Lucy A. Snyder - Sparks and Shadows

Praise for Sparks and Shadows

“Snyder has a unique voice and her work is almost instantly recognisable … It’s rare to encounter a writer who so loves words and the changes that can be rung and the tricks that can be played. Rare and precious. But because of Snyder’s versatility, it’s difficult to give an overview of this collection. Every piece is different, and every piece demands attention … Dark, funny, and romantic by turns, Sparks and Shadows is a must read. Go! Buy! Read!”

— Greatest Uncommon Denominator Magazine

“(N)ot only does Lucy A. Snyder write truly intelligent horror that is both witty and political but her stories and poems tap the feminist potential of horror to illuminate the shadowy extremes of both love and hate… Whether you are looking for dark fantasy or horror or just something to tickle your funny bone, I recommend you pick up a copy.”

— The Green Man Review

“The short stories and poems in Lucy Snyder’s debut collection range from dark to very dark to sexy to hopeful, often with a wry twist of humor … Highly recommended…”

— Sequential Tart

“At times poignant, witty, erotic, thoughtful, chilling and maniacally gleeful, Sparks and Shadows is a delightful collection and book length introduction to an author to watch.”

— Horror Reader

“Lucy Snyder’s Sparks and Shadows is everything you could want in a short story collection. Elegant, beautiful prose, deep emotional writing and powerful stories. Do yourself a favor and grab this one!”

— James A. Moore, author of Serenity Falls

Sparks

Lucy A. Snyder

CREATIVE GUY PUBLISHING

Sparks

by Lucy A. Snyder

Published by Creative Guy Publishing

Vancouver British Columbia Canada

No portion of this book may be reproduced in any way, except short quotation for the purpose of review, without the express written consent of the author.

CGP-2130

ISBN-10 1-894953-79-7

ISBN-13 978-1-894953-79-5

SPARKS edition–first edition Sparks and Shadows originally published 2007 by HW Press.

First CGP Printing April 2010

Cover art by Malcolm McClinton

www.creativeguypublishing.com

Sparks

Lucy A. Snyder

CREATIVE GUY PUBLISHING

Publisher’s Note

This is a short version of Lucy Snyder’s award-winning collection Sparks and Shadows. If you enjoy these stories, we hope you will consider purchasing the entire collection, which is available both as an ebook and as a trade paperback.

Introduction: The Surprising Pain and Joy of Lucy A. Snyder (or, Kill Gump)

by Christopher Golden

I hate Forrest Gump. Let’s get that out of the way right off. The movie has its charming moments, but there’s too much treacle to go along with it, and too many of its genuine moments have become—through no fault of its own—cultural touchstones, taking all of the power out of them. Any sentimental wisdom or sweetness evident in the “Life is like a box of chocolates” scene has been drained away by that dreaded disease, Catch-Phrase Fever. Fucking Gump. It’s no Titanic—by which I mean it actually has some decent acting—but it bugs the hell out of me.

All of which is by way of apology for my regretful surrender to the impulse to say this: Lucy A. Snyder’s short stories really are like a box of chocolates. The absolute best thing about the experience of reading Sparks and Shadows is that as you begin each story, you really have no idea what you’re going to get. Some of the chocolates are sweet and some are sour. Some are full of poison and others hide razor blades that will leave you raw and bloody. Quite a few have an aphrodisiac quality … even some of the poison ones.

The metaphor is overworked. I know. But if you’re rolling your eyes about it, I have one reply—read the book. Seriously. Maybe, like those scenes in the movie, the metaphor has lost its power through overuse, but it is nevertheless the most apt comparison.

So, what will you find on the following pages?

Pain and joy, often surprising, though not in equal measure.

Snyder writes with an unwavering confidence and purpose. There is madness in these pages. There is profound regret and lingering melancholy to be found in “So Lonely as the Grave” and “Darwin’s Children.” Much has been made about the eroticism present in some of these tales—including “Boxlunch,” “The Roses of Gomorrah,” and the phenomenal “The Sheets Were Clean and Dry”—yet I believe that instead of breathless eroticism you will find an admirably honest sexuality that is just one of Snyder’s keenly-honed tools.

Within these pages, you will find women who demand their dignity, even if only instinct has ever told them they deserve it. You will encounter twists that work even if you’ve managed to see them coming. (One of those is in my favorite story in the book, but I can’t tell you which without giving it away.) There is grotesquerie here, there are ugly consequences, and there is sadness. There are sinister powers lurking just beyond the curtains of our perception.

And there are other worlds.

Perhaps more than anything else, it is Lucy A. Snyder’s science-fiction that truly surprises me. I confess I am not a great reader of science-fiction, but I would consume it voraciously if all of its practitioners brought the kind of dark imagination to their work that Snyder does to hers. Some of the stories are shocking in that they culminate in at least a version of happiness [as do several of the non-SF tales in the book], and hope. Others, however, are full of dread. “A Preference for Silence” and “Through thy Bounty” are two of the best stories in the entire volume, and “Burning Bright” reads like the prelude to a series of novels I would love to read.

“The Dogs of Summer,” on the other hand, is not science-fiction but urban fantasy, full of compassion and the woman-striving-for-dignity element that echoes so convincingly and powerfully in a number of these stories. It is also the only story in the book that seems written by the same author as Snyder’s excellent first novel, Spellbent.

Yet there are things other than stories within these pages. Snyder offers a small handful of pieces that might be essays or arch asides, as well as a number of her excellent poems. There is an elegance to these poems that is inescapable, and they share the same sense of purpose as the collection’s prose stories. Lest you be tempted to skip these pieces, let me warn you how foolhardy that would be. Snyder’s poems—in particular “The Jarred Heart”—are as effective and affecting as her prose tales.

It was my great pleasure to read these stories, and I’m certain you’ll enjoy them as much as I did, and be haunted by them, just as I was. I’m also certain that you will come away from them with the same inescapable conclusion—that Lucy A. Snyder is a writer whose stories deserve to be savored.

Sort of like a box of chocolates.

Fucking Gump.

Boxlunch

ON THE sixth day the Libertarian People’s Army had the city under terrorist siege, Wendy Banks and her husband Juan Petrov ran out of orange juice, beer, hummus, and condoms.

Wendy, who’d reluctantly resorted to drinking some generic-brand diet soda someone had abandoned at their last party, continued to rummage vainly through the pile of ROM disks, computer cables, socks, and sundry debris around their bed in search of contraceptives.

“Just one condom,” she muttered. “My left tit for one lousy condom.”

She spotted a thin patch in a promisingly white medical wrapper peeking from beneath a pair of sunglasses. A hormone transderm? Oh, that would be entirely too sweet!

“Come to mama!” She snatched up the wrapper, only to have her hopes dashed. “Dammit! You’re a band-aid!”

Disgusted, she crumpled the Curad and threw it back in the pile.

“Hey honey,” Juan called from his perch on the couch in the other room. “Any luck?”

“No.” Wendy stomped into the living room. “We are entirely out of anything even remotely resembling birth control.”

“Well, there’s always your sparkling personality,” Juan replied, then dove for the meager cover of the throw pillows at the other end of the couch.

“Die!” Wendy leaped onto the couch, grabbed her husband by the waistband of his jeans and bit him on the ass.

“Ow! Hey, no teeth, no teeth!”

Wendy sat up, scowling.

“That was a mean thing to say,” she pouted.

“But highly accurate,” he pointed out, rubbing his rump.

Wendy growled and buried her face in her hands. “You know I’m PMS. I’m so horny I could die, and with my luck I’d get pregnant if a sperm were to jump up and yell ‘Boo!’ at me. And I’ve been stuck here all week because the freaking Libbies blew up the freaking gas company, killing dozens of poor freaks working third shift and leaving me freaking unemployed. And my vibrator’s burned out. And I can’t even spend any time with my own husband because your stupid bosses decided they need two backup sysadmins on premises at all times. Though I don’t see how your pulling double-shifts for them is gonna help if the Libbies do their normal thing and blow shit up.

“And when they finally let you take a day off…WE HAVE NO FREAKING CONDOMS!”

She began to weep.

“Aw, don’t cry, honey.” Juan scooted over beside his wife, slipped his arm around her and began to nuzzle her neck. He’d recently trimmed his black goatee and the bristles tickled. “Maybe Penny has some in her apartment upstairs?”

“Maybe,” Wendy sniffled. “She always did take that ‘Be Prepared’ thing she learned in Kid Scouts pretty seriously.”

“Computer,” Juan announced. “Connect to Penny’s smartwall.”

The big flatscreen monitor on the wall facing their couch clicked on. Onscreen, an image resolved of a young dreadlocked woman with pink plastic snakes wound through her black hair.

“Hi, I’m the avatar for Penny Lucas. In this, our sixth day of chaos, the hot conversation topic remains: the Libertarian People’s Army. Neither Libertarian, nor for the people, nor an army? You decide. Let’s look at the evidence. So far, they seem to be a bunch of unwashed dorks who figured out how to make bombs–”

“Avatar,” Wendy broke in, rolling her eyes. Penny had it programmed to talk endlessly to foil marketers. “Is Penny home?”

“Mmmm, I dunno, sugar. You got the magic word?” The avatar crossed her arms and cocked her head to one side.

“The magic word is ‘weenie-roast’.” Wendy replied.

The avatar’s image froze for the briefest beat while the password authenticated. “Voice and data match!” the avatar exclaimed. “Hi Wendy, hi Juan. How you lovebirds doing? Sadly, Miss Penny is not at home right now; she’s pulling double shifts at St. Anne’s. She won’t be home for another 14 hours, and after that she’s gonna be asleep.”

Juan sighed. “Okay, thanks, avatar. Computer, break connection. Find us a music server playing some light trance.”

The stereo came on. Wendy recognized the music as being an old Massive Attack remix.

Juan wrapped his arms around Wendy and began to kiss the sensitive spot behind her left ear. Shivers of pleasure ran down her spine.

“Oh, Juan, don’t start,” she moaned. “We can’t–”

“Yes, we can,” he whispered. “You just don’t get any man meat.”

“But I want man meat,” she whispered back. “So let’s go hit the convenience store, huh?”

***

The streets were a stinking mess; garbage service had been suspended three weeks earlier because the Libbies had taken to firing surface-to-surface missiles at city waste collection vehicles. A pair of National Guardsmen were patrolling the street on foot, automatic rifles held at the ready.

Wendy and Juan picked their way through ruptured bags of garbage fermenting on the sidewalk in the spring sun and entered Halfmann’s Deli & Grocery. They split up, Wendy to seek condoms and Juan for orange juice.

Wendy found a single $30 3-pack of lambskins still on the rack in the toiletries aisle. They had expired the previous month. She was still staring at the pack when Juan came up beside her with an elderly-looking quart carton of grapefruit juice.

“They want $15 for this, can you believe it?” he whispered. “They’re out of everything else except a bottle of Clamato.”

She tapped the price tag above the condoms.

“Jee-sus,” he said. “I guess it’s tap water and oral sex for us until this mess is over with, huh?”

Wendy’s eyes narrowed. “Ve should not giff up on ze condom mission so soon, Comrade Petrov. Ve still haff Thorn’s Pharmacy to infiltrate–”

“I told you I need butter for my kittens!” someone shouted.

Wendy and Juan turned. A street person had come into the store while they were shopping. His gray hair and beard were a wild mane around his grimy face. He wore a stained, peeling raincoat over a mismatched exercise suit.

“Sir, please, we’re all out of butter–” the girl at the cash register said.

“Liar!” the man shrieked. “The lady in the colander helmet told me I should butter the kittens to ensure their acceptance into Vishnu’s secret garden. She said you would have the butter, but you would hide it from me, because you don’t want poor deserving kittens to reach nirvana!”

“We don’t have any butter…really,” the girl pleaded, glancing out the door past the man. Wendy suspected she was hoping the Guardsmen were within earshot.

“Liar! Liarliarliaaaaar!” The man scrabbled at the pocket of his coat and pulled out a machine pistol. It looked to be one of the cheap Chinese models, but that made it no less lethal.

“Oh shit,” Juan muttered. “I bet one of the Libbies gave him that. It’s just the kind of uncontrolled chaos that really turns their crank.”

The old man was waving the pistol in the air, and the cashier was cowering behind the counter. “Vishnu wants the butter now! Now now now!”

Before Wendy could stop him, Juan had grabbed one of the two remaining jars of petroleum jelly and stepped to the front of the aisle.

“I have butter of the earth,” Juan said, holding out the jar. “The dinosaurs made it long ago, and it is very pure. I think Vishnu would be pleased to have it on his kittens.”

“Earth butter?” The old man looked puzzled, but he lowered the pistol to waist level.

“Yes, earth butter. Take it. It’s all yours.”

The man reached for the jar.

Wendy saw movement in the corner of her eye. A Guardsman had stepped into the store, raising his rifle.

A pop and flash from the rifle’s barrel.

The old man’s shoulder exploded in a crimson mist. He shrieked, his gun hand jerking up reflexively. His pistol vomited bullets right at her husband.

Juan fell.

***

The ambulances got to the store surprisingly fast. Wendy refused to leave her husband’s side, so the medics reluctantly let her ride with him on the way to the hospital.

She gripped his hand while the EMTs worked to control the bleeding. His belly had been nearly ripped to shreds by the two bullets the old man had managed to fire directly into him. She’d never seen so much blood in her life. Juan’s face was paper-white, and his fingers were like ice.

“Wendy?” Juan asked weakly.

“I’m here, Juan,” she said.

“Can’t…can’t feel my legs…” he trailed off, his eyes rolling up into his skull.

“Get me another unit of plasma, his pressure’s dropping fast,” the lead EMT said.

“We’re out, man,” the other said.

“Shit! Well, his microchip says he’s covered for resurrection. Pass me the cerebral recorder.”

“Oh God, he’s not–” she began.

“I’m afraid so, ma’am. Please stay clear,” the first EMT replied. The second passed him a fat steel cylinder with a handle and a cable leading to what looked like a hairnet made up of wires and electrodes. The first EMT put the net over her husband’s head and flipped a switch on the top of the cylinder.

“Push 9 milligrams of epinephrine; he’s gotta be conscious for a good read,” the EMT continued.

The second medic injected the drug into her husband. His eyes fluttered open, and the heart monitor started beeping madly.

“He’s taching bad,” the second said, pulling out a pair of defibrillator paddles.

“No, don’t,” the first said. “His heart’s pumping air. You shock him now, it’ll screw up the recording and he’ll be gone for good.”

Her husband went into a spasm of coughing, bright pink foam spilling from his lips. Then he went limp.

The heart monitor flatlined.

Wendy stared at the cerebral recorder. “Did – did you get him?”

The EMT checked the monitor on the side of the cylinder. “Yep. Got him. Your husband’s alive and well in softcopy, ma’am.”

***

After a nerve-wracking hour-long wait, Wendy was met by a doctor from Community General Hospital’s cloning department.

“Wendy Banks?” he asked as he approached her in the waiting room. He carried an odd-looking black computer drive attached to a fabric shoulder strap. “I’m Dr. Smythe.”

She stood and shook his hand. “What’s happened?”

“Well, your husband is fortunate to have an employer who provides for such excellent resurrection benefits. The EMTs were able to do a full, clean download of your husband’s mind in the ambulance. We’ve extracted his DNA, and have begun culturing a clone that will be ready in about 5 years. According to the terms of his insurance, he must stay with his company for at least a year after he is able to return to work, or he loses the right to be downloaded into the clone.”

Wendy nodded, waiting for him to continue.

“Unfortunately, due to the recent trouble with the terrorists, there have been an unusually large number of deaths of people with resurrection benefits. As a result, this hospital currently does not have any temporary bodies to download your husband into. Also—” the doctor took a deep breath “—we are out of the more modern quantum storage units, so we had to put his dynamic data into a Dirac drive.”

Wendy stared at the unit in the doctor’s hands. The Dirac quantum drives were painfully obsolete and tended to lose data like a cat sheds hair.

“The drive’s lead shielded to make it as resistant as possible to data loss from stray cosmic rays, but our cyberneurologist estimates you have 5 hours to get him to a downloadable body before his data starts getting corrupted. I called around, and there’s a replacement body available at St. Anne’s. Unfortunately, all our ambulances have been called to the scene of a suicide bombing out in Grandview. I’ve called you a cab; it should take less than an hour to get across town, so there should be plenty of time to get your husband taken care of.”

Smythe pulled a mini-headset out of the pocket of his white lab coat and a small plastic zip bag containing a microchip. “The Dirac is always on, so your husband is conscious in a virtual reality environment inside it. To talk to him and hear him, plug in this headset. The drive also has standard input/output ports if you have a camera or digital device you want to hook up to communicate with him. And here’s his ID chip; they’ll need to scan it at St. Anne’s before he can be processed.”

Wendy took the items and thanked the doctor — while inwardly cringing at the thought that they’d stored him in a medium slightly less durable than toilet paper — and he escorted her out to the front doors.

While she waited for the cab, Wendy slipped the microchip into her pocket. She clipped on the headset’s earpiece and swiveled the matchstick-thin steel microphone arm into place above her lips. She plugged the cord into the Dirac unit.

She heard a click. “Hello?”

“Juan, is that you?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine…a little dizzy.” The voice was a flat, generic voice-synth, nothing like her husband’s warm baritone. “Where are you? I came to in this hospital room, but the door’s locked and the phone’s dead. Or it was, until you called just now. It feels like I’ve been in here for hours.”

A green cab pulled up. Wendy pushed through the glass revolving doors. “I’m on my way to St. Anne’s,” she told her husband.

The cabbie rolled down the passenger window. “Are you Wendy Banks?” he asked.

“Yes,” she replied.

The cabbie smiled and nodded at the back seat. “Hop on in and we’ll get you to St. Anne’s in a jiffy.”

“Who’s that I hear in the background,” Juan asked.

