Hybrid Fiction, Issue 3

Copyright Š 2020 Hybrid Fiction. All material appearing in Hybrid Fiction is copyright. Reproduction in whole or part is not permitted without permission in writing from the editor. All characters and events are fictitious. The publisher bears no responsibility and accepts no liability for the work herein.

Hybrid Fiction April 2020

Table of Contents “Ghost Writer” by Philip Brian Hall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 A hard-up young writer encounters the ghost of a famous golden-age SF writer who wants to recruit an amanuensis.

“Goblin Star” by David A. Gray . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Beset by goblins, Tam must help Sheriff Magna stop a man possessed by the creatures before they take more souls.

Project Auroral: Chapter 1 by Ben Pyle and Marc Rene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Aryn—a brilliant scientist turned superhero—fights her former wife Gabby and their teammates to save Earth from subjugation by alien forces.

“Accountability” by Gareth D. Jones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 In an office in Chelmsford, there’s a tearoom that leads to an alternate reality, and there’s a man who can’t stop counting.

“Hotel for Psychics” by Christopher Woods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 The hotel for psychics is a special, and most imaginative, gathering place for psychic conventioneers.

“Short-handed” by Harold Gross . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 While celebrating a scientific break-through, Jackson realizes he may have discovered magic.

After the Warding: Part II by R. Z. Held . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 In the celebrations following the Century Warding, it seems everyone wants something from Aurea and the rest of the Sixteen. As Aurea drowns under their expectations, she gives way to wild parties.

“As the Crow Flies” by O. Sander . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 A punk fairy rides her crow through the skies.

Hybrid Fiction April 2020

GHOST WRITER

By Philip Brian Hall Sometimes a writer decides for himself what he’ll write. Sometimes his characters become so real in his mind they decide everything for him. Judging by my conversations with my fellow authors, the latter is more common than readers might generally suppose; writers are a psychologically odd lot after all. But very rarely, I suspect, has any of us been odd enough to take dictation from the dead.

"I hadn’t finished," this old man said as I was walking home from the pub one night.

Speaking in a gravelly, mid-western accent, he emerged from a dark side street, dressed in a pale trench coat, a black fedora pulled down low over his forehead. He fell into step alongside me the way, you know, annoying strangers do when they want to talk to you.

"I had a story I really wanted to write about an Egyptologist," he continued. "And then there was another story set on Enceladus; an expedition boring through the ice and..."

"Excuse me," I said politely as you do when you’ve supped a pint or two and are feeling reasonably mellow, "but who the hell are you, and why are your writing problems anything to do with me?"

"Ah, yes," he said, "I was forgetting. You’re English, and you’re very young, so we never actually met while I was alive."

He stopped walking, turned towards me and tipped back the brim of his hat, revealing a vaguely familiar, wrinkled face in the brash yellow light of a West London streetlamp.

"The thing is, you’re the first writer I’ve found who’s open to spirit communication.

Surprising, isn’t it? A rarer talent than you might suppose. But maybe you recognize me from the pictures on the back covers of my books? You’ve read everything I ever wrote, I believe."

Ordinarily, I’d have just kept walking, leaving the madman standing there in the street, explaining himself to fresh air. But he was old and he didn't look as though he could have mugged an invalid geriatric, let alone a reasonably fit young man like me. I paused and looked back at him, squinting against the glare. Suddenly it struck me.

"Good grief!" I exclaimed. "You’re..."

"No, no," he said, apologetically. "I was once. Now I'm just a ghost. I may look like I'm as solid as you but I'm not, see." He reached out his arm and passed it backwards and forwards Hybrid Fiction April 2020

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through the concrete column of the streetlight.

"Wow! That’s quite a trick, mate."

"No, it’s not a trick, Philip. Ordinary ectoplasm reflects light, you see, but it has no impact on material things."

"Ordinary ectoplasm?" At that time of night, I found the idea that a non-existent substance should already have acquired more than one form somewhat challenging to say the least.

"Yes, yes, you know, you’re a fantasy writer after all; I mean the kind of ectoplasm ordinary ghosts like me have, not the special-effects stuff poltergeists come equipped with."

"Of course." I nodded knowingly.

"That’s my problem, see," he went on. "I can’t use a typewriter."

"You and everybody else," I replied.

He seemed perplexed.

You’ll think it weird, but at the time I didn’t find it particularly out of the ordinary to be holding this arcane conversation with a self-identified spectre. Looking back on the experience, I can’t believe how calm I was. I could have run screaming from the place, I suppose, but well, it just never occurred to me.

"Where have you been lately?" I smiled. "Typewriters belong in museums; nowadays everyone has a computer."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Of course, the kids do everything on their portable smartphones, but writers like me fancy a keyboard big enough so you can actually touch type rather than prod with one finger."

"I see," he said. "In my day, and that’s not so long ago, phones and computers both had to be attached to cables."

"Sure, but now they don’t. And today’s phones can take dictation. So you don’t need a typewriter. Speak your stories into a phone."

"But I don’t have a phone," he said. "And, if I did, I don’t have a finger I could prod it with.

And, even if I could use voice commands, I couldn’t pick up the paper I printed my work on. You see what I mean?"

"Paper?" I laughed. "Who the hell uses paper? You send everything to your publisher electronically."

"Is that so?" he said. "But not, I suspect, if you’ve been dead twenty years. I mean, how would it look to him, for goodness’ sake? Like a forgery, I’m pretty sure. You see, I’ve been thinking, and I figure the only way I can get new stories published after such a lapse of time is if lost manuscripts of mine fortuitously turn up where they’ve been lying all this time waiting to be discovered. That’s where I thought you might come in."

"We’re a long way from Chicago," I said doubtfully. "Why would your old manuscripts be lying around in Hammersmith?"

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"Jeepers," he swore, really showing his age. "Have you never heard of lost and found?"  It was an old, tan-coloured cardboard suitcase covered in obsolete hotel stickers of the kind they used to give out in the middle of the last century back when people who couldn’t say ‘I’ve

been to Interlaken’ were more numerous than those who could and ordinary folk were still naive enough to be impressed by evidence of foreign travel.

The fake leather that swathed it was worn, dusty and stippled all over with patches of mould.

It looked almost as if it had been left behind, gathering cobwebs, ever since the Yanks pulled out at the end of the Second World War. But its two, flimsy flip-down locks were still sealed, doing their long-redundant guard duty along with the dry, brittle, leather belt that, through many decades, had secured the whole thing against bursting open. On some long-forgotten day, a short-sighted baggage handler had flung it into the hold of a prop-driven Stratocruiser outward-bound from Idlewild to London Heathrow instead of LA; it apparently arrived without identifying labels and was never reclaimed.

How the case had survived all these years was a mystery. By rights, it should long ago have been swept up and thrown out with the other rubbish, but there it was on a little-frequented lost luggage counter, and since I could describe it exactly and even list the top layer of its motheaten contents, it was mine for a handling charge of £50.

The fee was patently more than the case was worth in the eyes of the contemptuous young lady counter-attendant with big, droopy earrings and a knitted, multicoloured, Bob Marley hat.

While we negotiated in a desultory fashion, she emerged briefly and reluctantly from beneath the giant headphones she wore as optional extra uniform and slowed her rate of gum-chewing just enough to permit speech.

It was embarrassing to be seen in public with the case. On the tube home, people stared at me as though I might have stepped straight out of a black and white movie starring Humphrey Bogart. I needed the thing for provenance or I’d have tossed it into a skip to avoid further ridicule and embarrassment.

When I finally made home, turning up my coat collar, trying hard to be anonymous and probably contriving to look even more like a gumshoe than I already did, he was waiting in the entrance hall of my block. He seemed able to come and go at will.

Thereafter, I found myself the landlord of a ghostly lodger. I honestly doubt there are any other flats in Hammersmith quite so frequently haunted; in all probability, the local spectres, like most of the regular inhabitants, are just passing through.

"You found it. That’s great!" he said. "It’ll be easy enough to prove it’s is mine; there are name tags in the clothes and several personal letters tied up in a ribbon. There aren’t actually any manuscripts inside it, of course, but you can say there were, can’t you? It’ll keep us going awhile."

Well, I confess, at first I was fascinated by the whole business. I'd always thought of him as the outstanding speculative writer of his age, and the excitement of helping the great man put a Hybrid Fiction April 2020

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new work on the market carried me through several days of a punishing work schedule.

He dictated quite slowly, and I was able to keep up; the only problem was he didn't seem to need to pause for food, sleep, or even a refreshing walk around the park. In spite of my enthusiasm, my stomach was soon rumbling, and before long, my eyelids drooping.

At two in the morning on the first night, I had to call a halt and remind him I, at least, was still human. After that, he grudgingly conceded I should be allowed breaks; it wouldn't do if I made too many typos after all. He couldn’t do his own proof-reading because he couldn’t make any corrections.  At first, I wasn't sure whom to contact. He was out of contract, naturally, and the people who'd handled his work in the past were long gone. I didn't have an agent myself; I wasn't worth one's while. I'd sold about a dozen short stories, but I hadn't made the big breakthrough that every amateur writer desires into the most famous and popular magazines.

Finally, I picked out the biggest agency I'd heard of with clients writing in the relevant genres. I rang them and told the telephone receptionist I wanted to speak to the senior partner.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Chester only takes calls from his clients," she said.

"Tell him I’ve discovered an unpublished manuscript by the greatest speculative author who ever lived."

"Oh, and who’s that, in your opinion?" she asked sceptically.

I told her.

Mr. Chester decided he would speak to me after all, though his tone of voice gave every impression he didn’t really believe me, and the conversation was likely to be short. I’d better be convincing and quick. I was both.

"You’ll understand I can’t send you the original," I said at last. "Don’t worry, it’s in a safe place. I’ve transcribed a fair copy I can send you. Anyone who knows his work will see right away it’s genuine. And as I’ve explained, the provenance is rock solid."

"If it checks out, I’ll send you a contract," he said. "A thousand up front, nine more when it’s authenticated."

"And the usual royalties?"

"Of course."

So that was it; negotiations concluded. I could hardly believe how easy it was to do business on behalf of a big name. Within days a major publishing house picked up the book and we were ready for a splash launch, all singing, all dancing.  "You see, I knew I could still cut it," he said with a self-satisfied smile.

"I helped a bit," I said, a trifle miffed.

"Yes of course. Now we need to get right on with Enceladus."

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I bridled. That hadn’t been my idea of our deal.

"I need a rest," I said. "And after that, I need to get back to my own work. If I go quiet for too long the very small number of editors who currently know who I am will forget all about me and it'll be like starting all over again."

"You’re not trying to compare your work with mine I hope," he sniffed.

"Of course not. You’re the one with ten awards and umpteen stories made into feature films.

My name barely registers in reader awareness surveys. But you had to start somewhere too, didn’t you? I don’t suppose your first story was the headline credit in Adastra? I’ve got my own way to make in the world."

"You’re much more useful to the world as my secretary."

"Amanuensis. And I'm glad to help out, but it's not going to help my career progress, is it? I already risk being better known as the man who found your lost work than as a writer in my own right."

"Then one more story won’t make any difference. You can keep the money after all; it’s no use to me. I thought you were hard up."

"I am, and don’t think I’m not grateful, but I want to be a writer, not a copy-typist. You remember how that felt don’t you? Wanting to be an author? I have to write my own stuff. I need to. It’s who I am."

"But I told you I hadn’t finished. I thought you understood. That’s how this whole thing got started. I’ve so much more I want to do."

"And, as I said, I’ll help you," I protested. "I really will. But I can’t devote my whole life to it!

Have a little patience."

"Huh! That’s easy for you to say. You’re a young man. How do I know how long I’m going to last in this disembodied half-life? I could be gone tomorrow."

"Somehow I don’t think so," I muttered, just a little wistfully.

What had seemed like a great idea at first was beginning to look less smart every day. My own head was full of ideas too, but I never got time to write anything. My social life, such as it was, went right down the tubes. My occasional girlfriend gave up leaving irritated messages on my answering machine, and the local rugby club’s third fifteen found a substitute who turned out to be better than me as well as more reliable. I was off the grid. When I wasn’t taking dictation or eating, I was asleep.  So we went right on working. We produced the Enceladus story, and I sent it off, claiming it as the second of the manuscripts I'd found in the battered suitcase.

"Interesting," the agent said. "So you found a scifi as well as a fantasy?"

"That’s right."

"And how many more stories are there?"

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"Er, I’m not sure. There’s a lot of jumbled papers with manual alterations and half-torn sheets. It’s taken me all this time to decipher two full scripts. I’ll have to see how it goes."

"We can get you some help with that, you know."

"No, thank you. I’d rather do it myself. For security, you understand."

"Look," he said, "the thing is, the interest in the first book was huge. The second one won’t be quite such a smash. Don’t get me wrong; it’s good, and all the experts authenticate the writing as his. It’s just that it’s not so much of a novelty."

