Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2015

by Nino Cipri

I drop her seed messages in each of my sisters’ hands as I fly in into their cells and see them for the first time in years. Even Mariana stops her raving to receive what is given. Their faces are pallid and grim, but when the word drops, each flares with love.

  I fly into my cell, nudge a seed into the limp hand of the girl who was me. When I wished for freedom, I imagined it to be different than this. Can it be sustained: a body yoked, a soul unfettered?

  I return to my mother’s cell and mark each word as she prays, then, as she falls asleep, I doze too. When I wake at dawn she is already standing, washed and ready for what will come. She will go to the quemadero as Doña Francisca Nuñez de Carvajal, with all the meanings her names carry.

  When she hears the rustle of my wings, she holds out her hand and I land on it.

  “Adyó. Adyó, kerida.” She sings the cantiga that was my favorite once—in another place, another time. An enchanted time of perfumed dusks sitting in a courtyard filled with flowers gleaming like the moon, embroidery hoops forgotten in our laps as our voices joined in a tale of departure and heartbreak.

  “No quero la vida. Va, buscate otro amor, aharva otras puertas…”

  Goodbye,

  goodbye, beloved.

  I do not want to live.

  Go, find another love,

  knock on other doors …

  A key turns in the lock. My mother draws me close to her lips, kisses the top of my head. “Adyó, kerida Anica,” she says.

  I don’t have time to think of how she knows it is me before she flings my small bird body off her hand and toward the window.

  I don’t want to fly away from her, but I do.

  Where Is My Home?

  It is December 9 by the Dominicans’ calendar. Smoke hangs black across the valley. The first burnings at the quemadero took place yesterday, a year and a day after I first met Anica. My mother and I are out behind our house—a tremendous distance from the plaza where the crowds had gathered to watch the spectacle—and still we breathe in what happened.

  Our work of the past days has been uprooting the plants the Holy Office has declared demonic, to replant them where the Brothers will not find them. Remote, wild places that will sustain magic.

  I cannot stop thinking about Anica. From Fray Bernardino’s recounting when he came for his lesson late yesterday, I know she and Mariana were spared—one for her youth, the other for her derangement—and that the Dominicans hope more years in detention will ultimately reconcile them to the God of the Cross.

  But it is not my friend who is still behind those walls.

  The real Anica is an immigrant spirit, feathered and winged. She crosses waters, crests mountains, rides the scorching air of the desert to a remote and wild place where she might thrive until I set out to find her.

  I want to believe this is a triumph, only I am never going to forget how loneliness looks on her face.

  “Pay attention,” my mother chides as I clip the root of a pipiltzintzintli I’m digging.

  I tell my mother what I am thinking: how the gods make cages of our lives, lock us in them, and only occasionally let us find the key.

  My mother puts down her digging tool. “Come,” she says, and starts walking. I trail her all the way back to the water near the Tree of the Sad Night.

  “Pull your trap out,” she says.

  I yank on the rope, bring up the cage. A small turtle slips back into the water through the slats. A big turtle—an old rope scar across its neck—stays caught.

  “The gods don’t make cages,” my mother says. “We do. We choose to lock or unlock. Word, beetle, bud, and leaf—sometimes they are keys, sometimes not. There is only one thing that is always a key.”

  She waits for me to say something and when I don’t, she stomps on the trap with one leathery foot. Slats splinter and break on top and bottom. The turtle slides its bulk into the water and swims away.

  “That was tonight’s meal,” I complain.

  My mother smiles at me, but there is sadness in it. “You know this isn’t the only trap. Nor the only creature caught by one.”

  “I am just a girl,” I say when I work out that my mother’s imperfect couplet demands fulfillment.

  “Yes,” she says. “But it is owed anyway. Today. Tomorrow. The days after that.”

  As we start back to the stand of sacred plants waiting to be moved, I wonder why poems and gods and magic alone aren’t enough. I wonder why it all depends on us, a rope of people that so often leaves a scar.

  Where shall my soul dwell?