“Just the cabbie,” Wendy said as she climbed into the car.

“Am I at St. Anne’s?” Juan asked.

“Uh…sort of…”

“Sort of? What does that mean?” he asked, then paused. “Wait a minute. I remember you were with me in the ambulance, and I…oh God. I got shot, and I’m not shot anymore. Even if they’d used the fastgrow gel on me, I’d still be hurting right about now.”

Another long pause. “Oh crap. I died, didn’t I? I’ve been boxlunched.”

“It’s not so bad. Really,” she said, trying to sound cheerful. “They got a full download in the ambulance. No detected memory loss. And there’s a new body waiting for you at St. Anne’s.”

“The company will be pleased, I’m sure,” he replied dryly. “So what kind of a box did they put me in?”

“Uh.” Wendy considered lying to her husband, but they’d long ago promised never to keep the truth from each other. “A Dirac 20 terrabyte.”

“A D-dirac?” he stammered. “What, were they all out of papyrus and stone tablets?”

“It’ll be okay,” she insisted, hugging the unit to her chest. “We have hours before the expected drive failure point.”

“Hours! Woo! Be still my beating heart,” he said, his sick desperation clear even through the synth’s mechanical tones.

“Is that your husband in there?” the cabbie asked.

“Yes,” she replied.

“Lucky man, gettin’ a second chance like this.”

“Yeah,” she admitted. “But he’d have been luckier not to have gotten shot today.”

“Was it a Libbie thing?” the cabbie asked. “Not to be pryin’ or nothin’.”

“Maybe. This crazy homeless guy had a machine pistol, and a National Guardsman got trigger-happy. I can’t think of many places the old guy could’ve picked up a gun like that unless the terrorists gave it to him.”

“Sounds like a Libbie trick,” the cabbie agreed. “Heard they were doing shit like putting explosives in kids’ toys and stuff. And they still haven’t made any money demands or nothin’! They’re just fucking stuff up to fuck it up. They’re not even anarchists, they’re, like—” the cabbie snapped his fingers, seemingly trying to coax the word from his mind.

“Nihilists?” she prompted.

“Yeah! That! Fucked up fucks, ya ask me. I mean, if it was the Indians trying to reclaim California or something, that I could maybe understand, but this trying to destroy society stuff…totally wacko. And they’ve got a rich guy bankrolling them — what’s up with that?”

“I heard he’s an extreme environmentalist,” Wendy replied. “He decided the only solution to save the rest of the Earth is to wipe out as much of the human race as possible. Funding the Libbies is just a local means to a global end for him.”

The cabbie shook his head. “Buncha wackos.”

“Well, human overpopulation and overconsumption has caused the extinction of 75% of the species on the planet,” her husband commented inside her left ear. “There is something to be said for reducing the population as quickly as possible.”

Wendy frowned. “Are you saying you’d rather be dead? I mean, you’re population, too.”

“No, no,” her husband said quickly. “I’m a man of enlightened self-interest, and I very much want to continue living, if for no other reason than to be able to make love to you every night for the next fifty years. At least.”

She smiled and hugged the unit tighter. Nice save, honey, she thought. They’d had some of their worst arguments over ecopolitical issues. Wendy was all for trying to save the environment, but she couldn’t agree with the notion of killing people, even indirectly, to save animals. There had been a time when Juan would argue a point until they were both close to tears. They’d both learned a lot about agreeing to disagree in the two years they’d been married.

He paused. “It’s gonna take them how long to get my clone up to size?”

“Five years, the doctor said,” Wendy replied.

“You wouldn’t happen to know what my ‘temporary’ body looks like, do you?” he asked. “I mean, what if it’s got buck teeth and no chin? Or massive amounts of body hair? Or a microscopic dick?”

Wendy sighed. “Honey, what’s that they say about beggars and choosers?”

“I know, I know,” he replied. “I suppose I should just be glad I’m still virtually alive.”

They were on the city’s interior loop around downtown. Only a few cars besides theirs were on the road; well over half the city’s population had fled or been evacuated, and the rest had been officially discouraged from unnecessary travel. Abandoned and wrecked cars lined the sides of the freeway. Wendy could see that at least half of the big glass-and-steel high-rises showed some form of rocket or bomb damage. In the first few days of the siege, the terrorists had bombed buildings containing offices for credit card companies, banks, insurance agencies, utility companies, and the like. Collateral infrastructure damage, the Libbie spokesman had called it in his video to the news sites. Take out the financial underpinnings of society, and society will fall. We will destroy the corrupt and rebuild in the ashes of the old.

Wendy counted herself and her husband lucky that his company’s insurance was based in Canada.

“Oh crap, what’s that?” she heard the cabbie say, craning his neck up at the sky.

Then he was slamming on the brakes, tires shrieking, the car slewing sideways on the dry pavement. Wendy held onto the quantum drive for dear life as she was thrown sideways in her seatbelt. A car behind them honked frantically and Wendy heard the squeal of tires as it swerved to avoid a collision.

Then the mortar hit not twenty yards in front of the cab. There was a tremendous boom and mushroom of orange fire. Hunks of concrete and asphalt rained down on the cab, cracking the windshield.

“What was that? What’s happening?” her husband shouted in her ear.

“M-mortar attack,” Wendy stammered. “W-we’re okay. I think.”

“You okay back there, lady?” the cabbie asked.

She could only nod in reply.

The cabbie pulled a shotgun from beneath the front seat and got out of the car. Wendy fumbled with her seatbelt, got it unlatched, and pushed open the door to follow the cabbie.

He was standing in front of the car, staring at the smoking hole in the highway. A ten-foot-diameter section had been knocked out, sending huge hunks of rebarred concrete crashing to the road below the highway. Fortunately, it didn’t look as if anyone had been crushed beneath the rubble.

“I’m going to have to turn back,” the cabbie said. He nodded towards a section of the city outside the loop, beyond the downtown area. “St. Anne’s is to the southwest of here; I’d say it’s about four miles on foot.”

“On foot?” Wendy could feel the blood draining from her face.

“I’m real sorry, lady,” the cabbie said. “But I’ve got to go back. Company rules; a cab gets damaged like this, I gotta take it back to the garage. You could come with me and get another cab, but now that the loop’s trashed, it might take a real long time to get back down to the hospital. I think you can get there quicker on your own.”

The man went back to his cab and opened up the trunk. He pulled out a big coil of rope and a pistol.

“Here, take this,” he said, offering her the gun. “You should be out of Libbie territory where you’re going, but you never know. Go on, take it; I got lots more at home.”

Wendy accepted the pistol, hefting it in her hand.

“If you gotta shoot it, hold it with both hands, ‘cause it’s got a mother of a kick. You look like a pretty strong lady, so it shouldn’t be a problem. The clip holds nine rounds, and there’s a round in the chamber. Safety’s on.”

The cabbie began to unwind the rope coil. Wendy tucked the pistol into the waistband of her jeans. The cabbie tossed her an end of the rope.

“Tie this around your waist,” he said, “and I’ll tie the other to the bumper and help lower you down through the hole…”

***

Once Wendy was on the ground and the cabbie had shouted his goodbye and disappeared, Wendy said to her husband, “Well, this is going well. I have no ride, you have no body, and we never did find any condoms.”

“Though the whole condom problem is moot ‘til I get a new body,” he pointed out. “But, look on the bright side…you also have a gun.”

“And I have the sense of direction of a donut,” she said, looking up and down the deserted streets. Off in the distance, she could hear someone firing a gun. “I have no idea how to get to the hospital. It looked kind of easy from up there, but now that I’m down here…”

“You have your PDA, right? Just look the directions up on the ‘Net,” he said.

She checked her back pocket; the slim, playing card-sized PDA was still there. She pulled it out and flipped it open, then began to unspool the thin uplink cable stored in the edge of its case. “I have a better idea,” she said, plugging the PDA cable into the Dirac and tucking the PDA into her shirt pocket. “Why don’t you look up the directions, and read them off to me? I hate trying to read detailed stuff on this little screen.”

“But how do I—” he began, then paused. “Wait, there’s a video monitor over here in the corner. I tried it before and it didn’t work. Maybe…bingo! Works now. We have ‘Net. Where you at, honey?”

Wendy glanced at the nearest street sign. “I’m at the corner of 33^rd and Hudson.”

“Looks like you just go left down 33^rd for about a mile and a half, then hang a right onto Riverside until you reach the hospital.”

“Sounds easy enough,” she replied. “Hey, could you find some dirty stories online and read to me while I walk? It’s awful quiet out here.”

“Sure,” Juan replied. “Anything for my little nymphomaniac.”

***

Wendy had been tromping down 33^rd for a half hour when a National Guard truck rumbled onto the road toward her. She was in a commercial section of town; there was a Chinese restaurant, a small motel, an office supply store and an office strip nearby. All were boarded up and seemed entirely deserted.

“Ooh, it’s the cavalry,” Wendy told her husband, readjusting the Dirac’s shoulder strap for the umpteenth time. The drive had seemed to double in weight since she’d been carrying it. “Maybe they’ll give me a ride to the hospital. These boots were not made for walking.”

“Just be careful, honey…these guys do seem to be in the ‘shoot first, questions later’ mode.”

“I’ll be careful.” Wendy began to wave her arms and jump up and down.

The truck ground to a stop a dozen yards away. Wendy ran up to the driver’s window.

“Hi, guys, I was wondering if you could…” Her voice failed and her heart dropped to the bottom of her stomach when she saw that the two men inside the cab were unshaven and wore ragged Army surplus combat fatigues re-dyed an off-gray and plain black baseball caps. Libbies. She stepped away from the truck, her pulse pounding in her ears.

“Say, that’s a real nice quantum drive you got there. Think I want me one of those for target practice,” the driver drawled.

Wendy shook her head. “This one’s not for sale,” she said, voice shaking, still backing up.

“I didn’t ask if it was for sale, now did I, bitch?”

Wendy pulled the pistol out of her waistband and pointed it at the driver. “Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson say back the fuck off!”

The Libbie in the passenger seat raised a machine gun. “And Mr. Tommy here says hand us your stuff, and we’ll consider not wasting your ass.”

Wendy fired two wild shots into the cab, nearly dropping the gun from the force of its recoil. She sprinted for the cover of the boarded-up motel across the street. She heard an angry yell from the men in the cab, then the rattle of the machine gun. Bullets whanged into the pavement near her feet. She pelted into the nearest breezeway, stumbled rounding the corner, and took refuge in the doorway of one of the courtyard-facing rooms.

“I’m guessing they weren’t Guard,” Juan said. “How much trouble are we in?”

“Tons,” Wendy squeaked, getting a better grip on the pistol. “Dial out on my PDA and call the Guard. Maybe they can do something,” she whispered.

Wendy heard the truck’s doors slam and then the sound of booted feet hitting pavement.

“Ah, just let it go, bro. We gotta get the stuff back to camp,” one man said.

“Fuck that,” the other said. “She shot me! Her fuckin’ head’s gonna be my new hood ornament.”

“She grazed you. This is a waste of time.”

“Shuddup. She could be anywhere around here.”

Wendy held her breath. She heard their footsteps come through the breezway, then turn in her direction—

Anger and panic got the better of her. She jumped out of the doorway, firing the pistol. The men jumped back, surprised, weapons falling from their hands as Wendy’s bullets slammed into their chests and bellies.

In seconds it was over. Wendy’s pistol was empty and the men lay dead on the motel sidewalk. A wide pool of dark blood was spreading beneath their bodies.

“What’s going on? What’s going on?” Juan was hollering.

“Oh…oh God,” Wendy said, her whole body quivering. “I killed them. There’s blood everywhere. I think I’m gonna be sick.”

“Deep breaths, honey, deep breaths,” Juan said. “You better make sure there aren’t any more.”

“Right. Make sure there aren’t any more,” she repeated numbly. She dropped the spent pistol and picked up one of the automatic rifles, grimacing at the sticky blood on the barrel and stock.

Holding the gun at the ready, she crept back out of the courtyard through the breezeway toward the truck. The men had left it running. No one else seemed to be in the cab. She circled around back, raising the rifle, expecting a half-dozen terrorists to come leaping out from beneath the camouflage canopy—

—but the back of the truck was empty.

Except for several dozen cases of ammunition and what looked like long crates of rockets and rifles.

Wendy stared at the idling vehicle and its valuable contents. A smile crept across her face. “Honey, do you have the Guard on the phone?”

“They put me on hold,” he replied grumpily.

“When you do get through to them, please inform them that I have liberated one of their missing vehicles and have retrieved a nontrivial quantity of munitions. They can pick up said munitions and truck at St. Anne’s hospital. Whenever they can get around to it, of course.

“In the meantime, honey, we’ve got a ride!”

***

Wendy spent three hours in St. Anne’s fifth floor waiting room, alternately dozing and reading magazines until Penny came down from the nurses’ station on her break. The two women chatted for a while, and then Penny sneaked Wendy into an unused hospital room so she could catch a proper nap while she waited for the doctors to finish downloading and neurologically imprinting Juan into his new body.

Four hours later, Penny gently shook Wendy awake.

“Wha—?” Wendy groggily asked.

“Husband is served!” Penny’s broad smile stood out a stark white against her dark face in the dimness. “Juan’s D&I went smooth as butter. He’s awake, and ready to see you now.”

Wendy laced her boots back on, ran her fingers through her hair, and followed Penny down the hall.

Penny stopped just in front of Juan’s hospital room. “He’s going to be partly paralyzed for the next few days until he can teach his new spinal cord what it’s supposed to do. He’ll have to be in physical therapy for several weeks before he can function more or less normally. In the meantime, he’ll need your help to learn how to use his new body.”

Penny pressed a small plastic package into Wendy’s hand and ushered her into the room. “Think of it as a new honeymoon. I’ll make sure you lovebirds aren’t disturbed for the next few hours.”

Penny closed the door behind Wendy. Wendy heard the click of the lock. She lifted her hand and looked at the package her friend had given her. Condoms.

Smiling, Wendy approached her husband’s hospital bed. A completely strange body lay there, hairless and skin still shiny as all fresh tank-grown bodies were. The new body was smaller, younger and thinner than Juan’s old body, his fingers long and elegant. He wore only a thin hospital gown and an ID bracelet around his wrist. There was a small band-aid on the back of his hand where they’d reinserted his microchip.

“How are you feeling, honey?” she asked.

The man turned his head toward her but did not otherwise move. “I feel so weird,” he said. His voice was softer and mellower than Juan’s. “This body feels completely wrong in a thousand little ways. I can’t get over how my teeth feel; I keep running my tongue over them. And…I can’t move much below my neck. That’s got me a little freaked out.”

“Penny said all that’s normal. And you’ll only have to live with it for a couple of years. In the meantime, it’s time for your first physical therapy session.” Smirking, she held up the condoms.

“Ah, I see our mission was successful after all, Comrade,” he said. “But I don’t know that I can…”

“We’ll see about that,” she smiled.

Wendy set the condoms on the foot of the bed. She started to dance, doing a slow striptease for her husband. When she was completely naked, her nipples hardening in the cold hospital air, she saw that Juan had made a tent of his hospital gown.

“Looks like you’re gonna do just fine,” she said. She crawled up onto the bed and pushed the gown up around his chest.

“But how am I down there…?” he asked, looking worried.

She smiled and gave him a long, slow kiss.

“Like I said,” she replied, “You’re gonna do just fine.”

Camp Songs: Innocent Fun or Diabolical Brainwashing Plot?

PICTURE, IF you will, a road trip to attend New Year’s Eve festivities in Philadelphia. It was late at night, and it was my turn to drive. Our car was stuffed to the brim with goth chicks. I thought everyone else was asleep. I couldn’t reach the CD case. So, to keep myself awake, I started singing the first thing that popped into my head:

I’ve got something in my pocket
That belongs across my face
I keep it very close at hand
In a most convenient place
I’m sure you couldn’t guess it
If you guessed a long, long while
So I’ll take it out and put it on
It’s a great big Brownie smile!

“You’ve got what in your pocket?” Drea asked, cracking one mascaraed eyelid and peering at me.

“A smile?” I replied.

She started giggling. “Substitute ‘ball gag’ or ‘throbbing cock’ and you’ve got one of the filthiest songs known to humanity. Where did you learn that?”

“Summer scout camp,” I said. “It’s the ‘Smile Song’; every Girl Scout knows it.”

She broke into louder peals of laughter that awakened the rest of the car, and she was eager to share the joke. The meme spread amongst my friends:

“Is that a great big Brownie smile in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?”

Part of me was appalled at the treatment this sweet little childhood song was getting at the hands of my barbaric goth friends. But I soon realized that the kink in that song was built-in: it never sounds innocent when it’s coming from the lips of an adult.

Girl Scout songs are a kind of indoctrination; they’re supposed to be a fun way of teaching little girls positive values and good citizenship. But did they have a subtext that was teaching us something quite different?

I started thinking about all the other camp songs that were firmly wedged in my memory. And then I remembered Rhino.

Rhino was the nickname of one of the counselors at one of the camps I attended. She was, in retrospect, butch as fuck. After a long day of horseback riding, this is the song she taught us all under her buzzcut supervision:

I know a Weenie Man
He owns a weenie stand
He sells most everything
From hot dogs on down!
Someday I’ll be his wife
His lit-tle weenie wife
Hot Dog, I love that Weenie Ma-a-an!
Weenie Man!
Weenie Man!
Yaaaaay Weenie Man!

God only knows what this song did to our tender, impressionable young minds. True, I know of no girls who actually took the exhortation to marry a hot dog vendor or bratwurst meister to heart. But one can only shudder to imagine these blossoming girls casting secret glances at the virile vendors slapping meat into the soft buns, growing flushed from the smell of grilling mystery meat and weenie steam, their hearts a-flutter and their loins a-quiver as they step up to the counter and say, “I’d like a footlong, please.”

