by Yoon Ha Lee
He also had a great disdain for tigers—he called them “amateurs”—but would not say why. It wasn’t as if the station housed anything as exotic or dangerous as tigers, and it only came up because Osthen mentioned the visiting dreadnought Tigertooth.
The one time Osthen managed to step on a stray nail in a bad way, the foxwife talked them into letting him remove the thing. Kanseun wasn’t sure how she resisted the temptation to find a bomb to see if the foxwife could disarm it. She hoped it never became relevant. Even so, she couldn’t escape the disquieting thought: where would he have acquired such a skill?
Another letter arrived. Kanseun immediately put it in the pile with the others before the foxwife could file it for her, and then wondered why she was so embarrassed at the thought of him catching her doing this. This one, too, went unread and unanswered.
The foxwife’s obsession with doing chores continued to bother Kanseun. She finally discussed the matter with Osthen.
“Do you think I should try to get him to talk to a counselor?” Kanseun said in a low voice. The foxwife was in the kitchen. She didn’t know how good his hearing was, so she’d turned up the entertainment system. It was currently playing some hot new null-gravity sport and she was trying not to watch. Sure, she’d undergone the necessary safety training upon moving here, but she was a stereotypical planetsider and she liked gravity.
“I don’t mind him living here,” Osthen said. They didn’t look up from the miniature they were painting. “I mean, it’s not like he takes up more space than my junk does. He fits nicely on the couch at night. And he seems happy, doesn’t he?”
There was a certain degree of unreality to any conversation about the foxwife, given Osthen’s on-off ability to remember his existence.
“But don’t you think he deserves better?” Kanseun said.
“Better according to who?” Osthen retorted. “If this is so important to you, why aren’t you discussing it with him? Find out what he wants for himself?”
She couldn’t think of any noncondescending way to say Because I don’t think he’s healthy enough to decide for himself.
“Is it because you think he’s mentally tilted?” they said. She’d forgotten that Osthen, for all their laziness, could be good at reading people when they wanted to. Even if that was why she was asking their advice in the first place. “Because it’s still his life and still his say. Unless you’re planning to break up with him over it.”
Kanseun gritted her teeth. “We’re not dating. It’s not my fault he goes around calling himself a foxwife.”
Osthen did look up then, and their eyes were sharp and not a little disappointed. “If he calls himself a foxwife, he is a foxwife.”
“Not literally he isn’t.” Inexplicable abilities, yes. But he couldn’t be a mythological figure. He was real.
They shrugged and dabbed their brush into the pot of steel-blue paint. “So? You’re still talking to the wrong person.”
“You’re no help,” Kanseun snapped, and regretted it immediately.
Osthen had gone into “there’s no reasoning with you” mode and had returned their attention to the miniature. She wasn’t going to get anything else out of them tonight, and it was all her damn fault.
She glanced toward the kitchen to see if the foxwife was still puttering around; froze. He was standing in the doorway, staring at her, red-and-white polka-dotted handkerchief scrunched up in his hand.
Kanseun opened her mouth.
The foxwife walked past her and out of the apartment.
She lunged after him; of course she did. But no sooner had she reached out to grab his shoulder than he wasn’t there. She almost fell over. What else had she expected from someone who could turn himself into a table?
“Did you see where he went?” Kanseun said to Osthen.
“He who?” Osthen said.
Her heart turned to needles. “I have to look for him,” she said reflexively, and all but ran out the door herself.
Kanseun spent the rest of the day and most of the night searching the station. She stopped by one of the ubiquitous kiosks, asking after someone of the foxwife’s description, although it came as no surprise that the kiosk said, patiently, that no such person had asked for help. There was no sign of him at any of the cheap cafes or restaurants she had taken him to before, or even some of the ones they’d never gone to together.
Reasoning (hoping, more likely) that he would stick to the university level, she returned there and began knocking on doors. Not everyone answered, but those who did were unfailingly polite in their demurrals, which she took as a side-effect of the foxwife’s unchanciness. No, they hadn’t seen the boy she was looking for. In fact, they’d never seen anyone like that at all. And who wore spectacles these days, anyway?
