No Gods, No Monsters (Convergence Saga #1)

by Cadwell Turnbull

“The Lesson was a perfect debut, and this is a perfect second novel. Big and bold and ambitious, packed with everything we need right now: more heart, more monsters, more cooperative solidarity economies.” -Sam J. Miller, Nebula Award–winning author of Blackfish City and The Blade Between

I’m going to tell you a story. And, like so many stories, this one begins with a body.

“Anyway, we helped Lincoln get sober and helped him with the other scars too. He was coming to make amends.” “For what?” Rebecca smiles. “Because trauma is an open door. We all have to make amends to all the people we let in.” This, of all things, Laina did not expect, and she feels stripped down to her essential parts.

Harry is sweating through his clothes. The stairway is cramped and hot, but there’s also the lack of sound from below, which has begun to unnerve him. The butler’s words bleed together, and all Harry can hear is trap, trap, trap.

She drew joy out of him, a peaceful sort of joy that slipped into everything, the way a pleasant scent can linger in clothes. He loved her, but more than that, he loved the ease. She demanded little, and so he didn’t give much. At the time, he didn’t realize what a gift that was, how she made him light by not adding weight.

Later, when he wouldn’t stop calling, she sent him an email. I did love you. But I think we left each other alone for too long. We weren’t very good at our marriage. But you were worse.

Talking ants and calm, glittering nights seem like a kind bit of magic. But all things look kind from a distance. Dragon remembers the surprise on the faces of the sacrificed when he started to cleanse them with fire, how they didn’t believe the threat until it was happening. Dragon feels the shame rise again and must fight the urge to vomit. What a horrible thing he did. What a horrible thing he was made to do. Not Dragon’s choice. Someone else’s. If he stayed, this would always be true. It is inaccurate to say Dragon thought these things. They existed not in words but in emotion, a sudden sense of wrongness that could only be approximated. The words were inadequate to the feeling. “Will you protect me?” Dragon asks the ants. “Yes,” the ants say. And with that bit of reassurance, Dragon steps through.

When she told Laina about that day, Laina grabbed her by the shoulders and said, “There’s no excuse for what he did. Ever.” Rebecca nodded, but the words didn’t balance the scales in her heart. Sure, she agreed with Laina. That had never changed. But later, she found out that beatings were the way older Puerto Ricans disciplined their children—even some of her parents’ friends. Her father and mother had made the decision never to do that. There was room there, maybe not for forgiveness, but for understanding. Her parents had shown incredible restraint with her and her brother, had buried a lifetime of cultural conditioning for her and her brother’s sake. Her father had failed to do this once. Rebecca had lived a life of many mistakes she couldn’t take back. At the very least, she knew what that felt like.

But it really wasn’t about the thing itself. Rebecca was mourning all the other things that mistake stole from them. She and her father had both paid a price in lost time—a bitter, ugly, deep hole they could never fill.

She likes being out here because she doesn’t have to dull her senses the same way she must in the city. Whatever magic created the wolf makes life difficult in the city. Too many sounds and smells. Here, the magic spreads out, and it feels good—almost

Sarah is stout and powerful in human form, and that has carried over to her wolf: formidable hind legs, a thick neck, and solid shoulders. Nothing about Sarah’s wolf seems unnatural, though. Seeing it makes Rebecca feel that werewolves are something true and central, a long-kept secret spoken in whispers through time.

He was gone before she read the words on the paper. It was a list of names, in four even columns. Most of them she didn’t recognize, but near the top were several she did. Friends and family. Some school acquaintances she hadn’t seen since high school or earlier. There was no indication what the names meant. The threat was left unspoken. But those vacant eyes gave Rebecca a glimpse of a deeper story. They had done something truly dangerous, and the normal rules of engagement didn’t apply here. Werewolves weren’t the only things lurking in the dark.

On the events calendars, author events are listed as the name of their book. Too often, Rebecca has puzzled over an event only to realize that it is just a book title. One event, Murder Your Friends, had her both confused and excited, only to find that it was a humor book—no friends actually killed during the making of.

Sometimes, guilt and loss push a person into becoming more than singular. They split in two to resurrect what they’ve lost or live in service to what was lost. A lover will take up the mission of the dead partner. A mother might take up a dead daughter’s hobby to feel close to her. A sister might flirt with the notion of becoming a monster, to fill in the parts of her brother she doesn’t know. To understand what happened. Those words are bigger than a single event. They’re a question to the universe itself.

Rebecca squeezes Laina’s hand. “It isn’t selfish to protect yourself from abusive people.” “It is selfish. But it’s the kind that looks good on paper.”

