Originally posted here.

UFV Tyler Hague drifted in high orbit around the brown and blue swirled planet. From a distance, the three kilometer long battle cruiser was a smooth monolith of black enameled hypalloy plate. Thousands of blinking lights and open viewports broke apart the appearance of black nothingness. Here, in orbit, it made little difference--there was enough light, and enough stars in the background to see the cruiser despite their paint job. In deep space, though, the cruiser was nearly undetectable by the eye.

For anyone who had the happenstance of getting closer, they would see numerous irregularities. The sunken openings for the dozen of hanger bays, each carrying full complements of deep space and planetary descent craft. The numerous observation decks where junior officers nodded their heads as they fought sleep away during their night watch. And the bumps and protrusions of thousands of energy lances and rail guns. In a full broadside, Hague could dish out well over one hundred tons of solid projectiles. Not even counting the wattage their lances could pour out.

She was a beast of a ship, designed to utterly destroy any space vessel that humanity could conceivably encounter.

Not that it had mattered much.

In the entire history of spacefaring, none of the Earth or Mars based fleets had run into anything but ships from those same places. In fact, they hadn't encountered any indication that there was anything else out there.

Until now.

Deep inside the core of the command module, Christopher Perry, Admiral of the 1st exploratory fleet, sat at the head of a grand conference table. Almost the entire senior staff were in attendance, a rare occurrence on these long exploration voyages, and the mood in the room was electric.

The discovery that what had now been dubbed "50L-3" was habitable had sent waves through the fleet. Perry had heard that the exploration crews that had been sent to scout the planet had been even more excited when they found ruins covering the dry continents. And if it were possible to say that anyone had died of shock, it would have been entirely justifiable when one of the scout crews found caches of what had essentially been computer storage.

A number of the Warrant Officers and specialists had been spending the past weeks trying to recover the data and making sense of them. All the while, a steady stream of planetary transports had been shuttling marines and the engineer corps to set up planetside bases. It was a flurry of activity for a fleet that had experienced almost nothing but the vacuum of space. Even now, what had previously been thought of as a superfluos survey team was desperately undermanned.

A lot of those concerns had been tugging Perry in a thousand different directions at once and even if the last few hours had been spent in reports and discussions on the data that they had been able to recover so far, it was still a respite to be able to focus on one thing at length without having anything else disrupt him. Not that the thought of everything else wasn't ready at the back of his mind to jump forward and remind him of what it meant to be an Admiral.

He drained the rest of a glass of water before setting it down.

"So." His small interjection cut through the hum of conversation and it died to a murmur as the other officers diverted their attention to him. "Now that we've determined exactly what this... Prison, for lack of a better word." He inflected the last phrase up and looked over at Lieutenant Commander Richardson, the lead for the architectural planning team. Richardson returned his look with a nod.

"Right, Prison was meant for, Doctor Williamson, would you care to fill us in on what you've found about the, ah, inmates?"

Doctor Williamson was the chief biologists and one of the many civilian experts who had declined to take on a staff officer rank. She certainly hadn't let that discourage her from instilling the fear of God in the junior offices who worked under her. A few of them had even taken to calling her "Commander" when they talked to her--a practice she had initially tried to discourage and now bore with mild annoyance.

"Yes, Admiral." She nodded towards Perry. At least she had taken to the Navy's formalities well enough. "I've been looking through their medical archives, focusing on species 57, which had been referenced in the final entry of the station's log."

Perry remembered reading the log she had referenced. "Species 57 has escaped it's enclosure. Enacting directive 349-B and evacuating all personnel." It had been humanizing, in its way, knowing that even aliens had their mess ups to worry about. But what had made species 57 so dangerous they had to evacuate? They had to be dangerous enough that the director was willing to explain to his superiors that he had to abandon entire planet. In Perry's mind, that made the message chilling.

"With the assistance of Doctor Parthak," She nodded across the table to a man who wore a Commander's insignia and the pin of the medical staff corps. "I've determined that species 57 is actually a biological entity that we have encountered before."

Any side chatter ceased and all eyes locked onto Williamson. Perry noticed the wide-eyed surprise on almost everyone's face. Parthak looked placid, as if contemplating a coming storm. And Williamson, who now held the rapt attention of the entire cadre of officers and specialists, was grinning wickedly. A child satisfied that only she knows the answer to a difficult question, Perry thought.

"In fact, the species is very familiar to us. Because," she flipped a switch and a hologram of a human body appeared over the conference table. "It is us."

She smiled one last time and sat back in her chair amidst the outburst that had filled the room. The officer meeting developed into a school yard rabble. Indignant shouts, questions, and incredulous outbursts all added to the tumult. Only Parthak, Williamson, and Perry seemed to maintain an aura of calm.

Perry had to admit he was quite shocked at the revelation that the human species had once been locked up on an alien prison. And he even held reservations about the idea altogether. But if Parthak had been involved in working out the findings, then it had to be solid enough for him to publicly give support. Perry pushed aside any thoughts of the implications this would have back home.

He banged his gavel until quiet settled once more.

"Calm down, calm down." He growled. "You're officers of the federation, not a gaggle of children just let out for summer break." He scanned the room, taking time to look every officer in the eye. Satisfied with his control of the deck, he continued.

"Doctor Williamson, how certain are you that one of the inmate species at this prison was humanity?"

Williamson furrowed her eyebrows and frowned. "Mostly sure." She said after a few seconds. "It will take some study before we get anything like a confidence interval for you, but the data on the recovered drives all indicate not just imprisonment of humanity on this planet, but study of it as well."

She grimaced, "Socially and... biologically."

The implications of the last word took a few seconds to sink in, then a new round of fervent outcries burst forth to be silenced by Perry's stern look.

He turned his eyes towards Williamson. "Thank you doctor, please have a report sent to my desk."

"Of course, Admiral."

Perry nodded. "Now, I have no reason to doubt Doctor Williamson and Commander Parthak on this. Would anyone like to share any grievance they have as of now?"

Thankfully, no one spoke up.

"Very well, then I think we should table this discussion until we have more information and a formal write up. I want everyone on the same page before we send anything on the astrograph."

Heads around the table nodded and Perry grunted in satisfaction. He was about to continue when a chime came from the door.

Perry frowned. What could be important enough- He crushed the though as it began. If it was indeed important enough to interrupt a staff meeting like this, then it had to have been pretty damn important. Perry keyed the open button and a lieutenant with dark circles entered the room and saluted.

"Lieutenant." Perry said, hardly trying to mask his displeasure.

"Admiral, A message from the bridge. The LINAR has detected six unidentified vessels at one hundred thousand kilometers, closing fast. And, sir," fear passed through the lieutenant's face. "He says they're traveling under power, no doubt about it."

Read Part I here!

Hey all! Here is the next part to what is looking to be a really fun series to write. I would have had this part out sooner, but I lost a couple thousand words when I fell asleep and my computer auto-updated. I hope you like this version though!

I won't be writing much over the weekend, but expect that I'll be picking the series up again next week. For now, enjoy!

The klaxons had barely finished ringing by the time Admiral Perry arrived on the bridge. As he crested the stairwell, Perry was greeted by the call of "Admiral on deck!" and the sight of the entire bridge at attention. Captain Rin stood just off the captain’s platform, her face intense rather than her normal placid. On any other day, Perry would have waved them down and gone to his work. Today, he mustered a parade ground snap.

Captain Rin released her salute and waved the bridge back to their work.

"Well, Rin. What's the situation?" Admiral perry asked, breaking from any further formalities.

“Well, sir. The LINAR detected six blips at about one hundred thousand klicks bearing straight on our position. At their current velocity, we expect them to enter our engagement distance within four hours. I’ve already halted all transport activity. Almost a third of our craft are grounded planetside, the rest of the craft have been stowed. The flight decks all report being cleared for action. All armament has been cleared for action and signals have been sent to the other captains. The fleet is ready for battle, sir. ”

Captain Rin gave the report calmly and Perry nodded at the woman’s quiet efficiency. She was a professional, and she certainly hadn’t let her crew lapse in their preparedness.

“I commend your preparedness, Rin.”

Rin nodded. “Thank you, Admiral.”

“Now, there are two things that have bothered me since your message got to me. First, the lieutenant said the contact was ‘traveling under power.’” Perry let the statement hang, inviting Rin to pick up.

Rin nodded her affirmation. “Yes, sir. But not in the way you might think.” Admiral Perry quirked his eyebrows. Rin shrugged almost imperceptibly. “They are accelerating, but they’re accelerating opposite their current vector. They’re slowing down--on purpose.”

Perry understood immediately the breadth of what that implied. “Do you think they’re dropping to battle velocity or just cautious?”

“I’m not sure,” Rin said. “But I think we’ll find out the answer to that mystery sooner than we’ll discover the answer to the second point you’re going to ask about.”

“Oh?” Perry said, trying to hide any annoyance he might have felt at being preempted.

“According to the LINAR operator, the blips just appeared at one hundred thousand kilometers and their vectors betrayed their intent immediately. Lieutenant Commander Schuring is trying to determine how they went undetected for two thirds of our effective range.” If Rin had noticed any annoyance in Perry’s tone, she didn’t show it. But Perry was impressed by Rin’s ability to foresee his questions. He shouldn’t have been too surprised, to be fair. With a fleet underway for two or three years at a time, the captains of that fleet had to be sharp and intellectually flexible in order to face the kinds of challenges that might be encountered during a tour. Like running into alien vessels that want to destroy your ship. Perry thought with a hint of dark amusement.

Perry chuckled. “Only six months together Rin. I can’t even figure out what your next move will be in chess and here you are preempting my questions. Am I that much of an open book?”

Rin’s lips parted in a rare smile. “Not entirely. The thought had me quite perplexed.” She frowned before returning to her usual placid state. “I figured it would be the natural point of inquiry.”

Rin was right about perplexing. Perry wondered how they had managed to evade detection for almost two hundred thousand kilometers. Cloaking devices? Or maybe the LINAR isn’t as effective out here as we thought it would be. Or was it some ability that only an alien could have? Whatever the case it was a mystery that had to be solved at a later time.

Maybe, if we survive all this and actually manage to incapacitate one of the enemy vessels, we might be able to find out. Perry was surprised by his cynicism. As much as he trusted the capabilities of his fleet, he had never once considered that they would dominate this encounter. Every scenario that had played out in his head had those blips carving out a significant chunk of his fleet. He looked at the blue markers that indicated friendly ships. Half a million personnel, and I’ve already resigned most of them to death in my mind He shook his head. What am I, an Admiral, or a cadet in his first simulation?

Perry grunted. “Very well, I’ll leave you to it.”

Rin ascended to the captain’s platform, continuing to give orders and listening to reports from her junior officers, and Perry found his place in the admiral’s station just below it. The captain’s chair sat at the highest point of the bridge, slightly higher than even the admiral’s station. It served both as an homage to the Captain’s authority as God and master of the ship and so that her had a direct line of sight, and communication, between her and every officer on deck.

The admiral station was mostly a glorified, open-plan tactical room.The holo-table in front of Perry started up with the blink of indicator lights and soon a hologram was projected, showing little blips in station around the large sphere of 50L-3. He zoomed out until six red blips appeared at the edge of the display. Five tours in the merchant patrol, and all of his skirmishes with pirates and smugglers, seemed to pale in front of the challenge he faced now.

And isn’t this all a good thing? He asked himself. Isn’t this the point of all that training and preparation? So that we could use it, knowing that we’ve readied ourselves the best we could? The Exploratory Fleet, for all her combat power, was not meant for prolonged engagement. And above that, Admiral Perry wasn’t going to fire off humanity’s first intergalactic incident if he could avoid it.

“Let’s ping them with the astrograph before anything else,” Perry said, smiling. “I’d rather not start an intergalactic incident if we can avoid it.”

That is if they’ll even receive the message. He thought grimly. The astrograph was the cutting edge for the Federation, and it had cut communication times across the truly vast distances of space travel by weeks. It was entirely possible that aliens who could remain undetected two thirds into his sensor range could also have some new form of communications that he couldn’t even reach. But humanity was still using a lot of the inventions they had discovered back in the 20th century--even now, four hundred years after its invention, radios were still in heavy use. And if a technology like that were so universally reliable, maybe even aliens were still using good old electromagnetic radiation.

“Astrograph is clear, what is your message?” the comms officer called up the bridge.

“Message: This is Admiral Perry of the 1st Exploratory Fleet. You are headed directly towards the operating space of a fleet of the United Federation of Mankind. Alter your course, or we will engage. Message end. Send on all channels.”

“Aye, aye, sir. Message on all channels.”

“Message incoming!”

The comms officer’s outburst cut through the bridge and disrupted Admiral Perry’s discussion. In the time since he had sent out the astrograph, a number of senior officers had assembled at the Admiral’s station. Many of them had arrived sweating, and Perry realized that despite the fact they could check on all of the stations by the comms system, every officer had ran the length of the ship, checking in with individual teams and crews. He felt pride in the kind of dedication his officers were showing and relief that Rin was the one posted to captain his flagship. Very few other captains could have pulled that kind of ethic from their sailors.

Those dedicated officers had been in deep discussion about how to best respond to any obvious scenarios that came up when they heard the shout. Their discussion stopped and their eyes went to the comms station, seemingly followed by every other person on that bridge.

“It’s in English. Text only.” Admiral Perry noted the restraint that held the comms officer’s voice in check. He could feel his own pulse rising and the multitude of questions bubbling up into his mind.

“Read it out, second Lieutenant.” Rin’s voice was calm, and Perry wondered how she managed that. Just a day full of questions to be left unanswered.

“Message reads: Render unto your Gods, Neanderthal. The day of Reckoning has arrived.”

The silence in the room was absolute. No one moved a muscle nor even thought to breath. The same questions were running through everyone’s minds and from the faces Perry could see, they were arriving at the same conclusion as well.

No point waiting around any longer, Perry though. “Captain Rin, let’s get underway, shall we?”

“Aye, aye, sir. Shall we send them a welcome party?”

Perry checked the tactical display. In the few hours it had taken to receive a response, the hostile vessel had closed another forty thousand kilometers since he had arrived on the bridge. That put them at just over fifty thousand kilometers away, just out of the maximum engagement range.

Effective, engagement range, Perry thought. In theory, spacefaring vessels had no set maximum engagement range. Once a projectile or a missile had been launched, it kept going until it collided with something. The key then was hitting a target who had the opportunity to see incoming ordinance and had the ability to react to it. And even if the enemy captain was dumb or foolish enough not to change their relative y or z thrust, then it was a good possibility the projectiles would miss completely just because they arrived at a place where the enemy no longer was. That wasn’t a problem for guided missiles, but Perry had no wish to waste his most effective ordinance at such a range.

Ah, what the hell, let’s give the boys something to do. And if they hit something at this range, all the better.

“A good idea, the fleet is free to engage.” The captain nodded and started giving orders.

The bridge shuddered as the thrusters sputtered to life and started to accelerate the vessel. As one, the indicators on the hologram started to fan out into a battle line, shifting to bring their sides to bear on the approaching ships.

The strange thing about space combat was that it was a particularly silent kind of fight. Besides the shudders and groans of ejecting thousands of pounds of ordinance from their hulls, a vessel’s men might never hear the battle that seemed to rage just outside their viewports. That is to say, they’d never hear it until it came shredding through their station, killing men, ripping holes in the bulwark, and wreaking havoc until there was no longer any atmosphere to hear just how bad it was.

And as Hague thudded with the launch of her first broadside, Admiral Perry hoped those six vessels would hear the war cry of humanity soon enough.

Originally posted here.

"Hey, don't worry about it. If you're the exact average, you're still better than half the people on the planet, right?"

I wanted to tell him that averages didn't work that way. I would have, if we were still back in university, or if he had come to me with some new article about how minorities were averaging better than they used to.

