STRAYING FROM THE PATH

by

Carrie Vaughn

Copyright © 2011 by Carrie Vaughn.

Introduction copyright © 2011 by Jay Lake.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or

mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems,

without permission in writing from the author.

The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

Straying From the Path originally published by WSFA Press in 2011

as special limited and signed hardcover edition of 500 copies

available to members of the Capclave convention (October 2011, Gaithersburg, Maryland).

(www.wsfapress.com)

This electronic edition is being made available by the author and Agency Editions, Inc.

ISBN-978-0-9827970-5-1

Introduction

Jay Lake

I don’t even know where to start with talking about Carrie Vaughn. I’ve known her for most of the past decade, though for the life of me I can’t remember exactly where and how we met. (I’ve known a lot of people for most of the past decade.) She’s an erudite, entertaining and gentle-souled woman with a love of horses and fiction, almost certainly in that order. She’s also an amazing conversationalist, an author with a broad and mutable fandom, and an awfully pleasant human being.

When I looked over the table of contents for this collection, which is sort of “Carrie Vaughn’s Greatest Hits,” it pleased me to see two of her stories that I’d acquired as an editor included herein. “This is the Highest Step in the World” originally appeared in All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, co-edited by David Moles and myself. “The Heroic Death of Lieutenant Michkov” originally appeared in Polyphony, Vol. 1, edited by Deborah Layne and myself.

Can I pick ’em, or what?

As it happens, she’s famous for writing about werewolves. (And justly so, as her standing on the New York Times bestseller lists most certainly attests.) But that fame does Carrie a disservice by concealing her true breadth and depth as a writer. She is not a one-trick pony; far from it. Between those two stories on which at least traces of my fingerprints can be found lies Carrie’s whole range of human experience and fictive conceit. This volume is filled with pieces that I wish I’d had the chance to acquire and publish, and I’m very pleased to see them in one place. Fantasy, science fiction; contemporary, secondary world; realistic, magical—Vaughn covers an enormous ground with her narrative conceit.

Read through here and see where the paths of Vaughn’s imagination take you. She approaches aviation, theme parks and prophecy with a balanced equanimity. Like all good story-tellers, she’ll make you believe the deeply improbable long enough that you won’t think to question what you’re reading til long after, if ever.

These aren’t all pieces with happy endings, but then life isn’t always a piece with happy endings. These are all pieces that will make you think; about yourself, about the people you love (or possibly hate), about loss and victory, about our technology and about our place in the world as people.

And in truth, people are what it’s all about. People are what Vaughn’s writing is all about. Her novels sell so well because Kitty Norville is so real. This book in your hand will bring ten new insights, ten new slices of life, ten new realities into your head. Sit back, read, relax, and let these people into your life for a few hours.

You won’t regret it for a moment. And, much as I have been for years, you’ll walk away even more of a fan of Carrie Vaughn than you already thought you were. Don’t stay on the path, stray from it, and follow her into the woods of story.

Jay Lake

Portland, OR

Dedication

To Jeanne Cavelos (the ball was already rolling,

a little, but she gave it a great big push)

This is the Highest Step in the World

North of Tularosa, New Mexico. August 16, 1960. 0525.

Wearing the pressure suit, the oxygen supply, instrument pack and other equipment strapped to his back, Joe weighed over three hundred pounds. He moved ponderously. His breath fogged the inside of the plastic face shield of his helmet. The canned air smelled metallic and dry.

Clambering into the four and a half foot wide gondola was an effort. His ground crew eased him to his perch. Compared to the fully contained and sealed gondolas of earlier projects, the Excelsior III gondola seemed flimsy: half a steel shell with a cutaway door, completely open.

Someone had painted a sign on the lower edge of the doorway: “This is the highest step in the world.”

Don’t fly too high. Your wings might melt.

Bullshit.

High above the gondola, a helium-filled polyethylene balloon strained into the pre-dawn sky, a silver teardrop reflecting floodlights. Joe’s breath caught and his stomach churned. On paper, this mission looked like suicide.

His crew progressed to the end of a thousand-item checklist.

“Ready, Captain?” Daniel’s voice was muffled through Joe’s protective gear. Through the barrier of the helmet, the world seemed strangely silent, distant.

Joe gave him a thumbs-up. Please, God, make this one good.

A messenger ran from the meteorologist’s van, legs and arms pumping. “The mission is cancelled! Storm’s coming, abort!”

At the same time a pop sounded, a tiny explosion that meant the balloon’s restraint lines had released.

Free at last, the balloon bucked and lurched up, hauling Joe with it.

100,000 feet above Tularosa. 0705.

At high altitude, the helium expanded in the low atmospheric pressure. The balloon transformed from a long teardrop shape to a sphere, three hundred feet high. Three million cubic feet of helium strained in all directions.

Joe couldn’t move his right hand.

At about forty thousand feet, where the weight of the atmosphere began to thin until it was almost a memory, he discovered that the right glove of his suit had failed to pressurize.

The partial-pressure suit he wore was lined with tubes, bladders that filled with pressurized oxygen and compressed against his body, replacing the atmosphere and countering the physiological problems that accompanied travel in extreme altitudes: pooling blood, bursting vessels, and the like. He’d felt the suit’s comforting squeeze press against his body as he left safe altitude, except in his hand. The seal must have broken.

He should have radioed the ground as soon as he realized what was happening. They’d abort the flight, he’d have to come home, and they’d be right. He knew what would happen. His hand would swell as his blood pooled, the pressure inside his body straining to burst into the low atmosphere, like the helium in the balloon. Circulation would cease, and his hand would freeze. It was already stiffening painfully.

But it wouldn’t kill him.

Your wings might melt.

He should have radioed and aborted the flight, vented helium and sunk back to earth. But this had to be the best flight yet. Excelsiors I and II hadn’t flown past 80,000 feet. Except for the problem with his glove, everything was going smoothly, by the book. He couldn’t let a little discomfort ruin that. He’’d already talked to the ground crew about the storm, and they decided that completing the mission was worth the risk. There was a good chance the storm would pass to the north, and Joe would probably be back on the ground before it posed a threat. He’d convinced them that the mission was important enough to take the risk.

He wouldn’t let down his team. If they were willing to risk a storm, he could risk an injured hand. He could take a little pain. If he couldn’t move that hand, he’d make do. When ground control asked how he was doing, he said fine, and tried to keep the strain out of his voice.

The altimeter pointed at 102,800, some twenty miles above the surface of the earth.

Now the real fun began.

Dangling from the balloon, the gondola twisted, panning his view one way and the other. The horizon curved. He was high enough to see the shape of the planet. Clouds had gathered. Far to the west, roiling cumulus banks swelled, the hint of a thunderstorm. He hoped he didn’t have to worry about it.

He disconnected the radio. From now on, it was just him and the tape recorder. Slowly, methodically, Joe stood. He was cold, his joints were stiff, his suit awkward. His right hand was useless. He inched toward the doorway of the gondola. The clouds below looked very far away, featureless batting rather than the fluffy cotton balls he saw at lower altitude. They looked solid.

He inched a little farther, lugging his equipment with him: oxygen, a box of instruments that would record his next few moments. And his parachute.

His beating heart echoed inside his helmet. He moved slowly, in time with that rhythm. Toes edged over the rim of the gondola.

Twenty miles to fall.

“Lord, take care of me now.”

He stepped out.

He felt no wind. The fabric of his suit didn’t ripple with passing air. No Newtonian forces of gravity and inertia grabbed him and wreaked havoc with him. His body turned lazily, floating with apparent weightlessness.

Damn. I’m too high. I’m not falling. This can’t be right!

He turned his head in time to see the immense silver globe of his balloon hurl away at terrifying speed, as if a hand had reached out and yanked it away from him. In moments it was only a flash against the blue-black sky of near space.

The sky was dark and the sun was shining, searingly bright.

Ninety-five thousand feet to fall.

He could no longer hear his heart.

95,000 feet above the New Mexico desert. 0710.

New Air Force jets had the capability to climb to higher altitudes than ever before. As pilots traveled to the upper atmosphere with greater frequency—and as the first astronauts began traveling into space—there was a chance they’d have to bail out. Joe wanted to prove that a pilot could eject at extreme altitude and survive the fall back to earth.

Parachuting out of a high-altitude balloon was cheaper than bailing out of a jet airplane and letting it crash.

Sixteen seconds after stepping from the gondola, Joe’s stabilizing chute deployed successfully on an automatic timer. This was a small chute that wouldn’t slow him, but would stabilize his descent. Without it, he ran the risk of entering a flat spin that would knock him unconscious and churn his internal organs to a pulp. They’d learned that from the test dummies.

The main chute wouldn’t deploy until around 18,000 feet. Any sooner and his descent would be too slow and he’d freeze or asphyxiate before he reached the ground. Also, at this altitude he was falling too fast, close to seven hundred miles per hour. The force of a chute deploying would break him in half.

He had to survive four minutes of free-fall, approaching the speed of sound without the benefit of aircraft.

Pilots had once held the staunch belief that the sound barrier couldn’t be broken. Strange things happened when they tried: they met massive turbulence, planes shook themselves apart. But the sound barrier had been broken. It had taken work, but they’d done it.

And here he was just falling through it. No sonic boom, no wind. Just him and the cloud layer coming closer. His mind froze, thinking of it.

Don’t think. Do. People would get into space yet. Colonies on the moon before the end of the century. His grandchildren would look back on this stunt and think it was quaint, the way he thought the Wright Flyer was quaint. This was just a step. The highest step, but only so far.

He was falling, straight and true as an arrow. “Perfect stability!” he said for the benefit of the tape recorder documenting the jump. It was marvelous! He could move his arms, he could breathe, he could look around.

A light flashed, and he flinched. Something skittered across the face plate of his helmet. Little objects danced in the wind, reflecting sunlight. Feathers. A handful of long white feathers fluttered around him.

He was falling through the feathers, and the feathers were coming off the wings of a boy who was falling with Joe.

He must have been about fifteen, thin and still baby-faced. He wore a short tunic belted around his waist and leather sandals laced up his calves. The fabric of the tunic and his shoulder-length hair rippled and tossed in the wind. It’s an angel—

The wings were artificial, bound to his arms and shoulders with leather straps. They were disintegrating, feathers whipping off in clumps. He flapped his arms, trying to steady himself, but he tumbled, legs flailing, wings bent back. They no longer had the right shape to give him enough lift for a proper glide.

Joe had to be seeing things. The boy shouldn’t even be alive. He was practically naked, no pressure suit, no oxygen. He should have been frozen solid and purple with broken blood vessels.

Joe fell toward him, and for a moment they fell together. The boy looked over and met his gaze, even through the barrier of his helmet. His young face was gaunt with terror. He reached for Joe, clawing the air, but he spun away, buffeted, his wings ripping apart and slapping him. His mouth was open, but Joe didn’t hear his scream. Joe plummeted away.

Too high! This is too high!

Joe’s arms and legs flailed, and for a moment he thought he might enter the dreaded flat spin, despite the stabilizing chute. The boy was falling to his death, and so was he. If only there was a way to go back to the balloon, if he could just slow down, the speed of sound was too fast for a lone human body to fly, oh God he was too high—

No. No, he wasn’t. He’d planned this jump. His team of engineers and technicians, the best in the Air Force, who he trusted with his life, had planned this jump. This was the first step. Only the first step. It wouldn’t even be the highest step for long. Humanity was destined to go in to space, destined to travel even higher, even farther.

The boy had flown too high, but Joe hadn’t. Here was the proof: the boy didn’t have a parachute. Joe did.

The boy was a hallucination born of fear.

Forty thousand feet.

40,000 feet above the New Mexico desert. 0718.

He thought it best not to mention the hallucination on the voice recorder.

The compression exerted by his suit eased up and disappeared. He returned to livable atmosphere. Thick air cushioned him and slowed his descent to a sane speed. His right hand was still ice-cold.

The thunderheads blew north. Joe wouldn’t be falling through any storms today. The cloud layer still waited for him. He could finally see them as something more than flattened sheets of cotton. They looked solid, unyielding beneath his feet. Unconsciously, he tensed in anticipation of impact.

He passed through them, then out of them.

At 18,000 feet, the trigger in his main chute snapped, and a canopy of red and white striped silk burst forth and flowered around him. As air caught the chute, it billowed and spread. Joe jerked against the harness, his descent arrested. The chute would lower him gently the rest of the way to the ground. All he had to do was enjoy the ride. His wings hadn’t melted, not this time.

“Thank you, God, thank you.”

He cracked open his faceplate to take a breath of cool, succulent air. The earth had become recognizable: hills, dry riverbeds, the expanse of the New Mexico desert beneath him. The horizon was flat again. He heard the beat of a helicopter racing to the point where he’d touch down, west of Tularosa.

The balloon had taken an hour and a half to carry him over a hundred thousand feet up. He’d taken thirteen and a half minutes to fall the same distance back to earth.

It wasn’t his best landing. He rolled, the parachute fell around him, and he chose to just lie there and let his crew come find him. They did, tumbling out of the helicopter. A half a dozen of them clustered around him, shoving aside chute cords and silk and pawing at his helmet. He waved a hand to let them know he was alive. Feeling—intense pins and needles—started to come back to his right hand. Maybe he wouldn’t lose it after all.

Breathlessly, he told them how happy he was to see them.

He sat up as they pulled off his helmet. Looking down, his brow furrowed.

“Joe, what’s the matter?”

With his still-gloved hand, he awkwardly tugged at something caught in one of the lacings on his pressure suit. He held it up, bright in the sunlight: a white feather, sticky with what looked like melted wax.

As of 2004, when the story was written, Joseph Kittinger, Jr.’s record for the highest altitude parachute jump still stands.

As of 2011, when this collection was put together, it still stands.

Peace in Our Time

Two trumpets in harmony called “Taps” through a cemetery at the edge of a winter prairie. The congregation stayed rigid, forced to stillness by the song. Ken and I stood on the other side of the grave, apart from the others. The last sad note held, echoing with the wind, and faded. Ken shut off the digital player, and I presented the flag.

The words came rote. I didn’t hear myself saying them. They were a continuation of the recording.

“On behalf of the United States of America, the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post Eternity presents this token of respect and appreciation for your husband’s service to his country.”

We had a recording of “Taps” because no one could play it on trumpet anymore. Matt Barber was the last one I knew who could do it, and he died five years ago. I gave the flag to his son at his funeral.

I had done this so many times, given tightly folded triangles of American flags to widows, sons, daughters, grandchildren. I never wanted to give away one. When I was twenty-one and coming home from China I thought I was done with death. But it started again, a dozen or so years ago. Now, I watched my friends fall to old age, and once again there was nothing I could do but stand at their funerals. I hated this duty then and I hated it now. But someone had to do it. Someone had to stand at attention by the caskets, play “Taps,” and carry the flag to the family.

There were only two of us left.

VFW Post Eternity was the last. It was a special outfit, unlike any of its predecessors. It wasn’t tied to one town or community, its members hadn’t necessarily served together. As people died, as memberships thinned, we combined our posts, clinging together for numbers until there was just this one. We traveled to funerals all over the country with our vests, our medals, the recording, and the flags. None of us would be buried without the last respect, the last military honor.

None of us, except the last.

I used to think they’d stop burying people before I came to this, but some traditions lingered, like the old farming town of Hope’s Fort with its single main street and faded buildings. No matter how big the cities got, there’d always be a few small towns with an old brick post office attached to the feed store, and there’d always be people who wanted to be put in the ground in the same crowded cemeteries their families had been buried in for decades.

I thought I’d be dead and buried myself by now, before I had to serve at the funeral of the third-to-last American war veteran.

Paul Hoover had been well-loved in this community. Three-quarters of the town must have been there, wearing somber dress clothes, huddling in their coats, fending off the February chill. The family sat in plush-covered folding chairs, staring at us over the casket with round, stunned eyes. All eyes were dry. There was a sense of relief; Paul had been ill for some time.

To most of the congregation, Ken and I were a surprise, and I could sense the unasked questions: Who are these guys, what are they doing here? We looked out of place with our blue caps and vests dotted with pins, commemorations, awards, the red ribbon with the blue and black stripes for service in Pan-Asia. No one knew what any of it meant anymore.

Allison Hoover was, as her husband Paul had been, pushing a hundred. Small, wasted to bones and wrinkled skin, she looked like she’d blow away in the stiff winter breeze without her sons and grandchildren bracing her on both sides. I couldn’t read her expression when I handed her the flag. Her squinted, dark eyes looked past me, her mouth was an immobile line. She took the flag from me with a strong grip, though, cradling it, stroking the fabric with a finger.

Out of all of them, the spouses seemed grateful when I gave them the flag.

I wondered sometimes if the families and friends resented our presence, the reminder we represented of an episode long since faded to history for most of them. But the oldest ones, the wives and siblings who remembered the looks on their loved ones’ faces when they’d come home, they always seemed grateful that someone else remembered. The worst were the funerals where only the children and younger generations survived.

Theorists said there would always be war. No war to end all war ever had. They also said that there would come a time when countries wouldn’t need soldiers anymore. Computers and robots would fight the wars. From a room a thousand miles away from the battle, anyone could push the buttons that launched the missiles or guided the rovers.

They were right.

* * *

I was too old for this. I was too old to be alive. I was too old to survive the days ahead.

“You don’t look so good, John,” said Ken. We sat together at the shuttleport in Denver, at the gate to his flight. His suborbital left first, to take him back to Boca Raton, mine to Seattle. This was the last for us. There would never be another meeting. We had only each other to bury now.

“Well, thanks,” I said with a drawl. We’d both lasted so long, now it was a race.

“Just tired,” he said. “You just look tired.”

“Of course I’m tired.”

He grunted and turned away, a gruff response to my snapping at him.

I stared at him to gauge how he looked. How tired was he? How much life was left in his wiry frame? He had a narrow face, uncommonly long limbs and body. His skin, soft and wrinkled, hung on his bones like crepe. In his young days, he must have been a burly man, overwhelming. Now, he sagged, like the air had gone out of him. I hadn’t noticed any change in the years we’d been attending funerals together, since Frank died and Ken stood with me while “Taps” played at his funeral. No cancers were eating him, no organs had failed or been replaced. But I knew how these things worked. His heart could just give out, and that would be that. On the battlefield or in old age, I had never been able to guess who’d die next.

“How are you feeling, Ken?”

“Tired.”

“Too tired to do another one of these?”

“If I have to do another one, I will.” He looked me up and down, squinting, lips pursed during a thoughtful pause. “You know something I don’t?”

“I don’t know a damn thing.”

“Glad I’m not the only one,” he said, chuckling.

“I’ve been thinking about the war.”

“Jesus, why?”

“Back then, dying didn’t seem so bad because I wasn’t alone. I knew there’d be someone there to bury me.”

“I don’t think about dying.”

“I don’t believe you. Not even back then?”

He stretched out in the padded seat, pulling his arms over his head. Joints groaned, but he seemed pretty limber for a ninety-seven-year-old man. He had sharp eyes; he was always looking farther away than anyone else around him, to another country, another set of skies. A smile always wrinkled the corners of his lips.

“This one time I remember. Outside Bangkok. A guy next to me stepped on a mine. Tore him apart. I still see it, how close I came. But I don’t think about it.”

I still thought he was lying. We’d lain on death’s door back then and managed to survive. Now, here I was again. My chances had seemed so grim, then. I didn’t know anything when I was a kid.

A shuttle rolled up to the gate and an electronic voice announced the Atlanta flight. My heart began pounding, for no reason at all.

“That’s my flight,” he said, taking hold of his bag and preparing to stand.

“Ken—” I didn’t want him to go. I’d never see him again; I’d never known anything so firmly in my whole life. We had a few moments. How could I beg him to stay alive? Stay alive long enough to play “Taps” at my funeral. It wasn’t right, to ask him to make that sacrifice for me, to be the last one. Let fate decide, as it always had. Don’t think about dying. He looked at me, waiting expectantly for whatever it was I was going to say. Kill me, kill me and bury me now, who will play “Taps” when you’re gone?

I held my hand to him. “Ken, take care.”

“John. You too.” He shook my hand firmly. The shuttle boarded, and he was gone.

They all walked away, in the end.

When I was eighteen the draft came, I was made a soldier, and we fought, huddled in trenches, smelling gunpowder and blood all around us. No matter how many planes dropped bombs and satellites fired missiles, people still had to fight on the ground with their hands. War called for blood, blood had to be spilled, until war itself died. Or was reinvented.

When I was twenty-one, my battalion pushed through to Beijing and stood guard when the armistice was signed. The film is famous: all of us—American, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Indian, Pakistani, EU and soldiers of a half-dozen other multinational contingents—gathered in Tiananmen Square and piled our guns outside the walls of the Forbidden City as the generals watched, smiling and shaking hands. And it was over.

That young man in Beijing had been thinking of age. The age of the country I was in, the nations gathered, the flags, the hatreds that had brought us here. The age of the walls, almost buried under the mountain of weapons. The age of the ritual we performed. Military ritual was powerful. Nothing matched it. Nothing else had ever made me cry, not even the birth of my children.

My granddaughter who usually met me at the shuttleport was away on a business trip, so I took the monorail home, to a one bedroom retirement condo with a view of the mountains. Sometimes I sat and stared at the peaks for hours. This time of year, a solid mass of white snow covered them.

I checked my voice messages right away. I thought I’d get the call already, that Ken was dead, that I’d have to get on another shuttle tomorrow and fly to Florida. But that was stupid.

My routine, interrupted less and less by funerals this past year, usually returned to normal quickly after one of these trips. Every morning, weather permitting, I walked in the county park behind my building. I took along my old pair of binoculars and dog-eared bird guide, though I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had to look up a species in this area. I’d followed a half-dozen generations of red-tailed hawks who made the park their territory. Afternoons, I maintained the family internet site. I had two children, five grandchildren, one great-grandchild scattered all over the country. Along with a couple dozen cousins, we kept in touch by posting to the site: photos, letters, gossip. Saved them from travel to reunions. I also read. At a loss for what to give me at holidays, my family gave me book disks because I’d read anything. If nothing else, I’d read what Alice would have liked. She died ten years ago. I still rolled over at night and woke up when I didn’t feel her beside me.

The morning after my return from Paul Hoover’s funeral, I didn’t walk. Wrapped in my robe, a cup of morning coffee in hand, I found myself sitting in front of the west-facing picture window, staring at the mountains. After hardly moving all day, I watched the sunset. The moon arced over, glowing three-quarters full in the rich blue twilight. With my binoculars, I could make out the strings of lights of Artemis Base on the shadowed quarter. I could just stop eating. The automatic cleaner that came once a week would bump against my wasted body sprawled in the armchair.

Seemed a shame to live through war, to last this long, and think of suicide now.

When we slogged through miles of rice paddies, I thought only of a glorious MRE and a dry blanket. I tried not to think of the future. I’d paid my dues, served my country. I’d put it behind me, forget the uniforms and medals, heat and wet and wounds and illness, look on war forever after as a thing that happened in movies.

Seventy-odd years later, I still saw that boy, wet from toe to scalp, hungry, sunburned, covered with bug bites, aching inside from the emotional wounds of burying a best friend the day before, and marveled at how naïve he could be, to think that he would forget. To believe—to wish—that this would not change him.

I wanted to go back and tell him there would come a time when he would wish so hard and so fruitlessly for another man who understood.

I kept watch. The ritual of daily life. My grandchildren were busy. Volleyball games, bad grades, good grades, college dances, job interviews—some things never changed. I avidly soaked up the smallest piece of news. Ben, my youngest grandson, was growing tomato plants under black light for a science project. He posted the pictures on the family website. Growing was a charitable term; the poor things looked shriveled, like old men. Marcie got her license for a second baby approved. So that’d make two great-grandchildren. Bragging rights at the community center. I thought she was too young, and I’d told her so. At twenty-three, she had her whole life ahead of her, why worry about kids now? But she wanted kids, so there. Everybody wanted kids, now. After the plagues, no one was worried about overpopulation.

There had to be something better to do with my time than interfering in the lives of my offspring.

My son and daughter, attentive children, sent emails asking how my trip went. I was halfway through writing my automatic reply—fine, fine, just fine, no problem—when I stopped, deleted it.

Alice used to pester me about writing an autobiography. She meant it as a joke, making fun of me because I was a fan of military memoirs. I’d read Caesar, Grant and Sherman, Patton, MacArthur, Churchill, Schwarzkopf, God knew how many others. From nowhere, the idea came to me again. I’d bill it as the world’s last military memoir. The last soldier tells all.

But I didn’t want to start it. I wanted to believe I’d die before I finished. Or maybe I was afraid that I’d actually finish it and still be alive to appear on talk shows.

My kids didn’t need to hear this sort of thing from a crotchety old man. I didn’t need them looking out for me. I started the note again: I’m fine, a little tired, but fine.

I was the one who kept watch.

I’d kept watch, waiting for—shock, danger, the enemy. For the moment when I was needed, so that I would be ready. I was still doing it, worrying when I didn’t see my pair of hawks in their favorite tree, when my kids missed a week of email.

In the army, I kept watch for death, waiting for death that rained on us in the form of missiles, that snatched us from under the earth in the form of mines, that killed us with fever in the night, that crept invisibly with poisonous gasses. Every inch we walked, we watched. Every night, I hardly slept; the buzz of crickets sounded like jet engines to my tense hearing.

What killed most of us, and what finally killed the Pan-Asia Conflict, wasn’t the weapons of mass destruction—we’d had them for decades and never used them. Most nations seemed content to brandish the threat of chemicals and bioweapons without actually deploying them. Enough defenses had been developed to make their worth doubtful, and the danger to their own troops was always a consideration. In the end, disease killed more people than died in the two world wars combined.

A fast-mutating strain of streptococcus developed that was resistant to penicillin, erythromycin, a dozen other antibiotics. This plague could be cured—in laboratory conditions, with expensive, experimental medications. But during the war several million soldiers from a dozen countries were traveling all over the world, living in primitive conditions, exchanging their infections as they went. The plague mutated and new cures had to be developed. In a short time, a half-dozen different strains had invaded most of the population.

Once, countries fought as if their supply of soldiers was endless. By the end of Pan-Asia, generals staged battles in which no troops were healthy enough to fight. They faced a choice: they did not have the resources to fight both the war and the plague.

The night before the ceasefire, I kept watch over my platoon. I had to, because I was the only one standing, apart from the one medic still healthy enough to tend the ill. Soldiers lay on bedrolls on the ground, wet from recent rains. Row after row of bedrolls. Stripped to t-shirts and briefs, men complained of the heat and tossed, dehydrated, sweating with fever, coughing, grimacing, unable to swallow with searing throats. I made sure the fires we used to boil pots of water kept burning; we’d run out of butane and propane stove fuel. We always, always boiled our water.

I imagined them all dying. We were supposed to meet the battalion in two days. I’d have to go myself, carrying the stack of dogtags of my dead friends. If we were attacked now, we wouldn’t survive. One or the other, the plague or the Chinese, would destroy us. But the plague had leveled them just as badly. No one would be fighting when the armies met at Beijing.

Light, smoke from the fires that burned in the Beijing suburbs obscured the night sky with a hellish red glow. For a year I had waited to die, looked on every sweaty, noisy night as my last. I was prepared, I thought. I expected it. But still I kept watch. Something kept the plague from striking me, some obscene luck kept me from any injury greater than a cut from shrapnel.

That obscene luck meant that even if only one of us could join the battalion, one of us would, carrying the dogtags, ready to report.

But we didn’t join the battalion in two days. Orders came to hold our position, and we held for a week while supplies arrived, new medications that, if they did not induce miracle cures, at least stabilized many of the ill. Not all of us died. Those of us who were well enough to march met with the decimated battalion and arrived in Beijing for the armistice two weeks later.

Once, I’d been ready to be the last.

I kept my dogtags in a cardboard box with my medals, my old insignia, odds and ends and souvenirs that had seemed like a good idea at the time, and a sheaf of official papers: shipping orders, discharge papers, that sort of thing. A box of relics that wouldn’t mean anything to anyone but me. I hadn’t looked at that stuff in years. I avoided the urge. Let the kids find it when I’m gone. And so they didn’t wonder, maybe I would write those memoirs. A few pages of explanation, of memory. Just for them.

