Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Whenever things get rough, Roxanne escapes to other worlds. She possesses a talent that no one else believes exists. Except her granddaughter Marissa, who exhibits the same talent.

Roxanne wants to train Marissa to live with her talent, but the rest of the family wants to stop her. They fear Marissa will end up like Roxanne: difficult, unreachable, distant. Worse, they fear Marissa will not survive Roxanne’s training—or her love.

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Worlds Enough…And Time Kristine Kathryn Rusch

“Watch,” Marissa says.

She brings her small hand to her temple, then extends her arm. She tilts her head sideways, black curls falling against her neck, and stares at something I can’t see. Finally she twists her fingers ever so slightly, and a window opens in the sky.

It’s a tiny window, the size of a hand mirror, and it looks like a photograph floating on the summer breeze. The window blots out part of a birch tree, but not the lake beyond.

A floating miracle, adrift in a sea of air.

I crouch to Marissa height, barely over three feet, and stare into the window. All I can see are waves, like heat waves that appear on a highway on a sunny day.

Marissa giggles, clenches her fist, and the window disappears. All that remains are the birch trees, the dandelion fluff decorating the air, and the chill breeze off the lake.

The emptiness startles me.

My heart is pounding and my own fingers clench. I want to grab her, shake her, demand that she do it again.

Instead, I close my eyes, trying to control my own trembling. Marissa laughs, the sound farther away. She’s probably running off, but I don’t care.

Her father will find her. Bastard. He said nothing of this. He should have known how interested I’d be.

A son owes his mother. He always owes his mother.

And he should never forget that.

***

I was Marissa’s age when I first had the feeling, the sensation of worlds dividing, multiplying, changing around me. I had snuck into the attic. The air smelled of dust and mildew, the floor simple pine boards, the boxes slowly rotting in the summer damp.

My mother’s wedding dress hung in a metal wardrobe, the latch rusted open. I pulled the door, saw the white dress yellowing with age and inattention, the black cocktail gown beside it, and a blue silk evening gown with a plunging neckline and room for a bustle.

Only I didn’t know what a bustle was or a cocktail dress or an evening gown. I brushed against the blue silk, part of it trailing to the dirty metal floor of the wardrobe, and saw the dress as it had once been: hanging off a voluptuous woman, accenting her narrow waist, her high breasts, and adding to her already ample behind. The diamonds around her neck winked in the gaslight, and she smiled, her skin unlined and pale against the blackness of her hair. In the background, music played—a waltz—and couples twirled on a polished dance floor, none of the women as beautiful as the one before me, the one in the dress, the one who made the dress live.

She turned, saw me, eyes widening, and shrieked that my filthy hand was ruining her dress. Her skin, warm and soft, brushed mine, and dislodged my fingers.

Then she faded as if she had never been.

The dress hung in the wardrobe, forgotten against the black and the rusting wall.

My hand had fallen to my side, the skin still tingling from her touch.

I told my mother and she had laughed. “Miracles in the attic,” she said with enough contempt that even I, child that I was, realized she thought I made the entire thing up.

***

Darren slams open my kitchen door. He drags Marissa by the hand, pulls her inside, and takes her upstairs. I sip my coffee, warming my hands against the mug, and lean against the kitchen counter.

Outside, the breeze has become a gale. The birch trees sway and bend as if they are dancing to a music only they can hear. The sky has grown dark with an oncoming storm.

“Jesus, Mom,” Darren says from behind me. “She fell into the lake. She could’ve drowned.”

“She can swim.” I don’t turn around. I know Marissa can swim because I’m the one who took her to swimming lessons before she could walk. She would giggle and paddle toward me, dipping her head in the water like a baby seal.

“And if she’d been knocked unconscious? What then?”

Then she would have drowned. But I don’t say that.

“You were supposed to be watching her.” He steps into my line of sight, his face mottled with anger just like his father’s used to do.

“I did watch her.” My voice is amazingly level, considering how odd I feel. “I watched her create a hole in the sky.”

***

At four, you’re too young for theories. You simply know that things are not exactly what they seem.

I could never get the lady with the dress to come back. I visited the attic day after day, touched dress after dress and saw nothing except dust motes and the occasional moth.

But the air was alive up there, and I had a sensation that if I touched the right thing at the right moment, I could see worlds I hadn’t even imagined. Not just visages of the past, but possibilities of the future, permutations of the present, times that exist outside of ours.

In some of those places, my mother believed me, nurtured my talent, told me of hers. In most of those places, I believed the world was a much better, much friendlier place.

***

Darren takes Marissa home. The supervised visit is over. I am told I should not see her again.

I am left in my small house eighty miles from nowhere, one of Minnesota’s ten thousand lakes only yards from my front door. Nowadays, motorboats and airplanes break the stillness with startling regularity, but when I moved here more than thirty years ago, silence was the norm.

I needed silence to concentrate, the glitter of the sun on the lake water to focus, the sparkle of deep winter snow to catch and hold my eye.

Sometimes I could slip—find an already existing window and start to step through it, like I first did in my mother’s attic—but I could never create my own.

I learned that in 1970 when Darren’s father left me.

***

By then, the theory I couldn’t form at four had become a full-blown dissertation, complete with footnotes and bibliography. I saw each conversation as my orals—a chance to convince the people around me that we were in one timeline out of millions, each linked by events, separated by choices in response to those events, and tied to each other by a single touchable moment.

My theory had pieces of Alice’s Adventures through the Looking Glass mixed with some C.S. Lewis and twisted by a touch of Ray Bradbury.

Years later, I would add more pages—chaos theory, string theory, the theory of everything—as well as musings on time by scientists from Dirac to Einstein.

But those scientific principles were in the future. In 1970, I was exploring inner space, trying to expand my mind, thinking the adventure came from within, not from without. My guru was Timothy Leary, my expansion of choice LSD, my trips cosmic, significant, and oh so wrong.

It was a sign of the time that Darrell—Darren’s father—who couldn’t take my constant drug use, my discussions of the limitlessness of the universe, my willingness to sit at the feet of anyone who believed in the existence of alternate worlds left me alone, pregnant, and broke—and no one blamed him for what happened next.

They blamed me.

***

The shrink has her own theory. She still tells me about it, even though I heard it in court when Darren got the judgment against me, forbidding me to see my own granddaughter for more than two hours, and never ever unsupervised.

The shrink thinks I make up alternate worlds because I do not like this one.

No matter how many books I bring her, no matter how much my aunt testifies to the Talents within our family, the shrink persists in her belief.

“Roxanne,” she says to me when I complain about Darren’s hasty departure, “you have to face what you do. You cannot constantly escape to other worlds.”

What the shrink does not understand is that I did not escape that afternoon by the lake. I wanted to, but I couldn’t reach the window. I couldn’t even see what was inside.

I was there the entire time.

I was there, just like I was supposed to be.

***

There will be a new hearing. Some legal assistant arrives at my house with court papers. My son has decided to exclude me from my granddaughter’s life forever.

I hesitate before I call my attorney. I cannot sound hysterical. I cannot let him know what I will lose.

I walk through my small house, touch the antiques that have once opened the past for me and do no longer. The desk I found at a flea market outside of Boston, which took me to a dark gray afternoon with a filthy harbor out the window, and a man writing a letter with a quill pen. The letter began Dearest, She has learned of us. I must end—

Then he saw me, started, and the pen scrawled awkwardly along the page. He shouted, pushed, and I fell backwards, out of wonderland, and back to the flea market where a dozen people stared at me as if I had lost my mind.

By then, I knew: Only two trips are allowed through a window into another time—a trip there and a trip back. After that, the window closes.

Still, I buy the objects that open worlds for me: the desk; a book of poems written in Latin (once held by a sobbing priest who screamed when he saw me); a glass serving bowl that in a not-too-distant past had held salad and matching glass tongs (lost to time). The woman who had been mixing the salad in the bowl had seen me and smiled, thinking I was one of her guests, until she saw my attire—blue jeans, a Cal Tech sweatshirt, bare feet. Then she frowned and spoke to me in a language I did not understand. Someone nearby grabbed my arm and shoved me backwards—and that window closed, like all the others before them.

I can find windows—existing windows—but I cannot create them.

Not like Marissa.

Marissa, who holds universes in one tiny little hand.

***

Perhaps doctors are right. Perhaps newborns should not ingest mind-altering chemicals in their mother’s milk.

Over the phone, my mother called Darren’s screams colic, but when those screams didn’t end, the neighbors called the police. They took him away from me, claiming he was malnourished, claiming he was addicted, claiming he would be brain-damaged forever.

He programs computers now, graduated from the top of his class at Harvard, lives a mundane life with a wife who refuses to meet me and the most beautiful child in the world.

The doctors were wrong: he is not damaged. At least not visibly. But he has a paranoia I recognize from my hippie days, a tendency to believe the worst of everyone around him, a rebellion against authority that must have come through the milk as well.

That the authority he rebels against is me is something I have trouble dealing with. I freely admit that, even though the shrink believes I do not—I cannot—understand.

***

I remember the first time we met. He was eighteen. He had used his powerful mind to track me down.

I believe he remembered me from those first few months—inside that complex mind of his were images of me—and I had a hunch that he too had peered into alternate worlds and saw how happy we would have been if only I had done things right.

We had eight years. I was clean and pretending to be unimaginative. My visits to antique stores were infrequent and I tried to stay away from estate sales, garage sales, and public auctions so that I couldn’t touch the past.

I tried very hard to be normal, to hide my secret life.

We would talk about everything from politics to aliens, from the things we could touch to the things we could only imagine, to the importance of belief and the willingness all humans have to understand something beyond themselves.

We would talk, then.

And he would listen.

***

Finally, I call the lawyer.

He is my age, expensive, and world-weary, with a high tolerance for alternate lifestyles, even though he hasn’t lived one himself in nearly thirty-five years.

He takes my call: he has gotten the papers. He expected to hear from me.

I am slightly annoyed that he did not call first.

I sit on my screened-in porch and stare at the lake as we speak. Sunlight glitters on the water, making diamonds, making tiny untouchable windows that might—if we’re lucky—open alternate worlds.

Sometimes I am distracted, but my lawyer is used to that.

Today it seems to irritate him.

“I asked, Roxanne, if you were supposed to be keeping an eye on her,” he snaps, his voice metallic through the phone.

“The visits are supervised. I’m never the only one watching her.” I rock back in my chair, looking at the lake from a different angle.

The prisms of light flicker, but do not move.

“Don’t you remember the fight we had to get Marissa out to the lake house in the first place?” he asks. “Don’t you remember the discussion with the judge, your promise—in writing, Roxanne—that you would never take your eyes off her?”

“I blinked,” I say. A blink of an eye: the lid closes, then opens. It takes only a moment, or perhaps an entire night. The amount of time passing depends on your definition of time. If a moment is a blink of an eye, and a blink is the closing of the lids, followed by the opening of the lids, then I looked away for only a moment.

“It says here you left her.” I can hear papers rattling through the earpiece. “It says you went inside and made coffee.”

“Darren was already going to her. I knew she’d be fine.” Then I whisper: “She swims, you know.”

“I know.” He sounds so exasperated.

The swim classes convinced the first judge that I cared. I was the one who drove Marissa there, the one who held her in the water, the one who listened to her coach, swam with her, helped her learn to use those tiny limbs.

I was the only one thinking ahead—knowing, fearing, if she fell through a window into another world there was no guarantee she would land on ground. She might find herself a pond or a pool or a too-full tub. She might need to know how to hold her breath before she moved backwards, into the world she had just left.

Of course, I never explained it quite that way. Lawyers, judges, logical minds—they never entirely understand. So I said simply, convincingly, apparently, that swimming is a survival skill as important as walking and it’s always better for children to learn early, particularly if they’re going to be around lakes.

Back then, that had been a point for me.

“But that’s not the point now,” my lawyer says. “The point is that you should have gone after her. You should have saved her, not Darren. He sees it as one more sign of your growing irresponsibility.”

“I’m not irresponsible,” I say.

“Your granddaughter nearly drowns and you make coffee?”

“She didn’t nearly drown.” I have to struggle to keep my voice level. “She can swim.”

“I’m going to be honest with you, Roxanne,” he says to me, and I hate the tone. It is the same tone Darren uses with me now — an I-will-speak-slowly-because-you-will-never-understand tone. “You’ve blown this. Even if we do go back to court, the best you can hope for is supervised visits in a neutral place—like Social Services. You’ll never get to see her at your house, and certainly not at Darren’s. Maybe it’s best if you let Marissa go. Your record with children is poor. Wait until she’s an adult, like you did with Darren. Wait until the two of you can talk.”

I did not wait until Darren was an adult. He was taken from me, and no one would tell me where he went. He found me.

And for a brief time, I was his alternate world.

“No,” I say. “I have to see her.”

“Why, Roxanne?” he asks. “And don’t give me the grandmother-granddaughter crap. I don’t buy it. Other people aren’t real to you.”

“There are things in life that only I can teach her, only I can show her.”

“Yeah,” my lawyer says. “Which is precisely what your son is afraid of.”

***

He was too old when he came to me, my son, my Darren. His mind had already formed around precepts someone else had taught him—that solid objects existed only in one space-time, that this world was the only one (except for Heaven and Hell—which Darren himself called mythical concepts—he had taken his disbelief one step further than even the world around him had taught him).

Although I tried to tell him about our family’s talents—my aunt’s ability to know what had happened in someone else’s past, my mother’s sudden inklings of what was to come, my own ability to reach into already existing windows—he did not believe me. He laughed, calling our talents superstitious nonsense which could be explained logically, he was sure.

Later, he called my beliefs fantasies, and even later, drug-induced hallucinations.

By then, he had married.

By then, his mind had been poisoned, by his wife.

***

After that day near the lake, I have thought a lot about Marissa and how she fits into this world. She is one of the window-creators. If she touches an object, she doesn’t find the window, as I do. She makes it.

Like the woman in the dress (a great-grandmother, I later learned), like the man at the desk, like the priest with his poetry, my granddaughter has the ability to open moments in time.

I suspect she also has the ability to close them.

I have searched for this my entire life—something I cannot explain to my lawyer, who sees my actions as negligence—and something my shrink willfully misunderstands. My granddaughter is special, but only people who understand her special ability will help her develop it.

She needs me, even more than I need her.

***

It takes planning, of course. And silence. I speak to no one, confide in no one, write to no one.

I act alone.

I let my lawyer pursue our defense in court, even though his heart is not in it. Neither is mine. Supervised visits in Social Services will do neither me nor Marissa any good.

I let my shrink enroll me in more rehabilitation programs, even though I am still clean, and have been for nearly twelve years now.

Of course, I do not tell her that I plan to be gone before the first program starts.

Darren’s house is in a modern neighborhood with large lots and houses that the media calls McMansions. His is a 6,000-square-foot monstrosity with an indoor and an outdoor pool, a four-car garage, a guesthouse, and a state-of-the-art security system.

The system funnels into the guesthouse and the garage as well as the house.

People forget that I was once a beloved member of the family—or at least a tolerated one. I have keys. I have codes.

I can—and have—slipped in and out unnoticed.

Marissa’s bedroom is in the south wing, on the second floor. She has a suite with a playroom, a bedroom, and a second bedroom for guests or the nanny that Darren keeps threatening to hire. The south wing has a door at its far end that leads into the apartment above the garage.

It is so simple to enter the garage by the side door, shut off the alarm before it even blares, climb the stairs to the apartment, and then cross into the house. So simple that I worry I will get caught whenever I do it.

This night it is even simpler. I wait until everyone is asleep. I have a flashlight that I only use in the non-windowed parts of the hallway, but I really don’t need it.

I know this place as well as I know my own—the worlds we travel between, the lives that get lived within these little boxes, in these quiet walls.

Marissa’s suite is filled with nightlights. I close and lock the main door, then slip into her bedroom. She is asleep on her side, her hands tucked under her head as if she were praying. Her curls float behind her.

My hand hovers near her temple, wishing I could pull the window from it with a touch of my fingers. But I dare not try.

Instead, I cradle her against me, coax her awake. She blinks sleepily at me and smiles—to his credit, Darren has never said anything negative about me to her—and settles into the crook of my arm.

“Remember?” I whisper. “Remember showing me how you can make pictures in the sky?”

She nods.

“Can you do it now?” I ask.

She nods again.

“Watch,” she whispers.

She brings her small hand to her temple, then extends her arm. She tilts her head sideways, black curls falling against her neck, and stares at something I can’t see. Finally she twists her fingers ever so slightly, and a window opens right in front of us, a window filled with light.

I look through it, but cannot see clearly, just like before.

I reach out my hand, but Marissa shakes her head. “Papa says not to touch.”

Damn him. Darren knows—and believes—his daughter, but denies the talent to me.

Damn him.

Still, I smile at her. “Grownups can touch,” I say.

I touch the edge and the window widens. I still cannot see through the light.

Marissa puts her thumb in her mouth, a little girl now, in a world she does not understand.

I would comfort her, but I do not. She needs to remember this. She needs to remember it like I remember the attic, as the defining moment, the beginning of her understanding of the nature of the universe.

She will explore, on her own, her abilities, if she only remembers how I behave.

I am nervous, but I can’t let her see that.

My heart pounds. I ease my body away from hers, then kiss her forehead. She looks at me with wide, frightened eyes.

I place both hands into the light. It is warm there, and I catch the scent of daffodils.

“Remember,” I say, and tumble through.

She reaches out a hand to stop me—and instead, closes the window.

Just as I expected.

***

A blink of an eye—

—and suddenly, I am sitting beside a row of daffodils, planted against a headstone. The cemetery is carefully mowed, the trees are large—birches—and beyond, you can catch a glimpse of one of Minnesota’s ten thousand lakes.

Sunlight glimmers off the water, creating prisms of light, little windows into yet even more worlds.

I am not willing to travel beyond this spot. I am comfortable here. It is quiet, and I always do best in the quiet.

The air is alive, filled with visages of the past, possibilities of the future, and permutations of the present.

I know this world is a much better, much friendlier place.

 

Worlds Enough…And Time

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Svetap/Dreamstime, Naphotos/Dreamstime

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

 

This post is a chapter from my book, The Write Attitude, which is now in a second edition. I’m posting it here to entice you to head over to Storybundle to pick up a copy, along with ebooks by Robert T. Jeschonek, Andrea Pearson, J. Daniel Sawyer, Dean Wesley Smith, and ten more great writers. Everyone’s book is an exclusive. That’s right. Everything in the bundle is exclusive to the bundle, including my book.

The book is exclusive to the Storybundle—meaning that at the moment, you can’t get it anywhere else. So if you want to read it now, pick it up from Storybundle. If you don’t want a deal on the ebook or if you only read print, then you can always preorder the book on various retailer sites in a few weeks. The new edition will release on July 14.

The second edition of The Write Attitude is quite different from the first edition, which originally appeared in 2016. I kept some parts of the original book, but much of the material is newer. The new material comes from my Patreon page. Not every post from my Patreon page shows up here, although several do. If you want to see everything, though, head to Patreon and sign up. 

This post, which first appeared on this site in slightly different form, is from January of 2015, and is one of the early chapters in the book.

Churning It Out

Toward the end of a pretty good Entertainment Weekly article about the romance side of the publishing industry, this sentence appears:

[Bella Andre]’s a naturally fast writer—on average she churns out four to six books a year—and she released the first one in June 2011.

Before we get to the reason I’m telling you about that sentence, let me say one thing that might or might not be related: There’s a slight snobby tone to EW’s romance article. What’s that all about? The magazine’s called Entertainment Weekly. It’s not The New York Times Book Review. EW sings the praises of The Walking Dead and video games, and everything in between, for heaven’s sake, but somehow romance fiction doesn’t meet the high standards of entertainment?

Sorry. I had to get that off my chest.

As I said, the article, “A Billion-Dollar Affair,” by Karen Valby, appeared in the October 24, 2014 issue, and did cover the romance industry (of the time) pretty well. (And is still available online.)

So why am I objecting to that single sentence?

I’m not, really. It’s a common sentence from any media that covers books. And I’m not even objecting to the entire sentence. Bella Andre does write fast by most writers’ standards, and she does so comfortably.

What I’m objecting to is the phrase “churned out.”

It’s become a cliché. Any writer who writes fast “churns out” material. Or she “cranks out” or “pounds out” whatever it is that she writes. Because clearly, no writer who writes fast can think about what she writes.

There are other implications in that phrase. The material “churned out” isn’t very good. Anything “churned out” is an exact copy of what has come before. It has no real value, primarily because of the speed with which the writer “churns out” the material.

In the olden days of traditional publishing, those of us who “churned out” a lot of books did so under a lot of pen names. Here’s how it worked in my case: Kristine Kathryn Rusch might, at best, put out two books per year; Kris Nelscott one every two years; and Kristine Grayson one every six months.

Most reviewers never noticed all the short stories or blog posts or nonfiction. Only a handful of people (including my agents back when I was stupid enough to hire them) knew that I wrote under other pen names as well.

While reading a midlist thriller novel in bed one night several years ago, I laughed so hard that I woke Dean up. What made me laugh? The author’s bio, which stated that the byline of the novel I was reading was a pen name for a “well-known #1 New York Times bestselling author.” Ballsy and hysterical. That writer wrote so many books that his publisher refused to publish them all under the author’s bestselling name.

Or maybe the publisher never got a chance. Because I later discovered who the author in question was (and that’s why I’m not naming the book here), and discovered that the author had nearly a dozen pen names, and kept them all quiet—except for that coy little bio for at least one of them.

In the opening to Bag of Bones (first published in 1998), Stephen King writes that his main character, a bestselling novelist, kept one novel in the drawer for every novel he published, since his publisher was demanding that he publish no more than one book per year.

Think about this, people: How many other industries that have mega-selling products demand that the producer of popular, high-quality material slow down? What happened to providing the consumers with what they wanted?

When Nora Roberts started out, she was fortunate to begin with Harlequin, which could publish as many books as she produced. She stayed with Harlequin even after she moved to a bigger publisher (Bantam) for a once-per-year hardcover, which then became a once-per-year hardcover and twice-a-year mass market paper, and then became twice-a-year hardcovers and three-times-a-year mass market paper, and finally, she had a big fight with Harlequin, and started up the J.D. Robb pen name (twice per year) and her publisher (by then, Putnam) threw in the towel. The publisher finally agreed that Nora could put out a lot of books. But the publisher’s other writers couldn’t.

Nora Roberts’ speed didn’t matter to that publisher because the publisher had no expectation of quality based on the genre. As we all know, and Entertainment Weekly’s snobby tone confirms, romance is trash anyway. No one expects quality fiction from writers who crank out cookie-cutter books for women.

You think I’m kidding, right? I’m not. I’m old enough to have read the trade journals as romance got its start as a genre, as the Romance Writers of America (founded in 1980) fought for recognition from publishers, as romance readers slowly realized that they were marketing force that had a lot of clout.

Romance has a lot of respect now compared to the 1980s—and still writers see phrases like “churned out” and that slightly school-boyish tone that every Literary Critic uses when discussing romance.

It’s about love and mushy stuff. It can’t be good. It might include kissing and touching and actual irony-free emotion. Anyone can churn out that crap if they put their minds to it. But most people are sensible enough to want respectability instead of…whatever it is that these romance people have.

Oh, yeah. Money.

And readers.

Who actually like the books.

I have taken exception to that snobbish attitude for my entire career. I’ve written essay after essay about it in all kinds of journals and magazines. I’ve written some business blogs on it too.

Back when I was writing those essays, the attitude was merely annoying. Savvy writers could get past it with the judicious use of pen names, and make not just a living, but a substantial living. As in earning mid-six figures or more, simply by hiding the fact that the fast writers wrote more than one book per year.

That snobbish attitude has always been harmful to writers who wanted to make a living. But in my mind, that snobbery always went hand-in-hand with a desire to be recognized over a desire to have a full-time writing career. The writers who wanted to make a living figured out how to handle the respectability argument while “churning out” a lot of books. The writers who wanted respectability and labored over each word never left their day jobs.

Now, however, that snobbish attitude has become actively harmful to writers. Most of the ways that books sell to readers have broken down. The traditional publishing systems have lost their impact. The old-fashioned way that publishers advertised books—that one-size-fits-all method—no longer works. Bookstores don’t window titles much anymore, if a reader can find a brick-and-mortar bookstore that sells new titles within driving distance of home.

Because books are available all the time rather than for only a few months, readers pay less attention to release dates than ever before. Readers have always read a book when they felt like it, and not a moment sooner. But in the past, readers had to buy the book when they saw it, because they might never find a copy again.

So, even if readers didn’t read the book for a year or more, readers still had to buy it in that limited time window.

Not any longer. Readers can make a note of the title, realize it’s been published, and buy it days or hours or minutes before reading it. That really changes the way that the publishing industry markets books—or it should.

It hasn’t yet, entirely, anyway. But the industry is starting to get a clue.

Event books, the ones that publishers convinced the media to promote, are no longer events. The numbers to become a bestseller are much, much lower than they were in 2007.

Lists matter, but less and less as readers discover their books in other ways.

And one of the major ways that readers discover a book? E-mail alerts or notifications that scroll across the reader’s favorite online retailing site—alerts and notifications tailored to that reader.

No longer do we all get notification of the top five books on The New York Times bestseller list. Now, we get science fiction (if that’s what we read) or romance or mystery. We get notifications about our favorite author’s latest book, not the latest release from some author whose work we would never, ever, ever read.

The notifications come from bots designed by the retailers. What provokes those bots to let a reader know about an author? Publication of her latest work. The bots always send readers a note that an author they have bought before (through that retailer) has released a new book.

The reader might not buy that book immediately, but the book might go on a wish list. It might be put in reserve until the reader has the cash to order or the time to read.

Another change in the way people buy books also has to do with unlimited availability. All readers indulged in binge reading of a new-to-them author, but in the past, that binge reading was combined with treasure hunting.

Whenever I discovered a new writer whose work I liked, I’d read what was easily available, then I’d go to the library to see what it had. Libraries never had the complete oeuvre because, like bookstores, they have limited shelf space. So I’d dig through every used bookstore in every town I visited until I got each and every book by that author.

Or as close to each and every book as I could get.

Other readers did the same.

Now, readers can order every book that a favorite author has written, whether that author has written five books or hundreds. That fear writers have, the fear that readers won’t respect the work if it doesn’t take years to complete, is silly when looked at from a reader’s perspective.

Readers want to escape from their lives for a few hours. They might want to read a beautiful well-written slow-moving literary novel or they might want to read a fast-paced hard-to-believe thriller. But readers want the book when they’re ready to relax. If they liked that book, they want another by the same author. The author becomes a known quantity, and the reader wants more.

Binge-reading has become an all-consuming activity, just like binge-watching. And the best way to get noticed as a writer is to publish enough to enable your readers to binge for a weekend.

But the idea of writing a lot is the opposite of the way that most writers are trained. Writers are told to slow down, think about every word, consider every sentence. Writers are taught to forget story because story is something that hack writers do.

Hack writers can “churn” out words because words are unimportant to them.

Real writers write so slowly that they might only compose a paragraph per day.

Real writers who have day jobs and who still believe myths spouted in the 19th century.

Real 19th-century writers who are still read today, like Charles Dickens or Louisa May Alcott, got paid by the word, so they wrote a lot of words, for a lot of publications. These writers wrote fast long hand, and they “churned out” a lot of stories we no longer read.

But they also “churned out” stories that all of us still read.

That little phrase, “churned out,” holds so much disrespect. Deadly disrespect, because writers who hear that phrase—and use it themselves—won’t be able to survive in this new world.

The 21st century is not leisurely, although we have more leisure time than ever. Can you remember the name of the “important” literary novel of five years ago? Ten? Without looking it up? I didn’t think so.

Yet, I can still name the important literary novels of forty years ago, because they got all the press, and I do mean allthe press.

It’s impossible to get all of the press now. The best way to get attention is to give your readers what they want. If they like your work, they want more of it.

If they want more of it, the only person who can give them more is you.

And the only way to do that is to write a lot, whatever that means for you.

One sure way to teach yourself to write at a comfortable pace is to clean up your language. Watch every word. Make sure you’re using the right phrase—when you’re talking about writing.

Clean “churned out” from your vocabulary. Don’t say you “cranked out” a novel. Don’t apologize for writing fast. Don’t tell anyone how long it took to finish a novel.

Write and release.

The only people who judge fiction writers for how fast they write are people for whom reading isn’t something they do for enjoyment but for prestige. They want to impress others with their literary acumen.

I don’t know about you, but I want readers who get lost in the story, not readers who have already determined that I’m a hack because I don’t write at the proper speed or in the proper genre or with the proper attention to language.

Enjoy your writing. Take as much—or as little—time as you like to compose your stories.

Because how you created the story doesn’t matter. How much readers enjoy the story does. Readers don’t care if it took you one week to write that story or fifteen years. All readers want is escape.

And it’s your job to provide it.

“Churning It Out” from The Write Attitude

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This ebook, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

Albert’s mother championed Earth Day and its environmental causes. The cause became her first priority, almost an obsession. And Albert’s obsession? His mother. In her honor, he will Save The Earth…maybe not in the way she expected.

“Earth Day” is free on this site for one week only. If you just want a copy of this story, download it on any e-book site or by clicking here. Enjoy!

Earth Day Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Case Number: HSFBDC42225I17

Excerpt:

…personal documents identify him as Albert Suttles, but in his statement, he repeatedly referred to himself as Raymond Bilojek…

My mom had an obsession with Senator Gaylord Nelson. Nobody remembers him any more, except in dusty old history books, not that there are dusty old history books any more. Everything’s online now. Even our confessionals.

Here’s mine.

Let me start again.

Mom had an obsession with Senator Gaylord Nelson. Not a stalkerish obsession, but one of those I-think-this-man-is-the-greatest obsessions. She used him as an example all the time, particularly in the dysfunctional early decades of this century.

There are no more men like Senator Gaylord Nelson, she said to me on her deathbed—not that I was with her at her deathbed. I was a full professor by then, supervising more research than I truly had time for, living in Berkeley, and enjoying it. Especially the weather. California weather, for a good Wisconsin boy, is like an early glimpse of heaven.

Not to mention that I spent my formal education in cold places. The University of Wisconsin-Madison, Yale, MIT. If it weren’t for my second post-doc at Cal-Tech, I would’ve thought that you had to nurture scientists in the cold in order for them to flower.

But I promised myself no jokes in this manifesto. Not that people get my jokes anyway. I’m too quiet. I think of the joke, turn it over in my mind, then inject it too late into the conversation. People have looked at me funny my entire life.

I long ago gave up trying to impress the unwashed with my conversational skills, even though I admire folks who have them. Earliest influences for me include comedians, especially the really brainy ones—George Carlin, Dennis Miller, Lewis Black—the ones who can quip their way out of anything. Or I thought they could, until I saw Carlin in his dotage, just out of rehab, working off a paper script, telling the audience honestly that he was testing material for an HBO special.

You remember HBO, right? That’s where I first saw the “Seven Words You Can’t Say On Television” speech. I must’ve been ten, maybe, one of those years when we could afford premium cable. 1977? Something like that. We were pretty itinerant, and I didn’t see much television at all, especially premium television as it was called then. So I remembered seeing Carlin on HBO.

But his other routines? I didn’t see those until later. And his influential “bad case of fleas” routine? I didn’t see that one until maybe mid-2007, on the Internet. Ironic, right?

Anyway, Mom. Senator Gaylord Nelson. She met him, you know. One of those Earth Day rallies back in the day. Said I met him too, back when Earth Day was a movement, and she was part of it. Not that she ever left the movement.

The movement defined our lives. She’d say, we moved for the environment.

Not for the weather, like normal people. But for the environment. Someone needed a volunteer to coordinate rallies? Mom was there. Someone needed a volunteer to post flyers? Mom was there. We lived off the kindness of strangers, she’d say, and it took me years to understand that she was quoting a Tennessee Williams play.

The kindness of strangers got me into a science-only high school. We need scientists, too, the man who fronted everything said. He was one of those truly rich bastards, the kind who gave his money to all sorts of causes. But his favorite was Mom’s favorite: the environment.

Everything from the Sierra Club to some wacky fringe organization (Save The Cockroaches!), this guy gave it money. And he funded Mom for years, which is something I don’t want to think about even now. Because I don’t know why Mom in particular, even though I have a hunch.

It does go back to Mom, you know. I’m smart enough to know that. The therapist I hired at my first tenured position told me I was “unhealthily obsessed” with her, and we had to break the obsession. That therapist couldn’t divorce me from Mom entirely. I recognize that too. Because without Mom, I wouldn’t be a tenured professor with a large research staff and grants for fifteen different projects, including the private one you’re seeing today.

Or will see today.

But I digress.

My digressions are why I’m not doing this as a video. Or a holographic video. Some kind of statement broadcast on every single remaining broadcast channel.

The Internet.

No one’ll see this until after.

But then, no one will see it after either.

Heh. Just realized.

This is all for me.

Case Number: HSFBDC42225I17

Excerpt:

…his research assistants, graduate students, and post-doctoral candidates weren’t hard to find. All wore Earth Day T-shirts, modeled on the first Earth Day poster from 1970. Separate interviews attached. Each mentions Suttles/Bilojek’s insistence on the Earth Day experiment, which most participated in for a grade or because they were terrified of losing their research posting…

My influences:

1. Comedians (see above).
2. Space photos, particularly that one from the late 1960s—you know, the beautiful blue-and-green globe? That was Mom’s favorite too. But for different reasons. Me, I like the vivid colors, the rocks against the blackness, the vibrant life that we don’t recognize as life—you know, the sun big and deep like an ocean, with storms and spots and—I could go on forever. But we don’t have forever. ?
3. Great scientists from the past. The unassuming guys, at least in the beginning. Archimedes in the bathtub. Galileo dropping balls from the Tower of Pisa. Einstein contemplating the universe from the silence of the patent office.

