Andrew Sweet's Blog: Reality Gradient, page 4

Come Uppance

Raw Fiction brought to you by Andrew Sweet.

Din interlaced his fingers and rested them on his corpulent belly. He leaned back into his chair and tilted his head back to see the clouds pass by, filtering the sun down through the great sequoias. It was by all measures a beautiful day in the Pacific Northwest. Willamette River still coursed on below Burnside, and Ross Island, barely an island by any standards, still separated the river a little further down. It was his back yard though. And it was perfect. All of it. Except for the annoying pest who kept needling him in the ear. Breaking his thick fingers apart from each other, he tried twice before he managed to roll forward on his lounge chair, gripping both sides as he struggled his way up.

“What?”

“The dragonfly or the tortoise? Which one should be my new tattoo?”

 Din popped his neck and turned his head in a gargantuan arc to face Bobbi, or at least that’s what she called herself. She’d blown in one day and never blew away. He had no idea what Bobbi’s real name was. Or where she kept getting money for her tattoos, but it seemed like every week there was a new one she wanted. Bobbi’s last was still buried in bandages across her left shoulder. That one had been the sun, drawn in an Aztec-style of concentric rings and identical flames around them.

“They’re both stupid,”he said. He let out his breath, strained the effort of moving to see what had ultimately been disappointing images. The sun had been more imaginative.

“Who asked you anyway?” she muttered, crumpling the designs and shoving them in the hip pocket of her cut-off jean shorts.

“You did,”he reminded her, sinking onto his back as a thin beam of sunlight landed on his body.

“What do you know about it? You don’t even have a tattoo on your entire body.”

“Oh, I’ve got one,”he assured her, spreading his lips into a wide grin as he closed his eyes and soaked up the warmth of the humid August day. “I’ve got one but you’ll never see it.”

“What is it then?”

“A tortoise,”he said, his smile opening wider.  Din felt a little evil doing it, but Bobbi had insisted on interrupting his sunbathing for his personal aggrandizement. “A big one too. Inner thigh.”

He cracked one eye just in time to see Bobbi’s pupils darting to his thigh, exposed by cut jean shorts nearly as short as hers. There was nothing there, of course, but now she must have felt like a fool for checking.  Din reveled in the delight of her insecurity.

“Why do you do that?” she asked, her voice dropped to pleading. “You don’t have to be mean to you all the time. I’m human too.”

“I’m pretty sure you’re my imagination,”  Din muttered at her, though in truth, he was only about half-certain. What got him to that semi-conclusion was that Bobbi didn’t smell. No matter how long they sat on the lawn chair overlooking the river in the hot sun — and she did it a lot — there was only one of them who smelled like an armpit. That was undeniably Din. Bobbi didn’t even seem to sweat.

At first, he’d thought it was only because Din was about two-hundred pounds heavier than her. He was used to sweating a lot when others weren’t. But on days like today, when she’d been out there with him for over four hours as he worked his way through two tubes of sunblock, Bobbi didn’t make sense. The charcoal drawings that she’d made of her would-be tattoos didn’t have a single sweat stain or smudge. It was like she didn’t feel the heat. Din felt it on every inch of his squat, two-hundred-fifty pound body.

“Toss me one of those cigarettes you like,”  Din said, and despite Bobbi’s clear discomfort with how he’d treated her, she did just that. She had, borrowing a term his mother always used, been instilled with the habit of obedience. Din plucked one out of the pack and tossed it back at her, unconcerned with whether or not she caught it. Bobbi fumbled with it in the air, and only just managed to grab it before it could go over the cliff edge.

“Careful,”he chuckled. “If you go over, who’s going to keep me company?”

“Some other sadist,” she told him, eyes filled with fury.  Din stared at her until her angry eyes turned away. Then he chuckled again, loud enough to make sure Bobbi heard.

“It’s not fair, the way you treat me,” she said.

“Go, then,”  Din said. He’d had enough of the skinny woman, but he knew she wouldn’t go anywhere. She wasn’t a strong woman. Bobbi looked for all the world like she might cry, and  Din thought that would be funny — a grown woman, crying because he was just so mean.

Bobbi didn’t cry. Instead she looked at her charcoal drawings again, and then at Din, and then at the charcoal drawings one more time.

“No, I don’t suppose you do have any tattoos,” she said. She dropped the drawing beside her on the ground and pulled up another piece of paper. “But I could give you one. What would you want?”

“Nothing you’re going to draw.”

 Din huffed and shifted his weight on the chair. It creaked under him and in it’s creaking, he heard the children laughing again. High-pitched laughs, like it was the funniest thing in the world to ridicule a small child with a thyroid problem. They’d cackled like little effing vultures circling the carcass of a dying cow, too excited to wait until it was truly dead to pick meat from it’s bones.

“You have to admit it’s a good piece,” Bobbi said. “Both of them. I have an art degree, you know?”

“Do what you want,”he said. “Wake me when the sun goes down.”

She would, he had no doubt, wake him. In between now and then, Bobbi would draw him a tattoo, probably something equally banal like a tribal or some sort of spider. Or maybe she’d be mean in her art and draw a giant old ugly octopus or something. He resolved to really make her cry if something like that happened, then drifted off into an uncomfortable sleep.

~

Din awoke to the sound of the furious back and forth of an eraser. He rolled over on his side and saw her working hard at her drawing. Despite his manufactured appearance of aloofness, his curiosity bit at the back of his thoughts.

“How long I been asleep?” he asked, expecting Bobbi to turn the page over toward him. When she didn’t respond, he cleared his throat — but still nothing.

“What’d you do there?”

She finally raised her eyes. They seemed red in the setting sun, like little flames around the pitch-black hole in the middle of her iris. That, right there. That was another reason he thought she might be in his head. Nobody had eyes that looked like hers.

“I decided to give you my tattoos,” she said. “But I don’t think you’re going to like where I put them.”

“I told you…”

“Shush,” she said. The boldness of her command caught him off guard. Bobbi didn’t tell him to do things. Bobbi was there to take his orders.

“Come here,” he commanded, done with her back talk. She only smiled on one side of her mouth.

“No,” she said, in barely more than a whisper. “This color really does you justice.”

Din leaned back over the edge of the cot until he could get his feet out from under him. Then he made the command one more time and was once again ignored. His teeth ground together in his head, making the base of his skull ache. Then he summoned what energy he could and pushed up to his feet.

“Sit down,” she said. He didn’t. Din lifted his foot and swung it toward her, but as soon as it got halfway, his leg swooped up on its own and tipped him back over into his chair. She grinned and let out a thin giggle. “I told you.”

His heart began to race in his chest as he checked his body. Too long in the sun, he thought. He reached over to retrieve his bottle of water from the ground beside him. That was easy enough. Uncapped it and took a swig. So far, not too bad. Then he swung his legs around again, intent on showing Bobbi who’s boss.

“I said sit,” she commanded, and he found that this time his legs simply stopped, as though they’d been pinned to the chair.

“Now to get rid of those pesky clothes,” she said, dragging her eraser over the page. Din felt a tug across his chest and looked down to find a swath of his wife-beater, although Bobbi had always called it a tank. Usually when she tried to make that correction, he chortled and made fun of her. He didn’t see anything funny about his current situation. Parts of his body had simply stopped working. And he was hallucinating. Definite signs of a sun stroke.

“Call the hospital, Bobbi,” he said. “Something’s wrong with me.”

“Nothing’s wrong with you, hun,” Bobbi said, doing her best Din impression. “Nothing a good night of sweet loving won’t fix.”

“Call someone, Bobbi,” he said. She grinned and swiped the eraser and another section of his ribbed tee disappeared. At the same time. “Wait a minute. Is that you?”

She raised her eyes. Now he was certain that the centers were red, flames extended upward from her eyes and licked at her eyebrows.

“It’s all in good fun, baby. Relax and enjoy it.”

Din recognized the words, but he hadn’t ever said them to Bobbi before. It was a long time ago, and it was a party. The woman had known what she was doing, luring him on like she’d done. It wasn’t his fault her dress strap had fallen down, or that when he offered to fix it for her they made their way to the bathroom. And when she changed her mind, they were already on their way, weren’t they? You can’t just change your mind from there. You can’t.

Besides, he had stopped, hadn’t he? That part was a little fuzzy.

Another strip of shirt gone. The sun was still too high in the sky and nipped at his unprotected chest. He tried to move but now nothing worked. She still looked on, her eyes not eyes anymore — only holes of blue-white flame.

“Now that’s a blank canvas,” she said. “I could do anything with that.”

The pain started at once. A thousand needles followed its form around his bare nipple in a circle. Looking down he saw droplets of blood coming up to the surface under the black strokes that outlined the tortoise she’d shown him earlier.

“Change, Din. That’s all I needed. Just a little change from you. Maybe some remorse, maybe some kindness. But you couldn’t even do that to a genuinely kind stranger.”

“Bobbi, quit it. You made your point. However you’re doing this, stop.”

“I’m almost finished,” she said, and for a second he found some small amount of gratitude toward her. Until she followed up” “…with the turtle. Dragonflies are more complicated though. And you’re going to hate where that one goes.”

Models and Citizens

Won a BookFest award! 3rd in Genetic Engineering! Here’s the first chapter for free — have a read and if you love it, get your copy today! Hint: in celebration, I’m reducing the price to $2.99 for the rest of October!

Chapter 1

Harper concentrated on the crash of the waves as she pushed back in her magnetic-suspension rocker, nudging the ground with the tips of her toes. Straight, black hair, inherited from her mother, fell across her bare shoulders. She closed her hazel eyes and focused on the sound of her breathing, then counted with the waves. Each one relaxed her more and more. Thick, wet air blanketed her skin. She eased into serenity.

"Harper's just outside, Matthew."

Loud, harsh whispers interrupted her meditation. Her eyes opened to the sound.

"I know, Aayushi. Dammit, this is important.”

"What do you want? I'm sorry? Absolutely not.”

"I expected you to be faithful."

"I expected you not to hit Harper or me. And be sober every once in a while. I guess we're both disappointed."

Harper’s micro-mood stabilizer implant struggled to reign in her spiking emotions. Her heart accelerated, fighting back against the increase of melatonin. The moist air formed into a dank cocoon around her as her body sweat mingled with the humidity. She existed in a sealed balloon, and each breath reduced her limited, precious oxygen. The stabilizer notched up, making her a detached observer as her heart now slowed. The world around her became brighter and happier-looking. An artificial spike in endorphins took the edge off, but she wanted her edge. The stabilizer flipped into emergency mode and the artificial high overpowered her ability to concentrate until her mother's voice punched through.

"You're never here, Matthew. When you are here, you're drunk and violent. I've been waiting for thirty years on you.”

"I own a restaurant. I gotta go talk to people, keep them entertained, keep paying on this house somehow."

"You own a dive. And the 'people' you talk to there aren't people, Matthew. They're HPM."

The mention of HPM caught Harper’s attention. The Human Pride Movement tortured and killed models. The group had more weapons stockpiled than the Texas Rangers. She’d seen them at his bar, with their three-bar tattoos. Even through the haze she could envision the drunken patron telling her how they indicate “God, blood, and country - and no damn clones”.

“They're not wrong, Aayushi. We're being replaced!"

"You only think that when you're drinking, Matt. How many have you had? It's not even noon yet."

"Don't you dare change the subject! How could you cheat on me with one of those shills?”

“Models, Matthew, not shills.”

Harper visualized her mother flipping her head back and forth with her perpetual black ponytail following the laws of the pendulum. Her mother. Cheating. The idea was laughable. Still, she would have congratulated the woman if she’d gotten the news in confidence.

"How could you cheat with one of ...them?!"

Harper heard the raw hurt in her father's voice. She couldn't stop smiling, still on her endorphin ride, but the goodness had gone out of it. The summer would be another prolonged running battle. She couldn't remember why she had expected an idyllic summer break before she started on her doctorate, or work, or whatever her future held. The spike ebbed just enough for her to understand how sad that idea was. Voices rose again and cut through her concentration.

"One of them? Listen to yourself. He's around, and you're not."

"I'll show you, bitch."

Harper's smile vanished. The stabilizer couldn't keep up. With willpower that she didn't realize she could muster, she forced herself to focus on the situation. Endorphins fought against her, telling her that everything was fine, and she should relax. She struggled to maintain focus and with slow, deliberate thoughts. Harper mustered up the hope that her mother could resolve the situation soon. Harper recognized the wavering in his voice as the tone he took on just before violence erupted.