  Where is my home?

  Where shall be my house?

  I think I hear wings. When I look up, the sun has broken through the smoky overlay but there is only a small clear patch of sky.

  It is empty with waiting.

  About the Author

  Sabrina Vourvoulias is the author of Ink (Crossed Genres, 2012), a speculative novel that draws on her memories of Guatemala’s armed internal conflict, and of the Latin experience in the United States. It was named to Latinidad’s Best Books of 2012. Her stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Crossed Genres and in a number of anthologies, including Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History. She is the managing editor of Al Día News in Philadelphia, and was the editor of Al Día’s book 200 Years of Latino History in Philadelphia (Temple University Press, 2012). She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and daughter. You can sign up for email updates here.

  Copyright © 2015 by Sabrina Vourvoulias

  Art copyright © 2015 by Tran Nguyen

  I could reach no possibilities in which Johnny Rivers—wise guy, bootlegger, crook with his eye on the big time—still clung to life. In every crime scene every one of me was looking at, he lay face-down on the floor with two bullets in his back. It was a pity. Not because Chicago was particularly the worse off for one more dead mobster, but because murders are murders, and solving Johnny’s would have been a whole lot easier if he’d lived long enough to tell me who had pulled the trigger. Maybe, in another universe, another me had shown up sooner and had gotten something out of him.

  That me was a lucky woman.

  It was one of those drab Chicago winters, the kind where every sunrise brings fresh bodies on the sidewalks. At least this one was indoors. The shooting had taken place in the basement of a disused housing project just off of West 21st Street, which was, we had just discovered, the center of one of the Rivers gang’s bigger bootlegging operations.

  The details of the crime scene didn’t vary much between universes. Metal slatted stairs led up to the street outside, and a jumble of distilling equipment—drums, pipes, a big tin bathtub—shone grimily in the light of a single, swaying light bulb. In one universe the tub was on its side, leaking moonshine into the floorboards. The Johnny in that possibility had flung an arm out as he fell, I guessed. It didn’t change much: all of him had fallen in pretty much the same direction, cut down by a shooter on the stairs. I felt my heisen implant work behind my forehead.

  I tucked my hair into my collar and knelt to examine the body. Two entry wounds: one to the right of the spine and another just below the shoulder. I traced my finger around the edge of one of them and let the heisen throw up possibilities.

  —an acrid cough of gunpowder—

  —a shell casing tinkles as it bounces into a dark corner—

  —rubber soles slip on the stairs—

  —a small grey pistol leaps from clumsy, sweaty fingers—

  There!

  Other universes closed around me. I clung to the possibility thread that I had plucked out from the throng, visualizing it as a literal rope clutched in my fist. I felt like I was falling—the walls lurched briefly into the ceiling—then all at once I stopped, and I was standing in the basement—just one of them—listening to the faint wash of traffic on the street outside.

  In this universe, the murderer had dropped the gun.

  I found it in the shadows underneath the stairs, an evil glint of metal. It was a sn
ub-nosed pocket pistol—kids’ stuff, really, compared to what a lot of hoods were carrying, but I didn’t doubt that it had spat the lead that was now in Johnny’s back. It must have dropped between two slats as the shooter fled up the stairs. I squatted down to pick it up, the tail of my trench coat brushing my heels. The gun’s potential buzzed beneath my fingers.

  —a flashlight cuts the darkness, swinging, frantic—

  —fingers search and scrabble, desperate to close around the handle of the pistol, to retrieve the evidence, dispose of it—

  I took my hand away. I stood up, pinned the gun beneath the toe of my boot, and skidded it further underneath the stairs. That possibility was worth leaving open.

  “Moore!” It was the first time I had used my voice in a half hour. He took a second to reply.

  “Yeah?”

  “All done.”

  Light spilled in from the street outside and Detective Moore descended, feeling his way down the handrail. He had his eyes screwed shut.

  “You worked your magic?” he said. “Can I look now?”