They didn’t have grants and grad students, publish-or-perish mandates, the necessity of finding the smallest niche in the large world of science just to get someone to fund a project. They didn’t have to write grandiose papers before their discoveries. Sometimes they didn’t even write grandiose papers after their discoveries.

So of course, in this modern era, I decided not to write a grandiose paper either. I got dozens and dozens of smaller grants, on smaller topics, and isn’t it ironic that if you Google (Google. Heh. Created outside the system.) my professional name, you’ll see article after article, interview after interview, with me, whom they call the Scientist of Small Things.

Apparently I did find notice. Someone—maybe a scientifically minded clerk, handling grant applications for the U.S. government—noticed my name originating most of them.

No one put together all the topics, though.

No one except me.

Case Number: HSFBDC42225I17

Excerpt:

…appended to this file a report from several different departments in Homeland Security, as well as reports from similar bureaus in Germany, Russia, China, South Africa…

Senator Gaylord Nelson, founder of Earth Day and, some say, the founder of the modern environmental movement, was a saint. George Carlin, comedian, the enemy.

At least according to Mom. On her deathbed. Or what I call her deathbed—that dreadful nursing home bed she didn’t leave for the last few years of her life. I saw her a year before she died—2007—and after that I discovered why Carlin was the enemy.

In that wonderful, eye-opening routine, he said he hated Earth Day. He said, and I quote: “Environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat.”

Ah, it rang true. It rang so true.

That’s when I realized all my degrees, all those little environmental things I was doing weren’t for the planet. They were for the environmentalists. Like Mom.

And then, in that same routine, Carlin said, he said, the planet will be here after we’re long gone. And he added the inspiration: “The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.”

That was my Eureka moment.

I know how to get rid of fleas.

Case Number: HSFBDC42225I17

Excerpt:

…when the FBI received a notice from the Patent Office, delineating several patents that returned to the same man, known as the Scientist of Small Things. The small things, when combined in the proper order, could be seen as a potential terrorist threat. The patent office employee [name redacted] did not contact the FBI immediately. After some thought, however, she determined she could not remain silent….

It took very little tweaking to move from “Save The Earth For Environmentalists” to “Save The Earth.”

Because to save the earth for environmentalists, you have to know what will kill the little buggers. Instead of getting rid of those factors, you add to them. You tweak them.

You make them stronger.

I figured out the balance. Tweak this and touch that and you make the planet shake off the fleas a little faster. It is a multidisciplinary approach. To understand how water reaches entire populations, one must know the engineering of water treatment plants as well as urban planning. One must also learn the details of water processing in each community.

Tiny things, small things, all reported back to the one man who can understand it all.

Amassing small bits of data into one large experiment. Only large minds can understand this.

And there are very few large minds around any more.

Almost none.

Case Number: HSFBDC42225I17

Excerpt:

… the case built slowly. The initial investigator retired, and Agent William Franks took over. Franks had received a Masters in Biology from Harvard before joining the Bureau. He did not like the coincidences either, and talked off the record to two of Suttles/Bilojek’s graduate students. That raised enough suspicions to bring in additional field agents….

My pet graduate students run all of my projects. I have developed a multidisciplinary department, highly regarded, since most of my students go on to so-called great things in the so-called real world.

My current graduate students and post-docs are doing a one-day experiment for me, or so they think. They are not large minds. They are useful small minds. In the years I have planned this, it has always helped to have useful small minds.

It has also helped that in 2007 my mission changed from Save The World For Environmentalists to Save The World. Because of Mom, because of my initial environmentalist approach, I know how to talk to small minds, to make them believe I am on their side.

And I am. Truly I am. I do want to save the world.

In fact, my pet scientists and I are doing exactly that today.

My pet scientists have tweaked the ground water, and the air filtration systems. They’ve added toxins to all the poisons we already touch, from oil to Styrofoam. They’re adding viruses to enclosed spaces, like airplanes and ships. They’re even coating restaurant surfaces.

I don’t care how we get the fleas off the planet. I just care that we do.

And now we will.

As the first Earth Day T-shirt says, “We Have Met The Enemy and He Is Us.”

Case Number: HSFBDC42225I17

Homeland Security, FBI Division

Arresting Officer William Franks

Excerpt from Franks’ verbal message, attached to the huge packets of reports submitted to the U.S. Justice Department:

…gotta say, Dave, it’s a good thing guys like this are rocket scientists. If they understood people, they wouldn’t confess before the crime. Whenever I feel down about humanity, I gotta remember that good citizens saw this manifesto and reported it. Dunno if we got everyone, but I hope we did. If nothing else, the outbreaks will be isolated now. This guy had a good plan. He almost killed millions.

Creepy bastard. When I locked him up, he smiled at me like we were old friends. Then his grin widened to crazy. You know. You’ve seen it on the face of so many of these bastards.

Usually you can dismiss them. But I’m having trouble shaking this one. Because of what he said to me I started to walk away.

He said, “So, flea, how does it feel to save the world?”

 

Earth Day

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

Cover and Layout copyright © by WMG Publishing

Cover design by WMG Publishing

Cover art copyright © Matthew Trommer/Dreamstime

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

This post is a chapter from my book, The Write Attitude, which is now in a second edition. I’m posting it here to entice you to head over to Storybundle to pick up a copy, along with ebooks by T. Thorn Coyle, Ron Collins, Darcy Pattison, Anthea Sharp, and ten more great writers. Everyone’s book is an exclusive. That’s right. Everything in the bundle is exclusive to the bundle, including my book.

So if you want to read it now, pick it up from Storybundle. If you don’t want a deal on the ebook or if you only read print, then you can always preorder the book on various retailer sites starting at the end of May. The new edition will release on July 14.

The second edition of The Write Attitude is quite different from the first edition, which originally appeared in 2016. I kept some parts of the original book, but much of the material is newer. The new material comes from my Patreon page. Not every post from my Patreon page shows up here, although several do. If you want to see everything, though, head to Patreon and sign up. 

This post appeared on my Patreon page in October of 2025, and is one of the early chapters in the book.

 

GETTING LOST IN THE WORDS

From 2025

This past week, I finished the largest Fey book I’ve written to date. It is the fifth book in my side series on the Qavnerian Protectorate…and it ended up at 240,000 words long. I trimmed about 50,000 words out of it, and wrote the scenes that I missed. (Mostly the validation, because I always skip the validation in my first pass.) I figured the book was long because of how I wrote it. I dabbled at it during the two years of crisis that we endured at the business. For a while, I gave the book up entirely because I simply couldn’t concentrate on a story that big. That was when I wrote some of the novellas that came out this year, as well as a novel that will appear in late 2026.

My mind was trending long, I think, because I didn’t want to keep coming up with new things. I didn’t have the brain space for that.

I also found that I couldn’t make any decisions while still in the thrall of that huge, gigantic, super-sized novel. I wasn’t in the position to decide what I would do next. I’m going to figure that out in the next few days.

But some of the small things I meant to do included typing in about 6,000 words that Mick Herron wrote in the middle of his Slow Horses novel Bad Actors. He wrote a scene filled with mayhem that stretched over a couple of square miles of London and had at least four main viewpoint characters. (If you want to know what scene, it’s the one that more or less culminates with the iron and the bus, as well as a brick to the head.)

When I first read the thing, two years ago now, I became aware at the very end of the section that I not only had a feeling of mayhem, but that I had understood each part of the action. When a writer uses a technique that isn’t in my writing toolbox, I figure out how that technique works. Sometimes I can eyeball it, but occasionally, I type it into my own computer using my word program and my set-up, so I can see how it all works on the page.

It took two days’ writing sessions to do the typing, partly because I stopped to give my wrists a break and also because I would look up any words I didn’t know. As a reader, I skipped over the British slang that I was unfamiliar with, choosing to get it out through context, but as a writer, I wanted to know what he was doing.

So louring, cack-handed, and a whole bunch of other words entered my consciousness and, in the case of louring, changed my perspective on a moment in the scene that I was typing in.

Usually, when I type in another writer’s work, it’s a serious struggle. I want to add commas or punctuation or paragraphs or different words. Aside from the British slang, I did not feel the need to add or change words, but I did realize that he uses punctuation very differently than I do. There are a lot more colons in his work than there are in mine, and not as many commas. The only quibble I had, in fact, was that he wouldn’t use a comma in something like “For a moment he was thinking of his wife…” I would add a comma after “moment.” And he wouldn’t use an ellipsis plus a period for the end of a sentence. I don’t know if that was deliberate, a British punctuation thing, or personal preference. It caught me every time.

But the one thing I did note was this: I have been deep in the words in my own writing. Because life has thrown me a lot of lemons in the past year, I would catch them and consider them before making the lemonade. In other words, my critical voice was and is on very high right now.

Sometimes as I worked on the biggest Fey novel to ever come out of my computer, I would stop and stare at the words and think them very plain. That’s not a normal thought for me—or it wasn’t before this past year or two.

As I typed in Herron’s section, I noted that I reached the “words are plain” stage somewhere around 3,000 words in. His words were plain and sometimes repetitive. There were copy editing issues as well, one or two misspellings (not British spellings, but actual misspellings) and a few missing hyphens that my eye caught while I was working out his technique.

I had to pause and consider that moment, though. By putting his words into my format, I hit the same “these words are plain” place I hit in my own writing. Which meant that critical voice was not doing its job and looking at the technique. It was critiquing the words used instead of the effect those words had on the reader.

Copy editors make this error a lot. I train copy editors and have done so for decades now. The traditional publisher for my Grayson books in the 1990s used my books to test copy editors. If I got a heavy hand, the copy editor didn’t get hired. My Grayson books, like Herron’s Slough House series, are voice heavy. If the copy editor missed that, and put the book into proper English with traditional punctuation, they had no right to be called a copy editor at all.

The copy editor’s job is to find actual mistakes (misspellings, inadvertently repeated details, misnaming characters) rather than “clean up” some established writer’s punctuation. And copy editors who are harsher on new writers will often strip those writers of the very things that make their voice strong.

I can’t imagine the discussion Soho Crime had early on with Herron’s copy editors. He breaks every single rule of grammar and punctuation on purpose and does it to make a point in the story.

For example, I noted in his latest book, Clown Town, that in another mayhem scene, one character’s point-of-view section was usually one paragraph long and just a single sentence. I slowly realized that single sentence extended over many sections and many pages. Every time we were in that character’s point of view, there was a lot of punctuation, and not a bit of it was an actual period.

The period arrived at the end of the character’s point-of-view section in that mayhem scene…and I realized (because of how I read) that the character was dead. Herron played with that idea (are they really dead?) for the next twenty pages, and most readers would have missed the period at the end of the character’s section. But I didn’t. (I had the same problem in the book Silence of the Lambs when Thomas Harris has Hannibal Lector escape a well-guarded facility. Harris used an odd phrase, a strange verb, and a long sentence in the middle of a gigantic paragraph. The odd phrase from such a careful writer caught me up short. So I went backwards, looking to see if I’d missed anything else.

And yep, I had. I knew exactly how Lector escaped pages before Harris wanted me to. Most readers didn’t catch it until Harris did a big reveal. And then they would go back and see the odd phrase. I saw it going in.

Those things that excellent writers do out of their subconscious as they’re in the moment are things that a copy editor would “fix.” I can imagine that a novice (to Herron’s work) copy editor adding periods throughout those character sections—and ruining them.

The best copy editors read the book they’re editing for enjoyment first, so that they will see the author’s intent long before they start “fixing mistakes.” Most modern copy editors don’t do that at all, which is why you’ll hear Dean tell you that you don’t need a copy editor. He’s right: better to let some mistakes through than muck up the voice.

I hire and fire a lot of copy editors even now because I have a tendency in my fiction writing to repeat myself. Some of that comes because I write out of order. So I might actually introduce a character for the first time when I write chapter 45, but chapter 45 might have been the very first chapter I ever wrote. Then, later, I might write chapter 7, where the character appears for the reader for the first time and I’ll write the same description (often in the same language without checking back) again. And maybe I’ll worry that I hadn’t described the character when I get to chapter 15, and I’ll write the same description again.

I need someone to find that stuff. What’s amazing to me is that the words-only, rules-only copy editors never find the repeated information. Or the silly stuff, like a character putting on a hat in chapter 27 and then putting on a different hat six pages later without taking off the first hat.

That’s what’s valuable about copy editors. Not fixing the grammar, but fixing the goofy stuff. On the latest book which will appear in 2026, the other book I wrote during the crisis, I changed the name of one of the main characters but never did a search and replace. So occasionally, his name goes back and forth with one letter different. The very good copy editor that I have caught that. None of my first readers did—and neither did I.

In storytelling, the words are tools. Punctuation is also a tool. Paragraphing is a tool.

The rules are there for beginners. Storytellers need to have a huge toolbox, and they need to learn how to use those tools. Most writers get by with a hammer, some nails and a few screwdrivers. The best writers have finesse tools (to extend the metaphor) like a cape chisel, saw set pliers, and an egg beater drill just in case the story needs them.

And I can guarantee you that if the story does need them, the copy editor will probably not understand why they’re there—unless the copy editor is someone who actually reads and understands the story before looking at the words.

As for the rest of us—we storytellers—we need to stay out of the words and not worry about them. So what if they’re “plain”? So what if you’ve written a passive sentence? So what if they seem to lie flat on the page?

If you’re thinking those things, you’re not in the story at all. You’re in copyedit or critic mode.

Stop it.

Remember that you’re a storyteller. Not a writer. And don’t worry about the little fiddly bits. If you misspell them and the story’s compelling, your reader won’t even notice.

Just like reader me didn’t notice all the words I didn’t know in Herron’s work. I was so caught up in that mayhem scene that I went right over those unfamiliar words, and ended up thinking that the sequence was brilliant.

Because it is.

“Getting Lost in The Words” from The Write Attitude

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This ebook, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

 

D Street—the closest thing Hope’s Pass has to a red light district. Three whorehouses and a few independents to service the miners who survived the mines outside of town.

When someone murders a prostitute, Will, the mayor, must fill in for the drunken sheriff and investigate. Only the crime has deep roots—roots that will touch Will’s entire family and make him question everything he has ever known.

“Death on D Street” is free on this site for one week only. If you like this crime story, you might like my other crime stories. A Kickstarter for my latest crime novel, Candid Shots of the 1970s, will run until Thursday, April 16. There you can get the new novel as well as Consecrated Ground, a novel that hasn’t seen print in 15 years, and a brand-new collection of short crime stories (although this one is not included). Click here to look at the Kickstarter.

If you just want a copy of this story, download it on any e-book site or by clicking here. Enjoy!

 

Death on D Street Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Ginny had just blown out the lamp and snuggled against me, her slender arm across my chest. The house still held too much of the day’s warmth for us to be cuddled so close together, but I didn’t move her. I liked the touch of her skin against mine, even when we were both too tired to do anything about it.

The baby was quiet for the first time in two days. She was teething and not happy about it. Ginny’d been rubbing my brandy against the baby’s gums and it didn’t seem to be doing anything except wasting good liquor. Still, Ginny swore that was a teething trick and I figured she’d know. She had gotten Sam through it, and on her own. By comparison, this couldn’t be as bad.

We should have expected the knock on the door—or something to break the quiet, but the knock surprised both of us. The baby wailed. Ginny must have already been asleep because she rolled over fast and reached for the gun she kept in the top dresser drawer.

I caught her arm and soothed her awake. I’d seen this reaction before and knew its source. A woman traveling alone across country had to be adept at protecting herself and her child. Nothing I could do convinced her she was safe. I’d stopped trying a year before.

I jerked on my pants as the knock came again. The baby’s wail grew into a scream. I grabbed a shirt and said, “See to the kids.” Then I headed down the stairs.

The knocking started a third time. I yanked the door open. Travis stood outside. He’d set his lantern on the porch. The yellow light illuminated his mud-stained pants and scuffed boots. The stench of cigars and cheap booze wafted inside.

“Sorry to wake ya,” he said, “but Doc sent me. We got a holy hell of a mess on D Street.”

D Street was the closest thing we had to a red light district. Three whorehouses and a few independents all lined up in a row. When I was sheriff, I restricted the hookers to that area. I’d learned that getting rid of them was impossible, not to mention unpopular. When men got time away from the mines, they wanted some affection, even if they had to pay for it.

“Where’s Sheriff Muller?” I asked.

“Couldn’t roust him.”

“Drunk again?” I glanced up the stairs. The baby was still crying. The floorboards creaked as Ginny walked with her, trying to quiet her.

“Smelled like it,” Travis said.

“What kind of mess?”

“Somebody killed Jeanne.”

I stepped onto the porch and pulled the door closed. “While she was servicing him?”

“Jesus, Will, how’m I supposed to know?”

I shook my head and strode down the street. The dust was caked thanks to the summer heat, the wagon ruts treacherous in the darkness. The air was cool now, almost cold—one of the benefits of being in the mountains—but by dawn the heat would be creeping back, oppressive and overwhelming.

D Street was three blocks over and two down. I walked along Main Street. Most of the saloons were still open. Music filtered out of O’Hallerans—someone was banging on the town’s only piano. A few drunks were collapsed on the wooden sidewalk, leaning against the building, and I knew who they were.

I’d lived in Hope’s Pass since it was founded, eight years before. I’d stumbled through here, looking to make my own fortune mining for silver. I lasted a month underground in the dark, candle burning away the oxygen, cave-ins a constant threat. Even though the pay was pretty good, I realized there were other ways to make money.

The town needed a sheriff and I volunteered, setting my own pay so high that no one in their right mind would meet it. But in those early days of what would become known as the Comstock Lode, no one was in their right mind.

They paid me more than I was worth for six years. Then Ginny came to town with little Sam and enough money to set up a dressmaking business. Four months later, we were married and I had resigned as sheriff. I felt it wasn’t right to be dragged out of bed at all hours to calm down drunken miners or settle disputes over one of the town’s whores. I ran for mayor and won; then I appointed Johann Muller as the new sheriff, which was, I think, the worst decision I’d ever made.

D Street was down two blocks from Main, at the very edge of the mountainside. The ground was treacherous here—subject to floods in heavy rains. The buildings here had washed away more than once. There were other problems as well. Mine shafts had been dug underneath this entire area of Hope’s Pass, and more than one man had fallen through the street to the emptiness below. One of my campaign pledges had been to shore up the South Town area, but no one was really pushing me to fulfill that promise.

Lights were on in all the houses, and laughter filtered down from one of the porches. The men here weren’t drunk—or at least weren’t obviously so. A lot of them stood outside, smoking and talking as they waited in line. It must have been payday for one of the mines. I’d gotten so caught up in my daughter’s teething drama I hadn’t been paying attention.

I walked to the very last house. The street trailed off into nothing here, just scraggly grass and dust. Light poured out of this house as well, but the door was shut tight. As I approached, I saw a man knock and get sent away.

I didn’t bother to knock. I tried the knob but it didn’t turn. I glanced over my shoulder. Travis hadn’t followed me. Apparently his only task had been to fetch me. That completed, he was able to go back to one of the saloons and see if he could finish the task of getting drunk.

So I rapped on the big picture window, closed despite the coolness of the evening, and shouted, “It’s the mayor!”

The door opened just a crack.

“Doc sent for me,” I said.

The door opened the rest of the way. I didn’t recognize the girl behind it. She was blonde and buxom, wearing a cheap satin wrap that tied at her waist and left nothing to the imagination. I didn’t recognize her, but that wasn’t a surprise. Girls came and went at these places so fast that sometimes I was surprised anyone knew who they were.

Her face was ashen and she didn’t even bother to greet me. She just stepped aside, waited until I crossed the threshold, then pulled the door closed.

Six girls were in the parlor. A few were wearing dresses. The rest had on stained wraps just like the girl who had opened the door. Lucinda Beale, who’d opened this house six years before, sat on the edge of a chaise lounge.

She waved a hand toward a door. “In there.”

The room smelled of sweat and perfume. One of the girls sat on the ornate staircase leading to the second floor. She held her face in her hands, her legs slightly spread, revealing everything.

I walked through the women. They all moved away from me, something I’d never experienced in a whorehouse before.

The door led to the back parlor. It was usually reserved for the girls and “family,” anyone involved with the house. I’d been there half a dozen times before, mostly for a drink after getting rid of unruly customers. I hadn’t been inside since I married Ginny.

I swung the door open and stepped inside the room. It was hot and had the copper odor of blood.

“Watch where you step.” Doc Clifton leaned against the wall, arms crossed. His open medical bag sat on the ornate red sofa. His face was puffy from lack of sleep. He’d been up the night before helping one of Rena’s girls down the way through a particularly difficult birth.

I gave him a sideways look. Doc nodded toward the floor.

Jeanne lay there, legs splayed, wrapper open. Her torso was undamaged. The only visible wound was around her neck. It had been cut so deeply that her head had nearly been severed. Her hands, flung back beside her face, were cut as well.

I crouched beside her body. Her eyes were open. Her expression was one of great fear. I’d seen that expression on her face before. Her ebony skin brought a certain kind of clientele to Lucinda’s—one with exotic tastes. But some of the customers objected to Jeanne’s presence. Most of the fights I’d stopped in his last year as sheriff had started over Jeanne.

“Someone got her this time, huh?” I asked.

“It’s not that simple.” Doc pushed himself off the wall. He pointed to her hands. A single matching slit ran across both palms.

“So he surprised her, cut her throat, and she grabbed at the knife at the last minute.”

Doc nodded. “But he killed her in here.”

I rocked on his toes and looked around. Blood spattered the rug and a nearby table. It had clearly spurted. “He spun her.”

“Yep.”

I sighed. Murder in a small town was always difficult. I hated the cases when they involved someone important. Investigating one with a prostitute—and one who wasn’t even white—would be even harder.

“We knew it was only a matter of time, Doc,” I said. “If someone didn’t get her here, they would have got her when Lucinda sent her to service the boys in Shantytown.” I’d escorted her back a number of times and that was when I’d seen the fear on her face. The men usually ignored her, but the town’s women—even my usually tolerant wife—gave her looks filled with hate.

Doc’s eyes narrowed. “You gonna let this slide, then, Will?”

Of course I was. Solving murders wasn’t my responsibility any more. “That’s for Sheriff Muller to decide.”

“Sheriff Muller’s a drunk and you know it. You gave him the job so someone would take the midnight calls and you could continue overseeing everything else.”

I stiffened. “The girls get hurt. Sometimes they die. It’s not a safe or particularly joyful profession. If anyone knows that, it’s you, Doc. How many times do you get sent to D Street to tend to someone who’d had it too rough or was dying in childbirth and didn’t know who the father was?”

“So we let this go.”

I looked at Jeanne. She’d been pretty in a quiet sort of way. And she had been soft-spoken, almost shy. The prettiness was gone now, leached out of her with the blood. “It might be better to forget about it.”

“Will you say that when this same maniac slits some other girl’s throat? Or what if he attacks a real citizen, someone you care about? What then?”

There was an edge to Doc’s words that I had never heard before. “You got a personal stake in this, Doc?”

His gaze slipped away from mine. “I don’t ever want to see a mess like this again.”

“Chances are it was a drifter.”

“Who got invited into the back parlor?”

“All right. Maybe it was someone who knew her. Maybe even a relative. Lord knows Lucinda wouldn’t want a colored man in her waiting room.”

Doc looked at me. His gaze was clear and direct. “Is this about Jeanne’s profession, Will? Or her color?”

My cheeks heated up. “I’m just trying to take care of this with a minimum of fuss.”

“Fuss? We got a dead woman lying at our feet. Someone damn near sliced her head off and you’re worried about fuss?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s my job to keep things calm in Hope’s Pass.”

Doc’s cheeks were an ugly red. “You ignore this, Will, and I’ll kick up a fuss like you never seen before.”

I turned to him, careful to keep my feet away from the blood smeared on the floor. “What was Jeanne to you, Doc?”

“A person,” he snapped, and walked out of the room.

***

I’d never been shamed into an investigation before, and truth be told, it didn’t make me enthusiastic about it. Still, I’d prove to Doc that I could solve this—or at least make sure whoever’d done this was long gone.

First, I gave the scene one more once-over. A silver tray lay near the kitchen door. Two glasses lay on the rug. One still had a bit of whisky inside. The smell of blood overpowered the smell of alcohol, which was why I hadn’t noticed it when I’d first come in.

The couch’s cushions were untouched, except for Doc’s bag, which he had left behind. I peered in it and saw nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, except for the body and the blood, the room was neat. Lucinda always had a penchant for clean.

There were no footprints in the blood on the floor, no handprints on the wall. Whoever had done this had been careful. There was also no break in the spatter, so he hadn’t gone at her from the front.

Already I could hazard a guess on how the attack happened. He’d been sent to the back parlor and waited there, standing near the empty fireplace as Jeanne came out of the kitchen, carrying a silver tray. She’d clearly expected to entertain him, but whether that entertainment would lead to a trip upstairs, I couldn’t yet tell. She’d planned on drinking with him, though, and she hadn’t even gotten to the place where she could set the drinks down.

He grabbed her from behind, slit her throat quickly and viciously. She’d realized what was going on—she probably had a hell of a self-preservation instinct—and grabbed at the knife as he pulled it along her throat. But she hadn’t had a chance to scream—he’d been too fast for her—and the method he chose wouldn’t have allowed it.

Her life sprayed out of her fast, but she’d still struggled, forcing him to spin around because he was having trouble holding her. But she’d stopped pretty quick, going limp in his arms. Then he dropped her and ran out the kitchen—arms and hands bloody, but otherwise unscathed.

Knife wasn’t there. Nothing else was there, except a downed silver tray and the body of a woman Doc felt important enough to take time from my family.

I pushed open the kitchen door, and went inside. The kitchen was clean and everything was in its place. No dirt on the sideboards, tin canisters lined up against the walls. No fire burned in the stove, even though this room was hotter than the parlor. The only thing out of order was the whiskey decanter on the long kitchen table—and the bloody handprint on the back door.

***

I decided to talk to the girls individually. Most of them couldn’t tell me anything—they’d been upstairs with a client. Only Lucinda and Elly had seen anything at all.

Elly’d been between customers when the front door opened. A blond man, his hair falling ragged over his collar, came inside. Despite the day’s heat, he’d had on a gray coat. It was worn, almost a part of him. His hands were tucked in the pockets, pulling it down, messing up its shape.

At first she thought him old because he was so thin and he walked with a limp. Then she looked at his face and realized he couldn’t be thirty yet. He spoke with a Southern accent and his eyes were haunted. She figured him to be a Reb who’d been wandering since the war ended. She didn’t remember seeing him before.

She’d sidled up to him, put a hand on his chest, and thrust herself against him. “I’m just what you need,” she’d said.

“Maybe so, darlin’,” he’d said gently, “but you ain’t what I want.”

She’d backed away from him then, and Lucinda’d come forward. Elly went to the kitchen where Jeanne was cleaning the sideboards. She hadn’t had a customer all night and she was restless, feeling trapped in the house, unable to go outside.

They talked for a while, about nothing, Elly said, and then Elly rolled herself a cigarette and took it out back so Lucinda wouldn’t catch her.

Not that Lucinda was trying. She was talking to the stranger, finding out exactly what it was he wanted.

He’d heard, he said, she had a colored girl in the house. Then he’d lowered his voice so soft she had to strain to hear. “Growin’ up the way I did, I got me a special hankerin for colored girls.”

“We do have a girl,” Lucinda said. “Her name’s Jeanne. I’m sure she’d be happy to see you.”

He glanced at the front door then, and she could sense how nervous he was. “I’d like to talk first, but if my friends find me with her…”

He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to. Lucinda had heard that request dozens of times.

“Why don’t you go to the back parlor?” Lucinda said, pointing the way. “I’ll have her join you in just a few minutes.”

He’d smiled then. She’d thought it a particularly gentle smile, grateful really, and she’d smiled back. She hadn’t thought anything of it, not even when she’d heard the tray and the thud. Jeanne knew the rules—clients should be taken upstairs once the transaction was to begin—but sometimes men were too eager. That was a rule Lucinda was always willing to bend, as long as the man paid in full.

It was when the hour was up and then some that Lucinda got impatient. She’d expected her southern drifter to leave long before that. So she’d pushed open the door to the back parlor, and she’d seen Jeanne and she’d hoped that somehow the girl had lived through it, which was why she’d sent for Doc at the same time she’d sent for the sheriff.

Which was why she was willing to talk to me.

“This sort of thing got me closed down in St Louis,” she said. “I been real careful about it in Hope’s Pass. I run a safe house and my girls get treated good. You catch this man, Will, and you make everyone know that what he did had nothing to do with me.”

“You should check your clientele for weapons, Cinda,” I said.

“I do. They have to leave their guns at the door.” Then her eyes brightened and she held up one chubby finger. “Just a moment.”

She walked toward the door, moved a picture and opened a wall safe. From inside, she pulled out a small pistol.

“I suppose all your clients know that’s there,” I said.

Lucinda nodded. “That’s where we keep the guns. The real safe is somewhere else.”

She studied the pistol for a moment, then came toward me. “I got this off him before he went into the back parlor. Obviously, he didn’t come back for it, although he should have.”

“Should have?” I stood.

“I’ve never handled a gun quite like this one before.” She extended the gun to me, and I froze.

It was a Remington-Elliot single shot Derringer, .41 rimfire caliber, with walnut grips and blue plating.

“You sure that was his?” I asked.

“Oh, yes.” She frowned at it. “Pretty little thing, isn’t it?”

It was. It was so small that it fit in the palm of her hand. I took the gun from her and examined the barrel. Etched into the plating were the initials V.L., exactly as I expected.

“What’s there?” Lucinda asked.

“Hmm?” I looked at her. She was frowning at me. “Oh, nothing. Mind if I keep this?”

“I surely don’t want it.” She put her hands on her wide hips. “But it is a special gun. He might come back for it.”

“He might at that. Where’s Travis?” Travis worked as her security on busy nights.

“Probably drinking. He hasn’t come back since he fetched you.”

I checked the gun’s chamber. It wasn’t loaded. I slipped the gun in my pocket. “You get your own gun out, stay awake a while. I’ll make sure Sheriff Muller comes to keep an eye on this place, and I’ll find Travis for you.”

Lucinda smiled at me. “You always take good care of us, Will.”

In the past, I would have leaned over and kissed her cheek. But I didn’t dare get more perfume on me than had already leached into my clothes from this place. “You can tell Doc that it’s all right to come downstairs again.”

Lucinda’s smile turned sly. “I’m sure he’ll come down when he’s ready.”

“When he does,” I said, “make sure he does something with Jeanne. Remind him that’s his responsibility, not mine.”

Her smile faded. “Of all my girls to end up like that, I’d’ve never imagined Jeanne.”

“Why not?” I asked.

Lucinda’s gaze met mine. “She never was one who liked it rough.”

***

I found Travis and sent him back to Lucinda’s, not that he would do much good considering the condition he was in. Then I slapped Muller awake and sent him as well. He, at least, was a little more sober than Travis, only because he’d had time to sleep it off.

All the while, I fingered the gun in my pocket, the cold metal sending shivers through me. It took all my strength to find the men, to get them back to Lucinda’s, before heading home.

The sun was rising as I walked up Main. My house was dark, curtains closed, and the door locked. I opened the front door as quietly as I could and stepped inside. The early morning brightness hadn’t reached the interior of the house. Everything was in shadow. But the baby wasn’t crying.

I made my way up the stairs. When I reached the bedroom door, I stared at my wife, asleep in our bed. She lay on her left side, one hand tucked beneath her cheek, her chest rising and falling with her even breathing. Even asleep she looked tired.

I walked toward her, never taking my gaze off her. She didn’t stir. I crouched beside her and opened the top drawer of the dresser, and suddenly she was awake, reaching for the gun, the one I was covering with my right hand.

“Will?” she asked, as she blinked herself fully awake. “Everything all right?”

“I don’t know.” My voice sounded odd to my own ears, flat and emotionless. I pulled her gun out of the drawer and rested it on my left palm. The blue plating was nicked, the walnut grip scratched. But even from my angle, I could see the engraved initials.

V.L.

“Will?”

From my pocket, I pulled out the other gun and let it rest on my right palm. “Look what I found tonight.”

All the color left her face. Her brown eyes were wide, and I could see her tamping down panic. “Where?”

“In a whorehouse safe.”

“That what they called you out for? A gun?”

I had heard that kind of question before, and it made me sad. It was a stalling-for-time question, one that let the asker think about her story rather than try to obtain an answer.

“No,” I said, not willing to tell her what had happened. “Tell me about your gun, Ginny.”

“It’s just a gun, Will.” Another stall.

“Then there’s nothing to stop you from telling me about it.”

Her gaze hadn’t left my face, but I could see that took some effort. She was at a disadvantage. I was good at reading people, but I was best at reading her.

“I got it in a pawn shop in Kansas City, before I took the wagon train out here. I figured Sam and I needed protection.”

“From a single shot revolver?”

She shrugged. “It was all I could afford.”

She was lying. God help me, I could tell she was lying. The slight twitch of her upper lip, the sweat forming at the hairline. Something about this was scaring her and she didn’t want to tell me what.

“I thought the V.L. stood for Virginia Lysander,” I said. “In fact, you told me that once.”

“It’s my gun,” she said. “It can stand for anything I want. I don’t know what it stood for before.”

“It was just a bit of luck that you found a gun with your initials on it?”

“That’s why I picked it out,” she said.

“I thought you said it was all you could afford.”

A spot of color formed in each cheek. She knew I’d caught her. “That too.”

“Ginny,” I said, almost pleading with her. “This is serious.”

She pushed her lips together. She wasn’t going to say any more.

“The man who owned this gun murdered Jeanne.”

She blinked at me. “Jeanne?”

“She was a whore on D Street.”

Ginny frowned as if she were trying to place the name. It was a small town and she had lived here nearly as long as Jeanne. I knew they had to know of each other. “You mean that coal-black girl who worked Shantytown?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought you said you got the gun from a safe.”

“It’s a long story, Ginny. I just want to know how you fit in.”

She flung back the covers and got out of bed. She was moving with great purpose. “Where’s the man now?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I have to find out. I thought maybe you could help me.”

