The circular view moved, slid down until it crossed under Fergus’s feet, and he watched as they glided above the two ships and stopped, warning lights flashing all over August Moon’s exterior.
“Oooh, they are threatening to shoot us,” the agent said. “How exciting. Do you wish to speak with your sister?”
“Yes,” Fergus said. “How do I—”
Before he’d finished, the agent had reached out and placed a hand flat on his chest, and then they were both standing in the doorway to the bridge of Ignatio’s ship, directly behind Isla, just in time to see the captain of the August Moon, who was standing beside Ignatio, drop the World’s Best Boss mug and let it shatter across the floor.
The captain, to her credit, pulled her shit together fast. “MacInnis, I presume,” she said. “You’ve brought company.”
Isla turned around and shrieked.
“Taking that as confirmation, you’re under arrest,” the captain said. Beside her, a too-young, too-scared-looking private finally managed to fumble out his pistol. “Both of you, until that scary-ass ship of yours that came out of nowhere backs off and I get some explanations for just who the fuck that is up there.”
The Asiig agent laughed. “Yes, sorry, let me introduce myself,” he said, and stepped toward the captain, holding out his hand as if to shake and introduce himself. The moment she touched his hand, she froze in place, unmoving. The private froze a half-second later, and Fergus felt like there was something there he’d almost seen, something with the energies in the room, but it was gone again before he could pin the sensation down.
The agent looked at Fergus. “All existence, all perception, is just electrical signals and messy chemistry, from atoms to the universe itself. But as you can see, your friends are good. Happier?”
“You’re alive,” Isla said. “How the hell are ye alive? And what are ye wearing?”
Fergus glanced down, for the first time realizing he could have been wearing nothing, to find a brightly shining facsimile of his shirt and shorts, except when he poked the fabric, it was gummy, strangely staticky. “I have no idea,” he said. “About anything.”
“And who is this guy?” she asked, pointing at the agent. “Where the hell did ye come from? That ship—” Her voice trailed off as there was the sound of crickets and movement behind Fergus. It wasn’t just him and the agent who had come over. The Asiig moved ponderously onto the bridge, and Isla turned pale and backed up.
“Dru?” Ignatio asked Fergus quietly.
“She’s still on board their ship,” Fergus said.
The Asiig chirped, and to Fergus’s surprise, Ignatio chirped back. Even the agent seemed impressed. Then the agent pointed suddenly at Isla. “You,” he said. “What are you thinking, right now?”
Isla blinked. “That I want to go home,” she said. “That I thought I’d lost my brother and my heart hurts so much, and it’s long past time he came home too.”
“And you?” the agent asked Ignatio.
“That Fergus can’t go home again,” ey said, sadly. Ey waved a leg toward the captain, whose face was frozen in the very first moments of extreme irritation. “All of the Alliance is hunting for you. Whiro says they are at the Shipyard, and Mars, and just about everywhere in between. It is all very dangerous now. They will hunt for you everywhere you have ever been, everywhere you have friends, and they will not give up for years, if ever.”
Evan Derecho would be hunting him too, Fergus knew, and not ever stop. “You’re right,” he said. “I have to leave.”
“Don’t go alone,” Isla said, and bent down and picked up something from one of the helm seats, and held it up.
His cat yowled, all four of his legs flailing in indignation.
“Mister Feefs!” Fergus said, surprised by how much joy he felt in seeing his cat. He held out his hands, and Isla deposited the squirming ball of fur into his arms, where he promptly dug his claws through Fergus’s weird shirt into his chest and refused to let go.
“If the Vraet had come through the door and destroyed your solar system, it would have endangered much that we would not have liked to lose,” the agent said, translating the chirps and clicks from the Asiig beside him. “We are grateful that catastrophe has been averted so we can continue our work. We will take you somewhere you wish to go, but we must go now.”
“First, Dru—” Fergus said.
“Dru will take a very long time to heal, and she cannot do that in her old life,” the agent said. “She has been offered a choice, and made it. It is not your concern any longer. Decide.”
“I know where I want to go,” Fergus said.
“Where?” Isla asked.
“He can’t tell us,” Ignatio said. “You must know this.”
The Asiig made more sounds, and the agent rolled his eyes. “Can we have the captain?” he asked.
“Uh, no?” Ignatio said. “It would make a lot of trouble.”
“That’s what I thought, but I promised I’d ask,” he said. “Pity. Time to go.”
“I love you,” Fergus said. “Both of you. I’ll be back, as soon as—”
The agent touched his shoulder, and in that last split second before the ship around him vanished, he saw the captain shudder back to life in slow motion, eyes widening as the Asiig beside them stood up tall on its legs. Isla was just reaching out toward him, to pull him back.
Then they were gone.
Acknowledgments
You are in a vast, lightless maze. When you stepped in, it seemed a small hole in the ground at most, a quick, unexpected adventure, something scary and dangerous but finite, if you just kept your wits about you for a little while. Wear a mask, wash your hands, and somewhere at the end of the maze you’ll be rewarded with toilet paper again.
Instead, well. 2020.