"That’s understandable, I suppose," I said.

"Of course. But, as you’re bound to know, his last three books—the ones published during his lifetime, that is—were not really big sellers."

"Yes, I know. People said he was losing his touch."

"Exactly so. And making more use of co-writers, too, for the narrative sections he was less interested in."

"I’d heard that."

"Well Enceladus is much more in the style of his later work than his earlier work, do you see?

The first one, the Egyptian tale, that had lots of energy. This new one will do all right, but it’s a bit tired."

"I know how it feels," I yawned.

And then, in a single moment, my world changed out of all recognition.

"But, look, while I’ve got you on the phone," he said, "I read one of your own stories. The one you had in last spring’s Alien Frontiers."

"Oh, you did?" Abruptly, I woke up again and started paying attention.

"Yes indeed. And I liked it a lot. Have you got anything more like that in the pipeline?

Because if you have, I’d like to see it."

"Only a couple Adastra already turned down, I’m afraid," I admitted, far too honest for my own good. "My latest one’s not ready yet."

"Send me those two, then, will you? Adastra's slush readers aren't perfect; everyone makes mistakes. And send me the work in progress as soon as it's ready. You know, I've got a feeling we might be able to help you along a bit."  "Good for you," the great man said impatiently when I told him my earth-shattering news, "but that can wait. Your two rejections from Adastra will hold his interest for a while; we need to get on with my next story."

"Oh, we do, do we?" I snorted.

"Of course. We may not have much time."

"And what makes you so sure I’ve all the time in the world? I could be knocked down tomorrow, crossing the road."

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"So look both ways before you step out into the street and then you’ll be all right. Come on, let’s make a start. The Rings of Saturn Chapter One." "Hold your horses! Just you hang on a minute," I complained. "I have a half-written story that's been waiting for me to get back to it for weeks."

"It’ll keep."

I think my frustration just boiled over then. His selfishness and ingratitude were unbelievable. Almost before I knew it, I found myself vigorously criticising the great man himself.

"Oh, it’ll keep, will it? Well, let me tell you, smart ass, you should concentrate on fantasy in future; your imagination doesn’t show your age, but your science does. The factual content of

Enceladus was old hat."

"What are you talking about?" he protested. He was shocked. It seemed no-one ever talked back to him. "The possibility of life below the ice is the latest thing."

"No," I said, "it was the latest thing—twenty years ago. You've been gone awhile. In the interim, the Curiosity Rover found organic matter on Mars and water-ice only a few inches below the surface. Life on Mars is the latest thing, now."

"Ridiculous!" he harrumphed. "If it ever existed, life on Mars is extinct. That idea went out with the canals."

"Well, it's back. And, by pure luck, so's my chance of a career, if I can only get my latest story finished. It’s important to me. I may never have a chance like this again."

"Just one more, Philip," he insisted. "Then I’ll leave you alone. I promise."

To say I was reluctant would be the most monumental understatement. Finally, and grudgingly, I said, "Are you absolutely sure? Can I trust you?"

"Why, of course you can. What a thing to say!"

A long way from convinced, I gave in. Of course. He was who he was, after all. Or should that be, he had been who he had been? Either way, could I really be selfish enough to deny the world another of his masterpieces?  But as The Rings of Saturn gradually took shape under my hands, I could tell it had all the same problems as Enceladus and then some. He was reinventing, as though they were new ideas, things that had been in print or in the cinema years ago. Though they weren’t new, he wasn’t plagiarising. He simply didn’t know about them.

Now in a way, I know how that feels, because I’ve had personal rejections comparing my work to that of authors I’d never actually read, or films I’d never seen, and suggesting mine was derivative. That sort of thing annoys the hell out of me on one level; on another it’s flattering, I suppose, to be compared to people with well-established reputations.

Anyhow, I could tell how Mr. Chester was going to react to Rings if I turned it in exactly as written, so, taking advantage of the fact that I was my own proof-reader, I modified the story as we went along. I had to think pretty damn fast so as not to give the great man the impression I Hybrid Fiction April 2020

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wasn’t following his dictation word for word. That turned out to be terrific practice in a useful professional skill. In the end, I was modestly proud of my role in updating a good basic story and turning it into a modern novel. Between us, we'd created a sure-fire hit.

At the same time, it would be equally obvious to the publisher’s expert readers that the writing was not entirely authentic. I needed to cover my backside before I got it handed to me by an irate agent. So, underneath the author's name, I wrote in small text the additional attribution line “with Philip Brian Hall.”

As I’d expected, the agent rang me as soon as he’d read the manuscript. "What have you done?" he demanded. "You were five when he died. There’s no way the two of you collaborated on this book. On the other hand, you did write sections of it. Even I can tell that, just from comparing it with your other stories. It doesn’t take an expert."

"Which is exactly why I owned up," I said. "When I finally put together the third manuscript, I could tell it wouldn’t do. As you said yourself last time, the science just wasn’t up-to-date enough. But it was a good story; it just needed a bit of help. So I gave it some."

"Oh yeah, pull the other one!" Mr. Chester growled. "What you mean is you found an incomplete script and you finished it. There aren't any more scripts in this suitcase of his are there?"

"Er... Well, I don’t know for sure. It’s still all a bit of a mess."

"Hah! Do you know, I’m beginning to have my suspicions about the first two, now."

"I promise you they’re completely authentic."

"Since they’ve persuaded all the top experts in the field, and since I personally have a considerable investment in your credibility, I choose to believe that’s true."

"Thank you, Mr. Chester. I appreciate it."

"But no more, eh? We’ll explain the hybrid nature of this one exactly the way you’ve explained it to me but make it the last updating you do. The next story you send me is signed by Philip Brian Hall. Just by Philip Brian Hall, you understand me?"

"Perfectly." I hesitated. "But what if it doesn’t sell?"

"Are you kidding me? According to the PR they'll put out with this one, the publishers decided to trust you with revising the work of the greatest master the genre’s ever seen. Of course, your first solo piece will sell, out of sheer public curiosity if nothing else. What happens afterwards depends on you, naturally. There are no free lunches in this business."

"I understand. I’ll certainly do my best." I said. Then I wondered what would happen if the old man did ask me for more help, despite his promise. "But suppose I do find another complete manuscript in the suitcase?" I asked.

"No more, I told you!" Mr. Chester said emphatically. "After Rings, this suitcase stunt will be exhausted. Trust me, the public won’t have any appetite for more. But you can be the next big thing; I’ll stake my shirt on it. In fact, come to think of it, I already have."  Hybrid Fiction April 2020

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Well, I was all set to explain to the great man. I was going to confess and give it to him straight; admit what I'd done; tell him why I had to do it; report Mr. Chester's reaction word for word. He had said he’d leave me alone, after all. Naturally, I hadn’t trusted him because he’d been so demanding on the previous occasions.

I don’t know; maybe he did finally realise he was only a shadow of the genius he’d once been. Maybe he accepted it, not wanting to sully his memory. Or maybe he just faded away as he’d feared he would. I don’t know. Whatever the reason, I never saw him again.

But it remains a fact that working with him was what launched my career out of obscurity.

He gave me my big break after all.

And I like to think I helped him too. I believe I helped him to finish.

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GOBLIN STAR

By David A. Gray

The broad-backed young man stumbled along, arguing with the goblins in his head.

His hair was damp with sweat despite the morning coolness. A finely tooled crossbow bounced on his back.

“Get out,” he mumbled. “I refuse you!”

The youth paused. He peered up past pan-tiled roofs, eyes fixing on a glittering point, and touched two trembling fingers to the center of his forehead before pressing on, finally lurching into the village square. He stopped at the parapet around the town well, scattering chickens. Two lean, silver-haired men in skillfully tailored clothes nodded and touched their own foreheads.

“Is that the little people trying to push you out of your own head again, Tam?” Tam considered not replying to the old woman sitting opposite, because sure as the sun rose on Emain Ablach every day, Meg would repeat everything to the whole village.

But the loudest goblin was yammering in its strange language and sending horrific mental images.

“Aye, Meg, three, talking in tongues, and fighting like cats in a sack. The worst of them wants me to fell you, so it can possess your old carcass!”

The old woman guffawed.

“I wish it’d try, boy,” Meg said, “but it’s only the most sensitive of you young ones that they have a chance with. Us olders, our minds are too rigid. Mostly, we can’t feel them, and they can’t feel us. That one must be strong or a liar or both. But I’d be grateful if you don’t try the striking down part, all the same.”

“I won’t, Meg, I promise,” Tam said, rubbing his eyes. “Is it always like this?”

Meg nodded, her gray-green eyes glittering. “It’s the same every eleven-year. When the Goblin Star is in the sky, the little people come looking for bodies to steal, so they can escape it.”

“Tam, come away from that old gossip, why don’t you?”

Tam managed a weak smile when he saw Orla striding towards him with a basket full of purple berries. Her leather gloves and the front of her jacket were speckled the same Hybrid Fiction April 2020

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color as the fruit. She handed him three of the cloudberries, and Tam swallowed, ignoring the bitter taste. He mumbled thanks, and she handed him a palm-sized leather pouch.

“One every hour. No more or you’ll lose your sense of self, and… Well, at least you won’t feel anything.”

Tam grimaced.

“This year’s shaping up to be a bad one,” Orla added. Not a question. The apprentice herbalist wasn’t much of a one for the manners that the estate and castle staff had drummed into them from the time they could speak. “Smithy Ferguson is suffering the same as are the Murphy twins.”

“I know that well,” Tam said ruefully. “We’re all bedding down in the harvesters’ bunkhouse, staying awake all night thanks to that tea you make.”

“Don’t get used to it. It’s only for serious cases, and once the star passes, you won’t be tasting it again unless you go through childbirth.”

Old Meg slapped her leg in mirth. “What about it, lad, are you up for having babies with Orla when she’s old enough to marry? I’m sure she has a herb that would let you carry the child!”

Tam flushed, then doubled over as a cacophony of voices started in his head. A ripple of calm washed through them as the berries kicked in. He felt a dulling of the empathy that was a fact of life on Emain Ablach.

When he opened his eyes, Orla and Meg were looking at him with concern. He had to rely on words, now, and the nuances of facial expression, denied the ebb and flow of intent and emotion. It wasn’t pleasant.

“There’s a flask man coming from Dunedin,” Meg said. “He can take the worst of them out of your head.”

Orla let out a breath. “That’s good. The goblins will peak in the next three-day, won’t they, Meg?” “That they will. Then they’ll be gone for eleven years.”

A distant sound carried on the breeze. Hooves and the jingle of tack. Tam reached out with his mind and was surprised at the paucity of information, then remembered the cloudberries.

The doors to the town hall burst open, and Finn strode out. The mayor, while no youngling, was lithe and strong like everyone in castle lands. He caught sight of the three and came over, scowling. That accentuated the scars that ran down his face. Selfinflicted, from when the little people had come for him fifty-five years ago. A badge of honor.

“Tam, can you contain them and stand? The militia are here—there’s a possessed on the castle lands, and we need someone who knows their way around.”

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“Who have they taken?” Meg demanded.

“Not one of ours. A courtier from Annwyn. A goblin possessed the lad and had him bludgeon a constable. He’s been heading here in a straight line, leaving a trail of bodies and some new possessed.”

“Why here?” Orla asked.

“Who knows why the little people do things? He’ll be looking for somewhere he can hide. It’s his bad luck that we folks in the northern estates talk to one another. There’s tales that in the southlands whole duchies are infested and no neighbors know.”

Meg scoffed. “If neighbors don’t know, then how do you? Fairy tales, Finn.”

Before Finn could reply, the cobbles rang with steel, and the militia arrived. They numbered a dozen on dun-colored horses. They had leather armor, short swords at their waists, spears holstered on saddles, and curved bows across their backs. They were led by a woman of middle years with the ubiquitous freckles, reddish hair, and green eyes.

“Sheriff Magna,” she said curtly, nodding to the small group. Casting a critical eye on Tam, she stated, “You must be the hunter. You sure you’re up to this?”

“Yes.” The sheriff shrugged. “You know we won’t be able to nurse you if a goblin gets in while we’re riding...”

Tam nodded, and Magna softened a fraction: “We’ve a quarter of the squad off duty with the same as you’re going through right when we need them the most. Difference is, they said they couldn’t ride. If you survive this, I’m going to use you as an example of the spirit that we need. Might even find a place for you.”

Finn raised his voice, “No recruiting from my estate servants!”

Magna quirked an eyebrow. “There’s some as say no man or woman on Emain Ablach should be called ‘servant.’”

“It’s what we are, what we’ve always been,” the mayor muttered, growing red.

“Even when there’s never been any masters to serve?” Orla fired back, smiling to take the sting out of it.

