The Long List Anthology Volume 5

by David Steffen

  Then you remember the brightness of possibility, when Anyag asked if you would fight for freedom. You did not raise a jewel just to watch her die; even if this is how the legend goes, you cannot let it end like this.

  His long tail has just left the ground; you leap up, run forward, and stab your dagger into it as hard as you can, chanting for power through the blood in your mouth, as your feet leave the earth. The bakunawa flicks its tail but you’ve wrapped one arm around it now, the other still pressing down as hard as you can with your dagger, drawing blood in thick black gouts. For nothing will you let go, not the world. You are calm in the depths of your sorrow, and if Anyag is dead, then at least you don’t have to live without her—at least you tried.

  The bakunawa screeches, all human speech gone, as you sail over the ocean—it coils around you, wind rushing. When you turn your head you see the dark depths of its throat, the bright jagged line of its teeth, closing around you. You wrench your knife from its flesh. There’s a snap as air and wind and noise disappear. You fall into nothing.

  • • • •

  You reach out blindly with your dagger, and catch onto something—a distended piece of flesh, somewhere in its long throat. The creature bucks, seizes, and your head rattles, but you drag yourself onto the ridge of bone, rolling away from the edge. You gasp, savoring the air—it reeks of the ocean and decay, but you can breathe in here. The flesh is soft beneath you, slimy but not acidic like you’d imagined, and you roll onto your knees, shaking. The inside of the beast is massive, but the place you’ve landed seems to be solid, at least, living flesh pulsing beneath you. You blink, trying to let your eyes adjust to the darkness, but there’s no light save the dim steel of your blade.

  How did he consume Hugan-an? Did he take his last bride below the sea, and spit her out, and eat her bit by bit, to suffer? Or did she live out her life in this dark cavern, alone and starving, eventually fading away to nothing?

  How will you find Anyag here? You remove your top and wrap it around your waist, to staunch the bleeding. Your desperation, and the last vestiges of your magic, can only go so far.

  “Anyag!” you shout. It echoes back at you, dismal, desperate. “Anyag! I’m here!”

  Nothing. Your heart quavers. At least you still have your weapon. Perhaps you can still find the beast’s heart, and slay it, before dying. At least you won’t have to wait long, if she’s truly gone.

  Then, from somewhere behind you, a faint echo: “Amira?”

  “Anyag!” Cautiously you stand, wary of falling back into the pit of the monster’s insides; you turn and reach out, but there’s only emptiness. You turn and walk deeper in, one hand pressed over your nose to avoid the dizzying stench, the other stretched out before you, searching. “I’m coming!”

  You walk blindly into the dark, grasping the air, until your hand collides with something—another hand, a set of fingers. They twine with yours, shivering, the movement uncannily familiar. A sharp intake of breath, a stuttered cry—and then your arms wrap around each other, even in this place that might be your grave. You grip her tightly, like she might turn into nothing the minute you loosen your hold on her. Her fingers dig into your bare back, trembling. Blood slicks your arms, gashes from where his teeth grazed her (but didn’t snap her apart—he wanted to savor it—he said as much). She’s alive. She’s whole.

  “You fool,” she sobs into your chest. “What are you doing here? I told you to stay behind. Your wound—”

  “It’ll heal,” you say, hoping it will be true. “I promised to stay with you, remember?”

  She barks out a laugh, and pulls back slightly. “Then we’ll both die here?”

  “I won’t let you die.” You wish you had a light to see her by, but all you have is this familiar sensation; her cheeks beneath your fingers, wet with tears. You rest your thumbs on the corners of her mouth, feel her lips part, searching for words. Anyag has always known what to say, but caught here without hope, even she might hesitate.

  Her arms slide slowly down your back, and loop around your waist. She exhales. “Then I won’t let you die, either.”

