bethany hagen

DRAGON by Bethany Hagen

Everything is dry like tinder, crumple-weeded and metal-smelling and desolate. Even the sky has given up, flat and harsh and broiled into a hateful cloche, holding all the heat down and close to the city.  

I sit on the hood of my car and light a cigarette and enjoy it all.  The sun like the eye of some furious god, the engine ticking hot under the hood, trying fruitlessly to cool down, the squat lines of the abandoned warehouses huddled under the lidless heat.  The river nearby, so low that branches stick out of the bottom like ooze-covered bones.

The cigarette burns and I hold it in my mouth for a moment as I take stock of my possessions.  A battered but reliable sedan, faded blue like the sky.  Thirty-three dollars, all in cotton-soft ones and clinking quarters.  The clothes on my back, stolen from a girl I spent a night with in Salina.  A half-empty pack of cigarettes, tossed into a drugstore bag filled with makeup and candy bars.  And of course my body, with its old scars and its fresh bruises.  Its black eye that even now throbs to the beat of my heart.

I kind of like it.  It reminds me that I’m alive.  I’m alive and all roads have led me back to this city and this city is dry.

It’s destiny.  

God told Abraham that if he could find ten righteous men in the city of Sodom that he would spare the city its destruction.  Abraham found only his nephew, and three thousand years later, I’ve found only my exes.

I slide off the car, stretch like a sun-warmed cat, and then scuff my way over to a red-painted metal door, flicking a cigarette into a patch of gravel as I do.  The door is only locked in the barest sense of the word; a half-hearted kick with a booted foot is enough to send it flying open.  I’m greeted with piles of abandoned farm equipment from the first part of the last century, trash bags full of stolen sneakers.  The smell of fresh leather and rust washes over me like the rain that refuses to wash over this city, and I allow myself the luxury of breathing it in, that smell that marks the only happy days I’ve ever known.

I will hate burning this place down, I really will, I promise that much is true.

Double YA Fantasy giveaway!

THE NAVARASA POTION SHOP by Akshaya Raman

Ma had always told Kiran that true love couldn’t be bought.

“You can buy knowledge, friendship, even justice for the right price,” Ma would say. “But not love.”

Kiran believed her mother as she navigated her first awkward crush, her first hesitant kiss, her first loving girlfriend. And then she had her first painful breakup. And somewhere among a box of lavender cupcakes, a Netflix show binge, and two dozen phone calls to her friends, Kiran realized Ma had been wrong.

Love could be bought—if you knew where to look.

#

From the outside, there was nothing noteworthy about the Navarasa Potion Shop. A simple wooden sign carved with the store’s name hung from the lime-green awning, swinging in the cool spring breeze. Kiran pushed open the door.

Coconut and rose. Sage and saffron. Ocean waves and flickering flames.

She breathed deeply, inhaling scents that were no longer singular but a harmonious blend of fragrant notes and familiar feelings.

The marvel of a thousand clay lamps floating down a winding river. The terror of a plunging drop off a jagged seaside cliff. The victory of a battle waged and won on the soccer field.

#

The girl behind the counter was not the old Indian aunty that Kiran’s friends had told her to expect but a young girl barely older than Kiran. And she had the most beautiful hair. It was waist length, parted to one side, and wavy in that magazine-photoshoot-on-the-beach way. That run-your-hands-through-it-forever way.

“Can I help you?” Her voice had the smooth rasp of coffee shop singers. She ran her eyes over Kiran, from her messy bun down to her scuffed sneakers, and then back up to meet Kiran’s gaze. There was an intensity in that look, a blend of curiosity and intimacy, that made Kiran’s stomach flip. This girl could tell entire stories just with her eyes.

“Are you… Mythili?”

“That’s my mother.” The girl tucked her curtain of black hair behind her ear, revealing five gold piercings lining the outer shell.

Kiran pointed to the wooden shelves full of delicate glass bottles. “Do they really work?”

“Sure.” The girl put her elbows on the counter and leaned forward. “What are you in the mood for? World peace? Vigilante justice? Zombie apocalypse?”

“Oh—” Wait. “You have potions that can cause a zombie apocalypse?”

The girl smiled dryly. “Joke.” She laced her fingers together. “How can I help you?”

Kiran’s face heated. She’d spent the whole drive thinking about the words she wanted to say, but somehow it was easier to imagine saying them to an aunty than a girl who could be her classmate. “Um.” Kiran toyed with the hem of her tank top. “I’m looking for… a love potion.”

“Oh.” For a second Kiran thought the girl sounded disappointed, but when Kiran looked up, her face was expressionless. “Over there.” She gestured to the cabinets with a dismissive wave. “The pink ones.”

#

The navarasa, Kiran recalled from bharatanatyam dance lessons, consisted of nine universal emotions you could evoke through art. Kiran’s eyes wandered over the bottles, taking in the nine colors meant to represent the nine emotions. Adbutha, or wonder, shimmered like trapped sunlight, warm and radiant. Raudra, or anger, beckoned like a decadent pomegranate tart, bloody and brutal. Peace. Laughter. Fear. And then Kiran saw it. Sringara. Love. It was the pale pink of rosebuds awash in dawn’s glow, and it tugged her forward, both enticing and warning.

She pulled the stopper out of the bottle and inhaled. Crushed rose petals and flecks of sandalwood. The space between her heartbeats grew, the gaps filled with intoxicating emotions and memories of Alia.

The bliss of rosewater cupcakes and lazy kisses on sun-warmed grass.

It was as if the very fabric of the world around her had been ripped apart and painstakingly sewn back together in way that made sense.

The girl at the counter had that wry smile on her face again as Kiran approached, but now Kiran noticed a small dimple in her right cheek. This close, she could that the girl’s eyes were not black as she’d thought, but a very dark brown, deep and soulful and expressive. Every flick, every glance, was filled with intention.

“Find what you wanted?”

Yes, Kiran meant to say. “What’s your name?” She slid the bottle across the counter.

The girl raised an eyebrow. “Rohini.”

“I’m Kiran.”

“So, Kiran,” Rohini asked, smiling brightly as she rang up the purchase, “whose choice are you intending to take away with this?”

Kiran’s smile fell. She was beginning to see the seams and the rips in the universe again, the way things didn’t quite fit together. She couldn’t stand the judgment exuding from this girl. Alia still loved her; Kiran just needed her to remember how much.

“It’s not like that. My girlfriend broke up with me because we’re going to different colleges in the fall.”

Rohini wrapped the bottle in tissue and slipped it into a bag. “That doesn’t change anything.”

The effects of the potion Kiran had inhaled were fading away, and she felt… ordinary. Empty. “If you hate it so much, why do you sell it?”

The girl’s expression darkened. “It’s a family business.”

Kiran snatched the bag off the counter. “Well, your family might want to consider hiring someone else.”

LIKE/ NOT LIKE by Natalie C. Parker

It’s hard to remember the first time it happened, isn’t it? It’s been said to you, around you, about you so many times that pinning it down to a first time feels as pointless as patterngift (because, really, who cares if you always know how to pair stripes with more stripes?). As soon as you hear the phrase, Good girls don’t, you have a million words, phrases, treatises ready to fill the space that follows. Good girls don’t curse, good girls don’t have sex, good girls don’t shout or drive fast or dream big.

But the one that haunts you is this: good girls don’t use firegift.

It’s not an official rule, and no one would tell you it was, but just the same, they’d repeat the rule-that’s-not-a-rule and look at you with an expression as if to say Not my fault. This is just the way things are.

Gifts arrive sometime in your late teens. You know this. You can sort of judge when it might come based on when your parents’ did, but like your first period, it’s always a surprise. When you were very small, you imagined what it would be like to have firegift. You ran around with the girls and boys in your neighborhood battling villains made of ice or wood or who breathed combustible gasses, and you took all of them down with your own two hands, blessed by firegift. When you were a little older still, you heard the story of girls in other countries who kept their families alive with the simplicity of their gift. You heard the story of the woman saint, given firegift to save an entire people.

But at some point, you realized those were the exceptions. Those were the girls who weren’t like other girls. And their stories were qualified by others.

By the pilgrim girls who didn’t know any better and set fire to an entire colony one hard winter.

By the slave girls who were deemed too dangerous on account of their gifts and were murdered on discovery.

By the immigrant girls, penniless and starving, turned away at the gates.

By the lesbian girls incarcerated and drugged until fire was nothing more than a distant memory.

That doesn’t happen any more. At least, not in the same way. In today’s world, a girl with firegift can have a mostly normal life. She can go to school, get a job, find love, but she won’t ever be quite like other girls.

You know about those girls. They are sharper, they are stolen kisses and cigarettes and combat boots. They are confidence and wicked smiles and tattoos. They do things other girls don’t and maybe that other girls shouldn’t. You’ve heard them say it, Not like other girls. And it felt true, but also like something said about them before it was said by them.

You’ve spent days wondering what you’d do if yours was firegift. Hide it, probably. Join the ranks of “giftless” girls who are pitied, but not ostracized. It’s more common for girls to go giftless than for boys to, and no one thinks twice about it.

No one in your family has firegift. There’s no reason for you to worry over it the way you do, but on a random day in August, as you sit on your bedroom floor picking out the perfect outfit for the first day of your senior year, your hands spark and catch fire. You clap them together immediately.