Fifteen years after the armistice, resentment from the last war festered into new conflicts. Diseases continued to make populations unstable, and the supply of soldiers was unreliable. Governments started using machines to fight their wars. When they found they could claim territory and win arguments with machines, they didn’t need people anymore.

Machines didn’t care whether or not they were buried with military honors.

I asked Ken to email me every day. Nothing elaborate, just a note, a line: I’m alive. One last time, I keep watch, downloading my email every day, looking for that one note: I’m alive. When the day arrives that I don’t get that message, I will know.

I wait for my last funeral.

Silence Before Starlight

Metaphors tell of the cold light of the stars, but her body felt warm when she wrapped her arms around me, smiling at her reflection in the faceplate of my helmet. I had been looking at the stars—at nothing, at vacuum—and then I saw her, shining face, silver eyes, long pale hair floating weightless.

Her slender fingers raised the shield over the faceplate, so at last we looked into each other’s eyes. She pressed herself close to me; I could see she was naked. She couldn’t have been, she couldn’t have lived—she should have been dead. But she smiled.

Even through the suit I could feel her reaching for me, and I held her, clenching my bulky gloved hands against her while she worked the catch of the faceplate. I couldn’t wait for her to open the helmet so I could taste her lips. Making love to starlight.

The plate went up, her lips met mine. She kissed me, smoothed my face, my hair. My eyes closed, and I forgot what she looked like.

So I looked again, inhaled, and drowned.

I gasped at vacuum, reached for my helmet—gone, long gone. She smiled like an angel. I tried to scream as my lungs imploded, and she laughed at me, a sound of crystal bells, a sound starlight might make . . .

“Barrie!”

I breathed. I breathed one desperate inhalation after another. I tried to touch my face, and the faceplate—shield down, seals intact—blocked me. My hands shook, my gasping continued, and I saw the hull of the ship, the gray arc of Europa, and the stars. Nothing else.

“Barrie! What’s wrong? Your vitals spiked, your heart rate’s tripled—”

“Alvy?” My voice cracked, I couldn’t help it. The sound of my own breathing overwhelmed me.

“What’s happening out there, Barrie?”

The tether still held me to the probe. I’d have spun off into the void otherwise. Drifting, gently tugged now and then by the lifeline, I patted my helmet, my neck, every joint of my suit, convincing myself that I was well and whole.

I couldn’t explain to Alvy what had happened. Making love to starlight.

“Might—might be a suit malfunction. I think I should come in.”

Alvy’s voice on my helmet inset turned tired but no less anxious. “Just what we need right now. I’ll meet you this side of the airlock.”

Alvy had to talk me to the airlock hatch, telling me to breathe slowly, one breath in, one breath out, until I matched her steady coaxing. In, out. My hands stopped shaking by the time air cycled into the airlock, and I could finally take off the suit—safely.

I started trembling again when Alvy helped me lift off the helmet.

“What spooked you, Barrie?” Alvy—Teresa Alvarez—loomed over me, where I sat on the bench in what served as our combination medical unit and EVA prep room. Together, we’d peeled off my suit; like a headless corpse, it slumped by the airlock door, waiting for a diagnostic.

Her short brown hair stood straight up, she hadn’t changed her jumpsuit in days, and her face was so pale and lined, she looked ten years older than her thirty-odd years. Twenty years older. Like she was ready for retirement.

I didn’t want to know how I looked. I could feel the stubble on my chin growing. “I couldn’t breathe. I thought—I thought something had happened to the helmet. I saw—” I hadn’t meant to say that.

“What did you see?”

My hands lay in my lap, too heavy to lift to even rub my face. Neat trick in weightlessness. “I didn’t see anything.”

“So you were hallucinating? Did something happen to your oxygen mix?” She punched a few commands into the panel of the suit’s control unit and snapped out the data chip, which she plugged in to the medical comp terminal. “Something must have happened to your mix. Maybe for just a second. Another problem to add to the list. Command’ll scratch any more EVA work now.”

A momentary glitch in the oxygen flow. It sounded so logical.

My rational self responded to that thought, and backed by years of training and drills, began to gather my scattered wits. “So I managed to get the transmitter on line before I—before the malfunction?”

Alvy didn’t turn from her data readout to talk. “Yes. But that just means we have to report to Command. If I decide I like the blackout better I may send you out to foul it back up.”

Her joke stayed with me the rest of the day. Not because it was funny—although these days, the strangest things seemed hilarious—but because I wanted to go out again. Rationally, logically, I told myself I needed to overcome a developing phobia, a sense of suffocation that crept up on me every few hours or every few minutes, a claustrophobia that would be crippling on a small, two-person observer probe like Benjamin. If I didn’t get back out and prove to my psyche that space did not (necessarily) mean an inability to breathe, I’d end up sedated in the med unit.

That was the excuse. It was a good excuse—if exaggerated. But truthfully, I wanted to go back to find what it was I’d really seen.

Benjamin’s mission was the pipe dream of the century reduced to a bureaucratic joke: life on Europa. After the possibility of life on Mars went bust, Europa gained prestige as the System’s most likely candidate for supporting non-Earth life. Several dozen fly-bys, a dozen probes, a handful of remote landings and a hundred years of scrutiny later, Europa had lost all that prestige.

Regulations stipulated that a world with the potential for sustaining native life must have direct human confirmation that no life existed before it was declared lifeless and opened to mining and industry. The purpose of this admittedly impractical rule was to avoid the sabotage of automated probes or corruption of transmitted data by unscrupulous economic interests. The crewed mission to study the moon was the final, preparatory phase before Trade Guild lifted the environmental quarantine and sent surveyors to Europa.

No one expected us to find life, but enough politicians and naturalist groups supported the ideal behind the regulation that Trade Guild Command had to make at least the semblance of a serious effort to look for life one more time. The trouble was, I really wanted to find life. I believed the automated data was still inconclusive, and that Trade Guild shouldn’t lift the quarantine. We may not have found life there now, but Europa might develop life in the future, if left alone. Some of us wanted to protect the moon, if we could.

Ours was a mission of pure idealism and wishful thinking, and it was doomed from the start. Ideological and political difficulties aside, mechanical problems had plagued us the entire three months of the mission. We’d had a series of equipment malfunctions; tools and gear went missing at least once a week. So far, these glitches were annoying rather than life-threatening. But we all felt that sooner or later a true disaster would strike. Alvy and I were battling time—any day now, Command would send a recall order, shutting down the mission because of the mechanical problems, leaving Europa open for mining.

The day after my own personal malfunction, life aboard Benjamin returned to normal. Things went wrong. I sat at my lab station, collating data gathered the day before from our dozen or so scopes. Alvy called to me from another part of the ship.

“Barrie, have you seen that chip?”

“What chip?”

“The one from your suit.”

“Did you leave it in the medical computer?”

“I checked already. Are you sure it isn’t in with your chips?”

“Yes. Did you put it back in the suit?”

“I checked there.” She always checked everywhere.

“Well, it has to be somewhere on board. It can’t have gone anywhere.”

“That’s what I said about my wrench last week. Still haven’t found it.”

I knew what came next; she’d search the ship top to bottom, the chip wouldn’t turn up, just like the wrench hadn’t, and she’d stew about how the universe had it in for her.

A couple hours later I had the scope data ready and gave it to Alvy with the rest of the probe reports. She made the weekly transmissions to Command. This week’s was three days late because of the malfunction in the transmitter, which had required me going out to reconnect a cable that had broken loose.

About when she should have been uploading the data to the transmitter, her shouted expletive filled the ship.

I thought she’d blown up the computer, sliced off her leg, something truly horrible—as horrible as losing one’s helmet on an EVA. Hand over hand, I pulled myself from my station to control, kicking in weightlessness, to see what had happened. She met me halfway.

“Data’s gone,” she said.

She wasn’t bleeding, air wasn’t hissing out of any cracks in the hull. So matters couldn’t have been too cataclysmic.

“What?”

“Data’s gone. I went to transmit and got an error message. Zero bytes to transfer. I had it all on the chip, Barrie. A gig of data, ready to go, then a second later it was gone. Just disappeared. Where did it go?”

The same place as the wrench? “So something’s wrong with the computer.”

She covered her eyes with her hands and moaned. “Please tell me there was a backup.”

“Isn’t that your job?” I squeezed past her through the narrow corridor and went to control.

The message light still flashed on the display. Zero bytes. Nothing to upload. Communication canceled. I punched up some commands, searched the memory. The computer contained stored copies of previous reports for the last three months, but no sign of this week’s. I searched every database.

So the computer had a bug. I could almost hear the thing scratching away at our systems, carrying away loose gigabytes and wrenches.

If I listened very closely, I could hear it tapping on the hull outside the station. Something scraped hard nails on Benjamin’s steel shell, as though looking for a way to get inside.

“Maybe you didn’t fix the transmitter after all.”

“I don’t think the transmitter could have eaten the data.” The transmitter had never left dormant mode. But something made a noise, tapping on the hull hard enough for the vibrations to travel through the steel, through the station’s atmosphere, to my ears as sound. “Do you hear something?”

“The air cycling. The electronics.”

“No. Something outside.”

“Are you joking?”

There I was, hallucinating twice in as many days. I wasn’t even outside this time. I couldn’t blame it on bad air.

I changed the subject. “You think I should go back out and check the transmitter?”

“I think we should run some diagnostics first.” She pushed me out of her seat and dove into the computer systems herself. Last night, we ran tests on my space suit. The diagnostic came up clean, no obvious malfunctions.

I retreated to the sensor and observation deck, where most of the scopes and other receivers were mounted. There, a bubbled viewport revealed the space outside.

The streaked gray surface of Europa filled most of the view, Jupiter most of what was left. The light reflecting from them both washed out the stars and most of the well-defined shadows characteristically formed by the unmediated sunlight in space.

One shadow—long, slender, like a raised arm—lying along a bare curve of the ship that shouldn’t have held a shadow, remained. Something slipped along the hull. I saw movement—I shouldn’t have, not outside the probe.

“Alvy, I’m going back out,” I said, passing through control on my way to medical.

“But I don’t think it’s the transmitter.” She followed me; I hardly noticed.

“It wouldn’t hurt to check.”

“Barrie, do you think you should go out? After yesterday?”

I acted confident, assured. Shoulders straight, chin up. “I’m fine.”

She lifted a skeptical brow. She knew me too well. I usually slouched, and only straightened my shoulders when I was nervous.

“It’s probably not the transmitter,” she said.

I’d already climbed into the body of the suit, checking seals and oxygen charges as I went. Reluctantly, she helped me with the gloves and joint bindings.

“Why do you really want to go out? Some getting back on the horse thing?”

I could have left it at that. I’d already convinced myself of the excuse. But—I was supposed to trust Alvy. We’d been living out here for three months. We’d developed the project together, and Command had approved it and assigned us to Benjamin because we worked well together.

If I was going crazy, Alvy had a right to know.

“I saw something. Outside, through the viewport.”

She put her hand on my forehead. “Are you feeling well?”

Not really. My lungs still hurt from yesterday’s episode. “I’m well enough to go out. Just for a little while, for a walk around the probe. I just want to check things out.”

“What did you see?”

“A shadow. Something moving. Like something was trying to get in.” It sounded silly now, explaining it aloud. I was sure I didn’t remember it right.

“And what did you see yesterday?”

I probably didn’t remember that right, either. “Flashes. Light. All around me, sparkling. I thought I was drowning in it.”

Alvy frowned and tried to get me to look at her, but I stared at my bulky, gloved hands in my lap.

“The Mercury astronauts reported seeing flashing specks of light outside their capsules. Fireflies, they called them. Total mystery. People have been seeing things outside their spacecraft for over a hundred years, Barrie.”

No one ever saw a woman, a woman of starlight come to seduce them to their deaths. That is, they never said they saw a woman.

“Humor me, Alvy. I just want to look around.”

“All right. But I’m going to be on the radio talking to you the whole time. Keep your tether tight.”

She sealed my helmet, I entered the airlock, it emptied, and I was out.

I heard the same noise, a purposeful scratching on the hull, which was impossible. Not unless the sound was transmitting through Alvy’s radio.

“How you doing, Barrie?”

I didn’t answer, straining to hear the background noise.

“Barrie?”

“Do you hear that?”

“I don’t hear anything.”

Slowly, I made my way around Benjamin. The probe was an elongated cylinder, marred by protrusion of instruments, solar collectors, ports, and hatches. I paused a moment at the transmitter to make sure the repairs I’d made held up. I didn’t see anything unusual. The scratching sounded distant, maybe just around the ship’s curve—but always just around the curve.

Then I heard something else. Singing, heavenly singing, a sound as pure as crystal. I recognized the voice, the voice of starlight. I could feel her watching me. Any moment, she would touch me on the arm, the shoulder, the face . . .

I shook my head. If the monitor showed my vital signs fluctuate, Alvy would call me in. The voice paused its singing a moment to laugh at me, then continued, more beautiful than before. I wanted to close my eyes, to listen with all my mind.

I didn’t. I struggled to focus on the radio hiss on my helmet inset.

“Alvy, is that you?”

“Me what?”

“Singing.”

“Barrie, get back in here right now.”

If I didn’t go back, I’d follow the voice to the stars. Reaching for handhold after handhold, my tether retracting automatically, I returned to the airlock.

I couldn’t get her voice out of my head.

Alvy convinced me to lie down and take a sedative. A double dose knocked me out, but when I woke up the next day cycle, I heard the crystal singing again, louder than ever. I heard it more than I heard Alvy when she sat me down for a conference over breakfast.

“I finally got through to Command. I uploaded to them what data I could scrape together and downloaded all incoming messages. Including this one.” She slid a hand terminal toward me. I glanced at it, but the words looked messy, indecipherable runes. “The transmitter convinced them to close the mission. We’ve been recalled. We start the burn out of Jupiter space in a week. Barrie?”

Hyperspace, vibrations in a higher dimension: music of the spheres, Aristotle was right.

“It’s not over. Murphy is appealing the decision, going straight to the Presidency to apply for Natural Preserve status for Europa. The Guild won’t get here before then. Barrie—do you have to take it this hard?”

Just one more time. I’d go out just once more. Just to get it out of my head.

I went to medical, leaving Alvy and breakfast.

Something held Alvy back this time, I didn’t know what. Medical and our cabins were in the same direction. Maybe she thought I was upset about the mission’s failure, that I needed time alone and went to my cubicle. Under different circumstances, I probably would have done just that.

I managed to get the suit on by myself. It can be done, given enough determination, enough practiced dexterity with the gloves. I put the helmet on, clicked all the seals in place by feel, and attached and sealed the gloves last. Airlock, the hiss of decompression, the open door to starlight and music.

Our rotation had brought the airlock away from both Jupiter and its moon. All I saw were stars, they filled my vision, and she was waiting for me.

She beckoned me to her home, the place she belonged, where she wanted me to follow. Starlight. I pushed off from the open airlock and drifted. I hadn’t attached the tether.

Her hands sketched graceful movements, her pale arms formed an arc. Her skin gleamed.

“Shit, Barrie, what the hell are you doing? Get back here! Get back here!” My helmet speakers were on; Alvy interrupted.

I drifted toward the woman in the stars. I could touch her, I could almost touch her. She wanted me to kiss her. Her smile told me so. If only I could reach out . . . .

With bulky, shaking fingers, I fumbled at the catch sealing my left glove.

“Oh, no Barrie. Don’t you dare. Don’t you do it. You’ve got some rapture of the void thing going, but I’m not going to let you do it!”

The left glove seemed stuck, so I tried the right. With my right hand free, I could unlatch the left more easily.

Still the woman sang. I heard words now: Yes, yes, come to me!

“Please, James. Come back to me.”

Alvy’s voice did something I’d never heard it do before. It turned soft. It begged. Her ever-present anxiety became quiet, desperate.

“Come back to me, James.”

Her use of my first name made me pause. I’d always been Barrie; she’d always been Alvy. I almost forgot that we had first names. James Barrie. Teresa Alvarez.

Twisting, I looked over my shoulder. I was drifting away from the probe, untethered. Teresa called to me over the radio.

“Listen to me, James. Please.”

I would have done it. I would have taken off my helmet, to better hear the music of the stars. Compulsively checking my suit’s joints and readouts, I found I was safe. Everything sealed, air still flowing. I shut my eyes and relished the sensation of breathing.

Cold light of the stars—I once heard about a man who walked out of an airlock at Artemis Base on Luna, plainclothes. No suit, just his uniform, skin, and lungs. He’d been up for some kind of reprimand, the story said, and he decided he’d rather face the vacuum. That was one explanation. But maybe something drew him. Seduced him into taking those fatal steps.

There wasn’t anything wrong with the oxygen mix. I wasn’t buckling under the stress of watching our project get sucked down Jupiter’s gravity well. It was more like—Odysseus, hearing the Sirens.

“Alvy, give me static.”

“What?”

“Feed some static over the line, the audio output of the electrostatic readings from Jupiter or something. Just—just fill the line with noise.”

“Are you sane? Are you coming back here now?”

“I’ve got air packs with me. Just give me static.”

Alvy did as I asked, so I couldn’t hear anything but hissing, the white noise of a data stream. No singing. When I opened my eyes, the woman, the vision, was gone.

I used a compressed air pack attached to the suit to jet back to the airlock. A couple of controlled bursts was all it took. My breathing stayed normal, the danger was over. In fact, it seemed long gone. Like a dream.

Alvy met me at the airlock. Her shoulders were bunched to her ears with tension. It was good to see her.

She was talking before she even lifted off my helmet. “No more kidding around, Barrie. What’s up with you? What’s happening with you out there?”

Sullen, I clenched my jaw and stared at the floor. Honesty. Partnership. That’s what pulled me back from the song, but I still couldn’t open my mouth. I couldn’t just tell her: I’m going insane.

“Talk to me, Barrie.”

“If I tell you, you’ll tell Command, and they’ll ground me planetside.”

“If you don’t talk, I’ll tell them you’re completely off-balance, and they’ll ground you anyway.” That was Alvy, eminently practical.

“The data—electromagnetic, radiation. Have the readings been—strange?”

“Strange how?”

Maybe an effect of the swirling storms of radiation, the battling tides of gravity in the Jupiter system—its effect on people—had escaped detection until now. Regularly scheduled mining and survey missions to the other moons were only just starting. Maybe our prolonged exposure had affected our perceptions—

I so wanted to believe in an outside explanation.

“Maybe I’m just tired.”

Anxiety induced delirium. The simplest explanation was probably the correct one. The greatest proof supporting this was my readiness to rely on folklore for excuses.

Command gave us a timetable and programmed trajectory for the burn out of the system. We spent the next week collating data and shutting down our instruments. I spent some of that time on the observation deck, watching the view of Europa slip past. We’d found what all previous observations told us we’d find: silicate rock; oxygen; masses of frozen water, their surfaces cracked and scarred, broken and slushy from the heat generated by tidal flexing. We found the ingredients necessary for life, but not life, not so much as a colony of bacteria growing by an underwater thermal vent. Gray, somber, dead, she drifted.

Anything else I’d seen—I had no proof it hadn’t been my imagination.

I saw shadows of movement at the edges of my vision and decided not to look at them. I had been so desperate to find life, to be the one to make that discovery. So desperate, I saw phantoms.

We had an hour-long fuel burn to accelerate, then a day of travel to take us far enough out of Jupiter space to use a Mandelbrot jump to Mars space. We spent the hour strapped into our crash chairs, adjusting to the sensation of weight, stuck with our thoughts to pass the time. Even with my eyes closed, I could see the shadows dancing, calling.

I’d never had any kind of breakdown on a mission before, and I helped open Mars Polar. That statement usually got spacers to buy me drinks and pat my shoulder sympathetically. But maybe this was a sign; I’d been doing this too long. Maybe it was time to let Command ground me. If there wasn’t actually anything out there.

“Alvy,” I said, my voice sounding loud in the cabin. “Have you ever lost so much equipment on a mission before?”

“No. Why?”

“What if there really is something out there?”

“Something. Like what?”

Something. Sirens that lured sailors to their deaths, the fairy maids that seduced young men only to drown them, imps that stole one sock of a pair out of the cleaner—

“Something that causes wrenches and data chips to disappear, and a seasoned veteran to want to take off his suit during an EVA.”

Whatever had taken Alvy’s wrench had taken my mind. Or maybe I’d just misplaced it, and I hadn’t looked hard enough. We had a few days until we reached Mars. Maybe Alvy could help me find it before the post-mission psych evaluation.

Alvy stared at the monitors. The thrust of burning fuel rumbled through the ship, a pleasant background noise, preventing silence.

When she spoke, her voice was calm, like a computerized countdown. “I’ll find that missing gear. As soon as we’re home, I know I will. It’ll all be under a deckplate. I put it there and forgot it, part of a little hallucination, just like you had. Objects do not just disappear off spacecraft.”

That was our proof that we weren’t crazy. These things just didn’t happen. Not to us, not with our records. But Command wouldn’t see the situation that way. On the other hand . . .

“We can always tell Command.”

“Tell them what?” Alvy said, her voice strained with exhaustion and worry.

“Everything that’s happened. Then we’ll tell them something was affecting our perceptions.”

“Oh, they’ll love that. What kind of something did you have in mind? Gremlins?”

Sort of, but I didn’t say it. “Something that requires more study before Europa can be opened for mining.”

She opened her mouth to argue again, but paused. Understanding slowly lit her eyes. She turned to me.

“Do you really think you saw something alive out there?”

“Not alive. But something.”

“They might buy it. They might really buy it.” She settled back in her chair, smiling. Really smiling for the first time in weeks, though her expression looked awfully conspiratorial. “If we’re going crazy anyway, it couldn’t hurt to try.”

Behind us, receding now, the storms of Jupiter sang.

The Happiest Place

The worst part of my job is the terminally ill kids. The ones without hope, who get a wish from some charity or other, and they and their families come here. Sometimes, it’s a little girl who wants more than anything to spend her special day with her favorite princess. That’s way too much pressure to put on a twenty-one-year-old aspiring actress in a hoop skirt. I shouldn’t be responsible for making a dying child’s dream come true.

I’ve done it twice now. The first was two months ago. Elizabeth, age ten, suffers from the final stages of a rare blood disease. Her mother just sent the park a letter saying she’s in the hospital again and keeps a picture of the two of us by her bed to cheer her up.

The second is Abby. She has leukemia. She’s already had a bone marrow transplant, and it didn’t work. The cancer relapsed, and the doctors aren’t hopeful. Her family made the request to visit the park, and she asked to spend part of the day with me. Rather, I happened to be on shift the day that she asked to meet my persona. That’s all it is, luck of the draw. It kills me, because I have to shut down that part of my brain that knows this kid is dying and wants to burst into tears at the unfairness of it all. I have to smile my princess smile until my cheeks hurt and pretend like everything’s going to be okay. And this kid smiles back at me and I think, how can you be so happy? How can seeing me dressed up in a blue satin gown and blond wig make you so happy?

But of course, that’s not what the kids see. They see Cinderella stepped out of a fairy tale, and they believe that dreams are real. I wonder, do they ever dream of staying alive?

Abby is like any other nine-year-old girl. When I step onto the sidewalk, her eyes light up and she gasps in delight. I’ve seen a whole crowd of girls gasp at the sight of me, and I’ll admit it goes to my head sometimes. It’s what keeps me here, when I ought to be spending my days at cattle calls in Hollywood.

I’ve been told her name ahead of time, so it seems like magic when I kneel by her wheelchair and say, “Hello, Abby.”

She’s bald as an egg, thin as a skeleton, and still she smiles, beaming so hard her face will surely break in two. Her brown eyes seem too large for her head, and they are gleaming.

“What would you like to do first?” I say. “Would you like to see the castle?”

She nods vigorously, and we go to see the castle, walking up the pathway, a whole crowd of us surrounding her wheelchair. Her family—parents, grandparents, aunt and uncle—follow behind us, Dad pushing the wheelchair, and all of them are smiling like this really is the happiest day of their lives. A park photographer runs alongside, snapping pictures. One of the pictures will sit by a hospital bed, no doubt. Abby holds my hand.

This is so exhausting.

I have a break at dinnertime. I’ve promised to return to watch the fireworks with Abby, and she’ll remember the moment for the rest of her life, however many weeks of it the doctors say she has. She’ll remember the moment through the needles, pain, and fear, and that’s what keeps me going. That’s what gets me through when what I really want to do is run screaming that I can’t do this, I’m not a princess, I’m not a dream come true, I’m just a kid myself and I quit college because I thought I could be an actress and my boyfriend just broke up with me and I’m in a thousand family photos with a thousand little girls, smiling like a Barbie doll. But Abby will think of me when she’s afraid, and maybe it will help, and maybe, just maybe, the magic is real sometimes.

After my break, I come back through the Cast Members Only door and find Christine, Abby’s aunt, sitting on the ground behind a trash can, sobbing. Christine, Abby’s mother’s younger sister, is in her late twenties, young and smiling herself, though today her smile is the plastic one people wear when they really want to burst and scream. Most of the adults around Abby have worn that smile for at least part of the day. Christine has cheerfully pushed Abby’s wheelchair and carried bags much of the time so Abby’s parents could be close to their daughter, hold Abby’s hand, and ooh and ahh with her at some new wonder. Christine is support staff. I understand the role.

And she’s broken. She hid herself away behind hedges and trash cans so she could break. I think of walking away. Let her put herself back together, rejoin the group, and pretend her eyes aren’t red and puffy.

But I kneel by her and put a satin-gloved hand on her shoulder. “Are you all right?”

“What? Oh—it’s you.” She looks up, startled, sniffles loudly, and scrubs a sleeve across her face. “I’m sorry, I just had to get away for a minute.”

“You can only pretend to be happy for so long.”

She nods, and I see the family resemblance with Abby, an earnestness that comes through in the gesture.

“It’s just . . . this place. It’s so amazing, but everywhere we go they talk about dreams, and they sing about dreams, and at every step they tell you that dreams come true and that people live happily ever after. Well—it was my sister’s dream to have a baby, to have a beautiful little girl and watch her grow up. Then this happens. I look at Abby, and she’s so happy, and her dream has come true, and how can this place be so real and so impossible at the same time!”

The words come in a rush and she’s sobbing again, tears streaming, her back hunched, shuddering. My own floodgates are opening, the actress-brain that manages to keep it locked away failing.

I turn my face away, close my eyes, and take a deep breath. “Stop it,” I say quietly. “My make-up’s going to run.”

Christine’s sob turns into a laugh. “Oh God, I’m sorry! And your dress, you shouldn’t be on the ground like this! You know, for just a minute I forgot you’re not really Cinderella.”

The tears start all over again. I’m sitting beside her by this time.

“I can’t do this anymore,” she says. “I can’t go back.”

I know exactly how she feels. I put my arm around her shoulders. She hugs me back, her face pressed to my shoulder, and cries it all out. I hold her and whisper nonsense. That everything is going to be all right. Like I am really Cinderella, like I really can make everything better.

After closing, after the fireworks have faded and all the lights are out, I go into the park. We’re not supposed to do that. I’d said goodbye to Abby and her family, and I wonder how long my picture will sit by her hospital bed.

For a long time I stand on the bridge before the castle, looking up at its parapets, its gilded filigree confections. Wearing jeans and a tank top, I’m not a princess anymore. Under that fairy tale façade is nothing more than wood and concrete. Just like we’d all put on a good face today, to make this the happiest day of Abby’s short, short life. When underneath we’d turned to ash.

I am a rank, despicable liar.

I want to make a wish of my own, but I have too many choices. Blue Fairies, stone wells, godmothers, evening stars. The smog and haze is such that I can only see one small star, shining faintly, right above the castle. A stray bit of firework that has forgotten to fall back to earth. It almost seems like an omen.

Tonight, I choose the wishing well for my late-evening ritual. I only do this sometimes, because to do it every night would spoil it, make it ordinary. Only days like this when I have a sick girl’s short future weighing on my shoulders. I find the wishing well and put my hands on either side, leaning all the way over the edge, calling down inside so my voice echoes.

“I’m wishing!”

For happiness, unspecified. I don’t know what I want anymore.