Finn relaxed a little. “No, especially when the Lords and Ladies could be arriving any day. Our ancestors didn’t shape this world for them for us to get ideas.”

“Not so sure we owe them much,” Meg said unexpectedly. They all turned to look at her. “What do you know about me?” she asked, spearing Mayor Finn with a look. “What did I do with my life?”

“You did what every servant on Emain Ablach must do: you carried out your duty well and with honor.”

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Gray

"Goblin Star"

“My duty! I was a chambermaid, Finn! I wanted to explore the mysteries of our world, to adventure, but instead I spent 70 years tending rooms that were never occupied, making beds no-one slept in, and learning to bow to people I never met.”

“Now, Meg, we all do our duty as it was passed on from our parents and theirs before them all the way back to when we were sent here to prepare Emain Ablach for the Lords and Ladies.”

“And some of us never question that, do we, Finn?”

Sheriff Magna cut them off with a raised hand. “We can debate when the star passes,” she warned. “Until then, we stay alert.”

Magna pointed at a spare horse for Tam who pulled himself up with care. Hunters and other land staff were required to be able to ride, but militia steeds were feistier than the ponies he was used to.

He saw the sheriff watching and straightened. She signaled to move out. The militia rode in pairs, speeding to a trot then to a canter as the cobbled road meandered through neat fields, crossing streams on elegant stone arches. Tam’s great-greatgrandfather had been a stonemason, helping complete the roads that crisscrossed castle lands and linked with other great estates. Tam had grown up with the tales of gods who’d helped cut and polish millions of tons of stone, raising palaces, castles, and fabulous towers.

Magna slowed twice to ask him for directions, and let smaller contingents join, swelling their number to a score. Tam felt better, the combination of berries and open country bolstering his resistance to the goblins—but he could still hear them.

The road split, and the riders took the north fork, up around and above the castle, towards the forest. Tam was gazing back at the distant lawns when one of the new arrivals fell in beside him. Tam recognized the man as one of the village boys who’d been recruited by the sheriff these past five years. Merk was born in one of the Blessed Years—too young to be target when the goblins last came, too old to be vulnerable this time.

“Tam! Stay strong!”

“Can you hear them, Merk?”

“They sound weak and far away to me, but there’s a ... thing ... in the militia where if you’ve not fought off goblins, you’re weak. I’m glad a possessed came our way. It gives me a chance to prove myself.”

He grinned ruefully, and Tam changed the subject.

“Have you heard people question the way of things, Merk? Meg said…”

“I hear lots of questions, and no answers. If any of us could read the old language, things might be different, maybe someone smart like Orla could sneak into the Library, learn something that’s not just about the day-to-day. But we can’t.”

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15

Gray

"Goblin Star"

Tam searched for the right words: “It’s just that nobody seems curious about why we’re here.”

Merk smiled. “Most people aren’t curious or rebellious, Tam. I reckon it’s just in our natures.”

“Well I am.”

“And you best watch that doesn’t get you into trouble. If you want to know what I think, it’s that the Lords and Ladies didn’t know goblins plagued this place, and when they found out, they decided to go elsewhere.”

Tam changed tack. “So, the possessed. How dangerous is he?”

“Less dangerous than the person whose body he stole the sheriff says. For the first few days, a possessed has few of the memories or skills of the person they displaced. It’s why they can’t talk. And that’s mercy as their words are said to have the ability to command.”

Tam fought back an assault from his goblins that made his vision blur. The berries were fading, but he was wary of taking more and dulling his perception. He groaned.

Magna heard and shouted back, “You need to learn not just to be picking up what other people are giving you, but… Let me show you…”

Tam felt an extra pressure in his head. But this one was gentle unlike the goblins.

Tam felt Magna looking out of his eyes for a moment. Then the sheriff was cursing, and he was left with the goblins.

“Lad, these are bad ones!” she said. “My apologies for the intrusion. But once clear, you and I will talk.”

She upped the pace, and the riders streamed along behind her.

The party reined in at the base of a hill, and Magna and half of the party continued on foot to the top. A few sheep glared before ceding the high ground, and bees and razorwings performed aerobatics. Tam knew the spot. According to the stories, the domed mound contained the giant tools the gods had used to shape Emain Ablach. Tam thought that unlikely, but the top commanded views of the estates, across the river to the distant escarpment that marked the eastern edge of the fiefdom. To the west, farmland and clumps of blue-green feather trees mixed in with oak and redwood. He often came here to read the movement of the flying things and get a sense of the weather.

“Why here?” he asked the sheriff.

“How do you think we might find a lone man in all this country, Tam? We have scouts out, and trackers followed him to the edge of the castle lands, but after that …” Magna shrugged. “We need to use more specialized ways.”

At that, she, Merk and three of the militia sat down, and blank expressions stole over their faces. Tam could sense Magna’s presence like a breeze, and Merk’s strong Hybrid Fiction April 2020

16

Gray

"Goblin Star"

thoughts. At that light pressure, he felt his chief tormentor go berserk. He took himself downslope, away from the sheriff and her sensitives. His own goblins were fighting among themselves, the words lost to Tam, but their desperation so intense he could hardly stand it. The weakest was pleading with the strongest. The struggle intensified until the strongest gave a push so great that Tam thought his skull might split and the other was gone.

“Don’t just react, lad. Take the fight to them,” Magna called down.

Tam looked up and saw the party picking their way down.

“What do you mean,” he asked weakly.

“Push back. Like when I was in your mind, but not so light. Dig into them. Try to get into their heads. It’s impossible, of course, but attempting it puts them on the defensive.”

“I’ll try. Are we finished here?”

“We picked up the mental taint of the possessed, headed past the forest, towards the back of the castle.”

Tam frowned. “If he’s not from here he won’t know to go around the maze. Anyone approaching the castle from the back thinks they see a path, but it’s an illusion. You can wander in there for weeks.”

“Can we leave him and seal the exits?” a militia woman asked.

“There will be workers in there,” Tam offered. “Never less than a dozen.”

Magna clicked her tongue. “If he runs into them and they’re ripe, that’s more hosts.”

“There’s only one other way out, so if you send people around, we can maybe ambush him there,” Merk offered. “Unless there’s any secret ways?”

“We train to stage hunts in there, and there are the two main gates, plus a staging area on the west, and a rescue gate on the east.”

The maze was three miles away, and Magna soon had them at a gallop. Tam could ride, but the others seemed to flow along while his progress was clumsy. He came close to falling when the horses and riders followed Merk off the path, up a slope and over the hedge at the top.

The towers of the castle were a mile away. In between, a leafy cliff curved to both sides. An arch of branches suggested an inviting path. They came to a halt.

The sheriff dispatched militia to left and right.

“Lead us in,” she directed Tam. “We’ll try and get a sense of him, but you need to show us the path. If you face him, don’t hesitate to use that fancy toy you have on your back.”

Tam nodded, feeling the goblins in his head skitter. He concentrated, tried to do what Magna had directed, focused on the smaller one, and for a moment, felt

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17

Gray

"Goblin Star"

something. Heard something. A metallic pounding. A chorus of voices. Then the link broke, and he was back on his horse. Merk was looking at him.

“Tam, I was just saying to the sheriff, can the horses come in?”

“Yes. But closer to the center, we may need to dismount. It narrows a lot.”

Magna made a face. “Be ready. Merk, you stay in the middle, focus on the possessed.”

Silence reigned inside the maze. The hedges were a dozen times the height of a person, and the entwined bushes presented a wall of dense dark green vines.

This close to the edge, the passages were wide enough for two horses. The grass was cropped and soft, hardly a fallen leaf marring the perfection. Here and there were rabbit droppings already being carried off by a species of ants found only in castle gardens.

They didn’t need a mental fix. Several of the militia were first-rate trackers and the grass was pressed flat where someone running had stopped and turned occasionally.

After a while, these grew were fainter as if their quarry was taking more care. There was something, Tam knew, about the depths of the maze, where even the most boisterous person tended to feel cowed, then nervous. Finally, you would stick to the sides, brushing against the hedge for comfort. Not this possessed, though; the man was moving dead center. And with no false turns. Tam told Magna who turned in her saddle.

“Maybe there are maps after all.”

The corridors narrowed. Even the militia seemed edgy, their horses snickering as they went single file. Tam paid scant attention. His chief tormentor was trying to use his voice to shout something. He came close to being unseated when the column halted in front of a moss-covered statue. If the stone-carved beast had ever existed on Emain Ablach, no one could recall when or what it was called. The dominant predators were long feathered reptiles that were half as long again as this proud, big-maned creature.

Tam held his breath, waiting for Mark and Magna to confirm the possessed’s position. He knew before they did so that the direction they’d indicate was the farthest of the four corridor before them. Each corridor was identical in appearance, but the fourth led to the heart of the labyrinth. Tam said as much.

“What’s in the center?” asked Magna.

“Just a pond,” Tam said.

“Tether the horses,” Magna said. “They’ll be a hindrance in this press.”

The militia heard the screams before they arrived at the maze’s heart. Six bodies were scattered around the edge of a circular pool with a statue in the center, gardening tools abandoned. Abruptly, one of the six bodies staggered to its feet. He was a solid man, bleeding from the head. His stance was odd, and he snarled and fled, stumbling through the nearest exit into the maze.

“The possessed!” Magna shouted. “Bring him down!”

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Gray

"Goblin Star"

“That’s not the one we’re hunting!” Tam yelled. “He’s in estate clothes!”

“So this is a new possessed!” Magna grunted. “Gurty!” she turned to a stocky militia woman. “Take three troops and get him! The rest of you, focus!”

Tam felt a tickle in his head.

“Nothing!” Magna swore after a few seconds.

“Maybe he was wounded and passed out?” Merk suggested.

Magna looked around the heart of the maze—at the way they came in and the opposite one her militia had pursued the new possessed into. At the two other dark gateways.

“Divide into pairs,” she ordered, pointing. “One for each path!”

A few seconds later, the remaining half dozen soldiers looked around cautiously. The hedges had swallowed the others.

“Concentrate on the squads, now,” the sheriff ordered. “When they find one or the other, we need to move fast.”

Tam paced the clearing. He bent down by body of a gardener he had known and felt a breeze on his face. A dank smell filled his nostrils. A ripple was dying on the pond’s surface. And the statue in the center was angled off true. Not much, but he’d gazed at the green metal half-woman, half-fish so often that he knew every weathered curve. Now it felt wrong.

Tam walked to the edge, noticing a black wedge under one of the statue’s corners.

He sidestepped until he was opposite the statue and dabbed at the water with his boot toe. Just under the surface was a stepping stone. A hidden way for workers to reach the statue and clean it, Tam assumed. He stepped out. There were six stones in all. Seconds later, he was looking down at the hand-wide gap. The slab was scraped clean of moss where the base had pivoted.

The flow of air was less than the little gust he’d felt earlier: something down there had been opened and closed again.

“Here!” Tam shouted, and Magna turned.

“What you got?” she asked, striding to the edge. “And how come you’re not wet?”

Tam braced his shoulder against the statue’s base and pushed. The statue ground to the side.

“There,” Tam said, pointing to the start of the hidden steps.

“You said there wasn’t another way out,” Magna remarked as she stepped across the rocks Tam pointed to.

“We’ve never had guests in the maze, sheriff. It’s a fair bet that this tunnel goes to the castle.”

“We best get moving,” Magna said. “You know your way round in there, lad? Merk?”

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Gray

"Goblin Star"

Both men shook their heads.

Magna gripped her spear and descended into the dark. Merk, Tam, and the remaining two militia followed.

The passageway leveled out. The stone blocks that lined the narrow tunnel gave off a faint glow.

“One set of footprints,” Magna said as the party squelched through moss. “It’s our man.”

“Can’t sense him,” Merk said.

“He must have put thick stone between him and us.”

A while after, the tunnel began to slope up. Soon, they were at the foot of a staircase.

Without pause, Magna rushed up the stairs and through a trapdoor, catching the hatch before it had a chance to clatter on the floor.

Tam was last up. He had never been beyond the outer courtyard of the castle. The room wasn’t large, but the vaulted ceiling and the multi-hued light streaming down through colored glass slits impressed him.

“When you’re ready,” Magna said caustically, and Tam reddened and unslung his crossbow when he saw the others with lowered spears or notched bows. He cocked it, drew a steel-tipped bolt from the sling and nocked it, all quickly and silently, earning a nod of approval from the sheriff.

“Find him,” Magna murmured, and Merk closed his eyes.

“This way,” the sheriff ordered after several seconds, sprinting for the staircase at the end of the chamber. They raced through corridors lined with tapestries showing strange beasts and unfamiliar landscapes. Once, they ran through a hall bigger than the village square with tiered benches on two sides and two cloth-draped high chairs on a dais on one of the others. Tam had often imagined how it would feel to be in the castle, had thought it might be grand, but instead it felt dead.

“You will deny them entry!”

