The woman gives Simon a hard stare. “They’re clean?”
“They were prisoners, too,” he says.
The woman—light skinned, close-cropped hair—hoists an extra gun, unconvinced. Tris straightens up. “I’m pregnant,” she says. “And ain’t nothing going to convince me to stay here.”
“Fair enough,” the woman says, and hands Tris a gun. “We have ninety seconds. Just enough time to detonate.”
Our glassman lies on his back, legs curled in the air. One of those sticky black balls has lodged a foot away from his blank glass face. It’s a retaliatory offense to harm a drone. I remember what they say about brain damage when the glassmen are connected. Is he connected? Will this hurt him? I don’t like the kid, but he’s so young. Not unredeemable. He saved my life.
I don’t know why I do it, but while Tris and the others are distracted, I use a broken piece of the guard rail to knock off the black ball. I watch it roll under the truck, yards away. I don’t want to hurt him; I just want my sister and me safe and away.
“Libs!” It’s Tris, looking too much like a terrorist with her big black gun. Dad taught us both to use them, but the difference between us is I wish that I didn’t know how, and Tris is glad.
I run to catch up. A man idles a pickup ten yards down the road from the convoy.
“They’re coming back on,” he says.
“Detonating!” The woman’s voice is a bird-call, a swoop from high to low. She presses a sequence of buttons on a remote and suddenly the light ahead is fiercer than the sun and it smells like gasoline and woodsmoke and tar. I’ve seen plenty enough bomb wreckage in my life; I feel like when it’s ours it should look different. Better. It doesn’t.
Tris pulls me into the back of the pickup and we’re bouncing away before we can even shut the back door. We turn off the highway and drive down a long dirt road through the woods. I watch the back of the woman’s head through the rear window. She has four triangular scars at the base of her neck, the same as Bill’s.
Something breaks out of the underbrush on the side of the road. Something that moves unnaturally fast, even on the six legs he has left. Something that calls out, in that stupid, naive, inhuman voice:
“Stop the vehicle! Pregnant one, do not worry, I will—”
“Fuck!” Tris’s terror cuts off the last of the speech. The car swerves, tossing me against the door. I must not have latched it properly, because next thing I know I’m tumbling to the dirt with a thud that jars my teeth. The glassman scrambles on top of me without any regard for the pricking pain of his long, metallic limbs.
“Kill that thing!” It’s a man, I’m not sure who. I can’t look, pinioned as I am.
“Pregnant one, step down from the terrorist vehicle and I will lead you to safety. There is a Reaper Support Flyer on its way.”
He grips me between two metallic arms and hauls me up with surprising strength. The woman and Simon have guns trained on the glassman, but they hesitate—if they shoot him, they have to shoot me. Tris has her gun up as well, but she’s shaking so hard she can’t even get her finger on the trigger.
“Let go of me,” I say to him. He presses his legs more firmly into my side.
“I will save the pregnant one,” he repeats, as though to reassure both of us. He’s young, but he’s still a glassman. He knows enough to use me as a human shield.
Tris lowers the gun to her side. She slides from the truck bed and walks forward.
“Don’t you dare, Tris!” I yell, but she just shakes her head. My sister, giving herself to a glassman? What would Dad say? I can’t even free a hand to wipe my eyes. I hate this boy behind the glass face. I hate him because he’s too young and ignorant to even understand what he’s doing wrong. Evil is good to a glassman. Wrong is right. The pregnant one has to be saved.
I pray to God, then. I say, God, please let her not be a fool. Please let her escape.
And I guess God heard, because when she’s just a couple of feet away she looks straight at me and smiles like she’s about to cry. “I’m sorry, Libs,” she whispers. “I love you. I just can’t let him take me again.”
“Pregnant one! Please drop your weapon and we will—”
And then she raises her gun and shoots.
My arm hurts. Goddamn it hurts, like there’s some small, toothy animal burrowing inside. I groan and feel my sister’s hands, cool on my forehead.
