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

by Jonathan Strahan

  He gave the man a bleary grin, then made for the lift as quickly as he could without looking suspicious.

  NOW THAT THE rest of it was in Nahm’s hands, Dorian had nothing to do but wait. He camped out in an automated tourist bar across the way, slumping into a plastic molded seat with his tablet. Once Nahm messaged him to say they were at the hotel, he bought a gargantuan Heineken bottle, the liter sort, and drank it slowly on ice.

  Time ticked by on his tablet screen. He passed it imagining the whole thing going off flawlessly, and then by imagining himself on a small sleek yacht knifing through the blue-green waters off Ko Fangan. Maybe even with Nahm draped on his shoulder for a week or two, wearing a pair of aviators and a skanky swimsuit. Between that and the tingly insulation of a half-liter of Heineken, he barely rattled when a hand slammed down on the table in front of him.

  Dorian blinked hard. Nahm was standing in front of him, shoulders trembling, clutching herself. The static clip was still in place, moving her hair in graceful black ripples around her face, but the effect wasn’t the same with her lip gloss smeared halfway across her cheek and a growing brown bruise under her bloodshot left eye. And hulking behind her, red-faced and furious, was the hotel security guard.

  “Shit,” Dorian said. The buzz from the beer slipped away all at once.

  “I fuck up,” Nahm said shakily. “I left the bathroom open. The blur go off, but when we switch around on the bed she see herself in the mirror.”

  The security guard barked something fast and angry, from which Dorian could only extricate falang and police. He reached across the table and hauled Dorian up by the armpit, jerking his head toward the door.

  “The eyecam?” Dorian demanded, trying to twist away. No go.

  “She call this big motherfucker, he take it out my eye,” Nahm groaned, mascara finally starting to leak down her cheeks in inky trails. “She gets mad, she go. He says he will call the police so I tell him you have money.”

  “I don’t have money,” Dorian said reflexively, looking at the guard.

  “Bullshit.” Nahm’s eyes were wide and desperate. “I know you have money.”

  Dorian looked around the bar, licking his lips. He’d picked it intentionally. A collection of steroid-bulky expats were cradling pints in the back, watching the situation with increasing interest. If he played ignorant right now, they looked both drunk and patriotic enough to intervene on behalf of a fellow Englishman. Nobody liked it when the locals stopped smiling.

  “His cousin is police,” Nahm said, winnowing on the edge of the sob. “He says if I don’t pay he put me in the jail.”

  Dorian picked up his glass and finished it; the sweat pooling in his palms nearly made it slip out of his grip. He tried to think. If Carrow had left in a hurry, that meant the insurance cam he’d hidden was still there in the hotel room. The fact she’d left furious only confirmed how valuable the footage was.

  If he wanted to get back into that room before some overzealous autocleaner wiped the cam off the wall, he needed to defuse things.

  “Okay, fuck,” Dorian said. “Okay. I’ll come.” He gave a glance toward the back table. “Nothing to worry about, lads. Just a bit of a… lover’s spat.”

  One of the men rubbed his bristly chin and raised his pint in Dorian’s general direction. The others ignored him. As he let himself be steered out the door, the bar chirped goodbye in Thai and then English. Nahm followed behind, pinching the torn fabric of her shirt together. Her bare feet slapped on the tile. She was biting her lip, rubbing absently at the smeared gloss.

  “Sorry I fuck up,” she said miserably. Outside, the night air was warm and stank of a broken sewer line. Dorian fixed his eyes on the neon green sign of the hotel across the way. The sooner he had this dealt with, the sooner he could get the cam.

  “Me too,” Dorian said, but he searched for her free hand in the dark and gave it what he figured was a comforting squeeze.

  She looked down at their interlaced hands, then back up, brow furrowed. “You should have said, though. You should have said, Nahm, don’t let her see a mirror.”

  Dorian took his hand back. The guard ushered them into the side alley, stopping underneath a graffitied Dokemon. Dorian crossed his arms.

  “Alright,” he said. “How much does he want? And if it’s cash, we need a machine.”