The sudden voice boomed. They ran towards it, up a carpeted staircase. At the top, high doors were closing, being pushed from inside from inside by panicked castle staff.

Merk hit one with a shoulder as Magna and the others bowled through.

Tam followed at a slower pace. All his life he had heard of the throne room. It was where the king and queen would rule. Those servants who were allowed in bragged of its magnificence. The reality was anti-climactic.

The throne room was vast with high windows from which golden light streamed onto a gleaming red stone floor to capture two silver chairs perfectly. But the gaping fireplace was unlit; the room devoid of joy. A clot of scared servants had retreated and were cowering before the throne. Before its occupant. Who didn’t look very Lordly.

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20

Gray

"Goblin Star"

The possessed was not from the castle lands. He was blond, and his clothes were ragged. Despite this, he lounged as if he belonged there: one leg thrown over the arm, head back, arrogant. Tam had a sick feeling in his gut while in his head the goblins howled.

Sheriff Magna wasted no time. She’d used the butt of her spear to fend off the servants, and now she reversed the grip, cocked her arm to throw it.

“Stop!” the possessed demanded in awkward commonspeak. Magna staggered, and inexplicably, didn’t cast the spear. Merk, too, froze. Then Tam felt his insides clench, his feet slow.

“Kneel, all of you! And be silent!” the figure demanded. Tam felt his demons try to seize control of his voice, knew they were trying to greet the man on the throne.

In front of him, Magna and Merk were dropping to their knees, weapons clattering to the floor.

“Goblin!” Magna hissed through gritted teeth, and the possessed giggled. “‘Goblin?’ How dare you! Who do you think made you so perfectly! Why do you think I ran this body all the way here to my throne room? Why do you think you are alive? I planned and designed all of this! Down to the smallest detail! I am your king!”

The figure on the throne looked around eagerly, fixed his eyes on Tam. “This vessel is better than my own wretched body, but you, you will be better still! I’ll give this secondrate shell to another. Come closer, boy!”

Tam tried to refuse, but his feet betrayed him. The possessed continued ranting.

“Oh, you’ll all obey. It’s what you were created for!” A confused look stole over the puffy face. “It wasn’t meant to take so long. There was an accident! The ship burned! It drifts, slowly dying, seldom close enough, and you have grown resistant.”

Tam felt as if he was drowning in his own head. The goblins were fighting to get the attention of the possessed on the throne. Tam clutched at the only option. He focused on the strongest attacker and pushed, hoping to distract it. He expected terrible resistance, but to his astonishment, fell through.

Tam was in a cramped gray tunnel. He could taste the chill metallic air. And he weighed less. Looking down, he saw he was spindly, clad in gray overalls. He’d become a goblin.

There were hundreds of grimy glass beds in rows, shaped like the clams. Half were open and empty. The walls were covered in windows, many blank but others depicting shifting scenes. One was of a great empty hall with frost-rimed machines of unknown purpose drifting through the air. Another showed tunnels, blackened and twisted.

Then he heard the voices, crashing like a wave. Tam knew his real body in the castle was not his to command, but that this one would respond. He turned, and saw other goblins in the clam beds, was repulsed by their pallid, slack faces under hairless scalps.

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21

Gray

"Goblin Star"

He moved a thin hand to brush something from his face and felt a spiderweb that led to a helmet on his own head. The threads led to one of the windows. He stared at it, seeing what his real body was seeing back in the castle.

A voice behind him snapped, “You’re nearly in! You must take the host body!”

Tam recoiled, slamming back into his own body. He was close to the throne, could see spittle flecking the lips of the possessed, but he couldn’t hear for the roaring in his ears. To his surprise, he was in control of his own body again. But even as he noted realized this, he regained some hearing, heard the man ranting, and felt his limbs grow sluggish.

With the last of his own volition, Tam raised his primed crossbow and fired. He couldn’t see if he’d aimed properly, and the possessed’s scream of “Stop!” was like a physical blow. Tam saw the floor rush up. Felt his nose break on the polished stone.

He managed to sit, ignoring the blood and pain. His bolt had struck the possessed, pinning him through a shoulder. The man’s mouth was gaping. Magna and Merk stalked forward, spears raised.

“You even utter one word, my ‘lord,’” Magna hissed, then turned as the doors opened. Twisting his head, Tam saw Mayor Finn and the flask man. The fellow was dressed in the dark clothes of the trade, and his coat clinked with glass tubes.

“We got one of your lords right here, Mayor,” said Magna with venom.

The words seemed to rouse the possessed, and he started rambling. Tam felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise, and saw the others stiffen, and Finn jump. Magna prodded him in the other shoulder with her spear, and he felt silent once more.

The flask man pulled a tube from his coat. The end was a metal cap, heavy and inset with crystals.

He touched some places around the cap, and it glowed faintly. At that, the possessed twitched and his eyes flew open. He tried to jerk away, squealing as the bolt in his shoulder prevented it.

“That’s an AI storage tube! You can’t use it on a person! There’s no way to communicate! You can’t put me in there!”

The flask man stepped close. “I am going to extract you, into this flask that the founders of my order were given by a god.”

“That was no god! She was a traitor! She sided with you, the vessels, instead of us!”

The possessed tried to gather a breath, but the flask man began murmuring. Tam felt a stir in his own head.

There was a mental wrench and a shriek. The glass darkened, and the room was quiet. The flask man slid the tube into his coat.

“What do you do with them?” Magna asked.

“We store them at the bottom a cold, dark lake, forever,” the man said simply.

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Gray

"Goblin Star"

As he turned to go, the sheriff looked Tam’s way. “How did you break that goblin’s spell, Tam?” she asked.

Tam thought hard before explaining, “The goblin let slip that the fabric of this place—of all the great houses—lets them command us. We need to seal every castle and palace. Forever.”

Finn protested, “Then Lords and Ladies will never be able to come!”

Again, Tam paused. “I think they’ve been trying to come for a long time,” he said.

“But they’re not our betters.

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Hybrid Fiction April 2020

ACCOUNTABILITY

By Gareth D. Jones The counting never stops. I count when I'm in the shower. I count when I'm at work. I count when I'm brushing my teeth and eating breakfast and getting dressed and walking down the street. I go to bed at 315,360,019 and wake up at 315,387,245. It's not me that's counting, at least not consciously. It's always going on in the back of my mind. I don't recite the numbers— each number would take more than a second at this point in my life, and I would be totally lost.

It's just there, in the background, marking time, keeping track, logging the events of my life.

It started when I was twenty-two. Not exactly twenty-two, but during my twenty-third year.

One. There was no zero. I started counting one day and who starts counting with a zero? Two, three, four. I wasn't doing anything at the time. Just sitting on a bench, waiting, watching the autumn leaves swirl across the pavement. I got to four-hundred-twenty-six before Sioned appeared, emerging from the council offices where she worked. Wrapped in a blue coat, hair fluttering freely about her face. My girlfriend. I carried on counting as she crossed the road. At four-hundred-thirty-one she smiled and waved at me. At four-hundred-thirty-five a moped ploughed into her and snatched her handbag. At four-hundred-thirty-seven I was on my feet and she was hitting the floor, hard. The ambulance arrived at seven-hundred-twelve.

The moped driver was convicted of manslaughter at 33,696,885. He smirked as he was taken down.  My office is on the fourteenth floor. It doesn't matter what I do on my office, really. All offices are basically the same: phone calls, emails, reports, printing and scanning and budgets.

Grey desks, beige walls, blue chairs and re-usable cups. I get in the lift at 315,387,590, wait for the door to close. Press the button for the fourteenth floor just so and wait for the door to slide open again. Beige walls, grey desks, blue chairs. Someone who arrived accidentally would think nothing of it, save for the tinkling bells and alpine yodelling music, the smell of spicy Turkish salgam juice and the tall, thin man in dungarees and bare feet.

"Fletcher," he acknowledges, nodding his head slightly as he passes.

"Emil," I reply. I don't know what he does, but as I said, all office jobs are the same, so it hardly matters.

I amble along the corridor to what was an open-plan office in normal Chelmsford, regular Hybrid Fiction April 2020

Jones

"Accountability"

Chelmsford, mundane Chelmsford as the inhabitants of this Chelmsford like to call it. Here the open-plan office is strewn with armchairs, chaise-longue, and rugs in an eye-watering mishmash of styles. Retro-chic, renaissance, and functional chairs. Rugs that claimed to be from Persia, Iran, and the local big-name furniture store. People drinking tea of a dozen varieties: hot and sweet, fruity and flavourless, thick and syrupy, strong and buildery. Coffee, in all its glorious, poncy variegation. Spicy drinks far less well known in mundane Chelmsford. Clothing that could grace any marketplace or bazaar in the world, and equally could have been paraded down a busy street in Central London. There is no theme to the room, no over-arching aesthetic. Just people, an eclectic, eccentric gathering of people who do not work in my office building in Chelmsford.

I make myself a cup of tea and slouch into a comfortable-looking, overly-cushioned armchair.

Better than a tea-break, better than a change of scene, this is a complete change of world.

Things that matter in the mundane world don't matter here. I'm sure people have worries and stress and pressures, but they're not the same worries and pressures and stress. And I have none. I just sit and sip. Chat occasionally to the Swiss chalet owner in his impeccable English or the Brazilian farmer in his broken English or the Mongolian yak herder in his non-existent English. I don't know how any of them get here. The topology of this version of Chelmsford is far too complicated for me to understand. I only know that taking the stairwell down one floor leads to the ground floor and taking the stairwell up one floor leads to Epping Underground station. I'm happy to relax a while before returning to my mundane, indescribable office job.  I sat uncomfortably upright, perched on the edge of a large, black, leather chair, facing the psychologist who smiled reassuringly, and yet expectantly, at me from behind black-rimmed glasses. 40,174,442. She had explained my compulsive counting to be a consequence of trauma.

She had expected it to stop after the conviction.

I licked my lips and wondered how soon I could get away without seeming like I didn't want to be there.

She smoothed the folds of her skirt over her knee. A kind of forest-green, tie-die-butrespectable affair that swished somewhere down by her ankles. Crisp white blouse to emphasize the respectability.

"Do you feel like you want to stop counting?"

I shrugged minutely.

"Do you think he's counting?" I asked. "Counting the days on his cell wall?" Counting did not make me think of the moped driver. In my mind the two were not connected. But she thought they must be. I liked to humour her. I think she knew I was humouring her.

"Do you want him to be counting?"

She always referred to him as “him,” or sometimes “the moped rider.” I think she was trying to depersonalise him.

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"Accountability"

32

The moped rider: Devin Brookes, age sixteen, known to police. No driver's licence, no insurance. Moped 'borrowed' from a cousin. Previously arrested for shoplifting and public order offences but freed without charge. Cautioned for possession of cannabis. Associated with several other teenagers of similarly dubious credentials.

He was still personal to me.

"I don't want him to be doing anything," I said.  After work I take a detour via the retirement home where my grandmother now lives.

315,415,111 as I enter the building. Code to get through the main entrance. Another code to get into the corridor. Turn right, turn left. Up one floor via the stairwell. An extra twist of the stairs and through another door that the residents and staff will never see, and I'm on another floor that does not look like an institution for the bored and isn't decorated with WWII era posters. It looks, in fact, rather like the room where I like to go for tea. It looks nothing like that room in fact, but it contains such an eclectic mix of décor and furniture, people and artefacts, that it is impossible to define in terms of style.

"Darling!" says grandma, in her typically exuberant style as I enter the lounge. She moved out of the mundane world permanently after she retired and after the grandchildren left childhood behind. She rises from a huge armchair decorated in some kind of oriental, peacocktail pattern. She bustles about, making tea in the grand style: tea leaves, strainer, china cups and saucers, silver tray, sugar cubes, little tongs for picking up the sugar cubes. Rich tea biscuits.

I settle down and tell her about the boring trivialities of my day in the council office.

I've thought about moving here permanently, but it's too relaxed, nothing that needs to be done. I'm too restless, too much on my mind. I need to keep busy. I have my own responsibilities now. There's no equivalent of Chelmsford town council. No equivalent of any government as far as I can tell. The non-existent borders and thoroughly mixed population mean that nobody has jurisdiction anywhere. There are no laws and very little opportunity to commit crime. Antisocial behaviour is dealt with by whomever is on hand. No police, no courts, nobody to appeal to or “rights” to hide behind. Justice is swift and mostly just. Grandma loves it here. I say goodnight at 315,418,098 and head home.  They let him out after a quarter billion seconds. Only manslaughter; first conviction; good behaviour. I find the latter hard to believe. I think about revenge. Of course I do. Devin Brookes.

Hooligan, reformed, apparently. He went on to a life of benefits and unprovable petty crime.

Sioned went on to nothing.

What could revenge accomplish? What would it consist of? Mow him down with a moped?