* * *

A week later, I receive a letter from Elizabeth’s mother. My supervisor wore a grim smile when she handed it to me. Elizabeth slipped into a coma and passed away quietly last week. She talked about her trip to the park right up to the end. Thank you, thank you, and thank you, her mother writes. For what? I ask myself that more and more. I wonder how Abby is doing.

How can such a little piece of magic be so strong in the face of that immense tragedy? I fold the letter and secure it in my purse.

That evening I find a tiara at the bottom of my locker. I don’t recognize it from any of the costumes. All the usual tiaras are glittering, decked with rhinestones, visible from miles away so no one will mistake their wearers for anything but princesses. This is different, plain, a half-circlet of gold with a clear, faceted gem mounted in the center.

A slip of paper is tied to one of the arms. I pull the note free of the string that ties it.

One line of handwriting reads, I can’t do this anymore. I pass it on to you.

The writing looks like a woman’s. The words are clean, but the paper is wrinkled, as if whoever wrote it crushed the note, then smoothed it flat again. I look around the locker room for someone who might be watching me, who might have snuck the tiara into my locker then lingered to see my reaction. Only the usual bustle fills the place, dancers peeling off tights, character actors laughing in the showers as they wash off the smells of their plush suits.

The locker next to me belongs to Audrey, who plays Sleeping Beauty in one of the stage shows. I sometimes don’t recognize her, because her short black hair is so at odds with the blond wig she wears for her character.

“Audrey?” She turns to me, inquiring. I show her the tiara. “Do you know whose this is?”

She shakes her head. “No, sorry. I don’t even recognize the costume.”

“Yeah, neither do I.” The front of the locker room has a lost and found box for stray bras and sneakers and the like. I hate to just leave it there.

“Some of us are going out for dinner. Want to come?”

I’m tired. The exhaustion settles on me like a warm blanket. The letter about Elizabeth hasn’t improved my mood. I shake my head at Audrey. “Not tonight. I’m beat.”

“Maybe next time.” She slings her bag over her shoulder and heads out with some of the other girls.

I hold the tiara in both hands, and it feels warm against my skin.

I slip it into my backpack and take it home.

The studio apartment in a not so nice part of town is good enough, because I’m hardly ever there, between work, auditions, classes and scraping together enough to get by. Ramen noodles or pasta await my leisure, but I don’t make dinner. I leave my backpack by the front door, after taking out the tiara.

Holding it, I sit in the middle of the floor and wonder. Just a bit of strangeness, maybe even a bit of magic, like the well, like being a girl’s dying wish.

I put the tiara on. It settles comfortably above my ears.

I close my eyes and see a room, a studio apartment like this, but worse, with peeling paint, holes in the carpet, and soiled furniture. A family of six lives there, a mother and five children. Father in prison. A girl, the oldest of the kids, sits at a kitchen table doing homework, not minding her siblings screaming around her, her mother’s scolding, the noise of a television. Her pencil scratches math problems, and she works through to the end of the page. Then she digs a history book out of the stack and reads. She wants to go to college, the thought comes over me like an electric shock. But she’ll never get there without help.

So I grant her wish. Just like that, because I can, because the girl is working so hard and I want her to succeed, I want this little bit of magic to work. One day she checks the mail and finds a letter telling her about the full ride scholarship she’s won. She won’t just pull herself out of poverty, she’ll pull her whole family. I see it all, it will happen. The certainty is as wondrous as the wish come true itself.

I could float before her on fairy wings, waving my magic wand, and it would be the same.

My hands shaking, I remove the tiara. The gold holds the warmth from sitting on my head. Maybe I’ve imagined it. Maybe it’s all in my head. I’ve been working at that place too long. It’s starting to make me think I can change the world.

For a week, I put on the tiara every night. I see the wishes, I know their outcomes. I help a girl in the suburbs find her lost cat. I convince a middle-aged woman to walk out of her abusive marriage. I find a winning lottery ticket for a harried mother of three. Another girl wins a beauty pageant. I see the scenes play out as if I stand in the middle of them. I am invisible and omniscient.

Better, I move through my days like I believe. Yes, I can make a difference. Yes, dreams do come true. I believe in fairy godmothers. I think back to my own life, to the dream that made me drive to L.A. with nothing more than what I could fit in my trunk and pushed me through the door of every audition. Each step of the way there’d been a little voice whispering, You can do this.

I thought it had been ambition. Maybe there’d been something more. Something to explain why I’d taken the steps and my friends hadn’t. I wear that tiara and I hear that same voice whisper, You can do this.

A doctor marries the artist her wealthy family disapproves of.

A lawyer in Manhattan quits her job and moves to the Bahamas to be a tour guide.

And one little girl gets a pony for Christmas.

I wave my magic wand and shower the world with stars.

“Maddie, are you okay?”

I blink at her, aware suddenly that Audrey has asked the question several times. “Yeah, I’m sorry, I guess I was daydreaming.”

“I couldn’t tell,” she says with a wry grin. “A bunch of us are going out, you want to come?”

“No, thanks. Too much to do.”

“Come on, you haven’t been out with us in weeks.”

That long? I think about it and can’t remember when I’d last been out with the group. I try to imagine going out with them now, sitting at the end of the table or bar, staring into space, barely eating. Not really belonging. I have better things to do.

“I’m afraid I wouldn’t be very good company tonight. Next time for sure.”

She gives me a look like she doesn’t believe me.

Forcing a smile, I wave them off, then rush home, back to my real work.

During the day, I see the faces of a thousand children, and I don’t see them anymore. I look for the stories, for the wishes hiding behind their eyes. When Paige—the small plump woman with the big eyes who wears a white wig and draws in wrinkles around her eyes so she can play the fairy godmother—waves her wand and asks the children to make a wish, what do they imagine, and is it something I can see? What will the tiara show me?

A family with children gets off the streets in time for Christmas.

An overlooked youngest daughter gets the lead in the school play.

A battered woman presses charges.

I move through my days like a ghost. No matter how many women and girls I see through the tiara, there are always more. The scenes never slow, never stop. I think if I do this enough, if I work hard enough, I’ll make all the wishes come true.

It’s bound to happen, sooner or later, that I see someone I recognize. Someone I know, at least a little.

The scene is a hospital bed. On the table beside the bed is a picture of a deathly sick little girl in a wheelchair. Beside her kneels a beautiful Cinderella in a blue satin gown, holding her hand, smiling brilliantly for the camera. That isn’t me, I tell myself. That’s a character. In the bed lies Abby, a ventilator protruding from her mouth and taped in place, a dozen wires trailing from her body. A monitor beeps, very slowly. Beside the bed sits her aunt, Christine, leaning her elbows on the mattress beside the wasted body, her hands clasped and head bowed in prayer.

Christine is making a wish: Please God, take me instead.

I grab the tiara off my head so quickly it tangles in my hair. Heart racing, I throw it on the floor, stare at it. A dryness makes my eyes hurt.

Afraid to touch it, I leave it on the floor for a week, giving it wide berth as I move around the apartment in the course of my day. My muscles ache with fear, even as some small sense tells me that the wish hasn’t been granted.

It can’t be granted. It’s a terrible wish. Unless it isn’t. If she’s willing to make that wish, if I have the power to grant it, who am I to deny it?

I haven’t been to an audition in months. Audrey’s stopped asking if I want to go to dinner. Barry, who sometimes plays Prince Charming opposite me, has stopped asking me what’s wrong after I tell him nothing a dozen times. His smile turns fake, and he stops talking to me at all. I only notice as a vague observation.

I only ever feel real when I’m Cinderella. But I still can’t touch the tiara on my apartment floor. I wait for the letter telling me Abby has died. It doesn’t come.

I wish . . .

And I realize how long it’s been since I’ve even done that. I used to have lots of wishes. But I never see myself in the tiara.

For the first time in ages, I sneak into the park after closing and go to the wishing well.

Leaning on the stone wall, my chin bends almost to my chest, and my shoulders slump with the weight of the world.

“I don’t know what to do.” I whisper, but even then my voice echoes. The stone carries it down to the thin layer of water pooling on the concrete at the bottom. The nights are getting cooler. I shiver. I should bring my coat, if I’m going to come out here. I should go back, go home. But what’s the point? I’d see that thing on my floor. I don’t want to see it ever again.

What else do I have? I take stock: what else can I ever do in this world that would measure up to what I’ve accomplished waving my magic wand, making wishes come true?

“What’s wrong?”

I look behind me, assuming someone has snuck up, emerging from shadows. Security, maybe. If I get caught, I’ll be fired. But no one’s there.

“I’m right here.”

The voice comes from the well. Androgynous, a soft contralto, echoing then dissipating. If I hadn’t been sitting right in this spot, I might not have heard it at all.

“Oh my God,” I murmur.

The wishing well chuckles. “Don’t sound so shocked.”

“But—” I close my eyes, shake my head. The well. Talking to me. That’s it, I’m crazy.

“I know who you are. What you’ve been doing. You aren’t really surprised at all.”

It’s right, of course. “If you know all that, then you know what’s wrong.”

“Yes,” it says. It might even sound a little sad.

I lean forward. “You know where it came from, don’t you? You know who gave it to me.”

“Yes.”

“I want to give it back. I have to give it back, find whoever gave it to me, wherever it came from, and give it back.” I grip the wall, urgency firing my nerves. I can solve the mystery. I can be free. “Tell me where that thing came from.”

It remains silent for so long, I start to think I’ve imagined it. The well doesn’t speak, it’s my own addled mind.

Then it says, “It came from me.”

I stare into the shadowed space. “You?”

“It’s the same magic, after all. Granting wishes.”

“Then I’ll bring it back, I’ll throw it in—”

“Don’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“It came from me, but it can’t come back. I didn’t give it to you.”

“Then who did?” My voice is taut, nearly hysterical.

“The girl who left it in your locker.”

It speaks in riddles. Of course it does. “I don’t understand.”

“The tiara came from me, but it’s been handed down ever since, for more than fifty years now. From girl to girl to girl. From Cinderellas to Snow Whites to Sleeping Beauties and back again.”

“But why? Why did it come to me? There’s a dozen other girls who play Cinderella.”

“But you believe.”

I come to the wishing well. Been doing it all along. I’m marked.

“Then . . . then I have to pass it along, if I don’t want it any more.”

However enigmatic the well is, it seems kind. A voice whispering through a cave on a breeze. “Yes. The wishes aren’t free, Maddie. Each one takes a little bit of you with it. You were never meant to sacrifice yourself for so long. I can even tell you who comes here to make wishes, who you can give it to next. Then you can replenish what you’ve given away.”

“How?”

“You have to remember your own dreams.”

So. Time to write a note, tie it to the tiara, and hide it in a locker. Find the person who believes like I do, who sneaks into the park at night to make wishes at the well. Pass the burden on to her. And when she puts the tiara on her head, will she see Abby’s aunt praying by the hospital bed, wishing away her own life? Will the next girl grant that wish?

“What’s your dream, Maddie?” the well breathes. A chill air rises from it.

I stare vacantly at the stones on the wall, concrete painted with fake lichens. “I don’t remember.”

“It’s not so hard to give the power up,” it says, sounding frustrated now. “Sara, who plays Snow White in the parades. Choose her.”

And while I wait, frozen, unable to decide, maybe Abby will die, taking the decision out of my hands. Then we, those of us still living, can all be miserable.

“It’s very cruel,” I say, “To grant someone power, then make sure it kills them.”

“But that’s the way of fairy tales.”

I push myself away from the wall. Travel the cobbled path around the castle, run from the sound of rustling leaves, and flee the park.

Can the princess who wears the tiara ever see herself?

I stand in front of my bathroom mirror and put it on.

The scene has changed, but only a little. Abby looks worse, if that’s possible. Her skin has a yellow cast to it, as if internal organs are in the process of failing. More tubes, more wires, more drip bags are attached to her. Her aunt Christine sits back in her chair, hugging a thick cardigan around her. Abby’s mother leans on the bedside, clinging to the girl’s hand.

The wish is still out there. I see it there, in the mirror in front of me. Mirror, mirror on the wall . . .

I touch the tiara, preparing to take it off again, knowing the well is right. This isn’t my decision to make. The tiara has spoken. But I don’t have to be the one to see it happen. Let Sara do that.

But I don’t take it off. Blinking, I can bring myself into focus. I study the image: a twenty-one-year-old college dropout with shadowed eyes and gaunt cheeks. I look like one of those girls who starves herself to be thin enough for Hollywood auditions. I haven’t realized I haven’t been eating. Short hair, bleached blond. Pale skin. A crown on my head, its gemstone sparkling. A princess in the midst of her worst challenge, before the happily ever after finds her.

But I can’t see that road before me anymore. I can’t see how my story ends. I only know three things, the fairy tale three: I don’t want Abby to die. I don’t want Christine to die. This power I wear on my head has to be good for something.

I close my eyes and see the hospital room. I hear Christine, wishing in her mind, Take me instead.

Granting a wish takes a piece of me, that was what the wishing well said. What do I have to give to grant a wish that saves a life? I look in the mirror again, see myself in the room, and think, with all the power of my life, No, take me.

Abby opens her eyes, and her gaze meets mine, sees me, just before I fall, and the world spins away.

Swing Time

He emerged suddenly from behind a potted shrub. Taking Madeline’s hand, he shouldered her bewildered former partner out of the way and turned her toward the hall where couples gathered for the next figure.

“Ned, fancy meeting you here.” Madeline deftly shifted so that her voluminous skirts were not trod upon.

“Fancy? You’re pleased to see me then?” he said, smiling his insufferably ironic smile.

“Amused is more accurate. You always amuse me.”

“How long has it been? Two, three hundred years? That volta in Florence, wasn’t it?”

“Si, signor. But only two weeks subjective.”

“Ah, yes.” He leaned close, to converse without being overheard. “I’ve been meaning to ask you: have you noticed anything strange on your last few expeditions?”

“Strange?”

“Any doorways you expected to be there not opening. Anyone following you and the like?”

“Just you, Ned.”

He chuckled flatly.

The orchestra’s strings played the opening strains of a Mozart piece. She curtseyed—low enough to allure, but not so low as to unnecessarily expose décolletage. Give a hint, not the secret. Lower the gaze for a demure moment only. Smile, tempt. Ned bowed, a gesture as practiced as hers. Clothed in white silk stockings and velvet breeches, one leg straightened as the other leg stepped back. He made a precise turn of his hand and never broke eye contact.

They raised their arms—their hands never quite touched—and began to dance. Elegant steps made graceful turns, a leisurely pace allowed her to study him. He wore dark green velvet trimmed with white and gold, sea spray of lace at the cuffs and collar. He wore a young man’s short wig powdered to perfection.

“I know why you’re here,” he said, when they stepped close enough for conversation. “You’re after Lady Petulant’s diamond brooch.”

“That would be telling.”

“I’ll bet you I take it first.”

“I’ll make that bet.”

“And whoever wins—”

Opening her fan with a jerk of her wrist, she looked over her shoulder. “Gets the diamond brooch.”

The figure of the dance wheeled her away and gave her to another partner, an old man whose wig was slipping over one ear. She curtseyed, kept one eye on Lady Petulant, holding court over a tray of bonbons and a rat-like lap dog, and the other on Ned.

With a few measures of dancing, a charge of power crept into Madeline’s bones, enough energy to take her anywhere: London 1590. New York 1950. There was power in dancing.

The song drew to a close. Madeline begged off the next, fanning herself and complaining of the heat. Drifting off in a rustle of satin, she moved to the empty chair near Lady Petulant.

“Is this seat taken?”

“Not at all,” the lady said. The diamond, large as a walnut, glittered against the peach-colored satin of her bodice.

“Lovely evening, isn’t it?”

“Quite.”

For the next fifteen minutes, Madeline engaged in harmless conversation, insinuating herself into Lady Petulant’s good graces. The lady was a widow, rich but no longer young. White powder caked the wrinkles of her face. Her fortune was entailed, bestowed upon her heirs and not a second husband, so no suitors paid her court. She was starved for attention.

So when Madeline stopped to chat with her, she was cheerful. When Ned appeared and gave greeting, she was ecstatic.

“I do believe I’ve found the ideal treat for your little dear,” he said, kneeling before her and offering a bite-sized pastry to the dog.

“Why, how thoughtful! Isn’t he a thoughtful gentleman, Frufru darling? Say thank you.” She lifted the creature’s paw and shook it at Ned. “You are too kind!”

Madeline glared at Ned, who winked back.

A servant passed with a silver tray of sweets. When he bowed to offer her one, she took the whole tray. “Marzipan, Lady Petulant?” she said, presenting the tray.

“No thank you, dear. Sticks to my teeth dreadfully.”

“Sherry, Lady Petulant?” Ned put forward a crystal glass which he’d got from God knew where.

“Thank you, that would be lovely.” Lady Petulant took the glass and sipped.

“I’m very sorry, Miss Madeline, but I don’t seem to have an extra glass to offer you.”

“That’s quite all right, sir. I’ve always found sherry to be rather too sweet. Unpalatable, really.”

“Is that so?”

“Hm.” She fanned.

And so it went, until the orchestra roused them with another chord. Lady Petulant gestured a gloved hand toward the open floor.

“You young people should dance. You make such a fine couple.”

“Pardon me?” Ned said.

Madeline fanned faster. “I couldn’t, really.”

“Nonsense. You two obviously know each other quite well. It would please me to watch you dance.”

Madeline’s gaze met Ned’s. She stared in silence, her wit failing her. She didn’t need another dance this evening, and she most certainly did not want to dance with him again.

Giving a little smile that supplanted the stricken look in his eyes, he stood and offered his hand. “I’m game. My lady?”

He’d thought of a plan, obviously. And if he drew her away from Lady Petulant—she would not give up that ground.

The tray of marzipan sat at the very edge of the table between their chairs. As she prepared to stand, she lifted her hand from the arm of her chair, gave her fan a downward flick—and the tray flipped. Miniature daisies and roses shaped in marzipan flew around them. Madeline shrieked, Lady Petulant gasped, the dog barked. Ned took a step back.

A ruckus of servants descended on them. As Madeline turned to avoid them, the dog jumped from Lady Petulant’s lap—for a brief moment, its neck seemed to grow to a foot long—and bit Madeline’s wrist. A spot of red welled through her white glove.

“Ow!” This shriek was genuine.

“Frufru!” Lady Petulant collected the creature and hugged it to her breast. “How very naughty of you, Frufru darling. My dear, are you all right?”

She rubbed her wrist. The blood stain didn’t grow any larger. It was just a scratch. It didn’t even hurt. “I’m—I—” Then again, if she played this right . . .

“I—oh my, I do believe I feel faint.” She put her hand to her neck and willed her face to blush. “Oh!”

She fell on Lady Petulant. With any luck, she crushed Frufru beneath her petticoats. Servants convulsed in a single panicked unit, onlookers gasped, even Ned was there, murmuring and patting her cheek with a cool hand.

Lady Petulant wailed that the poor girl was about to die on top of her. Pressed up against the good lady, Madeline took the opportunity to reach for the brooch. She could slip it off and no one would notice—

The brooch was already gone.

She did not have to feign a stunned limpness when a pair of gallant gentlemen lifted her and carried her to a chaise near a window. Ned was nowhere to be seen. Vials of smelling salts were thrust at her, lavender water sprinkled at her. Someone was wrapping her wrist—still gloved—in a bandage, and someone who looked like a doctor—good God, was the man wielding a razor?—approached.

She shoved away her devoted caretakers and tore off the bandage. “Please, give me air! I’ve recovered my senses. No, really, I have. If-you-please, sir!”

As if nothing had happened, she stood, straightened her bodice over her corset, smoothed her skirts, and opened her fan with a snap.

“I thank you for your attention, but I am quite recovered. Goodbye.”

She marched off in search of Ned.

He was waiting for her toward the back of the hall, a fox’s sly grin on his face. Before she came too close, he turned his cupped hand, showing her a walnut-sized diamond that flashed against the green velvet of his coat.

Turning, he stepped sideways behind the same potted fern where he had ambushed her.

He disappeared utterly.

“Damn him!” Her skirts rustled when she stamped her foot.

Ignoring concerned onlookers and Lady Petulant’s cries after her welfare, she cut across the hall to the glass doors opening to the courtyard behind the hall, and across the courtyard to a hideously baroque statue of Cupid trailing roses off its limbs. She stopped and took a breath, trying to regain her composure. No good brooding now. It was over and done. There would be other times and places to get back at him. Stepping through required calm.

A handful of doorways collected here in this hidden corner of the garden. One led to an alley in Prague 1600; tilting her head one way, she could just make out a dirty cobbled street and the bricks of a Renaissance façade. Another led to a space under a pier in Key West 1931. Yet another led home.

She danced for this moment; this moment existed because she danced.

Behind the statue Madeline turned her head, narrowed her eyes a certain practiced way, and the world shifted. Just a bit. She put out her hand to touch the crack that formed a line in the air. Confirming its existence, she stepped sideways and through the doorway, back to her room.

Her room: sealed in the back of a warehouse, it had no windows or doors. In it, she stored the plunder taken from a thousand years of history—what plunder she could carry, at least: Austrian crystal, Chinese porcelain, Aztec gold, and a walk-in closet filled with costumes spanning millennia.

She dropped her fan, pulled the pins out of her wig, unfastened her dress and unhooked her corset. Now that she could breathe, she paced and fumed at Ned properly.

She really ought to go someplace with a beach next time. Hawaii 1980, perhaps. Definitely someplace without corsets. Someplace like—

The band played Glenn Miller from a gymnasium stage with a USO banner draped overhead. There must have been a couple hundred G.I.s drinking punch, crowding along the walls, or dancing with a couple hundred local girls wearing bright dresses and big grins. Madeline only had to wait a moment before a G.I. in dress greens swept her up and spun her into the mob.

Of all periods of history, of all forms of dance, this was her favorite. Such exuberance, such abandon in a generation that saw the world change before its eyes. No ultra-precise curtseys and bows here.

Her soldier lifted her, she kicked her feet to the air and he brought her down, swung her to one side, to the other, and set her on the floor at last to Lindy hop and catch her breath. Her red skirt caught around her knees, and sweat matted her hair to her forehead.

Her partner was a good looking kid, probably nineteen or twenty, clean-faced and bright-eyed. Stuck in time, stuck with his fate—a ditch in France, most likely. Like a lamb to slaughter. It was like dancing a minuet in Paris in 1789, staring at a young nobleman’s neck and thinking, you poor chump.

She could try to warn him, but it wouldn’t change anything.

The kid swung her out, released her and she spun. The world went by in a haze and miraculously she didn’t collide with anyone.

When a hand grabbed hers, she stopped and found herself pulled into an embrace. Arm in arm, body to body, with Ned. Wearing green again. Arrogant as ever, he’d put captain bars on his uniform. He held her close, his hand pressed against the small of her back, and two-stepped her in place, hemmed in by the crowd. She couldn’t break away.

“Dance with me, honey. I ship out tomorrow and may be dead next week.”

“Not likely, Ned. Are you following me?”

“Now how would I manage that? I don’t even know when you live. So, what are you here for, the war bonds cash box?”

“Maybe I just like the music.”

As they fell into a rhythm, she relaxed in his grip. A dance was a dance after all, and if nothing else he was a good dancer.

“I didn’t thank you for helping me with Lady Petulant. Great distraction. We should be a team. We both have to dance to do what we do—it’s a perfect match.”

“I work alone.”

“You might think about it.”

“No. I tried working with someone once. His catalyst for stepping through was fighting. He liked to loot battlefields. All our times dancing ended in brawls.”

“What happened to him?”

“Somme 1916. He stayed a bit too long at that one.”

“Ah. I met a woman once whose catalyst was biting the heads off rats.”

“You’re joking! How on earth did she figure that out?”

“One shudders to think.”

The song ended, a slow one began, and a hundred couples locked together.

“So, how did you find me?” she asked.

“I know where you like to go.”

She frowned and looked aside, across his shoulder to a young couple clinging desperately to one another as they swayed in place.

“Tell me Ned, what were you before you learned to step through? Were you always a thief?”

“Yes. A highwayman and a rogue from the start. You?”

“I was a good girl.”

“So what changed?”

“The cops can’t catch me when I step through.”

“That doesn’t answer my question. If you were a good girl, why do you use stepping through to rob widows, and not to do good? Don’t tell me you’ve never tried changing anything. Find a door to the Ford Theater and take John Wilkes Booth’s gun.”

“It never works. You know that.”

“But history doesn’t notice when an old woman’s diamond disappears. So—what do you use the money you steal for? Do you give it to the war effort? The Red Cross? The Catholic Church? Do you have a poor family stashed away somewhere that you play fairy godmother to?”

She tried to pull away, but the beat of the music and the steps of the dance carried her on.

The song changed to something relentless and manic. She tried to break out of his grasp, to spin and hop like everyone else was doing, but he tightened his grip and kept her cheek to cheek.

“You don’t do any of those things,” she said.

“How do you know?”

He was right, of course. She only had his word for it when he said he was a rogue.

“What are you trying to say?”

He brought his lips close to her ear and purred. “You were never a good girl, Madeline.”

She slapped him, a nice crack across the cheek. He seemed genuinely stunned—he stopped cold in the middle of the dance and touched his face. A few bystanders laughed. Madeline turned, shoving her way off the dance floor, dodging feet and elbows.

She went all the way to the front doors before looking back. Ned wasn’t following her. She couldn’t see him at all, through the mob.

In the women’s room she found her doorway to Madrid 1880 where she’d stashed a gown and danced flamenco, then to a taverna in Havana 1902, and from there to her room. He wouldn’t possibly be able to follow that path.

Unbelievable, how out of a few thousand years of history available to them and countless millions of locations around the world, they kept running into each other.

Ned wore black. He had to, really, because they were at the dawn of the age of the tuxedo, and all the men wore black suits: black pressed trousers, jackets with tails, waistcoats, white cravats. Madeline rather liked the trend, because the women, in a hundred shades of rippling silk and shining jewels, glittered against the monotone backdrop.

Gowns here didn’t require the elaborate architecture they had during the previous three centuries. She wore a corset, but her skirt was not so wide as to prevent walking through doorways. The fabric, pleated and gathered in back, draped around her in slimming lines. She glided, tall and elegant as a Greek statue.

He hadn’t seen her yet. For once, she had the advantage. She watched behind the shelter of a neoclassical pillar. He moved like he’d been born to this dance. Perhaps he had. Every step made with confidence, he and his partner might have been the same unit as they turned, stepped, turned, not looking where they were going yet never missing a step. It always amazed her, how a hundred couples could circle a crowded ballroom like this and never collide.

He was smiling, his gaze locked on his partner’s the whole time. For a moment, Madeline wished she were dancing with him. Passing time had cooled her temper.

She’d already got what she came for, a few bits of original Tiffany jewelry. After a dance or two, she could open a door and leave. In a room this large, she could dance a turn and Ned would never have to know she’d been here.

But she waited until his steps brought him close to her. She moved into view, caught his gaze and smiled. He stumbled on the parquet.

He managed to recover without falling and without losing too much of his natural grace. “Madeline! I didn’t see you.”

“I know.”

He abandoned his partner—turned his back on her and went straight to Madeline. The woman glared after him with a mortally offended expression that Ned didn’t seem to notice.

“Been a while, eh?”

“Only a month, subjective.”

“So—what brings you here?”

“That’s my secret. I’ve learned my lesson about telling you anything. You?”

He looked around, surveying the ballroom, the orchestra on the stage, the swirl of couples dancing a pattern like an eddy in a stream. Each couple was independent, but all of them together moved as one entity, as if choreographed.

“Strauss,” he said at last. “Will you dance with me, Miss Madeline?”

He offered his hand, and she placed hers in it. They joined the pattern.

“Have you forgiven me for that comment from last time?”

“No,” Madeline said with a smile. “I’m waiting for the chance to return the favor.”

Step two three turn two three—

“Do you believe in fate?” Ned said.

“Fate? I suppose I have to, considering some of the things I’ve seen. Why do you ask?”

“It’s a wonderful thing, really. You see, we never should have met. I should have died before you were born—or vice versa, since I still don’t know when you’re from. But here we are.”

“That’s fate? I thought you were following me.”

