No. No, this is not how it ends. I push myself to my feet. This is not the end. Around me there is a new chaos, and I can smell something burning. Abbotsville. The town is burning. Good. I put one foot in front of the other, and then Sainet is there, face spotted with ash.
“We have to go,” he says, and there’s something in his voice, a ragged hurt and desperation. Not cold at all.
Pain causes me to groan, nearly collapse, but I manage a nod. We’ll run, run until we are free.
A truth about rivers: There’s so much gone now. Not just our dead but all that we held. The fish and the plants—the life. What remains is only dry earth and memories, and maybe there will come a day when not even those are left.
I keep my mind on Sainet’s voice and the feeling of putting one foot in front of the other. I’m leaking. Fucking sea I’m leaking, ripe wet droplets of me sinking into the sand. Gut shot. That’s what I am. That’s what— I stumble and cry out and Sainet’s arms catch me, keep me from falling.
Everything’s jumbled. I can’t keep it straight.
“Wasn’t supposed to be like this,” I say. It was supposed to be . . .
“It’s nothing,” Sainet says. “You’re going to be fine.” He calls for Mor and Verdan, but they have their hands full with Druun.
A merry bunch we all make. Each step I take wets the sands, causes my feet to stick in earth that’s ravenous for moisture. I would kill for a horse, but I’m afraid I’ve killed for far less, far more, far far away where rivers run free. There is blood on my hands and mingled with the water spilling from me with each step. Whatever the bullet is, inside me, I can feel it doing its work.
“Have you ever been to the sea?” I ask. To Sainet, or maybe to Druun. To anyone. What does it matter anyway?
“The sea is a myth,” Sainet says. Of course he doesn’t believe. I want to ask him why he came then, but I’m afraid of the answer. Even now.
I take another step, another. I will not die here. I will not die here. Behind me I feel the heat of the flames. It’s almost inviting. I don’t look back.
“One day the sky will take us up one final time.” It’s Mor. Ey is suddenly standing there, one of Druun’s arms draped over eir shoulder. Ey seems mostly recovered now, but there’s a slight quaver in eir voice. “And the wind will take us out to sea, and we will fall as rain into the endless waters.”
“I’d like to see it,” I say. I falter again. More hands steady me. There’s Verdan, eyes still wide. Why is it they have to learn so young to be hated?
“I’m sure you will,” she says. “Just like you said. We’ll find the sea and we’ll bring it back with us, to tear down the dams and the dikes and the locks. Just like you said.”
I smile. Just like I said.
A truth about rivers: Sometimes we lie. And sometimes we tell the truth. And sometimes we hope so hard we can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
I’m on the beach, reclined, my head in Sainet’s lap, my eyes closed. He runs a hand through my hair. If I open my eyes I will see it, the endless expanse of the sea. I will hear the countless voices speaking as one and they will tell me it will be all right.
“I’m tired,” I say, and realize just how true it is. How did I ever get this tired?
“Don’t quit on me now,” Sainet says.
I smile. I’m not quitting, I want to say. Just taking a rest. A little rest. Haven’t I earned that? But words won’t rise in my throat.
“Open your eyes,” Sainet says. I hear other voices too. Of course. Mor is here, and Verdan, and Druun too. All here. “Open your eyes.”
There’s an edge to Sainet’s voice. I want to tell him to relax. We’ve come so far. We’ve come so far. But Sainet’s right. We’re not done yet. I move my hand over the fine sand of the beach. It almost feels like dust.
I open my eyes. The sea is so very far away.
“Take me there,” I say, though it hurts to say anything. Soon I’ll be gone into the Dust, but right now I can hold together long enough to . . . “Take me to the sea.”
They crowd around me. Mor and Verdan each take one of my hands in theirs and Druun touches my shoulder. I will make it to the sea, even if I never see it.
“Thank you,” I say, and close my eyes. I let go. I let it all go, and I think of Viora and freedom. I am a waterfall bound for the thirsty sand, nearly gone, nearly gone.