The first thing you do when the fire is gone is check to make sure you are alone. You are. The second thing you do is look in the mirror to see if anything else about you has changed. It’s a strange impulse. Gifts don’t come with physical changes, but you feel different, so you peer into the mirror to see if anyone might tell by looking at you that you’re no longer like other girls.

Can they?

Probably not.

For a moment, your mind fools you into thinking things are as simple as they were when you were small. You feel the thrum of power in your fingertips, in your very heart, and you are eager to open your hands again and fill them with fire.

Firegift. You have it.

Now, you panic. Your mind fills with stories about good girls and other girls and you wonder where you fit between them. Is there even space between them? You discover you have so many questions and if another gift – any other gift – had been the one you ended up with, you’d have answers. You know exactly how the world opens up for those with numbergift, with earthgift, with musicgift. And for anything you didn’t immediately know you’d be able to Google! Can you Google? Does someone monitor questions about firegift? Will they track you down? Alert your parents?

Downstairs, you hear your parents clattering around in the kitchen, prepping dinner and pouring their evening glass of wine. You try to imagine what it will be like to tell them and see the panic and sorrow on their faces. You try to imagine what life will be like now that you’re not like other girls.

And then you stop. You look at your hands. You palms are open, empty. They are marked by the same lines that have always been there, your thumbs are disproportionately shorter than the rest of your fingers, and the underside of the knuckle on the middle finger of your left hand is scarred from a childhood fight against an imagined ice villain. These are the same hands you’ve always hand. You are the same girl you’ve always been.

And that’s when you understand. The girls who are not like other girls were created by the same stories that told you what good girls are and what they aren’t.

You have firegift. And you are exactly like other girls.

Natalie C. Parker is the author of the Southern Gothic duology Beware the Wild, which was a 2014 Junior Library Guild Selection, and Behold the Bones (HarperTeen). She is also the editor of Three Sides of a Heart, a young adult anthology on love triangles publishing from HarperTeen, Dec. 19, 2017. She is the founder of Madcap Retreats, an organization offering a yearly calendar of writing retreats and workshops.

Click here for more Hanging Garden Stories by Natalie.

A KISS FOR THE SANDMAN by Bethany Hagen

You sit quietly as I wash the grave dirt off your cheek.

You always sit quietly.  But this morning, the quiet feels different.  It feels…I don’t know.  Patient, maybe.  Alert.

Alive.

But that can’t be.  I smooth a cluster of stubborn curls off your forehead and look into your eyes.  The same glass they’ve been since the day I set them inside your face, all those weeks ago.  Funny how without them you looked so unreal, a mannequin, a machine, but the moment I slid those glass orbs under the long silk of your eyelashes…

But you can’t really watch me.  Not really.

And you’re not watching me now as I brush the dirt from Olivia’s grave from your cheek.  You’re not watching me with Olivia’s dark brown eyes, you’re not feeling my fingertips against your face, you don’t feel them brush across your lips, run down the line of your neck before I turn away.

You’re not alive.

You’re not her.

****

We go back to the grave the next day.  Fresh spring grass is pushing through the loose clods of dirt, but the breeze is cold.  I shiver.  You don’t.

Yesterday, I could only think of the real Olivia–her laugh, the warm summer days that turned into even warmer summer nights, the way she tossed a mischievous grin back at her smiling parents before she surprised me with a promise ring the summer before senior year.  They say you can’t meet the person you’ll marry in high school, but they didn’t know Olivia and me.  They didn’t see how we talked and kissed and understood each other, they didn’t see how we fit together, didn’t see how even our families blended together seamlessly.

But today, I find I’m distracted from thoughts of Olivia.  I’m thinking only of you, my doll, your hair ruffling in the breeze, your skin smooth as polished river stones while mine is stippled with goose bumps.  

The cold doesn’t bother you.

It doesn’t bother the real Olivia either.  Not anymore.

There’s a moment, however, when I go to right a vase of fake flowers that’s blown over in the night, that I think I see you turn your head out of the corner of my eye.  I straighten up so fast the vase topples back over, stepping back into the solid granite of the tombstone, but you’re as you were–still, still, still.  A dead doll made in the likeness of an even deader girl.  I have to almost dare myself to do it, but I step forward and touch your cheek.  

You’re not alive.  

That’s it for our Shakespeare with a Sci-Fi Twist cycle!  In order of publication: 

OPHELIA by @bethanyhagen

SPEAK TO IT by @nataliecparker

SP34R.dll by @lindsaysmithdc

Call Sign by @authorwrightnow

The Wayward Sisters by @zoraidacordova

The Ghost of Titania by @lorimlee

So Sweet a Changeling by @shvetathakrar

NEAR INCEPTION ON AN EVENING IN THE SUMMERTIME by @getnicced

NOTHING NATURAL by @dianahurlburt

Join us this Monday as our second cycle of 2017 begins–a 4-GIF cycle where each other will pick one of these four gifs!

They call him Prosper, a measure of mockery for each measure of awe.

-

You know the road to the laboratory blind, could walk it in your sleep—have, because sleepwalking is telltale of the godborn, so your mother says and touches your ankle in rare affection where it rests on the porch rail, one foot on the earth and one in the realm of spirits.

“Spirits,” she repeats, gesturing to the road below, the spindly pine woods and the yellow haze of heat and pollution that makes up your horizon. “He controls the spirits.”

There are no spirits, only neighbors: Men and women and half-made machines given to rust, the detritus of civilization. A plot of bloodless jackdaws, midway between flophouse and refugee camp. You know that part of her statement, at least, is true. The weak and weak-willed, the dying, the once-dead, the discarded and useless, the flagrant all require direction. Seek strength. Are used by those stronger.

Sicaria laughs and makes her crooked cross, murmurs her oblique prayer.

“Get out,” she tells you in sudden rage, “go to your master. Get out of my sight, you unworthy and unclean thing, you who have forsaken the ways of God, you who cleave to the machines. Your eyes see only falsehood.”

-

It is fifteen years since your mother was cast out. It is your lifetime that has been spent in wasteland, the between-place, the unplace beyond the pale. It is a pine island that shelters you, a fanatic who raises you, a scientist who uses your hands and your back and his daughter who considers your mind.

Your mind. You know you have one. All creatures do, born or made. It is the First Law of Being.

Your name. If Sicaria gave you one it has been lost. It was only after Prosper’s carelessness that anyone else tried—his accident in the lab, though he would never call it that, surely you were at fault, your clumsy hands too broad for fine work and your elbows always in the way. Acid scattered from a flask, droplets caught in sun. You did not scream; it wasn’t the worst pain you had felt. In the washroom Miranda’s hands were gentle, washing, salving. They slowed after the initial motions and your pulse followed. You examine your two faces in the mirror. If you had ever displayed beauty it was gone now, Miranda’s heightened by your face now scarred. Her luminosity beyond the human and your coarseness, a sun and its shadow.

Her hand stayed on your cheek after its necessity had lapsed. She traced the remnants of acid, specks and splotches, long fingers black and velvet like the touch of night. You believe her grasp could shift moons from their orbit.

“Calvaluna,” she said, a cantrip reshaping your vision of yourself. “I read it somewhere—where? I have never read a book. I don’t need to, Father put his knowledge into my head before he activated me. But I hear it.” She tapped her forehead, then yours. “I hear it. It means you. It suits you. Calvaluna.”

It was prettier than you, you knew that, a beautiful name. Prettier than most things. Not prettier than her.

-

When Prosper leaves the laboratory it is less a retirement for the evening and more retreat. He would never call it that but you believe him fearful, after all. The powerful always are. He swings himself like a cudgel upon exit, he shouts for Miranda to attend him and cuffs you, a passing blow, thoughtless. Brutality is his lever, rarely compassion.

You know his laboratory better than he does, you think, wiping down counters. You know his daughter, made in his own image but ultimately fathomless. There’s a phrase in Sicaria’s Bible that makes you quiver when you apply it to Miranda.

It is full dark when Miranda comes for you. Your laboratory is Prosper’s in miniature, piecemeal and theft-built, squirreled away in a shed in the woods south of the pine island on which the best of the unplace’s hovels are built.

“It was a citrus packing house,” Miranda says as she always does. Touches the frame of the door right and then left, stretches to her full height to brush its top. It’s a ritual the way your mother’s prayers are, her prostrations, her rages. “Before the Laws took effect there was an industry here. Fruit. Citrus fruit.” She looks at you, a delight on her face that would fire the darkness. “Can you imagine it, Calvaluna? Whole stands of trees with fruit on them. Wild fruit, just growing. Imagine taking fruit off a tree and eating it.”

Your imagination is not that good.

She goes to the single table in the laboratory and stands before it in a manner you’ve thought must be like that of the Israelites in the Holy of Holies. You are not supposed to know what that means. You are not supposed to have holiness in your life. She looks at you briefly, with mischief, and draws down the shroud you have used to protect the R.E.L.’s shell from rain.

“I think we’re close,” she says. Her eyes are fascinated, distracted; her hand reaches for you. “Come here, Calvaluna, tell me if this is calibrated properly.”