With all of her conscious effort, she stopped the rocker and held her breath, working up the nerve to intervene. Each noise that escaped through the walls caused an involuntary seizing in her chest.

"What are you going to do? Shoot him? You don't even know where he lives."

"I'll find him. He'll come into Jarro sooner or later, and I'll be there."

There was a good chance the argument would wind down now that he talked about Jarro. Once he got the idea in his head, he'd be on his way there a few minutes later to get plastered drunk. Then one of them, she or her mother, would go get him. The unmistakable high-pitched whine of his proton rifle charging told her that this wasn’t going to end that way. Harper sprang from the chair, stumbling as the friction-less seat slid backward faster than she'd anticipated. 

She ran to the back door and the voices get louder as she approached. Harper swung the heavy door open, and her eyes fell to her father. He stood with his back to her beside the living room couch. Her mother stood just beyond him, eyes wide with terror.

"Matthew, calm down and put that thing away. Think – your daughter - “

"How could you do this?! How could you cheat on me with one of them? I'm going to find him, and I'm going to kill him. You'll see – “

Harper made eye contact with her mother, though her father's back prevented her from seeing where the gun pointed. Her mother’s frantic eyes shot wider. The woman shook her head violently side-to-side and mouthed the words 'go' without sound.

Harper heard the whispering sound of a proton rifle discharge. Then the air pressure changed a millisecond before a sharp retort shook the entire house. A hole appeared in the right side of her mother's face. Her mother looked stunned for half a second before she slumped forward to the floor, knocking the weapon from her father's hands as she fell. Harper tried to scream, but the most she could muster was a wheezy gargling noise as her stabilizer stopped working altogether. A panic attack closed off her airways.

Her father turned toward Harper when she made the sound. He didn't seem to see her as he picked the gun up from where it lay on the floor and placed the barrel under his chin. She clasped her hands over her mouth as he charged it again. As he pulled the trigger, he seemed to recognize her, and tears welled up and streamed from the corners of his eyes. Recognition wasn't enough to change his mind. One more bang and he collapsed into a pile on the floor in front of her.

Silence.

Harper stood in the porch doorway, unable to move any part of her body. She felt a sunburn forming on the back of her neck. A warm breeze kissed her skin, encouraging her to relax. The sun primed her Vitamin-D pumps. Her mind flashed the images again and again. First, her mother's recognition of her, followed by that sickening look of surprise. Then the hopeless, tormented stare from her father. Two lives gone in less than a minute.

By the time the police arrived, her neck was on fire, and she struggled not to pass out. An officer in the League City Police Department's dark-blue uniform walked across the living room toward her, side-stepping the bodies. His curly black hair and healthy, confident smile reminded her of a classroom assistant who had asked her on a date once. That boy was built like a linebacker, whereas the officer had the build of a soccer player. He seemed nice.

He waved his hand in front of her face and mouthed what looked like her name. He stepped so close that she could smell his aftershave lotion. The man seemed to be yelling something she could not quite make out. The tenseness of her body dissipated enough for her to take a step backward away from the advancing officer, which stopped his screaming and made him smile instead. So she took another step and then another. The man turned her by the shoulders to face the porch where the wooden staircase led to the sandy beach. They circled the house to where several police cars and an ambulance huddled together. In silence, Harper ascended into the back of the ambulance. It seemed like something she should do. When she finished, the policeman stopped moving his mouth, so she guessed she'd done the right thing.

Sometime later, a paramedic slopped sunscreen and aloe onto her burned neck and muttered something else she couldn't understand. She heard words, but they wouldn't reconcile themselves into concepts. Harper laid her body down on a mat in the center of the van and closed her eyes.

The Pumpkin King

Also published as a submission to Reedsy Writing Prompt .

Cherry apple dripped over his bottom lip and rolled as a drop of red-brown syrup down to Clay's chin. At twenty-four, he'd still not given up many of his childhood vices, including the least destructive of which was a penchant for hard candies that could only be found around Halloween time in his hometown of Libertyville, New York.

He sucked the cherry-apple-flavored liquid up over his lip, enjoying the tart sweetness on the tip of his tongue as he plowed forward through the snow in the open market. It was a Sunday, and he liked to make it to the farmer’s market while everyone else was still finishing up their confessions, reading the bible, or whatever else they did at their churches and mosques. Let them have the religion; he was going to have the pumpkin.

Something flashed at the edge of his vision, like a bluish-green light followed by a crash.

Especially when in front of him sat the most beautiful sphere of orange gold. With as much girth as his Santa-Claus belly, the pumpkin before him nestled into a mound of others as though they were a rugby team huddled together in a scrum. He ran his hand lovingly over its seductive curves. This. This was the one. He could feel it.

An explosion in the background. Clay became vaguely aware of the smell of burning rubber and far-away cries of panic and despair. He didn’t register that the blood-curdling screams were ever so slowly approaching.

He pulled his hand back. An imperfection. It was only slight, but an indentation interrupted the curve halfway from the peduncle to the base of the fruit. Clay’s mind spun. Could he discard that imperfection and keep the rest? He cocked his head sideways and scrutinized the fruit, envisioning his masterpiece lying over the top of it.

No.

There would be no saving it. With disgust, Clay toppled the fruit onto its side and off the shoulders of its brethren. He stared with angry eyes as it tumbled down to the ground.

“You going to pay for that?”

“For that tripe? Never. Did you see the blemish? I wouldn’t use that to make pumpkin stew.”

“But maybe somebody else might, and now look at her….”

Clay felt warm in his chest to see the pumpkin guts splattered across the cold snow.

“Now I’ve saved them then,” he said, eyeing another pumpkin in the corner. This one had the right curves. It was as if the original pumpkin existed only to highlight the virtues of the next. Clay reached out to touch it as the farmer’s mouth opened. Fully expecting a reprimand, Clay prepared his mental quips. The man should have brought better pumpkins, which is what it all came down to. With the right words, Clay could convince him of that.

But his opportunity never came, which both perturbed Clay as much as gratified him. The man seemed to stop working when his mouth opened the entire way. Clay thought he saw a flash of green, gold, red, and white in the man’s eyes. Then the white washed out everything else. The man turned and ran away from something. Coward. It served him right whatever happened.

Clay fondled the corpulent orb and caressed it, seeking out any hidden imperfections.

Heat prickled the hairs at the base of his neck. It was like a flash of heat, almost as though his neck was instantly sunburned. The pumpkin cart lit up like it was mid-day in Texas.

A blemish. This one must have been imported. It wasn’t local. Possibly the “farmer” brought it up from Virginia. It was anthracnose; Clay was sure of it. Only a tiny spot of black, but his jack-o-lantern didn’t require a beauty mark. His hand slid to the back of his neck to wipe the sweat away.

Something massive collided with the ground and shook the earth. Then another. Then another. As though some monstrosity of a giant took lumbering steps forward, heading toward Clay.

First things first. He shoved the pumpkin out of the way as the chill in the air disappeared. This pumpkin joined the other in a mess on the ground. Odd though. The snow had melted on the surface of the ground and the next pumpkin splattered against the hardtop. Clay unwound his scarf. The next one would be it. He felt his lower belly tighten as he reached for it. It was smaller, rounder, like a basketball or maybe a volleyball — somewhere between—a perfect sphere.

He loosened his top shirt button under his coat. Then he removed his jacket altogether. He flung it over the pile of pumpkins, concealing most of them except for the one sitting majestically before him. He’d never seen a pumpkin so smooth, ridge-less like the moon from afar. As he lifted it to his face, he inhaled its deep, meaty aroma with a faint hint of decay.

It was, in fact, the perfect pumpkin.

The ground shook behind him. The heat intensified against his back, and he squirmed to escape it, shedding his sweater and, finally, his shirt. But the heat still intensified. Clay kicked off his shoes next, only to feel the searing of the bottoms of his feet against the pavement that he thought — no, he was sure — glistened as though it melted out from under him. Bouncing from foot to foot, he watched the pumpkin guts boil and then catch flame.

Another flash.

Clay turned.

Another flash.

The perfect pumpkin fell to the earth, remarkably not breaking open as the other two had. It rolled over the pavement, past a pile of burning flesh that had once been Clay, and into something resembling a clawed foot. Two giant fingers closed around the pumpkin and lifted it. A huge red eye peered at it and, finding no imperfection, swallowed it in a single gulp. Then it let forth a guttural roar and set to work on the rest of its prey, enjoying the tart cherry-apple-laced crunch.

Good Versus Evil

As you’re aware by now if you’ve been looking at my website, I’m a science fiction author. What you might not know is that I’m also a fantasy writer. What I enjoy about both of these genres is a little different: I usually find fantasy to be a codification of the epic battle between good and evil and science fiction to exist somewhere in the nebulous gray. Like LoTR, there are the ultimate good “hobbits” versus the ultimate evil “Sauron”, and eventually, as everything falls apart around them, you can reasonably expect the “good guys” to win.

This is not the case in science fiction. Right now, I’m thinking about 2001: The Space Odyssey, where the sentient HAL is fighting for control of the ship due to some questionable programming directives. In contrast to War Games (movie) where the sentient was the only one who really had the answer to solve our nuclear doomsday scenarios (recall: “the only way to win is not to play”). You really can’t tell which way the technological advances are going to go in much of sci-fi. More recently, NineFox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee or Planetfall by Emma Newman, both of which feature main characters who walk a nebulous line between good and evil, teetering over onto both sides.

I’ve been talking a lot about Crooked V.2 lately, and I’m going to continue here for a minute. Eighteen of us authors got together and wrote some scandalous science fiction that takes that core concept much farther. In Crooked V.2, there aren’t any good guys, any more than there are bad guys. Noir-futures at every turn, super-criminals and confidants. That’s what I love about this anthology and why I keep talking about it. But you don’t have to take my word for it. This (bonus) interview between the main characters of Last Chance by Jessie Kwak does a great job of highlighting exactly what I’m talking about. Also, for the curious, yes. Last Chance is from the Nanshe Chronicles universe. (As a bonus, tomorrow you can join Jessie and hear about her work).

This is Alex Quiñones, award-winning champion reporter, writing for the Aymaya Apostles Gazette in Artemis City. Today, as part of the popular “Role Models” column which profiles the careers of former convent students, I’ll be interviewing my sister, the legendary Ruby Quiñ—

Ruby Quiñones: What do you mean, “champion reporter?” There’s a journalism championship now, is there?

Alex Quiñones: Roll with it, sis. Today I’ll be interviewing the legendary Ruby Quiñones, hacker extraordinaire. Since she graduated she’s been living a glamorous life in Artemis City working with—

RQ: If you actually print any of this, saints help me but I will kill you.

AQ: Relax. I’m not even recording, I swear.

RQ: *Pulls a device from her pocket, activates it; Alex’s recorder sizzles and smokes.* Now you’re not.

AQ: Hey! That was expensive! 

RQ: And I sincerely hope you actually paid for it. *Sighs.* You stole it, did you, love? 

AQ: I’m the one asking questions here. First up: How does it feel to be the proud big sister of the incredible Alexander? Kidding, ow! Actual first question: What have you been up to since graduating and leaving the convent twelve years ago?

RQ: Working.

AQ: …

RQ: …

AQ: And?

RQ: Working as a freelance data tech for several local Artemis City startups. 

AQ: See, that wasn’t so hard. What do you like about your job?

RQ: Solitude. 

AQ: Ruby, c’mon.

RQ: *Taking a deep breath.* Fine. I like solving puzzles, and hacking—freelancing as a data tech, I mean—is full of interesting puzzles. Solvable ones, which isn’t always the case in real life. A network may look like a tangled ball of numbers and strings if you don’t know what you’re doing, but it’s orderly, only. If you know which end to pull, the whole knot comes unraveled like a charm. 

AQ: Sounds satisfying. 

RQ: It is.

AQ: What are some of your favorite puzzles to solve?

RQ: Complicated ones. A lot of my clients bring me in when their in-house teams have been trying for a while to crack a particular problem, which means the solution is outside what you’d expect. Keeps things interesting. 

AQ: Or if it’s an illegal problem, right?

RQ: Alexander Abdul Quiñones! Saints give me strength not to murder you where you stand. 

AQ: What kinds of puzzles does Raj hire you to solve?

RQ: We’re absolutely not talking about Raj. You should never—

AQ: “—have even met him,” I know, I know. What advice would you have for other convent students who might be interested in a career as a quote-unquote freelance data tech who definitely doesn’t do crime for money? 

