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START YOUR VOYAGE AND GET YOUR FIRST TASTE OF SOME OF OUR BIGGEST NEW RELEASES HER MAJESTY’S ROYAL COVEN Juno Dawson THE BOOK EATERS Sunyi Dean BABEL R.F. Kuang HEART OF THE SUN WARRIOR Sue Lynn Tan THE THORNS REMAIN JJA Harwood GODKILLER Hannah Kaner SONG OF SILVER, FLAME LIKE NIGHT Amélie Wen Zhao DIVINE RIVALS Rebecca Ross ASCENSION Nicholas Binge

HER MAJESTY’S ROYAL COVEN Juno Dawson Coming July 2022

Evil spirits observe silly, young girls who are more given to curiosity, and so more easily led astray by elderly workers of harmful magic.

The Malleus Maleficarum, 1486 I agree with whoever said [the Spice Girls] are soft porn.

They’re the antichrist.

Thom Yorke of Radiohead, 1997

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25 Years Earlier…

The night before the summer solstice, five girls hid in a treehouse.

The shack, much too nice to call a shack, was sturdy enough, cradled in the arthritic branches of a three hundred year-old oak.

Below, in Vance Hall, preparations for tomorrow’s festivities were finalised, although it was more an excuse for the grown-ups to fetch up the dustier wines from the cellar two days in a row than it was a planning meeting. Their elders, quite some way past tipsy, truthfully hadn’t noticed the girls were absent.

Up in the tree, the youngest of the girls, Leonie, was upset because the eldest, Helena, said she couldn’t marry Stephen Gately from Boyzone. ‘I’m not playing,’ Leonie said.

A congregation of candles burned in the treehouse window, wax trickling off the ledge into lumpy stalactites. Skittish amber light danced up the walls, casting campfire shadows across Leonie’s face. ‘Why does Elle always get to pick first?’

Elle’s bottom lip quivered, her baby blue eyes filling with tears. Again. That was why Elle always got to pick first. She really could turn the waterworks off and on at will.

‘I think they can both marry Stephen,’ Niamh Kelly said, ever the peacemaker.

‘No they can’t!’ her twin sister said at the top of her voice.

‘How’s that going to work?’

Niamh scowled at her. ‘I don’t think we’re actually going to marry Boyzone, do you, Ciara? We’re ten!’

Helena said with authority, ‘When Elle is twenty, he’ll be thirty, so that’s OK.’ Leonie stood as if to leave the treehouse, her fists balled tight.

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‘Oh if you’re going to storm off like a kid, fine!’ said Helena. ‘You can both have Stephen. Poor Keith.’

Leonie nudged the trapdoor with her toe. ‘It’s not even that, Helena. It’s just a game. It’s stupid. Anyway, I said I’m gonna marry the Fresh Prince, so it don’t even matter.’

There was a moment of hush because they all knew what was really troubling her, for it troubled them all. The candles sputtered and there was a drunken hoot of adult laughter from inside the house. ‘I don’t wanna do tomorrow.’ Leonie said what she meant at last. She returned to the carpet and sat cross-legged.

‘My dad don’t want me to do it. He says it’s evil.’

‘Your dad is an eejit,’ Ciara bellowed.

Niamh, the elder of the Kelly twins by three-and-a-half minutes said, ‘In Ireland, we’re considered lucky.’

‘Is he saying my Grandma is evil?’ Elle added. ‘She’s, like, the nicest person in the whole world!’

It was harder for Leonie; the first in her line, at least in living memory, to exhibit the traits. How could Helena hope to understand? Her mother, her mother’s mother and all the Vance mothers before that had been blessed too. ‘Leonie,’ Helena said with the absolute certainty only a bossy thirteen year-old could possess. ‘Tomorrow is easy peasy, just like an assembly at school.

We’ll line up, swear the oath, Julia Collins will bless you, and that’s all. Nothing actually changes.’

She really emphasised the ak-shully, but they all knew, in the honesty of their hearts, that it was a lie. There were so few of them left now, fewer with every generation. This life, this oath, wasn’t like when Ciara cut her fringe with a pair of nail scissors. That soon grew out, but there was no turning back from tomorrow. The bell had sounded, and playtime was over. Leonie

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was only nine.

‘I’m nervous too,’ Elle offered, taking Leonie’s hand.

‘Me too,’ said Niamh who then turned to her sister.

‘I suppose,’ Ciara agreed reluctantly.

Helena brought one of the candles into the centre of the filthy old rug. ‘Here, form a circle,’ she said. ‘Let’s practice the oath.’

‘Ach, do we have to?’ Ciara groaned but Helena shushed her. She wasn’t intimidated by the twins, no matter how much the elders swooned over their potential.

‘If we know if off by heart, there’s nothing to be nervous about, is there?’

Niamh understood this would help Leonie and chastised her sister. The girls gathered around the candle and joined hands.

It’s hard to say how much was in their minds, but the girls would all later swear they felt a current flowing through their human circuit, sharing and amplifying their own latent gifts.

‘All together,’ Helena said, and they launched into it.

To the mother I swear To solemnly uphold the sacred sisterhood Her power is mine to wield The secret ours to keep The earth ours to protect An enemy of my sister is mine The strength is divine Our bond everlasting Let no man tear us asunder The coven is sovereign Until my dying breath.

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And they all knew it off by heart. Every single word.

The following night, they were allowed to wear their midnight black, velvet capes for first time. They smelled brand new, of the plastic they came wrapped in. Too long (you’ll grow into them), they lifted them up to stop the hems trailing along the undergrowth as they climbed Pendle Hill.

The procession snaked uphill into the heart of the thick forest that smothered the valley like a fur. They each carried a lantern jar to light the way, but the uneven path was a real anklesnapper by night. Eventually, charcoal trees parted to reveal a moonlit clearing, a flat boulder at its centre. There was power in this place, any fool could feel it.

It was scary for the girls, of course, to be surrounded by all the elders. A hundred of them, faces half-hidden by their hoods. Scarier still to watch each of them, in turn, approach the stone slab to leave their offering. They pricked their thumbs with a silver blade and deposited a tiny red pearl of blood into the yew tree cauldron. Julia Collins, her matronly face peering out from under her cowl, summoned the girls one at a time. They drank from the chalice until their eyes turned black and, when that happened, she dipped her finger into the yew bowl and drew the mark of the pentagram on their young foreheads.

And as the clock dolefully struck one in the village far in the distance, they stopped being girls, and finally became witches.

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THE BOOK EATERS Sunyi Dean

Coming August 2022

Chapter One

Devon By Day Present Day There is a strain of weirdness in the soil of England that will never be ploughed out.

—C. L. Nolan ❖❖❖ These days, Devon only bought three things from the shops: books, booze, and Sensitive Care Skin-cream. The books she ate, the booze kept her sane, and the lotion was for Cai, her son. He suffered occasionally from eczema, especially in winter.

There were no books in this convenience store, only rows of garish magazines. Not to her taste, and anyway she had enough books to eat at home. Her gaze skipped across the soft porn, power tools, and home living publications down to the lowest strata, where children’s magazines glowed pink and yellow.

Devon ran short, ragged nails across the covers. She thought about buying one for Cai, because he seemed to like reading that kind of thing at the moment and decided against it. After tonight, his preferences might change.

She walked to the end of the aisle, linoleum squishing beneath her heeled boots, and set her basket at the checkout. Four bottles of vodka and a tub of skin-cream.

The cashier looked at the basket, then back at her. “D’you have ID?”

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“Pardon?”

“Do you, have, any ID?” he repeated, slowly, as if to someone hard of hearing.

She stared. “I’m almost thirty, for Christ’s sake.” And looked every year of it, too.

He shrugged, crossed his arms. Waiting. Wasn’t much more than a kid himself, maybe eighteen or nineteen, working in the family shop and trying to follow all the rules.

Understandable, but she couldn’t oblige. Devon didn’t have any ID. No birth certificate, no passport, no driver’s license; nothing. Officially, she didn’t exist.

“Forget it.” Devon shoved the basket at him, bottles clinking.

“I’ll get a drink somewhere else.”

She stalked out, annoyed and flustered. Hordes of teenagers bought booze from other corner shops all the time. It was a daily occurrence around here. That someone would choose to card her, so clearly an adult, was ridiculous.

Only after she’d crossed the badly lit street did she realise that she’d left without buying the skin cream. It was a small failure, forgetting the lotion, but she failed Cai so constantly in so many different, myriad ways that even this tiny mistake was sufficient to wring her insides with fresh anger.

She considered going back for it, then checked her watch.

The time was pushing 8pm. Already in danger of running late.

She would just have to apologise to her son about his skin cream.

Besides, eczema was nothing compared to his hunger.

Much more important to feed him.

Newcastle-upon-Tyne was a pretty enough city, if a little touristy for Devon’s liking. This time of year, the sun set at 4pm and the sky was already fully dark, the lamps abuzz. The lack of

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ambient light suited her mood. Compulsively, she checked her phone with its short list of contacts. No texts. No calls.

She slunk past a row of decrepit terraces. Passer-by drifted up and down the pavement. A tight knot of people huddled outside one of the houses, drinking and smoking. Music leaked through curtainless windows. Devon took a left off the main street to avoid the crowds.

There were so many things to remember when she was out and around humans. Feigning cold was one of them. Thinking of it, she drew her coat tight around her, as if bothered by the chill. Walking with sound was another. She scuffed her feet with deliberate heaviness, grinding gravel and dust beneath her heels.

Big boots helped with the plodding tread, made her clunky and stompy like a toddler in adult wellies.

Her vision in darkness was another awkward one. Having to remember to squint, and to pick her way across a detrituslittered pavement that she could see with perfect clarity; having to feign a fear she never felt, but which should have ruled her.

Solitary human women walked with caution in the night.

In short, Devon had always to act like prey, and not like the predator she had become.

She picked up the pace, keen to get home. The maisonette flat she rented (cash only, no questions) occupied a squalid space above a tire shop. In the daytime it was noisy, reeked of oil, and filled with the conversation of customers. The evenings were quieter, if no less foul-smelling.

Down the alley, up the stairs to the back entrance. There was no street-facing door, but that was a good thing. Meant she could come and go by dark side-streets, unwatched by curious eyes—and so could her visitors, when she had them. Privacy was essential.

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Devon fished out a set of keys, hanging around her neck on a lanyard. The cord was entangled with a brass compass on a steel chain. She shook the lanyard free, slotted the key in, and wrestled briefly with the lock before stepping inside.

Since neither she nor her son required light, the flat sat in perpetual dark. It saved on the energy meter and reminded her a little of home, back when home had been welcoming: the cool unlit calm of Fairweather Manor, with its shade-tinted hallways and shadow-layered libraries.

She was expecting human company, though, and so flipped on all the lights. Cheap bulbs flickered into anaemic existence.

The flat contained only a claustrophobic living space, a small kitchenette with fold-out table, a bathroom veering off to the left, and a locked bedroom to her right where her son spent much of every day. She dropped her bag by the door, hung her coat on a hook, and clunked across to his room.

“Cai? Are you awake?”

Silence, then the faintest of shuffles from within.

“No lotion, sorry,” she said. “They were out. I’ll get some tomorrow, aye?”

The shuffling stopped.

Always, she was tempted to go in and offer comfort of some kind. By the three-week mark, starvation would have ravaged him to thinness, his suffering spiralling into unbearable agony as his body began to produce toxins. The madness already gnawed his mind, incurable except through his next feed, and even after feeding, the craving would remain ever-present. He would either sit in a corner, huddled up and unresponsive, or else attack her in a frothing rage.

Impossible to know which reaction she’d get and so, fingers

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shaking, she checked and double-checked the bolts instead of going in. One on the top and one on the bottom, both solid things she’d installed herself, and the regular lock. The room had no window, courtesy of its awkward layout in relation to the shop; no additional security needed there. For once. Barring up windows was such a pain.

Someone knocked at the entrance to her flat. She jumped, felt chagrined, then checked her watch. Ten past eight; bang on time. Just as well she’d not gone back for the lotion.

Devon went to let in her guest. He had a name, but she would not allow herself to think it. Better to consider only his role, his profession: the local vicar. He needed to be no more and no less.

The vicar waited anxiously on her doorstep, wearing a mustard jumper that might have been fashionable forty years ago.

He had kind eyes, a quiet demeanour, and impressive patience with his quarrelsome congregation. Not touchy-feely with kids and no severe personal problems that she could find after two weeks of intense stalking. Everyone had small vices and little problems, always, but that was a given, and she could cope with the small stuff. They were only human, after all.

“Thanks for coming.” Devon hunched herself smaller. Be uneasy, be reluctant, and above all be vulnerable. The sure-fire act that suckered them every time. “I didn’t think you would.”

“Not at all!” He offered a smile. “As I told you on Sunday, it’s no trouble.”

Devon said nothing, looking sheepish and fiddling with the compass round her neck. She’d done this conversation or some variation of it so many times, tried all kinds of lines, and found it was better to let them take the initiative. Probably she

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should have put on something more feminine to look even more unthreatening, but she despised dresses.

“May I come in?” he ventured, and she feigned embarrassment for her rudeness, stepping aside.

His gaze snagged on the dilapidated interior. Devon couldn’t really blame him. She gave the usual, awkward apologies for the state of the flat while he gave the usual demur reassurances.

That ritual completed, she said, “My son is in a bad way.

I spoke to him earlier, and he didn’t answer. You may not have much luck, I’m afraid.”

The vicar nodded, lips pursed with concern. “If you are happy for me to try, I will see if I can speak to him.”

Devon clenched her teeth to hold back a hysterical giggle.

As if talking could solve problems like this. Wasn’t the vicar’s fault, she’d been the one to say that Cai had depression, but hysteria crept up on her nonetheless.

The vicar was still awaiting a response. She managed a tight nod, hoping he’d read her emotions for the right kind of conflicted, and led him to the locked door.

“Is this where he is?” the vicar said.

“In here, yes.” Devon pulled the keys from her pocket.

“You lock your son in his room?” He sounded shocked, and she could feel the weight of his judgement as she undid each bolt.

No doubt he thought she had something to do with Cai’s present mental state.

If only he knew.

“It’s complicated.” Devon turned the final key and paused, aware her heart was racing. “I need to ask you something.”

“What is it?” The vicar was wary, his senses alert to a danger that his eyes could not perceive.

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Didn’t matter. He’d been lost the moment he stepped inside.

She met his gaze. “Are you a good person?” The question that consumed her, every time. Every victim. “Are you kind?”

He frowned, considering his words. Trying to understand what reassurance she sought, not that he had a cat’s chance in hell of guessing. Still, his hesitation was its own reassurance. The bad ones lied, quick and smooth—or worse, brushed it aside, sometimes with humour. Only those with a conscience would stop and evaluate her question.

“None of us are truly good,” the vicar said, at last. He put a hand on her shoulder, so gently, so kindly and she almost threw up on the spot. “All we can do is live by the light we are given.”

“Some of us don’t have any light,” Devon said. “How are we supposed to live, then?”

He blinked. “I—” Devon caught his wrist, wrenched the door open, and shoved him in. The vicar wasn’t frail but Devon was far stronger than she looked and had the element of surprise. He stumbled forward, startled and gasping, into the darkness of Cai’s room.

Devon yanked the door shut and held it hard.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, through the keyhole. “I’m just doing the best I can.”

The vicar didn’t answer. He was already shouting and thrashing.

Really, it was pointless to apologise. Victims didn’t want your sorry-so-sorrys when you were hurting them, they wanted you to stop. Devon couldn’t oblige, though, and apologies were all she had these days. Apologies, and booze.

The noise of the vicar’s muffled struggling trickled away in a minute or less. She could never decide which was worse:

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the wailing, or the silence. Maybe they were equally bad. After a moment of dithering, she let go of the doorknob. No point locking up. Cai wouldn’t be dangerous, not anymore, and better to make sure he could leave his room if he wished.

The flat oppressed, mildewed walls crushing her spirit to flatness. After so many days of ravenous hunger, her son would need to sleep off his feed. In the meantime, she wanted a drink and there was no vodka in the house.

No, wait. She still had a half-bottle of whiskey, left behind by the previous person who’d ‘visited’ her home. Devon didn’t like whiskey, but right now she liked being sober even less. A couple minutes of rifling through the cabinets turned up the errant alcohol.

Bottle in hand, Devon locked herself in the bathroom and drank into oblivion.

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Chapter Two

A Princess Of The Magic Line 22 Years Ago She was a princess of the magic line. The gods had sent their shadows to her christening.

—The King of Elfland’s Daughter, by Lord Dunsany ❖❖❖ Devon was eight years old when she met her first human, though she did not realise what he was at the time. Or rather, she did not realise what she was.

Growing up, there had only been the Six Families, scattered across different regions of Britain. Devon’s family was the Fairweathers, whose estate was wedged between low-lying hills in the wilds of the North Yorkshire Moors. Uncle Aike was the patriarch of their manor because he was the wisest, even though he was not the oldest. Under him were a succession of other aunts and uncles ranging from barely adult to discreetly ancient.

And under them were the seven Fairweather children, of whom all except Devon were boys. There were very few women around, for girl-children were rare among the Families. The uncles outnumbered the aunts, just as the brothers outnumbered their sister, and no mothers were in residence at the time. Devon’s own mother was an unremembered face, having long since moved on to another marriage contract.

“You’re the only princess in our little castle,” Uncle Aike

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would say with a wink. Tall and grey-haired, his hobbies included folding his lanky frame into comfortable chairs and drinking copious quantities of inktea. “You get to be Princess Devon. Just like in the fairytales, eh?” He would make a little flourish with his hands, a smile crinkling up the corners of his mouth.

And Devon would laugh, put on a crown made from braided daisies, and run around the yard in her tattered lace dress shouting I’m a princess! Sometimes, she tried to play with the aunts, because if she were a princess then they ought to be queens. But always, the grey-haired women withdrew from her with anxious glances to hide in their fusty bedrooms. Devon eventually decided they were boring and left them alone.

The house itself was a ten-bedroom building, three levels high. It might have been quite ordinary for manors of that type if not for the haphazard collection of parapets, extensions, tile roofs, and Gothic flourishes. (“Courtesy of your Great Uncle Bolton,” Uncle Aike had said, once. “Architecture was his, ah, treasured pastime.”)

Beneath the ground, more levels sprawled with delightfully twisted passageways. Devon knew every nook and corner, from the dark sublevel halls to the sun-filled music rooms of the upper floors.

And the libraries. Like the other Families, the Fairweathers’ libraries had a flavour all their own: vintage books stitched from carefully-aged leather—the darker, the better—with textured, embossed covers. When opened, the brown-edged pages flaked in soft, dry puffs, smelling faintly of March rain. One bite and Devon’s bookteeth could sink straight through those covers and chewy strings of binding, tongue alive with the acidic tang of inktinged paper.

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“Biblichor,” Uncle Aike liked to say, rolling the word in his mouth. “That is a word which means, the smell of very old books.

We love biblichor, here. And other old things.”

“Everything in the house is old,” Devon giggled. Like the paintings in the downstairs dining room; four hundred years old, apparently. “I think you’re very old!”

Uncle Aike always laughed, was never offended. “Maybe I am, princess, but you’ll never make it to my age with that tongue of yours!”

That tongue of yours. Lots of people commented on Devon’s tongue. She stuck it out, sometimes, inspecting it in the mirror.

There was nothing special about her tongue that she could ever see.

The land they lived on stretched vast to the eyes of a child.

Rocky hills couched moorland, full of hollows and peat bogs. In summer, when the moors bloomed purple with heather, Devon chased rabbits and grouse birds. Twice she found otters, whose little fangs looked like her own growing bookteeth. In winter, the grass dried up and crisped with frost. She built snowmen with her brothers and they ran together, ever barefoot, through the hillocks and valley forests.