“Ah yes.”

Madeline tilted her head back. Crystal chandeliers sparkled overhead, turning, turning. Ned didn’t take his eyes off her.

“Have you thought of why I might follow you?” he said.

“To reap the benefits of my hard work. I do the research and case the site, and you arrive to take the prize. It’s all very neat and I’d like you to stop.”

“I can’t do that, Madeline.”

“Why not? Isn’t there enough history for you to find your own hunting grounds without taking mine?”

“Because that isn’t the reason I’m following you. At least not anymore.” He paused. He wasn’t smiling, he wasn’t joking. “I think I’m in love with you.”

Her feet kept doing what they were supposed to do. The music kept them moving, which was good because her mind froze. “No,” she murmured.

“Will you give me a chance? A chance to show you?”

It was a trick. A new way to make a fool of her, and it was cruel. But she had never seen him so serious. His brow took on furrows.

She stopped dancing, and he had to stop with her, but he wouldn’t let go. There, stalled in the middle of the ballroom floor, the dance turned to chaos around them.

“No. I can’t love you back, Ned. We’re too much alike.”

For a long moment, a gentle strain of music, he studied her. His expression turned drawn and sad.

“Be careful, Madeline. Watch your back.” He kissed her hand, a gentle press of lips against her curled fingers, then let it go and walked off the dance floor, shouldering around couples as they passed.

He left her alone, lost, in the middle of the floor. She touched her hand where he had kissed it.

“Ned!” she called, the sound barely audible over the orchestra. “Ned!”

He didn’t turn around.

The song ended.

She left the floor, hitched up her skirt and ran everywhere, looking behind every door and every potted fern. But he was gone.

If Ned followed her, it stood to reason others could as well.

Her room had been trashed. The mirror over the vanity was shattered, chairs smashed, a dresser toppled. Powdered cosmetics dusted the wreckage. The wardrobe was thrown open, gowns and fabric torn and strewn like streamers over the furniture.

She didn’t have windows or doors precisely to keep this sort of thing from happening. There was only one way into the room—through a sideways door, and only if one knew just the right way to look through it. So how—

Someone grabbed her in a bear hug. Another figure appeared from behind her and pointed a bizarre vice-grip and hairbrush-looking tool at her in the unmistakable stance of holding a weapon. A third moved into view.

She squirmed in the grasp of the first, but he was at least a foot taller than she and he quickly worked to secure bindings around her arms and hands that left her immobile. All wore black militaristic suits, with goggles and metallic breathing masks hiding their features.

The third spoke, a male voice echoing mechanically through the mask. “Under Temporal Transit Authority Code forty-four A dash nine, I hereby take you into custody and charge you—”

“The what?” Madeline said with a gasp. Her captor wrenched her shoulders back. Any struggle she made now was merely out of principle. “Temporal Transit Authority? I’ve never heard of such a thing!”

“You’ve never stepped through to the twenty-second century, then.”

“No.” Traveling to one’s own future was tough—there was no record to study, no way to know what to expect. She’d had enough trouble with her past, she never expected the future to come back to haunt her.

“I hereby take you into custody and charge you with unregulated transportation along the recognized timeline, grand theft along the recognized timeline, historic fraud—”

“You can’t be serious—”

He held up a device, something like an electric razor with a glowing wand at one end and flashing lights at the other. He pressed a button and drew a line in the air. The line glowed, hanging in midair. He pressed another button, the line widened into a plane, a doorway through which a dim scene showed: pale tiled walls and steel tables.

He opened a door, he stepped through, and all he needed to do was push a button.

In that stunned moment, the two flunkies picked her up and carried her through.

They entered a hospital room and unloaded her onto a gurney. More figures appeared, doctors hiding behind medical scrubs, cloth masks, and clinical gazes. With practiced ease they strapped her face-down, wrists and legs bound with padded restraints. When she tried to struggle, a half-dozen hands pressed her into the thin mattress. Her ice-blue skirt was hitched up around her knees, wrinkling horribly.

“Don’t I get a lawyer? A phone call? Something?” She didn’t even know where or when she was. Who would she call?

A doctor spoke to the thug in charge. “Her catalyst?”

“Dancing.”

“I know just the thing. Nurse, prep a local anesthetic.”

Madeline tensed against her bindings. “What are you doing? What are you doing to me?”

“Don’t worry, we can reverse the procedure. If you’re found innocent at the trial.”

She lost track of how many people were in the room. A couple of the thugs, a couple of people in white who must have been nurses or orderlies. A couple who looked like doctors. Someone unbuttoned her shoes. Her silk stockings ripped.

Needle-pricks stabbed each foot, then pins of sleep traveled up her legs. She screamed. It was the only thing she could do. A hand pushed her face into the mattress. Her legs went numb up to her knees. She managed to turn her face, and through the awkward, foreshortened perspective she saw them make incisions above her heels, reach a thin scalpel into the wounds, and cut the Achilles’ tendons. There was no pain, but she felt the tissues snap inside her calves.

She screamed until her lungs hurt, until she passed out.

She awoke in a whitewashed cell, lying on a cot that was the room’s only furnishing. There was a door without a handle. She was no longer tied up, but both her ankles were neatly bandaged, and she couldn’t move her legs.

Gingerly sitting up, she unfastened the bodice of her gown, then released the first few hooks of her corset. She took a deep breath, arching her back. Her ribs and breasts were bruised from sleeping in the thing. Not to mention the manhandling she’d received.

She didn’t want to think about her legs.

Curling up on her side, she hugged her knees and cried.

She fell asleep, arms curled around her head. The light, a pale fluorescent filtering through a ceiling tile, stayed on. Her growling stomach told her that time passed. Once, the door opened and an orderly brought in a tray of food, leaving it on the floor by the bed. She didn’t eat. Another time, a female orderly brought in a contraption, a toilet seat and bedpan on wheels, and offered to help her use it. She screamed, batted and clawed at the woman until she left.

She pulled apart her elegant, piled coif—tangled now—and threw hairpins across the room.

When the door opened again, she had a few pins left to hurl at whomever entered. But it wasn’t an orderly, a doctor, or a thug.

It was Ned, still in his tails and cravat.

He closed the door to the thinnest crack and waited a moment, listening. Madeline clamped her hand over her mouth to keep from crying out to him.

Apparently satisfied, Ned came to the bed, knelt on the floor, and gathered her in an embrace.

“You look dreadful,” he said gently, holding her tightly.

She sobbed on his shoulder. “They cut my tendons, Ned. They cut my legs.”

“They’re bastards, Madeline,” he muttered, between meaningless noises of comfort.

Clutching the fabric of his jacket, she pushed him away suddenly. “Did they get you too? What did they do to you?” She looked him over, touched his face—nothing seemed wrong. “How did you get here?”

He gave her a lopsided smile. “I used to be one of the bastards.”

She edged away, pushing herself as far to the wall as she could. Ned, with his uncanny ability to follow her where and whenever she went. He didn’t move, didn’t try to stop her or grapple with her. She half expected him to.

“Used to be.” she said. “Not still?”

“No. It began as a research project, to study what people like me—like us—can do, and what that meant about the nature of space and time. But there were other interests at work. They developed artificial methods of finding doorways and stepping through. They don’t need us anymore and hate competition. The Temporal Transit Authority was set up to establish a monopoly over the whole business.”

“And you—just left? Or did you lead them to me?”

“Please, Madeline. I’m searching for a bit of redemption here. I followed you. I couldn’t stop following you. I knew they were looking for you. I found your place right after they did. I wish—I should have told you. Warned you a little better than I did.”

“Why didn’t you?” she said, her voice thin and desperate.

“I didn’t think you’d believe me. You’ve never trusted me. I’m sorry.”

No, she thought, remembering that last waltz, the music and his sad face and the way he disappeared. I’m sorry.

“You were following me all along. We didn’t meet by chance.”

“Oh no. It was chance. Fate. I didn’t know about you, wasn’t looking for you. But when I met you, I knew the Authority would find you sooner or later. I didn’t want them to find you.”

“But they did.”

“Once again I apologize for that. Now, we’re getting out of here.”

He started to pick her up, moving one arm to her legs and the other to her shoulders. She leaned away, pressing herself against the wall in an effort to put more distance between them.

“Please trust me,” he said.

Why should she believe anything he said? She didn’t know anything about him. Except that he was a marvelous dancer. And she needed to dance.

She put her arms around his neck and let him lift her.

“Come on, then.” He picked her up, cradling her in his arms. She clung to him. “Get the door, would you?”

She pulled the door open. He looked out. The corridor was empty. Softly, he made his way down the hall.

Then Ned froze. Voices echoed ahead of them, moving closer. Without a word, he turned and walked the other direction. If he had been able to run, he would have rounded the next corner before the owners of the voices saw him. But he held her, and he couldn’t do more than walk carefully.

Footsteps sounded behind him. She looked over his shoulder and saw a doctor flanked by a couple of orderlies enter the corridor.

“Hey! Stop there!” The doctor pointed and started running.

“All these bloody doors lock on the outside,” Ned muttered. “Here, open that one.”

She stared. The door had no handle, no visible hinges or latches. Ned hissed a breath of frustration and bumped a red light panel on the wall with his elbow. The door popped in with a little gasp of hydraulics.

He pushed through into what turned out to be a supply closet, about ten foot square, filled with shelves and boxes, and barely enough room to turn around. He set her on the floor and began pushing plastic tubs at the door. He soon had enough of a blockade to stop their pursuers from shoving through right away. He kept piling, though, while the people outside pounded on the door and shouted.

Madeline cowered on the floor, her legs stuck out awkwardly. “You can’t dance for both of us, and I’m too big for you to carry me through.”

“Yes.”

“You shouldn’t have come. Now you’re caught too.”

“But I’m with you,” he said, turning to her with the brightest, most sincere smile she had ever seen. “It makes all the difference.” He went back to throwing boxes on the stack.

She caught her breath and wondered what she’d have to do to see that smile again.

“Help me stand.” She hooked her fingers on a shelving post as far above her as she could reach and pulled. Grunting, she shifted her weight to try and get her feet under her.

“Madeline, good god what are you doing?”

“Standing. Help me.”

He went to her and pulled her arm over his shoulders, reaching his own arm around her waist. Slowly, he raised her. She straightened her legs, and her feet stayed where she put them.

There. She was standing. She clenched her jaw. Her calves were exploding with pain.

“Do you think there’s a door in here?” she said, her voice tight.

“There’re doors everywhere. But you can’t—”

“We have to.”

“But—”

“I can. Help me.”

He sighed, adjusting his grip so he supported her more firmly. “Right. What should we dance?”

She took a breath, cleared her mind so she could think of a song. She couldn’t even tap her toe to keep a beat. She began humming. The song sounded out of tune and hopeless in her ears.

“Ravel. ‘Pavane for a Dead Princess,’” Ned said. “Come on, dear, you’re not done yet. One and two and—”

She held her breath and moved her right leg. It did move, the foot dragging, and she leaned heavily on Ned because she didn’t dare put any weight on it. Then the left foot. She whimpered a little. Ned was right behind her, stepping with her.

The pavane had the simplest steps she could think of. At its most basic, it was little more than walking very slowly—perfect for a crippled dancer. It was also one of the most graceful, stately, elegant dances ever invented. Not this time. She couldn’t trust her legs. She dragged them forward and hoped they went where they needed to be. Ned wasn’t so much dancing with her as lurching, ensuring she stayed upright.

There was a kind of power, even in this: bodies moving in desperation.

She tried to keep humming, but her voice jerked, pain-filled, at every step. They hummed together, his voice steadying her as his body did.

Then came a turn. She attempted it—a dance was a dance, after all. Put the left foot a little to the side, step out—

Her leg collapsed. She cried out, cutting the sound off mid-breath. Ned caught her around the waist and leaned her against the shelving. This gave her something to sit on, a little support.

Without missing a beat, he took her hand and stepped a half-circle around her. He held her hand lightly, elevated somewhat, and tucked his other hand behind his back. Perfect form.

“This just doesn’t feel right if I’m not wearing a ruff,” he said, donning a pompous, aristocratic accent.

Hiccupping around stifled tears, she giggled. “But I like being able to see your neck. It’s a handsome neck.”

“Right, onto the age of disco then.”

The banging on the door was loud, insistent, like they’d started using a battering ram, and provided something of a beat. The barricade began to tumble.

“And so we finish.” He bowed deeply.

She started to dip into a curtsey—just the tiniest of curtsies—but Ned caught her and lifted her.

“I think we’re ready.”

She narrowed her eyes and looked a little bit sideways.

Space and time made patterns, the architecture of the universe, and the lines crossed everywhere, cutting through the very air. Sometimes, someone had a talent that let them see the lines and use them.

“There,” Ned said. “That one. A couple of disheveled Edwardians won’t look so out of place there. Do you see it?”

“Yes,” she said, relieved. A glowing line cut before them, and if they stepped a little bit sideways—

She put out her hand and opened the door so they could step through together.

* * *

Lady Petulant’s diamond paid for reconstructive surgery at the best unregistered clinic in Tokyo 2028. Madeline walked out the door and into the alley, where Ned was waiting for her. Laughing, she jumped at him and swung him around in a couple of steps of a haphazard polka.

“Glad to see you’re feeling better,” he said. And there was that smile again.

“Polycarbon filament tissue replacement. I have the strongest tendons in the world now.”

They walked out to the street—searching the crowd of pedestrians, always looking over their shoulders.

“Where would you like to go?” he said.

“I don’t know. It’s not so easy to pick, now that we’re fugitives. Those guys could be anywhere.”

“But we have lots of places to hide. We just have to keep moving.”

They walked for a time along a chaotic street, nothing like a ballroom, the noises nothing like music. The Transit Authority people knew they had to dance; if they were really going to hide, it would be in places like this, where dancing was next to impossible.

But they couldn’t do that, could they?

Finally, Ned said, “We could go watch Rome burn. And fiddle.”

“Hm. I’d like to find a door to the Glen Island Casino. 1939.”

“Glenn Miller played there, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“We could find one, I think.”

“If we have to keep moving anyway, we’ll hit on it eventually.”

He took her hand, pulled her close and pressed his other hand against the small of her back. Ignoring the tuneless crowd, he danced with her.

“Lead on, my dear.”

The Librarian’s Daughter

The prophet stood in a marble chamber of the great palace and broke a princess’s heart by telling her what she already knew, but with an authority she couldn’t deny. The prophet, called the Dreamer, wrapped the coat of a spotted horse tight around herself, the head with its gaping eye holes pulled over her face like a hood. Even so long after the mare’s death the skin smelled like a slaughterhouse, bloody and wet. It had belonged to a dear friend, though, so the Dreamer hugged it close. The mare whispered dreams to her, and she became a prophet.

“Two paths lie before you. In one, you marry for political reasons a man you have never seen. The union brings peace to two warring kingdoms. You will be known as the Just, and history will remember you kindly, as it has not remembered many of your ancestors. But you will always carry regret in your heart.”

The Dreamer’s blood rushed hot, her skin flushed, the horse’s coat grew sticky with her sweat. She held its legs twined around her arms, the bulk of it wrapped around her body. Its weight bent her shoulders. She gazed around the chamber with eyes that were not her own.

“In the other, you marry your true love.” She nodded to the man who stood beside the princess, a distant cousin who had wooed her and won her heart. They clung to each other like vines. “War follows. Ambition. Pride. Strife. You sometimes ask yourself, did he marry you for love or for your throne? But your nights together are sweet until the end.”

The man lunged two great strides, breaking from the princess, who tried to hold him back. Anger made his skin red, and he snarled.

“How dare you? How dare you speak so to the Royal House?”

The spell broke, the air turned cool. The Dreamer took a deep breath, smelling leather now instead of death. The prophecy had ended. She bowed deeply to the royals but did not remove the horse skin cloak.

“Her Highness asked the fortune of her marriage told.”

He wanted to hurt her, she could tell by the way his hands clenched and his body trembled. But he did not dare because she was the Dreamer and no one dared touch her. She had faced kings and emperors more powerful than this whelp and had not flinched.

The princess, a charming girl of eighteen with black hair and cream skin, held her face in her hands. Every monarch confronted these paths: the well-being of their people or the gratification of their own desires. Which would she chose? This was no longer a vague, academic question; her father the king was gravely ill. The Dreamer’s vision had forced the choice on her at last.

“Darling, don’t listen to her.” The beloved tried to laugh, a harsh sound in the room’s stillness. “What is prophecy? We will prove her wrong!”

“Be quiet,” the princess said.

The Dreamer bowed again. “I will take my leave now.”

“Thank you, Dreamer.” The princess sat straight, rigid in her velvet throne. Her eyes dry, she nodded graciously at the Dreamer and did not glance at her princely cousin. She looked as though she had made a decision. Her lover’s violent reaction to the prophecy may have made the choice for her. “Will you stay with us this night? There will be a small feast.”

Her small feast could feed a poor village for a year. Roast peacock, puddings, sugary sauces and brandied fruits; a warm night in a feather bed. They always invited her to stay for the feast, no matter how dire her predictions.

“Thank you, Your Highness, but no. The road calls me.”

The Dreamer left the marble chamber, the palace, and found the road leading out of the kingdom. The princess’s grandchildren would hear stories of this day.

Out of sight of the palace, she stopped, folded Falla’s skin, magically tanned and cured, and tucked it deep in her rucksack. Also in the sack: a change of clothes—skirt, shirt, tunic, and stockings; a wool blanket for sleeping; a water skin and some travel fare; and a book of poetry and ballads, a last gift from her father. She loved books.

She walked with the sack over her shoulder and a straw hat on her head, and became a common traveler, a scholar on the road between libraries. The librarian’s daughter.

Years ago, when she still lived with her father, a librarian to the King of a now distant realm, Elsa used to sneak into the royal stables after supper to feed carrots to the horses. She went in the evenings, when the place was quiet, after the animals had been fed and the grooms were away eating their own suppers. The grooms didn’t like her disturbing the royals steeds.

Her favorite was the spotted mare, the familiar of the King’s Wizard. She looked like a court jester, brown spots of all shapes and sizes splashed over her white coat. After the first time Elsa gave her a carrot, Falla always waited for her, head leaned as far out over the door to her stall as she could manage. After such a greeting, how could Elsa stay away? Falla let Elsa scratch her neck, her ears, the spot between her ears, where she couldn’t scratch herself. The mare sighed and let her lips quiver with pleasure. When Elsa looked into the mare’s large dark eyes, to try and learn what the animal was thinking, Falla rested her muzzle on Elsa’s shoulder and breathed warm air on her neck. And Elsa, tears in her eyes, thought: How wonderful to have this large, warm creature trust me.

For ten years now, since she was fifteen, Elsa traveled where the roads led her and did not mind the way. She appeared at the front gates of castles, palaces, cathedrals and guild halls when she was needed, as if she’d been called. Sometimes, messengers on winded horses found her, begged her to come with them even as they panted for breath. Life or death might depend on the dreams she had when she wore Falla’s skin.

Sometimes, though, she lived for herself. She went to Brewersville for its festival because she wanted a mug of fresh cider.

Anonymously, she bought her mug from a vendor set up with a dozen other tents and stalls in the large field outside the town. Musicians played, local folk who brought out their instruments perhaps twice a year, but made twice as merry because of that. In the center of the ring of wood and canvas merchant stalls, a crowd danced the ground to dust. She took her cider to a quiet spot, a tree with a view of the crowd but outside the paths of travel, outside notice. She sat with her back to its trunk, her pack at her feet, and rested.

She had begun to find it difficult to talk to people.

She would go the whole day without speaking to another soul, except to say thanks to the folk who sold her food and drink. She’d leave the town before nightfall, sleep on the open road, far from people. The music drew her, but she couldn’t bring herself to join the dance. She wasn’t sure she could open her mouth without prophesying, even to laugh with the crowd.

“A pretty girl like you should be smiling on a festival day.”

The figure spoke as he moved to block her view of the field. He might have stepped out of a ballad in the book, he looked so much the part of a rogue. Young, he had just a shadow of a beard and short, dark hair, a firm jaw and cocky half-grin. Worn leather boots contrasted with fine leather breeches dyed gray, and a leather jerkin opened over a loose linen shirt. He wore a knife at his belt, a pouch over his shoulder, and stood with his arms crossed, considering her.

Dumbly, she stared. She stood apart, a seeress, a legend, and she had long since stopped thinking of herself as anything like pretty.

“Tell me, what is the matter?”

She had to remember words and took a deep breath before speaking. “Thinking dark thoughts, I suppose.”

“May I join you?”

“In thinking dark thoughts? How could I stop you?”

He sat beside her in the grass.

“I am Conrad. You are?”

Being flirted at, and the novelty of it startled her. “Elsa.”

“Elsa. Very good to meet you.”

She didn’t have a clue what to say next. She’d spent her childhood in libraries and her young adulthood wandering at the whim of a haunted horse skin.

He rescued her from a confused silence. “Will you dance with me?”

She grinned at him like he’d sprouted mule’s ears. “Do young men always come right up to women and ask them to dance?”

“Yes, they do. You must be from a strange kingdom, if you’ve never before been asked to dance.”

The kingdom Elsa came from was not much different than this one, which was part of the reason she’d stopped here to rest. But the road between this one and that was a long one, and she frowned thinking of it.

Sensing the change in her mood, Conrad urged more gently. “Come, dance. Just a round or two. It will distract you from your troubles, whatever they are.”

He stood with a noble flourish, bowing as he offered his hand. His eyes were alight. His smile seemed honest. Elsa took his hand, and suddenly could not remember the last time she’d touched another living creature. She’d missed the warmth, the blood.

She danced until her heart pounded. Arms flung, legs working, bow and turn, circle with another couple, and there Conrad was to take her hand again and lead her back to the start. His gaze never left her, and she only had to see his face again to smile. Bow, cross, turn, bow again, her skirt swept behind her, the musicians quickened the beat, and she kept pace until she thought she’d trip and fall.

In one movement, a couple would touch hands briefly as they crossed to the other side of the line. It was meant to be tantalizing, a moment of flirtation, of seduction. The music lingered at the step, as though to tempt. Once, after Elsa had lost count of the rounds, she and Conrad came to this step. Instead of the touch, he picked her up. Took her by her waist, lifted her, held her close so their bodies pressed together, then he set her in her new place in the dance with a touch to her cheek. This audacity wasn’t unheard of, it had happened before—when a man had a particular fancy for the girl he danced with.

The musicians stopped for rest and drink, and the dancers paused to catch their breaths. Conrad kept Elsa by his side by holding her hand.

This wasn’t meant to happen to her. She walked in gray spaces.

And he—perhaps he really was a rogue from a legend. Perhaps that was why he’d found her, legend to legend.

“You’re a thief,” she said.

He grinned a sly fox grin. “Why do you say that?”

“You’ve got that air about you. You’re famous for it, I imagine.” By this time she had some experience with legends and thought she was right. In the stories about highwaymen and professional scoundrels, when such men weren’t utterly reprehensible, they were handsome and dashing. They swept girls off their feet. Stories were true sometimes, Elsa knew that very well.

She touched his cheek, ran her hand on the stubble. He felt warm, rough, giving.

He took her hands and pressed a coin into them. “We’re both thirsty. Buy us a flask of wine. I’ll be waiting where we left our packs.” He kissed her cheek and smiled.

The head groom warned her that the Wizard would not like her playing with Falla. But Elsa kept on, because it was so clear the mare longed for such attention. For her part, Elsa didn’t like the Wizard. He wore black leather armor, rings in his ears, and he scowled and cursed. When he had to consult with her father, the librarian and great scholar, the Wizard treated him like a common servant. Even the King was a little afraid of him. He was powerful. He had called rain from blue sky, had changed lead to gold. He rode out on his spotted mare to slay dragons and returned with the horns of the beasts slung on his saddle, the mare prancing with pride.

He was kind enough to Falla in his own way, petting her, speaking to her. But he never fed her carrots or scratched her ears. Nonetheless, Falla kept close by him, whenever he was near. Elsa’s father said Falla was his familiar, and his magic was bound to her, or came through her. But Elsa didn’t think the Wizard loved the mare.

Elsa didn’t go to buy the wine. She went away from Conrad, toward the market stalls and out of his sight. Then she slipped between a bread merchant’s stand and a fruit seller’s and went around back, made her quiet way to the copse at the edge of the market, and found a view of the tree, a strong oak that guarded the market square, where they’d left their packs together.

And there he was, crouched by her pack, searching inside it.

She stepped from her hiding place and went to him. “You are a thief. I knew it,” she said, smiling. She wasn’t angry. She had no valuables except the book, and she could see why a well-stuffed bag like hers would attract attention.

He hardly noticed her. He didn’t flinch with surprise or even glance up at her approach. Stricken, he was staring at something he’d found in her pack. He said, “And you’re the Dreamer. The prophet. Here’s the spotted horse’s coat the tales speak of. You’re her.”

She sat with him. When she moved to touch his shoulder, he cringed. He pushed himself away from her and the pack, propping himself against the tree trunk.

“What of it?” she said, a bit sadly. With him, she had almost felt normal, just a girl at a market dance.

“I never expected—I didn’t think to find—” He stared at her pack with the blank, shocked expression of someone to whom she’d just delivered a prophecy. Good or bad, they never knew what to do with her visions.

“You flirted with me just to distract me and steal from me.”

He huffed at her disbelieving tone. “It is a common enough strategy, milady. All the better when the woman’s pretty.”

The musicians were playing again, but their music sounded distant, and Elsa felt as though she heard the laughter of the townsfolk through the haze of sleep. Sun scattered flecks of light through the tree branches; their place here was shaded and separate. A breeze made the leaves rustle.

“You really think I’m pretty?”

He laughed a little and wouldn’t look at her. “You’re not supposed to be here, part of the world with the rest of us.” He made it sound like she’d done something wrong, being here with him and pretty as well.

“And what of you? You’re a famous highwayman, I know it.” He had to be, a dashing thief, a flirting rogue. “Tell me which one. The Raptor? Oslo of Pinnace? Robin of the Greenwood?” All were stories in her father’s book.

“No, none of that. I’m just a common thief, milady.”

“Don’t call me that. I’m Elsa, a librarian’s daughter. And no one has ever before called me pretty.”

“It’s no doubt hard to tell, with that horse skin pulled over your face.” She barely heard him, he spoke so softly, his face turned away.

Elsa had a daydream that she made up herself and had nothing to do with prophecy. In it, she buried Falla’s coat in a dark wood and never chanted visions again. But the story always got away from her, and instead of living free, she was pursued by Falla’s voice, which cried after her not to abandon her.

“You’re frightened of me,” she said. “Why don’t you run away? Doesn’t the Dreamer’s wrath frighten you?”

“It should. But you—you don’t seem very much like the seeress in the stories. You—you’re young. Alive.”

And the stories were old and dead. “I’m not the Dreamer, when I’m not wearing the skin. I’m just a girl. A librarian’s daughter.”

“I saw the book.”

“It was my father’s.”

They sat together quietly, Elsa thinking all the while that he’d leave her at any moment.

Instead, he asked, “How did this happen? That isn’t part of the stories, how you came to wear the horse’s skin. How did a girl like you become the Dreamer?”

If she told him the story, he would only become more horrified. It wasn’t a story for telling, without the filter of decades of legend. She wanted to talk to him, though, and wanted him to talk to her. She wanted to tell him something that would keep him here, talking to her. She did not know when she would have a chance to touch another living being again.

“The horse was magic, and when she died she called to me. It’s hard to explain.” She wasn’t used to talking; her words faltered. She shook her head, swallowed, and spoke again. “How does a man become a famous thief?”

“I tell you once and for all, I am common. Nameless.”

If she wouldn’t tell her story, she couldn’t expect him to tell his. After this, they had sat so long in an uncomfortable silence, she thought he’d surely leave her now. But he didn’t. He stayed. He was even watching her.

“Elsa the Prophet. Can you tell me my future?”

“You probably wouldn’t like it. People usually don’t, especially when they ask for it.”

“What do you do, to learn someone’s future?”

“I sleep a night wearing the skin. I dream the answer, and the next morning tell the person.”

“Spend a night with me, Elsa. Tell me my future in the morning.”

