The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume 6

by Libba Bray

‘Get them out of here,’ I say to the golden dog. ‘And all this nonsense. Only leave the princess—the queen, I should say. Her Majesty.’

  And the title is bitter on my tongue, so lately did I use it for her mother. King, queen, prince and people, all are despicable to me. I understand for the first time that the war I fought in, which goes on without me, is being fought entirely to keep this wealth safe, this river of luxury flowing, these chefs making their glistening fresh food, these walls intact and the tribals busy outside them, these lawns untrampled by jealous mobs come to tear down the palaces.

  And she’s despicable too, who was my princess and dazzled me so last night. Smiling at our solitude, she walks towards me in that shameful dress, presenting her breasts to me in their silken tray, the cloth sewn close about her waist to better show how she swells above and below, for all to see, as those dignitaries saw just now, my wife on open display like an American celebrity woman in a movie, like a porn queen in a sexy-mag.

  I claw the crown from my head and fling it away from me. I unfasten the great gold-encrusted king-cape and push it off; it suffocates me, crushes me. My girl watches, shocked, as I tear off the sash and brooches and the foolish shirt—truly tear some of it, for the shirt-fastenings are so ancient and odd, it cannot be removed undamaged without a servant’s help.

  Down to only the trousers, I’m a more honest man; I can see, I can be, my true self better. I take off the fine buckled shoes and throw them hard at the valuable vases across the sitting-room. The vases tip and burst apart against each other, and the pieces scatter themselves in the dogs’ fur as they lie there intertwined, grinning and goggling, taking up half the room.

  The princess—the queen—is half-crouched, caught mid-laugh, mid-cringe, clutching the ruffles about her knees and looking up at me. ‘You are different,’ she says, her child-face insulting, accusing, above the cream-lit cleft between her breasts. ‘You were gentle and kind before,’ she whispers. ‘What has happened? What has changed?’

  I kick aside the king-clothes. ‘Now you,’ I say, and I reach for the crown on her head.

  My mother stirs the pot as if nothing exists but this food, none of us children tumbling on the floor fighting, none of the men talking and taking their tea around the table. The food smells good, bread baking, meat stewing with onions.

  It is a tiny world. The men talk of the larger, outer one, but they know nothing. They know goats, and mountains, but there is so much more that they can’t imagine, that they will never see.

  I shower. I wash off the blood and the scents of the princess, the bottled one and the others, more natural, of her fear above and of her flower below that I plucked—that I tore, more truthfully, from its roots. I gulp down shower-water, lather my hair enormously, soap up and scrub hard the rest of me. Can I ever be properly clean again? And once I am, what then? There seems to be nothing else to do, once you’re king, once you’ve treated your queen so. I could kill her, could I not? I could be king alone, without her eyes on me always, fearful and accusing. I could do that; I’ve got the dogs. I could do anything. (I lather my sore man-parts—they feel defiled, though she was my wife and untouched by any other man—or so she claimed, in her terror.)

  I rinse and rinse, and turn off the hissing water, dry myself and step out into the bedroom. There I dress in clean clothes, several layers, Gore-Tex the outermost. I stuff my ski-cap and gloves in my jacket pockets, my pistol to show my father that my tale is true. I go into my office, never used, and take from the filing drawers my identifications, my discharge papers—all I have left of my life before this, all I have left of myself.

  Out on the blood-smeared couch, my wife-girl lies unconscious or asleep, indecent in the last position I forced on her. She’s not frightened any more, at least, not for the moment. I throw the ruined ruffled thing, the wedding-dress, to one side, and spread a blanket over her, covering all but her face. I didn’t have to do any of what I did. I might have treated her gently; I might have made a proper marriage with her; we might have been king and queen together, dignified and kind to each other, ruling our peoples together, the three giant dogs at our backs. We could have stopped the war; we could have sorted out this country; we could have done anything. Remember her fragrance, when it was just that light bottle-perfume? Remember her face, unmarked and laughing, just an hour or so ago as she married you?

  I stand up, away from what I did to her. The fur-slump in the corner rises and becomes the starving gray, the white bull-baiter, the dragon-dog with its flame-coat flickering around it, its eyes fireworking out of its golden mask face.