And then, one January morning, eight-year-old Devon went out on her own in search of snow buntings and red fox vixens. She had heard the foxes barking in the night and hoped to catch a glimpse of one scampering across the snow, like flame racing across paper.

She’d hardly gone three hundred yards, crossing into the small wood behind the house, when an unfamiliar noise snagged her attention. Someone was crashing through the trees and snow with loud, clumsy steps. No one at Fairweather Manor walked so

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heavily and Devon, intrigued, went to investigate.

A man she didn’t recognise slogged and huffed through freshly fallen snow. He was of indeterminate Adult Age, with dark hair and warm brown skin, his chin fully bearded. A curling black moustache framed his nose. Weirdly, he wore heavy boots, long trousers, funny knitted things on his hands, and bizarre puffed clothes that buttoned up to his chin. Another knitted thing sat on his head.

It took her a moment to recognise his gear as gloves, coat, and hat. They were things she knew from stories but had never seen on a real person. He looked so different from adults on the estate, who were rather paler and mostly dressed in dusty old suits. She wondered briefly if he was a knight of the Six Families, but knights usually travelled in pairs, on motorcycles, with a dragon in tow. He had no partner and no dragon and definitely no motorcycle.

She circled behind and tapped his shoulder.

“Hi,” she said, and snickered when he nearly fell over with shock. How had he not seen her? All that fabric must have muted his senses.

“Holy—!” He checked himself, took a breath. Frost dusted his dark sideburns, and hems of his flared trousers were soaked from melted snow. “Goodness, you’re quiet.”

Devon was utterly delighted. It’d been at least two years since she’d managed to sneak up on anyone. “Are you one of my cousins?” She skipped around him in a circle. “I haven’t seen you before. Why aren’t you in a car? I thought all the cousins came in cars.”

“Cousin? No, I don’t think so.” For some reason, he kept staring at her bare feet and knees, and her sleeveless linen dress.

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“Aren’t you cold, love?”

“Cold?” She stopped in her tracks, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

She knew about cold from eating all the right books. Cold was what made snow happen, instead of rain, just like in the Snow Queen story.

It was snowing now, light flakes landing on her arms and filling in her footprints. And it felt different from heat: balmy, instead of spikey. But cold was a part of the world and its seasons, a sensation detached from reaction. Not something that you had to do anything about.

“Strong kid,” he said, eyebrows raised. “You know, I have a little boy about your age. He’s not nearly so fond of the cold.

But no, to answer your question, I’m not a cousin. I’m a guest, I suppose.”

Now that, Devon understood. “You’re very rude, then,” she said, hands on hips. “If you really are a guest to the house, you’re supposed to tell me who you are and where you’re from.”

Non-Cousin people existed in the world: humans, who ate revolting animal flesh and dirty plants they plucked from the soil.

But guest or not, Family or not, everyone had to show what Uncle Aike called basic courtesy.

“Is that so?” A tentative smile. “Very well, my apologies.

I’m Amarinder Patel, or ‘Mani’ for short. I’m a journalist from London. Do you know London?”

Devon nodded. Everybody knew London. That was where the Gladstones lived, far down south: the biggest, richest, and most powerful of the Families. She’d met some of their visiting cousins, once.

“And you are?” Mani’s smile stabilised, became more genuine.

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“I’m Devon Fairweather of the Six Families,” she informed him. “All of this land belongs to Fairweather Manor.”

“The Six Families?” he echoed.

Devon gave up being polite. “What’s a jerna… jernaliss?”

If he wasn’t going to do the right words, then neither would she.

“Jour-na-list,” he said, with slow emphasis. “The investigative kind. That means I do research and go chasing strange stories.

Sometimes, the things I discover appear on the telly. Isn’t that exciting?”

“What’s the telly?”

Another pause, shorter this time. He was learning to hide his surprise. “Devon… interesting name, by the way… I actually came here in search of your family. There are rumours about a remote clan living in the moors. I was hoping I could write a story—” “A story? Like, a new one?” Devon was immediately interested. “Can all jour-na-lists write stories?”

“Well—” “Will you write one just for me?” Questions burst from her in an excited flurry. “Can I eat it when you’re done? I’ve never had a story written for me to eat!”

The smile slid from his face, like melting snow from a roof.

“Eat it?”

“Is that how stories are made? I always wondered but Uncle Aike said he’d tell me when I was older. How do you write a story?

I can’t write a story. Will it be a book when you’re finished? Do all stories become books?”

“You can’t write?” he said, bewildered.

“Huh? Of course not!” She goggled at him. “How can we write?” If bookeaters could write, they wouldn’t need other

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people’s books. The uncles had told her that.

Mani let out a slow breath. “I see.” He turned up the collar of his coat. “Do you have a mum or dad?” When she looked confused, he added, lips twisting, “Someone who looks after you.

A grown-up.”

“Oh. D’you mean Uncle Aike?” Devon said, trying not to let her disappointment show. Uncle Aike got all the visitors. “I guess I could take you to him.” She knew the stranger wouldn’t be wanting to see the aunts, because nobody ever wanted to see the aunts.

“Sure.” Mani said, darkly. “Let’s meet your Uncle Aike.”

Devon skipped through the snowdrifts, disappointment giving way to self-consolation. So what if the visitor wanted to see Uncle Aike? She’d found him first. Ramsey would be so jealous. Her other brothers, too, but she didn’t like them as well as Ramsey; most were much older and very boring and didn’t play with her so much. Anyway, she would rub it in Ramsey’s face all week. Maybe two weeks.

The forest thinned rapidly into rocky hills whose hard edges were softened with frost. The house unfolded into view, giving the illusion of a pop-up children’s book, the ancient parapets jutting uncomfortably against failing winter light. A few of Devon’s brothers played football in the front gardens. None of them paid any attention to her except Ramsey, who looked over in pure astonishment. Devon took smug pleasure in his shock.

“No power source, no crops, no adequate clothing for any of the children, yet they have modern cars on the drive.” Mani was muttering into a small black device with a red flashing light.

“Can’t help but wonder what they eat. Insular and isolated, either way. Could this be the source of those old local legends?” He

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caught her staring and smiled disarmingly.

“Follow me!” Devon said, and tugged him, strangely reluctant, beneath the yawning archway into the entrance hall beyond.

A once-rich carpet lay tattered and flat over a rough-hewn stone floor. Crystalline light fixtures hung darkly immaculate, barren of candle or bulb. If they’d ever been lit, Devon had never seen it. The rooms they passed contained low couches or polished wooden tables, the chandeliers and lamps also unused. Walls were thickly lined with shelves, unending shelves. The scent of biblichor suffused everything.

She took a sharp left at the end of the hallway and skipped into the drawing room, Mani trailing after. Several of her uncles were gathered around a particularly large oak table, playing a game of bridge and drinking inktea. The moment Devon and her prize visitor walked in, all conversation ceased. Every head swivelled their way.

“Uncle!” Devon said. “I found a guest!”

“So you have.” Uncle Aike set down his fan of cards. “Who are you, sir?”

“Amarinder Patel, freelance journalist,” Mani said, and extended a hand. “I was looking—” “This is private property.” Uncle Aike rose slowly. When not stooping, he stood comfortably over six feet. “You are not allowed to be here. Journalists in particular, are not welcome.”

Devon looked on, bewildered. She had never seen her favourite uncle so unfunny. So lacking in Basic Courtesy.

Mani lowered his hand. “I’m sorry, I would have called in advance, but I wasn’t even sure you and your family lived here.

There’s no listed phone number on the land registry, no names on

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the electoral register—” “Quite so.” Uncle Aike leant forward, knuckles pressed to the table. “Did it occur to you, Mr. Patel, that perhaps we have no wish to be contacted? Least of all by a journalist. Private citizens are entitled to private lives.”

The air seemed to thicken, stifling Devon’s questions.

Something was happening that she didn’t understand, though nobody seemed to be mad at her.

Mani adjusted his glasses. “Very well, I’ll see myself out.”

But Uncle Aike pointed to an empty seat and said, “Nonsense. Done is done, and you are already here. Take a seat, please.” A muscle jumped in his cheek. “This is what you have come for, yes? To find the members of my Family? Well, come and speak to us, and we shall converse like adults.”

“I…” Mani fidgeted with his small black machine, turning it over and over in his hands. To the perspective of this fully human man, he had entered a dark and sombre room lined with crumbling tomes and populated by looming, pale-faced men in old-fashioned suits. Not a situation for the faint of heart.

But after a moment, his professionalism and rationality must have won out. Mani edged over and sat down, squashed between Uncle Bury and Uncle Romford.

“Dev, my dear.” Uncle Aike did not take his eyes off the journalist. “Go and play, yes? We will be a little while, having a chat with Mr. Patel.”

“But…” Devon glanced mournfully at the table, where her guest sat rigid. She always had to leave when the grown-ups talked, and it was never fair.

Uncle Aike shifted his gaze towards Devon, shoulders and face softening a little. “Tell you what. Take yourself up to my

17

room, little princess, and find one of the special edition fairytales.

But off the lowest shelf, mind. Nothing naughty, aye?”

“Oh! I will, I will!” Devon scampered out of the room in excitement. Though fairytales were all she ever ate, some were better than others and the special edition ones in her uncle’s study tasted exquisite: the crisp gold bindings, ribbon bookmarks, bright illustrations with multi-hued inks. An explosion of colour and sparkles, words dangling and lingering on the palate.

The last thing she heard before darting up the stairs was her uncle saying, “Romford, shut that door, if you please.”

She forgot all about them by the time she reached the top of the stairs. Uncle Aike’s study occupied a smallish room on the east wing, and it was here she headed.

Devon slipped in soundlessly. These walls held Renaissance paintings and an eclectic selection of instruments, including a Chinese lute, none of which Devon had ever heard her uncle play.

Gifts from ‘eaters in other countries, back when travelling abroad had been a little easier. Too much paperwork, nowadays.

A desk and some chairs made for a cosy sitting area; a kingsized bed took up much of the remaining floorspace. The windows had long since been boarded over on the inside and fitted with yet more shelves. The closest shelf housed multiple copies of various Arthurian legends; those were usually given to her brothers. Full of stories that girls didn’t need to know.

Below that was a row of fairytales. Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White. Various others. All stories of girls who sought and found love, or else who fled their homes and found death. She could almost hear him saying, The lesson is in the story, my dear. That was the shelf her uncle had specified.

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Devon had other ideas.

She dug out the little wooden stool her uncle kept under the bed and dragged it over. She could, if she stood on her toes, just reach the tallest shelf, which was much more exciting.

From this vantage point she couldn’t see what books were there, but it didn’t matter. All of those books were forbidden, and thus desirable. Even the most diligent of children got tired of the same meal, day in and day out; she couldn’t miss the chance to try something different.

Her fingers closed around the edge of a paper-bound spine and Devon pulled the book free, nearly losing her balance. Joy at her success made her giggle fiercely. Her uncle would be cross if he found out, and she might have to eat nothing except boring dictionaries for a whole week, but the excitement of something forbidden seemed worth the risk.

She sat on the stool and examined her prize. Jane Eyre was stamped across the binding in a perfunctory script. The red leather cover was embossed with an illustration of a young woman surrounded by flowers. The printing date meant that the author was long dead. A shiver ran through her. That words could remain, printed anew and afresh long after the original writer had died, never failed to amaze. Devon flipped it open at random.

Something of vengeance I had tasted for the first time; as aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy: its afterflavour, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned.

How delightfully naughty, how ungirlish and un-princesslike! The idea that vengeance might taste like a particularly

19

exciting book was deeply intriguing. This novel, whatever it was, would surely be far more interesting than the usual fairytale.

She opened her mouth, teeth unsheathing—and halted. A strange urge came over her to not eat the book at all, but simply to pocket it. To read it, in fact, which was possible to do, if a little wrong.

Reading was a shameful thing. We consume written knowledge, her aunts and uncles had said so many times.

We consume and store and collect all forms of paper flesh as the Collector created us to do, clothed as we are in the skin of humankind. But we do not read, and we cannot write.

Which was fine, except that everybody knew the Collector was never coming back. The bookeaters would live and die without ever passing on their gathered information to the Collector’s unknowable data vaults. She couldn’t see the purpose behind their purpose.

Besides, taking a book from the top shelf was already wrong. It couldn’t hurt to be just a little bit wronger.

One sin beget another; the decision was made in an instant.

Devon stuffed the book inside her shirt to take it back to her own room, over in the west wing. She picked her way through the loft to the other side of the manor then climbed down, slipping into her room. By the time she’d read a chapter and hidden the stolen copy of Jane Eyre under her mattress, nearly an hour had passed.

She re-emerged into the hallway, straightening her dress and trying not to look criminal. The manor was very quiet, even for a wintry afternoon. The aunts were likely up in their sequestered quarters, from which they rarely emerged. The only sounds were the raucous yelling and shouting of her brothers milling outside but even that seemed muted, and more subdued than when she’d

20

brought Mani past.

Wait, the journalist! How had she forgotten about her guest? Devon took the steps two at a time and half-sprinted back towards the drawing room.

But her guest was already gone. In fact, the drawing room was empty except for Uncle Aike, who sat by the fireplace with his feet on a stool. He looked up as Devon entered, and waved her over. “Come in, love. Have a seat.”

She snuggled into the chair next to her uncle. “Where’s the jour-na-list?”

“Mr. Patel is resting, in a room in the cellar.” Uncle Aike had the gentlest hands, never snagging or tugging as he fingercombed through Devon’s tangles. “Tomorrow morning, knights will come to take him away.”

“Away?” She had only met knights once. They’d been serious and scary, not at all nice or funny like her uncle. “Where to?”

“The coast of North Yorkshire,” he said, after a moment of hesitation. “To Ravenscar Manor. The patriarch there has a use for humans and will pay good money for a well-educated one.”

“Oh,” Devon said, crestfallen that another house would get to steal her guest. “I wanted him to stay.”

“I’m sorry, princess. I know you did. But I’m afraid Mr. Patel was not a pleasant man. He wished to tell stories about us to other people.”

“Stories are good things. Aren’t they?”

“Not all stories are good things, no.” Uncle Aike kissed the side of her head. “You only have the right books to eat in this house, because we only give you the right stories, appropriate for a little princess. However, some stories are certainly bad, and your poor Mr. Patel would have written very bad stories.”

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Devon mulled that over. “Does that mean he was a broken writer?”

“Of a sort. Yes, that is a good enough description.”

“Oh, I see! Are the Ravenscars going to fix him, Uncle?”

“They certainly will, love,” said her uncle, gazing into the fire. “They certainly will.”

22

BABEL:

Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution R.F. Kuang Coming September 2022

Chapter One

R

Que siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio; y de tal manera lo siguió, que junta mente començaron, crecieron y florecieron, y después junta fue la caida de entrambos.

Language was always the companion of empire, and as such, together they begin, grow, and flourish. And later, together, they fall.

Antonio de Nebrija, Gramática de la lengua castellana

B

y the time Professor Richard Lovell found his way through Canton’s narrow alleys to the faded address in his diary, the boy was the only one in the house left alive.

The air was rank, the floors slippery. A jug of water sat full, untouched by the bed. At first the boy had been too scared of retching to drink; now he was too weak to lift the jug. He was still conscious, though he’d sunk into a drowsy, half-dreaming haze. Soon, he knew, he’d fall into a deep sleep and fail to wake up. That was what had happened to his grandparents a week ago, then his aunts a day after, and then Miss Betty, the Englishwoman, a day after that.

His mother had perished that morning. He lay beside her body, watching as the blues and purples deepened across her skin. The last thing she’d said to him was his name, two syllables mouthed without breath. Her face had then gone slack and uneven. Her tongue lolled out of her mouth. The boy tried to close her filmy eyes, but her lids kept sliding back open.

No one answered when Professor Lovell knocked. No one exclaimed in surprise when he kicked through the front door – locked, because plague thieves were stripping the houses in the neighbourhood bare, and

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BA B EL

volumes. Books written in English, spines battered from use, some pages worn so thin that the print was barely still legible. The professor flipped through them, smiling despite himself, and placed them in his bag. Then he slid his arms under the boy’s thin frame and lifted him out of the house.

In 1829, the plague that later became known as Asiatic Cholera made its way from Calcutta across the Bay of Bengal to the Far East – first to Siam, then Manila, then finally the shores of China on merchant ships whose dehydrated, sunken-eyed sailors dumped their waste into the Pearl River, contaminating the waters where thousands drank, laundered, swam, and bathed. It hit Canton like a tidal wave, rapidly working its way from the docks to the inland residential areas. The boy’s neighbourhood had succumbed within weeks, whole families perishing helplessly in their homes. When Professor Lovell carried the boy out of Canton’s alleys, everyone else on his street was already dead.

The boy learned all this when he awoke in a clean, well-lit room in the English Factory, wrapped in blankets softer and whiter than anything he’d ever touched. These only slightly reduced his discomfort. He was terribly hot, and his tongue sat in his mouth like a dense, sandy stone.

He felt as though he were floating far above his body. Every time the professor spoke, sharp pangs shot through his temples, accompanied by flashes of red.

‘You’re very lucky,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘This illness kills almost everything it touches.’

The boy stared, fascinated by this foreigner’s long face and pale grey eyes. If he let his gaze drift out of focus, the foreigner morphed into a giant bird. A crow. No, a raptor. Something vicious and strong.

‘Can you understand what I’m saying?’

The boy wet his parched lips and uttered a response.

Professor Lovell shook his head. ‘English. Use your English.’

The boy’s throat burned. He coughed.

‘I know you have English.’ Professor Lovell’s voice sounded like a warning. ‘Use it.’

‘My mother,’ breathed the boy. ‘You forgot my mother.’

Professor Lovell did not respond. Promptly he stood and brushed at his knees before he left, though the boy could scarcely see how any dust could have accumulated in the few minutes in which he’d been sitting down.

*

*

*

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The next morning the boy was able to finish a bowl of broth without retching. The morning after that he managed to stand without much vertigo, though his knees trembled so badly from disuse he had to clutch the bedframe to keep from falling over. His fever receded; his appetite improved. When he woke again that afternoon, he found the bowl replaced with a plate with two thick slices of bread and a hunk of roast beef. He devoured these with his bare hands, famished.

He spent most of the day in dreamless sleep, which was regularly interrupted by the arrival of one Mrs Piper – a cheery, round woman who plumped his pillows, wiped his forehead with deliciously cool wet cloths, and spoke English with such a peculiar accent that the boy always had to ask her several times to repeat herself.

‘My word,’ she chuckled the first time he did this. ‘Must be you’ve never met a Scot.’

‘A . . . Scot? What is a Scot?’

‘Don’t you worry about that.’ She patted his cheek. ‘You’ll learn the lay of Great Britain soon enough.’

That evening, Mrs Piper brought him his dinner – bread and beef again – along with news that the professor wanted to see him in his office. ‘It’s just upstairs. The second door to the right. Finish your food first; he’s not going anywhere.’

The boy ate quickly and, with Mrs Piper’s help, got dressed. He didn’t know where the clothes had come from – they were Western in style, and fitted his short, skinny frame surprisingly well – but he was too tired then to inquire further.

As he made his way up the stairs he trembled, whether from fatigue or trepidation, he didn’t know. The door to the professor’s study was shut. He paused a moment to catch his breath, and then he knocked.

‘Come in,’ called the professor.

The door was very heavy. The boy had to lean hard against the wood to budge it open. Inside, he was overwhelmed by the musky, inky scent of books. There were stacks and stacks of them; some were arrayed neatly on shelves, while others were messily piled up in precarious pyramids throughout the room; some were strewn across the floor, while others teetered on the desks that seemed arranged at random within the dimly lit labyrinth.

