Some of the Best from Tor.com

by Various Authors

  * * *

  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 corrected 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.”

  After a second I closed the door.

  We moved a short while after that, to a city where I learned not to say anything unless I was sure already that it was true. I ended up not saying much.

  Sometimes I dreamed that the paper I wrote was only sand now, rolling over the top of the dunes in a place I’ve never been, little black grains scattered for miles and miles.

  * * *

  Fairuz had boyfriends.

  I never remembered their names, and they all looked the same: tall, handsome, with the bearing of a man who’s landed a girl as beautiful as he thinks he deserves. She never lasted more than two weeks with a boy; she dated them mostly to drive them off. She’d get dressed up and sweep down to his car for a few nights, and after date four she’d tell him to call her at the house, mostly so our mother would shout him down about calling someone’s home and assuming he’d be welcome, didn’t he have any manners, did they think this was helping their cause with her daughter, put your father on the phone right now, I want to tell him the kind of son he raised.

  Fairuz would make me sit with her on the stairs, with her leaning forward with her arms pressed tight to her chest like a chrysalis, grinning wider and wider the angrier the boy got. If we could hear him shouting on the other end of the line, it was the last time Fairuz would hear from him. They always shouted, sooner or later; our mother had a way of getting them to show off their very worst. I was always proud of her; it felt she was working against us except when she was tricking one of Fairuz’s boys into proving how awful he really was. Maybe that’s why Fairuz did it, as much as anything.

  I never had boyfriends. I hardly knew how to make regular friends—I made people nervous, Fairuz said, always like it was their problem and not mine. When she brought me over to peer through the banister with her it mostly reminded me how much trouble it all was.

  I tried to take it as lessons in human courtship, but mostly I thought about the time we’d watched a pregnant spider giving birth to dozens of doubles that were just waiting to dry before they ate her. I wondered if our mother felt the same way about dealing with Fairuz.

  “Poor boys,” Fairuz said once, half-laughing.

  Once I said, “One day you’re going to fall in love, and then you’ll be sorry,” and she shot me a strange look, like I knew something she didn’t.

  (I did know. She’ll meet Michael in thirteen years, if my count is right, but in this memory I never know if time is moving at the same rate as it is in the other ones, depending on which life we’re leading; maybe she meets him in twelve.)

  * * *

  Michael was with the government now. He’d know how to find what I needed.

  He’d been an entomologist with the Venus Project when I met him. He’d discovered the analgesic properties of the beetle and was on the Ethics Committee there. It wasn’t a surprise he’d been asked to head up a federal task force on conservation. He knew how to cover the bases and how to make everyone feel as if they’d done good work; those kinds of men always ended up treading water in positions of power.

  I corresponded with him for my dissertation, which was a study of the ecological, cultural, and economic implications of domestication of half a dozen species of Entomos amoris. He always forwarded me new medical opinions about the neurology of the toxin alongside each set of observations about the beetles.

  “The most important element to the beetle’s survival—to the survival of any animal species—is the human element,” he wrote me once, as if I hadn’t been studying habitat destruction and shrinking populations, as if I didn’t already know exactly what every insect I was looking at was up against. From someone I liked less, it would have been insulting.

  Still, it was impressive, how much he hoped what he was doing would matter. It was flattering, how much he thought what I was doing would matter.

  Fairuz met him when she invited herself to the symposium where I was presenting; he had come down from Copenhagen to hear me read.

  “Looking forward to meeting you,” he’d written, and I’d looked at the screen with my whole face going hot, and thought about dusting bridal butterfly over my collarbones. I wondered whether he would look at me the way boys had always looked at Fairuz when she came down the stairs glowing, the pigment glancing off all the edges and corners of her throat.

  I never used it, in the end. I had written a dissertation about how the insects of love were used by the human element, in ways that benefited no one except to soothe old superstitions and deplete populations; even if the bridal butterfly’s power was real, the methods were unacceptable. I couldn’t take advantage.

