Nevertheless She Persisted
Author: Charlie Jane Anders; Brooke Bolander; Amal El-Mohtar; Maria Dahvana Headley; Kameron Hurley; Seanan McGuire; Nisi Shawl; Catherynne M Valente; Carrie Vaughn; Jo Walton; Alyssa Wong
Date: 2020-03-08 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: kindle; fiction; sf; anthology
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Rights: All rights reserved

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Our Faces, Radiant Sisters, Our Faces Full of Light!*

By Kameron Hurley

She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.

…was an epigraph engraved at the bases of statues around the city, meant to dissuade women from fighting monsters. But to Moira, the epigraph inspired. We all fight monsters, she knew. There was no shame in losing.

So despite or because of that epigraph, Moira intended to carry on in the work that had led to her own grandmother’s death, and her mother before, back and back, to the beginning of this world, and into the next. Someone had to hold back the monsters.

Moira left the confines of the gated city. She moved into the hills. She carried only a crystal staff. The city sent up the golems after her, as she knew they would. Many didn’t understand that someone had to fight the monsters. Someone had to persist, or the city would be overwhelmed. She fought the golems, twisting their guts and gouging out their ticking hearts. Snakes and bears and other beasts bred to keep her behind the walls slithered and snapped and snuffled in her path. Moira wrestled them too, and emerged bloody and bitten, but triumphant.

She limped her way to the base of the great mountain that all her female kin had talked of for time immemorial. She climbed and climbed, until her shoes were shredded and her fingers bled, and her arms shook so badly she thought they would fail her. When she pulled herself up onto the great ledge at the top, she saw what remained of her sisters: wizened, mummified visages, scattered bones, discarded shoes, two broken crystal staves. She limped through the detritus of her kin and into the cave where the monsters lay.

The monsters rose from their beds, already armored and bristling for another attack on the city below. They came to extinguish light, and hope. She was here to remind them they wouldn’t do it unchallenged.

Moira raised her staff in her hands and shouted. The monsters yowled and overtook her. She bludgeoned them, snapping and biting like the creatures in the valley, poking at their hearts with her staff until it hit home, ramming through the eye of one of the great giants. They fell together, she and the monster, gazing into one another’s ruined faces.

One less monster to take the city, one less woman to defend it.

“Oh, our faces, radiant sisters,” Moira said, gazing out over the monster’s body at the scattered bones as the monsters snarled in the darkness, readying to tear her to pieces, as they had her kin, “Our faces, so full of light.”

When Moira failed to return, and the monsters crept down from the mountains—one less this year, one less each year, one less, always one less, but never none, never enough—a statue of Moira’s likeness was raised beside her grandmother’s.

Each day, young women visited her statue. They ran their fingers over the inscription at its base. They did so generation after generation, as more statues rose and fell, more monsters came and went, and time moved on, the eternal struggle of light and dark.

The women pressed their hands to the words there until the only script that remained visible of the epigraph on Moira’s statue was a single word:

“persist.”

*see. Sheldon, Racoona. “Your Faces, O My Sisters! Your Faces Full of Light.”

Kameron Hurley is the author of the novels God’s War, Infidel, and Rapture a science-fantasy noir series which earned her the Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer and the Kitschies Award for Best Debut Novel. She has won the Hugo Award (twice), and been a finalist for the Nebula Award, the Clarke Award, the Locus Award, and the BSFA Award for Best Novel. Her most recent novel is the epic fantasy The Mirror Empire. The sequel, Empire Ascendant, will be out in October 2015. She writes regularly for Locus Magazine. You can sign up for email updates here.

God Product

By Alyssa Wong

She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted. As she stood over the god taped down to the kitchen table, Caroline knew this was the only way to win Hyeon’s attention.

“Watch me,” she said to Hyeon, who leaned against the counter on the opposite wall, her eyes glittering. “Don’t look away.”

All of Hyeon’s eyes blinked slowly, in a concentric pattern. How beautiful, thought Caroline. Hyeon was a god: sharp, lean, and bright with power, nothing like Caroline’s small god, whose restrained limbs trembled against the wooden tabletop. “You’ll regret doing this,” said Hyeon. Her voice was quiet, but it rang hard in Caroline’s ears. “The two of you are bonded.”

Caroline hated having been chosen by a small god, whose presence was so quiet that most people forgot she was there. “I don’t want her,” she told Hyeon. “I want you. Let me prove it to you.”

Watch me, she thought. Not the rest of my family. Not my cousin Jinny, who you love so much. Tonight, look only at me.

Her mother’s cleaver was a familiar weight in Caroline’s hand, and she used it to crack the hard, woody shell enclosing the small god’s body. The small god cried out, muffled by tape over her mouth. An oversweet odor spilled out between Caroline’s fingers.

She fought off the nausea and childhood memories of hiding in her god’s arms during thunderstorms, burying her face against the soft moss growing across the god’s skin, breathing in that damp flower scent.

She glanced up. Hyeon’s eyes seared into hers. But she didn’t tell Caroline to stop.