Falla wouldn’t like it. Elsa could almost hear the mare chiding. This was selfish, the dreaming turned into a parlor trick. If the dream were terrible, none of them would be happy. But to spend a night with Conrad—she would dream what she had to.

She knelt beside him. He touched her cheek, then kissed her, slowly and gently. It was lovely.

They found a hidden place in the woods outside the town. They stripped each other, quickly and desperately, as though afraid of interruption or afraid this wasn’t real. Cool air chilled their skin, making every touch that much warmer. Elsa didn’t think to open her eyes to look. They made love on her wool blanket, spread on the ground under a thicket. When Conrad lay back, spent, she crawled on top of him, bit his ear and whispered, “Again.” He said, “Yes,” and they did.

When they finished, Elsa move a little way away, leaving him to the wool blanket. She took the spotted horse skin from her pack and wrapped it tight around her. Silent, Conrad watched as she curled up to fall asleep and dream.

She never dreamed for herself. Others asked her to wear the skin, and she did so because the skin demanded it. Tonight, the skin was reluctant.

Tell me about Conrad.

I cannot tell you, Falla said, her voice like the rustle of hay.

Even dead, she smelled of horse: warm hair, hay, and dust. In memory, Elsa felt her breath and heard her nostrils snorting.

Why not? Is he wicked? Is there a mystery surrounding him? If he is common as he says, then so is his future. Why not tell me?

Do not ask me this.

I have served you for ten years, why can’t you answer me now? Is it because I like him?

It will hurt you to hear this. I do not wish to hurt you.

Falla was her friend, despite all that had happened, despite the fact her devotion to Falla made Elsa something other than human. Elsa used to hang on Falla’s stall door and wonder what the mare would say if she could talk. If she had known then, what the mare would say—I do not wish to hurt you—Elsa would have cried with happiness, because this meant that Falla loved her as much as she loved Falla. But love caused pain as well as joy.

Tell me his fate, Falla. I must know.

You are sure?

Yes!

You cannot save him. You will stand watching, his fate in your hands, and you will do nothing. Is that what you wished to hear?

Elsa cried, because Falla spoke truth, always. Falla, Falla, I can’t do this anymore.

Hush, dear friend. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

Once more, Elsa felt her soft muzzle against her hands, and Falla’s dark eyes gazed at her.

The first time she put on Falla’s skin, it was still wet with flesh and blood.

One day, the King needed a prophecy, and the Wizard worked his most powerful spell. But the spell failed, the prophecy did not come. It was a black day, as the Wizard stormed out of his workroom and the King despaired of overcoming his troubles. Folk everywhere wondered how the great Wizard could have failed.

Spying, the librarian’s daughter discovered the truth. She first went to the stables, to see Falla, but the Wizard’s familiar wasn’t in her stall. With a pounding heart, she went next to the Wizard’s tower, which was empty, because the Wizard was in the great hall, arguing with the King. By the front door to the tower, she found stairs leading down to the cellar.

There, the Wizard had sacrificed his familiar to raise power for the spell. The girl found the horse dead, her belly sliced open, her guts spilled over the floor, a slick mass of intestines and organs that made no pattern and offered no portents. She had been a noble animal, and the girl cried at the injustice of it. In her grief, a power took her. With the Wizard’s own sacrificial dagger, lying abandoned on the stone floor, she skinned the horse. She took the bloody skin to the great hall where the King pleaded with the Wizard to try again and the Wizard insisted such a prophecy was impossible. Wearing the skin wrapped tight around her, she delivered the prophecy that the King sought. “Betrayal! This is a Wizard who will slay his dearest servant for power. This is a Wizard who will covet his King’s throne!”

The Wizard denied it, the King disbelieved it, and the librarian pleaded for his daughter’s life, which the Wizard threatened to take. The King granted the librarian’s request, because while he did not understand the magic, he could see the girl was helpless in its grip. As she fainted, her father carried her home from the great hall. They both cried a bit, and he helped her run away, into exile. A year later, the King died of a mysterious creeping illness, and the Wizard took the reins of power before chaos could disrupt the kingdom.

The next morning, she awoke, naked and tangled in the legs and neck of Falla’s coat, a fringe of white mane tickling her nose. Conrad still slept nearby. She lay still and watched him until he stirred.

When he opened his eyes, looked at her, and smiled, her heart beat faster.

He could be a friend, she thought to Falla. My only other friend beside you.

Do not fall in love. Your fate won’t allow it.

I know, Falla. I know.

Elsa and Conrad sat and faced each other, Elsa wearing the mare’s skin, Conrad wrapped in the wool blanket.

“Well?” he said.

She lowered her gaze. “I didn’t dream. Your future isn’t for me to know.”

He gave his fox-sly smile, a joyless expression. “You’re lying. You cried in your sleep. Thrashed like you were having nightmares. You must have dreamed something terrible.”

Tears pricked her eyes. Sometimes, as with the princess and her marriage, she dreamed paths as clear as plate glass windows. Other times, like last night, the dreams were murky, little more than emotions and terror, which Elsa had to express. Conveying them meant reliving them.

“Tell me,” he said. “I’m not afraid.”

She quelled her own fear and spoke softly. “I dreamed of betrayal.”

He considered that, his expression falling to a frown. “Am I the betrayer or the betrayed? Whose betrayal?”

“Mine,” said Elsa.

After a long moment watching her, he pursed his lips and nodded, content to live with the enigma of prophecy. “Then I should leave, I suppose. If we are not near each other, we can’t betray each other.”

The princess’s cousin thought he could escape prophecy, too. Perhaps Conrad could actually succeed. She watched him dress, still wishing he was a famous rogue. Then perhaps his own legend would save him from hers.

He straightened his cuffs, fastened the last straps on his boots, and took up his pack. “Well then, I’m off.”

So that was that. “Where are you going?”

“I don’t know. About.” He paused and bent for a last kiss, dry and warm. His smile was bright, genuine. Perhaps he’d remember her. “God bless you and your hard path, Dreamer.”

Elsa dressed, packed her blankets, and started on her way more slowly. It was almost midday when she returned to Brewersville and saw a crowd gathered by the oak at the edge of the market. No musicians played today. She pushed through to the front to see what had happened.

The town constable was about to hang a man from the tree. The condemned man—barefoot, stripped to his waist and wearing ragged, third-hand trousers, stood on a stool with his hands bound behind his back. The noose around his neck was tied to a sturdy branch.

The man was Conrad, his expression slack, his gaze staring forward at nothing.

“That man,” she said to a laborer beside her. “What’s he done?”

“He’s a thief.”

Elsa still carried hopes. “A famous one? A highwayman or a rogue or such?”

“No,” the man said. “Just a common thief. Got caught this morning cutting the mayor’s purse.”

Then he saw her. He hadn’t seemed to be looking at anything, but his gaze found her. A look of such tenderness, such regret passed over his face. Like he would have kissed her right then, if he could have.

She knew what to do.

She knelt and pulled at the tie that fastened closed her pack.

When she wore the spotted horse’s skin, she became the Dreamer, and her words were prophecy. He will be a hero! Free him and he will lead your armies to victory! He is a savior! She could say these things and make a grand story, how the Dreamer snatched the rogue from the maw of death.

But you’d be lying.

Yes, she would. Conrad wasn’t a hero. But if she could make him one, if she could inspire him . . . He could make this prophecy true, after the fact.

If you use me for a lie, I will never speak to you again.

So. She could save Conrad, or she could be the Dreamer, but not both. She thought she wanted that, to leave Falla and never hear her speak again. Falla, who had rested her muzzle on Elsa’s shoulder with trust and love. So because she had known Falla for half her life, and Conrad for only a day, the choice was not as hard as she wanted it to be.

The story was so much larger than she.

The hardest thing was to leave her pack closed, to stand while he watched. Seeing this, he must have known what she had thought of, and what she’d decided not to do.

She hoped he understood why she couldn’t help. But he probably thought she was being cruel, and that was probably the thought he died with. The constable kicked the stool away and Conrad hanged. Elsa shut her eyes, but heard the crowd gasp and the rope creak as it swung with its weight.

Conrad or Falla, but not both. She’d have liked to have Conrad as a friend, but Falla was the only friend she knew.

The crowd dispersed but the body stayed hanging to serve as a warning. Elsa lingered, chasing away crows and stray dogs that came too near. She wanted him whole.

Late at night, when the town was asleep and no one would come near the gallows tree, she retrieved the stool and stood on it to cut him down, using the Wizard’s sacrificial knife. She hefted the body over her shoulders and took him to the woods to do the rest.

The first time she put on his skin, it was still wet with flesh and blood.

The Bravest of Us Touched the Sky

Evie curled up on the chairs in the ready room at the landing field. I sat with my head against the wall, my legs stretched out and propped on my B-4 bag. The place was empty except for us, the field quiet after a day full of roaring engines.

We had just ferried a B-26 bomber to Harlingen Army Airfield in the far south of nowhere Texas. It was late, so we had to wait until morning to catch the bus to Corpus Christi, where we could find a train back to New Castle in Delaware. WASP weren’t allowed to hitch rides on Army planes with male pilots—just didn’t look right, according to the powers that be.

I had started to doze when the door opened and two military types walked in. One wore a flight suit and bomber jacket without rank markings or insignia. The other was an Army colonel. He looked like he’d stepped straight out of a war bonds poster. He’d say, “I need you,” and you’d say, “Yes sir.” He was tall, broad through the shoulders, and fit. He could probably still make it through Basic—couldn’t say that about a lot of colonels.

I shook Evie awake. She rubbed her eyes as the men stopped in front of us.

“You two are WASP?” the colonel said, before we could stand.

What else would two women wearing flight suits be doing at an Army air field? I nodded and answered more politely, “Yes, sir. I’m Jane Bateson, this is Evelyn Harris.”

“Colonel Avery. Doctor Cook. Army Intelligence.” The colonel tipped his head at the man in the flight suit, who shoved his hands in the pockets of his jacket and shrugged. “Do you girls feel up to ferrying a B-26 to Wright Field tonight?”

Evie’s eyes sparkled; she was already nodding. Never turn down a chance to fly, you didn’t know when they’d ask again.

“Fuel will be tight,” I said. “But sure, we can fly it.”

“You are experienced with this craft?” Doctor Cook asked. He didn’t look much like a doctor, couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or so, skinny as a whip, uncomfortable in the flight gear. He wore glasses.

I crossed my arms and drew myself straighter. “I graduated with the first WFTD class at Ellington Field. I had a thousand flight hours before that. You know the B-26 that came in this afternoon? Evie and I flew it. We can fly your plane.” Some pilots called the B-26 the Widowmaker. A tough plane to fly, it was fast and hot and took a sensitive hand.

My act cowed most fly boys. Cook shook his head, oblivious. “But this isn’t a standard B-26. It’s had—modifications.” Colonel Avery gave him a sharp look.

My eyes narrowed. “We don’t normally receive our orders from Army Intelligence.”

“Miss Bateson, let me be frank. Cook is right, this plane isn’t standard. What’s been done to it is highly classified. Highly classified. Don’t misunderstand me, you can still fly it. In fact, you two are the only pilots available who are checked out on the B-26. And this plane needs to get to Wright Field as soon as possible.”

Evie was still nodding. If it had wings and an engine, she’d fly it.

“All right,” I said. “Show us the plane.”

The four of us walked out of the building to the hangars on the far side of the strip.

Avery said, “This is an unusual situation. The security clearance is of the highest order. If you speak of this to anyone, I’ll have you court-martialed so fast—”

“No you won’t, sir,” I said.

“What?”

“WASP are a civilian auxiliary. You can’t court-martial us.”

That only broke his rhythm for a second. “Then I’ll have you up on treason charges so fast your head will spin. I don’t expect you to understand what you’re about to see. Just get the damn thing to Wright Field. Understand? Cook will ride along, he’s one of the head scientists on this project.”

My mind turned over the possibilities. Had the bomber been mounted with a new kind of weapon? A new kind of engine? I’d heard they were working on new instruments that could see in the dark or through fog.

“What are you a doctor of?” I asked Cook. It was a subtle enough question to fish for a clue.

“Psychology.”

I couldn’t imagine what they had done to this plane.

We entered the last hangar through the side door.

The B-26 Marauder was a sleek plane, bullet-like, powerful. It seemed to crouch, waiting to spring into flight. It had two wing-mounted engines with propellers as tall as I was. The cockpit canopy perched up top; a gunner would sit in a plexiglass bubble at the nose.

I saw the bomber, alone on the concrete pad, before Avery hit the switch to illuminate the bank of lights. It glowed, a beacon in the dark. Colors played on it, reds flashing into purple, fading to blue, like some kind of Technicolor test on a movie screen. Rainbow bands traveled around the fuselage, bending with the curves of the plane, swirling, dancing, emitting light that pulsed with the rhythm of a heartbeat. The hangar lights didn’t diminish the patterns at all.

“What is it?” Evie said with a sigh. “Some kind of phosphorescence?”

Cook shuffled a little, shrugging his shoulders nearly to his ears. “Well, we—ah, don’t precisely know. That’s part of the problem.”

Evie moved toward the plane, stepping cautiously at first, then quickening her pace when the men didn’t stop her. By the fuselage, she reached up and touched the metal. Rose colored circles rippled from her hand along the belly of the plane. She laughed a little. “It’s incredible.”

“It’s not camouflage,” I said. “Are you trying to make sure the Germans can’t miss?”

“You’re not flying it to Germany,” Avery said. “Don’t ask so many questions.” Avery was one of those young hot shots, thirty-five or so, being groomed for four-star and a Chief-of-Something post. He gestured, walked, and spoke at double-time.

“You say it flies just fine?” I circled the plane, keeping my distance, unwilling to get too close. Did I hear it humming?

“Yes,” Avery said. “Practically flies itself.”

“I’ve never heard anyone say that about the B-26, Colonel,” I said.

He joined me. Side by side, we both stood with our arms crossed, staring at the bomber. Its aurora played over our faces—ribbons of purple, yellow, green. The colonel’s skin reflected the colors. Even he wore an expression of wonder, his lips parted.

“This war has produced some strange things.” He shook his head a little. “Strange ideas. Gadgets we only dreamed of five years ago. Right off the cover of a comic book. Ray guns, smart machines. The world is changing, Miss Bateson. This war is changing it.”

I did a careful walk around, taking twice as long as I normally did. It looked like a normal B-26. Tires filled, landing gear in good shape, no leaks. Its weapons had been stripped. Only the strange glowing metal didn’t match up with the checklist. Evie helped with the inspection, but not much. I kept having to ask questions twice. Each time, she always acted surprised to hear I was talking to her.

I collected charts and plotted a course, double checking headings, landmarks, and radio range frequencies all the way to Ohio. Avery kept pushing me to hurry, but as strange as the plane was, I didn’t want any surprises during the flight. I prepared a flight plan—and Avery took the paperwork, assuring me that he would file it properly.

“Oh, and you’re to keep radio silence through the trip.” Avery slipped in the order almost as an afterthought.

“Excuse me? What if we run into trouble? If we have to contact someone—”

“This trip is classified. You never know who might be listening in.” He patted my shoulder. “You’ll do fine, Miss Bateson.”

Evie, Doctor Cook and I boarded, lugging our bags and parachutes with us. Avery saw us right to the crew hatch.

“Is there anyone at the tower to clear us for take off?” I asked.

“I’ve already taken care of your authorizations,” said the Colonel. “Just take off whenever you’re ready. You won’t have any traffic for a hundred miles.”

Army Intelligence, sure. I forgot they could take care of things like that.

“Good luck,” he said before I closed the hatch. His smile was tight, his voice thick with genuine worry.

Evie and I traded piloting and copiloting duties on each trip. This time, Evie was pilot on the left, and I sat in the copilot’s spot on the right. Cook crouched between us, even though I told him he’d be more comfortable down below, in the radio operator’s station. But no, he wanted to watch.

I continued the pre-flight checklist, taking the maintenance log out of the pocket on the right side of the cockpit. I had to list our point and time of departure, the condition of the craft, any maintenance problems, and sign off. At our destination, I’d make the same entries.

The arrival columns for this plane’s last two flights were blank.

If one of the flights had been left blank, I might have believed that the pilot had been careless. But two? It looked like the plane had taken off twice and never landed.

I turned to Cook. “Do you know why these pilots didn’t log out?”

He shrugged. His whole body seemed to shift inside his bomber jacket. “Maybe they forgot.”

If it had been any other plane than this one, I might have believed that.

“What are these?” Evie lifted some coiled black cables that had been lying on the instrument panel. On each cable, a steel plug dangled from one end, and bare copper wires protruded from the other. They looked like cords from a telephone switchboard.

Cook leaped at them. Out of sheer surprise, Evie dropped the cables into his outstretched hands. He quickly bunched them together and shoved them inside his jacket. When they were hidden, he glanced back and forth at us guiltlessly, like we might not have noticed.

“Jane, look.” On the instrument panel in front of her, Evie touched a metal socket, about the size of a dime, set in a plate that had obviously been bolted on after construction, squeezed in between the standard instruments and dials. She pointed—a similar socket was located at the corresponding spot on the copilot’s side. The plugs on those cables would have fit in those sockets. I could assume these had something to do with the ‘modifications.’

“You’re not telling us everything,” I said to Cook.

He glanced away and pursed his lips. “It’s a security matter, ma’am. Need to know basis.”

Evie looked at me, her brows raised in a question, and I shrugged a little. I had no idea what the things were for. We could have made a stink, told Cook and Avery we weren’t going to fly until they told us what was up—and they’d just find a couple other pilots. If the plane wasn’t airworthy, Cook wouldn’t be riding along. That was a comfort, I supposed.

When I didn’t complain, Evie got back to work. She’d been waiting for my cue. She nodded curtly and said, “All right, then. Hold on, Doctor.”

Evie started the engines. They choked once and flared to life. The props spun and blurred to invisibility. The instruments were all reading normal. Avery himself opened the hangar door for us and removed the plane’s chocks.

We taxied out of the hangar and onto the runway. Evie opened the throttle. We pointed toward the long stretch of tarmac. Sparse landing beacons marked its edges. The plane’s light display faded enough for us to be able to see beyond the corona and into the clear night.

We accelerated, the force pressing us back in our seats. Faster and faster, the engines roared like thunder until we hit decision speed, and Evie pulled back on the yoke. We bounced, rumbling along the tarmac. Then stillness. The plane tipped back as it lifted off its nose gear. Then off the main gear. We climbed, with nothing but air all around us. Nothing but the bomber’s pulse, the drone of engines, and flight.

The engines revved to a higher pitch for a moment, and the plane jumped, leaping a dozen feet in altitude before settling into the ascent. Cook grabbed the back of my seat.

“Did you do that?” Evie said.

“No.” I shook my head and gripped the yoke, waiting for another jump. Every plane had its quirks; we’d just discovered this one’s.

“Ooh,” Evie said. “This baby has some kick!”

We soared. Half-moonlight turned the desert below an icy silver. Scrub made weird shadows. The Gulf of Mexico to the east shone like mercury. We climbed to 10,000 feet and cruised.

We glowed like an opalescent beacon.

My parents had been barnstormers. Mom was one of the original Ninety-Nines, Amelia Earhart’s association of women pilots. I had a blurry photo of Mom and Dad from the Twenties, my mother posing on the top wing of their biplane in a swimming costume, my father by the propeller, hands on his hips, looking like a fighter ace with his white silk scarf, leather flight cap, and handlebar moustache. These days they ran a charter service, flying rich tourists and thrill seekers up and down the California coast. They also headed up the local Civil Air Patrol.

The image I had of them, great pilots and adventurers, was a tough one to live up to, but I tried. I liked to say I was flying before I was born. I got my pilot’s license when I was sixteen. I worked for them as a pilot and mechanic while I was still in high school. This was after Lindbergh’s famous flight, long after the Great War, and flying had become routine, losing some of its romantic appeal. It was a job, something I’d done my whole life. I was practical about it. I took it for granted.

Evie, on the other hand—Evie’s voice got low and breathy when she talked about flying. She was from a good Pennsylvania family, a debutante, went to Smith. She rode in a plane for the first time on a charter—like my folks ran—while on vacation at Martha’s Vineyard. It hooked her. A lot of pilots had stories like that—one flight, and it was like they’d been called by God. Of course, piloting wasn’t something a well-bred girl from Philly aspired to. She talked an instructor at a local airfield into giving her lessons, she scraped the money for it together by selling her old clothes, and got her sister to lie for her and say she was spending all that time at the library. Somehow, she managed to learn, managed to solo, and got her license. For her, every hour of flight was stolen. Even now that she worked as a pilot, she treated flying like a treasure that might be taken away from her. In the cockpit, she was like a kid in a candy store, all eyes and smiles.

Three hours into the flight, Evie still smiled, a vague, dreamy look in her eyes. She was humming. “Though there’s one motor gone we can still carry on, comin’ in on a wing and a prayer . . .” I don’t think she realized just what she was humming.

Cook was not prone to conversation. He’d spent most of the flight writing in a little notebook with a pencil stub, looking around occasionally with a tight, anxious expression that I chose to attribute to his earnest youth, or possibly a fear of flying—or of flying with the current pilots.

“You fly much, Doctor?” I said at a moment when the pencil rested. Cook had made himself as comfortable as possible, sitting wedged behind the two seats, knees pulled up.

“Not really. I’m quite interested in flight, but the Army wouldn’t take me for pilot training. Bad eyes,” he said, pointing to the glasses. “So I’ve made the psychology of flight my specialty.”

“Psychology of flight?”

“Yes. What particular stresses do pilots experience, why do certain types of men seem drawn to becoming pilots more than others. Could the Army develop a profile for choosing the most psychologically fit pilots? Not something too many people have thought about. That just means the subject is long overdue for study. Don’t you think?”

At this point, with thousands of planes dropping bombs all over Europe and the war in the Pacific escalating, with factories turning out hundreds more planes every month, the Army couldn’t be too picky about who it chose to be its pilots. Evie and I wouldn’t have been here if it could.

“So what does psychology have to do with this plane?”

Cook pursed his lips. “That’s need to know.”

Smirking, I turned away and flipped through the bomber’s log. It only had a dozen flights logged since it was commissioned, one of the first batch of B-26’s to enter service earlier this year. I recognized the names of the two WASP who had delivered it from the factory. It had been designated for use in towing targets at the gunnery school at Harlingen. But right below that assignment was a mark, a star and the word “special,” that I’d never seen in a log before. I assumed that had something to do with Cook’s experiment.

On the last two flights, the pilots hadn’t checked out. They might have been under orders for security reasons, to cover up what they’d been doing. But then why log in? Or why not log false information? Avery hadn’t given us any instructions about altering the log. Nothing gave any clue as to why this bomber shone like a carnival midway.

“So what have you found out?” I asked. “Does flying attract a certain type of person? Are certain types more likely to become pilots than others?”

“Well, men who become pilots tend to be risk takers. They tend to have a greater sense of adventure. They also tend to be dreamers. Less practical than the average individual. They have a greater sense of, oh, I don’t know. Aesthetics. They’re more sublime, if you will. Army pilots write more poetry than officers in other branches.”

“I could have told you that without the Ph.D.” Just about every pilot I knew started out as a kid who looked skyward when the drone of an aircraft engine sounded overhead. “So how about women?”

He shrugged, wedging himself more firmly into his nook. “I haven’t studied the psychology of female pilots.”

“Figures.”

I didn’t think they’d ever be able to quantify the old dream of flight that had once sent people jumping off hillsides in paper wings. It wasn’t about numbers or types, but about becoming part of the sky, becoming free of gravity. Some people said an airplane was a crutch, substitute, not like being a bird at all because of the steel and engines and fuel. But there was something about the airplane, too—all that power, responsive to the touch of a finger. All that power at my command. I was in control of the height of modern technology, the pinnacle of what civilization had produced: a 35,000 pound machine that could fly.

It was about being part of the machine. Learning every nuance, reacting in the blink of an eye. The machine did the flying, yes, but it couldn’t fly without the pilot, without me or Evie or any of the guys in the logbook. So it wasn’t the plane flying at all, it was us.

According to the logbook, the previous pilot had been Captain Elliot Boyd.

I asked Cook, “Do you know Captain Boyd? Was he part of your study?”

“Yes,” Cook said without looking up from his notepad.

“What’s he like?”

He took a long time to answer, like he was gathering words and trying them out before speaking. “He was a good pilot,” he said finally.

Was? “What happened to him?”

“That’s classified.”

I looked over the logbook again. “And Captain McGlade? Where is he? And their copilots. Olsen? Todd?”

Cook shifted uncomfortably, pulling his cap over his forehead and lifting it off again. He wouldn’t meet my gaze. That told me all I needed to know—the last two crews of this thing were dead.

I was about to lay into the good doctor when Evie spoke softly.

“This is the last plane they ever flew.”

“What?”

“I can hear them. Listen.” Her gaze was distant, not on the instruments at all.

I heard the engines, their power vibrating through the body of the plane. The drone was hypnotic, comforting. Surrounded by the colors dancing outside the canopy, I felt cocooned. Warm and safe, like I was falling asleep in front of a campfire, with the hum of crickets all around.

“Now that you’re here, things are perfect. I always take girls flying on the first date. They love it.”

I thought for a moment another plane’s radio signal was bleeding into our channel. But our radio was turned off, not even hissing static. Yet, I heard a voice.

“Nice night for flying, isn’t it? ‘Comin’ in on a wing and a prayer . . .’ ”

Someone grabbed my arm.

“Miss Harris! Miss Bateson! Snap out of it, for God’s sake!”

Cook, breathing hard, shook my arm in a panic.

I blinked and rubbed my face. I’d been dozing. I’d never fallen asleep in the cockpit before. Never. That was a fast way to turn yourself into a smoking pile of wreck on the ground. I took a quick scan of the instruments, looked out the canopy—spotted the Mississippi, a glowing ribbon in the moonlight, a distinctive landmark. Everything looked fine. Except for those damn colors, like light through a stained glass window. What did we look like to a kid on the ground? Like a comet? A space ship?

Evie had her head cocked, like she was concentrating, listening closely.

“How’d you get in here?” she said softly. She smiled suddenly, like someone had told her a joke. “Oh really?”

Cook gripped her arm, but she brushed him away. He sat back, stunned, his eyes wide.

“Do you hear anything?” I asked him.

“This shouldn’t be happening,” he muttered, shaking his head.

“Evie!”

She gave me a sideways glance. “Can’t you hear it? They’re talking.”

I heard—the engines. The wind. A whisper.

“Come on, Jane. Be a sport and join in.” Male voices, like cocky pilots flirting and teasing. I couldn’t think of where they came from, except my own imagination.

“This is some plane, huh? Why don’t you see what it can really do?”

I didn’t hear anything, not a damn thing.

The lights glowing on the surface of the plane pulsed, throbbing red like a heartbeat. Nothing about the plane’s mechanics had changed—still running at the same speed, altitude, RPMs. Fuel still good, pressure gauges normal. Everything normal, as far as the dials were concerned. But this plane was haunted.

The skin glowed so brightly now, I couldn’t see anything outside the plane. The world was a circle of light. Beyond that, blackness, emptiness. We had to fly by compass readings.

“Evie,” I said, quelling the desperation that tinged my voice. “What is going on?”

She flashed me an achingly familiar look of annoyance. “This plane . . . it’s different. Look.” She wasn’t holding her yoke. I wasn’t holding mine. Yet we were aloft, maintaining speed and altitude. “What if it’s alive, Jane? I can hear it talking to me.”

Ray guns. Smart machines. Strange ideas, like Avery said.

“What did you do to this plane?” I said to Cook. “To those pilots?”

He shook his head continually, a fast, trembling gesture. “This shouldn’t be happening, it can’t be happening.”

“What can’t be happening?” I had to shout in his ear before he responded.

“This. The link-up,” he said weakly.

“Link-up?”

“She’s not really hearing anything. She’s talking to herself. It’s a hysterical response, women are unstable in stressful situations—”

“Does she look like she’s under stress?” Evie’s fingers hung loosely on the yoke, her smile was easy. “You’re the one who’s hysterical, Cook.” The psychologist cringed on the floor of the cockpit.