RQ: You’re a cheeky bastard, aren’t you. 

AQ: Runs in the family. 

RQ: My advice is to find a nice Pearls-based company as a full-time employer. Corporations from Arquelle will only offer indentures, and it’s not worth it. Stay with a local company and you won’t get caught in a shitty contract. Edit “shitty” out if the ayas are going to read this. 

AQ: I thought I couldn’t print any of it.

RQ: Correct answer.

AQ: Final question: Are you and Raj hiring? I know a very good thief-slash-award-winning-reporter who will be looking for a job when he graduates in a year.

RQ: Absolutely not. You’ll be finding yourself a boring, normal job right out of school and you’ll like it or so help me I’ll drag you back to the convent and make you take vows with the ayas. 

AQ: And that’ll do it, folks! Thank you for reading another fine installment of the “Role Models” column with the delightfully cheerful Ruby Quiñones. Love ya, sis.  

If you caught my last blog entry, then you saw another interview with equally dubious main characters. This is my favorite type of science fiction writing — no good guys, no bad guys, just people trying to get through life, hustling along with whatever skills they manage to find in themselves. Thieves, smugglers, general scallywags? Yes, please! If you’re like me, then download your copy of Crooked V.2 and find yourself immersed in a world of the morally gray.

Get Crooked V.2 Today!

Crooked V.2 Anthology

18 stories of mayhem and tangled loyalties…

Sometimes the bad guys win, sometimes the good guys do. And, hey. It’s a crime anthology. Most of the time it’ll be pretty damn hard to tell the two apart.

Are you ready for something completely different?

This week one of my short stories is joining the creative works of 18 other fantastic authors in an anthology called Crooked V.2. Mystery and intrigue are just two of the ingredients to this anthology. The smugglers, criminals, and deceivers join the ranks of the protagonists. You’ll find yourself rooting for the bad guys on more than one!

I’d like to offer a huge thank-you to the editor Jessie Kwak, who is also a contributor. She did a fantastic job bringing us together and helping us to get this volume done quickly and efficiently!

Now, normally, I’d drop a sample of my work here to whet your appetite. But since there are so many other great authors in the mix, may I introduce you to Talis, the main character of Love and Pickpockets by R.J.Theodore.

(Oh yeah, and I’ll be reading on 10/26/2022. If you’re seeing this before then, come join us — it’s usually a blast!)

Before you begin: Pause. Breathe. Register.

Register now to listen to the author’s reading from this series. If you like what you’re seeing below, note down that R.J.Theodore will be reading on November 12, 2022, and you, too, can get in on the action. There are several sessions to choose from, featuring many of the authors reading from their stories live!

Register Now! Talis Interview by R.J.Theodore

Where were you last Blossomwave?

Talis looked up, raising an eyebrow along with her gaze. There was plenty of enameled brass on the officer’s coat, but she hadn’t imagined him for the type to use the breeze names for the days of the week. Sure, he might be the type to try to flex a family name, but anyone who had any work to do used the Rakkar names for the week. For one, it gave you more days in the rotation to get your work done, and judging by the papercut on the officer’s left index finger, she’d taken him as a man who made his own effort. Evidence point two: he was grilling her for information instead of sending in an assistant to do it.

She lifted her hands, as if their emptiness was evidence of anything. “Is that Helsturn?” At the short, irritated bob of the officer’s chin, she continued. “We were loading inventory off at Rosa most of the day. I’d worked the second overnight shift at the start of it, and finished the following evening’s first overnight shift with my rest, asleep.” They both knew she was lying, but if they’d expected her to be honest and cooperate, they would have handed her the keys so she could lock herself up instead of clipping her to an interview table first.

We have reports that you made an unlawful entry to the home of House Arric and stole from their personal gallery.

She smiled, deciding to have fun with the conversation. Maybe if she could make it stretch long enough, someone would bring in coffee. Even if she couldn’t negotiate herself a cup by feigning exhaustion, she’d not mind the smell instead of what she could smell in this clearly well-used interview room. “Oh, that Blossomwave,” she said, as if it hadn’t been obvious the officer had been talking about the day prior. “Was it really trespassing? They opened the door and held it for me as I entered.”

After you gave a false name.

“Well I didn’t have a family name of my own to use, of course.” Few of her class and origin did, and there was the class separation that made those with full banks and brimming estates value a family name so much. “I borrowed a friend’s. She’d have not caused any less excitement than I did, I assure you.”

Her friend, Phira, eldest daughter and lady of House Newmeri, was the type to tether one of the drink services to her as firmly as Talis was tethered to the interview table. At least Talis had avoided the expensive beverages on service and kept to her business, quite out of the way of the main party crowd.

You left the property with a stolen object.

Talis flashed an innocent smile that probably could have done with more practice. “I don’t believe that’s the case. Did they say which object?” Knowing full well the family would never have confessed owning it in the first place. You could always count on a blooded family to see everything that happened upon the grass they called property as business of their own.

A music box.

Ah, shit. So it wasn’t the box itself that was worth the dance and grab. “And when you no doubt searched my ship, did you find this music box?”

You are well aware that if we had, you would not be in the interview room, but in a pit too deep for nexuslight to reach.

Talis nodded. She no longer knew exactly how to talk herself out of this officer’s attention span, but she did at least have a hope she would be there long enough to beg a cup of coffee off him. Then she’d just keep offering him answers of dubious helpfulness until Dug, Sophie, and Tisker figured out how to emancipate her from this unwanted interview. A night of free coffee seemed worth the inconvenience since they’d already handed off the merchandise from the quick contract. Officers must surely think themselves worthy of a strong brew and quality bean.

Want more? Find out the rest of the story in the Crooked V.2 Anthology! Get your copy today!

Saving the Reluctant

Raw Fiction: This is the rough first chapter of Book 2 in the Virtual Wars series, slated for release in 2023.

Saving the Reluctant

The sounds of proton rifles discharging caused seventeen-year-old Larken Marche’s shoulders to seize into a solid mass of useless muscle. She only exhaled when she saw the man in a green and gray military uniform collapse into arid land. A ticker scrolled across all four sides of a three-dimensional screen of her holovid projection: “Spain and Italy continue to exchange blows.”

Larken’s sniffling had been reduced to an annoying periodic whistling — but her nose still ached from illness. Her eyes drifted toward numbers hanging on the wall to her right. Still only early afternoon,  despite the dimness. She scanned the holovid channels, seeking hints of other outbreaks of violence, all the more common as nations ceased formalities and opted for armed conflict to secure their fair share of a shrinking global supply of resources from rhodium to peanut butter. 

Larken wanted none of it. 

She flipped through more channels, seeking a lofting match. All she could find was a men’s league final — the Boise Widowmakers, second in their league, against the Minneapolis Bolts, ranked twentieth but up and coming. Boise was up by five, so there wasn’t much of a game to watch. Larken flicked the station over and stumbled across more news. “France Threatens to Invade England” was the next ticker she saw. France hadn’t had a war with England for at least three centuries, according to her former history teacher’s ramblings in that life she’d had until only a year ago. Once upon a time, her back and legs had worked, and more than once, she scored the winning goals at lofting matches for her alma mater Brighton Academy. It seemed like another lifetime. 

The news anchor’s face appeared full of eyebrow-furrowed concern and grimacing sympathy before morphing into an apathetic grin when the story turned local. A now bright-eyed and smiling newscaster discussed how the amazing Seattle Aircrawlers were in the championship again. Larken turned the holovid off. Zephyr wasn’t her thing. With the Aircrawlers playing, she knew her brother Oliver would be watching — wherever he and his perennial girlfriend Molly had disappeared.

Larken twisted her neck to work out the kink from laying with her head propped at almost a ninety-degree angle for half an hour. She did a quick mental inventory and discovered no new pains beyond her neck and that her head cold had mostly subsided save her nose. The searing head and sinus pressure even replaced the usual dull throbbing that had plagued her for most of the previous year. Her back spasmed when she tried to stand, locking her into a supine position amid the cushions. The thick sweatpants she wore hung like elephant skin from her withered frame. She supported herself with her elbows, inhaled again, and blew out through her teeth, willing the pain away — which had all the effect she’d expected: none. It wouldn’t be a good pain day.

Her bearing held the next try as she forced her way to her feet. She scanned the room for the hundredth time since being relegated to it. Larken’s cane had disappeared since she’d begun her relaxing-on-the-couch journey. No cane yet, but she didn’t need it — not really. She could make it without the cane’s support if she had to. Her back and leg pain would be torture in the meantime, and she would pay for it later, but she could do it. Larken weighed the possibility of remembering where she’d lain her support against her need for a strong cup of yaupon tea and decided to go for the drink. Standing atop shaky legs, her bare feet sank into inch-thick carpet as she trudged toward the kitchen area, each step shooting a spike up through her hips.

“Play messages,” she said, breathless once she’d covered the distance to the kitchen counter. “MiniMaid 2201, make me some yaupon.”

One of the best investments she’d ever made was buying a MiniMaid about a year ago, even if she did forget that she owned it from time to time — well, all the time. Larken was almost to the food generator by now. Instead of standing by the thing and punching in the code for her caffeinated yaupon warm brew, she plopped down on a stool by the counter and watched as the little machine she hadn’t bothered to name whirred past and brought the device to life. She considered some different names. Candy? Eucana? Cher? No term or title seemed appropriate for her little pudgy round-shaped assistant.

“Larken, we have to talk. You need to call me. I’m worried about you.”

Larken jerked up and regretted it as her back protested. She’d already forgotten that she’d even asked for messages to be played, but that voice sounded like Jocelyn, her former grade-school classmate. But Jocelyn wasn’t supposed to know that Larken stayed at the H Hotel. Her brother and Molly had been sworn to secrecy, and Sam and Stephen didn’t even talk to the girl — who must still be sixteen by now, it being May and Jocelyn’s birthday being in July. Yet here her voice was, leaving messages. Unless it wasn’t her, after all.

“Replay the last message,” she said, clenching her teeth as she waited.

As she listened to the exact words, Larken tried to tease out what the concern might be that hid in Jocelyn’s voice. Her mind sped through the events of the previous year. She’d discovered she was a genetically-altered clone called a model — something only a handful knew. Her heron-headed cane — the only support she would accept — had been necessary in light of the beatings she’d taken that year. The cane was a gift from Jocelyn before Larken went into semi-permanent hiding — just in case the extremist organization, the Human Pride Movement, or HPM, decided to retaliate for blowing up their headquarters. She hadn’t, but they didn’t know that any more than they knew she was a model. In true Jocelyn fashion, the heron’s head indicated the goddess of the dead, Theron, from the Hesperia Basin emerging mythologies of Mars.

When the message finished, Larken convinced herself it was Jocelyn, even if the caller didn’t leave her name. Like most other relationships in her life, Larken's tie to Jocelyn had withered due to non-care. The saved message felt like a betrayal because of their shared past and unshared present. Larken bit her trembling lip, and the taste of dehydrated mud caked her tongue. She hadn’t cleaned her teeth the night before, and now, just as her neck protested still about her choice of sleeping arrangement, her tongue protested her tea-time selection the day before, which consisted mainly of the whiskey she’d liberated from Torrent’s room, coupled with champagne macaroons. She smiled at the thought of her benefactor waking to discover that his prize had been prized away.

“Call Jocelyn Reed.”

“No.”

Her hotel room had something of an attitude.

“Call her.”

“Last time, you said you didn’t want to speak to her again. She cried, you cried, and it was very uncomfortable for everyone. Including me.”

“I know that,” Larken said, although she should have admitted that she’d forgotten that they hadn’t exactly parted on speaking terms the last time she’d talked to Jocelyn. Larken shook her head, unsure how she could ever forget the screaming match that ensued. Her memory had been spotty since the attacks. “I need to talk to her.”

“You said if you ever try to talk to her again, don’t let you.”

It sounded like something she would do.

“She called me. She could be trying to apologize.”

Instead of connecting her to Jocelyn, House played the next message on the list. This one portrayed the voice of a stuttering boy who Larken had never heard before but guessed by the repeated throat-clearing to be Bodhi, as much her “half-brother” as Torrent was her “father.”

“I hate these things. I got your number from Dad. Listen. Stay away from the protests. I wanted to let you know that something strange is happening. People are disappearing, and they say HPM are responsible. I don’t know….”

“Disconnect.”

