The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine

by Jonathan Strahan

  “It has always been a dream of mine to see a Sister of the White disrobe before my eyes, but I was rather wondering whether you found the –”

  Shev tossed over the package and Carcolf snatched it smartly from the air.

  “I KNEW i could rely on you.” Carcolf felt a little dizzy with relief, not to mention more than a little tingly with desire. She had always had a weakness for dangerous women.

  Bloody hell, she really was turning into her father...

  “You were right,” said Shev, dropping into the chair she had so recently frightened Carcolf out of. “Pombrine had it.”

  “I bloody knew it! That slime! So hard to find a good expendable decoy these days.”

  “It’s as if you can’t trust anyone.”

  “Still. No harm done, eh?” And Carcolf lifted up her shirt and ever so carefully slid the package into the uppermost of her two cash belts.

  It was Shev’s turn to watch, pretending not to as she poured herself a glass of wine. “What’s in the parcel?” she asked.

  “It’s safer if I don’t tell you.”

  “You’ve no idea, have you?”

  “I’m under orders not to look,” Carcolf was forced to admit.

  “Don’t you ever wonder, though? I mean, the more I’m ordered not to look, the more I want to.” Shev sat forward, dark eyes glimmering in a profoundly bewitching way, and for an instant Carcolf’s head was filled with an image of the pair of them rolling across the carpet together, laughing as they ripped the package apart between them.

  She dismissed it with an effort. “A thief can wonder. A courier cannot.”

  “Could you be any more pompous?”

  “It would require an effort.”

  Shev slurped at her wine. “Well, it’s your package. I suppose.” “No it isn’t. That’s the whole point.”

  “I think I preferred you when you were a criminal.”

  “Lies. You relish the opportunity to corrupt me.”

  “True enough.” Shev wriggled down the chair so her long, brown legs slid out from the hem of her gown. “Why don’t you stay a while?” One searching foot found Carcolf’s ankle, and slid gently up the inside of her leg, and down, and up. “And be corrupted?”

  Carcolf took an almost painful breath. “Damn, but I’d love to.” The strength of the feeling surprised her, and caught in her throat, and for the briefest moment she almost choked on it. Not just lust. Much more. For the briefest moment, she almost tossed the package out of the window, and sank down before the chair, and took Shev’s hand and shared tales she had never told from when she was a girl. For the briefest moment. Then she was Carcolf again, and she stepped smartly away and let Shev’s foot clomp down on the boards. “But you know how it is, in my business. Have to catch the tide.” And she snatched up her new coat and turned as she pulled it on, giving herself time to blink back any hint of tears.

  “You should take a holiday.”

  “With every job I say so, and when every job ends, I find I get... twitchy.” Carcolf sighed as she fastened the buttons. “I’m just not made for sitting still.”

  “Huh.”

  “Let’s not pretend you’re any different.”

  “Let’s not pretend. I’ve been considering a move myself. Adua, perhaps, or back to the South –”

  “I’d much rather you stayed,” Carcolf found she had said, then tried to pass it off with a carefree wave. “Who else would get me out of messes when I come here? You’re the one person in this whole damn city I trust.” That was a complete lie, of course, she didn’t trust Shev in the least. A good courier trusts no one, and Carcolf was the very best. But she was a great deal more comfortable with lies than with truth.

  She could see in Shev’s smile that she understood the whole situation perfectly. “So sweet.” She caught Carcolf’s wrist as she turned to leave with a grip that was not to be ignored. “My money?”

  “How silly of me.” Carcolf handed her the purse.

  Without even looking inside Shev said, “And the rest.”

  Carcolf sighed once more, and tossed the other purse on the bed, gold flashing in the lamplight as coins spilled across the white sheet. “You’d be upset if I didn’t try.”

  “Your care for my delicate feelings is touching. I daresay I’ll see you next time you’re here?” she asked as Carcolf put her hand on the lock.

  “I shall count the moments.”