Because this song will lead to the worst sorts of carnal desires. Desires that will spawn unspeakable fetishes involving relish and hot mustard. And they won’t be satisfied with just hot dogs, oh no. Because once a young woman gets a taste for sausage, she’ll inevitably try bulging kielbasas and hard salamis behind the Elk Lodge. She’ll want to move to Germany. Or worse, she’ll move into the blood sausage demimonde, start wearing black and smoking cloves and be lost to decent society forever.

But those little songs weren’t just preparing us for a life of kink. Some songs were filled with nihilism and raw violence. Consider “The Window Song,” in which almost any nursery rhyme or children’s song can be turned into a seemingly-gleeful chant about rampant defenestration:

Mary had a little lamb,
Whose fleece was white as snow.
And everywhere that Mary went
She threw it out the window!
The window, the window!
The second-story window!
High low, low high
Throw it out the window!

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Threw him out the window!
The window, the window
The second-story window!
High low, low high
Throw him out the window!

It’s raining, it’s pouring,
The old man is snoring,
Got out of bed
And bumped his head
And threw it out the window!
The window, the window
The second-story window!
High low, low high
Throw it out the window!

Note the repetition of the song, and the repeated exhortation to “Throw it out the window.” Seems almost like brainwashing, doesn’t it? I suspect — but cannot yet prove — that our camp counselors were really part of a diabolical black operations plot to secretly convert young girls into assassin moles, ready to commit the worst violence upon hearing just the right bars of music.

Imagine: legions of upstanding American women could be Nymphomaniacal Puppets of Death in the hands of the dark forces controlling our government. I can see the newspaper reports now:

“I don’t know why I seduced the Armenian ambassador and threw him out the window,” sobbed Judy Baker, a registered nurse now held without bond at the local jail while she awaits transfer to federal facilities. “I was giving him a sponge bath, when…when, I don’t know. I think there was music. I couldn’t control myself. Does anyone have a hot dog?”

Why I Can’t Stay Out of My Husband’s Pants

I REMEMBER the first time I got into my husband’s pants.

That morning, all my work-suitable pants had problems: a stray red sock had bled on one in the wash, another pair had shrunk, and a third was fraying around the hem.

My kingdom for a lousy pair of khakis, I thought.

Then I spied with my little eye a pair of crisp olive-drab khakis hanging on his side of the closet. I touched them. The material was soft and substantial, and smelled faintly of his cologne. If I wore them, I’d think of him all day. Would they fit? I pulled them off their hanger. The zipper was strong, much sturdier than the zips on my own women’s trousers.

I pulled on his pants, and I faintly heard an angelic chorus somewhere down the block. His pants fit, fit better than many of my own clothes. Better yet, they were even rather flattering; the material was thick enough to not show off my every last figure flaw.

And, oh, the pockets! Deep, capacious pockets! I could keep all my hopes and dreams in pockets like those.

My husband came in from his morning shower, toweling off his hair.

“Can I borrow your pants today?” I asked.

“Ew, but you’ll get girl cooties all over them!”

I stuck my tongue out at him. “So where did you get these? I want them. I want your pants.”

“I got them at Target…they were $18.”

“So UNFAIR!” I wailed. “These are made better than chick pants! And way cheaper! And they fit better!”

“Huh.” He scrutinized my rear. “Yeah, they look better on you than they do on me. Weird. ‘Cause you’re built all girly and stuff.”

“Well, not so girly,” I sighed. “It’s been a while since I’ve even been able to fit into a size 14, and all the interesting clothes stop there. It’s like us big girls aren’t supposed to ever buy clothes. And most of the stuff in the Women’s section is all nasty synthetics and fits about as nicely as a gunny sack. And let’s face it, oh-so-low jeans just don’t look good if you’re not built like a 16-year-old.”

I was warming to my rant. “And have you ever noticed how they stick the Women’s section right by the Petites? It’s like they’re taunting us: ‘Neener, neener, look at all the cool stuff you could buy if you weren’t such a great big cow!’”

“I think you’ve got a persecution complex,” he said.

“You try finding decent clothes in the Women’s section sometime,” I replied.

He shook his head. “Those polyester florals frighten me. Maybe you should just buy guy pants.”

“But that would make me a transvestite, wouldn’t it? I mean, I’d still have to try stuff on. We’re in Ohio! I’ll be shunned as a freak. I’m not trying to push the gender envelope; I just want clothes that will fit.”

He paused. “Well, we’ve established that you can get in my pants. So, I’ll buy the clothes, and you can be my little pants bandit, my little trouser rustler…” He dropped his towel and backed me up against the bed.

“Your Jean Genie?” I asked, just as he was about to kiss me.

He winced. “I’ll be glad when this 70s fad has died out.”

The Dickification of the American Female

THERE ARE eight million dicks in the Naked City. And chicks are some of them. Here are two of their stories.

Cassandra’s Story

It all started when I was twelve, and saw Blade Runner down at the mall. It completely blew my mind, and so I ran right out to Waldenbooks to look for the novelization.

I had no idea who this Dick person was. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was a lot different than the movie…and the more I read it, the more I realized it was even cooler.

I got The Man in the High Castle next, and after that Confessions of a Crap Artist. By the time I was 16 I started on The VALIS Trilogy.

I started to seriously question the nature of reality and memory, and I began to distrust the government. When all the other girls were reading Seventeen and writing fan letters to the Backstreet Boys, I was reading the Philip K. Dick Society newsletter and engaging in intermittent correspondence with Tim Powers.

When it came time to go to college, I enrolled at Cal State Fullerton, just so I’d have the chance to read all his personal papers. I was a total dickhead.

Right now I’m working on my PhD at Stanford and doing experiments on the nature of time. If I can build the machine, maybe I can go back and save him…and then he will be mine, all mine.

Randi’s Story

I used to think that having a pussy was pretty cool. G-spots rock, plain and simple. And being able to have a baby and create a whole new human life — how awesome is that? And if you aren’t the baby type, you can keep your pot stash in there; if you wrap it up good and wear enough Chanel No. 5, the drug dogs are none the wiser.

Umm. Forget what I said about the stash — that’s just an example. My point is, the pussy is handier than most people realize.

And if you’re turned on, nobody has to know, right? That’s why guys don’t wear skirts, you know, except for Scotsmen and they’ve got a sporran to hide behind and keep their dignity intact.

But then I started camping with my boyfriend, and damn, the first time you gotta go pee in the mountains when it’s freezing outside, you really wish you had that dick. Then, of course, I met that hippie chick in Sonoma who showed me how to pee standing up. All you gotta do is get one of those hollow medicine spoons and cut the end off and press the spoon end against your bits — instant pee tube! No frozen butt on the mountaintop! And you can do it without; you just gotta learn to pull your lips up with your fingers and practice in the shower for a while, and you can get pretty good aim. I even learned how to write my name in the snow! It freaked my old boyfriend out something fierce, but then I figured it’s better to have a pussy than be one so I dumped him.

The pee thing aside, it wasn’t until I started reading Freud that I really got on the dick trip. I mean, here’s this doctor with all these women coming to him with stories of molestation and societal oppression…and he goes and decides they’re all crazy and have penis envy instead.

At first I was thinking, “Man, this Freud dude is such a dick for dismissing their abuse and thinking it was all about them wanting the Mad Powah of the High Holy Man Meat.”

But then I realized, for him to ignore all their stories…the cock must be pretty compelling, you know? He must have thought that his dick was just the most wicked thing ever.

And so I started noticing the inherent coolness of the almighty cock…and I began to seriously respect the cock, though sometimes not the guy it happened to be attached to.

I decided I wanted my own dick. First I got a functional red rubber number from the local fetish shop — I felt like Mick Jagger strutting around my bedroom with that thing strapped to my hips. So I went back and got this mighty 15-incher — you could hit homers with that baby. I felt like John Wayne and Sammy Sosa all rolled up into one petite package.

But wearing those rods under my clothes…well, I do have some sense of ladylike discretion. So I bought a couple of soft, wibbly pack-and-play numbers that wouldn’t show under my dresses. I could be a chick with a dick all day long! I felt powerful and confident.

But as time went on, and I got passed over for promotion after promotion at work, I realized it wasn’t enough to have the dick…you have to be the dick.

So I started extending my dick. I started smoking cigars, and I bought a cell phone with an extra-long antenna. I saved my money and bought a Hummer that I ram through every traffic opening I can find on the freeway. I use my cell phone as much as possible, antenna up, and talk loudly so that people know I’m more important than they are.

Am I a complete dick? I don’t think so, but I try harder every day.

Menstruation For Men

IT’S HARD to properly imagine an uncomfortable, aggravating biological condition that affects organs you simply don’t have. It’s probably as hard for your average guy to imagine what it would be like to menstruate as it is for the average gal to imagine what it’s like to suffer from a fractured penis.

Pain is part of the human condition, and we can all relate to plain ol’ pain. It’s the particulars that get real fuzzy real quick, especially for something that creates such a sticky mess of symptoms as menstruation.

So. We’ll have to use the organs at hand for this descriptive exercise. If you have a penis, and want to know what menstruation might be like for your girlfriend, sister, or mom, read on!

Start by imagining that your urethra is quite a bit larger than it is now. Now, imagine that you have a magical prostate gland that holds back urine but does nothing to hold back blood and tissue.

Yes, that’s right, boys…you’re going to be bleeding through your dick for the next several days! This is fun already, isn’t it?

Now, imagine that, overnight, a mass roughly the size of a ping-pong ball or a hen’s egg has grown inside your bladder. This mass is free-floating, and has a hard surface much like that of a cheese grater. On the third day or so, your hormones will work another feat of magic and the mass will rapidly shrink down to a size you can easily pass.

Because this mass has taken up much of the normal volume of your bladder, you have to pee more often than usual. Sometimes, a lot more than usual. And while it’s bouncing around in there, it starts to grate off the inner lining of your bladder. Painful!

So when you’re not having to run to the bathroom to pee, you’re bleeding. You have to wear a pad, sometimes two if you’re bleeding quite a lot. They chafe the inside of your thighs and your balls, and sometimes your pubic hair gets caught in the adhesive backing.

You decide that pads suck, so you stick a cotton wad in your urethra to stop the blood. It can chafe quite a lot if there’s not much blood flowing when you put it in, and if often chafes coming back out if you have to remove it to pee.

If you’re lucky, you can’t feel the wad in there, even if you get an erection, but if you have a smaller penis, you almost always feel it. It doesn’t hurt exactly, but when you sit down you’re aware that you’ve got a foreign object lodged in your dick, and it’s not an awesome sensation. Also, it seems to make the cramping from the little landmine in your bladder worse.

And when you pull it out, there’s sometimes a lovely little backlog of tissue in there. Clots of blood and reamed-off bladder lining come slithering out of you like warm slugs. In that moment, you so love your body, and just feel ever-so-sexy.

Your girlfriend, if she deals well with blood, is quite keen to have sex with you, since you’re infertile while all this bleeding is going on. Otherwise, she’s avoiding intimate contact with you on the grounds that you smell weird or you’ll get blood all over her sheets.

If you’re especially unlucky, your girlfriend will be totally unsympathetic to your situation: You go through this every month, John, I’d have thought you’d have learned to deal with it by now. It’s only a little pain, go take some Advil and be a man about it!

Meanwhile, you feel run-down and mostly want to sleep, the inside of your dick is chafed, two pairs of your drawers are stained with blood, the inside of one of your internal organs is peeling off, and sometimes the pain meds just don’t do the job.

And that, my friends, is what it’s like to menstruate.

The Sheets Were Clean and Dry

BREATHLESS, KATHY slipped into the fabric shop. Stavros would be furious if he discovered she’d left the house. Her blouse was sticking to the welts on her back she’d received as punishment for disappointing him. The night before, she’d mistakenly cracked open the ‘82 Chateau Margaux instead of the ‘80 as he’d ordered. An expensive mistake, and she’d paid for it in skin and blood.

Once he’d tired of exercising his belt, he curtly demanded she make a new suit for him by the next Tuesday. She hadn’t any good suit fabric left in the house. But she’d known better than to tell him that. He’d beat her for not being prepared.

Kathy stared around the shop. The cabbie didn’t understand English very well, and instead of taking her downtown, he’d deposited her in Chinatown. She decided to see if a nearby store — Chen’s Fabric Shoppe — had something useful.

“Can I help you?” asked the stooped old woman behind the counter. Her thick white hair was pulled up in a bun secured by two lacquered chopsticks.

“Do you have any wool? Something in a gray, good for a man’s suit?”

“Mmm-hm.” The old woman limped through the shop to some bolts of slate-gray cloth with a fine herringbone twill. “Tibetan wool. Feel very nice on your man.”

Kathy touched the fabric. It was quite nice, soft but substantial and had an excellent drape.

“I think he’ll like it,” Kathy said.

At least I hope he’ll like it, she thought, biting her lip. It was becoming impossible to please Stavros. He’d been so sweet and attentive at first, but now he found fault with everything she did. She’d made the wine mistake because she’d been working 36 hours straight. She’d spent the night baking bread to replace the loaves he’d thrown out because he claimed the wheat was bitter. And then she’d spent the entire day cleaning the fifteen-room house. She’d been so tired when she’d gone down to the wine cellar, she’d barely been able to keep her eyes open.

At least he’d let her sleep after he’d whipped her.

Kathy realized she was clenching her fists, and made herself relax. She had no right to be angry with Stavros. He let her live in a mansion and had taken her on trips around the world. Without him, she’d probably still be stuck in their cramped tract house in Atlanta, picking up after her little brothers and listening to her parents scream at each other when she wasn’t working nine-hour shifts at the dry cleaner’s. Without him, she wouldn’t even know what Chateau Margaux was.

She’d met him when he brought one of his suits in to be cleaned while he was on an extended business trip. The cleaners’ was right by the airport. Lots of businessmen came through the place, but the moment Stavros stepped inside, Kathy knew he was different. It was in his walk, the way he held himself, the way he looked at her. Power and confidence were his pheromone, and the sound of his voice made her instantly weak in the knees. They chatted a bit as she took his suit and wrote down his information, and that might have been the last she’d seen of him if she had not slipped a note into his suit pocket.

He called her that night, and took her to Phillipe’s Restaurant where they dined in candlelight and split a bottle of Dom Pérignon. The fanciest date she’d had before then was when one of her high school boyfriends took her to the Outback Steakhouse before the prom.

Their courtship lasted eight months. He treated her like a princess, and Kathy was entranced by how absolutely cool Stavros was. He gave her the kind of lifestyle she’d only read about in her mother’s romance novels. Only after she became his wife did she finally discover that the perfect sangfroid he displayed to the world required volcanic ventings in private.

Her mother had always said a woman should count her blessings. So what if Stavros forbade her to leave the house without him? So what if she couldn’t go to college, or have her own friends? He was an important man, and had worked hard for his money and position. As he always said, he deserved a good woman to make sure everything in his household suited him. He needed her. He only hit her because he loved her, and wanted her to be a better person.

Kathy realized she was digging her nails into her palms. She took a deep breath and smiled at the old woman.

“I’ll take ten yards of this, thanks.”

“Anything for you? You make man happy, you make something make you happy.”

“Oh, no, I—”

The old woman produced a bolt of the black satin, so lustrous it seemed almost to glow. Kathy stroked it with her index finger; it was the smoothest, softest cloth she’d ever touched. Slightly warm, even.

“Silk?” Kathy asked.

The old woman nodded. “From spiders in the Mekong Valley. Fabric made for bed sheets. 800 thread count. Woven tight to trap dreams.”

Kathy stroked the material again. Slowly. To lie naked on sheets of this satin would be absolute heaven.

She immediately tried to tamp down her desire. She couldn’t think of herself; she had to consider what Stavros would want.

“No, I really shouldn’t,” she stammered, pulling away.

The old woman’s gaze now rested on some fading yellow bruises on Kathy’s wrist; they were surely from Stavros grabbing her too roughly, but she couldn’t remember when it had happened. Kathy tried to pull her sleeve down to cover them, but it was too short.

“You make something make you happy,” the old woman insisted. “Nothing make man unhappier than unhappy woman. It take a lot of strength to take care of house; you need good sleep. Silk bedsheets just the thing to keep you strong.”

“Well…” Stavros seldom slept in her bed, but she could always use the satin for his suit jacket lining. Yes, he’d like that very much, she decided.

***

Kathy worked long and hard on the suit and when she finished, it was a wonder to behold. The luster of the satin lining seemed to spread to the twill, and when Stavros put it on he glowed with power and confidence.

He posed frowning in front of his mirror, turning this way and that, searching for some small flaw. His frown deepened when he could find nothing to criticize. Finally, his face relaxed into a neutral smile.

“Fine job,” he said, then gave her a quick kiss on the cheek as he headed toward the door. “I’ll be back in two nights.”

When he was gone, Kathy went back to her sewing room. She pulled out the rest of the satin and set to making her sheets. The fabric came together easily, almost seemed eager to join under the needle. She re-made her mattress with the new bedclothes, pulled the goose down comforter up to her chin, and fell asleep.

***

She woke with a cry on her lips and an orgasm in her loins. She’d dreamed that Stavros whipped her with a great cat-o’-nine-tails. Each lash brought as much pleasure as a kiss to her vulva. He beat her harder and harder ‘til the walls were covered in bits of her flesh.

She rolled over and tried to go back to sleep. Her naked body was drenched in sweat, but the sheets were dry.

***

The next night, she dreamed it was Stavros on the rack, and she with the whip.

Silk bedsheets just the thing to keep you strong.

She beat him, again and again, flaying the flesh from his body until he came and died in the same shuddering groan. Then she fell on his body, tearing out handfuls of his sweet-salty flesh that she devoured in greedy mouthfuls. She ripped loose a bloody rib, and pleasured herself with it, driving it into her own body until at last she came.