Warnings and concern, and nobody ever just calls to say hello. After an excruciating balancing act involving scalding hot tea in a mug and rickety legs carrying her across the thick carpet, Larken reclined into the sofa and sipped on her yaupon. House offered to play multiple board games or holo games, but she wasn’t in the mood, and now she wanted to go to a protest. Fucking Bodhi.

She brought up the cup and took a swig. As the bitter taste dripped down her throat, it spread warmth throughout her body. She could feel fake energy spread from her stomach to her mind. Ideas fired into one another in her brain until one latched on.

“House, next protest. When is it?”

“I assume you mean model rights protest since that’s what you always look for.”

“Of course.”

Snarky bastard.

“There’s one next Saturday, downtown Seattle. Industrial district.”

SoDo. Larken's memories harkened to nights running in terror through the woods nearby, trying to stay one step ahead of a crazed android and her oversized killer former-Zephyr mech. Larken’s jaw still clicked sometimes where the woman had connected one of the blows that had landed Larken in the hospital the first time.

“Any others?”

“Not for a few weeks. There’s one next month in May. Unless you want to take a trip to Bellingham. Up there, they have them every other weekend.”

Even by volantrae, Bellingham was a two-hour ride, worse on public transit, which Larken would have to take since she couldn’t legally drive due to medical conditions and is prone to the occasional seizure. She worked her way back to her feet from the kitchen counter stool. Maybe she could make it down to the University of Washington. There was always a mini-protest going on down there that she could join. Perhaps she could even do some recruiting.

Hopping the number sixty bus down to the metro would get Larken to the university in two stops. The alternative one-thirteen would take about four minutes less but wouldn’t arrive for another hour. Larken shuffled forward again and saw something from the corner of her eye. She swiveled her head toward the couch. Wedged between the cushion and the back peeked out two beady eyes of the heron-headed goddess. Pulling it out of its hiding place, she leaned her weight onto it. One-thirteen it was. She guessed she probably needed a shower from the odor that she’d only gotten whiffs of here and there due to olfactory fatigue.

Showering was an ordeal in the non-ADA-compliant room — one of the reasons she didn’t firmly stick to a shower schedule. There was no supporting handle or floor mat to secure her feet. Wobbling as she ran the soap over her body with one hand while trying to maintain balance with the other, she regretted the pride that had landed her in a “normal” room. Pride and the fact that Sam, her conspicuously absent roommate, had wanted to be on a higher floor had created her current shower dilemma. Larken's left foot slipped two inches, nearly spilling her to the floor. She bit down on her lip hard enough to draw blood but kept her balance through the agony of strained thigh muscles against dislocated vertebrae.

It took her the entire hour to shower, fix her hair back into a ponytail, and don some clothing that looked close enough to what the college girls were wearing: a sensible t-shirt under a checkered dress along with her favorite black boots that gave her at least an extra inch in height, putting her on the same level as most of the people she came across. She would have been taller than most women if the pain didn’t force her to hunch over at the shoulders. As it was, she counted herself fortunate to be able to look others in the eye.

~

The bus smelled like old latex and fake grape for reasons that Larken didn’t want to imagine. The wall of odor slammed into her as the bus driver opened the door. Larken carefully pushed her cane onto the first step, and then her body followed slowly as she negotiated the elevation difference. When she got to the top of the stairs, the bus driver stared needles of judgment at her.

“Miss, would you like to sit?” A boy just about Larken's same age —  though he probably couldn’t tell given how much her injuries had aged her — stood to allow room for Larken to sit. Larken passed the driver a judgmental scowl in return before accepting the seat. As she passed the boy who’d offered her the seat, she got a distinct aroma of acrid oil and must. The smell lingered in her nostrils and floated into her chest, lifting her heart and belly while she lowered herself to the slight warmth the boy had left behind. She glanced up at him to give him a thankful and maybe borderline flirtatious smile, but he’d already moved his attention to staring out the window as the volantrae bus lifted from the road and into the sky. She clamped her lips together and took her seat, having been relegated to the scenery by her cane.

People were always friendly to her, but in the way that someone had to be pleasant. The boy held no genuine concern for her. He probably felt a little better about himself for helping the cripple this morning and may brag to his friends about how good a person he was.

Larken tried to ignore him and practiced her recruitment speech in thin whispers.

“You can feel it in the air. Things are changing, and not all for the better. We need to be prepared.”

A magical woman who only exists in my mind told me so, so I’m building an army of people to sit around and do nothing, she thought. The ridiculousness of the idea made her laugh out loud, causing the boy who’d given up his seat for her to look down at her with one eyebrow raised just enough to betray his judgment.

“Prepared for what, dear?”

A shaky voice from beside shook her out of her gaze. She turned to face a withered-looking woman with a yellow hat and excessive make-up — not her target audience. So she didn’t feel like she had any reason not to tell her something that she probably wouldn’t believe anyway.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I know something is happening, and we must be prepared. I don’t know how or from where whatever it is will happen.”

Larken hadn’t meant to let the frustration into her voice. Something about the woman brought out the angst she’d kept inside and wove it into her response.

“I remember when Akston came to power,” the older woman said, her voice getting even weaker, which Larken thought was her attempt at a whisper. Larken leaned closer to the woman as the woman continued to speak about the totalitarian regime that had nearly toppled the world governments before Larken was born. “There were those of us who saw what they were doing, you know? Hundreds of thousands of us. And my parents and I protested too. For months we protested every day. Every single day.”

The woman got a far-off look in her eye, and for a second, Larken thought she might lapse into protest chants. Instead, she only continued with her barely-audible monologue after a deep sigh.

“And every month, we tried to get more people. But as Akston gained power, we lost more people than we got. At first, we wondered what was wrong with everyone, so they couldn’t see what Akston was doing. Then — I remember, it was 2100, and I was twelve — suddenly Akston rose in every nation on the planet, and there was no longer any point in protesting.”

“Not very encouraging,” Larken said.

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

“Oh.”

“The point is that my parents and I — we continued protesting. They beat us, hosed us, and even sent the military to shoot at us.”

The older woman let out a giggle that, to Larken, seemed inconsistent with being shot at by the military, but she offered a thin smile anyway in response. The woman seemed to see her discomfort.

“You must have a  sense of humor about these things, dearie. Otherwise, the weight of it all will destroy you. Where was I?” the woman asked, seemingly not having detected the same.

“Shot at by military.”

“Ah, yes. That’s how I lost my parents, you know. Protest in downtown Portland. They disappeared. One moment, they were there; another moment, they’d been shoved into an unmarked van and never returned.”

“I get it. It was harder in your day.”

“You don’t get it, though, do you? It wasn’t harder. And it wasn’t different. It was the same. No matter what enemy arises, people never change. Some are fighters, and some aren’t willing to risk anything, even at the expense of everything they claim to believe in. We didn’t realize until twenty years later that you can’t make people care. What we really should have been doing was finding those people who care already.”

Larken felt her stomach lift again as the bus began its descent. She looked at the woman’s smile and tried to imagine the woman younger, standing with a microphone or holo-projector and screaming in the face of a wall of police. The bus crept to a slow stop, and people began to disembark.

“I don’t understand, though. Akston was destroyed by Congressional intervention. What does that have to do with your protesting? It was an assassination that killed their leader and an investigation by United States Congress.”

“Who do you think we are, dearie? Let me out, please?”

Larken then realized that the departure had slacked, and the boy who’d given up his seat blocked the aisle for her to make her way out. She gave him a nod and felt a twinge of guilt for reprimanding him so severely in her mind as she pulled her weight up onto her cane and pushed her way forward. The woman followed just behind. When they’d breached the bus exit, Larken turned to ask one more question. The woman stood ready as though she’d expected it.

“But people don’t care. How can you get people to care?”

“We never did figure that out. Even when Congress went after the Akston Society leaders, half of Americans didn’t seem to care. Only ten years after Akston’s dissolution, when the evidence in Akston’s books was finally exposed to public scrutiny, did people start to understand the extent that they’d leached resources from the governments and tried to turn themselves into emperors? To this day, some people still haven’t learned.”

The older woman took a slow breath as Larken followed her gaze toward the university buildings, vast and spread out over a hidden valley in the foothills of Mt. Rainier.

“They have to care, though. They will die if they don’t.”

“Some might, but not all. And if you do prevent whatever you think you see, especially if you prevent it, some will always say that things would have been better if you’d never gotten involved. You can’t save people who don’t want to be saved.”

That seemed to be what the older woman had started to say on the bus but had taken a very long time to get to. The older woman began a slow shuffle toward the campus.

“Mind if I walk with you?” Larken asked.

“Professor Halbrook?”

The woman seemed less old now that Larken had spent some time talking with her, though she had to be over a hundred. Professor Halbrook turned faster than Larken would have expected to greet a young man.

“Dale, you’re late for my class.”

Dale seemed confused for a moment as he tried to craft a response. Professor Halbrook smiled at him.

“I’m joking, of course. I’m late too. Have you met… I’m sorry, dear; I didn’t get your name?”

“Larken Marche,” Larken said, though the name seemed foreign suddenly.

“Larken. This is Dale. He’s a senior this year in my Dissecting Objectivism class. It’s a very intriguing course. Someone like you would benefit from it if you could fit it into your program. Are you pursuing your doctorate at the University of Washington?”

Larken wanted to say yes. She wanted to say that she had a normal life and that she could pretend for a while that she was a college student with everyday concerns and shake the burden of world troubles. Of course, she was too young, but that didn’t matter.

She realized then why Professor Halbrook had spent the time talking to her: to the woman; she was a confused college student faced with the truth of the world for the first time and having trouble dealing with her relative weakness to affect change. A complete miss from Larken’s actual situation, but Larken felt that the woman tried, which was kindness.

“Not yet,” Larken said, giving herself some wiggle room. It would have been her senior year coming to a close at Brighton Academy if she hadn’t been a model. Now? She wouldn’t even be considered for admission. So she lied. “I’m checking the campus today to see if it’ll suit me.”

“Mention me on your application,” Professor Halbrook said. “I carry some weight here, and you seem like an intelligent young woman. Remember that whatever troubles you will pass, dearie.”

“Professor, I’ve been meaning to ask. Do you have time?” the young man, Dale, interrupted. Professor Halbrook smiled at him, seemingly unperturbed by his rudeness.

“About?”

“What licensed the assassination? I don’t understand at the end of….”

The two drifted off together, and Larken let them. She looked up at the university buildings with longing in her heart, wondering faintly what would happen if she told Oliver that she’d decided to get a college degree instead of preparing for a war she didn’t understand. After thirty seconds of introspection, she straightened her back, placed her cane tip, and followed the sounds of the protest.

The Lone Warrior

Raw Fiction: This is the rough first chapter of Book 2 in the Virtual Wars series, slated for release in 2023.

Vera Reverte’s throat itched. She resisted the urge to sniffle even while she felt at least three ounces of fluid trying to force its way through her irritated and swollen nasal cavities. A cough pressed up against her tonsils while she fought for control, her willpower unflappable. Oliver sat to her right, and beyond him, Molly Kostic — still Kostic however much she would like to be a  Marche. Between the two of them, small enough not to be noticed was the skinny boy who called her Aunty V, yet sometimes forgot to and just called her Aunt Larken. His giant, expectant eyes hovered over her as she stood. One quick swallow and she figured she could probably talk for about five minutes before the exhaustion forced her back into her seat if the perpetual pain in her back didn’t first. Whatever it was that she’d caught at that last event had kept her bedridden for two days, but recruitment efforts couldn’t be stopped — however dismal the turnout.

It was a small group. Only about thirty people had bothered to show up to the recruitment event of Vera’s as-yet-unnamed. Even Ordell’s HCC group advertising on their behalf and the Siblings of the Natural Order as well, they’d only managed thirty. From the looks of the crowd, from the too-elegant-to-be-real women and the massive hulking men, Vera saw no polli in the group. They were all genetically-altered clones — models — constructed to serve humanity. A significant part of her target audience, so she couldn’t ignore them. She had to start making inroads with the polli — non-models — like her now grown friends from Brighton or the people who frequented the H Hotel downtown. There just weren’t enough models to fight the war that was coming. She couldn’t squander any opportunity.

“Today,” she said, the tone and pitch of her voice picked up by hidden directional microphones floating nearby. She wasn’t strong in the recording arts. Vera cleared her throat and that too became amplified and broadcast throughout the building.