“They know the doctor,” she says. “That Esther that Bill told us about, remember? She’s a regular doctor, too, not just abortions. You’ll be fine.”
I squint up at her. The sun has moved since she shot me; I can hardly see her face for the light behind it. But even at the edges I can see her grief. Her tears drip on my hairline and down my forehead.
“I don’t care,” I say, with some effort. “I wanted you to do it.”
“I was so afraid, Libs.”
“I know.”
“We’ll get home now, won’t we?”
“Sure,” I say. If it’s there.
The terrorists take us to a town fifty miles from Annapolis. Even though it’s close to the city, the glassmen mostly leave it alone. It’s far enough out from the pipeline, and there’s not much here, otherwise: just a postage stamp of a barley field, thirty or so houses and one of those large, old, whitewashed barn-door churches. At night, the town is ghost empty.
Tris helps me down from the truck. Even that’s an effort. My head feels half-filled with syrup. Simon and the others say their goodbyes and head out quickly. It’s too dangerous for fighters to stay this close to the city. Depending on how much the glassmen know about Tris and me, it isn’t safe for us either. But between a baby and a bullet, we don’t have much choice.
Alone, now, we read the church’s name above the door: Esther Zion Congregation Church, Methodist.
Tris and I look at each other. “Oh, Christ,” she says. “Did Bill lie, Libby? Is he really so hung up on that sin bullshit that he sent me all the way out here, to a church. . . .”
I lean against her and wonder how he ever survived to come back to us. It feels like a gift, now, with my life half bled out along the road behind. “Bill wouldn’t lie, Tris. Maybe he got it wrong. But he wouldn’t lie.”
The pews are old but well-kept. The prayer books look like someone’s been using them. The only person inside is a white lady, sweeping the altar.
“Simon and Sybil sent you,” she says, not a question. Sybil—we never even asked the woman’s name.
“My sister,” we both say, and then, improbably, laugh.
A month later, Tris and I round Bishop’s Head and face north. At the mouth of our estuary, we aren’t close enough to see Toddville, let alone our home, but we can’t see any drones either. The weather is chillier this time around, the water harder to navigate with the small boat. Tris looks healthy and happy; older and younger. No one will mistake her for twenty-five again, but there’s nothing wrong with wisdom.
The doctor fixed up my arm and found us an old, leaky rowboat when it was clear we were determined to go back. Tris has had to do most of the work; her arms are starting to look like they belong to someone who doesn’t spend all her time reading. I think about the harvest and hope the bombs didn’t reap the grain before we could. If anyone could manage those fields without me, Bill can. We won’t starve this winter, assuming reapers didn’t destroy everything. Libby ships the oars and lets us float, staring at the deep gray sky and its reflection on the water that seems to stretch endlessly before us.
“Bill will have brought the harvest in just fine,” I say.
“You love him, don’t you?”
I think about his short, patchy hair. That giant green monster he brought back like a dowry. “He’s good with the old engines. Better than me.”
“I think he loves you. Maybe one of you could get around to doing something about it?”
“Maybe so.”
Tris and I sit like that for a long time. The boat drifts toward shore, and neither of us
stop it. A fish jumps in the water to my left; a heron circles overhead.
“Dad’s probably out fishing,” she says, maneuvering us around. “We might catch him on the way in.”
“That’ll be a surprise! Though he won’t be happy about his boat.”
“He might let it slide. Libby?”
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry—”
“You aren’t sorry if you’d do it again,” I say. “And I’m not sorry if I’d let you.”
She holds my gaze. “Do you know how much I love you?”
We have the same smile, my sister and I. It’s a nice smile, even when it’s scared and a little sad.
THOMAS OLDE HEUVELT
Thomas Olde Heuvelt (1983) is a Dutch writer whose short stories have received awards and been nominated for such awards as the Paul Harland Prize, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Awards and the Hugo Award for Best Novelette.
