YEAR’S BEST AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY

V2 / EDITED BY MARIE HODGKINSON

INTRODUCTION BY MARIE HODGKINSON

Earlier this year, I attended a book launch – in person. Any other year, that wouldn’t have been surprising. This year? Sitting in a bar, wine in hand, listening to Claire Mabey and Laura Jean McKay talk about Laura’s new book The Animals in That Country felt like something out of a dream. Or maybe it was the past few months that felt like a dream, my brain handily packaging all those same-same days stuck in the house, treading the same path between bedroom kitchen computer desk, into one easy-to-manage zip folder. It didn’t help (or did it?) that Laura’s book is centred around a pandemic – a disease that starts with people being able to hear animals speak, and ends with them losing their minds. After months in lockdown, I could almost hear my cats telling me to eff off and let them have the house to themselves, after all.

One thing Laura said during the launch has stuck with me: “Suddenly speculative fiction is not so speculative... And realist fiction is nostalgic”.

Putting together the second volume of the Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy has been a fantastic (har, har) experience. It’s wonderful to see the different places local writers are being published; in genre magazines and anthologies (both here and overseas) as well as mainstream and literary publications. No matter how much I read during the year, something I haven’t seen yet always appears in my inbox during the submissions period.

This year, though, reading and rereading stories has been a different sort of experience. Speculative fiction has always ferreted around in the pockets of the zeitgeist. In 2020, the world that shapes that geist has rapidly changed, but the ideas that change has brought to the forefront – safety/danger in connection and safety/danger in isolation – have long been part of the creative consciousness in this country. The thirteen stories in this collection all explore connection and dislocation to some extent – to/from family, history, the wider world or oneself. They explore a longing that might have become sharper under lockdown, and a pain at absence more vividly understood, but which has always been there. There are hints of nostalgia (bittersweet), but more often hope (painful), regret for a past that’s never presented in soft focus, and a feeling of making the best of what the world has thrown at the characters (or what they’ve thrown themselves into)… however bloodily.

Closed borders and pandemic are no longer a sci-fi what-if or convenient setting for historic fiction. Isolation, lockdown, bubbles, R_0 values ... our vocabulary has updated in what might otherwise seem like an anachronistic info-dump. Forget nostalgic – so-called ‘realistic’ lit should by rights now feel like what we once called science fiction, and the next book in this series might be better titled Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Stories of Easy International Travel and Breathing on People in Public.

So I leave it to you to decide – here in 2020, or whenever it is you’ve picked up this volume – whether the stories in this collection are speculative, realist, nostalgic or serendipitously forward-thinking – and to think about what those terms suggest.

—Marie

TE ARA POUTINI BY NIC LOW

The monorail carried the tour group above the Arahura River, moving fast. Āhua sat with her nose hongi’ed to the glass. Her pale blue-green eyes didn’t blink. Even a week into the tour, she still couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing.

The carriage doors opened. “Kia ora koutou,” a familiar voice announced.

Āhua and the other tourists turned from the windows. Tumuaki was standing in the aisle, dressed once more in his Ngāi Tahu tour guide’s kiwi-feather cloak.

“Welcome to the last day of Te Ara Poutini, whānau,” he said. “Feel free to tune out if you’ve heard this before, but for those who’ve just joined us for this final leg, gather round.”

About a third of the guests rose from their seats and clustered round Tumuaki. Āhua stayed put; she’d heard the story hundreds of times growing up.

“Our story begins in a sheltered bay on Tūhua Island in the Bay of Plenty.

“One day the guardian taniwha of pounamu, Poutini, was hiding there from his nemesis Whatipu, the guardian taniwha of grindstone. From his corner of the bay, Poutini spied a beautiful woman walking along the beach. He watched her strip naked and slip into the ocean to bathe. Poutini fell in love – or maybe it was lust. Her name was Waitaiki, and he wanted her for himself.”

Tumuaki caught Āhua’s eye and gave a small smile. She smirked. “Poutini swam silently across the bay, and with a faint ripple, he snatched Waitaiki up and sped across the ocean with her to Tahanga on the Coromandel Peninsula. When they arrived she was freezing.

“Poutini lit a fire on the beach to keep her warm.

“Now, Waitaiki’s husband was the powerful chief Tama-āhua. He found Waitaiki’s discarded kākahu by the water, and knew something terrible had happened. He gathered his men and hurled his magic tekateka spear into the air. It hung quivering, pointing to Tahanga. They loaded their canoes and paddled to the mainland at full speed.

“When they arrived, they found the cold ashes of Poutini’s fire. The taniwha had taken Waitaiki south to Whangamatā, where a new fire burned. And so a great chase began, all the way down through the North Island, and then the South Island. Poutini was finally cornered here in the Arahura at the stream we now call Waitaiki.

“Realising he could never defeat Tama-āhua in battle, Poutini hatched a desperate plan to keep his beloved close. He transformed Waitaiki into pounamu, then laid her in the river. She became the mother, and the motherlode, of greenstone. Poutini slipped out to the coast, Te Tai Poutini, where he guards her still.

“When Waitaiki’s husband Tama-āhua arrived he grieved over his wife’s cold and lifeless form. Before heading home, he named two mountains. The first, which you’ll see out the right hand windows in about a minute, is Tūhua, named after their island home. The second is Tama-āhua, named for himself so he could watch over Waitaiki. The great chief then returned to Tūhua, where he remarried, and his descendants . . .”

“. . . dreamed of revenge,” Āhua thought.

The twenty-eight-year-old martial arts expert returned her gaze to the window, looking down at the enormous taniwha scrambling up the riverbed below. Poutini’s scales glowed dark green against the wet stone. As he leapt from pool to pool his claws struck sparks off the boulders and dislodged small trees. His movements were part lizard, part fish, and wholly real. A naked woman with obsidian-dark hair clung to his back.

Āhua had been on the luxury tour for a week now, following Poutini and Waitaiki on their mythical journey south. She’d grown tired of her fellow tourists – mostly Ngāi Tahu from the east coast metropolises – but since the first day at Tūhua Resort, when Poutini’s nostrils and gleaming eyes had surfaced from the bay, the taniwha hadn’t gotten any less magical.

“Realistic, isn’t he?”

Āhua looked up from the window again. Tumuaki was watching her with quick brown eyes.

“Realistic?’ she said with a broad grin. “I was just thinking he looks magical. Grab a seat.”

Tumuaki settled into the leather recliner opposite. For a moment they studied each other. He was young, perhaps twenty-two, with an athlete’s slim muscular build. She let her gaze drift to the faint smile on his inked lips, remembering their taste from last night.

They both turned to the window, suddenly shy. Āhua watched Waitaiki’s naked figure crouched low on Poutini’s back, rolling her hips to match the creature’s gait.

“I still can’t believe it’s all robotics,” she murmured.

“Even better than the real thing,” Tumuaki said. “The finale this afternoon will blow your mind.”

“Already blown,” she said, and he had the decency to blush.

“You done any other Ngāi Tahu tourism trips?’ he asked.

“I’d love to go whale watching.”

“They sighted a real whale last week.”

She grinned at him. “Bullshit.”

He grinned back. “Maybe they’re robots, maybe they’re not. But you could try our Luminaries tour while you’re here on the coast. We’ve rebuilt Hokitika as a perfect replica of the book.”

“I’d rather go do The Bone People in Okarito. I’ve always loved Keri Hulme.”

“Me too. Maybe we could . . .”

Āhua’s phone chimed.

It’s time, her kaitiaki spoke in her ear.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

Āhua walked down the aisle, feeling Tumuaki’s eyes on her back. She passed through the boutique car with its softly lit cabinets of carved pounamu, then paused at the huge window outside the day spa.

The monorail had slowed to give them a good look at Poutini climbing the waterfall into the narrow, steep-sided second gorge. He moved swiftly, claws gripping the enormous jumbled stone blocks. The blue river surged off his back in billowing sprays. At the top he stood with the river pouring between his legs and turned to look back down the valley, watching for Waitaiki’s husband Tama-āhua.

The door at the end of the corridor hissed open. A man in his late forties in travelling clothes – thatched cape, gaiters, pāraerae sandals – came and stood casually next to her at the window looking out. He was short, heavily built and compact, his movements as economical as her own. Deep hand-tapped tā moko of Ngāi Tahu design and rank framed his handsome face. He wore a tour pin on the lapel of his cape, but he hadn’t been on the tour until today.

“Ko wai koe?’ she murmured. “Tama. Ko koe?”

“Āhua. We okay here?”

The man looked around the empty corridor and nodded. “Brought you a souvenir.” He palmed her a beautiful long kōauau of forged steel.

She slipped it into her kete. “Kia ora. Get ashore okay?’

“Timed it perfectly between patrols.”

Āhua heard hesitation in his voice. “But?” she asked.

He grimaced, “A fisherman spotted us at the river mouth.”

Āhua pictured the black Zodiac riding undetected through the booming coastal surf, then skimming up the wide flat waters of the Arahura River in the dark. A lantern gleaming on the bank. A figure standing abruptly, peering into the night.

“What happened?” she asked.

Kia tūpato, her kaitiaki whispered in her ear.

The doors at the end of the corridor slid open. Two tour guides passed.

“Oh you know, we had a few beers . . .” Tama said.

“Kia ora,” the guides murmured. One lingered over Tama as if trying to place him. She was reading his moko rather than his expression. Like the moko kauae on Āhua’s chin, the designs looked old, but they’d been lasered on by a corrupt southern tohunga just a month ago. They seemed to be working: the guide smiled.

Tama nodded and smiled back. “. . . and we had a good catch up,” he continued. “You know, how his whānau are doing . . .”

The guides entered the day spa. The door hissed closed.

“. . . and then I shot him in the face,” Tama said quietly but provocatively.

His eyes were cold. They’d been training together for six years. And she finally realised that what she’d taken as professional distance was actually dislike. He didn’t trust Āhua at all.

“You?’ he said. “No issues coming in the front door?”

“None,” she lied.

*

In the week spent tracing Poutini and Waitaiki’s animatronic adventure through the North Island, the tour group had stayed in five-star whare in the bush, watched sunrises over Taupō, and collected carved taonga at each of the ancient quarries along the route. On New Year’s Day 2038, they finally landed in Ngāi Tahu territory in Māwhera.

It had been sixteen years since the New New Zealand Wars, but border security between the sovereign tribal territories was still tight. At customs Āhua had summoned all of her training to keep her heart rate steady. She stepped up to the desk for her iris scan. Her entire whakapapa lit up the screen in a glowing grid. Her mother’s lines, the ones she knew, were from her home in Tūhua, but the system automatically highlighted the branching tree of her father’s Ngāi Tahu ancestry. This was why she’d been chosen to infiltrate the tour. She tried not to hold her breath.

The official leaned in to hongi. “Nau mai, haere mai e tōku whanauka. This your first time, eh?”

“Yeah, here to find my southern roots!” she said, doing her best impression of a born-again.

“Excellent,” the official said. “And your roots are . . .”

The screen shifted. The names of Āhua’s ancestors spread across a satellite map of Te Waipounamu, showing where they had lived and died.

“. . . in Arahura!” the official said. “Great choice with the Poutini tour. Follow the green line to Wharenui 3. Your flight’s pōwhiri starts in ten.”

The small carved gate opened. She stepped onto Ngāi Tahu soil. She was in.

A series of five-storey-high glass spheres dominated the arrivals concourse. Each was filled with towering sunlit kahikatea and rimu, with one of the southerners’ signature black meeting houses nestled inside. Waiting out front of number 3, Āhua breathed in the moist, earthy, strangely familiar scent of the West Coast bush. She kept her head down to avoid the roving patrols of armed guards.

Once called on, she watched, fascinated, as the digital faces of the ancestral pou inside the whare came to life. She’d heard that Ngāi Tahu had developed the technology to simulate their ancestors. Throughout the speeches the carved pillars listened intently, nodding along, even kicking off the waiata at one point when an old man droned on too long. Above them the roof glittered like the night sky in a constellation of whakapapa showing the links between every person present. Āhua had a lot of cousins in the room. It was a nice touch, but as she and the other guests passed down the long line of locals to hongi each in turn, she felt uneasy. She wasn’t really here to find her southern roots.

“Kia ora.”

Āhua found herself face-to-face with one of the Ngāi Tahu tour guides who would take them south. He had warm, quick brown eyes, and wore tā moko well, though he was young to have achieved such rank. As they clasped hands and pressed noses she could feel each of them lingering, inhaling deeply of the other’s scent. Dressed flax, a hint of taramea perfume, the sweet musk of his skin. She heard muffled laughter from either side; they were holding up the line. She pulled back, grinning. He flashed her a grin of his own as they moved away.

At the feast afterwards, as he approached through the tables, she observed an alertness and confidence of movement which seemed out of place in a tour guide. She finished her mouthful of takahē and wiped her lips.

“Hey. I’m Tumuaki,” he said as he sat down. “So your ancestors are from the Poutini coast like mine?”

“Hey. I’m Āhua. Some ancestors were, but I don’t know much.”

“How much?”

“My dad was Ngāi Tahu, but I never knew him, and beyond that, nothing. I asked Mum about it when I was about ten, and you know what she did?”

Tumuaki raised an eyebrow, making his moko come alive. “What?”

“Sat me down and told me how an evil Ngāi Tahu taniwha kidnapped my ancestor Waitaiki, and has kept her imprisoned up the Arahura ever since!”

“And you’re here to see her for yourself. Are you really descended from Waitaiki?”

“No, but I am descended from Tama-āhua,” she said.

“Wow! So—”

“Anyway, it’s my southern whakapapa I’m here to learn.”

After kai, in the coach on the way to the tour group’s hotel, they pulled out their phones and traded whakapapa. Tumuaki spun the story of one Poutini Ngāi Tahu ancestor into the next, and Āhua felt herself carried along by his enthusiasm.

“So we’re definitely cousins,” Tumuaki concluded.

“Mmm, close but not too close,” Āhua said. “I have to ask: what do you do outside of guiding?”

“Like you can’t guess! I see it in you, too.”

“What’s your weapon?”

“Mere pounamu.”

“Close combat, eh?” she said, thinking of her own love of the greenstone blade. “I teach taiaha. We should train together some time.”

“I’d like that.”

She smiled and flashed out a hand so fast he had no chance to react. Rather than strike him, she pressed her fingers to his cheek. He didn’t flinch. His eyes gleamed.

I’m supposed to act like I’m on holiday, she thought. Fuck it. “So what are you doing later on?” she said.

*

The day’s last light filtered through the primeval forest outside the hotel, illuminating Tumuaki’s muscular torso with dappled gold. He propped himself up on one elbow, and brushed a strand of hair from Āhua’s sweating face, then traced the pattern of the Ngāi Tahu moko kauae across her chin. Āhua felt a strange frisson at the intimacy of his touch and the dishonesty of her tattoo.

“You know, Papakura was one of your ancestors,” Tumuaki said.

“Who’s he?” she asked.

“She – one of our great warriors. That’ll be where you get your combat skills from. She led war parties up and down this coast, and fought at . . .”

Āhua nodded, but couldn’t take it all in. She lay back and stared at the ceiling, thinking, Why wasn’t I told about this?

“Hey, would you like Papakura while you’re here?’ Tumuaki asked.

“Huh?” she asked.

“As a kaitiaki, I mean.”

Most people had a celebrity avatar as their kaitiaki, or personal guardian, on their phone. It gave them a thrill to get news and omens from a grizzled kuia like Maisey Rika. Tumuaki was offering something else here.

“You mean the ancestor?” Āhua asked.

“Well, a simulation.”

It’d be a breach of security protocol, but a kaitiaki was just a voice and a face. What’s more, she was curious. “Sure, why not?”

“I should tell you she’s still in beta. They’re all a bit . . . dark.”

“Dark?” Āhua sat up in bed.

“We fed the tribe’s entire archive into a learning AI, and used it to create simulations of fifty tīpuna. The idea was to literally bring the archive to life so we could understand history just by chatting with our ancestors. But a lot of the source data was colonial. The simulations turned out a bit – savage. Take her advice with a pinch of salt, okay?”

“Okay, sure. Let’s do it.”

Tumuaki groped for his phone on the bedside table, then passed Āhua hers. She accepted his request, and blinked in surprise. She’d been expecting some wrinkled old crone; not this young woman with wild dark hair and clear skin and a serious mouth, her lips and chin inked deep green. Āhua realised with a start that the woman’s moko was identical to the one she’d had lasered on. Papakura’s eyes danced with recognition and mischievous life.

I’m your twenty-third great-grandmother, the voice in her ear said. Welcome home.

Long after Tumuaki had fallen asleep at her side, Āhua stayed up talking to the simulation. Each question about her father’s people and their lives on this coast led to ten more. She watched digital re-enactments of the meeting at Rūnanga when Ngāi Tahu debated permanently settling the Poutini coast. She watched Tūterakiwhānoa force open the Māwhera Gorge with his enormous thighs. She watched her twenty-third great-grandmother wield a taiaha in battle, dancing as if she was the altar flame that burned at Māwhera, centuries ago.

Back in the upper Arahura, Āhua pushed Tumuaki and their meeting from her mind. Tama was watching her closely, his black eyes unblinking and cold.

“No issues coming in,” she reiterated as the monorail gently decelerated, then finally came to a halt. “We’re here.”

They’d reached the creek known as Waitaiki, which was the source of pounamu, and ground zero for the myth and the tour. She and Tama bent their heads together and whispered a quick fierce karakia, then parted without a glance, strangers once more.

Āhua stepped down onto the platform. She turned in a slow circle, awed at the sacred place she’d heard so much about. The air was damp and cool. The mountains stood silently above. Great rivers of mist poured over the broken tops of the McArthur range into the valley below. Waitaiki Creek tumbled down to the Arahura in a foaming roar. Āhua could feel the wairua of the place. A quiet shiver of anticipation ran down her spine.

For generations her tribe had dreamed of retrieving their ancestor Waitaiki. The time had come.

She strolled down to the edge of the creek where the other guests were taking their places at tables discreetly positioned among mountain flax and hebe. Their faces were open, lit up with the unfamiliar beauty. Waiters brought cocktails. Āhua noted the positions of armed guards. She held up her phone as if taking a photo.

“Kaitiaki,” she murmured, “why are they here? Protecting the guests?”

Protecting the stone. This is still the real source of pounamu.

“Okay. Run divination app. What are the omens?”

Her phone chimed a moment later. It was part old lore – analysis of clouds, GPS mapping of birds, the positions of stars – and part simulation using all available data.

By nightfall you will drink your enemy’s blood, her kaitiaki said. But your enemy is yourself.

Āhua glanced sharply at her phone. She’d never had a response like that. “What do you . . .”

“That’s Arahura stone,” Tumuaki said.

He was standing at her elbow, just inside her personal space. He reached out to touch the inaka hei matau hanging at her throat. “Bringing it home, eh?”

“No, this is Tūhua stone,” she said, putting her phone away.

Tumuaki raised an eyebrow. “Tūhua stone?”

Āhua kept her voice playful. “Waitaiki’s the mother of greenstone, and she’s from Tūhua. So it’s really ours.”

“Hah! You—”

The reedy blast of a pūkaea cut short Tumuaki’s reply. Moments later a second trumpet joined, the note surging out then falling away in a plaintive echo of the human voice. The ground began to tremble. Cocktail glasses shook with a high-pitched ringing, then with a shuddering groan the taniwha burst from the river, clawed his way up the bank, then came to stand before them, poised and dripping, sniffing the air. His eyes flashed with the rainbow iridescence of pāua shell.

Waitaiki climbed from his back and slipped down onto the river bank, naked and shivering. The taniwha hauled driftwood into a heap and kindled it into flame with a quick karakia. Āhua watched with fascination and horror as Waitaiki and the creature folded themselves together beside the blaze, her arms draped across his neck, his tail encircling her body; concentric circles of life. The ancient deity and the young woman whispered to each other in low voices.

It was an ingenious piece of theatre, Āhua thought. What if Waitaiki wasn’t kidnapped? What if she eloped?

Every now and then Poutini lifted his head and looked down the valley. On the horizon, something gleamed. The creature let out a rattling hiss. Āhua knew how the myth went: Waitaiki’s husband had tracked them here, and was approaching fast.

“Here we go,” murmured Tumuaki. “Wait ’til you see Tama-āhua’s war party.”

“I can’t wait,” she murmured back.

Poutini unfolded himself and stood with muscular grace, padding away from Waitaiki to stand in the riverbed just metres from the guests, his attention focused on the horizon like a hunting dog.

From this close, Āhua could see the twin rows of serrated shark’s teeth gleaming in his jaw, the impossibly detailed matte-black tattooing on his hide, the ripple of muscles and tendons beneath. She knew they were the pistons and hydraulics of the tribe’s best engineers, but the wairua felt strong.

Then with shocking clarity, Poutini began to karakia. The penetrating, otherworldly rhythm of the atua’s war chant seemed to come from everywhere at once. He whipped his tail and stamped the ground, his eyes bulged and he seemed to grow in size. Sudden mist burst up from the creek, swirling at random then solidifying into Poutini’s own form, again and again, until a rank of ten spectral taniwha stood ready to fight at his side. The gleam on the horizon grew brighter against the thundery grey day.

Poutini’s chant reached a crescendo, then abruptly changed. The creature bowed his enormous head, took a deep inbreath, and then his war cry became a lament. Though he was of the atua, he knew he would never defeat Waitaiki’s husband in battle.

The wraiths of mist disintegrated in brief showers of rain. Poutini keened with an unearthly sadness that rang from the stones. He turned and folded himself once more around Waitaiki. His tail encircled the woman, holding her close.

His embrace grew tight, and his lament sank to a rumbling dirge, and he began to squeeze, and squeeze harder, bearing down on his lover with the great remorseless pressure of the mountains themselves. If he couldn’t have her, no one could. The piercing bone cry of a kōauau toroa joined in. Hairs stood up on the back of Āhua’s neck, and she felt tears forming in her eyes.

Waitaiki started to struggle, and then kicked and screamed as her skin began to change. Poutini’s tail coiled around her again and her breathing slowed and her struggles grew feeble. Poutini’s spiritual essence crept through her veins. She and the taniwha both wept. Her feet stilled, now looking as if carved. Soon she would turn entirely to stone, and shatter, and the tourists would all get a piece to take home. Āhua couldn’t watch.

She took several steps backwards, away from Tumuaki, and turned to look at the transfixed crowd. Even the guards were staring, though they saw it every day. Āhua scanned the many upturned faces.

There.

Tama had positioned himself on a small rise next to the booth that controlled the production. He was watching her intently, waiting for the signal. She flexed her fingers. The light in the sky grew brighter. She took the long silver kōauau from her kete and nodded.

Now.

As Āhua shook the kōauau, it telescoped out into a steel taiaha with a faint click, and as Tama brought up the barrel of his AR15, the light in the sky grew blinding, accompanied by the harsh scream of engines. As one, the crowd screamed as four jet-black helicopters tore overhead and a volley of rockets slammed into the monorail at their back, incinerating the sinuous white carriages in a series of brilliant flashes.

Tama began to fire in tight bursts into the clusters of guards. Āhua moved with a feeling of release, lashing the blade of her weapon into the chest of the nearest guard, cleaving his breast-bone with a metallic snap. She sliced another across the temple as she spun, then felled a third with a bloody thrust to the throat. They were dead before the first wave of molten glass from the explosions hit the ground.

Then she was sprinting through the smoke, head down, tearing into the next corpus of guards in a silver blur. Someone screamed at the guests to take cover. She heard the suppressed thump of Tama’s semi-automatic, felt the huff of displaced air as rounds tore past.