Caroline was already bonded. But Hyeon was about to choose a human companion. If Caroline could have Hyeon, then maybe her family would realize that she was worth just as much as Jinny.

Caroline prized the hard edge of the skin away from the small god’s body, revealing the fluttering, glistening flesh beneath. God blood clung to her gloves and started to eat through them, releasing a sharp, medicinal scent. With each new cut, Caroline’s own skin ached and throbbed.

She dug with the knife, her heart burning, and the god beneath her sobbed.

There. A soft, pearlescent bubble, nestled at the base of the small god’s throat. Power and light sang through its membrane. An offering worthy of an unclaimed god.

When she cut it away, the small god gasped and went still. The world blinked out. Pain and emptiness gaped in Caroline’s chest, and she cried out, dropping the knife. Memory swallowed her. She was a child again, and a strange new god, small, mossy-skinned, and beautiful, was perched on her windowsill. It smiled gently at her.

My name, said the small god, is Nara. And I have chosen you, Caroline, because I believe you are special.

When Caroline came to, she was on the floor in tears, the small god’s brightest part clenched in her fist.

Hyeon was gone. On the table, Nara’s remains were already crumbling into dust.

Alyssa Wong is a Nebula-winning, Shirley Jackson-, Campbell-, and World Fantasy Award-nominated author, shark aficionado, and 2013 graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons,Tor.com, Uncanny Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, Nightmare Magazine, and Black Static, among others. She is an MFA candidate at North Carolina State University and a member of the Manhattan-based writing group Altered Fluid. You can sign up for email updates here.

Alchemy

By Carrie Vaughn

She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.

Performed endless experiments, recorded measurements and observations in careful writing on lined paper, pages and pages sewn up in books and neatly stored. How much of this acid added drop by drop to a powder of carbon, a scraping of iron, caused the reaction she desired? When that combination failed, she tried lithium and lead. Copper, in a glass bulb filled with nitrogen. Titration, oxidation, precipitation and solutions. A careful test with flames, producing an analysis of light. Practice practice practice. (“You’ll never find what you’re looking for,” they told her. “Nevertheless,” she replied.)

The materials were often toxic, the procedures tedious, the outcomes uncertain, but she found solace in the experiments. The formulae she used made sense. The laws of the universe were predictable, discoverable. Unlike so much of the rest of her life.

She reserved one end of a bench in a corner of a mostly disused lab, a hundred years old and poorly equipped. She piled books and notes around her, a sort of fence to claim her space and keep others from disturbing her experiments. (“What are you looking for?” “The secrets of the universe,” she said, speaking in riddles because if she revealed the truth they would tell her she was doing it wrong. They would explain until she wanted to scream, but she never did. Patience. Practice.) However much she guarded her table-top territory, she would return from a meal, from a quick breath of fresh air, to find her books shoved to the floor, covers torn and spines broken, papers crumpled and scattered. She’d gather up the books, straighten the spines, smooth out the papers as best she could, spending time on it that she needed for study. She tried to ignore the glares. The glares were not as bad as the laughter. (“There has never before been one of you at this university, you know.” They explained that one to her all the time, as if the fact of it would give her pause.)

She had patience. The patience of stones worn away by wind and water, of continents creeping into one another to create mountains, of crystals growing in dark places. The patience of a planet caught in orbit around a sun that would last ten billion years before burning it all back to stardust.

She longed to be stardust.

Then one day, after she’d shut off the burner, after the burette had dripped all its liquid out—there in the bottom of a ceramic dish rested a mere particle, a trace. A treasure. The lab was quiet—it was late and she was alone. No one was watching, and so the moment was all hers. She cupped the substance in her hands and let its light shine on her, covering her face with warmth, pouring sunlight in her eyes.

She persisted, and when she triumphed: gold.

Carrie Vaughn is best known for her New York Times bestselling series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty who hosts a talk radio show for the supernaturally disadvantaged. Her novels include a near-Earth space opera, Martians Abroad, from Tor Books, and the post-apocalyptic murder mysteries Bannerless and The Wild Dead. She’s written several other contemporary fantasy and young adult novels, as well as upwards of 80 short stories, two of which have been finalists for the Hugo Award. She’s a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero books edited by George R. R. Martin and a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado. You can sign up for email updates here.

Persephone

By Seanan McGuire

She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.

They told us about the dangers of giving blood, broke it down bit by bit, but Mary said we had to. She wanted a shot for a better job, which meant online access and taxis to the uppers for interviews, and I wanted to know I wouldn’t get caught pregnant if some fool down on the lowers thought I looked a good brood mare. So we went to the Rejuve Center, her all pretty in her newest dress, me in overalls and scuffed-out shoes, and we said we’d give as much as the law let and then a little more, if they’d pay out for it.

Mary looked so pretty, in that flowered dress, with them ribbons in her hair. She looked like what they always said springtime looked like, back before the sunlight got too dear and only richies got to have any.

They checked us for diseases, parasites, just this side of everything. Quickest, cheapest way to get a clean bill, giving blood. They make sure you’re squeaky, and even if you never see your results, once they jab that needle in your arm, you know you’re good.

