The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2016

by Paula Guran

  “Jack,” she said, with what sounded like real concern, “what’s going on?” For a second, he wondered again if he could trust her. The oracle had said so, but then her mother was the Queen of Eyes, maybe she had rigged the answer. New grass grows clean. No, Jack decided. It wasn’t just the Teraph app. Carolien and her frogs would have caught something if El was dangerous.

  He said, “Let’s sit down, okay? It’s kind of a long story.”

  “Of course.” She led him into the living room, where they sat down at opposite ends of her off-white couch. When Jack had told her everything she said, “So all this is because you didn’t dissolve it properly?”

  Jack found himself shaking his head. “That’s the thing. I keep thinking I did.”

  El frowned. “Maybe that’s why it came to you in dreams. Perhaps you did it right in the physical world, but some fragments remained in your skeletal dream frame.”

  Jack guessed that was Dream Hunter tech talk. He thought a moment, said, “So part of the Dupe remained hidden in my dreams and that’s where it reassembled itself?”

  “Yes. And since your card, like everything of significance in your life, has its counterpart in the dream frame, the Revenant was able to get hold of it and present it to you.”

  “Jesus. And now it’s starting to break through into the physical.” He hadn’t told her about kissing Carolien, but the scene on Broadway was enough. El nodded, her lips tight. Jack said “Can you help me? Show me what to do so I can block it? Maybe if I can get the Dupe out of my frame, the card, and the job—you know, killing myself—will go with it.”

  She sighed. “I don’t know, Jack. I’m good, but I suspect this is beyond me.”

  “Fuck,” Jack said. He knew what was coming next.

  El looked down, then forced herself to meet his eyes. “Jack—I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask my father.”

  The Horne Research Agency was closed for the weekend but its owner opened the office for them. He was dressed casually, an old-fashioned red and black checked flannel shirt, khaki pants, and plain black sneakers. Despite everything, Jack almost smiled at the thought of Papa Click and Whistle jogging in Central Park. Down in the street it was a dreary, cloudy day, but Jack had assumed the office would be bright and sunny. Instead, everything looked dull, lifeless, and very old. A day off is a day off, Jack figured.

  He said, “Thank you for seeing me. I know the last time we talked—”

  Horne waved a fleshy hand. For an instant, Jack thought he’d seen that before, the hand, the gesture. But the moment passed as Horne said, “Forget it, Jack. I made you an offer and you weren’t interested. What’s past is past.” He turned to his daughter. “Now tell me the problem.”

  She looked at Jack, who nodded, then she told her father what she and Jack had figured out.

  Horne sat down on the edge of his desk. “This is serious,” he said.

  Jesus, Jack wanted to say, you think so, Sun boy? He kept silent.

  “As I understand the situation,” Horne said, “there are really two problems here.” As if running a meeting, he held up his left hand with the first two fingers extended. There were deep indentations at the base of the first finger, like tattoos dug deep into the flesh. He said, “First, obviously, is the Duplicate itself. The Revenant, as you term it. Jack, if there were no other complications, do you think you could successfully repel it?”

  “I’m not sure,” Jack said. “It’s in the dream world, or half in it, and I don’t have a lot of experience there. That’s why I need your help.” Something’s wrong, he thought.

  “Ah, but now we encounter the other problem. Are you even allowed to overcome it? Doesn’t your curse, your Guest, as you call it, require you to do its bidding?”

  Jack sucked in a breath. “Yes. That’s the other reason I need your help.”

  Horne’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

  “You told me once that you knew a way to remove the curse. I know I turned you down, but that—”

  Horne slapped his desk, and a gust of wind stopped Jack’s voice in his throat. “What?” Horne said. “That was then, this is now?”

  El stepped toward him. “Please, Daddy,” she said, “he needs our help.”

  Horne stared at her a moment, frowning. Then he sighed and shook his head. “It was never that simple. If you had joined us, if you had come to work as a Dream Hunter—”

  If you’d married my daughter, Jack thought.