Kathy awoke with a horrified start and stumbled into the bathroom, her belly aching. She’d started her period in the night, a whole week early, and was bleeding profusely. She swore softly; surely she’d ruined the sheets. After she put in a tampon and went back to bed, she discovered that the sheets were clean and dry.

***

Stavros stumbled in early the next evening, rumpled and red-eyed from his flight, still wearing the suit she’d made him. His eyes burned with the dark glow of his jacket’s satin lining.

“I dreamed of you,” he accused hoarsely. “On the plane, at the meeting, I could think of nothing but you. Go upstairs.”

She stepped back, shaking her head, even though she was electric with sudden desire. “I’m bleeding a little—”

“Then I’ll make you bleed a lot!”

She ran, and he chased her through the kitchen and up the stairs. She let herself be caught outside her bedroom. It wasn’t right to have sex in her condition, but oh God, she wanted it so bad!

He dragged her to the bed, tore off her clothes, and they had savage, frenzied sex. They sweated and bled and came until they were practically empty, and throughout it all the sheets stayed perfectly dry. Stavros was still worked up into a white-eyed, mouth-frothing frenzy that neither orgasms nor ordinary pain seemed to satisfy.

“I want to fuck your heart,” he said, reaching over the edge of the bed to pull something shiny out of his jacket pocket. A slim double-bladed dagger knife. “I want to feel it twitch around my cock.”

Death was more than she could submit to. She grabbed Stavros’s wrist and they wrestled for the dagger on the slippery bed.

Kathy fought and kicked, trying to pry the blade from his fingers. Stavros hit her across the face with his free hand—

—and she remembered her first kiss from the redheaded boy who sat beside her in her middle school English class.

He hit her again—

—and she remembered the sweet pain of losing her virginity; she could no longer remember the boy’s face clearly, but she’d never forget the smell of his aftershave.

A third blow fell on her shoulder, and she felt her muscles start to tremble and weaken—

—then she remembered her childhood dreams. The dreams she had as young girl before the gauntlet of adolescence and the dulling grind of school and work made her lose herself. She had not dreamed of being Rapunzel waiting for her Prince, she had dreamed of donning armor and slaying dragons; she had not dreamed of being Lois Lane fainting for her Superman, she had dreamed of being Catwoman on the prowl.

And she certainly had not dreamed of slaving as a rich man’s bitch; she had dreamed of battling pirates for their gold.

Silk bedsheets just the thing to keep you strong.

With a scream, she heaved Stavros over onto his own blade. He gasped as it plunged deep into his chest. Dark blood flowed over the bedclothes.

The sheets writhed and shimmered and drank down the gore.

Kathy watched, mesmerized, as the moisture was sucked from his body until he was a husk, then ashes, then dust, then nothing. Five minutes after she’d killed him, nothing remained on the sheets but the knife and a few gold fillings from his teeth.

The sheets rustled, the serpentine hiss of the satin whispering to her softly:

I will keep you strong if you bring me what I need…

The next evening, she put on her best cocktail dress and headed out to the downtown bars to look for a luscious young Lothario.

Maybe he’d buy her dinner first; that would be nice. She was hungry.

But more importantly, so were the sheets.

Burning Bright

NTURI HID in the darkness beneath the southern palace wall and stared up into the grey, drizzling sky. The fog-shrouded top fifteen meters above supported the antiaircraft field generators. If the information she’d paid dearly for was correct, she’d have about 40 centimeters of clearance between the top of the wall and the lower edge of the field. If not, she’d be a feast for the czar’s tigers or the rats, depending on which side of the wall her charred body fell.

Am I insane? She wondered. Is any love worth this?

The cold air was saturated with the mingling smells of garbage, factory soot, and sweet grease from the bakeries a few blocks away. Her wrists and forearms ached from her recent surgeries. She peeled her black thinskin gloves off with her teeth and flexed the new muscles in her forearms. Artificial bone stilettos, hard and keen as steel, slid out along the edge of each hand. The ivory blades were a sharp contrast against her caramel-colored skin. Retracted, the weapons hid neatly in grooves on the surface of her ulnas, rendering them invisible to most standard bioscans. With all the tribal tattoos Nturi already sported, the centimeter-wide slits on the ridges of her wrists could be explained away as decorative scarification and might be overlooked in a strip search. The blades were meant as a last-ditch defense; though she’d planned the break-in carefully, she had to be prepared for disaster.

She slid the blades in and out, testing the new muscles. Her newly-healed flesh itched, and the slide was a good satisfying scratch. In and out, in and out…

Heat rose in her eyes and chest. Closing her eyes, she retracted the blades and ran her hands over the smooth concrete of the wall, imagining it was Alexander’s muscular body. Even as an eighteen-year-old, he’d had the most wonderfully sculpted chest and abdomen. But he’d be five years older now, more fully a man.

Nturi shuddered and clenched her fists, pressing her knuckles into the stone. “God, Alex, why did they have to take you away?”

He hadn’t told her how he’d come to Guevara, not right away. She’d known he was an offworlder the moment he walked into New Vanuatu village, and everyone guessed from his accent that he was Novizvezdan. He said little about his family or his history, even after they began courting. But after they’d exchanged vows at the shrine and had the shaman tattoo the Goddess’ blessing over both their hearts, after they’d shared their first night in the marriage bed, he told her the truth.

She remembered how her heart beat fast when he drew out the royal signet ring with the double-headed eagle of the Romanov Empire. I am the second son of Czar Mikhail.

It all seemed a fairy tale: her beautiful pale offworld husband was a prince. He was born to be a duke on the empire’s central world, Novizvezda Prime, but as he grew older he realized the brutality his family had wrought on the races they had conquered. He was sickened by what the Romanovs had done and by what he was surely bound to do as a nobleman. Soon after he turned fifteen, he escaped Novizvezda on an interstellar freighter and didn’t stop running ‘til he reached the far colonies.

They had five happy months as newlyweds before the fairy tale shattered. Nturi was helping her little brother harvest piqueberries in the misty mountains outside the village when thunder ripped the air and the summery sky suddenly turned to midnight. She remembered looking up, seeking the sun, only to see a vast round blackness framed by a corona of lightning in the fractured air. Her guts turned to ice when she realized it was a giant warship settling down to hover above her village. An instant later she realized that only the Novizvezdans had the resources to build ships of such monstrous scale. And there was only one possible reason the Novizvezdans would come to Guevara.

She abandoned her brother and raced down the mud-slick, viney footpath, ran ‘til her heart pumped pure acid, ran ‘til she thought her lungs would explode in her chest.

But she could not run fast enough. It was all over by the time she reached the village. The warship was spinning back up into the sky. The door to her father’s house had been kicked off its hinges. Her mother wept amongst smashed furniture. Her father was dead, his chest sunken and blackened by a microwave burn.

And her husband was gone.

Her mother told her how the soldiers in their red and gold uniforms had come through the door, how her father had tried to stop them, only to be shot down like a dog. They’d torn the house apart ‘til they found Alex hiding in the basement, then dragged him to the ship.

“At least they’re gone now,” her mother had said. “We can try to rebuild our lives.”

But her mother was wrong. The Novizvezdans were back the next fall in ships bearing troops and strip-mining equipment. The small Guevaran army was defeated practically overnight, and soon the lovely skies turned a sulfurous yellow from the blasting and smelters.

Nturi could not bear to watch her family’s vineyards fall beneath the grinding earth-movers, could not bear to watch her mother crumble deeper in despair. So she followed her lost husband’s example and stowed away on a ship heading offworld.

She’d been determined to find Alex. She’d had so much with him, lost so much because of him… she would have him back by her side as her husband.

Novizvezda Prime was the richest, most advanced world in the entire quadrant — how hard could it be to reach? But it had taken her two hard years to make it to the planet, and three even harder years as a cat burglar’s apprentice to gather the skills, money and information she needed to attempt the unheard of: break into the royal palace.

Nturi took a deep breath and dug her climbing gloves out of her utility vest. Five years of sweat and sacrifice and loneliness had come down to this. There was no other way for someone like her to contact her husband; he was kept secure behind layers of guards and bureaucracy. She barely even saw his image on the news. Most recently, she’d seen an article announcing his engagement to an offworld princess to seal a diplomatic bargain, and she knew she had to make her move. She would be reunited with her husband, or she would die trying.

She had a little less than ten minutes before the palace patrol would swing past again; it was time to begin. She slipped her low-profile night vision goggles into place, wriggled her fingers into the tight gloves and began to pull herself up the stone wall. She’d first learned to free-climb rocky faces as a child hunting for the tasty bracket fungi that seemed to grow only beneath the most inaccessible overhangs in the mountains outside her home village. The palace wall wasn’t easy; the wet, mossy concrete was slick as sweating flesh. But her gloves worked beautifully; they’d been modeled on a gecko’s atomic-bonding sticky toe pads and could support her entire weight on three fingers. She closed her eyes and focused on the odd rolling grip the gloves required, as if she were trying to knead the concrete. The burn in her shoulders and arms felt good; her body was finally being used the way it was meant to be.

Nturi crept up on fingertips and tip-toes until she finally chinned herself to the top of the wall. The force-field mere centimeters above was invisible, but she could feel an electric vibration that made her hair stand on end. Next came the tricky part: getting up onto the wall without getting fried.

She swung sideways and caught her left heel on the wall’s rim, then began to carefully pull and roll her body onto the two-foot-wide ledge. It felt like her wedding night when she and Alex were trying to roll from one position to another without him slipping out of her body.

No sooner had she swung her other leg up when she heard the flat slap of boots against pavement. The patrol had arrived right on time. She flattened herself against the stone and held her breath.

The tension was delicious. She’d initially taken up burglary as a necessity; on Novizvezda, no one who wasn’t a pureblood descendant of the original Russian colonists could get a decent job. Nturi’s dark skin and tattoos limited her legitimate prospects to cleaning toilets or washing dishes in low-class establishments. She would never be allowed in the palace even as a scullery maid; girls of her color might be bundled in through the back door under cloak of darkness to please Czar Mikhail’s exotic tastes in whores, but never as legitimate employees.

Her sex limited her illegitimate prospects to prostitution or theft. She was determined that no man would touch her but her husband, so she joined a burglary ring. It helped salve her conscience that they never robbed ordinary people; most of their jobs were for nobles stealing expensive toys from other nobles.

She quickly came to discover that sneaking into forbidden places was an incredible thrill. The greater the danger, the bigger the charge she got from it. Some jobs she’d practically come the moment she touched the prize she’d broken in to steal.

“I’m detecting heat residue,” one soldier said. He sounded bored and sleepy.

“Scan it,” replied the other.

Then a whine, and in her peripheral vision she saw a blue glow. “Inconclusive. There’s tracks in the moss. Something might have climbed up,” the first man replied. The glow went out.

The other grunted. “Probably another rat. The cats’ll eat it.”

Nturi waited for the patrol to move on. When she was sure they were out of earshot, she peeked into the palace compound. The bottom of the wall was bordered by dense bushes, most likely briar roses. Trees and rocks showed up as a ghostly blue in her goggles. Two large objects forty meters away glowed red: heat sources. Tigers.

The royal family had long bred Siberian tigers for size and speed. The czar’s cats were unmatched killers. The average royal tiger weighed in at 320 kilograms, was over three meters long, and could sprint 60 kilometers per hour. They had fangs longer than Nturi’s fingers, and claws strong enough to shred plywood.

If those two heard her hit the ground — and they almost certainly would — they’d be on her in about three seconds. Best to take care of them from aloft. She reached into her vest and pulled out her ceramic dart gun. Each dart contained enough sedative to drop a full-grown tiger for at least five hours. She had no interest in killing the beautiful beasts if she had a choice; besides, a good burglar left as few traces behind as possible, and two dead tigers would hardly go unnoticed.

She slid the miniature sight onto the barrel of the air pistol and took careful aim. The first tiger was lounging half-asleep and didn’t even flinch as the dart sank into his haunch. The second tiger let out a coughing growl and worried at her flank for a moment before she tumbled onto her side. Satisfied, Nturi removed the sight and tucked the pistol back in its holster.

She rolled over the side and climbed down on her sticky fingertips. When she was near the bottom, she kicked off the wall to launch herself clear of the briar roses, twisted midair and hit the ground in a shoulder tuck and rolled to her feet.

Nturi ran over to the drugged tigers. She knelt beside the big female and pulled off her gecko gloves. The tiger’s smell was powerful, wild and rank and musky, and her shallow breath stank of blood from a recent kill.

Nturi put her bare hands on her flanks and ran her fingers through her shaggy fur. Her muscles felt densely molded, like cast soft metal. The feel of the powerful beast made her shiver. A growl rumbled from deep in the tiger’s chest, but she did not stir.

She could kill me in a blink, she thought. She could kill me as easily as she turns her head.

Nturi’s heart beat fast, but she felt no fear, only the sudden swell of desire for her beloved and the thrill of her invasion.

“I’ll have you soon, my love,” she whispered. She planted a kiss on the top of the tiger’s broad head, removed the dart and sprinted for the palace.

As she ran, she ratcheted her goggles’ polarization around until the invisible net of detection lasers ahead glowed red in her lenses. In trees above the leading edge of the laser net, she could see the automated sentry weapons, set to blast anything that the lasers didn’t scan as being a tiger, bird, or squirrel. When she was a few meters from the net, she got down on her hands and knees and switched on the false-field generator on her belt. It had been her most expensive purchase, mainly because of its illegality but partly because of the cold fusion cell supporting the device’s immense power consumption.

The air around Nturi’s body crackled and hazed blue. Her hair stood on end. The field would create the dimensions of a tiger for the detectors’ benefit, but not for very long. The fusion cell would hold out for only a few minutes, and the net extended the remaining hundred yards to the edge of the palace.

Nturi began to speed-crawl through the net. Sweat ran in an itchy trickling down the groove of her back. She got through just as the field seemed to be faltering a little. She hurried into the bushes bordering the palace, pushed through to the vine-covered stone wall, and began to climb.

Soon, Nturi was clinging to the third-floor windowsill of her husband’s suite as she contorted to avoid the thin laser beam of the alarm. She held on with one hand while she worked at lifting the steel bar latch through the glass with her electromagnetic multitool. The bar finally rose and fell free with a clink.

She pushed open the windows and slipped inside the room, which was dark but for a bright band of light streaming from beneath the bathroom door. The Romanovs were creatures of habit and schedule. If the details she’d bought from a recently-sacked chambermaid were correct, Alex would have just finished his fencing lesson and would be taking his evening bath. His older brother and the czar would be downstairs in the library, supposedly going over military reports, but the maid said they were just as likely to be enjoying the company of various prostitutes. Nturi was warmed by news that, as far as the maid knew, Alex had never shown any interest in the palace whores.

Nturi closed and latched the window behind her and fingertipped down the velvet-covered wall. She could hear the bath faucet running. She landed softly on the thick carpet and surveyed the room through her goggles. A leather couch and reading lamp near the middle of the room. A state-of-the-art sleeping/entertainment pod was nestled in the north corner. A richly-carved wooden writing desk and a comm station filled the opposite corner. Discarded clothes, still glowing purple from fading body heat, had been dropped in a trail leading from the hall door to the bathroom.

Nturi walked to the clothes and picked up the long-sleeved fencing shirt. The silk was damp with sweat; she sniffed it, and instantly went wet when she found the familiar scent of Alex’s flesh.

She pulled off the goggles, her gloves, her vest. Letting her gear fall to the floor, she unzipped her bodysuit, peeled it away from her perspiring skin, and shucked off her tight climbing sneakers.

Her nipples went hard in the cool palace air. She ran her hands over her bare body, savoring the delicious tension. She could be found. She could be captured. She could be killed.

She stepped naked toward the bathroom, the hungry, burning ache for her husband intensifying with every step. When she reached the door, she held her breath, held her head close, listening.

The faucet was off. She could hear water lapping in a tub, and Alex’s low voice humming. The tune was a Guevaran hunting song she’d taught him soon after they met; he’d never been able to remember all the words.

She opened the door.

The bathroom was huge, almost bigger than his room. Her husband was soaking in a big, sunken marble bathtub with golden fixtures. He practically jumped out of his skin at the sound of the opening door and dove toward what looked like a security intercom panel beside the tub—

—then stopped. He stared at her, his blue eyes wide. He’d had his blond hair trimmed short, almost buzzed to the scalp. His shoulders were broader, his chest deeper and more defined. He still bore their wedding tattoo above his heart.

“Nturi,” he whispered, then continued in faltering Guevaran: “How did you…?”

“Through your window,” she replied in Russian. “You look good, Alex. The years have been kind to you.”

“You look wonderful.” He was staring her up and down as if she were a ghost. His shaft had gone hard, the head peeking up above the water line.

“We have a lot to talk about, but conversation can wait.” She closed the door behind her, locked it, and stepped toward him, running her hands down her body. Her flesh keened for his touch. “Do you want me, husband?”

“Yes,” he replied faintly. “I’ve missed you every day I’ve been in this godforsaken place.”

“Then show me how much you missed me…”

***

Afterward, Nturi lay back in Alexander’s arms as he nuzzled her neck and poured handfuls of blood-warm water over her body.

“God, I missed you so much,” he whispered, his voice husky.

“I missed you, too.” A lump rose in her throat, and tears welled in her eyes. Five years. Five long years; so much had happened to both of them, it seemed like virtually a lifetime had gone by. They were practically strangers to each other, now, but at the same time…he was still the Alex she remembered. The same Alex she’d loved and craved every lonely night she’d spent in cold, cramped starship air ducts or in the hot, stuffy room she’d rented above the laundry. Every night, she’d wept at the pain of missing his touch, his smile, the heat of his body, the soft kisses he’d awakened her with to make love to her in grey hours before dawn.

She took one of his broad, strong hands and kissed his palm. “I never want to be without you again.”