  “Open your eyes, wise guy.” As if it made any difference now whether he looked or not. It did keep the possibility lines clearer on my end if he stayed out of the way while I searched the scene, though, and he might have closed a lot of universes to me had he come down first. He looked around and whistled.

  “Nice little set-up he had here. You know half the joints in this neighborhood carry his booze and no one else’s? Not that he gave them much choice in the matter.”

  It was West Chicago’s worst-kept secret that Johnny Rivers’s gang of toughs had bribed, bullied, and beaten the owners of half the local speakeasies into supplying their patrons exclusively with liquor from his distilleries. I’d have been dumb to think that this basement was the biggest one; Rivers’s operation spanned a lot of streets and ruffled a lot of feathers. The list of people in Chicago who might want him dead would be as long as my arm.

  “Two bullet wounds, probably from a small firearm,” I said. “Our shooter comes in, gets Johnny clean in the back while he’s checking the equipment or whatever, and makes his escape. Any wild hunches on who did it?”

  Moore took his hat from his head and went over to the body. The stink of spirits crawled into my throat.

  “I know the Montagnios are sore with Rivers,” he said. “He makes his stuff a lot cheaper than they can. Sells it cheap, too. There was an attempted shooting over on West 14th a couple days ago—one of the boys working the case reckons it was the Montagnios butting heads with Rivers’s lot.”

  I chewed my fingernails. Using the heisen for any length of time left me dying for a smoke, but there was no way I was going to light up in here, not with everything soaked in moonshine. “What about Big Dakota? He still doing the dirty work for the Montagnios?”

  “Yeah…”

  —a slight frisson of something in my head, like my brain had passed over a set of points on a railroad and clunked onto a different track—

  “…but it wasn’t him,” Moore continued. “One of our boys over on the east side took him in last night—raided a brothel on 18th and caught him with his pants down. Literally.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. “And Rivers was last seen when? And by whom?”

  “By his wife, around seven thirty.”

  I folded my arms across my chest and looked up at the light bulb. Why did I never get the universes where things were cut and dry? I fished in my pocket for my cigarette case.

  “I guess I’d better speak to his wife, then.”

  * * *

  I interviewed the newly-widowed Mrs. Rivers in the station that afternoon. It was grey and frigid still, and on her way inside the building a cab kicked up a puddle by the sidewalk and splashed her heels with slush. I helped her dry off when we got up to the office. I offered her a glass of water, which she declined, and told her to take as long as she needed, which she did. I let her sit in my chair and watched her eyes follow the plainclothes detectives around the room. The office rattled to the sound of typewriters.

  “I’m real sorry,” she said, dabbing at her eyes. “I think I’m still—Johnny, you know. I still can’t believe it.”

  She was a delicate little thing; the kind of broad these gangsters tended to go for, I guess. Her first name was ‘Kitty’, although she looked more like a china doll: big timid eyes, bow lips, a nose with the slightest pig-snout lift. Her cotton candy hair looked like mine had when I was a little girl.

  “Mrs. Rivers,” I said, pushing that unwanted association aside. “Could you tell me—?”

  “Kitty, please,” she said earnestly, and pulled yet another handkerchief out of a sleeve apparently stuffed with them.

  My implant twitched. “I don’t know if that’s really—”

  —petite shoulders slump a little further; a white hand comes up to pull the fur scarf over the tip of the chin—

  “Kitty, then,” I said, jumping with both feet into the universe that kept us on good terms. Her head lifted slightly. Her face was buried under a snowdrift of makeup. “Could you tell me about the last time you saw your husband? I know it will be tough to talk about. Remember, though—we want to help you. We want to find whoever did this.”

  She nodded, once, and drew a Marlboro from the pack I offered her. It took her a couple tries to get it to her lips.

  “Yesterday,” she said, once she had taken a drag, “Johnny came home about six.”