  “—then over time, gradually, we could have worked you free. But even in the best of conditions it would have been a slow process. No one, neither you nor I, can simply wave a hand and make it go away.” As if to demonstrate how hopeless it was, he moved his left hand in the air. To Jack it appeared in slow motion, the tattooed finger like a painting in the air.

  And suddenly Jack remembered where he’d seen that before. The dream. The one Ray had shown him. The old man in the projects—picking up odd bits and pieces—waving his hand over them—the indentations at the base of the finger—

  Horne said, “I just don’t know what we can do, Jack. It’s very possible that you simply cannot beat him, that he’s going to win.”

  I want to beat him, the Rev said. I want to win.

  Softly, Jack said, “Sonofabitch.” Then louder, “It was you!” And louder still, “You bastard! It was you!”

  Horne’s eyes caught fire, then immediately went back to normal as he turned to his daughter. “El?” he said. “What is he talking about?”

  “Jack?” Elaynora said. Jack could hear the tremble in her voice, the fear of someone who understands but doesn’t want to.

  He kept his eyes on Horne. “I didn’t do it wrong. Not in the awake world or the fucking dream world. The pieces didn’t just drift back together again. You went looking for them. You gathered up the shards, re-joined them, like a broken vase. You gave it my card, and then you told it what to say.”

  Horne glared at Jack, and once again light like fire came from his eyes, but Jack was ready, his own eyes narrowed to the thinnest slits. His face grew hot, but he could still see. Now Horne looked back at his daughter, his face and voice softer, pleading. “Elaynora,” he said, “I’m your father. I’ve taken care of you all your life. Are you going to believe him over me?”

  Without taking her eyes off her father, Elaynora held out her hand toward Jack. “Give me your coins,” she said. It took Jack a second to realize what she was doing, then he reached into his pocket and pulled out all his change. Three quarters, a nickel, and four dimes. $1.20. Jack hoped that was an auspicious amount.

  El shook the coins in her hand, tossed them on the desktop. She looked, made a noise, did it again, then once more. For a second, she just stared at them, then turned on her father, her fists up as if she wanted to hit him. “You goddamn sonofabitch!” she yelled. “How could you do that? What’s wrong with you?”

  Horne just stared at her, confused. Finally, as if desperate, he looked at Jack. “What did she do?”

  Despite everything, Jack had to hold down a smirk. What he wanted to say was, Asshole, but instead he said, “What do you think? She asked her mother.”

  Horne didn’t get it. “What?” he said.

  Now El threw up her hands. “She’s the Queen of Eyes, Daddy! Holder of all the oracular power in the goddamn world. Did you think you could hide anything from her?”

  His voice suddenly small, Horne said, “I didn’t know you could—”

  “What? Talk to her? Of course I can. She’s my mother! I could have used playing cards, matchsticks—coins are just the easiest.” Suddenly, her anger all gone, she said, “Why, Daddy? Why did you do that?”

  Horne stood up. Jack braced himself for another flare, but nothing happened. At least not inside. Out in the street, what was an overcast day suddenly brightened. Horne said, “He deserved it! He refused an offer other men would crawl for. I was going to make him my apprentice. Have you any idea how special, how rare, that is? But no, none of that was g
ood enough for him.” He paused, then said, “And on top of all that, he cast you away.”

  “What?” El said.

  Horne went on, “And all because he thinks he’s so damn important. Friends with the Queen of Eyes. Student of Anatolie the Younger. Even the murderers in La Societé de Matin love him. Well, it was time someone taught him a lesson.”

  Outside, the sky had gotten still brighter, bursts of light bouncing off the buildings. Jack was sure that if he went to the window and looked down he would see people running indoors. He kept his eyes on Elaynora and her father.

  El said, “He cast me away? Jesus, Daddy, I’m not some spurned maiden. We broke up. That’s it. And he didn’t want to work for you? So what? You think he’s one of your tribesmen who used to worship you? You think you had a right to smite him? Grow the fuck up!”

  Outside, the Chrysler Building gargoyles looked to have caught fire. Jack touched El’s shoulder. “What?” she snapped, still glaring at her father.