“How can I help you?” She grabbed her dress off the chair that she had lain it on the night before.

“Tell me what the connection is between the guns.”

She pulled the dress over her head, then keeping it bunched around her shoulders, stepped out of her nightdress. I couldn’t see her face when she said, “How should I know?”

“The matching gun, Ginny.”

“I told you. I bought it at a pawn shop.” She slipped her head through the dress. Her hair was mussed. “You believe me, don’t you?”

I stared at her, this woman I thought I knew well. I didn’t believe her, and I didn’t like the way I had started thinking. The way she woke up on edge, the fact that she always kept the gun near her, the difficulty she’d had initially trusting me or any man.

“Where’d you get the gun, Ginny?”

She blinked, looked away, then shook her head. “Don’t ask me any more. You’re not going to like what I have to say.”

“What I like and don’t like doesn’t matter, Ginny. Where’d you get the gun.”

She leaned against the wall, her head narrowly missing the crucifix she had put up there when we got married. “From a dead man.”

Somehow that didn’t surprise me. “Who?”

She swallowed, closed her eyes, and bowed her head. “Sam’s father.”

***

He’d been a decorated officer in the Confederate Army. He’d returned to Atlanta on a short leave around Christmas, 1862. That was when he’d forcibly raped Ginny and left her pregnant with Sam. Sam was born in August 1863 and she found she didn’t care how he was conceived. He was her boy. She made up a husband, a father for Sam—Russ Lysander, tragically killed at Gettysburg, the man she’d always told me about—and prepared to leave Atlanta as soon as she was healthy enough.

It took her some time to regain her strength after the birth. By November of 1863, she was ready to leave. But as she was figuring out how best to travel with an infant, she ran into Sam’s father again.

He had returned to Atlanta on Jefferson Davis’s business. Somehow—Ginny wasn’t real clear about this—Sam’s father managed to overpower her and take her to his home where he tried to rape her again. Only this time, she managed to get his gun.

She shot him, point-blank range, through the heart. He was dead before he hit the floor.

Then, she said, her voice oddly emotionless, she robbed him—took his gold wedding band, the diamond earrings he’d given his wife, some pieces of silver—spoons, a small box, and napkin rings. She also took the Confederate bank notes from his pocket, and the gold coins he’d stashed in his safe, and she used all of that to make her way west.

As she told me all of this, she met my gaze. It was as if she didn’t care what I thought—she would always be proud of what she had done.

“Who’s the man with the second gun?” I asked.

“His son.”

I waited for her to tell me his name.

Her lips thinned. “Beau Lewis.”

We stared at each other for a long moment. I could see the fear and hesitation behind her bravado. She wanted me to reassure her that I still loved her, even though she had killed someone, even though she’d been defiled. Neither of those things mattered to me.

What mattered was that she hadn’t trusted me enough to tell me either of them until now.

“May I have my gun?” she asked.

“You don’t need it,” I said.

“And if he somehow finds out I’m in town?”

“You’re not using the same name, are you?” That question was as much for me as it was for her.

She shook her head once.

“Then you’ll be all right.”

“I don’t like to be without it, Will.” A plaintive note to her voice, just the hint of begging.

I handed her the gun. “Stay inside. I’ll be back soon.”

“How’re you going to find him?” she asked.

“If what you say is true, then this gun means something to him. He’ll come back for it.” I slipped the extra gun in my pocket. “And I’ll be waiting for him.”

***

Whorehouses were quiet places in the daytime. The girls usually slept long past noon, and no clients appeared before dark. Things began to become active in the afternoons at a well-run place like Lucinda’s—people ate, cleaned, shopped, did all they needed to do.

I figured Lewis knew this, and would be back. I had only a few hours in which to catch him.

By the time I arrived back at Lucinda’s, Travis had fallen asleep in the chair by the door. Muller for once was awake and alert, but hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary.

I relieved him, locked and jammed the back door, ordered Lucinda to keep the girls upstairs, and then I unlocked the front door. I positioned myself between the front door and the safe, my Colt resting on my leg with my hand covering it.

Sure enough, long about 9 a.m., I heard rustling outside. My grip tightened on the Colt, and I fished in my pocket for the Derringer. The door opened, and a man sidled inside.

He was gaunt and blond, his hair ragged, his face careworn. He wore a threadbare gray coat, his hands in its pockets, ruining its shape.

“Come back for this?” I asked, holding up the Derringer.

He froze, one hand on the jamb of the open door. Sunlight framed him, making him look as if he were outlined in light. “I left in a hurry last night.”

He had a soft Southern accent, not as coarse as I had imagined from Elly’s description. He sounded educated.

“I bet you did. A man usually doesn’t stick around when he murders someone in cold blood.”

To my surprise, he didn’t even try to bolt. “You the sheriff?”

“I’m the mayor.”

“Then you should know why I did what I did. That nigra girl, she murdered my daddy.”

“Did she now?”

“Yes, sir. After the Devil Lincoln issued his illegal declaration freeing all the slaves in a country he no longer ruled, she let herself into the house, took one of my daddy’s guns from his matched set, and shot him with it. Then she told all her people to run away. Thank the good Lord some of them stayed to tell me about it when I came home more’n a year ago.”

I felt cold. “You’re sure this was Jeanne?”

“Her name wasn’t Jeanne. It was Jubilee. She took my dead momma’s name when she pawned my family’s silver in St. Louis and signed onto the wagon train. That’s how I tracked her here.”

“Your momma’s name?” I had to brace my arm so that the hand holding the Colt didn’t shake.

“Virginia Lysander.”

I felt as if I were encased in a shell.

“I take it,” I said flatly, “you never met the woman who murdered your father.”

“Oh, I seen her,” he said. “She was ours, after all.”

“But you don’t remember her,” I said, “and you didn’t ask for her by name when you came here.”

“What is this?” He stepped further inside. “Why should I ask for her by name? She’d already changed it twice. I just asked where the town’s nigra women were. I was told there was only one.”

“And?” My throat was dry.

“She recognized me same time as I recognized her.” He held out his hands. “I was telling you this because I thought you was a reasonable man. I wasn’t willing to take her back to Georgia for trial. Laws’ve changed, and I didn’t want to travel with a darkie, not in today’s world. Surely, you can see that.”

“I can.”

“So you can give me my daddy’s gun, I’ll leave your fair city, and we’ll pretend this conversation never happened.”

I stood. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

“Whyever not?”

“You just reminded me,” I said as I approached him. “Laws have changed.”

“It’s Biblical. An eye for an eye. Justice has been done.”

“No, it hasn’t,” I said, fishing for my handcuffs. “Murder’s a hanging offense in Hope’s Pass.”

“She was a nigra, a murderess, and a whore. Ain’t no one gonna miss her.”

“I can think of at least two people who will,” I said as I cuffed his hands behind his back.

I led him into the sunshine. As we stepped onto D Street, I wasn’t surprised to see Ginny, standing alone in the dust, her Derringer out and pointed at Lewis.

“Go home, honey,” I said, feeling more weary than I’d ever felt in my life, hoping that Lewis wouldn’t realize the mistake he’d made.

But his face flushed an angry red. “Ruby,” he said in soft recognition. “Son of a bitch. You and Jubilee done this together.”

“Step aside, Will,” she said to me. “I don’t want my shot to go wild and hit you.”

“Ginny, honey, this isn’t right.”

Lewis gave me an odd sideways look.

“It’s right that he killed Jube?” she asked.

“He’s going to hang for that.”

“He’s gonna ruin our lives, Will.”

“What the hell’s she talking about?” Lewis asked me. “You got something with this woman?”

“She’s my wife,” I said softly.

“Tarnation, man, don’t you know what she’s done? She’s been passin’. She was one of our house niggers from the time she was old enough to carry.”

“Shut up!” Ginny waved the gun at him.

“She’s been lying to you,” he said in that sly voice. “All these years, making you think she’s something she’s not.”

“Move aside, Will,” she said again.

“She used you to make her greater than she was. And now you know what she is. A killer, an animal, no better than a snake.”

That frozen feeling was still with me. All of this felt like it was happening to someone else.

“Will.” Ginny sounded panicked. “I don’t care what you think of me. But what about Sam? The baby?”

Sam, with his gray, trusting eyes, and my daughter, whose black hair had more curl than I’d ever seen in a baby. Curly black hair and skin so white it made mine seem dark.

I reached into my pocket for the handcuff key. My hand was shaking. I wasn’t thinking. I was just acting.

I unlocked his cuffs and walked away, leaving her with her single-shot pistol alone with him and his knife.

***

She had left the children by themselves. The baby was crying in her crib, drool coming from her sore gums. Her diaper was wet. I changed it by rote, then cradled her against me and looked into her black, black eyes.

I could see it now, of course, now that I was looking. The curl of her hair, the darkness of her eyes, the twist of her features in a way that I had once thought particularly Ginny. Amazing that I’d missed it before.

Sam was tugging on me, his face splotchy. He’d been crying too, although, at three, he was too big a man to admit it. I crouched down and hugged him to me, and willed the numb feeling to go away.

I was afraid of what I’d find underneath it. Loathing for Ginny, for me. I’d always despised men who used their slave women, like my father had used his. I’d walked away from that life ten years before, wanting no part of it, content to sit out the war in the West and watch the casualties roll by.

I didn’t figure I’d have some of its victims in my own house.

Sam was a bright little boy, full of pluck and energy. He didn’t deserve half a life. And neither did the baby, her whole future ahead of her.

Maybe, on some level, I could understand what Ginny had done. And why she had to lie to me.

I could understand it, but I wasn’t sure I could ever forgive her.

***

She came home about a half hour later, her eyes haunted. The blood that spattered the bottom of her skirt told me she’d had to use Lewis’s knife to finish the job—her shot had only wounded him.

The baby was quiet. Sam was watching us from the doorway.

I led her into our bedroom, careful not to touch her, and closed the door.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“I left him on the street.” Her voice was low. “Someone’ll find him.”

“And come get me.”

She nodded. “But if you don’t make something of it, no one else will.”

She was right. No one would care, and everyone would have their own version of what happened. Some might even credit me.

In an odd way, they would be right. Because I wasn’t going to speak up. As Lewis had said, justice had been done.

“You want to tell me the truth now?” I asked. “I deserve to know.”

Ginny looked away, her expression sad. Then she closed her eyes, and took us both back to the past.

***

When she was sixteen, Lewis’s father visited her for the first time. When she was seventeen, she had his child. She had another child the next year, and the next, and when it became clear that she preferred motherhood to her duties, the children were sold as part of a package to a nearby plantation and she never saw them again.

She was pregnant with Sam when word of the Emancipation Proclamation hit. She stole the derringer, and waited, shooting Lewis’s father as he pressed down on her in the dark.

Jeanne heard the shot, and was the one who thought of taking the money, the silver, the rings. Together the women left, making their way north, helping each other survive.

Sam was born in New York, the first free child in Ginny’s family. It was there she realized that unless she was seen with Jeanne, everyone thought she and Sam were white.

She sold one of the spoons and left in the middle of the night for St. Louis, not telling Jeanne where she was going. She invented Russ Lysander and his untimely death, and received treatment beyond her dreams.

Everything went well, until Jeanne turned up in Hope’s Pass. She’d followed Ginny across country. Jeanne earned part of her living at Lucinda’s and supplemented it by blackmailing my wife.

Which was why every time I saw them near each other, they looked at each other with such hate.

***

Ginny’s voice had trailed to nearly nothing. Her gaze met mine, and I saw the pleading. But Lewis’s voice echoed in my mind.

She’d murdered two men. And she’d lied to me.

There was a knock on the door. I jumped, even though I’d expected it. In the next room, the baby started to wail.

“What do we do now?” Ginny asked.

“Will!” Travis yelled from the street. “Doc says we got another situation.”

The baby’s cries had grown piercing. Sam tapped on our door. “Mommy?” he said.

Ginny’s gaze met mine and held it. I always prided myself on doing the right and honorable thing.

Only this time, I had no idea what the right and honorable thing was.

“Will!” Travis yelled.

I could see fear in her face, fear greater than any I’d seen before. I sighed.

“Change your clothes,” I said, “and feed the children. I have no idea when I’ll be back.”

I pulled open the bedroom door. Sam launched himself at my leg, and held it so tight that he nearly cut off circulation. He would grow up slender like his uncle. He’d have the same gray eyes, the same deep voice.

I slipped my hand on his head, feeling his thin straight hair.

Ginny was watching us, her hands clasped together.

“And make sure you’re here when I get home,” I said. “I want to have dinner with my family tonight.”

Her breath caught. I could see her fighting to stay calm. “What happens next, Will?” she asked, her voice soft. “To us?”

I stroked Sam’s hair. We had only one choice. “We put the past behind us, Ginny, like all people who come West.”

Her smile was thin, but there was hope in her eyes. Maybe there was hope in mine as well.

“Will!” Travis yelled from below.

I nodded at her, kissed our son as I extracted him from my leg, and went downstairs to clean up Ginny’s mess.

Death on D Street

Copyright © by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

Cover and layout copyright ©  WMG Publishing

Cover design by WMG Publishing

Cover art copyright © Philcold/Dreamstime

 

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

 

https://kriswrites.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Consecrated-Ground-Book-Trailer-Small-.mp4

Here’s the book trailer, specifically designed to feature the Kickstarter, for my noir novel, Consecrated Ground. This is the novel that I mentioned on Tuesday, the one that the original editor slapped an offensive title on (which stuck for nearly two decades). I’m using the original title.

This novel is historical through and through, although, like its compatriot in the Kickstarter, the novel straddles two different timelines. Memory and crime feature in both novels.

There’s also a short story collection in the Kickstarter, and it has some previously unpublished stories. Readers who are in my newsletter told me they wanted to see more short story collections, so I’m working diligently to give them what they asked for.

I hope the trailer interests you enough to send you to the Kickstarter. Consecrated Ground won’t be available anywhere but the Kickstarter for several months. So if you want to get a copy early, head on over now.

https://kriswrites.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Candid-Shots-Kickstarter-low-quality.mp4

We’re running a Kickstarter as of about five minutes ago. It features a brand-new crime novel that I hesitate to call historical, because part of the book is set now. I’m proud of that book, Candid Shots of the 1970s, but it also surprised me. I thought it was going to be a short story, but the characters took off with it, and told me a story that I did not expect. Yep, that’s how I spent my December holidays, listening to characters tell me about an afternoon on a Minnesota lake that turned into a massively traumatic experience by evening.

The second novel appeared under a different title. It was published in the 1990s, reprinted in the early part of this century, and got great reviews. The first editor also gave it an offensive title that I will not use here, even to tell you which novel it is. This one is a true historical, with a crime in the center. And it’s noir, so expect dark. We’re reissuing it with the original title, Consecrated Ground.

The final book in the Kickstarter is a collection of short stories, two of which are brand-new. There are some award nominees in the collection as well. I think you’ll all have a lot of fun with this one.

In addition, there’s a mix of workshops and other mystery short fiction collections. So you can find all sorts of reading.

The video above is for the Kickstarter itself, and gives you a good sampling of what’s in it.

Head on over. The Kickstarter will run until Thursday, April 16, but the sooner we hit our goal, the sooner we start on the stretch goals. Then you’ll get even more reading—and, if we get to the upper level of the Kickstarter, an online workshop that I put together last year. Here’s the link!

After a vicious attack, Louisa wants her life back. She takes the first step in her new home, filled with art and mementos, high in the hills, on a beautiful dark night. A night that will take an ugly turn. A night no one ever anticipated.

“Hot Water” is free on this site for one week only. If you like this crime story, you might like my other crime stories. A Kickstarter for my latest crime novel, Candid Shots of the 1970s, will run from Tuesday, April 7, until Thursday, April 16. There you can get the new novel as well as Consecrated Ground, a novel that hasn’t seen print in 15 years, and a brand-new collection of short crime stories (although this one is not included). Click here to look at the Kickstarter.

If you just want a copy of this story, download it on any e-book site or by clicking here. Enjoy!

Hot Water Kristine Kathryn Rusch

“You sure, honey?” Steve asked, hand on the brass doorknob. The foyer was dark and a bit too warm, carrying the day’s heat. “The Sandersons invited you too.”

Louisa brushed his curling hair out of his collar and straightened his suit jacket. “It’s okay,” she said, trying to keep the impatience from her voice. Steve wanted to include her, but this time she didn’t want to be included. She had been waiting for this night. “I’ve had a long week. I just want to be alone and relax.”

“All right.” He kissed her, almost missing her mouth, and pulled her close for a brief moment. “I’ll be back around midnight.”

She put her hand on top of his and pulled the oak door open. “No hurry. I’ll probably be asleep when you get here.”

He kissed her again, on the forehead this time, and walked out. She followed him onto the porch. Twilight had just settled in the valley, giving the trees a gray, shadowy edge. A cool breeze made the branches rustle. The frogs had started their evening chorus from the pond halfway down the driveway, and from overhead, a bird gave a good-bye chirp.

“Wish I were staying here with you,” Steve said. “It’s a great night.”

She smiled, but said nothing. She had been waiting for this evening alone for almost two weeks. She wanted nothing to spoil it. Steve squeezed her shoulder, then hurried down the wood stairs to the flagged path. They had only been in the house a few months, and it still needed work, but Louisa loved it.  If she strained, she could hear cars passing on the road over a mile away, but that was the only sound of civilization — except at midnight, when the distant whistle from the mill announced the arrival of third shift.

Steve hurried down the walk and opened the door on their car, a champagne-colored Porsche covered with dust from the gravel drive. He had been threatening to pave the driveway and to buy a truck, claiming that the Porsche was too expensive to suffer the nicks of tiny rocks churning beneath the wheels.

Someday he would decide the car was too expensive to drive.

The car roared to a start and made its way around the curving slope of the drive, through the trees. Louisa leaned against the wobbly wood railing and watched as the headlights grew smaller along the mile-long gravel drive.

No lights shone in the valley. The house just down the hill had been abandoned years ago. The three neighboring houses — the ones she could see sprawled on their individual twenty acres — had the clean look of a place with owners out of town. On Labor Day weekend, she could count on everyone being away.

She sighed and stretched, feeling the knots in her back pop. She couldn’t get more alone than this.

Still, she needed darkness. She slipped back inside and pulled the heavy door closed behind her. Then she shut off the porch light and the light illuminating the huge foyer.

Her hands were shaking.

The only way to conquer fear is to face it.  Her therapist’s voice echoed in her head. Roger wanted her to do this. He wanted her to take charge of her life. Now that you know why the fear exists, you can control it. It doesn’t have to control you.

Right.

She glanced at the stairs. Up there was her office, the safest place in the house. She could go there and grab a book, climb into the easy chair and while the hours away.

Or she could stay down here and face herself.

She walked to the kitchen, avoiding the bathroom and its mirror. The kitchen light was still on, illuminating the hand carved cookie jar she and Steve had bought on their honeymoon. Dishes dried in the rack, the long knife Steve had used to carve the beef resting on its side next to the plates.

Everything looked normal here. Everything was normal, except her. At least Steve had patience. He loved her. He had known even before they married that she would never take off her clothes for him, that she couldn’t stand to be naked in front of anyone. They made love in the dark with her nightgown pushed around her waist, his gentle fingers stroking her breasts through the fabric.

He loved her, but she could see in his eyes that sometimes he wanted more. Just once he wanted to see her, all of her, at the same time.

She flicked off the light switch over the phone. The fluorescent held their light for a moment, then went dark.  She walked into the breakfast nook and stared through the glass paned doors at the hot tub.

Even with the lights off, she could see it clearly, a big ungainly structure sitting in the middle of her backyard. A deck Steve had built circled it, with a rack to one side for their towels. He liked sitting nude in the water. He said it was one of the most sensual experiences in the world.

Her heart pounded in her throat. She hadn’t been this nervous since the first time she made a sales presentation nearly six years before. Roger had helped her overcome stage fright. Now he was helping her with this.

You need to face your fear, he said, each week. Next week, she wanted to go into his office and tell him she had.

She stepped back from the door and pulled her t-shirt off over her head. Her hair got caught in the neck, and for one suffocating moment, she couldn’t get free. She struggled, then pulled, willing to rip the shirt to free herself from the fabric. Finally, she was out, and she flung the shirt away from her.

It fluttered like a bird mid-flight, and landed gently on the sofa. Her body shook. She hadn’t been that trapped since (he grabbed her and threw her against the sand, the hot granules digging into her bare back. He wrapped his towel around her face and arms, pinning her in place—) No. She wouldn’t remember that. He had no place in this house. His memory, and the memory of his touch, were the things she was trying to get rid of.

She took a deep breath and made herself calm down. Then she slipped out of her shorts and panties, leaving them in a pool on the floor. She wrapped a towel around her waist, stepped into her thongs, and opened the back door.

Cool air caressed her skin, raising goose bumps. She loved the mountains. No matter how hot it was in the day, the nights were always comfortable, the breeze always fresh. She closed the door behind her and stood on the wooden back porch, letting the night woo her with its promise of secrecy.

She didn’t feel naked yet. The towel was enough protection. An owl hooted nearby, adding its voice to that of the frogs. At the base of the driveway, a car swooshed past, its sound little more than a reminder that other people lived in the world. The trees rustled around her as the wind caught the leaves.

Natural sounds. Safe sounds.

She took a deep breath and walked down the creaky wood stairs to the stone pathway Steve had built. The stones tilted to the left, down the hill, and she had to hold her arms out to maintain her balance.  The towel shifted precariously against her skin. She grabbed the top with one hand and nearly fell. Only Steve seemed able to walk across the stones without stumbling. She walked the rest of the way on the grass.

The tub made a low humming sound, so faint she only heard it when she was up close. Sometimes it clicked off, and she was left with complete silence.

Dew had formed on the tub’s plastic cover, leaving little trickles in the dust. The edge was cool to her fingers. She grabbed a side and pushed it back, not willing to take the entire cover off. She had tried to put the cover back on by herself once, and pulled a muscle in her back.

Steam rose off the surface of the water, and the biting scent of chlorine filled the air. Her heartbeat speeded up and her breath came in shallow gasps. Almost there. Almost.

The wooden stairs leading up to the deck were sturdier than the steps on the porch. Steve had built the deck out of cedar and the faint woodsy scent mingling with the chlorine made her think of him. She clung to that thought like the railing, maintaining her balance, giving her strength.

When she reached the top of the deck, she stopped, hands clutching the towel to her breasts.

The mountains across the valley were inky shadows against the dark horizon. No cars passed. Even the white glare from the mill was missing — it had shut down for the holiday. Occasional bursts of steam obscured her view like tiny clouds. Crickets had joined the frogs, and the breeze had an extra bite away from the house.

Alone. She was alone.

Carefully, she undid the knot holding the towel in place. The air kissed the sweat between her breasts and her body went rigid.

(He had smiled at first, friendly as she was, another nudist on a nude beach. The alcove didn’t seem private. Over the rocks, she could see her friends playing volleyball. But her screams mingled with the cry of seagulls, masked by their laughter, and no one found her until hours later, huddled in a small sunburned ball, nearly dehydrated from the sun.)

She had been wrong to go for heat. Heat would bring the memory back. Heat would make things worse.

Excuses. The memory was back, and would haunt her each time her skin was bare. Every morning before she got in the shower, she saw his face. She didn’t want to see his face any more.

Face it. Face your fear. Once you face it, no one will ever be able to hurt you again.

She hung the towel on the railing and immediately sat down at the edge of the tub, her feet in the water. The warmth made her toes ache, but she ignored it and slide inside, feeling covered by water, not quite as visible as she had been a moment before.

She didn’t move for a long time. Then she tilted her face toward the sky. She was doing it. She was sitting alone, under the stars, naked. Absolutely naked.

Free.

A tiny feeling of elation pushed aside her fear, and she breathed into it. Free.  She smiled and then stood. The chill tickled her heat-covered skin: she had never felt so sensual, so alive before. She ran her hands along her wet skin. He had had no right to touch her that way. Touch felt good.

It felt good.

And she was free.

***

She didn’t know how long she stood there, letting the breeze caress her in places her husband had never seen. The moon had moved across the sky, and wispy clouds appeared to the west.

Steve would be home sometime soon. And she would be waiting for him. Completely, gloriously nude.

She slipped back into the water and let its warmth relax her. Roger had been right. It had been so easy, but it had taken so long to get the courage. Even then, she knew. One false statement on Steve’s part, one wrong move, and she would have to do it all over again.

Unless she prepared herself. Unless she sat in the darkness and thought all the problems through. He would be startled, surprised to find her in the tub. He might comment on that. He might say her name softly, in a voice filled with awe. He might ask if she was okay.

A twig snapped. She stiffened, heart pounding. The sound had come from the front of the house. She swallowed, and listened closely. A faint rustle. Soft movements in the bramble.

Deer.

A week after they had bought the house, the tub was finally clean enough and warm enough to use. Steve took off his suit, looking glorious in the moonlight. She wore hers as she slipped into the water. They had held hands under water and stared at the stars for what seemed like hours before they heard something behind them.

She had tried to sit up, but Steve had held her still. “Deer,” he whispered. He put a finger to his mouth and turned carefully, without disturbing the water. Then he touched her shoulder and pointed. A doe stood just behind them, upwind, ears twitching. Finally she ignored them and began eating from the apple tree at the edge of the yard.

Deer.

Louisa made herself take a deep breath. Of course she was on edge. She would be until she got used to being without clothes again. Once she could be naked with strangers — at a nude beach, up in the hot springs, at hot tub parties when she worked in California — then it had all disappeared in the space of an afternoon, while she screamed, with hot granules of sand digging into her back.

She was safe now.

It was over.

She was free.

She leaned back in the water and rested her head on the tub’s plastic side. By the time Steve got home, her body would be shriveled and wrinkled. She smiled. Then he couldn’t judge it. Then he couldn’t decide that the woman he had married had one of the uglier bodies on the planet.

A light went on in the house.

Louisa sat up, water sloshing around her. Steve wasn’t home. She would have heard the car. She would have seenthe car, coming up the drive. No timers on the lights, because they felt no need for them. No one could see the house from the road. Sometimes they even went away and left the house unlocked.

Someone was inside.

A stranger was inside her house.

A man crossed the foyer. He was bigger than Steve and muscular. His shoulders, in shadow, looked like they could carry the world without dropping it. Another, smaller man followed him.

A light went on in the living room.

What were they doing? Waiting for her? No. The house was dark. They thought no one was home. They were looking for something. But they hadn’t brought a car, probably so that they wouldn’t caught on that circular driveway.  No car. She would have heard it. Something they could carry. Not the Dali in the living room nor the Degas in the den.

(Although they could cut the paintings out of the frame and roll them. Carrying tubes would be easy, even in the dark.)

The safe held extra money and her jewels, mostly her costume jewels. The real ones were in a safety deposit box in a bank downtown.

Except for the emerald. The antique emerald her grandmother had given her. The one the photographer for Smithsonian had photographed for the article they were doing on family heirlooms. The one that had been reproduced in papers all over the state.

It certainly wasn’t the most valuable jewel they had, but it was the most famous.

They must have been planning this for a long time. She thought she had heard a car earlier, down by the abandoned house. Steve had said she imagined it.

Steve was wrong.

Her heart pounded in her throat. They were in the living room. They didn’t know she was there. If she eased the lid back over the tub and crouched under it, she would have enough air to last for several hours.

But that might make too much noise. She was probably better if she didn’t move at all.

(Then they would find her and pull her out and hold her on the cedar boards, the wood digging into her naked back—)

No. She had to get away now. But her clothes were inside and Steve had the car.

Steve. What happened if he came home while they were in the living room. It would take them time. The safe was behind the heavy oak bookcases. They had to take the books off the cases, move the cases and figure out the combination.

(Mixed birthdays — her month, Steve’s day, the combination of their years: 6-10-56. Impossible to guess unless they knew. Unless they had a stethoscope like in the movies, a man who ran an emery board against his fingertips so that they would be sensitive—)

She was panicking, thinking nonsense instead of finding a way to save herself. The Holts lived half a mile down the drive. They rarely locked their house. She could go inside, use their phone, have the police catch the men in the act.

And she would be safe.

They didn’t know she was here. They wouldn’t know she had escaped.

Deep breath. Deep breath. Move quietly. Do not stir the water.

She moved her hand underneath the water, and braced herself against the seat.  A shadow fell across the living room window, but no one else moved in the foyer.  She brought her other hand out and grabbed the lid.

Water dripped, sending echoey pings through the yard.

Her heart rate increased, but she didn’t move. They couldn’t hear the pings. She couldn’t hear anyone in the hot tub unless the windows were open, and she kept them all closed.

She stood. The cold breeze raised goose bumps on her body —

And she froze. She couldn’t get out. They would see her. They would see all of her and —

She had to. She had to. It was the only way to save herself.

Maybe she could crawl back in. It wouldn’t take too much effort to pull the lid down and she would have enough air for hours. She would be safe there, and no one would see her. No one would notice that she was nude…

Another shadow moved across the living room window. She sank back into the hot water. In a minute, they would turn on the outside light, and see her. She wasn’t safe. Not here. Not now.

Face your fear, Roger had said.

If only he had known.

Her body was shaking so badly she was making little ripples in the water.  Out. She would only be naked for an instant. Long enough for her to grab her towel, wrap it around herself and get off the deck.

But to get to the driveway from here, she had to either go down a path beneath the living room or walk through six feet of brush. Snapping twigs and crackling branches. They would hear. They would find her.

She had to try.

She eased herself out of the water again, eyes closed, imagining Roger’s face, hearing his voice with its calm confidence. Face your fear, Louisa. That’s the only way it will disappear.

Her torso was out, breasts exposed to the night air. The breeze kissed the water droplets. Her shaking had grown.

Face your fear.

She braced her hands on the side of the tub, and pulled herself up until her buttocks rested on the lukewarm plastic. Then she slid back, feet still in the water, until the plastic turned to wood. The cedar of the deck. She reached over, grabbed the towel, and wrapped it around herself.

Then she opened her eyes.

A man stood in the kitchen, staring out the double paned doors. Staring at her.

She held back a scream, finally understanding how the doe had felt when she approached the apple tree. The man picked up a knife, and set it down, then opened the cupboards.

He hadn’t seen her.

He couldn’t see her. The kitchen light was on. He couldn’t see what was going on in the yard. In the darkness.

She pulled her legs out of the water, careful not to make a sound. With her right hand, she tied the towel in place. With her left, she grabbed her thongs and slid them on her wet feet. She glanced at the house and the path. Lights from the kitchen and the living room illuminated it. If someone looked out, he would see her, crouching by. Besides, going that way was the opposite direction. She had to go down. Away.

She climbed off the deck and paused for a moment, wondering if she should put the lid on. Too much time. And too much risk of noise. She had to get away. She had to disappear before they realized that under the towel she was —

She wouldn’t think about it.

The dry grass crunched beneath her feet. Each step sounded like a peal of thunder. She went around the large oak tree, using it for support as she slipped into the bushes.

Her towel caught on a thorn, nearly pulling it loose. She yanked, and the bush shook. She waited. Nothing changed inside the house.

She took a few more steps down. She could see the gravel, glinting in the moonlight. Up the driveway stood the carport with nothing in it. They had parked somewhere else. They had planned this.

They thought she was gone, with Steve, until midnight.

She let go of the oak tree and grabbed a blackberry bush, wincing as thorns bit into her palm. A few more feet and she would make it. A few more feet and she would run for her life.

A twig snapped beneath her thongs.

“Jesus!” a voice boomed from the house. “What was that?”

Another voice responded, and then the voices grew silent again. She huddled, knees against her chest. No doors opened. No one came down.

She was okay. As long as she didn’t step on anything else.

She made herself count to one hundred before moving again. She stayed low, letting the blackberry bushes protect her. Nothing snapped beneath her feet. She crossed the expanse of grass until she reached the gravel —

— which shuffled like an explosion against the silence of the night.

Another light went on in the house. She swallowed heavily. They would find her. They would find her and hold her —

She kicked off the thongs and ran down the side of the road, on the unmowed grass. Rocks pierced her bare feet, but she willed it not to hurt. It wasn’t going to hurt. It couldn’t hurt.

The back door opened.

” —told you I heard something.”

And the porch light went on.

“Good God. There’s someone here.”

“No. There’s no car —”

“Lid’s up. The damn tub’s steaming. And there’s footprints.”

She reached the fork in the driveway. Her bare foot landed on gravel and slid out from under her. She fell, gravel moving her forward. A grunt escaped her, and pain ran up her left side. Rocks had imbedded themselves in her legs and buttocks —

(like grains of sand)

— but she made herself stand up and keep running.

“Down there!”

The men crashed through the brambles. She ran downhill, gaining speed with each movement. One wrong step and she would fall on her face. Gravel flew behind her and her feet felt like lacerated sores.

“I’ll get the car. You see if you can spot him.”

Not the car. If they had the car, they would find her. But she had reached the bottom of the hill and the clearing. She only had a few more yards before she reached her neighbor’s house.

“Leave the damn car. It’s too far away. There’s nowhere he can go.”

Other footsteps followed her.  She rounded the corner, and vaulted the gate, losing her towel. She stopped, reached for it, but couldn’t grab it. The tall man was crashing down the road, looking even bigger in the moonlight. He saw her.

It was the towel or escape.

A whimper left her throat. She needed that towel, needed the cover, needed —

— the phone. The police. Help of some sort.

She took a deep breath and left the towel where it fell, ran up the dirt walk and onto the porch.

Please let the door be open. Please.

She grabbed the knob and yanked. The door opened, and she nearly stumbled backwards. She went inside and pulled it closed, locking it behind her.

The phone was on the kitchen counter. She had used it once before hers was installed. She grabbed it, thumbed the buttons, counted, and found 911.

It rang once.

“Nine-one-one, may I help you?”

“Yes. Men have broken into my house. They’ve chased me down to the neighbor’s. They’re coming up the walk now. I need someone out here as fast as possible.”

The doorknob rattled. She stepped back, fear making her entire body cold.