‘Over here.’ The professor was nearly hidden behind the bookcases.

The boy wound his way tentatively across the room, afraid the slightest wrong move might send the pyramids tumbling.

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7

‘Don’t be shy.’ The professor sat behind a grand desk covered with books, loose papers, and envelopes. He gestured for the boy to take a seat across from him. ‘Did they let you read much here? English wasn’t a problem?’

‘I read some.’ The boy sat gingerly, taking care not to tread on the volumes – Richard Hakluyt’s travel notes, he noticed – amassed by his feet. ‘We didn’t have many books. I ended up re-reading what we had.’

For someone who had never left Canton in his life, the boy’s English was remarkably good. He spoke with only a trace of an accent. This was thanks to an Englishwoman – one Miss Elizabeth Slate, whom the boy had called Miss Betty, and who had lived with his household for as long as he could remember. He never quite understood what she was doing there – his family was certainly not wealthy enough to employ any servants, especially not a foreigner – but someone must have been paying her wages because she had never left, not even when the plague hit. Her Cantonese was passably good, decent enough for her to make her way around town without trouble, but with the boy, she spoke exclusively in English. Her sole duty seemed to be taking care of him, and it was through conversation with her, and later with British sailors at the docks, that the boy had become fluent.

He could read the language better than he spoke it. Ever since the boy turned four, he had received a large parcel twice a year filled entirely with books written in English. The return address was a residence in Hampstead just outside London – a place Miss Betty seemed unfamiliar with, and which the boy of course knew nothing about. Regardless, he and Miss Betty used to sit together under candlelight, laboriously tracing their fingers over each word as they sounded them out loud. When he grew older, he spent entire afternoons poring over the worn pages on his own. But a dozen books were hardly enough to last six months; he always read each one so many times over he’d nearly memorized them by the time the next shipment came.

He realized now, without quite grasping the larger picture, that those parcels must have come from the professor.

‘I do quite enjoy it,’ he supplied feebly. Then, thinking he ought to say a bit more, ‘And no – English was not a problem.’

‘Very good.’ Professor Lovell picked a volume off the shelf behind him and slid it across the table. ‘I suppose you haven’t seen this one before?’

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R . F. K UA N G

The boy glanced at the title. The Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith.

He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, no.’

‘That’s fine.’ The professor opened the book to a page in the middle and pointed. ‘Read out loud for me. Start here.’

The boy swallowed, coughed to clear his throat, and began to read.

The book was intimidatingly thick, the font very small, and the prose proved considerably more difficult than the breezy adventure novels he’d read with Miss Betty. His tongue tripped over words he didn’t know, words he could only guess at and sound out.

‘The par . . . particular ad-advantage which each col-o-colonizing country derives from the col . . . colonies which par . . . particularly belong to it, are of two different kinds; first, those common advantages which every empire de . . . rives?’ He cleared his throat. ‘Derives . . . from the provinces subject to its dom . . . dom . . . ’ * ‘That’s enough.’

He had no idea what he’d just read. ‘Sir, what does—’ ‘No, that’s all right,’ said the professor. ‘I hardly expect you to understand international economics. You did very well.’ He set the book aside, reached into his desk drawer, and pulled out a silver bar. ‘Remember this?’

The boy stared, wide-eyed, too apprehensive even to touch it.

He’d seen bars like that before. They were rare in Canton, but everyone knew about them. Yínfúlù, silver talismans. He’d seen them embedded in the prows of ships, carved into the sides of palanquins, and installed over the doors of warehouses in the foreign quarter. He’d never figured out precisely what they were, and no one in his household could explain. His grandmother called them rich men’s magic spells, metal amulets carrying blessings from the gods. His mother thought they contained trapped demons who could be summoned to accomplish their masters’ orders. Even Miss Betty, who made loud her disdain for indigenous Chinese superstition and constantly criticized his mother’s heeding of hungry ghosts, found them unnerving. * In Book IV, Chapter VII of The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith argues against colonialism on the grounds that the defence of colonies is a drain on resources, and that the economic gains of the monopolistic colonial trade are an illusion.

He writes: ‘Great Britain derives nothing but loss from the dominion which she assumes over her colonies.’ This view was not widely shared at the time.

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‘They’re witchcraft,’ she’d said when he asked. ‘They’re devil’s work is what they are.’

So the boy didn’t know what to make of this yínfúlù, except that it was a bar just like this one that had several days ago saved his life.

‘Go on.’ Professor Lovell held it out towards him. ‘Have a look. It won’t bite.’

The boy hesitated, then received it in both hands. The bar was very smooth and cold to the touch, but otherwise it seemed quite ordinary. If there was a demon trapped inside, it hid itself well.

‘Can you read what it says?’

The boy looked closer and noticed there was indeed writing, tiny words engraved neatly on either side of the bar: English letters on one side, Chinese characters on the other. ‘Yes.’ ‘Say them out loud. Chinese first, then English. Speak very clearly.’

The boy recognized the Chinese characters, though the calligraphy looked a bit strange, as if drawn by someone who had seen them and copied them out radical by radical without knowing what they meant.

They read: ┌┇Ꮝቭ.

‘Húlún tūn zǎo,’ he read slowly, taking care to enunciate every syllable.

He switched to English. ‘To accept without thinking.’

The bar began to hum.

Immediately his tongue swelled up, obstructing his airway. The boy grasped, choking, at his throat. The bar dropped to his lap, where it vibrated wildly, dancing as if possessed. A cloyingly sweet taste filled his mouth. Like dates, the boy thought faintly, black pushing in at the edges of his vision. Strong, jammy dates, so ripe they were sickening.

He was drowning in them. His throat was wholly blocked, he couldn’t breathe— ‘Here.’ Professor Lovell leaned over and pulled the bar from his lap.

The choking sensation vanished. The boy slumped over the desk, gulping for air.

‘Interesting,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘I’ve never known it to have such a strong effect. What does your mouth taste of ?’

‘Hóngzǎo.’ Tears streamed down the boy’s face. Hastily he switched to English. ‘Dates.’

‘That’s good. That’s very good.’ Professor Lovell observed him for a long moment, then dropped the bar back into the drawer. ‘Excellent, in fact.’

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R . F. K UA N G

The boy wiped tears from his eyes, sniffling. Professor Lovell sat back, waiting for the boy to recover somewhat before he continued. ‘In two days, Mrs Piper and I will depart this country for a city called London in a country called England. I’m sure you’ve heard of both.’

The boy gave an uncertain nod. London existed to him like Lilliput did: a faraway, imaginary, fantasy place where no one looked, dressed, or spoke remotely like him.

‘I propose to bring you with us. You will live at my estate, and I will provide you with room and board until you’ve grown old enough to make your own living. In return, you will take courses in a curriculum of my design. It will be language work – Latin, Greek, and of course, Mandarin. You will enjoy an easy, comfortable life, and the best education that one can afford. All I expect in return is that you apply yourself diligently to your studies.’

Professor Lovell clasped his hands together as if in prayer. The boy found his tone confusing. It was utterly flat and dispassionate. He could not tell if Professor Lovell wanted him in London or not; indeed, this seemed less like an adoption and more like a business proposal.

‘I urge you to strongly consider it,’ Professor Lovell continued. ‘Your mother and grandparents are dead, your father unknown, and you have no extended family. Stay here, and you won’t have a penny to your name.

All you will ever know is poverty, disease, and starvation. You’ll find work on the docks if you’re lucky, but you’re still small yet, so you’ll spend a few years begging or stealing. Assuming you reach adulthood, the best you can hope for is backbreaking labour on the ships.’

The boy found himself staring, fascinated, at Professor Lovell’s face as he spoke. It was not as though he had never encountered an Englishman before. He had met plenty of sailors at the docks, had seen the entire range of white men’s faces, from the broad and ruddy to the diseased and liver-spotted to the long, pale, and severe. But the professor’s face presented an entirely different puzzle. His had all the components of a standard human face – eyes, lips, nose, teeth, all healthy and normal.

His voice was a low, somewhat flat, but nevertheless human voice. But when he spoke, his tone and expression were entirely devoid of emotion.

He was a blank slate. The boy could not guess his feelings at all. As the professor described the boy’s early, inevitable death, he could have been reciting ingredients for a stew.

‘Why?’ asked the boy.

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‘Why what?’

‘Why do you want me?’

The professor nodded to the drawer which contained the silver bar.

‘Because you can do that.’

Only then did the boy realize that this had been a test.

‘These are the terms of my guardianship.’ Professor Lovell slid a twopage document across the desk. The boy glanced down, then gave up trying to skim it; the tight, looping penmanship looked nigh illegible.

‘They’re quite simple, but take care to read the entire thing before you sign it. Will you do this tonight before you go to bed?’

The boy was too shaken to do anything but nod.

‘Very good,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘One more thing. It occurs to me you need a name.’

‘I have a name,’ said the boy. ‘It’s—’ ‘No, that won’t do. No Englishman can pronounce that. Did Miss Slate give you a name?’

She had, in fact. When the boy turned four, she had insisted he adopt a name by which Englishmen could take him seriously, though she’d never elaborated which Englishmen those might be. They’d chosen something at random from a children’s rhyming book, and the boy liked how firm and round the syllables felt on his tongue, so he harboured no complaint. But no one else in the household had ever used it, and soon Miss Betty had dropped it as well. The boy had to think hard for a moment before he remembered.

‘Robin.’ * Professor Lovell was quiet for a moment. His expression confused the boy – his brows were furrowed, as if in anger, but one side of his mouth curled up, as if delighted. ‘How about a surname?’

‘I have a surname.’

‘One that will do in London. Pick anything you like.’

The boy blinked at him. ‘Pick . . . a surname?’

Family names were not things to be dropped and replaced at whim, he thought. They marked lineage; they marked belonging.

‘The English reinvent their names all the time,’ said Professor Lovell.

‘The only families who keep theirs do it because they have titles to hold * I killed Cock Robin.

Who saw him die?

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R . F. K UA N G

on to, and you certainly haven’t got any. You only need a handle to introduce yourself by. Any name will do.’

‘Then can I take yours? Lovell?’

‘Oh, no,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘They’ll think I’m your father.’

‘Oh – of course.’ The boy’s eyes cast desperately around the room, searching for some word or sound to latch on to. They landed on a familiar volume on the shelf above Professor Lovell’s head – Gulliver’s Travels.

A stranger in a strange land, who had to learn the local languages if he wished not to die. He thought he understood now how Gulliver felt.

‘Swift?’ he ventured. ‘Unless—’ To his surprise, Professor Lovell laughed. Laughter was strange coming out of that severe mouth; it sounded too abrupt, almost cruel, and the boy couldn’t help but flinch. ‘Very good. Robin Swift you’ll be.

Mr Swift, good to meet you.’

He rose and extended his hand across the desk. The boy had seen foreign sailors greeting each other at the docks, so he knew what to do. He met that large, dry, uncomfortably cool hand with his own.

They shook.

Two days later, Professor Lovell, Mrs Piper, and the newly christened Robin Swift set sail for London. By then, thanks to many hours of bed rest and a steady diet of hot milk and Mrs Piper’s abundant cooking, Robin was well enough to walk on his own. He lugged a trunk heavy with books up the gangplank, struggling to keep pace with the professor.

Canton’s harbour, the mouth from which China encountered the world, was a universe of languages. Loud and rapid Portuguese, French, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, English, and Chinese floated through the salty air, intermingling in an implausibly mutually intelligible pidgin which almost everyone understood, but which only a few could speak with ease. Robin knew it well. He’d gained his first instruction in foreign languages running about the quays; he’d often translated for sailors in exchange for a tossed penny and a smile. Never had he imagined he might follow the linguistic fragments of this pidgin back to their source.

They walked down the waterfront to join the boarding line for the Countess of Harcourt, one of the East India Company ships that took on a small number of commercial passengers on each voyage. The sea was loud and choppy that day. Robin shivered as frigid seaside gusts cut

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13

viciously through his coat. He badly wanted to be on the ship, inside a cabin or anywhere with walls, but something held up the boarding line. Professor Lovell stepped to the side to have a look. Robin followed him. At the top of the gangplank, a crewman was berating a passenger, acerbic English vowels piercing through the morning chill.

‘Can’t you understand what I’m saying? Knee how? Lay ho? Anything?’

The target of his ire was a Chinese labourer, stooped from the weight of the rucksack he wore slung over one shoulder. If the labourer uttered a response, Robin couldn’t hear it.

‘Can’t understand a word I’m saying,’ complained the crewman. He turned to the crowd. ‘Can anyone tell this fellow he can’t come aboard?’

‘Oh, that poor man.’ Mrs Piper nudged Professor Lovell’s arm. ‘Can you translate?’

‘I don’t speak the Cantonese dialect,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Robin, go on up there.’

Robin hesitated, suddenly frightened.

‘Go.’ Professor Lovell pushed him up the plank.

Robin stumbled forward into the fray. Both the crewman and the labourer turned to look at him. The crewman merely looked annoyed, but the labourer seemed relieved – he seemed to recognize immediately in Robin’s face an ally, the only other Chinese person in sight.

‘What’s the matter?’ Robin asked him in Cantonese.

‘He won’t let me aboard,’ the labourer said urgently. ‘But I have a contract with this ship until London, look, it says so right here.’

He shoved a folded sheet of paper at Robin.

Robin opened it. The paper was written in English, and it did indeed look like a lascar contract – a certificate of pay to last for the length of one voyage from Canton to London, to be specific. Robin had seen such contracts before; they had grown increasingly common over the past several years as the demand for indentured Chinese servants grew concurrently with overseas difficulties with the slave trade. This was not the first contract he’d translated; he’d seen work orders for Chinese labourers to board for destinations as far away as Portugal, India, and the West Indies.

It all looked in order to Robin. ‘So what’s the problem?’

‘What’s he telling you?’ asked the crewman. ‘Tell him that contract’s no good. I can’t have Chinamen on this ship. Last ship I sailed that carried a Chinaman got filthy with lice. I’m not taking risks on people

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R . F. K UA N G

who can’t wash. Couldn’t even understand the word bath if I yelled it at him, this one. Hello? Boy? Do you understand what I’m saying?’

‘Yes, yes.’ Robin switched hastily back to English. ‘Yes, I’m just – give me a moment, I’m just trying to . . . ’ But what should he say?

The labourer, uncomprehending, cast Robin an imploring look. His face was creased and sun-browned, leathered in a way that made him look sixty, though he was likely only in his thirties. All lascars aged quickly; the work wrecked their bodies. Robin had seen that face a thousand times before at the docks. Some tossed him sweets; some knew him well enough to greet him by name. He associated that face with his own kind. But he’d never seen one of his elders turn to him with such total helplessness.

Guilt twisted his gut. Words collected on his tongue, cruel and terrible words, but he could not turn them into a sentence.

‘Robin.’ Professor Lovell was at his side, gripping his shoulder so tightly it hurt. ‘Translate, please.’

This all hinged on him, Robin realized. The choice was his. Only he could determine the truth, because only he could communicate it to all parties.

But what could he possibly say? He saw the crewman’s blistering irritation. He saw the rustling impatience of the other passengers in the queue. They were tired, they were cold, they couldn’t understand why they hadn’t boarded yet. He felt Professor Lovell’s thumb digging a groove into his collarbone, and a thought struck him – a thought so frightening that it made his knees tremble – which was that should he pose too much of a problem, should he stir up trouble, then the Countess of Harcourt might simply leave him behind onshore as well.

‘Your contract’s no good here,’ he murmured to the labourer. ‘Try the next ship.’

The labourer gaped in disbelief. ‘Did you read it? It says London, it says the East India Company, it says this ship, the Countess—’ Robin shook his head. ‘It’s no good,’ he said, then repeated this line, as if doing so might make it true. ‘It’s no good, you’ll have to try the next ship.’

‘What’s wrong with it?’ demanded the labourer.

Robin could hardly force his words out. ‘It’s just no good.’

The labourer gaped at him. A thousand emotions worked through

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that weathered face – indignation, frustration, and finally, resignation.

Robin had been afraid the labourer might argue, might fight, but quickly it became clear that for this man, such treatment was nothing new. This had happened before. The labourer turned and made his way down the gangplank, shoving passengers aside as he did. In a few moments he was gone from sight.

Robin felt very dizzy. He escaped back down the gangplank to Mrs Piper’s side. ‘I’m cold.’

‘Oh, you’re shaking, poor thing.’ She was immediately on him like a mother hen, enveloping him within her shawl. She spoke a sharp word to Professor Lovell. He sighed, nodded; then they bustled through to the front of the line, from which they were whisked straight to their cabins while a porter collected their luggage and carried it behind them.

An hour later, the Countess of Harcourt left the port.

Robin was settled on his bunk with a thick blanket wrapped around his shoulders, and he would have happily stayed there all day, but Mrs Piper urged him back above deck to watch the receding shoreline. He felt a sharp ache in his chest as Canton disappeared over the horizon, and then a raw emptiness, as if a grappling hook had yanked his heart out of his body. It had not registered until now that he would not step foot on his native shore again for many years, if ever. He wasn’t sure what to make of this fact. The word loss was inadequate. Loss just meant a lack, meant something was missing, but it did not encompass the totality of this severance, this terrifying un-anchoring from all that he’d ever known.

He watched the ocean for a long time, indifferent to the wind, staring until even his imagined vision of the shore faded away.

He spent the first few days of the voyage sleeping. He was still recuperating; Mrs Piper insisted he take daily walks above deck for his health, but initially he could manage only a few minutes at a time before he had to lie down. He was fortunate to be spared the nausea of seasickness; a childhood along docks and rivers had habituated his senses to the roiling instability. When he felt strong enough to spend whole afternoons above deck, he loved sitting by the railings, watching the ceaseless waves changing colour with the sky, feeling the ocean spray on his face.

Occasionally Professor Lovell would chat with him as they paced the

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deck together. Robin learned quickly that the professor was a precise and reticent man. He offered up information when he thought Robin needed it, but otherwise, he was happy to let questions lie.

He told Robin they would reside in his estate in Hampstead when they reached England. He did not say whether he had family at that estate. He confirmed that he had paid Miss Betty all those years, but did not explain why. He intimated that he’d known Robin’s mother, which was how he’d known Robin’s address, but he did not elaborate on the nature of their relationship or how they’d met. The only time he acknowledged their prior acquaintance was when he asked Robin how his family came to live in that riverside shack.

‘They were a well-off merchant family when I knew them,’ he said. ‘Had an estate in Peking before they moved south. What was it, gambling? I suppose it was the brother, wasn’t it?’

Months ago Robin would have spat at anyone for speaking so cruelly about his family. But here, alone in the middle of the ocean with no relatives and nothing to his name, he could not summon the ire. He had no fire left in him. He was only scared, and so very tired.

In any case, all this accorded with what Robin had been told of his family’s previous wealth, which had been squandered completely in the years after his birth. His mother had complained about it bitterly and often. Robin was fuzzy on the details, but the story involved what so many tales of decline in Qing dynasty China did: an aging patriarch, a profligate son, malicious and manipulative friends, and a helpless daughter whom, for some mysterious reason, no one would marry. Once, he’d been told, he’d slept in a lacquered crib. Once, they’d enjoyed a dozen servants and a chef who cooked rare delicacies imported from northern markets. Once, they’d lived in an estate that could have housed five families, with peacocks roaming about the yard. But all Robin had ever known was the little house on the river.

‘My mother said that my uncle lost all their money at the opium houses,’ Robin told him. ‘Debtors seized their estate, and we had to move. Then my uncle went missing when I was three, and it was just us and my aunts and grandparents. And Miss Betty.’

Professor Lovell made a noncommittal hum of sympathy. ‘That’s too bad.’