“Why, thank you,” Evie said—not to either of us, but straight ahead, to the canopy. “I always sing to my planes.”

A finger of luminescence seeped under the canopy. It had substance, mass, like a pool of honey pushing into the cockpit. Evie unbelted her harness, reached over the yoke and touched the pool of light. Her hand went into the light, through the light, and kept going into the instrument panel. She pushed her arm into the metal of the plane. Her face glowed, her eyes were half-lidded with a look of bliss. “Yes, I can feel it,” she murmured. “Flying, oh yes!”

I grabbed a fistful of her flight suit and pulled her back. “No, you don’t!” I didn’t know if I yelled at the plane for taking her, or at Evie for letting it take her.

She cried out. The light flashed to orange, angry as fire as her arm came free and she wrenched away from it. The engines revved—all on their own—like a growl. I grabbed her around the waist and held—she tried to lunge forward to the instrument panel, back to the light.

“Cook, help me hold her!”

Cook was pulling on the straps of his parachute. “We’ve got to either land this thing or get out of here. If this goes on, we’ll all die.”

“We won’t,” said Evie, struggling against my bear-hug. “The other pilots aren’t dead. You don’t understand, they wanted it to happen. They’re still here. They’re flying.” She pulled my fingers, desperate to wrench out of my grasp.

We fell off balance as the plane pitched into a dive. The lights on the hull were searing, hot like flames. All around the canopy seams, the glow pushed inside the cockpit, oozing like slime.

“See, Jane? You’re upsetting them.”

I grabbed the copilot’s yoke and pulled, leaning against the tension, trying to level us off before we plunged into a spin. Altitude dropped, speed increased.

Evie took the pilot’s yoke and helped. Together, we pulled the bomber back under control.

She whispered, “It’s okay, baby. You just scared her is all. She doesn’t really want to hurt you.” Tears glistened on her cheeks.

“Who the hell are you talking to?”

“Jane, if you’d just listen.”

“This is crazy,” I murmured.

A sputter rocked to starboard, followed by an ominous quiet as the usual background roar diminished by half. I looked out the window; the right prop fluttered, stalled.

“We just lost starboard engine,” I said, leaning back on the yoke and slamming the rudder hard to hold our position. “Evie, tell me what’s wrong? What happened to that engine?”

Evie scanned the gauges. “Fuel pressure is at zero. There’s nothing mechanically wrong. I think they’re trying to scare you.”

“That’s right, don’t fight it and no one gets hurt. You want to fly, don’t you? I’ll show you real flying.”

Our altitude was dropping. We weren’t in a dive anymore, but we didn’t have the thrust to stay airborne. I firewalled the throttle, but I couldn’t get the power to climb. We were still fifty miles from Wright Field.

Damned fly boys, always think they know best. “We fly on my terms, buster.” Fly—or not. “We’re going to have to land now. We’re going to have to put down in a field somewhere.”

“There’s no way,” Cook said, a waver in his voice. “Not with this plane, not at this speed. The best pilot in the Army couldn’t do it, and, well, you’re just—”

“We’re just what?” I said, murder in my voice. He didn’t have to say it, I heard it every time I showed up on an air field in my flight suit. “Can you fly this thing?” I shoved a roll of charts at him. “Here, look at these and tell me there’s a field we can put down in.” He disappeared down the hatch.

I didn’t lower the landing gear; it would be better to belly in on soft earth. I prayed there was an open field with good, soft earth.

Desperately, Evie pleaded, “Just let me talk to them, it’ll be okay if you’ll just let me—”

“Evie, this plane is trying to kill us! Now help me land!”

“They’re not trying to kill us. They just want to fly and you don’t understand.”

She put one hand on the yoke and reached the other toward the pool of light. It stretched to meet her, engulfing her arm in its radiance. The light poured into one hand, through her whole body, then out the other hand and into the yoke, completing the circuit. Her face glowed rose. She closed her eyes, and the plane steadied. The intense pressure eased off the yoke.

Holding the plane level had taken all my strength. I’d been shaking with the effort. But Evie held it with the touch of one hand.

Cook was wrong, trying to quantify the characteristics of the typical pilot so the Army could make a checklist and screen its candidates more efficiently. Good eyesight and a sense of daring, that was all a person really needed to be a pilot. To be a good pilot? A lot of us did a good job just by following the rules and using common sense. But to be a great pilot? Some pilots knew their plane’s condition without looking at the instruments. They could sense a change in the weather the moment before it happened, they could react before the plane itself did. I’d heard of guys coaxing their fighters out of flat spins just by talking to them, treating the planes like the sexy ladies they painted on the noses. It was instinct, a sixth sense that let a pilot be a part of his plane. You either had it or you didn’t.

Evie could fly a rock, if she put her mind to it.

“Evie? Evie, what’s happening?”

“Don’t worry,” she said, looked at me, and smiled. “We’ll make it.”

“There’s two hundred acres of empty farmland within range, heading north.” Cook climbed back through the hatch, a chart rolled up and tucked under his arm. “We can still bail out,” he added hopefully.

“I’m not leaving,” Evie said.

“I’m not leaving Evie,” I said.

“Aw, Jesus,” Cook said, sitting heavily.

Evie turned the wheel. The plane banked and hiccupped, dropping ten feet in a second as the remaining engine whined. I braced. Cook grabbed the back of my seat. Evie didn’t flinch. She murmured, words I couldn’t hear.

They were the most agonizing ten minutes I’d ever spent in a cockpit. I watched the altimeter—it was all I could do. Two thousand. Fifteen hundred. One thousand.

The glow filled the cockpit, but around Cook and me, it formed a bubble of dark, isolating us. Evie was fading. I could see through her to the side of the cockpit. I could see the instrument panel and the padding of the wheel through her hand. I wanted to stop her. I didn’t want her to go. I was afraid to touch her. She was flying.

A winter-razed cornfield, covered in the dry stubble of last year’s crop, loomed ahead. It stretched, warping with the oddness of our perspective. I glanced at the airspeed indicator. We were only going a hundred and ten. If we didn’t land going at least a hundred and thirty, we’d stall. One of the quirks of the Army’s most advanced and sensitive bomber.

“Evie, we’re too slow. We can’t land at that speed.”

“We only have one engine, Jane.”

“We’ll stall out.”

“We’ll be fine.”

Five hundred feet. Four hundred.

“Cook, get to the radio and belt in,” I said. I secured my own harness. “Evie, flaps aren’t down.”

“They don’t like you taking control. They don’t want to land,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Would they prefer a nose-dive? We gotta land if we’re going to get out of this.”

“Come on, baby. Let me put the flaps down.” She shook her head. Nothing.

Evie had sided with the plane. It had changed her somehow, like it had the other pilots. They didn’t want to touch the ground anymore.

I grabbed her and pulled her away from the yoke. She grunted, fell out of the light and collapsed into my bubble of darkness. I surprised them both and stole back control from whatever soul inhabited the bomber. I pulled on the yoke, lifting the nose, and lowered the flaps. Fifty, forty. We were still too slow. And for spite, the other engine cut out. We sailed in silence, plunging toward the earth like a bomb. I could only hope that we hit belly first and slid to a halt before we flipped.

“Hold on!”

I don’t remember what happened after the first impact. There was a jolt, the world through the canopy lurched, and we skidded. We skimmed on our belly like a rock on water, turning slightly so the port wing led. Must have crossed the whole two hundred acres like that. We didn’t flip. Eventually, we stopped. The monster came to rest at the end of a long furrow.

Smoke and dust filled the cockpit. I took slow breaths and the world came back into focus as I realized I could feel again. I was sore where the straps had held me. My heart pounded like a piston. But I wasn’t in pain. I wasn’t broken. I laughed with relief; the sound made me light-headed.

“Evie?”

She lay across the instrument panel. There was a crack in the canopy right above her head. Blood matted her dark hair. The canopy, the glass fronts of the instruments, shone with blood. She hadn’t secured her harness.

I undid my belt and touched her neck. I didn’t want to turn her over. I didn’t want to see her face, to see what she looked like with her skull smashed in.

Cook came up through the hatch. Apart from a cut on his brow, he looked fine. He saw Evie and didn’t say a word. He helped me pick her up and take her to the top hatch. Together we carefully lowered her to the wing, then to the ground, and carried her away from the plane.

The bomber’s skin was metal, dull gray. It had a faint, lifeless sheen in the predawn light.

I held Evie on my lap and stared at the bomber.

“You knew this would happen.”

“No. No, I—” Cook sat among dead cornstalks and stared at the wreck. He held his notepad, but didn’t write. I think he lost his pencil. He shrugged, and I wanted to hit him. “Sure, we lost Boyd and Olsen, but it shouldn’t have happened to—”

“To what?”

“To women.”

“Why not?”

“It—it’s classified.”

“Cook, tell me what that thing was,” I said, my voice tight with anger. “Tell me why it killed Evie.” Never mind that she had known what she was doing and if I hadn’t grabbed her . . . if she had belted in properly. If . . . if . . .

He shook his head. “I—I can’t. It’s on a need to know basis—”

I lunged at him and grabbed the collar of his jacket. I twisted the leather in my hands and pulled him so his face was inches from mine.

“Cook? I need to know.”

He pushed away, scrambling awkwardly until he collapsed. He rubbed the cut on his forehead.

He took a breath, then spoke evenly, as if lecturing. “It was an experiment in pilot-aircraft interface. We were examining methods to increase pilot reaction speed—hypnosis, electrodes, pharmaceuticals—and aircraft responsiveness to control. We hit on a method of translating nerve impulses into electrical impulses which could be transmitted directly to the aircraft controls.” The cables, the sockets, yes. “But something happened. On the first flight, the plane landed empty. The crew was just gone, and the plane’s skin started glowing. We didn’t know what happened, except that maybe the experiment worked too well. There are studies being done now by another research group, advanced physics and mathematics describing the conversion of mass into energy—” He waved the explanation away, like he was swatting at a fly. “We sent the plane up again, just a test flight without using the linking apparatus. The same thing happened. Then we thought something about the pilots, their ability and sensitivity to the aircraft, the responsiveness of the B-26, caused a link-up to form without the apparatus. We were at Harlingen because it’s isolated, not as susceptible to security breaches. After the—anomalies—Avery wanted to send the plane to Wright, where the engineers could examine it more closely. We believed—” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “—that female pilots weren’t as sensitive as male pilots and that therefore they would not form a connection with the plane.”

Evie and I being at Harlingen to ferry that plane probably hadn’t been a coincidence. Avery must have pulled strings to get us there. Of the WASP, we had the most hours in the B-26. Whatever else Cook and Avery thought about women pilots, they must have thought we at least had the experience to successfully ferry their precious experiment.

“How do you know anything about women pilots? You said yourself, you haven’t bothered studying them.” My hands clenched in my lap. I said softly, “Evie was every bit as good as your best. You weren’t expecting that, were you?”

He looked away, digging into the earth with a boot heel. “What I don’t understand about this flight is why you didn’t form a connection with the plane. You’re a good pilot. I didn’t think anyone could get us out of that fix, but you did.”

“I didn’t do anything. It was all Evie.”

I’d heard the voices and ignored them. I fought the plane instead of being a part of it, and every good pilot knew you couldn’t fight something that much bigger than you, you had to coax it on its own terms. Evie knew that. She tried to tell me.

Maybe I’d remember, if I ever managed to climb inside a cockpit again. I wanted to laugh—if I’d been a great pilot, I wouldn’t be questioning whether or not I’d ever fly again.

The thing hunkered in the field like a dying beast of legend. The fuel lines had to be leaking after a crash like that. If the electrics started sparking, if there was a fire—I waited for the fire and the explosion, but it didn’t come.

“Cook, do you have a match?”

He patted down his pockets and came up with a box of matches. He looked at me questioningly when he handed it over. Carefully, I laid Evie on the ground. I went to the bomber.

“What are you . . . ?” Cook started. I kept walking.

The wings had ripped during the crash. They hadn’t come off, but the metal was scraped and twisted, the propellers bent and curled like tin daisies. Part of the engine casing on the left wing had torn off, exposing the motor and fuel lines.

I climbed up on the wing and waited. I half expected the metal to gape open and swallow me, but it didn’t. Didn’t want me before, why should it take me now? I reached into the machine and pulled. I tore at electrical cables, ripped fuel lines. I made sure the liquid ran over the wing, made a path that led to the fuel line, which would carry the poison to the tank. This late in the flight, the tank would be filled with fumes. Very volatile.

I struck a match, dropped it.

“No!” Cook scrambled to his feet and raced toward me, then changed his mind mid-stride and backpeddled.

The liquid caught, flaring to blue and orange life—a more natural, more comprehensible light than the other—and I ran.

“You’d better duck,” I called.

Cook collapsed face down and wrapped his arms around his head. I covered Evie’s body with my own as the thing exploded. Debris rained. The air smelled of fuel and scorched metal. The flames were orange.

Cook sat up, gasping like a fish. “Why? Why did you—that was priceless—irreplaceable—”

“Must have been a hysterical response due to stress.”

A convoy from Wright Field picked us up less than an hour later.

The Heroic Death of
Lieutenant Michkov

In the cavernous reception hall, the sorting of paper rustled like bats’ wings.

Dispatches and more dispatches. Every morning, Lieutenants Michkov and Romey sorted through dispatches sent from across the Empire, from generals at the front lines, ministers in the Capital and wardens in the gulags. The two undersecretaries arranged the dispatches in order of importance, condensed the content, and organized the features into easily digestible reports for the Emperor.

Troop movements, supply schedules, projected deployments, morale reports. Dissatisfaction, unrest, starvation, defeat. Every day, the story of the Empire told by the dispatches grew more dismal.

“I wish—” Michkov said, then sighed. The shuffle of paper at the other desk stopped, and Romey—a small, thick, badger-like man—glared at him from under a creased brow.

Long used to Romey’s expressions, Michkov hardly noticed. “It’s the same every day,” he continued. “The line at Kajin has fallen back again. Casualties mount. A plague has decimated the Fifth Regiment. I wish there were better news. A victory. Or at the very least some tale of courage. We need more heroes. I can’t think of the last time His Majesty awarded a Meritorious Service Medal for field duty.” Chin propped on hand, elbow propped on desk, his eyes gazed unfocused at the mass of papers spread over his desktop. “We need more heroes. I wish—I wish I could be there. At the lines.”

Romey snorted. “You’d be the first one in the pits they dig for graves there.”

Michkov didn’t feel like arguing the point that morning. Just because he hadn’t proven himself in battle didn’t mean he couldn’t. He’d most likely never get the chance. He discovered recently that his father, a Sub-minister of the Interior, in return for some arcane favors had convinced the Dispatch Office to refuse all Michkov’s requests for a transfer to the front. The elder Michkov had secured this undersecretary post for him instead—a very fine post, with great opportunity for advancement in the government, as well as money and favor. Far better than being forgotten on the war-torn frontier, eh?

It was much spoken of in the family that Michkov did not quite resemble his father.

Between the courtyard and the military detachment offices ran a long corridor lined with cracked and darkened portraits of old Emperors, fathers of fathers of the one who currently reigned. The corridor ended at a double doorway, made from slabs of oak cut from a single immense tree and carved by northern craftsmen with depictions of battles from old epic songs. The door opened into a round chamber where petitioners of the regional director gathered. Another, much smaller door led to the reception hall—with walls and floor of polished rose granite, tall windows covered with dusty curtains, a ceiling with faded allegorical paintings, and numerous glowing lamps—where Michkov worked with Lieutenant Romey.

Every day at noon, the Emperor and his entourage marched down this corridor, passed through the round chamber and a crowd of bowing petitioners, through the smaller door, to the reception hall where the Emperor received oral summaries of the daily reports. His Majesty always asked his young undersecretaries about the state of affairs, a personal attention amidst the cold stone bureaucracy. A young lieutenant in this position could easily gain the notice of the Emperor and advance to a stunning position, if he were worthy and able. If he could fashion his reports to gain the Emperor’s notice.

Michkov and Romey heard the great double doors open on their ancient hinges, giving them time to stand at attention before the entourage crossed the round chamber and entered the reception hall.

The Emperor, stiff as though propped up by the gold braid and medals on his uniform, stood between the desks, looking at them each in turn. “Report, lieutenants.”

Romey stared suggestively, so Michkov cleared his throat to speak first. The most urgent dispatch related a defeat of Battalion Nineteen at the eastern frontier. The troops had fought to nearly the last man, and Michkov endeavored to paint a veneer of heroism on the tragedy, which cost the Empire a valley’s worth of villages. With so much sadness, Michkov longed for some spark of hope.

His enthusiasm carried him, despite the weakness of his argument. “I am sorry, your Majesty, to report the loss of a portion of territory. But you will be pleased to hear of the bravery and loyalty of the men who fought and died in your name. I have a list of commendations from General Tanov, who speaks highly of—”

The Emperor drew a tired sounding breath. “How many men died, Lieutenant Michkov?”

Too many. That was always the answer on Michkov’s tongue. But he had numbers. He could give the Emperor numbers, when his enthusiasm failed him, as it always did when he saw the Emperor’s weary face. “Battalion Nineteen, your Majesty.”

“The entire battalion?” Michkov nodded, and the Emperor’s gaze fell, like a farmer who learned that yet another crop was blighted and was unable to raise his ire against the hand of a God who allowed such hardship. He turned to Romey. “Lieutenant Romey?”

Where Michkov longed to see the heroic, and perhaps crafted his reports to reflect his longing, Romey saw insecurity and conspiracy.

“The Empire is beset, I fear I must report. Revolts have been uncovered at these villages.” He listed. “These garrisons inform they are undersupplied and cut off.” He listed. “Because of thieves, the roads are nearly impassable at these junctions.” Again, he listed, until the Emperor raised his hand, commanding him to stop.

“Enough. I will read the reports.”

At this stage, Michkov and Romey handed their neatly written reports to the Emperor’s aide.

Today, breaking the routine, the Emperor paused before continuing with his entourage to his study beyond the reception hall. He said, in a voice soft with defeat, “When I was a boy, there were heroes to carry the day. Great men. What have we now? Dispatches.”

All the portraits in the long corridor had stories to accompany them, great men who built the Empire from scraps of feuding lands. With them served great men, subjects of a hundred tales of generals fighting off barbarian hordes, discovering new lands to farm and mine, falling in love and rescuing fair ladies from evil marriages.

As a child, Michkov loved the stories of heroes—of a single man changing the world for the better, wielding a saber at the front lines of the eastern frontier, inspiring his whole division to push on, to rally for the Emperor—

As a child, Michkov had such dreams for himself.

After the entourage left, closing the door behind it, Romey said, reprimanding, “You’d do well to remember that His Majesty wants facts, not stories.”

Flushing, Michkov muttered as he returned to his seat, “Stories never hurt anything.”

. . . the Hero ducked bullets, flares, cannonballs, all pouring over the battlefield in an unearthly hail. A young lieutenant, he was leading his first patrol into battle. Against battle. He’d been ordered to flank the enemy’s position, disable the spur of artillery that had pinned the division in this bottleneck of a valley. He had twenty men who could not move without the threat of being shot. Impossible odds, a fool’s mission. So be it.

“What now?” his sergeant asked as he slid into the turf beside him. “We’ll run out of ammunition before they do.”

Staring down the rocky hillside, the Hero considered. A ravine, where snowmelt ran off in the spring, cut a narrow gash along the edge of the hill. Only large enough for a single man, the enemy had neglected to cover that position, rightly assuming the Imperial forces would not even consider sending forward troops numbering less than a patrol, at least. The Empire’s strength had always lain in numbers and persistence. Neither had saved them on this treacherous frontier, with its windswept mountains so unlike the ancient forests and meadows of home.

But the ravine led directly to the first row of cannon currently slaughtering his countrymen. One man with a pistol might inflict damage.

“What do we do?” the sergeant repeated, as if the Hero had not heard him over the noise of the shelling.

Before beginning the trek down the hill, the Hero reloaded his pistol. “We crawl on our bellies like worms, Sergeant.”

Michkov had been daydreaming again. He remembered running in the streets of the capital with his brothers and their friends, playing soldier, pretending they were brave officers fighting for glory on the front. His daydreams had changed over time, as he completed his schooling, graduated with his commission, and learned that military service had more to do with standing at attention than showing bravery. Now, if he could have one wish, it would be to make his daydreams for the Empire come true, somehow.

Another battle had taken place on the eastern front, and wondrously, this had not ended in so sound a defeat. So the report was not quite as dire as it had been the day before. Perhaps, perhaps . . . .

He gave this report to the Emperor: “The battle in the east continues. Again, I regret to report that the losses are great, your Majesty. But there is a small story of wonder. A young lieutenant showed great bravery when he crawled behind enemy lines armed only with a pistol. With stunning marksmanship, he shot down a whole line of cannoneers. Against all odds, this man returned to camp, ragged, bruised, but whole and inquiring about the safety of the men under his command. The crippling of the enemy artillery saved the lives of countless soldiers who otherwise would not have reached camp safely.”

Michkov’s voice, normally only just greater than a whisper, grew vibrant with the telling. He felt as though he had seen his Hero’s actions with his own eyes and wanted to shout the deed to the world. When he finished, Michkov became aware of his voice echoing in the granite hall. Suddenly self-conscious, he lowered his gaze, afraid he had overstepped his bounds before the Emperor.

After a pause that lasted long enough to be awkward, he looked and saw an amazing thing. For the first time in memory, the Emperor smiled. His eyes shone with an emotion that was not exhaustion but—pride. For a moment, the Emperor seemed to hold up his uniform, instead of being held by it.

“How . . . heroic,” the Emperor said.

Then the Emperor shocked them by not asking for Romey’s report at all.

“Lieutenant Michkov. Write to General Tanov. I would hear more of this young officer of his.” And he led his entourage away, his stride a bit longer than usual.

Michkov had done it, made the Emperor smile. Such an easy thing, when he put his mind to it.

Romey crossed the space between their desks and rummaged through the piles of dispatches. Michkov, wearing a pleased and almost giddy smile, was still watching after the Emperor and almost didn’t notice. When he did, it was with a sense of curiosity rather than anger.

“What are you doing, Romey?”

“Looking—ah, here it is.” He retrieved a document and read it quickly, eyes darting. Scowling so that his jaw trembled, he glared at Michkov with bullet-dark eyes. “That lieutenant didn’t crawl into enemy range. This says he was trapped there while looting bodies and was forced to shoot his way free.”

Michkov blushed. “Yes, well—the end result was the same. He did disable the entire line of artillery. And—did you see him?” Michkov gestured at the closed door where the Emperor had gone. “Did you see how pleased he looked?”

Romey slapped the dispatch against the desk. “No more of your stories, Michkov. I’m warning you.”

Michkov, declining to be intimidated by Romey’s theatrics, raised a brow. “We’ll go on as we always have, I expect. You continue to tell your stories, Romey. I will continue to tell mine.”

From then on, the Hero performed only the most daring of exploits. He assassinated enemy generals, rallied his men in the face of defeat and led them to stunning victories. He raided a den of highwaymen, making safe once more a road that was essential to the resupply of the army. He refused promotions, preferring instead to remain with the infantry, fighting in the dirt, smoke, and blood with the rest, where he felt he could do the most good.

The medals which he was awarded remained in a box, kept by a provincial gentleman’s beautiful daughter, to whom the Hero was betrothed.

“Well, Michkov—do you have any new reports of our young lieutenant?” the Emperor asked his undersecretary with startling familiarity.

Over the course of several months, Michkov produced everything the Emperor had hoped for in his great army, everything Michkov had dreamed, a respite from the dirge of dispatches they faced each morning, simply by painting the young lieutenant—his Hero—into his reports.

“Ah—he has a young lady he wishes to marry when the war ends, your Majesty.”

“Of course, of course. But the end is near, I think. I’m pleased I promoted General Yurivno. The new blood may turn the tide yet. Dear General Tanov was long due for retirement. Then again, those new supply lines may make all the difference.”

Michkov’s stories had done more than cheer the Emperor. They had revitalized him. No more a tired old man resigned to the wounds fate dealt him and his Empire, he reassessed his army and his frontier war, found them lacking, and went about repairing them. His inspired enthusiasm traveled down the chain of command. A battle won here, a new road there, made a difference.

“Perhaps—Lieutenant Michkov, do you think I should award our hero a medal? A Meritorious Service Medal.” His eyes lit with the thought. “I could summon him to the capital. We could have a ceremony.”

A little too quickly Michkov said, “Your Majesty—I am sure he is needed on the front, he may not be able to leave his duties—”

“Ah, yes, you’re right of course. Well. When the war ends, yes?”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” Michkov said, sighing as he bowed.

When the door closed and the undersecretaries were alone in the reception hall, Romey trained his ferret gaze on Michkov.

“I don’t believe your reports. I don’t believe your dispatches hold anything but catastrophe. There are no heroes.”

In a bright mood, Michkov laughed. “A sad life you must lead, Romey. Can’t you consider for one moment that some good might exist?”

“I have never seen it.”

“You’ve never seen a whale, either, but I assure you they’re real.”

Romey could not know what Michkov did or did not fabricate, how much his reports shaded the line between fact and interpretation. Each morning, half the dispatches were placed on his desk and half on Romey’s. Romey could have no idea what information lay in Michkov’s dispatches, what he may or may not have been inventing.

At last the day came when Michkov arrived at the great reception hall and found Romey already there, all the dispatches sitting in a pile before him.

“I’ve read them all,” he said. “I see nothing here about our great Hero of the eastern front.”

“Perhaps you’re not looking closely enough,” Michkov said, frowning.

“Find your Hero there, if you can.” Romey handed him a carefully sorted stack of dispatches.

None of them involved the war on the eastern front—they all told tales of plague laying the troops low, unrest in the capital, uprisings in the mines. Many people had died, none of them heroically.

So a day passed when the Emperor received no news of the young lieutenant. Then another. And another. Every morning now, no matter how early Michkov arrived, no matter that he awoke with the milkmaids and street sweepers to win these battles, Romey was already there, had already read and sorted all the dispatches.

“I do hope he is well,” the Emperor said after a week of this, his face creasing with worry. Michkov’s stomach churned. He wanted to give the Emperor good news, to continue the Hero’s story to a glorious conclusion.

The door closed behind the entourage. “Yes,” Romey said, grinning carnivorously. “I do hope nothing has gone wrong.”

Perhaps if Michkov had remained silent, had never mentioned the Hero again, Romey would have been satisfied, content to merely stifle Michkov’s hopes. But the Emperor always looked so pleased to hear of the Hero, and seemed sad when there was no news.

“We have not heard about him in so long because the Lieutenant is recovering from a bout of the eastern flu. The company doctor is frankly surprised he’s gone so long without catching it. But the Lieutenant is in good spirits. The doctor jokes that this is probably the only way they’d get him to rest after these last hard months.”

The Emperor chuckled at this, for indeed the Hero had been extraordinarily busy all along the eastern front. “Shall I write him a note, do you think?”

“I think it would cheer him immensely,” Michkov said, his stomach knotting. The Emperor was smiling again, yes.

But so was Romey.

The Hero was not the best patient. So much remained to be done. The tide of the war was turning, he could not pause now. A raid on an enemy stronghold was planned for the next week. They’d at last retake the valley that had been lost months before. He assured the doctors he was well, begged them to let him rise, take his horse, and return to the front lines where he belonged, where he could lead his men. He wondered how the sergeant was handling the new recruits. Such young boys they sent him these days . . . .

But the doctors kept him to bed, fed him medicines, told him he must rest until the fever stopped burning. Fever, ha! It was his blood, longing to strike the blow that would end this war.

Until then, he had his love’s letter, scented with her perfume, and in the stupor of a sleeping draught he read and reread her words of devotion.

Michkov feared the worst from Romey’s animosity. The next day, Romey’s report came directly to the point.

“Your Majesty, I have a most dire report of treason, committed in your very presence, by one of your own undersecretaries.”

“What?”

“There is no heroic lieutenant fighting on the eastern frontier. I have letters here from Generals Tanov and Yurivno, and they know nothing of this man. He is purely the invention of Lieutenant Michkov, who has been deluding us all for months with his flights of fancy.”

The Emperor’s expression fell. He aged years, all the sadness that had been kept at bay the last few months crashing on him at once. If his uniform had been any less starched, he would have sunk to the floor.