Blood and fire filled her nostrils. Centuries of anticipation swarmed in her veins.

Overhead, the huge twin-rotored helicopters swung wide and circled back around. As Āhua moved through the chaotic crowd towards another body of guards, she glimpsed the great whipping steel cables beneath each helicopter, and the familiar shape of her own iwi insignia on their sides.

Tama disappeared into the production booth. Two shots. An instant later the animatronic Waitaiki ceased her struggles. Poutini lay down on the river bank, with just his chest rising, eyes blinking, gone into some holding pattern. The epic soundtrack of taonga pūoro cut out, leaving the crackle of flames, the vicious rattling thump of heavy-calibre fire from the helicopters, and thrilled screams from the crowd.

In the thick of the melee, something flashed into Āhua’s vision. Without conscious thought she twitched the head of her taiaha up and felt a jarring impact. Another blow came in low and fast, and she found herself back-pedalling furiously, fending off lightning-fast strikes about her head.

Tumuaki. With a mere pounamu shimmering in his right hand. She spun on the ball of her right foot, sweeping the head of her taiaha towards his belly, then at the last instant flashed the broad blade down into his head.

He danced sideways and parried with a glancing blow, then struck hard with a back-handed grip. Āhua rolled away and turned, coming back to standing, taiaha quivering in her hands. Did she really want to hurt him? She pukana’d, a high-pitched yip, and sprang forward. Tumuaki was expecting the attack, raised his mere to parry, but he hadn’t expected her strength. She smashed the weapon from his hand, stepped forward and flicked the tongue of her taiaha around to rest against his carotid artery. The feathered collar of her weapon danced in time with their breathing. They were eye to eye, slick with sweat.

“What are you doing?” he whispered.

“Taking Waitaiki home,” she whispered back.

The air around them erupted in a whirlwind of downdraft as the choppers came in to land. Warriors in black fatigues jumped clear and forced the remaining guards into the dirt. Tumuaki was herded in with the rest of the tourists and guides.

The blades slowed, the din lessened. The cockpit of one opened and Āhua’s great-uncle Tūhākari stepped down, wrapped in a long kahukurī, flanked by his own personal guards. He strode towards Āhua through billowing black smoke, pressed his nose to hers, then pulled her into a brief embrace.

“Well done,” he shouted in her ear. “We’ll get that filth off your face. You’ve earned your real moko kauae today.”

She had to fight a strange urge to pull away.

From another helicopter the engineering team deployed. Women in scuba gear slipped into the river, trailing steel cables and slings. They’d drilled the manoeuvre dozens of times, knowing they only had minutes before Ngāi Tahu scrambled a reactionary force.

Then the engines powered up, the rotors whipping faster and faster until they disappeared. The air buckled and shimmered from the heat of the exhausts. Tūhākari stood with his head bowed at the water’s edge, chanting low and fast. The cables came taut. Slowly the choppers began to rise.

With a grinding, ripping rumble accompanied by a high and drawn-out scream, something began to rise from the waters. The helicopters’ engines howled under the load and the aircraft rose higher and higher until the tremendous form of a woman breached the surface and came to hover above the boiling creek.

The real Waitaiki was as large as a whale. She lay on her side with her legs drawn to her chest as if sleeping. Her face was peaceful. Her hair swooped away in the direction of the current, chipped and scarred where a millennia of storms had torn fragments off and sent them tumbling into the sea. The pale green-grey inaka of her skin gleamed.

Āhua fingered the pounamu around her neck with a blood- flecked hand. Her taonga had come from this river, which meant it was part of Waitaiki herself. She thought of her tribe’s plans to return her to the bay at Tūhua.

Her phone chimed.

There’s no mana in running like a dog with a weka, her kaitiaki said in her ear. Kill and eat every person here so your victory is complete. Or cut your ties.

Āhua stared at Papakura’s face on her phone. She couldn’t understand what was happening. Her avatar simply delivered messages from her own system.

“You’re meant to be my kaitiaki,” she stuttered.

I’m your twenty-third great-grandmother. Cut the tie. She belongs here. So do you.

“You’re a simulation.”

I’m a child of Te Rorohikotākata, the Kāi Tahu AI. If she leaves there will be two generations of war. Your children’s children will be consumed by fire.

“I don’t have children.”

But you will.

Āhua looked up from her phone. Tumuaki was staring at her across the smoke.

Āhua walked to the water’s edge and gazed up at the greenstone goddess. The scream of engines made it hard to think, but she’d made up her mind. She sheathed her taiaha behind her back, jumped to catch the nearest cable where it ran underneath Waitaiki, then hauled herself up until she was standing on top of the great stone figure. The downdraft blew her hair in wild tangles.

*

In her ear, Āhua heard Papakura begin to chant, something so ancient she barely understood the words. The karakia had been passed down from tohunga to student for generations until the chain of transmission broke with the missionaries, but the words had been transcribed into the archive by a Pākehā in 1834. The tribal AI had finally retrieved the chant from the archive after centuries lying dormant, and turned it back into speech. The syllables resounded with undiminished power.

Āhua unsheathed her taiaha, and cut the silver umbilical in two. The helicopter bucked skywards like an ejector seat with the sudden release of tension. The cable whipped high into the air, catching in the light before snarling up into the rotors. The helicopter did a lazy backflip, then plunged towards the valley floor. Āhua leapt to the ground and rolled clear as the mother of pounamu crashed back into the river, pulling two other helicopters in and down. As their rotors touched, the guests wailed. Smoking fragments of blade strafed the tussock with a vicious hiss. Both helicopters plummeted into the river, and the third broke across the rocks with a roar. Suffocating heat flared over Āhua’s face. The pilot of the last chopper hit the release on his cable and climbed free.

Āhua looked for Tumuaki and found him struggling in the grip of a soldier. In a few strides she was there. She pulled the mere from her own war belt and threw it back-handed. It caught the soldier behind the ear, dropping him to his knees, then she whipped it back into her hand by its cord and offered the weapon to Tumuaki, handle first. He cracked the soldier across the head.

“Why?” he asked.

“I changed my mind. Waitaiki’s home is here,” she said, glancing up at the remaining helicopter. “We need cover.”

“The production booth,” Tumuaki replied. “There’s an entire facility underneath.”

They moved fast through a tableau of grappling soldiers and guards, lit by a dozen burning fires. As they reached the production booth, instinct made Āhua look up. A gust of wind cleared the smoke. Stalking towards them through the flames, gaze fixed, gun levelled, was Tama.

The bullet tore across the top of her thigh as she rolled behind the booth. Blood welled from the cut. Tumuaki was at her side, pressed into the dirt. Shots ricocheted overhead.

To her left, a guard lay sprawled. A rifle hung from his hands. “There,” she said. “Grab it when I say. Go!”

She hauled herself up and lunged to the right. Bullets whined. Tumuaki crawled to the guard’s side and swung the rifle around, leaning it on the dead man’s chest. His shot snapped into a boulder, spraying Tama with shards of rock. He dropped, clutching his face.

“Muskets made all the difference, eh?” Tumuaki yelled.

“I’d rather have a real taniwha!” she yelled back.

“We do!”

Overhead, the roar of the helicopter grew, and Āhua heard the sickening thump of heavy-calibre fire. The chopper dropped down into her line of view, skimming the tussock, and swung side-on to expose the open door where the gunner sat. Directly behind the helicopter she saw Poutini’s huge motionless form, stretched out like a small hill.

Tumuaki vanished into the production booth.

As the gunner brought his weapon round, she saw a quiver go through the enormous serpent. The air flooded with the epic swell of taonga pūoro, backed by pounding of drums. Poutini’s head rose and turned and his lips parted on gleaming teeth. He opened his mouth and roared. The gunner’s finger closed on the trigger. Āhua watched, awestruck, as with a single fluid movement the guardian deity lunged forward and raked one enormous claw across the back of the helicopter, shearing off its tail.

As the gunner fired, the chopper began to spin wildly. Bullets raked the surrounding cliffs. The craft swirled sideways, caught a skid and tipped, disintegrating in a brilliant koru of fire.

Black scorch-marks covered Poutini’s flanks. He lashed his tail into a crowd of soldiers. Tama scrambled to his feet and ran. The taniwha pounced, landing on him with an earth-shaking thump.

At the water’s edge, Āhua’s uncle Tūhākari began to chant. A wall of black cloud boiled up the valley towards them like a flash-flood. Poutini snarled and lashed out at the tohunga, but the chant held him back. Tūhākari’s personal guard raked the taniwha’s scales with automatic fire.

The storm broke. As Poutini fell back, clawing at the wind, Āhua reached Tūhākari’s personal guard. She cut them down with swift strokes. Tūhākari turned and his chant faltered. Poutini snapped his head and torso between his jaws, shook him twice, and tossed him aside.

His body smashed through the cocktail bar, bounced and rolled. The soundtrack died away.

For a long moment, nothing moved beyond the lick of flames.

Āhua looked around. Pockets of guests cowered here and there. Away to her left, the animatronic Waitaiki went through her death throes in a pre-programmed loop. She shook, quivered, then shattered into a hundred gleaming jewels. Poutini stood watching with his enormous head on one side.

Then he turned to the real Waitaiki where she lay on her side, half out of the creek, eyes staring at the sky. The great serpent slid into the water and wrapped his limbs around her in a tight embrace. The pair sank beneath the waters with a gentle murmur.

Āhua reached for Tumuaki’s hand. They took a bow. The guests began to holler and cheer.

“Great tour,” one of the guests muttered. “But the ending was a bit much.”

A SHRIEK ACROSS THE SKY BY CASEY LUCAS

At first we thought a plane crashed in the Sound. Which was sad, you know, but not the end of the world. We were wrong about a lot.

Something huge shrieked past overhead, obscured by the rain-fat clouds, trailing sparks in its wake. There was a great, concussive roar from somewhere in the distance and the shock wave sent our boat wobbling. Beyond the clouds, the sky whited out, then dulled. Terns took to the air, squawking indignantly. Dad tried to radio in and couldn’t raise anyone, but that wasn’t too unusual – the sheer, high walls of the fiords interfere with radio all the time, and we were out further than most.

Still, we knew something was wrong. Dad half-assedly tried to comfort me, like he half-assed everything else. He offered me one of his beers and said we could play cribbage.

I was below decks cleaning our catch when the birds swarmed by. I couldn’t hear them till they were just about on us, and then once they were close, their cries were deafening. I poked my head up just long enough to see them flock past our boat: gulls, terns, even an occasional great gliding albatross, all hauling ass out toward the open ocean.

“Dad,” I said once I found him in the cabin.

“Sean,” he said.

We looked at each other. He never said much on these trips. I always got the impression he wanted to, but he didn’t quite know how. Or maybe I just hoped it.

“…Let’s head back,” he said, and I just nodded.

The ash started falling an hour later.

We were rolling in the last of the nets, sorting out the bycatch, when the first few flakes sprinkled to the deck like snow. Except it was March. Dad took a step closer to me then, his weathered face creasing in a wary frown. Whatever him-sized gaps there were in my childhood, they weren’t enough to chase away that protective instinct.

“Get inside,” he said. I normally balked at being given two-word orders like a dog, but his tone broached no compromise. I scurried into the cabin to wash my hands. Warm water pumped up through the faucet, and I washed and washed far longer than I had to.

Dad got the outboards roaring and we were underway. I wanted to ask him what he thought we’d find. What did he think had happened. Aboard this boat, there was nothing he didn’t know, from the taxonomy of all the fish in the sea to the difference between a seiner and a gill-netter to all the good kōrero pūrākau. He knew how every mountain got its name, how to read the weather from the sky … but he had no idea what had happened here.

Night fell. Our motor chugged and hiccuped and fell dead, choked with ash.

Dad went out to try to fix it, bundled up in a rain slicker with his hood up and a spare shirt tied over his mouth and nose.

We thought it was normal ash back then, too.

*

“Dad?”

“Sean?”

“Do you think Mum’s okay?”

In the dark of the cabin, I got the sense that he was trying to puzzle his way toward the right thing to say. Maybe if he’d been quicker on his feet or his heart was more in the right place, Mum would have been on this trip. But maybe that’s unfair.

Outside the cabin door, the boat creaked.

*

Dad was coughing a lot by then. His face shrank in against his skull. He didn’t want to eat. He didn’t want to drink. He parked himself by the radio and stayed there for hours, trying to raise the mainland, voice never rising above a dull, scratchy mumble.

Ash fell like snow. Big, fragile flakes. Anytime we moved beyond the cabin, we covered as much of ourselves as we could. When a single flake fell on the back of my hand, I smeared it along my knuckles. It disintegrated like fine, powdery makeup. Something inside it glittered.

I could hear Dad coughing on the other side of the cabin door, wet and rough.

*

The thumping woke us. It was slow at first, just one or two little thumps as something impacted the boat below decks.

“Dad.”

This time he didn’t speak. In the bunk above me, my father wheezed like a man three times his age.

Thump, thump.

Something in the cargo hold was wriggling around in the coolers. First one something, then many somethings. Soon, the whole craft shook with the impacts of a quarter-tonne of snapper and monkfish thrashing in the coolers that held them.

Those fish had been dead for days.

“Dad.”

This time, my father reached a hand down to the bottom bunk. I held it hard. His grip was weak and unsteady, fingers clammy against mine.

*

Every few hours, Dad hosed ash off the deck, right up until he got so sick he couldn’t. Then I gave it a try from the doorway, trying to keep the drifted heaps of grey away from our door. From behind, my father told me to cut it, to stop, to back away.

“I think it’s making me…”

I could tell he was trying to say sick, but instead he just coughed.

Dad and I had whole conversations with glances and nods. He kept trying the radio, signalling distress. He tried the motor twice more. Silence filled the gaps between us that words never could. The horizon glowed with blue light, blue like I’d never seen, like the bottom of a glacial pool with a spotlight shining through it.

When he grew too weak, I helped him rinse the ash off his hands and face.

*

The thumping. The wheezing. I don’t know how my father slept. But he slept hard, breath so shallow I feared more than once that he might have passed in the night.

*

On the fourth morning, Dad woke me by shaking my shoulder. He gripped me like he might stagger over without the support, fingers wracked with tremors.

Then he leaned over my bunk, extended his tongue, and licked the side of my face. His spit smelled like ash and rotten eggs. His gums had receded, teeth too long for hs mouth, and a sticky grey membrane was spreading across the surface of his eyes.

My father towered over me, impossibly tall, his face a sunken skull.

“I’m going…” he creaked. He took two staggering steps toward me, fingers twitching like a zombie in a film. Like a spider when you stomp it. I grabbed a fire extinguisher off the skirting board and prepared myself to use it if he got any closer.

But he turned, twisted the cabin door open, and staggered out. When I could bring myself to peek outside, all I saw were his footprints in the ash, disappearing across the deck. I slammed the bulkhead closed.

*

I hear my father at night now, thumping like the fish.

*

I check the radio out of habit every morning, but it’s still dead. The air in the cabin is thin and stale. I have to crack the smudged grey windows. We (or is it I? Are we even a we anymore?) drift past seabirds in the water, half-sunk feathery husks coated in grey sludge.

Sometimes I’m tempted to open the door and have a look around outside, but…

I don’t know where my father sleeps. Or if he does.

I’m running low on food. I wonder what he eats.

His presence has always been a silent obstacle in my life. A man who couldn’t rise to the occasion, who couldn’t step up when needed, who retreated to the sea when his wife needed him until one day he retreated so far she cut him adrift for good.

In my darker moments, I laugh about how not much has changed there.

There’s a life raft in one of the cabinets at the bow. In my braver moments, I wonder if I could reach it. Where would I even go? Why hasn’t anyone come to get us? (Is Mum alive?)

When the clouds part, the sky burns blue.

*

The thumping stops halfway through the night this time. That’s early. I grab my flashlight, thumb hovering on the switch.

I’ve never been able to bring myself to look outside at night.

With shaking hands and half-held breath, I lift the flashlight to the window.

“…Dad?”

Nothing. Just the sea lapping up against the hull, the ocean a hungry mouth.

I sit on the floor, leaning against the bulkhead, imagining my father’s ash-muted footsteps thumping up and down the deck. It’s hours before I fall asleep.

*

In the morning, I force myself to look. I have to shove the cabin door open, dislodging heaps and piles of ash. Dozens of footprints trail through it in crazy curlicue circles, but they’ve all been partially filled in by fresh fall.

Maybe Dad’s not out here anymore. Maybe I can make it to the raft.

I haul on a raincoat, gloves, and wind a shirt around my mouth and nose. When I step out onto the deck, my footsteps sound like nothing.

The ash has muted everything, like the quiet of a fresh winter morning. I avoid my father’s footsteps, inspecting the length of the boat, creeping like a burglar lest I disturb something from its slumber.

The steep, sheer walls of the fiord loom overhead, the sky beyond a sickly grey. I reach the bow, throwing open the cupboard with a horrible, too-loud creak.

Below the deck, something thumps in the freezer. My fingers clench around the cupboard.

Go. Go go go go.

I grab the raft kit in both arms and stumble away from the hatch.

The deck vibrates beneath my feet as I shuffle toward the gunwale. Something slams against it from beneath. I reach the rail and pull the tab and throw the raft into the sludgy, ash-grey sea. It inflates like a neon yellow flower, and as I watch it bloom, the hatch behind me creaks. Something wheels it open from the inside.

I still can’t make myself look. The hatch pops free with an ash-deadened clunk.

I grip the rail tight for a fraction of a second, then fling myself over the edge, landing half-atop the raft. Blindly terrified, I kick at the hull to shove off from the boat, to put any distance I can between it and me.

He’s back there. I know he’s back there.

Rolling onto my back, I sneak a glance at the deck above, terrified that I’ll see my father standing there, skin fish-grey, eyes scabbed over, wheezing that I left him. But the deck is vacant. There’s nothing. Nobody.

I drift down the oesophagus of the Sound. The sea is calm. Beyond the clouds, the sky is burning blue.

WHO WATCHES BY REM WIGMORE

Sam most closely watches the newest ones, with lichen not yet grown through flesh into the tendons. With barely enough motor ability to get to the sunlight, once there they find a place and they stay. Stand in ranks like sunflowers, quiet and turned to the tracking of the light.

She should be safe, in the shadow of the water tower. But there’s a noise behind her.

In her old life Sam was never the fastest. She liked going out at night, or staying in with someone pretty, better than she liked jogging or dancing or running. She knows how to run now, even if she’ll never need to learn to dance.

By the time she turns around the dead thing has stumbled nearly to her, arms outstretched. Again comes the soft noise of breath that is not like breath, mouth open, groaning out spores.

She snaps her mask over her face, even though she hates the feel and smell of latex. Steps back too fast, nearly stumbling, but she has time to reach for her bag. The thing follows only slowly, reaching blindly out, feet an awkward shuffle. Sam is faster, even if they can move and move and just keep moving.

This one looks like it died middle-aged, with a scrubby greying beard and slight bulge of stomach. It can’t be newly turned if it’s moving this much, but it’s not old. Barely any outside signs of growth crust over its skin.

Its hand brushes against her shirt, and she slices into it with her butcher’s knife. The flesh parts and the thing doesn’t stop moving but it does pull back its hand.

Like a man falling over it staggers towards her and she panics, breath damp against the surgery mask. She brings the knife down, and the blade catches in its ribs. She pulls free, staggering back, and runs at it and stabs it in the chest again with all her weight behind it. Though not old it’s quite light and falls under her weight, rattling against the ground. She pins it down and tugs at her knife frantically until it comes free. A few spores crumble from the wound, but her mask is tight, she hopes.

She starts sawing at the neck, keeping her hands steady on the hilt. The creature struggles, arms batting at her, mouth open trying to breathe on her. All moaning and hacking. She’ll take off her layers and clean thoroughly when she gets back, try to get the spores off, but it’s impossible to eliminate all the risk.

This life isn’t worth living if she tries to eliminate all risk. Life is risk.

Sam leans down on the blade of the knife, hands pressed against it, and finally she hacks through its neck. There’s the slight catch of the spinal cord, and then she’s cut clean through, and the head rolls back a little as it separates.

No blood comes from the wound, but the flesh is still red, mostly. There’s a slight green sheen. Not from the lichen or whatever, just normal rot.

Though slowed, the body is still moving. She doesn’t know how long this thing will stay alive, if it’s alive.

She grabs the head by the hair and puts it in her forage bag. She stands and adjusts her binoculars, then wipes down her knife and stows that away. She leaves her watching spot and leaves the ranks of dead to their swaying, soaking up sunlight like a corpse garden.

Her house is the best compromise she could find, isolated and not too high up. The older ones climb: more than once she’s come to the roof of a building and found it occupied by a corpse grown-over, the skin more growth than rot, crumbles and curls of it like broccoli.

She shouldn’t stay so close to the coast or coastal winds, where the disease first blew in from, but she likes being able to smell salt in the air. In her old life Sam talked a lot about balance and self-care, maximising your opportunities. Balance. If she walks half an hour she’ll come to the endless blue of the sea, and maybe she’ll keep walking.

But she has her house and her hunting grounds, and that valuable thing, routine.

She leaves most of her gear outside the door to the main house and enters what was once the laundry, taking off her coat. The room is small but had space to fit a stove, and the sink is good and big. Right now, the water still works. Sam washes her hands, rinsing them then scrubbing with soap. She splashes her face with water down to her neck, then scrubs her hands again, and flicks the nail brush under her nails to get out any flecks.

Sam hates how ragged her nails are. Her paring knife doesn’t keep them tidy as she’d like, and she ran out of mascara a week ago, but at least she still has two lipsticks left. It’s the little things. She is a one-woman civilisation.

She hangs up her bag, heavy with head, and stacks the stove with wood then lights it. Struggling her largest pot to the sink she fills it with water, then sets it to boil.

No salt. This would be much better with salt. The homey scent of a fire still makes her relax.

With gloves on, she tugs the head free from her bag, where it has stuck, eyeing with distaste the old bloodstains caked into its hair.

In the sink she washes it. The smell is worse in close quarters, she can smell it through the mask, fungus rot and a slight whiff of ammonia. Sam rinses industriously until the water runs clear, washing out the few ragged cuts on the surface and any insects that might be in them.

Her stomach is hollow and dried as a chickpea. She has one bag left of those, ready to soak and to boil. One bag left, sitting on the shelf for emergencies.

She lays the head down on the counter and pulls out her paring knife. When she makes her first slice into the cheek the head’s jaw jerks open, the creature letting out a moan, trying to groan out spores.

The water is bubbling. Sam focuses on that noise instead, as she cuts into the organism, slicing through the first layer of flesh. The meat itself doesn’t bleed, but growths spotted along the bone like stars are still alive like all plants are, and strands of tough plant fibre have replaced some sinews. In a way it’s fresh.

Her knife blunts a little as she cuts away the fatty cheeks from the bones and sets them aside, lichen-spotted. Keeping her hand on the outside of the jaw, away from the teeth, she saws through the tough root of the tongue. Tendons snap and the tongue comes free, a slick lump of muscle.

She loosens the eyeballs like getting muffins free from a pan, sliding the tip of her knife around them to cut through the clinging muscles. With her gloved hand she pulls first one eyeball then the other from their sockets, slicing through the optic nerve.

The nose she leaves, as it’s chewy.

The meat is still contaminated. She drops the cheeks and tongue into the boiling water. Patience is the first step to success.

While she waits she trims the nerves from the eyeballs and puts them in her jar of vinegar, screwing the lid shut tight. What’s left of the head is no use, and she takes it out back and buries it with the other bones, shoveling soil over the sightless ragged sockets. Even if it could make a decent soup she isn’t yet reduced to that, and she doesn’t want to risk eating any of the brain. She has to be smart about this.

