by Anthology
“Keep it chasing the fires!” he yells.
“How do you know it won’t chase us?”
He shrugs and waves his hands. Either he didn’t hear me or that’s his answer. Before I can repeat my question, I notice that our fire is suddenly, and strangely, dying.
Lee pushes me forward. “Run!”
We take off across the hills, in what I can only assume is the direction of the next fire. The ground shakes as the abyssus draws nearer, headed for the fire we’re leaving behind.
The glow appears behind the hills ahead of us and to the right. It’s getting brighter. Our path is set to cross the approaching monster. I push my legs harder.
When the abyssus bursts over the hill, it’s moving faster than I would have thought possible for something meant to live in the depths. Its flailing movements look frenzied and absurd, but its size and strength compensate for the inefficiency.
By the time we’re level with the abyssus it’s one hundred yards away and closing, leaping downhill. It roars again, and my right side tingles with the burst of heat. Lee pushes ahead, throwing himself into a sprint. No matter how hard I run, the tuft of hills ahead of us doesn’t seem to be getting any closer.
I hear and feel the beast’s thumping progress, and I guess that it can’t be more than fifty yards behind me. If it’s going to come after us, it will change its course now.
But the rumbling and roaring gradually recedes as the abyssus thunders toward the fire, and Lee and I race for the hills. When we stop again, I pitch forward. My legs are as limp as boiled cabbage, and my chest is filled with ice.
Looking up, I see another heap of pitch-sodden wood.
“Not another,” I pant.
“No choice.” Lee’s words are punctuated by desperate, heaving breaths. “Got to keep it on the island. One more. Should be enough.” He points to the horizon. “Look.”
The sky is a luminescent, predawn gray, and I understand why I can see the woodpile.
I sigh. “Just a few minutes more. Rest.”
In the lowlands beneath us, the abyssus shrieks.
“No time,” Lee says. He takes my lighter and has the pile burning in seconds. We don’t watch it for long.
“Which way?” I ask as we leave the fire behind us.
“Doesn’t matter now.”
We’ve barely crested the hills when we hear the monster again behind us. In the time that it’s taken us to get out of sight of the newest bonfire, the abyssus has closed half the distance to it. There’s another roar once the creature reaches it, followed by several seconds of churning devastation. Then, the timbre of the ruckus changes. It’s chasing after us.
The sky is just starting to show pinks and purples. It will be a beautiful sunrise if we live to see it.
We race downhill, following the steepest slope we can find. It would probably make sense for us to split up, but neither of us is willing to cede the slope. Our bodies lean forward, at risk of tumbling over, but we’re moving fast.
Or so it seems until I feel the abyssus’s smoky breath on my back.
And just then, the world flattens out. There’s nothing but my legs to push me forward, and with the ground shaking beneath me, I’m one good jolt away from a fall.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see yellow break the horizon. The abyssus roars, and for just a moment, the shaking stops. I slow down enough to look over my shoulder.
“Keep running!” Lee says. Sure enough, the earth begins to move beneath us again, but this time it’s chaotic and arrhythmic.
But it’s strong enough to knock me down. My legs collapse under me, joggled into critical harmony. Lee looks back, briefly, but he keeps running. I would have done the same. I turn around for a final glimpse of the abyssus.
Its body is thrown into an arc against the bronze sky. The bright glow from its open mouth makes it a strangely beautiful sight.
It doesn’t seem to have noticed me. It’s wriggling and thrashing, beating itself against the ground and whiplashing through the air. It reminds me of an unfortunate midshipman I once saw trying to put out a fire on his coat.
As I watch, the blaze within the creature’s mouth grows brighter until it’s too much to look at. I cover my ears, anticipating another deafening roar, but when it comes, it’s choked and cut short.
The abyssus is dying.