Taste of his own medicine. I'd end up in prison, he'd end up on even more benefits.

I chose something less direct.  Hybrid Fiction April 2020

Jones

"Accountability"

33

Devin Brookes arrived at my office block, and I got a call from reception at 255,441,882. I went downstairs to meet him. He had no idea who I was. I'd sent a letter on council headed paper: review of benefits, show up for the interview or all money will be cancelled, universal credit implementation, blah blah blah. Somewhat to my surprise, there he was.

I took him to the other fourteenth floor. If he was surprised by the trio of Buddhist monks, the yak grazing on potted plants, and the moustachioed Mexican, he didn't show it. Probably his first time in a council office building.

"Lift's

broken," I explained

as

we took the stairs up another floor.

I offered no explanation as we emerged from a cleaning closet onto the platform at Epping Underground Station. I have no idea if he'd ever been there before or knew that Epping Underground Station is actually above ground. Across the tracks and through the ticket office, a pair of horses were tethered. A train pulled in from the Ongar direction, decorated in the livery of

Indian Railways.

Devin Brookes was still drawing a breath when I bundled him onto the train. The carriage was empty save for an elderly woman with a spinning wheel.

"I don't‌" Devin looked out of the windows at the dense, snowy forest. "What the‌" I smiled.

"I know," I said.

The train pulled into Antwerp Central. I tugged Devin Brookes after me and was relieved to see the stern visage of a large man known as Arkady.

"This him?" he asked.

I nodded, and he rolled his shoulder, cricked his neck.

"Come," he said, grabbing Devin Brooked by the arm.

"What? Where?" He struggled briefly, until Arkady pinned him to the wall by both arms.

"No argue. Just come."

"Where are we going?" Devin appealed to me.

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"I don't know," I said. "I don't care."

Arkady dragged him away down a corridor which I'd heard led to a chalet in the Swiss Alps.

The Swiss man I'd met back in Chelmsford said he often popped over to Mongolia from there.

After that, I had no idea what led to where.

Devin Brookes would not be coming back.  "How was your grandma?"

I step through the door at 315,418,962. Home. Warmth. Normal, plain, décor. Smell of regular British food cooking. Whiff of perfume as I hug Cerys.

"Fine," I say. She's always fine.

"Ten years tomorrow."

I know. Of course I know. Ten years since Sioned finally succumbed to her injuries. Cerys was there too. Sioned's younger sister. People feel awkward when they find that out. It was a bit awkward, for a while.

"I wonder what happened to him?" Cerys says.

I've heard a couple of reports: begging in Nova Scotia, labouring on a farm in Bangalore.

Never back in the mundane world. Unlikely to get a chance at a life of crime. It might not be justice, but what is?

"As long as he's not here, I don't care."

Cerys looks up at me.

"As long as we're both here," she says.

I look out the window and wonder what my street looks like in that other world. I have no idea how to get to the rest of that other Chelmsford. Probably full of horse-drawn carriages, tuktuks, and French street performers.

"I've nowhere I'd rather be," I say. And it's true.

315,419,034.

Hybrid Fiction April 2020

SHORT HANDED

By Harold Gross

“Dance! Dance! Dance!”

The chant and laughter echoed off smooth, curved, alien walls, eventually slipping out the narrow windows high above the cavorting crew. Flames in the pit below illuminated the central chamber, the base of the walls serving as backdrop for a twisted shadow-puppet show of the survey team’s actions.

Near the limits of the firelight, Jackson moved to the beat of hands and feet drumming on the metal boxes and equipment that had been brought closer to the fire for use in the “ceremony.”

“Dance! Dance! Dance!” Came again from the crew. The noise was muffled in Jackson’s brain by the alcohol; a distillation from the leftovers of their rations over many weeks thanks to a contrivance by their intrepid geologist. It wasn’t good, but it got the job done.

He took a hesitant step into the center and eyes closed, attempted to match the pictograms in the book. Several steps into the sequence, he stopped and ran back to the sealed case at the edge of the circle. Male and female shouts followed him.

“Aw, c’mon!”

“Really?”

“Where’s the brain now?”

“C’mon, science boy, show us what you got! I’ve got 20 on the magic!”

A constant stream of cold air fell on his shoulders from the slit windows above the case, but the alcoholic haze continued its work, numbing the cold. He giggled a little as he looked at the book laid out before him; its pictograms and the superstition it elicited. Magic indeed. He’d prove his point and have some fun doing it.

Manipulating the robotic arms inside the case, he turned the pages of the unearthed Artencona back and forth under the soft research light within the box. When he was sure he’d memorized the movements fully this time, he returned to the gathering of his impatient crewmates.

He strode back to the edge of the smoldering campbricks, accepting another swig of Hybrid Fiction April 2020

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homemade drink as he went. He choked back a cough, having taken enough ribbing from the crew already. It wasn’t easy being the youngest scientist in a crew of lifers, especially when he was the one who’d made the biggest breakthrough. But he was willing to work to get them to accept him, even if it meant recreating (as best he could) this native dance purely for their entertainment. He’d weathered worse in his life.

The chant began again, quietly and then building in volume.

“Dance! Dance! Dance!”

Drunken giggles of joy and embarrassment escaped his lips as he began the motions he’d memorized. Laughter joined the cacophony of sound that swirled with the smell of alcohol, sweat, and the energy of the sense of achievement they all felt.

Irreverent, yes. But after an eight-year search they’d earned a moment.

He pictured the glyphs in his mind. He flailed his arms and legs to approximate alien joints.

He leapt. He shouted with joy, releasing the stress and effort of years searching, first in libraries and basements and then in ruins and across planets. With a final grand swing and leap, he pointed to the fire in the pit with a grand flourish… and a great sucking sound filled his senses as the fire burned white hot for a moment.

He fell through the brightness. The stone ground met his head with a hollow thump, filling his mouth with the taste of metal a moment before everything stopped.  He woke to the sharp bite of smoke in his nose, an aching head, and slightly nauseated feel from the residual drink. Or concussion? Even with the smoke, the air seemed empty, aseptic.

Sharp, like the air before the snowstorms where he grew up. He lay there for a moment as he forced himself to wake-up against his stomach’s better judgement.

Low flames in the pit continued a dim version of the earlier shadow play for his gummy eyes.

No sound stirred the air other than the soft crackle of the campbricks in pit.

Flexing his fingers, he felt the rough floor and then the quick bite of something sharp. He pulled back his hand and extracted small shard of broken plastic from his finger, watching a bead of blood form in its place. He squeezed out more blood to flush anything stuck inside.

Then he looked around, unconsciously sucking on the wound while he waited for it to stop bleeding.

The room was lit only by fire and moonlight, and it was silent. Off to his left, he could see the viewing cabinet for the Artencona was shattered. The trail of the sundered plastic case stretched from the wreckage to where he lay. The Artencona itself had slid almost to him across the fractured bits of plastic.

There was a low whimper that, for a moment, he didn’t recognize as his own voice. With aching elbows and hands, he tried to leverage himself up to reach the book and access the damage. Instead he fell flat, his arm outstretched.

Beneath his palm he felt the rough, embossed hide of the book. But below his navel, Hybrid Fiction April 2020

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38

nothing. Not even the burning cold he felt in his chest and arms from the frigid air.

This can’t be good. The thought sprinted through his confused brain.

He rolled carefully onto his side, momentarily leaving the Artencona to its own fate, and tried to see around the room.

“What happened,” he croaked out.

No one answered.

Cold from the ancient, open windows poured in, sluicing through his veins and mind, clearing the last of the alcohol fog. He could still only move his hands and arms. He tried the flashlight tethered to his belt, but it was dead, though it seemed in one piece.

“Hello?” His voice echoed emptily. Where was the team? A joke’s a joke, but they wouldn’t

have left him, would they? He turned his head and strained to see the rest of the room, but the movement set off a fresh wave of nausea. He lay back, letting it fade and allowed his training to kick in. He took a breath to tamp the rising panic and considered his options. First, he needed to get a bit more vertical. Staring at the ceiling wasn’t particularly helpful.

With effort, he pulled himself and the Artencona to the nearby wall and propped himself up, numbed legs out in front of him. Time to assess. What did we trigger? Had some long-dead bit of tech gone off from their presence? Or a broken bit of machinery misfire? They had found no indication of electronics or other energies in any of their surveys. He’d only been waving around his arms and making sounds, nothing in the Artencona implied a mechanical effect. It was a

religious book, a book of ceremony… A book of sp…!

He couldn’t finish the thought and not feel foolish.

Maybe they had all passed out too. Passed out? No, that isn’t quite right either, is it? The throbbing lump on the back of his head confirmed the memory of his fall. But where was everyone?

Back to wall, tome beside him, he surveyed the chamber. Darkness with darker areas of black resolved in the dying firelight.

“Hello?” he called again, weakly. Some of the shadows seemed recognizable, but his mind refused to put names to the shapes. He sat for a moment listening for breathing, for the beep of the locator just the other side of the fire where their supplies had been piled, for a moan.

Nothing came.

In the near silence, the creeping cold continued to descend even as the planet’s moon rose.

An invisible icy river flowed down through the slit windows along with the bluish moonlight.

Even through his protective gear, it continued to soak bone-ward little by little.

“OK, we’re on our own for now. Time to think. First question, how bad is it?” Poking along his torso he only reached his waist before he couldn’t feel the pressure. Below that was solid. Not just numb. Frozen solid. Several quiet, incredulous curses escaped his lips.

He looked around the room again. What had happened? Even the lights on the transponder and power packs were dark, like his flashlight. Without power or a fire, which was slowly dying, Hybrid Fiction April 2020

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he didn’t have a chance.

“First order of business, then: fuel.”

The Cona structure was on a rocky outcrop with no vegetation within miles. Even if he could drag himself out and back, the only thing he could find out there was ice. He’d have to find something here. There were additional campbricks in the supplies somewhere, but that was a limited supply. The rest was on the ship, at least a two day hike when he was ambulatory. And, regardless, it took multiple people to work the ropes to get back down to the valley floor.

He scanned the area within reach, and then beyond. The Artencona. His notes. Inflammable, hi-tech cold weather gear. Metal boxes. Frozen crew.

Frozen crew…

He closed his eyes again a moment to fight the bile that threatened.

How he kept the horror that clawed at the back of his brain from gaining purchase was beyond him. Shock? Small steps, he thought. One issue at a time.

Even if he used what little there was for fuel, what would it gain him? Minutes? Hours? Was he even going to survive the damage to his body? Home base would have had a fix on them before the transponder stopped working. Though Home base was a moon away, they would know something had happened. He only had to survive a few days at most.

But what had happened?

A scent of flowers rose from the book cover beside him. It was that aspect of the book, in part, that had help him discover it behind the fallen stones as their heaters had warmed the chamber. The hide would give off the odd scent in even the dimmest heat before they had protected it in the now-shattered case.

He lifted the heavy book to his lap and inspected it for obvious damage from the fall and shards on the floor. There was nothing apparent, though he could not be sure that the binding hadn’t been hurt.

In his lap, and leaning against his frozen legs, the Artencona felt more propped up rather than held. While there was no logical reason to believe it, he was sure the answer was in the book or connected to it. After all he was performing a ceremony from its pages before…

Before him he saw the tall, thin form of a Cona, similar to those he’d seen in the wall carvings and embossed on and etched within the Artencona itself. He watched as it went through the motions as he had: hands describing, feet leaping, replaying the actions, trying to find meaning in the thrum of the voices and drums as the smoke thickened and the energy built…

He shook his head to clear it of unhelpful thoughts. He wasn’t sure what had gotten him into this, but he was sure study and science could get him out—or at least explain what had happened. And if he was to die, he still could have his findings complete. A vision of his frozen, dead form, notes clutched in his hand, being found by the rescue party both terrified and then amused him… then terrified him again.

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He put down the Artencona and pulled himself over to his notes that scattered when the protective case had broken. As he moved across the floor, he could feel a clear demarcation where it was freezing on the inside of a curving edge and merely cold on the outside of what he could extrapolate as a large circle that included at least part of where the case had been. That kind of quick freeze could have shattered the plastic, but what might have caused that was still a mystery.

His notebook and the loose pages seemed unaffected. The pen in the spine was likewise fine. A few test strokes proving the ink to be sluggish from the temperature, but not flash-frozen like parts of the room, and parts of himself for that matter. His notebook and pen were another reason

the crew had

poked

fun at him. But

ink

and paper always worked, even without

electricity. He wished he could gloat now, but there was no one at the moment to gloat to.

With considerable effort, he pulled himself painfully over the still hyper-frozen ground, pushing some boxes along the way nearer to the dwindling fire to provide a backrest nearer the light and heat. Absorbing the heat might prove fatal if he began to bleed but doing nothing in the dark by the wall seemed a more pointless choice. Along the way he had to move other, less savory objects, but he refused to look at those too closely in order to keep his emotional zen in place. None of the electronics he encountered worked, and he eventually gave up testing them.