” —located at 6611 Aker Road?”

Her neighbor’s address. “Yes. He’s at the door. Can someone hurry?”

“There’s a car in your area.”

A face pressed against the glass of the sliding patio doors. Shit. She hadn’t checked the locks on any of the other doors. Even if the door was locked, all he had to do was break the glass.

“Please hurry,” she said. “Please.”

“Someone will be there as fast as possible, miss. In the meantime, stay on the line —”

She set the phone down and groped behind her. Damn. She should have paid more attention when she was down here. Knives on the sideboard? No. But she needed something. Anything.

She reached up and her hand brushed something metal above the stove. Skillets. Cast iron. Heavy. She pulled the biggest one down as he yanked the patio door open.

He held up her towel. “Forget something?”

She froze, seeing not him, but the man who had grabbed her on the beach. A big man, bigger than this one, smiling. She couldn’t see his face now, in the dark.  But he was probably smiling too.

Her breath was coming heavy, her chest heaving. She had to move. Had to. He had already seen her naked. He had already done the worst he could do. Help was on the way. All she had to do was hold him off until it arrived.

A tinny voice echoed from the phone. He came closer, shaking the towel. “Thought you were smart, didn’t you? Thought we would never find you. Wet feet leave footprints, miss.”

Her arms ached from holding the skillet. She backed up until the wood counter dug into her back. She was breathing through her mouth, the air whistling between her teeth.

“Scared, huh? You got nothing to be scared about. Not yet. Not till my partner gets here.”

He hadn’t seen the phone then. In this dark corner of the kitchen, he probably could barely see her at all. He came forward, waving the towel like a bull fighter waved a flag.

“Hope you’re pretty. I like pretty women.”

Pretty. He had said that before. On the beach. She could smell him, the sweaty oniony scent of an overweight man. He would touch her and this time, sand wouldn’t dig into her back. The counter would.

And she was naked, just like she had been the first time.

“Got you trapped,” he said. He reached out and she swung the skillet at him, catching him full on the side of the head. The metal rang. He grunted and fell against the counter. The towel landed on her feet, the soft weave tickling the skin. She kicked it aside. He moaned again, and reached for the counter to pull himself up. She brought the skillet down, harder this time, and he collapsed against the floor.

A voice was yelling, outside. A man’s voice. She held the skillet against her shoulder like a bat, and stalked to the door. The other man stood in the driveway, his body silhouetted in the moonlight. He glanced in all directions, unable to see her or his friend. He was shouting his companion’s name — a word she couldn’t quite catch.

And then she heard sirens.

He wouldn’t find her if she kept quiet. But she had to protect herself. She had to make sure the other one wouldn’t wake up. She walked back in the kitchen. He hadn’t moved. He huddled in a near-fetal position, one arm trapped under his head. She crouched over him, skillet poised, like a child about to smash a bug.

The tinny voice still spoke from the phone. Even though she couldn’t hear the words, the sound comforted her. Someone was there. Someone was listening. The sirens grew louder.  Flashing red and blue lights illuminated the kitchen. Something dark streaked the side of the counter. The man’s hair had matted against his skull. His breath was raspy, difficult, as if his nose were plugged.

The door behind her opened and a light came on. She stood and whirled at the same time, skillet clutched tightly in both hands.

A policeman stood there, hands out. “It’s okay, ma’am. I’m here to help.”

She didn’t move. He came across the carpet slowly, facing her as he walked. He knelt beside the man and touched his matted hair. His fingers came away bloody. Two other policemen came in the doorway.

“He’s breathing,” the first policeman said. “But we’ll need some help.”

One of the others went back out the door. The first policeman stood. “We caught the other man on the road. You’re safe now. That was some pretty quick thinking.”

Her arms trembled under the skillet’s weight. She didn’t want to let it go. It was her protection. He came closer, reaching for her.

“It’s okay. You’re safe now.”

“Your husband’s outside,” said the other policeman. “We met him as we were turning into the driveway. He wants to see you.”

Steve? She felt as if she were surfacing from a very deep sleep. Everything had to be okay if Steve was there. She loosened her grip on the skillet, and the policeman took it away from her as if he was afraid she would use it.

“Come on,” he said gently. “You’re safe with us. Do you have anything…?”

For a moment, she didn’t know what he meant. Then she glanced back at the man on the floor. His left hand lay flat on the towel. She shook her head.

He nodded to the other policeman who went into the bedroom. He returned carrying a pink chenille bedspread. With one hand, he extended it. She took it, and wrapped it around herself, wondering at the need for it. Would it embarrass them if she went outside naked?

“You hurt?” the first policeman asked.

She shook her head.

“Your husband’s outside,” the second one repeated.

They wanted her out of the house. Away from the man. That was good. She didn’t want to be near him anymore. She had shown him. She had finally shown him that he couldn’t hurt her, that he had no more power over her.

The night air was colder than she remembered. Five squad cars had squeezed into the small lawn, one parked on the baby pool near the swing set. Uniformed men huddled outside, talking. Steve stood with them until he saw her.

“Jesus, honey.”

He came over and put his arms around her. She realized for the first time that she was trembling. He caressed her face, then stopped when he touched the bedspread. It had slipped so that it clung to her like a cape.

“You’re not wearing anything. Did he—?”

His voice broke. She knew what he saw. More months of therapy. More months of darkness, of hesitant touch.

“No,” she said.

He took his hands off her as if he had been burned. She stepped back into his arms, and leaned her head on his strong shoulder. “I mean,” she said, “that he didn’t touch me. He didn’t touch me at all.”

His body felt good against her bare skin, the rough cloth of his suit giving her comfort she didn’t know she needed. The bedspread fell, and as he reached for it, she stopped him. He finished the hug, clutching her tight, and then bent down.

“You need this,” he said and wrapped the spread around her.

She didn’t need it. Not like he thought. Not ever again. Roger had been right. She had faced the fear and conquered it.

And no one would ever be able to hurt her again.

Copyright © by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover design by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © KrisCole/Depositphotos

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Technically, the first thing I finished reading was Anton Chekov’s The Seagull for my theatre history class. I’d read both the play and the short story the first time I was in college 100,000 years ago, and didn’t like them then. I decided to give the dang thing a chance again. Still didn’t like it, but I understand it now. Also, the prof mentioned in passing that we should read the play with Hamlet in mind. I did, and wow, that helps. It also explains why I don’t like The Seagull (besides, you know, the symbolism, the suicide, the unlikeable characters). Hamlet is my least favorite Shakespeare play. Reading a later play based on Hamlet does not make me like that story any better. (Sigh.) So yes, I’m not recommending it…

I am still reading a very long, very dense novel that I’m loving, but it blocked my easy reads of lighter fare for most of the month. I read a few other things that aren’t worth recommending and are, in fact, quite forgettable. 

So…here’s what I liked in March.

 

March, 2026

Abramovich, Seth, “The History of Mel Brooks, Part One,” The Hollywood Reporter, January 29, 2026. Full disclosure: I’m not the biggest Mel Brooks fan. His humor is too broad for me. Dean has tried to make me like Blazing Saddles as long as we’ve been together, and I just don’t. I saw it when it was released, I saw it with him when we were first together, and then later, he made me watch it again. The famous fart scene? Not funny to me. This is not my kind of humor. However, I do like some of his films. Young Frankenstein is a personal favorite as is Silent Movie (which no one ever mentions), particularly the scene with Marcel Marceau. I saw The Producers on Broadway because I adore Nathan Lane. We saw the show the very first week, scoring tickets through magic. And while I found it funny, I found it funny the way I usually find Mel Brooks’ material funny: I understood the joke and wished it would make me laugh.

That said, I admire the crap out of Mel Brooks. He’s 99 now, still creating, and still moving forward. This interview is all about risk and reward, about taking chances and about staying true to your vision. The introduction says this of Brooks’ work:

Across nearly a century, Brooks has repeatedly tested the limits of taste, commerce, politics and patience. He has offended studio executives, television censors, foreign governments and polite society at large, often all at once. He also has reshaped the grammar of American comedy, leaving behind a body of work that includes The Producers, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, History of the World, Part 1, High Anxiety and Spaceballs. Several of those films were dismissed or misunderstood on arrival, only to be adored later. Others were instant detonations. All of them bear the same unmistakable fingerprint: an artist who believes that nothing is sacred except the laugh itself.

 Read this interview. It’s amazingly wonderful.

Armstrong, Kelley, Watcher in the Woods, Minotaur Books, 2019. This is the fourth Rockton novel and it does not stand alone. It starts shortly after the previous book ends. If I could have read something this dark before bed, I would have finished this book in one of those all-night marathon sessions. As it was, I read it when I could, and finished quickly. The unique setting and strong characters make both for good thrillers and fascinating reading. Start with City of the Lost and have fun.

Carter, Ally, Cross My Heart And Hope To Spy, Little, Brown, 2016 edition of a 2007 book. I love the Gallagher Girl Books. Set in a secret school for girls who are going to grow up to be spies, these books are delightfully adventurous. This time, Carter adds some rather mysterious teenage boys to the mix and a few teachers who might or might not be what they seem. This is my bedtime reading. It doesn’t usually keep me up (although the ending of this one did), but it is memorable and the characters are grand. (Btw, Books2Read malfunctions more than not for me, so you might have to find the book on your own.)

Carter, Ally, Don’t Judge a Girl by Her Cover, Little, Brown & Company, 2016 edition of a 2009 book. I blew through this book even though it’s my nighttime, don’t-stay-up-late read. Instead of one chapter, I probably read three or four per night, and then hurried through the ending because I just had to know. Carter introduces a Big Bad in this book that will factor into future books. (I know this because I’m deep in the next one.) I love the relationships the girls have with each other, and this school sounds like a great deal of fun. Books2Read malfunctioned again for me, so I don’t know if it’s the book or if it’s Books2Read (which seems to have gone downhill), but I was only able to get two links for you. If you prefer to shop elsewhere, you’ll have to look up the book on your own. Believe me, it’s worth the time.

Neville, Stuart, “Juror 8,” Ink and Daggers, edited by Maxim Jakubowski, Titan, 2023. I’m still working my way through this volume. It’s heavily noir, which I like mostly, but occasionally the stories have left me cold. Which is why I love this Stuart Neville piece. Yes, noir. Yes, dark. But the voice is marvelous and the characters so dang real. I have several Stuart Neville books on my TBR shelf and I avoid them because he is so dark. But maybe now I’m feeling up to them…

Pirandello, Luigi, Six Characters in Search of an Author, multiple publishers, first published in 1921. Well, I’m remarkably consistent. I loathed The Seagull when I read it as a twenty-year old, and I loved Six Characters back then. I love it now. It was a fun read for my theatre history class. The other students were baffled as hell by it, but I love metafiction and this is one of the first well known pieces of metafiction. It was fascinating to learn that Pirandello was friends with Mussolini. (It was also fascinating to hear the prof, who is as liberal as they come, try to justify that friendship.) The discussion was glossed over in class, but it got me thinking about the age-old argument—do you judge the author by what they do or what they’ve written. I know with Rowling, I will not support anything of hers, because she’s doing active ongoing harm at the moment. Reading an old Pirandello play, aware of all the things Mussolini would do after the two men got to know each other…well, I just want to avert my eyes. In other words, I have no justification for recommending a play from someone who was a fascist, and yet, here I am, doing it.

When a journalist on assignment visits a convention held by a fringe group who believes that teleportation has changed them—he wonders how he will manage to complete his assignment. But the more he talks to the TVSo?s, the more he becomes convinced they might not be crazy—they might just be right. 

Finalist for the Best Fiction Maggie Award given by the Western Publications Association.

“Going Native” is free on this site for one week only. You can download your own copy of the story on any e-book site or by clicking here. Enjoy!

Going Native Kristine Kathryn Rusch

 

“God, could you find a duller way to travel?” asks my leggy companion, the luscious Ruth. She has this weekend off, and she insisted on coming with me on my assignment. It’ll be fun, she said, and then followed that up with, how can I know what you’re doing unless I come along with you on occasion? I listened to the logic of that, and now I find myself trapped in a 5-foot-by-six-foot moving room with a woman who finds train travel passé.

Me, I’m afraid that the Amtrak trip up the mountain will be the best part of this assignment. I work for eight online editors, and all of them called me last week to ask for an article on the annual TVS convention. Such a uniformity of requests has only happened once before in my career, and that was when a woman that I sat beside in grade school, tormented in middle school, and dated in high school was inaugurated as president of the United States. Suddenly my memoirs had value.

Somehow, I doubt that this essay has the same sort of import.

I also had my doubts about bringing Ruth to kooksville and now, when we’re still two hours away from our destination, I know I’ve made the Wrong Decision. She is lying on the bottom berth, her bare feet against the dirty plastic wall, her skirt pooled around her waist, and she is not thinking of sex.

Neither am I.

“I mean, we’ve been on this train for hours. How did people travel like this?”

They made love, they ate, they read books. But I do not tell Ruth that. She would see it as a slap, an insult to her great intelligence. In real life, Ruth is a receptionist for a lawyer, but she prefers to call herself a paralegal. She uses legalese, mispronouncing most of it, and pretends that she knows as much as someone who has a law degree.

I’ve never told her about mine. But then, why should I? It would ruin the sleazy nature of the relationship, the fact that I’m dating her for her deliciously man-made breasts and she’s dating me because I know the secrets of the universe.

She believes that’s because I’m a journalist. The old-fashioned print kind, even though what we print is done online. I’m paid by the download, which is why I’m on this train trip instead of, say, investigating the latest bombing in downtown Seattle. No matter how idealistic you start, you soon learn that it’s paranoia that sells.

Which is why we’re on a train instead of teleporting. There are no teleportation stations in this part of the Cascades. Rumor has it that the first teleportation technician who ventured into this part of Oregon was shot. Whether he lived or died depends on which rumor you believe.

Ruth knew we were heading into no man’s land when she decided to come with me, but the closer we get the less I believe she actually understood it. I think she thought we’d look at the crazy yokels and then go home.

I think I thought she could handle anything.

Check that. I think I knew, deep down, she was contemplating Marriage, and I wanted to convince her that breaking up was her idea. But that’s hindsight. Going in, I was simply concerned about the lack of sex.

“Once,” I say, gazing out the window at the snow beside the tracks, “this was the fastest way to travel in the whole world.”

“Yeah.” She flops an arm over her eyes, missing the deer that stand by a group of trees, staring at us. A 19th century vision in the 21st. “Sad, isn’t it?”

I’m not sure. I’m enough of a romantic to enjoy the view. I’m enough of a romantic to wish that she’d enjoy it with me.

***

The assignment, if you look at it historically (which is one of the few things that I’ve retained from law school, a sense of historical perspective), is a perennial: Go look at the fringe and report back to the masses. Around the turn of the last century, that meant going to carnivals and fairs to examine the bearded women, the two-headed chickens, and the stillborn fetuses that looked like fish. In my grandfather’s day, a reporter on this beat might go to see the mysterious Area 51, thought to be a repository for Unidentified Flying Objects (things so familiar they were known by their acronym UFO) and for the little green men who flew them. Me, I get assigned the annual meeting of the Teleportation Victims Society whose own acronym is TVS, but who is known in newsrooms nationwide as TVSo?. I should’ve known I was in trouble when I tried to explain this little joke to Ruth and she’d stared at me blankly, not even threatening to smile.

The TVSo?s meet every year in Harbor, Oregon, which used to be a 1990s survivalist camp between Bend and Klamath Falls. The area’s only attraction, or so I could glean before I arrived, is that it has no teleportation station, and none is planned. If someone wants to travel in that part of the Cascade Range, they either have to go to Bend, fifty miles to the north, or Klamath Falls, over 60 miles to the south. Then they have to take whatever ground transportation is available, provided, of course, they can get it. Amtrak still serves this part of the country, partly because the sparse population can’t justify the teleportation system, and partly because the tracks have existed for nearly two hundred years. It’s the only form of public transportation between those two stations, and mostly it’s used by the low-income folks who can’t afford the cost of speedier travel.

I insisted on taking the train all the way from Seattle, over Ruth’s protests, because I wanted my experience at the annual meeting to reflect the experience of all the other TVSo?s. I had secretly hoped I’d meet a few of them on this ride, but Ruth has kept me chained to the room, demanding room service, and not paying for it in the way that I had hoped.

Still I manage to sneak to the club car once, and there I see exactly what I expect, a group of tired, smelly people, most of whom are too drunk to look at the magnificent scenery whizzing past. I realize that, in my new khakis and bomber jacket, I am overdressed and as conspicuous as a rich man in Olympia. No one will talk to me. They barely manage to look at me.

And, for the first time, I worry about how I’ll pull this assignment off.

***

I should say at this stage of article research, I always worry about how I’ll pull the assignment off. Even though what I write is dictated into my wrist-top, edited on a larger screen at home, and e-mailed directly to my editor, what I do is really not much different from the work, say, Mark Twain did almost two hundred years ago. He ventured out into places unknown and reported back.

Ernest Hemingway did that, so did Ernie Pyle, and Peter Arnett. The great journalists thrived in times of war. When there is no war—or no war America is interested in—we are stuck with perennials. And no journalist ever became famous by risking his life at a TVSo? convention.

I simply want to go in, find a few things that are amusing, see if I can discover the secret behind the victimology, and return to home base with all parts intact. I know that, by Sunday evening, I will have a story. I’m just not sure if it’s the kind of story Hemingway would have dispatched from Spain.

In fact, I know it’s not the moment the train pulls into Harbor, Oregon.

***

When Ruthie and I get off the train at the small white station nestled against a snow-covered ridge, we are greeted like visiting royalty. I made no secret of my job as a journalist, but it’s really Ruthie they want to see. It seems, on the e-slip she sent with her fee, that she listed her employment as she always does.

A paralegal and a journalist. We are a dream couple for the TVSo?s.

I am not the only journalist in this place. Every major television reporter, radio commentator, vid producer, and holotechnician is here to record the loonies in action. I am one of the few print people, and the only one with enough awards to make me semi-famous. Every TVSo? wants to tell me his story, to introduce me to little Jonnie or Suzy or Uncle Billy, and to show me what makes them different.

When I get off the train, I realize I am not ready for this. The grasping hands, the slightly desperate gaze. I insist on going to the hotel before meeting people, and Ruth gives me her I-can’t-believe-you’re-doing-this look. That’s when I realize she’s not upset about the location or the people. She’s upset that I want to leave them. She not only relishes the attention, she believes she can give these people advice. She doesn’t realize how dangerous the situation can be. She’s with the only people in the world who might take her seriously. I grip her arm and follow our host to the Compound, our hotel.

The Compound was the former survivalist’s camp, and looks it. The outbuildings are made of wood hammered together by people who clearly didn’t know what they were doing. The main building, where the restaurant and gift shop reside, was once a ranch-style house, built in the mid-twentieth century, complete with front-facing garage. The building had been added onto, once during its survivalist camp days—that was evident by the concrete bunker in the back—and once by the hotel, the brass and wood façade that tried to make everything upscale.

Our room isn’t really a room. It was cabin Number 8. A plaque on the door tells us that it had once been used by the house’s original owners as a storage shed, and was remodeled into a cabin when the camp started in the early 1980s. The plaque tells us proudly that eight people lived in this space; I’m wondering how Ruth and I will manage for a weekend.

The room is square, with an area carved out for a bathroom with an ancient shower and plastic tub. The sink has motion detectors instead of computer controls, and the toilet actually has a handle for flushing. Ruth is charmed, but I wonder if that will last into the middle of the night, when one of us stumbles in there and initiates the gurgle and grunt of the ancient plumbing.

We unpack, and then Ruth wants to reenter the fray. I’m more interested in checking out the dining facilities. The reconstituted chicken I had on the train didn’t last me long.

Outside, we see several blue-and-white signs, pointing to various cabins. Most signs are hand-lettered and made specifically for the conference: Registration is to our left; Legal advice is to our right; and Testimonials is straight ahead. Other signs show us the way to improve our Education, covering everything from Technological Secrets to the History of Transportation. Many of these, I know, are ongoing programs, and I will check them out through the weekend. It’s the guest speakers I am most interested in, and those are going to be the hardest events to see.

***

In the registration line I learn that the TVSo?s aren’t all low-income poorly educated folks like the research had led me to expect. The man in front of me is a doctor from Philadelphia who has documentation on “differences” and was willing to call it up on his wrist-top right there in the frigid Oregon mud. The slender, pretty woman behind me is a reasonably well known vid personality whose career went into a decline, she says, after she teleported 65 times in one month. I talk to both of them at some length. Ruth has left me alone in line while she went on to the lodge for drinks.

She has been gone a long time.

I draw the same sort of crowd I drew at the train station. I am uncomfortable, used to being the observer, not the observed. Everyone wants to tell me a story; everyone wants me to know how teleportation changes people, how it creates differences where there were none before.

Some of the stories are just silly, like the vid personality’s. She claims she lost a little bit of charisma each time she teleported from one place to another. Some are strange, like the woman who has me examine holograms of her now-estranged husband, a man whose eye color changed in the space of one afternoon from green to brown.

The rest are merely sad. Many are from people who claim that their spouses are no longer the same people they married, and they blame use of public teleportation. Others show evidence of medical conditions they claim were caused by teleporting, and still some have tales of close loved ones who died soon after traveling in a teleportation device.

I have read the literature; I am familiar with all variations on these stories and more. I even know their origins.

I ask the eye color woman why she believes her husband’s eyes were the only thing to change.

“I didn’t say they were the only thing, now did I?” she says angrily.

I turn away, afraid to follow up.

***

The first big breakthrough in teleportation occurred in the late 1990s when a team of Austrian scientists successfully completed a transfer on the sub-atomic level. The physics of the breakthrough was too complex to explain to the layman in the popular newspapers of the day, so many journalists attempted (unsuccessfully) to put the discovery in layman’s terms.

I have tried to hunt down the origin of the example used for the laymen and have been, to date, unsuccessful. I suspect either one of the scientists got exasperated with the journalists’ stupid questions and used the example to explain, poorly, what was going on, or a journalist attempted to translate what he thought he understood into language that he thought other people could understand.

Their experiment, said the news organizations of the day, was as if the scientists had taken a red ball in one room, made it disappear, and then reappear in another room—although what was teleported was not the ball itself, but the quality of redness which was then transferred onto another ball.

It is not what we experience. We experience the teleportation first imagined in pulp fiction stories of over a hundred years ago. Our bodies literally disassemble in one location, are transferred to another location, and are then reassembled. There are documented cases of malfunctions, most dating from the early days of the technology and almost all of them having to do with apes who arrived dead. These deaths were not pretty or simple: they had to do with parts being reassembled in the wrong order, rather like taking a puzzle apart, then trying to put it together by placing all the corners in the middle. Those details were resolved long before any human being stepped onto a teleportation pad. The things we must worry about are simpler: power failures and computer malfunctions, both of which can lose us mid-transfer. This problem is the greatest in Third World countries, in devices built out of scrap metal, most likely, by the operator’s Uncle Ralph. Teleportation is not sanctioned to those countries, or is done purely at the user’s own risk. Here and in “approved” countries, every device is scrutinized, overhauled, and replaced more often than anything else in our technologically advanced society.

This is what the literature tells me. It is what exists in all published reports, the meetings before Congress, and in several teleportation companies’ legal databases. I know there can be problems—we all do. The problems are called “acceptable risk,” something we all assume when we step on a teleportation pad, or even when we walk out our front door. What varies from person to person is how acceptable some risks are.

It is the idea that we can be disassembled and reassembled that unnerves people the most. A large number of people (actual estimates vary, depending on the reporting agency) refuse to use teleportation, allowing other forms of mass transit to remain in business. Most of these people are not TVSo?s. They simply don’t like the idea of being taken apart and put back together without it being necessary, and are not willing to sacrifice their original unity for the sake of instantaneous travel.

Others cannot imagine traveling any other way. Frequent teleporters receive a discount on each trip. “Frequent” is defined in the industry as anyone making more than ten trips per day. I have only hit the ten trip in one day milestone once, and it left me feeling disoriented and unnerved—not, I hasten to add, because I was disassembled so many times, but because, after five different teleportation stations, I lost track of my surroundings. Later I learned that frequent travelers set their wrist-top to remind them of their location and their purpose for being there upon arrival.

I have read all the literature, examined all the records, and while I still feel a twinge of nerves when I step on the platform, I prefer the instantaneous shift, the delight at having been in Manhattan one moment and Rome the next. It is not different, my grandmother once told me, than that frisson of fear she used to feel whenever an airplane’s wheels left the ground or whenever a train went over a particularly high and narrow bridge.

It is human nature to worry about the accidental, the unexpected, the unknown. It is also human nature to magnify those things into problems so strange as to be somehow plausible.

***

The TVSo?s have three banquets at their weekend meeting, and I have bought tickets to all three. Ruth did not want to eat at the banquets. In fact, she soon made it clear that she did not want to spend time with me. She says my attitude is too cynical, my remarks too cutting. She is already right. I am already thinking in the tone I’ve decided to take for this article, a tone that my brain established while part of it tried to concentrate on the seriousness of the vid personality’s loss of charisma.

The first banquet is on Friday night, and there I am happily surprised. The food is excellent. It is free-range chicken, brought in from a nearby ranch, local vegetables grown and stored here, marinated in local wine, mixed with spices grown in the chef’s own herb garden.

Nothing was shipped in: no risk of teleportation tainting the food. And somehow it does seem fresher. Or perhaps the chef, a world-renowned man who refused to allow me to use his name in this article, has simply lived up to his spectacular reputation.

The speaker that night is a transportation historian who is, believe it or not, duller than he sounds. He reads his speech off the TelePrompTer modification in his contact lenses, probably much as he does in class, which forces him to stare straight ahead. That, combined with his monotone, makes him seem as if he’s teleported one too many times.

The diners at my table, which is toward the back, immediately deduce the problem and begin whispering, as I imagine his students often do. We introduce ourselves and tell each other why we’re here.

The woman to my immediate left looks like a Hollywood grandmother, which is to say that she’s round, gray-haired and jolly. She confides that she went to see her grandchildren on her only teleportation trip, and instead of arriving in Pittsburgh as planned, she arrived in Philadelphia. The teleportation operators claim she simply told them she was going to Philly, but she claims that they punched in the wrong destination. I take mental notes, knowing that what is at stake here is more than a simple trip. She lives on a fixed income and she scrimped to afford the teleport. She could not afford to then go from Philly to Pittsburgh and back home. She missed a trip, and probably several meals, for that one abortive visit.

This is a problem I can get behind. It is not magic woo-woo incantations in which she claims that she suddenly ballooned in size because her protons expanded or that she got skin cancer that should have belonged to someone else. This is the kind of operator error we all worry about. I have had nightmares about getting on a teleporter in Portland and ending up in Beijing.

The woman next to her confides that there is a lawyer in the legal section who is trying to get enough contacts to initiate a class action suit for just that sort of problem. The grandmother thanks her, and then asks her, whispering politely of course, why she’s here. The woman, who is in her mid-forties, has the prettiest lavender hair I’ve ever seen. She flushes a nice shade of pink that somehow complements the lavender and admits that she would rather not say.

I am beginning to think I’ve hit a lucky table. Imagine someone who has come to a TVSo? convention who is unwilling to admit why she has come. It is almost antithetical to the purpose of the conference.

I make a mental note to pull her aside later, then ask the man to my right why he has come. “Reporter,” he says tersely, not whispering. “Just like you.”

He gets shushed by the people at the table behind him, who, believe it or not, are engrossed in the teacher’s speech. At that point, I surface briefly, realize the man has droned on for thirty minutes and hasn’t yet reached the invention of the automobile. I signal a waiter for more coffee.

The woman to the reporter’s right bursts into tears when asked why she’s here, and we get shushed again. I actually don’t mind because I get an odd sense that the tears are fake. Still, we dutifully lean forward after she dries her eyes with her linen napkin.

“My baby,” she whispers, and stifles a sob. The entire table behind us glares at us with angry eyes. We glare back, then lean as close as we can.

“My baby,” she says again, “was a boy when he went into the device.”

Suddenly I don’t want to hear any more, and neither, it seems, does anyone else. The reporter hands her another napkin, and makes sympathetic noises, but as quickly as he politely can, he rises and makes his way to the men’s room.

Ten minutes later, when he has not returned and the speaker is rhapsodizing about the uses of airplanes in World War I, I excuse myself. The corridor outside is empty, but I find a new convention going on at the bar.

“I don’t know why they invite him back,” says one woman to a gale of laughter. It seems that this is the fifth year the historian has spoken on Friday night, and this year he is actually more interesting than he has ever been.

One of the conference organizers overhears, and says rather stiffly, “We invite him so that you all have an historical overview of the problems we face.”

“Oh,” the laughing woman says, “but don’t you think that teleportation is a little different than, say, a Model T?”

“No,” the organizer says, and I realize that this is one of those dangerous people to whom the phrase “sense of humor” has no meaning at all, “it is all a manifestation of our need to make the world smaller. Once everyone thought that instantaneous travel would solve all our ills. They didn’t realize that it would cause more problems than it started.”

“Do you believe,” one woman asks, “that everyone who has been in a teleportation device is still human?”

Not even the conference organizer answers that question. It is too touchy. Most of the people here are here because they have been in a teleportation device. If the woman’s right, that would mean none of us are human. I don’t believe that. I believe we’re very human, although the more I see, the more I wonder what side of humanity we actually belong to.

***

The next morning, I wander over to Legal, and listen to lawyers pontificate on ways to collect damages from teleportation companies. I hear the familiar litany of successful lawsuits—there aren’t many, and most are nuisance cases much like the grandmother’s of the night before—but the audience is attentive and asks polite questions.

In the afternoon, I poke my head into Education, and see the historian. I don’t run from there, although I’m tempted. I walk slowly, pretending I had ventured into that area by mistake.

Ruth is nowhere to be seen. She did show up in our room the night before, but long after I was asleep, and I thought I smelled brandy, but by that point I didn’t really care. I wonder idly who she has found to entertain herself with and how she can use him to further her career. The thought, though accurate, is uncharitable, and I then wonder when I stopped thinking with fondness of Ruth’s tendency’s to exaggerate and began to be annoyed by them. Probably around the point when her manufactured breasts became her most fascinating feature.

That night’s speaker is an expert in teleportation technology and I am assured by almost everyone who’s been here before that he makes the historian look glib. I am sorry to give up the free-range chicken, but I cannot bear another two hours trapped in those uncomfortable wooden banquet chairs.

I go into the restaurant, where I’ve had two delicious breakfasts, and cast about for a table. It seems to have a lot of patrons, considering there is a banquet going on in the next room.

Ruth is at a table near the window. Even though it is dark, I can make out the ghostly shape of the nearby mountain, snow-covered and shiny. She waves me over.

She is sitting with the lawyers. They have asked that no other tables be filled around them, and so far the restaurant is able to comply. Ruth, it seems, has been spending her time with the entire legal wing of this conference and learning “a whole heckuva lot.”

I sit down, and listen for a while. This seems like an informal version of the panel I had attended in the morning. I order a steak, and do not ask if it was shipped in or slaughtered locally, for which I am razzed, and then one of the attorneys, an overweight vegetarian who consumes way too much wine during the evening, informs me of the many ways that beef could kill me. Since I have heard this lecture before, I add a few insights of my own, all the while chomping heartily on my dinner.

Finally they ask me why I’m here, and I tell them that I’m a paid observer of human nature.

“He’s journalist,” Ruth says, breaking my cover.

They eye me as if I’m the slimy species and I explain that I’m a practitioner of New Journalism almost a century after New Journalism was introduced. It is my way of gaining legitimacy among the illegitimate: pretend to a literary value that I don’t really have.

The New Journalism comment seems to have silenced them, so to break the ice—and to make my dinner worthwhile—I ask them what they really think about teleportation technology.

“It makes lawyers rich!” one of them said and the others laugh. But I press them, and finally a dark-suited man next to Ruth says, “I used to laugh at these folks and then questions started coming up, questions I couldn’t get an answer to.”

One of the female attorneys nods, and still another, the overweight vegetarian, says, “Yeah, like why is there a ban on kids under the age of three taking teleportation?”

“It’s not a firm ban,” a New York lawyer says. “You can get around it with a doctor’s permission.”

“Yeah,” the vegetarian says. “Why a doctor? And what does he give permission for?”

“I’ve never seen any instances of babies traveling. They don’t allow it, with or without the doctor,” the woman says.

“But I met a woman who says her baby—” I start and they all shake their heads sadly, silencing me.

“She’s here every year,” the vegetarian says. “I checked the story out. She doesn’t have a kid. I don’t even think she’s female.”

They chuckle again, and the joviality is back. No matter how I push them, I can’t learn what the other questions are. The vegetarian promises to tell me if I come to the bar later. I do, and he’s passed out in a pile of corn chips. I vow to try and find him the following day.

***

The next morning, as the speakers are setting up, I go to the Technological Secrets area. It’s in a wide auditorium with holographic capabilities. My mind boggles just at the thought of seeing strange machinery in life-size and 3D.

It takes me a moment to find a speaker who’ll talk to me, who doesn’t try to get me to wait until his presentation. I tell him about the lawyers’ collective unease about the baby ban.

“You ask the teleportation stations they’ll tell you it’s because babies are too fragile for most kinds of travel. Like they’ll ban an infant from a jet.” The guy I’m talking to is six feet tall and has a honking nasal voice. I’m glad I elected not to stay for his presentation, even though he seems nice enough. “But it’s really because of the stress to the body.”

“I thought there is no stress.”

He looks at me as if I’m the dumbest thing he’s seen at this conference, and given what I’ve seen, I’m almost insulted. He holds up a glass of water. “You can’t teleport crystal either,” he says. “Sometimes it shatters. And it shouldn’t. I mean, they perfected this at the subatomic level, or so they say.”

“You don’t think they did?”