Just as I begin to wonder how, the glow within the creature seems to break through its skin. It happens in a handful of places first, perhaps at the joints that are straining with all of its violent jerking, scars that seem to tear and lengthen. Smoldering fissures erupt from them, running between the beast’s scales in a hellish map. Soon the skin starts to rupture like a rotten wineskin, and with a final squeal, the abyssus is ablaze.
I look at the sky, where the sun has just started to peek over the horizon. It’s as brilliant as ever.
But my attention drifts back to the monster, which is still burning brightly and throwing up thick, black smoke. I cough and stumble away, aware of the blistering feeling on my skin.
There’s a hand on my shoulder, and I look up to find Lee.
“You said you could get us out of here.”
He laughs. “There’s not a ship for miles that can miss this. That hulk is going to burn all day.”
He doesn’t sound worried. But then he never sounded worried about any of this.
“You’ve got a ship on the way,” I say. He doesn’t have to nod. “Which side?”
He shrugs. “Russian.” It might as well have been either.
Burning flesh collapses, exposing a gauntlet of flame and bone, and suddenly I can’t look away. I’m looking at the fires that will burn in every port town from Naples to Aberdeen, and then, once the Ottomans and the rest of Europe figure it out, from Sevastopol to St. Petersburg, for as long as the war continues. I’m hearing the screams that will ring across the rim of a continent.
“I suppose it’s time I gave this back,” Lee says. He pulls the flare gun out of his waistband and offers it to me, handle first.
I take it and stare at the brass barrel, cold and yellow as a coward’s death.
Lee turns his back to me and takes a step toward the burning abyssus. “Makes you wonder what’s inside, doesn’t it? Maybe nothing.”
The flare gun isn’t much larger than my outstretched hand. But it’s heavy.
Lee laughs. “I hope you don't live near the sea.” He’s still watching the blackened monster.
I raise the gun over my shoulder. I throw my weight into my arm and smash it into Lee’s skull.
Lee falls forward and I hit him again. The thick cracking sound, and the gurgling noise as he tries to turn his head, stops me.
“Monster,” he wheezes.
I hit him again. I don’t stop until he’s as silent and featureless as the thing burning in the dunes.
The Color of Regret(Short story)
by Carrie Patel
Originally published by PodCastle
Sefid’s aura was the same luminescent gray as storm clouds. “You will not regret this.” Yet he said it in that tone that people used when it was certain you would.
Nasrin cleared her throat. “What is there to regret? I am grateful for the matches.” She shifted on the concrete bench and slid the matchbox into the pocket of her faded corduroy coat. As a city bus rolled around the corner, commuters across the street pressed closer to one another, blending the colors of their own varied auras.
Sefid’s smile was merely a bristling at the center of his thick, black beard. It didn’t distract from the quick glance at his wristwatch. “You know as well as anyone how few of us there are in this province. Iran needs more people like your father. We trust that a daughter of Azad Rajavi won’t fail us.”
Nasrin hated hearing others talk about her father as if he were already dead. Martyrs were only romantic to people who didn’t have to carry their memory.
“I know my duty,” she said. The bus rolled to a stop with a hiss of exhaust and hydraulics
. The commuter line shuffled forward.
“Good. Any instructions we have for you, or any messages we need you to pass along, will be left in the alley. You remember the procedures we discussed?”
She did. Still, she wanted to go over them again, one more time. She wanted the reassurance of seeing him nod along as she listed the dead drop signals: gray-coded messages came from Sefid, blue-coded messages came from Farhad himself, and anything else was a decoy. But her talents were rare, not irreplaceable. If he detected any uncertainty on her part, he’d call the whole thing off, and the resistance would move on without her. Chances were, this was another test. Everything else with Sefid had been.
So she said, “Of course,” and clutched the matchbox in her pocket. Sefid rose from the bench, crossed the street, and melted into the glowing crowd boarding the bus.
Nasrin waited for another three minutes, as she’d been instructed, and counted the beads of sweat that rolled down her neck.
Her sister was waiting when she returned home.