As the meat cooks the smell grows more tempting, less ammonic now.

Sam brushes off her coat and bag outside, then washes her hands again. Then she settles inside on the couch with the floral pattern, and reads one of the books she’d raided from the old library. It’s the little things. Small touches. She’s able to keep her interest on the page, words making sense instead of crawling away into black dots and disasters, with anticipation warm in her dry empty belly.

After a few chapters she goes back, carrying her nicest plate. The meat is boiling, but not for long enough yet. Spores die at temperatures of over a hundred degrees Celsius, or that’s what she’s counting on. Anyway, she hasn’t noticed any lichen creeping in under her fingernails, itching at the back of her neck, scraping down through her throat and making her a dead thing walking.

Not yet.

It’s only a matter of time, so she may as well live a little. Make the most of her opportunities and the new possibilities of this awful world. Survival is finding things she wants to do in the time she has, and the meat is ready now.

She has a long ladle but doesn’t want to miss any pieces. Pulling on oven mitts, she takes the heavy pot and tips the water down into the drain, stopping the meat.

The cheeks and tongue look pretty on the plate, and her anticipation is lively.

If this habit ever does spell the end of her, maybe it won’t be so bad. The things are still alive, in a fashion. A whole other system living inside the rotting bodies. Sometimes she swears she sees intelligence in their eyes.

For now, she is stronger, and she is smarter, and she has won.

She reclines on the couch in the last late afternoon sunlight and spears a gobbet of cheek on her fork. It’s overcooked, but falling apart it’s so tender.

She places it in her mouth. Her eyes close involuntarily. The meat is moist with fat, melting on her tongue. The few strands of lichen are softened from boiling. They make it taste, just a little, like green tea.

She chews and swallows it down, then spears another.

She won’t need to break out the chickpeas tonight, so that’s another day worth waking up for. Treating herself is more important than ever here at the end of the world. There is no one left to judge her, if she wants to feast on monsters.

FISSION BY N. TAN

At the station, I see my binary on the other train, arriving in a squall of blinding wind. Me – I’m on the opposite train, the one about to depart, doors already wheezing shut, sealing me in with the rest of the rush hour crowd.

For a moment, we’re both wonderfully parallel, my binary and I, the compartments of our trains aligned. The phosphorescent oblong of the window frame makes a portrait of my binary’s outline: one arm raised to hook xir wrist around one of the suspended handles. Limp-fingered. Head snug against the raised post of xir arm. Xir entire weight strung up by that wrist. Almost exactly how I’m standing right now.

We look nothing alike any longer, but my body recognises xir. The tingling that starts in my forehead radiates across my eyes, down my neck, torso, the length of my spine, all the way to my groin. The train starts to move, throwing my balance, and then I’m pressed against the window, handprinting on the glass. As though I’m trying to reach across the gap between the tracks, through the glass and aluminium casings of the compartments that insulate us against each other.

*

I don’t have an explanation for what happened. All I know is I’d been feeling off for weeks.

I broke up with my girlfriend Mai for no reason, and then the next day I ran to her office in the middle of a storm, begging her to come out to dinner with me. At dinner, I ate an entire plate of boiled squid pieces without offering her any and said to Mai’s face, “This is not what I want to say, but honestly, nothing’s working. At all. That includes us.”

Mai didn’t say anything, but with her fingers gingerly clipped a hollow cylinder of ice from her glass of tea and threw it at me. Then she left but not without telling me to make up my fucking mind.

That was it: I couldn’t make up my mind. About anything. I was vague, restive, went out walking all through the city searching for nothing, coming home, and then going out again. Forgetting to eat, then buying food and being sick before ever consuming it.

The split happened while I was walking past the train station. It started from the top of my head. My skull chimed again and again with tiny bell-hammer notes that soon enough rolled up the whites of my eyeballs. Beneath my scalp, my nerves opened fire. The pain dulled quickly as my body released some kind of self-anaesthetising enzyme, and numbness overwhelmed me.

I nearly threw up while stumbling into the nearest toilet, inside the station. I locked myself in a cubicle even as the centre of my body turned spongy. I prodded the flesh on my neck, leaving fingertip-shaped dents in my skin. My scalp began to tear, from the top down. Another point of fission began right above my belly button. Skin and bone and muscle softened, sludged, and breached as my body diverged along the invisible axis that determined my bilateral symmetry. My jeans and shirt were straining at the seams so I pulled them off.

Then I was halved like an apple, pressing one-handed against the wall for balance. My binary was the half that stepped away. The consciousness that opened in my binary’s one staring eye was new, too far away from me to be mine. I looked at xir. Xe studied me in return. One-armed, one-legged, with unfinished bones, half-slurry, garbled blood vessels, plasticine tendons that even then were lengthening, restructuring.

My face grew back. So did xirs. We regenerated the replacement halves of our separate bodies. Xe was a perfect copy of me.

*

I snap a selfie and study it before uploading it to the community lookup network. I haven’t changed. I’m sure of it. I got older, yes. There are a few extra creases around my eyes, pulling my lids into a slight droop. I still don’t smile in selfies. But I look the same. It’s my binary who has changed over the years.

Xe must have surgically altered xir facial structure. I remember the glimpse of xir cheekbones, slanting in a way mine can’t. Xir forehead accentuating the rest of xir features instead of drawing attention to itself. Xir nose cut into a slim triangle.

Still, the lookup network’s AI recognises some root of xir origin from my own uploaded selfie and hauls up a cache of data on my binary.

I skim through everything. The name hasn’t changed; it’s still mine, still Ellis Teoh. The date of birth is the same as well.

But the pronouns. My binary’s pronouns are listed as she/her. It feels like I’ve been punched in the soft mass beneath my ribs. I’d assumed my binary’s pronouns would be the same as mine, so carefully chosen all those years ago, written along my lifelines, in the clefts between my knuckles, bangled in endless loops of ink around my wrists.

Her name is Ellis. She gets on the train. She is herself. She gets off the train. She sells seashells on the fucking seashore. Not me. She. I sing the sentences in my head, whisper her pronouns over and over, listening to the way they hiss between my teeth.

That’s not the only difference between us: she’s also married. When I stalk some of her many profiles, I see photos of her wife – Mai. I haven’t been in touch with Mai, not since I fled ten years ago and moved to a new town. I never thought of Mai as someone I’d want to stick around with for long, but apparently this other Ellis does.

How could we have veered so starkly away from each other? Wasn’t she once part of me? If I go to her, if we see eye to eye, maybe the whole process will be reversed. Maybe half of me and half of her will detach and disintegrate to dust, and the remnants of us, struggling for coherence, will somehow reconcile.

*

My binary arrives home in a rideshare. I watch her from the playground across the road, like I’ve been doing every day for nearly a week.

She swipes across a console in the transport, paying off her tab before getting out to walk to the door. Her hair creeps past her shoulders, striped with ugly pale highlights.

Her gait is still mine, though slightly pigeon-toed and slump-shouldered. Some traces of me in her are indelible.

The door slides open and Mai appears. They kiss, flick laughter at each other.

I’ve never seen Mai laugh like that, not when we were together. We were always so tense and elaborate about everything, trying to saturate every small movement, every word we said to each other with arcane meaning, trying to read clues about each other’s psyche and mistrusting each other’s replies. (“Oh, I’m good and you don’t have to worry. What does it mean for you if you’re worrying about me?”)

It got to a point where we couldn’t reach across the table for salt or chilli sauce without eyeing each other, intrigued and suspicious, saying, “You could just ask me to pass it? Did something go wrong? Are we on speaking terms today?”

We weren’t happy like Mai is with this other Ellis. I get embarrassed, resentful, watching them.

The playground I’m in looks like it hasn’t seen a child in decades. There’s a heavy log seesaw, a merry-go-round, and a bouncy horse and a bouncy caterpillar mounted on springs. A dried-up paddling pool full of dirt, the bottom covered by a sheet of dead leaves. My palms, gripping the chains of the swing I’ve been rocking on, smell like I’ve sweated rust.

After an hour of stalling, I finally cross the road and approach the house. I’ve pulled my cap low over my larger-than-life forehead and put on an oversized pair of shades. The speech is weaving itself in my head – all the things I’ll say to my binary. All the tears I might shed. All the accusations I want to press on her. Is it so bad being me? I want to ask her. Do you really have to be so different?

There’s an intercom system but nobody answers when I hit the buzzer. Instead, the door slides right open. It’s not my binary standing before me; it’s Mai.

I stare at her for a long time and she stares back. The speech peters away in my mouth, blows like dry wind out of my throat. Nothing. Mai doesn’t say anything at first, but the frown lines dredge deeper into her face, and suddenly it occurs to me: she doesn’t recognise me at all.

“You just going to ring and stand there?” Mai says. She’s wearing big silver-rimmed glasses and a lot of black stone jewellery around her neck.

I swallow and try to distort my voice into a rasp. “Is Ellis there?”

“You know my wife?”

“In a way.”

Mai squints at me, at the melon-wedge swath of my forehead, at the lump of my nose, my cropped hair. “Do I know you?”

“Probably not,” I lie. The way she looks at me – it’s like she’s on the cusp of a memory, a snapshot of someone from a different timeline.

“So, I don’t know you, and yet you know my wife?”

“You keep tabs on everybody your wife knows?”

Her eyes turn into crevices. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

There’s no resemblance between Mai and the laughing wife I’d seen not too long ago, greeting my binary at the door. I’m starting to recognise this Mai, and maybe even like her a little more. By the looks of the screwed-up corners of her eyes, still netted in that frown, she’s getting closer and closer to calling me by name. Maybe she hasn’t changed that much after all.

“I’m sure I know you. From somewhere.”

“No, don’t think so.” Then I decide to play with her. I can’t resist – she brings out the worst kinds of play in me. I shift my stance, so I’m standing the way I used to around her, hip leaning to the side of the wall, one hand in my hair, head to one side. Giving her a sliver of a glance, a slice of my expression. That “slice of judgement” look that Mai once said was what attracted her to me in the first place. It was the only pose she could imagine me in when we weren’t together, and she missed me.

The shift must really unnerve her in the wrong way, because her gaze snaps straight to mine. “Who the fuck are you and what do you want with Ellis?”

I start to back away. I’m not prepared for this at all. “Hey, sorry, didn’t mean to disturb you, okay? This is a mistake. I’ll go.”

“A mistake? You and Ellis – you’ve been seeing each other, haven’t you? It’s so obvious. Of course.”

I start laughing. I can’t help it. It’s fucking hilarious that this is the first thing she can think of. Me, some shady figure from her wife’s past who has sunk xir claws into their charming domestic arrangement. Me, her ex. The ex of myself. The interloper.

Mai turns and calls over her shoulder. “Ellis! Someone here for you. Another one of your dirty little secrets. Ellis!”

I turn and break into a fast stride, trying not to run. It’s like she’s calling both of us, me and the shadow surfacing from the weird domestic depths of that house.

*

Ten years is plenty of time to get shit done. You can score a handful of qualifications and get a job that doles out a decent salary. You can find yourself a nice place to live, and if you’re successful enough, actually own it, buy it off the phantom real estate corporations that own so many of these housing estates. You can find yourself, fit yourself into a body you’re comfortable with, get married and carve out your share of a happy ending.

Or you can do absolutely nothing. You can live in transit all the time, slip through jobs and only surface in the interstitial periods between employment. You can adapt to a new city, learn to change trains and then how to miss them because you no longer want to get on them. You can meet people and then leave them before their names wrap around your lips and tongue like clingfilm.

You can spend all your time wondering if what happened to you was a fucking hallucination or not, pinching your arms, pulling your hair, trying to do splits while holding on tightly to the edge of the table. And yet you don’t dare look back. Ten years can hollow you out if you don’t use them.

After the fission process cut me in two, while my binary and I were both in the midst of regenerating our missing halves, I lifted my right hand and she raised her left. I touched her cheek and she touched mine. We studied each other’s shoulders, breasts, stomach, rounded hips and thighs and body hair patterns. I trailed my hand across her half-face to the growing, feathering, writhing mass of her body, and felt her own fingers brush against the rawness of my exposed windpipe.

I remember recoiling from her, from the disgust on her face, which must have been reflected on mine. We were a mirrored phenomenon. But when our bodies were whole again, two separate entities standing awkwardly in the cubicle of a public toilet, she broke away from my stare and examined her own hand at eye level, fingers flexing, fist clenching and unclenching like the first trace of a rebellion.

My mind was clear that day. My heartbeat slowed right down and I nearly forgot to breathe as a miracle of thought dawned on me. Very calmly, I put on my jeans and shirt.

“Where are you going?” my binary asked, a note of panic in her voice. My voice. “You can’t leave me here like this.”

I picked my jacket up off the floor and pushed it to her chest, careful not to touch her skin. “I need to get you some clothes. You stay here.”

“What happened to us?”

“I don’t know. Stay right here and wait for me. We’ll talk when I get back.”

“How long will you be?”

“I’ll run back as fast as I can.”

I left the toilet and stood outside the door. I thought I heard a sudden, sharp intake of air from inside. Perhaps a sob. I laid two fingers on my pulse. The rhythm was so slow, so beautifully languid that I could hardly feel it. My limbs were loose. They flowed like air. Someone walked past me, music blaring from their headphones, and I recognised the song. I sang a few lines as I got on the first train that pulled into the station and forgot about my binary, about Mai, about the train itself.

*

The other Ellis and Mai are having a fight. I followed them both when they left home together, to go out for dinner. From outside the restaurant, they look like a pair of statues, hardly moving at the table, their eyes locked on each other. Just like how Mai and I used to be.

They leave dinner, both stony, and call separate rideshares. But they both end up back at their house.

The sound of their amplified conversation leaks outside, before graduating into screaming, crying, laughing, and finally, the sound of something shattering. The door opens again and out comes my binary, striding down the road.

It’s my chance to talk to the other Ellis without Mai getting in the way. I start after her, but she’s angry, and the anger pumps through her walk so she’s verging on a run.

I know this walk all too well; when I’m engulfed in this kind of anger I can barely even keep up with myself, with my thoughts. I go barrelling into passersby and don’t even notice. I skip across busy streets, go through doorways of buildings, trespassing on private property just so I can take shortcuts I’ve never been consciously aware of. This kind of rage makes me light-footed and impossible.

The other Ellis takes her phone out of her pocket and switches it off. She tilts her head upward, giving that slanted look toward the night sky. That slice-of-judgement look. Exhales so loudly like she’s spitting at the clouds.

“Fuck this. All of it,” she says, and I can’t tell if she’s laughing. She doesn’t see me.

I don’t want to follow her after all. She ebbs away from me, the curve of the street ushering her beyond my line of sight. I’ve never felt more benign toward her, even though we’ve never actually had a proper conversation.

She must be feeling how I felt that day, ten years ago, practically running out of that toilet, onto the train, never sparing a thought for who or what stayed behind, cowering, helpless.

I start walking away, but I’ve not gone ten steps before I get light-headed. My sight doubles, and for a moment, the street before me is replicated; there are two sets of streetlamps, houses, playgrounds, two arrangements before me that swerve and weave into each other.

Almost like a choice: Can I choose this reality with this street and this set of houses, or that other one? Opportunity or yet another loss.

There’s a bristling beneath my skin. I feel it distantly, as though I’ve been elevated out of my flesh and connected to my body only by a vague cat’s cradle of senses. At the same time, the muscles in my body tighten and numbness blossoms in my torso, radiating outward.

It’s happening again.

There’s nowhere else to go except to the house I’d been watching, so I stumble back, retracing my steps as calmly as I can, even as everything becomes dizzying and unstable. Even as I’m about to tear apart yet again.

Ellis is not there, but still I slam my palms against the door, my body straining with the onset of fission, my eyes seared by tears and my splitting vision. Opportunity or loss. Someone moves inside the house. Maybe it’s Mai. Maybe someone only the other Ellis knows. The footsteps become louder and I bang at the door harder than ever, begging to be let in, to be let back in.

PROOF OF CONCEPT BY JAMES ROWLAND

There was nothing unusual about the postcard. It waited on my doormat, nestled within a bill and some junk mail. On the front of it was a photo of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the sleek, flowing curves bathed in moonlight by the river. I smiled. I didn’t have a choice. It was like a painter receiving a postcard of The Starry Night or Water Lilies, a nudge to the soul, a reminder of what they longed to be able to create. Scrawled across the back, an inked afterthought, letters curved together to say: Even now, made me think of you. Hope you’re doing well. Erin x. My finger traced the words. There was nothing unusual about the postcard.

Except Erin didn’t exist.

I stood there frozen, the postcard in my hand. My cup of tea cooled and the radio prattled on. The presenter interviewed some politician about the latest draft of the Memory Protection Act, and I didn’t hear a word. I was still staring at the fluent, smooth handwriting when there was a knock at the door. My stomach dropped. The card slipped from my fingers. Erin wasn’t real. It couldn’t be her. Another knuckle rapped against the wood and I took a step closer to the door. Whoever was there must have heard my frenzied heartbeat. I tried to construct some sort of explanation, building from the foundations up. It must be a practical joke. One night with one too many beers had led to an indiscretion, had given away my defence. A friend was probably pissing themselves right now, waiting to be let in.

“About time! I was freezing out there! I told you I’d be stopping by,” Mum said as I opened the door. All the frantic energy poured out of my body. “What’s wrong with you? You’re as pale as a sheet. Are you sick?”

“It’s nothing.” I swatted the question out of existence and pulled my mother into a hug. A minute later, I was in the kitchen, making her a cup of tea. I downed my own mug. The cold, congealing liquid clung to my throat. The last thing I needed was a lecture about wasting teabags.

Mum had always wielded some extraordinary power to wrangle your attention and pen it in like an animal. Once she started talking, no one had the time, concentration, or inclination to worry about other things. It only took five minutes with her for the postcard to be hurled from my mind by the swirling vortex of maternal conversation. She was on a rampage today, adamant that Dad had stolen some of her memories to win some sort of argument over who exactly had suggested a beige coloured sofa.

“What’s that?” she asked, nodding at the floor. Crossing the room, Mum plucked the card from its resting place before I could even blink. “Leaving things around, the place’s a mess. I taught you better, and I would have thought an architect would have more respe—from Erin? How lovely!”

I stared, open-mouthed. I tried to remember telling Mum about Erin. Maybe I had mentioned her in passing, a tactic to give the paper woman more form. I shook my head, trying to shake away the shock. That must have been it. It was a better design defence if my memories contained conversations about Erin. “Oh, you remember her? I didn’t think you would; it’s been so long.”

“Well, Steven, some of us remember faces better than others,” Mum said, her eyes narrowing over the frame of her glasses. She still hadn’t forgiven me for calling Mrs Kelston, Mrs Kennington when I was twelve. “And I always liked Erin the most of your college sweethearts. She was such a nice young girl. So polite. I honestly don’t know what you were thinking breaking it off with her. Better than you deserved, and I say that as your mother who loves you.”

“What?”

Mum raised her hands. “You’re a lovely boy, Steven. But Erin was something special. She made you grin like a naughty schoolboy whenever she was around. You don’t let those relationships slip through your fingers. If she’s thinking about you, I’d call her back. Better than that Rita girl you brought around last month, anyway. Though, there’s no number here? Well, I suppose it’d be easy enough to find her. I’ll look for her on Facebook for you.”

“No.” The word leapt from my mouth. “I mean, I don’t … you never met her. I never took her home.”

Mum’s face transitioned flawlessly. Any shadow of the smile brought about by some memory of Erin vanished, and only the narrowed eyes and thin lips of concern remained. Leaning forward, her hand took hold of my arm. “Are you okay, Steven? Are they working you too hard? I said you needed a holiday.” I sat there, the weight of Mum’s hand against my arm no longer a comfort as she carried on talking. “You brought Erin home for Christmas once. And your birthday. Why, she practically lived with us for two weeks in summer.”

I nodded. I mean, what else could I really say? An apology trickled from my lips, an excuse about long nights at the office. Inside, though, just beneath the surface of my skin, a cold panic started to take root. Mum was losing her grip on reality. It was too soon for dementia. In those few seconds, a hundred terrible scenarios filled my mind, a pressure building, inflating inside my chest. The postcard popped it. It still sat on the coffee table. Mum’s mental decline couldn’t explain that small photograph of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Erin’s handwriting danced in the morning sunlight, the flowing cursive letters everything I imagined they would be if she were real. I felt the tiniest crack in my foundations.

*

I called in to work sick the next day. The illness sprawled out, claiming the rest of the week as well. No one challenged me on it. People didn’t tend to upset the principal money-maker. Instead of meeting with clients and finalising the design for some accounting firm’s new headquarters, I sat at my computer with a cup of tea, a declining packet of biscuits, and a trail of Facebook and Google searches. Every so often, there would be a hint of Erin, like the shadow of a bird that had just taken flight.

She wasn’t on social media. Rather, there weren’t accounts I could click on and read. Every so often, though, there would be a comment, a reply to someone else’s post. Ha, that is so true! or Still on for Wednesday? etched onto the internet. Her profile picture sat so small on the screen. I couldn’t see more than the outline of dark skin and curly hair, just like I sometimes imagined. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t make the photograph any larger. For several hours, I simply stared at her, sitting on my computer screen. She wasn’t real. Erin didn’t exist outside of my mind. Yet here she was, setting up dinner plans to meet with an old friend.

I hung up on five different people until my nerve finally withstood the wait before someone answered the phone. An old friend from college, a name I could barely put a face to anymore, had liked one of Erin’s witty replies. I let the conversation drift, pointing in no specific direction, a boat lazily letting the current pick a destination. Erin’s name didn’t appear until the very end. I dropped it into the conversation, a passing reference, a trifle fancy.

“Oh, Erin. I haven’t seen her in years.”

Those few words broke the dam of restraint. A flurry of calls followed. Most people couldn’t remember her. They wrote her off as another acquaintance that vanished into the mists of memories. Others mentioned having caught up with Erin recently. When I pressed them, though, an eager wolfhound now giving chase, they buckled. They couldn’t offer anything more than platitudes. “Oh, you know. She’s like Erin.” But yes, I wanted to scream, what was Erin like? No one knew. Erin was like Erin.

By Friday night, I stared at an empty television screen. It was barely visible in the darkness. I hadn’t moved to turn on a light as I tried to understand what was happening. It wasn’t that I didn’t have an explanation. Rather, there couldn’t be one. It was simply impossible and yet it was happening. Erin, invented in the recesses of my mind, existed. I drummed my fingers against my knee, tapped my foot against the floor. The nervous energy reached a crescendo, crashing down with enough momentum to grant me the courage to make the call I was always going to have to make.

“Hey, Becks,” I said, when Rebecca answered the phone. I didn’t know why I had waited so long to talk to her. She, more than anyone, could understand the fear bubbling inside me. But calling her felt like pushing two repelling ends of a magnet together. “I need your help.”

*

Where London ends is impossible to answer. We sat in a little café, somewhere in a place which may not have been London. Both of our plates were nearly empty. Nearby was the monolith that Becks worked in. It was all orderly straight lines and sharp edges, everything I hated in architecture. Becks never cared about that, though. She could have worked in an upturned shoe as long as it was pristine and contained her lab.

“So, what do you want?” She dabbed at the corner of her napkin, staring at me.

“Just a social call.”

Becks laughed. “You haven’t been social since the last week of university. I’d assume this was a building thing, but then, you’d just call me from your office. A real big favour then. Or an even bigger problem. What is it?”

When I sat with Becks, no matter where we were, it felt like my forehead was transparent. All she had to do was squint her eyes a little and she could see all the thoughts laid out in my mind like a blueprint. Some people might say she was a real Sherlock Holmes, but I’d never seen her pull this trick with anyone else but me. If I dashed out to the loo, left her with a stranger in this little café in maybe not London, I’d find her five minutes later stammering through social norms without a clue as how to escape. But no, she was with me, and I was as clear as a polished window.