  You remain standing like that, holding each other, for a moment. Then you step back and fumble at your belt, unlatch her dagger and press it into her hand. “We have these,” you say. She holds her dagger tightly, considering. You skim her arm, feeling for cuts, and she stops you by clutching your hand—no need. I’m fine. She makes a thoughtless humming sound, as if you are merely in the dark of her room and not in the belly of a monster.

  A sudden thought crosses your mind—a flicker of possibility. You hum with her, letting the idea take shape. You have nothing better, and neither of you dare wait—already you could be sinking into the sea, miles away from where anyone can save you. You have to try.

  “We can change her song,” you say. “We can make a new one. Just as Hugan-an did, that time.”

  “But my magic isn’t—”

  “We have to try.” You’re both more comfortable with swords than with spellwork, but against the bakunawa, brute force will get you nowhere. Anyag nods, keeping quiet. You sense her thinking, determining how to lay down the words, what to sing so that you might live, or if not, take this monster with you in your perishing.

  “Bathala,” she starts, her voice thin and shaky. “I, your humble daughter, have nothing to offer—”

  But I raise my eyes to you, beseeching, my arms uplifted, reaching—

  I call on you to fill me with your light

  That I might take this blade and shatter darkest night…

  You take the thread of her chant, her magic, and weave it into yours—just as you first guided her hands to mimic a dove’s wings, taught her to swing a sword—but this is her power, her right for the sacrifice of becoming binukot. She is destined for this.

  And you have been singing together for years.

  You repeat the words, join your free hands, feel power thrum through both of you. The sensation of warmth flares around your neck—your mother’s amulet, her anting-anting, alighting, the last gasp of protection from your blood relatives responding to this plea as you shut your eyes and beg, beg, beg—for you deserve to live, too, you deserve a chance at joy. Not everything has to be a sacrifice. On your third round of the song, something changes. You open your eyes and there is light in the darkness, a bright fire, dancing over both of you, crackling, growing—

  Your song begins to echo. You don’t dare stop singing it, but another voice joins it, then another, and another, each note different, some a throaty hum, others at a pitch higher than humanly possible—a melody of moons, and the spirit of a girl who gave her everything to save a village and would give no more, not this time.

  Has he heard you? Bathala listens and does not in turn, and anyone invoking him knows that. One must accept what fate rolls out in due course, inexorable as the ocean and the slow growth of trees, the tide drawn in and out, the shape of a song that has been carried in a heart for years and years at last finding itself…

  The light collecting above you spirals down into your blade. You keep singing as you hold the blade out, no longer a simple kalis but a beautiful kampilan, curved and deadly, sparking fierily, then growing longer and larger until it is a giant shaft of light.

  You see Anyag’s face at last. Her eyes are scrunched, set with her will to fight: one answered prayer among so many abandoned, one dim ember sparked to flare all of your guttering hopes. Her hand in yours tightens; in the other is her blade, and you see that it is now a burning pillar of light as well.

  Then Anyag’s eyes snap open and she nods, bidding you to strike. You face opposite directions, determined to slay the beast together. You arch your arm, and thrust with all your might into the darkness, throwing the light, pushing your magic out as far as you can—the amulet at your neck explodes, and the wound in your gut opens wider—but you do not let go, Anyag’s hand clutched tightly in yours, her voice high and clear above all the others.

  The world wrenches apart,
the floor beneath you gives way. You free-fall in the midst of the wildest screeching, a scream so inhuman and endless that your head feels like its tearing. But light is spilling through—and air—and the sound of the ocean, and drums beating. You are not beneath the sea at all—you are still in the sky. Just as you two were fighting a battle inside of the beast, the village was doing its best outside of it. Your sphere of light keeps growing, extending from both ends of the hilt now, splitting the beast apart around you, until its scream is cut off and you close your eyes against the glare of light, brace yourself for an endless fall. Only then do you stop singing.

  You aren’t expecting Anyag’s hand to find yours, as you drop through the air, still trapped in the gutted neck of the bakunawa. But it does, and you are only a little surprised as you curl your fingers together.