“Today is a good day,” she said, careful to make eye contact. It was her eighth such speech since she’d recovered enough to start giving them. She slipped into her well-practiced monologue. “Today is the first day that we prepare for the future the right way, instead of waiting for it to happen to us. Today we begin our resistance.”

Empty eyes. 

She furrowed her eyebrows and looked at each person, attempting to impress upon them the gravity of the threat that she thought they would face. And yet, like the other events, she saw no response. She finished her speech to light applause and lowered herself back into her seat, beads of sweat collecting on her forehead. Oliver leaned toward her and flicked a switch under the panel in front of her.

“To block the mics,” he said. “You look horrible, La— Vera. You should go home and get some rest.”

If she rested every time she felt horrible, she would never leave the house. Since her pretty much one-sided battles — and she’d been on the wrong side — almost five years earlier, Vera’s good days had been few and far between. Even on those, she couldn’t rid herself of the constant pounding behind her eyes or the spike that shot up her back from her tailbone. She shook her head at him, because of all people, he knew that.

“Rest won’t help,” she said, for the thousandth time. “Too much internal damage.” She shifted to ease the pressure on the right side of her back.

“Auntie V, are you coming over today?”

Big brown eyes shined up at her and she couldn’t help the smile that curled up across her face. She glanced first at the boy then up to Molly, catching Molly’s dark eyes in Vera’s brown ones. She kept Molly’s gaze even as she addressed the child. Molly didn’t smile.

“Not today, Andy,” she said and leaned forward to rustle his thick curls. A sniffle worked free of her sinuses and she pulled up her left hand to rub her nose while her right worked its way through Andy’s hair. She marveled at his perfection. Deep-set irises the light brownish-green of a nascent tree branch tucked into cheeks that were just a little too fat for his large head. Andy did double-duty of both spreading the joy that his effortless smile seemed to bring to every occasion and provided his father (and her brother) Oliver Marche with a “beard” as evidence that no, he was not a model — even though he was. Her eyes floated back out to the crowd, most of whom were a different kind of model who, unlike Vera and Oliver, had been genetically modified to prevent them from having children.

“I have things to do,” she went on, staring at Molly. “Thirty people isn’t enough. We need to build an army and if we do it by the tens and twenties, it’ll take a thousand years. How many sign-ups did we get today?”

“It’s not over yet,” Molly said, her eyes hardening. “Just wait until it’s over.”

“How many, Molly?” Vera asked, her tone betraying her growing weariness.

“Five,” Molly replied.

Five. That meant none since only about ten percent actually responded after events typically. Vera was expecting a war that would shake the continents and fill the skies with missiles, and to date, she had only about fifty people, mostly models, who claimed they would show up to even talk about it.

“Nobody believes, Larken. It’s not Molly’s fault,” Oliver stressed.

“Vera,” she corrected. “I can’t be Larken. Police are looking for Larken. It’s Vera. Always Vera.”

“I know. Sorry. Look, it’s impossible to get people to fight a war that is still half a century away if anyone believes you. Listen to your story as others see it: an apparition showed you the future and we’re all going to die. Do you hear how it sounds?”

He didn’t believe.

That wasn’t new. Vera already knew he didn’t believe. She knew that the only reason he and Molly came to her events was to show support. He did more than almost anyone else to help fill the seats that he could, and between his loyalty and that of Molly, she knew they would support her until the end — whether that was to fight in the war as it materialized, or confine Vera to an asylum which, frankly, would have been much easier. What broke her heart was that she further realized that Molly not only didn’t believe but was a large part of the reason that Oliver didn’t believe either. Vera didn’t know exactly when it happened that Molly had soured on their friendship, but the evidence was clear.

“We need more,” Vera complained with a long exhale. She sucked in air again and let it out one more time. “Ramsey…”

“Lost,” Oliver interrupted. “He lost his third bid for President and his people are falling apart. There’s no coalition anymore. More and more people are showing up for the model-rights rallies nationwide. The tide is shifting toward supporting models. Soon, you and I won’t have to hide any longer, and Andy will be safe.”

“I was saying that he’s bought a launching station to start doing business with Mars. He’s not backing down, he’s just redirecting.”

“And? Let him. What’s that got to do with us? Let them hate models all they want on Mars.”

“He’s doing it for a reason, Oliver.”

“You’re overreacting. Gregory Ramsey has been kicked out of politics. He doesn’t even have a political party backing him anymore.”

“You’ve heard of the Liberti, right?”

“Fringe. And like I said, they don’t back Ramsey. Besides, we’ve got bigger problems. Remember the Emergent deal? The Immortality Program is in full swing as of yesterday.”

That got Vera’s attention. The Immortality Program was the same program that saved Vera and Oliver’s half-brother’s life five years earlier. Anyone who could afford a model, for a hefty price tag, could have their consciousness replace that of the model. It was touted as a cure for death or any number of incurable conditions. Tor the model it was anything but, and given all of what Oliver had just said about the model sentiment, the move seemed contradictory.

“You mean…”

“Yes,” he whispered, lowering his voice. “I mean that they’re going to start working through that list. And get this — company employees are given their replacement models for free.”

“I thought the sub-model program wasn’t ready yet.”

“Still not. I guess Christine Hamilton has decided that even in this political environment, the risk is worth it. Immortality will always get some takers. The first official replacement is next week.”

“Protest?”

“Lined up already. Humanity in Crisis Counsel will be there representing, maybe Siblings of the Natural Order — for security in case the Human Pride Movement show up.”

Humanity in Crisis Conference was led by Ordell Bentley and used peaceful protests to try to further the cause of model rights. SNO, Siblings of the Natural Order, were more like terrorists than protestors, in that they kidnapped and murdered people strategically within the modeling industry to make their points. But they had weapons.  Even Molly liked having them there in case the equally dangerous Human Pride Movement showed up.

“Yeah, I guess we should include SNO. Any other action from HPM?”

Molly raised two fingers just above the dinner table that doubled as their panel’s shared podium.

“Kidnappings have increased,” Molly said. “This year up by about ten percent. Normal models, doing what they’re supposed to do, just getting scooped up off the street and found later in pieces in dumpsters or not at all.”

“The more people get behind us, the more extreme they’re getting. Surely that’s got to be getting people’s attention.”

Just then she noticed that the room had gone silent. Looking out over the tables and chairs, Vera saw that half of them had emptied in the last few minutes, and models were standing up to leave from others. Not a single additional one had come by the desk to sign up to help. This event, just like the last one, had been a complete failure.

“Let’s go,” she said as her heart began to amp up in her chest. “I need a break.”

Nobody waited for her to say it twice. Molly sprang up and came to Vera’s side as Vera pushed up off of the table. Unsteady on her feet, Vera wobbled until she found herself leaning against Molly’s shoulder, putting her full weight on the woman who didn’t seem to strain under it. There wasn’t much weight to Vera since she couldn’t keep food down. Internal damage was too severe from the destruction to her body, and five years’ worth of recovery had only barely gotten her to the point of walking around without assistance most days.

“Larken, let’s go,” Molly muttered, slipping just like Oliver. They did that all the time, as though Vera were some fevered dream they hoped would someday disappear so they could have Larken back. That was over. Some day even Molly would realize that Oliver’s sister and had been destroyed and Vera had arisen — sort of half-risen — from the ashes. But today, Vera had no strength left to complain, so she allowed herself to be led across the auditorium, through the double doors, and down the elevator back to Vera’s hotel room.

“We’ll leave you here,” Molly said, dropping Vera onto the couch in her long-term double room. Vera obliged and grabbed her worn copy of Emperor of America and delved back into the rise of the Akston Society and their attempt at world domination. Beside her, strewn across the coffee table, were books and data coins of novels on warfare, society, and philosophy. She meant to be prepared, though she could tell that Molly didn’t approve by the sidelong glances.

“You could come with us,” Molly told her. “We’re just going up to the rooftop bar for lunch. Kind of like a reception to say thank you to the HCC folks who helped put this together.”

The bar was new-ish, and rotated allowing patrons to see every aspect of the Canopy around them. Vera opined that the real reason that Molly wanted Vera to come along was to keep an eye on her. The way Molly looked at her was like the way someone might look at a favorite pet who, left unattended, might eat their entire house and pee on things. Oliver’s glances were only marginally less patronizing.

“I’ll be fine,” Vera insisted. “Stephen and Sam will be up soon…”

“They’re going to be there.”

Vera blinked. 

“Jocelyn will be by, won’t she? I thought she was coming this week. I’ll get her to…”

“Finals. That’s next week that she’s coming.”

Shit. Alone again.

Suddenly Vera’s loneliness filled the room. These two before her, her former family, treated her like she was breakable, and had been doing that for so long that she wasn’t an equal in their relationship any longer. She had become a chore to them. At least Sam and Stephen made Vera do things by herself: case in point, they’d left her alone while they also went to party it up. Usually welcome behavior, but today she could have used some help. Oliver and Molly had to go rub elbows since they’d organized the event on her behalf. A more diplomatic version of Vera would have attended as well.

But Sam? At least Sam could have come back to the room and kept her company. Except maybe Vera burdened Sam too. Who wouldn’t feel burdened to be in the presence of a sick cripple who expounded endlessly on a pending war that hadn’t materialized in five years of talk? Vera felt her eyes sting and she swallowed and looked away from Molly.

“Go,” she said. “I’ve got work to do. There’s a war coming, and someone has to be ready for it.”

“I know Vera. Everyone knows how you feel — righting the world’s wrongs. Not every little thing needs your attention, Vera.”

Vera didn’t have to look to know that Molly’s face had scrunched up the way it did when she was on her soap box. She could imagine the woman’s freckles swarming together as her eyebrows frumped into tents over her too-passionate brown-black irises. But Molly said nothing more, and Vera didn’t turn again until she heard the door close behind her as the two left her to read about Galt, namesake to the Atlas Shrugged character from centuries before that had begun the movement to catapult the Akston Society into dominance.

She picked up the historical text for about a second, then put it back down. She’d lied. She had wanted to go to the after party, she now realized. To show up would make things very strange — stranger than the normal “Vera has made things strange again” situations. Even she wasn’t willing to destroy the normalcy that her friends and associates had managed to carve out of their fringe existences.

So she turned on the news instead, after she cleared enough clutter from the coffee table to free up the projectors. There, she saw the image of Christine Hamilton. Her entire body fit into the frame, as the press had taken to doing because, since she was female, they’d seen fit to talk about her clothes every single time she was on the news — which was daily. This segment, she read in the ticker, was called “Christine Hamilton’s next move: President?”.

“She’s only twenty-three,” Vera muttered, waving away the channel with a swipe of her hand in the air before her. Any talk of the presidency would have to wait at least twelve years — she wasn’t a threat. The United States Constitution, even during Akston Society take-over, had not changed to which Vera was aware. Vera looked around her hotel room at the mess that had overflowed from the couch and to the counters. The tiny bedroom was eerily similar to her one-bedroom apartment. Christine Hamilton took private jets to each coast and other countries even, while Vera had to beg people to show up to protests and organization meetings. Tiredness nipped at Vera’s eyelids as she found herself reading the same chapter over again. She didn’t really have a plan for recruiting, for which she also chided herself yet didn’t have the energy to work on one. Perhaps even she was losing faith in the war that she’d hallucinated. She briefly imagined herself as Christine Hamilton, with billions of dollars and press attention with a comm call. Building an army would be easy with that kind of platform.

It must have been nice to have Gallatin Hamilton’s resources, she thought as she drifted into unconsciousness.

Southern Highlands is Live!

My latest novel, Southern Highlands, is now live and ready for you to purchase to add to your Reality Gradient series collection.

It’s 2201, and interstellar trade has become a flourishing industry. The power balance of the post-Equilibrium (and post-Akston) worlds has shifted to be more consistent with population. Africa has become United Africa, and is steered by a leadership committee known as the Induna. Apryl Sallow is not an Induna, but her godfather is. And through his support and the support of others, Apryl survived an abusive relationship at the hands of her former lover, Liu Jian, to rise to prominence, becoming sole commander of the trading orbital despite some (many) setbacks along the way.

Unfortunately for her, Liu turns out not to be the total loser she’d left and has risen to the level of warlord in the Martian province called the Southern Highlands. This can hardly be a coincidence, since Apryl’s trade is predominantly with the Southern Highlands (being that she works for the Southern Highlands Trading Company and ships rhodium from Mars to Earth). The month’s long journey between planets has provided enough distance that Apryl is able to work out a reasonable trade deal in spite of Liu’s ascension. Or so she thinks.