  “Look out the window,” Jack said.

  She turned to him for a moment, then to the glass. “Oh my god,” she said. She stepped to her father, began to hit his shoulders, his chest. “Stop it!” she yelled. “You’ll kill everyone!”

  Suddenly, all the fight drained out of Alexander Horne. He sat down hard on his desk, his head bowed. Outside, it looked for a second as if night had fallen, but it was just the ordinary day returning. “I’m sorry,” Horne muttered. He looked up, his face in pain. “Really, sweetheart. I don’t—I don’t know what came over me.”

  El crossed her arms, refusing to let him in. “You’re going to have to fix this,” she said. “Break down that—that thing you assembled and scatter the pieces.”

  “But that’s just it,” Horne said. “I can’t. It’s too late.”

  “What?”

  “It’s nearly out of the dream world. I can’t contain it.”

  “Then kill it.”

  “That’s not possible. Not until—not until it becomes completely physical. And that means . . . ” He stopped, but Jack knew what came next. The Rev taking over. Horne turned to Jack. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Please believe me. If I could—he’s going to win, Jack. I don’t know how to stop him.”

  Jack’s mouth opened, but nothing came out. Instead, he heard the dupe. I want to beat him, Johnny had said. I want to win. Jack had assumed that meant he would have to allow his own death since he had no choice but to do what the client asked. But nothing was actually said about Jack dying. He looked now from Horne to Elaynora.

  “Jesus,” Jack said. “I know what to do.”

  Jack Shade—Original Jack, accept no substitutes—stood naked in front of the mirror in his room at the Rêve Noire. This was the second time in two days he’d done this. It reminded him of Layla examining herself on her thirtieth birthday, turning, frowning, pinching, pulling. This was different. Jack wasn’t assessing, he was memorizing. Every part of himself, every fold of skin, every kink of muscle, the palms and backs of his hands, the turns and knots of his hair—even more than when he’d made the Dupe, he had to get it all clear.

  The back was the worst, of course. Jack had bought some cheap mirrors at one of those Walgreen’s drugstores that could pass for a small town and set them up to reflect his back to his front, but it was still tricky. An old Traveler motto: Where you’ve come from is always more dangerous than where you’re going. You can see where you’re going.

  The silver had spread—a big shiny patch on his upper right thigh, another over his left kidney. He couldn’t let himself worry about it. He just had to take it in as more details and make sure he got them right.

  Next to him stood the room’s mahogany table. He’d moved it from the wall and stacked it with very thin sheets of rice paper and a Subtle Pen. The Pen looked like a thin metal stylus with a very sharp point. In fact, it was a border-crossing device, using ink from the Other Side. Subtle Pens were very rare—Jack had borrowed this one from Carolien—and used mostly for the kind of contracts that could never be broken. The quality Jack needed was simpler, however—the ability to write very, very small, in words that couldn’t fade or be erased. Everything Jack saw he wrote, and still it all took up less than two sheets of paper.

  Once he’d gotten down everything he could see, Jack used his black knife to cut out every written segment. When he’d finished, the table looked littered with the discarded carapaces of minute insects. Jack placed his palms on the table. A breeze stirred the fragments. They swirled an inch or two above the table, and then, slowly, they drifted over to Jack’s hands—and slid under his fingernails.

  The sensation caught him by surprise, very soft yet somehow a jolt. Jack gasped, held up his hands at eye level. He couldn’t really see the pieces of paper, only a faint shimmer, yet there was a kind of heaviness. Not weight, really, more like a shift in his center of gravity, as if—as if he was doubled. Just what I need, he thought, then reminded himself that in fact it was exactly what he needed.

  Painstaking as it was, the physical part was easy. The memories, however . . . Someone once said that to set down all your experiences would take longer than it did to live them. But neither could you consciously decide on the important ones. You had to allow them to come to you. So Jack closed his eyes, let out a breath, and invited his life to parade before him.