“We’ll never be separated again, I promise,” he replied, gently rolling her over so she was facing him. They kissed, their hands gently roving over each other’s water-slick bodies.

He took her hands in his and licked her water-wrinkled fingertips. “You’re starting to prune. We better get you out of here before you melt,” he smiled.

They got out of the tub and dried each other off with thick white towels, then went into his bedroom and climbed into his sleeping pod.

“Come away with me,” she said as they snuggled under his blankets. “Leave this place. I can have us on a ship headed for the outer rim in three hours.”

His smile faded. “I can’t.”

“Yes, you can, you just have to trust me—”

“No, I can’t.” He took a deep breath. “And I don’t want to. They’d find me, no matter where I went, and I could never forgive myself if Guevara happened all over again.

“I tried to stop my father from raping your planet, Nturi.” Alex’s voice cracked. “But he wouldn’t listen. And I’m so sorry about your papa — your parents told me to hide, but I should have been there to protect them. I can’t tell you how much I’ve hated myself for what I brought on your family and your people.”

He cleared his throat. “Did — did your mother and little brother make it?”

She swallowed against the tide of bitter sorrow rising in her chest. “No. Kiro was killed in the fighting, and my mother…after Kiro died, she lost all hope and stopped eating. She died while they were marching us to the camps. I watched the soldiers burn her body by the side of the road. I didn’t even get to say a proper prayer for her.

“Your family took everything I ever had, Alex. You were the only thing I could get back. I need you.”

“I need you, too.” He pulled her close to him. “But I also need to stay here. Even if we did find a place where my father wouldn’t find us, what then? Billions of people suffer under my family’s rule, and I could never do anything to help them if I ran away.”

Nturi pulled away a little and stared at him. “What can you hope to accomplish here? Your father is—”

“—an old man who doesn’t listen to anyone else, including his doctors. He’s already had to have his liver replaced twice, and someday they won’t be able to keep him from drinking himself to death. And he’s always pissing the nobles off; a year hasn’t passed when someone hasn’t staged an assassination attempt. And my brother’s got a taste for dueling and racing that’s going to get him killed someday.”

“‘Someday?’ How long is ‘someday’?” Nturi asked, her eyes narrowing.

“Twenty years, if my father lasts as long as his father did. But then I’ll be czar, Nturi.” His eyes shone with excitement in the dim light. “I can fix things. I can make Guevara green again, for you and our children.

“As soon as my family fully trusts me again and lets me take on some real duties, I can start making little changes here and there. If I can help just a few people now, maybe that will start to make up for Guevara.”

Nturi considered this. “So are you going to cancel the wedding I heard about?”

Alex’s smile faded. “I can’t. It’s crucial; my father needs me to get married so he can get his hands on the platinum and uranium mines in the Taorane system. If I try to get out of it I’ll have wrecked all the work I’ve done the past two years to get them to trust me—”

“Damn it!” Nturi exploded. “You said we’d never be separated, yet you say you’re going to marry someone else?”

“You can still stay with me,” he said quickly. “I want you to stay with me—”

“As what? Your concubine?” she spat. “I am your wife, and I will not be treated like a whore!”

“It wouldn’t be like that,” he pleaded. “Neither Princess Duria nor I expect to see much of each other. We’ll just appear together to sign papers and smile at ceremonies. We’ll live separate lives.”

“What about the part where you’re expected to produce a royal heir to really seal the bargain?” she asked, fuming.

Alex didn’t say anything.

“God!” Nturi rolled away from him and slapped the release button on the pod door.

“Where are you going?” he asked as she rolled out.

“To the bathroom! Alone!”

She shut the door in his face and stomped across the room to the bathroom…then stopped. A thick red satin robe hung on a peg beside the door, the back emblazoned with the golden Romanov crest and the front with Alexander’s initials.

I’ve come too far to give up now, she thought. And I’ll be damned if I’m waiting another 20 years to have my marriage back….

Nturi glanced at the clock. It was five shy of midnight. If Czar Mikhail and his eldest son Oskar were indeed having a private party in the library, it would just be getting good.

She snatched up the robe, fluffed her short black hair, and marched for the hallway.

***

“Am I late for de party?” Nturi asked the two guards standing at attention in front of the big double doors leading into the library. Her pidgin accent sounded painfully fake in her own ears, but she hoped the guards would buy it.

“Where did you come from?” the larger of the two guards growled.

“Oh, I did need to go to de toilet on de way up from de dock—” Damn, what was the procurer’s name? “—after Meester Korotkov drop me off. And when I come out, Prince Alexander is in de hallway. He tell me to go upstairs wit he. So I do. He just finish wit me.”

The first guard continued to scowl at her intensely while the other dug a small bioscanner out of his belt pouch.

“You expect me to believe that Prince Alexander’s been consorting with you?” the first asked scornfully. “He’s never had any truck with whores!”

“Why you tink I lie?” she protested, her heart hammering in her chest. “This he robe he tell me to wear as proof for you!”

The second guard ran the scanner up and down her body while he patted her down.

“Looks like she’s telling the truth,” he said, switching off the device and stepping away. “She’s just been laid, and the semen matches Alexander’s genotype. She’s clean, otherwise.”

“Huh. Guess there’s a first time for everything. Get in there,” the first guard growled at Nturi. “And you better know how to suck, because they don’t like sloppy seconds.”

He gave her a shove toward the double doors. She stumbled, straightened up, and took a deep breath. Her whole body was shaking. I could lose everything I have left in here. Don’t screw this up, girl.

She pushed into the library. The floor was littered with huge, old pornographic picture books opened to choice scenes. A handful of guards stood at discreet attention in shadowed alcoves. A dozen beautiful, naked young women were arrayed on leather couches and chairs in various poses and salacious embraces, clearly for their masters’ amusement rather than their own. The eldest might have been Nturi’s age; the youngest not much more than sixteen or seventeen. All were from planets recently subjugated by the Novizvezdans. None would ever have a chance at a decent life on this planet, not while the current regime was in power.

Czar Mikhail was seated in a leather easy chair in the middle of the room, his corpulent body stripped down to a pair of red velvet breeches. A girl with long, flowing black hair was sitting on the floor between his knees, sucking him.

Prince Oskar was in the middle of a richly-woven carpet a few meters to his left, pounding away at a frail-looking girl pinned beneath him. Oskar was a man of about thirty with a shock of short red hair. He looked a little like Alexander, but he was heavier, his features coarser. He was still wearing his silk fencing shirt and trousers, the latter opened and pulled down just enough to give his equipment room to work at the unfortunate girl. She was completely naked, biting her lip as if in pain, her eyes shining with tears.

Nturi felt a terrible fire building in her chest.

“Move a little, for god’s sake,” Oskar snarled at the girl.

“I’ll move for you, Your Highness,” Nturi said loudly. “Perhaps you should try me, instead.”

Oskar’s head jerked up, and he arched an eyebrow when he saw Nturi. He pulled out of the girl and stood up. Nturi saw that his erection was streaked with blood. The girl lay where she was, apparently afraid to move.

“Where did you get that robe?” he asked.

“From your brother, Your Highness.”

Both eyebrows rose in surprise. “Did he fuck you?”

She nodded. An unpleasant smirk spread across Oskar’s face.

“Well, well, so that pale little priss decided to be a man after all. Lose the robe,” he ordered.

Her heart pounding, she pulled the silken belt open and shrugged the robe off her shoulders. The garment fell in a soft heap around her ankles. She could feel a blush spreading across her skin. She swallowed down the reflexive embarrassment and fear. Don’t lose your resolve over a little exposure. You’re built from steel now. Act it.

Oskar prodded the girl with his toe. “Get out of my sight.”

The girl rolled over and scuttled away behind a couch. He waggled his softening penis in his left hand and stared at Nturi. “You. On your knees before me.”

Nturi did as he asked. Oskar held his blunt, bloody tool inches from her face.

“Give me your head,” he ordered.

“Why would I give you my head, Your Highness,” she replied, her voice dangerous and low, “when I came here for yours?”

She flexed the new muscles in her forearms and the bone stilettos snapped into place, sharp as tiger’s claws. A split-second later, she’d leaped to her feet, skewering her left blade deep into Oskar’s heart as she cut a wide smile across his throat with her right.

The nearest guard gave out a shout, and the girls began to scream and scramble for the doors. In the chaos, Nturi threw Oskar’s hemorrhaging corpse to the floor and vaulted over a couch toward the czar. Mikhail had been too engrossed in his blow job to realize what was happening until it was too late.

Nturi jerked his chair back, dumping him headfirst onto the floor. She landed two vicious kicks to the side of his head to stun him, grabbed him by the neck and dragged him backward to an unoccupied alcove. He was heavy, but she’d grown strong, and her rage made her stronger still.

Her back to the marble alcove wall, she pulled the czar’s semiconscious form up in front of her body as a shield and pressed her right blade to his throat.

The startled guards had drawn their guns and were stumbling toward her.

“Stay back!” she shouted. “I can cut his throat before any of you can get a shot off. Bring Alexander in here! Now!”

But Alexander was already there. He pushed into the library, his face red. He’d dressed hastily, his shirt misbuttoned. He’d probably come running out of his room when he heard the girls screaming. Probably anyone within a hundred yards of the palace had heard them.

Her husband stared around and the room, his face turning pale when he saw his brother’s cooling corpse and paler still when he saw Nturi with a blade to his father’s throat.

“What have you done?” he whispered. His expression was an odd mix of shock, dismay, wonder and hope.

“Something that you should have done a long time ago, my love,” she replied. Nturi crossed her blades beneath the czar’s Adams’ apple, then ripped them down and across. A jet of bright blood sprayed out in an arc from his ruined neck.

“All hail Czar Alexander!” she shouted. “Long live the new czar!”

The guards were taking aim, their guns’ capacitors giving off a hard whine as the weapons powered up.

This is where I die, she thought, closing her eyes and retracting her blades.

“Stop! Lower your guns!” Alexander shouted. He pushed through the knot of men and stood before her, trembling.

“Is this what you came here to do?” he asked in Guevaran. “To take revenge on my family? A brother for a brother, a father for a father?”

“No,” she replied in her native tongue. “This isn’t vengeance. And it’s not even close to justice. It’s necessary. You told me yourself what you hoped to accomplish for the universe once these two were dead. Now you won’t have to wait two decades to do it.”

He stared at her, at the blood on her hands, considering.

“Is your wife not fit to be your queen?” she asked. “Politics and chess, my love. The queen defends the king, and after what everyone’s seen here tonight, my reputation might be the best protection you could ever wish for. The nobles will think you’re quite a clever boy to have masterminded a coup like this.”

“Yes,” he replied slowly. “Yes, I think you’re right.”

He took a deep breath and turned to the guards and servants. “Bring the Minister of Offworld Affairs and the Minister of the Interior to my chambers in one hour,” he ordered in Russian. “I am hereby canceling the engagement my father set up for me with Princess Duria, and I will be marrying this woman, Nturi of Guevara, in a formal ceremony in one week. Until then, she is to be addressed as Czarina Nturi, and she is to be given every courtesy you would give to me. Understood?”

A chorus of stunned “yes, Your Highness,” came from the assorted onlookers.

Alexander retrieved his robe and helped Nturi to her feet. “Someone bring some decent clothes for my wife,” he called, wrapping the robe around her shoulders.

“And get some decent clothes and food for those girls that were in here,” she added, staring pointedly at the guard who’d shoved her outside the library. “Make sure they’re comfortable in the guest rooms tonight. And if I find out any of you have been molesting them, you’re going to wish you’d never been born. Clear?”

“Perfectly, Your Highness,” the guard replied grudgingly, then ducked out of the room.

Nturi turned to Alex and kissed his cheek. “I think this is the start of a wonderful partnership, don’t you?”

He lifted her hand and kissed her bloody fingers. “Yes, my love, I do.”

Roses of Gomorrah

KIRA LAY very still until she heard the brothel guard’s footsteps receding down the hallway. His booted heels rang hollowly on the aluminum floor panels, the sound barely audible over the moans, thumping, and orgasmic cries coming from the Class C dormitory beside her room. The C girls were having a loud, athletic orgy. They were always having an orgy. Their libidos were amped up so high that they’d fuck each other until they passed out from exhaustion. They’d have to be shaken awake in the morning, but once they’d gobbled down their breakfast, they’d be horny as ever and ready for customers.

Kira rolled out of bed and stood in the darkness of her small cell. She hated hearing the Cs going at it all night, because their pleasure amplified her own loneliness. As a Class A, Kira was engineered to satisfy the refined tastes of customers who wanted conversation, dancing, or perhaps a bit of role-playing. The expensive As had both the intelligence and the self-control to find a way to escape the New Vegas space station, so the owners kept them separated and locked down.

But, at least in Kira’s case, they hadn’t tried hard enough.

She stood on the metal folding chair beside her costume closet and used her thumbnail to work at the screws holding the air vent cover in place. Once she’d gotten the cover off, she chinned herself up to the open vent and began to ease herself inside. Kira was a small, wiry woman, but her breasts and long black tresses inevitably got in the way, and the institutional pajamas she’d been given were too thin to keep her from getting snagged by jutting rivets and sharp metal corners. She had to be careful; cuts and bruises would be noticed and questioned during the weekly inspections. Her masters would have no qualms about chaining her to her bed at night if they thought she was getting out.

Once she was in the vent, Kira sniffed the air, trying to figure out if her beloved Seth had been able to get out of his cell. The exotic genes that made her technically nonhuman (and therefore property) had also given her a few talents that veered from the human norm. Her flesh-pretzel limberness was a planned trait, she imagined, but her rat-keen sense of smell probably wasn’t.

She took a deep breath. There were tens of thousands of people on the station, the stale station air an olfactory white noise of sweat, excrement, food, oil, and hydraulic fluid. But the prostitution constructs smelled different than normal humans, sweeter and muskier. If Seth were in the ductwork…yes. He was out. His lambstew-vanilla scent slid across her olfactory nerve, and Kira felt herself getting wet.

She’d first met Seth two years before when a quartet of spacers on shore leave rented them and another pair of prostitutes for a night of group sex. The moment she’d laid eyes on Seth, she’d felt an unmistakable, undeniable attraction to him. Once the spacers had drunk themselves unconscious and the other two slaves had nodded off, she and Seth ended up making out and talking until dawn.

It smelled as if he were down a few levels. Maybe he was in the mezzanine health club? She hoped so. The gym had been shut down for a few weeks due to some sort of revenue tax problem with the station government. But the station hadn’t shut off the water or electricity, and Kira loved making love with Seth in the showers and steamroom. And on the locker room benches, and on the exercise equipment, and on the wrestling mats…

Kira made her way down through the maze of metal ducts to the grate that led into the women’s locker room. The grate had already been removed and was leaning against the locker room wall. She crawled through and stood up on the dry, rubbery floor. She could smell Seth clearly, and could hear the hiss of the steamroom jets.

Kira pulled off her pajamas, folded them, and laid them on one of the dressing benches. Seth’s scent was deliciously strong, and she felt herself getting wetter and wetter as she crept toward the steamroom. It had been three days since she’d seen him, and it felt like three years.

When she opened the translucent glass door, the first thing she saw through the hot mist were the purple welts and bruises across her beloved’s back.

“Oh no,” she breathed.

He turned. There were more welts across his sculpted chest and thighs. His wrists and ankles were rope-burned. His thick blond hair had been shaved off, and his left eye was blackened and nearly swollen shut.

“Kira,” he said, his voice cracking. “I’ve missed you so much.”

She ran to him, and he grabbed her and hugged her tightly. Up close, Kira could see that the bruises on his shoulders were actually bite marks.

“What did they do to you?” she whispered.

“I haven’t been able to think of anyone but you,” he murmured. “I was escorting a woman two days ago, and I just…I just wasn’t into it. She got mad, and complained to the owners. So I got sold for rough trade last night.”

“Oh god, did they—” she began.

“Let’s just say they weren’t into safe, sane, and consensual,” he said. “I really don’t want to talk about it.”

She kissed him gently, and he returned the kiss less gently, his vanilla-flavored tongue sliding into her mouth. Kira’s knees went rubbery, and her loins ached with desire for him. The steam condensing on their skin ran down their flesh in warm rivulets. She felt his ridged erection harden between their bodies. He kissed her neck, licked her earlobes and traced the length of her throat with his tongue. His hands slid down her smooth back to her ass.

Kira kissed his chest and found his nipple with her lips. He sucked in his breath as she nibbled him. She slid a hand down his taut, wet belly to his erection and began to stroke him, the soft skin sliding over the thick cartilage rings around his shaft.

“I wish I could be inside you,” he whispered.

“I wish that, too,” she replied, caressing his balls with her other hand. “But even if you could get inside me, we’d lock up. We’d be stuck together for hours.”

“If we ever get out of here,” he said, “first money I make, I’m getting surgery to get these things taken off. And then I’m going to make love to you for three days straight.”

“Just three days?” she teased.

“Well, after three days I’ll probably be too faint from hunger to keep it up much longer.”

He slid his hands around her hips to her hairless vulva. He gently spread her thighs. “And speaking of hunger, I’ve been dying to taste you again.”

He knelt on the rubbery floor before her and spread her lips with his thumbs. “Why, hello there! Looks like someone’s glad to see me.”

He ran the tip of his tongue over her inflamed clitoris, and a jolt of pleasure electrified her body, dizzying her. She rocked backward, but Seth caught her by her thighs and pulled her close to his face.

“Uh-uh,” he said. “You don’t get to faint until after I’ve made you come.”

He began to run his tongue in slow, agonizingly wonderful circles around her swollen little bundle of nerves. He slid a finger down the slick groove of her vulva and slowly penetrated her. One ring. Two rings. Three rings. She felt him find the sweet spot between her third and fourth rings, and she felt her flesh tighten around him, her legs quivering.

“Yes, that’s it,” she moaned.