  ‘I want you to do one last thing for me.’ I pull on my ski-cap. The dogs whirl their eyes and spill their odours on me.

  I bend and put the pink Bic in the princess’s hand. Her whole body gives a start, making me jump, but she doesn’t wake up.

  I pull on my gloves, heart thumping. ‘Send me to my family’s country,’ I say to the dogs. ‘I don’t care which one of you.’

  Whichever dog does it, it’s extremely strong, but it uses none of that strength to hurt me.

  The whole country’s below me, the war there, the mountains there, the city flying away back there. I see for an instant how the dogs travel so fast: the instants themselves adjust around them, make way for them, squashing down, stretching out, whichever way is needed for the shape and mission of the dog.

  Then I am stumbling in the snow, staggering alongside a wall of snowy rocks. Above me, against the snow-blown sky, the faint lines of Flatnose Peak on the south side, and Great Rain on the north, curve down to meet and become the pass through to my home.

  The magic goes out of things with a snap like a passing bullet’s. No giant dog warms or scents the air. No brilliant eye lights up the mountainside. My spine and gut are empty of the thrill of power, of danger. I’m here where I used to imagine myself when we were under fire with everything burning and bleeding around me, everyone dying. Snow blows like knife-slashes across my face; the rocky path veers off into the blizzard ahead; the wind is tricky and bent on upending me, tumbling me down the slope. It’s dangerous, but not the wild, will-of-God kind of dangerous that war is; all I have to do to survive here is give my whole mind and body to the walking. I remember this walking; I embrace it. The war, the city, the princess, all the technology and money I had, the people I knew—these all become things I once dreamed, as I fight my frozen way up the rocks, and through the weather.

  ‘I should like to meet them,’ she says to me in the dream, in my dream of last night when she loved me. She sits hugging her knees, unsmiling, perhaps too tired to be playful or pretend anything.

  ‘I have talked too much of myself,’ I apologize.

  ‘It’s natural,’ she says steadily to me, ‘to miss your homeland.’

  I edge around the last narrow section of the path. There are the goats, penned into their cave; they jostle and cry out at the sight of a person, at the smells of the outside world on me, of soap and new clothing.

  In the wall next to the pen, the window-shutter slides aside from a face, from a shout. The door smacks open and my mother runs out, ahead of my stumbling father; my brothers and sisters overtake them. My grandfather comes to the doorway; the littler sisters catch me around the waist and my parents throw themselves on me, weeping, laughing. We all stagger and fall. The soft snow catches us. The goats bray and thrash in their pen with the excitement.

  ‘You should have sent word!’ my mother shouts over all the questions, holding me tight by the cheeks. ‘I would have prepared such a feast!’

  ‘I didn’t know I was coming,’ I shout back. ‘Until the very last moment. There wasn’t time to let you know.’

  ‘Come! Come inside, for tea and bread at least!’

  Laughing, they haul me up. ‘How you’ve all grown!’ I punch my littlest brother on the arm. He returns the punch to my thigh and I pretend to stagger. ‘I think you broke the bone!’ And they laugh as if I’m the funniest man in the world.

 
We tumble into the house. ‘Wait,’ I say to Grandfather, as he goes to close the door.

  I look out into the storm, to the south and west. Which dog will the princess send? The gray one, I think; I hope she doesn’t waste the gold on tearing me limb from limb. And when will he come? How long do I have? She might lie hours yet insensible.

  ‘Shut that door! Let’s warm the place up again!’ Every sound behind me is new again, but reminds me of the thousand times I’ve heard it before: the dragging of the bench to the table, the soft rattle of boiling water into a tea-bowl, the chatter of children.

  ‘You will have seen some things, my son,’ says my father too heartily—he’s in awe of me, coming from the world as I do. He doesn’t know me anymore. ‘Sit down and tell us them.’

  ‘Not all, though, not all.’ My mother puts her hands over the ears of the nearest sister, who shakes her off annoyed. ‘Only what is suitable for women and girl-folk.’

  So I sit, and sip the tea and soak the bread of home, and begin my story.