  There were things he would have expected—the lion’s mouth, his first meeting with Anatolie, the first time Ray came to him, finding the Queen of Eyes. And of course Layla and Eugenia. So many moments. Precious, angry, stupid, frightened, triumphant.

  And then there were the things long forgotten. Stealing a pack of gum when he was seven and being terrified a cop would kill him. Wandering into some gang street where a group of older boys, in colors he’d never seen, taunted him, only to suddenly run away for no reason Jack could figure out. His thirteenth birthday, after his parents had bought their own home in a safe area. Jack had slipped out at night, just to walk around, and one by one, all the dogs in the neighborhood began to follow him. A fight with Layla so ridiculous that neither of them could stay angry. Genie’s third grade report card, when she got straight A’s except for a B- in PE that made Jack love her all the more.

  When he’d let everything come to him that wanted to, he wrote it all down, cut the strips, and then these too took their hiding places under his fingernails.

  He was ready, he told himself. Now he just had to wait until the meet time. So why did he feel like he’d missed something? He stared in the mirror. What the hell was it?

  He felt woozy, his eyes heavy. Oh, you gotta be kidding, he thought. He’d cast dream net over the whole damn room, emptied a fresh can of Spell-Breaker covering every surface. Then his eyes returned to the mirror and he saw Ray, walking toward him as if out of the glass, and he realized it was all right. There was someone behind Ray, a child. Jack squinted, trying to focus, before he realized it would better if he sat down and closed his eyes.

  It was Genie, of course. Not as he’d last seen her, fourteen years old and sprayed with her mother’s blood, but younger, sweeter, in jeans and a Girl Power T-shirt. Dream Jack made a noise. The photo. This was Genie from that day at the theme park. In fact, it was the actual moment the picture was taken, with that spray of hair lifted by a gust of wind. “Daddy,” she said. “You can’t go away.”

  “I’m not—”

  “Don’t let him get rid of you, Daddy. Please. You have to come save me. I want to go home.”

  Jack looked around. They were in the hotel room, only now there were trees all around, thin and gnarled and leafless.

  “Sweetie,” Jack said, “it’s going to be fine. But even if I screw up, which won’t happen, you’ll still be okay. Because he’ll still be me. So he’ll come save you. I promise.”

  “No!” she yelled, and her fists came up in front of her like a shield. “He’s not you, Daddy. He’s nothing like you. He doesn’t have the scar.”

  Jack came awake so suddenly he nearly fell b
ackward. Of course she was right. Jack had made the Dupe—the original copy—as if the disaster had never happened, and that didn’t change when Horne put him back together again. He wouldn’t care about Genie, not like Jack did.

  He walked over and picked up the picture from that faraway day. He looked at it for what felt like a very long time, then brought it to the table, where he removed it from the frame. Now he went to his nightstand and took out a vial of contact dust. He scattered some on a fresh sheet of paper, then pressed the photo onto it. When he picked it up, the image was gone from the photo, while on the rice paper Layla, and Genie, and he himself stared up joyously. He took out his knife and began to cut the picture into pieces small enough to fit under his fingernails.

  Once Alexander Horne realized he was caught, and more, that his relationship with his daughter depended on him trying to undo the damage he’d done, he switched completely and just wanted to help. Jack believed him. You probably didn’t last long as a former god if you couldn’t adapt. He still didn’t trust him, of course, but there were ways Jack could use him. Two things, actually, one simple, the other more tricky. And neither of them involved telling Horne, or even El, exactly what he was trying to do.

  The simple task involved taking over a New York City street in the evening. For the street, Jack chose the block on Lafayette where the Momentary Storm had opened the border and allowed the Rev to make his first appearance. He got a certain satisfaction at seeing Horne wince when Jack told him the location. The Big Kids hated it when some short-lived human saw through their tricks.

  The standard way to take over a city street, day or night, was to fake a movie. So many films were made in Manhattan that people hardly stopped to look anymore, just rolled their eyes in annoyance at the roped-off area and the detour. Jack could have glammed the fake permit and the police barriers himself, but as a businessman, Horne was more connected to the city’s power structures. Besides, it gave him a stake in what they were doing.