Until they catch me.
Through them all, I am. I give, like we gave to Druun after we pulled them from the well, and all that I am they catch, my hopes and my dreams—my waters, until I am just a wave passing through them, soon to crash and fade but for this moment alive in them all, connecting them.
They—now we—all look down at the dry earth, vacant now but for my empty clothes. We stretch, bodies suddenly refreshed, wounds gone as if washed clean. We stand and look back at Abbotsville burning.
“Let’s go,” Mor says, and we turn toward the horizon, and the mountains beyond that, and the forest beyond that, and the sea beyond that, and start walking.
Kate Alice Marshall
Destroy the City with Me Tonight
from Behind the Mask
Cass gets the diagnosis in high school, three weeks shy of eighteen, full of dreams about Paris and London and New York. She’s always had the aches. Growing pains, her mother tells her—normal. She repeats it to herself as they wait for the X-rays—normal—in a waiting room with a broken air conditioner—normal—and an antiseptic smell. She repeats it when the nurse calls them back—normal—while the doctor looks down at his notes—normal—all the way until he says the words.
Caspar-Williams Syndrome.
The city is mapped on her bones, to lines that wrap ribs, tibia, mandible. A dense knot of streets engraves her sternum; a lonely road carves a notch in her clavicle. An intersection splays like a starfish below her left eye, and she stares at the shadow of it on the X-ray as the doctor explains. Rare condition. Few known cases. Well, we’ve all seen the news.
Her mother gives a strangled laugh, covers her mouth. “It’s only,” she says. “It’s only, I thought I was going loopy in my middle age, but I guess . . .”
Cass thinks of the times her mother has forgotten to pick her up. Has seemed startled that she’s in the room. Has stuttered over her name or only stared a moment, bewildered, as if she does not know who this stranger is.
Normal.
“The pain will get worse if she doesn’t leave. She might have weeks or months or years before it’s unbearable,” the doctor says, but Cass doesn’t wait around. She’s never liked long goodbyes.
It takes her a week to find the right city, searching maps for familiar streets, matching them to the osseous grooves beneath her skin. It’s not London or Paris or New York; it’s nowhere she’d choose to go, but she buys a one-way ticket. Her doctor gives her the name of a local specialist, but she never calls the number. There’s no cure, after all, and she’s had enough of tests.
She gets a job at a diner and an apartment barely big enough for a bed. The street she lives on sits snug in the crook of her left elbow. For the first time in years, her bones don’t ache.
She waits.
It’s six months before the visions start. The city starts her out easy: a little girl lost ten blocks from home. Cass walks her back and leaves her at the doorstep. It’s stolen suitcases next, dumped in the bushes, money scraped out but otherwise intact. A few weeks after that, it’s a mugging. She takes a fist to the stomach, punches back, feels the man’s bones break. She doesn’t even bruise.
Her boss forgets to give her shifts. Then he forgets she works there at all. But that’s all right; her landlord’s forgotten she’s there too and stops collecting rent. Cass spends her nights riding buses, always tucked in the rearmost seat, waiting to be where the city wants her. She never once fights it.
Two years in, the symptoms are getting worse. Her fingerprints have smoothed out, vanished. Her features blur in photographs. She can stand in a room for an
hour before people notice her.
She’s always wondered why you’d bother with a mask; now she gets it. It’s not to be concealed, it’s to be seen, to be remembered. Her mask is pale blue, the hint of feathers at the edges; she gets wings tattooed across her shoulders. When the name arrives, it’s Seraph. She takes to it, ditches Cass entirely. No one’s called her by name in over a year anyway.
The city offers up a better apartment, right on Main Street. The former tenant is dead, a tunnel taking the place of his right eye, the killing too quick for the city to catch on. She drops the killer off at the police station and cleans up the blood. The walls are decorated with black-and-white photos: New York, Paris, London. She frames her X-rays and hangs them next to Big Ben.
The next day she gets shot. It’s the fifth time, but it still stings.