  The Last Ride of

  the Glory Girls

  Libba Bray

  Libba Bray has worked as a waitress, nanny, burrito roller, publishing plebe, and an advertising copywriter, and is distantly related to Davy Crockett. Her first novel, A Great and Terrible Beauty, was a New York Times bestseller, and was followed by two sequels, Rebel Angels and The Sweet Far Thing. Her fourth novel, Going Bovine, was awarded the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. Her latest novel is Beauty Queens. Bray lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and their son.

  I were riding with the Glory Girls, and we had an appointment with the 4:10 coming through the Kelly Pass. I fiddled with the Enigma Apparatus my wrist, watching the seconds tick off. When the 4:10 was in sight, I’d take aim, and a cloud of blue light would come down over that iron horse. The serum would do its work, slowing time and the passengers to stillness inside the train. Then the Glory Girls’d walk across a bridge of light, climb aboard, and take whatever they wanted, same as they’d done to all them other trains—a dozen easy in the past six months.

  In the distance, the white peaks of the revival tents dotted the basin like ladies’ handkerchiefs hanging on the washing line. It were spring, and the Believers had come to baptize their young in the Pitch River. Way down below us, the miners were about their business; I could feel them vibrations passing from my boots up through my back teeth like the gentle rocking of a cradle. The air a-swirled with a gritty dust you could taste on the back of your tongue always.

  “Almost time,” Colleen said, and the red of the sky played against her hair till it look like a patch of crimson floss catching fire in an evening dust storm.

  Fadwa readied her pistols. Josephine drummed her fingers on the rock. Amanda, cool as usual, offered me a pinch of chaw, which I declined.

  “I sure hope you fixed that contraption for good, Watchmaker,” she said.

  “Yes’m,” I answered, and didn’t say no more.

  My eyes were trained on them black wisps of steam peeking up over the hills. The 4:10, right on schedule. We hunkered down behind the rocks and waited.

  How I ended up riding with the Glory Girls, the most notorious gang of all-girl outlaws, is a story on its own, I reckon. It’s on account of my being with the Agency—that’s the Pinkerton Detectives, Pinkertons for short. That’s a story, too, but I cain’t tell the one without the other, so you’ll just have to pardon me for going on a bit at first. Truth is, I never set out to do neither. My life had been planned from the time I were a little one, sitting at my mam’s skirts. Back then, I knew my place, and there were a real order to it all—the chores, the catechism, the spring revivals. Days, I spent milking and sewing, reading the One Bible. Evenings, we evangelized at the miners’ camp, warning them about the End Times, asking if they’d join us in finding the passage to the Promised Land. Sunday mornings were spent in a high-collared dress, listening to the Right Reverend Jackson’s fiery sermons.

  Sunday afternoons, as an act of charity, I helped Master Crawford, the watchmaker, now that his sight had gone and faded to a thin pinpoint of light. That were my favorite time. I loved the beauty of all them parts working perfectly together, a little world that could be put to rights with the click of gears, like time itself answered to your fingers.

  “There is a beauty to the way things work. Remove one part, add another, you’ve changed the mechanism as surely as the One God rewrites the structure of a finch over generations,” Master Crawford’d told me as I helped him put the tools to the tiny parts. By the time I left the township, I knowed just about all there was to know in regards to clockworks and the like. Before what happened to John Barks, my life were as ordered as them watches. But I ain’t ready to talk about John Barks yet, and anyway, you want to know how I come to be with the Pinkertons.

  It were after Mam had died and Pap were lost to the Poppy that I left New Canaan and come to Speculation to seek my fortune. Weren’t more’n a day into town when a pickpocket relieved me of my meager coins and left me in a quandary of a serious nature, that quandary bein’ how to survive. There weren’t no work for a girl like me—the mines couldn’t even hire the men lining up outside the overseer’s office. About the only place that would take me was the Red Cat brothel, and I hoped it wouldn’t come to that. So, with my guts roiling, I stole a beedleworm dumpling off a Chinaman’s cart—none too well, I might add—and found myself warming a cell beside a boy-whore whose bail were paid by a senator’s aide. I knew nobody’d be coming for me, and I was right scared they’d be sending me back to the township. I just couldn’t tolerate that.