They put Mary, pretty Mary, with her pretty dress and her pretty O- blood, in a room, and they put me in a different one, said some sharp words about how we couldn’t really be sisters, not with my AB+; how she wasn’t only worth more, but if I didn’t let them take the max, they might report us for illicit activities.

Of course I said yes. We were there to give the max already. They didn’t have to threaten. All they had to do was pay.

So the machine pulled and blood went and then I went, too, and when I woke up the world was spinning and an alarm was screaming and Mary, pretty Mary, Mary who looked like springtime, was being carried out with a sheet up over her face. I wasn’t supposed to see that. I don’t believe anyone was supposed to see that.

They gave me the check for what they took out of me, but not for what they took out of her, because they knew we weren’t sisters, and there wasn’t any other legal thing we could have been to one another. They gave me two hundred and fifty dollars and they took Mary. The last springtime in the world, and they drained her dry and kept what they took out of her, and they wouldn’t even pay her back.

Two hundred and fifty buys a lousy IUD and a lot of cheap beer. It doesn’t bring back the springtime. But…

Somewhere on the uppers there’s a richie with Mary flowing in their veins. I don’t have much, but I have this knife, and I have my pride, and they never paid for what they took.

One day, I’ll find a way up there, and I’ll bring what’s left of Mary home.

SEANAN McGUIRE is the author of the October Daye urban fantasy series, the InCryptid series, and other works. She also writes darker fiction as Mira Grant.Seanan lives in Seattle with her cats, a vast collection of creepy dolls and horror movies, and sufficient books to qualify her as a fire hazard.She was the winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and in 2013 she became the first person ever to appear five times on the same Hugo ballot. You can sign up for email updates here.

Margot and Rosalind

By Charlie Jane Anders

1. She was warned.

The doorbell rings as she’s giving the brain its nutrient bath. The Hyperbrain likes it when she scritches behind its temporal lobe, like a cat—if a cat was a biomimetic neural network that filled up your entire basement. Margot whispers stories about heroes to the Hyperbrain, which likes Rosalind Franklin best.

Margot changes as she walks along the hall of her creaky rowhouse, lined with photos of dead people: her wife Sukey, other lovers, all worry-smiling. By the time Margot reaches her door, she’s playing up her non-threatening slouch and the way she favors one leg.

The man from the Brain Brigade looks uncomfortable to be in the Lowdown, talking to someone like Margot. “Ma’am. Miss. Ms. Baxter,” he says. “We’ve had reports of an unlicensed A.I., in contravention of 37 use cases.”

She glances past him, upward, at the place he comes from. Crystal skyways cris-cross, rippling with light. Above it all dwell the Immortals, playing their Wall games. Occasionally a gamepiece falls and blocks the street down here. Everyone’s GPS just re-routes around the obstruction.

The man talks for ages, but has no warrant. Margot keeps saying, “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re speaking about,” but doesn’t let him inside.

2. She was given an explanation.

The brain, which Margot has taken to calling Rosalind, already knows everything and predicts the weather years from now. But Rosalind still purrs louder whenever Margot tells stories of people who stood up for truth. Borrowing those seeds was the best decision Margot ever made.

The Brain Brigade keeps sending notices, which float outside, singing the legal code to the tune of a Bach fugue. She drowns them out with some good zydeco. Pale, fragile men shiver on her welcome mat. She stopped answering the door.

Then an ice sculpture comes from Margot’s refrigerator. A bull of a man, with a cunning smile. The statue looks around and raises a frozen hat.

“Ms. Baxter, my name is Arthur. I run the Brain Brigade. I must counsel you: An uncontrolled Hyperbrain could cause unimaginable chaos. Most of all, under no circumstance should you attempt to connect your own mind to your illicit Hyperbrain.”

“Ha,” Margot says. “That’s reserved for the Immortals up top, is it?”

“Actually,” the figurine says, “no. None of the Immortals has connected to their own Hyperbrain in over a century. The Hyperbrains engineer wealth and eternal youth for people, and we leave them to it.”

“You have the most advanced consciousnesses in creation,” Margot almost spills hot tea on herself. “And … you don’t even use them to think?”

The iceman laughs, not entirely at Margot. “Believe me, there’s nothing worse than being both immortal and intelligent. Imagine the boredom! Plus you start to ask questions, and the worst thing about questions is that sometimes, they have answers.”

The statue melts, leaving a wet mess on her parquet.

3. Nevertheless, she persisted.

Every network airdrops a reporter onto Margot’s lawn, and they intone that Margot is destroying the fabric of society. Why does Margot hate ordinary people? What gives her the right to be better than everybody else? A salt-of-the-Earth man named Jeff the Chair Maker has built a chair that bursts into flames every five minutes. All the reporters want Jeff to shout at them on camera. The police wear riot gear to hold back the mob. Men and women in white spacesuits prepare to breach Margot’s house, but they’re alarmed by Jeff’s self-immolating chair.