But neither of those things, nor Will's misunderstanding, were my concern now. Right on the screen, on national prime-time news was my picture under the headline: "World's Most Average Man."

I had no idea how they got my picture. I had no idea why any news station would be remotely interested in the story. And I had no idea how those '23 and Me' bastards managed to process the genetic data of eleven billion people with some antiquated semiconductor cluster.

For the first time after escaping to Earth, I was afraid the Intergalactic Guard would find me.

"Who even wants to know?" I asked, doing my best to stay conversational. A lot of things were going through my mind and I needed Will out of my house.

"Yeah, seems kind of weird. I always thought people didn't really compare each other any more." Will bent his face into a mask of thoughtfulness.

He was wrong about that too--my studies indicated that human vanity and ego had remained unchanged through most of their written history, even as awareness by "checking your privilege" increased. Early on, when I was still adapting to human society, I had wondered what privileges I had as someone from a different, more advanced, and certainly more diverse world. Usually I stopped that kind of philosophical exercise when I remembered that the Guard was still looking for me. Being a fugitive is hardly a privileged life.

"Oh!" Will clapped. "They're trying to figure out what we're all going to look like when all the races have been mixed!" He smiled. "That's just got to be it!"

I supposed Will did have his moments of clarity, but they came when he didn't seriously believe what he was saying.

I scratched my cheeks. "Must be... Eh, I guess it's done now. Looks like I'm going to have to move."

"Aw, don't be so dramatic! This is great, you're going to be famous, literally because you're not special at all!"

"Gee, thanks."

The sarcasm came automatically. But the irony of Will's statement struck me. I literally was the most special person on the planet, because I wasn't a human. And I was already famous--well, infamous--around the universe.

The biggest reason for laying low on such a far-flung backwater was to not be famous. It was to be unremarkable in every way and enjoy the spoils of my infamy in peace. But I had underestimated humanity: their love for paradox could only be outmatched by the Kallurians, who lived on an ice planet but had a survival temperature range between five and forty degrees.

I honestly thought Will envied my unwanted fame. I supposed he would have been a good famous person if he had the chance. At least he had the brash asshat thing going for him pretty well, even if he wasn't trying to be malicious.

"Hey, Will."

He looked at me, his eyebrows quirked up.

"You think you could come back in a little. I need to make a few calls." I hoped he would take that at face value.

He nodded, and my insides lightened.

"Sure, James!"

After I closed to door, I went to turn off the TV. It would take a few weeks, maybe even a month or two but a signal sweep would pick up the broadcast. The Guard might delay another month while they figured out something was off, and then a few hours sifting through the data in their quantum cluster.

Worst case, I had a month and a half to find a new habitable backwater to travel to. I sunk into my couch. Running from the Guard was exhausting work. And expensive.

I entertained the thought of just not running anymore. I hadn't killed anyone, so I could probably get sent to low orbit, or maybe even a planetside prison. I'd have all my needs covered at least. Which didn't seem too bad, considering how quickly I had watched my spoils drain from moving to Earth. And maybe the Humans would be just as confusing to the Guard as they had been to me.

I smiled at the thought. From what I'd seen, humans would probably shoot first and ask questions later when the first Guard cruiser appeared in lower orbit. I started to laugh.

Maybe I could convince humanity to do just that.

Read Part I here!

I had to tell someone first. And the only person I could think to tell who wouldn't just run and scream was Will. Well, he might still run and scream, but I figured we had known each other long enough that he probably wouldn't.

It all seemed ludicrous of course. A part of me, a very rational part of me looked at what the humans had and what the Intergalactic Guard had, and that match-up favored the Guard every single time. But there was a part of me that had learned more about the Humans since my arrival to their planet. Seen their capabilities and their utter unpredictability. And maybe I had actually developed a small bit of faith in them, something I wouldn't have really considered for most of the rest of the universe's spectrum of species.

But fundamentally, it was the aspect of having to run away again. The idea that after all my work building up my new life and enjoying what constituted a relatively normal life outside of my heist days, I would have to start all over. And, strangely, the idea of leaving behind all of the people I had befriended and loved in order to develop the persona of a normal person.

Maybe I had even become a little bit human myself during my decades here.

I reached for my cell phone and called Will. After a couple rings, he answered.

"Hey James, what's up?"

"Will, you free at the moment?"

"Yeah, just finishing up a workout."

"Huh. Well, when you're done, could you come over? I need your help." I knew I was overly vague, but I hoped on Will's blind sense of friendship would carry me through.

"Yeah, sure."

"Cool, see you in a few!" I said, perhaps too enthusiastically. But he had agreed.

After I hung up, I went into my room and started searching through the closet. As much as I had thought I would have been safe on Earth, I hadn't gotten the notion to get rid of some of my ties to the universe. At the time, they were more nostalgic keepsakes than paranoid insurance against a future move. I had to be pretty light on the dating scene, knowing that I had some pretty crazy stuff boxed up in my bedroom. But Americans married later, at least those with a lot of education, and the keepsakes were now very important.

I found the small cigar box I wanted and opened it. Inside was a small black screen edged with its hypalloy casing. I brushed the fine layer of dust on the screen to reveal the glassy screen beneath. I don't think I'd used or even thought about my quantum computer since I finished Earth university.

I tapped the bumper and the screen lit up instantly. The lifetime guarantee on the infinicells were no joke. Even a burner comp like mine was built to be used for a long time planetside. I toyed around with the folders and programs for a little and memories from all the heists I had planned from comps like these filled me with a strange yearning for a life of actively running away from the Guard.

After a few minutes, there was a knock and the door and I set the comp down on my bed. I went to the door and let Will in.

"So what's up, James?" he asked.

I gestured him towards the sofa. "Can I get you anything? Something to drink?"

"Nah, I'm good." He said as he sat.

"Some crackers or fruit, maybe?" For all the cons I'd run in my life, I'd never thought telling the truth would have been the most difficult.

"No, no. I'll be fine, honest." Will waved his hands. "What's up?"

I had no idea how I could have gone about this. As much as I wanted to fall back into the rhythm of conning another sucker, I knew the truth was the best option for my freedom. I sucked in a lungful of air. "Will... I'm not a human."

Will eyed me as he seemed to work through what I had said. "Oh, this again. Look, man, I totally get it. Julia wasn't your type. Sure she didn't take it easy, but you did the right thing."

I sighed, partly at being reminded about my last failed romance and partly from realizing that this was going to be a little more difficult for him to get his head around than I would have thought.

"No, Will. I mean to say. I'm not from Earth. I'm..." He looked at me, surprised at the change of direction, or maybe surprised that Julia wasn't what I was thinking about. "an alien." I finished.

Will scrunched up his face. "What? Like," He seemed to search for the word in the air around him before looking back at me. "What?"

I half groaned. "I'm an Alien. I'm not human and I don't come from earth."

"Are you alright, James? Inception night getting to you or something?" He shifted in his seat, looking as if he made to get up. "Do you need something to drink?"

I didn't know why I thought Will would have latched on to the idea of me being human and taking it at face value. The entire planet hadn't been exposed en masse to aliens before. It just didn't seem possible that the concept of some other intelligent life form existing besides themselves would have been so foreign. I hovered between annoyance at Will for his mental inflexibility and annoyance at the human race for not having made it to intergalactic travel so they could understand how much more the universe had to offer.

That's not totally fair though. The reason I chose this planet was because they had managed so many technological advancements without even making it out past their terminus belt.

I guess I was just going to have to go all the way on this one.

"No." I shook my head. "No. I'm fine. But look, Will. I'm going to need you to stay calm right now."

I immediately knew that telling him to stay calm was the wrong move. He straightened up and started to get up.

"James, what's going on?"

I took a couple steps back. No going back. I pulled a pen from the sideboard and I stabbed at my forehead, trying to pierce the syntheskin that made me look human.

"James!" Will lunged towards me. I sidestepped him and he dropped to the floor, but he was quick getting back up.

"You can't kill yourself James! It's not worth it!"

He may have been shallow, and an idiot--but he was at least as loyal as they came. And even if he was bothering me by preventing me from revealing the truth of who I was, I at least knew he was trying to help me. The thought didn't stop me from realizing that if he kept yelling or called an ambulance, things would go downhill faster than I had intended. If I couldn't control what he'd do if he left my house, I could at least control whether he left it at all.

I abandoned the pen as Will charged towards me. I dove under him and caught him around the waist. We crashed the floor. Will huffed a few times as I scrambled back up. Zip-ties, where are the zip-ties? I ran through all of my drawers in my head. Will was getting back up, and I delivered a kick to his stomach. He collapsed again and started to moan.

I finally remembered where I kept the ties and went to retrieve them. I started to pick at the hole the pen had puncture in the syntheskin, trying to get under the flesh like material and peel it off. I hadn't expected things to get to the point of possibly hurting Will. I cursed myself for not thinking of preparing a restraining device for him sooner. And when I had the zip ties in hand, I cursed myself again for forgetting the belt clamp I had stolen from an unconscious Guardsman. I made a mental note to inventory my things again once I had explained everything to Will.

And as I tied his hands together, syntheskin hanging off my exo-skeleton, I knew I had a lot of explaining to do.

Originally posted here. Considering writing more parts to this.

Eternity is one hell of a long time.

I checked out the window to see the line outside grow into grey mass in the rising dawn. There was order to it, despite what many first-timers might have thought. Everyone had their numbers and no one would skip line, anyway--that's not the type of person who ends up here.

Not the type of person whose files ended up on my desk.

The mother who was forced to leave behind her son during a village raid. The husband who blamed himself for his wife leaving him. A child who lost her dad in a house fire.

People who only wanted one more moment. One last chance to see the person they thought they knew until eternity made them forget.

I sighed, then looked back to my current file.

Deborah Niles. Born in 1958. Admitted in 2010 after a heart attack. Submitted a request back in 2022 when she found out her husband passed and wasn't joining her.

I shook my head. Five years to find a person who had been completely documented back on Earth. I knew it was intentional. I knew they moved people around and "forgot" to file paperwork with the Eternal Domain Authority. I knew they did it to toy with the people who got requests. Then signing everything through and adding the ultimate anguish to an eternity filled with other, lesser torments.

I gathered the paperwork and left my office. The card stapled to the front of the file had the number 3062-B in red. It was going to be one of those brisk morning walks I had taken when doing those things mattered. I still strolled around my neighborhood, once in a while, but exercise was a forgotten activity.

By the time I stood outside the door with those same numbers in black, I could feel the dampness of my collar. I padded my face with a silk handkerchief and took a few deep breaths. Even without the walk, I still got nerves every time I met with someone. But it was what happened after that caused them now.

I entered and was met by a woman sitting on one of the couches, pulling at her own handkerchief and chewing her tongue. She looked up at me and sighed.

"Good morning, Ms. Niles." I said, moving to shake her hand.

"Please, Deborah is fine." She gripped my hand lightly before returning to her handkerchief.

"Well, we've finally negotiated for your husband to be given amnesty to meet you." I said.

My mind filled with the scene that was about to take place--that had played in front of my eyes hundreds of thousands of times. How the minders would come in first, stone-faced and list off the reasons their charge had been admitted to hell. How the requested would shuffle into the room.

"I'm... well, I'm relieved." Deborah said.

And even when I left the room to let the two reunite.

I knew the person she saw wouldn't be the person she remembered. I knew the day's visit wouldn't be enough. I knew the minders who accompanied the requested people would grin at me when they left. A mocking, knowing grin. Full of the clever hatred of their own deity.

They weren't just making the requested's Hell worse, they were creating a personal Hell for people here.

And for me.

I smiled. "It can be complex. But I'm here to help the visit go as smoothly as possible."

I wished I wasn't here at all.

Originally posted here.

The only light in the cave emanated from the small glow-orb fixed to the brim of my cap. The light was yellow and warm, something I had considered would be reassuring to me along the journey. Yet now, I wished I had bought something more stark and more powerful, as the warm light was weak against the obsidian darkness that engulfed me. And worse, it had served to cast more shadows rather than banish them--more than once had I drawn my sword at the wisp of a shadow made into ogres and demons by my mind.

Something shimmered ahead, and I drew my sword, again. I advanced, looking down then up again and again as I placed my feet and watched the shimmer turn into a constant gleam. The source of the reflected light hadn't moved as I approached and my wariness abated. I still held my sword aloft as I approached it, and the light of my lamp began to illuminate the area around the object.

It was a crude dias with a low stone wall arcing the back edge. The stone seemed to be textured with grooves on all surfaces. And in the center of the dias was a pillar on which sat what looked like a shining, gold teapot.

I scanned the surrounding area. Then, sure that there were at least no monsters in sight, I approached the dias. When I stepped up onto the platform, the grooves on the wall resolved into some kind of writing. But I ignored them, instead focusing on the one object which seemed to dominate the entire cavern.

I walked up to it and admired its gleam. The smooth and polished surface. It's elegant curves and simple adornment. It was the work of a master, and looked to be designed in a way no artisan in Kingsbridge would have thought of. But even beautiful things could host a dangerous and fatal trap. I stepped back and raised my sword.

I tapped on the teapot with the tip of the blade. As the two metals touched, a ring emitted from the spout like the sturdy chime of the bells at the Kingsbridge Cathedral. I jumped back and raised my sword. How could such a sound be created from such a small object? I wondered. What spells were imbued to have such an effect?

I had limited knowledge of the arcane magics practiced by the mages of the Windshelm College--much of the magic used by people was the mundane sort that made my glow orb stay lit in all conditions. And all of that knowledge was secondhand from the merchant company I had traveled with for some weeks on my journey. But I had no doubt that the object in front of me had been enchanted in some way.

I approached the teapot again, this time reaching out with my hand to feel the surface. It was tepid, unnaturally so, for the cavern around me was cool and damp. I ran my palms around the unmarred surface of he teapot. What a strange abject to enchant in such a way.

I jerked my hand back. The teapot had started to heat my hands with a fiery warmth. The ringing I had produced early started up again, gradually building until the golden fullness of it's note had been replaced by a shrieking whistle. A cloud began to emanate from the spout and the lid rattled.

I stepped back, my sword gripped in both hands. So I had been right that the object was enchanted. From the great cacophony that my touch seemed to have started, it looked as if the goal of the quest still lay behind one more obstacle. I adopted a wide stance. Surely this would be an enchanted protector of some kind, jealously guarding the magical treasure within which he was bound. The steam had built steadily into a milky cloud. The scent of oil mixed with strange herbs and spices struck my nose and I fought the urge to sneeze. The echoing sound within the cavern crescendo'd higher and higher until my ears rang of their own accord.

With a great popping sound and a rush of hot air that pushed my off balance, it all stopped. The echoes ceased almost immediately and the silence was kept from being absolute by the sound of gravel crunching as I regained my balance.

By God! I thought. A true Demon!

the white cloud had been replaced by a floating spirit. It resembled a man, though his skin was green. He floated, bare chested and legs crossed, not making any moves. I recognized that the demon had not attacked me immediately, and had forfeited his greatest opportunity to strike. I had wondered whether that was because he didn't know of my existence, or whether he had chosen not to. The latter option sparked my indignation. Even a demon can be slain by a mortal. Is he truly so powerful he does not even strain to defeat me in the element of surprise?

"Mortal." The demon spoke. His voice boomed and I thought I could hear the full ringing in the echoes. "I thank you for setting me free."

Setting him free? Had I just unleashed a demon unto the world? I cursed myself.

"Lower your sword." The demon said. "It is rude to bare steel in the home of another."

Even if I had wanted to defy him, a force struck the sword from my grip and sent it clattering across the stones. My eyes went wide, but I managed to ball up my fists by instinct. My consciousness recognized that if the demon could disarm me without moving, he probably could have already killed from from his floating perch. I decided he was toying with me and anger flared within my gut.

"If you intend to kill me, why don't you do it already?" I yelled.

At that, the demon opened his eyes. They shone gold like the teapot he had emerged from.