He stopped circling her clitoris and started giving it quick, direct licks as he pressed into the wonderful spot inside her. Kira cried out as the orgasm took her hard and fast. Her legs turned to mush, but Seth wouldn’t let her fall. He drank down her nectar as her flesh spasmed sweetly against his hand and tongue.

When her climax had passed, Seth lowered her to the floor and planted a soft kiss on her lips as she lay there, stunned.

“A good one?” he asked.

She nodded. “I don’t know how you do it,” she whispered. “I come all the time with customers, but when I’m with you…it’s like comparing static electricity to a lightning bolt.”

He grinned at her. “I’m just that good, is all.”

Kira got up on her knees and took hold of his erection. She leaned down and licked off the prejack beading on his glans. Vanilla cream. She started to take him into her mouth, but he stopped her.

“Do you think you could come again?” he asked.

Her flesh was still humming. “Yes. For you, I could come a thousand times and still want more.”

“I want to feel that hot groove of yours. And I want to kiss you. And most of all, I want to be looking into your eyes when you come.”

He helped her up, then backed her up against the warm, wet tile wall. A steam jet hissed near their heads. He kissed her deeply, passionately, and she helped him slip his erection between her legs. He began to thrust in and out, his rings bumping wonderfully against her slick flesh. She tilted her pelvis forward so her clitoris would get the best of the rub.

“More,” she whispered. “Faster.”

Seth was working hard, grunting as he pushed against her. She licked his neck, and tasted his sweat, salty and sweet like honey-roasted peanuts. He leaned back, staring deep into her eyes. His green eyes were dilated so wide she could barely see the irises.

“Come for me,” he whispered.

Kira felt the tension rising in her loins, and she leaned into him, squeezing her thighs around his hard shaft. Each stroke brought her closer and closer to ecstasy.

“Come for me!” he shouted.

The shock of his voice brought her home. She thrust her hips against his, meeting him stroke for stroke, wishing he was inside her, aching for him to be inside her, and as her flesh pulsed she felt his body shudder and he was coming, too, howling as he greased her thighs with his sweet vanilla spunk, and this time his legs gave out, and they tumbled backward in a jumble of arms and legs and tongues and she humped against him until they were both spent.

“Ouch,” he said, his body stiffening beneath her. “Please let me up.”

She rolled off him. As he unsteadily got to his feet, she saw that the fall had torn open some of the scabbed welts on his back and he was bleeding. She helped him out of the steamroom, got him to sit on one of the benches, and found some peroxide and gauze in a first aid kit bolted to the wall.

He winced a little as she wiped off the blood and cleaned his wounds.

“It’s not fair that we can’t be together,” he said, tracing a finger down her damp cleavage. “We were made to be together.”

“I know,” she said, blinking back tears. They’d really beat Seth up. His injuries hadn’t looked nearly this bad in the dim light of the steamroom. “Dammit, why didn’t the madam take you to the medic?”

“All part of the lesson,” he replied bitterly. “But they’ll have to heal all this up in the morning so I’ll be a nice, clean slate for the next customer.”

God, Kira thought. What will they do to him next?

“I can’t take much more of this,” he said, his jaw tightening. “I won’t take much more of this. We’ve got to get out of here.”

***

The next morning, the brothel madam came into Kira’s cell.

“Congratulations,” the older woman said. The madam was wearing one of her many black business suits, and she’d painted her long fingernails a turquoise blue to match her short spiky hair. “You’ve got a date this afternoon. A real big spender, too; you’ll be with him the whole night.”

The madam looked Kira up and down, frowning a little. “He was very specific about how you should look. I think Tina has the sort of dress he wants you in…but we’ve still got to do something about your hair…”

***

Late that afternoon, Kira stepped into the Little Zagreb steakhouse on Level 7. Her nose and eyes still burned from the fumes of the chemicals the beautician had used to turn her straight black hair to wavy auburn. The lilac perfume they’d spritzed her with to hide the chemical odors wasn’t any help to her suffering sinuses. The sequins of the green strapless cocktail dress chafed her skin, and the silver tracking bracelet was uncomfortably tight around her left ankle. The dress was a few years out of fashion, but it was what the brothel had on hand in her size. She hoped the customer wouldn’t mind.

She made her way through the knot of tourists and gamblers crowding the front entrance to the maître’d’s station.

“I’m supposed to meet Captain Zorleski here,” she told the headwaiter.

He glanced at the reservation screen. “Yes, the Captain’s already been seated in the back. Rachel will show you to your table,” he said, waving a hand to summon a nearby waitress.

The waitress led Kira through the restaurant to a table occupied by a broad-chested man in the scarlet and black uniform of the Godunov royal guard.

Kira had seen a fair number of men wearing the old Godunov uniforms around the station, claiming to be veterans of the fabled war in which the bloodthirsty Romanovs wrested control of the Novizvezdan empire from the elderly, honorable Czar Petro Godunov. The vastly outnumbered Godunov guard had battled for their czar and homeland to the last man on the last ship; of 5,000 guardsmen, less than 100 were thought to have survived. The survivors were banished from the Novizvezdan territories. In the 15 years since their defeat, the Godunov guard had come to represent old-fashioned honor, determination, and unflinching courage. Of course, most if not all the men she’d seen wearing the uniform were nothing but blowhard frauds trying to impress women with tales of a war they’d only seen in videos and holos.

The Captain stood up as the women neared the table. And in that moment, Kira knew he was the real thing. He was a tall man, but even if he’d been short Kira suspected he’d still be an imposing figure. He radiated strength and calm authority. A white, netted burn scar extended over the lower half of his left face and disappeared beneath his high collar. She’d heard the Godunovs didn’t believe in having battle scars removed cosmetically. His gray, wiry hair was cropped close to his scalp, and he smelled of white soap, ozone, and testosterone.

Though he smiled at her, his grey eyes remained intense and sad, and she suspected very little escaped his gaze.

He extended his right hand toward her, palm up. Each of his fingers were as wide as two of hers. “I am Nikolai Zorleski. May I have the pleasure of your company for supper?”

“Yes, of course,” she replied, giving him her hand.

He planted a quick, formal kiss on the back of her hand, then moved around the table to pull her chair out for her. She sat. As he pushed her up to the table, she noticed he wore a gold wedding band on his left hand.

“What would you like to drink, miss?” the waitress asked.

“A glass of merlot, please, and an ice water,” Kira replied.

“And you, sir?”

“A glass of sweet sherry to start, and a pint of ale with my meal,” the Captain said. “I already know that I want the porterhouse. But the lady will need time to decide, I expect.”

As the waitress left with their drink orders, the Captain evidently noticed Kira glancing again at his wedding band.

“You have questions, yes?” He raised his left hand and twisted the ring thoughtfully. “Why an honor-bound old soldier like me should be on a pleasure station like this when I have a loving wife waiting for me at home?”

Kira kept her face in a neutral smile, hoping he didn’t really expect an answer. Above all, she dared not do or say anything to offend a customer, particularly a big spender like the Captain. If this man went back to the madam with complaints, she’d get rough trade or worse.

She relaxed a little when the Captain continued.

“The trouble is, my loving wife is not waiting for me at home. My home is gone. My Vanessa was murdered sixteen years ago by those scabby dogs the Romanovs dared call soldiers. I fought my way back to the homeworld to find her, and when I found her corpse…when I found her I knew that they’d done the most horrible things imaginable to her before they finally slit her throat.”

The Captain took a deep breath, unclenching his fists and spreading his hands flat on the white linen tablecloth. “My wife and I had just celebrated our tenth anniversary when the war started, and we had the kind of love the angels in Heaven should have envied us for. A day doesn’t pass that I don’t ache to feel her beside me.”

The waitress returned with their drinks. “Are you ready to order, miss?”

“Um.” Kira glanced at the menu. “The cress and isopod salad, thanks.”

The waitress turned to the Captain. “You wanted the porterhouse, sir? What sides would you like with that?”

“Buttered barley and the mashed turnips, please,” he replied.

He took a sip of his sherry as the waitress left for the kitchen. “The last night before I joined the fleet, I took her to dinner in a restaurant much like this one. Her hair, her dress…she looked much like you do now. Your resemblance to her is…astonishing.”

The Captain drained his glass and stared into the crystal facets. “I can accept that she died; we all die. But that such a sweet and loving woman should die tortured and burned and mutilated at the hands of raping beasts…no. No, no, and no. I was a madman for a long time after that, but I finally realized that no revenge upon the Romanovs could ever make up for what had been done to her. And revenge was not what she would have ever wanted.

“And then I had a dream about Vanessa. She told me, ‘Do for others what you did for me. Give to other women the joy you would have given to me,’” he said.

“Today is her birthday, and to honor her memory, I will do for you whatever you desire in the time we have together,” the Captain finished.

Kira paused, considering his story. “But why me?” she asked. “Why choose a whore?”

He shrugged and smiled. “Who else should I choose on this orbiting Gomorrah? The spoiled daughter of a rich businessman? A bored widow? Who else here is more in need of joy but the slave who must provide it?”

“Why haven’t you gotten married again?” she asked. “It seems like dedicating yourself to a new love would be the best way of honoring your wife’s memory.”

“Were I a different man, remarrying would be a fine thing to do,” he replied slowly. “But I’m a man of the sword, and any wife of mine would live in danger. My heart isn’t strong enough to bear the death of two loves.”

He smiled at her sadly. “If you can’t have a real rose, a paper rose will have to do.”

***

After they finished their meal (Kira happily succumbed to the temptation of a huge slice of chocolate cake for dessert) the Captain led Kira back to his hotel suite.

He undressed her and laid her down on the satin sheets of his bed and began to give her a full-body massage. Though his hands were big, his touch was light and gentle, and when she closed her eyes and ignored her nose, it was easy to imagine that his hands were Seth’s hands. It was easy to imagine that she and Seth were free and had money and could make love in their own hotel room. Yes, those were Seth’s fingers caressing her sides and kneading her neck and shoulders, his palms sliding down the smooth length of her back to her thighs.

The more she thought about Seth, the wetter she got. The hands gently rolled her over onto her back. Lips — yes, she could imagine they were Seth’s, though he had no stubble to scritch against her skin — planted soft kisses on her neck, her breasts, down her belly, down her thighs. She felt hot breath on her hairless vulva, and then a soft kiss on her lips. And then a deeper, longer kiss, his tongue sliding into her vagina.

“Amazing. You taste just like raspberry jelly,” the Captain said.

Her fantasy of Seth deflated, and she felt her loins grow cold. “That’s because I’ve got raspberry genes,” she replied, suddenly feeling like an old woman. “The gengineers gave us plant scent-and-flavor genes so we’ll always be yummy for the customers.”

He slipped a finger inside, gently probing, then withdrew. “You’ve got rings in here?”

“Cartilage, like in your trachea,” she replied. “I’m ridged for your pleasure.”

“Isn’t that uncomfortable?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Not really. The rings have some stretch to them. And I don’t have a lot of pain receptors down there. It doesn’t hurt unless the guy tries to put his fist in me. It’s not like a baby’s ever going to go through there. They made me seedless, too, you know.”

“You seem to know a lot about your body,” he said.

“One of my regulars last season was a gengineer. He designed doxies like me, and told me all about it. Seemed to enjoy his handiwork.”

The Captain sighed and sat up. “It’s a shame, you know. Up until I tasted you, I could almost imagine you were Vanessa.”

He gave his head a little shake, as if to physically shake off his sadness, and smiled at her. “Are you enjoying this? Really?”

“Of course.”

“Don’t lie,” he said gently. He touched the bracelet on her ankle. “Are you worried about this? About them listening in? Don’t worry, I told them no bugs, and they knew better than to cross me. My security system would’ve alerted me if you’d come in here with anything but a tracking beacon.

“You can say what you like in here,” he said. “Tell me what you want.”

Kira got up on her knees and faced the old soldier, who was sitting crosslegged on the foot of the bed. He’d stripped down to his gray boxer shorts. The pale burn scar she’d seen on his face and neck extended down across his left shoulder. The thick hair on his chest and belly was more than half gray, but his body was still lean and corded with muscle. His erection had subsided.

“What I want most in this world,” she said, “is to leave this place with my boyfriend, marry him, and live the rest of my life with him as a free woman someplace far, far away from here.”

The Captain was staring at her, his expression unreadable. “Are you asking me to help you escape from this station?”

“I don’t know — are you offering to help me?”

He chewed the inside of his cheek. “You’re aware, I hope, that in this part of the universe, the punishment for stealing or releasing your sort is execution? I’ve already been banished from the Novizvezdan empire; I don’t relish having to avoid the New American Confederacy worlds on top of that.”

“My sort,” she said. “And what am I supposed to be?”

“A thing that looks human, but isn’t. A flesh machine, or so most corporate scientists say. A soulless thing created to be perfectly charming, beautiful, and an effortless liar. A lust-driven, conscienceless hedonist that can’t be trusted to live free in normal human society.”

“Do you really believe all that?” she asked.

“The public believes it.” He bowed his head. “And I…” he trailed off.

“What?” she prompted.

“Did you know that your model is very popular?” he asked. “There’s a Kira in all the best brothels and gentlemen’s clubs in this quadrant. I first saw you — a Kira, rather — five years ago. I was in Nova Monaco, and had to go into a show bar to meet a client. I stepped inside the club, and suddenly I saw my dead wife dancing onstage.”

He shook his head. “I was…stunned. I asked around, learned the girl’s name, and found out that she was a construct, a slave of the club owner. Everywhere I’ve gone since then, I’ve seen Kiras. And all of you look so much like Vanessa. I feel I’m being haunted.”

The Captain paused, looking uncomfortable. “You’re the first Kira I’ve even spoken with. I tried just avoiding you, but the harder I tried, the more I seemed to see you. I thought…maybe if I bought you for an evening, I could get my heart to realize that you’re nothing like Vanessa, that you’re not even a real human. I could finally stop feeling this horrible longing when I see your face.”

“So, your story about the birthday ritual was just a lie?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I’ve told you no lies. I just…didn’t tell you all the truth at first.” He looked ashamed. “The universe is full of freewomen who live chained by sorrow and loneliness. I’d like to think I helped ease the burden on their hearts, if only for an evening.”

“What good is all this supposed to do me?” she asked. “You asked me what I wanted. I need my freedom. I need the chance to have what you had with Vanessa.”

He smiled, staring down at his feet. “When I was a young officer, I and my shipmates smuggled a little cat onboard our warship. He would sit by the airlock and howl to be let out. I’m sure that if he’d been able to talk, he’d have told us that he needed to be outside. He’d have never understood that outside was a cold vacuum that would kill him in an instant.”

Kira tried to bite back the angry frustration building inside her. “Stop patronizing me, please. I’m not an animal.”

“No, but you’ve been sheltered like one. This is not such a bad place; I’ve seen Kiras who live far worse lives than yours. And even they live in luxury compared to many commonfolk. The universe won’t be kind to someone like you.”

“Do me a favor,” she said, her voice low, “and please don’t assume you know anything about my life. I have to break out of my cell at night just to spend a little time with the man I love. I spend every waking moment of every day wanting to be with Seth, and we can’t even spend a single night together.”

She paused to angrily wipe away the single tear that had slipped down her cheek. “Seth got depressed because he couldn’t be with me, and some rich lady he was servicing decided she didn’t get her money’s worth and complained. Do you know what happens to us when we get customer complaints? We get put on rough trade to teach us a lesson. Right now the man I love is very likely being beaten and pissed on, and there’s nothing I can do to help him. Nothing. And if he doesn’t smile and say ‘thank you, may I have some more?’ and gets more complaints, there’s a very good chance he’ll get sold to a snuffer. A rich psycho will lay down his cash, and get to take him apart. Or, if the psychos aren’t buying and the house feels like it’s already made its target 500% profit on Seth, they’ll sell him for garden fertilizer or pet food. That’s what happens to us when we start to get old and sag, after all — off we go to the rendering plant.

“So don’t please compare me to some pet you once owned,” she finished. “I know what an airlock is. I’m living inside one.”

The Captain was staring at her. “You really do love him, don’t you?”

“Yes!” she exclaimed, throwing up her hands in exasperation. “I love Seth. Why should this seem like such a miracle to you?”

“Because true love always is a miracle,” he replied.

Then the Captain was silent for what seemed an eternity.

“I want to see you two together,” he finally said. “I believe that you are in love, yes, but I haven’t seen this boy. If his love for you isn’t real, the two of you can’t survive out there. If I think that he loves you, too, that it’s not just the natural lust you feel for one of your own kind — then yes. I’ll help you. I’ve made my living fighting for other peoples’ money and land — why not fight for love for a change?”

***

The Captain made arrangements with his ship’s crew, then called the brothel to order Seth. Kira had put her cocktail dress back on and watched him from the bed.

“I don’t care if he’s busy,” the Captain said, pacing in front of the comm terminal. He shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his burgundy robe. “I’m paying you top dollar, and I want him here on the double.”

The madam frowned from the terminal screen. “He’ll need to get cleaned up first—”

“Am I not speaking clearly?” the Captain asked. “I just said I want him sent here, right now. Now. Clear?”

The madam forced a plastic smile. “Perfectly. We’ll deliver him in ten minutes. You’ll need to pay in full when he arrives.”

The madam’s word was good. Captain Zorleski had barely gotten dressed in gray fatigue pants and a khaki shirt when the doorbell chimed.

“Come in,” the Captain said.

The door slid wide. Outside, Seth stood between two burly brothel guards in plain brown suits. Seth wore simple, loose-fitting green cotton trousers and tunic. His feet were bare, and he was holding a bag of ice wrapped in a bloody bar towel to his nose and freshly-blackened eye. Kira saw new marks on his wrists, possibly from shackles.

“Is this the boy?” the Captain asked Kira.

“Yes,” she replied.