  Just then she wanted a kiss more than anything, but she was not sure her resolve was strong enough for only one, so she blew a kiss instead, and pulled the door to behind her, and slipped swiftly across the shadowed court and out the heavy gate onto the street, hoping it was a while before Shevedieh took a closer look at the coins inside the first purse. Perhaps a cosmic punishment was thus incurred, but it was worth it just for the thought of the look on her face.

  The day had been a bloody fiasco, but she supposed it could have been a great deal worse. She still had ample time to make it to the ship before they lost the tide. Carcolf pulled up her hood, wincing at the pain from that freshly stitched scratch, and from that entirely unreasonable ulcer, and from that cursed seam in her trousers, then strode off through the misty night, neither too fast nor too slow, entirely inconspicuous.

  Damn, but she hated Sipani.

  THE INSECTS OF LOVE

  Genevieve Valentine

  Genevieve Valentine’s (www.genevievevalentine.com) first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, won the 2012 Crawford Award and was nominated for the Nebula. Her second, The Girls of the Kingfisher Club, appeared in 2014 to acclaim. Coming up is science fiction novel, Persona. Valentine’s short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, Fantasy, Apex, and others, and in the anthologies Federations, The Living Dead 2, The Way of the Wizard, Teeth, After, and more. Her story “Light on the Water” was a 2009 World Fantasy Award nominee, and “Things to Know about Being Dead” was a 2012 Shirley Jackson Award nominee; several stories have been reprinted in Best of the Year anthologies. Her nonfiction and reviews have appeared at NPR.org, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Weird Tales, Tor.com, and Fantasy Magazine, and she is a co-author of Geek Wisdom (Quirk Books). She has also been known to write Catwoman comics for DC! Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable.

  BEFORE FAIRUZ GOT the tattoo, I’d never even heard of the beetles.

  I just knew that the tattoo she wanted was enormous, and that it would take all night, and even as I agreed to come with her I said, “This is a bad idea.”

  “Good,” she said, and hit the gas.

  I expected some shithole off the main drag, the kind of place Fairuz would go to make a point. But it was clean as a dentist’s office, and they gave us paper caps and told us to watch what we touched.

  Inside was even cleaner, and the man waiting for us was in a work suit that zipped up to his neck.

  “Lie down,” he said, turning on the projector.

  As Fairuz pulled off her shirt and settled onto her stomach, the ink drawing snapped into place over her skin: fifteen constellations, scattered on her back from the shoulder blades down past the waist of her trousers; freckles with labels, pulled together by string.

  “You want something for the pain?” the guy asked.

  Fairuz shrugged. “Sure.”

  He picked up a container of gold and pink marbles and poured them over her back.

  Of course they weren’t marbles, but when you haven’t heard of the beetles before, you don’t think that kind of thing will ever happen, that someone gets a Tupperware of bugs and dumps them out.

  (You only need one or two, if the area’s small, but Fairuz never did anything small if she could help it; the tattoo was all over and so were the beetles.) They skittered back and forth over her skin, a shirt of rosy sequins, and across their bodies the projected constellations flickered in and out of sight.

  I think this is before she died.

  CETONIA APHRODITE (VENUS beetle). This beetle, native to co
ntinental Europe and long thought extinct, was recently rediscovered in Denmark’s temperate thickets. Though no definitive studies have been conducted, it may be inferred that global warming forced a migration of the species to a more northern climate.

  Cetonia aphrodite , commonly known as the Venus beetle because of its pink-gold coloring, feeds off pollen, particularly roses and other flowering climbers. In order to monopolize this popular resource, the beetles produce a toxin that deters predators and competition.

  It is this trait that has made the Venus beetle of particular interest, and combined with a hardy disposition that does well in captivity, domestication efforts have brought the species back from the brink of extinction. Breeding programs recently began in Denmark to assure the supply of Venus beetle toxin as a natural pesticide.