  “No cash,” the guard said, brandishing a phone still slick from the plastic wrap. “I do Bank.”

  “Of course you do,” Dorian said. “So how much, shitface?”

  “Five million Baht.”

  Dorian’s exaggerated guffaw accidentally landed a speck of spit on the guard’s shoulder, but the man didn’t seem to notice and Dorian didn’t feel keen to point it out. “Who do you think I am, the fucking king?” he demanded instead.

  In reply, the guard thumbed a number into his phone. “I call cousin,” he said, seizing Nahm’s wrist. “Your ladyboy will go to jail, maybe you, too.”

  Nahm gave a low groan again. Dorian made a few mental calculations. He had just over a million Banked, and the footage from the hotel had to be worth triple that, even if it wasn’t a full encounter. He would still come out of this in the black. The last thing Dorian needed was police showing up. And he didn’t like the idea of Nahm sobbing in some filthy lock-up, either.

  “Half a million,” Dorian said. “All I got.”

  The guard’s ringtone bleated into the night air. He shook his shaved head. Nahm started cursing at him in Thai.

  Dorian clenched his jaw. “A million,” he snapped. “I can show it to you. It’s really all I’ve got.”

  The guard stared at him, black eyes gleaming in the blurry orange streetlight. The ringtone sounded again. Then, just as the click and a guttural hallo answered, he thumbed his phone off.

  “Show me.”

  Dorian dug out his tablet and drained his account while the guard watched, dumping all of it to a specified address and waiting the thirty seconds for transaction confirmation. Nahm shifted nervously from foot to foot, mascara-streaked face bleached by the glowing screen, until it finally went through with an electronic chime. Dorian’s stomach churned at the sight of the zeroes blinking in his Bank. He reminded himself it was temporary. Very, very temporary.

  Once the transaction was through, the guard bustled out of the alley without so much as a korpun krap, leaving Dorian alone with Nahm. He was formulating the best way to get back into the hotel room without running into the guard again when she threw her arms around his neck and pulled him into a furious bruising kiss. Her fingers on his scalp and her tongue in his mouth made it difficult.

  “Thank you,” she panted. “For not letting him call.” She hooked her thumb into the catch of Dorian’s trousers, giving him her smeared smile. “No champagne. But…”

  With her right hand working his cock, he nearly didn’t feel her left slipping something into his pocket. He clamped over it on reflex. Nahm looked vaguely sheepish as the sound of a sputtering motor approached.

  “I still am working on my hands,” she said, wriggling her fingers out of his grip, leaving a small cold cylinder in their place. “Bye.” She stepped away as a battered scooter whined its way into the alley, sliding to a halt in front of them. Dorian watched Nahm climb on to straddle a helmeted rider with a cartoon snake on one thick forearm. He lost his half-chub.

  As the scooter darted back out into traffic, Dorian looked down at the insurance cam in his palm and grimaced.

  IT TOOK ANOTHER oversized bottle of beer before he could bring himself to watch the cam footage. Finally, slouched protectively over the table, he plugged it into his tablet and fast-forwarded through the empty hotel room until the door opened. Nahm glided inside on her pencil-thin heels, but instead of Alexis Carrow coming in behind her, it was the security guard, furtively checking the hallway before locking the door.

  And instead of fucking, they sat on the edge of the bed and had a fairly business-like discussion in Thai. At one point Nahm departed for the bathroom
and returned with the ziplock in hand. Dorian narrowed his eyes as she tossed it casually to her partner in crime, who stuffed it into a black duffel bag. The man paused, gesticulating at the bed and walls, then, with Nahm’s approval, dug a scanner bar out of the duffel.

  Dorian fast-forwarded through an impressively thorough search until the cam was spotted, plucked off the wall, and carried back to Nahm. She flashed a very un-vapid smile into the lens. The screen went black for a moment, then cleared again in the bathroom, pointing towards the mirror where Nahm was now painting a bruise under her eye.

  Dorian swilled beer in his mouth, letting the carbonation sting his tongue while he listened to Nahm explain, in her roundabout way, how her “little” brother had caught him running a scam in a bar where he bounced. How Dorian had drunkenly bragged about his takings. How Nahm had shopped photos from Alexis Carrow’s vacation in Malaysia six months ago and slipped the fake news report into the mirror for him to watch.