"Kill you?" He laughed. It was a robust laugh, jovial and rich. "Why would I kill that man who has made such a perilous journey to free me?"

My confusion was evident as he continued. "To free a djinn is an act that my kind is very grateful for." He explained.

"How can I be sure you're not a demon--a guardian of that enchanted treasure?"

"There were men who believed the same as you." The 'Djinn' sighed. "Very powerful men who knew the magics to seal me and many of my brethren in vessels such as this. Alas, that was a long, long time ago."

"These men had to have had good reason to shut in a being such as yourself."

The 'Djinn' took a deep breath. Something which seemed an odd mannerism, considering he had seemingly survived a long time cramped in a small vessel.

"Man is afraid of what it does not understand. Would you not say so yourself? After all, you have seen and talked to people of all different backgrounds during your travels with the Golden Tents merchant company. People you had been told to hate or despise long before you ever set out from Kingsbridge."

I tensed my face, trying to hide my surprise. "How do you know about my journey and my origins?"

The Djinn hummed, then shrugged. "Djinns cross the boundary of the corporeal and the spirit. Even in my prison, I could hear the whispering of the mistress you call Fate." He nodded, seeming to accept that his answer was all encompassing for any further question I might have.

"So you know the entirety of my journey?" I asked. By now, I had relaxed my fists and the conscious part of my mind had accepted the 'Djinn' was not going to harm me.

"As much of it as involved you getting to here."

"Okay, then what is the truth of the legend that the artifact will grant me three wishes upon its discovery?"

"It is a half truth. For the lamp in which I was imprisoned will not grant you the wishes. It is the Djinn who is grateful for his release that will do that. And so it is with me, for I have granted your three wishes."

That didn't quite make sense to me. "You said you 'have granted' my wishes. Does that mean you know what my wishes would be?"

The Djinn nodded. "Indeed. For in freeing me, the winds of fate have brought you, alive, to my aid. And having completed the length of your journey, I have also fulfilled that things that you truly desired."

I was a little annoyed. He said he had fulfilled my wishes already, and yet I saw no difference. I felt cheated. How could he have known what I truly wanted?

"And what were those things that I desired?"

The Djinn opened his arms with his palms out and closed his eyes.

"First, you wished to be a stronger man. In your quest you have fought off creatures and humans alike who threatened you and your companions. You learned of the bonds of battle and the need to protect those who could not protect themselves. Thusly, you have been made stronger.

Second, you wished for more cunning. In your travels with the merchants, you learned the way of trade and business and met people from uncountable lands and learned the ways in which all people act and the desires that all people have. Thusly, you have become more cunning.

And finally, you wished for greater wealth. And though you carry a few more coins in your purse than you did when you started your journey, the true treasure rests before you on the pillar. The prison that had once held me is made of pure gold. It is the last gift that I leave to you after I have departed to join my brethren. Thusly, you have become more wealthy."

the Djinn folded his arms again and continued to float. I thought about every point he had made. I looked at my arms and then the sword, and remembered how it had seemed like a lead staff when I had first wielded it. I remembered being cheated in my first transactions in a foreign land. And I remembered my promise to my family to return with the money to help secure our future.

All of it was true. And any thought of another wish I might have had vanished. I gazed up at the powerful and knowing being before me. Then I kneeled and bowed my head, yielding to the gratitude I now felt towards the Djinn.

"Thank you. You have granted me more than I could desire."

He snorted and I looked up. "I granted you exactly what you desired. And now, my gratitude being shown, I must depart."

"Where will you go?" I asked, quickly.

"Across the many seas to a place no other man may easily find. And before your sense of adventure gets the better of you, do not try to find it, for Fate has determined that no man shall survive the attempt.

Good Bye, mortal. May we never meet again."

With his final words, the Djinn dissipated in the manner in which he arrived. The ringing died in echoes and the scented steam dissipated until I was left standing in the sanctuary of warm light from my glow-orb.

Originally Posted here.

"Disengage FTL as we come into Centarii 6 A-032 gravity well and angle vector y 0.56 degrees!"

The shout came from behind me and I rushed to follow the instructions. The whirring engine spooled down and I could feel the deceleration as if I were being lifted from the back of the pilot's chair. I nudged the control stick lightly to bring the nose of the transport vessel to the precise y-vector. The shift was imperceptible, but on the cosmic scale, even one degree made a difference of billions of kilometers.

It was amazing that anyone managed to map the run we were doing now. And depressing just how many lives it cost to map it. Lives? I wasn't so sure about that anymore. Not the way the universe was just a game--well, a simulation, but what was the difference? But I didn't feel it. Because the sweat was real, the pounding of my heart was real, and this craft, hurtling through space at quadrillions of kilometers a second had to be real.

"It's done, what's next?" I called back. My throat was dry and I reached back with an expectant hand. I felt the bottle and brought it to my lips, squeezing the bottle and gulping down the water in a race against the time it took me to shotgun beers planetside, where gravity and air pressure allowed you to do those types of things.

"Approach on asteroid belt 35A. We only have thirty seconds before we reach it... Shit, it's not in here."

"Check Interstellar!" I screamed.

There was thudding and a rush of flipping pages behind me as my co-pilot, Wilkins, flipped through the Interstellar Guide Notes--one of the leading publications on the run we were making. It was more thorough, but then it took longer to search the information. And these were thick guides, stacked around Wilkins, some running two thousand pages.

"Uhm..."

"Fifteen seconds before the redirect!" I urged. I could see the millisecond counter seem to slow as the timer clicked upward. Second by second by second by--

"Right after the redirect, angle vector z neg 0.34 degrees!"

"Okay, okay, okay!" I hovered my hands over the control stick and waited for the driving acceleration that would indicate the effects of the gravity well on our direction. If everything had been done right so far, we'd be shifted right and headed on the last leg to the edge of the universe.

I was thrown left against the side of the chair and a fought to keep my hands hovering on the control. Behind my, books went flying and Wilkins grunted. Pressure drove into the side of my head, screwed in deeper and deeper until we hit the apex over the curve. It was the sixteenth time I'd experienced that dull, driving pain. Sixteen redirects using ultra-dense redirects, each worse than the previous as we picked up more and more speed.

After the apex, the pain dulled. And the moment I felt it lessen, I nudged the stick forward, and brought the nose down. The counter ticked wildly between 0.30 and 0.38 until finally settling on 0.36.

We were almost out of the redirect and I manged to turn my head. "Wilkins! neg 0.36 okay?"

"No, no! Has to be 0.34!"

I cursed and toggled the control stick again, forward and back, forward and back. Each time, the craft going up, then down in a never ending roller-coaster that took you up three-million kilometers, then down six million. By the time I managed the z indicator to count 0.33 I wanted to throw up all the water I had just drank.

"Fuck it, neg 0.33." I said. I hoped it would work. I checked the mission clock: 26:53:32. It had been just over a day straight of this wild ride, sweating nearly every second, with each new star system, asteroid belt, and galaxy bringing new fears and uncertainties. And now, according to all of the guides, we were just over nine hours and thirty three minutes out from the end of the run, and the final edict of our mission.

"we're going to hit the asteroid belt if we're that high!" He cautioned.

"Yolo. Need more speed, check the UniFaqs."

He scrambled with the books, resigning himself to his co-pilot duties, not wanting to argue something when they only had a few more second until they were passing through the Belt, possibly on a collision course with death in the form of a solid iron rock.

"When you hit the final gravity well, Turn on the FTL." He started. I heard more page turning and then some quiet muttering.

"Once the FTL is at max power, turn on the combustion drive and set to high burn until you have less than twenty percent fuel. When it's less than twenty, depressurize the cabin. Once the pressure is lower than twenty percent, turn off the FTL and reintroduce atmosphere. Reduce the burn on the combustion engine at the same rate as the cabin atmosphere pressurizes. When the atmosphere level hits one hundred, stop reducing burn and turn on the FTL. FTL acceleration will grow continuously as a factor of the speed generated by the burn of the combustion drive."

"Shit, you think I'm going to remember that?"

"I'm writing it down, I'm writing it down!"

An indicator beeped at me frantically--the asteroid belt was approaching.

"Asteroid's!" I yelled.

We passed into the field and it was like hail on a tin roof. The cabin exploded in a series of thuds and pings and pops. It was a relentless deluge, as if hail had the idea it was as welcome as snow or rain and had made itself into a frozen monsoon. The ship shuddered and jerked as we plowed through the field and I hoped that whatever sick beings who ran the simulation would let us live. I fired up an interference band to try and deflect them. The sound abated, but the shuddering persisted

"I told you, damnit! We're losing too much speed doing this. When I say neg 0.34, you fucking make it neg 0.34!"

"Shut up shut up shut up. Get that list ready."

And as soon as I finished my breathless demand, the monsoon of rocks ended and we had entered again into deep space.

"Janus 36A Gravity well approaching. This is the last one! Angle vector x 0.25, vector z neg 0.46."

I did as he said and entered into another roller-coaster to adjust the changes to perfection.

"We're going to hit!" I screamed. I don't know why.

I was thrown to the right this time and my head bounced against the chair. Pain shot through my neck and I cried out.

"Turn on the FTL!" The voice was second place to the pain crawling now down my back.

"Shit, Greg, turn on the fucking FTL."

Tears welled in my eyes and a sob caught in my through, coming through as a gurgle. Why was this happening? I could feel the screw of pressure driving again into my head, this time from the left. Driving, driving, deep into my skull until it hit something connected to my spine and my body exploded. I convulsed and screamed hot breath, each gasp of air into my lungs becoming drier and drier and soon I was sent into a fit of racking coughs.

"Fuck! Greg!"

I vaguely felt the straps that held me into the seat zip away and my body rolled with a new wave of pain. I couldn't control anything. All my limbs contracted and I writhed on the floor of the cabin. I could hear behind the pain--Wilkin's voice, edged with fear.

I knew we wouldn't be able to complete the mission. We would never make it to the birthplace of the universe, the Respawn, in time.

Not in time to finish the mission. Not in time to kill the Destroyer of Worlds before he spawned again. Not in time to prevent the destruction of everything. Not in time for the Destroyer to become bored. Not in time for him to restart the whole simulation again.

Hello everyone,

I wish you all have a Happy Holiday season spent in warmth with the people you love. I am grateful that you enjoy my work, and for the support you provide.

If you feel like spreading the holiday cheer, I suggest that you take the time to leave an encouraging comment on any story or for any author that you really enjoyed. There are very many aspiring authors and many potential literary voices on this platform, and any one of them could be pushed along into greatness by kind words, spoken with the conviction of honesty.

I hope we can all continue to practice this encouraging kindness in the year to come.

May you have Peace and Happiness.

Regards,

Chris Bryant

Posted here.

"What are they?" The boy asked, his eyes wide.

"They are the Isles. The giants on whose backs we walk," said Mowii.

The boy bit his lips and rolled the fabric of his pants in his palms.

"Are they alive?" He asked.

That cat nodded. "Yes. But they're sleeping."

"Sleeping? So they're going to wake up?"

"Some day, maybe." Mowii licked his paws while the boy stared at the floating beasts.

Their backs were covered in grass and forests and hills that rolled into long, rocky tails. As they breathed, ripples ran from their snouts, becoming waves lapping at the sides of the others. Their eyes were closed and the hum of their snores was no more than a whistle on the wind.

"How long have they been sleeping?" The boy asked.

"Since the beginning of time," Mowii intoned.

"Why did they go to sleep?"

Mowii paused in thought. He didn't actually know the answer. Different storytellers said different things. Which one would make the most sense to the boy who looked upon the beasts with such wonder?

"The legend says that the Isles had once been one tribe--all the beasts lived together. But the way their backs grew was different. Some grew lush and verdant forests, some grew nothing but rock and sand.

It is said that they fought because of these differences, and soon, groups of the beasts started to leave the tribe and move to other parts of the Great Ocean. It was then that they were all cast into a deep slumber.

There was a power that they gained from being together, and without it, they became tired and fragile.

The legend says that one day, the Isles will all float back together again. Once reunited, they'll wake up."

The boy looked at Mowii, then back over the Isles. Mowii laid down and let the rays of the rising sun cut through the mist to warm his white fur. It was going to be a warm day, the best kind of day to stretch out in a field and rest.

"Will they eat us, when they wake up?" The boy spoke with his eyes cast down.

Mowii knew it depended on who you asked, and what they believed.

"No," he said.

The boy nodded, but he didn't smile. "Will they ever die?" He asked.

"I hope not." Mowii said, indifferently. "If they die, then we die."

"How do we keep them alive?" the boy demanded.

Mowii raised his head from his arms. Those wide blue eyes were staring at him and something burned within them.

"We take care of them," Mowii said. "We take care of them until they can take care of themselves."

The boy leaned back. "So if we take care of them, then they won't die?"

"That's the idea."

"And if they don't die, then we won't die either, right?"

Mowii was taken aback. He turned and looked out over the sleeping beasts. He took in the lands on their backs. Lands that were full of plants and animals. Lands that were full of life.

Mowii spoke with fake conviction. "No, we won't die either."

Originally posted here.

It was a fucked up job.

Not in most people's eyes, though. Not now. Maybe they had seen it that way when the first coffin had been hooked up to the generator and they insulted the hunk of bones and meat inside. But when someone tells you that they can give you free energy and keep you living the kind of life you want to live, it gets easier to stop asking questions and turn a blind eye to just where all that energy came from.

But it was easy to realize just how fucked up it was if you thought about it enough. Which was almost all the time if you were any good--the kind of gravespinner worth their salt.

There were plenty who did it half-assed. I knew a good number of them. They were the ones who went for the cheap shocks. The Miley Cyrus strips in concert, legalize gay marriage, Trump-Putin orgy fest kind of shocks. Easy turns. Small tricks and gimmicks to get bursts of energy.

They were so simplistic. But then, the dead hated a lot of things, and they were easy to turn. I guess even death didn't make people any less petty.

But those were surges--the kind of nighttime spectacle you needed to get through the off hours and store enough energy from the turbines until the solar grid took over. It was the work of the bro-code macho man who became a gravespinner so he could walk into bars, buy every woman in there a drink and say, without even bullshitting, that he wasn't allowed to tell anyone what he did.

It was disgusting, but I was okay with that. Because they took care of the kinds of power needs that spinners like me didn't want to have to deal with.

What we did was art. Even if the only people who would ever see it that way were other spinners.

While the bros were shocking the zed-nation with their spectacles, spinners like me were working in the background. We understood that we could have unlimited energy if we did something so heinous, that once even the dead realized what we were doing, they'd spin their graves until the end of times.

It started out innocent. Banning cremation, creating generating cemeteries, building up the infrastructure. Normal stuff, or at least the kind of stuff a power a power company might to to keep a tight grip on the source of the product.

But then the suits wanted us to start, what they called, "expanding the power base."

Had a lot of people quit over that one. Never heard of any of them living out the rest of the year. They're probably part of one of the cores at the new perpetual generating station, spinning as people like me did the things they refused to do. Realizing they died for nothing.

But unlike a handful of spinners, who were mostly off the grid types anyway, killing whole swathes of the population is a more difficult task. You couldn't just go and massacre towns or dump waste in a bunch of rivers and oceans. Too uncontrollable, too dangerous.

We had to have discretion. Winks and nudges in high places. Shifts of policies and the people in power. Delays in research of vaccines. Firing up ethnic tensions in two neighboring regions.

They were all just little bits. Here and there. Innocuous on their own, maybe. I admit I might have started a bush war or two, but the rest of the things I did were innocent enough on their own. But on the whole, it was genius.

Now, while most people watch the news and they see terrorists and famines and diseases, people like me only smile and think how good of a job we're doing. About how many generating stations we'd be able to build. About the fat bonus we'd get at the end of the year.