Margot’s toaster makes toast with Arthur’s mustachioed face on it. “Ms. Baxter. I must counsel you. Nobody knows what might happen if a human tried to think using a Hyperbrain. The consequences—”

The pounding at Margot’s door sounds like a stampede.

Rosalind’s purring sounds different, like it’s time. Knowledge is justice, the rumbling seems to say. Margot reaches for her brain-interface, which looks like a diamond colander, and lowers it onto her own crown. This Singularity will be most singular, she thinks, and then her mind opens wide.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which won the Nebula, Locus and Crawford awards and was on Time Magazine’s list of the 10 best novels of 2016. Her Tor.com story “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo Award and appears in the short story collection called Six Months, Three Days, Five Others. Her short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Wired Magazine, Slate, Tin House, Conjunctions, Boston Review, Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, ZYZZYVA, and several anthologies. She was a founding editor of io9.com, a site about science fiction, science and futurism, and she organizes the monthly Writers With Drinks reading series. Her first novel, Choir Boy, won a Lambda Literary Award. You can sign up for email updates here.

Astronaut

By Maria Dahvana Headley

She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted. Miss Baker was on a mission to defy gravity.

It was 1959. The world was pencil skirts and kitten heels, stenographers following scientists in suits, and it was no different in Florida. Miss Baker had thirteen competitors for the single spot on the voyage, and they were all male.

If you keep trying to rise, one of them whispered to Miss Baker during training, no one will ever want to marry you. No one likes a girl who tries to climb over everyone else. To that, she spat in the dust, and went to find herself some lunch, doing stretches all the way. She had no time for their shit.

The Navy thought they’d chosen her randomly, but she’d been planning this since her birth in Peru and childhood in Miami, placing herself in line for a path to the stars, each moment of her existence a careful step toward a shuttle.

By day, the academy was all lustful glances, pinches, and indecent proposals. By night, Miss Baker slept with gritted teeth, curled tightly into her bunk. She was busy, slowing her heart rate, stabilizing her blood pressure, meditating, in preparation for her voyage. The training was necessary. There’d been seven failed astronauts before her, all but one of them named Albert. They’d died of suffocation, parachute failures, and panic. If any of the Alberts had seen the world from above, they hadn’t told anyone about it. The most recent Albert had gone into space with a crew of eleven mice, but died waiting for his capsule to be retrieved. What had he told the mice? No one knew.

But Miss Baker was no Albert. She was herself.

She lowered her heart rate still more, impressively. The others were being eliminated. One by one they went, cursing her and insisting that she’d be alone forever, that she would never find a home or a husband.

You’ll die, they told her. You’ll fall into the ocean and they’ll never find you. Or you’ll fly into the sun. You’ll die alone eaten by fish, or you’ll die alone eaten by birds. You’re not even pretty, they said, as a last resort, but Miss Baker did not care.

She hummed to herself in her isolation capsule as her competition melted down, hearts racing, teeth chattering.

Assssstronaut, hissed her second-to-last competitor, as though her dreams could be used to taunt her. He raised his fist to throw something foul, but she was too quick, up and over his head, doing a backflip on her way into the next room.

Pendejo! she shouted over her shoulder.

He didn’t have her discipline. If he went up, he would die of fright. None of the women of Miss Baker’s family suffered from nerves. They’d climbed together up the highest volcano and looked into the boiling belly of the earth.

She felt a grope on her way to the galley, kickstepped into the groin of the grabber, and hightailed into her own quarters to practice weightlessness.

Astronaut, she whispered in her bunk. Astronauta, she said, in Spanish. Then she said it a third time, in her mother’s tongue.

The next day, her last two competitors were dismissed.

The supervisors commissioned a shearling flight jacket and a flight helmet lined with chamois, a necklace with her name on it, and a national announcement that she’d been chosen to rise.

Miss Baker remembered her first sight of destiny. She’d seen a shuttle go up, from a window facing the Cape. She’d stood at that window, staring, as something small and bright broke the rules of the known world, and from then on she’d been certain.

Astronaut.

Now she was that bright thing.

Into the jacket and helmet she went, into the capsule and shuttle at Canaveral. Her companion from the Army’s parallel program, Miss Able, was tall and dignified, no doubt as hardworking as Miss Baker herself.

She nodded at Miss Able, and at the crew—not mice this time, but provisions. Miss Baker’s crew consisted of vials of blood, samples of E. coli, of corn, of onions and of mustard seeds. Sea urchin eggs and sperm. Mushroom spores of the genus Neurospora, fruit fly pupae, and yeast. Who knew why those items had been chosen? Miss Baker did not, but she treated them respectfully. That was the mission.

She zipped her jacket with her own hands, and was closed into her capsule.

Two thirty in the morning. Cape Canaveral was dark. They jeered, her competitors, as Miss Baker rose, up, up, over the ocean and into the sky, but she didn’t care. They were earthbound, and she was a pioneer. Out the window, she could see fire and hoopla. Miss Baker was alive as she ejected from Earth’s gravity, alive as she returned to the sea. She was a star in a leather jacket, fetched from out of the Atlantic, healthy and grinning.

Flashbulbs and a press conference. What did the astronaut want? What could they bring her?

What is it like in space? they asked.

She asked for a banana.

Later that same day, she smiled for Life magazine, stretching her tail to its full length. Miss Baker posed with her medals and certificates, then went about her business as a private citizen.

She was married twice, first to a monkey named Big George, and then to another called Norman. She didn’t take their names, nor did she become a Mrs. For the second wedding, she wore a white lace train, which she tore off and waved at hundreds of spectators. If she was not wearing her flight uniform, she preferred to be naked.

She celebrated her birthdays with balloons and Jell-O, and she persisted in setting records.

To herself, and to her husbands, and to anyone who came near, she only said one word, in several languages: Astronaut.

It was their own fault if they didn’t understand.

In 1984, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the day Miss Baker slipped the bonds of gravity, the Navy gave her a rubber duck as a retirement gift.

When the reporters asked for an interview, she made no comment, but she thought about it.

For nine minutes in 1959, Miss Baker had been weightless. She’d pressed her fingers to the glass, and looked out into the glittering dark, a squirrel monkey in a capsule the size of a shoe box, floating in triumph three hundred miles above the world of men.

The Earth from afar was exactly the size of an astronaut’s heart. Miss Baker might eat it, or hold it, fling it into the sun or roll it gently across the dark.

She sat calmly in her flight suit and medals, holding her duck. She smiled for the cameras.

She asked for a banana, and it was delivered to her on a platter, as bright and sweet as victory, as golden as the sun.

Miss Baker, May 1959

Maria Dahvana Headley is a #1 New York Times-bestselling author and editor. Her novels include Magonia, Aerie, and Queen of Kings, and she has also written a memoir, The Year of Yes. With Kat Howard, she is the author of The End of the Sentence, and with Neil Gaiman, she is co-editor of Unnatural Creatures. Her short stories have been shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, and her work has been supported by the MacDowell Colony and by Arte Studio Ginestrelle, where the first draft of The Mere Wife was written. She was raised with a wolf and a pack of sled dogs in the high desert of rural Idaho, and now lives in Brooklyn. You can sign up for email updates here.

More than Nothing

By Nisi Shawl

She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted in singing her pagan prayers.

Pines cast feathery shadows on the brightness far below. Smoothing her polka dot apron over her fresh-pressed jeans, Cora parted her full lips. Ready to pour from them a wordless yearning she’d never been taught. Liquid like the lake, golden like the light of the setting sun, calling—

“Cora!” Pastor Rose slashed through the gathering evening with his voice. “You finished washin them spoons for ice cream?”

He’d married her twin Nora, but he acted like they were two mints in one. “You wanted me to wash all of em?”

It was a steep trail up to the bluff’s viewpoint; she saw Pastor’s bald head before his white-shirted shoulders. Sweating just slightly. He stood beside her, pretending to take in the darkening vista. “However many we brought,” he said. “However many times they used. They gotta be clean when we put em away tonight in the church kitchen.” He smiled as if forgiving a child. “I know you miss your grandmama, but she raised you better than to go lazin off by yourself when there’s work.”

“I only needed a little air. I’ll be down to the picnic shelter directly,” she lied.

“All right.” But Pastor lingered. “You heard them stories about how the lake so special? Wishin on stars and that nonsense?”

Cora nodded. “Yeah.”

“Well, don’t let it affect you. The Devil’s in that mess, waitin to lure you to his side. Won’t nobody protect you then.” He stepped closer, held out a big hand. Cora ignored it. “Well?”

At last he left. Cora heard his scuffing feet kick up fainter and fainter disturbances in the forest floor’s carpet of shed needles.

He was gone. But she still wasn’t alone. “Come on out.” Stubborn silence. “No use hidin, Spence. I seen you slip behind that tree after you followed Pastor here.”

“Awright.” A thin-necked school boy came from behind the not-terribly-adequate shelter of a white pine’s trunk. “But you ain’t gonna lemme keep you from doin magic. Is you?”

“How you know what I’m doin?”

The boy thrust out his chin. “Cause you had me feelin the same way I felt when you said that spell stopped them bad kids beatin me up.” He swiped a palm across his short-clipped kinks. “Magic makes my skin on top of my head tingle and—” He stopped, then started again, talking faster. “—and I don’t know why come but it does. It just does. And it works. Someways. Maybe you could show me what you tryin and I’ll figure out how?”

“What if it’s evil?” Cora asked him.

“Evil? Nawwww. You my favorite babysitter!” Suddenly Spence wrapped his arms around her waist and hugged her. She hugged back by reflex. He tilted his head to smile up at her, brown eyes sparkling in the last of the light. “Come on! We gotta study this! You could be conjurin a brand new 1949 convertible!”

“I got a better idea.”

“Yeah?”

“A city fulla factories! All for us! We can build our own convertibles.” Those she prayed to would be fine with that. Wouldn’t they?

“Yeah!”

