“I choked him until he fainted, and then I took all the money I could find and left.
“So I come to you, Liang. Will you help me?”
I stepped up and embraced her. “We’ll find some way to reverse this. There must be doctors—”
“No,” she interrupted me. “That’s not what I want.”
* * *
It took us almost a whole year to complete the task. Yan’s money helped, but some things money couldn’t buy, especially skill and knowledge.
My flat became a workshop. We spent every evening and all of Sundays working: shaping metal, polishing gears, reattaching wires.
Her face was the hardest. It was still flesh.
I poured over books of anatomy and took casts of her face with plaster of Paris. I broke my cheekbones and cut my face so that I could stagger into surgeons’ offices and learn from them how to repair these injuries. I bought expensive jeweled masks and took them apart, learning the delicate art of shaping metal to take on the shape of a face.
Finally, it was time.
Through the window, the moon threw a pale white parallelogram on the floor. Yan stood in the middle of it, moving her head about, trying out her new face.
Hundreds of miniature pneumatic actuators were hidden under the smooth chrome skin, each of which could be controlled independently, allowing her to adopt any expression. But her eyes were still the same, and they shone in the moonlight with excitement.
“Are you ready?” I asked.
She nodded.
I handed her a bowl, filled with the purest anthracite coal, ground into a fine powder. It smelled of burnt wood, of the heart of the earth. She poured it into her mouth and swallowed. I could hear the fire in the miniature boiler in her torso grow hotter as the pressure of the steam built up. I took a step back.
She lifted her head to the moon and howled: it was a howl made by steam passing through brass piping, and yet it reminded me of that wild howl long ago, when I first heard the call of a hulijing.
Then she crouched to the floor. Gears grinding, pistons pumping, curved metal plates sliding over each other—the noises grew louder as she began to transform.
She had drawn the first glimmers of her idea with ink on paper. Then she had refined it, through hundreds of iterations until she was satisfied. I could see traces of her mother in it, but also something harder, something new.
Working from her idea, I had designed the delicate folds in the chrome skin and the intricate joints in the metal skeleton. I had put together every hinge, assembled every gear, soldered every wire, welded every seam, oiled every actuator. I had taken her apart and put her back together.
Yet, it was a marvel to see everything working. In front of my eyes, she folded and unfolded like a silvery origami construction, until finally, a chrome fox as beautiful and deadly as the oldest legends stood before me.
She padded around the flat, testing out her sleek new form, trying out her stealthy new movements. Her limbs gleamed in the moonlight, and her tail, made of delicate silver wires as fine as lace, left a trail of light in the dim flat.
She turned and walked—no, glided—towards me, a glorious hunter, an ancient vision coming alive. I took a deep breath and smelled fire and smoke, engine oil and polished metal, the scent of power.
“Thank you,” she said, and leaned in as I put my arms around her true form. The steam engine inside her had warmed her cold metal body, and it felt warm and alive.
“Can you feel it?” she asked.
I shivered. I knew what she meant. The old magic was back but changed: not fur and flesh, but metal and fire.
“I will find others like me,” she said, “and bring them to you. Together, we will set them free.”
Once, I was a demon hunter. Now, I am one of them.
I opened the door, Swallow Tail in my hand. It was only an old and heavy sword, rusty, but still perfectly capable of striking down anyone who might be lying in wait.
No one was.
Yan leapt out of the door like a bolt of lightning. Stealthily, gracefully, she darted into the streets of Hong Kong, free, feral, a hulijing built for this new age.
…once a man has set his heart on a hulijing, she cannot help hearing him no matter how far apart they are…
“Good hunting,” I whispered.
She howled in the distance, and I watched a puff of steam rise into the air as she disappeared.
I imagined her running along the tracks of the funicular railway, a tireless engine racing up, and up, towards the top of Victoria Peak, towards a future as full of magic as the past.