Apart from these talks, the professor spent most of the day holed up in his cabin. They saw him only semi-regularly in the mess for dinners;

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more often Mrs Piper had to fill a plate with hardtack and dried pork and take it to his room.

‘He’s working on his translations,’ Mrs Piper told Robin. ‘He’s always picking up scrolls and old books on these trips, you see, and he likes to get a head start on rendering them into English before he gets back to London. They keep him so busy there – he’s a very important man, a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, you know – and he says sea voyages are the only time he gets any peace and quiet. Isn’t that funny. He bought some nice rhyming dictionaries in Macau – lovely things, though he won’t let me touch them, the pages are so fragile.’

Robin was startled to hear that they’d been to Macau. He had not been aware of any Macau trip; naively, he’d imagined he was the only reason why Professor Lovell had come to China at all. ‘How long were you there? In Macau, I mean.’

‘Oh, two weeks and some change. It would have been just two, but we were held up at customs. They don’t like letting foreign women onto the mainland – I had to dress up and pretend to be the professor’s uncle, can you imagine!’

Two weeks.

Two weeks ago, Robin’s mother was still alive.

‘Are you all right, dear?’ Mrs Piper ruffled his hair. ‘You look pale.’

Robin nodded, and swallowed down the words he knew he could not say.

He had no right to be resentful. Professor Lovell had promised him everything, and owed him nothing. Robin did not yet fully understand the rules of this world he was about to enter, but he understood the necessity of gratitude. Of deference. One did not spite one’s saviours.

‘Do you want me to take this plate down to the professor?’ he asked.

‘Thank you, dear. That’s very sweet of you. Come and meet me above deck afterwards and we’ll watch the sun go down.’

Time blurred. The sun rose and set, but without the regularity of routine – he had no chores, no water to fetch or errands to run – the days all seemed the same no matter the hour. Robin slept, reread his old books, and paced the decks. Occasionally he struck up a conversation with the other passengers, who always seemed delighted to hear a near pitch-perfect Londoner’s accent out of the mouth of this little Oriental boy. Recalling Professor Lovell’s words, he tried very hard to

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live exclusively in English. When thoughts popped up in Chinese, he quashed them.

He quashed his memories too. His life in Canton – his mother, his grandparents, a decade of running about the docks – it all proved surprisingly easy to shed, perhaps because this passage was so jarring, the break so complete. He’d left behind everything he’d known. There was nothing to cling to, nothing to escape back to. His world now was Professor Lovell, Mrs Piper, and the promise of a country on the other side of the ocean. He buried his past life, not because it was so terrible but because abandoning it was the only way to survive. He pulled on his English accent like a new coat, adjusted everything he could about himself to make it fit, and, within weeks, wore it with comfort. In weeks, no one was asking him to speak a few words in Chinese for their entertainment. In weeks, no one seemed to remember he was Chinese at all.

One morning, Mrs Piper woke him very early. He made some noises of protest, but she insisted. ‘Come, dear, you won’t want to miss this.’

Yawning, he pulled on a jacket. He was still rubbing his eyes when they emerged above deck into a cold morning shrouded in mist so thick Robin could hardly see the prow of the ship. But then the fog cleared, and a grey-black silhouette emerged over the horizon, and that was the first glimpse Robin ever had of London: the Silver City, the heart of the British Empire, and in that era, the largest and richest city in the world.

HEART OF THE SUN WARRIOR Sue Lynn Tan Coming November 2022

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darkness, draping shadows across the earth. While this was the time of rest for the mortals, on the moon, our toils were just beginning.

Winter white flames curled from the splint of wood in my hand.

Crouching down, I brushed away a stray leaf from the lantern, wrought of translucent stone and twisted strands of silver. As I lowered the splint to the wick, it caught fire with a hiss. I rose, shaking the soil from my robe. Rows of unlit orbs stretched before me as pale as the osmanthus which flowered above—moon lanterns, one thousand in all, that would cast their glow upon the realm below. Through wind and rain, their light would not falter, until they were extinguished at the first breath of dawn.

Each time I lit the lanterns, my mother urged me to be diligent, to perform the task by hand. But I had not her patience.

I had grown unused to such quiet work, to peace and calm.

Reaching inward, I grasped my energy, the shining magic that flowed from my lifeforce. Flames rippled from my palm, streaking across the lanterns, leaving half ablaze in their wake. My Talent lay in Air, but Fire was useful at times as these. The ground now glittered like stardust and in the world below, the mortals would be lifting their heads to the curved wedge of light in the sky, its face partially hidden.

IGHT CLOA K ED THE SKY IN

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Few wrote poems about the half-moon or immortalized it in paintings— devoid of the elegant arch of a crescent or the perfect wholeness of the orb. Clinging to both light and dark, and lost somewhere in between. It resonated with me, a child of mortal and immortal heritage, in the shade of my luminous parents.

Sometimes I would find myself slipping into the past, threaded with a sliver of regret—wondering what if I had remained in the Celestial Kingdom, reaping glory across the years, each accomplishment strung to my name until it shone like a strand of pearls. A legend in my own right, revered as the heroes like my father, Houyi, or beloved and worshipped like my mother, the Moon Goddess.

The mortals honored her during the annual Mid-Autumn Festival, a celebration of reunion, though this was the day my mother had ascended to the skies. Some prayed to her for good fortune, others for love. Little did they know my mother’s powers were limited, perhaps untrained or a remnant of her humanity— shed when she had consumed the Elixir of Immortality, the one gifted to my father for slaying the sunbirds. When she had floated to the heavens, my parents were parted as irrevocably as though death’s blade had severed them, and indeed it had, for my father’s body now lay entombed in a grave. A sharpness pierced my chest. I had never known my father, cherishing him as an abstract figure in my mind while my mother had mourned him every day of her immortal existence. Perhaps this was why the tedium of her task did not trouble her; relief to a mind splintered with regret, easing a heart clenched with grief.

No, I did not need renown and reverence, just as my parents had not asked for them. Fame was often accompanied by suffering, the thrill of glory came entwined with terror, and blood was not so easily washed from one’s conscience. I had not joined the Celestial Army to chase dreams as fleeting as the dazzle of fire-

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works, leaving a darkness twice as deep in their wake. I would temper this restlessness, untangle such desires. To be home again with my mother and Ping’er, to have love in my life . . . these were the things that made me whole. It was what I had dreamed of, what I had fought for, what I had earned.

To many, this place might be humble compared to the opulence of the Jade Palace. Yet there was no place more wondrous to me—the ground shimmering as starlit waves, the osmanthus blossoms hanging from branches like clumps of white snow.

Sometimes I woke in my bed of cinnamon wood, taut with uncertainty whether this was just a dream. But the sweetness curling in the air and the soft light of the lanterns were gentle yet unassailable assurances that I was here, in my home, and no one would tear me from it again.

As a breeze wound through the air, something clinked above.

The laurel, its clusters of seeds aglitter as ice. In my childhood, I had longed to string them into a bracelet for my mother but could never pull the seeds free. From habit, I wrapped my fingers around one, translucent and cool. I tugged hard, but while the branch dipped and swayed, it held fast as before.

The air shifted with the presence of another immortal, though the wards remained undisturbed. I reached instinctively for the bow slung across my back. After this peaceful year at home, my lifeforce had recovered much quicker than anticipated.

I no longer strained to draw the Jade Dragon Bow; I no longer feared an intruder’s trespass. But almost at once, I lowered the weapon. That aura was one I knew as well as my own— shining, summer bright.

“A warm greeting, Xingyin.” Liwei’s voice rang out, tinged with laughter. “Or are you keen for another challenge with the bow?”

I turned to find him leaning against a tree, arms folded across

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his chest. My pulse quickened though I kept my tone steady. “If you recall, I won our last challenge. And since then, I have had a lot more practice compared to Your Highness, spending all your time at court.”

An intended gibe for he had not visited in weeks. Yet I had no right to expect more. While we had grown closer of late, no promises had been exchanged—we were at once more than friends and less than what we had been. The seeds of doubt once sprouted were much harder to uproot.

The corners of his lips curved into a smile. “Our tally remains even. I might win.”

“You are welcome to try,” I said, lifting my chin.

He laughed, shaking his head. “I prefer to keep my pride intact.”

He strode toward me, stopping when the hem of his lapisblue robe brushed mine in a soft rustle. A gray length of silk encircled his waist, from which hung an oblong jade tablet and a crystal sphere, agleam with the silver of my energy. The Sky Drop Tassel, its twin swinging from my sash.

I fought the urge to step back, as much as I did the pull forward. “I did not sense your arrival. Did you adjust the wards?”

A simple matter for Liwei to circumvent the enchantments that guarded my home, for he had helped me to craft them. While they were not as powerful as those of the Celestial Kingdom, a warning thrummed through me whenever the boundaries were crossed. I was not concerned about those familiar to us; it was the strangers I was wary of.

He nodded. “If they are disturbed, I will sense it, too. An inadvertent outcome is they now recognize my presence.”

“Does it matter when you are so rarely here?” The words fell out before I could stop them.

His smile widened. “Did you miss me?”

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“No.” Yes, but I would not give him the satisfaction. And I would never admit it—not even if someone pressed a knife to my neck—that since his absence, a hollow ache had gaped within me, which only now began to subside.

“Should I leave?” he offered.

How tempting to turn my back on him, but it would be like kicking myself in the shin. “Why did you not come sooner?” I asked instead, which was what I truly wanted to know.

His expression turned grave. “An urgent matter arose at court; the appointment of a new general to share command over the army with General Jianyun. My father’s relationship with him has grown tense of late.”

Guilt burrowed in my chest. Did Their Celestial Majesties bear a grudge against General Jianyun for defending me a year ago, the day I won my mother’s freedom? They rewarded those who served them well, but insults were repaid in full.

“Who is this new general?” I asked.

“Do you recall Minister Wu?” A shudder coursed through me at the recollection of the courtier who had argued so vehemently against mercy for us. If he had his way, the emperor would have clapped my mother into chains and sentenced me to death that day. Had I offended the minister without knowing it? Or did he really believe us a threat to the emperor, to whom he was undoubtedly loyal? Whatever it was, my stomach churned at the thought of him wielding such influence over the Celestial Army.

“I did not realize the minister harbored these aspirations,” I remarked. “Is he qualified for the position?”

“Few would refuse so illustrious an appointment whether they are capable or not,” Liwei said grimly. “I stayed to lend General Jianyun my support in hopes of changing my father’s mind, but he is adamant. While Minister Wu is a loyal subject

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of my father’s, I have always felt uneasy around him, even before he spoke against you.”

“Unclouded by emotion, instinct can be a powerful guide.”

As I spoke, my insides knotted at the memory of Wenzhi’s betrayal. Who was I to preach such things when I had stifled my own instincts, seeing only what I wanted to believe?

Something pulsed through my mind like a soundless drumbeat; someone had come through the wards. I probed the stillness, sensing the unfamiliar flickers of energy. Immortal auras, several of them, yet none familiar to me. As I stiffened, Liwei’s eyes narrowed. He had sensed it, too, these strangers who had come to my home.

Since the moon was no longer a place of exile, many immortals visited us. An unfortunate outcome of the emperor’s pardon was having to suffer their curious stares and callous remarks like I was some object to be paraded for their amusement.

“How did it feel to be struck by Sky-fire?” a Celestial courtier had asked breathlessly.

“A miracle that you survived.” A face alight with anticipation.

While another had wondered in a too-loud voice, “What of the scars? Do they still hurt? I hear those will never heal.”

Feigned concern. Gloating commiseration. False sympathy.

As hollow as those puppets wielded by street performers in the mortal world. If I had detected a fragment of genuine care, I would not have resented them so. But all that spurred their interest was greed, for a scrap of gossip to share. How my fingers had itched to draw my bow, summoning a bolt of lightning to send them fleeing from our hall. I would not have released it but the mere threat would have sufficed. Only my mother’s glare and the manners she had instilled in me since I was young kept me fixed to my chair.

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Yet better by far their idle curiosity than those with malice in their hearts.

A crash rang out, something shattering against stone. Lifting my skirt, I sprinted toward the Pure Light Palace. Each time my feet slammed the ground, kicking up clumps of powdery earth, the Jade Dragon Bow thumped against my back. Liwei’s footsteps were never far behind as he raced after me.

Shining walls rose ahead, then the mother-of-pearl columns.

I stumbled to a halt by the entrance, examining the porcelain fragments strewn on the floor, drenched in a pool of pale-gold liquid. A sweet and mellow fragrance wafted in the air, soothing and languorous. Wine, though we kept no stores of it here.

Liwei and I stalked through the doors, along the corridor that led to the Silver Harmony Hall where visitors were received.

Jade lamps cast their soft glow upon the strangers, seated in wooden chairs around my mother. As I entered, their heads swung my way as they rose to their feet.

The jade tassels on my mother’s vermilion sash clinked as she came toward us. “Liwei, we have not seen you for a while,” she said warmly, dropping his title as he had long urged her to.

“Forgive me for my lengthy absence.” He bent his head in courtesy.

As I greeted our guests, I studied them in turn. Their auras were not strong which meant any trouble could be easily subdued, nor were there any ominous flashes of metal or subtle thrums of magic held at the ready— only discernable if one was searching for them. A frail immortal stood beside my mother.

His eyes were the shade of a sparrow’s coat and his hair and beard gleamed silver, which meant his age was great. A bamboo flute with a green tassel hung from his waist. Beside him were two women in lilac robes with turquoise pins in their hair. The hands they lifted in greeting were smooth and unblemished, that

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had never wielded a weapon or done a day’s work. I breathed easier until I caught sight of the last guest. The hard planes of his features seemed like they were chiseled from wood, while his neck was corded with muscle. Beneath his fine brocade robe, his shoulders were thrown wide, yet his fingers twitched restlessly.

A prickle of warning slid over my skin as I smiled to conceal my concern. “Mother, who are our guests?”

“Meina and Meining are sisters from the Golden Desert.

They wish to stay for a few weeks to observe the stars.” She gestured to the elderly immortal beside her. “Master Gang, a skilled musician, has come to seek inspiration for his latest composition. And this is . . .” She paused, her forehead creasing as she stared at the younger man. “I am afraid we were interrupted before I could learn your name.”

He bowed to us, holding out his clasped hands. “I’m honored to be in your company. My name is Haoran, and I’m a winemaker from the Phoenix Kingdom. My patron, Queen Fengjin, requested a new wine for which I require the finest osmanthus. It is said the most beautiful ones bloom in your forest, and I humbly ask your permission to harvest some of the flowers. I would be eternally grateful for your boundless generosity, that is famed throughout the realm.”

I recoiled inwardly from the obsequious flattery in his words, the way his eyes darted around the room. Something about him set me on edge like a tune played in the wrong rhythm— and it was not just that he was from the Phoenix Kingdom, the closest ally of the Celestial Kingdom and the home of Liwei’s former betrothed. A refusal hovered on the tip of my tongue, an urge rising to send him away. Not just Haoran; all of them. We were safe here, our peace hard-won.

As though sensing my unease, Haoran turned to my mother.

“It would be no more than a few days. I brought a humble gift,

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several jars of my finest wine, one of which was unfortunately dropped outside,” he said with artful cunning.

“Master Haoran, you are most courteous but there is no need for any gift,” my mother replied graciously. “We welcome all of you. I hope you will excuse us for the simple way we live; we do not entertain in a grand manner.”

Master Haoran inclined his head again. “I am grateful.”

The others bowed in acknowledgment before they followed my mother from the room, leaving just Liwei and me in the hall.

As I sank onto a chair, pressing a fist to my lips, Liwei took the seat beside me.

“What do you think of Master Haoran?” I asked.

“I would like to try his wines.”

I was in no mood to jest. “Perhaps I am searching for trouble where there is none. Perhaps I am used to it.”

Liwei leaned toward me, his face grave. “Trust your instincts; I do. Keep watch over them. If anything happens, send word to me at once.”

As his eyes dropped to the Sky Drop Tassel by my waist, his expression tightened. Memories crowded me— of a dark cave, a taunting laugh, the tip of Liwei’s sword pressed to my flesh . . . and how close we had come to losing each other.

I stared through the doorway until the footsteps receded to silence. For the first time ever, strangers would reside beneath the roof of my home. I forced from my mind the recollection of the last time I had felt this way here—a child hiding from the Celestial Empress, pressed against the stone wall, half frozen with fear.

THE THORNS REMAIN JJA Harwood Coming January 2023

The Dreamer smiled. It slid across his face like a knife.

“You do not use my proper titles,” he mused. “Why is this?”

“Well, you’ve got so many to choose from,” said Moira Jean, trying to sound charming. “I picked the one I liked best. Why… why do they call you The Dreamer?”

His eyes were fixed on her. Colours flashed through them, roiling together like the shine of oil on water. She thought of Duncan and Fiona and the strange dreams they had complained of, and wondered what terrible and beautiful things they saw when they closed their eyes. “They call me many things,” he said, “for I have many dominions. Recognise them.”

“Exc–” Moira Jean clapped her hands over her mouth before she could complete the phrase excuse me. There was a flash of teeth in The Dreamer’s grin, and the haze across his features parted. Not teeth, Moira Jean realised. Spines.

“You are learning,” he murmured. “Good. I have no use for a stupid servant.”

Moira Jean took a deep breath, struggling to keep a lid on her temper and her fear. The needle-like teeth vanished behind full, human lips, and once she could not see them it was hard to remember that they had ever been there. “What did you mean by that?”

The Dreamer drew closer. “In exchange for the shelter I have provided you, you shall thank me. You shall say ‘thank you, my lord’, and you will know your place.”

Moira Jean tried to tell herself that it would mean nothing.

Words were words, and nothing more. But The Dreamer was standing over her, a cruel smile on his lips, hunger radiating off him in waves. The suggestion of sharp cheekbones was somewhere behind the haze obscuring his features; as much as she feared him,

she wished she could see his face clearly. The longer she looked at him, the more she wanted to reach out and brush it aside.

But even though looking at him was like trying to see through morning mist, she could tell how much he craved to hear the words from her. He was bending over her, standing like a gnarled old tree, his elegant hands all but grasping at her dress.

He didn’t just want to hear the words for the sake of his pride. He needed it.

She could use that.

“I know my place well enough,” said Moira Jean. “And I know that it’s worth more than shelter from the rain. If you want me to thank you and call you my lord – and it’s just going to be the once, mind – then you’ll give me back another of my friends.”

The Dreamer laughed, careless and dismissive. “Do not flatter yourself, Moira Jean. Your obeisance is not worth a mortal life.”

Disappointment slashed through her. There was just over a month until Beltane, she couldn’t afford another empty bargain.

Moira Jean thought fast. “Fine. Then you’ll owe me a favour.”

He went still. There was an explosion of chittering over Moira Jean’s head. She did not look up. She kept her gaze fixed on The Dreamer’s ever-shifting eyes.

“I have already given you more than shelter,” The Dreamer said, as though he was weighing the price of each word. “I have given you a companion.”

Moira Jean glared at him. “She made a bargain of her own.

You had nothing to do with it. And whatever you took from her, I’ll find a way to give it back. She’s not…she’s not the same.”

The Dreamer smiled like he was unsheathing a knife.

“Mortals rarely are, after seeing my realm. Are you not happy,

Moira Jean? Is seeing the face of your friend not worth far more than a favour?”

“No. Not when she’s like this.”

The smile vanished. “What favour?” he asked, his voice cold.

“That’s not for you to decide.”

The Dreamer considered her. He was close enough that she could have reached out and placed a hand on his chest. He was wearing a long, white robe, like a wraith fresh from the tomb.

Moira Jean was sure that if she tried, her fingers would pass right through him.

“I accept,” he said. “But when I have granted your request, that shall be the end of this particular bargain. Your friends are part of another; remember that.”