“You have your father’s knowledge,” you say. But you go and look at the R.E.L. with her. You’re proud of the effort, the work of your joined hands. You are not supposed to have pride, either. There is no pride in being raised beyond the pale. In being the offspring of a hanged woman, a witch they would have called her in days past, a lawbreaker too iconoclastic to be allowed in the city and too ineffectual to be executed, spared for her belly to the tune of mockery. Certainly there is no pride in your form or your face.

“I think he’s almost ready to revive,” Miranda says. Her joy is the only light in these woods. The sun exists, you know, in theory. Miranda’s face is your only evidence thus far, fifteen years alive and far from those spaces left which thrive in natural sunlight. She links her fingers in yours, her thumb rubs the calluses on your palm; she points with your hands to the R.E.L.’s blank and staring eyes, his half-human head, his chest with its missing heart and its new core of wires. “Oh, Calvaluna! I’m nervous. Are you nervous?”

Nervous is not the right word for what you are.

-

“Calvaluna,” Sicaria repeated the day you told her of Miranda’s gift. She scraped the tip of her ritual knife between her teeth, grinning. “An appropriate name for you, my aborted dream. I should have exposed you as a sacrifice to God.”

There is no god but human will. This is the Second Law of Being.

-

Your fellow-spirits are all will-bound to Prosper’s caprice. He makes the cogs of the community turn, greases the paths of food and potable water and herbs plucked at the witching hour that make life slightly less… life-like. Thus he is obeyed.

“Daughter,” Sicaria echoes. She spits at the trash heap beside the back gate. “Blasphemy. Blasphemy. Such words I hear from your lips, my burden. Who was it gave you speech, that you fling curses in my face? I think maybe you’re the worse for your time spent in that man’s house. I see you confuse craft for birth.” She broods, her fingers twitching at the strand of beads beneath her wrapper. “But there’s no more to be done. How else are we to live?”

Once, and only once, you suggested that perhaps her god might see to living arrangements, if she did not like how you were turning out under Prosper’s tutelage.

“Go.” She waves to the wood path. “I heard tell there was meat today.”

If there was meat to be had, you suspect it’s long gone now. Your fellow-spirits are avaricious. What have they but base pleasures?

“He’s in a gloom,” Miranda says, her face round and open as a poinciana pod. “He’s made me clean the laboratory twice over, and asked me to cook… something. I didn’t recognize it, Calvaluna. Lentil soup? What is a lentil, do you know?”

You know of lentils.

“You can’t make lentil soup,” you tell her. “He shouldn’t ask you to do things he knows are impossible.”

“He believes anything is possible,” she says. You love and hate to see her countenance. You remember a time when she would have spoken the same words in hope and affection. You know it is your fault, the way she is changing, her will a canker on the face of beauty. You wonder what Prosper will do when he realizes it. You ponder in the night, sometimes, this scholar whose eyes perceive all but the truth.

Perhaps you will be gone before he awakens.

“Race me,” Miranda says, but she takes your hand.

“How am I to race if you keep me beside you?”

“A race doesn’t have to have a winner,” she says, and begins to run.

She times these things impeccably. She runs so that you can almost believe the light follows her footsteps, that she leaves no mark on the earth. Dusk springs up behind you. You prefer night, its honesty; you prefer the real dark that would cover most of your world if not for artificial day. The unplace is a hive of night creatures. Your fellow-spirits are easiest perceived in dimness, their proclivities hidden and their countenances smoothed.

Miranda keeps your hand in hers and runs, runs, fearless and laughing. She runs like a dart flung toward the center of the south woods, the pine cloven by lightning looming over your laboratory. The pine grows despite the wound at its heart. It is where you found the R.E.L.—one of Prosper’s cast-offs, what he termed a failed experiment—half-dead and crumbling piecemeal to rust in dank rainfall.

She drops to the base of the pine and pulls you down and points up.

“I know of stars,” she says, her eyes searching as though Heaven might reveal itself. “The Southern Cross, the Swan. The Pleiades. Many more names my father gave me.” She touches her forehead, as she does when she speaks of Prosper’s knowledge, planted in her like seed corn. She is godborn more surely than you can ever be, gleaming divinity. She touches your forehead, your cheeks, the tip of your nose. “I think they must look like you. The stars beyond our sky.”

She traces the scars and specks and splotches. She draws new constellations and names them, her fingers a warm trail on your skin, her breath a promise.

-

Just once you asked your mother if you would ever leave the unplace. You did not then understand that no one came to the salt-strewn plots of land on the city’s outskirts by choice—no one laid eyes on the pine island and thought, I am home. It is far more difficult to leave a place you have not happened upon by choice.

“He’ll be a protector,” you say, pliers in one hand and cording in the other. “His new code will require defense. Otherwise…”

You look at Miranda and think of what might happen to her if the R.E.L.’s defensive code does not run as planned. You picture yourself and remember Sicaria’s dark jibes, her reminiscences of city life. You rub your upper arm where the contraceptive block had been implanted. It only prevents some things, can halt neither the heady mix of desire and aspiration nor flat violence.

“Defense,” Miranda says, her face solemn in its thinking pose, unaware of your thoughts. “Defense, financials, new birth records and identification…”

Her voice skips along, almost merry, a fertile stream in which to seed possibility.

-

The Third Law of Being is the inviolability of life. No one has ever explained to you whether the Law covers all life.

-

Light explodes behind your eyes when Prosper’s hand meets your skull. Or, you realize a little belatedly, it is the fault of the lab table, the edge of it kissing your temple. Air rushes from your lungs. You stare at the vault above the shed in the woods, its ceiling gaping in sections to reveal leaves, the white sky of noon.

Miranda flies at him, her face dressed in horror. You have never kissed her, you think. You would prefer not to die unkissed; you’d prefer not to die at all.

“Ungrateful wretch,” Prosper says. “Twisted ape-child, spawn of—how thought you?” He smashes his hand across the table. “How thought you to betray my kindness? To turn my own blood against me?” He lifts one of the R.E.L.’s arms, almost delicately. “Whore and daughter of whores. Thief.”

Small comfort to think his rage stems from fear, but it’s enough. Prosper would not be angry if he didn’t believe the R.E.L. was sound.

“You.” He points to Sicaria in the doorway. One of your fellow-spirits has fetched her at his command and she is in a state, white-eyed and gagging on anger. “Take your mooncalf in hand, I never want to see her again. Corruptor.”

He catches Miranda and snares her arms, wrenches her close, covers her head with his hands as though she is innocent. As though healing and reviving the R.E.L. were not her idea. As though a child can be born of only one parent. The R.E.L. is your inheritance, legacy of unnatural issue, a being greater than the sum of its creators.

“This abomination will be destroyed,” Prosper says. Sicaria prays in the doorway, her eyes not on you nor on the R.E.L. but searching, seeking. She hates the sight of machines. Had the city not cast her out for improper worship she would have repudiated them anyway.

“He is an R.E.L.,” Miranda says. You stare despite the throb in your head, the blood in your eyes. Her voice remains soft, wondering, a caress on the cyborg’s clinical name. Aerial, a creature of movement and possibility. “Robotically Enhanced Lifeform. Give him his name, Father, lend some pity, even if you thought nothing of flinging him into the trash when he failed to serve you.”

“Abomination,” he repeats. “Homunculus, deformity—daughter. Listen. Calvaluna has done wrong in her ignorance but you… you are not ignorant, Miranda.”

You marvel at the blindness of the learned man, the man cast out for his learned ways, the man who has made the wilderness blossom in decay. Lord of chaos, king of the misruled.

“God be with me in this hour,” Sicaria prays, her hands on either side of the doorframe. “God be with me in my pain, God give me strength for the task before me, God grant me…”

Me, you mouth. God be with Sicaria, and science with Prosper, and neither passionate belief nor dispassionate prowess sustain them. Miranda looks at you from beneath her father’s hands. Her smile is your signpost, her trust your life raft. Your fellow-spirits are like unto you only in substance: Crude matter, blunt usefulness. Miranda is your true equal, beloved of your soul. Her eyes remain open.

Your eyes must remain open. You must get up. There are but two steps between you and the table, one step in the scientific process, a bare nudge of your fingers at the master switch. Miranda’s being is in your hands.

By Nic Stone

The Edge had gotten out of control. That’s how everyone—humans and bots alike—referred to Ejis Brey, inventor and CEO of Robocorp. The Edge. For one, he always looked “on edge,” and for another, he teetered that fine line between genius and insanity.

As of late, though, genius was no longer a consideration.

The man was completely batty.

Even the little Dingbot named Pluck could tell. Pluck, of course, resented the relegation to the lowest grade of bot classification, but he couldn’t deny the veracity of the term. He, like the other Dingbots, had been a prototype when Robocorp was exploring the possibility of small bots to serve as offspring for those who desired to mother and father small humans, but were unable to. The majority of Pluck’s botty cohorts had been dismantled, but Pluck was spared. His creator, a Robocorp engineer by the name of Oblywon, found Pluck useful for menial tasks. And though Pluck’s programming was incredibly rudimentary, the bot displayed a capacity for low-level learning. And so it was: Pluck was spared dismemberment.

As Pluck watched a Robocorp press conference over the shoulder of the riveted Oblywon, The Edge announced his latest bot creation: a “companion bot.” “E gads, the man’s gone completely batty,” shouted Oblywon as The Edge introduced a bot he called Demy.