Seth’s eyes flicked from the Captain to Kira and back. He stared at the old soldier as the other men completed the transaction.

Kira saw a dark, horrible anger building behind Seth’s eyes, a hateful rage she’d never thought him capable of.

“Door, close,” the Captain said as the guards left with four bars of platinum. He turned to Seth. “Well, you must—”

Seth flung the bloody icepack in the Captain’s face and savagely swung at the older man’s jaw. The Captain neatly dodged the punch and caught Seth’s wrist. He jerked Seth’s arm up and down in a wide arc, throwing the young man onto his back. The Captain completed the takedown by stepping over his prone body and holding Seth’s twisted arm locked against his knee.

In the next instant, Seth popped his elbow, shoulder, and wrist out of joint, his arm slithering from the Captain’s grasp. The older man looked profoundly surprised as Seth lurched up underneath him, knocking him forward onto his hands and knees.

“Seth, no!” Kira yelled.

Not seeming to hear her, Seth leaped onto the Captain’s back and grabbed him in a headlock. Choking, face turning purple, the Captain tried to shake Seth off. Seth pulled his arm tighter, digging his knee into the small of the Captain’s back, his own contorted face turning red with anger and exertion.

“Seth, stop!” Kira shouted, jumping off the bed and hurrying toward the grappling pair. “He’s trying to help us, stop!”

Her words finally seemed to clear the angry haze clouding his mind. He released the Captain’s neck and sprang back a few yards, catlike. He stood in a tense half-crouch, as if waiting for the other man to retaliate.

“Captain, are you all right?” Kira asked.

Gasping, the older man nodded and sat up on his knees. He rubbed at his throat and stared back at Seth.

“That was some move you pulled,” the Captain coughed. “Your joints must be half rubber.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Seth replied belligerently. “Ask Kira; she knows that kind of stuff.”

Kira went to Seth and touched his bruised face. “What’s gotten into you? I’ve never seen you like this.”

Seth’s rage seemed to evaporate when Kira touched him. He smiled at her, still looking a touch unhinged, and took her hand in his and kissed her palm.

“What’s gotten into me is — I’m not going back there. No. Not after today and yesterday.” He swallowed nervously. “I saw this guy was alone, and had cash, and I thought we could take his money and clothes and get out of here.”

“Seth, he told me he’d help us.”

“Help us?” Seth laughed bitterly. “Kira, he’s a normal. They’ll never help people like us. He’s just a rich guy playing with your head.”

“No, it’s not like that,” Kira said. “I believe what he’s told me.”

“I told her,” the Captain said, “that I’d help the two of you get off the station. If I think you love her.”

Seth turned a cold gaze on the Captain. “The fact that you’re alive right now should be proof enough. I wouldn’t have stopped if I didn’t love her.” He hugged Kira close, wrapping his arms around her protectively. “She’s the only woman I’ve ever loved, and right now, she’s the only person I don’t hate in this entire damned universe.”

The Captain stared at the couple for several moments, thoughtfully chewing on his lip. “I believe you. Let me contact my crew, and you’ll be off this station within the hour.”

“Wait,” Seth said. “What’s the catch? You can’t be doing this out of the goodness of your heart.”

“There’s no catch,” the Captain replied. “I’m doing this to repay a debt I owe to an old love.”

“Bullsh—” Seth began.

“Seth, stop it,” Kira said, gently grabbing his chin and forcing him to look down at her. “I believe him. If you can’t trust him, then trust me.”

“All right,” Seth said, relaxing. “All right.”

***

A young, dark-skinned woman with close-cropped green hair stepped into the Captain’s hotel room carrying plain clothes for Kira and Seth. She looked at the couple doubtfully, then approached the Captain.

“Are you sure about this?” she asked.

“Yes, I’m quite sure,” he replied. “Did you find the lock decoder, Loren?”

“Yeah.” She pulled a small, oval device out of the front thigh pocket of her fatigues. “How long are they going to be on the ship? Are they gonna be, like, crew? And if they’re gonna be crew, do they know how to do anything besides fuck?”

Kira felt Seth stiffen in indignation, and she put a hand on his knee to calm him. “I’m sure you’ll find we have many talents that can be of use onboard a mercenary vessel. We’re fast learners.”

“Indeed,” the Captain agreed. “A few judo lessons and this lad will be quite dangerous. Get those tracking devices off them, please. And scan them for microchips. Did you see any watchers?”

Loren nodded. “Couple of ugly guys in brown suits hanging out on a couch in the lobby.”

“Then we’ll be taking the maintenance corridor back to the dock…”

***

Kira held Seth’s hand as the ship’s medic, a thin redhead named Susan, ran an ultrasound wand over Seth’s penis. The artificial gravity on the Captain’s ship, the Petrograd, was only a quarter what it was on the station. Kira felt a little dizzy, and she hoped she wouldn’t get spacesick.

“This feels really weird,” Seth told the medic.

“I’m liquefying the cartilage,” she explained. “I’ll put a nerve block on you once this part’s done, and then I’ll extract the cartilage with a needle. And then—” she paused to lift his flaccid member and run the wand across its underside “— I’ll give you a couple of seconds under the soft tissue growth stimulator, and you should be good as new. Cartilage tends not to grow back without encouragement, so we shouldn’t need to do this again.”

Kira watched as the rings that had kept them from truly consummating their love melted beneath Seth’s skin. When the medic was finished, Kira thanked her, helped Seth get dressed, and walked with him back to their cabin.

They crawled into the big padded sleep sack on their double bunk and snuggled down for the night. Seth slipped an arm around Kira and kissed her cheek. He seemed more relaxed than she’d seen him in months, much more like his old self. He slid his other hand across her smooth belly, drawing soft tickling circles on her skin with his fingertips.

“I can’t believe this has really happened,” he said. “I can’t believe we’re free.”

“Yeah,” she said, snuggling closer to him and smiling into the darkness. “But I keep thinking about something…the Captain said he’s met my model on a dozen stations. I wonder…I wonder if all the mes are in love with all the yous?”

“Hmm. I knew I wanted you the moment I saw you, and I can’t imagine feeling any differently.” Seth paused. “So, I guess if all the yous have actually met the mes, then there’s a whole lot of people out there who ought to get freed from slavery, don’t you think?”

His suggestion sparked her imagination. Why stop at just our models? she thought. Once we’ve learned what the Captain Zorleski can to teach us, we could get everyone out. Station by station…

“Viva la revolucion,” she whispered. “But first, I think we out to try your new toy out. You know, just to make sure everything’s working.”

Seth had gone hard against her thigh. “Oh, I think it’ll work just fine.”

“That’s good,” she said. “Because I’ve got a couple of orgasms in me that are in serious need of liberation…”

Flesh and Blood

MIKE INHALED sharply as the first drop of hot candle wax hit his chest. His eyes strained against the darkness imposed by Olivia’s silken blindfold, arms strained against the leather thongs binding him to the bedposts. He could hear the faint hiss of the candle’s flame, nearly drowned out by the rustle of Olivia slithering across the satin sheets. And by the beating of their slave’s heart, so agonizingly slow now that he was sure the girl had lapsed into a coma.

If he’d undergone this delicious torture only a year earlier, he would have been sheened in sweat, shivering like a mouse. But now his skin was cool and dry as a snake’s, his dead heart steady, a cold flesh clockwork.

The second candledrip seared onto his lower belly, alarmingly close to parts he didn’t want burned, and he reflexively tried to cover himself. The leather ripped, and suddenly his hands were free.

“Oops. Sorry,” he mumbled.

Olivia sighed. “Michael, will you never learn to be still?”

He pulled off the blindfold and blinked at her in the candlelight. “We could try regular handcuffs next time.”

“And have you ruin the finish? I think not.”

She caressed the dark bedpost. Mike remembered her telling him that she’d had the bed since 1850. It had been part of the dowry she’d brought with her from England, and it was only piece of furniture she’d been able to rescue from her then-husband’s estate before Sherman’s troops burned Atlanta. He wondered how many thousands of lovers she’d entertained on it since.

“You’re so strong, Michael, even for one of us.” She lay down beside him, her long white hair tickling his shoulder, and ran her hand across his broad chest. “Are you like Samson? If I cut off those lovely dark locks of yours, will you be weak for me?”

He smiled grimly. “I don’t think my hair has much to do with it.”

He’d known real weakness: multiple sclerosis. It first struck him when he was twenty. He was at the gym, on the bench press doing an easy warm-up set of a hundred pounds, when suddenly his arms went weak and numb and the bar crashed to his chest. The spotter who heaved the bar off him to help him up had to call a cab because Mike’s hands were too numb to pick up his car keys.

He had a cousin in Toronto who had MS; she’d been wheelchair-bound since she was thirty-five. She couldn’t even pee without help. The doctors insisted that Mike’s illness wasn’t likely to get that bad, since he almost fully recovered from the first episode less than a month after it happened. But the specter of living his life in a chair drove him wild. He started spending all his money on women, parties and trips, trying to cram as much living into his existence as possible while he searched for something, anything, that would cure him.

Two years later, he’d blundered into the Outland in a drunken haze, and woke up the next morning in Olivia’s bed, a pint lighter. While he never told her of his disease, she could apparently smell his desperation in his sweat. Her offer of eternal life had been tempting, but it was the implication of eternal strength that had swayed him.

“Barbarian. You have no sense of the romantic.” Olivia sat up, and picked up the scarred arm of their unconscious slave. “Care for another drink?”

Mike looked at the teenager, who went by the name Onyx; he thought her real name was Betty Lou or something. She was one of the dozens of little girls who hung out at the Outland, hoping to get the attention of one of the members of Olivia’s circle. Most of them were underage, getting into the club by way of fake IDs or blow jobs for the bouncers. The unlucky ones simply clustered near the front door, trading stories and clove cigarettes until the cops busted them for breaking curfew.

Onyx had been plump and comparatively healthy-looking only a few months before when Olivia had picked her up, but now her ribs stood out in plain relief, her skin so thin and pale her whole body was traced in a webwork of blue veins. Her small breasts rose and fell with every shallow breath, silver barbells glinting in her pink nipples. Her neck and wrists were crusted with dried blood.

He shook his head. “I don’t think we should take any more from her tonight.”

Olivia laughed. “What does it matter? There are dozens of these little tarts for us. This one’s a runaway; nobody will miss her.”

“I’d miss her. She’s a good little dancer.”

“Hmph. I see you haven’t got any sense of value, either.” Still, she put down the girl’s arm.

He made a mental note to take the girl out for a decent meal once Olivia was occupied with somebody else.

Suddenly, there was a rap on the door.

“Phone call for Michael,” Adrian announced.

“I told you not to bother us. Whoever it is, send them away,” Olivia replied, frowning in irritation.

“I tried, but she keeps calling back. Some girl named Julie. Says it’s an emergency.”

Olivia fixed Mike with a cold purple stare, her enormous pupils contracting to pinpoints. “A mundane girl? Calling here?”

“Look, I don’t know how she got this number; I sure didn’t give it to her.” He rolled off the bed and dug his jeans out of the pile of discarded clothing on the floor. “She’s just a girl I went out with for a while last year before you initiated me. Whatever this is about, I’ll take care of it.”

“Make sure she never calls back.”

He dressed and went up through the maze of concrete corridors and steel stairs that led up to the Outland’s business office. The building dated from the early 1900’s, beginning its existence as a bank. During Prohibition, the Mob took it over, converting the underground vaults into secret accounting offices and storerooms for liquor. Now, the subterranean complex served well as dark apartments for the thirteen members of Olivia’s circle.

Mike climbed up through the trap door in the coat closet and stepped out into the smoky club manager’s office. The fluorescent light momentarily made his eyes hurt, and he had to stare at an old dark Bauhaus poster for a few seconds to ease the pain.

Adrian took a drag off his cigarette and held out the phone. “She’s all yours, man.”

“Thanks.” Mike lifted the receiver to his ear. “Hello?”

“Mikey, is that you?” Julie sounded as if she had been crying.

“Yeah, how did you—”

“Oh, thank God I’ve found you! Look, I know it’s been a long time, but I’ve got to talk to you…this is my last quarter, can you meet me at the coffeehouse on the corner of Ninth and Wilshire?”

“Wait, I—”

“Please, Mikey, it’s a real genuine emergency! I’m here at the cafe now, promise you’ll come? Please? You’re the only one left.” Her voice was shaking, strained to the point of cracking.

With Julie, everything was an emergency; her life was one self-inflicted crisis after another. But he’d never heard her sound quite so upset before. “Oh, hell, okay, I’ll be there in a while.”

“Olivia’s gonna be pissed,” Adrian commented as Mike hung up and passed the phone back to him. No doubt he’d overheard the entire exchange. “I’d tell you to just blow this girl off, but I got the feeling she’ll keep calling back if you don’t show. She musta called a dozen times before I came to get you.”

“Yeah, she’s persistent, that’s for sure,” Mike sighed. “And I need to find out how she tracked me down, so I can make sure none of my family finds out where I am. Hey, is it still light out?”

“Yeah…here, take my shades and my trench.” He pulled a floor-length gunmetal gray suede coat off the wall hook and dug a pair of Gargoyles out of the inside pocket. “It’s too warm out for a coat, but people are gonna think you’re a freak anyway.”

***

A half-hour later, he was hurrying down the sidewalk toward the coffee shop. He kept his head down, hands jammed deep into the coat’s pockets, collar turned up high to protect at least some of his face from the rays filtering through the overcast sky. It was an utter myth that his kind would burst into flames if they were exposed to the light of day, but the sun was definitely not their friend. Soon after he’d been converted, he’d made the mistake of staying out past dawn in a T-shirt. In ten minutes, he’d ended up with a blistering burn on his face and arms that left him shivering and sick for days. All part of the cost of changing from mortal to immortal.

Changes. His gums itched around his loose canines; Olivia said his new fangs would push through in another month or two, and the rest of his teeth would be replaced during the coming decade. Happily, he hadn’t lost his superficial sexual ability, though he no longer produced semen. He’d look less and less human as the years passed, become more like Olivia in every way except his size and gender. She was a beautiful creature, to be sure, but couldn’t be mistaken for anything but what she was. All her teeth were as sharp as a serpent’s. The flesh beneath her skin had turned from red to purplish-blue, her gums and tongue sometimes almost black if she hadn’t fed in a while. Her irises had grown huge, her pupils the size of dimes. She could only safely expose herself in the freakshow atmosphere of the club, though she was so light-sensitive she’d banned strobes and blacklights. Still, she sometimes went out into the city to hunt, cruising the dark streets in her big black Lincoln. He suspected she did it as much for the thrill of the risk of exposure as for the bloody satisfaction of taking unwilling prey.

Like the other young ones, Mike was merely pale, his lips slightly bluish, though he was far too muscular to be taken as anemic. He didn’t sweat and had lost all body odor, and he’d noticed that alone was enough to alert some people’s instincts and make them recoil. It almost seemed part of the grand design that they could pass for human their first twenty years, since that was often the span it took them to completely break their ties to family and unconverted friends.

He’d thought his relationship with Julie had been too slight to ever need re-breaking.

He pushed through the front doors of the coffeehouse, thankful that the place was dimly lit, grateful to be smelling coffee, chocolate and cinnamon instead of the oppressive diesel-and-garbage stink of the subway and city streets.

The pay phone was a few feet from the door, and Julie was leaning against it, chewing her thumbnail and sniffling. Her left eye was badly bruised, nearly swollen shut, and she had finger-shaped bruises on her left forearm. Her strawberry blond hair was uncombed, and she was wearing a ratty Kurt Cobain tee and torn jeans, the kind of clothes she’d wear around the house but would never willingly go outside in.

Her eyes widened when she got a good look at him, and she took a step back.

“Mikey, is that you?” she asked uncertainly.

He took off the Gargoyles and squinted at her. “Yeah, it’s me. What’s happened to you?” On second appraisal, he realized she’d gained about twenty pounds since the last time he’d seen her.

“Um, well, it’s sort of a long story…maybe you just need to see her.”

Mike followed her back to her booth. A few-months-old baby girl lay asleep in a yellow plastic carrier on the seat. She wore pink polkadot footed pajamas, and loosely clutched a white blanket.

Dear God, this woman couldn’t keep a cactus alive, and now she’d had a baby?

“This is Rebecca; I named her after Tank Girl. I guess I named her after my aunt, too, but she killed herself and I heard it’s bad luck to name a baby after suicides.”

“Cute kid,” he said aloud as they sat down, she by the baby and he across from them. “Who’s the lucky father?”

“You. I think. Which is why I had to talk to you,” she stammered.

His? She expected him to think that this child was his? After she’d openly cheated on him? He felt as though his heart should be pounding, but it stuck to its dull, slow funereal beat.

He stared at her, and she flinched and averted her gaze. “You said you were on the Pill,” he said.

“Well, I was…sort of. I guess I missed a couple of days.”

He shook his head. Those that didn’t want, got, and those that wanted had to go without. His sister Nina, an architect with a dull but utterly reliable husband, had been trying for years to get pregnant. They had a beautiful house out in the country, the perfect place to raise kids. They’d recently tried to adopt the child of a teenaged girl in their town. Nina had shown him snapshots of the baby: she’d had skin the rich color of milk chocolate and a cap of black curls framing her sweet little face. But, in the end, the girl’s family insisted she keep the baby. Afraid of having her hopes raised and dashed again, Nina had not tried for another adoption.

“What makes you so sure she’s mine?” he asked. “I seem to recall I wasn’t the only guy you were fucking last year.”

Julie looked as if he’d slapped her, and her lips twitched for a moment before she could get any words out. “Jamar is Black, so she can’t be his. I thought she might be Tony’s, he’s the guy I’m living with now, the one you, um, found me with—”

“Is he the one who gave you that black eye?” Tony was a wiry coke freak who worked as an auto mechanic, though his temper made it hard for him to hold down steady jobs. He had aspirations to be a professional kickboxer, and played guitar in some kind of garage band. Girls found him handsome and charming. Mike had disliked him on sight, hated him bitterly when he found the guy going down on Julie in the back room of a friend’s house during a party.