  The most promising potential for human application since the project’s inception has been the peripheral effects of the toxin, which acts as an analgesic on contact with skin. Like many great discoveries, it was an accidental find, but its medical application as an inexpensive, naturally derived painkiller could be significant.

  When applied repeatedly in a short span, buildup of the toxin creates mild euphoria. Addicts and experimenters have been known to plant the Venus beetle under the skin near a vein for a sustained high. The Insect Preservation Act of 2046, if passed, will place these and similar insects under protected status and make implantation punishable, but the market for them continues to thrive, and each year, dozens of injuries are reported from those who tried to self-extract the beetle, and the image of the beetle – a distant, smaller cousin of the scarab, inheriting their round heads and sturdy legs – has become a symbol among the chemical class of thrill-seekers.

  MY FIRST MEMORY is Fairuz cradling the mantis in her hands and showing it to me.

  It was gray and spotted white, and its wings were crusted over. She blew on it gently; the sand scattered, and the mantis flew away as our parents came looking for us.

  My parents always told the story like Fairuz was trying to scare me, but I don’t think it had crossed her mind. Being cruel came later. I think she just felt sorry for the mantis, and wanted to see what I would do.

  I remember the mantis’s wedge-head and the antennae waving, the mottled and translucent wings, the pressed-up arms. Its eyes were huge, the matte steel blue of a storm cloud.

  Maybe she’d expected me to hate it, or to be frightened, but it was beautiful; I looked through its glassy wings, watched the trembling, curious feelers moving around its mouth and smearing blood, until Fairuz took it back, frowning absently at the bug, at me.

  I wondered what she was thinking. (That happened a lot. It happened when she burned through one career after another. It happened whenever she knew more about what I was doing than I did. It happened when she knocked on my door one night and said without waiting, “I’m sick of all this. I’m getting a tattoo. Let’s go.”)

  She lost interest in bugs after that. I never did.

  EVERYTHING ABOUT AN insect tells you what it is.

  The antennae, the wings, the joints on the legs, the color of the larvae, are all advertisements of its origin and its adaptation, a line of waiting flags for its taxonomy. It’s easy work. They want to be organized, down to the thousand-facets of their eyes; they wear exoskeletons to keep everything in order.

  Fairuz had always been interested in the theory behind things – she studied math because she said she wanted to find out what was going on underneath the universe. She must not have found what she was looking for, because after one and a half degrees, her bedroom stacked waist-high with sheets of scribbles that looked like insects had migrated across them, she moved on to the public-advocacy theory of making people do what you want them to do, and from there to some government think tank where everything was classified, and she sometimes got intense and sometimes cutting, but never any happier.

  I felt sorry for her. Insects were easy to love. It’s always easier to find a thing and love it without hoping for a reason.

  I REMEMBER SITTING in the schoolroom.

  We’d been kept late because Fairuz argued with a teacher and I’d agreed with Fairuz. They didn’t want any talking, so they sat us in rows, one desk apart.

  Fairuz was in front of me, her shoulders hunched (she pulled in when she was angry, like a pill bug).

  As we took our temporary seats she said, “You’re so stupid sometimes,” even though it was only that Mr. Richards hated when girls spoke up in class. She had been right to argue, and I had been right to agree.

  For the three hours we sat in detention, I didn’t even try to answer her. I just seethed in my chair and stared at the bun on her neck, low and beetle-black.

  If I try hard enough, between the moment she breathes out and back in, her skin flickers and I can see Auriga, five dots tattoo-traced into a point, the lines disappearing below the collar of her shirt.

  FAIRUZ WENT MISSING in the desert.

  Probably exposure, the officer said when he came to my door. He said she’d been present at evening roll-call, according to the excursion director. Then she’d gone out, and never come back. There was no body.

  “Is there a search?”

  They’d called it off after seventy-two hours. They’d looked in every known shelter for a hundred miles, though she couldn’t possibly have gone that far. They had flown over in helicopters, looking for her clothes. There had been carrion birds, he said finally, which was when I realized what he was trying to tell me.