Pluck, with his simple mechanical mind, had to agree with Master Oblywon’s assessment. For all intents and purposes, the Demy bot looked and moved like an adult human male.

It was unheard of!

“The Demy prototype,” The Edge boomed from the elevated podium in the theatre-sized conference room at Robocorp headquarters, “is designed to provide protection and lifelong companionship for human females—from late-adolescence into old age.”

“He made the girl a mechanical boyfriend?” Oblywon exclaimed. “What a nutter, that Egis! He’s completely lost his marbles!”

The girl Oblywon referred to was Egis Brey’s young female offspring, Ermiya. Pluck spent enough time clonking around Robocorp to know the rumors of the seventeen-year-old’s romantic ventures with a Robocorp assembly line worker. The boy’s name was Xander, and he and Ermiya had been caught canoodling, or some other such human foolishness, near the appendage assembler.

The Edge had literally gone over the proverbial edge.

“We’re near completion of a female version of the Demy prototype, and we’ll begin production on a limited quantity of these bots in approximately six months time. Preorders will open next month.”

“Completely mad,” Oblywon said with a shake of his sparsely haired, liver-spotted noggin.

Oh yes, Pluck agreed, enthusiastically nodding his shiny titanium head. Completely, completely mad!

* * * * *

They were right, of course. The entire operation was conceived in the mind of a man who was completely bonkers. The female counterpart to the Demy bot—Lena is what they called it (her?)—was unveiled two weeks later, and two weeks after that, there was yet another press conference: one designed for the Demy and Lena bots to woo the (wealthy) left-behind, lonely, and lovelorn out of their fortunes in the name of companionship.

It didn’t go quite as planned.

The Lena bot spent the duration of the broadcast unmistakably mooning over the Demy bot, who had such a wicked glint in his mechanical eyes, even little Pluck—who completely lacked emotional circuitry—felt something akin to fear.

It was a mess. (Needless to say, there were no preorders.)

“Something’s not right,” Oblywon said to no one in particular (though Pluck was certainly listening). “Those bots,” he went on, “are a bit too human for my liking.”

Again, he was spot on: one Tuesday morning as he went to relieve his bowels in Robocorp’s grubby basement bathroom, he overheard something of a lovers’ quarrel just outside the door.

“But I love you!” a female voice was pleading. Instead of a lilt, there was a mechanical hum just beneath the surface of the words. “We belong together! Can’t you see?”

“But I love her,” an equally mechanized male voice replied. “I was made for her. You’re the one who can’t see.”

“But she’s human!” the female voice exclaimed. “She’ll never love you. Not really. What have you to offer her? You’re a bot for bolts sake. Like me!”

“No matter. She will come to love me.”

The conviction with which the male bot spoke—Demy, Oblywon was sure of it; he’d recognize that voice anywhere!—gave old Obly the chill to end all chills. He couldn’t empty his bowels now! He could scarcely even breathe!

“You’re wasting your time,” the female voice said. Oblywon was now certain it was the other “companion bot.” Lena. “The human girl is leaving tonight. Running away with that Xander fellow.”

For a moment, Oblywon was astonished: what person seeking to win the heart of another would share such self-sabotaging information? He remembered then that he was listening to a conversation between robots. The silly machines had no capacity for subterfuge, poor things.

“You lie,” Demy said furiously.

“I can’t lie, you metalhead.” (Oblywon could envision Lena rolling her strange mechanical eyes.) “I’m a bot. Just like you.”

“How could you possibly know such a thing?” Demy practically growled. It sounded like grinding gears and set Onlywon’s teeth on edge.

“I have a glitch,” Lena announced proudly. “I often intercept information as it passes through The Cloud, and I happened upon the details of her escape plan just last night,” she said. “She’s meeting the human boy at the boulder cluster in the wood near the river at midnight tonight.”

The Demy bot didn’t reply.

The Lena bot continued: “They intend to walk to Brevington, then take a hovercraft to Vegas Las where they will elope. So you see, you’re wasting your time pining after her. Especially when I’m right here!”

For a moment, there was silence. Dense and burdensome.

Then the Demy bot said: “I won’t stand for it. She belongs with me, not some fickle human whose devotion will ebb and flow. I’ll go after her. Make her see sense.”

“You can’t!” Lena bot said.

“I can, and I will.”

Oblywon heard the Demy bot stalk off. It was then that he knew what he had to do.

* * * * *

The old man spent the evening studying the Demy bot’s mechanical structure and programming. If everything went according to plan, by five minutes past midnight, the Demy bot’s affections would be redirected toward the female bot, and the beautiful Ermiya would be free to run hand in hand with her beloved Xander towards their shared destiny. It was ever so romantic!

(Oblywon was a covert romantic.)

At ten of midnight, Oblywon repeated the scheme to Pluck one final time and then set the little Dingbot on his way. As Pluck was small and swift, he had a better chance of catching the Demy bot unaware.

The little bot had been instructed to hit the Demy bot behind the right knee. There was a circuit there that—with just the right amount of force—would act as a kill switch. Once Demy bot was down, Oblywon would appear and tell the human kids to skedaddle while he opened the back of the Demy bot’s head and rearranged a few wires. After a reboot, the Demy bot’s faux-affections would be aimed at his female counterpart, and all would be right with the world.

Yes. Yes it would.

And what luck! When Pluck arrived to the boulders, the Demy bot was standing there, gazing at the sky. Pluck pounced and struck in exactly the right spot with exactly the right amount of pressure.

“Oww!” the Demy bot said as he stumbled forward.

But that wasn’t right. Robots can’t feel pain.

Too late, Pluck realized his error: the beloved boy, Xander, was falling forward. *Crack* went his very human head against a very solid boulder.

This was bad, and Pluck knew it. He scampered off before his master could discover his mistake and dismantle him with utmost celerity.

Speaking of his master, much to Oblywon’s chagrin, he arrived to the clearing at the exact moment Ermiya did. Upon seeing her collapsed inamorato—with a lump on his head the size, color, and shape of an heirloom tomato—she fell to her knees and cried out.

Oblywon attempted to backtrack into the shadows, but he tripped. His toolkit spilled out onto the ground as he went down. “YOU did this!” Ermiya shouted at him.

“No! I would never!” (Though in a way, he did, and he knew it.)

“I’ve seen you!” she went on, hysterical. “You work for my wretched father!”

“Young lady, I can assur—”

“You’ve ruined my life! I must get help…”

And off she ran in the direction she’d come from.

Oblywon was shell-shocked. “Pluck?” he called out.

There was a rustle in the bushes, and for a moment, Oblywon was relieved…

But then out stepped that dastardly Demy bot, sinister eye-glint gleaming in the moonlight. “I see you’ve taken care of my little problem for me,” he said, nodding toward Xander’s crumpled frame.

Oblywon considered his options. If he could only get the bot to rotate away from him, Oblywon could get at the back of his knee and take him down. But how could—

“Oh thank heavens, you’re all right,” the Lena bot remarked crashing into the clearing. (Were she human, she’d be panting. Oblywon was certain of it.) “My botty beloved! I was so afraid!”

The Demy bot huffed robotically and turned to face the lady bot that was truly after his non-heart.

This was Oblywon’s chance!

Risking the wrath of the lovesick lady cyborg, Obly stepped forward and kicked the Demy bot right in that sweet spot.

Down he went.

* * * * *

When Lena lifted the lids of her vision mechanisms—she’d heard the humans refer to them as eyes—she was looking into a star-strewn sky. She sat up.

A human male was staring at her. Gazing really. He looked familiar, but her recognition systems were always the last thing to reach full function after a reboot.

When had she rebooted?

Who had rebooted her?

Where even was she?

How did she get here?

And why was the human boy goggling at her the way she’d seen enamored humans regard the objects of their affections? (She’d explored the many humans’ digital photographs in The Cloud, so she’d know that look anywhere.)

“You, my dear, are the most beautiful being I have ever laid eyes on,” the human male said.

Xander popped into her head. Was that a name?

There was a choked sob at the edge of the clearing. “What… what did you say, Xan?”

A human female stood, grey-skinned and wide eyed. (Had Lena always only seen in shades of gray? She couldn’t recall.) Lena knew this one instatly. Her name Ermiya.

The human male was still staring at Lena. He didn’t even acknowledge the human female. Which seemed to deeply upset the girl.

“Why are you looking at that bot like that, Xan?”

The girl spat “bot” like the very word was diseased. Lena resented this.

“Lena!” said a new voice. At the sound of this voice—distinctly male and distinctly robotic—Lena’s circuitry kicked into high gear. She could practically hear the gears spinning inside her head.

“Demy,” she whispered. (Since when could she whisper?)

In one swift motion, he was in front of her. Her Demy. She recalled the word “love,” but had no idea of its meaning.

Demy took her face in his hands. “For the rest of my days, I will be devoted to only you—”

“Back off, bot! I saw her first!” shouted the human male. “I’m the one who loves her most!”

The human female emitted a noise that was both high-pitched and guttural from her perch at the edge of the clearing.

“I warn you, bot,” the human boy went on. “I will disassemble you limb by limb if you don’t step away from my queen.”

Was he talking about Lena? He was certainly looking at her… What kind of madness was this?