  • • • •

  The first thing you see is Anyag’s face, fractured through your bloody vision. Her hands rest on your stomach, sealing the wound with the last of her newly strengthened magic. Everything hurts, but you’re alive.

  “My jewel.” Your voice is cracked, having spent it all in spell and song. You lift one hand and she grips it, weakly.

  Behind her floats the moon. You are lying in the carcass of the moon-eater. You are floating in the ocean to the beat of drums.

  You don’t dare hope that you are free.

  “Amira,” she answers, and her smile is bittersweet: she has grown up, so impeccably, and it has nothing and everything to do with you, of who you are together. “Don’t call me that. When we leave this place, I can be your jewel no longer. And you cannot be my sword. It won’t work.”

  Your heart splinters, a loss as distinct as your mother’s amulet, now an empty piece of string around your neck.

  “I refuse to be something you must take care of and defend at every turn. I want to stand with you on even footing, and face you freely. Rather than your jewel, let me be your shield, for I can protect you. I cannot honor that unless you do.”

  You ease yourself up so that you are sitting. You do not touch her face, but you press your forehead to hers, look her in the eye. “Have I ever said no to you?”

  She grins. “Yes. Lots of times.”

  Fair enough. You don’t know what it will mean, to be together after this. You’ve never known a life where you don’t feel beholden to her, simultaneously paving her way and blending into her shadow; where your hopes aren’t tethered to hers by default. “It won’t be easy for me.”

  “I know. But you’re good at difficult things.”

  You nod, and her smile goes from tentative to delighted. There will be time enough in the future to determine how things must be: where you will live, how. What to say to her parents. What songs you will sing. Bathala is not known to bestow favors twice, and you already know your future cannot be in this village. But for now. For now. None of that matters.

  Anyag turns her face slightly, so that half of it is cast in moonlight.

  “I want to see the sunrise,” she says. “It’ll be my first.”

  “Okay.”

  She leans into you, and you do the same, balancing each other out in your exhaustion. Right now, you have all the time in the world. Time enough to watch the moon melt into the horizon, and wait for the sun to appear, as blindingly bright as its promise of tomorrow.

  (Author’s Note: The lines in the letter Anyag writes to Lisoryo (Dear Night Sky, dear Veil…) are from Barbara Jane Reyes’s poem “Having Been Cast, Eve Implores 2” from the collection Diwata, published by Boa Editions in 2010. I received the author’s permission to include the lines in the piece, with credit.)

  * * *

  Isabel Yap writes fiction and poetry, works in the tech industry, and drinks tea. Born and raised in Manila, she has also lived in California and London. She is currently completing her MBA at Harvard Business School. In 2013 she attended the Clarion Writers Workshop, and since 2016 has served as the Clarion foundation secretary. Her work has appeared in venues including Tor.com, Strange Horizons, and Year’s Best Weird Fiction. She is @visyap on Twitter and her website is https://isabelyap.com.

  A World to Die For

  By Tobias S. Buckell

  Your hunting party of repurposed, cobbled together and barely-repaired pre-Collapse electric vehicles sweeps across the alkaline rich dust flats of old farm land. The outriders are kicking up rooster tails of dust into the air behind them, their bikes scudding over the dirt and slamming hard into every divot and furrow. Pennants whip about in the air.

  You’re glad to be on the top of a pickup with suspension, ass in a sling, feet shoved hard against the baseplate of the machine gun mounted right up against the back of the cab. You’ve been an outrider before, trying to balance a shotgun on the handlebars of the bike without wiping out. You didn’t like it.

  The outriders might get more respect, but there’s a reason they wear all those heavy leathers, padding, faded old football helmets, and other chunks of scavenged gear.

  “There she is!” Miko leans out from the passenger-side door and bangs on the roof of the cab to get your attention away from the outriders and pointed front. “Get ready.”