Moira Jean started. She hadn’t thought The Dreamer would take her up on her offer. Fear flickered through her. Was she giving up more than she knew? What should she ask for in return?

The Dreamer came even closer. His white robe was brighter than moonlight. His hunger was infectious; it was gnawing at her.

Slowly, he reached out, pulling the shawl away from her face. It slid over her hair, the damp air suddenly tangling itself in her curls.

“Now,” he said, his voice low and cruel, “say it.”

Moira Jean’s face was burning. The Dreamer’s beauty was like a weapon; it made her into something that could be cut down to size. Her tongue seemed heavy in her mouth. But then, her fury ignited, crackling through her veins like fire through dry bracken. She’d show him exactly what it meant for him to lord his titles over her.

She licked her lips. He watched the movement of her tongue

like a cat.

Moira Jean took a deep, steadying breath. She’d make him pay. But first, she had to get it over with.

“Thank you, my lord,” she said, through gritted teeth.

The Dreamer’s smile widened. His eyes glittered. The creatures over her head shrieked and howled. Moira Jean flinched; she’d forgotten she’d had an audience. The thought alone made her want to crawl into the earth and hide.

The Dreamer ran a long-fingered hand through her hair.

His palm was cold, the touch of his fingers more like stray leaves than flesh. “You have done well. Ask for your reward, my servant.”

Moira Jean clenched her fists. “I want your solemn oath that you’ll never, ever cause me harm. No more talk about…about ripping out eyeballs, or tongues, or anything like that. I want you to swear by all that you hold dear that I will be safe from you.”

The Dreamer’s hand curled into a fist, gripping a chunk of her hair. It did not hurt, but it was starting to pull. “A high price.”

She glared up at him, her cheeks still hot. “You and I made a bargain as equals. Of course the price is high.”

His lip curled. “As you wish.” He leaned forward, whispered in her ear. “I should have made you kneel.”

Moira Jean’s hand shot out. Before she could stop herself she slapped him, right across the face. It felt like hitting dead meat, and when the blow landed, his features blurred.

The Dreamer’s eyes vanished. At once his face was thrown into sharp relief, and she wished she had not seen it. It snapped into focus, suddenly long as a deer skull. His mouth fell open and kept on falling. Horns sprouted from the crown of his head. The fist still buried in her hair seemed to have twice as many fingers, and while it still did not hurt, his hand suddenly felt like a spider

crouched on her scalp.

His voice groaned like rocks tumbling down the mountainside. “You dare to strike me?”

Terror flooded through her. But her pride still burned, smouldering under the fear. And while she could feel the pulling at the roots of her hair, it did not actually hurt. She ground her heels into the dirt, forcing herself to look into his empty eye sockets. “For a bargain to be proven, it must first be tested,” she said, fighting to keep the tremor out of her voice. “You said yourself that you have no use for a stupid servant.”

The Dreamer stared at her, his empty eye sockets fixed on hers.

Then, he began to laugh. The delight in it shocked her; it was almost human, although there was a scrape to it that seemed to drag the sound across her spine. He drew his hand away – Moira Jean caught a glimpse of a few too many long, long fingers – running it down the length of her hair. The creatures over Moira Jean’s head joined in, shrieking and clicking and chittering until the noise grew so loud, she had to press her hands over her ears. As he laughed, his monstrous face faded away, the horns retracted, and soon, he was beautiful again.

“I am glad, Moira Jean, that it was you I spared from the dance,” he said, his eyes glittering. “You are a rare prize indeed.”

Moira Jean left the clearing. The Dreamer was still laughing.

GODKILLER Hannah Kaner Coming January 2023

‘We’re not sorry, liln,’ said Mit. How dare he call her ‘little one’? That was what uncles did, friends. He was not a friend. He was a traitor. ‘It is what must be.’

Kissen drew up her strength and snapped at his hand with her sharp teeth. He leapt away, clutching his thumb pad where she had caught it.

‘Leave her,’ he snapped. ‘It’s time. They won’t wait for us.’

They ran. Kissen was shaking. She spat out Mit’s blood and tried to breathe, turning against the ropes to find the closest family. ‘Papa.’ He was not far from her. ‘Papa!’

Bern, her father, was breathing badly. His mouth was torn and bloody, his face bruised. They must have beaten him in his drugged sleep. That ruined mouth had kissed the god of the sea, but now coal daubed his forehead in the bell-shaped symbol of Hseth.

The air thickened with smoke again, not sweet this time but bitter and sticky, hot and black, rising up through the floor. Their village had lit the pitch beneath their stilt foundations.

Kissen yanked at her wrists, her legs. ‘Papa!’ she cried. They had left her neck unbound when she had tried to bite. She writhed, tugging her arm into strange contortions, the bones popping as she craned her neck towards her closer hand. There. She could reach. She set her teeth to the rope, gnawing and tugging at the knot. It was sea-rope, not meant for fraying, but she didn’t want to die.

Tidean was awake too. ‘You filthy castoffs,’ he was shouting, struggling against his bindings, choking as they tightened on his throat. He coughed on the smoke. ‘You saltless traitors!’ His voice was raw.

The heat was rising. Kissen could feel it on the soles of her

feet. ‘Be calm,’ their mother said, her voice drug-thick. ‘Be calm, my loves. Osidisen will save us. I promise.’

They couldn’t see the flames yet, but the air swam. Osidisen’s sea wind was still forcing its way inside, and the smoke and air were dancing together like oil and water. Kissen’s mouth, her eyes, her nose dried out. She set her teeth to the rope with renewed force.

‘I’ll make you all pay for this!’ Tidean yelled his promise over his mother’s, but he was bound too tight, tighter than Kissenna. His wild thrashing did no good. The floor cracked in places. Bright light peeked through from the foundations. The walls blackened. Then, an ember, a spark, a lick of flame, and the wooden doorway caught alight, sending sparks into Tidean’s eyes. He screamed, and thrashed.

‘Breathe deep, my son,’ said his mother. ‘It’s all right, Osidisen will come.’ She was lying, lying to ease their deaths, lying to herself. Osidisen was a water god; he would not come past the shoreline, not even for them, just as no fire god would dare swim in the sea. Gods couldn’t save them now.

The rope sliced the delicate flesh between Kissen’s teeth, and blood poured thick and hot across her tongue. She growled and bit down hard, wrenching at her restraint. A shot of pain, a grinding in her gums, then a snap. The rope! The rope was loose, her canine still buried in it, ripped clean from her mouth.

Kissen snatched her wrist free and went to work on the other, letting her salt blood drip down her chin onto the stone below, where it hissed and steamed.

Second hand, free! Her feet. She bloodied her nails on the ropes, snarling with desperation. She would save them. She had to. Her breath was hot, her eyes stinging, but she would not stop.

Her mother was coughing now.

‘Breathe deep, my children,’ she said. Kissen could hear the tears in her voice. Lunsen was whimpering now; Tidean’s struggles were less and less intense. Mell had not even stirred.

‘Let the smoke take you to sleep, and Osidisen will come for you.’

Kissen’s ropes came away, and her feet were loose. The floor was now on fire, and the sea wind was doing nothing but thinning the smoke, losing them the chance their mother wished for: a painless death.

‘Papa.’ They had tied her pa hard to the metal, which was getting hotter. Kissen climbed anyway, her hands burning.

‘Kissenna,’ Papa mumbled through his swollen lips. His eyes were open. They shone with dazed relief. ‘My girl, run.’

‘I’m going to save you,’ she growled between coughs. ‘I’ll save you all.’

Kissen pressed her fingers into the hard sailor’s knots; they were tight, but she could work them, releasing her papa a piece at a time. Her eyes were stinging. Mell woke at last and yelled as the flames reached the edges of the hearth, nipping at his heels.

Good, all awake. If they were awake, they could run. She freed her father’s left hand and moved to his foot while he unbound his right. They were losing time. The sound of the bells outside was rising, sonorous, merging into a single note, louder than the fire.

The flames changed. They twisted together, spinning up the walls, then plunging to the floor in a pillar of fire, sparks spinning out like snow. Laughter crackled in the smoke, harsh and delighted.

The fire spun and blossomed into skirts of light and embers.

Within them, a woman twirled, her arms wide. Hseth, the fire god. Her hair sparked with yellows and poisoned red, and heat

rose from her, cracking and splitting the wood and beams.

‘Sea god!’ she cried, then she called him by his name.

‘Osidisen! Look how they turned from you and gave your loves to me. You cannot touch me, you gutted old water goat! This land is mine!’

Hseth did not look at Kissen or her family. She did not flinch at their screams. She burst through the ceiling in a scourge of flame and the roof came crashing down.

SONG OF SILVER, FLAME LIKE NIGHT Amélie Wen Zhao Coming February 2023

1 Power is always borrowed, never created.

— Dào’zǐ, Book of the Way (Classic of Virtues), 1.1

Elantian Age, Cycle 12 The Black Port, Haak’gong

T

he Last Kingdom had been brought to its knees, but the view was mighty fine from here.

Lan tipped her bamboo hat over her head, parting her lips in pleasure as the cool evening breeze combed through the strands of her silky black hair. Sweat slicked her neck from the afternoon’s work of hawking wares at the local evemarket, and her back ached with the beating she’d received from Madam Meng for stealing sugarplum candies from the kitchens at the Teahouse. But in rare moments like this, when the sun hung ripe and swollen as a mandarin over the glittering silver sea, there was still a shattered-glass beauty to be found in the remnants of a conquered land.

The city of Haak’gong unfurled before her in a patchwork of contradictions. Red lanterns were strung from curved temple eave to gray-shingled rooftop, weaving and wending between pagodas and courtyards wreathed in the halo of night 1

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bazaars and evening fairs. On the distant hills, the Elantians had settled on higher ground, building their strange architecture of stone, glass, and metal to watch over the Hin like gods. The skyline glowed a dusky auric from their alchemical lamplight that spilled through stained-glass windows and arched marble doorways.

Lan rolled her eyes and turned away. She knew the story of the gods—any gods—to be a big, steaming bowl of turd.

Much as the Elantians wished to pretend otherwise, Lan knew they had come to the Last Kingdom for one thing: resources. Ships full of powdered spices and golden grains and verdant tea leaves, chests of silks and samites, jades and porcelains, left Haak’gong for the Elantian Empire, across the Sea of Heavenly Radiance, each day.

And whatever was left over trickled into the black markets of Haak’gong.

At this bell, the evemarket was in full bloom, merchants having filed in along the Silk Trail with jewels that glittered like the light of the sun, spices tasting of lands Lan had never seen before, and fabrics that shimmered like the night sky itself. Haak’gong’s heartbeat was the clink of coin, its lifeblood the flow of trade, its bones the wooden stalls of marketplaces.

It was a place of survival.

Lan paused at the very end of the market. She took care to lower her dǒu’lì—her bamboo hat—over her face lest any Elantian officials prowled nearby. What she was about to do could very well earn her a spot on the gallows, along with other Hin who had broken Elantian laws.

With a surreptitious glance around, she crossed the street and made for the slums.

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This was where the illusion of the Last Kingdom ended and the reality of a conquered land began. Here the cobblestone streets carefully curated by the Elantians after the Conquest faded to dust; the elegantly renovated facades and shiny glass windows gave way to buildings crumbling from disrepair as trash gathered in heaps around them.

The trading house sat in a derelict corner, its cheap wooden doors chipped and faded with time, paper windows patched with grease yet sagging with the humidity of the south. A wooden bell tinkled somewhere overhead as Lan stepped inside.

She shut the doors, and the hubbub of the outside world fell silent.

The interior was dim, dust motes swirling in the lateafternoon sunlight that spilled onto cracked floorboards and shelves crammed with an assortment of scrolls, tomes, and trinkets. The entire shop looked like an old painting left to fade in the sun, smelling of ink and damp wood.

But this was Lan’s favorite place in the world. It reminded her of a time long past, a world long gone.

A life wiped from the pages of the history books.

Old Wei’s Pawn Shop dealt in odds and ends of goods left over from the evemarket after the Elantians had their pick, purchased by the shopkeeper at wholesale and sold to Hin buyers at a thin margin. The shop escaped the notice of government inspectors, for secondhand goods held no interest to the colonizers as long as they weren’t made of metal.

This was why the shop had also become a hub for contraband. The wares Old Wei had on display were innocuous enough: reels of wool, hemp, and cotton, jars of star anise and

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bay leaves, scrolls of cheap paper made from pounded dried bark. But hidden somewhere inside the shop, Lan knew, was something for her.

Something that could cost her life.

“Old Wei,” she called. “I got your message.”

Silence for a moment, and then: “Thought I heard your silver-bells voice. Come to bring me mischief again?”

The old shopkeeper announced himself in a shuffle of feet and a hacking cough. Old Wei had once been a teacher in a northeastern coastal village, before his family was killed and he’d lost everything in the Elantian Conquest twelve cycles ago. He’d fled to Haak’gong and used his literacy to pivot into the trading business. Constant hunger had whittled him to a stick, and the damp air of Haak’gong had afflicted him with a permanent cough. That was the extent of what she knew of his life—not even his truename, banned under Elantian law and reduced to a monotonous single syllable.

Lan gave him her sweetest smile from beneath her dǒu’lì.

“Mischief ?” she repeated, matching his northern dialect, the tones harsher and rolling compared to the sweet, singsong southern tones she’d become used to. It was a rarity to speak either these days. “When have I ever brought you mischief, Old Wei?” He grunted, casting her an appraising look. “Never brought me fortune either. And I still let you come back each time.”

She poked her tongue out. “Must be my charm.”

“Hah,” he said, the word cracking through a thick layer of phlegm. “Any gods watching would know what lies beneath that charm.”

“There are no gods watching.”

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5

It was a point she often liked to debate with Old Wei, who was a stout worshiper of the Hin’s pantheon of gods—in particular, his favorite, the God of Riches. Old Wei liked to tell Lan he’d devoutly prayed to the God of Riches in his childhood. Lan liked to remind him that the God of Riches must have a twisted sense of humor to have rewarded him with a rundown contraband shop.

“There are,” Old Wei replied. Lan raised her eyes heavenward and mouthed the words along with him—words she had heard a hundred times: “There are old gods and new gods, kind gods and fickle gods—and most powerful of them all are the Four Demon Gods.”

Lan preferred not to believe that her fortunes lay in the hands of some invisible old farts in the skies—no matter how powerful they were meant to be. “Whatever you say, Old Wei,” she replied, leaning over the counter and cupping her chin in her hands.

The old shopkeeper wheezed a few times, then asked, “Evemarket again? What, is the Teahouse not feeding you enough?”

They both knew the answer to that: Madam Meng ran the Teahouse like a glass menagerie, and her songgirls were her finest display. She fed them just enough to keep them dewy and ripe for the picking, but never enough so that their bellies grew full—gods forbid they become lazy or fat.

“I like it here,” Lan said, and she did. Out here, hawking alongside other vendors and pocketing the coin she made into her own pockets, was where she felt some semblance of control over her life—a taste of freedom and free will, if only temporary. “Besides,” she added sweetly, “I get to drop by to see you.”

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He cast her a shrewd look, then tsked and wagged a finger.

“Don’t try your honeyed words on me, yā’tou,” he said, and bent to the cabinets beneath his counter.

Yā’tou. Girl. It was what he’d called her since he’d found her, a scrap of an orphan begging on the streets of Haak’gong.

He’d taken her to the only place he’d known that would welcome a girl with no name and no reputation: Madam Meng’s Teahouse. She’d signed a contract whose terms she’d barely been able to decipher, and whose length only seemed to swell and swell the harder she worked.

But at the end of the day, he’d saved her life. Gotten her a job, put a stable roof over her head. It was more kindness than one could ask for in these times.

She grinned at the sour old man. “I would never.”

Old Wei’s grunt turned into a bout of coughing, and Lan’s smile slipped. The winters down in the south had none of the biting cold that she grew up with in the northeast. Instead, it encroached with a chill damp that sank into bones and joints and lungs and festered there.

She took in the state of the battered old shop, the shelves that stood fuller than usual. Tonight, on the eve of the big festivities for the Twelfth Cycle of the Elantian Conquest, security had been tightened around Haak’gong, and the first thing people tended to avoid in those circumstances was a shop trading in illicit goods. Lan couldn’t afford to dally either: soon the streets would be crawling with Elantian patrols, and a lone songgirl in their midst was an invitation to trouble.

“Lungs acting up again, Old Wei?” she asked, running a finger over a small stained-glass dragon figurine on the counter— likely a prized trade from one of the Silk Trail nations across the great Taqlarmakan Desert. The Hin had not known glass

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until the era of the Middle Kingdom, under which Emperor Jīn—the Golden Emperor—established formal trade routes reaching all the way west to the fabled deserts of Masyria.

“Ah, yeah,” the shopkeeper said with a wince. From the folds of his sleeve, he drew what must once have been a fine silken handkerchief and patted his mouth with it. The cloth was sodden and graying with grime. “Ginseng prices have shot up since the Elantian farts learned of its healing properties. But I’ve lived with these old bones all my life, and they haven’t killed me yet. Nothing to worry about.”

Lan drummed her fingers on the wooden counter, polished with the comings and goings of so many others before her. Here was the trick to surviving in a colonized land: you couldn’t show that you cared. Every Hin you came across would have his share of sob stories: family slaughtered in the Conquest, home pillaged and plundered, or worse. To care was to allow a chink in the armor of survival.

So Lan asked the question that had been brewing in her chest all day. “Well, what do you have for me?”

Old Wei gifted her a gap-toothed smile and bent beneath his counter. Lan’s pulse began to race; instinctively she pressed fingers to the inside of her left wrist.

There, imprinted into flesh and sinew and blood, was a scar that only she could see: a perfect circle encompassing a character in the shape of a Hin word that she could not read, sweeping strokes blooming with an elegantly balanced flower—blossom, leaves, and stem.

Eighteen cycles she’d lived, and she had spent twelve of those searching for this character—the only clue to her past that her mother had left her before her death. To this day, she could feel the searing heat of her mother’s fingers on her

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arms, the hole in Māma’s chest bleeding red even as the world erupted in blinding white. The expensive lacquerwood furniture of their study darkened with blood, the air filled with the bitter scent of burnt metal . . . and something else. Something ancient; something impossible.

“Now, I think you’ll like this one.”

She blinked, the images dissipating as Old Wei emerged from the dusty shelves and placed a scroll on the counter between them. Lan held her breath as he unfurled it.

It was a worn piece of parchment, but even with one look, she could tell that it was different: the surface was smooth, not rough like the cheap papers made of hemp or rags or fishnet common these days. This was true parchment—vellum, perhaps—singed black in the corners and smudged with age.

She’d known the feel of it intimately, once a world ago.

Between the wear and tear, Lan could make out faded traces of opulence. Her eyes raked over the sketches of the Four Demon Gods in the corners of the page, barely visible but present nevertheless: dragon, phoenix, tiger, and tortoise, all facing the center of the scroll, frozen in time. Swirls of painted clouds adorned the top and bottom margins. And then . . . there, in the very center, ensconced within a nearperfect circle: a single character, blooming with the delicate balance of a Hin character, yet with nothing recognizable.

Her heart jumped into her throat as she leaned over it, barely breathing.

“I thought you’d be excited,” Old Wei said. He watched her carefully, eyes glinting with the prospect of a sale. “Wait till you hear where I got it.”

She barely heard him. Her pulse thundered in her ears as

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9

she traced the strokes of the character, following every line and comparing it to the character she’d memorized well enough to know in her dreams.

Her excitement faltered as her finger stuttered over a stroke. No . . . no. A line cut too short, a dot missing, a diagonal slightly off . . . Minute differences, but all the same— Wrong.

She slumped, letting out a sigh. Sloppily, she rotated her wrist, finger tracing a loose circle to finish up the character.