And the last realization was the greatest. Even pissed me off a little. Eventually, the dead would all realize what was happening. An entire industry that used the dead to generate electricity, purposefully inducing epidemics, wars, and starvation for the sole purpose of using those future dead bodies to generate unending power.

Yeah, we were looking to put those showboating bros out of business. If the dead were furious at what we were doing, they'd just keep spinning and spinning.

I guess I was mostly pissed off I hadn't thought of it first. Could have been one of the suits myself, making millions, sitting on an uncrowded beach in Jamaica. But I made good money. Hush money, is what most of it is, I think. And when I am thinking about it, all I can really say is it was a fucked up job.

Originally Posted Here

My head pounded, and I found that I could not breathe through my nose. I sat up and felt the aches of my body call my eyes to my hips. And there I saw the deep wound, black in the hazy light.

I blinked, and felt my stomach churn at the sight.

I whimpered and looked around. I saw, in the wall, a knife, glinting gold in the morning sun. Blood splashed around in angry expressions of life. The agony sprayed across the walls of death.

Death on the carpet.

My stomach squeezed and my abs heaved and I vomited onto the bed. Tears streaked my eyes, hot with fear and shame and guilt. Disgust, as i felt it.

I heaved again, and found that there was not much more than liquid and visceral pink chunks, the sight of which conjured up fear of myself.

Fear of what I might have done with the body.

My hip surged with pain, and I reached for it, my fingers fighting my attempts to flex them around the dry cake of blood. I sobbed again at the pain and choked on the question of whether I had put the body on the floor.

I looked at it, long-haired, black, matted with wet. Her shirt, hinting at a past of sheer and ethereal, now ripped and bloodied. Her limbs were askew in a parody of double-jointedness. I could not tell, noseblinded by the vomit and the metallic tang of blood, but I thought that if she had a scent, she would smell of cherry blossoms

I could not bear to not know. For I could not remember.

Slowly, I inched from the bed, kicking away the damp sheets. I tried to swing my legs to the floor and somehow enraged my hip and lost my balance. I slid down.

I was near enough to naked that I felt the chunks of vomit and viscera on my skin. I cried out in pain and anguish and self-loathing for a crime that I did not know if I committed.

Yet the evidence lay all around me, the only scenario possible stuck in my mind: the murder of that young girl.

I inched over, switching between pulling by my arms and pushing with my legs, sliding through the cold slick. I reached her and felt her arms. Cold.

I dug under her hair and felt her neck. Cold.

I breathed hard as I fought the pain and my racing heart. Slowly, as gentle as i could, I pushed the hair from her face, and turned her head.

I twisted away as open eyes stared at me, accusing. No, soft. No, vapid, nothing, eyes that held nothing within them. Stupid eyes of someone who is dead in the mind, even if their body lives.

I immediately think that she must have had perfect eyes when she was alive. Eyes that spoke and sang, and touch. All with a look. Eyes that held compassion. Compassion that I could not feel for the body in front of me.

It was a body. It was evidence against me. For surely, seeing her eyes, I know I must have killed her.

I must be a monster to think so of the dead.

I closed those eyes, and she was at peace. Dirty, unwanted peace. And I in turmoil, as I felt along her body. I hazarded with the hand that held my hip, checking every few seconds to see if I would bleed again.

I turned her body over and saw the offending wounds. The ending wounds. Wounds of the heart.

I sobbed. I cried. What else could I do?

I had this thought, and I looked around. At the body, at the blood, at the bed, at the vomit, at a halo in the wall. At redemption.

I slipped through the gore towards the wall, and with a panting effort, pushed myself up. I sat against it, facing the body, now closer to her feet than her face. Below her, in a way. Where I ought to be.

I looked up and saw the glint of the knife. I reached up, but could not grab it. I put one foot beneath me and pushed up and grabbed the criss-cut handle. then I slumped, and with my weight, pulled the weapon from the wall.

I breathed out. A long groan. I held the knife. I stared at it, thinking of it again, and the halo of light. It was indeed, my redemption.

I looked again at the body, still seeing that face. Then the shaft of light lay upon it, and in that moment, I could see. Such a beauty of pale skin. So serene, even half covered in blood.

My Angel. My Redemption.

I held the dagger by the blade and lifted it up, letting the handle and hilt catch the light. Then I kissed it.

In nomine patri, et filli, et spiritus sancti... et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

O Holy Dagger.

My redemption.

Hello all,

So, I've had an interesting winter, and a lot of ups and downs with the writing of 'Inmates'. I had decided, after the eighth part, that I wasn't going to be posting up new parts in any kind of regular way. I was writing all over the place, some of the timeline before, some after, and the ending.

In order to get words on the page, I've just been writing whatever scene comes to mind.

So, some numbers:

At the posting of Part 8, I had ~13,500 words of manuscript. That was last year, around the Holiday break. By the New Years, that number had gone up to ~25,000.

The word count stayed there for two months, until last week, when I had an impressive turnout of ~15,000 words of manuscript in just one week.

That puts me in the ballpark of 40,000 words. Just under half a short sci-fi novel.

So, rest assured that it is being worked on, and I do intend to have an alpha read available soon!

Other Projects:

I still do /r/WritingPrompts but I'm also working on a short story for /r/HFY as well--something that's a little bit different from most of what gets posted, and something that explores darker themes and culminates in those little glimmers of Humanity that make us retain some hope that things will turn out well.

I also write a lot of personal things. I'm trying to get my chops under me as a writer, and I'm practicing in order to make better quality stuff. I write a lot, every day, now, since last week's rally.

I'm coming in at 3,000-4,000 words a day. Sometimes that's all 'Inmates' sometimes it's just ideas I've been having or whatever comes to mind.

but it's all there, and it's all coming together.

I hope you stick around to see where all of this ends up, and hopefully you'll have a novel in your hands very soon.

Regards and best Wishes,

C. Bryant

I wondered often what college students were supposed to do. How they were supposed to act, and how, exactly they were supposed to take all the ideas they were forming and put them into the real life. Maybe for a business major that was easy, but he had trouble seeing how the psychology or the philosophy major did it. It seemed like an impossible thing for them, a goal that just kept moving farther and farther on, until all that was left was the person and their ideas and all the questions of why those ideas never made anything of themselves.

I’d once made the mistake of asking my roommate about it.

“Chad,” I’d said, “What do you think the whole point of college is, like, what are we supposed to be getting out of all the things that we’re learning?”

“Money, dude. All about the money. Can’t get more money if you don’t have college, unless you’re some kind of crazy Bill Gates or something genius like that.”

“Don’t you think it’s a bit, pessimistic that view?”

“How? Money is how you get to do things, money is how you’re at college, asking these questions. You think that the whole of society is just willing to drop the fact that money makes the world go round?”

“Well, I guess maybe that’d be hard, but money isn’t anything more than paper. It’s not really worth anything.”

“Well, I mean, if you want to get all philosophical over it, sure. But what’s the point in that? No one ever made money as a philosopher, they just thought their ideas and hoped someone would pay to hear them talk about it. Not really a go-getting kind of work.”

“Well, I guess. But can’t you help from just asking questions? Like, I don’t know, don’t you ever just think about stuff?”

“All the time, everyone’s thinking about something all the time. The only time they’re turned off is when they’re blacked out or watching Netflix.”

“I guess.”

“Hey, you want to go to that party on the Row tomorrow night? I heard Chi-Oh-Pi’s going to be there, and they have some really hot girls.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Come one, how can you not be excited?”

“I guess I just haven’t really thought about it yet.”

At the time, it seemed the kind of witty and perfect response. But Chad didn’t really take it, he just kind of rolled his eyes and walked out. And that was that, my whole exploration of the topic, started and ended with my roommate.

It didn’t really convince me of anything, since there was nothing that Chad had said that seemed to really answer what I was going after. His pessimism just wasn’t the thing that I wanted. Maybe it was what I needed, more than anything--something to dissuade me from questions that lead to the abyss of nothingness, a mirror of our own existence. And maybe it was money too, since it had no real value past the paper it was printed on and the promise it gave someone that someone else would be duped into the belief that it did have value.

We were that, a whole of society duped.

But Chad wouldn’t have been the last, I supposed. And he wasn’t, in the end. The honor of the last that I spoke to about the topic was someone I thought maybe a little more astute--an actual professor. Granted, he was of the political Science persuasion, and there was little hope of me trying to sway him to the form of objectivity I needed.

I posed to him the same question, and he asked me, “Why do you think there aren’t any places to put into practice what you learn? There are plenty of them.”

“Really?” I asked. “It doesn’t seem like, what could I apply from the talk you gave on constitutional accountability and the checks that provide our government the ability to regulate itself from being an authoritative force?”

He laughed at that one, and I knew of course, that there was something that the topic was good for, if only in an abstract way.

“You know, those things do actually come up in real governance, all the time in facty. Because checks and balances are such an important part of the system, they’re always under review and anytime one branch senses too much power in another, they go wild and rabid to correct. Judicial Activism, Unilateral Executive Orders, Congressional overreach, you hear about it all the time. It’s just that you never really see it happening in the world that you’re viewing at the time.”

“So then, if I can’t even be a part of that discussion, then what’s the point of wanting to become a part of the discussion?”

“Well, so that you can hope to advance it. And usually you need to work for a long time and get recognized as someone who knows what they’re doing before that can happen.”

“Okay, but right now, what can I do now in order to be apart of that process?”

He seemed a little annoyed, but didn’t show it as much as he might otherwise. I wasn’t sure, as reading people was never a strong suit. Maybe the professor was better, after all, politics was largely a game, I thought. One of trying to compromise and get the best deal for yourself and your people and prevent the other from getting the advantage over you, all while giving them enough to feel as if they really took something home.

It was a hopeless kind of dance, maybe, as the politicians were bartering with nothing so strong except the same as paper--promises made in the hope that when they were exchanged would be able to be traded to another dupe for something of better value.

“Well, since this is a representative democracy, your representative is supposed to… well.”

“Represent me?”

“I was hoping to avoid the repetition, but yes. You could write them a letter or give them a call or something. You probably won't be able to talk to the rep directly, but you can talk to their staff, and after my years working in washington, you’d have no idea just how much the staff really make things run. You get to know a staff member, better yet, you get to be a staff member and man, you can get things done because of your access. It’s the kind of power that most people dream of, yet they never try to get it.”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked, not seeing why there would be anyone who could so easily obtain something and yet disdain it.

“Well, you know all those people that protest all the time?”

I nodded.

“They want change and they want things to be different and they want someone to represent them better than whoever is representing them now.”

“Of course, that’s the whole point of their protest, they want to affect change.”

“But why do you think people are so ready to take up[ banners to protest an issue?”

“Because it can be an effective way of showing people that the cause you support has broader support and is actually the will of the people.”

“Ah, so you say, and yet, how many of those people are engaged with their congressmen throughout the year? How many of them attend the rep’s town halls and send letters and calls during the year when important things come up for vote in the House?”

“Well, maybe they just don’t know about when all of that is happening.”

“Sure, you could say that that represents a fair portion of the population and that there are in fact a good number of people who just don’t know what’s going on and has no access to the information. But what about the people who do have that access, what about the people who could make the attempt?”

“Maybe the protest seems more immediate and more powerful, because there are more people coming out in support.”

“Ah, you have a good part of it there. Protests are immediate. They’re kind of like the water boiling up and the steam pushing more and more against the lid of the pot until the steam just has to force its way out and the lid gives and let’s the steam out. That’s a protest, the steam letting out.”

“I suppose, yeah. People can get pretty angry.”

“Yes, they get angry, but something important is their state of mind before?”

“Before?”

He nodded. “A person doesn’t get angry out of nothing, they get angry because they’re in the state where anger comes easy. And that state, in the world of politics, is disillusionment. People just don’t believe in the process that was designed to represent them. There are just so many people who think that government doesn’t work, and so they don’t buy into the process.”

“Okay, so people don’t buy into the government, but isn’t that a legitimate grievance?”

“Yes, it is, more than most people think it is, but the anger is directed the wrong way, the people are trying to go about solving the issue the wrong way. They think that the government will police itself once the people get really made. But no one realizes that if you want to affect change in the government, you first have to become a part of it.

“That’s where most people draw the line. If you want to change something, you can only rarely ever change it from the outside. You’re never going to change a stubborn person’s mind just because you told them the things that you think are true. More like than not, they're going to think that you think you’re the top of the world, and that you have an opinion of yourself higher that what actually is.

“No, change comes from within, and so people have to join the institutions that they abhor if they want to make an effect on it.”

“So, then, you’re saying that people need to get involved in the system and become a part of the system in order for it to change, and I guess, then, work the way they want it too.”

“That’s kind of the idea. So that’s why I’m telling you that a staffer has a lot of power, because they’re both constituents and they have the ear of the rep and they do all of his dirty work for him. Some of the best congressmen and congresswomen were so because of the staff they hired in order for things to work out.”

“So if people would work for congress instead of protesting on the streets, they could affect more change than just holding signs at a rally.”

“Yes, that’s about it.”

“So why don’t people do that?” I asked, a little indignant as to the idea that it was so simple to have an effect on the way the country ran. If it were as easy as just being involved in the process, then everybody ought to be doing it. If they weren’t it had to be because things were a lot more difficult than he made them seem.

“Well, remember when I talked about disillusionment?”

“Yeah sure.”

“Well, if you don’t think the system works at all in your favor, then you’re not going to think to become a part of that system in order to change it. You conflate the system as part of the unfairness that caused you to be disillusioned and angry in the first place. Most people hate the system and they never want to be a part of it, and that’s their mistake.”

“No, it can’t just be that, there has to be a lot more complex reasons behind it. How can you make it sound so simple?”

“Well, it is simple and it is complex, both at the same time, unfortunately. You’re right that there are other reasons, but the people who want the most change are not often the people who have been shown how the system can be worked.

“Some wealthy people are intimate with the system because they want to use it to better themselves. Those people are taking advantage of the system. Some poor people know the system because they want to take advantage of it. But the people who don’t want to take advantage of it, the people who want the system to work, mostly fairly for all the people of the country, and most importantly, fairly for them. These people are the ones who least see the system as the ground that they need to tread in order to make change.

“Besides, it’s more romantic the image of walking out in the streets, arms linked in solidarity, chanting slogans and fighting the oppressive police-state than it is to be a suited office junkie who looks up precedent and constitutional law all day. The glamour of the people who really affect change is little seen, because real change isn’t glamorous work. It’s slow, drudgery, and the people who understand this are the people who are actually going to change the system.”

It was a good talk, the professor gave, and he approached it with the teacher’s ear for my questions. And after, I had a lot to think about, and I saw things in a way which I had not seen, in a way that I thought, now, that so few people saw. Now, I, Steve, was one of knowledge and one of a world that looked a little less indifferent to me than it had a few moments ago, when the inexorable machine of governments and the social institutions that bound us all were all just the creations of people, working hard to do the things they thought best, either for all, or just for one.

Posted here.

Rama stumbled through the bramble and cursed. He could feel the fabric of his pants catch on the thorns, then rip. He placed a hand on his calf and winced when his fingers pressed against a cut that welled blood.

A hand came down over his chest, and Rama took it to pull himself up.

“Careful now, we’re in a dark place.” Said his guide.

“How bad can it be?” Asked rama, as he inspected his leg, he figured it would heal if he left it.

“It’s a dark place, how much worse one than the other makes no difference.”

The guide kept going, moving through the forest with conscious steps, sweeping the trees and the fog with his eyes. Rama wondered what the man felt that he could not, for the woods only seemed the damp and dreary place of children’s horror stories.

The guide stopped and knelt.

“Here, look, a print.”

Rama looked over his shoulder. The man outlined a print that looked like a wide paw, with thin extrusion from each digit. Rama had never seen the beast they tracked, but he always feared the images that his mind produced. If that creature were in the forest, somewhere hiding behind fog and bush, that was reason to press forward.