About the Authors
New Zealand born fantasy writer and podcaster Philippa (Pip) Ballantine is the author of the Books of the Order and the Shifted World series. She is also the co-author with her husband Tee Morris of the Locus best selling, Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences novels, which have all appeared in the top 10 science fiction titles of the Goodreads Awards for the year they were published. Her other awards include an Airship, two Parsecs, the Steampunk Chronicle Reader’s Choice, and a Sir Julius Vogel. She currently resides in Manassas, Virginia with her husband, daughter, and a furry clowder of cats.
Alex Bledsoe grew up in west Tennessee an hour north of Graceland (home of Elvis) and twenty minutes from Nutbush (birthplace of Tina Turner). He's been a reporter, editor, photographer and door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. He now lives in a Wisconsin town famous for trolls, writes before six in the morning and tries to teach his three kids to act like they’ve been to town before. He is the author of the Eddie LaCrosse series (most recently He Drank, and Saw the Spider), the Tufa novels (Wisp of a Thing and The Hum and the Shiver) and the Firefly Witch ebooks.
Emily Cataneo is a dark fantasy and horror writer based in Boston, Mass. Her short fiction is forthcoming from the Chiral Mad 2 anthology and from the online magazine Kaleidotrope. She is a 2013 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop and a member of the online Codex Writers Group. Her stories usually involve winter, bones, female friendships, the Victorian occult, anxious characters, and the darkly beautiful. When she's not writing fiction, she's a freelance journalist for the paper of record in the Greater Boston area.
S. J. Chambers is the Hugo and World Fantasy nominated co-author of the best-selling The Steampunk Bible and The Steampunk Bible 2014 Calendar (Abrams Image). Her fiction has appeared in a variety of venues, including Mungbeing magazine (where her story “Of Parallel and Parcel" was nominated for a Pushcart prize), New Myths, Yankee Pot Roast, as well as in anthologies like the World Fantasy nominated Thackery T. Lambshead’s Cabinet Of Curiosities (HarperCollins), Zombies: Shambling Through The Ages (Prime Books), and the Spanish steampunk anthology Planes B. She has stories forthcoming in Starry Wisdom Library (PS Publishing), Acronos II (Tyrannosaurus Books), and in The New Gothic (Stone Skin Press) the latter which features her collaboration with writer extarodinaire Jesse Bullington.
Lillian Cohen-Moore is an award winning editor (Indie RPG Awards, Origins Award, for Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple), and devotes her writing to fiction, journalism and game design. Influenced by the work of Jewish authors and horror movies, she draws on bubbe meises (grandmother’s tales) and horror classics for inspiration. She loves exploring and photographing abandoned places. She is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists and the Online News Association.
Indrapramit Das is a writer and artist from Kolkata, India. His fiction has appeared in publications including Clarkesworld Magazine, Asimov's Science Fiction and Apex Magazine, as well as anthologies such as The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirtieth Annual Collection (St. Martin's Press), Aliens: Recent Encounters (Prime Books) and Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond(Rosarium Publishing). He has written reviews of film, books, comics and TV for Strange Horizons and Slant Magazine. He is a grateful graduate of the 2012 Clarion West Writers Workshop and a recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Scholarship Award to attend the former. He completed his MFA at the University of B
ritish Columbia and is currently in Vancouver working as a freelance writer, artist, editor, critic, TV extra, game tester, tutor, would-be novelist, and aspirant to adulthood.
Malon Edwards was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, but now lives in the Greater Toronto Area, where he was lured by his beautiful Canadian wife. Many of his short stories are set in an alternate Chicago and feature people of color. Currently, he serves as Managing Director and Grants Administrator for the Speculative Literature Foundation, which provides a number of grants for writers of speculative literature.
Jaymee Goh is the postcolonial steampunk writer of Silver Goggles, a blog that focuses on postcoloniality, anti-racism and the meaningful participation of people of color in steampunk beyond tokenism. She has been seen on the Apex Book Company Blog, Racialicious.com, and Tor.com. Her non-fiction has been published in Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution, The WisCon Chronicles, and Fashion Talks: Undressing the Power of Style. Her previously published short stories take place in the same steampunk 'verse as this one. Currently she is a Comparative Literature PhD student at UC Riverside.