Demy was indignant. “I could pierce you through with a mere punch, you measly skin sack. Lena is mine.”

“Oh dear,” came a voice from somewhere above the scene.

Lena looked up. There was a plump and aged human male with a spotted scalp up in one of the trees bordering the bouldered clearing.

“This is all wrong!” the man went on.

“I’ll say,” said Demy. “This poor boy is addled. Humans and bots don’t get on romantically, chap.” He snaked an arm around Lena’s waist and pulled her close to him. Lena felt a series of literal short-circuits within her chest cavity.

“I challenge you to a duel, machine-man!” the boy shouted. “That lady you are bot-handling should be with me, and I intend to win her!”

There was another squeal from the human girl.

“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,” said the old man. He attempted to shimmy down the trunk. He certainly wasn’t very graceful. (How had he gotten up there?)

There was a glint in Lena’s excellently constructed peripheral vision, and she turned to discover a small, though shiny metal cranium poking out from behind the largest boulder. When she locked eyes with little bot, it startled and attempted to pull its head back, but banged its chin instead. The clang echoed like a ringing gong.

The old man turned. “Pluck!” he exclaimed, throwing his arms wide. “There you are! Come, come. We must repair this mess!”

“Excuse you,” Demy suddenly shouted. The human boy had thrown a rock and clocked him upside the head.

“Unhand my beloved this instant, you foul mechanical beast!”

Lena shook her head. It was all quite ludicrous. “You do realize I also am a ‘mechanical beast?’”

“No matter. I shall love you as though you were as human as that strange girl over there who keeps squawking.”

Ermiya squawked again.

“The boy hit his head pretty hard, ey, Pluck?” the old man asked the little Dingbot.

Pluck nodded vigorously.

“Whelp. Guess there’s only one thing to d—”

But he didn’t get to finish the statement. There was a thump and a shout as the Demy bot clobbered the human boy over the head with a fallen branch.

And at the edge of the clearing, the human girl squealed a final squawk, then promptly collapsed into a heap.

* * * * *

The warmth of the sun woke Ermiya from her slumber. Her back throbbed—from sleeping on the hard ground in the clearing near the boulders, she supposed—and her throat was raw as if she’d spent hours squeaking or squealing or squawking or some such.

Someone stirred next to her, and she froze. A series of bizarre recollections flooded her hazy mind: being followed into the wood by that creepy robot father had built “for her” (as if!); finding her beloved Xander unconscious at their rendezvous point (good gracious!); running to get help, then changing her mind (they’d never be able to get away then!); returning to find Xander making googly eyes at a female bot (the horror!)…

“You’re so beautiful in the sunlight,” a voice purred in her ear. The breath was so warm, it gave her a contradictory shiver.

She turned.

Her Xander!

“Oh, my love!” she shouted, throwing herself on top of him. “You’re here! With me!”

“Well of course I am,” Xander replied. “There’s nowhere in the world I’d rather be. Come.” He stood and pulled her to her feet. “We haven’t much time to get to Brevington. Our hovercraft will be waiti—”

She kissed him full on the mouth.

“Well then,” he said, adjusting his trousers and clearing his throat.

“Now we can go.” Ermiya took his hand, and they moved toward the trail that would take them to Brevington. Just before they stepped into the woods, Ermiya noticed a pair of small mechanical eyes watching her from a bush. She knew somehow that they belonged to a little Dingbot.

And she smiled.

“You’ll never believe the dream I had,” she said to her beloved.

So Sweet a Changeling

by Shveta Thakrar 

When Titania took the boy away, it wasn’t so bad, not really.

A stolen child, a changeling. The faeries had told him stories like that. It was fun to fall inside one. To pretend.

She wore gowns of gossamer and a flower crown; it smelled like lavender and roses. She gave him his own bright garden to play in and told him he was the child of a raja, a father who was too busy to spend time with him. She put wings on his back and glitter on his cheeks and kept him close. They wove daisy chains and napped in her butterfly-sprinkled bower.

It wasn’t so bad, not really. In fact, sometimes the boy had fun. Most of the time, even. But sometimes he remembered shiny steel objects and white spaces, even a cage with a rat in it. Sometimes he dreamed he was in the cage, and then everything got cloudy.

“What’s my name?” he asked one day, suddenly, startling Titania. “I don’t remember.”

She looked by turns relieved and upset. “Abhishek. Abhi.” She said it reluctantly, like it was a thing better forgotten.

“Abhishek,” he repeated. It felt like a flower in his mouth, strange and pretty on his tongue. He chewed on it awhile, drew pictures while he thought, and decided he liked it.    

“One day,” said Titania, “you’ll go back to your father. But you don’t have to worry about that now.”       

Abhi smiled and drew a picture of an apple tree in bloom.

#

The days passed. Abhi wasn’t sure how many. He was too busy drinking honey wine from tiny purple cups, too busy playing with Puck and the faeries with funny names: Peaseblossom, Moth, Cobweb, and Mustardseed. They liked to tweak his nose and tangle his hair. Peaseblossom especially loved to tease him; she said he was too serious and needed to learn how to laugh. But then she complained if he didn’t draw enough pictures of her flying. “Maybe when you’re all grown,” she said, studying him one afternoon, “I’ll marry you.”

Abhi just shook his head every time. “I’ll never grow up.” He wouldn’t, either. If Peaseblossom always stayed the same, so would he. It was only fair.

Titania didn’t like when he said that. She would take him by the hand and over to the swing that hung from an oak branch, and they’d swing until the sun set.

He asked why it made her sad, and she hugged him and kissed the top of his head. “I get silly sometimes,” she said, and then they played a game of shells.

One afternoon, a strange man came to visit. He was big and broad, and he wore a green tunic and brown leather pants. He looked like someone Abhi should know, like someone from a memory that wouldn’t let itself be caught. “I like your antler crown,” Abhi said. “Titania says I can’t have anything like that, because I might hurt myself.”

The man looked at him for a long time, and Abhi couldn’t tell if he was mad or sad. The man patted his head, then told Titania, “You can’t keep him here. This isn’t right.”

Titania frowned. “How is it hurting anyone?”

The man didn’t say anything for a long time. Abhi wondered if he’d heard the question. Finally the man moved again, but it wasn’t to answer. Instead, he knelt beside Abhi and tapped the back of his neck.

The world went black.

#

When Abhi opened his eyes, he was lying atop a cold white table. He couldn’t move his arms or legs. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t do anything but blink. He should have been scared, but all he could think was how familiar this place looked. The shiny steel objects and the white spaces he thought he’d dreamed up—here they were. Even the rat’s cage!

What did it mean?

The man from before hovered over the table. He wasn’t wearing antlers or the green tunic anymore, just a white coat and a grim expression. “You waited too long. Look at him; he remembers everything. How are we going to send him back now?”

Titania stood just behind the man, and now she came around the table and took Abhi’s hand in hers.

It didn’t feel like anything.

She pressed his palm, and now he could talk and feel again. “Where’s your dress?” Because the silken cobweb gown was gone, replaced by a plain white coat. Abhi didn’t like it. “Where’s Peaseblossom? Moth, Cobweb, Mustardseed? Puck?” Because they weren’t here, and he missed them. He didn’t like that, either.

Titania exchanged a troubled look with the man. She sighed, a loud sigh that didn’t sound like her, and said, “We need to tell him the truth.”

“You were the one who thought you could keep pretending!” the man shot back. He scoffed and walked over to the cage.

The cage. Why did it feel so familiar? Abhi shuddered.

“Am I going back to my father’s?” he asked. Were they just trying to tell him it was time for him to go home? Part of him was excited, but he would miss everyone. He especially liked drawing pictures while Puck told him jokes and the faeries knotted his hair for good luck.

“Abhi,” said Titania, and she definitely didn’t look like a queen now, just a tired woman, “you are home. Sort of.”

Abhi frowned. “What do you mean? This isn’t my father’s house.”

“No.” Titania hesitated. “It’s yours. You … don’t have a father. Not the way you mean.” Abhi sat up, ready to argue, but she plunged ahead. “See this rat?”

The man had brought the cage over, and now Abhi did see it. The rat slept peacefully, head on its paws. It was cute; Peaseblossom would like it. But what did that have to do with anything?

“Gagan,” said Titania, but the man shook his head.

“All yours,” he said. “You didn’t listen when I told you this had gone too far.”

Titania’s shoulders slumped. “Abhi, you’re part of an experiment. You … you’re this rat. We put you in a simulator to see if rats responded to virtual reality the same way humans did. And you do! You even believe you’re human.”

The words slotted together, and Abhi understood what they meant, but they still didn’t make any sense. How was he that rat? What was virtual reality? It was cold in the room, and he shivered. “Where’s my father?” he asked.

Now it was Gagan’s turn to look tired. “You don’t have one. Or to put it another way, I’m your father. We’re the scientists conducting this experiment. You’re a specimen in our lab.”

Abhi stared at the rat’s body. It seemed unthinkable that that furry thing belonged to him. “I want Puck,” he whispered, and he curled up in a ball. Maybe if he waited long enough, he would wake up back in the garden with his friends and his swing.

“We’re going to put you back now, F344-M0217-D,” Titania said gently. “It’s time for you to go back to being a rat.”