Until Liu starts sending her light shipments. When she confronts Liu about it, she discovers that Liu is not just warlord of Southern Highlands any longer, but Liu has managed somehow to disrupt Mars and take over other regions to become what Liu calls ‘Enze’ of Mars, or supreme ruler.

This puts more than Apryl’s rhodium shipments at risk. Her aspiration to become Admiral in the Southern Highlands Trading Company is tenuous unless she can secure regular trade. When ansible calls don’t work, and Induna reaches out, expecting results, Apryl decides her only recourse is to make a surprise visit to Mars and see if she can talk some sense into Liu.

Can she recover her trade shipments and bring Liu back to the table? Will she kiss her Admiral career aspirations goodbye? What will she have to trade away to make her future viable again?

And there’s always the unsettling question at the back of Apryl’s mind: does the negotiation she’s about to start concern more than just rhodium? What does Liu really want?

Available in Paperback, Ebook, or through Kindle Unlimited! Get yours on Amazon today!

Get your copy today on Amazon!

Raw Fiction: The Crone and the Future

A raw, unedited, short story by Andrew Sweet. Prequel to the 2023 upcoming series Virtual Wars.

Larken Marche passed through the wide school gate shy of four in the morning. She should have been studying. She would have been, except Jocelyn Reed, her roommate, had sworn that there was a psychic on Strata Six — an actual one, not a fake who only gave good news. This psychic was a worshiper of Catamitus, the crone goddess of Ganymede. After a day spent buried in books, Larken craved a distraction and a creepy crone-goddess worshipper seemed like a good diversion, even if Larken didn’t believe in psychics.

She didn’t not believe. Larken always had something else to think about that made everything else dull and not worth investing in. The sport of Lofting was the focus that Larken had an almost religious conviction in. Women dominated the sport, though men sometimes played — if they were good enough. Excelling at Lofting meant teamwork and passing the tiny ball around, sometimes faster than a hundred and fifty miles per hour. Few at Brighton could match Larken’s stamina and quick returns. The only thing that could keep her from the varsity team next year was the test she’d studied for all day yet couldn’t seem to retain the facts of Vector Equations. Her friend and roommate Molly Kostic had declared Larken hopeless at Trigonometry and Vector Equations, and Molly had been Larken’s roommate since she turned five.

Larken nodded to the bus driver as she boarded.

“A little late for a Brighton kid, isn’t it?”

“How do you know I’m from Brighton?”

“You look the part. And you’re smug and rude. Like those Brighton students, they always think they’re better than everyone else.”

The driver scowled. When she exited the bus, she could feel his eyes penetrating through the back of her skull. For fear of another lecture, she faced forward, head up, as she departed, only to be slapped in the face by a frigid burst of wind.

Larken pulled her cloak tight around her shoulders to keep the air out as she stepped from streetlight to streetlight, hastening through the shadows in between. Unimagined terror chased behind her and lurked in every dark crevice between the buildings. One streetlamp flickered before her as she walked up nearly four strata — a stratum being about the height of a standard single-story building — above the Burnside Bridge. At least up there, she could pretend to be safe (though it wasn’t unheard of for people to be kidnapped even as high as Strata Six at this time of night).

Her flats slapped against the rubberized material that coated the airborne walkways, sounding like a slow clap of an audience of one. The echo bounced off of the buildings beside her. Larken checked her time on her communicator, a cylindrical device with a rectangular cutout on one side just wide enough for four blocks of light-emitting diodes to shape the time. Seeing that she was nearly late, Larken quickened her pace. In the darkness, she moved carefully and with slow determination. No guardrails. The people who had built the entire Canopy — the interlaced network of walkways was only a tiny part — hadn’t considered such things necessary. Larken, on the other hand, saw them as extremely important. She guided her feet straight down the center of the elevated path to avoid the edges and the swooning effect of looking down at the ant-like traffic below.

She thought that even the criminals seemed to be sleeping, staring into the mostly silent city.

Her destination rose before her: a towering building wrenched and molded from dark iron and black glass. She gulped as she approached, recalculating in her mind exactly how much willpower she could muster. Larken tucked her front lip under her teeth and stared. The metalwork stretched skyward, looping together in weblike arches surrounding thick framed windows. The lines pulled her vision upward until her eyes rested on the clouds blocking the pointed pinnacle. She used her imagination to visualize it: tall and sharp, like an arrow trying to stab the moon.

A volantrae — a flying vehicle that had evolved from early attempts at flying cars — zipped by on her left. Larken tried to remember where the skyway access ramp was. It had to be nearby because the bus had just dropped her off. Another volantrae followed that looked like a book folded open. Larken imagined what the people inside must have seen if they looked her way. They probably couldn’t have seen the color of her dark purple cloak, but her face they would have noticed as the moon reflected from her pale complexion. She wondered if they could make out those too-bushy eyebrows she’d been born with or that nose that was just a smidge too large to make her beautiful. Her eyes, dark auburn, matched her hair of the same color, but she imagined it looked black to the people on the skyway.

Would they have thought that she was a woman of the night? Larken was tall enough and formed enough to be obviously a woman, even beneath the cloak. And her walk was undoubtedly feminine. She knew that because she’d practiced it that way.

Third Avenue was just below where she stood. Tempted to look down and mark her progress by Strata 0 landmarks, Larken reminded herself that she’d nearly swooned off the edge the last time she’d been on Canopy walkways. Instead, she had to trust the markers that jutted from the walking surface that kept some consistency with the city streets far below. This one marked Southwest Third Avenue and Burnside, which meant she needed only another block to meet the address on her card. The horror of a building beside her was another clue that she was moving in the right direction. She guessed that she only sought the entrance, which had to be tucked away on Fourth.

Rounding the corner, Larken saw a glimmer of blue light flicker and then die. She licked her lips to temporarily fend off the inevitable chapping of the cold, dry air. She thought she would be nice and warm inside in only a few more minutes.

Shadows shifted near ground level, and she pulled her cloak in even more tightly. Larken strayed to the left, away from a mound of homelessness that had wedged between the building and the walkway’s edge and met only open sky. She gulped, focused on her flats that poked their way out from under her cloak with each step.

A hand extended from the mound. It was the gnarled hand of someone stuck in the Canopy for so long that they no longer bothered to pretend they had everyday lives. The hand caught a flash of moonlight as a cloud pulled away from the waxing gibbous. Light slid from the fingertips down slowly to the wrist, where Larken saw barcodes. She stopped in her tracks and stared at the mound, captivated as it shuffled again, revealing even more of an arm to the elbow.

“What are you looking at?” Came the raspy voice of too many smog drift drags. Larken tried to identify where a head might have hidden in the mass of cloth and tarp, but she was disadvantaged by the darkness.

“N-nothing,” she said back, conscious of her voice cracking as she spoke.

“You sure do stare a lot at nothing,” the voice replied, still from an unclear origin. The mound seemed to shake with laughter. “Isn’t it late to be staring at nothing up here?”

“I guess,” she said. “Isn’t it a bit late to be lying on the walkway?”

The mound shook again, releasing a cackle.

“I guess,” said the mound.

“I have some cash coins if you need some,” she offered to the mound. She thought the voice sounded feminine but still took care not to assume. The pile chuckled once more as a bit of cloth seemed to fall away, revealing a face nearly as gnarled as the arm. It had been a woman at once, but she was so worn and wasted away that Larken didn’t know if she qualified as human anymore. That barcode meant that the woman wasn’t human in the first place. The woman was a genetically modified clone -- a shill to any of the millions who hated them. She was the first one Larken had met in person after the isolation of the boarding school.

“You don’t know much,” the woman commented.

Larken started backward but stopped as she remembered exactly how close she was to tumbling into the vast expanse below.

“Just trying to be nice,” Larken muttered in defiance and tugged the edges of her cloak. “Never mind. Have a good night.”

“As though that’s possible,” the woman retorted.

The blue light came back on, catching Larken’s attention. She shuffled in the direction of the glow and then looked back at the woman’s glistening eyes, overladen with cataracts. The moon disappeared behind a giant gray-blue mist. When the moon cleared the clouds again, the woman was standing. Larken hadn’t even heard her rise.

“Don’t worry about me,” the woman said. “I’ve lived longer than a hundred others. The street keeps me company.”

Larken didn’t have to be told twice. She walked more quickly, and the blue light flashed back on. Molly’s pre-departure warning chiseled its way into her head.

“That’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever tried to do. I’ll cover for you, but you know it’s dumb, right?”

Larken knew. Studying until that point hadn’t been working, so she’d thought a break wouldn’t be a problem — out and back in. She fished through her pockets to pull out her communicator and clicked a button on the side. As Larken pulled the device up to her face to peer into it, she heard the woman cackle again. The invitation Larken had received from Jocelyn was projected on the side of the black metal building. Larken cursed as she fumbled with the device to change the privacy mode.

“Seeking Madam Rawls?”

Larken gulped as she finally found the switch to turn off the projection. Then she peered into the hole at the end of the communicator to review the invite.

Madam Rawls, 300 Burnside, Strata 4, East Entrance, 4:00 AM

“I suppose. I think it’s that light over there,” she said, relinquishing the words slowly as she tried to decide what use it was to share this information with some woman still hidden in darkness.

“I am who you seek.”

“You? Not possible at all. How could a model claim to be psychic?”

“Well, Larken, you tell me.”

Larken stepped more toward the blue light, pondering whether she’d given the woman her name. It must have slipped into the conversation, even if she couldn’t remember.

“You’re a model. Models don’t even have souls. They can’t be psychic. Everyone knows that.”

“Everyone does?” The old woman chuckled more, and more of the cloth came down to reveal a gnarled neck and what looked like an old scar zig-zagging down her right cheek beneath her left eye. She hadn’t noticed that the left eye had so many cataracts that it had gone reddish-white. “Maybe we have souls after all. Maybe we are the only ones who do have souls anymore.”

“No,” Larken said. “Look here.” 

She switched the communicator back to projection mode. Though vaguely resemblant to the woman who claimed to be her, the image on her invitation had luscious eyelashes and thick lips, not gray hair and wrinkles. That woman seemed vibrant and alive. This woman was frail to the point that her next breath might very well be her last. “That’s not you.”

The woman chuckled again and slipped her hand under her mound of clothing. Larken heard a click and a whir and realized that the woman could have concealed nearly anything under there. From the whining sound, she thought it might be a proton rifle. Larken’s body tensed as she prepared to run and chastised herself for her lack of common sense. She’d have given anything to have Molly’s perspective at that moment.

The blue light flashed.

Larken’s eyes flitted to it involuntarily, and the old woman was gone when they returned. She’d been replaced by the caricature on the card, complete with bangles, hair as black as the depths of space, and hazel eyes.

“I know you, Larken,” the woman said, the edginess gone from her voice, replaced by a mellifluous tenor. “I didn’t think you would come.”

Larken only stared, deep in contemplation. Perhaps a holographic projection might achieve the sleight of hand she’d witnessed. Those mainly were used as party tricks and cosplay costumes. They were never as detailed as what Larken had just seen. Larken had even once gone to MultiCon, an annual celebration of all animation varieties, as Gansks — Ganymede’s superhero protector. The projection had lagged for her by milliseconds, even when she’d moved as slowly as possible. This woman’s projection was perfect.

But she didn’t know Larken.

“I’ve never seen you before,” Larken replied.

“I’ve seen you.”

Larken looked at the projected image, still plastered against the side of the building, then back at the woman. So very clearly, the projection and her kind-of-companion were the same, but she couldn’t place the woman in her memory. The woman might have known her at one time. Holes permeated much of Larken’s past, taking the place of birthdays and hugs. Of Larken’s mother, she only had the faintest of impressions. Blond hair, swishing, and a faint smile were all that had been left to her.

Molly was right. It had been a dumb idea to come.

“I know you have questions,” the woman said.

“We all have questions, don’t we?”

“Not like yours. Why don’t you ask one?”

It was simple: would she pass her exam and, by doing so, pass her class? To fail meant not being on the Lofting team. As she reached inside to pull the question out, she found it elbowed aside by another -- one that had plagued her since the first day she’d been dropped at Brighton Academy.

“What am I supposed to be doing?”

Larken hoped the divine Madam Rawls would figure out that the question was about the rest of her life. What should she do without a mother, without a father? How should such a life be guided without someone to help wisen her to the workings of the world. All of that was wrapped into the question Larken had asked. The question Larken kept to herself was: what advice could a model possibly have to offer on the world’s ways?