One of the boxes contained the remaining campbricks. But a quick experiment with the frozen blocks proved they no longer had any interest in burning. Something about the freezing had broken down the chemicals in the suspension. After some additional and considerable grunting, dragging, and shifting, he was arranged with his notepad on the ground to his right, near the waning fire, and the Artencona on the ground to his left. He went about reviewing his findings and set about to record additional thoughts and possibilities.

In the dim light he strained to see the glyphs and pictographs that had been pounded into the tome’s cover. If these images were of the creatures that had created this building and book, and not some depiction of spirits, they were bipedal (possibly) but multi-limbed and trilaterally symmetric above the waist. All the Cona in images he’d seen were the same. It made it much less likely that it didn’t depict them as they were. Religious and mythic texts of gods and spirits usually had them relating to their followers or victims, in human history at least, and there were Hybrid Fiction April 2020

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no other creatures drawn or carved anywhere. And what good was that information?

“It’s facts. Facts will help,” he muttered to himself.

He looked outward from the fire to the shapes in the deepening dark around the room that used to have names he knew well. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. Though he wasn’t sure what he was sorry for, other than surviving whatever had happened. Somehow, that didn’t make it less painful.

He looked back to the smoldering bricks with a mix of gratefulness and horror. “I don’t understand…”

The thought and words drifted off into silence again as he envisioned the chamber suddenly filled with Cona and then, just as suddenly, disappear as a sharp pain in his waist closest to the fire suggested that his flesh was thawing.

He gritted his teeth through the pain; he’d survived frostbite more than once before. The pain was a good thing and it would fade eventually. Instead he focused back on the issue at hand: saving his life, saving his friends, if he could, and saving his notes. His legacy.

He carefully opened the Artencona to the page he’d enacted earlier that night. Moonlight through the windows had moved to help expel some of the shadows on the book from the firelight. He examined it again hoping meaning would assert itself. His fingers brushed the pages, enjoying the contact he’d not allowed himself with it earlier in order to protect it. It was smooth and slippery, but still supple. He had no idea what it was made of, but it had withstood bitter temperatures unharmed for at least a millennium, if not more. He suspected his touch would have little, if any effect. He casually tried to brush away a bit of dirt on the page that the moonlight illuminated. The dirt, however, refused to rub off. In fact, when shielded from the moonlight, the mark was not visible.

Something in the dim shape woke up his mind, his intellect. “I couldn’t have been that foolish.” The thought bounced in his brain as he rubbed page harder with his cold-thick fingers to remove what had to be a smudge from the passing years.

The moon continued its ascent, providing light to aid him as the fire died, but only in exchange for more of the heat he needed. As he angled the Artencona to catch the light, more marks appeared on the page. It wasn’t dirt. It wasn’t even a smudge!

He blinked, trying to clear his vision. That pictograph that looked like a Cona lying on its side with a dot above it, that’s where he had been mistaken. It didn’t mean “to provide for” it meant “to take from” a common notation convention for the cultures in this area of space.

“Oh my god,” the words escaped his lips as he understood what had happened.

What he thought was a celebration of fire wasn’t a ceremony. It was a—his brain tripped on the word “spell” and shifted its trajectory—it was an effect that had absorbed all the heat in a particular radius around it and focused it into the bright flash that would have started a fire.

All the heat: from the air, from the floor, from the chemicals in the campbricks, even from his team and half of his own body. He’d only been partially in the sphere when it had gone off. In Hybrid Fiction April 2020

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fact, he’d been in midair. They’d all been laughing in the evening cold, drinking rations as he hopped and twisted trying to approximate the movements of the posited two-legged, threearmed species whose ruins they were excavating.

Maybe he could reverse it? If this really was—again his mind spasmed—an effect, it might be possible to reverse it. He scanned the pages. It might be futile, but for every “effect” there was usually an opposite one. Comparing the pages to one another, he could see similarities.

Reversals? There was no way to know. If there was a way to save everyone, he had to try, but the fire was dying, and he could barely see what was on the page anymore.

He needed heat and light if he was going to make any attempt to survive. He could barely see in the dimming embers.

The pain in his side was nearly blinding now. He thought he could feel partway down his right leg as well.

It all comes down to choices. Choices to live or die. Choices to safeguard his work or live to explain and understand it. Through his life, his peers and crew had been amused by his choice of paper over digital, but it was a good choice from where he lay now.

With a grimace, he tossed years of information, not nearly all of it transcribed to digital, onto the campbricks. Sparks flew up and floated as distant stars above him as the notebooks settled on the smoldering coals. The pages soon began to brown and burn returning light and some heat.

They wouldn’t last long, and alone, they wouldn’t save him or his friends. He needed something more. Something “effective.”

He lifted the Artencona onto his legs and searched for a solution. One recipe for effect implied a fire fed by a non-local source. “Non-local,” he chuckled in a semi-hysterical way.

With heat, he could make water. With water, he might survive long enough. Maybe. If the damage to his legs and torso wasn’t too severe. The pain suggested some hope.

The Cona he’d conjured from his febrile brain moved before him as he interpreted the pictographs. It was like watching a bizarre stop-action vid, but it helped him formulate the actions.

The spell only appeared to require hand movements, no dancing. Spell! How easily that word now seemed to fit in his brain. He had assumed that the acts in the friezes and carvings were technological. That the movements and words were superstition or activation commands.

Maybe that wasn’t the case. They’d not found any machines alive anywhere in this ruin. No energy of any kind that they had been able to measure. His words and dance alone had caused this destruction.

Now, perhaps, his words could save his life. At least save it long enough to tell someone what they’d found on this dead rock of a planet and maybe help his team. Oh, they were going to have a field day with him if he survived this, but at least he’d be alive to feel the barbs… As long as they were aimed above the waist.

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He looked back to the Artencona in his lap and studied the images carefully. It seemed simple enough: wave the right hand thus, the left thus, the right again (this time taking into account a similar “smudge that wasn’t a smudge” above the action), chant these words. There was enough derived language surviving in the sector that he was sure they’d gotten the sounds correct.

An ice sheen had formed upon his lips while considered. Wincing slightly, but using the pain to focus, he cracked it off and greedily licked at the salt and warmth of the blood that flowed from his tortured mouth as he prepared for the chant.

After a calming breath, he began to wave his right hand in circles, while his left described a square, then his right hand changed to a serpentine motion. He chanted the words spraying, unnoticed, a fine mist of blood across the book balanced on his dead legs. His chant rose in fervor and a tingling feeling, the same he’d felt the first time but had attributed to excitement and liquor, built in the part of his spine that wasn’t frozen. He repeated the cycle of gestures and sound. He mentally urged the universe to provide for him the heat he needed. As the tingling peaked, he focused the energy back at the dying fire with a final shout and watched as a great blaze of red and purple flames appeared, illuminating the carnage around him clearly.

Eyes wide, he let loose a madman’s laugh staring upon the fire and the bodies of his companions. He held his hands out to the flames to soak in the warmth. A moment passed. No heat arrived from the fire. None. It flickered, danced, crackled, but it wasn’t producing heat. It was a simulacrum, a doppelganger of a fire, not a nourishing flame.

He looked back to the Artencona in confusion, scraping away the frozen bits of blood. He stared in the increased light and began to shake. What had he done wrong now? It had only required hands and voice. He was sure he’d translated properly this time.

The cold ate at his concentration as he stared in the shimmering, useless light. The glyphs danced, and the moonlight continued its trek down the wall and across the floor before passing past the edge of the high window.

The Cona returned before him, arms dancing, feet pounding. Right hand, circles. Left hand, square. Third hand, serpentine…

The laugh that had overwhelmed him before came back as understanding dawned. Deadly, clear understanding. It wasn’t just his right hand that was required, but his other right hand as well. The spell required three hands simultaneously to complete, not sequentially.

He stared mournfully at the miracle he’d created. A dancing image that would have shattered the world as he knew it. Beneath the ghost of fire he’d created, a single campbrick was slowly dying. It continued to smolder; a true heart to the fake image surrounding it.

Resting before him was a key to the universe. An imperfect and confusing key, to be sure, but a key nonetheless. The greatest find of the last century, if not the last several. Magic! Well, he was sure there was something scientific to back it… resonances or… well, something.

The Cona in his vision continued to dance and chant. Before vanishing utterly, it looked directly at him. He was sure his imagination was chiding him with a look of disdain.

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How many more mistakes were still to come? Was the death across this planet a message?

The shadows around the room spoke to him only in silence. And he still had to survive to bring the message home. His paper notes were gone now. It would seem like he’d gone mad rather than made a discovery.

With gritted teeth, cringing as he violated every bit of training he’d ever had, he took the pen and tried to annotate a warning on the pages of the Artencona.

The ink refused to hold on the slippery surface. In desperation, he tried to write on his own skin. He hands, frozen legs, anything that they might find should he not survive, which seemed more likely by the minute. His shaking hands kept smearing the ink as his coordination failed from shock and the deepening cold.

He had to survive to deliver the message himself. He had to show them what he’d learned.

But there was nothing left to burn.

His eyes glanced at the book on his lap and back out to the frozen jumble of limbs that were the rest of the expedition. Or maybe this just wasn’t anything the world needed to know about anymore? He could protect them from making the same mistakes.

In his mind, he was sure he heard the sound of the Cona laughing. With joy or derision he was no longer sure, but at least he felt less alone. He had to keep hope. He had to stretch out his time in hope. He wasn’t being selfish, he was being a hero, a protector.

He would leave it to fate. If he survived, he could explain and show everyone. If he didn’t…

Slowly, he tore out the pages of the Artencona and pushed them into the glowing ashes for a few more minutes of miserable, penitent heat.

Hybrid Fiction April 2020

AFTER THE WARDING: PART II One Day after the Solstice, Year of the Century-Warding

By R. Z. Held

Aurea thought that, after the warding had blazed high at her back, holding back the wild magic for another hundred years, the Caretakers assigned to her had carried her out of the desert. She could not be certain—her memories of living and breathing were tangled as if with debris, overshadowed by— 

Once, she’d felt wild magic—a dream of wild magic—as water. A flood. Ask the irrigation canal what it thought of the flood. Ask the irrigation canal where it might wish the water to go.

The canal did not think, did not wish. It directed the water by its nature alone. She, North, took the flood and directed it North-Northwest and North-Northeast and did not think, did not wish.  When the leytrain, with its special blacked-out car for the daylight-blind Sixteen, pulled into Centerpost, Aurea stepped off on her own. The great warding spell had no lasting physical effects, aside from fatigue—and what may have happened to South, she hadn’t heard yet—and her thoughts more or less linked together in the proper manner now. The station was soothing in the familiarity of its adobe walls, the cream color tinged slightly moonlight-white in the brightness of her night vision. She’d traveled through it often enough to visit her family over her year of “training”; although the tracks for Secondpost had a different alignment. The sound was wrong, though. The low rumble of the crowds who had seen them off had become a growling thunderstorm.

A man darted between two of the several people wearing Caretaker white gathered immediately around the platform.

“Aurea?” Her brother searched faces as he jogged past, and Aurea stepped forward from the knot formed of North’s intercardinals and secondaries, coming to meet him where they’d have a little privacy if they kept their voices down.

“Dominic? Is something wrong? I thought you and the rest of the family were going to wait another day or two to travel in, to let the crowds die down.” And well they should, if the roar was anything to go by. Aurea offered him her hands, meaning to step into a hug next, but he seized her, embrace leaving her little room to breathe.

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“Word passed that the warding had killed someone, but not who! Our parents are camped by the leyscribe, waiting for the official written news, but I couldn’t wait. I had to make sure it wasn’t you. I sweet-talked a couple Caretakers into letting me back here.” Ancestors above, Dominic could sweet-talk corn into growing from a sand dune. He pressed his cheek against the side of her head, somewhat crushing the arrangement of black waves Casilda, Northwest, had helped Aurea achieve on the train in anticipation of their arrival procession.

Aurea clung to him anyway. “South did die, then. He didn’t want us to tell anyone.” She’d had a year to adjust to the grief but she’d also had that year to come to know Isidore and his easy sense of fun, and a sharp spike of emotion clotted tears in a mask around her nose.

Dominic jerked back. “You knew?”

“It was his choice. When he stood.” A choice Aurea could not comprehend, no matter how she tried to bend and shape her recalcitrant emotions. But she didn’t need to understand it, she supposed, only respect it, as all of them had done. “The Ancestors told him he’d been born with a heart that was likely too weak to stand the strain of the warding spell. But none of us knew for certain.”

“You didn’t feel it in the spell?”

“It must have been after. The Ancestors were sure he could complete his part. But as for feeling anything…” Aurea wasn’t sure she should say more. She had explained to her brother what it was like to see magic, but she couldn’t be certain he wasn’t prodding at a lingering bruise now. After all, they had always thought he would be one of the Sixteen, except the Ancestors had chosen her instead.