  Her brother, working as a valet at the Emerald Palace, had gotten the imposing black ute out of the garage for a quick spin. She’d worked on her Cockney accent for a few weeks and done up a voice synthesizer. And from there, Dorian realized his overactive imagination had done the rest of the work.

  “I hope the last part is so easy, too,” Nahm said sweetly, smearing her lip gloss across her face with the heel of her hand. “With the money, we think maybe to buy a boat. Mwah.” She blew a kiss to the cam, then reached in and switched it off.

  Dorian leaned back at his table. Unprofessional of her, to add insult to injury like that and lay out her method besides. But he supposed it was understandable in the excitement of pulling off a semi-long con for the first time. And at least this way he’d recouped one of the cams. Dorian slid it back into his pocket, pensive.

  For a little while he rewound the footage and sourly watched Nahm blowing kisses on loop, then finally he put the tablet away. He still had enough cash stowed to take a domestic down south and start over from there.

  A fresh wave of tourists would be showing up on the islands soon, and Pattaya just wasn’t doing it for him anymore.

  YOU’LL SURELY DROWN HERE IF YOU STAY

  Alyssa Wong

  ALYSSA WONG (crashwong.net) is a Nebula, Shirley Jackson, and World Fantasy Award-nominated author, shark aficionado, and 2013 graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Tor.com, Uncanny, Lightspeed, Nightmare, and Black Static, among others. Her 2015 short story “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers” won the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards, and was nominated for the Locus, Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson Awards. Wong is an MFA candidate at North Carolina State University and is a member of the Manhattan-based writing group Altered Fluid.

  WHEN THE DESERT finally lets you go, naked and stumbling, your body humming with raw power and the song of dead things coiled under your tongue, you find Marisol waiting for you at the edge of the bluffs. She’s dressed in long sleeves and a skirt over her boots, her black hair tucked under a hat and a blanket wrapped around her shoulders against the night cold. Madam Lettie’s bony horse whuffs at you in the glow of the lantern as you approach.

  “You were gone longer than usual,” says Marisol. “I got worried.”

  Human speech is always slow to return on the nights when the desert calls you. You nod in reply.

  Marisol sets the lantern down and pulls off her blanket to wrap around you. Most girls her age would flinch away from touching a naked boy’s skin, but her fingers brush yours indifferently. She’s seen your body as many times as you’ve seen hers, in all of its pitiful states: bruised and scratched; bramble-bled from running through the thorns with the coyotes; finger-marked by rough hands. “Did you step on any scorpions?”

  You turn your head and spit a brown, dusty gob into the dirt. You hope she doesn’t notice the fur and tiny bone fragments caught in it. “Who do you take me for?”

  A wan grin spreads across her face, and she almost looks like the kid she is—that you both are. “Check ’em anyway.”

  You glance at Madam Lettie’s horse instead of at your battered bare feet. “She’ll be furious when she finds out that you took Belle.”

  “She’s always furious,” says Marisol. She swings onto the horse, and the animal shivers as you climb up behind her. “Besides. She pretends otherwise, but she knows how you get home every night. She’s never raised a hand to me about it.”

  “Good. If she does, tell me. I don’t want you to get in trouble.”

  “Just hold the lantern,” says Marisol. She nudges Belle forward and the three of you turn toward the road leading to the Bisden mines. A few pinpricks of lamplight glimmer along the ridge from the town beyond, and the path snakes through the sand like a pale sidewinder.

  The horse’s back rolls beneath you like dirt in a goldrusher’s pan, and you practice breathing. In, out, with the rhythm of the hooves and Marisol’s heartbeat.

  “Some of the men from the big mining company out east visited the house while you were gone,” Marisol says. “The city folk who rode in on the California-bound train yesterday. They’re staying across the street.”

  Oh. “Which did you have?” you say.

  “The tall one. The one with dark brown hair and the Yankee accent. He speaks pretty enough, but he’s not... kind.” She shrugs. “But then, who is to a whore?”