That was when it happened.

The air in the shop shifted, and she felt as though something inside her had snapped into place—an invisible current that rushed from her fingertips into the shop. Like a static shock in winter.

It was gone in half a second, so quickly that she must have imagined it. When she blinked again, Old Wei was still watching her with pursed lips. “Well?” he asked eagerly, leaning forward over the counter.

He hadn’t felt it, then. Lan touched the tip of her fingers to her temples. It hadn’t been anything—a momentary lapse in focus, a trick of the nerves, brought on by hunger and exhaustion. “It’s a bit different,” she replied, ignoring the familiar disappointment that curdled in her stomach.

It had been so close . . . and yet it wasn’t.

“Not what you’re looking for, then,” Old Wei said, clearing his throat, “but I think it’s a start. See here—the syllabary seems to be composed in the same style as yours, with those curves and dashes . . . but the circle outside is really what caught my attention.” He tapped two calloused fingers to the page. “Everything we’ve seen with a circle around the

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character has been there only for decoration. But see how these strokes bleed into the circle? They were written in a conjoined line—a clear beginning and end.”

She let him drone on, but really, her mind reeled with a crumbling realization: that she might never understand what had happened the day her mother died and the Last Kingdom fell. That she might never know how it was possible that her mother had reached up, fingers trembling and slicked with red, and, with her bare skin, burned something into Lan’s wrist. Something that had remained after all these cycles in the form of a mark visible only to Lan. A memory that existed between dream and imagination— the faintest spark of hope for what shouldn’t be possible. “. . . hear anything I just said?”

Lan blinked, the past swirling away like smoke.

Old Wei was giving her the stink eye. “I was saying,” he said with the peevishness of a teacher who’s been ignored by his pupil, “that this came from an old temple bookhouse and was rumored to have originated at one of the Hundred Schools of Practitioning themselves. I do know that the practitioners of old wrote in a different type of script.”

Her breath caught at the word. Practitioner.

Lan curved her lips into a smile and slid forward, propping herself on one elbow on the counter. “I’m sure the practitioners wrote these, alongside the yāo’mó’guǐ’guài they bargained their souls to,” she said, and Old Wei’s face dropped. “ ‘Speak of the demon and the demon comes!’ ” he hissed, glancing around as though one might jump out from behind his cabinet of dried goji berries. “Do not curse my shop with such portentous sayings!”

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11

Lan rolled her eyes. In the villages where Old Wei was from, superstitions ran deeper than in the cities. Stories of ghouls haunting villages in forests of pine and bamboo, of demons eating the souls of babies in the night.

Such things might have sent shivers up Lan’s spine once, given her second thoughts about walking in the shadows. But now she knew there were worse things to fear.

“It’s all just folklore, Old Wei,” she said.

Old Wei leaned forward, close enough that she could see the tea stains on his teeth. “The Dragon Emperor might have banned such topics when he founded the Last Kingdom, but I remember the tales from my grandfather’s grandfathers. I have heard the stories of ancient orders of practitioners cultivating magic and martial arts, walking the rivers and lakes of the First and Middle Kingdoms, fighting evil and bringing justice to the world. Even when the emperors of the Middle Kingdom attempted to control practitioning, they couldn’t hide the traces of evidence across our lands. Tomes written in characters that are indecipherable, temples and secret troves of treasures and artifacts with properties inexplicable— practitioning magic has always been engrained in our history, yā’tou.”

Old Wei was one of those ardent believers in the myths of folk heroes—practitioners—who had once walked on water and flown over mountains, wielding magic and slaying demons. And perhaps they once had—long, long ago.

“Then where are they now? Why haven’t they come to save us from . . . this?” Lan gestured at the door, at the dilapidated streets. At the old man’s hesitation, her lips twisted.

“Even if they did once exist, it was probably centuries and

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dynasties ago. Whatever folk heroes and practitioners of old you believe in are dead.” Her voice softened. “There are no heroes left for us in this world, Old Wei.” Her friend gave her a penetrating look resembling that of a stern teacher. “Is that what you truly believe?” he said. “Then tell me, why is it that you make your weekly visits down here, searching for a strange character on a scar only you can see?”

His words cut like a blade to Lan’s heart, pinning the smallest flicker of a spark she hadn’t dared utter—had never dared utter: that, in spite of all she told herself, what she had witnessed on the day of her mother’s death . . . had been something like magic.

And the scar on her wrist held the clue—the only clue—to the truth of that day.

“Because it lets me hope that there’s something else for me out there. Something other than this life.” The dust motes before her swirled, stained red and orange by the setting sun, like the dying embers of a fire. Lan set her hand over the slip of parchment. Perhaps there was something to be learned in the inscrutable strokes of that character. It was the closest she’d gotten in the past twelve cycles, after all.

“I’ll take it,” she said. “I’ll take the scroll.”

The old shopkeeper blinked, clearly surprised at this development. “Ah.” He tapped the scroll. “You be careful, eh, yā’tou? I’ve heard too many a tale of marks created by dark, demonic energies. Whatever’s on your wrist inside that scar . . . well, let’s just hope it was left by someone with a noble cause.”

“Superstitions,” Lan repeated.

“All superstitions must come from somewhere,” the shopkeeper said ominously, then crooked his fingers. “Now, let’s

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13

see the payment. Nothing comes for free. Got rent to pay, food to buy.”

She hesitated only briefly. Then Lan leaned over the counter, brushing aside a small sack of herbal powders Old Wei had been weighing, and placed a ragged hemp pouch on its surface. It landed with a clink.

Old Wei’s hands darted out, pawing through its contents.

His eyes widened as he drew something out.

“Ten Hells, yā’tou,” he whispered, and drew his old paper lamp closer. In the light of the flames, a sleek silver spoon glistened.

The sight of it brought a stab of longing to her heart. It had been her prize find, accidentally thrown out with the broken dishes in the back alleys of the Teahouse. She’d been counting on selling it to buy off a moon or two from her contract at the Teahouse. The thing would clearly fetch a small fortune, for metal—any type of metal—was a relic of the past. One of the first things the Elantians did when they took over was to monopolize the supply of metal from all over the Last Kingdom.

Gold, silver, copper, iron, tin—even a small silver spoon was a rarity these days. The Elantians had stopped short of seizing all the metalware in the Last Kingdom; Lan surmised that a few spoons and some coins and prized jewelry were hardly enough to build weapons of resistance for a revolution.

Lan knew where all the metal was going: to the Elantian magicians. It was said they channeled power through metal— through magic. That Lan could believe. She had seen, with her own eyes, the terrifying power they held. They had brought down the Last Kingdom with nothing but their bare hands.

They had killed Māma without even touching her.

“I couldn’t sell that spoon,” Lan lied. “No one’s taking

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anything metal these days, and it’s more trouble than it’s worth if an Elantian officer catches me. Not to mention Madam Meng’ll have my skin if she finds out I stole it. Just use it to get some ginseng for those old lungs, will you? It chafes my ears to have to listen to you cough like that.”

“Right,” Old Wei said slowly, still peering at the silver spoon as though it were made of jade. The remainder of her proffered payment—a sack of ten copper coins she’d earned from her day of sales—lay untouched. “Possessing any metal can be dangerous these days . . . best leave it with me . . .” His gaze sharpened suddenly, and he broke into a toothy smile.

He leaned over to her and whispered, “I think I’ll have something really good for you next time. Source of mine’s introduced a Hin courtdog to me, and he’s in the market for—” The shopkeeper stopped and drew in a sharp breath, his gaze darting behind her to the paper screens he’d thrown open to let in the cool evening breeze. “Angels,” he hissed, switching to the Elantian tongue.

The word sent terror spiking through her veins. Angels was short for White Angels, the colloquialism that Elantian soldiers used to refer to themselves.

Lan spun around. There, framed in the fretwork of Old Wei’s shop windows, she caught sight of something that made bile rise to her throat. A flash of silver, the gleam of a white-gold emblem with a crown and wings, armor colored in winter’s ice— No time to think. She had to move.

Lan cast Old Wei a frightened look, but something in the old shopkeeper’s expression had steeled, his mouth pressed into a resolute line. He caught her hand as she reached for the scroll. “Leave it with me, yā’tou—don’t let them catch

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you with something like this on the eve of the Twelfth Cycle.

Come back for it when it’s safer. Now go!” In the blink of an eye, the scroll and silver spoon had vanished.

She tipped her dǒu’lì low over her head just as the bell over the entrance rang, a toll now sharp with menace.

The air thickened. Shadows fell over the floor, long and dark.

Lan made for the door, glad for her rough hemp duàn’dǎ, a loose, cheap garment that concealed most of her figure.

She’d worked long enough at the Teahouse to know what Elantians could do to Hin girls.

“Four Gods preserve you,” she heard Old Wei mumble to her. It was an old Hin saying based on the belief that the Four Demon Gods would watch over their motherland and their people.

But Lan knew, with cutting clarity, that there were no gods in this world.

Only monsters in the form of men.

There were two of them, burly Elantian soldiers dressed in full armor, their steps clunking as they passed her. Instinctively, Lan’s gaze darted to their wrists—and it was then that she loosed a breath. Bare wrists—no glint of metal cuffs wound so tightly that they seemed fused to their flesh, no hands that could summon fire and blood with a flick of pale fingers.

Just soldiers, then.

One of them paused as she passed him, the door just paces away, a sliver of cool evening air already brushing her face.

Her heart lurched like a rabbit’s beneath an eagle’s gaze.

The Angel’s hand darted out, fingers closing over her arm.

And that seed of fear in her stomach bloomed.

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amél ie wen zh ao

“Say, Maximillian,” the soldier called. With his other hand, he flicked up the rim of her dǒu’lì. Lan stared into his eyes, the youthful green of a summer’s day, and wondered how a man could make a color look so cruel. His face might have been cut of the marble statues of the winged guardians the Elantians erected over their doors and in their churches: handsome, and utterly inhuman. “Didn’t think I’d find such a fine specimen of flea in this kind of a place.”

She’d learned the Elantian tongue—she’d had to, to work at the Teahouse—and it never failed to strike ice into her veins. Their words were long and rolling, so different from the sharp-cut, dragonfly-touch characters of Hin speech. The Elantians spoke with the slow, unhurried slur of a people drunk on power.

Lan held very still, not even daring to breathe.

“Leave the thing be, Donnaron,” his companion called, already halfway to the counter, where Old Wei bent at the waist and bobbed his head with an obsequious smile. “We’re on duty. You can have your fun when you’re done.”

Donnaron’s gaze roved over Lan’s face, down her neck, and lower, and she felt violated with that single look. She wanted to scratch out those youthful green eyes.

The Angel shot her a wide grin. “That’s too bad. Don’t you worry, my pretty little flower. I’m not letting you go so easily.”

The pressure on her wrist increased slightly—like a promise, a threat—and then he released her.

Lan stumbled forward. She had one foot out the door, hands pressed against the handle, when she hesitated.

She looked back.

Old Wei’s silhouette was small between the hulking

s o ng of silver , fl ame like n igh t

17

Elantians, a shadow in the setting sun. His rheumy old eyes flicked up to her—just for a single moment—and she caught the tilt of his nearly imperceptible nod. Go, yā’tou.

Lan pushed through the door and ran. She didn’t stop until she was well clear of the stone parapets that marked the entrance to the evemarket. Ahead stretched an expanse of darkness that was the Bay of Southern Winds, glittering crimson as it caught shards of sunlight in its waves. Here the winds were sharp and briny, rattling over the wooden jetties as though they wished to raise the land itself, whistling over the old stone walls of Haak’gong.

To be so free, and to be so powerful—what might that taste like? Perhaps one day she would know; perhaps one day she would be able to do more than gift an old, ailing man a slim silver spoon and run when danger knocked on the door.

She tilted her face to the skies and breathed, massaging the part of her wrist where the soldier had grabbed her, wishing to scrub the feeling of his fingers from her mind. Tonight was the winter solstice, marking the Twelfth Cycle of the Elantian Conquest; with the highest Elantian officials in the land gathering for the festivities, it made sense that the government had increased surveillance and patrols across the largest Hin cities. Haak’gong was the Southern Elantian Outpost, the jewel of trade and commerce of Elantian colonies, second only to the Heavenly Capital, Tiān’jīng—or, as it was now meant to be known, King Alessandertown.

The Twelfth Cycle, Lan thought. Gods, has it been that long?

If she closed her eyes, she could remember exactly how her world had ended.

Snow, falling like ashes.

Wind, sighing through bamboo.

18

amél ie wen zh ao

And the song of a woodlute weaving to the skies.

She’d had a name, once. Her mother had given it to her.

Lián’er, meaning “lotus”: the flower that bloomed from nothing but mud, a light in the darkest of times.

They’d taken that from her.

She’d had a home, once. A great courtyard house, green weeping willows sweeping stained-glass lakes, cherry blossom petals coating fanstone paths, verandas yawning to the lushness of life.

They’d taken that from her.

And she’d had a mother who loved her, who had taught her stories and sonnets and songs, who had nurtured her calligraphy stroke by stroke across soft parchment pages, fingers twined around hers and hands wrapped around her entire world.

They had taken her mother, too.

The long, booming tolls of the dusk bells echoed in the distance, cutting through her memories. Her eyes flew open, and there it was again, the empty sea looming so lonely before her, echoing with all that she had lost. Once upon a time, she might have stood here, at the precipice of her world, and tried to make meaning of it all—how it had all gone so wrong, how she had ended up here with nothing but broken memories and a strange scar only she could see.

But as the bells’ sonorous tolls continued to sound across the skies, reality washed over her. She was hungry, she was tired, and she was late for the evening’s performance at the Teahouse.

The scroll had been promising, though. . . . She brushed a hand over her left wrist again, each stroke of the strange, indecipherable character burned indelibly into her mind.

s o ng of silver , fl ame like n igh t

19

Next time, she told herself, just as she had for the past eleven cycles. Next time I’ll find the message you left me, Māma.

For now, though, Lan tipped her dǒu’lì over her head and dusted off her sleeves.

She had a Teahouse to return to.

She had a contract to pay off.

She had Elantians to serve.

In a conquered land, the only way to win was to survive.

Without another glance back, she turned to face the colorful streets of Haak’gong and began making her way up the hills.

DIVINE RIVALS Rebecca Ross Coming April 2023

Chapter 1: Sworn Enemies

1

Sworn Enemies five months later Iris dashed through the rain with a broken high heel and a tattered trench coat. Hope was beating wildly in her chest, granting her speed and luck as she crossed the tram tracks downtown. She had been anticipating this day for weeks, and she knew she was ready. Even soaked, limping, and hungry.

Her first pang of unease came when she stepped into the lobby. This was an old building, constructed before the gods were vanquished. A few of those dead divines were painted on the ceiling, and despite the cracks and the faint light of the low hanging chandeliers, Iris always glanced up at them. Gods and goddesses dancing among the clouds, dressed in long gilded robes with stars gleaming in their hair, their gazes sweeping the ground. It sometimes felt like those painted eyes were watching her and Iris stifled a shiver. She removed her mangled right shoe and hurried to the lift with a stilted gait, thoughts of the gods swiftly fading when she thought about him. Perhaps the rain had slowed down Roman too, and she still had a chance.

She waited a full minute. The confounded lift must be stuck, of all days, and she decided to take the stairs, hustling up to the fifth floor. She was shaking and sweating when she finally pushed through the heavy doors to the Oath Gazette, greeted by a wash of yellow lamp light, the scent of strong tea, and the

13

morning hustle of preparing the newspaper.

She was four minutes late.

Iris stood amidst the hum, her gaze flickering to Roman’s desk.

It was empty, and she was pleased until she glanced at the assignment board and saw him standing there, waiting for her to appear. As soon as their eyes met, he gave her a lazy smile and reached up to the board, yanking a piece of paper from a pin. The last assignment.

Iris didn’t move, not even when Roman Kitt wound around the cubicles to greet her. He was tall and lithe with cheekbones that could cut stone, and he waved the piece of paper in the air, just out of her reach. The piece of paper she so badly wanted.

“Late again, Winnow,” he greeted her. “The second time this week.”

“I didn’t know you were keeping tally, Kitt.”

His smirk eased as his gaze dropped to her hands, cradling her broken shoe. “Looks like you ran into a bit of trouble this time.”

“Not at all,” she replied, her chin tilted upward. “I planned for this, of course.”

“For your heel to break?”

“For you to get this final assignment.”

“Going easy on me, then?” He arched a brow. “That’s surprising. We’re supposed to duel to the death.”

She snorted. “A hyperbolic turn of phrase, Kitt. Which you do often in your articles, by the way. You should be careful of that tendency if you get columnist.”

A lie. Iris rarely read what he wrote. But he didn’t know that.

14

Roman’s eyes narrowed. “What’s so hyperbolic about soldiers going missing at the front?”

Iris’s stomach clenched but she hid her reaction with a thin smile. “Is that the topic of the last assignment? Thanks for letting me know.” She turned away from him and began to weave around cubicles to her desk.

“It doesn’t matter if you know it,” he insisted as he followed her. “I have the assignment.”

She reached her desk and flicked on her lamp. “Of course, Kitt.”

He wasn’t leaving. He continued to stand by her cubicle, watching her set down her tapestry bag and her mangled high heel like it was a badge of honor. She shed her trench coat. He rarely watched her this attentively, and Iris knocked over her tin of pencils.

“Did you need something?” She asked, hurrying to gather the pencils before they rolled off the desk. Of course, one did, landing right before Roman’s leather brogues. He didn’t bother to pick the pencil up for her, and she swallowed a curse as she bent down to retrieve it, noticing the spit polish of his shoes.

“You’re going to write your own article about missing soldiers,” he stated. “Even though you don’t have the full information on the assignment.”

“And that worries you, Kitt?”

“No. Course not.”

She glanced at him, studying his face. She put her tin of pencils on the back side of her desk, far from any chance of spilling again. “Has anyone ever told you that you squint when you lie?”

His scowl only deepened. “No, but only because no one

15

has spent as much time looking at me as you do, Winnow.”

Someone snickered from a nearby desk. Iris flushed, sitting down in her chair. She grappled for a witty reply but came up short, because he was unfortunately handsome and he often drew her eyes.

She did the only thing she could; she leaned back in her chair and granted Roman a brilliant smile. One that reached her eyes, crinkling the corners. His expression darkened instantly, just as she expected. He hated it when she smiled like this at him.

It always made him retreat.

“Good luck on your assignment,” she said brightly.

“And you can have fun with the obituaries,” he countered in a clipped tone, at last departing to his cubicle, which was— regrettably—only two desks away.

Iris’s smile melted as soon as his back was turned. She was still absently staring in that direction when Esther Prindle stepped into her field of vision.

“Tea?” Esther asked, raising a cup. “You look like you need some, Winnow.”

Iris sighed. “Yes, thanks Prindle.” She accepted the offering but set it down with a hard clunk on her desk, right next to the stack of handwritten obituaries, waiting for her to sort, edit, and type. If she had been early enough to snag the assignment, Roman would be the one sifting through this heartache on paper.

Iris stared at the pile, remembering her first day of work three months ago. How Roman Kitt had been the last to shake her hand and introduce himself, approaching her with a hard-set mouth and cold, keen eyes. As if he were measuring how much of a threat she was to him and his position at the Gazette.

It hadn’t taken long for Iris to learn what he truly thought

16

of her. In fact, it had only taken half an hour after she had first met Roman. She had overheard him saying to one of the editors, “She’ll give me no competition. None at all. She dropped out of Windy Grove School in her final year.”

The words still stung.

She hadn’t expected to ever be friends with him. How could she, when they were both competing for the same columnist position? But his pompous demeanor had only sharpened her desire to defeat him. And it had also been alarming that Roman Kitt knew more about her than she knew of him.