  I nodded encouragingly. Watching her suck on the cigarette was making me crave a smoke myself, but I forced my attention onto the possibilities the heisen was throwing at me. The more Kitty’s story varied between universes, the more likely it was that she was making it up as she went along; the more similar, the more likely she was telling me the truth—or that the story had been carefully rehearsed. Shadows of those possibilities stretched out on either side of us, rows of doppelgangers interviewing and being interviewed, as though Kitty and I were caught between two mirrors.

  “…and he went out again at around seven thirty,” Kitty said. “He—”

  “—said he needed to go back to his office—

  “—wouldn’t tell me where he was going. Said it was nothing to do with me—

  “—didn’t say a word when I asked him where he was off to—

  “—and he left. By eight o’clock I was getting worried. By nine I was imagining all these terrible things that could’ve happened to him. By eleven … I got a cab over to his office on West 21st. Heard a gun go off as I was getting out.”

  “Did you see anything?”

  She stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray on the desk and twisted her handkerchief around her finger.

  “A man,” three Kittys said in unison. “Running down the street. I didn’t see his face. He might—I think he was wearing a hat.” She glanced up at me. “After that I—I went into Johnny’s office and I saw—I found him—lying—”

  She pressed the handkerchief to her mouth. Her shoulders shook.

  “Take as long as you need.”

  “I ran all the way to a callbox on 20th,” she said, “and called the cops. I didn’t—I couldn’t believe it. Him just lying there, I mean. He never meant no harm, Detective, I swear…”

  I poured her a glass of water. She was just a kid, when it came down to it—eighteen, nineteen; easily young enough to be my daughter. Too young to be married to some dead gangster.

  “Here.” I held the glass out to her.

  “Thanks.”

  —the water falls into her lap: for a second, the young woman drops her guard—

  I jerked my hand back as Kitty’s fingers closed around the top of the glass. The rim slipped underneath her thumb and the whole thing dropped into her lap.

  “Ah, darn it, Kitty, I’m sorry … here.” I drew my own handkerchief from my pocket and knelt to dab at her dress. I felt her slim legs tremble through the fabric.

  “It was my fault,” she said, and looked at me with wet, red eyes, like a child
. The glass rolled along the floor and stopped at my knee.

  “Kitty,” I said seriously. The handkerchief still rested on her thigh. “Do you have any idea who might have wanted Johnny dead?”

  She sucked her cushioned bottom lip. “I—” She dropped her eyes to her lap. “Two men came to see him a while back. Months ago. I don’t know what they wanted—Johnny made me leave the room as soon as he saw them. But there was one fella the size of a truck—fair-haired, scar on his neck—”

  Big Dakota. Moore reckoned our boys on the east side had already ruled him out.

  “—and another guy, dark, a little heavy; I think the other fella called him ‘Quine.’”

  That would be Vincent Quine, I guessed—another Montagnio tough, and a first-rate slimeball. Kitty twisted her handkerchief around like she was wringing out a dishcloth. “Is that”—she stopped and got her voice under control—“is that any help? Do you have anything … any clues to go on?”

  I stood up and put my handkerchief back in my pocket. The sun was already low and squinting through the window blinds. “All we have to go on,” I began, and hesitated. The pistol I had left beneath the stairs hovered in my mind. “All we have to go on is what you just told me and a couple bullets we found at the scene.” I turned to my desk and started leafing through some papers. “It might be that we check the distillery again once we know what we’re looking for, but … Excuse me.”

  Moore was staring at me from the doorway, tapping an envelope against his lips and looking thoughtful.

  “Not like you,” he said, when I approached. “Falling for the bereaved widow act.”

  I turned my head. Kitty was staring into space and picking at her handkerchief. “She’s just a kid,” I said. “Did you want something?”

  “For you.” He held out the envelope and I saw the familiar handwriting.

  Detective O’Harren, c/o Chicago Police Department, etc. etc.

  “Still not giving out the home address, huh?”

  I took the letter without looking at him.

  “Mrs. Rivers needs escorting home,” I said. “I think you just volunteered. Oh, and while you’re out—see what the word is on the street about our old pal Vincent Quine.”