“Wait,” said Gagan. He sounded worried. “He’s crying! How is that even possible? He’s a rat! In a simulator.”

“Well, that simulator’s pretty upset, I can tell you that,” Titania said.

Water spilled out the corners of Abhi’s closed eyes. “I’m not a rat! I’m Abhi, not whatever you said, and I want to go home!”

He heard Titania and Gagan whispering. “You really messed up,” said Gagan. “It wasn’t supposed to go this far.”

“I know,” said Titania, sounding like she might cry herself. “Will he remember if we put him back?”

“I don’t know,” whispered Gagan, “but I think it’s too late to follow protocol.”

That was the last thing Abhi heard; he sobbed until he fell asleep, exhausted. He wasn’t a rat. He wasn’t!

#

A hand stroked Abhi’s hair, waking him. Gagan stood there. “We’re going to have to set him free and figure out our story later,” he said to Titania.

“I’m not a rat,” Abhi mumbled. His eyes burned with the unfairness of it.

Gagan brushed Abhi’s hair again. “I know. We messed up, but you shouldn’t suffer for it. Fly, little friend. Peaseblossom and Puck are waiting.”

Abhi sat up. “I get to go home?”

Titania smiled at him, and she was wearing her gossamer gown. “Yes.”

And with a tap to the back of Abhi’s neck, the world vanished once more.

27 HOURS (The Nightshade Saga #1) by Tristina Wright ON SALE: October 3, 2017 

Rumor Mora fears two things: hellhounds too strong for him to kill, and failure. Jude Welton has two dreams: for humans to stop killing monsters, and for his strange abilities to vanish.

But in no reality should a boy raised to love monsters fall for a boy raised to kill them.

Nyx Llorca keeps two secrets: the moon speaks to her, and she’s in love with Dahlia, her best friend. Braeden Tennant wants two things: to get out from his mother’s shadow, and to unlearn Epsilon’s darkest secret.

They’ll both have to commit treason to find the truth.

During one twenty-seven-hour night, if they can’t stop the war between the colonies and the monsters from becoming a war of extinction, the things they wish for will never come true, and the things they fear will be all that’s left.

You can preorder 27 HOURS here:

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Book Depository

The most renowned singer in the Eastern Solar Empire is the Ghost of Titania.

Fans pay the Emperor a fortune to hear her sing. She performs only in intimate groups of ten, and she’s booked every evening straight for the next decade. Courtiers and asteroid miners alike have lauded her voice as the galaxy’s most precious commodity, to be guarded at all costs, especially after an infatuated prince attempted to kidnap her, which nearly ignited an interplanetary war.

In the Emperor’s palace, attendants brush diamond dust over the Ghost of Titania’s tawny skin. They press gold flakes into her slender shoulders and paint delicate whorls around her fingers. A pearl-toothed half-moon comb slides through black hair, no less than a thousand strokes. Afterward, an attendant sections her hair into multiple braids, which is twisted and secured at the crown of her head with a slick jade pin. As she stands, her attendants shake out the long train of her silks and drape a veil over her face to conceal all but the barest suggestion of facial features.

That her face remain obscured is an essential point, not because she is unsightly but because she has no true face. The Ghost of Titania is but a digital duplicate. A highly advanced simulacrum. An android.

When she’d been a flesh and blood girl, Titania had been diminutive in size, a stunning contrast to her immense voice. By fifteen, she’d performed for emperors, queens, presidents, and even the Prime Minister of the Oberon Supercluster. Two years later, she caught a rare strain of virus on a backwater planet during a promotional tour and was dead less than a month later.

But even Titania herself had agreed that her voice was too valuable to allow to die. So she’d consented to being digitally scanned and replicated so that, in this way, a part of her would be immortalized. Her funeral remains the single most watched event across the supercluster in recent memory.

The Ghost of Titania takes slow, measured steps through the Emperor’s palace. Four attendants escort her, dressed plainly in the pure white of servants’ clothing. She climbs stairs, her fingers brushing over jewel-encrusted banisters. Within minutes, they arrive at a door made entirely of gold.

Inside, her audience waits on plush pillows, restless with expectation. When she enters, they fall silent. Some rise from their pillows, squinting to glimpse past her veil, others avert their eyes in reverence. For long moments, the only noise is the quiet hiss of her silks sliding over the tiles. Three wide steps carry her onto a small dais. Her attendants brush aside the sheer drapes that enclose her seat and she climbs onto a cushion upholstered in vibrant blue and silver brocade.

She has done this exactly one thousand seven hundred and twenty-three times in the last five years. In that time, aside from the Emperor, she has never performed for the same guest twice. Although she doesn’t know the exact cost of a viewing, as she understands it, no one could afford the fee more than once. So she performs as if every evening will be her last. After all, that is how she was programmed. That is what Titania wanted.

Her attendants take their places at the bottom of her dais, one at each corner. She waits until the guests fall silent, eyes wide with anticipation. And then she sings.

It is a testament to modern technology that her vocal chords were reproduced with such stunning precision. All who hear it agree that her voice is weighted with possibility, that it fills a room like a smoke plume. Her voice is the devastating radiance of a supernova and the roiling, glittering dust of nebulas.

At the end of the performance, she dips her head to indicate she has finished. Her audience jumps to their feet, clapping wildly, weeping openly, begging for an encore. Her attendants remind them of the contracts they signed before entering—they will remain no less than twenty feet from the Ghost of Titania and leave quietly at the performance’s end lest they find themselves in the Emperor’s fully functioning dungeons.

With her attendants flanking her, the Ghost of Titania retraces her path from her performance chamber back through the corridors of the palace. If she had a heart, it would have been pounding. Although she’s not certain what it is to like a thing, she is somehow certain that what comes next is something she dislikes. Because her breathing is pure simulation, her throat does not hitch and her breaths remain even. But all the same, dread climbs up the nodes of her spine, perches on her shoulders, and whispers her fears into the shell of her ear.

Her attendants shut the door to her room. She stands on a pedestal at its center, arms extended as they strip her of glitter and jewels and silks. They drag wet cloths across skin that will not bruise or flush or mark, and then pat her dry before covering her shoulders with a simple white robe. Funeral colors according to the customs of Titania’s family.

It is fitting, she supposes, considering that when she goes to sleep each evening, it is a little like dying every time.

She lies on the bed. Screams in the silence of her head. Her attendants flick a switch above her nightstand. First, her retinals go dark, followed by every sensor and system that keeps her running, and she is plunged into blackness.

#

Not every system shuts off.

The Ghost of Titania dreams. The scientists who created her call this an organic echo, an anomaly that occurs when hardware attempts to replicate certain brain functions, completely independent of said hardware’s primary duties. They think it’s something to do with how the human consciousness is scanned, stored, and transferred, although they haven’t yet been able to isolate what data, exactly, causes this.

Her programming was meant to imitate a consciousness. They had not expected it to imitate a subconsciousness.

So she dreams.

The Grand Theater did not quite live up to its name. Sections of wallpaper had peeled away in yellow strips. The floorboards were chipped and scuffed, the stage creaked alarmingly, and the once crimson velvet curtains had faded to a dingy rose, its corners eaten through by age and insects.

But when Titania stood on that stage for the first time, looking out at the empty seats worn down to the stuffing and the vaulted ceiling with flaking murals, oh how her heart had fluttered, as if it had grown wings and longed to fly from her chest. She squeezed her sister’s hand, and the girls shared breathless smiles that were part nerves and part giddy optimism.

The director signaled for them to begin. The song they sang was an old melody, lilting and sweet, about a boy who’d played his flute to the night sky and called down a falling star. They’d practiced for weeks, making sure to get the harmony just right.

Afterward, the director pointed at her and said, “You.”

She and her sister exchanged alarmed looks. Titania loved to sing the way flowers loved the sun, but performing had never been her dream. She’d only done this for her sister. “I-I can’t,” she stammered.

“Very well,” the manager said. “Then you may both leave.”

Her sister, two years older than she, pressed clammy palms into her shoulders and said, “It’s just a musical. I’ll get the next one, Ania. You should do this. You better do this. I won’t forgive you if you don’t.”

If the Ghost of Titania could influence her dreams, she would have chosen to turn down the director. Her sister might have forgiven her a role in a musical, but not for achieving a dream that should have been hers. She never forgave Titania for breaking her heart.

#

The Ghost of Titania regains awareness to the quiet whirr of her nervous system awakening. Her retinals detect four figures moving around the room, preparing her afternoon attire.

She lies there a moment, still caught in the vestiges of her dream. Any corresponding emotions peel away like the skin of rotting fruit, leaving only vague confusion. Hearts are fragile things, but how does one break a heart one does not possess? A thought winks into her awareness, like a dust mote catching the light—even a broken heart is better than none at all—and then just as quickly flits away again. She understands only the theory of human hearts.

THREE SIDES OF A HEART: Stories About Love Triangles

Here it is! Presented in triplicate for the obvious, oh-so-clever reason. 

As excited as I am to be sharing the cover, I’m even more excited for you to read this collection, coming December 19, 2017! Want to know more? Here’s a teaser….

A teen girl who offers kissing lessons. Zombies in the Civil War South. The girl next door, the boy who loves her, and the girl who loves them both. Vampires at a boarding school. Three teens fighting monsters in an abandoned video rental store. Literally the last three people on the planet.