  Up ahead, through the bitter clouds of dirt that seep around the edges of your respirator, is the black line of the old Chicago tollway. You reach forward and yank a latch on the machine gun, pulling one of the large-caliber bullets into the chamber with a satisfying ratchet sound.

  The seventy-year-old gun has been lovingly maintained since the Collapse. It has seen action in the Sack of Indianapolis, spat fury down upon the Plains Raiders, and helped in the defense of the Appalachian Line. You look down the sights, ignoring the massive ox horns and assorted animal skulls bolted onto your truck’s hood.

  Your quarry is ahead. A convoy of trucks pulling hard for places out further East. Their large, underinflated balloon tires fill the potholes and scars of the old expressway as they trundle on at a dangerous thirty-five miles an hour. It’s axle-breaking speed, a sprint across the country in hopes that they can smash any MidWest Alliance blockades without paying import/export duties.

  Fuckers. As if they could just roll across a state for free. Now they’ll pay a lot more than just a ten percent transit fee.

  “Cheetah cluster: right flank,” Miko screams over the screech of old suspension and the rumble of tires. He is still hanging out of the door, and he points and throws command signs at other drivers. He’s ripped his respirator off and left it to dangle around his neck. “Dragon cluster, left. Cougars for the front.”

  Your cluster of vehicles splits off to swing behind the convoy’s dust trail, the world turning into a fog of black dirt and amber highlights, and you fall in on the right like a vulture. Enemy outriders split off from the convoy to harass the impending clusters, but they are outnumbered. Shotguns crack through the air, people scream.

  In moments the security around the convoy peels off, uninterested in paying for cargo with any further lives. They’ve done their paid duty—they can head back in honor to whoever hired them.

  “Do it,” Miko orders you. He pulls his respirator back on, and now he’s all green eyes and blonde hair over the edge of the cracked rubber. He’s the commander. You’ve risen far following in his footsteps. Maybe one day you’ll run a cluster, give commands to your own outriders. You’ve been tasting ambition like that, of late.

  To survive, you need to find the right people to follow. Miko has created a strong pack. The fees you pull from what little cross-country traffic still trickles over the road keeps you all fed, the respirators fixed, and batteries in stock.

  You lean back and pull the trigger.

  The old Browning destroys the world with its explosive howl. You rake the tires of the trucks as Ann, the driver, moves the pickup along the convoy in an explosion of acceleration.

  All three of the oversized vehicles shudder to a halt. Ann brings the pickup to a sliding stop, dirt and chunks of the old highway rattling up to kick the undersides of the old vehicle.<
br />
  Miko steps out, shotgun casually slung over his shoulder.

  Everyone’s expecting the drivers to come out of the truck cabs with hands up. But instead there’s a loud groan from the trailers. Miko swings the shotgun down into his hands and aims it up at the sound.

  The sides of the middle trailer fall open and slam to the ground. Houz Shäd shock troops in their all-black armor are crouched behind sandbags and a pair of fifty-caliber machine guns.

  You’re all dead.

  But instead of getting ripped apart by carrot-sized bullets, one of the Shäd shouts through a loudspeaker, “We seek information from you, and only information. Drop your weapons and live. You’ll even be allowed to keep them. In fact, give us what we seek and your cluster can take the entire shipment of solar panels in trucks one and three.”

  Miko drops his shotgun.

  You push away from the machine gun, hands in the air, wondering what happens next.

  The Shäd jump down from the trailer, greatcoats flaring out behind them. Their deep-black machine guns seem to soak up the amber light. There’s a storm brewing up north, you can tell. You will all need to run before it, get down underground before the tornados touch down and begin ravaging everything.

  “Remove your ventilators,” the nearest Shäd gestures. “Kneel in a row.”

  Your mouth is dry. This is an execution line and you know it. Bullshit promises aside. People like the merchant riders of Shäd view the continent as a place they should be able to trade across. They view clusters as “raiders” and not the customs agents you know yourselves to be.