  Took me seven seconds to pick the lock and another forty-four to take the gate mechanism down to its bones. Couldn’t do nothing about the whap to the back of my head, courtesy of the guard. Next thing I knew, I had an audience with Pinkerton chief Dexter Coolidge.

  “What’s your name? Lie to me and I’ll have you in a sweatbox before sundown.”

  “Adelaide Jones, sir.”

  “Where are you from, Miss Jones?”

  “New Canaan Township, sir.”

  Chief Coolidge frowned. “A Believer?”

  “Was,” I said.

  Chief Coolidge lit a cigar and took a few puffs. “I guess you’ve already had your dip in the Pitch.”

  “Yessir. When I were thirteen.”

  “And you’ve received your vision?”

  “Yessir.”

  “And did you see yourself here in manacles before me, Miss Jones?” He joked from behind a haze of spicy smoke.

  I didn’t answer that. Most people didn’t understand the Believers. We kept to ourselves. My folks come to this planet as pilgrims before I were even born. It was here, the Right Reverend Jackson told us, where the One God set this whole traveling snake-oil wagon show in motion. The Garden of Eden were hidden in the mountains, the Scriptures said. If people lived right lives, followed the Ways of the One Bible, that Eden would be revealed to us when the End Times came, and those Believers would be led right into the Promised Land, while the Non-Believers would perish in an everlasting nothing. As a girl, I learnt the Ways and the Stations and all the things a goodly young woman should know, like how to make oat-blossom bread and spin thread from sweet clover. I learnt about the importance of baptism in the Pitch River, when all your sins would be removed and the One God would reveal his truth to you in a vision. But we never shared our visions with others. That were forbidden.

  Chief Coolidge’s sigh brought me back to my present predicament. “I must say, I’ve never understood why anyone would submit to such barbaric practices,” he said, and it weren’t snooty so much as it were curious.

  “It’s a free world,” I said.

  “Mmmm.” Chief Coolidge squinched together them blue eyes and rubbed a thumb against his fat mustache while he sized me up—the moleskin pants tucked into the workman’s boots, the denim shirt and the duster what used to belong to John Barks. My brown hair were plaited in
to long braids gone half unraveled now. There were dirt caked on my face till you couldn’t hardly tell I had freckles across my nose and cheeks. Chief Coolidge shook his head, and I figured I were done for, but then he went and turned a crank on the wall and spoke into a long, fluted tube. “Mrs. Beasley. Please bring up some of that superior pheasant, roasted potatoes, and a portion of orange-blossom cake, I should think, thank you.”

  When the fancy silver tray come, and the heavenly Mrs. Beasley put it down beside me, I dug in without even saying grace or washing the dirt from under my fingernails.

  “Miss Jones, your facility with the mechanical is quite impressive. Can you put things together as well as you take them apart?”

  I told him about Master Crawford and the watches, and he give me a choice: go back to jail or come work for the Pinkertons. I told him that didn’t seem like much of a choice to me, just two different kinds of servitude. Chief Coolidge give me his first real smile. “As you said, Miss Jones: it’s a free world.”

  The next morning, Chief Coolidge set me up in the laboratory. Every manner of device and contraption you could imagine were there. Rifles that fired pulses of light. Clockwork horses that could ride for a hundred miles full out and not get tuckered. Armored vests what would stop a bullet like it weren’t no more’n a fly. Master Crawford’s little watch shop paled in comparison. I’d be lying if I said the sight of all them metal parts didn’t make my heartbeat flutter some.

  “Gentlemen, may I introduce Miss Adelaide Jones, late of New Canaan Township? She is apprenticed to our agency in the Apparatus Division. Please see to it that she receives your utmost courtesy.”

  Chief Coolidge put me at a long bench piled thick with gears, rivets, tubes, and filaments. A long, fat rifle of some sort with a mess of metal innards laid out for me.

  “This, Miss Jones, is Captain Smythfield’s Miasmic Decider. The weapon was confiscated from a Russian agent at considerable trouble. A schematic has been provided, courtesy of our engineering department. As of yet, we’ve not gotten it to fire. Perhaps you will prove useful in that capacity. I’ll leave you to it.”