Olde Heuvelt was born in Nijmegen, Netherlands. He studied English language and American Literature at the Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen and at the University of Ottawa in Canada, where he lived for half a year. In many interviews, he recalled that the literary heroes of his childhood were Roald Dahl and Stephen King, who created a love for grim and dark fiction. He later discovered the works of a wider range of contemporary writers like Jonathan Safran Foer, Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Neil Gaiman and Yann Martel, whom he calls his greatest influences.
Olde Heuvelt wrote his debut novel De Onvoorziene at the age of sixteen. It was published with a small press in 2002, followed in 2004 by PhantasAmnesia, a 600-page novel in which he combined horror with humor and satire. This drew the attention of Jacques Post, publisher with Luitingh-Sijthoff. Olde Heuvelt was the first Dutch author Post published with Luitingh-Sijthoff.
After several of his stories were translated into English, Olde Heuvelt was invited to be a panelist at the British Eastercon (2008, 2012), World Horror Convention in Brighton (2010) and Worldcon in Chicago (2012).
Olde Heuvelt is a multiple winner of the Paul Harland Prize for best Dutch work of the fantastic (2009 and 2012). His story "The Boy Who Cast No Shadow" published by PS Publishing in the UK, together with Carlos Ruiz Zafón received the Honorable Mention in the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Awards in 2012.
The same story was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2013.
In April, 2013, Tor Books released his story "The Ink Readers of Doi Saket" in e-book.
The Ink Readers of Doi Saket, by Thomas Olde Heuvelt
People send their dreams and wishes floating down the Mae Ping River with the hope that those dreams will be captured, read and come true. It is a surprise what some wish for and why. One can never know what’s inside someone’s heart—what they really truly want, and those dreams sometimes reveal our true selves.
It was during a night in the twelfth lunar month of this year when two strong hands pushed young Tangmoo down into the bed of the Mae Ping River, and by doing so, ironically, fulfilled his only wish. Tangmoo flailed his arms wildly, churning up the swirling water. The whites of his eyes reflected flashes from the fireworks as his smothered cries rose in bubbles to the surface, where they burst in silence: help, help, help, help!
These filtered cries of alarm were mistaken by a pair of dragonflies fused in flight, their only wish to remain larvaless and so prolong their love dance endlessly, for the dripping of morning dew. So unsettled was the pair that their breaths caught, and for a second, just when the male ejaculated, they separated. Force of habit subsequently incited them to repeat this in all their future climaxes, making their fondest wish actually come true.
But this was a chance circumstance. The point here is that young Tangmoo screamed, and his lungs filled with water, and please, he did not want to die this way.
In order to fully grasp the tragedy of this drama, we’ll have to flash back a few days and take a peek at the village of Doi Saket, situated on the exact same river shore. Late one afternoon, about an hour before it was time for his third bowl of rice of the day, the well-bellied weed exterminator Uan [1] came running into the temple square. Winded as a consequence of the oversized behind that had given him his name, he stopped to catch his breath, leaning against the enormous stone phallus outside the temple (though not on the temple grounds themselves, since Buddha doesn’t approve of that kind of non-Buddhist folly), before wheezing, “Come see, come see! The first wish has arrived!”
“Watch out!” cried the malodorous lampshade maker Tao [2], whose nickname did not spring from his shell head or his tortoise appearance, but from his extreme robustness, and he nodded toward the phallus.
In his frenzy, Uan had forgotten all about the general consensus around the ancient fertility symbol. The adulterous rice peeler Somchai [3] had once cheated on her husband with three neighbors and a shopkeeper from a nearby village after she had been spotted on the phallic altar, touching herself and wrapped in nothing but silk ribbons. As a penalty, Somchai was buried waist deep in the rice field so that her excess fertility could seep into the crops, and it was decided that the bewitched phallus was never to be touched again, and was only to be greeted by passersby with a brief nod of the head, something that was ardently copied by the villagers and which consequently led to an abundance of oral sex. (There were rumors that the stone was not in fact bewitched at all, but that lustful Somchai suffered from some type of obsessive exhibitionism. Nonsense, of course.)
Quick as lightning, Uan let go of the stone (but he was too late: in the following year his wife would give birth to triplets) and yelled, “Come to the river, all of you! The first wish is arriving—I’ve seen it with my own eyes!”