“So? How did it go?” It was impossible to keep anything from Leila. Her powers of perception were rivaled only by her lack of discretion.
“Fine,” Nasrin said, shoving her hands deeper into her pockets. “How’s dinner coming?”
Leila watched her gesture. “It’s close.”
Nasrin ducked into her bedroom, hoping to shut the door before Leila could follow. “Don’t let it burn.”
“It’s simmering. I’ve got time.” Leila, her face aglow, was halfway through the door by the time Nasrin turned around.
Nasrin’s hand tensed around the matchbox, and her sister’s gaze dropped as if she could see it through the corduroy coat. Nasrin sighed. “Shut the door behind you.” She pulled out the matchbox and opened it as Leila hovered next to her.
A withered cigarette butt, smoked down to the filter, lay in a sparse bed of matches. Farhad’s scent—or what must have been his—clung to the box: earthy and musky, a mélange of sweat and gunpowder. More importantly, his aura stuck to the cigarette, which glowed a dappled blue and threw off sparks like a severed cable. She was careful not to touch it, lest she wear it away.
Leila peered over her shoulder. “What’s it look like?”
Nasrin forced a shrug. The movement felt jerky and unnatural. “Fiery. Bright,” she lied. “Just what you’d expect from a resistance leader.” She looked at her sister’s face to see if she’d said what Leila wanted to hear.
“You’re lucky to have the Sight, you know.”
“Not if the Clerics find out.” Auras were like fingerprints. No two were alike, which was why the resistance had begun recruiting Seers to verify the origin of hand-coded messages. Inevitably, the Clerics would start to hire, or conscript, their own.
“But you can make a difference.” Leila’s brilliant teeth appeared in a slowly widening crescent. “Father would be proud.”
Father, the local hero, the only man in town who’d refused the monthly home inspection. Father, sitting in the Clerical Enforcer’s prison. With all the talk, you’d think he’d single-handedly liberated Markazi province. It was hard to see how such a small act of defiance was worth any of it. Nasrin grimaced and slid the box shut.
“Does this mean you’ll start delivering messages?” Leila asked.
“It means you need to be more careful.” Nasrin felt her sister’s zeal like a noose tightening around her neck.
Leila clucked. “I’m not the one getting involved with the resistance.” She said it with more pride than Nasrin liked. It suddenly felt as if the steam from the kitchen had boiled into the bedroom. Nasrin glanced at her watch and adjusted her coat.
Leila frowned. “Where are you going?”
“Clear my head.”
Her sister jerked her chin toward the door. “Dinner’s in ten.”
“Don’t wait up.”
Leila left the room, and Nasrin waited until she heard the clatter and scrape of pots and spoons in the kitchen before lifting a loose floorboard under her bed and tucking the box underneath.
The streets were quiet and dark, owing in part to electricity rationing and in part to the simple fact that there wasn’t much to do in Arak, or any other town outside of Tehran, after nightfall. There was an even chance that any civilian on the street at this hour was a Clerical informer, a dissident, or both, for the right price.
Still, it seemed easier to keep her new involvement secret from strangers on the street than from her sister in the apartment. Home had ways of disarming a person. Her father had learned this the hard way.
The air was heavy with diesel fumes even though most of the cars and buses were parked for the night. Nasrin passed Shohada Square, where even the fountains were empty. So too were the Chahar Fasl baths.
At least the darkness hid the more depressing developments in her hometown: bullet holes scarring the walls from the uprising five years ago and banners praising Arak’s new Clerical Enforcer, all strung across the alleys like clotheslines. It was amazing how the force of an army could influence public opinion.
Nasrin had worked in a factory building boilers and turbines both before and after the revolution. The final years under the old regime had been lean, much like the last five under the new one. The slogans and political parties were new, yet their promises were the same. So too were their methods: secret police, interminable incarceration, and the watchful eye of censors and inspectors.
Somehow, securing a better tomorrow always required momentous sacrifice today.
Nasrin focused on familiar cracks in the pavement. People seemed to think that Seers viewed the world in a violent explosion of color, but for the most part, Arak was just as mute and gray to Nasrin as it was to everybody else. Still, the romanticism was understandable.
For Seers like her, people bore halos of color and light, each with its own shape and pattern, but it took sustained contact for those auras to rub off on anything else. On the streets, Nasrin glimpsed patches of color on discarded tissues and wads of chewing gum. These were as commonplace to her now as cloud streaks and the morning fog. What she hadn’t gotten used to was coming across something of her father’s at home—his pillow, his pipe, a wild-bristled toothbrush—still radiating traces of rippling green.
Nasrin followed Beheshti Street to Shokrael, trying to glance into the alleys without moving her head. She knew not to pass her dead drop site more often than normal, but the spot was like an itching scab, impossible to leave alone. It was too soon for her handlers to have left anything, which the crooked address plate hanging by the teahouse confirmed, but she told herself that this was good practice.
She continued a few blocks more until she could pass through Jannat Park and conceivably turn back for home.
Pots of eggplant stew and rice were waiting on the stove when she returned. She ate quickly, thankful that the food was already cold. She was too exhausted to taste it, anyway.
The next three days introduced Nasrin to her new routine: passing the dead drop morning and evening on her way to and from the Zarab factory and dodging Leila’s persistent questions over dinner.
It wasn’t until the fourth evening that things changed.
Nasrin almost missed the straightened address plate. The dim streetlamps seemed to conspire to throw as little light as possible beyond Shokrael’s cratered pavement. They urged her home, to a rushed dinner, evasions with Leila, and the blissful oblivion of sleep.
But she saw it and felt a hitch in her chest.
Ducking into the alley, Nasrin fished a cigarette and lighter out of her pocket. Getting out of the wind to light a smoke was as natural as anything. Nevertheless, her hands trembled as she held the flame to the tip.
She moved closer to the pockmarked wall. A loose brick near the trashcan came away in her cold-numbed hand. She dug into the gap and closed her fingers around an envelope even as she felt her knuckles scrape the pitted wall.
She slipped the letter into her pocket and casually shoved the brick into place wi
th her hip while her right hand held the cigarette to her lips. She turned.
A guard was standing at the entrance to the alley, his silhouette a throbbing purple.
“Late to stop and admire the scenery, sister.”
She lifted the burning cigarette for him to see and willed her hand to remain steady. “A little company for my walk, sir. Father doesn’t allow it at home.”
He watched her and said nothing. The Clerical guards had a way of prompting you with silence. It was as if all of them had been schoolmasters before the overthrow.
Nasrin clutched at her coat with one hand and passed him the cigarette with the other. Her knuckles were raw and lined with blood and mortar grit.
The guard took the cigarette and looked at it as if it were a trampled coin that he could not decide whether to keep.
She dug into her pocket and handed him her box of cigarettes.
He took it and nodded. “My father is also strict.”
“God’s protection on you, sir.”
Nasrin finished her route home, her legs shaking. She didn’t take the letter out of her pocket until she had locked the bedroom door behind her. She read slowly, willing her mind to focus on each word.
Farhad must have slept with it under his shirt to give it such a thick halo of blue. She distantly wondered whether the letter and the cigarette really came from Farhad—whether the resistance was desperate enough to trust someone as new to the cause as she was—or whether her orders came from someone expendable.
In the end, it didn’t matter.
She buried the letter under the floorboard beneath her bed where it spent the night like a telltale heart. When she finally slept, her dreams were shaded with green and blue.
The sun was a dull smear against the frozen sky when Nasrin began her pilgrimage the next morning. Past Shohada Square, now full of silent pedestrians and coughing cars. This time, she continued down Malek Street.
She was careful to cast her eyes down as she passed government offices. Here there were no bullet holes in the walls, no medallions of gum on the street. One of the girls on her shift at the factory swore that a sister-in-law’s uncle had been detained for sneezing here.