Wrung out, eyes stinging, she finally conceded defeat at four in the morning. She’d go out tomorrow and try again. Osthen had already gone to bed. She looked around at the jacket that Osthen had kicked into a corner and went to pick it up and fold it away, even though she never picked up after her roommate. Then she sat down on the couch. Her head started to pound, and it took a long time for sleep to come.
The next morning—more like very early afternoon, since she wasn’t used to having her sleep this messed up—Kanseun went to the kitchen to look at the teas directly because the watcher’s voice aggravated her lingering headache and she didn’t want it to enumerate all the options. She found the foxwife in the kitchen, eating ginger peach jam directly out of the jar.
Kanseun didn’t lecture him about it.
The foxwife didn’t say anything at all.
She pulled up a stool and sat next to him, watching him eat. The spoon wasn’t one of hers.
After a moment, he produced another one and offered it to her. Kanseun accepted it gravely. It was beautiful: made of some beaten bronzy metal, maybe even actual bronze. There was a little curled fox engraved on the handle.
The foxwife held out the jar. Kanseun dipped the spoon in and had a mouthful of jam. It tasted delicious, like honed sunlight.
They finished the jam together, in companionable silence.
Two weeks and one day after that, the latest letter arrived for Kanseun. More specifically, it arrived while she and the foxwife were out for a walk. When they returned, the watcher said, “You have correspondence from your older father.” Today its voice was bright, Osthen’s latest fancy. “I have left it on your desk.”
Kanseun had been in a good mood, which evaporated when she realized how long she had been avoiding the letters. “Great,” she said, and made no move toward her desk.
The foxwife’s organizational instincts had been triggered, however, and he went to pick it up. “Shall I open it for you?” he asked.
“Go ahead,” she said with a sigh. “I’m impressed Older Father even bothers when I’m such a lousy correspondent.”
The foxwife produced a letter opener, although he could have used the one she kept on her desk, and slit the envelope open. He held it up and looked intently at it. She thought he was admiring the calligraphy—Older Father did beautiful work, elegant rhythmic strokes, even if she struggled to decipher it—until he said, “It says there’s been a lot of rain in the city, and are you studying hard still, and—”
“You can read this?” Kanseun said. She didn’t know why she was so surprised, given the foxwife’s proven facility with languages. Maybe it was the fact that he was holding the letter sideways.
Nevertheless, he started reading: “‘On this 23rd of 11-month in the year 4297 of the Azalea Cycle’—”
“Wait, wait, wait,” she said. “I thought you didn’t do numbers.” She hadn’t meant it to come out like a put-down.
“4297 comes after 4296 and before 4298,” the foxwife said. Misinterpreting her confusion, he added, with a hint of dismay, “If you want me to do all the numbers in between 4296 and 4297, and 4297 and 4298, we’re going to be here a long time. As in infinitely long . . . ”
“Remember when we first met,” K
anseun said slowly, “and I asked how many people, and—?” She held out her hands the way he had. Thought of the foxwife holding up his fingers one by one.
“Yes,” he said, and looked away. “I stopped counting after ten thousand or so.”
Ten thousand. Kanseun swallowed. “How long have you been doing this?”
“A very long time,” the foxwife said. He took off his spectacles and tapped the frame, a nervous tic she had never seen before. His eyes had gone sad and dark. “I’m the last of my litter. There were more of us once. I wasn’t—I’m not a good foxwife. The sister who raised me was a very proper foxwife. According to the family stories, she seduced queens and investment bankers and fighter pilots, and she collected eggs made of gold wire and glass, and she insisted that I learn mathematics so I wouldn’t get cheated in the stock market.
“She told me once that being a foxwife is all about shapeshifting. I tried to do as she said, but we got separated when we started following our humans off the origin world. I’m only good at things like tables and vases and fountain pens, not the kinds of shapeshifting that matter.”