“Yes.” She started crying again. “Becky doesn’t look anything like Tony, and he knows it. She looks like you,” she added defensively. “If you don’t believe me, we can get a blood test—”

“Don’t worry about it.” He wasn’t sure he even had a blood type any more; a paternity test would only prove he was no longer human. “So let’s say, hypothetically, that she is mine. What now? I wasn’t cut out to be a father before, and I’m certainly not the daddy type now that I’m…dying.”

She gave a start. “Dying? I — I thought you looked kind of…ill, but…it’s not AIDS, is it?”

“Leukemia.”

“Oh.” She was silent for a moment. “I’m so sorry—”

“Don’t be. It’s no great loss.” He rubbed his eyes; dim as it was, the overhead lights still bothered him. At least the sun was finally going down. “So what did you want from me? I don’t see how I can help you. You and Becky should go to the women’s shelter.”

“I know,” she sniffled. “And I want to, but…I got so scared this morning when he started to hit me, I just grabbed Becky and ran. I don’t have my credit cards, clothes, or anything. I had to buy diapers and formula at the drugstore, and I have two dollars left. I can’t go to the shelter without my stuff, but I’m scared to go back to get it alone. So I called you…I figured, you’d maybe…want to help, on account of Becky and all.”

She looked up at him, her eyes pleading. “I mean, you’re so big, Tony would never mess with you.”

Big. Clearly, he’d missed his true calling as a knight in shining armor. He sighed, wondering how many other ex-boyfriends she’d fruitlessly called for help that day.

“Okay,” he finally said. “I’ll go with you back to Tony’s apartment, we’ll get your stuff and go to the shelter. And then,” he leaned over the table ‘til his face was inches from hers, “you will never, ever call me again, and let me die in peace.”

***

On the subway ride to Tony’s apartment, Julie told Mike that she’d found out where he was from one of her girlfriends, who frequented the Outland on techno nights. Mike normally eschewed makeup and outrageous outfits, but realized now that perhaps he should put on vampire drag, blacken his lips and eyes and tease his hair into a scary mess every day, just to keep from being recognized again.

Becky was fretful during the trip, and worked up to a genuine squalling fit halfway through. Mike offered to hold her, and managed to unobtrusively hypnotize her and put her back to sleep. It was one of the first tricks Olivia had taught him; he never thought he’d use it on a baby.

As Becky slept, he realized he’d never held a baby before. She was so small, and fragile. And awfully cute. He gently traced the curve of her face with his index finger. Would her nose be his, or Julie’s? She had his jawline, he was sure of it. He tried to imagine what she would look like when she grew up. A heartbreaker, he decided. No doubt, she’d drive the boys wild. Then he frowned as he began to think of all the grubby, horny boys who’d be after his little girl.

His frown deepened as he thought of Olivia. He’d been away from the Outland too long, but perhaps she hadn’t noticed his absence yet. She’d be absolutely furious if she found out what he’d been up to.

***

Tony’s place was, unsurprisingly, in an utterly appalling part of the city. The hallways of the apartment building reeked of mold and spoiled food and urine, but at least it was dark.

They got no answer when they rapped on the apartment door. Tony was probably off at one of the neighborhood bars. Julie silently unlocked the door and let them inside.

The apartment smelled even worse than the hallway. The stove top was crusted with burnt macaroni and cheese; papers, dirty clothes and candy wrappers littered the floor and furniture. The TV was on, showing an ad in which a smiling suburban housewife mopped her kitchen so her toddler could crawl on a shiny, germ-free floor.

“Let’s get this done quickly,” he said as he shut the door. “I’d just as soon not have to deal with your boyfriend tonight.”

“Okay.” Julie cleared off a section of the couch and set down the still-sleeping baby.

He watched her slip into the bedroom, presumably to pack some clothes. She’d seemed increasingly afraid of him on the subway ride. Realistically, there wasn’t much he could do to keep from being frightening, but he did feel bad about having to be so harsh with her. Better for her to be frightened than for her to call the club again and attract Olivia’s tender attention.

He heard the elevator door open at the end of the hall. Booted feet began to clomp toward the apartment. Tony, or just a neighbor?

He got his answer as a key scrabbled into the lock and the door swung open. Tony jumped in surprise when he saw Mike, and clumsily pulled a Glock-10 semiautomatic out of the pocket of his motorcycle jacket.

“‘The fuck you doing here?” he demanded, pointing the pistol at Mike’s head. Tony stank of whisky, and Mike thought he detected the acrid tang of crack smoke.

Great. Julie never mentioned the guy carried a piece. Of course, given the neighborhood, nobody but an idiot would go out alone without protection.

“Calm down, Tony, I’m just here to help the lady get her things. Another minute or two, we’ll be gone, out of your hair, you’ll have the whole place to yourself.” He stepped forward, staring into Tony’s bloodshot eyes. He’d never tried mesmerizing a druggie before. Olivia had told him drunks and stoners were trivially easy, but crackheads and speed freaks were liable to spook, snap awake as if from a nightmare and lash out at anything that moved. He couldn’t tell what chemical ruled Tony’s brain. “Just be calm, and put down the gun.”

Tony’s eyes glazed, and the nose of the pistol dipped.

“Ohmygod, Tony, put that down!” Julie shrieked, running out of the bedroom.

Tony’s eyes snapped wide in disoriented terror, the spell shattered. His finger reflexively jerked on the trigger. Two rounds slammed into Mike’s belly. Mike’s vision clouded in the bright vortex of pain.

Mike stumbled backward against the wall, numbly staring at the purple blood spilling down his shirt and pants. Would he bleed to death? No, the wounds were already starting to heal.

But he’d lost precious blood. His veins burned with a horrible thirst.

Tony was still firing wildly around the apartment, hollering incoherently. Mike shook off his momentary shock and sprang forward, batting the gun out of Tony’s hand. He grabbed Tony by the hair and threw him to the scarred wooden floor.

Tony shrieked and thrashed wildly as Mike’s blunt teeth clamped around his throat. But Mike could not be thrown off. In seconds he’d crushed the man’s trachea, gnawed open his carotid. The blood came out in a bubbling fountain, and Mike drank ‘til he could hold no more.

As he came up for air, he saw himself reflected in Tony’s dead eyes. Cold horror extinguished his predatory fury. Sweet Jesus, what had he just done? Behind him, the baby was screaming. He couldn’t hear Julie; the girl was probably petrified with terror at what she’d just witnessed.

He fairly sprang away from the corpse, and turned, trying to think of something he could say to her —

Julie was on the floor, dark blood spreading beneath her. He knelt beside her and gently lifted her head. A stray bullet had hit her in the temple. She was dead.

The baby abruptly fell silent, and he felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise.

“Well, you’ve made a mess of things, haven’t you?”

He slowly looked up, his whole body electrified with dread. Olivia was standing in the doorway of the bedroom, a vision in a black lace dress. She’d apparently climbed the fire escape and slipped in through the window. Just to drive home the point that she was far better at this than he, no doubt.

He stood and stepped away from Julie’s body, nervously wiping the blood off his face. “How did you find me so quickly?”

“I made you, Michael. I could hear the beat of your heart halfway around the world.” Smiling sardonically, she glided into the room, delicately lifting her skirts to keep them out of the blood and debris.

“In my day, this would be considered the result of blind stupidity, but we live in more enlightened times, don’t we? Now this sort of thing is called a ‘learning experience.’” She stared at him. “So tell me, Michael, what have you learned tonight?”

“That what you told me was true,” he stammered obediently. “That if they’re not fit to be converts, mortals are playthings or food. Nothing more.”

His stomach churned as he spoke, curdled blood rising in his throat. He didn’t believe a word of it, but he dared not anger her further. Though she’d always cooed over his strength, they both knew she was more than a match for him. She was fiendishly fast, and had a century of experience as a murderess; he’d watched her single-handedly disarm (and then eviscerate) a pair from a rival circle who’d broken into the club basement.

“Don’t feel too bad, Michael, for I also had a learning experience tonight. I should’ve heeded your advice to leave little Onyx alone. No great tragedy, true, but I had not intended for her to die so soon. A mistake is a mistake.”

Becky gave a low, frightened whimper.

“Ah, but the night’s not a total loss,” Olivia said, fixing her gaze on the baby. “I do so love little children. Is she yours?”

He paused. “Yes.”

“Not any more.” She stared at him, her eyes daring him to challenge her.

He could not. She would destroy him, as easily as he’d destroyed Tony. Maybe easier.

But if he let this happen, let her kill a baby who might be his only child, what was the point of his existence? Fun? Pleasure? He’d never asked himself those questions before. He’d known the price of joining Olivia was losing his soul. But to let her kill Becky…that would cost him his heart. Mike bowed his head, wondering how many hundreds of children she’d murdered to satisfy her palate.

Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted the pistol lying on the floor. He remembered the shock of the bullets slamming into his own flesh. Maybe there was still a chance.

“I don’t care,” Mike lied. “Take her.”

She smiled and gave a satisfied nod, then turned to the couch to take Becky.

Mike dived sideways, praying the magazine had not been spent, and scooped up the pistol. Olivia turned on him with alarming speed, shrieking in rage. He pointed the Glock at her midsection and furiously pumped the trigger.

Two firecracker pops, then impotent clicking. But he’d hit her. She stepped backward, staring in mute surprise at the ichor-spilling holes below her breasts.

That hesitation was all he needed. He threw the pistol aside and leaped into her, ramming his left hand into her razored jaws as he dug the fingers of his right into her solar plexus.

He’d thought the impact would knock her down, but she stood fast, snarling and slashing his face with her sharp claws. He had to shut his eyes to keep from being blinded. Dear God, she was strong! He shoved his fist deeper into her mouth, and she savagely worried his hand. His fingers broke with an audible popping.

Ignoring the pain, he managed to hook a leg around and kick her feet out from under her. They fell in a heap beside Julie’s corpse. The momentum of the fall helped him pierce the skin beneath her breastbone with his fingers. She bucked and thrashed, hammering his head and shoulders with bone-cracking blows as he worked his hand deeper and deeper into her slick, cold flesh. She got her claws around his neck, ready to tear out his throat. His fingers closed around her coarse, pulsing cardiac muscle. He yanked it free.

Her heart came out in a great gout of ichor. Olivia’s body convulsed, and then was still. As Mike watched, her dead flesh deliquesced, skin and muscle melting into grayish goo over crumbling black bone. Her heart turned to foul jelly and slipped through his fingers. The stench of rot greased the air.

He stood up, feeling nauseated as the ragged edges of broken bones in his skull and arms scraped against each other. He gingerly explored the lacerations on his face and scalp, thankful he’d been able to kill her before she’d done much more damage. The blood loss made him desperately hungry, but he could endure it until he found a dog or rat. He couldn’t bear to dine on the cooling blood in Julie’s corpse.

Becky was wailing. What was he going to do with her now? The answer came to him instantly: if his sister had been desperate to take some poor stranger’s child, she’d certainly take custody of her only niece.

He wiped the rest of Olivia off on his jeans, then hurried over to the infant.

“Hush,” he said, mesmerizing her with his black eyes. “It’s okay, I’ll take you someplace nice. It’s got trees, and a barn, and when you’re a little older you can have a puppy, I bet.”

Wrinkling his nose in distaste, he poked through Olivia’s sodden dress until he found her car keys. The Lincoln was likely parked no more than a few blocks away; Olivia had always hated walking. He shook the keys free and stood up, breathing deeply.

People were making noise out in the hallway. It was only a matter of time before the police arrived. He’d have to sneak out by way of the fire escape, go up and over the building if a crowd had gathered on the street below.

His sister’s house was an hour away from the city. He wasn’t sure what he’d tell her; the truth would probably work, or most of it. He’d make sure to leave a note granting his sister guardianship. With luck, Becky’s first few months in chaos and single evening in Hell wouldn’t leave lasting scars. She could grow up with parents who would love her, and she would be free to make her own dreams. He hoped that she’d do better than her biological parents, but if she didn’t, well, at least the mistakes would be hers to make.

He washed the gore off his face, hands and arms in the kitchen, then gathered up Becky. His body itched; his flesh and bones were starting to knit. He had strength, he had freedom. And he might just have eternity.

And wherever he ended up, he would make sure his existence meant something.

Afterword

by Nalo Hopkinson

I first met Lucy Snyder in 1995. We were both students at Clarion East, then housed at Michigan State University. Clarion is a six-week long workshop in writing science fiction, fantasy and horror. I had just had my first short story published in a Toronto magazine. I left Clarion mentally wrung out.

Whereas Lucy, within weeks of leaving Clarion, created the online fiction zine Dark Planet, which she edited for about seven years. She’s been the fiction editor for a science magazine. She’s done science writing herself, not to mention tech support, web design, research, bassoon instruction, and radio news editing. Her resume also mentions snake wrangling. Why am I not surprised? Through it all, she’s worked at her own fiction and non-fiction, found her way back into poetry, and discovered her flair for short humour. (“Installing Linux on a Dead Badger” is in another collection of hers. Do go read it. When you do, don’t have anything in your mouth that a surprised snort could catapult up into your sinuses. You have been warned.)

I remember the Lucy I first met as a pale young woman who had clothing in every shade of black. She would be responsible, several years later, for filling my miniscule one-bedroom apartment with goths when she and a few of her friends were in town for a convention. We were all pretty messy. Getting ready to go out on the town that evening was quite the challenge as we all tried to figure out whose clothing was whose. That was when I realised that I wear a hell of a lot of black, too.

The Lucy I first met was shy. I suspect all nineteen of us Clarionettes were, and far too many of us knew stanzas from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales by heart. In the original old English. Lucy often looked serious; either unhappy or angry, it was difficult to tell which. Until she smiled, and you could see the friendly, sweet person that she really was. When writer Samuel R. Delany heard her responses to an autobiographical writing exercise that he had set us, he beamed and said, “I’m half in love with you myself, just from hearing that description.”

He was right. Lucy was easy to like. Then you’d go back to your room and read the story she’d turned in for that week, and find yourself wondering whether you could manage to stay awake all night so that you could check under your bed every five minutes for the boogie man. Cause you know it’s when you’re asleep that he gets you. And the funny thing about it? Lucy was and has remained a sweet, gentle soul. It’s just that you don’t always see the impishness in that grin of hers for what it is right away.

Lucy didn’t only write horror at Clarion. Her conception of how the baby in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass could have legitimately morphed into a pig fascinated me and had me thinking differently about biology than I ever had. I didn’t quite understand the science, but I could picture it from her description, and I have never forgotten it. “A Preference for Silence,” the story of the space-faring Cassandra, who “never lost her tea in zero gee,” first showed up at Clarion.

One day, Lucy showed up for the critique session wearing a bandaid on her leg. I nearly didn’t see it because she is that rare human being; her skin is the “flesh” tone of regular bandaids. I remarked on how unusual that was and how frustrating it is for this brown-skinned person to see the word “flesh” on boxes of bandaids when what they really mean is light pinkish-beige. And Lucy said the loveliest thing to me: “but don’t they sell bandaids to match your colour skin?” (There are more now, but at the time, not so much.) To Lucy, bandaids that could match various skin tones was just so obviously the right thing to do that she hadn’t thought to check whether that was in fact what was happening.

That sense of justice comes across strongly in her writing. Lucy’s very aware that there are horrible people in the world, and oh, is payback ever a gleefully, terminally sadistic bitch in her stories! Some of her characters are the very embodiment of “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more.” Lucy also doesn’t forget for a minute that bad things can happen to good people. There were times I was afraid to turn the page while reading this collection, because I just knew that something more horrible than I wanted to imagine was coming down the pike for some unlucky soul. Man. And people think my writing is viscerally graphic. They don’t know from viscera. Lucy does.

Is it sick and bad and wrong that reading Sparks and Shadows meant that I giggled my way through some of the most macabre fiction this side of the Seventh Circle of Hell? In fact, the last half of “Feel the Love” made me laugh out loud. It also shocked me. It’s been a while. Lucy’s one of the few people who can produce anything so irreverent that even I, who think that sacred cows are just perfect for tossing on the barbie (and enjoying with a fine Chianti), can find it blasphemous. Blasphemous in a good way, you understand. In a “sear the gloss off your illusions” way.

Lucy can write a poem about a one-horse twin. She can make Girl Guide songs kinky without changing a word. (Well, okay; perhaps they already were kinky.) But, not content with leaving it at that, she can spin off from the songs into a surreal futuristic feminine fantasy with a James Bond bravura. She’s welcomed you, via this collection, into her imagination. It’s a bacchanalia in there. And I must tell you; you may never find your way out again.

Acknowledgements

The first edition of this book was published by HW Press in 2007.

“Menstruation For Men” originally appeared in Horror Quarterly , Autumn 2004, and in the Horror Quarterly Anthology , 2005.

“The Dickification of the American Female” originally appeared in Clean Sheets , June 15 2005.

“The Sheets Were Clean And Dry” originally appeared in Masques V , Gauntlet Press, June 2006.

“Flesh and Blood” originally appeared in Blood Magic , Eggplant Literary Productions, October 2001.

About the Author

Lucy A. Snyder is also the author of the urban fantasy novels Spellbent and Shotgun Sorceress, the humor collection Installing Linux on a Dead Badger, and the Bram Stoker Award-winning poetry collection Chimeric Machines. Her writing has appeared in Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Hellbound Hearts, Chiaroscuro, GUD, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.

She was born in South Carolina but grew up in San Angelo, Texas. She currently lives in Worthington, Ohio with a pack of cats and her husband/occasional co-author Gary A. Braunbeck.

You can learn more about her at www.lucysnyder.com

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