What if what I feel is a mistake? Cora wondered. This hope. This dream. What if it turns out to be nothing, no answer, nobody home? But despite all her doubts, she took Spence’s hand, turned to face the fading twilight, and let fly the first notes of their new prayer.

Nisi Shawl is a writer of science fiction and fantasy short stories and a journalist. She is the co-author (with Cynthia Ward) of Writing the Other: Bridging Cultural Differences for Successful Fiction. Her short stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, and numerous other magazines and anthologies. You can sign up for email updates here.

The Last of the Minotaur Wives

By Brooke Bolander

When the first of the Minotaur Brides was set to be a concubine in darkness, she was warned never to try escape. She was given an explanation: you are a monster, and below the earth you & your kind shall stay.

Nevertheless, my darling calf, she persisted. And so too have we.

The oldest wife finally dies. Blue is alone in the labyrinth, last of the lot.

She picks up the body in her strong arms, light as linen or sand, and carries it to the drying place. The sudden sun is bright there. The shadow of her horns slants a black slash against the sandstone walls. Bones clatter beneath her hooves.

“I’ll be back,” she says to the body and bones and blue iris of distant sky, gruffly. “Soon.”

Once you’ve been in the light for awhile, Blue finds, it’s hard as hell to willingly walk back into darkness.

You can hear them dancing sometimes in the palace above. Blue’s no good at dancing. What she’s got a lot of is patience. She sits in the dark, listening to distant feet go trip-trap-trip. She goes over what the bones have told them. Bear left at the thirdmost fork. Turn right at the drawing of the Dipper. Persist. Smile if men throw the ladder down, do as they ask, but keep your horns sharp. For the sake of your mothers, your daughters, your freedom, persist.

Months pass.

The body isn’t much more than a mummy, all leather & horn & ivory. The skin brittles from its bones with a touch. Blue is respectful, but she doesn’t stand with ceremony. Hands that wiped away Blue’s tears and tended scraped knees crumble to pebbly dust beneath her own clumsy fingers.

It’s mebbe what they call an e-vo-looshunary trait, my darling. Ever since the first of us was stuck down here, we’ve been working counter-clockwise, leaving instructions for the rest. Don’t be fearing. Mebbe you’re to be the last link in the chain, eh? Mebbe your bones are blank.

Tendons part. Blue scans the bone’s instructions. Two words jump out at her, written in the language of fissures: TRAPDOOR and KNIFE.

A smile splits her face like a hoof.

She kisses the dried-up thing, stands, and—eagerly, this time—trots off.

They’re dancing as she gallops through the labyrinth. The way is clear now. The maze twists and turns like a lizard’s senseless tail beneath her. Up above, the lords and ladies thunder.

There’s a ringing in her furred ears, a stink of perfume and powder and sweat in her flat nose. She pauses only once, to punch through the tunnel’s wall where the sandstone is thin. The knife inside has a curved blade, handle shaped like a bull in full charge. She jams it into her belt, keeps on running. The smells and noise grow stronger. Instruments she doesn’t have name for bawl & moan.

Further on, further in. A stone trapdoor overhead leaks yellow light. It’s heavy, and thick, and no human woman could ever hope to budge it.

With a snort and a grunt and a prayer, Blue puts her forehead against it and pushes.

Slowly, the stone begins to move.

BROOKE BOLANDER writes weird things of indeterminate genre, most of them leaning rather heavily towards fantasy or general all-around weirdness. She attended the University of Leicester 2004-2007 studying History and Archaeology and is an alum of the 2011 Clarion Writers’ Workshop at UCSD. Her stories have been featured in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Nightmare, Uncanny, and various other fine purveyors of the fantastic. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, the Hugo, the Locus, and the Theodore Sturgeon awards, much to her unending bafflement. You can sign up for email updates here.

The Jump Rope Rhyme

By Jo Walton

“She was warned

She was given an explanation

Nevertheless, she persisted.

She persisted once. She persisted twice. She persisted three times….”

On planets all over the universe

Kids jump their ropes to this counting verse

Some think it’s Leia or Éowyn:

Women fight monsters and really win.

But you google one day in that distant time

To find the roots of the ancient rhyme

And the AIs link you to the history

So you read about the fight to keep us free.

You vaguely remember all those ancient things:

Caesar, and Hitler, and tyrant kings,

And the guillotine, and the Fifth of May

Anne Frank and Tubman and—it’s time to play!

So you run and skip and make fourteen

Thinking about the words that mean

She was warned, and explained at, and patronized

But persisted still, against their lies,

For you, the future, she in the past

Persisted, to make things good at last.

Then your best friend skips and goes out on ten,

Complains the gravity’s low again.

And your brother’s in, so you turn the rope

Persisting, in bad times, with only hope,

For you, in space, for the dream we share

Of a better future everywhere.

And on he skips till the rope gets twisted

At nineteen skips, and she still persisted.