“Between you, me, and the wall,” he says, “I know they perfected it. The problem is that they don’t use the right equipment to teleport people. It’s like building a house. We can build a damn fine house with everything correct. But we hire contractors who want to make as much money as possible, and they do it—have done it—since time immemorial by using inferior parts and charging the same as they would for good parts. I try to tell the lawyers that, but it’s not glamorous, and it’s damned hard to prove. They tell me they’ll help me when I can show damage caused by inferior parts. I can show damage. I just can’t make a credible link.”

Later that day, I check his statements with a few other technology wonks. They agree that the problem with public teleportation is that it’s public. The system used by the President and other heads of state is state-of-the-art, so protected that nothing can go wrong. The system used by the rest of us, well, these guys would have us all believe it’s held together by spit and glue and pieces manufactured just after the turn of the century.

It makes me think of all those bans on teleportation travel to third-world countries. If our technology is bad, what is the technology like that was hammered together by someone’s Uncle Ralph? The very idea raises images of those poor puzzle box monkeys with the corners where their middle should be.

Of course when I get back home, and call the various teleportation manufacturers, they all give me the company line and swear teleportation is the safest form of transportation since walking. Even that can go wrong, I say. Think of potholes. Think of missteps, twisted ankles and tripping over small children. But the manufacturers don’t find me funny. When I get belligerent, forgetting, for a moment that this is supposed to be a puff piece and not investigative reporting, they transfer me to their legal departments who remind me of libel laws and how careful I need to be in questioning their companies.

***

The free-range chicken is gone by the third banquet, but the speaker is delightful. He’s a comedian just starting out, and he proves to me that the TVSo?s have a sense of humor, since most of his jokes are aimed at them, and they laugh uproariously. I don’t. I feel vaguely embarrassed, mostly because I know I would have laughed if I’d been watching this guy in any other setting but this one.

As I head out, I look for Ruth. She’s still surrounded by her lawyers, and when she sees me, she waves me over. She puts a hand on the overweight vegetarian’s arm and informs me that he has hired her as a paralegal. I pull her aside, remind her that jobs aren’t always that easy to come by and that she’d better check his credentials. She frowns at me, asks me if I think she’s dumb or something—a question which I decline to answer—and then stalks off. I gather, from that whole exchange, that she’s not taking the train home, and I turn out to be right. My wish has been granted. She has forgotten thoughts of Marriage and believes that our break-up is her idea. I find that I regret the whole plan, not because I wanted to marry her, but because I had hoped that I would at least get to try all parts of train travel, from meal to sleep to sex. We had neglected sex on the way there, and I was hoping for a bit on the way home.

Instead, I spend the next week finding a way to ship her clothes cheaply without using teleportation technology, since the vegetarian likes to keep his office “pure.”

I am beginning to understand the sentiment. My moment of hesitation as I step on the teleportation platform in Bend—I see no point in train travel all the way to Seattle if I’m not going to be able to have nookie in transit—lasts nearly three minutes, and customers behind me get angry. But I keep thinking of those banned babies, and Uncle Ralph, and inferior-grade equipment, and the way that the sheet rock in my condo flakes like someone’s untended dandruff, and I find myself more and more reluctant to travel in that instantaneous sort of way. After all, why am I in such a hurry? I’m a journalist, for godssake, a man who makes his living off observing, and observation is something that can’t be rushed. I am proud of my observation skills, and proud of my capability for contemplation that makes them possible.

But what I’ve been observing since I got back is my own reflection in the mirror. There’s a line down one side of my face, an instant wrinkle that really doesn’t look like a laugh line or something that would naturally occur as I age. It looks more like a fold, or a crease, something incorrectly ironed in, as if a section of me were miscut and hemmed wrong.

I never noticed the wrinkle before getting on that teleportation station in Bend. I have been obsessed with it since. And I think, I really think, that my obsession is a product of the TVSo? convention, but not for the reason that you’d think. It’s not that I suddenly believe the teleporter has given me a new wrinkle. It’s just that I find the idea of a wrinkle induced from the outside better than the idea that I’m growing older. It’s easier to believe in the fiction. It’s nicer.

It takes the responsibility for that particular line off me.

Or at least, that’s what I tell myself. Because I do need to teleport on occasion for my job. Journalists observe, yes. But they must observe in the right places. And when my editor tells me to get to London yesterday, I do the next best thing. I get there two minutes from now, new wrinkles be damned.

But I find that I do examine mirrors more, and I wonder, when I think something particularly cruel, like most of my thoughts about Ruth lately, if I’ve become less than human. Is humanity something we can lose, little bit by little bit, like the vid personality and her charisma? And if so, how can we tell it’s gone? Is it replaced by paranoia, by worry, in equal degrees? And am I, in worrying about this, showing signs of latent TVSo?ism?

I don’t know. But I do suspect that my recent desire to take the train to the far reaches of the United States has less to do with my unfulfilled sexual fantasy than it does with my desire to avoid a technology that I may have learned to fear. Then I remind myself of the history of this form of paranoia; I know that being a reporter from the fringe requires an ability to cross over into that land and appear to be a native. I’m simply afraid I’ve taken it too far. Going native requires residency in kooksville, and while it only takes an instant to reach that particular destination, it takes years and expensive psychotherapy to get out.

***

When I turned in this essay, I thought of asking for a bonus, a sort of combat pay to compensate for the wrinkle, for the increased harassment as I take an extra minute of other people’s time while I hesitate before stepping on a teleportation platform.

But my editor vid-conferenced with me this morning, wanting to discuss what he calls “proper compensation.” My article, he says—(this thing you are currently reading, without this coda)—has given him an idea. Teleportation has overtaken other forms of transportation so much that his younger readers have probably never flown in a plane or driven a car. He wants me to do these things, and report back about my experiences, as if I have gone to yet another frontier, even if it is a part of the past.

He asks what I want to do first, and then reminds me this will be on the magazine’s expense.

“A ticket on the Orient Express,” I say.

“Ah,” he says. “You’ll title it ‘Strangers on a Train?’”

I’m thinking not of Patricia Highsmith and Alfred Hitchcock, but of luscious, willing blonds with breasts the size of helium balloons and the ca-thunk, ca-thunk of the wheels on a track suggesting a rhythm that no teleportation device can hope to match.

“I hope so,” I say, and realize this is the kind of fringe I like. “I certainly hope so.”

Going Native

Copyright © by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

Cover and layout copyright © by WMG Publishing

Cover design by WMG Publishing

Cover art copyright © Embe2006/Dreamstime

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

Edith works for Number Crunchers Incorporated. Her job? Determine the monetary worth of each human being.  But her corporation faces a nemesis—the EISHies. The ridiculously sentimental organization sabotages Crunchers, Inc. and other places just like it.

Edith must discover how the EISHies infiltrated her business—and then figure out what to do about it, without succumbing to the EISHies’ subversive message: Everyone Is Someone’s Hero.

“Crunchers, Inc.” is available on this site for one week only. You can get the story as a standalone ebook on all retail sites. Enjoy!

 

Crunchers, Inc. Kristine Kathryn Rusch

 

The scream from the middle office was loud and long.

“Damn,” said Edith. “We’ve just lost another one.”

Sure enough, Reginald Waterston burst out of the office, slamming the door against the wall—the windowed one, with the expensive glass that formed its own shutters.

He stopped at Edith’s desk—they all stopped at her desk, for reasons she never quite fathomed—and said, “My grandfather gave me a horse!”

Edith resisted the urge to roll her eyes. She folded her hands on top of the file that she hadn’t been studying, and leaned forward. The computer built into her desktop beeped, letting her know that on its screen, it already had Reginald’s personnel file, his suggested severance pay, and his recommendation letter.

“A real horse?” she said, pretending interest in Reginald Waterson’s revelation.

“A plastic horse. From 1942. It had no chips in the paint at all.” Reginald Waterston was forty-two himself, balding, with a tummy that needed a bit of tuck. His suit fit loosely—something Edith would have told him to change if she had been his company advisor—and he needed to trim his fingernails.

Employees five cubicles over slid their chairs toward the aisle. People were leaning around the ancient gray formations, so that all she could see were eyes.

Rows and rows of eyes.

It was different every time, with every single Actuarial Engineer. And everyone except Edith thought these outbursts were interesting.

Edith resisted the urge to sigh. She needed Reginald to get the point, and if she followed his inane line of reasoning, she would be listening to the poor man all day.

“This horse is important because—?”

“It’s the only thing I ever got from him.” Reginald had to mean the grandfather, not the horse.

Edith nodded.

“I was five, maybe littler. He told me to take care of it.”

“Which I’m sure you did.” The computer beeped again. Edith wished she could take that insistent tone with people. Maybe that was why they all came to her in the end. Because she was unfailingly polite.

“I did!” Reginald said with something like surprise. “And because of that horse, I went to a Wild West vacation in Arizona when I was twenty-five. I met my wife, we had my daughter, and I wouldn’t be standing here.”

“Resigning,” Edith said.

That stopped him. “Quitting,” he said after a moment. As if he were actually reflecting.

None of them had ever reflected before.

“How will you pay for your home? Your wife’s – .” she paused, looked down, saw nothing on the wife except that she had some outstanding student loans, and took a wild stab at it. “—continuing education? Your daughter’s first four-year college? Hmmm?”

“We have savings,” he said, sounding less and less certain of himself.

“And what happens when those savings run out?” she asked.

He stared at her for a long moment. Then those blood-shot eyes of his went slightly wild and he yelled, “I can’t stay here! My grandfather gave me a horse!”

“I know,” Edith said, hitting the image of the check on her desk-screen, then hitting print so that Reginald could have a hardcopy recommendation letter in addition to the e-mail version. “Believe me, I know.”

***

Reginald left fifteen minutes later, stopping to tell anyone who made eye contact with him about his grandfather, the plastic horse, and the small gestures that could turn into major events.

Damn EISH, anyway. They’d found a way to get to him.

They always found a way in.

Edith summoned Conrad Meisner, telling him to meet her in five minutes in what had been Reginald’s office. She felt unfairly burdened.

Any senior management official who got confronted with a terminating employee had to handle all problems caused by that employee.

Which meant that Edith had more than her share of terminal offenses. She’d actually dug through the hiring records to see if anyone had instructed quitters to come to Edith, but so far she had found nothing.

She would have to look again.

Then she heaved a sigh and got up, heading toward Reginald’s office. She had put on weight again, so moving wasn’t as easy as it had been. She had eight months before she was eligible for her third reduction surgery, so she’d either have to lay off the Cheetos before bed or take a six-week cure.

The last time she took the six-week cure, she went down to her official, government-recommended weight for two extra months, then gained every pound back plus the friend that pound had probably been shacking up with. She could do the old-fashioned starvation/exercise thing, but she wasn’t an exercise kinda girl even though she knew in fifteen years, she’d have to be at regulation weight or it would count against her. She already had two black marks—mid-level management position and no children—and she really couldn’t afford another.

She pressed her palm against the doorknob to get in. The office had reset itself when Reginald took his walking papers. The door unlocked then eased open, as if it were afraid to reveal the office’s interior.

The interior window had stayed shuttered, and so had the exterior window. The office itself was dark. As she crossed the threshold, light rose slowly—the brochures had said it calmed, but mostly it replicated the moment of irritation when she learned that she couldn’t make the lights come up any faster.

She had no idea how many times she had walked into this room, felt that same irritation, wished she could alter the moment when she ordered the lights. Originally, this had been her office. She hadn’t been demoted, just moved, because the Brass thought that perhaps a private office (with tons of extra security) would help Actuarial Engineers stay at the job longer.

So far, it hadn’t worked. Reginald had been the fifth AE to leave in the past sixteen months.

She stood with her hands on her too-ample hips. He hadn’t even personalized the space. The wall across from him had two dozen screens, all of them scrolling information in real time. His work desk had five more, slowed down to show the problem accounts, and the vid unit—digitized at optimal level for Reginald’s personal myopia—wasn’t even turned on.

The chair remained at the height the last AE had left it at, the spaces on the desk for photographs had dust, and the air-perfume was still set on Chanel, which was the preference of at least two AEs ago. Reginald didn’t strike her as a Chanel-type guy. Maybe, with all this talk of horses, he’d been a Bud and illegal smokes sort, but he hadn’t even set the air to imitate that.

Almost as if he’d known he wouldn’t last.

She shook off the paranoia and looked at the accounts while she waited for Conrad. Conrad always ran ten minutes late, except when he was fifteen minutes early. It was almost as if he couldn’t decide who he was.

She knew who he was. He was a relatively young man with too much responsibility. Conrad was in charge of all of the security on the seventeenth floor—a daunting task, considering the amount of information that flowed through this place.

Public records, bank records, arrest records, personal complaints, grades, salaries, family size, and any other information that someone—anyone, not just the subject—chose to share. People could (and often did) send false information on someone they hated; if the sender got caught, the information went into the sender’s file—one of those horrible black marks that Edith feared.

She constantly checked her records and saw only the two legitimate marks—the middle-management position (and no sign of ambition for a higher place in society) and the childlessness, which could be a plus if her ambition grew. Only she didn’t know how to grow ambition. She’d already come a long way. Her mother had been a homemaker in the days when homemakers were shunned as retro-women, and her father, an Iraqi war veteran, never really got over his period of service—moving from job to job to job, each with less pay and less responsibility.

That she managed to rise this high—and stay here—was a bloody miracle if she said so herself, and she did, although not as often as she could have (fearing that someone would report her for repetitious behavior or vainglory or some other minor sin that could besmirch her record if too many people reported disliking her).

“Edie?”

She jumped, even though she recognized the voice as belonging to Conrad. He was one of the few people in the world who called her Edie.

She turned, hand against her beating heart, glad for the cover of her fear. He always made her heart beat faster. He was six feet tall, broad shouldered, and strong featured. He had a classic 20th century handsomeness—the kind you saw on war recruitment posters in World War II (her area of expertise in college, all those years ago)—and his voice, a rumbling baritone, seemed to match it.

A few of the women said he was too perfect, suspecting him of abusing enhancements to improve his physical appearance (even in this day and age, women were supposed to do anything they could to improve their physical appearance, but men should abstain for fear of focusing too much on good looks over character). Edith believed he was one of the few humans on the planet born with his incredible good looks. No matter how much she stared at him (and she stared at him too much), she couldn’t see evidence of any surgical procedure, nano- or otherwise.

“You seem jumpy.” He came all the way into the office, and closed the door. Something in his movement jarred the wall system and both glass-shutters opened, as if preventing some kind of physical (albeit unplanned) rendezvous.

“I hate this,” she said. “EISH got to him.”

EISH was short for the Everyone Is Someone’s Hero Society, with the last “s” dropped because EISHS was too hard to say. If Edith had been running the Society, she would have given it another acronym altogether because EISH sounded too much like “ish” for her tastes.

“I don’t know how EISH got in,” Conrad said. “I’ve added more secure equipment to this room than any other place in the building. We even have guards posted outside—real, living, breathing guards—just so that no strangers get inside the elevators coming up to the seventeenth floor.”

Edith shrugged. “He screamed, then came out at top speed to tell me about his grandfather and a plastic pony, and how that made him the man he is today.”

Conrad sighed. “Sounds like EISH.”

He leaned against the desk and crossed his arms. He stared at the information still scrolling on the wall across from him, but he clearly wasn’t seeing it.

Edith sank into the chair. It felt comfortable, familiar, as if she had come home. Here she didn’t feel quite as heavy; here she didn’t feel quite as useless or out of date.

She sprang up.

“Check the chair,” she said.

“They did chairs two years ago. They’re not going to—”

“Check the chair.”

He sighed a second time—what other response could they all have to EISH but sigh?—and crouched. While he worked, Edith paced.

Technically, EISH wasn’t her responsibility. The Brass was supposed to monitor EISH and all other like-minded groups. There were divisions that handled anti-EISH spin; divisions that persecuted EISH members to the full extent of the law; and, it was rumored, divisions that sent EISH members into the database earlier than they deserved to go.

But technically, Actuarial Engineers were supposed to prevent database tampering. Even though it was against the company’s best interest, Actuarial Engineers were supposed to double-check suspicious information—especially information provided about a hated person or a person who belonged to a hated organization (like EISH). This protected the corporation from class action lawsuits, too much government oversight, and the occasional overzealous politician/prosecutor/investigative reporter.

After all, EISH had a point that most people sympathized with: Every life had value. Sometimes the value was as small as giving a plastic horse to a child you’d never see again. Sometimes the value was being the person everyone ran to in a crisis (Edith would have to see if that somehow made it into her file—a white mark to counteract the black). Sometimes the value was in living the perfect American life—2.5 children, a dog, a house and too much credit, and perfect attendance at the marginally useful job.

This sentimental view, which even she had some sympathy with, appealed to everyone whose life hadn’t exactly gone the way he’d planned. The person who woke up at forty, realizing that he wasn’t going to get the chance to buy enhancements that would make him a star quarterback (those were age-limited to the under thirty crowd, no matter what your innate talent level) or that he wasn’t going to be a wunderkind in any subject because wunderkinds all died before they turned forty, usually of some self-inflicted something or other.

EISHies, as she called them, gave succor to the hopeless, hope to the fearful, and pap to everyone else. They simply didn’t understand the way the world had to work.

“Yup,” Conrad said. “They got the chair. I’m going to have to boost the scans again. They put a low energy chip into this thing. It must’ve been working on him for weeks before he finally blew.”

Blew. That was a term. Actuarial Engineers went through a battery of personal tests, showing that they lacked the kind of sentimental bent that made EISH appeal to most people. AEs were as close as people got to being robots themselves, or so personnel had told Edith after the fifth AE blew his cool and left.

People who got hired by Crunchers, Inc., which was a branch of Number Crunchers, Inc., a branch of Statistical and Numerical Services, Inc., a branch of—well, she couldn’t remember, not that she had to. She’d only gone to the third level when she’d been applying here.

Suffice to say that the job of Crunchers, Inc. and companies like this was to assist decision-makers in those hardest of hard decisions.

The ones that involved life and death.

Rather than applying a standard of morality that varied from person to person or township to township, Crunchers and companies like it made certain that decisions occurred on a level playing field.

Each American life (someday, the bigwigs hoped, each life) would be reduced to a series of positives and negatives. The intrinsic value of the human being—not just his political clout and financial worth (although those factored in; no one could ignore the way that money talked, even now), but his value to society, how much has he contributed in a variety of measures—as a teacher, as a valued member of his own community, as a giver of advice. Is he a good parent? Have his children grown to become equally valued members of the society or are they in prison/unemployed/living on some sort of benefits? Has he had a positive influence on the people around him?

Each action could cause a reaction—good and bad. The programs worked out a level of disgruntledness proportionate to fame or good fortune or (in cases like Conrad’s) simple good looks (figuring that jealousy created bad human behavior). There were also the health factors—was this person keeping good enough care of himself so that he wouldn’t become a burden on society—too much alcohol, too much food, too little exercise (unless these things were matched by weight loss surgeries and overnight nano-exercises, things that only a fortunate few [like Edith] could afford).

In other words, the programs kept a functional and relatively simple database—most people fell into easily predictable categories.

It was the folks who led non-traditional lives who were the problems, and they fell under the auspices of the relatively robotic AE, who gave the information a somewhat human glance and decided what category the person belonged in.

Somehow, organizations like EISH had discovered the AEs and even worse, found their names. Now AEs were targets, and all of them seemed to be breaking under the pressure.

“Got it.” Conrad held up a chip the size of a fruit fly. “I’ll analyze it, but I’m sure it’s an EISH component.”

“Scan the room for more of them. And find out how it got on the chair.”

He gave her a lazy grin that warmed her more than it should have. “Yes, ma’am. And what’ll you do?”

“Besides fill out report after report on poor, broken Reginald?” She sighed, making this one gusty and long, so that Conrad knew he wasn’t alone in his disgust. “Find a replacement, of course.

***

The replacement, Edith decided, had to be someone with no trace of sentimentality. No hidden plastic horses, no loving spouse, nothing that could pry through the shield of that person’s loyalty to numbers, statistics and the purity of formula.

She no longer allowed personnel to make the final decision. She added a few interviews of her own.

It took a week before the seventeenth floor got its new AE. That put seventeen behind all the other floors in the building, a serious problem. Life and death decisions were being made all over the country, and the files that had been routed to seventeen couldn’t be accessed.

That meant doctors, who needed to know which patients deserved life-saving treatments couldn’t find out; insurance companies couldn’t figure out who deserved the high-end coverage; extended living facilities and comfortable retirement centers couldn’t evaluate applications—at least, not for the thirty thousand or so files normally processed each week on floor seventeen.

If this went on too long, seventeen would get docked (and black-marked). More than a month, and everyone on seventeen would be fired for lack of productivity—and then try to find a new job.

Edith shuddered. Job loss wasn’t a black mark on the permanent files, but job loss resulting in demotion was, and if she got fired along with everyone else on seventeen because they couldn’t find an AE, then she would never find a mid-level management position again. She’d be an “average” worker, and more than black marks, one thing you didn’t want in your permanent record was the word “average.”

So she went above and beyond. She stayed late, reviewing applicants’ life histories, breaking an unwritten rule and investigating their permanent files in search of sentimentality. (Technically personnel was supposed to look through permanent files for mundane things, like genetic predisposition to various diseases, criminal records, criminal charges, and personal complaints. To look for something more specific, like family history or a tendency toward weeping at sad movies, was against some Federal law that personnel could cite chapter and verse [and did whenever Edith asked them to do it] but Edith didn’t care. She wanted the best AE possible, and that meant taking extraordinary measures.)

She also had Conrad beef up security to the room—again. She looked in the budget to see if there was money to secure the AE’s place of residence as well. EISH had become quite sophisticated; its anti-formula programs slowly bombarded the AE’s subconscious with sentimental stories of the ways that the smallest of encounters could trigger life-changing events.

Even EISH didn’t argue that everyone should be saved. The serial killer, the repeat child molester—their bad deeds outweighed any potential for good. Despite the word “everyone” in EISH’s title, they were really arguing for the ordinary person, the average person, the person who, when they died, wouldn’t have enough accompaniments to fill a fifteen-second obituary spot on the Mourning Network.

Edith always thought (privately) that the founders of EISH were trying to protect themselves and their family. She always argued (publicly) that if EISH wanted the entire well-behaved world to get extended life treatments or the best medical care, then EISH shouldn’t concentrate on changing the formulas that companies like Crunchers used.

EISH should get more and more people to live on the high end of the Crunchers’ scale. EISH should encourage them to give more to charity or donate genetic material or house foster children. If more people wanted the benefits of an exemplary life, they should live one.

Even though it was hard. Edith was falling short, but at least she tried. She didn’t go through day-to-day sleepwalking. She actually thought about each action, and its equal or opposite reaction.

She knew she was taking risks interviewing the AE candidates herself, but she figured the benefits outweighed any chance she took.

And finally, within seven days, she found the perfect candidate.

***

He was tall and thin and homely. He wore black wool suits, white shirts, and work boots, all of which looked like they’d come from a second-hand store. He lived alone. His parents had died when he was young, and he’d been shuttled from foster home to foster home, never staying long enough to make attachments. He had been an excellent student who graduated with degrees in economics, applied mathematics, and computer analysis, but he didn’t read for pleasure nor did he see movies, play games, or socialize.

He never had a pet. He never, so far as Edith could tell, had a friend. He never supported a cause or took a stand. He ate every meal placed in front of him without complaint. He wasn’t even a vegetarian, as so many of these systems guys were.

Edith could find nothing—in his résumé, in his history with the company (in a lesser department; straight accounting), in his own personal life files—that showed a trace of sentimentality. There wasn’t even a place where sentimentality could breed—nothing, so far as she could see, that would give those relentless little chips that EISH was so fond of placing (somehow!) in this company a way to make him see the facts and figures he was crunching as human beings.

His name was Bartleby Plante, and he could start immediately. In fact, accounting was happy to transfer him to the seventeenth floor.

Edith ran through the training and Plante had no questions at all, rare for someone in this job, most of whom would ask for certain kinds of clarification, like “What does living alone really mean? Is she alone if she has a dog?” or “Does it matter how long ago his last act of kindness really was?”

Plante simply nodded, took notes, and then set to work.

By the end of the business day, he’d gone through five hundred files, more than any other AE had done on a single day. Edith had to stay late to check his work, and she found no fault with it.

If anything, he was a bit too strict—if someone huddled on the cusp of “deserves Excellent Treatment” and “has earned Good Treatment,” Plante always gave them the Good Treatment recommendation.

Of course, Edith recommended that to new AEs, with the caveat that good treatment costs all businesses that contract with Crunchers, Inc. less than excellent treatment, and one should save money where one could.

Still, all other AEs, faced with a subject one-quarter of a percentage away from Excellent Treatment, upgraded that subject. It seemed like the most humane thing to do.

But, she reminded herself that first night, she hadn’t hired Plante to be humane. She’d hired him to make judgments that fell outside the normal parameters, and if he was slightly harsher than most, it simply meant she wouldn’t lose him to EISH infiltration quite as quickly as some.

After a few days of checking, she felt satisfied that Plante could do the job. Sure, she had to tweak his process a little. If a subject was one-sixteenth of a percentage into Excellent Treatment country, Plante would downgrade them, and Edith had to remind him that once they earned Excellent Treatment, no matter how narrowly, they deserved to stay there.

Until, of course, their behavior moved them down a category—but she didn’t say that to Plante. He would not get a chance to review a file twice. Reviews moved up the floors—next year, new information would move everyone processed on seventeen to eighteen, and so on, as a sort of double-check. Of course, once a file had an eyeball review which was, at heart, Plante’s job, then the file tended to remain in whatever category it had been assigned—usually all the way to the bitter end.

Edith liked the system. She believed in the system. It was so much better than having individual doctors, for example, deciding which patients got the most expensive treatments based on personal likes and dislikes or on desire to perform that particular new experimental procedure or on ability to pay.

Edith believed in all that, she truly did. She felt sorry for the people who didn’t qualify for everything they wanted—few did!—but in the end, it was their own damn fault.

She found comfort in that.

She was certain she did.

***

Plante irritated her.

She couldn’t confess that to anyone. She had stressed that she needed the perfect EISH-proof employee, and she had found that in Plante.

But…

He ate tuna fish sandwiches for lunch, and the smell stayed in the office until closing. He picked his teeth while he waited for the on-floor barista to make his coffee. He didn’t seem to dry clean his suits regularly, and his boots had a faint barnyard odor.

Finally, Edith had to go to his office after he left and set the air-perfume on Scrub followed by Lilac, not caring that it was a gender-associated scent. She needed the strongest smell she could find to cover his odors, not to mention the strongest smell she could stand.

She sent a memo to personnel so that someone would discuss his hygiene with him, and hoped it would do some good. She didn’t want to disturb him more than she already did.

He scuttled away from her when he saw her; wouldn’t make eye-contact; and spilled his mocha-cream double-tall the first time she said hello to him during the mid-afternoon mandatory coffee break.

She tried to shrug it off—after all, a lot of people had trouble with her: she was the highest-ranking manager on seventeen—but she couldn’t entirely shake the feeling she’d made a mistake.

So she watched him. Watched him interact with the other employees (he didn’t); watched him arrive first thing in the morning (his breakfast came with him: McDonald’s biscuit with cheese); watched him lock up at night (always the same movement—a press of the palm to the doorknob, then a double-check with the other hand, just to make sure the door was locked).

He said hello to no one—not even the barista on the two mandatory coffee breaks—acknowledged no one, and shied away from any personal contact at all. If someone brushed against him in the elevator, he moved as if he’d been hit. If someone grinned at him, he ducked his head and looked away.

None of this was in his file, of course. He wasn’t listed as anti-social, just shy. So nothing pathological had come from this—and, she supposed, it was all expected, given his upbringing. He’d never learned any of the major social skills.

But he should know them, shouldn’t he? So that he could make evaluations? So that he could decide that a woman who smiled at babies sometimes saved them in a crisis—but said crisis hadn’t happened yet, so it couldn’t be counted on her record. But the smiling should be.

Or a man who gave money to the legion of homeless (those who hadn’t behaved well enough to let the system help them or who opted out of the system entirely) wasn’t that bad after all. He was just trying to provide what he could for people who couldn’t help themselves. There was no guarantee that those deadbeats would use the money to buy alcohol or drugs—and wasn’t it on the plus side for the man that he didn’t quiz the recipients on how they’d use his money? He trusted them to make the best decision for themselves.

Edith’s head was swirling with this and all the other factors that Plante had to consider for his job. She wanted to ask him if he realized he initially got a high rating because of his difficult childhood. For the first ten years of an adult’s life, a difficult childhood gave him a pass—an excuse to miss on certain things like marriage in your twenties or learning personal hygiene.

After ten years, though,—and Plante was right on that cusp—difficult childhoods faded in importance. The cultural assumption (again a correct one as far as Edith was concerned) was that adults should learn and grow, and yes, a difficult childhood handicapped people but they should learn the things they missed in childhood in their twenties, making them much better citizens in their thirties.

She found herself idly searching his file, looking for his exact birth date, the day he would turn thirty and become, in society’s eyes, accountable for his own weirdness.

And that was when she realized she was stepping over a line. She wasn’t quite sure what the line was, except that she knew it had to do with obsession, and eventually, she would get caught.

Another black mark on a file that couldn’t afford any more.

So, she contacted Conrad, met him in a coffee bar off-premise after hours, and waited the requisite fifteen minutes because he was, as usual, late.

He arrived, wearing the same twill pants he’d worn that day in the office with a different shirt (a brown that accented his coloring) and his hair slicked back.

He looked nice.

She wondered if that was for her, then decided it wasn’t. Men like Conrad were never interested in women like Edith. They had nothing in common except their jobs, and she wasn’t pretty enough, smart enough or interesting enough to keep him satisfied for very long.

The other women in the bar watched him walk across the room. The bar was small, with ferns against dark wood paneling—some kind of faux 20th century look—and the entire place smelled of coffee mixed with vanilla, a smell that always made Edith hungry.

“Out of the office,” he said as he sat down. He was smiling, which he didn’t do at work either. “Clandestine meetings, secret talks. Are we suddenly spies?”

She smiled, but waited to answer him until the waitress took his order—a plain black go-for-the-throat charger with extra caffeine, a man’s drink. A macho man’s drink.

“I may have made a mistake with Plante,” she said.

Conrad looked sympathetic.

“May I tell you my worries?” she asked.

“Is this on- or off-the-record?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Which is safer?” she asked, knowing that either could backfire.

“Just tell me,” he said, and he, the head of the seventeenth floor’s security, would make the decision for her.

Somehow she found that comforting. She found him comforting.

So she told him her observations and her fears about Plante. Conrad listened (they ended up having dinner), and then asked, “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

She blinked at him, not quite sure what he meant.

“A person who couldn’t be persuaded by anything EISH threw at him, a person without sentiment, a person who saw the world in numbers and codes and absolutes. Isn’t that why you got involved, so that you’d get the exact right man?” Conrad pushed his plate aside—he’d had a sandwich made from some kind of thinly sliced beef so rare it didn’t look like it’d been cooked—and folded his hands on the table.

“I didn’t expect him to be so cold,” she said, and realized how lame that sounded. She had picked at her salad, which she had ordered to impress Conrad with her restraint, not because she really wanted it.

“How could he be anything but?” Conrad asked. “You wanted no sentiment.”

“Sentiment’s a bad thing in this job,” she said.

“Is it?” his voice was soft. “Maybe compassion’s a better word then.”

She frowned.

“I mean, there’s compassion built into the system, right? Isn’t that why people with difficult childhoods get a pass early on?”

“The pass doesn’t cost much,” she said. “Younger people don’t have as many illnesses. They often don’t have insurance, and they’re not usually involved in life-and-death decisions. If they’re in an emergency room, it’s usually because of their own stupidity, which by every form, counts against them.”

Conrad’s lips turned up, but he wasn’t smiling. “So there’s compassion when it doesn’t cost anything.”

She nodded.

“And isn’t that what you’re complaining about?”

She frowned again.

“The eighteenths of a percentage point—he’s waiting for a perfect score to move people up and down the scale, but really, how much difference is there for people who are on the cusp, people who deserve more privileges in this society or nearly do?”

She shrugged. “Some.”

“Then I don’t see what the problem is,” Conrad said.

The smell of vinegar was beginning to turn her stomach. She pushed her salad away. She was beginning to regret this. She had thought Conrad was sympathetic, but he was like all the others.

He didn’t understand the fineness of her position, the way it sometimes became personal. If Plante were reviewing her file, he wouldn’t look at her previous weight losses. He wouldn’t look at the fact she was the first manager in her entire family, the first non-blue collar worker, the first person to make something of herself by her familial standards.

She was too old for him to look at familial standards. Her previous weight losses were too far in the past. She’d relied on surgery and tricks recently, and that wouldn’t wash.

She hadn’t had children, didn’t give enough money to charities, worked in the Crunching industry which—because crunchers didn’t want to be accused of bias—actually counted against her (but because crunchers did the work, was often bypassed as a “non-consideration.”) Plante wouldn’t make that a non-consideration. He’d examine each of the past five years for black marks and recommendations, for her good work and her bad. He’d see that no one would really miss her if she disappeared, and he’d mark that into her file, and no one would review it, not for quite a while, and if she suddenly found herself with some kind of strange cancer or something, she wouldn’t get the preferential treatment she would have received in her thirties, when she was still up and coming, when she was a potential wife, a potential parent, a potential CEO, someone who would eventually become a major contributing member of society, who, even if she didn’t have family, would sit on boards of various charities, and give a healthy percentage of her eight-figure income to various needy folk, and would serve as a role model to children of blue collar workers everywhere.

She’d stalled, grown content, felt no urge to move on, and her files would reflect that. The statistics said she wasn’t going to improve any longer, and Plante would know that, instead of looking at her and realize that just by getting involved in his hiring, she was showing ambition again.

She was striving. She just wasn’t doing a very good job at it.

“Edie?” Conrad asked. “You okay?”

She made herself take a deep breath. She nodded, regretting this conversation, regretting speaking to anyone on or off the record.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Thanks for coming, Conrad. I appreciate your time.”