And how could she put the warding into words anyway? 

Nothing but wild magic, nothing but a channel—  “Aurea. It’s time to go.” Dominic smoothed his hands over her shoulders, seemed to notice the mess of her hair for the first time, and helped her with that too. While she’d lost herself in the memory, he seemed to have done the opposite, grounding himself in the task at hand.

The Caretakers were gathering all of the Sixteen—no, fifteen now—from where they’d arrived on the other train platforms. They were marked out by the shimmery, gauzy iridescence of their tunics over sober black pants, but Aurea doubted anyone would even notice the clothes.

Not when faced with all those eyes, wholly black, and framed by the white spatter of starmarks along one side of each face. Aurea headed for the center of the group, meaning to steal a last word with Casilda, but a Caretaker intercepted her and herded her to the front of a rough line.

North Star leading the way, of course. And then a space left for South, and down through a hierarchy she found ludicrous now, having lived through the spell. She and the other cardinals had been closer to the wild magic while the intercardinals and secondaries had felt it slightly more filtered, that was all.

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Out of the station into the thunder-rumble of the city then. The adobe walls along the street squeezed together such a press of people that Aurea could not register them as individuals. One could only guess at the locations of the boardwalks lining the streets by a bump in the average height of the mass. The people were cheering and behind and between the shouts was music anchored by drumbeats—the celebration a flood-rush crashing down on them all.

The Caretakers began as something of an honor guard, flanking them, and then tightened to form the point of the wedge necessary to clear anything resembling a path for the Sixteen. The townspeople closest to Aurea, young and old, grinning and crying, overwhelmed with reverence and joy, were begging for blessings, but how could they even hear her if she gave one? She could barely hear them, could only guess their meaning by the supplication of their hands as they reached for her.

She couldn’t remember the wild magic or she’d stumble and fall, but she couldn’t not remember the wild magic. That, at least, had entered her and then left once more, draining into the warding. This noise, this press of people, beat against her skin in a pressure so intense her senses registered it as waves, easing only when she could fight in a breath and increasing as that breath was not enough to sustain her.

They slowed and slowed again as the Caretakers fought for every meter of progress. People caught at her hands. Her wrists. Her elbows. She jerked away from each touch as she felt it, not caring that such behavior hardly suited the grace expected of the triumphant Sixteen. Please.

She needed this to stop, but who did she even beg for such a thing? The path behind them had closed. The temple wasn’t far from the station, but she couldn’t see where they were nor judge how long they’d been struggling along already. 

Ask the irrigation canal what it thought of the flood. Ask the irrigation channel when that flood would crest, when it would ebb. By its nature, it had only now. How long had the North Star been channeling the magic? Forever. How long would she continue to do so? Forever.  “They’ll never get you to the temple before dawn at this rate!” Dominic’s voice in her ear, sharp and clear as he spoke at a distance. Her gaze scanned the mass of people, but she couldn’t pick out one face in a whole landslide. “Hold on, this is going to get splashy.”

Magic burst at Aurea’s feet, the spark-spatter of the kind of herding spell her family used every day out on the range. The internal lattice of its magic stood out clear to her, but she appreciated that her brother had also given it a blaze of visible light as a warning, not that anyone heeded it. The spell stung where it spattered, nothing more, but the crowd drew back with a collective gasp that Aurea could have sworn sucked some of the breath right out of her own lungs. She surged forward into even the small crack of space it had forced between people, one hand going back to catch hold of whichever of the others she could drag after her.

It took until the second burst of the spell for the rest of the Sixteen to catch on to what her brother was doing, but then Aurea felt their reassuring weight at her back, helping her press Hybrid Fiction April 2020

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forward. Between Dominic’s spells, she sought out Casilda, caught at the young woman’s wrist and drew her alongside. She was the youngest of them all, having been sixteen years old when she received her starmark last year. The last vestiges of puppy fat rounded her cheeks and made of her face a delicate heart—one currently blank with distress.

At least with Aurea holding Casilda tight across her waist, none of the crowd could touch the younger woman from that side. And being a shield gave Aurea purpose, made it a little easier to weather the dragging clutches at her own arm. Then South-Southwest—Sebastian—was there, layering his arm over Aurea’s to protect Casilda’s other side. Dominic’s next spell stung her shins, but she didn’t care. Forward. She had a direction, and she wasn’t in the Ancestors’ hands.

She was in her own, and she was getting herself there.  The temple’s shared veneration space was poorly set up for allowing the Sixteen to be interviewed en masse. It was broken up to allow quiet privacy around the various shared shrines, but Aurea supposed that hosting the Sixteen in the governing chambers—or worse, a theater!— would hardly strike the right note.

The Caretakers had herded them into the holy space following their breakfast-dinner meal just after sunset. Those remaining of the Sixteen sat in a semicircle in front of the largest of the shrine nooks, newspaper reporters crammed in every which way before them once the photographers had cleared away. Aurea was in the center chair, of course, pulled out of line with the rest, though she’d been trying to subtly scoot it back the whole time. She didn’t know how to answer any of the stream of overlapping questions, but the reporters were determined to address every inquiry to her alone.

“North Star, what was it like, to feel the wild magic?”

“North Star, did any of you speak to the Ancestors? What did they say to you?”

“North Star, were you worried any of you would die as South did?”

“East?” Aurea looked to her left—again—to Beatrice, who was apparently aptly named because she looked positively beatific. Though she was only thirty, white was threaded in the black of her two tidy braids and lent her an aura of wisdom.

Beatrice bowed her head solemnly—again—before answering. “We were filled to the brim with the honor of the Ancestor’s presence…”

Aurea stopped listening to the platitudes almost immediately and concentrated on the rhythm. When Beatrice wound down, Aurea rose—she could be graceful if she tried, and she really was trying—and gestured in invitation for Beatrice to take the spokesperson’s chair in her place.

Beatrice smiled gently, rose, and clasped Aurea’s hands as if accepting the passing of a sacred charge. On the way, she leaned in to whisper, “Stop being such a petulant child. This is as much our duty as the warding itself.” Then she smoothed her tunic over her hips, sat down, and cocked her head, ready for the next question.

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Aurea managed not to thud into her new seat, but she did clench her jaw and her hands in her lap. People were hungry for that little brush against the Ancestors—through the Sixteen, certainly. She wanted to grant it to them. She did. But she didn’t have Beatrice’s skill.

So Aurea smiled and smiled and tried not to think as the night wore on. The reporters were soon flagging visibly—for those with daylight lives, it was all very well to stay up when caught in the energy of celebration but quite another to merely stand and listen. The Caretakers chased them away when it was time for the midnight meal—eaten by the Sixteen and those who’d sacrificed a day life to be with them through the night.

Aurea felt only resignation when a Caretaker blocked her path as she tried to follow the rest.

Was this a talking to for passing so many questions to Beatrice? Or— “South’s family has asked if the North Star might take the midnight meal with them?” The woman’s voice was gentle.

Aurea had anticipated another task, but this particular one drew the grief back up through her throat to her eyes, leaving tight fog behind it. “Of course.” She had no idea what she’d say to them, how she could possibly be any help, but that didn’t matter. South’s memory, and his family, deserved her every effort.

Sebastian stepped away from the general movement of the group, tipping his head to suggest his attention was on them even if the blackness of his eyes hid it. “South?” he guessed.

“May I come along? I was close to him in the warding…”

No closer than South-Southeast, and in any case with the whole of the Warded Lands to encircle, none of the Sixteen could be said to have been close except at the speed magic traveled and linked them to one to another. Aurea caught his elbow anyway, drawing him close in case he changed his mind. She needed all the help she could get, and Sebastian had a soothing presence fostered by the strength across the breadth of his muscled shoulders.

This time, they traveled within a ring of Caretakers, but with no warning that some of the Sixteen might be appearing, no one had had time to gather, to whip themselves into a frenzy of veneration as they had earlier. Some people clumped around their group, laughing and shouting for blessings once more, but the Caretakers easily channeled them aside.

It occurred to Aurea that for some, the Sixteen must be rather distant, rarified figures. Why bother spending one’s attention on them there was the much headier warmth of food, drink, and human touch on offer for the rest of the solstice celebration? It was reassuring to sink into the pulse of voices and music when she thought of all those living their lives fully to the edges without any need for one of the Sixteen to perform a duty for them.

Isidore’s family met them in the inner courtyard of their house. Introductions of siblings and uncles and aunts and cousins passed over her in a wash. The comfortable space was more soberly lit than the rest of the city by leylanterns just bright enough for those with unaltered eyes to see. For her, even the leylanterns were a double dose of brilliance, light over top of the magic’s color that curled in anchoring tendrils into the spell’s vessel. The relatives showed her to their shrine, to the solemn photo among blooms that must have been magic-grown because Hybrid Fiction April 2020

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she could see the blush of magic’s color also along their petals. In the photo, Isidore had black eyes; it seemed he would be one of the Sixteen even in death, for as long as memory held him.

“Ancestors keep him,” Aurea pronounced as she accepted the bottle of mezcal and poured a generous measure out on the packed dirt. Her offering fell among the darker circles of past offerings now dried away.

“Keep him and feed his memory in our minds,” the lead Caretaker prompted, soft beside her. Right. A full blessing. She’s heard those before. Aurea stumbled through it with as little prompting as she could manage and was reassured when Isidore’s—father?—father clasped her hands when she’d surrendered the bottle to a younger relative.

“Thank you, North Star. Please, drink with us. You and South-Southwest both.” He pressed small glasses into their hands without waiting for a response, and the young boy with the bottle filled them before Aurea could politely refuse.

If she drank every shot offered in return for a blessing, she’d be ending the night with a decidedly irreverent bout of vomiting. But this was the only blessing she’d be granting to Isidore, so she tipped it back in time with Sebastian.

Surely she could do better than that, though, drinking and mumbling through the same blessing anyone might hear at a memorial. “Your son was so brave,” she offered the father. “The Ancestors warned him, but he still accepted the risk.”

The father scrubbed at the corner of his eye with the side of his thumb. His eyes had a redness that suggested he’d wept all his tears out earlier tonight—and now he had none left.

“Warned? Accepted? I don’t understand, I thought the spell was simply too powerful. Weren’t you all in equal danger?”

Sebastian shifted restively beside her, which Aurea should have marked but didn’t, not with Hybrid Fiction April 2020

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her focus on finding the right words to offer. “When the Ancestors offered us the choice to take on a spirit, they warned him about his weak heart. But he was brave enough to—” “The choice?” The father’s voice more than broke; it shattered. “How could Isidore choose to die? To leave us all behind? He wouldn’t do such a thing!” He caught Aurea’s hands as if to squeeze that truth into her with the strength of his grip.

Oh, Ancestors. She hadn’t stopped to consider there might be a reason Isidore had sworn them all to secrecy. But what could she say now to save this? “He chose to protect you and everyone else in the Warded Lands…”

“Of course he didn’t know what was going to happen.” Sebastian set a hand on the father’s shoulder, accepted the grip the man transferred to him calmly. “With powerful magic, there is powerful risk, but he accepted that risk out of his love for you all.”

The lead Caretaker cleared her throat. “The Sixteen all have so many responsibilities tonight…”

Aurea was surprised she hadn’t interjected earlier, but she supposed the woman had been allowing Aurea the chance to save the situation—or force someone else to save it for her. When directed outside, Aurea went meekly.

In the street, in a bubble of quiet between the sound of courtyard celebrations around them, the lead Caretaker rounded on Aurea. “Why couldn’t you just give the blessing instead of upsetting them?”

“I was trying to comfort them!” And didn’t that sound petulant? Aurea bit the inside of her cheek to ensure she said nothing else.

“South was a loss to us as well, Caretaker,” Sebastian said heavily, which lifted the weight of the woman’s disapproval off Aurea’s shoulders as the Caretaker turned to him. “May we have a moment?”

The woman dropped her chin in agreement and even murmured an apology as Sebastian turned to Aurea, hands on her upper arms. Eye contact was a strange thing between any of them, so he tipped his head down to frown at the same patch of dust she herself was concentrating on. “I think those who would ask for blessings are more like Beatrice than we are,” he said. “The Ancestors are more comforting as an unquestioned abstract.”

“Embodied in us,” Aurea muttered. Absurd, how much that “we,” that “us” helped her. There wasn’t something wrong with her—well, perhaps there was—but she had company. “I like being concrete.”

Sebastian laughed, and she looked up, startled. She’d met him a year ago, but somehow now on this night, with so little space between them, she saw him for the first time, noticing the humor in the weathered lines around his black eyes. Not that he was one to crack jokes, but he had a compelling appreciation for the absurdity of life.

If only he wasn’t married. The thought was sudden too.