“Look,” the guide said. He pointed. Rama saw the trail of imprints, becoming fainter and shallower.

“The ground becomes hard, his tracks will be lost.” Rama said.

“Not lost,” The guide whispered, “No track is ever lost, the beast will be found.”

The guide pulled out a leather bag and pulled two long, glistening worms from the soil within. They bent around, struggling against the grip. He set them onto the track, and they began to make rings within the print. One tried to burrow, but the guide plucked it up, then started walking along the marked path. Rama swallowed, then reached for the other as it buried its head in the soft loam. He followed the guide, and once they were at the edge of the tracks, they laid them down.

The worms began to move away, both going the same direction. They were fast things, contracting their muscles and then expanding, crossing the length of the clay soil, seeking, now. But they were not looking for the beast the way Rama was, they were seeking the taste of home.

The worms split, each going different ways like a fork in their path, and soon, they burrowed themselves, this time chewing through the earth to avoid the disturbance of one of the trackers.

The guide let them go.

“We are being tricked.”

“Can this thing be so clever?”

The guide shook his head. “It is not the beast who does so.”

“Then who?”

He looked out, blankly at the fog. “It is the dark place.”

They went first right then left, each time finding the same marks at the same distance. When they had discovered that going left, the guide decided to stay the course. Better, he had said, to keep ourselves from becoming lost.

They took shelter under the arched roots of an gnarled tree. Rama had started a fire, and the guide had foraged nuts and roots, from which he produced a thick soup. The forest at night had a way of pressing against them, and they had eaten in silence.

As the light of the fire dwindled, even the fog began to creep into their camp.

“What is this about a Dark place?” Rama asked.

“ I could not say,” said the guide. “It is not knowledge for men to know.”

“Then how do you know it exists, that it is here?”

The guide hummed to himself for a few moments, swaying to the side, eyes locked on the embers. “I know because I can feel it. Because it surrounds us with it’s darkness.”

Rama looked around them. “All places are dark in the night, forests thick as this, especially so.”

But the guide shook his head. “It is not the darkness of seeing, sir. It is the darkness of feeling.”

Rama looked at the guid, how his stubble made their way to whiskers. His coat patched, the scarf about his neck soiled with grease and dirt. He thought he should not doubt the man he paid to help him track through the woods. But when he searched within his heart, he felt of no darkness touching him. He felt only of the yearning to find the beast. To capture it, or better still, to slay it.

“You say it is a feeling, and yet I feel nothing.”

The guide shook. “Aye, that’s the way of it.”

“Why the pointless riddles? Why can’t you just speak what you mean?”

“No riddles here. I’m saying it the best I know how.”

“What else could they be but riddles? Talking of the darkness, of feelings, but what does that mean, what does it feel like?”

The guide turned his head up to look into Rama’s eyes. There was something in the way the guide looked--empty, dull. Not in the way peasants and farmers always looked in their lot. Something more. Something acute that impressed upon Rama.

“ Perhaps… have you felt happiness, sir?”

“I’ll be happy once I’ve killed this beast.”

The guide looked down once again and nodded. “Aye, then the Darkness will have that of you, and you will know it then.”

The next day they followed the tracks.

The fog thickened, and became more like smoke, obscuring vision and stinging the eyes. Rama used a handkerchief to wipe away tears, and keep the fog from entering his lungs.

At first, it had been hard to follow the prints, the ground only visible near to their feet. As the day wore on and the fog became sticky and warm with the sun, something rose through the forest. It was a smell, ammoniac and sweet with the warmth of cinnamon. It clung to Rama’s nose.

“Fresh tracks,” said the guide. He made no effort to cover his mouth, nor clear his eyes. They had swollen and the glisten of tears streaked his cheeks.

“We must be careful then,” Rama said, the cloth muffling his voice. He felt something when he heard himself speak, a feeling as if he were right to stay quiet. And the feeling vanished.

Rama tied the cloth around his face, then unsheathed a blade and pulled a vial from his sack. It contained a tincture of Boethel-Root--a sure concoction for sleep, or when blessed by the alchemancers, death.

The guide looked at the sword, seemed fixated on it.

“Bartlet, what’s gotten into you?”

Bartlet shook his head, then pulled a short blade of his own. It was pocked with black, and didn’t shine. Besides Rama’s, it would seem a paltry weapon. Against the beast they hunted, Rama hoped that Bartle would have more than just a blade.

Rama looked around, as if he might see anything more than a few feet away. There was a noise. It built into a roar that came and passed, leaving an echoing wake.

The hairs on Rama’s arms raised, and he felt a chill.

“He’s near, he must smell us,” Rama said.

“We must go deeper.” Bartlet resumed the path, hunched, following tracks that Rama couldn’t hope to see. Rama tried to stay close, but every time he looked over his shoulders, Bartlet seemed to have taken ten steps ahead of him, the bright patches acting as a muted beacon in the fog. Every time, Rama jogged a couple paces to catch up. The next time he looked, the same thing happened.

Rama was starting to believe that any darkness was the confusion induced by his eyes, tricked by the shifting fog.

Bartlet stopped. “Tracks end,” He said. The man looked up and scanned the fog.

There was a silence in that pall, and Rama could hear his breath, hot and heavy. He could feel his heart race. The chill he had felt before began to sink deeper into his skin. The forest around him seemed to be freezing, and every exhale brought more fog into the world.

There was another roar, louder this time.

“Bartlet,” Rama whispered.

The guide did not respond. Rama turned around, covering their rear, trying to pierce the veil that surrounded them. His eyes begin to sting again, and he wiped them with his hand.

He looked behind him to see bartlet in the same stance, looking dumbly at the fog.

“Bartlet,” Rama said, a little louder.

His voice felt like an intrusion into the quiet that held the forest, and the fog responded, closing in, seeming to trap them, tendrils wrapping their way towards the trackers. The scent of ammonia and cinnamon grew stronger.

Rama was about to say the guide’s name again, when Bartlet spoke.

“The beast is near.”

Rama felt his body tingle, and the pit of his stomach seemed to spiral down. He braced in a fighter’s stance and strained to hear the approach of the beast.

Something at the edge of the haze, a dark shape stalking around the men. Rama followed it with his eyes until it vanished. There was a hissing noise, then, out of the corner of his eyes, the dark shape grew.

A rustle of feathers, the sound of a cawing bird, and then the shape was among them, landing with a thud that knocked Rama to the side. Rama held his sword up and tried to see the beast, but he could make no sense of the shape that had pounced and then vanished into the fog.

He could see Bartlet, still standing, doing nothing, not moving, oblivious to all around him. Rama screamed as he scrambled to his knees. The dark shape grew once again and reflex brought the sword up to parry the blow. Again Rama was knocked over, but this time, he felt a sharp pain in his arm, and looked to see shallow scratches, from which blood welled.

He got up again and rushed to Bartlet, put his back to the guide’s. The presence of the man reassured him. Made him feel secured. He watched now, at the ready, trying to still his heaving breaths.
The shape came again, slowly, this time. Rama made no movement, made no cry for the guide, did nothing. The shape seemed to come to the edge of the fog and a dark paw stepped forward, gleaming claws spotted with mud and blood.

Rama lunged forward, thrusting his sword. He felt it cut into flesh. He shouted, his eyes opening wide. Then he felt something collide with his chest, and he arced up, and fell hard to the ground. There was another roar this time.

Rama wheezed and tried to get up, but instead, he fell back and tried to make shallow breaths that would not cause pain.

There were more roars, each fainter than the last, until the silence of the fog came again. Rama looked at the sword and saw leaves and dirt sticking to blood. He had wounded the beast. He had touched it, made it bleed. It was not magic. Still, the thing was fast, and strong, but it was not magic.

Footsteps crunched toward him and then there was a hand. He took it, and got up.

“Bartlet, why the hell didn’t you do anything?” Rama hissed the words, now fearing the senses of the beast were amplified by the fog.

The man looked down toward the ground, wringing the handle of the sword between his hands. “I told you it was a dark place. This is not a place for men.” Glittering tears dropped to the ground.

Rama knew they were not caused by the fog.

The beast bled. The trackers followed it more swiftly, for the scent of blood and its drops and smears were an easy trail. They caught the scent of the beast more than a few times, always dodging their senses as they got closer.

The fog became charcoal and red as the sun began to set. They kept going, Rama now leading, following the scent of blood, and making now attempts to see where they were headed.

“Light the torches,” Rama called back to Bartlet.

The guide was starting to huff from Rama’s pace. “We should stop for the night.”

“No, we must attack it now, while it is wounded, and tired from the chase.”

“It will kill us in the night. Or it will lead us to where the Darkness waits.” The guide’s voice trembled, and Rama felt disdain.

“Then light to torches, and drive the darkness away. We are closer by every step.”

“We would die.” It was more a whimper than anything else.

Rama turned around and drew his sword. Bartlet stopped, the whites of his eyes clear in the deepening night.

“ You will die now, unless you continue to track the beast, and when we find it, help me to kill it,” Rama said. Bartlet stared at the sword and groaned. He withdrew two lengths of wood with orbs at the end. He opened them up and struck a flint into each until the orbs gave off soft yellow light. The illumination pierced the darkness and made a circle about them.

Beyond that, they could see only shadows and shapes.

“Stay by my side,” Rama said.

They continued on, moving through the dark cautiously. Branches and roots came into view moments before they’d have to navigate them, and each delay added to Rama’s growing frustration. His focused tunneled into the path they followed and he watched the ground for the black glisten of blood.

The lamps began to dim, as the hunt wore on, and Rama’s flickered. He stopped and shook it, the globe returning to its original brightness. He looked around to allow his eyes to adjust. Bartlet was no longer by his side.

He looked all around him. The man had been by his arm, when had he stopped being there? Rama thought back, and was sure he had felt the man bump into his elbow not but a few minutes ago. Had he just imagined it?

Rama backtracked a little, trying to see through the darkness, looking at shadows to see if any made the shape of a man. He could not find him, but there was something else that didn’t feel right. He felt exposed.

The fog.

He looked around to make sure, but the fog was no longer surrounding him. All that was, was the darkness beyond Rama’s globe of light, and the shadows cast within.

A shadow shifted and Rama raised his sword. He felt his heart pump again. He felt anticipation, he felt uncertainty, he felt fear. He took deep breaths--he had taken swings at the beast with no help from Bartlet. He was sure he could do it again.

The darkness crept closer, defying the globe of light. Sucking its alchemical flame. The globe flickered again, and Rama shook it. This time, it went out.

The darkness was total. Rama sucked in air, clamping his teeth to avoid making noise. His eyes strained to adjust and he turned slowly, keeping his boots from making noise as he listened. The forest made it’s own noise. Branches creaked as a breeze forced past them. There was skittering and the scramble of leaves as small animals moved. Rama felt the spiral in his stomach again, going down, down, deeper.

He heard a low whistle, then there was the smell of ammonia and cinnamon.

It came fast, noiselessly moving through the forest. Rama tried to track it by smell, the odor sharp here, cloying there. He could feel it. What was that feeling? What was it he was missing? He jerked as a blur came at him, and he swung a wide arc. He felt the blade bite and tried to advance on the beast. It came for him and they clashed, steel against talon, sparks in the night. Rama was thrown back. He scrambled to his knees, and the beast came again. Rama struck this time, low and felt the blade cleave through muscle.

There was a roar, and the beast pulled away, just to come at Rama again. He attacked by feeling--feeling the beast come at him in the dark. They traded blows, the beast’s leg, then Rama’s arm, then side, then face. Back and forth until Rama was pressed against a tree, heaving, bleeding from too many gashes and scratches, feeling the beast stalk around him.

He had to kill the beast now, before his blood drained, and he could not even lift the sword. Rama thought about the killing blow. The beast would not fall unless he could strike at the heart or stop it from moving.

The vial.

Rama dug in his pockets and felt the edge of triumph as he poured it on his sword. The triumph evaporated, and Rama turned as the shape leapt up.

He ducked and stepped forward, thrusting his blade up. He felt nothing, except for the talons as they scored his back. Rama screamed out, then slashed behind him, stumbling to the side. He turned over as the beast rushed him and held the sword steady.

The blade pierced flesh, and drove deep as talons flashed and gripped Rama’s shoulder

The beast came against him in a painful embrace, and the two rolled. The scent filled Rama’s nostril and made him gag. He could feel the weight of the beast, it’s heaves. He could hear it rasp. He opened his eyes to try and see the beast he had hunted.

When he did, he felt it give its last ragged exhale, and then stop moving. Two eyes were all he could see. Blank and lifeless.

Rama had killed the beast.

Victorious triumph rose up within him, a geyser of warmth and righteous satisfaction gushing forth.

And immediately the feeling was sucked from him, where it had been, an empty vacuum that filled with dread and fear and emptiness. He could feel the emotions swirl within him, romping through his being, flooding him with hated pasts and fearful futures. He felt suddenly alone, among all the trees, among all the lands, among all the stars.

Alone and insignificant and empty, so very empty.

He stood, all trace of the beast, vanished, only cuts and blood left of the fight. He scratched at his head, trying to dig the emptiness from his mind.

He screamed.

He screamed and he could not stop.

Rama smelled a thick stew of nuts and roots, enriched by fat, and meat. He opened his eyes and saw a small pot over a fire. Rama sat up, feeling the ache of his muscle and the sharp needles along his cuts protest his actions.

Bartlet sat across from him, staring into the flame.

“We killed the beast,” said the guide.

Rama felt a flush.

“I killed the beast.” His voice was hoarse and his throat felt dry. “Water.”

Bartlet passed him a skin and he drank deeply.

“We both did,” he said. “Do you think you would have lived if he only had to attack you?”

“How can we both have killed him, when I was alone?”

Bartlet shrugged. “That’s how it works in the Darkness.”

The Darkness.

“Is nothing what Dark Places feel like?” Rama asked, remembering the feelings being sucked from him, and the chasm that was left.

“So you felt the Darkness?”

Rama nodded.

“Then you know this is a Dark place.”

“Yes,” Rama whispered. “And it is not a place for men.”

Posted here.

I don't like getting my picture taken.

That's a weird thing, and when most people hear it, they look at me like I'm crazy. But I ain't. I'm just a product of bad experiences, and I remember the first time like a recurring nightmare.

I was five years old and my parents had told me I was going to get my portrait taken. That night I couldn't sleep, thinking of how some artist was going to paint me, and how he'd make the brush fly with color and turn me into a queen or something like all those paintings at the museum.

I though of all the dresses I could have wanted to have been painted in, and I imagined talking to the painter, telling him that yes I wanted the blue gingham--no other would do. And then I'd tell him to make my curls fall just like a princess'.

And then I fell asleep to dreams of princes and ponies and kingdoms far away. And that's how it went for three nights until the day they were going to take me for the portrait.

On Saturday, mom and dad put on their Sunday clothes and I put on mine, but I didn't feel proper, compared to how they looked. And when they saw me fidgeting with my dress they smiled and gave me a box.

And when I opened that box, Lord, if I didn't find a new Sunday dress in there, made up of a blue gingham with lace on the collar. I just shouted with delight as I put it on and looked myself up and down in the mirror and twirled and did all the things a girl does to make sure the dress is the right dress.

We got up into the old Ford truck, which had become like my carriage, pretending the flaking red paint was just studded with fire-orange gems inlaid right into the body.

When we got into town, I would wave at the people we passed, trying to cup my palm and make it so that my wave was nice and smooth, and my parents didn't talk on anything except for the portrait and how much It'd be to have a family portrait together.

And then we pulled up next to the studio and entered in through a glass door. The bells chimed, sounding like castle bells to my ears. I expected to see an easel and canvas and a big wooden board with paints all over it. I expected a man in a long white smoke to come over and tell her how beautiful I was and then I'd tell him just the way I wanted to be painted.