“So soon?” said the well-mannered crab gatherer Kulap, just returning from the rice field with her basket. “I don’t believe it. It’s way too early.”
Inside his house the generally respected Puu Yaybaan, chief of the village, heard the commotion and came running out the door. “What’s going on?” he shouted, scattering chickens in his wild dash. “What’s all this racket?”
“Uan says the first wish is here,” Kulap said, crinkling her nose in a way that was all in contrast to her gentle nature. “But I don’t believe it.”
“Is this true?” the Puu Yaybaan asked.
“It’s as true as me standing here,” Uan insisted, and indeed, there he stood.
“Well . . . so did you retrieve it?” Tao asked, placing his lampshade at his feet.
“Certainly not,” Uan responded. “I can’t swim, I’m too heavy to stay afloat. Come on, everybody! To the river!”
The hubbub caused many a window shutter to open, many a cell phone to ring, and many a banana leaf to furl bashfully back into its tree, as curiosity was the one thing that could mobilize all the villagers in unison. And sure enough, when they arrived at the riverside, they all saw it. A trace of brilliance on the tranquil stream. A floating lily made of plastic and crepe paper. A pearl inside a lotus blossom. The first wish of Loi Krathong.
The philosophical irrigator Daeng [4], named after the blood that covered him when he was born, waded through the shallows saying, “Is it a wish for happiness? A love wish? A last wish? Wishful thinking?”
The short-spoken restaurant owner Sorn [5], named after some curious agricultural mishap that no one remembered, pointed his stone pestle toward the brilliance on the water and said, “If we don’t do something, it’s going to float right past.”
“Someone needs to go get it!” the Puu Yaybaan cried, shushing the onlookers. Men hesitated on the shore, children waded into the river until their mothers whistled them back, and the scrawny frog catcher Yai [6] took off his clothes and dove into the deep green water. [7]
“What is it? What’s the first wish?” the people shouted when Yai finally resurfaced and reached the little boat. “Does it have a note inside?”
Treading water, Yai unfolded the lotus leaves and produced a moist piece of paper. “Wait. I’m having trouble reading it. The words are smudge
d. But it says”—dramatic pause as the river held its breath in anticipation—“‘I wish for my dying water buffalo to get well —Bovorn S. from San Phak Wan.”’
“LOI KRATHONG HAS STARTED!” the Puu Yaybaan declared over the PA system, used for announcing all important and unimportant news in the village, and his tinny words were greeted by cheers from the crowds on the riverbank. The cunning monk Sûa [8] broke into the traditional Loi Krathong song, soon joined by the village elders clapping their hands and the children splashing one another with water, while miles upstream, in the city of Chiang Mai, thousands upon thousands of wishes were being launched onto the river.
November full moon shines
Loi Krathong, Loi Krathong
And the water’s high in local river and the klong
Loi, Loi Krathong, Loi, Loi Krathong
Loi Krathong is here and everybody’s full of cheer
We’re together at the klong
Each one with his krathong
As we push away we pray
We can see a better day
Young Tangmoo [9] heard the noise from where he was perched in the crown of the slender teng-rang tree, slinging a piece of plaited cotton around a broken and dreadfully sagging branch. The tree had been struck by lightning the previous summer. No matter how Tangmoo propped, nailed, tethered, or jiggled the dead wood, every day around noontime it produced a loud crack and the infernal thing sank down a little closer toward his father’s house. Every day Tangmoo climbed the tree with new boards or ropes, and every day the proportion of natural versus artificial outgrowths in the teng-rang tree shifted a little more in favor of the shoring material. His mother kept her tip money in an old wok, saving up so she could one day afford to call in a landscaper to eliminate the danger. But Tangmoo did not mind his daily chore. It somehow reminded him of a sacred ritual. The crown and leaves of the tree triggered a subconscious memory of the hollowed-out watermelon after which he had been named; a crib that had afforded him many sheltered days and nights when he was a baby.
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 511