  You hold her tighter.

  “One of them asked for you.”

  “For me?” you say. No one notices you, not you, the small and half-feral boy kept in the back to clean the kitchen. Bless Madam Lettie’s heart for taking you in, you poor soul, with your dead witch-father and propensity to make discarded bones quiver and shake like living things. Poor souls, both.

  “He looked like some kind of preacher. But there was something off about him.” She won’t look at you, not while she’s guiding the horse back to town, but when you press your face against the back of her neck, strands of hair tickling your cheek, you can feel her breathing relax. “I don’t know why, but he reminded me of you.”

  “How so?”

  “I’m not sure,” Marisol says. “But the city folk are planning to hold a party at Madam Lettie’s in a few days, so he’ll probably be back tomorrow with the rest. You can see for yourself then.”

  You’ve witnessed a few parties at Madam Lettie’s, and mostly that means a rough night for Marisol and the rest of the girls at the brothel. Madam Lettie will probably have you attend the guests, too. Just thinking about it makes you wince.

  The town is quiet, the sound of Belle’s hooves muffled against the sand. Madam Lettie’s is the only building with candles still burning in the windows, and the empty, boarded up buildings littering the stretch remind you of when the town was still lively, before the silver dried up, before the desert’s call grew too loud for you to ignore.

  Marisol helps you up the stairs, past the bar, and together you stumble into her room. It stinks of sweat and musk, but probably no worse than you do. The two of you collapse into Marisol’s bed. It’s barely big enough for one person and your own cot is down the hall, but everything in your body aches, and Marisol feels so human against your bones. You need that right now.

  “I saw my pa tonight,” you say into Marisol’s hair. Her dark braids smell like smoke, and you bury your face into them, just behind her ear. “Walking among the brush with the rest of the dead.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I didn’t find your folks, though. I heard their voices, but I couldn’t dig a path deeper into the mine.” You’d torn your hands to pieces, ripped the skin and flesh down to the bone, and the desert had built you back out of sand and briars, then pushed you rudely away from the entrance to the collapsed mineshaft. The wandering skeletons of slain cattle and men had stopped their nighttime shambling to watch through ant-eaten eyes. Stay away from this, child.

  She sucks in a breath. “If you found them, could you bring them back?”

/>   You close your eyes. “No. Not like you want. I could make their bodies move, but it wouldn’t be real.”

  She nods and holds your hand tight. It’s a conversation you’ve had a few times, ever since the desert started pulling you away from Madam Lettie’s every night and you started being able to coax dead things into dancing for you. This time, Marisol says, very softly, “Sometimes I wonder if that would be enough, just seeing them again.”

  It wouldn’t, but you don’t need to tell her that. Her grip on your hand means that she knows.

  ONE OF THE company men appears on the doorstep in the morning, black hair slicked away from his naked face, too young and too nervous to be standing in front of a saloon-turned-cathouse in broad daylight. Madam Lettie, who is lean and tough like rawhide, lets him in, and as they pace the ground floor and talk about plans for Saturday night, you and Marisol sneak peeks from behind the kitchen door.

  “That’s not the preacher man, is it?” you say. Marisol shakes her head. She’s helping you with laundry today, and the filthy sheets bunch up between you, muffling the sounds of your bodies moving.

  “I figured it out,” she says, “the preacher man’s strangeness. He walked like his feet didn’t touch the ground, and he stank. God, he was foul.”

  “You’ve said the same about me,” you say. And it’s true; usually you’re so much dirt that you could grow plants in the creases of your arms and fingers, if the sullen clouds over Bisden ever gave water. But when she glances at you, there’s no humor in her eyes.

  “Ellis, I’m telling you. That man reeked like a body left bloating in the sun at high noon. I never smelled something so bad in my life, even from across the room.”

  The familiarity of it builds a sense of relief and dread in you. Almost every one of the customers Madam Lettie demanded you take had said something similar. They’d never lasted long; the last rancher who’d slipped his hands into your trousers had bitten your neck, then turned and vomited off the edge of the bed.