Then she patted him on the hand, grabbed the bill and swiped it through the pay register on the side of the table, then pressed her right index finger on the marker, so that she paid out of the correct account.

He was trying to say something as she walked away, but she didn’t stop. She couldn’t stop.

She felt like a fool—and she wasn’t exactly sure why.

***

She became sure when she arrived at work two days later to find her boss, Conrad, and three members of upper management huddled around her desk.

Conrad looked at her guiltily, but the others had a coldness in their eyes. She recognized that coldness; she’d felt it too whenever she’d had to confront a misbehaving employee.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

Conrad held up a chip. It was barely the size of a grain of sand. She had to squint to see it.

“EISH,” he said. “They couldn’t reach Plante—in any way—so they got you.”

She felt a flare of anger that she immediately suppressed. Anger would guarantee that she would lose this fight—and fight it was, sudden and terrifying.

“I told you I wasn’t being sentimental,” she said, sounding a bit clipped. She made herself breathe.

The others looked at her as if she were a subspecies of bug. Conrad bit his lower lip, an attractive look for him.

“I’ll walk you through the termination procedure,” he said gently. “It’s the least I can do, since I had to report that conversation.”

She had known he would. No matter what she’d said, on the record or off, she had known he would report her. She would have reported anyone who said those things—if she didn’t believe in the person. If she hadn’t trusted them.

Apparently, Conrad hadn’t trusted her.

“You had to know I’d do that,” he said into her silence. “You gave me the choice.”

She glared at the other three, who looked away from her, as if she were tainted somehow, as if, even by being close to her, they would ruin their own careers.

They had decided. Anything she did now would simply make matters worse. A black mark—being fired!—would become a stain if she fought too hard. She might never find another job if she protested. Someone would write her up as “irrational,” “emotional,” or “uncooperative.”

“All right,” she said to Conrad. “Walk me through.”

***

She knew the procedure better than he did. She had to help him when he got stuck, remind him that she needed her final check or the contents of her personal drawer.

He didn’t say much as he did the work, although he did have trouble meeting her gaze.

Finally, it was done. She grabbed her pitiful box of personal belongings and headed for the door—away from the prying eyes, the people who peered from the sides of their cubicles, the private glee that some of them would feel at losing a manager no matter what the cause.

Plante didn’t even look to see what the disturbance was. He didn’t seem to care—and why would he? That was the problem, after all.

Conrad caught up to her, took the box from her, and pushed the door open with his foot.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said.

“Yes, I do,” he said.

According to company regulations, he had to make sure she left, had to certify that she had walked out the front door, taking nothing from the company except her check and doing no vandalism as she went.

She resented that. She rarely accompanied any employee out—only the ones who were certifiable or who seemed unduly angry. The rest, she monitored through the company’s surveillance system, letting it verify when they had left.

Conrad stood silently beside her as the elevator took them down all seventeen floors—a trip that seemed to take most of her life. Then he followed her as she marched to the front door, feeling the gaze of two dozen people in reception following her as she left for the very last time.

Outside, it was sunny and warm, the air smelling faintly of hamburgers being grilled at the diner next door, the diner she had never gone into for fear it (and the preferences it implied) would show up on her record.

Maybe she’d go in there. Maybe she’d eat every greasy salty sugary thing on the menu. Then she’d go home and lay on her couch and order the worst movies ever made, play the most violent interactive internet games she could find, and maybe even indulge in some illegal porn downloads.

Who cared, after all? She had more black marks than she could fight. Her record had gone from not bad to worrisome in the space of an afternoon.

“I’m sorry,” Conrad started.

“Save it,” she said, reaching for her box.

“I mean it,” he said. “I had to keep my job. You know that, right?”

And he said it with some kind of weird emphasis, as if she should have an in-depth understanding of what he was talking about.

“Yeah,” she said. “We all feel that way in the real world.”

He winced. He moved the box away from her, and stepped toward the curb.

“They’re going to fire Plante,” he said.

She hadn’t known that. She wasn’t sure she cared.

“He’s compromised. You hired him by going outside procedure.”

She blinked. “He’s the perfect man for the job.”

“Yes,” Conrad said. “But this way…”

His voice trailed off. He leaned toward her, giving her the box, but as she slid her fingers through the cardboard handholds, he clung.

“EISH couldn’t get to him,” Conrad was whispering now. “We knew this was the only way.”

“We?” Edith asked.

He nodded. “I had to stay. Do you know how hard it is to keep a guy like me on the seventeenth floor?”

He let go of the box. Her head was spinning. What was he saying?

“Conrad, are you—?”

He put a finger on her lips. “You’ll be all right,” he said. “I’ll make sure of it.”

And then he walked away from her, disappearing back into the Crunchers’ building, the place she had spent most of her adult life. A place she had believed in.

Or maybe it had just been a place she feared. And maybe, by working there, she had tried to control those fears.

She had taken it to an extreme with Plante. Whom Conrad had gotten fired. The only man doing a superb job, and Conrad had found a way to get rid of him.

By getting rid of Edith too.

She hefted the box, glanced at the diner, and thought about it. Eating her way through her problems wasn’t the answer. She’d have to do what she recommended to so many others—career counseling, a personal reassessment, a quiet contemplation of what she really wanted from life.

Maybe she hadn’t contributed much because she’d been stuck in her fear instead of living her life.

Maybe.

Or maybe she had just been going through the motions, like everybody else. Marking time until someone made a decision for her.

Like EISH had.

Like Conrad had.

At her request. She had been trapped with Plante, a creature of her own making; Conrad had freed her.

If she understood him right, he was getting rid of all the Plantes, making sure that certain things didn’t go any farther.

She stared at that diner door, silver on the outside and spotless because of city regulations, but a faint grease line coated the interior. The man at the counter was as round as she was. The woman behind it had gray hair and wrinkles all over her face.

Imagine living a life like that—without worrying about each movement, each decision. Without thinking about black marks and ratings. Taking the consequences when the time came—but not before.

Just going through life, the way people did before computers and information-gathering and streamlined decision-making regulations.

Imagine having a piece of pie because she wanted a piece of pie—not because she was allowed one on her current program or because she could afford one given the amount of exercise she’d done.

She glanced at the Crunchers’ building, and then at the diner. She’d never before seen the irony in them being side by side. She studied them, thought about them, shifted her box from one hip to the other.

And then she walked away, heading—

She didn’t know where. She didn’t care. Somewhere new.

Somewhere undefined.

Somewhere very different from here.

 

Crunchers, Inc.

Copyright © by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

Cover and layout copyright ©  by WMG Publishing

Cover design by WMG Publishing

Cover art copyright © Karol Brandys/Dreamstime

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

Everyone hates Wicked the dog. Wicked, the aptly named baggage, who arrived with the next door neighbor’s daughter and granddaughter after they escaped his bastard son-in-law.

Wicked barks all the time—until the day he gets kidnapped, and the entire neighborhood spirals out of control.

“The Disappearance of Wicked”  is available on this site for one week only. You can get it as a standalone ebook, or in the anthologies Little Troublemakers, Crimes Collide Vol. 4, and Series Collide Vol. 2.  Enjoy!

The Disappearance of Wicked Kristine Kathryn Rusch

First, let me preface my story by telling you that none of us liked Wicked. He was an obnoxious little yappy dog, with long curly white hair that needed trimming and a propensity for peeing on anything vaguely foodlike, from a bag of groceries in the open trunk of a car to the kibble set out for the neighborhood cats. He barked most of the time he was awake. When he wasn’t barking, he was yipping, a sad little high-pitched sound that was twice as annoying as any bark could be.

Even Isabel, the dog he lived with, an elderly female mix about the size of a Lab, hated him. Isabel, who faithfully guarded our neighborhood hilltop for the past thirteen years, would slink away whenever Wicked was outside, as if to say, Don’t look at me. I have nothing to do with that smelly, undisciplined little thing.

None of us had much to do with Wicked, not even his so-called owner, Ike Maize. Ike had inherited the dog from his daughter, Roxy, who was going through a messy divorce. Ike and his wife Stella promised to care for Wicked while Roxy went back to California to move her things to Oregon.

I had assumed Roxy would get an apartment when she got to Oregon. Instead, she showed up with the furniture and a six-month-old no one had told me about. The divorce wiped her out financially, so she moved in with her parents.

And that meant Wicked stayed too.

I work at home and am usually immune to the neighborhood noise pollution. I’m not the kind of man who investigates each blaring radio or early morning chain saw. Normally, I play my own stereo so loud that I don’t hear much during the day.

But I could hear Wicked. Nonstop. Barking, barking, yipping, and barking.

By the end of the first day, I wanted to strangle the little thing. By the end of the third day, I spent more time glaring at Wicked than I did working. By the end of the week, I was actively plotting the dog’s death.

I’m an inventive plotter. The critics say that’s one of my (only) strengths as a novelist. In fact, they claim I’ve been on the bestseller list for the past ten years because I can plot better than anyone else in the business.

Outwardly, my home does not reflect the wealth that my plotting skills have brought me. I kept the same footprint—as my realtor likes to say—and built up to make three full stories It’s quite a redesign, but it fits into the neighborhood—or it pretends to.

And that’s all that matters to me.

Because I don’t want to leave the Crest Hill Subdivision. This house was the first house I ever bought—and I vowed not to sell it. Back then, it was a simple split-level, built in 1972, and not remodeled in twenty years. I pulled the orange and green shag carpeting, remodeled the kitchen by myself, and turned the free-standing garage into my writing office, which I still use without many modifications.

In fact, the free-standing garage/office is the problem. The walls are thin because here on the temperate Oregon Coast, houses don’t need insulation. I haven’t replaced the cheap windows I put in during my first redesign, which is why I can hear that early morning chainsaw and the blaring truck radio.

Normally, I don’t mind.

But that was before Wicked.

It was all before Wicked who, oddly enough, changed my view of the neighborhood forever.

***

The Crest Hill Subdivision was built on a sandy ridgeline, 700 feet above sea level, several blocks east of the Pacific Ocean. The story of the subdivision is a story of neighbors—common in most places around the country, but extremely uncommon here on the Oregon Coast. In Seavy Village, three out of four houses are vacation rentals or second homes. These houses are full every Fourth of July. Two-thirds are full on Thanksgiving. A third are full during spring break.

Seavy Village has housing for forty thousand people, and hotel rooms for twice that many, but its year-round population is 7,000. Most neighborhoods are entirely empty most of the time or have only one year-round family residing on those quiet streets.

Crest Hill Subdivision has always been different. We are a small enclave in a sea of empty houses. All twenty houses in Crest Hill are owner-occupied.

For the most part, we get along. We have an annual barbeque at Dave the Plumber’s. When we see each other during the rest of the year, we always wave. If we have time, we stop on the street and chat.

Not a week goes by without a group of us gathered in front of the mailboxes, exchanging the village gossip, and catching up on each other’s lives. We watch out for each other as best we can, and sometimes we even babysit each other’s children or feed the pets during the occasional long weekend.

When my money started pouring it—and it did pour: one minute I was scrambling to make my mortgage, the next I was talking to my broker about various places to store excess cash—I could have built a true mansion on a cliff face overlooking the ocean. But every bare piece of property I looked at, every tumbledown house that could be replaced for something better, existed in that sea of empty houses.

I didn’t like that much isolation, so I stayed in Crest Hill, along with Ike and Stella next door, the Sandersons one house up, Old Mrs. Gailton across the street, and Annalita Carmica on the corner. We formed the foundation of the neighborhood and over time, we acquired even more full-timers. Dave the Plumber and his wife (whose name I always forget), Joyce the Hollywood Producer who retired to her dream house, and the McMillians who bought, for a song, a McMansion that lost its view to the six-plex.

We’re a pretty quiet bunch who lived in very safe place—or so I thought, in those days before Wicked moved in.

***

The morning Wicked disappeared seemed like any other. I had trudged through the rain from my back door to my freestanding office, a hot mug of coffee in one hand, and an offering to the Goddess in the other.

The Goddess was the elderly cat who lived alone in my office. She bit the hand that fed her each and every day. I was inordinately fond of her, enough that I put up with her nasty temper and her inability to get along with anyone, including me.

She spent that morning in the library window, watching Wicked, as she often did. She hated the barking more than I did. Once, she had seen him peeing on one of her dishes that I had set down outside. She had pushed the screen out of the window, then attacked him, beating him so badly that I had to go over to Ike and Stella’s and offer to pay for Wicked’s trip to the vet.

That’s when I learned how much Ike hated Wicked.

“Let the damn dog suffer,” he said. “He’s got to learn that the world isn’t his toilet.”

During Wicked’s stay on the hilltop, the Goddess glared out the library window—the only room in my office that had a good view of Wicked’s yard—and occasionally made little growling noises. Mostly, she seemed to believe if she stared hard enough, Wicked would feel her anger and shut up.

It spoke to my desperation that daily I wished she did have magical powers. I wanted something to shut that damn dog up.

About 11 o’clock that morning, I got my wish. Wicked let out one of his sad yips, followed by the strangest bark I’d ever heard. It was high pitched and sharp, almost sounding startled. Then he let out a long half-bark, half-yowl that seemed more like a human scream than a noise any dog was trained to make.

That sound didn’t end. It got cut off. I leaned back in my office chair and listened, waiting for the barking to begin again.

It didn’t.

Instead, I heard the squeal of truck tires against gravel. Rocks pelted my newly built fence (good fences make good neighbors; they also keep out little peeing yappy dogs).

Then silence.

After a moment, the Goddess sprinted across my desk. She landed in my lap, meowed in my face, and pawed at my hands. I hadn’t seen her that agitated since a yellow tom sprayed one of the rose bushes outside the office’s sliding glass doors. So I followed her into the library.

She jumped onto the window ledge and pressed her face against the glass.

I peered out. From this one window, I could see over the fence and into the Maize’s yard. No truck sat in the driveway, even though I had heard one. Isabel, the elderly dog, was sitting on the walkway to the back door, head tilted to one side.

I didn’t see Wicked.

The Goddess was murping, a sound she made when something in her universe was out of order. I frowned, my stomach knotting in a little ball.

I realized I recognized that sequence of sounds.

I hadn’t heard it in years, not since the Maize’s daughter was little and Ike drove up the driveway too fast one afternoon, running over one of their cats.

He scooped the bleeding, broken creature into his arms, placed it on the floor of the truck, and then backed out of the driveway, peeling away as fast as his old Ford one-ton could go.

He made it to the vet’s in record time, but it was still too late. He’d crushed his daughter’s favorite cat beneath the wheels of his truck and it took months for her to forgive him.

Now, I figured the same thing had happened. Right in the middle of her messy divorce, one that threatened to spill into a long custody battle over her own daughter, her father runs over the dog she has loved since she moved away from home.

Ike had to be devastated.

I really didn’t want to be there for him—there were some things that were beyond neighborly, even in Crest Hill Subdivision—but I knew I had to investigate, just in case my writerly imagination had leaped to the wrong conclusion.

I let myself out of the office. The morning rain had turned into a light drizzle, the kind that looks harmless but actually can soak you within five minutes.

Red and gold leaves littered my driveway. Sometime during the night, a raccoon had clearly pulled part of a white plastic trash bag through the slight hole in my garbage can’s lid, scattering plastic food containers and paper plates across the yard.

I ignored the mess and walked to the fence. It was a picket fence, painted brown, with the pickets rising over six feet, so that few people could see over the top of them. I pulled open the gate in the center and stepped into the Maize’s unpaved driveway.

The rainstorm had left the ground so wet that the retreating truck had torn up deep grooves in the muck. I walked to the edge of them, expecting to see some pieces of white curly hair ground into the dirt or maybe a bit of blood on the already wet rocks. Maybe even a smashed collar or the impression of a small dog’s body in the dirt.

To my disappointment, I saw none of that. I didn’t even see Ike’s footprints in the muddy gravel, although mine were clearly visible.

I frowned and looked up. Isabel, who was used to me, stared at me, a matching frown on her large doggy face. I couldn’t tell if she was perplexed to see me standing on her driveway or if the truck’s quick retreat had surprised her.

I clasped my hands behind my back and walked farther up the driveway, so that I could peer inside the garage. No injured Wicked lying on his side on the concrete. No impish brown eyes peering at me through the small window beside the garage door.

Nothing barked, nothing yipped.

The silence was profound.

Isabel sighed, seemingly in relief, and put her head between her paws. Again, I couldn’t understand the reason for her emotion. Relief that a human was on the case? Or relief that Wicked had finally shut up?

Or both?

I felt no relief. The depth of my Wicked hatred surprised me. Part of me really wanted to see that dog dead. I had never actively wished anything dead before, not even the raccoons who constantly defeated each garbage can I bought.

I had hoped to find evidence of that dog’s demise.

Finding none disappointed me.

But at least, something had forced Wicked to become quiet. As I peered into my neighbor’s garage, I realized I should accept the gift.

I hurried back to my office—after stopping briefly to clean up after the raccoons—and had the most productive day I’d had in the month and a half since Wicked had moved in.

***

The silence didn’t last.

As I microwaved the take-out I picked up for dinner, someone knocked on my door. Even though our neighborhood was close, very few people knocked. The UPS guy knocked every morning, and the newspaper delivery boy knocked once a month, but almost no one else came to the door.

I pressed stop on the microwave and walked to the door. The door was solid core, with no peephole, something I’d meant to remedy. So opening it always contained, for me, a small bit of adventure.

Someday, my vivid thriller writer’s imagination told me, the person on the other side of that knock would be a serial killer, coming to attack me. My logical mind told me that serial killers didn’t knock, but my vivid imagination would counter with the fact that thieves often did, just to see if someone was home.

Fortunately, the person waiting on my stoop wasn’t a serial killer or a thief.

It was Ike.

He was a big man with long, graying hair that showed his hippy roots. He slouched on a good day, but this evening, he was nearly bent in half.

He gave me a sheepish half smile. “I don’t suppose I can ask you a question.”

“Sure,” I said. “Come on in.”

I stepped back and he walked in, careful to stay on the throw rug I put over the hardwood at the start of every rainy season. Even though we had been neighbors for more than fifteen years, we hardly went inside each other’s homes. I couldn’t remember the last time he had been in mine.

He looked at his mud-covered shoes as he said, “My daughter sent me over here. Seems Wicked is missing.”

His voice had the right combination of sincerity and loss, but he wasn’t meeting my gaze.

“Wicked stopped barking about 11 this morning,” I said.

Ike looked up, frowning at me much the way his elderly dog had when I stood in their driveway.

I told Ike the entire story, such as it was, leaving out, of course, the Goddess’s odd attack and her murping sounds, as well as my desire to see Wicked’s blood seeping into the muddy tire prints.

“A truck?” Ike repeated.

“I thought maybe it was you,” I said. “You know, that whole incident with the cat.”

He winced. “No one lets me forget that. I didn’t mean to hit the damn thing.”

“No one ever does,” I said, then realized I wasn’t being neighborly. “You want a beer?”

“I want an entire keg,” he said tiredly. Then he smiled at me. “But a bottle will do.”

I got him a Rogue Brewery Pale Ale from the fridge, then kicked out one of the dining room chairs. “Sit for a minute.”

“I’ll track all over,” he said.

“Who cares?” I said, catching myself before I added, I have a housekeeper who worries about such things. I had a lot more money than my neighbors—hell, these days, I had more money than the entire town—but I didn’t try to call attention to that.

Although it was hard not to notice in my maple and cherry kitchen, with the matching formal dining table, the brand new appliances, and every cooking gadget known to man lining the kitchen counters. Not that they saw those.

What they usually saw was my one and only toy. My late-model Jag, which I replaced each and every year.

He sat down and took a sip from the longneck bottle.

“That goddamn dog,” he said. “If my karma determined that I had to run over only one animal with my truck, why did it have to be Roxy’s kitten? Why the hell couldn’t it have been Wicked?”

“If the neighborhood had known you were looking for volunteers….” I said, letting my words trail off.

He looked up at me, startled. Then he realized I was joking. He leaned against the table, resting his elbow against the tablecloth my housekeeper insisted on changing every Tuesday.

“There were times I might’ve looked,” he said. “The Bastard—” That was his nickname for his daughter’s soon-to-be ex “—trained the little fucker, or didn’t train it, as the case may be. Wicked loves my daughter and that baby, and will guard them with his little doggy life, but other than that, he isn’t a dog at all. He’s a goddamn menace. He doesn’t shut up, he pees all over everything, he tears up the furniture.”

“He’s still a puppy,” I said, not exactly sure why I was making excuses for a dog I hated.

“A puppy?” Ike said, sitting upright. “Are you kidding? Wicked is three years old. I’ve been trying to train him all month. It’s not working.”

Obviously, I nearly said, but didn’t. No sense in causing my neighbor more pain.

“I haven’t heard Wicked since that truck,” I said. “You’d think if he got injured or snuck into the woods, we’d hear him.”

“You’d think the entire town would hear him,” Ike said. “I’m hoping the little bastard ran off.”

The little bastard, trained by the Bastard. I had never put Ike’s language together before. He hated Wicked not just because he was an uncontrollable dog, but also because the dog represented an uncontrollable soon-to-be ex-son-in-law.

“If Wicked did run off,” I said, “he did so chasing that truck. Silently.”

“That dog isn’t quiet about anything,” Ike said. Then he paused for a moment before adding, “You thought I was driving that truck?”

I nodded.

His frown grew deeper. “Not many trucks sound like mine. Did you see it?”

“Nope,” I said, taking another sip of my ale. “I heard it. It sounded big and heavy, like yours does when it comes up the driveway. But you usually don’t peel out. In fact, the only time I ever heard you peel away down the driveway was—”

“The cat incident,” he said tiredly. “I know.”

He started to take a sip from his beer, and stopped.

“The Bastard,” he said.

“Hmmm?” I asked. I wasn’t sure if he was talking about the soon-to-be ex or the little dog.

“The Bastard,” Ike said to me, slowly, like he was having a realization. “He used to peel.”

I sipped. Thought. Remembered.

He did peel. It was one of the noises I had gotten used to. Roxy had started dating the Bastard in high school. It became one of those neighborhood dramas, something everyone in Crest Hill Subdivision talked about, since the Bastard came from a family of do-nothings on the wrong side of town.

In a town of 7,000, the wrong side is pretty low-key. We don’t have murderers, thieves or knife-wielding maniacs. Our do-nothings are well named. They’re freeloaders who try to live on county money without doing any work. If they do get a job, from an unsuspecting out-of-towner, they lose that job within the month.

The Bastard’s family was pretty notorious. Entire generations lived in a small trailer on an expensive lot near the ocean. They wouldn’t move, no matter how much developers offered them, and they wouldn’t work either. Mostly, they sat outside—rain or shine—and drank, throwing their empties into an ever-growing pile in a part of the yard that had once housed a driveway.

The Bastard had that bad-boy charm. At least, that was what fifteen-year-old Roxy had thought. She had been a straight-A student, and remained so, graduating at the top of her class, earning several partial scholarships—enough so that the Maizes could send her to the school of her choice in California.

The Bastard followed. By this point, he had dropped out of high school, lost three jobs, and had his first DUI. Yet for her, the charm remained.

For Ike, who complained about him every moment he got, the Bastard was a gigantic version of Wicked, peeing all over the neighborhood, then barking and yipping when anyone else got in his mangy little way.

When the Bastard followed Roxy to California, I stopped thinking about him.

“I thought he was still in California,” I said. That was what Stella had told me one morning when we met at the mailboxes, both of us picking up our rain-soaked copies of the Oregonian.

“He went to live with his mother in Vegas,” Ike said.

“Oh, jeez.” I didn’t even have to ask how that was working out. When you took do-nothings and gave them the opportunity to get rich quick for very little effort, they spent every dime they hadn’t earned on penny slots and the upcoming big win.

“Yeah,” Ike said. “Good riddance, I thought. But he threatened to come back and get his things. I told Roxy to get a restraining order, but she thinks he doesn’t have the balls to drive all the way up here.”

“But you think he does,” I said, trying to keep the surprise from my voice. I agreed with Roxy on this one. A third generation do-nothing wasn’t going to drive across three states just to retrieve his things. That would take too much effort.

“Yeah, I do,” Ike said. “He’s a mean, weasly little bastard who thinks my daughter is something he owns.”

He took the final sip of his beer and sighed.

“I’m not the smartest man in the world,” he said, “but I’ve seen guys like him before. When they think they’re losing the only things they own, they get dangerous.”

I hadn’t thought of that. Ike was right; sometimes do-nothings became violent and possessive. I hadn’t seen that in the Bastard, but then I hadn’t done much more than exchange a few sentences with him in a little more than five years.

“Why would he take Wicked?” I asked.

Ike gave me a chilling glance. “Because my daughter loves that horrid little dog. Although for the life of me, I have no idea why.”

***

In the next few days, the Wicked saga became the focus of neighborhood gossip. From Dave the Plumber, I heard that Ike had the cops searching for the Bastard’s truck. From Old Mrs. Gailton, I heard that Roxy had been getting threatening phone calls. From Stella, I heard that Roxy had finally hired an attorney to finalize the divorce and to get that all-important restraining order.

The whole family believed that the Bastard had stolen Wicked, although the chief of police, Dan Reilly, thought the little dog had finally run away.

“Good riddance,” he said. “The nasty thing peed on my leg one afternoon.”

We had run into each other at the local A&P. We stood in the fresh fish aisle, which smelled of both fish and cocktail sauce. Twice during our conversation, the butcher snuck us bits of a steak he was cooking up in the back.

“We’re looking for the Bastard, of course,” Reilly said. He was a big man with gym rat muscles. They made him look formidable in his gray-green uniform.

As he spoke, I smiled to myself. Ike had everyone in town calling his daughter’s soon-to-be ex the Bastard. “But I doubt we’ll find him. He knows better than to come back here.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“He’s got a bench warrant,” Reilly said. “You didn’t know that?”

“No,” I said. “Does Ike?”

“Now he does.”

“What did the Bastard do?” Even I had picked up the phrase.

“Robbed the Cruise Inn one Friday night using his father’s .45. Got away with about one hundred dollars, but the crime’s pretty serious. See, it’s—”

“Armed robbery,” I said. “A felony.”

Reilly’s eyes twinkled. “Forgot you write about this stuff.”

Usually I write about bigger things. Stockbrokers taking down entire corporations and having hit men after them; the President surviving assassination attempts; and, of course, my biggest seller, the serial killer truck driver working the Pacific Northwest who finally gets caught by the plucky female cop from the Oregon Coast.

“How come I never heard about this robbery?” I asked.

Reilly shrugged. “The Cruise Inn doesn’t want anyone to know how easy they are to rob. Or how often they do get robbed.”

“How often do they get robbed?” I asked.

“At least once a month. We leave it out of the police report as per their request.”

I shook my head, this time letting my amusement show. These things happen in small towns. In fact, when I moved to Seavy Village, Ike Maize told me that the best way to get your news was to talk to the locals. The paper didn’t cover most of the interesting stories, since we were a tourist town and we didn’t want our tiny crime waves to scare the tourists away.

“How long has he had that warrant?” I asked.

“Since before he went to California,” Reilly said.

At least a year then. “Why didn’t you tell Ike? He knew where the Bastard was.”

Reilly sighed. “I thought about it. But Ike and Roxy fought about the Bastard enough. Ike almost lost his daughter because of it. So I never said anything to Ike, although I did find out where the Bastard and Roxy lived. I tried to get someone down there to act on the warrant, but they wouldn’t. Seems a $100 theft, even if the thief used a .45, is small potatoes to them.”

I wondered how much anguish it would have solved for the Maizes to have the Bastard arrested in California. But that would have been before the marriage went south, and Roxy might’ve gotten stuck, like so many women did, waiting for her man to get out of prison.

“What if he has come back to town?” I asked.

“I would’ve heard about it,” Reilly said. “Everyone’s looking out for him.”

“Now they are,” I said. “But a week ago? I had no idea this was going on. Neither did anyone else in Crest Hill. And we were the ones most likely to see him.”

“He’s not in town,” Reilly said. “You can take that to the bank.”

If I took it to the bank, I wouldn’t be able to deposit it. Much as I liked Dan Reilly, he was a placeholder chief of police, one of the local boys made good until the out-of-town replacement showed up like she was supposed to do sometime in the following spring.

Reilly, for all his certainty, really didn’t know much about police work. He knew Seavy Village, and nothing else. Usually, in this town, that was enough. But bench warrants, armed robbery, and hints of violence took the Bastard out of the local small-time range and into something much more dangerous.

Something I really didn’t want on the other side of my fence, not even for a short, dog-stealing visit.

Still, I didn’t hear any more trucks except Ike’s reliable one-ton. Occasionally Isabel barked, but those were welcome-home barks for her family or her standard warning to the UPS guy not to get too close.

The Goddess and I worked every day. I progressed on the latest book. She growled at the raccoons. We both had a productive week.

Until we heard a truck zoom its way up the Maize’s driveway. The Goddess murped at me as she ran from the double glass doors to the library window.

I didn’t go to the library window at all. I hurried out of the office, grabbing my cell phone along the way.

The truck I heard was bigger than Ike’s. It was one of those with the double-long bed. I had no idea what kind it was—trucks aren’t my specialty—but I called this kind, which stood higher, wider, and longer than most trucks, penis shrinkers. I figured any guy who wanted one of these was overcompensating for something, and the overcompensation was worse if he actually found the dough to buy one of these monsters.

I had already dialed 911 as I approached the fence. Through the slats, I could see the Bastard. He had stepped out of the truck’s cab, leaving the door open. The truck was running, and even over the roar of the diesel engine, I could hear the dinging of the warning bell, reminding us all that the keys were in the ignition.

The Bastard ignored the sound. He was one of those guys who changed from a thin, somewhat good-looking teenager to a muscular, menacing twentysomething.

As I reached for the gate’s handle, I saw Roxy step out of the garage. Isabel was barking, a strange, frightened bark I hadn’t ever heard from her. She blocked Roxy’s path, but Roxy went around her.

Roxy, still carrying baby weight around her hips and stomach. Roxy, carrying the baby—now a cute blond toddler—tightly in her arms.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” she said in a frightened voice as the 911 dispatch answered on my cell.

I stopped, softly gave my address, and said, “We need police up here immediately. We have a felon with a bench warrant against him in my neighbor’s yard, threatening everyone he sees.”

Then I pulled the phone away from my ear, opened the gate, and stepped onto the Maize’s driveway.

The Bastard whirled toward me. He had something white and bloody in his arms, and I realized that was Wicked. I couldn’t tell if the dog was alive or dead.

“Go away,” the Bastard snarled at me. “This is a family matter.”

“It’s a neighborhood matter,” I said loudly, hoping the 911 dispatch could still hear me. “You’re not supposed to be on Ike Maize’s property. There’s a restraining order against you.”

I said all of that for the 911 dispatch, not for the Bastard. Still, he glared at me with so much anger that my pulse started to race.

“Is that Wicked?” Roxy asked, her voice shaking.

“Stay back,” I said.

But her question had turned the Bastard back to her.

“Yeah.” He tossed the dog onto the driveway. The dog bounced on the gravel and then, appallingly, whimpered.

Time and time again, I had imagined horrible, hideous ways to kill that dog, but now that I saw it in front of me, I ashamed for myself and terrified for the dog.

So was Roxy. She ran to the dog, and as she did, the Bastard ran toward her.

“Roxy, don’t!” I yelled, and I ran toward both of them.

But I was too far back. The Bastard grabbed his daughter from Roxy’s arms and raced for the truck. He cradled the toddler against his chest as he jumped into the cab, pulling the door closed.

“Noooo!” Roxy screamed, running for the truck. I ran for it to. She got there ahead of me, grabbing the door handle.

The Bastard shoved the truck into reverse and sped up, sending gravel in my direction. It hit me like sharp needles, but I kept going.

Roxy lost her grip, falling backward.

For one horrible moment, I thought he was going to back over her, but he didn’t. He put the truck into drive, and sped off down the driveway.

I reached her side a moment later. Her knees and hands were scraped and she sat there, defeated, staring at the truck down on the road.

“Here,” I said, thrusting the cell phone at her. “I’ve already called 911. Give them the license plate and the make of the truck. I’m going after the Bastard.”

I didn’t give her time to argue. As I ran back through the gate, I realized I should have told her to call her dad as well. I hoped she was smart enough to figure that out.

I ducked inside my house, grabbed my car keys and sprinted for my one indulgence. That Jag could outperform any other car in Seavy Village. And it could outperform a penis shrinker too.

I slid into the driver’s seat and started the car in the same motion. It purred into life, the engine ready to go at whatever speed I wanted.

I peeled down my driveway—something I had always wanted to do, but never dared to, not in this quiet subdivision. I turned right at the bottom of the driveway, thanking whatever developer had designed this place for the long twisty road that took us out of the subdivision to the highway.

I could just see the truck at the intersection. He didn’t come to a full stop—he was kidnapping his daughter after all—but the stupid Bastard had his signal on.

He was turning left. To the straightaway that would take him out of Seavy Village and down Highway 101, away from the police and into a kind of legal no-man’s land.

He pulled out and for the first time, I cursed the fact that I had given Roxy my phone. I wanted to tell the dispatch what direction he was going in.

Of course, in this tiny town, he only had two choices—north or south. The smart direction was south. Anyone with a brain would think of that straightaway and legal no-man’s land.

There, in the miles between Seavy Village and Whale Rock, the Seavy Village Police Department lost its jurisdiction. For ten miles, only the state police could arrest anyone. Then the Whale Rock police took over.

The state police, underfunded and undermanned, never patrolled that section of the highway. If they had to come in to make an arrest, they often had to come from another part of the county—sometimes from another part of the state.

When I reached the intersection, I didn’t stop either. I turned left, sliding behind a black Subaru and in front of a bright blue Smart Car. The Smart Car slammed on its brakes, but I was already in the other lane, heading south at 80 miles an hour, double the speed limit.

