Kristine Kathryn Rusch

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.