Which meant Iris needed to dig up his secrets.

On her second day of work, she went to the friendliest person on staff. Esther.

“How long has Kitt been here?” Iris had asked.

“Almost a month,” Esther had replied. “So don’t worry about him having seniority. I think you both have a fair shot at the promotion.”

“And what does his family do?”

“His grandfather pioneered the railroad.”

“So his family has money.”

“Heaps,” Esther said.

“Where did he go to school?”

“I think Devan Hall, but don’t quote me on that.”

A prestigious school where most of the rich parents of Oath sent their spoiled brats. A direct contrast to Iris’s humble Windy Grove. She had almost winced at this revelation, but pressed on with, “Is he courting anyone?”

“Not that I know of,” Esther had answered with a shrug.

“But he doesn’t share much about his life with us. In fact, I don’t really know that much about him, other than he doesn’t like

17

anyone touching the things on his desk.”

Partly satiated with her newfound knowledge, Iris had decided the best course of action was to ignore her competition.

She could pretend he didn’t exist most of the time. But she soon discovered that would be increasingly difficult as they had to race each other to the bulletin board for weekly assignments.

She had triumphantly snagged the first one.

Roman had then obtained the second, but only because she had let him.

It had given her the chance to read a published article of his. Iris had sat hunched at her desk, reading what Roman had written about a retired baseball player—a sport Iris had never cared about but suddenly found herself ensorcelled by, all due to the poignant and witty tone of Roman’s writing. She was transfixed by his every word, feeling the stitches of the baseball in her hand, the warm summer night, the thrall of the crowd in the stadium— “See something you like?”

Roman’s haughty voice broke the spell. Iris had startled, crumpling the paper in her hands. But he knew exactly what she had been reading, and he was smug about it.

“Not at all,” she had said. And because she was desperate for something to distract her from her mortification, she noticed his name, printed in small black type beneath the column headline.

ROMAN C. KITT “What does the C stand for?” she asked, glancing up at him.

He had only lifted his cup of tea and taken a sip, refusing to reply. But he held her gaze over the chipped edge of the porcelain.

“Roman Cheeky Kitt?” Iris had guessed. “Or maybe

18

Roman Churlish Kitt?”

His amusement dimmed. He didn’t like to be made fun of, and Iris’s grin broadened as she leaned back in her chair.

“Or perhaps it’s Roman Cantankerous Kitt?”

He had turned and left without another word, but his jaw had been clenched.

Once he was gone, she had finished reading his article in peace. It made her heart ache—his writing was extraordinary— and she had dreamt about him that night. The next morning, she had promptly torn the paper to shreds and vowed to never read another one of his pieces again. If she did, she was bound to lose the position to him.

But she was reconsidering now as her tea went cold. If he wrote an article about missing soldiers, she might be inclined to read it.

Iris yanked a fresh sheet of paper from the stack on her desk, feeding it into her typewriter. But her fingers hovered over the keys as she listened to Roman pack his messenger bag. She listened to him leave the office, no doubt to gather information for his article, his footsteps muffled amongst the clack of typebars and the murmur of voices and the swirl of cigarette smoke.

She clenched her teeth together as she began to type out the first obituary.

By the time Iris was almost done for the day, she felt heavy from the obituaries. She always wondered what had caused the deaths and, although that information was never included, she imagined people would be more inclined to read the eulogies if they were.

She gnawed on a hangnail, tasting a faint trace of metal

19

from the typewriter keys. If she wasn’t working on an assignment, she was elbow deep in either classifieds or obituaries. The past three months at the Gazette had seen her cycle through all three, each drawing different words and emotions from her in turn.

“In my office, Winnow,” said a familiar voice. Zeb Autry, her boss, was walking by, and he tapped the edge of her cubicle with his golden ringed fingers. “Now.” Iris abandoned the obituary and followed him into a glass-walled chamber. It always smelled oppressive here, like oiled leather and tobacco and the strong sting of aftershave. When he sat at his desk, she settled in the wingback chair across from him, resisting the urge to crack her knuckles.

Zeb stared at her for a long, hard minute. He was a middle-aged man with thinning blond hair and a nose that was perpetually red. Sometimes, she thought he could read minds, and it made her uneasy.

“You were late this morning,” he stated.

“Yes, sir. I apologize. I overslept and missed the tram.”

By the way his frown deepened . . . she wondered if he could sense lies too.

“Kitt got the final assignment, but only because you were late, Winnow. I posted it on the board at eight o’clock sharp, like all the others,” Zeb drawled. “You’ve been late to work two times this week alone. And Kitt has yet to be tardy.”

“I understand, Mr. Autry. It won’t happen again though.”

Her boss was quiet for a beat. “Over the past few months, I’ve published eleven articles of Kitt’s. I’ve published ten of yours, Winnow.”

Iris braced herself. Was it truly going to come down to the numbers? That Roman had written slightly more than her?

20

“Do you know that I was going to simply give the position to Kitt after he got his feet wet here?” Autry continued. “That is, until your essay won the Gazette-in-Winter Competition. Out of the hundreds of essays I sifted through, yours caught my eye. And I thought, here is a girl who has raw talent, and it would be a shame if I let that slip away.”

Iris knew what came next. She had been working at the diner, washing dishes with muted, broken dreams. She hadn’t once thought the essay she submitted to the Gazette’s annual competition would amount to anything, until she returned home to find a letter from Zeb with her name on it. It was an offer to work at the paper, with the tantalizing promise of columnist if she continued to prove herself exceptional.

It had completely changed Iris’s life.

Zeb lit a cigarette. “I’ve noticed that your writing hasn’t been as sharp lately. It’s been quite messy, in fact. Is there something happening at home, Winnow?”

“No, sir,” she answered, too swiftly.

He regarded her, one eye smaller than the other. “How old are you again?”

“Eighteen.”

“You dropped out of school this past winter, didn’t you?”

She hated thinking about her broken promise to Forest.

But she nodded, sensing that Zeb was digging. He wanted to know more about her personal life, which made her tense.

“You have any siblings?”

“An older brother, sir.”

“And where is he, now? What does he do for a living?”

Zeb pressed on.

Iris glanced away, studying the black and white checkered

21

floor. “He was a horologist’s apprentice. But he’s at war now.

Fighting.”

“For Enva, I presume?”

She nodded again.

“Is that why you dropped out of Windy Grove?” Zeb asked. “Because your brother left?”

Iris didn’t reply.

“That’s a pity.” He sighed, releasing a puff of smoke, although Iris knew Zeb’s opinion on the war, and it never failed to irk her. “What about your parents?”

“I live with my mother,” she replied in a curt tone.

Zeb withdrew a small flask from his jacket and poured a few drops of liquor into his tea. “I’ll think about giving you another assignment, although that’s not how I usually do things around here. Now, I want those obituaries on my desk by three this afternoon.”

She left without another word.

Iris set the finished obituaries on his desk an hour early, but she didn’t leave the office. She remained at her desk and began to think of an essay to write, just in case Zeb did give her a chance to counter Roman’s assignment.

But the words felt frozen inside of her. She decided to walk to the sideboard to pour herself a fresh cup of tea when she saw Roman Conceited Kitt walk into the office.

He had been gone all day, to her relief, but he now had that annoying bounce in his stride, as if he were teeming with words he needed to spill across the page. His face was flushed from the chill of early spring, his coat speckled with rain as he sat at his desk, rummaging through his messenger bag for his notepad.

22

“Do you know that I was going to simply give the position to Kitt after he got his feet wet here?” Autry continued. “That is, until your essay won the Gazette-in-Winter Competition. Out of the hundreds of essays I sifted through, yours caught my eye. And I thought, here is a girl who has raw talent, and it would be a shame if I let that slip away.”

Iris knew what came next. She had been working at the diner, washing dishes with muted, broken dreams. She hadn’t once thought the essay she submitted to the Gazette’s annual competition would amount to anything, until she returned home to find a letter from Zeb with her name on it. It was an offer to work at the paper, with the tantalizing promise of columnist if she continued to prove herself exceptional.

It had completely changed Iris’s life.

Zeb lit a cigarette. “I’ve noticed that your writing hasn’t been as sharp lately. It’s been quite messy, in fact. Is there something happening at home, Winnow?”

“No, sir,” she answered, too swiftly.

He regarded her, one eye smaller than the other. “How old are you again?”

“Eighteen.”

“You dropped out of school this past winter, didn’t you?”

She hated thinking about her broken promise to Forest.

But she nodded, sensing that Zeb was digging. He wanted to know more about her personal life, which made her tense.

“You have any siblings?”

“An older brother, sir.”

“And where is he, now? What does he do for a living?”

Zeb pressed on.

Iris glanced away, studying the black and white checkered

21

floor. “He was a horologist’s apprentice. But he’s at war now.

Fighting.”

“For Enva, I presume?”

She nodded again.

“Is that why you dropped out of Windy Grove?” Zeb asked. “Because your brother left?”

Iris didn’t reply.

“That’s a pity.” He sighed, releasing a puff of smoke, although Iris knew Zeb’s opinion on the war, and it never failed to irk her. “What about your parents?”

“I live with my mother,” she replied in a curt tone.

Zeb withdrew a small flask from his jacket and poured a few drops of liquor into his tea. “I’ll think about giving you another assignment, although that’s not how I usually do things around here. Now, I want those obituaries on my desk by three this afternoon.”

She left without another word.

Iris set the finished obituaries on his desk an hour early, but she didn’t leave the office. She remained at her desk and began to think of an essay to write, just in case Zeb did give her a chance to counter Roman’s assignment.

But the words felt frozen inside of her. She decided to walk to the sideboard to pour herself a fresh cup of tea when she saw Roman Conceited Kitt walk into the office.

He had been gone all day, to her relief, but he now had that annoying bounce in his stride, as if he were teeming with words he needed to spill across the page. His face was flushed from the chill of early spring, his coat speckled with rain as he sat at his desk, rummaging through his messenger bag for his notepad.

22

“Do you know that I was going to simply give the position to Kitt after he got his feet wet here?” Autry continued. “That is, until your essay won the Gazette-in-Winter Competition. Out of the hundreds of essays I sifted through, yours caught my eye. And I thought, here is a girl who has raw talent, and it would be a shame if I let that slip away.”

Iris knew what came next. She had been working at the diner, washing dishes with muted, broken dreams. She hadn’t once thought the essay she submitted to the Gazette’s annual competition would amount to anything, until she returned home to find a letter from Zeb with her name on it. It was an offer to work at the paper, with the tantalizing promise of columnist if she continued to prove herself exceptional.

It had completely changed Iris’s life.

Zeb lit a cigarette. “I’ve noticed that your writing hasn’t been as sharp lately. It’s been quite messy, in fact. Is there something happening at home, Winnow?”

“No, sir,” she answered, too swiftly.

He regarded her, one eye smaller than the other. “How old are you again?”

“Eighteen.”

“You dropped out of school this past winter, didn’t you?”

She hated thinking about her broken promise to Forest.

But she nodded, sensing that Zeb was digging. He wanted to know more about her personal life, which made her tense.

“You have any siblings?”

“An older brother, sir.”

“And where is he, now? What does he do for a living?”

Zeb pressed on.

Iris glanced away, studying the black and white checkered

21

floor. “He was a horologist’s apprentice. But he’s at war now.

Fighting.”

“For Enva, I presume?”

She nodded again.

“Is that why you dropped out of Windy Grove?” Zeb asked. “Because your brother left?”

Iris didn’t reply.

“That’s a pity.” He sighed, releasing a puff of smoke, although Iris knew Zeb’s opinion on the war, and it never failed to irk her. “What about your parents?”

“I live with my mother,” she replied in a curt tone.

Zeb withdrew a small flask from his jacket and poured a few drops of liquor into his tea. “I’ll think about giving you another assignment, although that’s not how I usually do things around here. Now, I want those obituaries on my desk by three this afternoon.”

She left without another word.

Iris set the finished obituaries on his desk an hour early, but she didn’t leave the office. She remained at her desk and began to think of an essay to write, just in case Zeb did give her a chance to counter Roman’s assignment.

But the words felt frozen inside of her. She decided to walk to the sideboard to pour herself a fresh cup of tea when she saw Roman Conceited Kitt walk into the office.

He had been gone all day, to her relief, but he now had that annoying bounce in his stride, as if he were teeming with words he needed to spill across the page. His face was flushed from the chill of early spring, his coat speckled with rain as he sat at his desk, rummaging through his messenger bag for his notepad.

22

Iris watched as he fed a page to his typewriter and began to furiously type. He was lost to the world, lost to his words, and so she didn’t take the long way back to her desk, as she often did, to avoid passing him directly. He didn’t notice her walking by, and she sipped her overly sweetened tea and stared at her blank page.

Soon, everyone began to leave for the day, save for her and Roman. Desk lamps were being turned off, one by one, and yet Iris remained, typing slow and arduously, as if every word had to be pulled from her marrow, while Roman two cubicles away was pounding into the keys.

Her thoughts drifted to the gods’ war.

It was inevitable; the war always seemed to simmer at the back of her mind, even if it was raging six hundred kilometers west of Oath.

How will it end? she wondered. With one god destroyed, or both of them?

Endings were often found in beginnings, and she began to type what she knew. Snippets of news that had drifted across the land, reaching Oath weeks after they had happened.

EXTRACT-B It began in a small, sleepy town surrounded by gold.

Seven months, ago, the wheat fields were ready for harvest, nearly swallowing a place called Sparrow, where sheep outnumber people four to one, and it only rains twice a year due to an old charm cast by an angry—and now slain—god, centuries ago.

This idyllic town in Western Borough is where Dacre, a defeated Underling god, was laid to sleep in a grave. And there

23

he slept for two hundred and thirty-four years until one day, at harvest time, he unexpectedly woke and rose, sifting through the soil and burning with fury.

He came upon a farmer in the field, and his first words were a cold, ragged whisper.

“Where is Enva?”

Enva, a Skyward goddess and Dacre’s sworn enemy. Enva, who had also been defeated two centuries ago, when the five remaining gods fell captive beneath mortal power.

The farmer was afraid, cowering in Dacre’s shadow. “She is buried in the Eastern Borough,” he eventually replied. “In a grave not unlike your own.”

“No,” Dacre said. “She is awake. And if she refuses to greet me . . . if she chooses to be a coward, I will draw her to me.”

“How, my lord?” the farmer asked.

Dacre stared down at the man. How does one god draw another? He began to END “What’s this?”

Iris jumped at Zeb’s voice, turning to see him standing nearby with a scowl, trying to read what she had typed.

“Just an idea,” she replied, a bit defensive.

“It’s not about how the gods’ war began, is it? That’s old news, Winnow, and people here in Oath are sick of reading about it. Unless you have a fresh take on Enva.”

Iris thought about all the headlines Zeb had published about the war. They screamed things like THE DANGERS OF ENVA’S MUSIC: THE SKYWARD GODDESS HAS RETURNED

24

AND SINGS OUR SONS AND DAUGHTERS TO WAR or RESIST THE SIREN’S CALL TO WAR: ENVA IS OUR MOST DANGEROUS THREAT. ALL STRINGED INSTRUMENTS ARE OUTLAWED IN OATH. All his articles blamed Enva for the war, while few mentioned Dacre’s involvement at all. Sometimes Iris wondered if it was because Zeb was afraid of the goddess and how easily she recruited soldiers, or if he had been instructed to only publish certain things—if the chancellor of Oath was controlling what the newspaper could share, quietly spreading propaganda.

“I . . . yes, I know, sir, but I thought—” “You thought what, Winnow?”

She hesitated. “Has the chancellor given you restrictions?”

“Restrictions?” Zeb laughed as if she were being ridiculous.

“On what?”

“On what you can and cannot feature in the paper.”

A frown creased Zeb’s ruddy face. His eyes flashed—Iris couldn’t tell if it was fear or irritation—but he chose to say, “Don’t waste my paper and ink ribbons on a war that is never going to reach us here in Oath. It’s a western problem and we should carry on as normal. Find something good to write about, and I might consider publishing it in the column next week.” With that, he rapped his knuckles on the wood and left, grabbing his coat and hat on the way out.

Iris sighed. She could hear Roman’s steady typing, like a heartbeat in the vast room. Fingertips striking keys, keys striking paper. A prodding for her to do better than him. To claim the position before he did.

Her mind was mush, and she yanked her essay from the typewriter. She folded it and tucked it away in her small tapestry

25

bag, knotting the drawstrings before she scooped up her broken shoe. She turned her lamp off and stood, rubbing a crick in her neck. It was dark beyond the windows; night had settled over the city, and the lights beyond bled like fallen stars.

This time when she walked by Roman’s desk, he noticed her.

He was still wearing his trench coat, and a tendril of black hair cut across his furrowed brow. His fingers slowed on the keys, but he didn’t speak.

Iris wondered if he wanted to, and if so, what would he say to her in a moment when they had the office to themselves, and no one else watching them. She thought of an old proverb that Forest used to invoke: Turn a foe into a friend, and you’ll have one less enemy.

A tedious task, indeed. But Iris paused, backtracking to stand at Roman’s cubicle.

“Do you want to grab a sandwich?” she asked, hardly aware of the words spilling from her mouth. All she knew was she hadn’t eaten that day, and she was hungry for food and a stirring conversation with someone. Even if it was him. “There’s a delicatessen two doors down that stays open this late. They have the best pickles.”

Roman didn’t even slow his typing. “I can’t. Sorry.”

Iris nodded and hurried on her way. She was ridiculous for even thinking he’d want to share dinner with her.

She left with bright eyes, hurling her broken heel into the dustbin on her way out.

26

ASCENSION Nicholas Binge Coming April 2023

Ascension

Tuesday, 22nd January 1991 Evening [———]1 My dearest Harriet, Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.

Do you remember those words, Hattie? I don’t believe Ben would have exposed you to them. He never did take to faith. But when Grandpa used to take us to church when we were kids, every Sunday he’d point out the little box in the corner. ‘That’s where you go to confess,’ he said. ‘That’s where you find salvation.’

Talking to the priest was never easy. Salvation is not an easy thing for children to understand. I don’t believe that we’re born sinners, any of us. We’ve yet to discover what ‘sin’ really is. I remember sitting in the dark of that little room, searching my heart for some kind of transgression.

‘I was mean to my sister at school,’ I would say. ‘I stole some money from my mum’s purse.’

None of this ever happened, of course – I never really strayed far from the rules – but I knew enough to know my lines. And though I couldn’t see his face to check if I was doing it right, he’d give me my Our Fathers and my Hail Marys and send me on my way. And Dad would smile. I think, perhaps, that was all I was really after. That little approving smile that would appear on his face.

1

EDITOR’S NOTE: Harold’s letters are mostly both dated and addressed.

However, due to an ongoing legal dispute, some of the locations in Harold’s letters have been redacted in this edition.

19

Nicholas Binge As we grew older, it got more difficult. Puberty made me awkward, self-reflective to the point of nausea. The little white lies didn’t come as easily anymore. Real sins bubbled somewhere underneath the surface, nebulous and incomprehensible, and I didn’t quite know what to do with them.

Ben stopped going, but I never did.

One day I sat in that cubicle and said nothing. My place in the world had started to weigh on me and I didn’t know how to hold it. I had no words to break the holy silence of that little room, until Father Michaels – did you ever meet him, with the red hair? – he said to me, ‘You know, son, I can’t make you speak. You’ve come here every week since you were a boy and I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say a single thing that’s true.’

‘I . . .’ My mind blanked. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be sorry. Everyone has their own relationship with God. The confessional is here to help you, as am I, but I’m just a translator.’