There weren’t a lot of cars on the road, but there were enough that I had to weave and dodge around them, moving from the southbound lane to the passing lane to the shoulder in the areas where I could see far enough ahead to make sure there were no cyclists on the road.

The hotels and convenience stores, the kitschy restaurants and antique stores sped by me in a blur. My engine roared as I shifted into the final gear, cranking the speed up to 100 miles per hour.

I had never driven these roads this fast. Part of me hoped someone would report me to the police—I could lead them on a goose chase to the Bastard, and then, since they were already on the scene, they could arrest him for the state police.

Part of me prayed that I wouldn’t hit anything or anyone. If I hit someone going this fast, I’d kill them. My Jag was so well built that I’d probably survive, but I wasn’t sure I could live with myself.

Then I thought of that little girl. I had only gotten a glimpse of her, even though she lived right next door for the past few weeks. Tiny, blond, quiet for someone that age, on this afternoon, she had been wearing a pink dress that showed her chubby legs.

Those legs were probably coated with Wicked’s blood, rubbed off from the Bastard’s hands.

I shuddered, gripped the steering wheel tighter, and pressed hard on the accelerator. I continued to weave, continued to pray, and finally, as the road narrowed and curved up the mountain between Seavy Village and Whale Rock, I saw the truck.

It was hard to miss with that extended back end. A lot of young men in Seavy Village loved those trucks, but most couldn’t afford them.

It had to be the Bastard.

I drove even faster.

The truck moved closer at a rapid pace.

Now if I swerved, I would hit the guardrail, maybe bounce over it and fall wheels over roof all the way to the ocean. Or if I crossed into the northbound lane, I would hit the mountainside.

I wouldn’t survive either of those.

My breath caught. I had to make myself exhale and think. I couldn’t force the Bastard off the road because he had the toddler with him.

But there was a wide area in the road about eight miles from this point, where another road—coming from the east—intersected it. I could force him down that road, away from the ocean.

That road dead-ended into a large parking lot that led to a state park.

I zoomed up to him, then around him, hoping that he was smart enough to stop or turn when he came across an obstacle. He knew these roads better than I did, and I hoped that would influence his driving as well.

When I reached the road that formed a T with the highway, I glanced east. The road was as wide as I remembered. Someone driving fast could make a quick turn—even if that someone was in an extra long truck.

I stopped only a few yards away, turned on my flashers, and blocked both lanes. I kept watching both lanes, hoping that the first vehicle to approach—on either side—was the Bastard’s truck.

Of course, it wasn’t. A minivan heading north pulled up and stopped. A middle-aged man with a paunch and graying hair got out. He walked around to the driver’s side and knocked on the window.

“You okay?”

“No,” I said. “Move away from my car.”

“You can’t block the road.”

In the distance, I saw the truck. I pointed at it.

“You see that truck? The man in there is wanted for armed robbery. He kidnapped the baby in the car with him. I’m trying to force him to stop. You got a cell phone?”

The man was looking at the truck, squinting. “Yeah.”

“Call the police. Tell them that you’ve seen the gray long-bed truck that everyone’s looking for. Tell them he’s gone into Whale Cove State Park. Can you do that?”

“Um—”

“Because I’m going after him and I need backup.”

The truck had nearly reached the T. He was at the point where he would see the car blocking the highway. At that moment, I realized it was good to have the middle-aged man alongside my Jag. The Bastard wouldn’t know I was waiting for him.

He turned east, just like I expected him to. His truck was too big to make a U-turn. The drive to the parking lot and back would allow him to drive north again.

“Move!” I said to the middle-aged man.

Smart guy, he ran behind my car, so that I could zoom after the Bastard.

My initial plan had been to follow the Bastard down to the parking lot, but as I drove the few yards, I realized that was stupid. The best thing I could do was park in front of the T. He’d have nowhere to go.

I parked over both lanes of the state park road, blocking it, my Jag facing north.

Then I shut off the ignition, set the parking brake, and got out.

I was only a few feet away when the Bastard crashed into my car. The sound was tremendous, overpowering everything, the scream of metal on metal.

His truck shoved my car toward me. I had to dive into the ditch between the highway and the mountainside to get out of the way. My car rolled and then hit the guardrail.

The Bastard turned north and drove away as if nothing happened.

I lay in the ditch. I had landed in cold brackish muddy water. I made myself climb out slowly, my heart pounding, my breath coming in short gasps.

I never expected him to hit my car, not with the toddler in his truck. I thought he’d get out, scream at me, and stay busy until the police showed up.

Maybe I’m not as good a plotter as the reviewers say I am.

I pulled myself up by my hands, then got onto the state park road and walked to the highway. I stood beside the highway, looking north, probably as forlornly as Roxy had looked as the Bastard drove off with her baby girl.

In the distance, I heard sirens.

I turned, slowly, and saw the middle-aged guy with the van. He was walking toward me, clutching a cell phone.

I refused to look at my Jag.

“That was like a monster truck rally,” he said. “I kept expecting him to drive over your car.”

He sounded almost excited. His cheeks were flushed. As he got closer, I realized he was probably younger than I was. All I had seen before was the gray hair and paunch. I’d missed the roundness to his cheeks, the brightness of his eyes.

Or maybe that came from the adrenaline brought on by witnessing an accident.

“He did enough to my car,” I said without looking at it. I didn’t want to know exactly what happened to it. I knew the moment it hit the guardrail that he had totaled it.

Because of my vivid imagination, I did not want to know what the driver’s side looked like. I didn’t want to have nightmares about what might have happened to me had I been inside.

The middle-aged guy waved the cell phone at me. “They said that they already had reports on the guy and they were heading this way. They said that they’d catch him now that he turned around. You forced him back to Seavy Village, you know?”

I knew. That hadn’t quite been my plan—I didn’t have a plan past blocking the road and waiting for the police—but it would have to do.

I would rather have the police take down the Bastard with the baby in the truck than have me do it.

“How’d you know what was going on with the guy?” the middle-aged man asked.

“I was there when he took the baby.” I suddenly felt very tired. My whole body hurt.

I wanted to go home. It meant I would leave the scene of an accident, which was a crime, but not a major one if no one got injured.

I had a hunch I could talk my way out of that one.

And even if I couldn’t, I could pay the damn fine.

“Can you give me a lift?” I asked the middle-aged guy. “I want to go home.”

The middle-aged man grinned. “I’d be happy to,” he said. “Just don’t ask me if you can drive.”

***

The middle-aged man, whose name was Tom Yates, chattered all the way to Crest Hill. I figured it was a nervous reaction and let him talk. I had him let me out at the bottom of Maize’s driveway—for some reason I didn’t want him to see my house—and then I waved as he drove away.

He had told me he was going to the police station to make a report. What a good citizen he was. I figured they could come to me if they wanted to talk.

As I reached the top of the driveway, I was stunned to see Ike’s truck, two police cars, and an ambulance. One of the paramedics was working hard on something on the ground.

It took me a moment to realize he was bandaging up Wicked.

Ike wasn’t around. Neither was Roxy.

But a uniformed police officer—a man I recognized but didn’t know by name—walked over to me.

“You the famous writer neighbor?”

“Yeah,” I said tiredly.

“I didn’t expect you here, sir,” he said. “I thought you’d be by Whale Cove State Park.”

“I was. But the other guy at the scene offered to drive me home.”

The policeman stuck out his hand. I stared at it a moment before taking it. He shook hard, then let go.

“You’re a real hero, sir. They have the baby. She’s fine. The Maizes have gone down to the station to get her.”

“So they caught the Bastard,” I said.

“They did. He’s going away for a long, long time.”

I hoped so. I hoped that the legal system worked the way it was supposed to. I would testify against him, that was for certain.

But I didn’t say that. I just nodded at the police officer and walked over to the paramedic.

“Didn’t know you guys worked on dogs,” I said.

“That girl,” he said, “she was hysterical. Dispatch thought she had been injured and sent me up here. She asked me to work on the dog. How could I say no?”

I looked down at the stretcher. Wicked’s eyes were glassy and he was panting. The paramedic had bandaged his back legs.

“That guy who took the dog—he cut its tendons in its back legs. Knew what he was doing too, because he stayed away from major arteries. This poor thing’ll probably never walk right again.”

Wicked’s gaze met mine. He was clearly in pain. He whimpered.

Lifting his leg was probably impossible now. He wouldn’t pee on my groceries again. He probably wouldn’t ever run again.

I never thought I could feel sorry for that dog, but I did.

“I’ve got him stabilized,” the paramedic was saying. “Can you let Ike know I’m taking the dog to Seavy Village Animal Clinic? They’ll know what to do with him.”

“Think they’ll have to put him down?” the officer said from behind me.

“No,” the paramedic said. “He’s not a horse. You don’t have to shoot him just because he’s injured his leg. Right, buddy?”

To my surprise, he put his hand gently on Wicked’s side and Wicked didn’t even try to bite him. The dog closed his eyes. His tail thumped.

“I’ll tell Ike,” I said. I wasn’t sure he’d be happy. But he would have a different dog than the one he hated. Wicked would never be the same.

Neither would Roxy. I only hoped her daughter wouldn’t have lasting scars.

Knowing the Maizes, they would do everything they could to make that little girl feel loved and wanted, not the product of some felon who had seduced their only daughter.

The paramedic wheeled the stretcher into the back of the ambulance, got in beside it, and pulled the double doors closed. The ambulance backed up in the very tracks left by the Bastard’s truck, then eased carefully down the driveway as if its cargo were as precious as an injured human being.

The officer watched from beside me. Then he looked at me and frowned. “You okay?”

“Tired,” I said.

“No kidding. You did a great thing.”

I hadn’t done anything great. If anything, I’d been reckless and stupid, letting my vivid imagination get away with me, making me think I could be as heroic as the people I wrote about.

“What do we do about my car?” I asked. “It’s crumpled on the side of the road by Whale Cove State Park.”

“I’ll take care of it,” the officer said. “And we’ll need you to make a statement whenever you’re ready.”

“I’m ready now.” I wanted this incident behind me.

I didn’t want to think about Wicked or the Bastard or Ike’s helpless hatred of both. I wanted to go back to my office and use my vivid imagination to create stories.

I thought it would be easy to go back. But I found I couldn’t shake the memories. Which is why I’m writing this.

Wicked is home. He’ll limp badly, and he’ll be a mostly indoor dog. The incident changed his temperament—or, as Ike says, being helpless has. Wicked lost all the aggression that made him the nasty little piece of work that he was.

Roxy’s divorce went through. The Bastard pled out to the minimum on both kidnapping and the armed robbery. He’ll be gone for years.

And the neighborhood has gone back to normal. Except that people ask me for advice now, as if my impulsive moment has given me some kind of wisdom.

Actually, Old Mrs. Gailton says they don’t see me as wise so much as the neighborhood leader. The mayor of Crest Hill Subdivision.

Apparently, it’s an appointed position. It’s certainly not one I want.

I blame Wicked. If it hadn’t been for the little bastard, I’d still be the mostly invisible weird writer who lives next to the Maizes, not the thriller writer who channels James Bond in his off-time.

So I hide in my office with the Goddess. She hunts raccoons again, having no interest in Wicked now that he’s not barking incessantly.

I have a little more interest. Sometimes I wonder what he went through in his last days with the Bastard. Sometimes I wonder if Wicked realized he meant nothing to the man who had trained him. And I wonder if the little dog had wanted to die when the Bastard tossed him onto the driveway.

I’ll never know, and Wicked will never tell.

He’s quiet these days. Isabel actually stands guard over him, as if she understands the changes too.

Sometimes in the middle of the afternoon, when no one’s around, I go to the Maize’s yard and pet him.

I have the sense that, ever since the incident, Wicked needs comfort.

And I know that I do too.

 

The Disappearance of Wicked

Copyright ©  by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

Cover and Layout copyright © by WMG Publishing

Cover design by WMG Publishing

Cover art copyright © amoklv/Depositphotos

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. 

All rights reserved. 

This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. 

This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

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We did better than expected on the Three SF Books Kickstarter—and that’s due to you backers! We’ll let the credit card process progress through Kickstarter and then send out the surveys in the next week or so.

Thank you so much!!!

Ragged, hungry, Skye gets abandoned at the door of what looks like a gigantic prison. The Assassins Guild—an impenetrable fortress. Only they let her in. And now, she either joins or escapes. One final test will determine the future—for herself and everyone around her.

“Skylight” is available on this site for one week only. You can get the story as a standalone ebook on all retail sites. And, if you like this story, check out the Three Science Fiction Books Kickstarter that runs until Thursday. You’ll get three of my sf books, including a brand-new collection of short stories, any other reward you might choose, and stretch goal short science fiction.

Skylight Kristine Kathryn Rusch

 

SKYE STANDS OVER the unbelievably fat man, feet spread as far as they go so she can straddle him, and clutches the spear in her right hand. His eyes are wild, but he’s past begging. Tears stain his face, and his lower lip trembles.

She doesn’t hate him. She should hate him, right?

She doesn’t look up either, because if she looks up, she fails, but she feels like stepping aside. Even though she’s in a simulation, everything feels real—there’s an actual wind blowing her long black hair (over her face, dammit), her footprints depress the grass around the fat man’s body, and the light of the fading sun seems too bright to her untrained eye.

Plus she can smell this guy. He smelled like garlic when she first arrived at his estate, pretending to be an escort that he had hired, and now he smells like sweat. Not healthy manly sweat, but flop sweat, tinged with fear so powerful that if there were predators in this simulation, they would come from the woods beyond in droves.

But there are no predators here, not even her. She’s supposed to be one, but it’s just not working for her.

“I asked this before, and I’m going to ask it again,” she says, sotto voce to her handler, just like she’s supposed to if something goes horribly wrong with the simulation. “A spear? Really?”

She knows the answer. Her handler has given her the same answer for two full days. You have to be ready to use everything around you. The story she’s acting out here is a simple one: the fat man’s bodyguards disarmed her at the door, so she grabbed what was near to hand.

But she hadn’t arrived at any door, and there were no bodyguards. She just appeared inside the estate, near the fat man, conversation already in progress. She stood with her hands folded in front of her while he talked, and scanned the room that overlooked the manicured grounds, searching for weapons.

The fat man had no idea she would grab a weapon (and the spear was handy), then end up like some kind of warrior, chasing him down that perfect lawn until he tripped and sprawled in front of her. Not half an hour ago, those bulging eyes twinkled with the idea of sex.

Now she’s supposed to plunge that spear into him. Preferably into his heart where he’ll die immediately, but considering what he’s (supposedly) done, impaling him in the eye isn’t bad either. It’ll make him scream and hold him in place and then she can go back for a more suitable weapon, like a knife or a laser pistol.

She’d prefer a laser rifle—hell, she’d prefer some air-to-ground missiles—because she doesn’t like looking at this guy’s face. Even if it is a simulated face.

It’s a simulated face that’s crying, because, apparently, that’s what the fat man did the day he really died, when a real assassin killed him nearly a decade ago.

Skye stabs the spear into the ground beside her, then uses it for balance so she can step away from the fat man. He sits up, his lower lip still trembling.

“Thank you,” he says, his voice wobbling. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

This is the point where her best friend MingLee said, Screw it, plucked the spear out of the ground and ran the guy through. She wasn’t supposed to tell Skye the experience in this simulation (or any simulation for that matter), but she had, in whispers, when they were off the Guild grounds, on holiday.

I guess that’s when I knew I could do this, MingLee said. They say you have to have a lot of anger in you to qualify, and I had no idea I had any anger at all until that fat man sat up and treated me like his savior for letting him go.

He isn’t treating Skye like a savior. He’s thanking her, sure, but she can see in those bulging eyes of his that he’s trying to gauge her, to see how badly he can fool her before he manages to escape.

She sighs. “You’re really a piece of work,” she says to him, then shoves him backwards with her booted right foot.

He starts crying again. She’d wager that in other simulations, people would kill him for those tears. But she’s not other people.

Nor is she a good candidate.

She thought she was angry about everything. Apparently, she’s not.

***

Still, what anger she had started the day she arrived at the Assassins Guild. She’d been ten, ragged and hungry, so thin that she could see the outline of the bones in her hands. She’d been told she was going back to her parents, and instead her uncle (if indeed, he was her uncle: it had never been proven) brought her here.

The Assassins Guild looked like a prison to her, but then, everything on this part of Kordita did. The Guild took up the area of a small city and it was a fortress, literally and figuratively. Outside its gates, it seemed so formidable that she had no idea how people would enter it.

The gates, seemingly made of blond river stone, towered above her. Columns rose on the right and on the left, apparently holding up the actual door in the middle.

Only it wasn’t a door so much as the image of a door. If she put her hand in it (and she didn’t at that moment; she only learned this later), she would discover that the image rippled, faded, and showed the actual entrance behind it. The entrance had three different airlocking systems, filled with all kinds of identification monitors and DNA checks.

Almost no one entered the Guild this way; those who tried usually died. But her so-called uncle hadn’t known that, not that he would have cared.

He spoke to that ripply door as if someone were there.

“I’m leaving the kid here per her parents’ instruction.” He glanced over his shoulder to see if she was listening. She was, but she was also trying not to look at him. He had a long thin face, something like her mother’s but not enough like her mother’s to think they were related. Besides, his black eyes were shifty, looking at Skye, then looking away, like people did when they lied.

He turned back to the door, and said, “Either you let her in or you don’t. It’s not my business. I will say, though, that I doubt she’ll live longer than a week without a good meal. And that’s on you guys, not that assassins would care about anyone’s life, right?”

No one answered. Nothing happened at all. There wasn’t even any indication that anyone had heard his message.

Skye thought he would try again. But apparently, she didn’t even warrant a second try.

He shrugged, and backed away from the door. Then he turned toward her, tousled her hair, and gave her the fakest smile she’d ever seen.

“Good luck, kid,” he said almost like he meant it, and walked away.

Her breath caught. She wasn’t going to yell after him. She knew better than to do that. But part of her couldn’t believe he was walking away.

He was the last tie to her parents. How would they find her? She couldn’t imagine that they would want her someplace called the Assassins Guild, but she couldn’t imagine a lot of things about her parents, things that they would later say or do.

Of course, they wouldn’t try to find her. They never did.

She swallowed and raised her chin as her so-called uncle disappeared over the horizon.

She didn’t cry. He wasn’t worth the tears. Besides, she was already used to people discarding her. Her parents had tried for years, and had only succeeded six months ago—only because she stopped trying to find them.

She wasn’t going to beg back into their good graces. Not anymore—and that resolve stayed, even now.

She sat down, wrapped her scrawny arms around her scrawny legs, and rested her cheek on her knees. She could still hear her so-called uncle cursing even though she could no longer see him. He was going on about money owed, payment denied, and revenge exacted.

Not that she cared. She was done. No one wanted her, and she wasn’t even sure she wanted herself.

She decided to wait until he’d been gone at least an hour. Then she’d try to find her way back to that slow-moving train he had taken her on. Maybe she could take it back to the city. She knew how to survive in a city; she could pick a pocket, steal an identity, and scrounge food better than anyone she knew.

She had a plan. But surprisingly, the Guild changed it.

And they changed it by opening the gate.

***

Skye sits in the debriefing room. She hasn’t expected to come here; she was told she’d be debriefed inside the simulation. Apparently she failed so badly that no one wanted to visit the interior of the simulation with her.

The debrief room is purposely devoid of anything except a table, two chairs, and of course, the replay walls that are able to show her failure in both 2D, 3D, and full virtual. Right now, the walls are off.

Maybe she’s going to get thrown out of the Guild, although she isn’t sure if that’s even possible. After all, she owes them a small fortune for fifteen years of room, board, and education. Theoretically, she’s supposed to work off the money as she apprentices with someone.

But she’s not going to apprentice with anyone now. No one’s going to want her. She already has a reputation for failing to play well with others, and now she can’t even kill a mass murderer properly.

Or better put, she can’t even replicate the murder of a mass murderer properly.

Oh, wait. She’s supposed to call his death an assassination.

The Guild defines assassination and murder differently. Assassination is a targeted death, done for reasons other than passion. Murder usually happens in a moment of passion, often without planning, but usually in response to some kind of emotional stimulus.

Assassination, properly done, is actually legal. The Guild is registered with hundreds of cultures on dozens of planets, and gets called into service whenever a major criminal (usually a mass murderer) escapes local justice and moves to a jurisdiction that protects him. Or won’t give him back. Or simply lets him exist.

Treaty after treaty make it okay for members of the Guild—and for other licensed assassins—to get rid of legal targets, targets already convicted elsewhere of provable crimes.

Sometimes the Guild even goes after folks whose heinous crimes can’t be proven in a court of law, but who are clearly guilty. That requires a bit more finesse, and a lot of proof from either the person (government, business, whatever) hiring the Guild or proof from the Guild itself.

Ten years ago, the fat man was one of the unconvicted—he’d actually bribed his way free. He’d murdered dozens of people, including some of the jurors on his very first trial five years before the one that made someone—Skye isn’t sure who—figure out that this guy was too slippery to convict of anything; he just needed to be executed.

Execution is another word that the Guild says is different from murder. But Skye isn’t sure of that either. Execution, as she learned in school, is simply what murder/assassination/death caused by others is called when a government does it.

She knows the lecture she’s going to get now, in this debriefing room. You can’t have pity for these guys, her handler will say. Then she’ll hear a recitation of everything the fat man ever did, probably the same damn recitation (with actual footage, in some cases) that she heard when she moved to this training level.

It took her a while to get here. Her hand-eye coordination isn’t the best. She required extra training just to get through weapons’ proficiency, and she passed it by such a low margin that she wasn’t sure they would move her forward.

But those anger tests, they got her a lot farther than anyone expected.

She might have bad hand-eye coordination, but she has enough anger for twenty assassins.

Or maybe twenty-five.

Or so they told her—before this simulation.

***

She didn’t make friends in the Guild. What was the point of friends? You’d just have to leave them anyway. Or they’d abandon you when it mattered.

From the moment she walked through that door into the Guild, she stayed on her guard. She expected them to throw her out. No one did.

They threw her in a class with a dozen other kids her age. Those kids paid real money to come here—or their parents had paid it. The kids were supposed to learn a trade, and assassin was one of the hardest trades of all.

You had to be smart, because you had to outthink your opponents. You had to be strong, but that could be trained. You had to be charming, or else no one would befriend you. And you had to have an ability to be forgettable, or your usefulness would end after your first few jobs.

The Guild tested for all of that—or at least, it tested the things it could test for. It could test for smarts, but charming appeared over time. Forgettable was something that couldn’t be tested either. And the Guild believed that anger would become strength over time.

Skye mimicked charming. She told people what they wanted to hear.

All the kids had parent stories, so she had parent stories. Some of them were even true.

Usually the parent stories got exchanged when the kids were in the gardens. The gardens inside the Assassins Guild were extensive, and were supposed to be calming. The kids had their own garden, filled with plants of all kinds—although none lethal. There actually was a lethal garden, locked and hidden, something the students got to use if they made it through regular schooling and moved into Assassins school proper.

Skye loved the garden, mostly because of the sunshine. Lots of stone paths widened into flat areas where kids could lie down and study the bugs in the dirt. She hadn’t seen bugs in their natural environment before coming to the Guild; she’d only seen bugs on ships or in restaurants or in low-rent space stations. There the bugs were disgusting, a sign of filth. Here, they were normal and desired, usually to keep the plants alive.

She wasn’t sure how she felt about the plants. All the other kids knew what the green ones were called and why some of them had red blossoms and others purple blossoms, but she didn’t. She’d never had regular schooling.

In fact, she’d never been in one place long enough to know where she was from. Her parents hadn’t named her for the sky she now saw above her, beautiful and blue and clear.

Instead, they’d named her Skylight, to remind them of a daring escape they’d made out of some ancient palace on some faraway planet. She had no idea what a skylight was until she’d come here, and someone had shown her one that existed in the upper towers of the student wing.

Even then, that person hadn’t known her name. No one knew her as anything but Skye. She wouldn’t even tell them her last name.

Not that any of the kids asked. They were more concerned with prestige and wealth and backgrounds of the parents.

“Hey, Skye,” some kid would say, “how much money do your parents make?”

That one was easy and true: “I don’t know,” she’d say. “They never told me.”

Or

“Hey, Skye, why haven’t your parents come to Parents Day?”

Harder, but also able to be truthful: “Their job takes them all over the sector. They never know where they’ll be from one month to the next.”

Or

“Hey, Skye, what do your parents do?”

That one she couldn’t answer, not truthfully, not and stay here. They’re pirates wasn’t quite true—they didn’t steal ships per se, but they did steal things on ships. They’re thieves made them sound small, and her parents were anything but small. They had grandiose plans, and sometimes those plans even succeeded.

So she’d say something almost true: “I don’t know what they do exactly. They can’t tell me what they’re doing most of the time.”

“Top secret, huh?” the kid would always answer, and she’d smile knowingly.

“Top secret,” she’d say, and go back to her bug study, or whatever else she was doing.

No one ever asked her how she got here. No one ever asked her why she was here. She didn’t even know this place cost money until six months in, when one of the administrators pulled her aside.

“Your probationary period is over,” the administrator said. “Congratulations. You’re a perfect candidate for our school. We’ve gotten you several scholarships to get you to age fourteen, but after that, we will need to review your situation.”

Fourteen seemed like forever away. She didn’t think of it.

Nor did she think much about it when, at fourteen, they explained that she could move to Kordita’s biggest city, Prospera, and go to public school at the city’s expense or she could stay here, have a top-notch education, and then work off her debt to the Guild once she graduated.

Working off debt sounded just fine to her.

It wasn’t like she had plans.

But, of course, back then, she hadn’t known what working off debt actually meant.

***

Václav, her handler, strides through the door. He’s whip-thin, muscular, and not much taller than she is. He keeps his head shaved, not because it’s perfectly formed—it isn’t—but because he lost his hair early, or so they say.

His skull shows his difficult life. Scars scatter across it like tattoos. He can have the skin enhanced so that no one sees the former injuries, but he’s proud of them.

Skye thinks they make him look like he has been stitched together by an inept seamstress.

He sits in front of her. He doesn’t reach under the table and activate the walls. She at least expects to see her failure in slo-mo.

Instead, Václav tilts his chair onto two legs, one elbow resting on the back, and says, “I don’t think you were objecting to the spear.”

She doesn’t expect him to say that. She raises her chin anyway. “It’s a stupid weapon, especially at close range.”

“Yes, it is,” Václav says. “That’s why the assassin who actually killed your target didn’t use it. In fact, you’re the first person to do the simulation to set the spear aside, just like the original assassin had.”

Her stomach twists. He’s not supposed to tell her how the actual job went. “Why are you telling me this?”

He smiles. His smile reveals laugh lines around his mouth, but not his eyes. She’s always found that curious. He has learned to smile and look amused without changing the expression in his eyes at all.

“I think you know the speech I would normally give here,” he says. “I suspect you could recite it to me. I also think that it doesn’t matter to you.”

Her heart pounds. She’s not used to being seen so clearly.

“I do want to ask one question, though,” he says. “Does it matter to you that after this guy escaped the first time, he murdered sixteen people, including ten children?”

She shudders just a little, and looks down. This is the reason no one tells the apprentices the names of the simulation targets. That way, the apprentices can’t look up what really happened. They have to trust their instructors to tell them the truth.

“Or that our projections showed that if he had been allowed to live, he probably would have killed—conservatively—another two hundred people over the course of his natural life?”

She swallows. She wants to say, Statistics can be manipulated or something else equally vapid like, We can’t predict the future. But she doesn’t because she knows there is no excuse for what she has done.

She’s an apprentice. She’s been given a target. She’s supposed to assassinate him.

In fact, her instructions were to kill him in any way she could, only she must not let him escape.

The word “escape” filters into her consciousness. She frowns. “Did you say he escaped?”

Václav’s smile finally reaches his eyes. Still no laugh lines, but the edges turn downward in amusement. As he trained her over the years, she always enjoyed seeing that downward turn more than she enjoyed seeing him smile.

“And the actual assassin didn’t use the spear?” she asks. Then she tilts her head. Her breath catches. “This isn’t a training simulation. You guys first created this simulation to see where the original assassin screwed up.”

Václav claps his hands together slowly.

“Brava,” he says. “You are the first student ever to go to the metalevel. Of course, in doing so, you’ve also managed to fail to qualify as an assassin.”

She isn’t sure what he means, why it amuses him, or why he finds it all praise-worthy. So she focuses on the failure. “Just because I set down the spear?”

“What do you think would have happened to you had he escaped?” Václav asks.

She doesn’t know. No one has ever talked about this. All she has ever learned in the Guild is that failure is not an option.

“I don’t know,” Skye asks. “What happened to the original assassin? The one who screwed up?”

“She didn’t report her failure,” Václav says. “The only reason we learned of it was the loss of those sixteen souls.”

Skye’s breath catches. “You mean, she just came back here and said she succeeded?”

“Oh, no,” Václav says. “She was still on his trail. She caught him shortly after the sixteen died, and then she dispatched him quite quickly—and very nastily, if the truth be told. She was angry.”

“I’ll bet,” Skye says softly.

“But she did get reprimanded,” Václav says. “And then she got removed.”

Skye leans back just a little as she understands what really happened. “She lied to you. She told you it wasn’t possible to kill him on his estate.”

Václav’s smile grows. Then he looks away and nods, as if Skye’s done well. She knows she hasn’t, so she’s even more surprised.

“Yes,” he says. “That’s why we created the simulation. We ran it with dozens of trained assassins. Every one of them found a way to dispatch the fat man on his estate. The spear, by the way, proved to be the most popular weapon.”

“Only because it’s unusual,” Skye mutters.

Václav’s eyes twinkle. “And here I thought it was because it’s ancient, something humans have used since the dawn of time.”

Is that humor? From Václav? She can’t quite tell.

He says nothing else. She knows this trick. He studies her, and then waits until she breaks. She’s not going to break. She knows how badly she failed. She just wants the verdict.

“So,” she says, “what’s the metalevel?”

His eyebrows go up, moving all of his scars. “That,” he says, “is a very good question.”

***

Skye started to get an inkling about the ways she’d work off her debt when she was told she’d go into Assassin school. Some of her peers—most of her peers—got to choose whether or not they’d continue in the program, but she didn’t.

When she finally asked if she could choose something else, her advisor had looked at her like she was dumb.

“You know what we are, right?” her advisor had said. “We train assassins.”

“But lots of people do other jobs here,” Skye had said. “There are scholars and investigators and teachers—”

“All of whom have been through Assassin School,” her advisor said.

“I thought only assassins go through Assassin School,” Skye had said.

“Yes,” her advisor said. “That’s right.”

***

“Before we go any further,” Václav says, “you need to tell me why you didn’t kill him.”

The debriefing room had gotten cold, or maybe Skye had. She had come in here covered in sweat. After all, she had been the only real thing in that simulation, and as a real thing, she had had real reactions to her physical efforts.

She felt damp, sticky, tired, and annoyed.

She’s had this discussion with Václav before, often in this wing of the Guild—when she blew her first exam to get into Assassins School; when she failed her laser-pistol test, the one where all she had to do was get the pistol to fire; when she refused to punch MingLee in the face hard enough to cause damage.

Skye should hate these plain, windowless debriefing rooms, because she’s been in them a million times, but she doesn’t. In fact, she feels just a bit victorious every time she enters.

She isn’t trying to fail at being an assassin, but she’s told everyone for years now that she’s not suited to it. And time and time again, she’s proven it.

As if Václav can hear her thoughts, he says, “I don’t want the discussion about why you’re not suited to be an assassin. We’ve had it. I want to know why you didn’t kill this target in particular. You were nearly there.”

His smile is gone, which she expected, and so is that little downturn at the edges of his eyes. He’s not happy with her, which shouldn’t surprise her. He’s usually not happy with her.

“The fat man wasn’t worth it,” Skye says.

Václav’s face reddens. She’s never seen that before. She actually got an emotional reaction out of him.

“Not worth it? We can prove that he killed hundreds of people in cold blood. How is that man not worth killing?”

She knows better than to bark out the answer that comes to mind first: Most people in the Guild have killed in cold blood. Does that make them worth killing?

Instead, she says, “Not worth killing to me. I’d lose a bit of myself. I don’t want to do that.”

“Lose a bit of yourself,” Václav repeats as if he doesn’t understand. And maybe he doesn’t. After all, he was one of the best assassins ever until he failed his last physical and had to retire from the field. She has no idea how many people he’s killed.

Her cheeks warm. “I’d lose a little bit of my—soul. Some people call it soul. Others call it…humanity. I don’t want to lose that.”

Is this the first time she’s told him this? Maybe in those words. He’s looking at her like she used to look at the bugs. Like she’s interesting and strange and imminently squashable.

“You think none of us have humanity?” he asks.

A verbal trap, one that she opened up. She answers cautiously. “I think we’re all different.”

She wants to stop there. Maybe he will let her stop there. She hopes he will let her stop there.

“But…?” he says.

And here it goes: the trap closing, mostly because—for once in her life—she’s tired of giving the expected answer.

Tired of lying.

She shrugs. “You believe that what you do puts you on the side of right. I think it makes me the same as the fat guy.”

Václav slams his palms on the table. It bounces up and then down. He stands up so fast his chair flips over.

She’s never seen him like this. Her heart pounds, but she doesn’t move.

He glares at her so coldly that she actually shivers. Then he yanks the door open, slamming it against the wall, and leaves, pulling the door closed so hard behind him that the entire building shakes.

She lets out the breath she was holding.

She’d managed to keep those thoughts to herself for more than a decade.

Now everyone will know.

“Ooops,” she says softly to herself, and wonders if she means it.

***

She was nineteen and one year into Assassin School when she finally had enough knowledge to marshal her arguments against continuing her education. She went into the chief administrator’s office.

It overlooked the kids’ garden, but the windows were so sheltered that Skye had no idea the administrator could watch the kids until this meeting.

So many secrets in this place, some of them built in.

The office itself was asymmetrical, walls jutting out at odd corners, spaces set aside seemingly haphazardly, unless one knew where to look. Skye had always known where to look.