  Doesn’t stop some.

  * * *

  When he picks up the phone my heart thumps. I manage, “Dr. Mason?”

  “Soraya?”

  His voice sounds just the same. I close my eyes, catch my breath, say, “It’s about Fairuz.”

  * * *

  Fairuz always wrote me messages when we were apart, but her messages from the desert were different, and wrong.

  I knew they’d be strange—this was a classified project, there was a lot she’d be unable to say directly, I had expected some vagueness and some secrets—but not like this. These were frightening. Unfocused.

  Of all the things you could say about Fairuz, “unfocused” had never, never been one. When she changed directions it was like repositioning a gun.

  She sent me a letter nearly every week. She filled it with wails about the heat and long stories I remembered about our childhoods (“Those were the days,” she’d write) and stories I didn’t recognize (framed, “Do you remember?”).

  She wrote, in almost every letter, “We’re out of time.”

  Before the desert, she’d never used the phrase. Fairuz had never been out of time; the world would wait for her, and she knew it.

  But I remember her hair shaking as we served detention, pages of a paper I never wrote curling under her fingers, as she worried about me.

  I remember her looking over her shoulder at the tattoo parlor to make sure I was still with her, as the constellations scattered across her like she’d found a way straight through the sky.

  I was the thing she waited for. It sounds sad, it sounds desperate, but I was. She was my sister. She would never have gone into the desert without me, unless she knew I’d be coming to find her.

  * * *

  I don’t know how to tell Michael what I need, how to explain what’s wrong. The silence pushes in like a broken rib.

  Finally I say, “There’s something in the desert, and no one wanted her to tell me.”

  The other end of the line goes very quiet. I don’t know what he’s thinking; if he loved her, I’ve never wanted to know. Not now, either. Even dead, she’s mine first.

  He says, “I have to go,” disconnects.

  * * *

  The year I wrote my dissertation, at a half-size desk in a studio apartment barely big enough to turn around in, Fairuz headed up the environmental campaign that made the tidal basins protected government land, to preserve them from further damage.

  “Those tourists and their jet skis can piss off,” she said, flinging herself onto my bed and grinning up at the ceiling. In repose, her suit looked even more expensive than it was.

  I tried not to feel lesser, just having her around.

  “Well, while you were doing that, I found someone who actually works with the Venus beetles. I’ve written to him—he’s an ethics man, I think his work will really strengthe
n the case for insect conservation.”

  She laughed and rolled onto her stomach, narrowing her eyes at me. “Oh, Soraya, champion of the insects. They suit you—I don’t mean it in a bad way, don’t look like that. I just don’t dare think what would have happened if I hadn’t shown you that mantis.”

  I frowned; didn’t know what she meant.

  She hadn’t shown me anything.

  For a split second, across the back of her gray suit, fifteen constellations flickered in and out of sight.

  * * *

  Soraya,

  Well, I’m here. Don’t ever tell me you told me so about this whole thing, because you never did and I wouldn’t have let you, but if you ever even thought it, don’t tell me.

  The heat’s awful, of course—I told you I’d hate the desert, didn’t I, back when my heart was broken and I left the ocean behind? Do you remember? Do you hear from Michael? Don’t tell him I’m asking.

  The work in [REDACTED BY ADMINISTRATOR] continues, though, and the way things are going I think I’m not going to be home for a long time. The good news is that by the time I’m out of here I’ll be ready to go back to the sea for a little while—any place with water sounds wonderful by now.

  Well, I’m out of time. I’d trade all this for one day on the seaside. I still think about that book of photography that got me in all that trouble, those waves and the seaweed and that water the color of turquoise. Those were the days.

  All my love –

  * * *

  I know she has the tattoo.

  I know which fifteen she has etched on her back, a star-map in miniature: Auriga, Columba, Pegasus, Delphinus, Vulpecula, Taurus, Draco, Aquila, Cygnus, Lyra, Canis Major, Monocerus, Lepus, Orion, Eridanus.