Growing up, Ridley didn’t like his hometown. He was asexual and trans, with a white mother and a Black father—both upper-middle-class doctors in a town that vaguely resented them and outright resented him. His parents didn’t handle any of it well. In order to be “well-rounded,” he’d been made to learn line dancing, wood carving, horse riding, pottery, and the piano, which—obvious to him but not to his parents—didn’t help ingratiate him with his peers. The wood carving had stuck, but Ridley had excised the rest from his life.

When he was thirteen, he told his parents that he wanted to change his name from Rachel to Ridley. His mother took it hard at first, but eventually adjusted, though she still occasionally forgot when discussing hair and clothes. His father adjusted immediately, which surprised Ridley at first, until he realized that like everything else with his father, it was a calculation. Ridley’s father hated his radical leftism, but he was a secular man and presented himself as openly tolerant. Despite her mistakes, his mother had real love behind her acceptance.

Ridley looks back up at the Lathe of Heaven poster. It was the first novel by Le Guin he ever read, about a man whose dreams could alter reality itself—a power that eventually passes for a time to the man’s therapist, through a device called the Augmentor. Strange how time changes one’s relationship to a work. Back then Ridley saw the story as distant from the reality he lived in. Now he sees all the ways reality can be written and unwritten before his very eyes. True reality is scary, and so we’ve fashioned a pretty substitute, agreed to it. To live within it, people have augmented themselves.

Karuna believed in a shadow society; the emergence of monsters was proof of it. Networks of secret societies, dark organizations, private interests. Maybe even conflicts between secret groups with different agendas for the world. Most of the crazies thought that a single group was responsible for the leaked footage and the suppression afterward. It was Karuna who suggested that it could actually be multiple organizations acting independently. “Perhaps it was the terms of a truce,” she wrote in her blog. “A cover-up that served multiple factions.”

“What is this?” Marcus asks. His gaze is direct. “Just a night. I’m not asking you to do anything but let me be here.” Marcus makes a face Ridley remembers well, and it breaks his heart again as if no time at all had passed. “I’m sorry.” “We good,” Marcus says. He smiles and touches Ridley’s hand. A silent pact, then: to be a little of what they both want for the night.

he texts his parents to tell them he’s heading back to Boston. Your father and I thought we’d see you before you left. Ridley apologizes. Easy to seem genuine in a text. His father texts back: Be safe, son. I will.

Or perhaps, Ridley means “take care” as a child might, in that precise moment when the child understands that he knows more than his parents yet must pretend otherwise for their sake. If they don’t know the darkness by now, a good son would know better than to lead them there. Better to say, “Stay in the light. I’m going to wade in deeper now. It is different here from what you think. No, I can’t explain. I’m closing the door behind me.”

Sondra leans against the porch railing and curses. “You lied.” “It wasn’t a lie. I don’t see it that way.” “Stubborn old man.” “Stubborn young woman.” Sondra lets a bit of the anger slide away for just a moment.

Monsters fell into one of three categories. They belonged to the societies, which meant they were institutionally bound to secrecy. Or they were monsters with a deep family history of monstrosity, which meant they’d been taught over generations to hide well. Or they were rogues, whose only guarantee of safety from the societies and the wider world was their practiced cunning and low profile.

Dragon learns to climb coconut trees, to find and pull genip from branches, to follow stray cats into the bush. He spends a lot of time watching iguanas and birds, looking from one to the other, combining the two, comparing them to himself.

“The act of observing electrons affects the outcome,” Hugh says. “That shouldn’t be possible.” It’s not just electrons. Other subatomic particles also ignore Newtonian laws. They teleport, superimpose, and disappear. They run off cliffs and forget to fall. Upon witnessing the complete lack of fucks given by the quantum world, physicists collectively lose their minds. How can they reconcile reality with what they are seeing?

Bohr won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. He modeled the atom. He is brilliant and highly respected, and when he tells a room full of people his theory, they listen. They listen so hard that Bohr’s ideas hold the field hostage for decades. His idea is this: The world is separated into two: our physical macro world, which we pretty much understand; and the quantum world, where shit just happens. When we are not looking at subatomic particles, they exist as waves of possibility: wave functions. When we observe them, the wave collapses, and they become particles. It is pointless to try to figure out what subatomic particles are doing when we are not looking at them, and that is not our job as physicists.

It didn’t occur to him until he stood in that crowd that there was no line between them. They’d been living side by side all along, only now they knew it. And for some of them, there had never been a line. They had never stopped being human. Sarah was fully both, monster and human, and now she was dead. Humans had killed her. Ridley thought he needed protection, that he needed to protect the people he loved, through his complicit silence. It had made him uncharacteristically betray his principles, thinking he and Laina would be spared. But when the gunshots came, he lost that expectation. That is the best word for it. Lost. He will never find it again, will never go looking. No one deserves protection over anyone else. No human above. No human below.

Grassroots Economic Organizing Collective. For teaching me everything I know about solidarity economics and for welcoming me into a community of kindred spirits.