  “Who saw her go out alone?” I asked.

  “Every attempt was made to locate –”

  “Who saw her go into the desert alone?”

  “We’re very sorry for your loss,” he said.

  I folded my arms, careful with the barbed cricket specimen I was carrying on a pin. It trembled one reedy note (my hand was shaking, my voice was shaking).

  “What were they looking for?”

  “It’s classified,” he said. “I’m really very sorry. Someone will be in touch with you to make arrangements.”

  I crushed the barbed cricket in the door when I slammed it. That was worse than anything; that was the horrible omen that let the words slip in – she’s dead.

  Some words are knives. I cried for a while, my forehead pressed against the door, clammy and sick.

  When I could walk again, I pulled up every picture, every message she had sent while she was away. She would have left me a clue, something to go on if the worst should happen, some way to find her or follow her, no matter what.

  There was no chance she’d died how they said. If there was one thing Fairuz couldn’t stand, it was being alone.

  ACHETA EMARGINATA (BARBED cricket). Known colloquially as ‘The Ragged Cricket,’ this insect’s reedy call sets it apart from its cousins the field cricket and the tree cricket. Found widely throughout the Eurasian continent, the barbed cricket population spread as trade increased with Europe and the Americas.

  The legs of Acheta emarginata are perforated for greater buoyancy when jumping through the tall grass of the temperate plains to which it is native. When the male draws its barbed wing edges together, air passing swiftly back and forth across the holes creates the mournful tone of a woodwind instrument, unique among the shrill sounds of others of its genus. So striking is the sound that the insect has historically been kept at royal courts in China and Indonesia, and has been used by hunters – particularly when displaced from its natural habitat – as a novelty lure to draw curious birds from the brush.

  It has recently been speculated by entomologists that this sound, which seems designed to mimic a bird call, is not a mating song as previously supposed, but in fact a way to misdirect those same birds that are the barbed cricket’s natural enemies.

  Due to the long-standing superstition that a ragged cricket’s music has the ability to call loved ones home again, they are considered good luck, and are often kept as pets.

  FAIRUZ HAD ARGUED with Mr. Richards because he correct
ed me. “This is not an assignment where we should be using our imaginations,”

  he said, holding my biology report out to me. I’d drawn the mantis on the front in pencil, outlined in ink. The eyes I had gone over and over, until they were fathomless black; they’d bled through to the second page. That was strange, that was wrong, its eyes had been the color of slate; why had I drawn such deep, open black?

  Fairuz had turned to watch us, her face pulling at the edges she was so angry.

  I opened my mouth to defend the mantis.

  “Sir,” she snapped, “Given the liberties you take regarding societal evolution, surely she should be forgiven the mistake of thinking this was an exercise in creative writing.”

  He pivoted slowly to face her, one eyebrow going up. “And what exactly are you suggesting, Fairuz?” He never used last names when he spoke to girls like he did when he spoke to the boys.

  I said, “She’s suggesting you’re an awful teacher who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

  We got detention, and he walked back to the front of the room and dropped my paper in the garbage.

  When he left, Fairuz sprinted for the trash can as soon as the door was closed, before he could come back and set the clock. She sat with her hands folded on top of that report the whole time we were in detention. “Never talk about anything unless you know it’s true here first,” she said, like it was a warning she’d given me before. “You’re so stupid sometimes.” What she did with it I never knew; I never saw it again. I never looked for it. I never asked what she meant by “here.” Fairuz had reasons, most of the time, and either way she wouldn’t tell you.

  I GOT A book about insects, the kind you could verify, and started reading about those instead. I never found the mantis.

  Once I came in to ask her, but she looked up from her book (it was all water, tide pools and surfers and lonely-looking shells wrapped carelessly in kelp) and took one look at me and said, “If this is still bugs, I’m looking at shorelines, so only tell me if it’s dragonflies.”