Jo Walton won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer on publication of her debut novel The King’s Peace. She won the World Fantasy Award in 2004 for Tooth and Claw, and in 2012, the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Among Others. In addition to writing SF and fantasy, she has also designed role-playing games and published poetry. Her song “The Lurkers Support Me In Email” has been quoted innumerable times in online discussions all over the world, frequently without attribution. A native of Wales, she lives in Montreal. You can sign up for email updates here.

Anabasis

By Amal El-Mohtar

A warning is the same as a threat. Television teaches this. Is that a threat / call it a warning. Call it by a different name, and it changes.

Snow is only slow, cold rain. Only rain.

Her child said, Mama, I want to die in the snow.

I am a shape-shifter. Most people are. We change our shapes day on day, replace cells, grow muscles and fat, shed hair, grow it back lighter, darker. Some of us do it faster, is all—some of us have specialties.

My specialty is mouths.

My real mouth is full of sharp teeth and a sharper tongue, three languages coiled like snakes in my throat, scaly and silent. My real mouth is an armoury of words forged in the furnace of my chest, hot as a spitted sun. My real mouth is a storm, and my voice is thunder.

To pass among you I wear a different mouth: full lips unparted, always smiling. I paint it pretty colours. It speaks only when spoken to, softly. To pass among you, it tells you stories:

I am sweetness. I am sunshine. I am here to hold your hand through the horror of my name.

My mouth is a coin, and I spend it.

An explanation is the same as an excuse. There are agreements, laws, protocols; there are pieces of paper more important than her child’s pain.

She was given an explanation as if it were a blanket, or food, or shelter. She was given an explanation as if it were a gift, to be purchased with gratitude.

She walked past it, into the snow.

Borders are shape-shifters, too: they change what goes through them. Time was, the only border worth crossing was into the underworld, to fetch back a lover’s life: Take off your shoes, said Ereshkigal to Inanna, your belt, your rings. Take off your armour, your hair, your skin, your flesh. Set your bones aside separately; bag your liquids. Do you have any sensitive areas—

We cross into the sky now. Plus ça change.

My passport is a blue rectangle stamped Canada. My name is inside it. The border’s eye falls on it and shifts it into threat. The border’s eye looks at me and we wrestle, as his eye tries to change me into Arab or Muslim, and I struggle to remain Canadian.

My mouth does most of the work. My mouth is soft and yielding; my mouth is what books call generous. My mouth does not get angry. My mouth spills its English out as tribute, smooth seamless scales gleaming in the fluorescent light.

The cold has a mouth. It eats fingers and toes, nibbles ears like a paperback lover. She knew the stories of bodies carved into classical sculpture, here missing a hand, there a foot, a nose. She knew the border is a wire that shears bodies into meat, to be chewed and spat out again, one bloody gobbet at a time. She knew it.

The only mouth that matters is her child’s, gnawing her heart one word at a time.

So she walks.

If I could take each of my words and lay them in the snow at her feet. If I could take each of my mouths and eat this distance between us. If I could devour this border, if I could tell it to smile while I broke its teeth, if I could unsheathe the sword of my mouth and strike it down, if I could thread the needle of my mouth and stitch good shoes for her baby, if I could cut a path into this country with the sharpness of my tongue—

If I could change the world as easily as my mouth…

With the whole of my furnace-heart, I would. But I can’t.

Nevertheless, she persisted.

Amal El-Mohtar is an award-winning writer of fiction, poetry, and criticism. Her stories and poems have appeared in magazines including Lightspeed, Uncanny, Strange Horizons, Apex, Stone Telling, and Mythic Delirium; anthologies including The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales (2016), Kaleidoscope: Diverse YA Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories (2014), and The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities (2011); and in her own collection, The Honey Month. You can find her on Twitter @tithenai.

The Ordinary Woman and the Unquiet Emperor

By Catherynne M. Valente

She was warned. She was given an explanation.

After long years, it came to pass that the Unquiet Emperor was seized with the desire to show his true heart to one of his subjects. He sent out his chief emissary, but gave the creature no time to put his body on, so that when he came to the house of the ordinary woman, she saw him naked before her as he truly was: a ghastly, suppurating, tooth-crowded mouth, and nothing more.

The mouth licked its incisors and groveled upon the woman’s unswept floor. “He has taken an interest in you. I cannot promise you will enjoy it.”

“Why me?” The ordinary woman gasped at her own insolence and hurried to hide it. When he was a young man, the Unquiet Emperor had banned questions, inquiries, curiosities, rhetoric, and finally question marks entirely, for such things were surely the source of all the mistrust and isolation in modern society. “I am only a baker of bread. I live alone, without care for another living soul, as the good law decrees. I am no one. I am nothing.”

The mouth took pity on her and answered, though the Emperor had wisely placed an embargo on answers (direct and indirect), commentary, and backtalk.

“You spoke kindly of him.”

“That’s not—” This time the ordinary woman caught herself. The Unquiet Emperor had banished the words true and false from the kingdom, along with all their arrogant synonyms, which dared to cause division in his sacred realm.

The mouth smiled, but without a face, it looked nothing like a smile. “In your sleep last night, you turned on your side and sighed in the shape of his name. He heard, from far off in the capital, and sent me, for the tenderness of your sigh, for the sweetness of your longing.”