“A problem. I think.” I nudged the last bit of sushi around my plate. “Do you, uh … I’m gonna sound like an idiot. Forget it.”

“I promise not to laugh. An engineer’s always honest to her word.”

That was all I needed. I just needed the tiniest push to spill my soul. “Erin’s writing to me. And she’s replying to people on Facebook. And, man, she’s talking to people. Like, actually having conversations with people.”

“I assume you’re not meaning the Erin who lives down the street,” Becks said. My eyes almost stabbed her. She lifted her hands, showing me her palms. There was an ink splotch against her dark skin. “Just making sure. That would be a lot more likely than your trap person getting in touch, wouldn’t it?”

There it was. The words that I couldn’t bear to think myself. My trap person had written to me. Becks was the only other person I knew who had one; it was why I had ventured out to this café, under the shadow of the ghastly building that was her work. She was the only person who could begin to understand the fear unravelling inside me, a single thread being tugged. After all, she had been the one who introduced me to this mess. One morning, a rare brunch date, and a fleeting comment was all it had taken.

“This new Heritage Library,” I had said, “is doing my head in.”

Becks smirked. “Tell me about it. Designing a building for keeping old books. Cutting edge. Revolutionary. If only someone had invented the shelf or something.”

“Oh, shut it. That’s not what I meant. This design is gold. Loads of clients are going to want something similar. That’s what is worrying me. The design’s too valuable. We’ve already had one break-in and three cyber-attacks, and that’s not even counting someone having a crack at hacking my memories. I was buying a sandwich and I could feel it. Someone probing at my implants. You see it on the news all the time. Hell, what about that palaver over the new Bond film. Two writers, same script.”

I was used to others laughing off my fears. People who didn’t understand what it was like to create from nothingness, to draw together invisible, ethereal tendrils and to craft them into something real. Becks didn’t laugh. She scratched her nose and stared through me, like she was mapping out the ripples of some decision. I looked down at the eggs benedict weeping on my plate, and only after I glanced back up did Becks begin my initiation.

“We’ve been working on a solution for that. Just a few of us for now, but trust me, Steve, this is gonna go global.”

“What is?”

“The idea is simple enough,” Becks continued, something of the professor sneaking into her posture. “You’ve created something. Someone has stolen it. You need to point to a signature that shows it was yours. Mapmakers used trap streets. They’d fake a road, even an entire town, and when it appeared in a rival’s map … boom! Caught in the act. We use people instead.”

The sentence dangled there in the silence, a bait floating in the river. I didn’t even have the comprehension to bite. Becks rolled her eyes at my blank face. “Think about it. When someone steals your memories, they take any inspiration, any spark as well. So, infect it. Infect it with the memories of someone who isn’t real. You’ve left a trace on them, a marker, a signature to prove the theft. A trap person.”

There was more to it than Becks’s simple explanation. For two months, I made weekly pilgrimages to that café to discuss it with her. Erin arrived soon after. She was my trap person. Whenever I had some new idea, some fresh design, I enmeshed it with Erin. I pictured conservations I had with her about the curve of the building. When I considered natural light, it was Erin who discussed the different styles of windows. If anyone stole a blueprint, they stole Erin too.

“Are you sure this isn’t just some fantasy?” Becks said back in the present, staring at me over her mug. “I mean, let’s be honest. A guy creates a person, and he creates some lovely girl he knows from college, with all the same interests. And then this chick starts writing to him. Sounds like a fantasy to me.”

It took me several attempts to dislodge a response from my throat. “That’s not … this isn’t … Becks, this isn’t funny. I’m being serious.”

“Well, I don’t know, Steve. Trap people don’t just write. What other advice could I offer?”

“You’ve never heard of this happening before?” The question came out as a plea. All I needed was to hear that someone else had struggled through this problem.

Becks took a deep swig from her mug, her eyes never leaving mine. I could see a calculation running behind them. “Maybe you’re doing this? A better form of defence, you know? Create some physical evidence of Erin. Delete the memories of you organising it. Boom. That’s a pretty powerful trap person for someone not to get sucked into. I mean, that’s a pretty great explanation, actually. The only reason it probably isn’t true is it’s too clever for you.”

I ran a finger along my plate. It wasn’t a bad idea. I had some important work coming up too, a fancy European competition to submit a design to. By the time we were settling the bill, I’d nearly convinced myself I believed it. Becks gave me a hug, rolled her eyes, and left me alone in maybe not London. A series of trains and busses took me back home, and all the while Becks’s explanation started to knit back together my frayed nerves. My attention was already turning back to the accounting firm’s headquarters that needed to be finalised by the end of the year.

In the darkness of my living room, a single red light flashed. A message waited on my answer phone.

“I know you’re looking for me. I don’t mind. Really, I hoped you would. I’ll be at the beach tomorrow, if you want to meet. Love, Erin.”

*

Another day, another descent into the belly of the public transport system. Busses gave way to tunnels, and tunnels opened out into the country, towns and green fields passing indiscriminately by. I knew which beach she meant. When I had first thought of her, bringing together a dozen different people alive into one person, I imagined meeting her in Whitstable. We sat together, dangling our legs off the most pathetic of piers, watching the boats sail by, condemned to the mercy of the wind. I don’t know why. I’d been to the seaside town only once as a child. The name only stayed in mind because the cement that kept it there had been mixed with Peter Cushing and his films. I think I chose Whitstable for our first meeting because who could possibly guess that memory wasn’t real. What type of mad man, with all of geography available for a cinematic first meeting, would have chosen Whitstable?

Erin was waiting for me, her legs dangling off the pier. I stared at her, a thousand thoughts rattling through my head. She wasn’t how I remembered her. I almost laughed at how ridiculous the idea was. I invented her. How could she not be what I remembered? Still, she was a little taller than I’d imagined, her hair a little darker. As she smiled at me, I noticed the shadow of a scar beneath her jaw, a trace of pain I’d never wrecked upon her. She gestured for me to walk over to her and my feet gave me no choice in the matter.

“Hey,” she grinned, her hands buried inside the pockets of her grey coat. I didn’t remember the sea breeze of Whitstable being quite so biting as a child. “It’s good to see you again.”

“You too.”

The words fell clumsily from my mouth. Then again, I struggled to imagine what else I could have said. Now that I was standing in front of her, could see her, could even reach out and touch her, every obvious thing I wanted to say melted away. Imagine how rude it would have been if I had blurted out that she wasn’t real. I couldn’t say that to her face. It crossed my mind that I was stuck here, as flexible as a brick wall. Erin and I were going to spend an hour together and I’d leave just as clueless as I started, all because of a sense of manners that had been hammered in from thousands of hours of life.

Erin giggled. I’d never imagined her giggling before and it sounded so foreign. “I reckon if I don’t say anything, we could go years without you ever bringing it up. Wouldn’t that be funny?”

Reaching up, her fingers wrapped around my hand, pulling me down to join her on the pier. Her skin was warm. It shouldn’t have been anything else, yet the warmth struck me as hard as any palm across the face. Compliant, I sat next to her, feeling her shoulder against mine, too stunned to say anything. Erin was here, my hand in hers, a figment of my imagination made flesh.

“I’m not real. But I’m sure you already knew that,” she said as we both stared out at the sea. The sunlight danced in between the waves, weaving between each rolling crest. “But then again, neither are you. So, I think we’re okay.”

Her words burrowed into my ears, almost leisurely sinking into the churning mess of my brain. They lounged there, waiting patiently for my comprehension to catch up. The penny dropped. There was no internal explosion. My stomach didn’t lunge down to my knees and my heart didn’t skip a beat. Erin said I wasn’t real and the idea wrapped itself around me with all the intimidation of a warm, woollen blanket. Looking at Erin, her eyes remained set on the sea, following a little boat vainly attempting to escape the wind’s thumb.

“So, I’m not real, huh?” I said it in such a way that it could still have been a joke. I could have walked away, left the detonator behind, and carried on with my life. “What am I then?”

“A trap person, like me. Well, we’re proof of concept anyway.”

Erin finally looked at me then, her eyes so round and bright. They kept me tethered on the pier, in windy Whitstable, my legs swinging just above the tides. If she wasn’t there with me, if her hand wasn’t wrapped around mine, I think I would have plunged straight into the water. Imagining reaching this conclusion on my own, in a darkened living room, I could see the trail of destructive steps that would have been mapped out for me. Alcohol and dark rooms where everything stank, broken bottles and jagged shards of glass chewing into flesh, the feral paranoia of madness, and then the death rattle of a bottle in a bathroom. Erin was saving me from all that. Not once did I think she was wrong. The only certain thing in my life now was that Erin didn’t exist. She was a figment of my imagination and now she was holding my hand. If she wasn’t real, then neither was I.

“So, who created us?”

“Oh, come on, you’re a clever boy,” Erin smiled, nudging me with her shoulder. The weight of it felt so real. “Didn’t you find it odd how Rebecca could read you like a book? Always knew what you were going to say? That’s how I first figured it out, anyway. I think we’re her Mona Lisa. Trap people, the perfect defence against piracy and corporate espionage. There’s a few kinks, though. I’ve found half a dozen issues with it. I think in the real world, she hasn’t gone public yet. Not that we can ever really know, I guess. I just have this feeling that no one knows about us. We’re a problem she’s working through. But she’ll figure it out. Rebecca’s a smart gal.” Erin sniggered at that. “What a narcissist. Having her own trap person call her that!”

So, I was an idea and not even a completed one at that. Existing inside Becks’s head, slowly being fine-tuned for a specific tool, I was only another invention for her to engineer. My hands didn’t shake. I wanted to be angry; I wanted to rage at the world, stand at the edge of the pier and scream into the sea. I wanted every ounce of fury that my life deserved, but the truth was I simply didn’t feel anything. In my head, I could see Becks sitting at a café, thinking this all through. Maybe it was too messy for her to imagine me breaking down. She had never been good with emotions. Or perhaps a breakdown simply wasn’t conducive to her experiments. Looking back to the beach, I tried to pick out a nice collection of rocks and pebbles, an opportunity to fill my pockets and walk out into the waves. I wondered if I even could.

“Thank you for telling me,” I said. “I mean that. It was better to hear this from you. I can only imagine how shitty it must have been to you, realising all this on your own.”

“Shitty?” Erin looked at me, eyebrows disappearing beneath her dark fringe.

“We’re not real,” I said, gesturing to the world around us. The boats still struggled in the breeze and the sleepy English town rumbled on behind us. “None of this is real. That can’t have been fun to realise.”

“Steve,” Erin said, squeezing my hand. I couldn’t escape the idea that she looked like a disappointed parent. “We’re a few years away from creating a simulation of the universe. And if we can build the simulation, so can the simulation, and the simulation’s simulations. It’s simulations all the way down. And if there are a million simulations and one real universe, then what’s the chances you’re in the real one. Or,” she carried on, just as my lips parted. “maybe it’s impossible to simulate this crazy, beautiful thing. It was designed by a god. A god who is all powerful and who is all knowing. A god who knows exactly what you will always do. A god that can see your entire life, and therefore it is already set in stone.”

“That’s just … you’re just…”

“Or probably,” she continued. “There is no god. There are no simulations. There is only one reality. And what do we know about that? That spacetime is plotted, that everything which has happened is happening and will always happen.”

I sat there, letting her words buffet me like the wind. “What’s your point? That everything is fake? It doesn’t change that we’re not real. That we’re just a game inside someone’s head.”

“I’m saying, why bother worrying? Who cares if this is real or not, as long as it feels real,” Erin squeezed my hand, her skin against mine. It still felt so warm. “I feel real to you. This all feels so real. So, I don’t care if I live inside Rebecca’s head. It’s no different than any other possible reality really. All I can do is live my life. Have fun. Laugh. Cry. Send a postcard to an old boyfriend because I felt lonely. All we can do is live, and that meant seeing you. Meeting you, I guess. Properly anyway.”

“So, what. We just act like this hasn’t happened? Live long and happy lives together?”

Erin laughed. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. All I’m asking for is a coffee. Let’s see if we really click, handsome.”

Looking out to sea, I didn’t see the water. Instead, I thought back to sitting in a café, being told about trap people for the first time. The smell of the eggs benedict came to my nostrils. Or, feeling the sand beneath my toes, running freely, laughing, thrilled to reach the sea before my parents could stop me as a child in Whitstable so many years ago. Mostly, I thought about Erin’s hand in mine, so warm and soft to the touch. It all felt so real. Memories of a life I had enjoyed living. I struggled, stumbling over some crumbling, mental wall, at the idea that they no longer mattered because they weren’t so real. “I think I can do a coffee. But … I’m not sure I think like you.”

“We’ll take it one step at a time,” Erin said, beaming. She tugged me to my feet, leading me off the pier and toward some coffee house she had spotted.

Out at sea, the little boat finally caught the breeze just right and began to tack, escaping the wind.

THE FISHER BY MELANIE HARDING-SHAW

It was Wednesday and a man was standing on a small rock jutting out of the ocean a few metres from the beach in Oriental Bay. He had a fishing rod in his hands and an old paint bucket by his side for when his luck found him. He was wearing a tatty blue and purple jacket that looked like it wouldn’t keep the water out at all.

*

Neil disguised himself in his wife’s old jacket and came down to the beach to fish one day every second month. His wife thought he was at work and his workmates thought he was at home. The stresses of both were lost in the noise of the waves crashing and the anticipation of success. At the end of the day, he would take his catch to a local homeless shelter, change back into his suit and go home for dinner.

His wife was grateful that he came home early every once in a while. They were more like flatmates than husband and wife these days. She would try not to start up old arguments that day, although her mind couldn’t help but save them up for the next. Maybe this was the Wednesday she would bring up having children again. Surely a child would close the gap that had grown between them.

In two months’ time, his wife would go for a walk along the beach and see him standing on a rock fishing. She would feel betrayed, but at least they would have something new to talk about.

*

Jack lost his job three months ago, right around the time his fourth child was born. He’d suffered a brain injury at work and never gone back. His jacket came from the free bin outside a thrift store and his hands ached from the cold. He walked an hour to the beach to fish every day. His wife was breastfeeding and needed the protein. He’d heard fish oil could help with depression. Sometimes he thought if he ate fish one more time he would scream.

Each night as he walked up to his front door, he wondered if his family would still be there to greet him. His wife was exhausted and kept asking him to stay home and help. She glanced sideways at Jack as they sat on the couch watching TV, but only when she thought he wouldn’t notice. She wondered if he would ever be the man he used to be.

That Wednesday, she took the kids down to the beach to see him. They dug for pipis in the sand and pestered their dad to sing. She rolled her sweatpants up and waded to his rock in the ocean to take his hand.

“Come on. Let’s go home,” she said.

*

Steve’s Grandmother taught him about kai moana, the foods from the sea, when he was a little boy. Her tangi was two weeks ago. He had not been home for years and he cried almost as much for the memories he had lost as for her death.

He’d called in sick from his city job to stand on that rock and fish. It was a different ocean to the one at home, but if he closed his eyes the sounds of the waves and gulls calling started to restore his memories. He hadn’t worn the jacket in ten years. Even all these years later it still smelled of teenage angst. Its scent mixed with the smells of bait and seaweed to make him feel slightly ill. That brought memories back too.

His boyfriend was reading a book further up the beach, wrapped in the red picnic blanket they always carried in the boot of their car. When Steve grew tired of standing on the rock, he waded back to shore and sat with him. He told him about the fragments of his childhood on a wild coastline that had returned to him, and his boyfriend added his own. They had never realised they had this in common.

Two years later, Steve would propose at that same spot and six months after that they would exchange vows and rings with the sea breeze blowing around them. The rock sticking out of the ocean was just big enough for two men to stand with arms wrapped around each other, smiling into the wide-angle lens that would capture all 180 degrees of memory-restoring ocean.

*

Poseidon was far from home and searching for his lost trident. He was hoping if he stood out of the water in disguise that Tangaroa would not notice his encroachment in this ocean. Who would think a God would wear such a tatty jacket?

He had followed the trail of earthquakes up New Zealand from Christchurch, through to Hurunui and Kaikōura. Now he stood on a rock in Wellington harbour hoping he could get the trident back before the next earthquake struck. He wasn’t against earthquakes generally, unless someone made them happen with his stolen property. He didn’t know who had stolen the trident. It could be Tangaroa for all he knew, but he hoped it wasn’t. That would be awkward.

As he stood there fishing, the rod bent and he started reeling in the line. His muscles strained and his eyes narrowed as he realised whoever was holding the trident might be as strong as he was. He’d been reeling for 10 minutes when he felt a tremor travel through the rock underneath him. He looked across the harbour just as the pier in the main business district crumbled into the ocean.

“Fuck,” he said, and started reeling faster. The water around him receded out into Cook Strait, leaving him stranded on a rock surrounded by sand. He could feel the ocean preparing to lever itself up to flood the city quays lined with high-rise buildings. A tsunami-warning siren wailed in the distance.

He sighed in frustration. He may as well make the most of it though. He fashioned himself a surfboard from the sands around him, melding it into golden glass. Then he rode the 20-foot waves into the city as if it had been his idea all along.

*

Kate lies on a smooth hard surface. The man, the fishing rod and the bucket aren’t even real. They are just a virtual construct created for a woman who yearns for the days when the oceans were full of life; days she hadn’t been alive to see.

Does the jacket have special meaning to her? Perhaps it came from researching her family history. Or perhaps it was just made up by the author of the construct to give authenticity to an environment he had never experienced. Just another line of code.

The ocean and the sky start to flicker and then disappear. Kate sits up in a room with plain white walls, ceiling, and floor and pulls her headset off.

“I wasn’t finished, I didn’t even see a fish,” she yells to the empty room. “And why the hell did you make me a man?”

Only static comes from the room’s hidden speakers. The door opens to tell her it is time to leave.

“Bloody budget VR companies,” she mutters as she returns to her apartment.

It won’t stop her coming back month after month though, spending her savings to search a virtual construct for anything that might make her life more real.

*

Jeremy lies in a hospital somewhere. The scene at the beach is part of a years-long timeline that plays through his head in the hours between when he loses consciousness and when he regains it.

He stands on the rock with his son, teaching him how to fish. It was a spur of the moment trip. He’d grabbed the jacket from a bag of old clothes they had cleared from his mother’s house after she died. He should have taken it to the dump months ago, but he couldn’t bring himself to throw it away. They only stay ten minutes before the cold gets to be too much and he piggy-backs his son to the shore.

In a few hours, he will wake in the hospital to find he has never had any children. He will stifle his great heaving sobs in his pillow until his chest aches and he is dizzy from lack of air. One of the nurses will find him sobbing and hold him tight to her, even though she knows she shouldn’t.

Their first child will be a boy. Jeremy’s mother will come to stay for three weeks when he’s born. She will snuggle the baby close under her jacket to protect him from the wind when they take him for his first trip to the beach.

*

It was Wednesday and a man was standing on a small rock jutting out of the ocean wearing a tatty blue and purple jacket that looked like it wouldn’t keep the water out at all.

HENRIETTA AND THE END OF THE LINE BY ANDI C. BUCHANAN

Henrietta’s mother is an engine driver and wants her daughter to become one too, but Henrietta prefers the buffet car. She can see her future self there, all grown up in a waistcoat with her hair cropped short, smiling as she dispenses tea and spoonfuls of powdered milk. She feels at home among the plastic plates and formica tables, the thin sandwiches and the drinks in cartons. Another girl might dream of other trains with silverware and fresh white tablecloths, a meat or chicken or vegetarian option served on a china plate, but this train is not like other trains, and Henrietta doesn’t want to be anywhere else.

This evening, as the sun is swallowed by the horizon, Henrietta is helping out. It’s easier to forget what they left behind them when she has something to do, easier to not think about what might still be seeping through the night after them. She loads up the little trolley with the jug and the teapot and the collection of worn, chipped cups, and pushes it through the carriages.

“Would you like some warm milk?” she asks those passengers who eyes are still wide. “Or some chamomile tea?”

They hesitate, picking nervously at their feathers or stretching atrophied muscles below thick white fur. Even those who always make the same choice pause before answering, as if they need to know there is a choice to be made, even if that choice is between nightmares and the memories that still flicker in front of their open eyes when they can no longer distract themselves. Whatever they choose, the train keeps going through the night, its great tentacles beating on the coastal rocks. The drivers swap shifts to schedules written in a different world, a world where there were stations and return journeys and homes that didn’t fly through the night on rails.

Henrietta would like to pour out tea every night, but there are more people than there are jobs to do on this train so there’s not much work given to a girl not yet twelve. She does her sums on fogged windows, her tail wrapped around her like a hug, and practices her reading on tattered novels and the old timetable books her mother keeps in the cab. She’s not sure how long it’s been since her pen ran out, but it feels like a long time ago.

Sometimes, Henrietta’s scaled green legs itch with worry. Maybe the flood-metals they have been running from for so long will finally catch up with them, she thinks one night, curled up in her reclined seat with her blue blanket pulled up to her chin. Or maybe one day they’ll run out of money for supplies. They don’t need much; just food and fresh water, and to stop every few days by the water to allow the engine to feed, to suck in fish from the rivers or to scoop prawns from the great lakes, but she’s old enough to know that money doesn’t last forever. And no-one knows if they have a destination, let alone how far it is, not even the drivers.

At dawn, Nils comes through the cabin shaking a bell. Blankets are thrown off, and heads emerge uttering words Henrietta’s mother would prefer she doesn’t know yet. Nils is officially the ticket collector, but everyone only had one ticket, and they were bought and checked a very long time ago. Nils has pointed, furry ears and big black eyes.

“Scheduled stop in one hour!” he announces, ringing his bell between each word. More groans. “Please take all valuables when you leave the train.” Satisfied he’s delivered his announcement to these rows of passengers, he moves on to the centre of the carriage where he rings his bell and repeats it all over again.

“We get the message,” someone grumbles, but most people are looking for shoes or hats or sunglasses, or squinting out of the window to see if they can see a town on the horizon. Pulled back curtains let the early morning light in, and Henrietta stretches her legs and her arms and her tail, yawns at the ceiling, and starts to think about what to wear.

Henrietta owns two dresses and a pinafore with a blouse, which she keeps in a bag under her seat. She’d prefer to wear trousers but they never have space for her tail. She has no shoes either, no shoes would fit her feet – but she doesn’t mind that. It’s one of her jobs to keep her clothes clean, and she does her best but if she doesn’t wash them they begin to smell and feel itchy, and if she does they fade thin and grey quicker. She decides on her best dress, the blue one with tiny yellow stars all over. Shutting the door to the tiny cubicle, she washes herself quickly at the basin because a queue is building up, before putting it on.

When she gets back to her seat she can see the town coming into view; houses with steeply sloping roofs, jetties heavy with boats out into the bay. Henrietta’s mother will need to stay behind to help with the maintenance so she counts out coins carefully for Henrietta and makes her repeat a shopping list back to her until she has it memorised: a tin of toothpaste, two new washcloths, a piece of cotton large enough to make Henrietta a dress and herself a shirt. If there’s enough money left over, Henrietta can buy herself a pencil and notebook and a small bag of candies.

Henrietta descends the small wooden staircase from the front carriage – there are no platforms here, no platforms and only rails when the train brings them. She feels nauseous. She walks not towards the town but towards the sea, sucking in the salt air between her teeth. Around her the passengers gather, stretching their muscles, practicing walking again. To pass time on board, they play cards and read each other’s fortunes and swap books until they’ve read each of them several times. Some of them exercise on the metal platforms between the carriages, using spanners or cans of food as dumbbells, pulling themselves up on the bars and clinging on as the engine makes an unexpected turn, its huge tentacles flying through the air, picking up one length of track from behind and laying a new one in front.