Jay Lake is the award-winning author of ten novels, five collections, and over 300 short stories. He was the winner of the 2004 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards. He has been published by Tor Books, Night Shade Books, MonkeyBrain Books, Fairwood Press, Wheatland Press, and Subterranean Press. He is also a cancer survivor who blogs about politics, technology, and health.
Ken Liu is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He has won a Nebula, two Hugos, a World Fantasy Award, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award, and been nominated for the Sturgeon and the Locus Awards. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.
Rochita Loenen-Ruiz is an essayist, a fictionist and a poet. A Filipino writer, now living in the Netherlands, she attended Clarion West in 2009 and was a recipient of the Octavia Butler scholarship. In 2013, her short fiction was shortlisted for the BSFA short fiction award. Most recently, her fiction has appeared in We See a Different Frontier, Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond, What Fates Impose, The End of the Road anthology, and as part of Redmond Radio’s Afrofuturism Event for the Amsterdam Museumnacht at FOAM museum. She also has upcoming work in Clarkesworld Magazine.
Nayad A. Monroe is an editor and short-story writer. She read over 5,000 submissions for the Hugo Award-winning semiprozine,Clarkesworld Magazine, before she became an editor with her anthology of divination stories, What Fates Impose. Several of her short stories have been published in various anthologies, such as Space Grunts: Full-Throttle Space Tales #3; Space Tramps: Full-Throttle Space Tales #5; The Crimson Pact: Volume Two; and Sidekicks!. Her sidekick story, "Quintuple-A," is scheduled to be made into a short film by Wild Hawk Entertainment. Nayad has also contributed an interview with Tim Powers to Writers Workshop of Science Fiction and Fantasy. You can find her making odd remarks on Twitter as @Nayad.
Balogun Ojetade is author the Steamfunk novel Moses: The Chronicles of Harriet Tubman, the Sword and Soul novel Once Upon A Time in Afrika and the Urban Fantasy novel Redeemer. He is contributing co-editor of the anthologies, Steamfunk and Ki-Khanga: The Anthology. Finally, he is screenwriter and director of the action film, A Single Link and the Steamfunk film Rite of Passage.
Diana M. Pho (Ay-leen the Peacemaker) is a scholar, activist, blogger, and general rabble-rouser. She earned her B.A. from Mount Holyoke College and her M.A. from New York University. Awards given for her work include the Steampunk Chronicle Reader's Choice Awards for "Best Politically-Minded Steampunk" and "Best Multicultural Steampunk" in 2012 and 2013 as well as "Best Blog" and "Best Feminist Steampunk" in 2012; the SteamCon Airship Award for "Community Contributor" in 2013; the Last Drink Bird Head Award for "Gentle Advocacy" in 2010. About her work, New York Times bestselling author of the Leviathan trilogy, Scott Westerfeld has said, "I always point to her to rebut the genre’s haters." Diana currently lives and works in New York City for Tor Books & blogs for Tor.com. You can follow her academic work on Academia.edu.
Nisi Shawl’s collection Filter House was a 2009 James Tiptree, Jr., Award winner; her stories have been published at Strange Horizons, in Asimov’s SF Magazine, and in anthologies including The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. She was the 2011 Guest of Honor at the feminist SF convention WisCon and 2014 co-Guest of Honor for the Science Fiction Research Association. She co-authored the renowned Writing the Other: A Practical Approach with Cynthia Ward. Shawl’s Belgian Congo steampunk novel Everfair is forthcoming in 2015 from Tor Books.
Lucy A. Snyder is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of the novels Spellbent, Shotgun Sorceress, Switchblade Goddess, and the collections Orchid Carousals, Sparks and Shadows, Chimeric Machines, and Installing Linux on a Dead Badger. She will have two new books out in 2014: Shooting Yourself in the Head For Fun and Profit: A Writer's Guide will be released by Post Mortem Press, and her story collection Soft Apocalypses will be released by Raw Dog Screaming Press. Her writing has been translated into French, Russian, and Japanese editions and has appeared in publications such as What Fates Impose, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, Hellbound Hearts, Dark Faith, Chiaroscuro, GUD, and Best Horror of the Year, Vol. 5.