“Survive,” the woman said, holding out her hand. Larken placed in it two cash coins.

“What else? Am I going to be a Lofting champion?”

“Oh, child,” the woman said, her eyes softening and drifting to the ground in a manner tempered with regret. “That path I can’t see for you. I don’t know how you can achieve that -- the way you came into this world.” She shook her head.

Larken squinted at the woman. “What do you mean?”

“The future I see for you is filled with pain. But also with triumph. You will lead so many to places we never thought we would be able to go. You will make nations tremble, and you will be the cause of falling empires.”

Larken blinked.

“What about Lofting?”

The woman’s chest rose and fell as she emitted what seemed like something too loud to be a sigh.

“Did you hear me? Empires will crumble before you. Because of you, the Earth will change forever!”

Larken felt as though the woman believed what she said for a second. Perhaps it was how the woman’s teeth clenched or how her cheeks grew noticeably redder. She thought it wise to change the subject.

“How did you do the old woman thing?” Larken continued, looking around for a projector.

“Oh. A nanite suit, preprogrammed. But did…did you hear me?”

“I heard.”

“Empires? Trembling?”

“But I want to know about the Lofting, Madam. If I don’t pass Vector Equations, I don’t know how I can keep playing. Can you tell me about that?”

The woman seemed flustered now, and Larken felt the evening’s lack of sleep catching up with her. She eyed the woman warily and saw her for what she was: an opportunist, just like Molly had said. The woman took her money and offered nothing to resolve the problems in Larken’s life. Instead, she hinted at vagaries about an impossible future. Empires? Worlds trembling? None of it seemed like anything that remotely interested Larken. Larken would have some choice words for Jocelyn.

“You are not what you think,” the woman continued, apparently interested in continuing her schtick. Larken waved her hand to stop the woman.

“None of that’s going to happen, though. I’m a high-school student, and I like to make art, play Lofting, and occasionally eat those glazed honey buns they serve in the Brighton cafeteria on Thursdays.” The memory of eating one earlier that day made Larken’s mouth water. “I just want to know one thing: am I going to pass Vector Equations and get to stay on the Lofting team?”

The woman cleared her throat.

“It’s three o’clock in the morning. I waited here all night for you to ask me a question? All you can think about is Lofting?”

“It’s four o’clock. Which you would know if you were really psychic. You aren’t, though, are you?”

The woman’s lips flattened together, and she stared into Larken’s eyes. The hazel distracted Larken for a second before the woman let out a severe “harrumph,” pretending to be offended at what Larken knew as the truth.

“You believed enough to come out here, didn’t you?”

“I shouldn’t have. Molly was right about you.”

“Trembling. Worlds trembling. And the eyes of all models will be upon you for their salvation.”

“Vector Equations.”

The woman threw her hands up as her bangles rattled against one another. She shook her head side to side, her black hair making empty streaks against the stars in the night sky. The moon glared down in a sky suddenly devoid of clouds.

“Fine,” the woman said, drawing out the’ n’ at the end for at least an extra second. “You will pass your Vector Equation class and make it onto the Lofting team. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

Larken’s heart jumped at the news. Real or not, it was reassuring to hear someone have confidence that she lacked for herself. She grinned widely and, on impulse, ran to the woman and planted a massive hug, wrapping her arms around and squeezing tightly. The woman smelled of cumin and thyme, with hints of sage — exactly as Larken had expected her to smell. When Larken drew back, she saw a smile on the woman’s face, displaying perfect teeth and kindness she hadn’t seen before. The smile didn’t last. As soon as Larken’s eyes met the woman’s again, the woman’s face had screwed up into a look of concern.

“Did you hear the rest?”

“About empires? Yeah. I think you got me and Jocelyn confused.”

“Jocelyn?”

“She plays those role-playing games. You know, with gods and empires and all that. I think that maybe you got us confused?”

The woman seemed to ponder that for a minute, then shook her head.

“No. Definitely you.”

“Okay then,” Larken said, looking around at … well, nothing. “I have to get back. After all, it is four in the morning.”

“Give my best to Brigid.”

“Molly’s mother?”

“Tell her thank you for looking after my daughter so well. And you, too. Thank you for watching after all of my children.”

Larken smiled and nodded at the crazy old woman. She had no intention of doing any such thing as telling Brigid about her encounter. Larken gave a modest half-wave before turning away. As she did, the blue light sprang to life again, pulling her attention back toward the massive building. Halfway up, she noticed a sign that she hadn’t before: Emergent Biotechnology. The building was under new ownership, she guessed. Then she looked back to see if the woman stared after her.

There was no woman. 

All Larken saw was the edge of the building and the iron snaking up. The moon slid behind some clouds that seemed to have come from nowhere and flooded her in darkness. She wasn’t afraid. Quite the opposite. She guessed that the woman had used her nanite disguise again — all part of the show. Larken turned to make her way back home.

She skipped for the first few blocks of the way home. Geometry final? No problem. She would study more, of course. But now that the concept of her failing felt less likely, Larken would learn with confidence instead of dread. No matter what Molly had said, that little bit justified the trip in Larken’s mind. As she approached the escalator bus stop, the woman’s words needled into her.

“Empires will crumble before you.”

Larken felt a shiver work its way up her spine. She chose not to believe that part of it, shutting it out as best she could. She pushed it down, but the feeling welled back up no matter how hard she pushed, even if the words didn’t. Empires crumbling. 

Lofting had seemed like enough. Now, though, another idea began to grow, worming its way into her core.

Empires crumbling.

Larken identified the first impulsive emotion that came with that phrase. Fear. A deep and treacherous fear of a future filled with violence and apprehension. Once the terror dissipated, the next feeling caught her off-guard. This one was a longing severe enough to be called a craving. Instead of being directed at her goal to become a professional Lofting player, it latched itself onto the idea of entire nations cowering before her.

Fear, dread, and desire twisted into her like vines growing from her gut. She shook her head once, and the sensation sat unblemished in her stomach. She shook her head and blew out, trying to send the thoughts away. That time it worked, mostly. The all-encompassing emotions had given way again to her more attainable dreams. Larken stumbled slightly and then corrected herself as the bus slowed to a stop before her. The same driver on the same bus, going the other way. She climbed aboard and tried to ignore him as he stared at her, this time through slits, making his disapproval clear. She stared right back, and he diverted his gaze to the road.

Larken didn’t deposit any cash coins this time.

The bus driver said nothing.

Series Starter: The Great Conjunction

Series Fiction by Andrew Sweet. More chapters available on Wattpad.

I watched the slow, relentless narrowing of the gap between Jupiter and Saturn in the days that preceded the Great Conjunction. I couldn’t have known that another celestial body born of my own tumultuous past was at that very moment making its way toward me.

Certainly, of my multitude of reasons for taking occupancy in a frigid cabin embedded precariously into the side of a mountain, the inevitable collision of past with present, of which I had no knowledge, could scarcely have registered as a reason for my decision. A quaint experience in a Scottish village near Glencoe had teased at my longing for solitude (a solitude since denied to me by my obstinate and obtuse older brother who had self-invited himself and his new lover). My idolized isolation came to me in fleeting moments, afforded to me only at night and in the early mornings. That was why in the mornings I spent my time wading through styrofoam-like snow and crunching powder beneath black boots. 

Walking was my center, and the stubborn remaining stars were my companions as they performed their celestial dance.

Clouds flanked the mountain, lifting the peak from of its base higher up into darkness. With the illusion came a memory. Ages ago, on a distant evening little like this morning — that cast my breath into puffs of lingering smoke — I had known love. In the pre-dawn darkness, I saw her again — hair falling like a golden river splashing to the earth behind her upturned head. I remembered the smell of her, the taste of her, and the feel of her back beneath my fingertips as the water licked at us, struggling to escape its cement prison nearby. The circular breath I offered to her and received back into myself was never enough. Each kiss pulled us closer together until I ceased to be a dark haired and invisible child-man and instead turned into an angel and granter of miracles. Our souls swirled in ephemeral mist, tugging and pulling, and I only realize now, fighting, dodging, and whispering untrue promises of eternity.

The memories floated like sparks upon a wind that froze and tantalized me. I shivered with its breath and pulled my down-filled nylon coat closer to press out the chill that had crept up from the gap beneath. Before me lay only more fresh snow, no longer falling from the gray blankets above. Sunlight strobed across the bottoms of the clouds now, lighting them with pink and gray light that bounced back down to me — harbingers of Apollos crown, soon to crest the foothills. A heavy sigh carried my burden in white down the hillside toward the village centre below. Behind me, I heard the lift engage to escort those invested few ready to throw themselves from the side of the mountain like spurned lovers.

Wind slapped me back to reality. My lips tightened and pulled back, exposing my crooked bottom teeth in a forced grin. My exposed gums resisted whiplike lashes that worked into the roots of my teeth and sent spikes of pain up each in turn. I found myself awake, and somehow still alive. The odor of burned coffee and damp roofing tiles mingled in my nose, reminding me that I had chosen this moment to be awake. The cup clasped between my exposed, reddened fingers betrayed my decision to steal the only time in the day that could still be taken. But my seconds had all been spent now, and as the sky brightened, my mouth closed around the untainted mountain air.

No sooner had I circled, abandoning the empty trail that cut through the banks of snow to eventually end at the old Everrett tavern in the town below, than I heard the creek of the cold steel hinges setting my brother free.

“Ten inches fell last night,” he said, eyes sparkling with lust. My own eyes drew up from the boot holes that comprised evidence of my earlier exodus. “Should be clear today though. Maybe negative six degrees or so.” 

He’s always been taller than me, and with more hair — not that I’d lost any of mine. My own pitch-black frothy mane stayed close, very much like the snow on the hillside. His was a lumpy, half-melted brown snowman with greens and browns of the earth poking through. It didn’t frame so much as follow his large face and easy smile. I’d never known what it was that he ever had to be so happy about. There were reasons he’d come on my vacation instead of carving out one of his own, and most of those had to do with the fact that his expectation of life was that at some point, everything would fall in according to his will. Unlike in my own shattered life, everything did seem to bend to him. Including me.

A second later, the hinges sang again and a giggle escaped before the doorway relinquished the stark red hair and vain crimson lips of his second in life and philosophy — neither of whom had paid for the room they shared. I gave a half-smile as a snowball let fly almost as soon as her foot hit the first of the powder. The projectile sailed like magic through the air at his unprotected face, which had turned as soon as the creak emanated forth. Instead of the bruising collision I’d expected, he was suddenly not there, and the ball seemed to levitate toward me, directed by the force of the throw and aided by the will of a sudden gust of wind.

I picked icy flecks from my hair and rubbed the blistering cold dampness over my eyes.

“Artemis, I’m sooo sorry. That was for Kaleb.”

Kaleb only laughed his guttural yawp, a yelp-like laugh that echoed off of the hillsides and somehow still drove into my ears with the force of a snow plow. He turned toward me and stared through. I turned as well in the same direction. Smoke wafted up from the cabin across what might have been a street before the snow had taken over the entire world and painted it white.

“Somebody’s in. We should go say hi.”

I only shrugged, feeling the drippings of the snow’s remnants trail down my neck and under my clothes.

“Or we could go up the mountain before anyone else does.”

“Too late for that, Mina” I muttered, turning my attention now away from the rising smoke and instead toward the ski lift as it queued up passengers one after the other. “They started that thing ten minutes ago.”

“Let’s go then,” she said. “The longer we wait the longer the lines.”

“I haven’t even had coffee yet,” Kaleb said. He even grinned when he complained.

“There’s a shop up there,” I offered. “I saw it in the brochure.”

I didn’t want to go, but now that the two of them had decided to grace the world, hurling myself off of a mountain had become strangely compelling.

“Then it’s settled,” Mina said, her voice taking on a chirp that I noticed she always had when excited and sometimes, through the far-too-thin walls of the tiny snow cabin, during the peak of sex. That thought turned my stomach.

“Snowed in here,” I said. “We’ll have to walk to the bus stop and hope the roads are clear up the mountain.”

“Or we could go down to the lift,” she said, pointing down the hill to where the hanging wires and sealed buckets came to a stop, loaded up, and took off again.

“Faster on the bus,” Kaleb remarked, not even looking. I watched as she acquiesced without an argument and switched directions. She started out before us up the steep hillside, which was a little too steep for her as she fell backwards into Kaleb’s open arms.