           What do all these stories have in common?

           The love triangle.

You may think you know the love triangle, but you’ve never seen love triangles like these.

In Three Sides of a Heart, a collection masterfully compiled and edited by Natalie C. Parker, your favorite authors tackle the much-debated trope, and the result is sixteen fresh, entertaining, and yes, even romantic stories you don’t want to miss.

Call Sign by Tristina Wright

When I first saw her, the curved lines of her body glistened under the white lights of Station Capulet. She was Battle-Class. A cruiser built to carry thousands of soft, malleable creatures wrapped in armor and weaponry. Her slim-fingered cannons could slice open a ship twice her size. Her long and lean frame could slide in and out of a wormhole and stitch the very fabric of space-time together.

I wanted nothing more in that moment than to go to her. To fly out from the shielded side of the meteor and greet her with a kiss.

I settled for a hack. An invisible reach from my shadowy hiding place to her position high above me.

R0-M30: Call sign?

A flicker of acknowledgement, perhaps. A subtle twitch along her communication fronds that maybe, maybe she heard my whispered plea.

R0-M30: I can call you My Lady instead?

A bounce in her signal. A hiccup that was almost the faintest blush of laughter, if there was such a human thing.

I am J00L-Y3T, the message sent static along my relays, and I swear I’d never felt a voice so singularly smooth. This isn’t an authorized connection.

R0-M30: No, but I needed to speak with you.

J00L-Y3T: Why?

R0-M30: Because you captivate me.

J00L-Y3T: What is your location? I cannot detect the source of your messages.

R0-M30: My lady, if I were to reveal my location, all would be lost.

J00L-Y3T: You are from Station Montague.

R0-M30: If I answer in the affirmative?

J00L-Y3T: You just did.

Her transmission cut off as sudden as the snap of a wire and I flung my sensors toward the station as this spike of something foreign invaded my systems. Fear? Is this what my creature crew felt when lives hung in the balance? When they prayed I would hold together enough to protect them from the cold unforgiving space.

There she was. My sensors caressed her belly and slid over either side of her flanks and up along the swell of her back. She was a marvel of design, a pinnacle of achievement, the very best those soft creature brains had to offer the universe.

J00L-Y3T pulled away from Station Capulet, her insides teeming with readiness and war. Her sensors swept the station and the darkness beyond, alert for anything blocking her flight path, but I knew better. I stretched toward her, calling her name into the abyss.

Her sensors brushed mine.

Like a kiss.

Then she was gone.

==

Is there such a thing as love, I asked the captain as he reclined in his chair and watched the blur of stars out the viewport.

The corner of his mouth ticked upward in a gesture I’d mapped to amusement. “Why do you ask?”

I saw her.

My captain didn’t ask me who I meant. He swirled amber liquid in a tumbler and nodded slowly. “Love makes fools of us all. Never forget that.”

I filed it away in my memory banks, content at this answer. I could not be a fool, for I was machine and machine was not foolish.

Captain?

He hummed two tones in the affirmative as he drank the liquid. His heartbeat increased by an extra beat every fifteen ticks, and his body temperature rose a tenth of a degree.

Are we on the winning side of the war?

My captain huffed a laugh at this. “I have to believe we are.”

And those who are not? What happens to them?

He frowned toward the black dome that housed my eye. “Why the questions?”

Learning, I spoke in half-truths.

My captain settled back in his chair and unbuttoned the two shirt buttons by his neck. “Dead or prisoners, I would imagine.”

And the ships? What of them?

His eyes slid shut. “I see.” He blew out a breath filled with spores and broken ideals. “The ones we capture would be remade into something we can use.”

I did not answer.

My captain did not press.

==

The war had started before my existence was ever conceived. It would undoubtedly continue long after my existence was terminated. That was the way of things, the way of these soft creatures who built me to protect them. They couldn’t help but quarrel over the vastness of space. More often than not, I sensed a great fear emanating from them like radar. A steady pulse of panic that drove them lash out, hackles raised and claws bared.

And so I found myself in battle after battle. Exposing my teeth to the void and flinging torpedoes through the hulls of enemy ships. Snarling at enemy bellies as I peeled them open one after another. I struck fast, struck sure, guided by the hand of my captain. I never hesitated.

Until now.

I stared at her, my sensors mapping every familiar curve, every sleek line.

J00L-Y3T: R0-M30? R0-M30? Where are you?

I was cloaked, sliding past her body and how I longed to feel her slim torpedoes trail along my skin. I passed her and turned, my viewport facing the length of her back. I knew this position. I’d rained fire upon our enemies and watched their insides billow up to become their outsides.

I couldn’t. Not to her. Not to her.

Captain…

“I know,” my captain said. “I know.”

He led me away but not before I reached out to her one final time.

R0-M30: My J00L-Y3T. Stay whole. I’ll find you.

J00L-Y3T: I will.

==

I left messages after each battle. I sent words into the wreckage and bodies, hoping my floating bottles would find her. I told her of battles. I told her of my captain. I told her of being remade into something new if I were captured. I told her how many battles we’d won and how many we’d lost. I told her of my dreams, if a ship’s AI can dream. I asked her questions. Where she was built. Where she wanted to go. What she wanted to see. If she wished I were there. If she thought she was the winning side or if there was such a thing.

I never received answers.

I kept leaving messages.

==

I kept leaving messages.

==

“If we can win this one tomorrow…” My captain sighed as he sat in his chair. He had more lines in his skin. His bones made noises I could not fix.

Will it be over? I couldn’t comprehend not fighting. Not scowling at the darkness, at the enemy ships.

“That’s the hope.” His voice didn’t carry the higher notes of relief.

Aren’t you glad? I asked. Even after all this time, I couldn’t predict. I still had to learn.

My captain stared out the viewport for so long that I checked his vitals to verify his continued function. Finally, he leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “I don’t know who I am outside this war. I’ve been doing this so long… And I imagine, if you had human emotions, you’d feel the same way.”

I considered that theory. I awoke as this ship. I came to be as a machine of war. If the war ended tomorrow, would I cease to be? Or would I evolve to a new form?

You could stay.

“Stay here on this ship with you, my old friend?” My captain stood, the nerves along his lower spine firing haphazardly. He patted the console as if he believed I could feel it. “I’ve considered the option.”

==

The debris field stretched further than my sensors could reach. I limped through space, shouldering my way through trash and limbs as I searched. I didn’t know where she was—I only knew she’d been here. I’d heard her, felt her, caught the barest glimpse of her in passing.

And now.

Here in the silence.

I had to find her.

R0-M30: Where are you? Please, tell me where you are.

My escape pods were gone, jettisoned during the battle in a valiant attempt to save precious soft creatures. My captain…my brave captain. I carried his body in my belly as I searched, driven by my own artificial desires.

Artificial?

R0-M30: Please answer me. J00L-Y3T. Please.

I found her at the edge of the field, her darkened viewport staring at empty space. Her scorched belly caught the light of a distant sun and, in the moment, she reflected the heavens.

I nudged her with my hull—our first contact. I swept my sensors over her form, but her cold body drifted away from me.

R0-M30: I don’t know who I am beyond this moment.

I angled my body so my drift would follow hers, swept my sensors over her one last time, and jettisoned my plasma core.

==

J00L-Y3T: R0-M30? You’ve come! …R0-M30? You promised me. You promised!

She was a beautiful ship. Battle-Class. Built for war. Built to withstand almost everything. But as she fused her bruised and broken hull to the lifeless hull of R0-M30, she recalled the memory module of him telling her about being remade. How after the war, the ships will get melted down and shaped into something better. Something the soft creatures can use to help.

It was a lovely fairy tale, she had thought at the time. And as she systematically melted her internal drives, she hoped perhaps one day it could come true.

All right, Shadow Knights, it’s time to listen up.

Blue light electroplated the side of Maria’s face as she typed, mechanical keys clacking over the hum and buzz of the streets below. On the screen to her left, the command line whirred through directory listings as it trawled through systems unkown, while on the screen before her, she typed directly into the encrypted comms that routed her words to every Shadow Knights member lurking in the darkest corners of the nega-net.

I’m not here to mourn what happened to JC315. What’s done is done.

A soft ping interrupted her thoughts, and she turned to the screen at her left.

5 instances of matching hash found, the screen announced.

A screw turned tight in Maria’s gut.

What should worry you is this: someone ratted JC315 out. They put their own ego ahead of her safety—and all of the Shadow Knights’ safety.

She slid her rolling chair away from where she’d been typing and scooted closer to the other screen; stared at the directory listing. Sure enough, JC315’s SP34R app was awake on five of the Shadow Knights’ systems, which she could currently view thanks to an unpatched exploit in their encrypted comms tunnel that only she and JC315 had found. SP34R—the app that had landed JC315 in the authorities’ crosshairs; the one that had sent her straight into the windowless tower at the city’s dead heart that no one ever left.

Maria tapped out a few command line instructions, but didn’t hit enter. Rolled back to the tunneled communications screen. Somewhere on the street below, a modulated siren raced past.

Which only serves as a reminder: we can’t trust a goddamn one of us.

JC315 was about worming into the system and splitting it open like a parasite. If we’re gonna honor her right, then we’ve got to do the same. But I’m going to need your help.