There is a disjointedness in time to the start of a novel’s life. The ideas for this book have been rolling around in my head since I was finishing up the first Finder book several years ago, got some experimental pokes during lulls in the drafting and editing of the second book, and only really got my full time and attention in the second half of 2019. Briefly full, anyway. In mid-November I was fortunate enough to be invited as a guest to the 5th International SF Conference in Chengdu, China. It was a whirlwind of a trip, almost deliriously unreal, to a country I never thought I’d see in my lifetime. It was a life-changing experience, and I met many wonderful people both local and from around the world. It was such an extraordinary affirmation that the wider we open the doors of our fannish communities, the more diverse and welcoming our genre, the stronger and brighter it becomes. And on the 14 1/2 hour first leg of the flight home, with some passenger two rows behind me coughing the whole time, I was exhausted and exhilarated and homesick and desperately keen to go back again, go more places, see the world. 2020, I thought, I am going to TRAVEL.
And yeah, you know. Got home, felt sick, weird respiratory symptoms that didn’t want to go away, off and on ill through the first few months of 2020. Never got a diagnosis, so who really knows? And then in February, the neighborhood bear made a hole in my fence that I didn’t spot, and my dogs got out and got lost in the woods. One was found by a hiker a week later, but the other was hit and killed by a car. By the time the pandemic started in earnest here in the US, I was already several twists and turns into that lightless maze. I gathered my kids back at home, safe and sound and bored and obstreperous, and hunkered down to finish The Scavenger Door.
And for all of us, the maze just kept getting deeper, longer, twistier. We knew we were losing people in there, did our best to hold hands and help along those faltering, knowing at some point we’d be the one reaching out our own hand hoping somebody would take it and pull. We worried about those we knew were out of our reach, trapped in some dead end because the ‘system’ failed them, or because someone they trusted led and abandoned them there. And slowly, slow
ly, slowly, for some but not all, there was light ahead.
As I write this, it’s just on the cusp of spring in 2021. My first crocus just flowered. Many things have changed, and we can feel the warmth of hope on our faces as we alternately stumble and run toward an apparent exit, carrying with us no small share of grief and trauma and uncertainty. When you are reading this, it’s going to be late summer 2021 at the earliest, possibly years past that, and what will the perspective on this time be with such hindsight? It’s very odd and disconcerting to write with love about the distant future and yet find the idea of five months from now inconceivably strange and unknowable. But maybe that’s why I do what I do, so that I can say: hey, we can get to the future together, and no matter what it looks like there will be people that care, and people who watch out for each other just because it’s the right thing to do, even if they’re sweary people with terrible attitudes.
But anyway. This book exists because of so very many people. My agent, Joshua Bilmes, and the rest of his team at JABberwocky Literary Agency continue to be absolutely fantastic to work with, and none of this series could or would have happened without them. Thanks also to my editor, Katie Hoffman, and the whole lovely team at DAW for their support and hard work in such strange and difficult times. And once again I have a truly gorgeous cover by Kekai Kotaki, who as usual got right to the heart of my vision for this book. Also, I wish to thank Richard Shealy, who is precisely the sort of friendly but exacting copy editor every author needs.
Thanks also are due to my kids, who have now been largely trapped in the house with me for a year and who still can’t figure out how to stack pots when putting them away, and have as always been both a great support and a constant source of humility, entertainment, and exhaustion. Of my friends—and you know, I’m a serious introvert with almost crippling social anxiety, so the extroverts have to be really hurting out there—I miss them all so much, but they still found time and energy to give me support and critical feedback, particularly my usual crew of awesome first readers, Jonathan Turner, Robin Holly, and Laurie Vadeboncoeur. I also want to thank John Wiswell and Sydney Drinkwater for vetting some representation for me, Steven Brewer for assistance with Esperanto, and I am very especially grateful to Sean, Saya, and Miya Donovan for helping me with my very rusty 日本語. As always, I hope I got everything right, and if not, the fault lies entirely with me. I do my best, always mindful that it is possible to do better, and I will keep striving for that.
And as always a shout out to the communities, real and online, that keep me company, from the decades-long love and support of the September Moms to the writers, artists, and poets of Absolute Write, Viable Paradise, Twitter, Slack, and elseweb, and to my fellow CATS who keep my days interesting and don’t mind my odd, often chaotic, dual-career life. Last, I want to mention the very kind emails and letters from strangers who felt strongly enough about my work to write me, and remind me that I have the miraculous and somewhat mindboggling privilege of readers. Thank you, one and all.
Whatever future you find yourself reading this in, be well.
—Suzanne
About the Author
Suzanne Palmer is an award-winning and acclaimed writer of science fiction. She won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette for “The Secret Life of Bots” in 2018 and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for the novella "Waterlines" in 2020. Her short fiction has also won readers’ awards for Asimov’s, Analog, and Interzone magazines, and has been included in the Locus Recommended Reading List.
Palmer has a Fine Arts degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where as a student she was the head librarian of the UMass Science Fiction Society and spent many fine summers reading in the stacks from back to front (she wanted to hit Zelazny sooner rather than later.) She lives in western Massachusetts and is a Linux and database system administrator for the Sciences at Smith College. You can find her online at zanzjan.net and on Twitter at @zanzjan.
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