Nothing in the Guild was accidental. Either those walls hid secret passages or secret viewing areas or just plain old secret rooms. Sometimes they were designed merely as decoys, so if anyone broke in looking for the secret passages, viewing areas, or rooms, they’d find one of these places.

But Skye saw all of them, the decoys and the real ones. She just said nothing. She would look at the Guild architectural drawings later to confirm her suppositions. She’d found the drawings nearly a year before when she was researching something else. Of course, the drawings had been miscategorized on purpose, so that no one could do what she had started to do—study the Guild from the inside out.

The head administrator, Umeko Hagen, was a tiny woman whose desk dwarfed her. She hadn’t held the job long; she’d been promoted when something no one talked about happened to or with her predecessor. She had hair as black as Skye’s and wore it so short that it looked like it had been accidentally lopped off.

“Every student believes she should leave the program at this point,” Umeko said before Skye had a chance to speak. “Not many get an audience with me about it.”

Skye swallowed hard. “I have talked to other administrators.”

“I see that,” Umeko said. “They told you to talk to me. They say your argument is persuasive. Is it?”

Skye wasn’t going to answer that. It was a silly question, and one meant to put her on the defensive.

“You’ve probably looked at my file by now,” she said. “You know I was dumped here with no say in the matter. You also know that I have said from the beginning that I’m not suited to be an assassin.”

“The tests say otherwise,” Umeko said, repeating what every administrator had said at this point.

“I may have the personality for it,” Skye said. “I may have the background for it. But I don’t have the desire.”

“The first year is hard—”

“I’ve never had the desire,” Skye said, “and unlike my peers, I don’t get to choose my future. You people have chosen it for me.”

“The scholarship students all get a choice,” Umeko said.

“I’m not a scholarship student,” Skye said. “I’m indentured. And that’s not legal.”

She wasn’t sure about the legalities. She couldn’t find which legalities applied to the Guild and which didn’t. The Guild seemed to be its own country, which meant it made its own laws. Although she wasn’t even sure of that. The secrecy of the Guild had worked against her, and for once, she wasn’t sure how to get around it.

“You made an agreement,” Umeko said.

“At fourteen,” Skye said.

“Which is old enough under the law,” Umeko said. Of course, she didn’t say which law. And Skye didn’t ask. She did know that on Kordita, fourteen was old enough to enter a contract, provided certain conditions were met.

“But no one explained all the terms to me. They said I’d have to work my room, board, and education off. No one told me that the only people who work here are assassins. I didn’t learn that until I was nineteen.”

“I thought you were observant,” Umeko said.

That insult hit home. “I am,” Skye said. “But none of the chefs kill people here.”

Umeko grinned. It made her look young. “Touché.”

“I understand that I owe you a great debt,” Skye said. “I’m willing to get work outside the Guild and send you half of what I earn for as long as it takes.”

“You want out of here that badly?” Umeko asked.

Part of her did. But for another part of her, the Guild was home.

“I like it here,” Skye said. “But I don’t want to be an assassin. Even for a little while. I’d like to choose my own future.”

Umeko templed her fingers. “As would we all.”

Skye held her breath.

“Do you know the cost of your room, board, and education?” Umeko asked.

“No one will tell me,” Skye said. “I have a guess, based on what the others say their parents pay.”

Umeko’s fingers folded together. “The other students have no idea what their parents pay. The cost of your education, so far, is in the millions.”

Skye frowned. “How can that be? I’ve done some figuring—”

“Yes, but you do not know how hard it is to get into the Guild, how much people are willing to pay for the privilege. You have been given a great opportunity. All we ask is ten years. Ten years in which you work for us, doing as we ask. Then you may set your future.”

Skye clenched her hands into fists. Umeko was her last chance. The other administrators said Skye had a good argument. She actually thought she might be able to control her life right now, get out of school, move onto something else.

She wasn’t going to let go so easily.

“I’d still like to try to pay you back myself, without going through Assassin School,” Skye said. “I’ll only incur more debt if I do.”

“Your path is set,” Umeko said. “Believe me, ten years is no hardship. You might only have one job per year. You will travel. Your expenses will be paid. We will pay for your home, your wardrobe, your weapons. You will have money in savings when you leave us. If you leave us. You are still getting the better of the deal.”

“If it were actually a deal,” Skye said.

“Ah, but it is,” Umeko said. “You were a scholarship student until you turned fourteen. You could have left us then. You chose not to.”

“I didn’t know what I was choosing,” Skye said.

Umeko’s face darkened. “Have you learned nothing? Ignorance is never an excuse.”

Skye’s fingernails dug into her palm. She’d tried claiming the judgment was unfair once, just once. And she was told that nothing in life was fair.

If anyone had cause to believe that, she did.

Especially now.

***

For the next two hours, she sits alone in that debriefing room. She can do nothing except wait. The walls are silent. She cannot access any of the communication devices that she knows are nearby. Exactly one hour into her wait, a side door opens and reveals the debriefing room’s private bathroom.

She’s been through this before. She will be able to take care of herself no matter how long she’s in here.

And it could be hours, or even days.

If she’s here for a few more hours, she’ll get a meal. More hours, and the lights will dim so she can rest.

She sighs. She supposes she deserves this punishment. Not just because she got rid of the spear and let the fat man go, but because she so badly insulted everyone here.

Finally, the door to the outside opens. A young man she’s never seen before waits outside.

Skye’s been through this before too; even if she talks to the man, he won’t answer. He’ll just lead her to the place she’s needed next.

Which is a conference room in the debriefing area. No windows here either, but on the walls, image after image of Skye failing. There’s the laser weapons’ test, the missed punch, the laughter at one of the more serious weapons. The image of her standing by the fat man, hand on the spear, appears every five images or so, and after it, the look on her face two hours earlier when she told Václav that she felt morally superior to him.

She looks vicious in that moment with Václav. Her blue eyes flash, her cheeks are red.

No, not just vicious.

Hateful.

Does she hate them all here?

She’s not going to answer that, not even to herself. But she will admit that she’s still angry. Furious in fact. Angry that she’s in this position. Angry that she’s never had a chance at anything resembling a life like the one she’s wanted.

She wants the opposite life from the one they insist she has. She wants to climb into one of the towers here, sit under a skylight, and use the grids and the old books. She wants to study everything, learn everything—not how to do something, but why it was done, who invented it, what its initial purpose was.

She likes information, and learning, and seeing patterns.

She likes being alone.

She’s not alone in the conference room for long. Václav comes in, with Umeko, and five of Skye’s teachers. And then they all bow as the director of the Guild walks in.

Skye stands still in shock, then remembers to bow as well. She’s suddenly shaken.

Skye has seen Kerani Ammons from afar, but never interacted with her. Skye did not realize that the director is the same size as Skye. The director seems bigger somehow. She glides when she walks, and she presents a calm that no one else in the room has.

This, then, is as serious as it gets. Skye has heard the rumors: the reason no one questions the Assassins Guild is because no one survives the questioning. Those who dissent get the same sentence as the criminals that the Guild pursues.

Skye hasn’t believed those rumors until now.

“I have reviewed all of your records,” the director says. “Václav tells me that you have seen through most of our tests, including this last. You know how our systems work, perhaps better than we do.”

Skye swallows. She isn’t sure if she should say anything. Her teachers stand back—all of them good at being forgotten, like the Guild teaches. Skye wouldn’t be thinking about them either, except that they seemed to step out of the conversation all at the same time.

They seem to want nothing to do with her.

Only Václav and Umeko stand near her. Skye can’t tell if they’re beside her to defend her or to judge her.

Or to observe.

“I have but one question for you,” the director says, “and I will know if you fail to answer truthfully.”

Skye’s heart rate has increased. If they’re looking for physical tests, she’s already presenting as someone either terrified or deceptive or both. She’s not deceptive at the moment, but she is terrified.

The director sweeps her hand toward the images. “Did you fail all of these tests on purpose?”

“All of them?” Skye asks.

The director bows her head slightly. “Forgive me. I will ask the question in a way that provides a better answer. Did you go into all of these scenarios with the intent of failing them?”

“Did I take all my classes and all of the tests planning to fail?” Skye asks. She knows she has to be honest. She’s just not sure how.

The director studies her for a moment, as if assessing that answer. “You’re a good student,” she says. “Let’s forget the classes for a moment, and speak only of the tests. Did you take them expecting to fail?”

Skye doesn’t dare lie. Not to the director. Not now. There’s no point. They’ve probably already judged her.

“Did I expect to fail?” she repeats. “Yes, I did. My heart wasn’t in it. But that’s not the pertinent question.”

Václav glances at her, startled. Is she talking back? She’s not sure.

The director nods. “What is the pertinent question?”

Skye swallows against a dry throat. A nervous habit, one she thought she’d trained herself out of. “The question you should ask,” she says, “is whether or not I tried to succeed in each of the tests.”

“Did you?” The director asks.

Skye lets out a large breath of air. Honest. No lies. She never thought it would be so hard to tell the truth.

“I went into the tests hoping to succeed,” she says. “In the middle of these tests, what you asked of me was too much. If I do what you want—if I hurt my best friend or kill a helpless crying fat man in the middle of some grass—then I become someone other than me.”

“Is that such a crime?” the director asks.

Crime. Skye has never used that word in her mind, not in connection to this. But she has mulled over all of the terms that the Guild uses and she rejects their subtle distinctions.

She clearly defines “crime” differently than the Guild does.

She’s not going to say that though, because the Guild is often about word games.

“Legal, illegal, crime, not a crime,” Skye says, “that’s not what I thought about in those moments.”

“What did you think about?” the director asks.

Skye squares her shoulders. She’s never admitted her true thoughts about anything to anyone. “I thought that if I continued at whatever it was I was doing at that moment, I would break.”

“And what is wrong with breaking?” the director asks.

Tears fill Skye’s eyes. She has to take several breaths to make the tears fade back. She does not blink while they are there. But she does swallow hard again, her throat hurting.

“If I break,” she says, “I will come back different.”

“What is wrong with different?” The director asks.

“I will be like everyone else,” Skye says.

The director nods her head once. “Like your parents.”

“Yes.”

“Like the man who left you here.”

“Yes.”

“Like us.”

The truth. They have asked for the truth. The director has asked for the truth.

“Yes,” Skye says.

The five teachers draw in breath. Václav whirls as if she has betrayed him. Umeko looks down.

“And we are so contemptible?” the director asks.

Skye shakes her head. “You’ve been nothing but kind to me.”

“You have not answered the question,” the director says.

“You aren’t asking fair questions. All I have said from the beginning is that I don’t want to be like you.”

“And being an assassin would make you like us?”

Skye shrugs. “I would lose what little ability I have to see people for who they are.”

 “Why?” the director asks.

She’s shaking. She’s never had uncontrollable physical reactions to words before—at least, not words she’s spoken. Words others have spoken, yes, but not her own words.

“Because if I see people for who they are, I can’t kill them.” Skye says.

The director takes one small step back, as if she’s shocked. “No matter what they’ve done? What monsters they’ve become?”

“That’s the thing,” Skye says. “They’re not monsters. They’re human. Just a kind of human we as a society have deemed unacceptable, because society itself cannot survive with them in it.”

Umeko raises her head. Václav turns slightly, looking at Skye as if she is someone he does not recognize.

The director smiles, just a little bit. The smile is not for Skye. The director is looking at Václav.

“There’s your metalevel,” she says to Václav, as if Skye is not in the room. “We either use her singular talent or we destroy it.”

Skye holds her breath. She knows what they mean by “destroy.” They could kill her, but they won’t. They’ll send her into the field, and if she fails to perform, if she tries to flee, then they’ll come after her, and then they will destroy her.

If she works for them, and she succeeds, then, by her own admission, she will be destroyed.

“We have rules,” Umeko says.

“We do,” the director says. “But we have also learned that sometimes things do not go as planned.”

Like that simulation, Skye thinks but does not say. And even as planned, each trained assassin proceeded in a different way. She doesn’t say that either.

“So,” the director says to the others, “we make an exception.”

Skye’s mouth goes dry.

The director turns back to her. “You will work for us for fifteen years, not ten. You will use your talents as we say, seeing what we send you to see. You will send back your thoughts on what you discover. And you will never ever have to harm another human being—monster or not.”

Skye thinks for a moment, then understands. “You want me to spy for you.”

The director nods. “Precisely.”

Skye is trembling. “What’s the catch?”

The director smiles. Her smile is cold. “It is simple, really. We offer our assassins our full protection. Legal, mostly. Some, though, those you thought had trained for other jobs, they live different lives. They were trained as assassins, and they can no longer ply their trade. Many of them cannot leave the Guild for threat of reprisal or even death. We keep them here because keeping them here keeps them alive.”

Skye’s face grows warm as she realizes what the director is saying. “You won’t protect me?”

“That is correct,” The director says. “We won’t even admit you work for us. Ever. If you get in trouble, you are on your own.”

Skye bites back her first comment: It’s not fair. She bites back her second, You’d send me into trouble with no backup? No safety net?

Instead, she blurts, “Five years.”

“What?” the director says.

“If I’m to risk my life for you, if I’m to do something this unprecedented, then I work for five years to repay my debt,” Skye says.

The edges of Václav’s eyes tilt downward. He’s smiling without smiling. He looks down.

“Ten years,” the director says.

“Seven and a half,” Skye says.

“Ten and full protection,” the director says.

“Done,” Skye says.

The director tilts her head back and laughs. The laugh is infectious, but no one joins her. They look away as if they do not dare.

Finally, the director catches her breath. “You are the first to change our rules,” she says. “How does that feel?”

“I’ll let you know,” Skye says. “In ten years.”

“Fair enough,” The director says. “Václav will draw up the agreement with our legal team. The others here will be cited as witnesses, plus we have recorded all of this, in case you worry that we will not keep our end of the bargain.”

“I don’t worry about you.” Skye says.

The director studies her for a long moment. Then nods once. “And I no longer worry about you.”

Then she leaves the room. The others follow. The images wink off the wall.

The door remains open.

Skye isn’t sure what she’s supposed to do.

Then she realizes that none of them know what she’s supposed to do either.

This is what freedom feels like.

Like climbing out of a trap into blinding light. The next stop is hard to see. But it’s there.

She just has to find it.

 

 

Copyright © Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Published by WMG Publishing

Cover and Layout copyright © WMG Publishing

Cover design by WMG Publishing

Cover art copyright © oscargutzo/depositphotos

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

On my Patreon page, I’ve been putting up free posts about the new and improved cover art that we’re doing at WMG. You can find a number of posts, but I thought I’d share this one with you here. (I’ll be sharing the occasional Patreon post throughout 2026 and maybe beyond.) You can sign up there for free and get the free posts only. On the weekends, I also write a new business post, but you’ll have to go through a paywall for those. Here’s a long(ish) one on the history of the Alien Influences cover.

Alien Influences

We have a plethora of covers to choose from here, and I even missed one, because mine is in storage, and I can’t find a good example of it online.

So…Alien Influences. I wrote the novel as interconnected short stories originally because at that time I did not realize I wrote out of order. The stories were published in various places, got nominated for awards, and (I knew) needed to be threaded into a full novel.

At the time, I was being published first in England, through Orion Books’ imprint Millennium. There’s a lot of backstory here, some of which I was never privy to. I do know that the company was co-founded by Anthony Cheethem, who had been in British publishing since the mid-1960s. This company, which was founded in 1991, was the third company he had founded. The first two were acquired by major publishers in the UK for sums of money that I can’t find on a quick search.

Everyone I worked with at Millennium was enthusiastic. They all had a chip on their shoulder and something to prove. That they could build bestsellers? I have no idea. That they could publish good books that sold well? Possibly.

I do know this: I was never treated as well in traditional publishing as Millennium treated me.

They published my early fantasy novels and then they took a flyer with Alien Influences. I love the cover on the British hardcover, and they did a different version (which I can’t find easily) for the mass market paperback. There was also a trade edition.

The book hit number one on the bestseller list for the Times of London, got extremely well-reviewed, and became a Topic of Conversation, at least in UK fandom.

It had also sold to Bantam in the United States as part of a bigger deal. Then in the U.S., I lost my editor at least five times. (I have blocked the exact number.) Meaning I had five different editors before my first novel from Bantam came out. Someone—and god knows who—moved Alien Influences away from the Fey publications and then buried it.

It was the only non-romance book that I know of that has the 1990s hunk (blech) Fabio on the cover. This cover often gets featured in retrospectives on Fabio covers…and then ignored.

It is a truly, truly, truly awful cover.

I got the rights back to the book because it went out of print very quickly, despite the excellent overseas sales and the good reviews—including one in The New York Times.

When we started WMG, we published it as soon as we could. We had one ugly-ass cover on it for a nanosecond because at the time, there weren’t yet art sites. I’m not even showing you that one, which was designed in PowerPoint, using historical (pre-20th century) artwork.

I think it only showed up on Amazon for that nanosecond because there were no other markets at the time.

Then we hired locally in Lincoln City, and brought in someone who eventually proved to be a mistake.

We hurried to rebrand Alien Influences. The first cover, co-designed by Dean, has pretty good art and adequate branding.

For some unknown reason, the cover got redesigned around the time Dean and I moved to Las Vegas. I remember seeing the redesign after it was uploaded to all the sites. I do not remember being consulted on any of the redesign.

The most charitable thing I can say about the artwork itself is that it looks like a Richard Powers imitation. I loathe most of Powers’ work, so this is not a compliment.

Still, the name is more-or-less properly branded and the pull quote is good. Maybe if I liked the art, we might have made it pass muster.

But why would we do that? It doesn’t look like modern science fiction at all. I see nothing here that would get a reader in 2026 to buy it and, in fact, I see two different things that would turn the reader off.

The first is that art. Blech, yuck, icky.

The second is the award I was nominated for. Back in the 1990s, the U.K.’s Arthur C. Clarke award was prestigious as hell. Maybe it still is, because it exists. But, the man was credibly accused of pedophilia, and there is a lot that I know about him because I was close to people who ran sf conventions. After the year 2000 or so, he was never invited to a U.S. sf convention again. (That I know of.)

I don’t want the association. We took that off my book cover this time. We put the best quote on the book, the one from The New York Times, not one from PW that sounds literary. (Yes, I find it ironic that the Times was the least literary review.)

I was the one to suggest rebranding and redesigning Alien Influences right away in our quest to brand everything properly. Now we have a cover I like. I believe this cover will entice readers to take a look, much more than the previous cover.

This book has had an interesting and weird history. I’m pleased it’s getting the kind of design it hasn’t had since it was introduced in the U.K. decades ago.

And right now, remember, we’re doing a Kickstarter on this and two other books. Broken Windchimes, which is also rebranded (and which I blogged about last week), and a short story collection that I will blog about on my Patreon page on Monday or so.

…in the brand-new Kickstarter that just launched. It features my bestselling novel, Alien Influences, which The New York Times calls “a well conceived, well executed novel,” my award-winning novella, Broken Windchimes, and a brand-new collection of my science fiction stories, called Strange People, Stranger Places.

In addition, you can get all 28 Diving books in ebook format or more than 100 short stories in large collections. If we’re lucky enough to hit some stretch goals, you’ll get even more fiction and two workshops for writers and readers on the history of science fiction.

We have some writing workshops here as well, including my favorite—”Handwavium.” “Handwavium” is the art of making the reader believe in impossible things.

So lots of fun things and lots of reading. But hurry! The Kickstarter will disappear forever on March 12. Click here to see all the offerings.

Mickey never imagined her life would turn out this way. But she learned the hard way that life holds many surprises. Seeking solace on the skating rink, she discovers that life’s changes hold hope for new beginnings—if only she knows where to look.

“Skating in Time” is available on this site for one week only. You can get the story as a standalone ebook on all retail sites. Enjoy!

Skating in Time Kristine Kathryn Rusch

 

MICKEY STOOD and turned slowly on the thin orange carpeting. They never played Mozart at the roller rink. If they did, she’d go out there and skate with the finesse of Dorothy Hamill. She’d pretend she was on ice, wearing a small, glittery costume, performing for thousands of fans. Her movements would be as elegant as the music, with little trills and delicate pauses, light with an undertone of warmth.

If only. Her life had been full of idle daydreams. She had never gone to college, never tried the glamorous activities of her imagination. All she knew of Mozart, besides the fact that she loved his music, was that he had died young. Like Carl. Her heart tightened, and she made herself breathe. Nearly a year now. She could live without him. She had lived without him for eleven months, twelve days and ten hours.

Mickey rolled up the ramp and onto the floor as Elvis launched into “Jailhouse Rock.” For one giddy moment, her feet threatened to slide out from under her, then she got her balance and moved forward.

As she gained speed on the straightway, the years left her body. She was thirteen, when she’d skated every Friday night until closing, staring at the guys and swaying with the beat. She’d given all this up when she married Carl. They’d been oh-so-serious at eighteen, straight out of high school and determined to be adults. She’d gone to work, cooked and cleaned, and cuddled with Carl on her days off from the travel agency. He came home at night, ate her meals and watched television, never saying a word about the lumber company or his experiences in the woods. A skidder had killed him and, up until the day of his death, she hadn’t even known what a skidder was.

A man clomped by her, clearly on skates to please his date. Mickey watched him: a frown on his face, pot belly, feet sticking out at an awkward angle. A woman passed him, skating backwards, shouting instructions. He clomped harder. As the woman disappeared into the crowd, Mickey found herself beside him

“You ski?” she asked.

He looked at her and had to kick a skate forward to keep his balance. She extended her hand to catch him if he fell. “Yeah, I ski every Sunday.”

“They tell me it’s the same motion,” she said. “I don’t ski so I don’t know.”

And then she passed him, crossing into the corner to a singer whose name she could never remember, a deep-voiced man who cried about summer loves. The woman skated past again, still going backward, weaving in and out among the other skaters as if she’d been born on wheels.

Mickey skated around the rink a few more times, wondering if her desire to hear Mozart was a wish to make the sport more serious, less fun. She didn’t have to be graceful on the rink. The only graceful person here was skating with a frown on her face and her nose in the air. The other skaters flopped and flailed and laughed as they fell. Since the month after Carl’s death, Mickey had been coming here every Thursday for the sense of community. Although she rarely spoke to anyone, she just knew that if she landed on her back, someone would put a hand under her shoulder and help her up.

The smell of hot dogs and popcorn from the concession stand grew stronger with each turn, and finally she followed the aroma off the rink. She leaned against the greasy counter, bought a diet soda and a hot dog with everything, then sat at one of the picnic benches and watched the other skaters as she ate.

The man she’d helped skated off the rink. His movements had eased; his legs flowed beneath him rather than jerked along. He made his way across the floor, stopping when he reached her table.

“Hey, you know, you were right,” he said. “It is just like skiing.”

She smiled, feeling awkward with the large, messy hot dog in her hand. “You look a lot more comfortable now.”

“I am.” He had a nice face, chocolate-brown eyes and ears that stuck out a tad too far from his scalp. “You said you’d never been skiing.”

Her heart thudded against her chest and her fingers dug into the hot dog. She tried not to expect anything but still found herself wondering what she’d do if he asked her. “No, I never have.”

He glanced at the rink, at the frowning woman circling backward. His smile, when he looked back at Mickey, appeared apologetic. “You ought to try it sometime,” he said.

“I will,” she smiled.

He skated by her to the concession stand and she took another bite of her hot dog. It tasted gritty and slightly charred—delicious. Carl said hot dogs were made of things no human should eat and so she hadn’t had one the entire time she was married. She hadn’t skated, she hadn’t skied, she hadn’t done anything because adults didn’t have fun.

She glanced at the man waiting for his food. If he did ask her out, she’d say no. Dating was too adult. She needed time to feel her heart thud like a teenager’s when she talked to a man; time to eat a decade’s worth of hot dogs; time to skate around the rink until she was exhausted. Her desire to hear Mozart had nothing to do with being an adult. It came from an urge to be different, to break rules she’d followed for too long.

She got up and skated out onto the floor, her plastic wheels rumbling beneath her. She had loved Carl, but he was gone, and she had some of herself to rebuild. She smiled and felt the breeze blow the hair off her face.

Next week, she’d bring a Mozart tape and ask them to play it—something lively and warm.

 

“Skating in Time” Copyright © by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © by WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Alexander Kataytsev/Dreamstime

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

Any use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (“AI”) technologies is expressly prohibited. The author and publisher reserve all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

 

…and here’s the video. I just finished it. As you can tell, I had a blast doing it.

If you want to be notified at the time of launch, click here.

I’ll have more information for you on Tuesday. Stay tuned!

Alien Influences Kickstarter Low Resolution

I had a lovely February of reading. Lots more time than I expected, which is fun. As regular readers of this feature know, I don’t recommend everything nor should I, considering I’ve also been reading 300-year-old plays for my Theatre History class. But there’s lots of good here, including a nonfiction book that everyone in the U.S. should read.

You’ll note some recommended articles from On Wisconsin, the alumni magazine for the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I learned something rather amazing. The University has a foundation that has existed for 100 years to manage its intellectual property. Well…hmmm…made me wonder if most universities do that. I know the bigger ones do. This one is proactive, though. I did not link to the article, but found its concept interesting.

Started a book by a well-known producer, songwriter, and DJ, the stepson of a rock star, and the child of privilege. As interested as I was in the start of his career, I couldn’t get past all the sweaty teenagers at raves in the 1990s. Clearly the book was a compilation of the stories he tells his friends. So, I donated it to the library. Maybe someone else will like to read about sweaty wealthy teenagers taking drugs and learning about music, but not me.

And then there was the science fiction novel I pulled off my TBR shelf. The novel is fifteen years old, but new to me. I like the author’s work. I’ve read some of his books before. This one started really well. It was scary and dark and intriguing…but the mystery that drew me in got resolved halfway through and suddenly we were in some kind of galactic war that wasn’t well described and read like an outline of a larger work. I actually got bored. So I won’t be recommending that, which kinda makes me sad because it started so very well.

Even though I recommended a lot of stories from the Best Mystery Stories of the Year, I’m not recommending the whole volume. I had to skip too many due to my own issues with child endangerment. Also, some of the stories I read just didn’t hold me. So, if you want to see what else I thought good in the volume, check out November’s Recommended Reading List.

I am also recommending a story from a collection that includes a story by a now-disgraced sf author. Dunno if the editor knew the accusations before buying the story; I’m guessing not. But just be cautious if you don’t want to buy anything with that man’s name on it.

Here’s what I recommend from my reading in February.

 

February, 2026

Armstrong, Kelley, This Fallen Prey, Minotaur Books, 2018. Yes, yes, I know, I came to this series late, but OMG, is it keeping me enthralled. The problem is that it is so dark I cannot read one book right after another. And, the deeper I go in, the more it violates a few of my personal reading rules, but I’m committed, which is a testament to Kelley Armstrong’s writing.

SPOILER ALERT for those of you who share my aversion to children/animals (cute ones, anyway) harmed in books:

an animal we care about gets injured…and some baby animals die.

END SPOILER ALERT

Note that I’m a hypocrite because I’m writing a story right now with a five-month old baby in mortal jeopardy. (It is a Nelscott story, which are often dark and noir, but still…)

Anyway…this book is amazing. I thought of trying to describe it to Dean, but I can’t because there’s so many areas where you must suspend your disbelief, starting with the town of Rockton itself. But within the world of Rockton, this story is a true thriller, filled with situations that would never happen anywhere else. And that’s a great thing. Kelley Armstrong has created a world so vivid and powerful that I believe every word she writes about them. (And I’m so happy I don’t live there.)

I really can’t say anything else without spoiling the story. Start with City of the Lost and read on. These books are that good.

Boschert, Sherry, 37 Words: Title IX And Fifty Years of Fighting Sex Discrimination, The New Press, 2022. First a note on the link: I sourced the New Press’s site because I couldn’t get any of the other places that will give me links to various ebook sites like Kobo and B&N didn’t work. I’m happy to have you all order directly from the publisher, even though they slapped an awful cover on this book. I mean truly terrible. And I only found the book while I was buying books on women’s basketball, so there wasn’t much promo either. It makes me grumpy, since this is a good book and an important topic that got buried by publisher mistakes.

The book was published in 2022 and written before that. So it does not reflect the era we’re in at all. There’s a lot more hope in this book for the future, and an assumption that the rebuilding we’d have to do was rebuilding from the previous time the orange menace was in office. Sometimes that made me sad.

But Title IX was passed in my lifetime. I did not benefit from it because it took forever for schools to implement it. I watch now with joy, tears, and a little bit of envy over the girls who get to play sports I was denied. I have no idea if I would have been good, but getting the opportunity would have been nice.

The fight for Title IX impressed me. Even though it happened in my lifetime, and I really study the time period, I had no idea what these women went through to get it passed. And as I write this, the WNBA and the players are negotiating a CBA for their next contract…and can’t agree on revenue sharing which every male professional sports league  has (even the minor sports, like bowling). This, after A’ja Wilson just won Athlete of the Year. Not Female Athlete of the Year. Best athlete in general, male or female or nonbinary.

If Title IX had passed in its original, there wouldn’t be the fights over trans kids in sports. There wouldn’t be a lot of problems that we have now. But we also have the WNBA and other great professional women’s sports now because of it. The book does show the deeply embedded misogyny in U.S. culture, which partly explains the situation we’re in with our leadership right now. (Let’s vote for a white man who failed the first time over a highly decorated and extremely competent Black woman. Sigh.)

There’s a lot of hope in this book and it’s not false hope. It’s the strength of people fighting for ground, inch by important inch. Read this, even if you think you remember or know what happened with Title IX here in the States. Understanding what happened in the past is essential to our future.

Kilkenny, Katie, “Extras! Extras! Read All About Them!” The Hollywood Reporter, December 3, 2025. At the end of every issue of The Hollywood Reporter, they pull something from the history of the magazine. Usually, they’re fun things related to current events. This one was fascinating. The thug in charge uses the phrase “central casting” to describe people. The cliche has been around for 101 years, and The Hollywood Reporter explains why, and what Central Casting really was. (And, oh, yeah, it still exists.) A short, fascinating read.

Millman, Ethan, “‘I Think Everything I Write Is Going To Be A Hit,'” The Hollywood Reporter, December 3, 2025. This link is to the Songwriters Roundtable that The Hollywood Reporter runs every year. Usually, there’s a quote or two that I pull from the roundtable, but this time, most everything here was strong and good and (weirdly) not very pithy. So writers, music fans, read this one.

Schmitt, Preston, “A New Era For College Sports,” On Wisconsin, Fall 2025. Dean follows college sports more than I do. He’s been griping about some of the changes for years now, especially the transfer portal. I know he supported the changes in students being allowed to profit from their name, likeness, and image. In other words, they can earn money, which is something that he has been held against the NCAA for more than fifty years. (He was disqualified as a student athlete because he taught skiing, so he couldn’t be on his college’s ski team because he wasn’t an “amateur.”) I’ve been griping about the Big 10, calling it the Big 100—which, right now, has 18 “member institutions.” 18 is not 10, and yes, I understand why the branding hasn’t changed but…get off my lawn.

Anyway, this article explains in great and clear detail about all of the changes in college sports. From deals to laws to sports agents, it’s all here, and it finally made the era we’re in clear to me. I hope it helps out those of you who haven’t been following this as closely as Dean. And, from a contract/negotiation/intellectual property standpoint, it’s fascinating as well.

Specktor, Matthew, “After Burn,” The Hollywood Reporter, January 2, 2026. A fascinating article about Los Angeles, one year after the fires. The piece (and the sidebars) show a city divided between haves and have nots, between people who are still dealing with the fires and people who “know someone who lost their house.” Worth reading.

Stegman, Casey, “Effie’s Oasis,” Mysterious Bookshop Presents The Best Mystery Stories of The Year 2025, edited by John Grisham, Mysterious Press, 2025. As regular readers of this little blog feature know, I hate children-in-jeopardy stories. I have a system: when I hit the mention of a kid in a story/book/novel, I skip ahead to see if the kid is mentioned (and alive) at the end. If the story seems a bit too rough, I quit then and there. (I do the same with pets.) Usually, I find out that the kid’s dead or not important, and I don’t read the story.

So, when I read Stegman’s story, with its wonderful voice and great main character, I got to page four or so, when a child starts crying after being called a name, and I of course skipped to the end. Yep, the kid’s there. And the ending was so fascinating that I did something I hadn’t done outside of my editing days.

I read the story backwards. That usually means something kicked me out in the middle, but I’m intrigued enough to want to know what happened. And in this case, I had no obligation to read the story, but I did so anyway. It’s good, it’s smart, and it’s powerful. I suggest reading it forward, however.

Wenc, Christine, “Fake News!” On Wisconsin, Fall 2025. Well, I ordered a book because of the alumni magazine. I had forgotten that The Onion was founded at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and came from a particularly Madison sensibility. I had already moved away from Wisconsin when it started and hadn’t seen the early editions—which I guarantee that I would have since I never missed the free newspapers around town. I even wrote for one, Isthmus, for years before I moved.

This is a fascinating little excerpt on the actual start of The Onion. It’s worth the read to see how crazy ideas can often work, and work well.

Wignall, Kevin, “Retrospective,” Ink and Daggers, edited by Maxim Jakubowski, Titan, 2023. I have to admit some disappointment with this anthology. It’s a collection of stories chosen from the short list for the British Crime Writers Association Dagger awards. It took until I got halfway through the book before something really held me. (Except for one story that might’ve worked for the Brits of the world. I had to look up all the references, which took some of the punch out of the ending.) “Retrospective” is a story of a war photographer who has given up his work for a reason that we learn later. Very powerful, and worth reading.

Dean Wesley Smith, one of the most influential voices in indie publishing, has updated his most essential writing books for 2026. Through our Kickstarter, which just launched, get all four ebooks for $20, and, if we hit our stretch goals, receive hundreds in online writing workshops as well.

You can also opt for four of my books on writing as a reward.

Lots of learning here, and all at a discount. But the Kickstarter won’t last forever, so order your copies now.