The apartment on Main has been “vacant” for six years now. At some point the former tenant’s family showed up for his things, but they somehow forgot to take the bed, the couch, the TV, the photos. They looked uneasy when they left, and they lingered, engine idling, for nearly an hour. She almost wished they’d come back and demand she get out, but like everyone else, they shook it off and left.
Seraph’s skin is a map of its own now—scars too deep to heal clean. Bullets, knives. Rebar that punched through just under her ribs. Not enough to kill her, though she knows that they can die. She watched it happen once, on the news, the one called Glaive, body slicing downward through the air for a few graceful seconds before gravity and asphalt put an end to her momentary flight. Death breaks the amnesiac contagion; in death, she is remembered, known. Her name was Danielle and no one pushed her.
Seraph gets a recording. Watches it on repeat and wonders when she’ll get too weary of being forgotten. When she goes, she decides, she doesn’t want to be witnessed.
Another winter passes.
He shows up in April, when the streets are wet and cool. Another Caspar-Williams. The Rothschild variant, though it hasn’t been proven that the variation is one of pathology rather than psychology. Every city produces a Rothschild eventually. An echo, a reflection, the destruction to her protection. Whether it’s a matter of balance or just a fluke mutation of the virus, no one knows.
Shadows seethe around him when he moves. He’s faster than her, hard to keep a fix on; his symptoms are advanced. That worries her, as she steps over the bodies he’s left for her; she should have known about him before now if he’s been infected this long. He kills bad men, but not exclusively. He doesn’t seem to have any point or purpose but destruction.
Their first real fight is at the arboretum. She gets dirt in her hair and a broken arm and doesn’t land a blow. Then the Main Street Bank, then the subway, then the football stadium, and by then she can’t taste anything but her own blood, and her ears won’t stop ringing.
“Why bother?” he asks her, before dislocating her shoulder with a twist. She doesn’t have an answer.
She sits in the diner where she used to work, arm in a sling. No one comes to serve her; they never do. Symptom of the disease. She’s not wearing her mask. She’s no one. So it takes her a while to hear the voice calling her.
“Cass.” The woman’s said it three times before Seraph looks up. The woman is middle-aged, tired. She’s clutching a page ripped out of a school yearbook. Distantly, Seraph remembers the faces on the rear side. Recognizes a few names too.
“Mom,” Seraph says. Not sure if she’s surprised or glad or anything at all. She’s spent years trying to forget her family, her friends, as thoroughly as they’ve forgotten her. No use clinging to what she can’t have. Now the memories hurt like a half-healed wound wrenched open again.
The woman sits down across from her, smooths the page out on the table between them. One picture is circled. The girl looks vaguely familiar. Cass, the woman has written, letters traced and retraced until they’re thick and manic. Arrows point to the picture, more words. Cass your daughter cass CASS casS don’t forget CASS.
“I don’t know if I’ll remember long enough,” the woman says. “So I wrote it all down, everything I wanted to say.” She slides an envelope across the table, stuffed thick with folded paper. Her eyes are already getting distant. “There’s treatment now. Maybe a cure. That’s what they’re saying.”
Seraph allows herself a moment of fantasy. In her mind, they talk for a while. Catch up. The woman, her mother, says that she’s proud of what Seraph’s done. That she misses her.
In reality, she only gets those few sentences. Then the woman gets a puzzled expression, stands. She shakes her head a little, like she’s forgotten something, and picks up the envelope before wandering away. She leaves the page from the yearbook.
Seraph folds it neatly into eighths and tucks it in her pocket. She doesn’t cry; even she has trouble remembering Cass these days.
She goes to the cathedral and sits at the peak of the roof, the wind tugging at her hair. There’s nowhere in the city she can’t get. It’s in her bones, after all. She’s not surprised when he shows up, but she is surprised when he sits down next to her.
“My mother came to see me today,” she says.
“That’s a head trip,” he says, and she nods. He offers her a cigarette; she declines.
“She says there’s a cure.”
“You going to take it?”
It’s already the longest conversation she’s had in years. “Would you?”