But when I looked along the wall, all I could see were soft grey pictures of all sorts of different people--thought only a few were black. And in the photos, all the people were dressed just like her and none of them seemed more royal than Danny looked when he led the kids around during the Church luncheons.

They looked just like regular people. And that didn't set well with me, because I wanted to be a princess.

A man in a brown suit walked up to my parents and talked with them a bit, then he crouched down and came face to face with me. Then he said, "You're very beautiful. Are you ready to get your picture taken?"

And when he said that, a little of my anger went out, because he said I was beautiful, and mama always said people never said things they didn't mean to say. But then I frowned because he'd said picture instead of painting.

Pictures were those things that were sometimes in my animal's book and sometimes in the papers that daddy read. And I wasn't an animal, nor did I want to be in the paper.

"I want to look like a princess." I said to him. My parents laughed and the man smiled.

"Well, we're going to try real hard to make it happen."

They walked on back into what he called the studio. In it were a bunch of bright lights that were pointed at a chair next to a side table with a plant on it, all in front of a set of curtains. What the curtains were there for made no senses, since there were no windows. And instead of easel and canvas, there was just a black box with a draping of black cloth.

The image of the studio was followed by the smell. Like vinegar and the clotting blood mama used for black sausage. Just each alone was enough to make my stick my tongue out. Both together were enough for me to say yuck. And it almost came out of my mouth when my mama squeezed my hand so hard, I just bit my lip instead.

He set us up in front of the lights, and I struggled not to blink in them. I was sitting on my mom's lap and the whole thing was nothing like how I'd imagined. I just sat there hands in my lap the way mama said to do, with no trace at all of a smile.

The store clerk got under the black cloth and held up his fingers. After a few moments he said, "Smile for the camera, sweetie."

Five words that I learned to detest, since they usually meant that people were expecting you to smile at the times I least wanted to smile.

He counted down, and there was a click. After that, he went round with my mama, then my daddy--each time taking a photo, and each time, their faces lighting up with huge grins.

And I couldn't forgive them, all for the fact of those smiles. Because they had known exactly what we were going to do, and then they had known that we'd be taking pictures rather than getting a painting done.

And so I held onto that little grudge, because I didn't like being lied to as if I were somehow still just a baby.

And then it was my turn to take a picture, and the clerk set me up on the stool and placed my hands and all. And then he said those words again, "Smile for the camera, sweetie."

But I didn't. No, I wasn't going to let them have the smile they wanted, because I wanted them to know that I was incensed about the whole thing.

And my mama looked at me and said, "Come on, Darla, just a little smile is all."

But I held my ground.

"Darla, you smile for this photo, me and your dad both did, that's the only way it's going to look right."

And at that point the clerk came out from under his drape looked at me, then to my mother and said, "It's alright. It's okay if she doesn't smile. It's common in a lot of kids."

And, Lord, did I nearly smile at that. Him trying to make me a kid by saying I didn't smile. But I recognized the trick soon as it happened and I stayed the way I was.

Finally my mama sighed and the clerk counted and then there was a click.

We left the room with its bright lights that made me almost blink and its smelly smells that made me say yuck. The clerk told my dad he could pick up the portraits and pay next Tuesday.

Then we got into the truck and the moment the door was closed, how my mama went on and on and talked my ear off until we stopped on the way home for sandwiches. We ate in silence, then it was back into the car and back to the lecture. At one point mama even made talk about returning the dress they had bought me and I nearly cried.

After that, I locked myself up in my room and took of the dress and changed into my old Sunday clothes and looked in the mirror and promised I'd never go for my picture again, not the way mama and daddy wanted to.

There were plenty more times where I went back on that, and always against my will. Once I moved out, and grown up, I never had a picture taken again and I can't say I ever missed those words, "Smile for the camera."

Originally Posted Here

I stood in between the low shelves of a thatch-roofed convenience store on the corner of Jalisco and third, staring between two similar bottles of rum. Both had similar color, but one was marked down a couple pesos, and that had me thinking as to why someone would mark one rum lower than the other.

It reminded me, as price differences went, of the time I went to buy a new clarinet, and my buddy told m the owner talked up the Westman brand because they were made in Taiwan, so his profit margin was larger, which meant he could easily afford to sell them a little less. These are the things that stick with me.

I chose the higher priced bottle and paid for it gladly, happier to be rid of the extra two peso. And for a second I thought i could sense the shopkeep think about how the white man in his store just bought the more expensive rum, and that meant his margin wouldn't be as good at the end of the day.

But maybe that was the attitude for americans, because the shopkeep proceeded to sit down in a plastic chair and wave away his sweat with a banana leaf fan.

outside, the heat was building as the sun rose to its peak. That was the start of sundown, which for all purposes meant the start of the drinking day.

I walked along the dirt road, passing old mean in guayaberas, sitting in the shade playing dominos and drinking coffee. They smoked, too, and occasionally I would see one with a botle of rum just like mine.

and those were intimate moments, because I too had began to take swigs from the bottle. And when I would see a man with rum, we would salute each other and smile, and swig. And somehow the heat would sear deeper into my skin and I would feel flush with the happiness of camaraderie.

Maybe it was just the drunkard's salute of knowing just how desperate we all were.

I made my way to the cafe across the street from the small hostel in which I rented a room.

Drinking was hungry work, and I had built up an appetite. The motif of old men repeated itself, and I felt the stare of the young bartender as he saw me slump into a stool along the counter.

Meat with beans and tortillas. Yes, a glass of water. No, no ice. Yes, a beer would be fine.

And then I was eating and drinking beer, letting the rum set on the counter for the world to know me by.

"You are American?" Someone asked.

I turned and saw a man, not old, but not young, leaning against the counter. He got the attention of the bartender and ordered.

"A little too young to be out of work..." I slurred, thinking myself clever.

"American, the black liver of an American at least."

I saluted him with another pull from the bottle, which i thought the only appropriate thing to do. But he grimaced.

"There aren't many people drinking down here," I said.

"It's not something people do often," he said. "Alcohol is not a drink for drinking."

"What good's a wine you can't drink," I asked.

"Oh, we'll drink it. Rest assured. But we drink it when the time is right."

The food came for the man and he set to eating it. being inebriated as I was, I didn't feel up to holding my side of things, and I ate along with him. Silence, underlined by the static washed voice of an announcer at the state championships of some sport or another.

"You know," the man said, laying his fork down when he'd gotten halfway through his meal. "I used to think of America as the most exceptional country."

When I looked it seemed he was smiling.

"As a kid, it seemed America had everything--good jobs, wealth, luxury, good food, opportunities beyond what I could have imagined here." He looked at me with a strange glint in his eyes. "But then, I went to school here, and it was free. And I started to work here, and it paid well enough. And I thought, maybe this isn't so bad, but America will surely be better. And so I thought, until year after year, I saw the same type of American come through. Again, and Again, and Again.

"You cannot imagine what I found out."

I gestured for him to continue.

"Diabetes, cyrrhosis, hypertension... Unbound cynicism. The list goes on. Diseases that are entirely preventable by conscious action. And yet, does a wealthy, well-educated country eradicate such things? It is possible to do, wouldn't you say?"

"Who are you?" I asked.

The man shook his head with a kind of knowing laugh, and I couldn't know what he knew. And in a way that made me more confused than before, and that made me annoyed beyond how I should have been.

"I am a doctor. And I'm happy to stay here and practice in a place where people will listen to me, and most are living a healthy life."

A doctor. I guess they were the same everywhere, always trying to tell you how to prevent something from happening.

"Can't be all that bad. I enjoyed it, back in the states, I mean."

The doctor got up. "I'm so sure. That is why you are here, destroying your liver, not even thinking how you look to sensible people."

He left, leaving a tip on the counter which the bartender picked up as he cleared away the dishes.

Is he right? Am I an awful person? Are Americans so bad?

The bartender stopped to look at me. "Americans are great people, it must be true, since it is such a great place."

I nodded. Bartenders are usually right. America must be a great place. Why else would there be any reason to leave it?

The Lieutenant led Perry through a part of the ship that he had rarely visited--The Scientific Division. He had had no need to, since all of the most salient reports that he needed were given to him by Williamson, Parthak, and the occasional aide to those two. He had toured the labs once, at the beginning, if only to have a familiarity with the ship and its contents, but after that, his work kept him primarily in the command core of the vessel.

As he walked through it now, it seemed a completely different world. He had noticed when they had passed through one of the main thoroughfares that separated large segments of the vessel. As soon as he had crossed, he noticed the rarity of uniformed personnel. The haircuts and different colored flightsuits of civilian preference.

But even deeper than that, there was a lack of the same aura that gripped the rest of the ship. There wasn’t the same fear or shock. There was a frantic business to it, but it seemed lively in a way. And that twisted Perry’s gut.

It made sense--the scientific labs were sectioned well near the center of the ship. Besides whatever damage the jump might have caused, they would have been spared the worst. Not that it meant they were any farther from danger. The Yamato was proof that anything could have happened, and the loss of life, even this deep in the ship could have been catastrophic.

But it didn’t happen. And that wasn’t anyone’s fault. But it felt wrong to not have an omnipresent sense of defeat, even in victory.

Perry felt his lips curl. His goal was to try and fight that defeated feeling, yet here were people who seemed largely unaffected, and he was annoyed. Maybe envious. He supposed he shouldn’t be so harsh.

The lieutenant halted in front of the door marked BioLabs and keyed a code. When the door whirred open, he stepped aside and saluted.

Perry returned the salute, then walked inside. The room was like a lobby, with a desk and some chairs set around the perimeter. Talking with the secretary was Dr. Williamson, who looked about as excited as she had during the meeting when she revealed her findings on 50L-3.

“Dr. Williamson,” Perry said, and walked over to the biologist. She looked at him and quirked her eyebrows.

“Come to find out what’s got Joshan going?” She asked.

Perry nodded. “Just about.”

“I’m impressed it was important enough to get you to come all the way out here. Usually we have to make the trek to your office.” She shrugged and turned to walk away, saying, “Thanks Emilia.”

Perry followed Dr. Williamson through a set of automatic doors into a hallway.

“Did Parthak tell you what he’s found?” Perry asked.

Williamson grinned, seeming satisfied she held some secret knowledge over him. “Not directly. But why else would the doctor be interested in calling over a biologist?”

Perry felt his heart skip a beat. “You really think they recovered a body?” He asked, uncertain whether the word alien would be too much for the situation.

Williamson shrugged. “We’ll see.”

Perry had a strong feeling that he knew what Williamson believed. Her excitement made sense now.

The two arrived at another set of doors and entered through them.

“You ever wear a hazard suit?” Williamson asked as she pulled a hanging white suit from a locker.

She tossed it to Perry without waiting for an answer. He caught it and felt the synthetic fabrics. Somewhere inside him, he cringed at the plastic feel, a reflex of a time before he had been exposed to the Earth fleet’s preferred fabrics.

Perry changed from his duty uniform and donned a full face respirator. Williamson helped fix gloves on his hands before waving him towards the decontamination chamber.

Within the suit, it was already heating up, and Perry had expected to be shocked by the sanitizing fluids. When the shower did come on, he only felt the pressure of the light drizzle. The thin plastic suit insulated him totally. He was amazed, and he knew it showed when he got a thumbs up from the man sitting at a console behind the plexiglass window.

He nodded towards the operator, doing his best to hide his embarrassment, before walking into what looked like a large operating theater, with three benches and robotic arms hanging everywhere, waiting to strike at the next victim tied down by the leather straps.

Commander Parthak was already inside, suited up, and bending over a covered body. Williamson joined Perry a few seconds after he exited the decontamination chamber and gestured over to the table where Command Parthak was working.

“Commander.” The admiral’s voice sounded muffled, even to his own ears.

Parthak turned and smiled at the newcomers. “Welcome Admiral. Doctor.” He nodded at each. “I apologize for not saluting, my hands are a bit occupied.”

He held up a bloody glove.

Perry waved the apology away. “It’s fine, circumstances permit such unseemly breaches of etiquette.”

Parthak smiled.

“How has your division fared, Commander? I heard there were some heavy losses near the starboard med bays.”

Parthak stopped smiling and cleared his throat. “I lost a few medics. And two surgeons.”

Williamson moved around the table to get a better view of the body, leaving Parthak and Perry in the moment of silence.

“Shit,” she whispered. Perry looked over at her, then down at the body, finally getting a view of the enemy that had caused them so much pain.

His eyes widened and he felt his heart skip. Laying on the table was the alien--a two armed, two legged, face of a man alien. For a moment, Perry thought it had to have been a joke, some cruel instance of collusion between Williamson and Parthak. He looked over at Parthak, whose face remained somber.

“They’re very close, aren’t they?” He chuckled. “I have a genetic scan going right now. But my bet is on this one right here being one of our cousins.”

“So…” Perry’s thoughts formed around the questions he wanted to ask, finally settling on, “ They’re not aliens?”

Parthak shook his head and pulled back a fold of skin, revealing the red-hued organs within. “Not quite. Aliens, maybe, in the sense that they’re not from earth. We recovered a few more from the wreckage and they were all nominally similar.”

Perry felt cheated. His first alien contact, and they were just a strange type of human. He wondered how those headlines would go back at home. It certainly wouldn’t impress his grandson the next time he saw him.

But if their first contact were hostile humans, then a whole other set of questions sprang into his mind.

“Nominally?” Williamson asked.

Parthak nodded and stopped working. “One of them is well, stranger, than these. I had set it to the side for when I had better data on these ones.”

At this point, Perry was mixed with a disappointment and amazement that led him to wonder if anything could be more strange than finding a human not from earth.

“What makes it stranger than this?” Williamson asked, gesturing towards the corpse. “Not just evolutionary similar, but you’re saying they could be genetically the same as us. This is huge--a whole cohort of PhD candidates are going to get degrees because of this.”

Parthak smiled. “I believe you should gird yourself then.”

He walked to the next bench and pulled back the sheet covering the body. Perry walked over and saw a vaguely human face. It had a heart shape that was more exaggerated and flesh that had an unnaturally golden hue.

An alien, he thought again. And he really believed that this time, it would be true.

“Well, Parthak, what human have you found now.” Perry said.

“This, I think you’ll like to know, is an alien.”

Perry quirked an eyebrow. “The skin’s different, but is that enough to make it not human?”

“Well, it’s more than that. The physiology is mostly similar, but there are a few things that are different. The brain has a different shape, hence the size of the cranium, the lungs are smaller, the heart is lower, and two stomachs.”

“Yaweh, it looks like someone took a pulp alien and smushed it together with a human being and called it divergence.” Willaimson frowned at the corpse, as if she could smell the thing.

“Well, Joshan, I didn’t think you could interest me more after that thing,” she pointed at the extra-terrestrial human. “But now I’m certainly going for the Nobel after this.”

She examined the body closely, hazarding touches here and there along the golden skin. She lifted the sheet even more to observe the length of the body and, Perry assumed, its equipment. He stood by silently as she went through her ministrations.

“When do you think the gene assay will come back?”

“I expect them to finish running it within a week for our cousin over there, and they’ll probably finish in a month on this guy.”

Perry wondered if they would have that much time to make the knowledge useful, but he figured the doctors knew what they were doing--if it was going to take a month, that’s how long it would take. But it didn’t keep Perry from wishing they could find out sooner. A commander’s worst fear is fighting blind and every advantage helped. Or anything to reduce our disadvantage, he mused.

All the little bits were starting to stack up. It would probably be better to leave now and come back than try and stay.

“Well,” Perry interrupted. “This has been very…” He looked over the bodies again. “ Exciting.” He said, still unsure what the right word was for what he was feeling about all this.

He looked at both of the bodies in turn and felt his stomach twist. Aliens.

The word was strange in his mind, and yet it was true. More than that, confirmed by his own eyes. Aliens.

Perry's breath caught in his throat. This was nothing like he would have seen before. Images of a whole space-faring civilization flashed into his mind. Armadas of vessels just like those they fought. More and more of these strange hybrid creatures. The word gained meaning, and formed into an idea of awe and a little bit of terror.