All the disappointment he turned on Michkov in an expression of betrayal. “Lieutenant Michkov, what do you have to say to this? Is it true?”

“Your Majesty, if I may explain—”

“Please do.”

“Your Majesty. The stories haven’t hurt anything. Look at the reports . . . .” He swallowed. He could plead innocence or ignorance. He could, in effect, lie. He’d all but admitted his guilt. He could defend himself without lying. Try to defend himself. “Look at the reports . . . . Your Majesty, you are winning the war! You weren’t, six months ago. Who is to say there isn’t a Hero behind this?”

His brow furrowed, the Emperor lowered his gaze as he considered.

“You think this change is because of your stories?” Romey, harsh and indignant, interrupted the pause. Michkov stood accused, and he would accuse him, before the Emperor could ponder. “You believe that in telling fables you have succeeded where the vigilance of the Empire has failed?”

In fact, Michkov could, because the Empire’s vigilance had failed. But to say so here and now would be treason.

Michkov stood rock-still beside his desk, hands tucked regimentally behind him. “Morale, good or bad, is a powerful thing. But I claim nothing more than the offer of a spark of hope.”

Romey pitted his vision of the Empire against Michkov’s. The paranoia of one who saw only impending disaster against the idealism of one who still indulged in his childhood daydreams. The one who could make the Emperor and his train of glazed-eyed advisors believe his own vision would triumph.

Michkov waited for the Emperor’s answer to his plea, but once again Romey filled the silence.

“Your Majesty, Michkov has done this only to flatter your fine sensibilities, a deceit to win your favor and his preferment.”

Ah, here was a familiar tale of greed and fraud that the Emperor could well believe. And if Michkov claimed that such a plan had never entered his mind—that would be most unbelievable to the men of court.

With his eyes clouding as doubt left them the old Emperor stared at Michkov, frowned, and gestured to the soldiers at the door. “Arrest him.”

Michkov held the Emperor’s gaze. It was the least he could do. Perhaps he should have apologized, but he did not think he was really sorry.

And so Michkov was officially charged with fabricating reports during wartime, a treasonous offense punishable by death. And so, come spring, he was convicted and sentenced to hang.

Perhaps he deserved this. To the letter of the law, perhaps he had committed treason. Perhaps he had been naïve to expect the Emperor’s forgiveness. Perhaps Romey was right, and the age of heroes had passed forever. If only Michkov had been able to prove him wrong.

Stories did have power over life and death. Michkov had always believed that.

The dreams always ended badly. Standing on the scaffold, rope around his neck, Michkov dreamed the Hero’s death, not in battle, cutlass slicing the air, shouting in defiance at the enemy that overwhelmed him, but in his sickbed. He was so strong, everyone had been so sure he would recover. But the illness consumed him. He died clutching his sweet lady’s letter.

The following week, a new undersecretary, a Lieutenant Orfiev, who looked even younger than Michkov had, occupied Michkov’s desk. Here was a whelp Romey could bully. Part of what had been frightening about Michkov was the sense that nothing Romey did affected him. He had those bright eyes that always seemed to look elsewhere.

By chance, Romey received that morning’s oddest dispatch, postmarked the day of Michkov’s execution.

“What is it?” Orfiev asked when Romey’s face turned white and his hand with the sheet of paper began shaking. When Romey didn’t answer, Orfiev was so bold as to take the sheet from him. He had heard rumors of what went on in the reception hall, what dire news was buried and what lies were told the Emperor, who was too old to know better. He wondered what could be so terrible that not even the Emperor could know.

He read aloud, “ ‘Dispatch. Message from General Yurivno. The Lieutenant has surprised us again and climbed from his deathbed. Last rites had been given, but the next day the fever broke. Heaven be praised we have our Hero back with us! Already he is calling for his horse, but the doctors say he must move slowly. Me, I think it was a new letter from his dear lady that called him back from the dead.

“ ‘Your Majesty, I do hope your undersecretaries put this at the top of their report: our Hero, Lieutenant Michkov, lives!’ ”

Real City

Stalking around the party without her referencing link flashing names and stats at her felt a little like being drunk. It was Cass’s way of making an adventure for herself. Off-balance, senses muffled, she indulged in self-induced paranoia. Smiling faces, links hooked to their ears, nodded in greeting as she passed. They all knew who she was, thanks to their links, and she hadn’t a damn clue about two-thirds of the people here. She was working blind and stupid, and it made her giddy, along with the glass of wine she’d had.

It seemed like most of Hollywood had shown up for the RealCity Productions launch party. Probably because they all wanted to be able to say they’d been here and known the company was doomed from the start.

Vim had said they had to have a party to manufacture hype.

“We don’t have the money for that kind of party,” she’d told him.

“Oh, but we will! We have to throw parties like this if we’re ever going to have enough money to throw parties like this!”

Stacy in marketing had nodded sagely at the logic. No one ever listened to the accountant.

Without the link, she couldn’t even tell the live people from the interactive holoforms Vim had set out as decorations. She knew that wasn’t really Harrison Ford because he was dead. Same with Bogart and Grace Kelly. But surely the real Penny Cho wouldn’t be here.

Cass scored another glass of wine and tried to work up the nerve to poke Penny Cho in the ribs, to see if she was real.

“Cass!”

She gasped and nearly dropped her wine. Vim had snuck up behind her and hissed in her ear. That wouldn’t have happened with the referencing link.

Beaming, he said. “Isn’t this great? You would not believe who is here. Everybody’s here.”

“Investors? Are potential investors here?”

“Haven’t you been drinking? You wouldn’t talk like that if you’d been drinking.”

She sighed. “I’m trying to loosen up, honest I am.”

“You should. You look great.”

He trotted off. She smiled absently after him and resisted tugging at the hem of her awfully short black silk dress.

Stay for an hour, that was what she’d promised Vim, and herself. She could do this for an hour. She was even having a little fun. Lots of good people-watching here. If nothing else, she could park in a corner and make a dent in the sushi tray.

She decided that Penny Cho was a holoform. The actress never moved from the same spot. Same with Nick May. The Nick May. She’d sure like to tickle his ribs. Not really, of course. That was what movies were for. With a movie she could think about it all she wanted and not have to deal with the consequences.

He stood by the sushi tray, smiling at people who looked admiringly at him as they walked past, like a good holoform. Fidgeting even, with those gee-whiz boyish good looks that made him a heartthrob. The wine kicked her over the edge.

She approached him from behind, a little to the side. She’d do it. She’d have to, to get to the sushi. Reach right through the holographic light stream to the tekka maki. How amusing.

Her hand touched silk. The slick blue silk of Nick May’s shirt. Nick May turned to look at who had poked him in the ribs.

Solid flesh stood between Cass and the sushi. Solid flesh, looking back at her with interested eyes.

“You’re not a holoform. Um—” Oh, wow. “You’re Nick May.”

“Yeah. And you’re Cass Nellis.”

She wrinkled her brow. She wasn’t famous. Then—the link hooked to his ear. Right.

“Yeah,” she said weakly. She stuck out her hand. He actually shook it.

She hated making conversation. Never mind conversation with famous people. She was a great listener, and she liked talking to her friends. But this— He wasn’t saying anything. And he wasn’t going away. He was smiling. Boy, was he smiling. “So. Um. What brings you here?”

“Schmoozing.”

“Huh?”

“Old Hollywood term. You know—schmoozing. Networking. Chatting up people who can get me a job.”

“You need a job?”

“In on-location film, yeah.” He looked into his glass of wine and shrugged, his smile turning into an almost embarrassed wince. “I’m trying to get into real film. See if I can do something cutting-edge for a change. Respectable.”

“That’s cool,” she said with a vague smile.

Vim needed to hear this. No, not Vim. Nathan Pauli, the creative force behind RealCity and the spearhead of the revival of on-location filming, needed to hear this. If they could get a name like Nick May aboard—the publicity of casting the best selling body in bluebox interactive movies would guarantee success for the film.

She must have been staring, imagining this scene for way too long, because he cleared his throat and said, “Your file says you’re an accountant for RealCity.”

She shrugged, as if in apology for not being something more interesting. Truth be told, she was the accountant for RealCity, but they were supposed to be playing Big Time here, so she nodded. “Yeah. I add numbers for people who can’t.”

“Aren’t there computers that do that?”

“That’s the beauty of it. Not only can’t they add, they can’t use the computers that can. I can. So really, I don’t even do what they’re paying me for.”

“That’s Hollywood for you.”

She giggled, shaking her head. “You don’t know the half of it. Vim has spent more time planning this party than gearing up for production. Here they are trying to be all artistic and new, and—”

“So RealCity’s in production? That’s not on any of the news feeds.”

She narrowed her gaze and gave a lopsided smile. “You going to start chatting me up for a job?”

“I could just start chatting you up.”

Her knees went weak and she bit her lip to try to keep from smiling wide enough to split her face. Failed. His eyes really were that clear rich brown, no tell-tale line of colored contact lenses in sight.

“Hey, you gotta know, I don’t have any pull with these people. If you’re thinking that I’m a good contact, or a good networking prospect—nobody listens to me. I tell them not to spend too much money on parties and they don’t listen. They just need me to make sure the credit stays good.”

He switched off the link, pulled the device off his ear, and shoved it in his pocket.

“I didn’t feel much like working anyway.”

They claimed a sofa in a corner and were still talking four hours later. Working on yet another glass of wine, Cass was probably giving away trade secrets, but she didn’t mind.

“—not that there are any numbers for me to account, but having an accountant looks good on the business plan. Besides, it’s cool. This whole business is cool.” She sighed. She was too chicken to step into a bluebox or in front of a camera, didn’t have the gung-ho personality for production work, so here she was, making Hollywood magic the only way she knew how. And she loved it. Getting to work with people like Vim and Nathan at any level was worth it.

“Yeah, it is.”

If this were a movie, she’d jump him. She was in the perfect position, curled up on the sofa with her legs tucked under her, him reclining within arm’s reach. She could wrap herself around him, just like the heroine, just like she might in an interactive movie. Who was she kidding: just like she had in an interactive movie.

But he was looking at her, her for real, and her stomach had awful butterflies. And she couldn’t do it.

“Cass!” Stacy from marketing yelled across the room. “Cass!”

She should have done it. If she’d been making out with Nick May, surely even Stacy would have known better than to interrupt.

Instead, she ran to Cass’s side and clutched her shoulder. Then she caught sight of Nick. She batted her eyelashes. Giggled. Batted them again before remembering her grip on Cass. “You’ve got to come help Vim. He’s in tears.”

There it was, a bill had come in that they couldn’t pay. She took a deep breath. “What’s wrong?”

“He’s having trouble figuring the tip for the catering staff.” She had a desperate, pleading grimace on her face, like she’d just asked Cass to talk Vim down off the roof.

“Tell him to move the decimal one and double it.”

“Come on, Cass—he’ll move the decimal the wrong way. You gotta come help.”

“Can’t his link do it for him?”

“He’s too drunk. His link’s gone hazy.”

“But—” Nick looked amused, wearing a dead-cute smile. Nick May, who wouldn’t be here when she got back because people like him didn’t sit alone on sofas waiting for accountants. Or she could sit here while Vim tipped the catering staff with the entire budget for costumes. “I have to go. It’ll just be a minute. I hope.”

“It’s okay. I should probably be going.” He stood and brushed off his slacks.

She had to do something. Say something, anything. Wasn’t this talking to boys you liked thing supposed to get easier after high school?

“It was really nice talking to you,” she said earnestly.

“Yeah,” he said. “We’ll have to do it again sometime.”

He squeezed her hand before Stacy dragged her away. Cass smiled at him all the way across the room and held that hand to her chest.

“Cass was making out with Nick May on the sofa,” Stacy said for the ninetieth time. She had to tell everyone as soon as they came into the office Monday morning. “I’ve got the replay. Here, you can upload it.”

Cass had tried to correct her for the first dozen or so.

Vim stared off into space for a moment as he watched the replay on his link. “They’re not making out,” he said with a disappointed whine.

“Well, close enough.”

Vim looked over at Cass’s desk and grinned. “Good job, Cass.”

She winced.

The RealCity main offices were four rooms tucked in the back of an ancient building in Burbank. The front room was posh, with blue carpeting, a huge receptionist desk and Nathan Pauli’s awards on display in bullet-proof cases. The other three rooms looked like the set of a second-rate 1970s police drama: vinyl flooring, desks crammed together, substandard lighting, filing cabinets, all drenched in hope. Things usually stayed busy, or at least with the humming computers and files of paper scattered around, storyboards and headshots pinned to the wall, it seemed busy.

Nathan arrived and went straight from reception, through the main offices, to his own private office in the back, where he locked up his cameras.

“Hey Nathan, Cass was making out—”

Nathan walked right past her without stopping.

Cass managed to intercept him when he paused to unlock his door.

“Hi Nathan.”

“Hi Cass.” He was boyish, unassuming, with disheveled brown hair and an untucked t-shirt. No one would ever pick him out of a crowded room for being the hyped-up big-shot director. He’d paid his dues, spending the first ten years of his career in bluebox engineering before he got the idea of reviving on-location filming.

“I wondered if I could talk to you for a minute.”

“Sure.”

“Privately?” She gestured at Stacy, who was watching them.

“Right. Come on in.”

The room was part office, with the requisite desk and computer, and part laboratory, with dissected cameras scattered over a workbench and tripods propped against the wall like insectoid skeletons. Nathan closed the door.

“I talked with Nick May at the party.”

“I saw. You looked like you were having a good time.” Her knees went all weak and silly again.

“Yeah. He, uh—he wants to act in on-location film.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Said he wanted to do something respectable.”

His brow wrinkled. “He called it respectable?”

“Yeah. It almost seemed like he was bored with bluebox.” She pointed her finger in emphasis. “He’s seen Casablanca.”

“It’s funny. Film has turned into what live theater was to film a hundred years ago—the poor aristocratic cousin. Everyone respects it, but no one gives money to it. Did he put you up to this?”

“No. That is, I don’t think so. He didn’t ask me to talk to you if that’s what you mean. It’s just—you might talk to him. Having him on board might give the company the boost it needs.”

“If he can act in front of a camera.”

That was the kicker, wasn’t it?

A knock came at the door. Wearing a sinister grin, Stacy peeked her head in. “Cass? Hi. There’s someone here to see you. Out in reception.”

Cass shrugged at Nathan and followed Stacy out.

There, scuffing his feet on the carpet in the middle of the reception area, stood Nick May, dressed in photogenic casual wear and holding a bouquet of pink star lilies.

His expression lit when he saw her. “Hi.”

“Hi,” she said, digging her nails into her palms.

“Um, here. These are for you.” He offered the flowers. Roses would have been presumptuous, carnations would have been cheap. These were just perfect. “I wanted to tell you I had a really nice time Saturday.”

Speaking of theater, she felt like she was in a play, with Frank the receptionist watching from his desk, Nathan standing in the doorway, Stacy struggling to see over Nathan’s shoulder, and a couple more people crowding behind Stacy.

Slowly, she moved to take the flowers. Her eyes were stinging, and she hoped her smile wasn’t as big and stupid as it felt. “Wow. Been awhile since anyone gave me flowers. Thanks.”

She looked at him, and the link she hadn’t been wearing at the party scrolled a library of information at her optic nerve.

—opening date of his next film, Lunar Wake (in a week), the latest starlet he’s been attached to (Sylvia Fremont), clerk at Gino’s reveals his shirt size (36), and a dozen other facts with the option to see more, (yes or no). More raw data than she’d learned in four hours of luscious conversation. But the data didn’t say anything about him being allergic to sushi, as she’d discovered at the party.

She might have stood there beaming all day, hugging the flowers, but Nick looked over to where Nathan stood in the doorway.

Cass made introductions. “Um, Nick. This is Nathan Pauli. Nathan, Nick May.”

They shook hands. Enthusiastically, Nick said, “I’m a big fan of yours.”

Which was awfully surreal.

“Good to meet you. Hey Frank, can you go get a couple cups of coffee?” Nathan gestured to the back office. Crestfallen, Frank made a show of how hard it was to leave his desk. “Thanks. Stacy, don’t you have some e-mail to check or something?”

Nathan managed to herd them all back and close the door. “So, Mr. May. You ever think of trying your hand at acting on-location?”

Nick smiled and breathed a little sigh. “I was hoping I could talk to you about that. After I talked to Cass and all.”

“Let’s go back to my office. Nobody’ll listen through the door there.” He opened the door, almost knocking Stacy over.

Cass stayed behind as they headed for Nathan’s office. Nick looked back and mouthed, “Thank you.”

Maybe she did have pull around here. And the flowers said he wasn’t just using her for her influence. Right? Cass touched her cheek to the petals.

The only thing she could find to put the flowers in was a plastic super-size cup from a fast food place, so worn out she couldn’t read the logo. She set the bouquet on her desk and tried to make it look nice.

They were in Nathan’s office talking for two hours. Stacy found every excuse she could to wander back there—fetching a file, consulting a storyboard. She pestered Cass, but Cass ignored her.

Finally, the door opened. Nick’s steps were almost bouncing as he left the office.

He scanned the room, found Cass, and went straight to her, crouching by her desk.

“How did it go?” she asked.

“Well,” he said with a shrug, but his smile belied him. “He’s going to talk to my agent. We’ll see. So—are you doing anything tonight?”

Monday night. Could she go on a date on a Monday night? Had she ever been on a date on a Monday night?

Was Nick May asking her out on a date?

“Nope,” she said and bit her lip.

“Can I take you to dinner?”

“Sure.”

“Seven?”

“Okay.”

“Can I pick you up at your place?”

“Okay.” She was blushing horribly. “I’ll upload directions for you.”

“Great. See you then.”

And off he went, leaving Cass to not get much work done.

“The secret to miniature golf,” Nick explained to her on their third date, a Saturday afternoon at Americana World, “is the distractions. All the windmills and moving parts and bright colors and stuff don’t have anything to do with the play. They’re just distractions to mess up your shot.”

“Have you learned the secret to ignoring the distractions?”

Distractions, right. Three teenage girls at the next hole over kept pointing at them. Cass could hear their whispers. “I think that’s really him!”

Nick fished his ball out of the alligator pond again. “No,” he said with a sigh. “Who’s winning now?”

“Me, still.” She was one under par for the course.

“That means you’re buying the ice cream, right?” He shifted his club to his other hand and put his arm around her waist, pulling her close.

“You bet.”

He kissed her, long and leisurely, and Cass leaned into him. They let the teenage girls play through.

The first time they slept together, Cass couldn’t get Patton Walsh out of her mind.

Her favorite movie of Nick’s was Dark Waters, the Europa mining action/drama. He played Patton Walsh, an idealistic young mining foreman caught between vicious corporate interests and exploited miners. Something was killing the miners one by one, and it was up to him to discover what: terrible working conditions, or a mysterious alien lifeform? The film managed to transcend the action genre to deal with real-world issues of exploration, the friction as the frontier of the solar system was absorbed into the mainstream economy, the still unresolved question of whether or not life existed on Jupiter’s moon—and at the center of it all was Nick May, boyish and tough at the same time, sensitive and unrelenting. He struck a deep and abiding chord with the 18-35 female demographic.

The film had one intimate scene between Patton Walsh and the company doctor, played by Estelle Reasoner, who hadn’t made a decent movie since. They were trapped in a mining rover, the battery cells were burned out, the temperature was dropping. She’d kept her guard up for the whole story, he’d never trusted her stonewalling, but sparks flew every time they were in the same room, and finally—it was just one kiss. A chaste kiss even, mouths closed, both of them bundled to the gills in survival gear. But it was one scene where the wonders of interactive bluebox entertainment rose to their full potential.

With just a couple clicks of a button, an adjustment to her link, Cass was there in that rover, in Patton Walsh’s arms, and he was unfastening her parka, groping with determination. The interactive link tapped into her senses, and responded to her thoughts. If she wanted to be passive, she could be, thrilling to the sound of ripping fabric. Or she could fight him—and will him to fight back, if that was what she wanted. And she could always shut it off exactly when she wanted to. And turn it back on, whenever she wanted to.

They’d gone to her place because it wasn’t being watched by the tabloid reporters yet. They sat on her hand-me-down sofa in her little one bedroom apartment, and neither of them seemed to know what to do next. Not like being with interactive Patton Walsh at all. But he looked like Patton Walsh, and that made it strange.

Her skin tingled just thinking about him.

She ended up making the first move, which surprised her—she never made the first move. She touched his face and kissed him. Then, everything seemed to work just fine. If a bit unexpectedly a time or two, since her imagination had never told Patton Walsh to do that. And once or twice she had to whisper, “touch there,” and guide his hand.

She woke up the next morning cuddled against him, happy.

Nathan called Cass into his office one morning. He gave her the room’s only chair and perched at the edge of his desk.

“What do you think of Nick?” he said.

She blushed. That was hardly fair. “He’s nice. Why?”

“Can I show you something?”

He swiveled around his computer monitor and touched an on-screen key. The film editing software booted up and a sequence began rolling. The slate read “Nick May Screen Test. Take Twelve.” Nick turned up the volume on the speakers.

The scene was the convenience store down the street, the one they all went to for coffee and chips when they were avoiding work. Nathan had set up his camera looking straight across the counter, so the frame caught the clerk on the left, and Nick on the right. The clerk was laughing, pointing at the camera, pointing at Nick, amused by the whole situation. Nathan’s voice, sounding echoey and distant, said, “Just relax. Be normal.”

Nick, veteran actor, was also staring at the camera. In bluebox, the actors couldn’t see the camera because the box was basically one large camera, with a dozen fiber optic lenses taking in all angles. Nathan’s camera locked down the scene—all mobility and dynamic movement had to come from the actors. Nick was fidgeting.

Bluebox actors were trained to be cyphers, blanks on which digital engineers could paint any setting, costume, or prop necessary. It was still more economical and less time consuming to have actors provide the faces and the nuances of emotional expression—for all their efforts, the animators still could not get human faces and movement exactly right. But everything else? Why fly to Tunisia when you can program it? Who in Podunk, Wisconsin would know the difference?

“Action!” Nathan said.

Nick shrugged, uncomfortable in his own jacket. “Um. Yeah. Lotto ticket, please,” he enunciated unnaturally. The clerk handed over the lottery card. Nick dropped it, looked at the camera and smiled an apology.

A sinking feeling weighed down Cass’s stomach. What happened to his suave? The easy-going elegance that had made him the biggest film hero in the last five years? It couldn’t have all been digitally enhanced. “That was take twelve?”

“Yeah.”

“Um, he’s a little uncomfortable, isn’t he?”

“He can’t act.”

“But—” A half-dozen bluebox blockbusters couldn’t be wrong, could they?

Nathan clicked off the film. “You ever see Singin’ in the Rain? Some of the greatest silent film actors couldn’t make the transition to sound. This may be the same thing. It’s not that Nick isn’t great at bluebox. He maybe just isn’t cut out for film.”

Nathan’s vision for RealCity’s first film was simple—simple story, simple setting, minimal sets and characters. That was part of the point, with bluebox it was so easy to create complex, baroque worlds, pour on the detail without bounds of location or expense. All Nathan’s shoots would happen in L.A.—the real L.A., not the stock footage digital creations that had become the norm over the last generation. The story was one main character’s journey across the city as he followed clues to find a woman he’d fallen in love with at first sight. The weight that one actor would carry was enormous. He had to show that a man interacting with his genuine environment was as interesting as a bluebox extravaganza.

The simple task of buying something at a convenience store, something he’d probably done a hundred times himself, Nick made look like an exercise in torture.

“I can’t use him,” Nathan said.

Of course he couldn’t, but Cass’s heart broke for Nick anyway.

“Can you—” Nathan said, tapping his finger on the desk and looking away. “Can you tell him?”

She stood. “No. You’re the director—that’s your job.”

“I thought he might take it better coming from you. I know how much he wanted to do this—”

“That’s why I can’t tell him. I don’t want him getting pissed off at me.”

“But he wouldn’t—”

“No. No way. I have no connection to him professionally.”

“Can you at least be here when I break the news to him? Just in the room.”

“Then he’ll know that I knew and he’ll be mad that I didn’t tell him.”

Nathan pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. “Okay. You’re right. That isn’t fair. I’m sorry.”

Nathan let her off the hook, but her stomach churned the rest of the morning. Nick arrived, and the churning got worse. Nathan called him to his office just as he was saying good morning to her, saving her from trying to act like nothing was wrong.

They’d been seeing each other for six weeks. If he had just been after her for the job, he wouldn’t have stuck around. And if she’d just been seeing him because he was famous, she wouldn’t have stuck around. Right?

When Nathan was finished with Nick, she’d take the afternoon off. She’d get sandwiches and take him to the park.

“Cass? Could you come here please?” Nathan called from his office.

He closed the door behind her and put his hands in his pockets. Nick was leaning against a cabinet, arms crossed, shoulders hunched sullenly.

“What’s up?” she said warily.

“Here’s the situation: I’ve been considering whether or not to keep Nick on the film.” Graciously, he saved her from being in on a conspiracy. No explaining to Nick how much she did or didn’t know. Still out of the loop, like a good accountant. She tried to look shocked.

Nick shook his head. “You can’t can me. The press is already talking about this. ‘Nick May Does Real Film,’ on the Variety feed. If it gets out that I was kicked off the film—it’ll look bad. Like I couldn’t hack it, you know?”

“We’re trying to work out a compromise,” Nathan said. “You might be able to help.”

They played tag with their gazes: Cass looked at Nick, Nick looked at Nathan, then at Cass, Nathan looked at Cass.

“What can I do?”

Nathan pursed his lips. “Help Nick learn how to act.”

Nick looked wounded, hunched in on himself like a bear. But his eyes were hopeful, pleading with her.

“Why are you asking me?”

“Because you’re smart. Because you genuinely like film. Because then Variety won’t report that Nick May has hired an acting coach, who’d probably be some wizened professor from UCLA who doesn’t know the first thing about film anyway.”

She didn’t know anything about acting, much less teaching acting. But Nathan was right; she loved film. She’d spent hours of her childhood watching old video disks when she should have been out playing with the other children or cultivating a sports habit. Movies were windows into other times and places. She liked peering through them. She liked modern bluebox as well as the old stuff, which had a visceral solidity.

Cass Nellis, acting coach? It sounded a lot sexier than Cass Nellis, accountant.

Nick looked so hopeful, she couldn’t say no.

It couldn’t hurt to try. Famous last words.

She borrowed a couple of cameras—vintage handheld jobs—from Nathan and followed Nick around with them for a day. She didn’t actually film anything—just held the camera like she was. He worked out in the morning, spent a couple hours over lunch reading scripts on his handheld, did an interview, dealt with calls from his agent. Most of it was dead boring. But she kept the camera on him and yelled whenever he looked at it.

“Ah-ah-ah. Stop looking at the camera. Ignore it.”

He scowled. “How am I supposed to concentrate with that damn lens staring at me?”

“That’s the whole point. You just have to do what you’d normally do, even with the lens staring at you. I’m desensitizing you.”

He got back to work, smirking. Eventually, he forgot the camera was there.

The minute he had to work from a script, though, he was back to his self-conscious hyper-awareness.

“Do you have some psychological fear of cameras?” she said to him finally.

“It’s just that this is important. I don’t want to mess up.”

She set the camera down. “This is like miniature golf. You have to ignore the distractions.”

“You’ve seen how well I do with that.”

“I think you’re thinking about it too hard.”

“What do you suggest?”

“Read the lines and pretend I’m not here.”

He started in on another scowl, then turned it into a smirk, matched by a lascivious wink. “Couldn’t possibly do that, babe.”

He reached for her, she pretended to resist, and they ended up on the floor together, which finished any more coaching she had planned for the day.

That weekend, they were sprawled on Cass’s living room floor, eating popcorn and watching Casablanca on the old-fashioned flat screen.

“What makes this great,” she said, blathering on again, “better than bluebox stuff, is that this is all about setting, and characters interacting with the setting. I mean, the title’s the name of the city. The story couldn’t have happened any other time or place, and these characters grow out of the time and place. The film manages to capture all this in a tiny little frame. It forces you to watch and you can’t escape.”