‘A translator for God?’ He chuckled. ‘No, my dear boy. None of us are capable of that. A translator for you. Sometimes a man needs help giving his thoughts life, giving his words meaning, so that he can confide that meaning with God. I think, perhaps, your problem is the opposite.’

I shifted uncomfortably in my seat.

‘If you’ll let me give a little advice, I recommend you keep a journal,’ he said. ‘Set down your thoughts. Not to me. Not to anyone else but yourself. Just the simple events of your day, in plain form.’

‘Why?’ ‘Sometimes what the soul needs isn’t to give meaning to hollow words: prayers and confessions that you do not really believe. Instead, we need to let it give words to the unspoken meanings inside of us. To do that, you have to give it a voice.

It’s not an easy thing, son. Not at first. It’s not an obvious task, but . . . write everything down. Don’t cross anything out. Don’t 20

Ascension lie or explain or prevaricate. You have no one to hide anything from but yourself.’

I did as I was instructed. I don’t think I’ve ever told you this.

It’s never seemed appropriate – for all our trips together, my faith has always been a very personal thing, just as your father’s pragmatic atheism has always been for him. My journal, for many years, became a form of communication – of speaking to an other. It was Father Michaels who taught me this need not be done on my knees, or in a church.

Pages upon pages of ink spilled out of me then like blood from a thousand cuts. The need to confess has never left me: the curative, cathartic power that comes from sharing oneself with the world and with others. I obsessed over it. But the truth is that in time, it became too much. When everything happened with Santi, and the hospital, I had to step away, wean myself off it, rehabilitate. To look too closely would have driven me mad.

And yet, for the first time in a very long time, events are happening that I do not understand. I feel that I must communicate them with someone, if only to make sense of them myself.

That is, after all, my stated purpose, isn’t it, Hattie? Making sense of things.

But I find I cannot return to my journal now, not in the way I once did. The words are false. They ring with a cold emptiness.

I write this letter in the hope that you might be my translator, of a sort. I’m sorry to place this burden on you, but you’re the only one I have left. You must be what – fourteen now? It was your fourteenth birthday when I took you to paddleboarding, wasn’t it? You’re old enough, then, perhaps, that you understand what it means to confess. Though in truth, part of me hopes that Ben will hide this away, or burn it. In fact, I expect that it will probably be burnt. But there is no one else that I can think of, no one else that I haven’t already pushed away.

I no longer believe God is listening.

I watched an old friend die today. I wanted to get that out of the way early, so it didn’t come as a shock. I have no wish 21

Nicholas Binge to scare you, but I am sitting here, staring at camera feeds and desperately clawing at an explanation. I’m not sure I’m allowed to write this; I have no idea how I’ll even get it to you. I just needed to share with somebody, with anybody.

Yesterday, I arrived in New Mexico for work. My own work – not a commission but rather a personal investigation, spurred on by bizarre and contradictory reports of bird migrations coming out of the region. It was as though, all of a sudden, all the swallows that would normally have migrated south for winter were coming back early.

Like they were running from something.

It might seem a strange lead to chase, but you know I like to travel. Living alone in my dusty London flat becomes tiresome and exhausting, as though I can feel my very brain atrophying.

And I’d made enough from the Hubble launch in Florida last year – that space telescope I told you about – that I could afford to follow my own interests for a while.

I checked into the Historic Taos Inn, a quaint location set across several adobe houses, thankful that I was here in January.

I’d been to New Mexico once before in the summer – you remember that awful physics conference? – and I was sweating the moment I stepped off the plane. Winter is appreciably cooler, and for all the desolate and desert landscape, the cold winds remind me a little of London.

As I was led up to my room, I was smiling at the pride the proprietors took in their inn’s history. Old pictures and placards littered the walls, consistent blaring reminders that this place was over a hundred years old.

‘This main building dates back to the 1800s,’ the porter told me, chest out. ‘There’s a lot of history here.’

He left me just outside my room, key in hand and heavy luggage at the door, and bade me good evening. I stood, still smiling at him, and he at me, for some time. What a fool I must have looked, beaming at him. It took me a good ten seconds to remember that I was supposed to tip in this country.

22

Ascension I fumbled in my pockets haphazardly, muttering a poor mixture of apology and an excuse about different cultures. I managed to pull out a crisp ten-dollar note and he disappeared promptly and efficiently.

Sighing, for I was finally to be offered some solitude, I turned the key to my room.

It was not empty.

Two men waited for me. The first was right in front of me: an imposing, straight-backed man with military bearing, tall and wide, his shoulders barely squeezed into the fabric of his suit jacket. He stood, towering over me, the grizzle on his dark face hinting at scars tucked beneath. His leathery brown skin spoke of a life worn by a few too many exotic experiences.

It took me a second to notice the second man behind him.

He was sitting at the desk – a pale white man, his face grey and hair fading like an old photograph. The shadow of the curtains fell on his brown polyester suit and almost completely blended him into the dark wooden chair. In front of him, there was a closed briefcase.

‘Mr. Tunmore,’ the first said. ‘We’ve been waiting for you.’

‘Well, I can see that,’ I replied, squeezing past him and into the room. ‘Otherwise, this would be an astonishing coincidence.’

‘Ha!’ He let out a deep grunt of a laugh. ‘People are usually a bit more taken aback. Do you know what happened last time we waited in someone’s hotel room? The man fainted – actually damn fainted – I swear, like something out of a movie.’

I shuffled forwards and took an awkward seat on the bed.

‘I suppose nowadays I’m always half expecting some sort of corporate or military representative to show up unexpectedly.

What can I do for you gentlemen?’

‘Oh.’ His face lit up as if he’d just realised something. ‘Please, let me get your bags. You relax, maybe have a cup of tea? That’s what you English do, isn’t it?’

I frowned, trying to reconcile the bullish image of this man with his jovial nature. ‘I hate to be one to reinforce stereotypes, but yes. I could murder a cup.’

23

Nicholas Binge The big man laughed, flicked the electric kettle on. As he went to grab my suitcase, I couldn’t help but notice there was already water in the kettle. They had been here awhile.

I turned to the man in the chair. ‘You have me at a disadvantage. You seem to know my name.’

The man smiled back at me, wordless.

‘Names aren’t important right now,’ the first man called back, lifting my bag like it was filled with feathers. ‘Just call me the Warden. Everyone calls me the Warden.’

‘Very well. I suppose I should ask why you’re here?’

The Warden ripped open a tea bag and dropped it in a cup, pouring water over it.

The man at the desk reached forwards to open his briefcase, and I noted his long, spindly fingers, like the legs of a spider.

They deftly clacked at the combination. He pulled out a few pieces of paper, which he tapped on the desk to keep in line before placing them in front of him.

‘We’ve come to find you,’ the Warden said, looming over me as he handed me my tea. ‘Because apparently you’ve got a nose for this sort of thing.’

‘What sort of thing?’

The Warden frowned, as if a little confused, and looked at his colleague. The man at the desk just smiled.

‘You’re a physicist, right?’ he said. ‘So . . . physics.’

I laughed, and leaned back a little into the bed. There’s something about an American using sarcasm that always puts me a little more at ease.

‘Physics is a pretty broad umbrella. It encompasses most of the known universe. Could you be more specific?’

‘I’d like to tell you, but the problem is,’ the Warden said, then paused, frowning. ‘Well, it’s difficult.’

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Top secret, is it?’

‘You know the funny thing about that phrase, “top secret”?

It isn’t actually the top.’ The Warden stepped forwards, his figure blocking out the light. ‘It’s a common myth. Top secret is just a term people use to convince people with top secret access that 24

Ascension they have the highest clearance – to keep them from asking questions about what else might be going on.’

I didn’t reply.

‘You see, there’s all sorts of higher clearances than “top secret”. There’s T Access and there’s Q Access. Hell, there’s accesses that I probably don’t even know exist. And trust me – I know a lot. But if we really wanted to tell you anything, anything at all, you know what I’d have to do?’

I shook my head, taking a sip of my tea. ‘Perhaps you’d have to kill me?’

‘I’d have to leave the room,’ he said, pointing at the door, ‘and call my superior to ask if you had the specific access required, which you don’t. You wouldn’t be allowed to be with me, obviously, as then you’d hear the name of the access, and even that would be too much. And if they confirmed that you did – which they won’t – I’d have to come back in here and make you leave the room and call your superior, to triplecheck that I had the clearance required to even be having this conversation.’

‘Do you?’

He smiled. ‘I can’t tell you that. You don’t have the clearance.’

I took another sip of tea. ‘Then why, if you can’t tell me anything, are we here?’

‘There’s a man,’ he said, glancing at his colleague. ‘Well, there’s a . . .’ He pressed his eyebrows together. ‘Let’s call it a . . . phenomenon. The organisation I represent would like you to take a look. I am, of course, not at liberty to tell you what it is.’

‘I’m sort of engaged on a job already. Can you at least tell me where it is?’

The Warden shook his head, splaying his hands out as if to apologise.

I sighed. ‘So, you’ve got a phenomenon that you can’t talk about, in a place you can’t tell me, working for people I’m not even allowed to know the names of. It’s late and I’m tired – what on earth makes you think that I’ll say yes?’

25

Nicholas Binge He grinned. ‘A more interesting little bird than you’re currently chasing told me you wouldn’t be able to resist.’

I frowned, thinking about the investigation that had brought me here. Did he know about that? I hadn’t told anyone what I’d been looking into.

‘I mean—’ The Warden shrugged. ‘I could tell you how well you’d be paid, but they said that wouldn’t matter. The more obscure the mystery, the more intrigued he’ll be, they said.’

I sighed again.

The truth is I was tired. I was hungry. All I wanted was to tell these men to leave, that I wasn’t interested, and that they could find someone else.

But damn it, Hattie, the man was right. I don’t know who he’d been talking to, but this – all the secrecy, the strangeness of their visit, the hint at larger answers? I felt a familiar shiver of excitement run down my spine.

This was a mystery.

Less than thirty minutes later, we were in a van, my things loaded into the back. The windows were tinted and the curtains drawn. Despite the sudden change, I was overwhelmed with tiredness. I slept, Lord knows how long, and when I woke up and peeked through the curtain, we had arrived at a facility out in the desert.

The morning sun poked over the horizon. Around us was an expanse of cold, flat nothingness. The hot dust kicked up from the van seemed to settle in the air, almost like snow, in a haze that spread out in all directions.

The building was completely nondescript, so out of place that at first I thought I was looking at a mirage or a trick of the light. This flat grey monolith rose out of the yellow sand, all blocky sides and corners. There wasn’t a single sign or identifying feature, and even the windows looked so washed out that I could barely distinguish them from the walls. It seemed as though, in the blink of an eye, the desert might swallow it up and there’d be nothing to say that it had ever been there at all.

26

Ascension The van trundled up outside of it, parking beside a couple of black cars that were nestled right against the building wall.

I rubbed my blurry eyes from the glare of the desert, then felt a push from the driver behind me. Stepping out of the vehicle, I lifted my shirt in front of my mouth to keep the dust from sticking in my throat. Without so much as a word, the Warden led me inside.

Through the door, the greys transformed to clinical whites.

The pristine lemon scent of cleaning products eradicated the dusty smell of desert. The walls were bare, the corridor empty but for several blank closed doors. Only the sound of our reverberating footsteps punctuated the silence. The driver stayed outside by the van and closed the door behind us.

Halfway down the corridor, the Warden opened a door and invited me in. There was a security office, with several chairs and a large desk adorned with four computer monitors. Each one of them showed the feed from a different camera, but all four cameras were looking at the same thing: a small interrogation room, walls blank, with a black-haired man in plain grey clothes sat at a metal table, drumming his fingers against the top. The taps echoed through the speakers and into the sterile air of the office.

Dum-dum-dum-dum. Dum-dum-dum-dum.

His face was unreadable – a halfway point between indifference and serenity. His eyes were glazed, looking outwards as if they were not seeing, as if staring ahead at a landscape beyond the cold white walls of his cell. He was not cuffed.

‘Who is he?’ I asked.

‘John McAllister.’

I blinked. I knew that name. I looked again, piecing together fragments of recognition. I’d worked with John, about five years ago – an epidemiologist from out of New York. He had led a team containing a smallpox outbreak in Birmingham. I think I told you about this, Hattie? When they brought me in as a consulting physicist to study the impact of wind turbulence on airborne pathogens. Flashes returned to me: John at a whiteboard, 27

Nicholas Binge scribbling; John smiling, making a joke about seagrass; John buying me coffee. We’d been close for a time – I’d been impressed by his diligence and keen sense of empathy – but it had been so long.

‘What’s he doing here?’

The Warden shook his head. ‘Access, Mr Tunmore. Access.

Let’s just say he was working on something for us, and . . . things went awry. We’re at a bit of a loss as to where to go from here.’

‘Why is he being held?’

‘He isn’t,’ the Warden said. ‘Well, he’s free to leave this room, at least. He just doesn’t.’

‘What do you mean, doesn’t?’

‘He’s been here for four days. Hasn’t moved an inch, except to eat and drink what we bring him, and to go to the toilet, but then he goes right back to where he’s sitting.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ll be straight with you. I don’t like bringing a civilian into this. But you came to me on recommendation – you’re meant to be good at these things. And I’m at my wits’ end. There’s weird and then there’s weird. I’ll try anything at this point, if we can find out what’s happening here. He’s been away from the site for too long and the higher-ups are getting antsy.’

John’s drumming reverberated out of the speakers.

Dum-dum-dum-dum. Dum-dum-dum-dum.

‘What site did he come from?’

‘You don’t have clearance for that question.’

‘Who recommended me?’

He pulled his lips together. ‘You don’t have clearance.’

I sighed. ‘What do I have clearance for?’

‘To talk to him. And to see the test. Then tell us what you make of it.’

I stood, looking back at him. I was about to tell him that I needed more than obfuscation and mystery if he wanted my help.

John’s tapping stopped.

In the quiet of the room, it had become like a metronome; 28

Ascension without it, there was only the light hum of electronics and the Warden’s stern gaze.

We both shifted to look at the monitor as John’s head turned, slowly, deliberately, until he was looking straight at one of the cameras. Though he was in a closed, his eyes felt as though they were directly on us.

‘You can run the test again now, Steve,’ John said. I shivered at the sound of his voice. It was too cold, too level, as though it were coming from a different body. ‘I’m sure Harry doesn’t want to be kept waiting.’

The sound of my name sent a small jolt down my spine.

‘You told him I was coming,’ I whispered.

‘No.’ The Warden gave me a tight smile. ‘We haven’t told him anything. He just . . . well, he just does that.’

John’s head turned, smoothly as a mechanised doll, back to facing the wall directly ahead of him. His fingers started up again, drumming a steady beat.

‘It’s been a long time,’ I said. I was in a seat opposite John and he was not looking at me. His eyes were on me, but they looked past me. Through me. I fumbled at a pack of playing cards that the Warden had given me. He hadn’t told me what they were for. ‘Can you tell me why I’m here?’

He cocked his head a little to the right. ‘That’s quite a big question, isn’t it, Harry? Why are you here? Moving from job to job. Country to country. Too scared to let roots grow. Do you tell yourself there’s meaning in that?’

‘I haven’t seen you in five years,’ I said, a chill running down my arms. ‘And you talk about my life like you’ve studied it.

What’s happening here, John?’

‘I was shown truth,’ he said. His face smiled, but it didn’t touch his eyes. ‘It turns out truth isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.’

His voice was still emotionless: a man reading a script for the first time, not understanding the inflections of the lines.

This was not John I had known. His features were the same – the facial structure, the hair, the shape of his body – and, 29

Nicholas Binge though aged, they individually seemed to belong to the same man that I had worked with those years ago. If I had seen a picture of him, I would not have noticed anything wrong. But in front of me, they didn’t quite seem to come together. It was as though each bit of him had been gradually taken away and replaced. They combined to form an accurate simulacrum of John McAllister, but the cohesive whole, the essence of the man, was gone.

He leant forwards. ‘Open the cards.’

I blinked, taken aback by the flat monotone of his demand.

Obliging, I flicked open the pack and pulled them out. John’s fingers kept drumming.

Dum-dum-dum-dum.

‘Shuffle them.’

I did as I was told, under the table. ‘What is this?’ I asked.

‘A magic trick?’

He cocked his head slightly to the left. ‘You tell me. Three of spades.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Nine of hearts. Jack of spades. Four of clubs.’

I looked down at the pack in my hand and at the card lying faceup, away from John: the three of spades. As he spoke, I peeled one card back and then another, then another. The nine; the jack; the four. He kept reeling them off – perfectly and completely accurate. The hollowness of his voice echoed around the room as card after card fluttered past, his distant eyes staring out and beyond. With each prediction, I felt a tightening in the room. A claustrophobia pressing itself into me.

‘Stop.’

He fell silent.

‘I don’t know why you’re doing this.’ I leant in. ‘I’m impressed, I am. Deeply intrigued, and I would love to know how, but . . .’

I glanced up at the camera. ‘Look, I don’t know why I’m here, but something isn’t right. I can see that. I want to help you.’

He laughed and my whole body shuddered. Hattie, do you remember that old amusement park I took you to? I think you 30

Ascension must have been ten – and that mechanical rabbit that laughed when you shook its ears? You were so scared of it, because you told me ‘it was a laugh with no laughter in it’. That’s what John sounded like. Empty.

‘Don’t be a fool, Harry. No one can help me now.’ He leant across the table towards me, close enough that I could hear him whisper. ‘But I’m glad you came. I knew you would. I’ve been waiting for you. For this moment. I didn’t know why it would be you, but I do now. I’ve seen it through a glass, darkly.’

My ears perked up at the Bible verse, as though he was trying to send me a coded message. I lowered my voice, matching his whisper. ‘What is it, John? What have you seen?’

‘Everything, Harry. It’s all been set up. Listen to me now: in a moment, two guards will come in here because I’m whispering too quietly for them to hear it on the cameras. One of them will be armed. After what I’m about to tell you, you’ll shout a warning at them, but it won’t help. It’ll only confuse and panic one of them, and he’ll take out his weapon. In the ensuing struggle, I’m going to take his pistol and shoot myself in the head.’

‘What?’

He grabbed my hand. ‘Why does Sisyphus keep pushing the rock up the hill, Harry, if he knows it’ll just fall down again?

Why does he keep pushing?’

The door swung open.

I’ve replayed the moment again and again in my head, asking myself a hundred questions. Would I have blurted out a warning if he hadn’t told me I would? Would John still be alive? I have no answers at the moment – only the series of recurring images: the stumbling guard, surprised by my scream; the grabbing of the pistol; the splatter of blood on those pristine white walls.

I’ll spare you the details; I’m not sure I could write them anyway. I’m fine, at least physically. I know how you worry.

But they’ve had me sitting in an office surrounded by screens, reviewing footage of the last day.

I’m watching John sit there, barely moving. I’m watching as they shout at him; they cajole him; they interrogate him. Most 31

Nicholas Binge of the sound has been redacted – information I do not have clearance for.

His face barely changes throughout his last minutes. His posture never shifts. His damn fingers never stop drumming. It’s as though his consciousness has left him; he’s just a puppet, an automaton reciting lines that have been programmed into him.

They’re expecting some kind of explanation from me, but I don’t have any. There are guesses, the starts of ideas that have popped into my mind, but each time they do they’re clouded by the image of his head exploding all over the room.

How did he know about the cards? How did he know about the gun? Why did he mention Sisyphus? Those final words were not just any old words, Hattie. I could tell they were meant for me. And the more I think about them, the more I think about Santi. I don’t want to; I can’t help it. I heard John’s words and I was back in that hospital, shouting at nurses. I was back in the confessional, screaming at my own impotence.

Oh God – there’s still blood on my hands as I write this. I haven’t even been given time or space to properly clean it off.

Every time I close my eyes, the drumming of his fingers runs through my head.

32

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