As if summoned, a woman’s voice carried to them from down the street. “Sebastian? There Hybrid Fiction April 2020

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you are!” Vicenta strode up to her husband. She was a thing of floating delicacy, short with waves of black hair around her shoulders that mirrored the waves of swirling tunic around her hips, but no one who had heard the muffled fights carrying down the corridors of the living quarters in the temple would mistake delicacy for weakness.

Sebastian stepped to meet her and would have embraced her, but Vicenta apparently preferred greater distance to shout at him properly. “I have turned my life upside-down for you, living in the night, never able to see any of my friends, never able to spend time with my family, and you can’t even warn me when you’re going out? I was waiting for you in the temple, and you left me behind!”

Aurea turned away to allow them as much privacy as she could while Sebastian poured out apologies. She doubted it would ever be enough, just as she doubted there was anything Sebastian could do to resign Vicenta to everything neither of them could control. Sebastian couldn’t live in the daylight. The Sixteen could neither conceive nor sire children. Sebastian’s wife could never again be his first priority.

But that was not her life to live—Aurea had enough of her own trouble. As she pondered what she might manage to do wrong at the next blessing, Vicenta spat a particularly vicious curse. Then, “Come back to the temple with me!”

“South-Southwest has duties—” The lead Caretaker disappeared from Aurea’s side, wading into the argument, and the others followed at a tip of her head. Bolstering her authority, perhaps.

And leaving Aurea to her own recognizance.

It wasn’t like she could go anywhere incognito, but she slipped away nonetheless, making up her plan as she went along. If she could find one of the celebrations she’d been imagining earlier—one about food and drink and lust and now—maybe no one would want a blessing. She kept to the spaces between the leylanterns. She didn’t need to see, only feel for the blood-pulse of music she wanted.

The celebration she found was full of young people, likely her cohort of those who had stood in the desert a year ago, spilling out of its original courtyard to fill the street. They danced around a guitarist and drummer set up on the boardwalk to one side. One or both of the musicians was a mage, judging by the threads of magic caressing their instruments and carrying the sound up and over the rumble of conversation. Bottles passed hand to hand, never set down until they were empty.

“May I—?” Aurea asked as she stepped up to the edge of the dancers, though she wasn’t entirely sure what she was asking. Of course she could dance to someone else’s music in the street. And how could she say, May I be one of the Sixteen in your vicinity?

A disturbance rippled outward from the first dancer who saw her eyes, but not so far as the musicians. The music continued to pulse as consternation turned to delight. “Yes! Dance with

me.” One man held out his hands to her, a vision of cheekbones and wicked smile, and Ancestors, he was prettier than any man who had flirted with Aurea before in her life.

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“And me!” The woman who made the next offer wore her tunic tight at her waist above the flare of her hips, a warmer beauty than the first man but similarly delicious.

And Aurea did.

She danced with anyone who asked as the night wore on and the music swirled, until she felt drunk on the attention and attraction. She should speak to them, get names, choose a partner for a more intimate dance, be more careful than simply picking the one whose face most grabbed something in her gut and twisted. And yet. She certainly couldn’t get pregnant. So why not?

Why shouldn’t she kiss Cheekbones, her back against the wall of someone’s house, his hand at the back of her neck, threading into her hair, as he pulled her mouth against his until she was gasping for air. In the taste of him, there was a glorious not-thinking about Isidore or blessings or “petulant child.”

He broke the kiss to draw back enough to tug down the neckline of her tunic. His hands roamed, charting her preferences with gasps of pleasure.

She closed her eyes and tipped her head back, savoring, only to have him stop, hands leaving her skin with a sensation like a splash of cold water. “Open your eyes, North Star,” he invited, low and husky. She did, if only in surprise, and then his hands were back.

She almost managed to lose herself in the sensation again—almost. Her mind worried at the idea. Why open her eyes, why not close them and diminish what divided them, if they wanted intimacy? She focused on him, how his eyes were tight on hers. But with his eyes unable to meet her own limitless black, no connection was forged; the gaze was cold.

He was staring at her, drinking in her strangeness. Hungry for what one of the Sixteen looked like under his hands, the North Star herself. Did her place in that absurd, false hierarchy make her a better conquest? Or was any of the Sixteen exotic enough?

He disgusted her. She disgusted herself. She ripped away from him, jerking her tunic back into place, striding, then running out of the range of whatever he might have called after her. At the next party, she didn’t dance until she’d captured one of the bottles on their journey and finished that and whatever others were handed to her. 

A canal did not wonder, did not question. But neither could it glory in its purpose.

Hold the wild magic. Channel the wild magic. Protect, protect. Protect everyone. The North Star gloried in the rightness and wholeness of her purpose and then it ended.

And she was empty.  On waking, Aurea caught just a hint of the stench of vomit, though her tunic showed no stains when she examined it. She groaned, curled tight in her bed for a few more beats, then forced herself to sit up despite her pounding head and widen her investigations into how low she’d descended last night. She was in her own bed, clothed but without her boots. And Hybrid Fiction April 2020

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Dominic was sleeping under a borrowed blanket in a chair.

“When—?” Aurea cut herself off, thinking belatedly about allowing him his rest, but Dominic roused quickly enough he’d likely only been dozing.

“When did I join you?” he guessed, knuckling his eyes. “Word went around about North Star gracing the city with her presence at random. I traced it from where Sebastian said you’d started.”

And then guided her sloppy ass home, presumably. Aurea didn’t remember that part.

Ancestors preserve her. She put her face in her hands and spoke through her fingers. “Thanks.

How close are the Caretakers to chaining me to this bed by my ankle?”

“The Caretakers are supposed to answer to the Sixteen, you know.” Dominic rose and rolled his neck and shoulders.

Aurea drew up her knees but made no move to rise herself. “What now, Dominic?”

“Breakfast-dinner. Or maybe the midnight meal by now.” He gave her a lopsided smile, which was when she realized he hadn’t misunderstood her.

She laced fingers into her hair, found it horribly tangled, and focused her attention on that instead of her brother. “I can’t do this. I can’t live in the temple and offer blessings each night.

Beatrice called it our duty, but…”

Was it, though? A new day—new night—tinted Beatrice’s words differently in Aurea’s mind.

It was the Sixteen’s duty to renew the warding and keep their people alive. Granting them a feeling of closer connection to the Ancestors—that was a kindness, certainly, but was it really a duty? A little more veneration of the Ancestors was not necessary as long as young people were willing to stand to receive their spirits and perform the spell once more a century from now. Did that continuity of knowledge really rest only on the shoulders of the Sixteen? Or, rather, did it rest on the shoulders of all the Sixteen? Or the remaining Sixteen at least? They were down to fifteen already, what harm would fourteen do?

Hadn’t she done her duty? Wasn’t she allowed to step back when she had no skill at aiding veneration? When it proved too much for her to bear?

“Didn’t one of the last Sixteen go out into the desert to be a hermit?” she asked.

Dominic perched on her bed. “You won’t stop being one of the Sixteen because you’re alone in the desert.”

Wasn’t that the truth. Aurea’s chest squeezed to find her younger brother running ahead of her in articulating what she wanted. “At least there I’d have space to figure it out for myself.”

Dominic gently gripped her ankle, evoking their childhood tussles where he would refuse to let her get away from him. “Come home. To the ranch. Just because you tell Centerpost you’re going to live as a hermit doesn’t mean you actually have to do it.”

“The Caretakers—” “I’ll tell them I’ll live nights with you.” He lifted a palm, bringing up a modest light for one breath, then banished it again. “I can make my way around more easily than most.”

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Aurea felt behind her until her fingers closed on her pillow. She thudded it into her brother’s shoulder. “How can you have a life of your own like that? As Vicenta likes to point out, that’s no way to keep friends.”

Dominic confiscated the pillow, holding it on his lap. “It would be my own life, because it’s the one I’m choosing. So. Are we going or not?”

“Yes.” Aurea murmured the word softly to her knees. She just needed a little space. By the time Dominic came to understand the consequences of his choice, she’d hopefully have discovered how to be this—yet another—new self.

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Held

After the Warding

Until next time...

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About the authors and artists...  Philip Brian Hall is a Yorkshireman and graduate of Oxford University. A former diplomat and teacher, at one time or another he's stood for Parliament, sung solos in amateur operettas, rowed at Henley Royal Regatta, completed a 40-mile cross-country walk in under 12 hours and ridden in over one hundred steeplechase horse races. He lives on a very small farm in Scotland. Hall's had short stories published in the USA and Canada as well as the UK. Four of his stories have appeared in Flame Tree Publishing hardback anthologies. His novels, The Prophets of Baal and The Family Demon are available in e-book and paperback form.

Contact: sliabhmannan.blogspot.co.uk/  David A. Gray is a Scots-born creative director, writer, and photographer living in Brooklyn, NYC. His short stories have been accepted by Starship Sofa, Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores, Metaphorosis magazine, Ahoy! Comics and more, and his first novel, Moonflowers, was published in Summer 2019. A sequel, and a Scottish-set contemporary fairytale, are in contract and will come out in 2020 and 2021 if he can stop procrastinating and complete edits. Gray’s greatest wish is to be well enough known that he can falsely claim to be notoriously private. Contact: davidagray.com or Instagram david_a_gray  Ben Pyle’s prose short stories have appeared in Literary Yard, Ariel Chart, Page & Spine, and Scarlet Leaf Review. His comics with artist Renan Balmonte have appeared in My Kingdom for a Panel from Arledge Comics, Elsewhere by Unlikely Heroes Studios, and Monster Mashup by Grit City Comics.

Ben and artist Marc Rene have worked together on comics for years and will soon debut their comic Slugger. Contact: bspyle@crimson.ua.edu or Twitter @bspyle  Marc Rene is a self-taught artist with a background in design. His mentors include noted artists J.H. Williams III, Darick Robertson, and Steven T. Seagle. Rene’s credits include work for Cartoon Network, Disney, Creative Juices Design, the San Jose Sabercats, Public Speaking Los Angeles, the National Forensics Association, Fry’s Electronics, COGnitive Gaming, NACL eSports, and comedian Sammy Obeid. Rene has worked on several graphic novel projects: NICE from American Gothic Press, Slugger by Ben Pyle, and iHolmes by Michael Lent. Contact: Instagram Hybrid Fiction April 2020

marcrene_art,Twitter @marcusRhill, or Facebookwww.facebook.com/marcreneart  Gareth D. Jones is from the UK and works with hazardous waste, which has so far failed to mutate him into a superhero. He is a father of 5 who also writes stories and drinks lots of tea. His stories have appeared in 28 languages, making him unofficially the second most widely translated science fiction short story author in the world. Contact: http://www.garethdjones.co.uk/  Christopher Woods is a writer and photographer who lives in Chappell Hill, Texas. He has published a novel, The Dream Patch, a prose collection, Under a Riverbed Sky, as well as a book of stage monologues for actors, Heart Speak. His photographs can be seen in his website gallery. His photography prompt book for writers, From Vision to Text, is forthcoming from Propertius Press. His novella, Hearts in the Dark, is forthcoming from Running Wild Press. Contact: http://christopherwoods.zenfolio.com/  Harold Gross lives in the mountains outside of Seattle, Washington in the US. He landed in the country-life after transplanting from New York City where his primary career had been as a professional actor. The move shifted his main focus from performance to the written word. His efforts, solo and collaborative (with Eve Gordon as Gordon Gross), have been published on three continents (North America, Europe, Australia) in such venues as Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog, Pseudopod, Aeon, and Story Seed Vault. Other stories have appeared in anthologies as varied as Star Trek: Strange New Worlds III, Alternative Truths: Endgame, and even a cookbook. Gross has received several prizes in various fiction contests and an honourable mentions in The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror. A near-daily blog of spoiler-free movie reviews (2200+) can be found at his website http://www.haroldgross.com. Contact: website or on Twitter: @haroldgross  R. Z. Held writes speculative fiction, much of it in the apparently disparate subgenres of space opera and weird western. Her Silver series of urban fantasy novels was published under the name Rhiannon Held. She lives in Seattle, where she works as an archaeologist for an environmental compliance firm. At work, she uses her degree mostly for copy-editing technical reports; in writing,

she uses it for cultural world-building; in public, she'll probably use it to check the mold seams on the wine bottle at dinner. Contact: http://rhiannonheld.com/ or Twitter @RhiannonHeld  O. Sander is a writer, artist, composer, photographer, crafter, and family caregiver. She is originally from California but has bounced from place to place for most of her life. Having landed in “25 square miles surrounded by reality” in Michigan, she spends her time inventing worlds and exploring them through her drawings as well as writing their stories and music. She lays claim to being a combination of Morticia Addams and Glinda the Good Witch and tends to embarrass her longsuffering spouse into trying to pretend he doesn’t know her. Contact: https://beneathstrangestars.com/, Facebook or on Twitter @threadwings

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