see more than one twinkle. Star light, star bright, first and only star I see in this concrete clusterf— The bus arrived.
She climbed in last and sat on a hard plastic chair. The screen above her displayed a white-haired Congressman next to a blonde talk-show host. Their voices blared through tinny speakers.
“US citizenship is a birthright. Voting is a birthright,” the Congressman said. “But social services—public education, health care, retirement benefits—those need to be earned. Unlicensed families haven’t paid into the system.”
The blonde nodded. “Do you think we should repeal the Postnatal License Act?”
“The problem with postnatal licensing is the barrier to entry: it’s too low. The unlicensed pay a small fee—that doesn’t scale with age—and then they’re like us.”
“Bull,” Marmeg muttered. She’d spent three years saving for her “small
fee.”
Her cuff zapped the skin on the inside of her wrist. She flicked it. The screen lit up and displayed a message from Jeffy.
SORRY TO BUG. SHIT’S GOING DOWN. HELP?
So much for getting a few hours of rest before catching the midnight bus to Fresno. Her brother needed rescuing more often than Marmeg cared to tally, especially right after a club shift. She hopped off the bus at the next stop and used Jeffy’s cuff GPS to locate him: Long Beach.
She took the train to the station closest to her brother’s location. From there, she ran in long, loping strides. Leg muscles encased by exoskeletons flexed and relaxed in a stronger, more graceful counterpoint than she could have achieved naturally. As she moved, she downloaded new code into the chips controlling her gear. She had developed the software to bypass the legal limits for her embeds. When it came to Jeffy’s “friends,” legal wasn’t always good enough.
The fight house was a narrow single-story with a sagging wood porch that had been white at some point. Puddles of stale beer and vomit soaked into the weedy lawn. A cheerful roar rose from the backyard.
Marmeg ran along the right side of the house. A ring of people—mostly nats—blocked her view of the action. She crouched and sprang onto the roof, landing on all fours.
Jeffy reeled in the center of the crowd. Blood dripped from his nose and left ear. His black curls were plastered to his head by dripping sweat, one hank covering part of a swollen eye. His left leg had an obvious limp. Cords of muscle rippled under his torn shirt. Chestnut skin peeked through the hole.
Her brother hadn’t done much after leaving the army, but he maintained a soldier’s body. Not that it did him much good in these fights. His lithe opponent, clad in deteriorating exos, kicked him hard in the bad leg. It flew out from under him. He collapsed and lay unmoving.
The crowd cheered. Some of them waved bottles in the air. Others held old-fashioned paper money in their raised fists. Marmeg jumped into the clear center. The crowd roared again, probably expecting her to fight. Instead, she scooped up her unconscious brother, slung him over her shoulder, and leapt over the crowd. A disappointed groan rose from the onlookers. Marmeg barely heard it. She stumbled on her landing, Jeffy’s bulk complicating her balance. She kept to a simple jog on the way to the bus station.
The Long List Anthology Volume 3 Page 52