“I only dreamt, sir.”

“Then you must beg him to spare you the punishment of thieves. You know very well that all dreams belong to the Emperor. You may take a dream from the hoard only by his leave, and his majesty does not grant such favors even to me. You will come with me to his palace. You will not look away when he opens his chest. You will not cry out. You will not beg him to close himself again. You will not touch the heart of the Emperor. You will bow down. You will tell him it is a beautiful heart, the best heart. You will thank him for this unimaginable gift to you. You will weep in your abject awe. And when you return, you will tell no one exactly what lies in the chest of your master, only that it was a glory you did not deserve. What is your name, woman?”

The woman bowed her head. She had once known her name. She had once been a maker of poems as well as a baker of bread, before the Unquiet Emperor had executed the written word, since nothing could be free if it was locked inside a prison of text and subtext. “I do not remember, sir.”

The naked mouth was satisfied with her obedience. The Emperor had outlawed memory long ago, and all names but his own.

And so she was brought before the Unquiet Emperor in all his finery, in his scarlet and gold, in his flame and his endless hunger. His chieftains surrounded him, roused from their beds without their bodies, just as his emissary had been. One was a single dead black eye. One was a naked bone. One was a bent penny. One was an unsheathed knife.

“At last,” coughed the Emperor, and when he coughed, coal sludge clotted with ancient coins dribbled from his mouth. He reached for her with a swollen hand covered in golden rings. “At last. It is she, just as I said. The woman who truly loves me. I am so tired. I have waited so long.”

With a clotted and intimate sigh, the Unquiet Emperor fumbled at his body and pried open the rotting barrel of his chest. The ordinary woman peered inside. There, she saw not a heart, but the name of the Emperor in cold, gilded letters, slung with cobwebs and vast spiders. Each letter cried out with the squall of an unloved and unloving infant and the grinding of gears long gone to rust.

The woman reached out her hand to touch the heart.

“Stop,” cried the single dead eye. “His heart cannot bear your ordinary touch.”

“He will feel the heat and blood of your ordinary life,” wailed the bent penny.

“He will suffer the oils of your ordinary nameless flesh,” shuddered the naked bone.

“He will hear the hideous pounding of your own ordinary heart,” hissed the unsheathed knife.

“Love me,” whispered the Unquiet Emperor, his chest gaping. He writhed at the nearness of her fingers.

The open mouth called out to her. “Stop. One touch of your filthy hand; your questioning, remembering, answering, dreaming, writing hand; your hand which makes the signs for true and false even in your sleep; your rebelling, thieving, apostate hand; and the name of his heart will crumble to dust and the world we have built so carefully crumble with it, like a flower shriveled brown. The old world will come rushing back in across the dunes. He will no longer stand between you and the wasteland. No one will protect and shield you, as we have done. No one will be left to keep the devils at the gate. Without him, you will drown in an ocean of reality.”

The ordinary woman’s eyes glittered, searching through the infinite shadows of the Emperor’s chest.

“Stop,” roared the Unquiet Emperor’s chieftains.

Nevertheless, she persisted.

Catherynne M. Valente, the acclaimed author of many books for adults, made her children’s book debut with The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her husband. You can sign up for email updates here.

This Tor.com anthology includes

Our Faces, Radiant Sisters, Our Faces Full of Light! By Kameron Hurley

God Product By Alyssa Wong

Alchemy By Carrie Vaughn

Persephone By Seanan McGuire

Margot and Rosalind By Charlie Jane Anders

Astronaut By Maria Dahvana Headley

More than Nothing By Nisi Shawl

The Last of the Minotaur Wives By Brooke Bolander

The Jump Rope Rhyme By Jo Walton

Anabasis By Amal El-Mohtar

The Ordinary Woman and the Unquiet Emperor By Catherynne M. Valente

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Contents

1. Title Page

2. Copyright Notice

3. Our Faces, Radiant Sisters, Our Faces Are Full of Light! by Kameron Hurley

4. God Product by Alyssa Wong
5. Alchemy by Carrie Vaughn
6. Persephone by Seanan McGuire
7. Margot and Rosalind By Charlie Jane Anders
8. Astronaut by Maria Dahvana Headley
9. More than Nothing by Nisi Shawl

10. The Last of the Minotaur Wives by Brooke Bolander

11. The Jump Rope Rhyme by Jo Walton

12. Anabasis by Amal El-Mohtar

13. The Ordinary Woman and the Unquiet Emperor by Catherynne M. Valente

14. Copyright

NEVERTHELESS SHE PERSISTED. Copyright © 2020 by Charlie Jane Anders, Brooke Bolander, Amal El–Mohtar, Maria Dahvana Headley, Kameron Hurley, Seanan McGuire, Nisi Shawl, Catherynne M. Valente, Carrie Vaughn, Jo Walton, Alyssa Wong.

All rights reserved.

For information, address Tom Doherty Associates Book, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.

eISBN 9781250781680

First eBook edition: February 2020