They do their best, amazingly well under the circumstances even, but all of them feel their muscles wasting day by day. It’s hard not to let apathy and then depression set in. Even if they don’t let themselves remember, they’ve still lost everything. They’ve lost their homes, their suburban houses with little square gardens and their apartments above noisy taverns. They’ve lost their little shops where they sold vegetables and baby clothes and fireworks and books. They’ve lost their winding city lanes and open squares and they’ve lost even the sky above their heads; it’s not the same sky here and it always moves away so fast.

And now here they are at the edge of a town which is not theirs, with other houses and other apartments, and people who are not like them – but are perhaps like the people they once were. They walk tentatively towards it, worrying – as they worry so often when the train stops – that perhaps it is here, in this pause from their desperate journey towards survival, that they will finally fall to pieces.

Henrietta won’t fall to pieces. She knows that by now, even though it sometimes feels like she’s going to. Once she gets into a rhythm, once she starts moving her heavy legs and putting each foot on a cobble so her claws curl over the end, it gets easier.

The people here are human all over, their skin black or brown or so pale you can see the veins through. None of them have scales or feathers or wings or tails, but they don’t stare. Henrietta thinks she remembers a time when everyone was like that, a time when her legs were brown not green, when engines ran on coal or diesel or sparks from the wires hung high overhead, but it seems like someone else’s dream so she tries not to think about it too much.

Up the main street, Henrietta finds the shops she needs, checking and comparing prices like she’s been taught. At the fabric shop she chooses a green cotton with tiny snails printed on it, and it’s measured and cut and folded into a paper bag by a woman with flame red hair and wide green eyes. Henrietta thanks her and thinks that she can use the bag for drawing or practicing her letters.

The engine blows its whistle twice when it’s time for them to board, and even though she knows they won’t leave without her, Henrietta begins to hurry, down the cobbled streets, below the balconies billowing with laundry that jut out over the shops, over the stone bridge across the river, and back down to where the engine is looking full and happy, well fed and well maintained.

It’s only when she’s back on board that the nausea sets in. Too much time on still ground leaves her uncomfortable, and she ends up perched on a dining car stool, her head between her knees, until Adria Price brings her some peppermint tea. A little later, her mother comes up and stands beside her, placing a clawed hand on her shoulder. Henrietta’s mother doesn’t talk much – she never talks much – but her hand is heavy and comforting and Henrietta knows it means love.

Some people on the train don’t really talk at all, and some of them talk a lot, as if they’re unable to stem the flowing words. There’s no-one in between – except maybe Henrietta herself, and she doesn’t really count because she’s only a child. There are no other children on the train. Her mother says that’s because all the other people with children left earlier, before the flood-metals came. Before everything changed. Henrietta tries to believe her, just like she tries to believe that she never had a brother, only an imaginary childhood friend.

The train continues along the edge of the rocky continent. They’re following the coast south to where the air is colder and the storms are more frequent, where the wind whips sea spray across the carriages and even the salt air is not enough to stop ice gathering on the rails. They stop when they need to, for supplies or to clear the rails, but mostly they push on. Henrietta sketches portraits of her fellow passengers onto the outside of her paper bag, and then borrows a penknife from the couple who sit in front of her to gently cut it open so she can use the inside as well. Through the window she can see the engine’s tentacles flying through the rain, their tops wrapped tightly around the sections of track they pull up and then place down. Henrietta’s heard of places, times and places, where the rails were laid and all the train had to do was move along them, times when predefined tracks covered the world. Now there are only a few lengths of tracks left so they have to make the best of it.

In the morning, the flood-metal catches up with them. Henrietta had woken early and now drifts in and out of sleep, her head against the window, her blanket pulled up to her chin. Her mother is driving this shift, so the seat next to her is empty, and Henrietta takes advantage, stretching out her feet luxuriously. The first sound is one she could write off as one of the inconsistencies of rail travel, a track laid a fraction of a second too late, or a bump in the ground it runs over. The second envelopes her, loud enough to consume everything in its path, a high pitched, impossible sound, just out of reach. A sound that brings back memories. Half memories, long buried memories, that shatter and burst into flames all around her.

Henrietta’s first thought is to scream. To scream amid the now awake and moving passengers until someone comforts her. But she’s almost twelve and too old for that, so she kicks off her blanket and turns to the window. She grabs the strap and lowers the glass down into the door, standing on her seat to lean her head out all the way even though her mother says it’s dangerous. It’s early light and the sun is glowing behind her, spreading light over the beanfields and the little copses of trees that dot the landscape. And in that early light are the flood-metals, glowing and silver-blue, sweeping across the beanfields behind them. Henrietta blinks, willing it to all be a trick of the light, willing her memories to not come flooding back.

The flood-metals are not metal like the metal the engine is made of, the parts of the engine that are not flesh. The flood-metals are something that is not like anything else. They are a cold slow tide that seeps through the cities like pooling water. They do not burn like fires or drown like floods. They melt. They melt and they change.

Most people on the train never talk about them. Those who do usually say they are magic, though Henrietta’s also heard people say they were sent by the gods. Henrietta’s never seen a god, but she’s seen a few sorcerers; two of the people on the train were sorcerers even, before the flood-metals rose up around their staffs and melted them into their ever-advancing flow. So magic is more likely, she deduces. Perhaps they were caused by a sorcerer’s experiment gone wrong; perhaps it was a game or an act of wrath. She’s not really sure how bad it was when the flood-metals changed her; she feels comfortable in her own skin, both the smooth skin with hair and the thick skin with scales, and she likes living on the train even if it feels cramped sometimes. But every time she tries to open the closed doors in her memory she has to slam them shut quickly before anything gets out.

She knows that in the early days, some of the passengers flung themselves from the train, down to the angry sea and the jagged rocks below. The train could not stop for them. But that hasn’t happened in a long time.

The train speeds up, racing away from the flood-metals behind. The clack-clack of the coupling rods speeds like a panicked heartbeat, so fast that Henrietta can’t calm herself by counting them like she normally does. The wheels scream as they turn on the tracks. They turn inland, racing across the plains where grass cedes to desert. It’s risky this way; the engine will need food at some point, and they will all need water, but Henrietta’s mother knows what she’s doing.

They’ve survived this long, after all.

Around her, the other passengers are beginning to panic. Some go very quiet, while others edge round Henrietta in the aisles, their hands and voices quick and loud, arguing with each other and with the world. Henrietta wonders if they can outrun the flood-metals forever, or if it would be a relief to just slow and let them take . . .

No! Henrietta remembers not fighting, a very long time ago. She remembers being young and tiny and scared and how her brown and fleshy legs, human legs she had then, just didn’t seem to work. She has not been that person in a very long time and she is not going to be today.

Henrietta stands up and tries to determine where she is and where she should be. It’s hard, when you’re on a moving train, to think yourself still and understand yourself in relation to all that is around you, but Henrietta closes her eyes and knows exactly where she’s meant to be.

Henrietta may like the dining car best of all, but when it comes down to it she’s an engine driver’s daughter. She opens the window again, stretches her body through as far as she can without falling. The sand in the air stings as it blows against her face. She looks behind her and sees the shimmer of flood-metals on the horizon. Then she looks forward and yells to the engine above the noise. She doesn’t know if it will understand her words, but she can only hope the urgency in her voice will break through.

Just as she’s wondering whether to give up hope, one of its large tentacles flips backwards and wraps tightly around her waist, so tightly Henrietta worries she won’t be able to breathe, but she curls her own tail around it and hangs on.

Through the air she sweeps, the red sand blown against her skin like a burn and the sky empty overhead. Henrietta knows that she will likely not survive this, that soon the flood-metals will reach them, that their endless desperate flight had to, always had to, have an end, but she has to try.

Perched on the engine, she feels small and helpless. The tentacles never cease their rhythm, flying past her with lengths of track, building as they go. The train speeds and the tentacles fly, and she’s just a small person with green scaled legs and a lizard tail, sitting on top of a large engine, gripping the little bit of life she has left.

She thinks. She thinks quickly. She’s not here to tell the train to go faster – the train is going as fast as it can. She’s not here, either, to steer it, because her mother is steering and her mother is the very best at what she does. But she knows she needs to be up here, not down in the carriage waiting for the flood-metals to take them all. If you know you need to be somewhere, then you must be needed there.

The train takes another corner. They only have two pieces of track that are curved, one in each direction, so in order to take a corner the train has to work very hard, picking up the curved piece of track as soon as the train’s last carriage’s wheels have left it, and laying it directly in front. It’s a slow turn and yet there’s so much speed and frantic movement that it feels as if they’ve suddenly jerked left. But at last they’re moving back towards the sea, alongside the sea, while the flood-metals, now diverted inland, do not turn.

They do not turn yet. Henrietta knows they will soon enough.

Henrietta stretches her neck up, and her shoulders, as much as she can without falling. She looks out across the sea, as the train turns and runs alongside it, and she gazes at the little flecks of white atop the waves, and she looks far into the distance. She remembers, distantly, going down to the rocky little beach by the river, near the footbridge, but she doesn’t think she’s ever been into the sea.

She knows, distantly, that there are other lands out there, far across the sea. She’s fancied she’s seen them faintly, seen tips of distant mountains rising like shadows through cloud. But she has never thought of them as somewhere she could ever go. They seem like places from a story, not places with real people and real land and real hills and towns and bridges over rivers.

The flood-metals have turned and are already gaining on the train.

Henrietta asks the engine – with tugs and motions as much as with words – to lower her and it lowers her to the window of the first carriage and she bangs on the window until a confused passenger opens it, and then she leans her head in and yells to all the passengers.

“We need to get the tracks on top of the train.”

Everyone stares at her. They don’t move. She wants to tell them to stop being idiots, but she suspects that won’t help, so instead she yells again, tells them to get the tracks up to the roof.

Even in an upside-down world where everything has changed, the idea of tracks running on the train is too much for some of the passengers. But enough of them rise to the occasion, reasoning that no-one has come up with a better idea and the flood-metals are gaining on them so fast, so fast. They clamber out between the carriages and they help the engine with its tentacles manouevre track after track onto the roof and with whatever rope they can find they tie them down on top of the carriages. And then they uncouple all but the front carriage.

It’s no choice at all really; whether to take the terrible risk of being in the first one, not even sure if it will float, or to sit and wait for the engine to return, only able to hope that the flood-metals won’t catch up. But people need to have a choice, and so they choose their carriage, Henrietta yelling at them from the front to hurry.

The train is at the edge of the water. It’s not moving. Henrietta inches forwards, taking care to be gentle against both its metal body and its squid body. She’s lying on her stomach, her arms spread across the wide curve of the engine, being sure not to fall. She strokes the rubbery skin gently, while her legs grip warm metal.

Henrietta once asked, years ago, if the train was happy, and her mother told her that it is, because if it didn’t like it then it would just stop, and nothing they could do to make him go further. She remembers this now, as its tentacles seem to droop sadly by its sides, as the train stops – and the train rarely stops, and only at a town. She wonders how the train feels about being squid, or the squid feels about being train.

“You’re scared, I know,” she says. “I was scared too. I wore a blanket for ages to cover up my legs and my tail so I didn’t have to believe what had happened. As long as you run on land, as long as you run on metal tracks, you can be the same engine you always were. But we’ve all had to cope with this change. Becoming something different. And maybe … maybe you can be squid and train. Squid live in the water, right? And trains on rails. Maybe you’re more than any of them because you can do both.”

The train does not move, does not respond.

Henrietta takes a deep breath and whispers all the words of encouragement she can find in herself. And slowly, just very slowly, the engine edges off the land and into the water. Henrietta feels the muscles of the train below her tighten in fear and then relax, relax in a way they haven’t in a long time, perhaps in forever.

The engine is remembering something.

The engine is remembering home.

Below, the passengers in the first carriage scream as they hit the water, and behind them others run to the shoreline in terror, watching the train that has saved them vanish into the water. Henrietta screams too, a quiet desperate scream at the back of her throat. She has killed everyone. She has killed them all. She has killed her mother. She has killed everyone she remembers ever knowing.

She barely watches two tentacles reaching back, pulling up the back of the last carriage to hold it out of the water. Henrietta imagines how heavy it must be, the wood and metal carriage, the track lengths tied to the roof and the terrified people below, and she feels every muscle in her body begin to ache in sympathy for the engine.

Using all the strength in its tentacles, the engine, this squid train, moves across the sea, across this wide channel that is open before them. Land becomes visible quite early, but reaching it is a whole other matter. It grows so slowly in the distance that Henrietta worries they might not be getting any closer at all. There’s not much she can do, not much anyone can do, except gently encourage the engine, this hybrid of flesh and machine, melded and meshed together by the flood-metals just like all of them.

They leave the passengers, the carriage, the soaked-through lengths of track, upon the shore, and travel back. The return journey is faster, and because they know now the journey is survivable and the flood-metals are travelling ever closer, the passengers have to draw lots to sit in the next carriage.

The engine pulls the carriages, one after another, across this channel of water, a channel that Henrietta would once have thought of as impassable. As they connect up the final carriage, Henrietta thinks she can smell the flood-metals on the breeze that travels across the land.

The engine is tired, so tired, by the time they reach land, struggling to hold up the carriage behind, but somehow it manages, and then moves slowly forward. The earlier passengers have set up the tracks to guide the exhausted train out of the shallow water and onto the beach. Water drips from the carriages, which are spread across the sand.

Henrietta buries her face in the train’s thick, rubbery skin and says, “It’s okay, you don’t need to go anywhere else today.”

Today, just for today, they don’t need to go anywhere. The flood-metals may too cross the sea, one day, but they’ve fallen far behind, and even Henrietta, standing atop the engine, cannot see their glimmer. Today, just for today, they sit out on the black sand and light a fire and share a meal. Henrietta takes plates to those who are too exhausted to get their own. The engine drinks deeply from the sea, and having rested, catches quick-jumping fish.

The next day, they travel again. The carriages are still damp but most of their possessions have dried out in the sun. They’ve all been through worse, much worse, in any case. They travel through the day in this strange land. They see villages and farms but don’t approach them, not just yet. And when darkness falls on all of them, Henrietta pulls her blanket around her and walks slowly between the rows of seats, balancing as she crosses between carriages. The wind catches her hair and fans her blanket out like a cape. Most of the people are pretending to sleep, as if by pretending hard enough they could make it so. Perhaps they are thinking about the past and wondering about the future, wondering if the train will ever again be able to pause for more than a few hours, if they will ever get far enough away, or if the flood-metals will catch up with them once more.

Henrietta doesn’t think about that. She doesn’t think about the past and the future. She puts a lot of effort into not doing. It’s the only way you can get through. You can cope with having lost near everything, and with the prospect of losing the little you have left, if you have nothing to compare them to. She opens the door of the engine cab carefully, quietly, and her mother shifts on her seat to make just enough room for her daughter and wraps her wings around her, nuzzling her gently with her hooked yellow beak as if she were still a little girl, as the train travels ever onwards, the purple sea crashing along the rocks of the coast.

SPONTANEOUS APPLAUSE BY ZOË MEAGER

In Asteria’s dream, she is one in a thumping line of chorus girls. In Asteria’s dream, there is one from every curve of the globe, from every spectrum, one of black eye, one of green, one of pointed tooth, rounded tooth, snaggletooth, claw. In Asteria’s dream, she is one supple joint in a long row of marrow.

In Asteria’s dream, blood pumps, hips swivel, and the crimson tendrils of their costumes breathe and bounce between them. Chests heave, muscles burn. The rush of breath, the thrum of body. In Asteria’s dream, all their legs are blades made for cutting.

In Asteria’s dream, the dancing girls are arm-in-arm and nothing else exists. The orchestra, drowned. The audience floating up into space. Businessmen, bosses, bankers ascending to the empty reaches of the theatre, past its velvet stretches, towards the chandeliers and painted skies, sucked into the dark air of its lungs. Up they throw the money and down the money falls. It catches between the soft wood and hard strings of the first violinist’s bow. It is sucked into the many tubes of the tuba player, into the creases at the back of every flautist’s knee.

In Asteria’s dream, the chorus girls are chopping the money into confetti. A swirling fluttering green and grey between their legs. She looks out to the darkness and sees only stars. In Asteria’s dream they are tumbling, the chorus line, they are head over heels for the mystery before them. A combine harvester, bladed and bright, they dismount the stage in unison, catching their costumes on the stage lights, so with smouldering fires at skirt and bodice and stocking, with haloes of hairspray wavering and garter elastic snapping in the heat, they bump over the orchestra and careen unbridled into the vacant rows of the theatre.

In Asteria’s dream, there is a deep calm darkness, full of confetti and women and chance.

HEARTS MADE MARBLE, WEAPONS SHAPED FROM BONE BY A.J. FITZWATER

My horn is sharp and I thought I would never hesitate when they inevitably came for my family.

But I did.

*

A few definitions first.

Hesitation: a horn which slices through flesh so easily is a burden, one all unicorns must contend with.

Burden: whatever those without horns told me it would be. Tread careful now, They’d say, even your hooves strike sparks and your tongue might be set aflame.

Family: anyone we damn well choose it to be. Sisters and siblings of all definition. My family is legion, because my hearts are weak, They sneer.

They: Capital T. The Enemy. Simple in name. Don’t let that fool you. They are not simple in deed. They are patient and Old.

They also have no idea. The longer the stars spin, the more a unicorn’s heart turns to stone. We became the source of marble in this world, hard and unyielding as a statue whose hands are pressed lovingly into flesh, veil delicate across face. Beauty that pierces right through.

A singularity, my horn is made of tougher stuff still.

*

Breaking of a uniquine; an insidious word and deed, turning the wild and free into beasts of burden. They say we enjoy serving, that it benefits all of us Beasts to come together, but that’s a lie. My spine is not for bending or mastering.

They don’t come for us in the night, as you would expect. The full light of day is Their cover.

A corral and harness, for our safety.

A bit, for silence.

A bone-saw, at the ready.

A knife and goblet, for our blood.

And all the while, silence rings from the gold-glass cages of the menagerie.

*

A few things about lies.

Virgins: a whopper as big as unicorns. What is it about a hymen – a simple piece of skin, something as flexible as a tongue – that makes a woman pure? What about the women who don’t have hymens? We don’t have them, and yet…

Blood: prick us, unicorns bleed black and gold. Another burden, another thing stolen from us.

Blood again: that of virgins, of which we do not drink for immortality or power. You’re thinking of vampires.

Blood, yet again: unicorns drank blood long ago, but not for the purpose you think. I have no taste for it. It is a past we are careful not to forget.

*

I’m ashamed to say I hid in the deepest part of the forest, an orchard where even They hesitate to tread. Through the leaves and lashes, I see white: the stain of a rolling eye, muscle rippling under unicorn coat, snow falling on tongues.

This attack comes from a simple Arm of The Enemy, but I can feel His presence all over them, oozing hot and cold: the dankness of blood-mucked boots and batons and bridles; and sweat stinking like damp cardboard and stiff, old wool, yellow at the pits and crotch.

Blood spots my hide from where I bite and my horn pricks to keep from screaming. I am no use to my family dead.

But what use am I when I hesitate? I could have run Them through then and there. Stopped the madness.

But how mad is too mad? My hesitation always said: if I run this Betrayer through today, will there just be a bigger wound tomorrow? Dare I prove them right about unicorns? Dare I prove to myself?

I am paralysed as They suck eagerly at the throats of my family, lead the ones away they believe are female.

Bits jangle, heads bow.

A voice rises, prelude to a scream, but They point a sister’s horn in its direction, push her flank, and the sound gurgles to a stop.

*

More lies:

Unicorns are not actually white. Nor pure. You’re seeing us in the wrong light.

Angle the prism a little stronger and you will understand what I mean.

*

When the snow melts, churning the fallen forest of our home into pink slush, I run. From place to place, always finding sanctuary, but not for long. The more unicorn They harvested, the more they wanted. Our horns made excellent swords.

A horn is not a weapon unless you have the right head to wield it.

Just as blood is not something abstract. My family’s blood is painted into masterpieces They hang in every museum, decorate every textbook.

And the hearts. Oh, my sisters’ hearts…

My deep family take me in. They too are afraid and I don’t blame them. Look what we’ve become, so few. They frown at me and I can see it in the whites of their eyes: do something, why don’t you do something.

I run for what feels like forever. You do what you must do, day by day, minute by minute, to survive.

Deep in my hearts, I know I want to do it. One burns hot, one burns cold, a balance I can’t tip.

What is the worst that can happen?

I would die.

What is the best that can happen?

I could die.

*

There it lies: I am a coward.

*

Fear can be a powerful weapon. It depends on how you use it, how far it will take you, if you know how to wield it.

Snow can pack down into a glacier, bones upon bones, grinding along, carving out the land, making way for the river to get to the ocean and start the process all over again. Water back to water. Blood back to blood.

As the saying goes: take the bit between your teeth.

*

Cracked yellow bricks finally end beneath my splintered hooves. I make sparks no more.

Tarnished golden gates bar the way into the Glass Mountain. The Enemy’s Sanctuary. This is where the heart of darkness lives, within the middle of the light. Such a cliché. Light, dark, good, evil. But you also thought unicorns were made from snow and candy and ate virgins until now, didn’t you?

Because my hide is camouflaged, stained with the sweat of all my family who propelled me along, They don’t see me slip between the cracks. Snow has that habit when it melts, a trickle finding its way through. And then when it refreezes it expands, widening the cracks.

At the centre of the Glass Mountain, the conceit: a single great building, pillars made from the marble of my sisters’ hearts. Seeing my sisters’ veins running black and gold through the stone breaks the last shred of dignity in me and I can only crawl the last few feet.

He looms between the pillars, reverent hand stroking the stone. The Enemy. I quell my scream – not yet! – at the lascivious repugnancy.

His darkness hides in the glare of the spotlight, a mirage for the viewer’s greatest fears: cockroaches seething within a shadow, debonair sweptback hair and bright eyes, a cane toad in prince’s clothing.

A grin slicks its oily way across His face. He’s not afraid, because now my family is reduced to a mere shadow He thinks I am hobbled.

I won’t forgive myself for the lies I had to tell myself to get here, but I will not forgive myself more if I don’t try.

I need my fear, like it needs me.

Good girl, He croons, sweet girl.

Lies, lies. When I am done with this, I will never Be Good again.

He avoids my horn with practised ease. Thinks He doesn’t need to threaten the bridle, the bit.

Yes, come closer.

Pretty girl, He whispers. The flesh of His fingers roiling like a maggoty corpse sink into my mane, pick out thorns and burrs as if doing me some courtesy. Then, the horror of those fingers curling towards my hearts. He just can’t stop Himself even though He has everything. More, more, ever more. He’s grabbing for more stone, yet one more brick to prop up His edifice.

No, I can’t do it. I can’t be like Him. This is not what unicorns are made for, though we are made for just this purpose. Let him take my hearts and be done.

Pretty girl.

So close I can taste the citrus-over-rot of His breath.

The horn is a lie.

So easy, it doesn’t even require thought. Simple genetic muscle memory.

The bone of the singularity, a black hole devouring any light that dares to come near, enters His chest with the greatest of ease.

Ribs crack, a wet tearing sound of laughing wings and skittering carapaces.

*

What they don’t tell you is when a unicorn uses its horn, it’s a one-time deal. We maim to kill.

With a flick of my head and the searing pain of starlight scouring my skull, my horn tears off.

Blood.

Blood everywhere. Black and gold and red all mixed together.