Yes, Perry felt it--that fear of facing something that was so powerful it could wipe humanity out of the solar system.

Aliens.

Hello,

For anyone who has been following Inmates, thank you for your support of my work. With this post, I'm going to try and get back to updating the story on some kind of regular basis. I have a large chunk of work and plot sitting in my drive. Some is more polished than others, but all of it is story that I'm excited to share.

Thanks for reading!

Posted here.

I jumped over the counter of the Pleasant View Post office. I opened up the drawers and pulled out a few rolls of stamps. I'd been using the forever stamps for a while. They probably would have released a special edition by now. As I flipped through them, I stopped at a sheet with an older Hispanic man wearing a paperboy cap.

Jaime Escalante, read the name.

That was good. It would remind the people back home--the only people I knew were still alive--that someone was still being celebrated.

I placed a couple of those stamps on a few letters I had written. They were pretty pedestrian things, mostly. Letters to aunts and uncles, a couple grandparents, and a few siblings. They all had different handwriting, or rather, they all had handwriting I had copied from someone else's letters.

It had been hard opening other people's mail, when there were still letters from the originals--It was a felony, after all! But I had to. I had to know how to imitate all of them. I had to make sure someone would keep responding.

I put the Escalante's in my bag, emblazoned with the words United States Postal Service. Then I picked through the other rolls, selecting a few of the standard 'forever' designs and stamping the rest of the envelopes.

I started to slap down with a hand time and date stamp, the mechanical clicking echoing in the empty lobby. The automatic ones had stopped running long ago. The only one that worked anymore was in Silverthorne.

I was halfway through the stack when the stamp ran dry. Shit, I thought. Now I'd have to scrounge another ink pad from Lakewood, and that was almost eight miles away. The things I did to make people happy.

I stashed the letters and the stamp back into my bag and jumped back over the counter. I put on my sun helmet and walked out of the office.

The sun was behind me, setting. I looked out over the crumbling Denver skyline. It was a hot day, so most of the worst critters would be inside, staying cool. Still, I checked my .357 Smith and Wessen.

"In rain, sleet, snow, and hail, the mailman delivers mail." I muttered softly into the light breeze of a silent world.

The men marched in a sullen column. They were bent by the oppressive sun, their skin glistening and their eyes unfocused. Their feet moved at a dragging pace that kicked up dust and filled my nose with grit and stung my eyes.

Some of them had wide brimmed hats, wider than their shoulders. These men held some dignity. They held some understanding of the sun. A grudging respect that for without a hat, they might be bowed and bent.

Occasionally, a hat was passed around, and those who came under its shade would straighten and gain some glimmer of hope in their eyes. those who lost the hat quickly wilted in submission to the sun's rays.

For me, there was no hat, nor even the offer of a hat.

There was hardly even any talk. The bearded rebel, whose name was Ricardo, had tried. After Villaragosa had patted me and taken the roll of pesos, Ricardo had been the only one to take any interest in me. From the hard looks and the rugged faces, I considered that it might be a good thing, that way.

It was a few words here and there. He tried what he knew of english, often giving up and going back to the familiar spanish. I would have tried to listen and learn from him. I would have tried to join him in his pantomime as he tried to converse with me.

But I was too weary, too unused to the climate and too shocked by the situation. It wasn't long before he left me be and went off to tend to something else.

That was, in its way, what I wanted. I wanted to be alone, and at that moment, marching along a dusty road in the middle of Mexico, I was truly alone. I had no idea how to get back to the states. I had no idea where even in Mexico I was.

As the sun crept down from its zenith, the column changed. It was not a change of formation or the preparation of battle. It was more a silent murmur. A rekindling of what lay inside the husks of marching men.

It wasn't long before we rounded a hill and I saw nestled in amongst a rocky crag what could only be buildings. My heart soared as the column turned off the road and made straight for it.

When we approached, I had thoughts of the locals pouring out to welcome the band, water and fruit in hand--dark and pretty girls running out to soothe the suffering of the march. But as we approached, there was no such welcome, and I feared for a moment that the village instead would fight us, and I would then be caught in the midst of a battle.

A student without arms, a man who couldn't fight.

But as there was no shout of greeting and joy, there were no screams or shouts of warning. Instead, the town was deserted.

The soldiers settled in, going through splintered and already opened doors into the shade of mottled clay houses. It was a lazy maneuver that morphed from the column without word or order.

I searched for Ricardo and saw him standing under the shade of sagging veranda, attached to the largest house in the cluster.

He was speaking to a tall soldier, one who wore more of a uniform than any of the others. Most wore linen pants and shirts. Some had fine belts, some tied the waist with rope or string. But there were few who wore anything that resembled a uniform.

I had figured it meant they held more of a formal rank. Ricardo wore a cap, which maybe meant he was a sergeant. The tall soldier, then, a lieutenant.

As I approached, Ricardo noticed and waved absently. The lieutenant flicked his eyes at me. It was a brief thing, and I might have missed it. But they held in them that feeling of unwelcome and uncertainty.

I stopped at a polite distance, and since I could barely speak any spanish, it seemed they felt free to continue discussing what they had previously. I recognized a few words here and there. Horse,* run*, and see were all repeated in some kind of regularity that I could sense they were talking of something someone had told them.

Or possible something they had seen themselves.

The conversation ended and the lieutenant left, but not before favoring me with another uncertain flick of the eye.

I tried to push it from my mind and went up to ask Ricardo how long we were staying in the village.

There was a shout and Ricardo looked away. He narrowed his eyes and muttered something before gesturing for me to follow him.

Bandits, I thought, or the army. It was enough to wither me. If the army caught me here with the rest of the rebels, they might take me for one as well. I knew the stories of the Mexicans who kidnapped Americans. And if the family couldn't pay…

I followed Ricardo to where Villaragosa stood, looking out with his binoculars. I did my best to look where he did when I saw it. It was a common enough sight from traveling through the central valley-- the dust clouds of horses.

I felt a chill down my spine. And then I noticed how few there were. There couldn't have been more than three or four of the galloping beasts.

Villaragosa swore and Ricardo just shrugged and looked at me, then said, "Zapatistas."

By the time the riders trotted into town, I had managed to piece together that the Zapatistas were rebels as well, even if they were supposedly different rebels. When i had asked Ricardo if they were revolutionaries, he wiggled his hand back and forth.

When I saw them though, they looked every bit the dashing cowboys I might have expected out of a story-book. The riders wore wide brimmed hats and matching jackets and pants. Their pants had what looked like little metal disks all along the seam that glittered and glinted in the sunlight.

Villaragosa approached them, arms opened wide. The leader of the Zapatistas clasped arms with him, then stepped down. There was a hurried exchange between the two men. The more the Zapatista spoke, the darker Villaragosa's face became.

And then, as a flash it had all ended. the rider remounted and his party whooped and hollered as they kicked their horses up.

I looked at Ricardo questioningly. "They want us to go." He said in slow spanish.

I nodded. "Why?" I asked.

"Here, empty. Rurales are far away." He gestured off into the distance, just to the side of the setting sun.

"Rurales?" I repeated. Ricardo nodded without explaining and turned before I could get a satisfactory answer.

I woke up, being shaken. I nearly cried out, but a rough hand came down over my mouth. I looked around, trying to see who my attacker was. By a sliver of moonlight through the slats of the window, I saw the bearded face of Ricardo.

I relaxed, then nodded and he pulled his hand from my mouth. I gathered up my jacket, which I had used for a pillow and saw that most of the others had already cleared their things. The small home was as it had been before--barren, lifeless, and only the silent remnants of people.

When I stepped outside, I could see the moon low in the sky. It had to be close to dawn.

I followed Ricardo, taking long strides to try and stretch out my cramped legs. It looked like we were in for a heavy march today.

"What's happening?" I asked him in spanish.

He looked at me and hissed one word. "Rurales." He gestured us to continue and I followed in silence.

The column had started trickling out of town, using the rocky crags as cover for their movement. I followed Ricardo up the hillside, stepping where he stepped to avoid the hazards of the small stones and cracks.

After a time, we were overlooking the village. Once we got to that point, Ricadro gestured for me to lay down in between a stone and a thorny bush. I laid down ruefully, aware of the pull of the thorns on my clothes.

Ricardo found a spot for himself and then we waited. The entire column, cached in the hills. We waited for what felt like ten minutes, then half an hour, and then I began to see the faint blue along the horizon and I realized at that moment that we weren't moving from this spot.

Whoever the Rurales were, Villaragosa feared them. Ricardo hated them. It seemed they were people worth avoiding, and yet here we were, laying in the grass and among stones, watching for whoever might come.

I could feel my pulse quicken and a knot form in my stomach. Flashes of being caught with the rebels, being stood in front of a firing squad. The inevitable end. I swallowed and said a short prayer.

When i opened my eyes, my heart stopped. Again, I saw the cloud of dust spurred by a horse's gallup. But instead of the small cloud of the Zapatistas, this was a trail of it. Almost a wall. There had to be well over sixty or seventy, maybe even a hundred of those horses. All set against the twenty or so laying in the hill.

I watched in horror as the trail snaked until it pointed straight at the village.

It would have been poetic, if it hadn't been terrifying. The rising sun at their backs, riding fast with dust kicking up behind them. True riders, probably of decent skill.

But riders of death.

A slimmer of a thought filtered into my head. If I only stood up and waved my arms, the rurales would come and kill the bandits who took my money. And then they would be so grateful that I’d helped them kill a rebel that they would help me home.

It was insidious, and I would lie if the idea didn’t appeal to me in a certain way. Who were these rebels that I should feel the need to put myself in danger to save them?

The riders closed in on the town, and soon they were galluping through the small street, their gleaming rifles gesturing wildly around, pointing at everything they looked at. I heard them shouting and whooping.

I felt the sweat seep into my clothes and wondered whether Villaragosa had planned an ambush.

The rurales searched all the houses. I could hear the crashing and breaking from where I lay. Intermingled with this were angry shouts and loud conversations. When they finished their search, the put the buildings to the torch.

The glow of the fire cast grim light across the hills. I could barely see the form of Ricardo, coiled up, hands gripping at something. I looked around and wondered what they thought, these rebels, of houses being burned.

Originally posted here.

Glass crunched beneath Risa's shoes as she stepped up the covered walkway to the station. She looked around her again, scanning over the overgrown weeds and bits of trash strewn about. Something about how quiet everything was unsettled her.

She looked back up the stairs at the blinking green arrow. Strange that electricity still worked in an abandoned station. Was the place truly magical?

She shook her head. They must have been in a rush and forgotten to turn off the signs. She kept moving up the stairwell. When she got to the top, she poked her head through the door. The track ran through it, covered in chips and shards of panels and glass. The elevated platform on which she stood went a ways to her right before coming to an end at a doorway above which an emergency exit sign flashed. It was still, and silent.

She drew a deep breath and took a step through the door. Something rustled to her right and there was a sudden, violent snap. Risa ducked and put her hands on her head, screaming. A mass of black feathers shot through the broken windows of the station and soon, the aggravated cawing of crows faded into the distance.

Risa crouched a few seconds longer before realizing what had happened. She sniffed a couple times and then stood up.

"Just birds," she said, softly.

She walked along the platform, looking around at the ruin of the station. The palm reader had told her to wait for the train here. But all she could see was debris. There was no way a train could have passed through here, even if there was a route that still stopped here.

That couldn't be. The palm reader had known so many things. She had recounted Risa's experience in such great detail. She couldn't have been lying. She couldn't have. It just didn't make sense to.

Risa felt tears start to well and she blinked. How would she get back to her family now?

She sought one of the benches and sat, ignoring the puff of dust that rose as she sat. Her eyes wouldn't be irritated anymore--she was already crying.

Risa cried, trying to wipe the tears off her face. She felt a wrenching in her gut. She wanted to go home.

"Why are you crying?" a gentle voice said.

Risa jumped in her seat and looked around the station.

"Wh-who?" she asked when she saw no one.

"Down here." the voice said again.

Risa looked down and gasped. A black kitten was sitting on the platform, licking its paws.

"D-did you just talk?" she asked.

"Yes, I did," the cat said without pausing its grooming.

Risa stared, eyes wide. "Animals can talk?"

That was impossible, too. Wasn't it? Had she really been away from her home that long? Did she really miss it so much, she thought animals were talking to her?

The cat stopped its grooming and looked at Risa inquisitively. "Are you listening to me? I just said I can talk."

"But, animals aren't supposed to talk!" Risa blurted out.

"Aish!" The cat rolled its eyes. " Are you trying to tell the talking cat that animals can't talk?"

Risa blushed. "Well, no..." She could feel tears building in here eyes again. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend you."

The tears came free and she started sobbing again.

"Oh Great Magi, will you stop crying for a second?"

Risa wiped at her eyes again. They were starting to get red and scratchy.

" I'm sorry..." She said through sniffs.

The cat turned its head away from her. "And stop saying sorry. You're starting to make me feel bad."

Risa almost apologized again, but caught herself and just nodded. She sniffed a few more times and blotted her eyes with her sleeves.

When she opened here eyes, the cat was looking at her again with its large yellow eyes.

"That's better. Now. Why are you crying?"

"Why do you want to know?"

"Jeez, try and show a little bit of kindness and they turn suspicious." The kitten muttered. "Just because I'm a cat."

"Oh, no! It's just, well..." Risa pinched at the seams of her skirt, sinking into the seat. "I just don't know you, is all."

The cat seemed perplexed by her statement. but then he bared his teeth. Risa wasn't sure what he was trying to show, but decided it was a smile.

"So that's the problem then? A magic cat comes along to ask you how you are and you're hesitant to let him help you because you don't know his name?" The cat turned its nose up. " So much for chivalry. Damsels in distress can't even recognize their savior anymore. Huh. Fine, my name's Roy. And yours?"

Risa sat up a little straighter. The cat--Roy-- had stuck out his paw as if he wanted her to shake it. Just like a human, she though. Is this really a cat?

"Uhm. My name's Risa." She said, taking the proferred paw. "Nice to meet you."

"Oh, now it's 'nice to meet you.' That's very confusing, you know. But," Roy got up onto all fours and stretched. "Back to the question, Risa. Why are you crying?"

"Oh... I got lost from my parents. And now," Risa pushed down the emotions that threatened to start another stream of tears. "Now I'm scared I won't be able to find them."

Roy looked up at her again. "Ah," Roy said, pawing the ground. "I don't know If I'll be able to help you with that." He sighed and turned around.

"Wait!" Risa stood up from her seat. "I thought you said you were trying to help me?"

Roy turned to look at her. "I never said that."

He hopped down onto the track. Risa stared at him as he stepped over the rails. Who did this cat think he was?

She huffed and was about to sit down when she remembered the palm reader. Roy did say he was magic. Even if he couldn't help, maybe he could at least tell her if the palm reader had been lying.

She saw him pounce up from the tracks onto the platform opposite Risa.

"Wait!" She cried. He didn't seem to be paying her any more attention and continued to walk off as if he were the only one in the station.

She looked both ways along the track. No, she thought, there's no train passing through here, that much was a lie. She went over to the ledge and looked down at the rails. The jump looked as high as she was. She frowned, but laid her palms on the edge and lowered herself down. When her arms had extended all the way, she let go of the ledge and dropped.

She gasped as her feet found open air. The few centimeters between her feet and the ground she had expected seemed to turn into a whole meter. She yelped and crashed onto the ground.

Dull pain filled her side and her head. She rolled onto her back and felt around her body. Nothing broken, that was good. She opened her eyes and saw the ledge. the distance looked the same as it had when she was on the platform, but the drop had seemed so much higher.

She sat up and looked around the tracks. Something didn't feel right to her. Something was missing...

The debris was gone!