He lifted his chin and put the spectacles back on. “But there’s no help for it,” he said. This time his bright tone didn’t fool her. “I have to do what I can to be useful in the world as it exists, that’s all.”
Kanseun regarded him intently. “Listen,” she said. “How much of my language do you read?”
“All of it, I expect,” the foxwife said unboastfully. “My family believed in the value of a good education.”
“Do you write it too?”
He was smiling at her. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
“Teach me,” Kanseun said. “I won’t pretend I’m good at languages, but if I work at it and you’re patient with me, I might pick something up.” The next words came out in a rush: “Older Father used to tell me fox stories, shapechanger stories. I don’t know if they’re about your people, or about something else. But I could—I could ask him. Maybe he would know something.” Maybe even something that would help the foxwife find his sister. “Of course, if I wait until I know enough Na-ahn to formulate the question, it could be a while, so I should just ask in Kestran—”
She’d been avoiding Older Father’s letters for months now. What if he said something reproving, or worse, simply forgave her? What if he didn’t remember the fox stories at all? What if, what if, what if. But she looked at the foxwife and thought, Ten thousand doors. I can try, too.
“I’m sure he would be happy to hear from you either way,” the foxwife said. “But we can start the lessons whenever you want.”
“Today,” Kanseun said. “Let’s start today.”
About the Author
Yoon Ha Lee’s works have appeared in Lightspeed, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Her collection Conservation of Shadows came out in 2013 from Prime Books. Currently she lives in Louisiana with her family and has not yet been eaten by gators.
Stone Hunger
N. K. Jemisin
Once there was a girl who lived in a beautiful place full of beautiful people who made beautiful things. Then the world broke.
Now the girl is older, and colder, and hungrier. From the shelter of a dead tree, she watches as a city—a rich one, big, with high strong walls and well-guarded gates—winches its roof into place against the falling chill of night. The girl has never seen anything like this city’s roof. She’s watched the city for days, fascinated by its ribcage of metal tracks and the strips of sewn, oiled material they pull along it. They must put out most of their fires when they do this, or they would choke on smoke—but perhaps with the strips in place, the city retains warmth enough to make fires unnecessary.
It will be nice to be warm again. The girl shifts her weight from one fur-wrapped thigh to the other, her only concession to anticipation.
The tree in whose skeletal branches she crouches is above the city, on a high ridge, and it is one of the few still standing. The city has to burn something, after all, and the local ground does not have the flavor of coal-land, sticky veins of pent smoky bitterness lacing through cool bedrock. In the swaths of forest the city-dwellers have taken, even the stumps are gone; nothing wasted. The rest has been left relatively unmolested, though the girl has noted a suspicious absence of deadfall and kindling-wood on the shadowed forest floor below. Perhaps they’ve left this stand of trees as a windbreak, or to keep the ridge stable. Whatever their reasons, the city-dwellers’ forethought works in her favor. They will not see her stalking them, waiting for an opportunity, until it is too late.
And perhaps, if she is lucky—
No. She has never been lucky. The girl closes her eyes again, tasting the land and the city. It is the most distinctive city she has ever encountered. Such a complexity of sweets and meats and bitters and . . . sour.
Hmm.
Perhaps.
The girl settles her back against the trunk of the tree, wraps the tattered blanket from her pack more closely around herself, and sleeps.
Dawn comes as a thinning of the gray sky. There has been no sun for years.
The girl wakes because of hunger: a sharp pang of it, echo of long-ago habit. Once, she ate breakfast in the mornings. Unsated, the pang eventually fades to its usual omnipresent ache.
Hunger is good, though. Hunger will help.
The girl sits up, feeling imminence like an intensifying itch. It’s coming. She climbs down from the tree—easily; handholds were gnawed into the trunk by ground animals in the early years, before that species disappeared—and walks to the edge of the ridge. Dangerous to do this, stand on a ridge with a shake coming, but she needs to scout for an ideal location. Besides; she knows the shake isn’t close. Yet.