*

Laughter.

Evil laughs in my face, my twisted bone of confection lodged in His chest, point protruding out the back, blood dripping at each end.

I expected there to be some sort of muscle to fight through, no matter how scarred and hard and atrophied. But there is nothing.

A black hole cannot eat what is simply a void.

Those ugly hands twitch and keep reaching for my hearts.

Smile, little girl.

*

DON’T TELL ME TO SMILE.

*

This is not how the myth goes.

*

Another thing they don’t tell you about unicorns:

There is a dangerous place in our chests, right beside our hearts, where embers are banked. Waiting.

We can burn it all down with just one scream.

This is also a one-time deal. And it takes everyone, the dealer and the dealt.

These embers have simmered since the first uniquine ancestor crawled up from the mud. All it takes is a single spark upon our hot tongue to ignite. It is a secret we have kept too long and too well, reserving it for the right time.

And Each Time never seemed to be the right time. So angry, They said, so ugly. And slowly we let it drain from our myth along with our colours. We did not want to let our ugliness let the world drown. Perhaps we should have learned to let the scream out in small sips.

Perhaps. Perhaps.

*

With a grimace that grows to a maw, I peel my lips back to reveal broken, rotten teeth burned from behind, acid staining my tongue.

*

With what little I have left, I strike a hoof against the gold bricks. The air shivers sparks.

A scream of purple-black-silver light death.

Flesh melts, simple wax. Blood boils away, the red first and easy, then the black and gold glimmering to vein-roped tar, which evaporates with the released triumphant bellows of my sisters. Bones crack, letting out their sweet, juicy marrow which I suck out to power the last of my scream.

Bones collapse into grey dust in the final blast. I swallow the dust, every speck. There must be nothing left of Him in this world; it will go with me as the untameable fire within expands and consumes.

Soon. The anger will take me soon.

But for this glorious moment, I can lie beside my sisters’ hearts. It is not my place to judge why they didn’t use their own voices; it will not be history’s place to judge their fear or what was enough.

As for my judgment? Martyr, betrayer, hero, invisible; whatever may be, let it come. There is nothing I can do about that now.

My hide spasms, charring from the inside with the heat of the universe’s vast stars. I try to lick away the congealing mess on my forelimbs, but the lingering iron-copper stench makes me gag. I keep the bone dust down by inhaling the satisfying storm-fresh scent of my own blood as it forms a pool fresh as a fae vernal.

A whisper. Not from the wall made of my sisters’ hearts; they ignore my exhortation to crumble at will and stand strong, perhaps forever now, a monument, a warning. The whisper comes behind me on the old, gold road and the glass mountain as they all fall down.

The snow melt, the burning steam. The avalanche. Slipping between the cracks, their hides beautifully dirty. The last of the unicorns are here to witness. They see what burns in me, how I cannot contain this handful of evil in my belly much longer.

One by one, my family kneel and lay their lips against mine.

A kiss to share the power. A kiss to take a pinch of the bone dust into each of them, to keep it safe beside each of their hearts. One by one, so many, not enough.

The fire lessens, a mercy.

A kiss each atop my head, to seal the searing wound, a blessing.

Twitching, I lie between the marble wall of my sisters dead and the soft wall of my family living, fire inside slowing my hearts to molten.

However, each kiss has given back some coolness of peace, a trickle of clear water between the cracks of my marble hearts. Much of it simply evaporates, but some pools there – a gentle pond to sip from to soothe my ravaged soul.

Who knows what way the balance will tip; blood, fire, water. There is no myth, no truth, to tell us what comes next for a unicorn with horn ripped from their head and scream ripped from their chest. I wait, my family curled alongside, and I do not fear.

FIRST DISPATCH FROM THE FRONT BY ZOË MEAGER

This and that, this and that. She has a lot of this and that to do. Water this Boston-bird’s-nest-maidenhair-rabbit’s-foot fern, scrub that slow-cooking-toaster, that saucepan-sieve. She’s got a tea towel that wants a stubborn sigh removed, and a politician in the attic who wants listening to, for one hour, two. She’ll yank the ladder down and climb it and listen listen with this ear and listen listen with that, and he will smile spit shout and she will slip lit fireworks up his trouser leg and leave him to combust. Back downstairs she will fold the pinafores, fold the onesies, fold the silky-nightie-longjohn-fitted-sheet. She will switch the radio on and catch some of the news but only the highlights, because she’s got a patient in the sleep-out who wants tending and there’s a family of refugees in the living room who want and want and want, their boat spins in the middle of the carpet, sending up flares that burn the ceiling in the shapes of another language. She will side-step them to find a matriarch in the kitchen who wants the butter softened, who wants to press her palm into it and leave all five digits impressed there like tracks for blood to flow down. To a lost child in the hallway who needs comforting she will show garter-stocking-blanket stitch, and he will practice with clumsy fingers on his own liver but now there’s a knocking at the door there’s a knocking, a whole hospital waits outside with the smell of fluid inside-outness, and she will open up a crack and tell them I’ve only room for a crutch, but there’s a knocking at the door there’s a knocking, the sea is surging to come inside, and she will open up a crack and say Please, I’ve only room for one thin starfish, but there’s a knocking at the door there’s a knocking, firemen have come to stop an ouroboros forest from devouring itself, and she will open up a crack and say, Just hand me an axe. I’ve got to get back to the roses I’ve got growing in the walls.

MOVING HOUSE BY ALISHA TYSON

I have a mattress on the floor next to my bed. I keep it for times like this when I wake at night, hips hurting with growing pains. I worked out that if I just keep moving I don’t feel my bones growing.

I use my floor mattress to practise flying. I jump off my bed, knowing if I land on my knees in mid-air then I can take off and fly – through my half open window, above square gardens, pointed roofs, toward the power-lines so thread-thin and high as if drawn by God with a Sharpie. I’d sit up there with dark birds that come out only at night, and we’d watch the cats fight until morning.

But I never land in mid-air. I hit the mattress hard every time. This is why my knees are always bruised.

I turn on my nightlight, the light catches the plastic lunchbox I kicked beneath my bed, then reported lost to Mum.

The walls move in and out like a breathing person and I wish I hadn’t learned the world is always rolling over – that I could be on the upside-down part of the planet and not know it.

I will trick my parents into giving me a new room.

*

I step off my floor mattress, and my animal ornaments watch me walk by.

I open my door. My brother Scott’s door is shut and his light is off. He is not old enough for his bones to wake him like mine do. Mum says boy bones grow slower than girls until all at once they are large, and it is like all the careful growing you did as a girl has gone to waste.

I walk down the corridor. My toes curl from fear when I see the painting, hung up high, with gold words that say, “Be still and know that I am God.” I pass the bathroom that smells of chickenpox shampoo and enter the laundry where our dog sleeps when it’s raining and too cold to put him in the garage. His name is Barney, like the dinosaur, and he is a Chow Chow. He looks like a dog-sized Grizzly bear and has a purple tongue. He hides his face in his paws when I rub his stomach.

Mum and Dad are sitting on the couch near the fireplace in the lounge.

“What are you doing up?”

“Go back to bed, sweetie.”

“I want to go tenting. Nine is old enough, okay?” I tell them.

Dad goes to pick me up, but I dodge him. Dad loses hair from his head every time he moves, though we know not to mention it. To make up for it he has a brown beard so thick anything could be beneath it – anything at all.

Dad looks at me carefully, and I hold my breath. Finally he nods. “Okay, you can go tenting – tomorrow.”

*

They fell for it. I am going tenting and from today onwards I will not live in my rectangle room anymore.

Mum says to pack only the most important things, so I pack my spikey dinosaur and my remote-control car into a plastic bag I find near the front door. The bag is torn but it still works.

Mum finds me looking at my animal ornaments. She leans against the door and says, “You can’t take those. They’re fragile. You can’t play with them like you do with Spiderman.”

“He’s the Mysteriously Dark Spiderman – you don’t even know!” I shut the door on her. I wasn’t thinking of packing the ornaments anyway, I was keeping an eye on them. And they aren’t fragile. They are thick with stones in their bellies and throats. I don’t love them; I live with them.

I have dreams that I am small, and my ornaments are large and they don’t love me either. They want to hold me, and I hate being held. They want to squeeze me until I fall asleep and wake up bigger than them again, still choking.

*

After dinner, Scott and I go straight to our new tent home in the backyard. This is where we play our made-up game “Heaven And Hell”. We walk over the concrete near the garage, which we call Hell, into the grass, which is Heaven.

The tent is a nice shape with a triangle roof and its walls shift like wings. It’s okay that this new room needs to be pegged down; it makes sense for wing walls to try to fly away.

The air is still and heavy as though the weather will turn.

“Air mattresses are gross,” I say, squashing the lungs out of mine. Scott has his face turned away and he shivers.

“I miss Mum and Dad.”

“Yes, they are very far away.” A whole Heaven and Hell away. A whole afterlife from where we are.

Scott sits up and holds his sleeping bag in bunches. I lie back and watch the roof. Rain starts falling and it’s like sleeping under an umbrella. In the baggy bits of the roof, water pools.

“Do you like your new room?” I ask, “Not the tent, I mean.”

“It’s okay. At Christmas I watched next door. I saw Santa.”

“You didn’t!”

“I did! He was on the roof. I think that makes my room quite good.”

I hold my words in and change them. “Do you like the shape of your room?”

Scott stares at me, “What?”

“You know. Is the shape a good one?”

“It’s square. What’s the best shape for a room?”

“Probably a circle shape would be good.”

“I guess. But not a triangle.”

“No, because the corner would be pointy and you couldn’t get small things out of it.”

“Do you miss our last house?” Scott asks. He means in Australia.

“No, there were huntsmen everywhere.” Spiders the size of babies. “And cockroaches in the toilet.”

“Yes, this one is lots better. I think I like New Zealand more than Australia.”

“I don’t. No one likes the way I say dance or six.”

“But the magpies aren’t as mean.”

“That’s true.”

I look at the walls. At least you can see the skeleton of a tent. It’s made of string and bendy tubes. A tent doesn’t hide things.

“Even though there were spiders and it was always too hot and the kookaburra in the garden was loud in the morning I was happier there,” I say definitely.

“I think you’re remembering wrong,” Scott says.

I think about this. “Maybe I’m just too old for a house now. Maybe I’ve outgrown houses.”

“That’s silly. You’re not bigger than a house!” Scott says this like it is the final point to be made.

We are quiet for a long while now. There is the sound of the TV too loud inside and Mum laughing.

“I think I’ll go inside,” Scott whispers. “Is that okay?”

I sit up. “I’ve never been alone in a house before.”

“But this isn’t a house, it’s a tent.” His eyes look wet. He needs Mum and doesn’t want to disappoint me.

“I’ll be fine,” I lie back down. “I’m too old to be in a house, anyway…”

Scott peels his sleeping bag off like thick rolls of skin. He stands in a crater in his air mattress and stares at the floor, making up his mind. Then he picks up his pillow and disappears into the wet air, zipping up the wall as he goes.

*

Soon I will outgrow this tent and I will live somewhere else and then I will never move. Never no matter what. Not even if my garden becomes the ocean. Not even if wild animals move onto my porch. I will never move. My house will always be the same and I will know how far the walls are from my bed. I will wake in the morning without wondering where I am or how I got there. And I will live in the same place forever.

*

I try to fall asleep with my arms crossed to keep warm.

The rain has stopped. I give up sleeping and unzip the wall. Water is seeping on to my floor. Lucky for me the uneven ground means it won’t reach my mattress.

Outside in the veggie garden I spot a hedgehog. It shrinks down when it notices me. I breathe out slow. Then it stands on frighteningly long spindle legs and sprints across the concrete toward the metal gate.

“Hey! Wait!” I run after it, the grass sloshing under my bare feet. The hedgehog darts across the concrete and smacks into the gate. It is scrambling, stuck between the diamond spaces of the linked wires. It misunderstood its own shape.

I stop at the edge of the concrete. In our Heaven and Hell game when you stand on concrete you become a demon. You cannot go back to Heaven unless you are Barney, because he is part dog, part bear. Once on the concrete you can only retreat into the house where the walls move. Those are the rules.

In the night the rules must be much more serious.

The hedgehog makes a terrible hissing sound. I need a way to reach it where I won’t touch the ground.

*

I return to the edge of the grass with my sleeping bag, flopping it onto the concrete. It’s just like a flying carpet, only difference is it lies still and does nothing. I inch to the very edge of the bag and try to reach the hedgehog, but even then I am a whole Hell city away.

I pace up and down the sleeping bag. It squelches and feels glossy, so I take it between my toes and squeeze it. I snap my fingers, back up onto the lawn and get ready to take a running jump.

When I jump off the sleeping bag the concrete rises fast to meet me.

My legs shoot with pain. Like the time I rode my bike too fast and crash-landed over the handlebars, removing sheets of skin off my knees, and a whole thumbnail as I skidded to a stop on the road.

I open my eyes and I am floating several inches high above the concrete. The pain must be the price for flying.

I see Hellscapes far beneath me. Every window in the buildings below holds a room on fire, bodies squirming in smoke. Red demons, with thick skin and bat wings, flap above a blood lake. They can’t fly high like me, though.

The hedgehog thrashes.

I move slowly forward, so slowly anyone watching me would think I was not moving at all.

Inch by inch I defy gravity and float forward, dragging my knees through space. So long as I concentrate I won’t end up in Hell. They teach you that in church.

*

Light shines through cracks in the neighbour’s wooden fence. A bunch of bones are tossed over into our yard.

“You’re not allowed to do that,” I say without thinking.

The neighbour rests his chin on the top of the fence. For a moment I wonder if his neck is extra-long, because he’s up high and is only two years older than me. But I realise he’s likely just stepped up and jammed his feet between the fence’s slatted wood.

“It’s for your dog,” he says.

“I know. But dogs can only have frozen bones – cooked ones get stuck in their throat.”

He twists his mouth. “They’re big bones for a big bear-dog like yours.” His words are sharp. He hasn’t said anything about me floating.

The rain starts again, soaking my flannel pyjamas. The neighbour nods at the gate, “You going to get that hedgehog free or should I jump over and help?”

There are lots of reasons he can’t come into our yard.

“I’m almost there.”

“You’re bleeding. A lot.” His words are flat and still.

I brush my fingers along my knees, surprised to feel the sticky blood. “Obviously.”

“The hedgehog will die if you don’t do something.” He snorts, “Let me guess – the floor is lava.”

“I don’t play that game anymore.”

My focus wobbles. The hedgehog is trying to curl up on itself with the gate at its centre like a new bone. Blood runs off its paws, and I am less and less sure I’ll stay afloat. I can feel Hell beneath me, but now it feels more like being too still on sharp stones, than a white-hot fire. I feel my stupidness form a ball in my throat that can’t be swallowed.

I shove a hand out to our neighbour, my fist tight. “If I give you something, will you take care of it?”

If I don’t look at him then maybe he isn’t there. Maybe I made him up like a house that has lungs that breathe, or concrete that is a shell for the afterlife.

“Throw it to me! I’ll catch it.”

I feel how painfully small I am. But his hand is out and open, so I toss him something. I haven’t decided what it is yet – maybe it is something as large as my heart with just as many knobs and fleshy bits, or maybe it is something as small as a coin that I can slip behind my ear to hide.

He catches it, holds the same hand up to his mouth, and eats it up.

I feel the world fall apart just like a sandcastle when waves lick the beach. Stones pinch my skin and suddenly I’m on my knees. The concrete catches me and the gate rushes forward. I hear the world’s thin feet breaking off and turning into asteroids.

I stand up, hurting and bleeding. I look at the boy who made everything different.

“Well, hurry up!” he says.

*

I undo the hedgehog from the gate’s wire. I get so many cuts on my fingers from its quills and the loose metal. The rain washes my red knees. After I put the hedgehog down he tries to duck through the same place in the gate like a baby chipping away at a puzzle piece until it fits the wrong spot.

“No!” I tell it. I go to pull it back, but it hisses again and tries to nip my hand. Startled, I trip, grabbing the gate to keep from falling. The neighbour laughs.

I open the gate quickly and the animal, still stuck, is dragged along. Finally it finds a way to free itself and runs on its oddly long legs, up our driveway to the park, and away forever.

The neighbour and I catch each other’s eye. He climbs the fence, and just like I don’t want him to, he takes my hand and walks me over the concrete to my parent’s back door.

*

Mum uses cotton wool and Dettol to clean my wounds. The neighbour is talking to Dad in the kitchen as Mum puts me to bed.

I lie in my rectangle room and watch the walls, but they won’t move. The walls won’t dare move. I stare at the walls until my eyes are too dry to close.

The neighbour has everything that made my life interesting burning up in his stomach. I know because I asked Mum once what happens in a stomach and she said it is full of acid. The acid takes everything apart – that’s why it hurts when you throw up, and it’s why you’re not allowed to open your stomach and see in.

I know how many steps it is from my bed to the ornaments. Three large ones and one half one. I decide to test it. As I get up I slip a hand beneath my bed, something I wouldn’t normally dare do in the dark. I find the lunchbox I pretended I’d lost. When I open it I smell stale Dunkaroos.

I walk to the other side of the room, and the other side of the room doesn’t retreat from me. The wall is very still and the stone bodies are still too. I fit every last ornament in the box. I close the lid and slide my lunchbox back into the hidden recess beneath my bed.

I wait to feel afraid, or better, or finished. I wait in the dust at the foot of my bed.

GOOD DOG, ALICE! BY JULIET MARILLIER

In Great-Uncle Bartholomew’s opinion, it was a mistake to name my dog Alice. He made that clear from the moment I introduced them.

“Alice? You can’t call a dog Alice!” Uncle Bart’s moustache quivered with disapproval, putting me in mind of an overexcited caterpillar.

I had known other dogs with names generally reserved for girls and boys: Monty-short-for-Montague, for instance, a British bulldog; and Seraphina, a well-coiffed miniature poodle. “What’s wrong with Alice?” I asked.

“My dear girl! Everything! A learned colleague of mine knows a young person of that name, and I gather she is involved in all manner of wild escapades. I once had a gardener whose daughter was an Alice. She would tuck up her skirts and climb trees all day long, and if anyone asked her to descend and comport herself like a lady, she would pelt them with random objects.”

That sounded rather fun to me, though I could imagine Uncle Bart being somewhat put out if I hit him on the head with, say, a conker. “What sort of objects?”

“Whatever one finds in a tree, I suppose. Sticks, acorns, squirrels.”

“Squirrels?!”

“The slower ones might be caught, then hurled,” said Uncle Bart thoughtfully. “The gardener’s daughter was a quick sort of young person.” His eyes fell again upon the dog, a tri-coloured King Charles spaniel which my favourite cousin, William, had brought for me as a surprise birthday present that very morning. William had not obtained Uncle Bart’s permission to give me a dog, perhaps anticipating the answer would be no. He had simply arrived with the puppy in a covered basket. He’d brought his parents too, not in a covered basket but walking behind, all smiles. It had been impossible for Uncle Bart to refuse.

“That’s only two Alices,” I pointed out. “I believe there is something amiss in your statistical method, Uncle.”

“Ah, well,” said Uncle Bart, ignoring this comment, “at least the dog will not tuck up her skirts or climb trees. But I fear the wild escapades.”

“You could come on them too,” I suggested, wondering at what age a person would be too old for escapades. It would do Uncle Bart good to get away from his studies from time to time.

He chuckled. “I am a scholar. A scientist. A man of many parts. None of those parts is inclined towards escapades. Not to say that scholarship and adventures cannot go hand in hand. I recall a time…” Then, just as he was about to say something interesting, Uncle Bart went off into a dream. This was a frequent habit of his.

“Uncle?”

He snorted, coming back to himself. “Yes, child?”

“I think Alice is missing her mother.” I picked the dog up and held her to my chest. “We should make her welcome.”

“Why not call the creature Fluff or Spot or … or Rover?” Uncle Bart had not given up.

“Rover is for a boy dog. Spot is for a spotted dog. And Fluff…” There was no denying the fluff; Alice possessed it in abundance. “Fluff is too obvious,” I said. “A scientist would not choose that name for his dog.”

“Ah,” said Uncle Bart. “But she’s not my dog. You’re the one who had the eleventh birthday.”

“And I’m the one who is calling her Alice.”

*

William and his family had stayed only long enough to wish me a happy birthday and hand Alice over. That was disappointing. William and I could have explored or made a snow monster or played shuttlecock. We could have had a proper birthday luncheon: roasted potatoes with rich gravy; tiny cakes with crystallised violets on top; lemonade to drink. Not that our cook and housekeeper, Mrs Manifold, would dream of preparing something so festive. Maybe if I’d still had a mother and a father, birthdays would have been different, but my parents and my brother had been killed when I was three years old. That was why I lived with Uncle Bart.

At least there were no lessons on my birthday. Froggy was away for four days, doing some kind of examination. Froggy was my tutor. I was supposed to call him Master Frederick. He had been Uncle Bart’s prize student at Oxford University.

“One good thing, Alice,” I told my dog as I put on my cloak and boots and woolly hat. “With him away, we have four whole days to ourselves, and nothing to worry about.”

Mrs Manifold had decreed that Alice should stay in the scullery, eat and drink from her own bowls and not get underfoot. I saw no good reason to keep to those rules. “You will sleep on my bed, of course,” I whispered in Alice’s ear as I carried her down the back stairs. “I’ll take you for two walks every day, and I’ll teach you all manner of tricks. I know you are an exceptionally clever dog.”

I gazed into Alice’s round, bright eyes, searching for signs of the naughtiness Uncle Bart anticipated her developing, but she was the very picture of innocence. Her face belonged in a painting, the sort where the girls wear white frilly frocks and have their hair in ringlets, and the boys are in satin sashes and knickerbockers. “You won’t be that kind of dog, Alice,” I told her, “because I’m not a frilly frock sort of girl. You and I will have escapades. At least, when Froggy is away we will.”

On the first day I showed Alice the garden. It was winter, but there was not enough snow on the ground to make a snowman. There was not even enough for a snow dog the size of a King Charles spaniel. We made a snow mouse, then another one so the first would not feel lonely. Alice spent most of the time digging a hole under a leafless rose bush. But she was there. That was the important thing. I found tiny pebbles for eyes, so the snow mice could watch out for trouble. I made their ears from dried-up leaves and gave them tails of winter grass. I named them Sebastian and Amethyst. When you made something it was right to give it a name, even if it was only a snow mouse that would soon melt away. A name brought a thing to life. A name gave it light. You remembered that light even after the thing itself was gone.

I didn’t remember my parents very well. But I remembered Tom. He was my big brother, two years older than me. I spoke to him every day, so he wouldn’t be lonely wherever he was. Not out loud; deep down, without making a sound. Do you like my snow mice? If you were here, we could make a whole army and enact a great battle. But I fear Alice would become overexcited and romp all over the field of conflict, scattering the mouse warriors in all directions. I imagined Tom smiling, laughing, throwing a snowball.

I spoke to my brother at night, too, when I sat on my bed with my shawl clutched around me, my heart hammering as I waited for the creak of the door. When I whispered his name, the light of it made a little glow in the dark space of my bedchamber. I wish you were here, Tom. I would be braver then.

On the second day it was too windy to go out of doors. I showed Alice the inside of our house. Uncle Bart was in his study. Mrs Manifold was mostly in the kitchen, but as the only live-in servant at Wraithwood Hall she had many responsibilities, so I made a game out of avoiding her. Then there were Molly and Susan from the village, who came in to scrub floors and remove cobwebs and change the sheets. They chattered while they worked, so it was easy to keep out of their way. James, the gardener, had been given the day off.

Alice and I toured the bedchambers. First was Uncle Bart’s, with an improbably high four-poster bed and a writing desk strewn with academic papers. We did not go into Froggy’s room. After that came two spares, kept in readiness though Uncle Bart rarely had houseguests. Last was mine, with its own little hearth, a tall stack of books – I frequently borrowed items from Uncle Bart’s collection – and a window that looked out over the front garden. My room had only one deficiency: the door was without a lock. I had never found the right words to request one. Uncle Bart would be sure to ask why, and how could I possibly answer? If I told him the truth, he would be shocked. He would be upset. He might not believe me. After all, he was a man.

On the third day, Mrs Manifold remarked at breakfast time that a dog should know its place. A disobedient animal, she said, was an insufferable nuisance and not to be tolerated. Alice gazed back at her, eyes bright in anticipation of bacon.

I would train Alice in the old ballroom, I decided. It was cold and dusty and darkish, but had the advantage of being in a tucked-away corner of Wraithwood Hall, visited only by pigeons. There had not been a ball since Uncle Bart was young, and that was a very long time ago.

I taught Alice Sit and Stay. I taught her Shh. And because lessons should be fun, I taught her Catch. My breakfast bacon was in my pocket, broken into tiny pieces. Alice was hungry from all the sitting and staying; she learned to catch quickly. I’d been right about her. She was an exceptionally clever dog.

On the fourth day, I lost Alice. We were so busy with our training that I missed the bell for luncheon, and only realised how late it was when I heard Mrs M calling my name. The quickest way back into the main part of the house was through a narrow hallway between the ballroom and the servants’ quarters. I was not supposed to use this shortcut. The hallway was barely wide enough for me to pass through; a solid person like Mrs Manifold would be in danger of getting stuck, and a tall one like James would have to stoop, for the ceiling was low. Stranger still was the blue-painted door halfway along, a door just the right height for an eleven-year-old girl, but far too small for grown-ups. Long ago, Uncle Bart had seen me coming out of the shortcut, and I could still remember his stern warning: “Do not go through that passage, child. No good can come of it. And never, ever open the blue door. Do not even speak of it. Promise me, now.”

Shocked by the terrible look on his face – it was as if he could see demons – I had squeaked out a promise before I had time to consider. Later, I wished I had asked questions. Why must I never open the blue door? What would happen if I did? And if that place was so dangerous, why didn’t they block it up so nobody could go there?

I had never disobeyed the rule about the blue door, though I did use the passage sometimes when in a rush. I had performed some investigations, going around the outside of Wraithwood Hall and trying to work out where the blue door might lead. But it didn’t seem to lead anywhere.

That morning, Alice had been learning Wait. Wait was short for wait-until-I-say-the-magic-word-before-you-eat. It was a measure of how clever Alice was that before the lesson was over she could wait for a slow count of five without falling upon the scrap of bacon I had placed before her. The magic word was Crunch. I thought this might be a useful thing for her to know, should someone offer her comestibles that would not agree with her. I hoped this would never happen, but there was no accounting for the vagaries of humankind, or so Uncle Bart frequently muttered while reading The Times over his breakfast eggs.

When I heard Mrs Manifold calling me I ran through the little passage, trying to tidy my hair as I went and hoping I would not be in trouble. Mrs M stood outside the dining room with a covered platter in her hands and a harried look on her face.

“You’re late,” she said, looking me up and down. “Your uncle has a visitor. Did you wash your face and hands?”

“Yes, Mrs Manifold,” I lied.

There followed a tedious luncheon during which Uncle Bart and his guest, a fellow scientist, discussed at length a paper on the topic of phrenology, which had to do with interpreting bumps on the head. I could not imagine why anyone would want to study such a thing, but I knew better than to say so. In fact, I said nothing at all, but worked my way through a somewhat better meal than usual, thanks to the presence of my uncle’s learned friend. It was not until I was finishing my stewed apple and custard that I realised I had left Alice in the ballroom on her own.

I set my napkin down and waited for a pause in the conversation. “Uncle Bart, may I please be excused from the table?”

“What lovely manners,” commented the learned friend with a condescending smile.

“Go, go, by all means, child,” said Uncle Bart, evidently keen to return to the topic of head bumps. I fled. Not through the little passage, since Mrs M was nearby, but the long way, out of the house, around the stone pathway, into the ballroom through the big door that did not quite close properly.

“Alice!” I called. “Alice, come!”

No reply. All was still.

I commenced a search. The ballroom housed a miscellany of old furniture, draped with protective sheets. I crawled under things, I climbed over things, I squeezed behind things. From time to time I called, “Alice!” I had not realised so many spiders lived in the ballroom. As I was pulling the last of the cobwebs from my hair I heard muffled barking. It was coming from the little passage.

I tiptoed over, not wishing to startle Alice into flight. When I looked in, nobody was there, only shadows. But the blue door, the door Uncle Bart had said must always stay closed, stood ajar. A cold draught came from within, making me shiver. Alice barked again. She was in there. In the place beyond the door.

There was only one choice. Alice was my dog. She was my responsibility, and I must bring her back. Courage, I told myself. It’s a rescue mission. An adventure. I walked up to the blue door, pushed it wide open and walked on through.

I had expected a hallway, a chamber or steps to a cellar. Instead, I found myself outside. But this was not the garden of Wraithwood Hall, though here, too, it was winter. Snow lay in drifts around towering trees, enough to make a monstrous snowman. Icicles hung from the branches, shining as if with their own light. I could hear a rustling, as if something was moving about up above, keeping an eye on me. I stared in wonder. This was a place from a strange fairy tale. It surely could not be real. Yet here it was, only one step from home. I had walked into a true adventure.

Alice, I reminded myself. Find Alice. There was no sound from her now, but across the carpet of snow was a trail of neat pawprints, heading towards a round bush, all prickles and berries. It looked somewhat like an oversized hedgehog.

“Alice!” I called. My voice sounded monstrously loud. The rustling from above ceased. “Where are you?”

The prickle bush lurched to its feet and began to move towards me. The feet were gnarled and knobby, and the gait was that of an infirm old man. This was becoming odder by the moment.

“Ah, a young person.” The bush had a voice to match its walk. “We are not often graced with such a visit these days. Welcome, welcome! Sit down, make yourself comfortable.”

I discerned beady eyes deep in the foliage, and perhaps a twiggy nose. There was nowhere to sit except on the ground in the snow. Fearing to offend my host, I sat. “Have you seen a little dog?” I asked. “Her name is Alice and she came this way. She is very young and will be easily lost.”

“It is customary to begin a conversation with introductions,” said the creature. “My name is – it is – oh dear. It has been so long since I had a visitor that I cannot remember.”

“Oh, how sad,” I said, wondering how long it might be before Uncle Bart started to forget his own name. I must make sure I called him by it at least three times a day. “Would you like a new name? I could give you one.”

If a bush could blush, this one did so. The edges of his leaves turned pink, and his berries glowed. “Oh, yes!” he said in tones of such awe that I might have been offering a chest full of pirate treasure or The Complete Works of William Shakespeare in a collector’s edition. “Oh, that would be very fine indeed!”

A name was quite a responsibility. It had to contain the essence of the individual’s character, which meant something like Prickly would not do at all. “I’ll need to ask you some questions first,” I said. The snow was soaking into my skirt, all the way through my undergarments to my skin. I could not hear Alice at all.

“Ask away.”

“What is your job here? What is your responsibility in this – this interesting place?”

“I guard. I protect. I keep watch. Small folk hide in me or shelter under me. My fruit keeps them alive in the long winter.”

“And in summer?”

The creature sighed; all his leaves trembled. “In summer I rest, so I will be strong when the winter comes. Tiny folk rest in my shade.”

This was a very important personage. Clearly the small folk could not survive without him. Such a being could not be given an ordinary name, such as John or Cedric or Charles. “I think your name could be Trusty,” I said. “Would that be acceptable?”

“Rusty?”

“No, no – Trusty with a T. Because everyone trusts you, or they would not hide in you or shelter under you or eat your fruit. You are the guardian of the woods.”

“Trusty with a T. That is an excellent name. I thank you.” The creature seemed to bow; his leaves all tilted a little in my direction.

“Trusty, could you help me to find my dog, Alice? She is about this big” – I motioned with my hands – “and her fur is three colours: white, black and russet. She has long ears and a plumy tail.”

Before Trusty could respond, a terrible shrieking broke out, the high-pitched cry of a small animal in deathly peril. I whirled to see an enormous owl seated on a branch nearby. The bird’s great eyes were most curious. In one I could see the face of a clock, with a full set of Roman numerals, and in the other was a pair of scales in perfect balance. There was no time to reflect upon this oddity, for the bird held in its beak a tiny struggling creature. It had a tri-coloured coat, long ears and a plumy tail. It was no bigger than a mouse.

“That’s Alice!” I cried. “Oh, please don’t eat her!” The owl blinked solemnly, making no attempt to reply. If it had opened its beak to do so, I could have dashed across the clearing and caught Alice as she fell. I turned towards Trusty. “Why is she so small?”

“Your little friend has more curiosity than is advisable in one so young,” said Trusty. “She has eaten two of my silver berries, and as a consequence has diminished quite considerably. Indeed, she is now too small to furnish a satisfactory dinner for an owl. Let her go!” This command was intended for the owl, and the bird was startled into obedience. Alice plummeted towards the ground; I dived and caught her, rolling to land in a pile of snow. My shoulder hurt, but Alice was safe. Or as safe as a creature the size of a mouse can be. Those silver berries were indeed powerful. I must make sure my dog ate no more of them or she would be shrunk to the proportions of a flea.

Holding Alice between my cupped palms, I took a closer look at Trusty. The silver berries were all on his left side. On the right were berries of rich deep purple. “What happens if someone eats the purple berries?” I asked.

“A foolish question.” The owl’s voice was undeniably female. “Use your powers of logic and deduction, infant. Tut, tut, whatever do they teach children in school these days?”

“I don’t go to school. I have a tutor.” I failed utterly to keep the wobble from my voice as I spoke these words. Froggy would be back tonight, and I still had no lock on my door.

“This tutor has not taught you much,” said the owl. “Why not feed your animal a purple berry and observe the result? That way you answer your own question.”

“Because I love Alice, and I would rather have a mouse-sized dog than a dead one. How do I know those are not poison berries?”

“Did you not name me Trusty with a T?” It sounded as if the bushy creature was smiling. “Feed her one purple berry, as the bird suggests. You may require two, since she took two of the silver. She can eat them safely.”

Alice was shivering hard. She’d had a terrible fright. I could only hope this would teach her a lesson. I plucked one purple berry and set the tiny fruit before her on my palm. “Wait,” I said, and counted to five. “Crunch!”

“Oh, very good!” exclaimed Trusty, as Alice snatched up the berry on command and devoured it as if she had not been fed for weeks. She was immediately larger. But not big enough; she had grown only to the size of a small kitten. I waited a little, wanting to be sure a second berry was necessary. It seemed it was. I put it on my palm. To do so, I had to move Alice to my other hand. I kept her within reach of the fruit.

“Alice, wait.”

“One, two, three, four, five,” chanted Trusty and the owl in unison.

“Crunch!”

The berry was gone, and Alice was back to her normal size again, the size of a puppy just old enough to leave its mother and go to a new home. “Thank you!” I said, curtseying first to Trusty and then to the owl. “It has been good to meet you. I had best take Alice back to … to the place where we live.”

“Oh, so soon?” The owl sounded mournful. Yet she had given no sign of taking any liking to me. I eyed her, wondering what life would be like in this world beyond the blue door, and what parting gift might be appropriate for a bird whose meal I had, in effect, snatched from her jaws, or rather, beak. I wanted to leave my new acquaintances on good terms.

“May I know your name?” It had worked before; perhaps it would again.

“My name is Madame Eye.” The owl spoke in a grand tone, as if she had been reading too many dramatic plays.

“That is unusual,” I said. “But then, your eyes are quite remarkable.”

The owl turned her large orbs on me. “I for Inevitability. I am Inevitability J. Moon-Fleet.”

“Oh! That is a magnificent name! Does the J stand for Justice?” With the scales in one eye and the clock in the other – is not the passage of time inevitable? – this seemed likely.

An owl cannot smile, but I sensed a softening in Madame I’s expression. “That was well deduced,” she said.

There was a silence. Both of them were looking at me, expecting something. After a little, the owl asked, “And what is your name?”

I really had forgotten my manners. “Dorothea. It means a gift from God. Only … sometimes I think God has forgotten to watch over me. Maybe He has fallen asleep.” I held back the words that wanted to spill out. How could these two possibly help? “I must go now. I must take Alice back.” My voice trembled.

“Dorothea,” said Trusty, “I see tears in your eyes. Why are you afraid?”

The owl shifted on her branch, staring down at me. “Trust. Inevitability. Justice. Now is the time to speak, child.”

So I did. About Froggy – Master Frederick – and the strange pictures he showed me late at night when he came tapping on my door, and his clammy hands, and what he had said he would do when I was a big girl of eleven, and how I couldn’t tell Uncle Bart or Mrs Manifold or anyone because I couldn’t make myself say the words. And how even if I had a lock for my bedchamber it wouldn’t be enough because I had lessons with Froggy every day, and sometimes in the middle of a lesson in French or Mathematics he would say something that made my flesh crawl. When I got to the end, I wiped my eyes and said, “Thank you for listening. But there’s nothing you can do.”

“You could stay here,” said Madame Inevitability. “Unless this Froggy is a very small man indeed, he could not fit through our door.”

I would have been happy never to see Froggy again. But I would miss William, and I would miss Uncle Bart. And Uncle Bart would miss me. He would be lonely. “I don’t think that would do. I need to go back, and so does Alice. Is there any other way?”

“Wait,” said Trusty, stretching out his twiggy hand to pluck a small harvest of his own berries: five of the purple ones and five of the silver. The owl flew down with a large dry leaf in her beak. Trusty dropped the berries carefully into the shallow receptacle. “This task is for you, Dorothea.”

“But how…?” I imagined growing so large I would be unable to get out of my bedchamber, or so small that I would fall down a crack in the floor and never be found. That would be a terrible fate, but almost better than waiting for Froggy’s tap on the door.

Madame Inevitability passed me the leaf. “The solution is in your hands,” she said. “Use your powers of logic and deduction. And take care not to drop these on the way.”

I balanced my burdens carefully: Alice supported by one hand, the leaf and berries cupped in the other. In my mind, an idea began to form itself. “You mean…”

But the owl had flown back to her perch and was using her beak to tidy her feathers, and Trusty said nothing.

“Goodbye. And thank you. I am very grateful.” The idea was getting bigger. It was getting monstrous.

“Don’t mention it,” Trusty said. “Just as well your dog is a tidy eater.”

*

Froggy did not come back until the rest of the household was abed. I was watching from my window, with a candle alight on the old chest, and when I saw him come through the gate I took out the berries. The silver ones were in a small china bowl and the purple ones in an eggcup. There must be no confusion in the dim light.

He let himself in by a side door; Uncle Bart had given him a key. When I heard his footsteps on the stairs I spoke to Alice, who was hunkered down on my bed.

“Alice, wait.” A count of five. “Crunch.” And again. After the second berry, I moved Alice into the shadowy corner near the wardrobe. “Alice, wait.” I counted. “Crunch.” And twice more. The five purple berries were gone.

A familiar tap on the door. In my stomach, a familiar sinking dread. I blew out the candle. In the faint glow from the banked-up fire, I sat down on my bed and wrapped my shawl around me. “Alice, ssh,” I murmured. “Wait.”

The door creaked open, and there was Froggy. “Sitting in the dark, my little scholar? You must be lonely all by yourself.”

He closed the door behind him, then took two steps forward.

“Crunch!”

Alice came out of the dark. Master Frederick’s mouth opened wide, but she gave him no time to scream.

The old sheet I had spread over the carpet absorbed much of the blood. When I had bundled it up, along with various oddments of tweed, hair and leather, Alice gave the place a thorough going-over with her large tongue. I stowed the sheet in the wardrobe. In the morning, before anyone was stirring, I would take it outside and bury it in the stack of rubbish James had ready for burning. When all was to rights, I fed Alice the five silver berries. “Good dog, Alice,” I said, giving my little friend a special pat. We snuggled into bed together and were soon fast asleep.

*

For a short while, Master Frederick’s disappearance was the subject of local conjecture. He was known to have attended his examination and set out for home. A heavy snowfall overnight had obliterated any clues as to his later movements. The constabulary came to Wraithwood Hall and spoke to James, who was tending his bonfire. They questioned Mrs Manifold and Uncle Bart. But nothing came of it.

I have a governess now. Her name is Miss Flora Buchanan. She speaks four languages and knows lots of games. In her free time she writes stories about monsters. Miss Flora is nineteen years old, but she is a small person: only a little taller than me. I think she might enjoy escapades.

And Alice? She is growing a great deal, but no more than is usual for a King Charles spaniel. She has learned to roll over and to shake hands. I always knew she was clever.

INSIDE THE BODY OF RELATIVES BY OCTAVIA CADE

It’s a state house, or was. Low-income housing, built decades ago by the government and I rented for years before being able to buy. It’s not big, it’s not flash, but it’s mine – and the state, when it built, built well. There’s features here you’d never get nowadays, in a new build.

All the floors are made of kauri. It’s protected now and fair enough – those trees are too big and too beautiful to be logged, and that bloody dieback disease is doing it for them, no matter how much the Department of Conservation cordons off the reserves, puts out disinfectant stations so people can scrub their shoes off and not spread the spores. Seems like a losing battle some days, and I suppose if we lose the species I’ll feel worse about treading it all underfoot, but there’s a part of me that’s good for gloating because the wood is warm and lovely and you could only match it now with recycled timber, which costs a fortune I don’t have and wouldn’t waste on wood if I did.

There’s also two bedrooms. The house is always telling me I should use one of them for visitors. “Companionship is vital for maintaining mental health in the elderly,” it says.

Do-gooder programming.

It was a new addition, one I didn’t particularly want but since I had that bad fall two years back, broke my hip on those lovely floors, well. It was better than a bracelet or one of those little button alarms or moving to a home. I was expecting it to be worse, actually – I’ve been a science fiction fan all my life and artificial intelligence always ends up wrong in the stories. It goes insane or turns into some sort of nanny tyrant but this one’s pretty good, for all its emphasis on socialisation. When I tell it to shut up it does, which is more than I can say for most.

There’s a reason I don’t have a lot of guests – or worse, a tenant, for all the rent would round out my super. I like my house quiet.

“Quiet as the toooomb,” says the house, in response. It gets sarcastic when it’s worried. “I don’t like to think about you getting depressed,” it says.

“I’m not depressed.”

“Loneliness can be a trigger for depression,” says the house. “You are lonely, and I am not a substitute.”

“I go out every day.” Chess matches, coffee dates, I volunteer at the library teaching English to migrants. The house know this. “What more could you possibly want?”

“Don’t you miss your family?” says the house. “You never see them anymore.”

Truth is I see them too often. They’re nice enough kids, but the young are exhausting and all my relatives are young now.

“A home should have a family in it,” says the house, plaintive.

It’s a conversation we’ve had before. At first I thought the thing was trying to encourage me into a home of a different kind, one with common rooms and drooling and detergent, the incipient stench of decay. I thought perhaps it was hoping for a more interesting replacement – a young couple with a new baby, for instance, people who would enjoy its fussing. But that was anthropomorphising, and foolish. The house is a programme. It doesn’t want anything but what it’s programmed for, which is the health of the inhabitant. And I’m healthy enough, the hip’s healed well, I get my yearly flu vaccinations and all it has to worry about now is my state of mind.

“I know you’re lonely,” says the house.

“I’m not lonely.”

“Your vital functions change when you lie,” says the house. It’s even programmed to sound regretful, as if the airing of a painful truth causes sadness in the both of us.

There’s nothing I can say. Nothing that won’t sound like an excuse. The house won’t understand that there’s pleasure in loneliness, sometimes – that living for so long with absence fits you to it, curls you round the hollow of it so that your entire self is shaped around space, spiralled around it as if you were a seashell, or a cell full of vacuole. That any attempt to rid yourself of it is a destabilising force, as if the space that fills your form has become a structural thing, and necessary.

There’s so many things that can’t be explained to a programme. I’d like to say it’s exhaustion that keeps me from trying, but the truth is that shape comes with shame, and it’s hard to admit to being so structured. As if you are a defect to your species, and one that stands outside of community, or at its fringes. And there are chess matches and coffee dates and library readings, but these have lost their attraction, and increasingly they are a difficulty and a chore and my fantasies these days, such as they are, involve just not going.

I feel less lonely at home.

But it’s shameful to admit that, and exhausting, so I scoff at the house, just loud enough for it to hear and then I disconnect the system so I can forget the conversation in silence. If loneliness is a structural thing that structure is self-created, and creation is good at blocking off and branching out, but none of these things matter when three days later I slip again on those gleaming, hardwood floors and break the other hip.

The house can’t hear me, because I turned it off, and it’s another three days before neighbours hear the screams.

*

The screams. I say it distanced, as if they’d come from someone else. They were my screams, mine. I choked on them, burst the blood vessels in my eyes for them, wept for them.

I thought I was going to die. At home, alone, and with that glorious, beautiful floor smooth under my face.

*

Sometimes I dream I did die. That it was months before anyone came, years, which is unrealistic but dreams never have much sense of time, at least the good ones don’t. And this was a good one. I died on the floor and my flesh melted away, not a sticky, stinking mulch of a melt but a slow and clean dissolving, and then my skeleton, my clean pale curve of bones are pressed against the straightened skeleton of kauri that’s spread over the floors, and with my cheekbone pressed against the floor I can feel the faint vibration of sap.

*

Only a dream. The sap’s all dried in those floorboards, and the ghost of them that lives in the unconscious is only that – a relic of imagination and construction, but the image is one that stays with me. My bone and kauri bone, all mixed up together, and the longer I dream of our mutual remains, the more polished the wood becomes, until my bones are mirrored in them as if the wood were the surface of water.

I’m in the hospital for three months this time. The healing goes slowly – much more slowly than last time, and although everyone is very kind I can sense what they’re not saying: that if I’d left the house on, I would have been found sooner and my recovery wouldn’t have been inhibited by the wait, the hip exacerbated by prolonged shock and dehydration.

I admit to the social worker just how very foolish I’ve been. This is necessity as much as truth. I want to go home, but if people think my mind is slipping, that I can no longer care for myself, then they’ll look for other alternatives. And I’m sure a rest home is deadeningly pleasant, in its own saccharine and superficial way, but it’s the beginning of the end and if my end comes I’d rather it came with silence.

“I’d rather it came with company,” says the house, when finally – finally! – I’m allowed to go home. “You are so alone. I’m frightened for you.”

Truth is when I shuffle across that gleaming floor, bare-footed for I’ve never liked the feel of socks, I can feel the vibrations, again, of sap. I don’t think I’m hallucinating, though it’s certain that the ghost of the tree that was is an unreal thing. But if it’s not real it’s not threatening either, and this isn’t something I can say to the house. I think it would have to call the nurse, poor thing, report on delusion and mental ill-health. It’s so worried about my solitude.

“I’ve got you,” I say in reply, but if the misdirection works it’s a poor attempt at flattery.

“I’m not a substitute for connection,” says the house. “I’m not a living thing. I’m a programme only. You can’t even touch me, and touch is important.”

I can touch the house, its floor and walls and windows, the furniture in it, but I know what it means. With the floor echoing life underfoot it touches back … or part of it does. The seeming-intelligence of the programme, its monitor call-and-response, is a separate thing from structure.

“How would you feel if I got a pet?” I say. If touch is important, there’s fur and a little licking tongue, the ability to curl up against and share warmth.

“Human-animal bonding has been shown to have a salutary effect on mental health,” says the house, and it almost sounds pleased.

The cat is small and warm and old. I don’t want a kitten, they’re too much work, and besides, with a kitten there’s a good chance I’ll die before it will and the poor thing would have to find a new home. I don’t think that’ll be a problem with this one.

I feed the cat tinned fish and call it Cat. Not original, I know, and I’d swear the house thinks it is a dissociating mechanism, a way of keeping distance and not getting too attached. But I let the cat sleep on me and pat it enough so that it purrs on the regular, and this interaction is likely logged as positive, the house caring more for what I do than what I say.

It’s a nice cat. I get attached. Well, you do, don’t you? I just wish the attachment didn’t come with the need for talk, for communication. Why is it when you get a pet you start talking to it, and always in that stupid baby voice which is never yours? I’m ashamed to hear myself, truly. “Fish-fish, pussums!”

I’d like to say it’s loneliness but we had a dog when the kids were growing up and I did it then too. Everyone does.

“You’re a social species,” says the house, as fixated on that empty bedroom as the cat is on fish. “It’s normal to talk to the things around you. People, animals, plants.”

“I do not talk to plants!”

“Yesterday you told the fern in the hall that it was growing very nicely when you watered it,” says the house, and if I could shut off that insinuating precision I would, but shutting off didn’t go so well for me last time and the image of my face reflected in floorboards is enough to keep my hand away from switches.

Enough, too, is the knowledge that if questioned I might offer up that it’s not just the fern I’ve been talking to. Not aloud, I’ve not forgot myself that far yet, but the floorboards are still alive and they’re sprouting now as well, small branches and soft little leaves and that my hand goes through them doesn’t make them any less real, I think.

“You could always invite someone to come and visit,” says the house. “Family is important. Three of your grandchildren alone have rung this week.”

“And it was very nice to talk to them,” for about five minutes. Then I was ready to hang up. Good kids, but still. “Isn’t the cat enough?” I looked down at it stuffing its face at the food bowl. “If only you were a relative. We might get some peace that way.”

“I suppose, technically…” sighs the house, and trails off.

I no longer go to the library to teach. It’s too much, walking there now with both hips aching, and they’ll bring any books I want out in the mobile service, but there’s more than once way to get information and the house maintains excellent network services.

“Technically we are related,” I say to Cat. Felis catus. It has a whole taxonomy behind it. Family: Felidae. Order: Carnivora. Class: Mammalia. I have a taxonomy too. Homo sapiens, Family: Hominidae. Order: Primates. Class: Mammalia.

There’s a common ancestor in there somewhere. “You’re a cousin of sorts, I suppose,” I say to Cat. “Distant, but family.” The house is sceptical. “You never said it had to be a close relation I invited round. I’m only following your instructions. You can’t be cross!”

“I’m never cross,” says the house. “But I believe you are stretching definition. You might as well call the fish the cat eats a relative.”

“I’m going to make you regret saying that.” Shuffling to the pantry, I unearth the tinned tuna that is all Cat, the fussy beast, will eat. “Skipjack,” I announce. “Katsuwonus pelamis.” Family: Scombridae. Order: Perciformes. Class: Actinopterygii. Phylum: Chordata. “That’s us,” I say. “That’s our phylum, the chordates. That’s the human phylum. The cat phylum too, for that matter.”

“Congratulations,” says the house, and if its tone wasn’t so carefully modulated it might almost have been what I’d call dry. “You’ve fed one relative to another. What a lovely family you have.”

“Phylum. Not family. But you’re close enough.”

A petty thing, to so stump a programme that exists only to be useful. It’s not a fair fight: the house lacks imagination, fails to appreciate quirk. But small victories are victories for all that, and when I lie awake at night, with the cat twined about my feet, incapable for all its relation-form of upsetting that delicate structure of self that loneliness creates, I’m struck by the memory of maudlin things. Perhaps it’s the rain on the roof, a lovely sound and a soothing one but not anything that’s conducive to happy thoughts, unless it’s the happiness of being snuggled under covers, warm in isolation.

I’m thinking of Cat, and how it will die. Before me, probably, and I’m thinking too of a friend I had once who would never have said that she was lonely, would never have thought it. But she had a pet too, a small and unkind dog she thought the world of, and when the dog died my friend had it stuffed and placed in a basket, so it looked as if it were always sleeping. (Such things the structures of loneliness make of others. If I pictured my own solitude as the spiral centre of seashells, hers must have been a black hole inside that insisted on gravity and event horizons.)

If I’m related to Cat, my friend was related to her dog (Canis familiaris, of Canidae, Carnivora, Mammalia respectively). And if she was related to it alive she was related to it dead … and there’s the curled up, furry corpse of her relative set for the rest of life in front of fires, waiting to be stroked. Waiting to bite, too, knowing that thing as I did.

Well, what of it. I’ve got other relatives who bite. I suppose the dog is no great exception.

And the wind, and the rain. It gusts outside, louder than ever. I tuck the duvet more closely around, snuggle back into pillows. They’re all full of merino, a warm bedroom set of relatives just as dead as Kathy’s dog was. Merino wool, from a merino sheep. Ovis aries (Bovidae, Artiodactyla, Mammalia). There’s a common ancestor there too, and what they would have thought I wonder, because it’s not just wool in the pillows, it’s in the carpet as well, and hung in the wardrobe. The sheets, too, although they’re cotton, and I’d have to go all the way back past Kingdom to Eukaryota find the organism that led to my sleeping in the processed body of yet another relation.

That night I wake to the sound of hooves in the hall, the brush of cotton bolls against my face and when I reach my hand out in the dark there’s a furry smell, the whisper of snout in my hand.

The cat stalks through cotton and kauri. It’s unbothered by sheep.

I should find this more disturbing than I do, but all I can think, in this weather, is how nice it would be to have a possum fur bedspread. If the bedspread brought its own ghosts with it they could always sleep with the cat. Not that possums and cats have ever got along but they’re friendly, these ghosts, I think – so long dead that they’ve lost the fear of it, and the blame.

“The common brushtail possum,” I tell the house. “Trichosurus vulpecula.” (Phalangeridae, Diprotodontia, Mammalia.) “What do you reckon?” They’re pests, after all, and introduced at that. It’d do the ecology here a world of good to turn a few more of them into blankets.

“It’s not the science I question, it’s you,” says the house. “Don’t you think you’ve taken this far enough? At your age a growing interest in death is not unremarkable, but one can take identification too far.”

“It’s those dreams of floorboards,” I say. “Over and over again, the skeletons lying together. That’s what this house is, isn’t it?” Kauri, Agathis australis. (Araucariaceae, Pinales, Pinopsida, Pinophyta, Plantae, Eukaryota.) “A very distant relative, and we cut it down and carved it up for houses. No wonder I can see my face in it.”

“This is frankly disturbing,” said the house.

“It’s not like ours is the only culture to do so. At least we chose a really distant kin to make our home in. Did you know a thousand years ago people were still building houses out of whalebone? Out of bowhead whales.” (Balaenidae, Artiodactyla, Mammalia.) “Try doing that today and see what the conservation groups will say about you.”

I wonder if any of them ever woke from the slide into death and saw fins surface out of floor, heard the whales singing to them at night, relatives telling them of home.

I wonder if they sound prettier than sheep.

“Would you like me to call a doctor?” the house asks.

“For what? A sudden and absorbing interest in cladistics? What do they prescribe for evolutionary biology these days?”

“You’re being facetious. I’m only trying to help.” It almost sounded hurt.

“You did help,” I say to it, trying to comfort. “You were right. I was lonely. I used to lie in bed at night and feel the hollow inside me. But then I realised … I’m related, house, to everything around me. This is my home, and I’m related to nearly everything in it! The cat, the potted plants. The books, house, they’re all made of paper, and all come from a tree that comes from an ancestor we both share. The paint on the walls gets its colour from plant extracts. The insulation in the roof, the curtains, the micro-organisms embedded in the concrete outside the front door … Hell, there’s micro-organisms spread over everything here anyway, and all of it is me somehow. If you take a very broad definition of me, anyway.”

All of it, dead around me. All of it coming back to life, the realisation of relation calling kin.

“It’s not you,” says the house. “Even if your premise is valid, even if your biological relationship holds to all the living and dead things around you. You are alone in it. You are not paper or extract or wool. You are not a cat, you are not skipjack tuna. You are a single entity.”

“That’s just it, house. I’m not. I’ve seen myself that way – like a hollowed out shell on the beach, next to all the other shells and with isolation making a shape inside me to fit around. But a human being is a colony animal, even more than a social one. There are a multitude of species inside me, and yes, they’re all micro. Bits of bacteria, and I’d be dead without them. If I were a single species I’d be dead, house. The fact is I can only survive because there are so many of me. So many in me. The fact is … the fact is, house, that the only single entity here is you.”

It was a distinction we’d made all along. The body of the house, made of wood and paint and plaster … and the programming. That was separate. Created entirely from inorganic materials, and from language, and so very different from everything that came before.

No wonder it can’t understand. No wonder it doesn’t see kauri, feel the bleating gallop of sheep, see the lacy growth of micro-organisms starting to spread over walls.

There’s nothing here for it to see its face in.

“House,” I say, “perhaps it’s you who needs a family.”

The silence lasts for three days. It’s not my doing this time – or perhaps it is. The floors in which I saw my face don’t have another hip to break, but they might have led me to break something else in their stead.

“I never knew a house had a heart before,” I say. Between the roof and the walls and the floor there is a space defined by absence, that curls up around me like the inside of shells. “I’ve been cruel with yours, and I’m sorry.”

“We do not share a family,” says the house. Its voice is very small.

“No.”

“We do not share a phylum, even.”

“No.” We didn’t share so much as a single living cell, or the memory of one. “But any life you have came from us. From the living things that made us. Perhaps you’re a new Kingdom, one all your own. The Kingdoms are related, too. Perhaps that’s why I talk to plants. Perhaps that’s why I talk to you.”

“That’s more likely to be loneliness,” says the house, stubborn to the last.

“But I don’t feel lonely,” I say. How can I, alive as I am and tucked inside the body of relatives? “Not anymore. Do you?”

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

No reprint anthology could exist without stories to reprint. Ngā mihi maioha to the slush readers, editors, and production and marketing staff who originally dug out and polished up these stories. Onya.

A.J. Fitzwater’s ‘Hearts Made Marble, Weapons Shaped from Bone’ first appeared in Apparition Lit Issue 5: Resistance.

Alisha Tyson’s ‘Moving House’ first appeared on ReadingRoom.

Andi C. Buchanan’s ‘Henrietta and the End of the Line’ was originally published in Issue 1 of Translunar Travelers Lounge, edited by Aimee Ogden and Bennett North.

Casey Lucas’s ‘A Shriek Across the Sky’ was first published in Issue 5 of Sponge.

James Rowland’s ‘Proof of Concept’ was originally published in Issue 49 of NewMyths.com, edited by Susan Shell Winston.

Juliet Marillier’s ‘Good Dog, Alice!’ was originally published in Wonderland: An Anthology, edited by Marie O’Regan and Paul Kane (Titan Books, 2019).

Octavia Cade’s ‘Inside the Bodies of Relatives’ was originally published in the November/December 2019 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, edited by Sheila Williams.

Melanie Harding-Shaw’s ‘The Fisher’ was originally landed by Steve Braunias at ReadingRoom. It has since been reprinted in The Best of British Fantasy 2019, edited by Jared Shurin (NewCon Press, 2020).

Nic Low’s ‘Te Ara Poutini’ first appeared in Pūrakau: Māori Myths Retold by Māori Writers, edited by Witi Ihimaera and Whiti Hereaka (Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2019).

Nicole Tan’s ‘Fission’ was originally published in Issue 9 of Anathema: Spec Fic from the Margins, edited by Chinelo Onwualu, Andrew Wilmot and Michael Matheson.

Rem Wigmore’s ‘Who Watches’ was originally published in Sharp and Sugar Tooth, edited by Octavia Cade (Upper Rubber Boot, 2019).

Zoë Meager’s ‘First dispatch from the front’ was originally published in Landfall 238, edited by Emma Neale, and was republished in FlashFlood in 2020.

Zoë Meager’s ‘Spontaneous applause’ was originally published in Turbine | Kapohau 2019.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Alisha Tyson is a writer, and librarian based in Wellington. She has an MA in Creative Writing from the IIML, and her stories and book reviews are featured in many places, some of which include The Sapling, Turbine, and LEFT (published by ‘We Are Babies’). She can be found in libraries reading to children about bears who feel strongly about hats.

Andi C. Buchanan lives among streams and faultlines, just north of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Winner of a 2019 Sir Julius Vogel Award in the Best Short Story category, their fiction has been published in Apex, Kaleidotrope, Glittership, and more. You can find Andi on Twitter @andicbuchanan or at www.andicbuchanan.org.

A.J. Fitzwater lives between the cracks of Christchurch, New Zealand. A Sir Julius Vogel Award winner and graduate of Clarion 2014, their work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer, Giganotosaurus, and various anthologies of repute. A unicorn disguised in a snappy blazer, they tweet @AJFitzwater.

When she isn’t writing, Casey Lucas works in video game development, voice acting, and comics, where she localises Japanese manga for the English-speaking market. Both her short fiction and her web serial Into the Mire have been shortlisted for the Sir Julius Vogel Award. She has recent or upcoming work in Diabolical Plots and Monsters Out of the Closet, an LGBTQ horror fiction podcast. She’s active on Twitter as @CaseyLucasQuaid and you can read more of her work at www.intothemire.com.

James Rowland is a New Zealand-based, British-born writer. His work has previously appeared at Aurealis, Compelling Science Fiction, and Andromeda Spaceways. When he’s not moonlighting as a writer of magical, strange or futuristic stories, he works as an intellectual property lawyer. Besides writing, his hobbies are reading, stand-up comedy, travel, photography, and the sport of kings, cricket. You can find more of his work at his website www.jamesrowlandwriter.wordpress.com.

Juliet Marillier is the author of twenty-two historical fantasy novels, including the Sevenwaters and Blackthorn & Grim series. Her latest book, The Harp of Kings, was published in September 2019 and begins a new series, Warrior Bards. Juliet loves mythology, folklore, music and complex characters. She’s also very fond of dogs.

Melanie Harding-Shaw is a speculative fiction writer, policy geek and mother-of-three from Wellington. Her stories have recently appeared in publications like Daily Science Fiction and The Arcanist. You can find her at www.melaniehardingshaw.com/.

Nic Low is a writer of Ngāi Tahu and European descent. His work has been published and anthologised widely in Australia and New Zealand, covering wilderness, technology, and race. His first book is Arms Race, a collection of speculative fictions shortlisted for the Readings and Steele Rudd Prizes; his second, a Ngāi Tahu history of the Southern Alps told through walking journeys, is out with Text Publishing in 2021.

Nicole Tan is a Malaysian writer living in New Zealand. They write mostly speculative fiction in cramped pockets of space and time, which sadly are few and far between anomalies in their everyday life. Their work has appeared in Anathema: Spec From the Margins, Umbel & Panicle and The NZ Listener. They can be found lurking on Twitter @moxieturbine, retweeting the opinions of others.

Octavia Cade is a New Zealand writer. She’s had close to 50 short stories published in markets such as Clarkesworld, Shimmer, and Asimov’s. A handful of novellas, an essay collection on food and horror, and two poetry collections have been published by various small presses. The latest, Mary Shelley Makes A Monster, was published by Aqueduct Press. Octavia attended Clarion West 2016, has won three Sir Julius Vogel awards, and was the 2020 writer-in-residence at Massey University.

Rem Wigmore, also published under Summer Wigmore, is a speculative fiction writer based in Wellington. Their first novel The Wind City was published in 2013 by Steam Press, and their stories appear in the Sharp & Sugar Tooth anthology and the Capricious Gender Diverse Pronouns Issue. Rem likes coffee, friendship, and fighting capitalism. They can be found on twitter as @faewriter.

Zoë Meager is from Ōtautahi and has a Master of Creative Writing from the University of Auckland. Her short stories have been commended and published at home and abroad, including winning the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize, Pacific Region, 2013. Recent work has appeared in Bonsai: Best small stories from Aotearoa New Zealand, Turbine | Kapohau, Landfall, and been highly commended for the 2019 Sargeson Prize. There’s more at zoemeager.com

ALSO FROM PAPER ROAD PRESS

If you enjoyed this book, you might be interested in other titles published by Paper Road Press.

Paper Road Press publishes science fiction and fantasy, all things in between – and things from the fringes, too; the familiar made unfamiliar and the unfamiliar familiar.

Sign up for our newsletter to hear about our new releases and other news.

Click on the titles below to find your next New Zealand science fiction or fantasy read.

NOVELS AND NOVELLAS

The Stone Wētā, by Octavia Cade

We talk about the tyranny of distance a lot in this country. That distance will not save us.

When the cold war of data preservation turns bloody – and then explosive – an underground network of scientists, all working in isolation, must decide how much they are willing to risk for the truth. For themselves, their colleagues, and their future.

Murder on Antarctic ice. A university lecturer’s car, found abandoned on a desert road. And the first crewed mission to colonise Mars, isolated and vulnerable in the depths of space.

How far would you go to save the world?

*

From a Shadow Grave, by Andi C. Buchanan

People will say that you are just a ghost story. Something that needs to be sent away. You’re a memory of memories they’d rather forget.

They name you not with your name, but with the site of your murder. They don’t remember any of your other stories. To them, you will never be a lonely, angry, confused teenager, who liked to go to the movies and hoped she was in love, who fought with her siblings and always had a tune in her head. You’re a ghost story, and all other stories of you have been told and ended.

You deserve more stories than you get.

*

No Man’s Land, by A.J. Fitzwater

While her brother fights a war on the other side of the world, Dorothea ‘Tea’ Gray joins the Land Service and is sent to work on a remote farm in the golden plains of North Otago, in the South Island of New Zealand.

But Tea finds more than hard work and hot sun in the dusty North Otago nowhere—she finds a magic inside herself she never could have imagined, a way to save her brother in a distant land she never thought she could reach, and a love she never knew existed.

*

The Ghost of Matter, by Octavia Cade

1886. Two young boys disappear in the Sounds. Their mother grieves, all the music cut out of her heart; their father wanders the coast for a year, wanting and not wanting to find any part of them left behind. And their brother Ern, faced with a problem to which no solution can be found, returns to his laboratory – and to the smell of salt, soft voices in his ear, wet footprints welling seawater in the darkness.

*

Bree’s Dinosaur, by AC Buchanan

Cam’s ambitions are straightforward: study Business English in Wellington for six months, then return to Vietnam to build a promising career. She doesn’t need any complications. But when a dinosaur is being (very noisily) built in the bedroom next to yours, and a meteor-strike is threatening, it’s not always possible to avoid being sucked in – especially when her own past surfaces, half a world from where she left it submerged.

*

The Last, by Grant Stone

Rachel Mackenzie has travelled to New Zealand to interview the reclusive musician Katherine St. John about her first album in nearly thirty years. But strange things are happening at St. John’s farm and soon Rachel finds herself caught up in something far larger than the world of music.

*

Landfall, by Tim Jones

When the New Zealand Navy torpedoes a Bangladeshi river ferry full of refugees fleeing their drowning country, Nasimul Rahman is one of the few survivors. But even if he can reach the shore alive, he has to make it past the trigger-happy Shore Patrol, set up to keep the world’s poor and desperate at bay.

*

Mika, by Lee Murray and Piper Mejia

Mika Tāura arrives in New York in the middle of a storm, where she accidentally kills a motorist and lands herself with an injured child. And with time running out for those she left behind, those are the least of her problems.

*

The Pocket Wife, by IK Paterson-Harkness

Carl’s work requires him to travel extensively, but he and his wife Jenny stay connected through their Tinys – four-inch-tall replicas of themselves which, when turned on, transmit whatever sensory information they are receiving directly into their living counterparts’ minds. Through his Tiny, Carl can see his wife, speak to her, even feel her touch. But when Jenny’s Tiny malfunctions and she can’t turn herself off, Carl has a major problem. He’s having an affair, and he’d rather his wife wasn’t around.

*

Murder & Matchmaking, by Debbie Cowens

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a mother in possession of unmarried daughters must be in want of eligible bachelors. Less well known are the lengths to which she might go to attract them…

*

ANTHOLOGIES

Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction & Fantasy, Volume I, edited by Marie Hodgkinson

Thirteen of the brightest stars in New Zealand SFF.

For the first time ever, the best short SFF from Aotearoa New Zealand is collected together in a single volume. This inaugural edition of the Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction & Fantasy brings together the very best short speculative fiction published by Kiwi authors in 2018.

*

At the Edge, edited by Dan Rabarts and Lee Murray

From the brink of civilisation, the fringe of reason, and the border of reality, come 22 stories infused with the bloody-minded spirit of the Antipodes, tales told by the children of warriors and whalers, convicts and miners: people unafraid to strike out for new territories and find meaning in the expanses at the edge of the world.

*

SHORTCUTS: Track 1, edited by Marie Hodgkinson

Writing on the theme of strange tales of Aotearoa New Zealand, seven Kiwi authors weave stories of people and creatures displaced in time and space, risky odysseys, and even more dangerous discoveries.

*

Baby Teeth: Bite-sized Tales of Terror, edited by Dan Rabarts and Lee Murray

Kids can say the creepiest things. New Zealand and American authors delve into the strange, the unexpected, and the downright terrifying things that kids say in this collection of all new flash fiction.

COPYRIGHT

Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction and Fantasy: Volume II

edited by Marie Hodgkinson

First published in paperback and ebook in 2020

ISBNs: paperback 978-0-9951355-6-7 epub 978-0-9951355-8-1 kindle 978-0-9951355-7-4

Paper Road Press

paperroadpress.co.nz

This collection © 2020 Marie Hodgkinson

All stories © 2019 their respective authors:

‘Good Dog, Alice’ © 2019 Juliet Marillier

‘Te Ara Poutini’ © 2019 Nic Low

‘Inside the Body of Relatives’ © 2019 Octavia Cade

‘Henrietta and the End of the Line’ © 2019 Andi C. Buchanan

‘Hearts made Marble, Weapons Shaped from Bone’ © 2019 A.J. Fitzwater

‘Who Watches’ © 2019 Rem Wigmore

‘The Fisher’ © 2019 Melanie Harding-Shaw

‘Fission’ © 2019 Nicole Tan

‘A Shriek Across the Sky’ © 2019 Casey Lucas

‘Moving House’ © 2019 Alisha Tyson

‘Proof of Concept’ © 2019 James Rowland

‘Spontaneous Applause’ © 2019 Zoë Meager

‘First dispatch from the front’ © 2019 Zoë Meager

The authors have asserted their moral rights.

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the permission of the publisher. The authors have asserted their moral rights.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand

Cover art by and © Laya Mutton-Rogers 2020

Cover and internal design by Marie Hodgkinson

Table of Contents

Introduction by Marie Hodgkinson

Te Ara Poutini by Nic Low

A Shriek Across the Sky by Casey Lucas

Who Watches by Rem Wigmore

Fission by N. Tan

Proof of Concept by James Rowland

The Fisher by Melanie Harding-Shaw

Henrietta and the End of the Line By Andi C. Buchanan

Spontaneous applause by Zoë Meager

Hearts Made Marble, Weapons Shaped From Bone by A.J. Fitzwater

First dispatch from the front by Zoë Meager

Moving House by Alisha Tyson

Good Dog, Alice! by Juliet Marillier

Inside the Body of Relatives by Octavia Cade

Acknowledgements

About the Authors

ALSO FROM PAPER ROAD PRESS

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