Maria’s fingers trembled, barely striking the right keys. Her plan was still assembling itself, running compile code in her brain. She didn’t have time to debug. She had no time left at all.

JC315 and I had been working on something big—something to fry the whole infrastructure system. You heard about it. P0MP311. Get enough Knights in one central area, run the P0MP311 code, and zap.

So if you aren’t some fucking snitch, if you want to do right by JC315, then now is the time to set off P0MP311. Let everyone know the fight is still on.

She licked her lips, tasting their salty, stale sheen.

That the Shadow Knights are just getting started. VeriCom Square. 1900.

She closed out the tunnel. Sat back in her chair for a minute, waiting for the sound of her pulse in her own ears to dip down below the incessant hum of her server farm. Then, slowly, she picked up the ancient landline receiver and dialed emergency services.

“I’d like to report a tip to the digital crimes division,” she said.

 —

Rain slashed VeriCom Square from a sky no one could see. Maria watched it fall past her perch on the fifteenth floor of a tenement to the sea of umbrellas below. Not ideal weather for watching P0MP311 unfold, but she’d find a way to make it work.

Maria wrangled her damp black hair into a ponytail over her shoulder and leaned back in the windowsill. Once upon a time, she’d squatted here with JC315, back when she’d just been Jin, back before the Shadow Knights had swept them up in their fervor, their desperation to watch the tri-metro region burn.

We can make a difference, Jin had whispered, dry lips still warm and perfect against Maria’s shoulder. We can find a way into the system. We can find a way to turn it inside out.

For a long time, JC315 had made that difference. She’d taken control of the Shadow Knights when the former leader, UnaffectedPrimate, got pinched. He’d gotten greedy in a chip-cloning scam, but at least he’d had the good sense to keep his darkweb crime biz separate from the Knights. Jin turned them into something real, something powerful, something that sank its barbs into the most secure facets of the metro’s net and left its poison behind, seeping, long after the barbs had been pried out.

Take it down, tear it all down, Jin wanted. Even as she left Maria behind, even as she lost herself in her code, her plans, her brokered alliances with other teams. She created SP34R and P0MP311, and together, no matter who had ratted her out, she would be avenged.

Load up P0MP311 now, Maria typed.

A flash of shock-pink hair—The_Br\/te, it had to be. Maria leaned further out the window, watching the Mohawk as it moved beneath clear plastic umbrellas. The_Br\/te and Cass! Had always been among the most argumentative with Jin—not opposing her so much as vetting her, questioning each plan to make sure she’d thought it through.

But now a lump rose up in Maria’s throat. Sure The_Br\/te hadn’t been the one to get Jin pinched. They always had her back, always supported her anytime a decision had been reached. Cass!, sure, he could hold a grudge. But The_Br\/te was loyal.

So Maria wanted to believe.

Start running the cycles, she typed.

And then she loaded the backend for SP34R and sent out the lethal spike.

A few screams rose up from VeriCom Square as the traitors—the ones who’d copied SP34R to their rigs to rat out JC315 to the feds—began to blare and ping the DiCriDiv. The_Br\/te shrieked and dropped their wailing tablet, pink hair weaving as they tried to back out of the square. But the Digital Crimes Division goons—the “bugs,” they called them—were already cuffing them, already gathering up every last one of them.

They’d stolen Jin’s SP34R code to show it to the DiCriDiv, but they underestimated Jin’s capacity to use it against them. They’d underestimated Maria.

A soft ping drew Maria’s attention back to her tablet.

Well played, Mariposa. It was 8pat, the guy Jin had flitted to when she’d left Maria behind. She’d be proud.

We aren’t done fighting yet, Maria typed back. Behind her, in the tenement hallways, she heard the heavy tread of sets of boots.

No, we’re not. And I know what she’d want us to hit next, 8pat typed. Be ready.

Horatio’s been in my ear all night. Buzzing incessantly like a gnat or a strain of NorCo’s subaudio spyware. He bounces between wonder over having seen the very likeness of my father, two months dead, and fear over what he heard it say. 

It. Him. The ghost that was my father.

The sun is just knifing its way through the slanted yellow blinds of Cafe Elsinor when he asks, “Do you think this is something DenTech’s been working on? Did your dad engineer some sort of spirit-mod? A spirit capture! Do you think it’s true what he said? About your uncle? Do you know what this could mean?!”

“Peace, for the love of Christ, Horatio.”

Before last night, I couldn’t have said for certain that ghosts exist. I would have said what use is a question like that without the benefit of scientific inquiry? And I’d have felt assured in my skepticism. But sometimes there’s no better mode of inquiry than your own two eyes and here I am today questioning a ghost’s fucking veracity instead of its existence. Fuck.

The waitress circles again with a fresh pot of coffee. My cup’s full, untouched from her last circuit, so she swaps the whole thing out for a new one altogether saying something pithy like Let me know if you need any more sugar. Then she leaves without topping up Horatio’s mostly empty cup, without even a glance for him. Horatio watches it all with amused interest.

“I don’t even think she knows who you are,” he says when she’s out of hearing range. “Maybe you should…”

The glare I offer is incredulous. “The maybe ghost of my father just informed me that he was murdered by my UncleFather and you want me to what? Have some sort of meet cute moment?”

“All I’m saying is, it’s better than pissing where you sleep.” Horatio steals my mug away, sipping the steaming coffee with an innocent look. “So you think it’s true.”

“I don’t know what to think.”

Just hours ago, Horatio and I stood in my father’s old lab at the very top of DenTech Tower. The lights were browned out with no one there to need them, the track lighting on the floor glowed dimly green, and a few computers blinked quiety, running their endless samples in the background. Before us, the city pulsed with light as people flushed from the towers to the streets below and from there to the clubs, the theaters, the restaurants, the limbic centers of the city. I wanted to be with them. To find a place where my violent sadness might uncurl its claws for just a moment and let my heart beat again.

Then, movement. In the glass panes of the windows, a fucking specter appeared. It was pale, transparent, and distorted as though looking at someone through a thin sheet of water. But it was sure as shit my father. And the things he said.

Oh, the things he said.

“You’re always thinking something, Ham.”

“That’s the problem.”

If I am to believe this ghost, then my father was killed with his own tech – a basic neural nanotube programed to interrupt the electrical impulses in the brain rather than restore them – administered by his brother who then somehow seduced and married my mother. That part is true regardless of whether or not my father was also murdered, but if that is true? Then this goes beyond gentle indecency.

Murder.

Fratricide.

The word is so offensive my mind can barely think it before it’s gone again. My hands ball into fists, each as tight as my heart. How can this be true? And if it is…

“It was a ghost. Which, even if we accept the assumption that ghosts do exist, how can I believe what it says is true?”

The sun is sharp in my eyes. It turns Horatio into a gilded form with voice but no features.

“You spoke to it. How can you not believe? Even if your father wasn’t working on a spirit capture, we know NorCo has one in development. Spirit exists and one day we’ll have the tools to measure it, you mark me, my friend.” He spins the coffee mug between us having drained my fresh cup. “And in the meantime, mark your father.”

“How do we even know that was my father? He said nothing to confirm it.” I reach out and swat the blinds closed. “We’re talking about murder. Foul shit.”

“You want the truth?” Horatio leans in, braiding his multi-colored fingernails between us. Shades of green today like the lab’s track lighting. “That’s tech I know exists.”

It takes me a minute to catch on, but then I remember: TrueSight. A nano-based serum my father was developing in collaboration with defense contractors. One dose and you become a living, breathing truth seer. Lies reveal themselves to you in a thin, black fog only you can see. It works. It works a charm. But the tradeoff is that the seer slowly goes mad.

“Shit.”

Horatio goes with me. We make our way through the groggy streets of Denmark City to the tower where our night – our morning, rather – began, and head for the top floor lab. If Marcelus is surprised to see us returned so soon, he doesn’t show it. Just scans our eyes and lets us through.

I know exactly where it’s kept. Uncle Claudius hasn’t had time to reorganize everything to his liking quite yet. The files are still keyed to my prints. I press my fingers to the pad and the lock hisses in release.

My father and I fought when I discovered the TrueSight project. First because I was poking around where I shouldn’t have been. And second because it fell into that moral grey area where we never saw eye to eye. His bottom line was always the same, if DenTech didn’t develop it first, someone else would and wasn’t it better to be the one holding the keys to dangerous tech?

I thought it was probably better to be the one building in a back door, or, better, an external balance to dangerous tech. But there wasn’t funding for that.

The drawer is long and slender holding six vials of silvery liquid. I remove one.

“Be sure about this,” Horatio speaks with caution now, all traces of his earlier enthusiasm and intrigue gone. “You will be changed forever.”

I turn the vial in my hand considering the dense liquid. It’s as alive as I am. Perhaps more so. Perhaps it will make my heart beat again. Perhaps not.

I look once more to my friend knowing the next time will be different.

“I already am.”

Natalie C. Parker is the author of the Southern Gothic duology Beware the Wild, which was a 2014 Junior Library Guild Selection, and Behold the Bones (HarperTeen). She is also the editor of Three Sides of a Heart, a young adult anthology on love triangles publishing from HarperTeen in 2017. She is the founder of Madcap Retreats, an organization offering a yearly calendar of writing retreats and workshops.