Advertisement
My ghost bled through the shadows, an icy wind stirring the leaves. Eyes like candle flames shuddering and crescent moon mouth, it had found me as a girl and never let go—the only thing that was really mine. It led me to an overgrown graveyard, pelts of moss eating like acid through fallen tombstones. In the haze of tree-shadowed dark, huge stone towers loomed in the distance, wrapped by vine and tree limb.
The woman’s name was lost in The Fall, as was so much else we once thought vital—seasons, rivers, uncharred air—but her image persists, has become indelible. The giant wall of white upon which her travesties are projected once yearly has become a mecca for all in this, our new world. The desert for miles around is littered with the bleached bones of those who would gaze upon her bare body, to confirm for themselves and their outposts that one such as her ever actually existed.
By the time he went to reclaim himself, it was too late. As a young man, he’d realized there was a power to being alone. Relationships were tethers that held you back, sapped you of strength, of will. People were poison. And not all poisons were bad; sometimes the toxic taste, the caustic kiss, was a good thing. But too much killed you all the same. No matter how alive it made him feel in the moment, he knew that in the end, it would cost him.
The Starsinger, the Starsinger, the Starsinger, he sings. His histories have long been recorded—in every pit stop he has visited. In every station he has stayed. It may be just a minute of the traffickers slapping the Bini out of his mouth, or them telling him to recite the Western verse, or them colonizing his heart. But he remembers. Oh, the Starsinger remembers.
In its dreams, the thing they call “Kos” sleeps deep and drowned in the clutch of the ice-cold trenches, where the pressure is a loving clasp around its arms and tail, where it is near-disintegrate, more spirit than substance, more magic than meat. Then it wakes up in the bathtub. The deoxygenated water filters tepidly through Kos’s gills. It gasps, coughing through a windpipe and lungs that weren’t meant to be so exercised, even with the “humidifier” that pumps clouds of soft wet air into the bathroom. Irina had set it up the fifth night, when Kos had started coughing lacy bright red sprays of blood.
In City of One, the object is to avoid being seen. You begin at a random point in the city. If you are seen, you die. You cannot leave the city. If you try, you die. Your wellbeing starts at 1 out of 100. At 0, you die. To maintain your well-being, steal food, water, and shelter. If caught, you die. Remaining unseen does not increase your well-being. Sleep does not increase your well-being or decrease your exhaustion. Remember: You are surrounded.
Dear Dr. Erzsébet Krajcsik-Nagy,
I am contacting you as a member of the general public, and not as a fellow scholar, though I must say my chosen field of art history does have certain similarities to yours. I read the interview with you in the online edition of the Plains Dispatch with great interest, and went on to seek out your research article mentioned therein, titled “On an Unusual Kind of Spatially Distributed Haunting.” I believe I have additional information which could shed light on the case study you mentioned.
The company man’s smile showed off his perfect teeth. Evie hated that smile; it meant he was going to kill her again. Him staring down the camera above the Manic Pixie’s door didn’t help. Even with the dead pixels mildewing the monitor, Evie got the full gut-liquidating effect.
Outside the cabin, there was snow. There had always been snow, far as the eye could see, and further still. It might be true that the snow extended forever in every direction, sitting heavy on mountaintops and green pines, on frozen lakes and frigid tundra. Asha hadn’t tried to go very far from the cabin. […]
The place I came from, the port across the sea of stars, the isle town edged with sturgeon scales, was built on basalt. The place I came to, the city at the centre of the field of view, the once-ringed origin of dreams, was too large and too important to answer to a single kind of rock, but the first I encountered there was an unpolished railing of coarse-grained granite—the kind that leaves little slivers behind in your palm, but when you go to investigate you find they are only imprints where stone has been.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement