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Rachel sat at the edge of the sparkling pond in the secluded glen that had taken her five years to find. The air smelled of roses and lavender and pine. Tiny white sparks, like fireflies, floated upward, almost as if they were watching her.
The magician raises his wand.
Initially, this commission seemed simple. One large country invading a much smaller one, a clear case of aggressor and victim—but nothing is ever so straightforward.
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There’s a wolf where my brother used to be, a beast absolutely hellbent on ruining my life. He plunges his broad snoot into the Wednesday night spaghetti, and neither Mom nor Dad cares when half the bite slides off his nose and onto the table, to later be jostled to the floor by his grabbing, grubby paws. But if I came to the table without washing up first . . .
You know you are fucked when you see fragments of the broken radio on the floor. Your damaged ship lay nose caked into the sand, and coupled with your sprained ankle that hums an excruciating pain, and slight concussion on your head—your chances of survival in this unknown territory has now drastically dropped. In your first year as a space cadet, you were taught to remain calm, breathe slowly, and call for help in the event of a crash.
The creatures who shared your art with us had to explain many things to make it minimally comprehensible. This by itself made sense. You are who and what you are, and we are who and what we are, and the physical differences between us are profound. We belong to different orders, and this means that our minds are also different, our philosophies are different, our ways of measuring and of comprehending the universe are different.
Look, it’s bad enough that my wife gets cat-called in the street and flashed on the train. There’s a lot of sickos out there who get their jollies by harassing women, and usually I try to shut them down without escalating it to a fight.
But we moved a few months ago to a new place. (I don’t want to say where, but it’s in Ishikawa Prefecture.) Last week my wife went to the toilet one night—we have the traditional kind, rather than a Western-style seat—and a moment later I heard this godawful shriek.
“They farm starlight.”
“Bullshit.”
“Okay, they’re going to farm starlight. For now they’re running fusion rigs. But that’s not their long-term plan.”
“No one in the sunforsaken Oort has a long-term plan. Other than slow suicide. You know what they told me, when I was first coming out here? ‘There are warmer ways to die.’ That’s in the bloody Kuiper.”
She assures them, again and again, that she acted under the best—the very best—of intentions. Oh, yes, she can be a bit dramatic at times—she won’t deny that. And she was hurt—very hurt—by that mess with the invitations. She won’t deny that, either.
But surely—surely—no one can think that she would respond by hurting an innocent child?
On a wooded hillside outside Pittsburgh, where the rivers braid together and the bridges flash yellow in the sun, there stands an old private school no one ever remembers enrolling in. Ivy grips its cracked bricks. Moss blurs the leaded windows. To almost anyone looking, it appears abandoned. Unless they are the newly dead. If that is the case, it is more of an inevitability.
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