There.
The walk down into the valley is more difficult than she expects. There are no paths. She has to half-climb, half-slide down dry runnels in the rock face which are full of loose gravel-sized ash. And she is not at her best after starving for eight days. Her limbs go weak now and again. There will be food in the city, she reminds herself, and moves a little faster.
She makes it to the floor of the valley and crouches behind a cluster of rocks near the half-dried-up river. The city gates are still hundreds of feet away, but there are familiar notches along its walls. Lookouts, perhaps with longviewers; she knows from experience that cities have the resources to make good glass—and good weapons. Any closer and they’ll see her, unless something distracts them.
Once there was a girl who waited. And then, at last, the distraction arrives. A shake.
The epicenter is not nearby. That’s much farther north: yet another reverberation of the rivening that destroyed the world. Doesn’t matter. The girl breathes hard and digs her fingers into the dried riverbed as power rolls toward her. She tastes the vanguard of it sliding along her tongue, leaving a residue to savor, like thick and sticky treats—
(It is not real, what she tastes. She knows this. Her father once spoke of it as the sound of a chorus, or a cacophony; she’s heard others complain of foul smells, painful sensations. For her, it is food. This seems only appropriate.)
—and it is easy—delicious!—to reach further down. To visualize herself opening her mouth and lapping at that sweet flow of natural force. She sighs and relaxes into the rarity of pleasure, unafraid for once, letting her guard down shamelessly and guiding the energy with only the merest brush of her will. A tickle, not a push. A lick.
Around the girl, pebbles rattle. She splays herself against the ground like an insect, fingernails scraping rock, ear pressed hard to the cold and gritty stone.
Stone. Stone.
Stone like gummy fat, like slick warm syrups she vaguely remembers licking from her fingers, stone flowing, pushing, curling, slow and inexorable as toffee. Then this oncoming power, the wave that ripples the stone, stops against the great slab of bedrock that comprises this valley and its surrounding mountains. The wave wants to go around, spend its energy
elsewhere, but the girl sucks against this resistance. It takes awhile. On the ground, she writhes in place and smacks her lips and makes a sound: “Ummmah.”
Then the
Oh, the pressure
Once there was a girl who ground her teeth against prrrrrresssure
bursts, the inertia breaks, and the wave of force ripples into the valley. The land seems to inhale, rising and groaning beneath her, and it is hers, it’s hers. She controls it. The girl laughs; she can’t help herself. It feels so good to be full, in one way or another.
A jagged crack steaming with friction opens and widens from where the girl lies to the foot of the ridge on which she spent the previous night. The entire face of the cliff splits off and disintegrates, gathering momentum and strength as it avalanches toward the city’s southern wall. The girl adds force in garnishing dollops, oh-so-carefully. Too much and she will smash the entire valley into rubble, city and all, leaving nothing useful. She does not destroy; she merely damages. But just enough and—
The shake stops.
The girl feels the interference at once. The sweet flow solidifies; something taints its flavor in a way that makes her recoil. Hints of bitter and sharp—
—and vinegar, at last, for certain, she isn’t imagining it this time, vinegar—
—and then all the marvelous power she has claimed dissipates. There is no compensatory force; nothing uses it. It’s simply gone. Someone else has beaten her to the banquet and eaten all the treats. But the girl no longer cares that her plan has failed.
“I found you.” She pushes herself up from the dry riverbed, her hair dripping flecks of ash. She is trembling, not just with hunger anymore, her eyes fixed on the city’s unbroken wall. “I found you.”
The momentum of the shake rolls onward, passing beyond the girl’s reach. Though the ground has stopped moving, the ridge rockslide cannot be stopped: boulders and trees, including the tree that sheltered the girl the night before, break loose and tumble down to slam against the city’s protective wall, probably cracking it. But this is nowhere near the level of damage that the girl had hoped for. How will she get inside? She must get inside, now.