“The problems of two people don’t amount to a hill of beans . . .”

“Wasn’t this filmed at a studio? Not really Casablanca.”

“But it was still a set. Setting. The actors were still there.”

“You really love this movie, don’t you?”

“Yeah.” She didn’t need an interactive link to imagine she was right there with Rick and Ilsa and the rest, singing “La Marseillaise.” That it was black and white didn’t even matter.

“You think we’ll ever be able to make a movie like that? Something so compelling it carries the audience right along and they don’t care if they can’t change the view?”

“If anyone can, it’s Nathan.”

“What about me?”

“You know I’d follow those brown eyes anywhere. We just have to get them onto film.”

“So what’s next?” He scrolled through the file list on her handheld for the next film. It took a while. She had hundreds of movies stored digitally.

He paused, his brow furrowing. “You have a dozen saved interactive versions of Dark Waters?” He looked at her sideways.

“It’s my favorite of yours.” She donned a vacant, nostalgic smile. “That scene in the broken-down rover’s a killer.”

“Thanks, I think. I can’t help but wonder how the real thing measures up.”

She pulled her knees up to her chin and watched him. He was in full-force casual mode, which never showed up in the tabloid photos: sweatpants, faded university t-shirt, barely combed hair. When he knew, or even suspected cameras were going to be around, he dressed up, not a hair out of place. Right now, she wanted to grab him and roll around on the floor with him. He was Nick—she hadn’t superimposed Patton Walsh on him in weeks.

“You’re asking if I prefer the Nick May who played Patton Walsh, or the Nick May who’s in sweatpants in my living room.”

He looked away; his smile was humorless.

She ruffled his hair. “I haven’t watched that movie since we started dating. I know every line by heart, but I never know what you’re going to say, and that makes me smile. The rest of the world can have Patton Walsh. I’ll take the guy in the sweatpants.”

He took hold of her hand, kissed it, and that ended another afternoon of coaching.

Nathan gave them a week, then ran another screen test. He filmed in the alley behind the RealCity offices, with a full crew on hand to make it seem more like a real set. Cass came along to watch, and felt a buzz in the air at the sight of the camera on the dolly, the boom mike, the cables, the lights, the chairs. For a hundred years, Hollywood had been filled with sets that looked like this, before the blue screens, then the three-dimensional blueboxes took over. It wasn’t just a piece of history coming to life; it was a different medium being revived. Films done on location felt different, and she wondered if this hum of energy, the excitement that jumped from person to person with a glance or a word, was why.

Cass found Nick leaning in a doorway, out of sight, while final preparations continued. He was rubbing sweaty hands on his jeans and looked pale.

Cass’s heart sank. They’d worked so hard on this. They’d read scenes from dozens of scripts, watched dozens of classic films. He’d studied Brando, Hoffman, Washington, Damon. He’d been getting it.

“I don’t think I can do this,” he said.

She took his hand and leaned her forehead on his shoulder. “You can.”

She didn’t understand why this was so hard for him. It was like he faced the psychological hurdle and simply refused to leap over it. She supposed it happened like that sometimes.

Maybe there’d be a miracle.

The production wasn’t just for Nick. Nathan was training his entire crew. Hollywood hadn’t seen a full-scale on-location shoot in thirty years, before a lot of these people were born. They’d probably never seen most of this equipment, except maybe in museums. The boom operator was practicing, moving the mike up, down, up, down. The cameraman yelled whenever it showed up in the shot.

It was all part of the atmosphere. DeMille or Kubrick might walk by any minute.

Cass stayed well in the back, out of everyone’s way, and leaned on the wall to watch.

Nathan took Nick aside for a conference, probably telling him what to do, what the scene was about. Then came the magic. Cass held her breath, ready for it.

“Quiet on the set!” Nathan called. The production assistant ran up with the slate. “Nick May outdoor screen test, take one.”

Then, “Ready? And . . . Action!”

Nick, who had moved some ways off, ran up the alley, toward the camera. He stopped, looked around for a split second, hesitating. Cass’s stomach flip-flopped. She doubted that was part of the scene he was supposed to be playing. He seemed to recall himself, which gave her hope. He just needed to warm up was all.

He looked at the roof, put his hands to his mouth, preparing to shout—a scene perhaps meant to recall Marlon Brando.

“Jenny!”

It came out flat. Not that it was the most forceful name in the world, not like STELLA! or ADRIAN! But he conveyed no feeling. He invited no belief that he was desperate for anything. Not even the job.

“Jenny!”

It wasn’t acting, he wasn’t emoting. He was simply following directions.

She closed her eyes. She’d failed as a coach as much as he had as an actor. She didn’t know what else she could have done. She was an accountant and didn’t know anything about acting, so it seemed. So Nick proved. She knew how hard he’d been trying, how much he wanted it. Maybe Nathan was right. He had his niche in bluebox, and that was that.

They endured this for an hour and a half before Nathan finally announced, “Let’s break for lunch.”

No one had moved much except for Nick, but the crew heaved a collective sigh of exhaustion.

Nathan said, “Nick, would you come inside for a minute?”

No one on the set said anything. It was like someone had died. Nick’s career, maybe? The tech people shuffled in place, fiddling with their equipment. Transmitting word of Nick’s failure to the gossip feeds?

She waited until the door closed behind them before following them inside.

They were at the other end of the service corridor, next to his office, when Nathan spotted her. Not that she was trying to sneak. Instead of shooing her away, though, he gestured her inside with a tilt of his head.

All the tension that had been simmering on the set when she left followed her into the room, concentrated and unbearable. Nick glanced up at her entrance, set his jaw and appeared annoyed. After that, no one looked at each other.

Finally, Nathan said, “This isn’t working.”

Nick tightened his fists and begged. “I’m close to getting it right, Nathan. I can feel it. I’m this close—” He showed thumb and forefinger touching. “I just need a little more time.”

It was a small comfort that at least Nick realized he wasn’t any good.

Nathan shook his head. “There’s a thousand actors in this town with stage and camera experience who’d kill for a shot at this. It’s nothing personal, Nick. It just doesn’t make a whole lot of economic sense for me to spend time with you when I can pull someone off the street who’s ready to go now. I’m sorry.”

Nick paced a small circle, looking away, turning back like he wanted to say something, but no words revealed themselves. Cass had never seen him like this, tension running through his whole body, a frustrated snarl twisting his features, his arms clenched like he wanted to break something. He never even looked like this around paparazzi. Even Patton Walsh never looked like this.

Nick closed his eyes and took a deep breath, calming himself. When he was finally ready to speak, his voice didn’t shake. Much.

“I’ve never failed at anything. My career’s one long string of lucky breaks, I know that and I’m grateful for it, don’t think I’m not. But here, I thought if I actually worked for something, it might . . . I don’t know. Mean something.”

Cass’s turn to speak. Her voice caught, making her sound even softer than usual. Not that anything she could say would help.

“I’m sorry. I tried everything I could think of, and I don’t know what else to do because the skills are there, you know what to do, it just—” She gestured vaguely. “—isn’t happening. I don’t know what to say.”

Angrily, he brushed her words aside. “Oh come on, Cass. This isn’t your fault. It’s not like I’m some interactive fantasy you can change at will, push a button and turn me into Humphrey Bogart, or . . . or Patton Walsh. You’re not the actor, I am. It was up to me and I blew it. You don’t have anything to do with this.”

Then, something happened. His expression went slack for a moment, a light dawning, a realization overcoming him. He narrowed his gaze, which dropped for a moment. The room had fallen dead still while Cass and Nathan let Nick think.

After the space of several heartbeats, he glared at Cass. “Did you guys set me up? At the party, you coming onto me—”

She’d come on to him? Was that how it had happened? If she’d had her link on at the time she could have played it back, but no, the scene was lost to memory now.

“Did Nathan put you up this? I can just hear it. ‘Yeah, we get Nick May on board and investment capital will come pouring in. Cass, you’re on it. Soften him up a little.’ ”

She stared at him, amazed. Didn’t he know her well enough to know how incapable she was of such . . . conniving? She couldn’t even flirt, much less seduce anyone for commercial gain. “Nick, that’s just a little ridiculous.”

“Is it? Come on, think about it. Everyone in the business knew that it didn’t matter how much of an artistic hotshot Nathan was, without a name actor he wouldn’t get a cent of funding. So you threw a big party to see who showed up, sent your little minions out to bait the hook. Must have been a big shock to find out I didn’t have any talent.”

Cass had never thought of herself as bait and was almost flattered.

Nathan smirked. “Sounds like a movie plot to me.”

The actor gave a bitter huff of a laugh and turned away. “I should have known. I should have known the minute you guys took me seriously.”

Cass dared a step toward him. “Nick, calm down, you’re pulling this out of thin air—”

By now, he’d worked himself up to shouting. “Christ, Cass. For the first time I’m thinking, here’s someone who doesn’t care what I do for a living, who doesn’t care about the fame, who I can be around without any pressure—and it was all fake.”

“No!” she said, her voice gone thin and high-pitched. Her eyes went wide. “No, Nick, I—” I love you. She hadn’t said those words to him yet. She choked on them now. Swallowed. Tried it again. “Nick, I can’t stand not being with you. There was never any conspiracy, I met you totally by accident, and I—I love you.”

The anger sputtered a moment. He stared, unable to retort immediately. But suspicion still darkened his features. “I’m booted off the film. You don’t have to pretend anymore. And you—” He pointed at Nathan. “—you can just take your cameras and—” Rather than finish the thought, he let out a growl, made a dismissive toss with his hand, and stalked out of the room.

Her eyes were burning. She would not cry. She wouldn’t. Wiping tears away, she wondered why she wasn’t running after Nick, and realized her legs wouldn’t move.

“If he could emote like that on camera . . . ” Nathan muttered. “I’m sorry, Cass. I’m sure he’ll cool down in a little while.”

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someday . . .

She wasn’t going to wait that long.

Nick owned a bungalow in one of the nicer parts of the Los Feliz area. It was a cozy bachelor pad, not at all gigantic and pretentious like he might have had. Except for the security gate.

That afternoon, Cass stood at the gate’s A.I. box and begged. Nick had changed the codes. She couldn’t get in.

“The resident is currently unavailable. Please depart the premises or the authorities will be contacted.”

“I know he’s in there,” she said to the A.I. guard program’s speaker. “If he won’t talk to me, at least let me leave a message. Come on, it’s me! You have my voice print on file!”

“Voice print unrecognized. Please depart the premises—”

“Goddamnit, Nick! Talk to me!”

“If you do not depart in ten seconds—”

Wrong tack. She leaned on the brick wall by the steel gate and took a deep breath.

She tried again. “Hi. I’m an accountant from RealCity Productions, and I have a file upload for Nick May. It’s his severance check.” Money: the only thing in Hollywood that talked.

The guard program clicked ominously for a moment. Then, “File upload approved. Proceed.”

She uploaded the file, along with a voice message. “Nick, I wasn’t kidding about what I said. You said it yourself, I’m not an actor.” She couldn’t think of anything else that didn’t sound trite, so she ended the message.

Back to the wall, she sat on the sidewalk and hoped.

She didn’t know how long she planned on waiting. She’d told herself fifteen minutes. Any longer, the A.I. program would notice and call the cops. Then she realized that someone calling the cops was about what it would take to get her to leave. The paparazzi were going to have a field day with this.

Two minutes had passed when the gate opened.

Nick leaned out, standing half on his property and half on the sidewalk, hanging onto the bars of the gate. He went barefoot, wore sweatpants and a t-shirt, and his brown hair was ruffled, like he’d been crashed out on the sofa. He looked like a million bucks.

“Hi,” she said, staring up at him.

“Hi.” He scraped a toe on the concrete, and she just kept staring.

“You could have just emailed it.”

“I wanted to talk to you. I’m sorry the movie didn’t work out. I wish it had.”

He made a boyish shrug. “It’s okay. I’ve got a contract on the table for a sequel to Lunar Wake. That’s the story we’re going to put out, that the production schedules conflict so I had to quit Nathan’s film. That happens all the time. Career saved.”

“Good,” Cass said. It wasn’t what she wanted to say, but everything else that occurred to her started with please don’t leave me, please please please! There had to be a more dignified way to beg.

He looked up into the heat haze of the afternoon sky. “It’s not your fault that it didn’t work out. Working in Hollywood, living like I do, I forget sometimes that life isn’t a fairy tale where all the endings are happy. The real world isn’t like that.”

In the real world, movie stars didn’t date accountants. Cass swallowed a lump in her throat. “We’re not going to have a happy ending?”

“I wasn’t talking about us.” He slid down to the sidewalk next to her and leaned against the wall. “I lost my temper. I’m an ass. I’m sorry.”

She wasn’t going to argue.

“You meant it, what you said back there.”

She nodded. Her tears had started falling. It’d be hours before she got them to stop. He offered his hand. He wasn’t going to take hold of hers; he was letting her choose.

She put her hand in his and squeezed.

“So, I’m just a bluebox actor and you’re just an accountant. We’ve learned our lesson and we shouldn’t try to be anything we aren’t.”

She snuggled against him and leaned her head on his shoulder. “I don’t know. We just haven’t found the right glamorous artsy job yet. You know when Nathan said this sounded like a movie plot? I was thinking, maybe we should try writing it down.”

“Write a screenplay—you and me?”

“Sure. How many movies have we watched and thought, I could do better than that? I mean, you turn down how many scripts a year? You must see some pretty bad ones.”

“I’ve made some pretty bad ones.”

“So we know what not to do, right? Couldn’t hurt to try.”

Her eyes felt round and puppyish. He grinned back at her and kissed her forehead, humoring her.

“All right, but we have to give it a happy ending. Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds riding into the sunset.”

“I think you mean Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.”

“Them too.”

In Time

That’s what they call a metaphor in our country. Don’t be afraid of it, sir, it won’t bite. If it was my Carlo now! The Dog is the noblest work of Art, sir. I may safely say the noblest—his mistress’s rights he doth defend—although it bring him to his end—although to death it doth him send!

—Emily Dickinson, in a letter of 1850

Carlo died—

E. Dickinson

Would you instruct me now?

—a letter of 1866

First thing was to write letters. Make letters into words into sentences into letters. Tell the world—and a letter was how to do it because a letter stayed. Even when a person was absent, one could not disregard the page in hand. Immortalize the event, begin to turn the grief into something else, something that would live outside her instead of inside her.

“Emily, come down, please!”

Not supper yet, but still her sister Vinnie called, which meant visitors. Emily didn’t hear. She crouched beside Carlo at the foot of the bed and tied folded packets of paper to his collar with string.

“Take these with you when you go. If you can, bring some back for me.”

He looked at her with clouded eyes half-hidden under his coarse black hair, and his tail thumped the floor once.

From downstairs, Father’s orator voice sounded, and Mother’s soft immovable one, and Vinnie’s over all, shepherding the whole house with a will like a staff. More voices, more visitors.

“Mr. Dickinson! What a fine house—”

“—please, take off your wraps—”

“—how is your son and his lovely wife?”

The front door opened and closed. Carlo raised his head. In his younger days he’d run to greet everyone, tongue dangling and tail wagging the whole back half of his body. She’d have to hold him, leaning her whole weight against him. Carlo was so large, he sometimes scared callers. If she lay down very small, she could hide behind him. Vinnie could come in and not even see her. They’d all have a good laugh about that.

Emily tore a scrap of paper off an old envelope and wrote another note. This one would be to God, how could she forget to send one to Him, along with all the others?

“Another one, Carlo.” After the ink dried she tied the note with the rest. She scratched his ears. Patient Carlo hadn’t moved all day.

Carlo was getting ready to take a very long walk, without her. She remembered every walk they’d ever taken together, everything they’d seen. Every tree and blade of grass, new spring leaves, brown fallen leaves of autumn. Blue skies and gray. They followed sunsets and climbed hills like they were Crusaders’ castles. How much ground had they touched? All of it, everywhere, for dust from the whole country blew in and came to rest in Amherst.

Carlo could not take her with him this time, but he could take part of her, the words. Faithful Carlo could carry her letters.

If she could ask a question of Death, any question at all, what would it be? Emily wrote her questions on scraps of papers and tied them to Carlo’s collar.

“Emily?” Vinnie was calling from the top of the stairs this time. She’d crept up so as not to startle the guests with her shouting. “They’ve come all the way from Boston. They’d like to see you.”

They might as well be visitors from Jerusalem as from Boston. There were so much more interesting places to travel than Jerusalem or Boston. How far could a bee burrow inside an iris before it became lost? How far would Carlo walk this time?

She hugged him, holding her face against his smelly fur. He used to be massive, weighing almost as much as she. But he’d stopped eating, and she could feel his ribs.

No visitors tonight, oh no. She had to wait for Carlo to return.

It had happened late that evening, when the house was still. Carlo slipped out, and she didn’t even hear his clawed paws clicking on the floor. The gardener, Dick, took him away, saying he’d put him in the ground under a nice tree. Nearest thing to a Christian burial one like Carlo could have, he’d said. Everyone was very quiet that night, more careful of Emily than usual. Especially Vinnie, who sat with her a long time and told stories about great good Carlo. Emily contradicted her. Carlo belonged to her. All Vinnie had ever done was spoil the beast with pastries or punish him for tracking mud.

Emily clung to her sister until the candle went out, then she curled up in bed alone.

Emily wrote the best condolences. She understood, she took the grief of others into her heart, tugged it and sewed it up to try and make it whole and good, then she sent it back as poetry. Her correspondence was voluminous.

He was my friend! Easier to express sadness when sadness had a cause. People would understand. They would mourn with her.

And they would say poor Emily, like always.

How to write it? What words? He died. That was all. But that didn’t explain it, not at all. What would she do when the hole left behind was larger? A Father-sized hole? But Father didn’t take walks, not like Carlo. Carlo taught her as much about the world as Father ever had. And Carlo had never begrudged her Keats.

A week ago she had not imagined a hole shaped like Carlo.

Was Death so enticing, that Carlo would walk with him and not her?

A house asleep. A world asleep, so still the maple in the yard groaned. It creaked so loud, as though goblins danced on every bough. They’d break all the limbs if they weren’t careful. There should be a dog to bark at them.

And so it did. A deep rumble, like a saw raking through wood.

Emily sat up. “Carlo.”

He’d come to fetch her, so they could take a walk together.

Wrapping a blanket tight around her, she climbed out of bed and scampered down the stairs, barefoot. The clicking of paws sounded in the foyer.

Skidding to her knees, slipping the rug on the hardwood floor of the foyer, she met Carlo head-on, crashing into him with a hug. He wrestled her over, playing, and she had to clamp shut his muzzle to keep him from barking and waking up the house, even though she was laughing loud enough to do so. But no one woke; they were alone.

There was a note tied to his collar. Just one, thick creamy stationery folded and tied with a black velvet ribbon. Her name, “Emily,” was written on the outside in a flourishing hand.

A reply. She loved receiving letters. Every one with her name on it was an affirmation—here is a world, here is a friend, and I am here too! When her friends didn’t write back it was so easy to think them dead. They frightened her when they didn’t write back.

Climbing out of their wrestle, half-sprawling on Carlo, she eagerly untied the ribbon and unfolded the page. Written in solid black ink, in confident cursive:

In time—

And nothing more.

The paper lay lightly in Emily’s hands. “In time, the carriage stops for all.”

Was that right? It was a riddle, surely, and she must know if her answer was right. In time all happens, armies march, wars are won and lost, the seasons turn endless and eternal. All people are born and die. But what happened out of time?

“I must reply. At once, I must write! And you must carry the letter for me, Carlo.”

But Carlo stood at the door, nuzzling the knob and wagging his tail, like he needed to go out.

“Well, how did you come in, you great beast? Surely you can go the way you came and don’t need the door.”

He wagged his tail, whined a little. He had to go, that was that, and he needed her to open the door this time. If one could predict the rules, there’d be no need to ask questions at all, would there?

When she stood up to get the door, he bounced in place, jumping back on his legs—he was as tall as a person when he did that. He’d run when she opened the door, like a cannonball. He could run again.

“I want to go with you.”

The letter felt cold in her hand. It didn’t answer any of her questions. None at all. Perhaps if she asked them in person—but she had come to dislike visitors, and visiting.

She’d open the door, and he’d run so fast his legs would be a blur. She could never keep up with him when he ran. But Carlo always came home. However far ahead he ran, he’d always come back for her.

She knelt and held his stout head in her hands, looking into his clear brown eyes. “Don’t forget, when you’ve gone far enough ahead, come back and get me.” A kiss on the nose, like she gave him when he was a puppy.

She opened the door, and in a flash he was gone, running into darkness.

“A piece of Immortality,” she said, holding the letter tight in both hands, close to her heart. “That’s what I’ve always thought a letter is.”

Carlo returned to fetch Emily twenty years later.

Story Notes

“This is the Highest Step in the World”

The photo on the back of Craig Ryan’s book The Pre-Astronauts shows Captain Joseph Kittinger Jr. plummeting from his balloon gondola at an altitude of 102,000 feet. This has become my favorite story in the history of U.S. aerospace research. It has everything: heroes, suspense, scientific endeavor, impossible missions. The photo is deceptively mind-boggling—he’s parachuting from space! I wanted to write about the mental state of the person going through this impossible jump. This feat makes anything possible, really.

“Peace in Our Time”

My great-uncle, Francis Pearl, introduced my grandparents to each other. He and my grandfather served together on a converted destroyer in World War II. In early 2000, my mother and I went to his funeral. Two VFW members were there, and they played “Taps” on an old tape recorder. This was before the fact that there aren’t enough trumpet players to play “Taps” at the funerals of all the WWII vets who are passing away started making news. Seeing this, hearing this on the edge of the winter prairie outside the dying farming town of Rocky Ford Colorado, was one of the saddest, most poignant things I have ever seen. I wondered what would happen when there was no one left to play “Taps” for anyone, when the last war veteran passed away, because there was no more war.

“Silence Before Starlight”

I call this my “Elves in Space” story. In his introduction to his book Good Fairies/Bad Fairies, Brian Froud writes about fairy stories, and how part of nearly all of them is the idea that fairies and fairy magic are fading from the world, and that there was a time when they were more common and more powerful. Since this has always been a part of the stories, Froud concludes that their magic isn’t fading at all—that such stories will always have a place in culture, no matter how technological we become. We get computer hobgoblins rather than bogeys that spoil the milk. I like this idea, so I took a fairy story, that of the leannáne sídhe, the beautiful maid who seduces young men and drowns them in bodies of water, and set it in space. Still, for some reason, my original readers thought it was an alien. Go figure.

“The Happiest Place”

I went to Disneyland in 2006 (in conjunction with Worldcon) and had a really fabulous time. My mom and I went to one of those hokey musical shows, just because it was starting around the time we happened to be passing by. It was aimed at kids, very lalala, it had singers pretending to be animators drawing characters, and at the end of the show, the drawings “came to life.” The characters were Aladdin, something else, and Cinderella. Cinderella appeared on stage and I swear to God every girl under the age of ten gasped and squealed in sheer delight, and mobbed the poor actress when she came down off stage to greet them. I thought, what power. The immense power these women who play the princesses at Disneyland have, to bring out such an instant visceral response. So this is a story about that power made real, and about princesses who really can make wishes come true. It’s dark.

“Swing Time”

I had a lot of ideas and a lot of notes about dancing and magic. I’ve always loved dancing, the old-fashioned Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers set pieces and the like. I love a good waltz, I love swing, and one of my greatest experiences in the SCA was learning to dance the pavane to live music, with a whole crowd of other dancers. I wanted to write something about dancing and this is what came out—dancing powers the magical system that allows my two main characters to travel through space and time. The rest of the story is an old-fashioned “I hate you/I love you” romance, which probably also owes something to my love of Connie Willis’ stories. Swing Time is also the title of one of the great Astaire/Rogers films.

“The Librarian’s Daughter”

I don’t write many horse stories. I don’t have much patience for reading them because they seldom do the real thing justice. But one day I had a horrifying image of finding my horse dead and deciding to skin her. That was a great image, promising a very creepy story, but in itself wasn’t enough to build an entire story around, so I added the emotional turmoil of a one-night stand. The nightmare burgeoned quite nicely from there.

“The Bravest of Us Touched the Sky”

This is another story that started with a book, Amelia Earhart’s Daughters, by Leslie Haynsworth, a succinct popular history of women in American aviation. I was most intrigued by the WASP, their struggles, triumphs and tragedies. The people who insist that women don’t belong in the military and don’t belong in combat fail to acknowledge the thousands of women who have served their country in military capacities, whether or not they were labeled military, and who gave up their lives in that service.

“The Heroic Death of Lieutenant Michkov”

I listen to Colorado Public Radio a whole lot, which is one of the best classical radio stations ever. I like it because they tell you something about nearly every piece they play, and I always learn something. This is where I first heard Prokofiev’s “Lt. Kijé Suite,” a powerful, joyous, moody, evocative piece. The commentator told the story of the film the music was originally set to score in a brief, ten second sound bite: a clerical error results in the creation of a nonexistent military officer, and the bureaucrats scramble to “create” the officer in order to keep from having to admit their mistake, inventing stories of heroism, marrying him off, and even holding a grand funeral for him. What a wonderful story! All sorts of comic potential. To find out more, I went to the original novella, Lieutenant Kijé by Tynyanov. There, I found one of the most hard-bitten, cynical, depressing satires I have ever read. Here, the same clerical error that produced Kijé announced the death of another, very much real young officer. And since an imperial document couldn’t be wrong, this officer was “disappeared” by everyone around him simply believing him dead. He ended the story wandering the countryside in rags, surrounded by people refusing to acknowledge his existence. So, I could no longer write my humorous story. I ended up combining the two moods, and I like to think that while “Michkov” is thoroughly depressing, it ends on a note of joy that suggests that hope will never die. Kind of like the music which inspired the story in the first place, in a round-about way.

“Real City”

In a world where all film is done with CGI backgrounds, where the actors are all motion-captured characters, where every film is created from the ground up, pixel by pixel, filming real people in real locations becomes esoteric and artsy. The model for the story is, of course, Singing in the Rain. My story is about an actor who’s a star in CGI/motion capture, but can’t seem to get the hang of performing in front of a camera. I’m glad this story sold when it did, because it’s in danger of becoming too close to reality to be science fiction.

“In Time”

Writing this was pure catharsis. The professor of an Emily Dickinson seminar I took during grad school was an affirmed cat person and didn’t want to talk about Emily Dickinson’s dog, Carlo. An amazing number of so-called exhaustive biographies of Emily Dickinson fail to mention her animal companion of sixteen years. At the same time, learning about Carlo is what brought Emily Dickinson out of the realm of icon and into reality for me. So I wrote about Carlo’s death, and at the same time I wrote about my seventeen-year-old dog Snowball’s death. I paid homage to Dickinson, Carlo, and Snowball, and thumbed my nose at the professor.

Publication History

“This is the Highest Step in the World” first appeared in All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories. Eds. Jay Lake and David Moles, 2004, Wheatland Press & All Star Stories.

“Peace in Our Time” first appeared on Futurismic.com, December 2004.

“Silence Before Starlight” first appeared in Talebones 23, Winter 2001.

“The Happpiest Place” first appeared in Realms of Fantasy, February 2009.

“Swing Time” first appeared in Jim Baen’s Universe, August 2007.

“The Librarian’s Daughter” first appeared in Realms of Fantasy, August 2002.

“The Bravest of Us Touched the Sky” first appeared in Talebones 29, Winter 2004.

“The Heroic Death of Lieutenant Michkov” first appeared in Polyphony, Vol. 1, Eds. Deborah Layne and Jake Lake, 2002, Wheatland Press.

“Real City” first appeared on Futurismic.com, June 2006.

“In Time” first appeared in Talebones 21, Spring 2001.

About the Author

Carrie Vaughn survived her Air Force brat childhood and has managed to put down roots in Colorado. She published her first short story more than ten years ago, and is best known as the author of a series of novels about a werewolf named Kitty. She’s also written young adult novels (Steel, Voices of Dragons), and two standalone novels (Discord’s Apple, After the Golden Age). She’s a graduate of the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop, and has a master’s in English literature. Find her online at www.carrievaughn.com.