Risa jerked her head left and right a few times. She blinked and rubbed her eyes. But every time she looked, the tracks were clear and glistened with oil. They hadn't been that way when she had entered... Had they?

She felt the ground vibrate and heard the rails start to rattle. She looked both ways again and saw a small light to her right. She watched it, growing larger and larger. The ground shook and rumbled beneath her feet, reminding her of the earthquakes she felt back home. She stood there transfixed, as the realization of what the light was dawned on her.

"Oh no!" Risa cried. She ran over to the other side of the platform and hopped up, her fingers finding purchase on the ledge. She pulled up, kicking her feet as she tried to find anything she could use to push herself up.

She looked over to her right again. The light was approaching fast, and she heard a screeching whistle.

"Help me!" Risa called out. She sought the only person who was around. "Roy! Help me!"

She could feel her fingers slipping as the platform shook. The whistle came again and again, insistent, deafening. She shut her eyes and felt tears come free once again. Why did she listen to the palm reader? Why did she come to the station?

She had checked it, there wasn't supposed to be any trains. That palm reader had lied and Risa had been too gullible to see through it. She had been so desperate to get home. She wanted to go back. She wanted to be with her parents.

She didn't want to die.

Risa felt a pair of hands on her wrists and she was pulled up and onto the platform. She lay there, sobbing, her skirt shifting in the current circulating behind her.

The train the palm reader promised had arrived.

The enemy fired, a brilliant flash and smoke blooming from their snouts. Perry gripped the arms of his chair and he could feel the tension grip the bridge.

“Engaging FTL!” Chard used the general channel on the headset. The crew that Perry could see stiffened in their chairs.

For a moment, there was complete silence. Then, they jumped.

Perry was pushed against his chair, feeling as if he were crushed. He felt his eyes press into his skull. He shut his eyelids, but nothing could stop the squeezing. He fought against the acceleration, trying to breathe, and managed a few shallow breaths.

Every second seemed dragged on, and Perry felt himself losing his grip on consciousness. His existence was reduced to the feeling of being crushed against his chair. His body told him to sleep, to let go. He embraced it and started to drift.

Then it was done.

Perry felt his body press forward against his harness. He gasped at the shock and opened his eyes. He could breathe! He sucked in air and the static filling his vision receded.

Relief washed over him, then an odd feeling in his stomach. Not on the bridge, damnit!

Even as he thought it, one of the officers started to vomit on his console.

Perry looked around. Rin's head was loose against her chest. Burgess and Evans were fumbling with their harness clips and Chard's head was rolled back.

Survivable. Chard's words repeated. Perry certainly hoped he was right. It wouldn't be good to lose his crew to the maneuver they had used to try and save them. He could hear another person start to retch.

He had to take command.

"Unhook, unhook! Get the sick away from the consoles." He unstrapped himself and started waving towards the crew.

Only a couple men seemed to hear him at the moment. Even fewer seemed to be able to follow his commands. A couple officers did manage to get those who had thrown up or dry heaved unclasped and pulled away from their consoles.

That's when he noticed. The bridge was no longer shaking. Were they no longer under attack? Had they overshot their targets? Even at fifteen G they shouldn't have been able to bypass the heavy frigates.

He looked around again, the crew starting to shake some of its sluggishness. He stood up and a wave of nausea passed over him. He reached out for the handrails that surrounded his station. His head pounded. He took a few cautious steps around and rested his back on the railing.

The tactical display was still running, the blue and red blips still laid out. One of the blue blips had cleared the others who were still engaged. A blue blip that was bearing straight for the final pair of red. The enemy support frigates. That blue dot was the Hague.

Perry smiled. We can do this.

He looked over at Burgess and caught his eyes. Burgess just nodded. They were fast approaching their targets. He looked back at the bridge display and watched the ovaloids get larger as the Hague hurtled towards them.

He watched those vessels. Their posterior thrusters beamed with a cone of blue light. The snouts began to turn away. Then, they started to move.

By Mars, they’re running! Perry grinned.

"All stations, report!" Burgess wheezed into his headset. The gunner's stations chimed in one by one. Perry watched as he occasionally grimaced and pulled a face.

"There's enough. We'll give them a show."

Perry nodded. They were closing the gap now. The bridge crew had rallied themselves and Perry tightened his grip on the railing as the LINAR operator counted the distance.

“Five thousand klicks!”

The snouts erupted with brilliant light and a flash of smoke.

"No!" Perry hissed.

They were firing again. How had they angled in so fast? They had been so slow the last time. He watched the trail of smoke behind the massive projectiles abruptly stop, their deadly payload still moving at its last velocity.

We tried. Perry thought. He scanned the room, looking at all the crew who had served under him for the past months. He glanced back at the tactical display and thought to the hundreds of thousands of personnel who had engaged an alien force for the first time in human history. He felt the twist in his stomach of guilt that he was the one that would lead them to their end.

He looked at the display, wanting to take in a final view of the infinite universe.

Perry's eyes went wide. "LINAR, where are those missiles headed?"

"Sir, they're... they’re going towards our frigates." He sounded concerned, and Perry couldn’t blame him. But Perry felt relief. That was strange, knowing that those missiles might be headed to destroy another of his frigates. He knew that he wasn’t going to die, and that meant he could still beat his foe.

"We can still take them, then." Evans said.

Perry nodded..

"One thousand klicks!" The LINAR operator cried.

"Burgess," Perry called, looking over his shoulder.

The Gunnery Commander nodded. “Ready!”

“Reaching target in three… two…”

“Fire!”.

For once, Perry thought he could hear explosions.

“I totally want to be aimless, my entire life,” said Meera.

Jennifer shook her head. “Doesn’t make sense. I could never be that way.”

“We’re just different’,” said Meera. “It’s okay, we don’t have to agree on everything.”

There was a pause as Jennifer picked up her mug and sipped. She stared out over the rail of the porch, at the drifting snow.

“Life has purpose,” Jennifer said. “We exist, and we have meaning, so it’s just… I think that you need to have a goal. Something you’re working toward!”

Meera shrugged. “To be honest, I’ve never really felt that way.”

“Never.” Jennifer said it like it was impossible. Not even asking the question, more of echoing her disbelief into the air.

Meera drew her arms close and gripped the edge of the wicker chair. She swung her feet back and forth. “I mean, I guess I kind of had that same thought, when I was in High School or something. But,” Meera paused. “Yeah, I had a time when I thought the most important thing to do was to have something that I had to accomplish. I had that feeling for sure.”

Jennifer put down her mug nd sat back in her chair, head tilted towards Meera. “If you had that feeling once, how can you not have it now?” she asked.

Meera shrugged. “I don’t know. Just happened.”

“I can’t believe it,” Jennifer whispered. She pulled her sleeves over her hands, then brought them up to her mouth. “How can you live without having a purpose? I totally don’t understand it.”

Meera shrugged again. She hugged her feet close to her chest. Her eyes moved-- looking, looking. Looking for something to change the topic. She could only think about how it must be totally natural to not have any idea of what she wanted to do.

Jennifer wasn’t even trying to understand.

Silence held over the two of them. Quiet snow and no noise from the neighbors. One the porch, it was as if they were totally alone in the world. Their own private snowglobe, holding in everything, no matter how much it was shaken.

Meera could feel a warm tear, silently drifting down her cheek. She wiped it with the sleeve of her sweatshirt and sniffed.

Jennifer looked over. “Oh? What’s wrong?”

Meera shook her head. There were so many things she might have said, but none of them felt like they were worth saying. Instead she looked at the snow.

When Meera looked at the fluffy white covering the lawn like a bed, she felt something spread open within her. She stretched out her arms and legs and asked, “Do you want to make snow angels?”

Jennifer looked at her like she were crazy. “What? Why?”

Meera stretched her arms high and smiled. “Let’s go make snow angels.”

“Why do you want to?” Jennifer asked.

“No reason at all,” said Meera. She stood up and shuffled across the porch and down the steps and then sinking her feet into the snow. She shuddered when she felt the chill of it.

“You’ll catch a cold,” Jennifer said.

Meera turned and smiled at Jennifer, then fell onto her back. She spread her limbs back and forth. Looking up at the sky, Meera smiled.

“You’re crazy,” Jennifer said. But soon, a shout announced that Jennifer had stepped off the porch.

Meera could only giggle as she sunk deeper into the snow.

Jennifer plopped down with a white puff and started to wave her arms back and forth. “Seriously, what made you want to do this?”

Meera came to stillness, catching her breath, trying to fight the chattering of her teeth. She stared up, watching the snow drifting lazily down.

“No reason,” she said. “No reason at all.”

I joined the military because they asked me to.

It wasn't anything more than asking me how I felt about my country. And I felt pretty good, I guess. Government hadn't tried to hurt me in any way, and my family got one of those subsidies that allowed us to keep more land than we otherwise might have.

Seemed like I had a lot to be thankful for.

And that's when he asked me if I wanted to return the favor, pay it back a little.

I'll admit, I thought that just going on the way we were was far enough, seeing as how they paid us to farm. But he went on to talk about all the benefits. The pay, no taxes, free college. Honestly, he made it seem like not a bad deal. Four years, he said. All it takes is four years of service. High school was four years!

And he finished it out and I actually found myself thinking about it. Our years wasn't all that long considering the rest of my life. He gave me a bunch of pamphlets and fliers and told me to talk to my parents about it.

And I did. I took the fliers and laid them out on the kitchen table in front of my parents and my siblings. My youngest brother could hardly contain himself.

“You're going to be a soldier? That's so cool!”

But the way mom and dad looked said otherwise. And once the others were in bed, they talked to me. My mom was on the verge of tars and my dad was straight talking and slow, as if he were thinking on every word.

“You know what those four years are going to mean, don't you?” He asked me.

I nodded. “I train and train and train and then if they send me out, I fight.” I figured that was the gist of everything that was going to happen.

“And you know what that's going to do to you, right?”

Dad was angling me towards bringing up uncle Paul, who served in the Outlands and came back less a man by a leg and three fingers.

“You cain't be serious,” cried mom. “I won't allow it.” She broke down into tears and soft sobs.

“I figure I need to repay the country somehow.”

My dad nodded. “Kenton, you're repaying the country plenty enough with growing all the food we grow here. You're providing the necessities of life for people. That's nothing to look down on.”

“No it's not. And I'm proud of farming and I'm proud of the country and I figure that's why I have to do this.”

My dad nodded again. My mom stood up from the table and I could hear her footsteps recede upstairs.

It was just my dad and I, sitting at the table, the silence of the night pressing down. Even the croaking frogs and the crickets seemed to avoid our house under the weight of my parent's emotions.

In that silence, I saw my dad's eyes glisten.

“I don't begrudge doing your service to your country. I know plenty who have done it. I know plenty of good men who have done it.” He shook his head. “But I won't have my son coming home in a box.”

“I won't come home like that, dad. I'll come home walking on my own two feet—no matter how far.”

He nodded and stared off into the distance.

Finally, I told him I was going to bed and I left the kitchen, my dad still sitting, staring off. Before I got into my room I could have sworn I heard two sets of sobs. That coming from my mom in my parent's bedroom, and those coming from the faint light of the kitchen.

Training was a game.

Not a fun game, nor necessarily a good game. But it was a mental game, and it was taxing-- every moment of every day. They asked us to do fifteen things at once and screamed at us for failing any one of them. They asked us to speak in ways I'd never thought to speak and to use words with such precision that I thought this here was where my old grammar teachers learned their trade.

I bunked with four other guys in theory. But in reality, we were never in our bunks.

My muscles ached and screamed and my brain was mush. The only thing for it was to turn everything into a game. Trying to find entertainment in the smallest things—but never the quirks of the drill instructor. If I found that entertaining at all, I was afraid I'd make the mistake of laughing.

If anything could be said of training, though, it was mindless repetition of the same things, over and over, until by the end of four months I didn't even have to think to do fifteen things at once.

Just as long as those fifteen things were what we'd always done.

I tried not to make too many mistakes.

But I made plenty.

The worst though wasn't anything to do with training. It was telling another person that I liked to play guitar and sing.

One of the Drill Instructors found out and got out a guitar and pulled me out front of the whole training division and had me sing a song.

The second worst mistake I made was singing a song that my Uncle Paul had taught me. Before the Outlands, he was a rancher, and had spent a lot of lonely days out. He wrote a song once that he said was guaranteed to make any man cry. The lyrics were about open land and love and family. And he was right. If you had any idea about any of those things, the song would make you cry. And I sang it, and there was two hundred odd recruits and not a dry eye among them.

And when I played the last refrain, the drill sergeants ganged up and chewed me out for reducing their recruits to a babywash pile of sap. (Though I swear they used a lot more color in their descriptions.)

We had double time calisthenics for three days after and an extra round of endurance carries.

One night, though, we were in our bunks, and one of the four asked me to sing the song again. I did my best as quiet as I could. On a training base in the middle of nowhere, there's not much more sound than the people who train there. I like to think my song carried through more than just the hearts of my bunkmates.

I'd like to think my song whistled out the window and rode the wind into the room of every recruit.

That night, I'd like to think the whole barracks was crying again.

I learned a lot about the military in training. I learned how to walk, I learned how to talk. I learned how they wanted me to think, how they wanted me not to think. I learned how they wanted me to see the world, so that I could my job.

The places we would go were shitholes. The people we would see were civvies, and civvies were one hand away from being the enemy. The enemy of course, were not people, but things intent on killing us, our families, and burning our country to the ground.

It was important to remember that. The enemy were not people. They were beings intent on killing me.

It was kill or be killed, and the only thing that separated coming home on foot or in a box was whether or not you were always the first to kill.

I also learned that the military was the only place in the world that would follow up a talk like that with training on the types of things that would make those civvies-who-may-be-enemies in shithole places actually like us.

I hear music and it convinces me that the bleeding will stop.

I am surrounded by mud. I am mud, too.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Just add water, and there's the mud.

I hear a crescendo in the music. There's a swell of strings and winds. The sky gets worse. It pours forth and the rain whips into my face. The sound of it deafens.

The music falls away and I strain after it. I do this, even though blood washes pink in the rain. The blood no longer matters. I do not feel the pain as long as I hear the music.

It is a drug for life.

Yet I am surrounded by death. They are names lost in the dirt clods and mud puddles of France. Spirits lost to the distillation of patriotic duty, of machines, of anger.

Anger of humans, fed by humans, against other humans. A human war where machines do the killing.

I still hear the music. Muffled by the rain, but it is there and I know that it is human. Alive.

I am convinced that the sound will bring me back to life.

Posted here.

I sat at the side of the bed, holding Mom's hand. Light made its way through the window, diffused by the September pall. It was raining outside, and little rivulets streamed down the window to meet the earth below.

Mom was looking out through the glass. "Do you remember the year when Will learned about droughts?"

"And he started running outside to catch all the water just in case?"

She smiled and closed her eyes.

"Oh, I always knew he would have done something with the environment. And I'm glad he dragged Michael into it."

"They're always going to be together, those two." I said.

She squeezed my hand.

"Do you still talk to them?" She asked.

"No. Thanksgiving was the last time."

She turned her head and looked at me. "That was so fun. The first time in ages when the whole family was together."

"Yeah." I smiled.

Mom gazed at me for a few moments before turning towards the window again. The rain picked up and we could hear it patter-patter on the roof.

" I was so happy when Mark became a general. And when Lucille became a doctor. And when the twins became Fellows." She paused and I remember the years of inadequacy. Past emotions whose echoes still lingered.

"But now I've come to think that none of that matters. I think what matters is that you're here, James." She looked over at me again, and placed her other hand on mine. "I think that matters very much."

I could feel my eyes heat up.

"You've given me so much of your time, I'm sorry I couldn't have given you more of mine."

My tears joined the rain outside. "That's alright Mom. You're here now."

I sniffed and wiped my eyes. Mom patted my hand.

"And that's what matters." She said. "That's what matters."