He shrugs. “I’m faster and stronger than anyone alive. I can heal a bullet wound with a nap.”
“And you just use it to cause mayhem.”
“And I’m supposed to what, save kittens from trees?”
“If you don’t get the cure, I can’t,” Seraph says. “I can’t let you run amok.”
“Amok?” he laughs. “Okay. I’m your fault, you know.”
“How are you my fault?”
“You infected me,” he reminds her, and for a moment, it works. For a moment, she remembers.
Three weeks shy of eighteen, dreams of London and Paris and New York. He wants to see the Great Wall; she wants to see the Grand Canyon. He draws a map across her skin with one finger.
He sits in the waiting room with her. He holds her hand. Normal, she whispers; he squeezes her fingers tight.
The doctor tells them sexual transmission is unusual but not unheard of. Her mother turns scarlet; Cass looks away. He just nods. At least they’ll get to take one trip together. A pair of one-way tickets, but they don’t talk. When they get to the city, they rent an apartment barely big enough for a bed. She waits tables; he washes dishes.
When the visions start, she goes out to meet them. He stays home, digging the heels of his palms into his eyes, trying to blot them out. She tries to convince him not to fight them: it’s easier if you give in.
The city finds her a new place. She looks at photos of London and Paris and New York and wonders if she should get anything from the old apartment. But she can’t think of anything she cares about enough to bring.
She blinks. The memory is gone. He’s still there, but not for long. He’s standing, stubbing out his cigarette.
“I’m your fault,” he says. “I’ve done everything I can to remember you, but you never even tried to hold on to me. You left me behind.”
She can’t remember whether that’s true, but she doesn’t argue. She goes home instead. Smooths out the yearbook page. She finds his photo. The name beneath it isn’t familiar, but he’s signed next to the picture. Can’t wait for the summer. A sloppy heart.
The morning paper arrives. They’ve given him a name: Nightblade. Dramatic. She thinks he’d like it, though she can’t say why. She frames his picture, puts it up on her wall next to Paris and an X-ray of the bones of her right hand.
The nights they’re too weary to fight, they meet at the church. Half the time she can’t remember why she’s there until he shows. They don’t talk much. Shared silence is revelation enough.
She watches a special on Caspar-Williams. It�
�s still misunderstood, the mechanism of transmission imprecisely imagined. They’re the only two in their city, but elsewhere there are more. Dozens. New York, London, Paris. Men and women with maps on their bones, cities that own them. Most are like the two of them, strong and fast and quick to heal. But she sees a woman sheathed in flame, a man whose skin sprouts plates of armor like a beetle’s carapace.
She pauses on a blurred image of herself in mid-leap, shadows streaming behind her like wings. She can’t even see herself clearly in mirrors anymore.
“I have an idea,” he says that night. “We can keep our powers and escape the city. See the world together, like we planned.”
She pretends to know what he’s talking about. Some nights she remembers. Tonight isn’t one of them. “How?” she asks.
“You’ll see.”
She doesn’t see him for weeks. She keeps hearing about the cure. Watches an interview with a former Caspar-Williams sufferer. His cheeks are hollow, eyes sunken, but he smiles, arm around a wife who thought she was single the last three years. She doesn’t seem to know what to do with herself.
“What has your life been like, the last three years?” the reporter asks her. She hesitates a long time. “It was good,” she says at last, not looking at him, not looking anywhere in particular. “I didn’t know I missed him.”
Seraph crouches on the cathedral steeple, waits for him to show. The city calls to her; for just one night, she doesn’t answer. Winter passes.
It’s spring when he finds her again. Things have been quiet without him; she’s lost the habits necessary to survive such utter isolation. When he tells her to follow him, she doesn’t hesitate.
The machine is a nest of wires and clear tubing. Phosphorescent liquid churns at its core; it clings to the wall like a starfish, like a tumor. It pulses with the heartbeat of a dying titan. Seraph runs her hands over the cold metal; the city’s fear is electric in her blood.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 Page 4