“Easy,” he reassured. His deep voice seemed to steady her as she took another tentative step, and then sure of her footing, joined it with another. I followed behind Kaleb, who took one wide stride to her two. Their love was a strange bond of love and hate and tolerance.

“Left at that tree. There’s a trail…”

“That takes us up the the road with the bus stop just beyond. We all saw the map, Artemis.”

“Then why were you turning left, Kaleb?”

“A stump. That’s all. Remember it from when we came down from the stop?”

I sighed. The stump was reality, but not in this direction. This wasn’t even the way we’d come, as anyone could tell from the indentions still in the snow, ten inches or not, leading to the back of the cabin. I remembered it clearly because that bus is where Kaleb had seen to surprise me with his visit-turned-sqat-in.

“Whatever,” I murmered, turning myself now. I could hear the harsh whispers ahead.

“Is he always like this?” Mina asked.

“Not always. Usually he’s more fun. I don’t know what the problem is.”

“I can hear you both.”

“Then what is your problem?”

“Nothing.”

We walked like prisoners bound together by the ankles, one by one forward through the powder and between the trees that now wore their own cloaks of white. The first few steps were in blissful silence with nothing but the crunch of ice crystals beneath our feet. Then they grouped off like gazelles ahead of me as I fell back, then the chattering began again. I spent my time examining the trees, thin and sparse with arteries clogged by snow.

“The bus is arriving,” Kaleb told me, reaching into his coat pocket to produce a black cloth mask that he affixed to his face with one hand in a practiced, swift motion. Looking from him to Mina, I saw her struggling with her own, the loop dangling uselessly below her ear. In a deft motion, Kaleb corrected the misplaced ear loop over her left ear — now tinged with pink. My own mask was the navy blue of the sky just after dark settled on an overcast evening.

“The sign is over there, Kaleb,” I said, pointing to the other side of the road. He looked up to where my finger directed. 

“We want to go up,” he said with a smirk.

“Europe,” I reminded him. In one word, his smirk disappeared and a sheepish grin replaced it. I had humbled him, and the feeling of victory sank through my skin and into my bones. “Let’s cross.”

The bus arrived in seconds after we’d made it to the other side, compounding my inner gloat. I kept my face down, still seeking something of the isolation I required. I nodded to the driver and dropped three euros into his toll collector. A seat near the back remained unoccupied, even with the rows of passengers completely filling the front ones. I forwent the pleasure of my own need for reflection to allow Kaleb and Mina the only completely free seat available, opting instead to slide in next to a portly gentleman who I would learn tended to sweat on others.

Before I took that seat, I saw her eyes staring at me over the heads of the other riders. The blue was unmistakeable, and that would have warned me to her presence had I been in Texas instead of Scotland. As it was, I recall thinking only that once upon a time, I had known eyes like those — and when I had known them, they used to study me with the same intensity as the ones that peered over the back of the storm gray bus seat, hovering over an exposed neck, the rest concealed beneath a green mask.

It couldn’t have been her. 

I looked away. 

My part of the day had passed, and the rest belonged to everyone else. 

It couldn’t have been her. 

Stomach sinking, I took that seat offered, despite the lingering smell of armpits and desperation. The occupying man muttered something in Scottish, probably an insult. I nodded and flashed a thin smile that couldn’t have made it to my eyes, and behind my mask was rendered by Omicron as useless a gesture as the man’s unintelligible words. Trading nods, we dutifully ignored each other for the remainder of the trip until we emerged at the top of the mountain, overlooking a white bank of snow that stretched endlessly downward. From my vantage point, the snow looked pristine and clean and untouched. My eyes tumbled down the hillside and bounced off of the trees, then took flight across the valley below to an expansive rock bluff in the distance. Birds sailed from their homes, swarming into a giant seventy-foot tall tsunami that exploded at once into a million tiny fragments still caught in an invisible tornado. The sun glinted flecks of purple and blue and green as the starlings that sought direction from a drunken master.

“We’re here,” the man beside me said in broken English, having figured out that I am exactly the stupid American he thought I was who spoke only one language, and even that in limited capacity. His breath labored behind his words so much that I had to look at him — a mistake as I saw the raised eyebrows and darting eyes of someone whose patience I had clearly worn thin. With a muffled apology, I shoved my way into the disembarking stream of passengers and right into Mina who, in a surprising display of strength and agility and stubbornness, elbowed me back. Her eyes went slack as she saw that I was the target of her animosity.

“Sorry, Artemis,” she threw at me beneath her sparkling brown eyes. “I always thought folks are nicer in Europe, but you really have to fight for your place in the queue, don’t you?”

I gave her as polite a nod as I could in passing before I, too, was swept up and guided forcefully between the columns of seats to be ejected onto the snow. My hand went up to shield my eyes as the sun’s full toll became apparent, being magnified by a million tiny flecks of snow. Kaleb and Mina joined me six feet — or I guess I should say a third of a meter — away from the river of faces and bodies that dwindled to a stream and then died on the mountainside in a splash.

“No sunglasses?” Kaleb asked, sliding his own protective goggles down over his face.

“No,” I told him under my raised arm. “Forgot them back at the lodge.”

Not exactly true, but it was close enough. I did remember to bring the novel that I’d carried all the way from Texas. I know, I know. I travel halfway around the world to an exclusive ski resort in Scotland only to spend my time reading a novel I’d already read. Please remember that I hadn’t planned to be on the side of a mountain anyway. Without glasses, I could make my escape and once the two of them started down the mountain, I could ease into a booth in the slightly disappointing cafe

“Here. I brought an extra set.”

Of course he did. With as much grace as I could muster, I accepted them.

“Remember those?”

I turned them over in my hand.

“From?”

“That last trip we took to Ireland,” he said, taking the deep breath he normally took when preparing for a story. “Where was that we went? Was it Glasgow? And the bus? And Niamh? Do you still talk to her.”

The mention of Niamh snapped Mina into the conversation.

“Who was Niamh?” She asked.

“Nobody,” I answered, feeling my cheeks flush hot. “Just a girl.”

“Just a girl?” Kaleb posited, pivoting on his heels. “If you weren’t so hung up on what’s her name then you’d have seen that she was insane for you.”

“Lia,” I told him. “It wasn’t that.”

He turned to Mina as he stepped away toward a battered equipment rental sign suspended over a small shack caddy-corner to the cafe. She stepped forward to keep stride, and I followed closely to defend myself in this attack of a conversation.

“She gave him her number and everything.”

I mumbled something about international rates as Mina shot a woeful glance at me.

“She even invited him to an after-hours bar downtown, but my brother Artemis decided he didn’t want to go. He was ‘tired from traveling’ or something.”

“I was tired from traveling. It’s a nine hour flight and a time zone change.”

“She was hot too,” Kaleb continued.

“As hot as me,” Mina asked, batting her eyelashes above her mask.

“Of course not, Babe. Impossible. But she was damn close. Here. Look.”

He pulled out his phone and showed him the only picture we had of her. She hadn’t liked me though. The after-hours invitation was only a courtesy. Distracted by the conversation, I hadn’t realized that we’d made it to the rental stand until we came to a stop before it.

“They have toboggans,” Mina squealed. “We have to do that!”

“Let’s do it,” Kaleb replied, and turned to the man, gushing the Gaelic he’d learned for the trip. “Cia mheud?”

I took in the rental shop, little more than a one-room shed with a small window cut-out of it. The man whose eyes lit up at Kaleb’s attempt at Gaelic nodded like a machine gun, head bobbing up and down. He wore a dark green stocking cap over his pale freckle-pocked forehead. He was wrapped in a fluffy brown down coat and sported a sunburn just beginning around his eyes. A thick green mask covered his face. Behind him the sun lit a wall of sleds, snowboards, and other ski-related tools which I didn’t recognize, given that I rarely ever ski. Long poles that had to be used for something sat next to vials of topical ointments that warded off sun and windburn could be purchased for just under five euros. The man disappeared and returned carrying a toboggan sled as tall as he was.

“This one, seventeen euros for three hours,” he told Kaleb, who glanced at Mina. She nodded.

“Come back when you’re done to pay,” the man followed.

“Sure will, Fraser,” Kaleb said. “Tapadh beat.”

The man nodded with an expression around his eyes, unless it was my imagination, that seemed pained and relieved at the same time. Then he turned his attention to me.

“What would you like?”

Mina whispered something to Kaleb, who glanced at me with one open eye, and then whispered back.

“One sec,” I told the man. Inserting myself into the conspiracy, I addressed Mina first. “What?”

“Nothing. Just…”

“Just if you’re okay, we’d like to get going. Is that okay with you, little brother?”

I shrugged, and before my shoulders fell back to their original position, I found myself alone with the rental agent. My chance had arrived.

“Okay,” I whispered to the man through my mask. “I’d like some coffee. Do you all have that here?”

He seemed confused over his mask as his left eyebrow shot up.

“Coffee? No. There.”

He pointed to the coffee shop which was exactly where I knew it was. But I would rather seem ignorant than rudely taking up space in a queue for no apparent reason.

“Oh,” I exaggerated complete with hand gestures. “Great. I’ll go there then. My mistake.”

A gust of wind blew snow loose from the roof, dropping a glob of damp cold onto my stocking cap. I stepped out of the line as I knocked it loose, banging my head with my hand while trying to keep ice out of that gap between my stocking cap and my ski suit. In a frantic wave, I shifted my chest forward as melting snow dripped down between my shoulder blades.

“I didn’t know you ski,” came a voice that tensed my shoulders and thumped at the inside of my skull. “It’s hard to find a lot of skiers from central Texas.”

I turned and saw the eyes again — Lia’s eyes, as impossible as it was. There was a smile in them, possibly even directed at me. I looked closer, trying to imagine Lia’s triangular jawline under the pink mask and hair perpetually pony-tail beneath her lilac knit beanie.

“Who are you?” I asked, fear wracking through my body as my heart raced with expectation yet my mind grappled with the thousands of miles between where we stood and where I’d last seen her. The burly ape-looking man beside her stared at me though despite his size and the obvious intimacy between them held me in a coddling gaze.

“Is this him?” The man asked.

“I think so,” she said in a voice that was too familiar and yet had taken on the huskier tone of the years the spanned between my memories and now. I felt the pull, and that’s when I knew that it had to be her. A single step in her direction was all I dared to take.

“Lia?”

Her blue eyes brightened.

“You do recognize me. I thought that was you on the bus but I wasn’t sure. How have you been, Artemis. It’s been so long.”

The man stuck out his right arm and spoke with a Texas twang.

“I’ve heard so much about you. Well… in the last ten minutes or so, anyway. It’s nice to meet you Artemis. I’m Michael but you can call me Mike. Mike Summers.”

I took his hand, but my eyes never left hers, nor hers mine. Mike didn’t seem to notice.

“Artemis,” I said. “Friends call me Art, I guess.”

“Don’t fall for it,” Lauren said, eyes still drilling into mine. “He hates being called Art. Call him Artemis. Artemis Mallory.”

Her voice trailed off as she said it, then she finally broke gaze.

“Mike, do you mind if Artemis and I catch up? Just maybe get some coffee or something.” She looked at me and admitted. “I heard you ask for some.”

“Fine by me, hun. I’ll get the boards.”

“You snowboard?” I asked her.

“There’s a lot to talk about, Arty. So much has happened in the … what… twenty years since we’ve known each other?”

I noticed the start of wrinkles around those eyes then, and grew self-conscious about the ones surrounding mine.

“You think half an hour or so?”

She let slip another giggle that chimed through the air and massaged my ears.

“You are just anxious to get down the mountain, aren’t you?” She turned to me again. “Mike competes. For him, this blue square is pretty boring but he understands that for us beginners, we need to take it slow. Right, Mike?”

“Sure, doll. I was just going to zip over to the black diamond while you talk. Might be my only chance today — not that I’m complaining.”

“Go, Mike. We’ll be fine.”

And just like that, Jupiter and Saturn aligned. Gravitational forces went to work on my insides, pulling me into the past. Kisses so deep and passionate that if I didn’t come up for air I would suffocate in them. In my imagination, I did die, suffocated in her embrace with my molecules slowly spinning to a stop. I forced myself to remember that we’re not in the past, and there’s nothing between us now but the cold mountain air. I’d almost succeeded in convincing myself of that one solitary fact when I felt those thin fingers wrap around my arm, through the glove, through the down coat, and through two layers of underclothes.