Lucien Moussa Shukri Soulban is an author from Montreal, Canada. He was born in Saudi Arabia, but grew up in Houston, Texas. He has lived in Montreal for 16 years. Lucien Soulban is his real name.As well as numerous credits, both role-playing and fiction, with White Wolf, he has written for Dream Pod 9, AEG, WizKids and Guardians of Order, and has also worked on video games with Relic and Artificial Mind and Movement, among others.
Benjanun Sriduangkaew enjoys writing love letters to cities real and speculative, and lots of space opera when she can get away with it. Her works can be found in Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Dark, GigaNotoSaurus, The Mammoth Book of Steampunk Adventures, Upgraded, and Solaris Rising 3. They are also reprinted in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Vol. 8, The Year's Best Science and Fantasy 2014 and The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women. Her novella Scale-Bright is forthcoming from Immersion Press.
Tade Thompson’s roots are in Western Nigeria and South London. His short stories have been published in small press, webzines and anthologies. Most recently, his story "Notes from Gethsemane" appeared in The Afro SF Anthology, and "Shadow" appeared in The Apex Book of World SF 2, and "120 Days of Sunlight" appeared in Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond. He lives and works in South England. He creates under a unified influence field comprised of books, music, theatre, comics, art, movies, gourmet coffee, and amala. He has been known to haunt coffee shops, jazz bars, bookshops, and libraries. He is an occasional visual artist and tortures his family with his attempts to play the guitar.
A Note From the Publisher
Dear Reader:
I hope you enjoyed this book. I did, and that’s why I helped it become a reality. Too many big publishers are more concerned with cash instead of characters, stories, and ideas. They care more about their bottom line instead of what you really want.
That’s not how I work. I want to bring you awesome characters and stories from authors that you enjoy.
So I have one small favor to ask of you.
Leave a review for this book. Loved it, hated it - just let the author and I know what you thought of it. What you liked, what you didn’t like, and what you loved.
A short honest review will help me—as a publisher—know what you what to read… and it will help other readers like you find this book.
To help make it even easier for you, there’s a full list of my publications at http://alliterationink.com/pubslist.html, or you can go directly to a collection at Amazon or Goodreads to easily review them.
I look forward to hearing
what you thought of the book!
Steven Saus, publisher
Life is uncertain. The chance to peek into the future is tempting. But is it a good idea to look?
Edited by Nayad Monroe, this anthology brings together stories from a diverse group of speculative fiction writers who provide insight into the possibilities.
The book includes cover artwork by Steven C. Gilberts, and an introduction by Alasdair Stuart. Featuring new stories from Maurice Braoddus, Jennifer Brozek, Keffy Kehrli, Jamie Lackey, Cat Rambo, Ken Scholes, Lucy A Snyder, Ferrett Steinmetz, Tim Waggoner, Damien Walters, Sarah Hans, Erika Holt, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Remy Nakamura, LaShawn Wanak, Andrew Penn Romine, Wendy Wagner, Eric James Stone, and Beth Wodzinski.
Some poems in this book gallop and kick. Some swerve elegantly like an escape pod caught in a gravity well. Other roll quiet as a child’s blanket. The words in these pages won’t seem the same each time you read them. They will be just what you were looking for, but nothing that you expected.
- Lucy A. Snyder, author of the Bram Stoker Award-winning poetry collection Chimeric Machines
Merging her fascination with images of the space age and cowboy/equine lore, Leslie Anderson gives a quirky personal vision of the contemporary world where "America is a boy with long hair/ Who holds cigarettes like a burden" and who tells us we can be anything we desire "but first you have to be sad for 200 years."
- Diane Wakoski, author of the William Carlos Williams Award-winning book Emerald Ice.
Sidekicks: We know them, and we ignore them. They sit courtside, they wait in the shadows, they ride on the coattails. They have nothing to offer.
Or do they?
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