The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  “The king was still very alive, and there was no dispute.” I held up my hand to forestall his questions. “He had been told we were coming to hunt him, and had also been fed information about you. How to drug you so you couldn’t use your abilities without killing you, for example.”

  His face was bone-white, jaw clenched. “He did it. He really, finally did it. He tried to fucking kill me.”

  “And you can’t prove it,” I said.

  “I—what?” The tone of his voice fluttered somewhere between incredulous and panicked.

  “How can you prove, definitively, that it was the man you think it was? Or that he was trying to kill you? You tell his superiors that he set you up, and he’ll tell them that he was testing you, and you failed.” I paused, but the bleak expression on his face prompted me to continue speaking. “Cal—we did succeed in our assignment. The territory is stable. Contact whomever you need to contact to terminate your connection to him. You’ve freed yourself. ”

  “But he’s not gone, and I can’t get rid of him,” he whispered. “I’ve got to walk around knowing that he’s out there, watching me, and waiting to try and make a grab. Or just kill me.”

  “He’s only one man,” I said.

  “If I can’t kill him, he still wins,” he said. “He doesn’t forgive and forget, Hilde.”

  I smiled. “Who says you can’t kill him?”

  “I can’t,” he whispered. “I just can’t. So he’s still got me. He can still—“

  Cal cut himself off with an anguished noise and punched the mattress, still weak. His shoulders trembled and he held in a hiccupping sob. I slipped off of my bed and sat on the edge of his, hands in my lap. I understood being trapped under a master who held so much power it was nearly impossible to see a way to escape him, but I also thought it likely that, one day, Cal would find the strength to win. He had to grow into it, like any young person.

  I reached out a tentative hand. He didn’t pull away when I touched his back, so I rubbed smooth circles over his spine as he wept. I, however, jumped when he grabbed me around the waist and burrowed close. I moved my hand to his hair and held him. His skin was burning hot under my fingers, feverish, alive. I must have gotten the job as his partner or he was still inebriated, because the man I’d met four days ago didn’t seem like the type to let anyone see him cry—or perhaps I had misjudged him, and I had more to learn.

  “I need a shower,” he rasped after a long moment of quiet shivering.

  “You do smell,” I said.

  He snorted and sat back, avoiding my gaze. “How did you get us out?”

  “You wondered what my ability was,” I said. He nodded. “I was a gifted psychic when I was alive. I had an affinity for all dead things. When I died, it intensified.”

  “So you, what, mind-control other vampires?” he asked.

  “In a word,” I said. “Yes.”

  “Holy shit,” he said. A moment passed in silence. He touched the bandage again, pushing down on it, and winced. “So, I don’t remember this. Was it—you? Or…”

  He was putting a brave face on being unsure who had touched him, who had fed from his body, but he was so obviously unnerved. His attempt at a nonchalant smile was more of a grimace.

  “It was me. They locked me in a box for three days,” I said as lightly as I could, which was not very. “If I hadn’t fed, I would have been too weak to capture the master, and we would have died there. I’m—sorry.”

  “Fuck,” he said again, laughing in a burst of relief, and collapsed onto the bed like his strings had been cut. “I don’t care, what’s a little blood between friends when you save my ass like that?”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I need to prepare for morning.”

  He let the silence go on as I moved around the room, readying myself for the dawn, and then said, “Hey, Hilde.”

  “Yes?” I murmured.

  “Want to be my partner?”

  “Of course,” I said. I walked back to the bed. “But I expect you’ll try to rescue me, next time.”

  “You don’t seem like the kind of woman who needs a lot of rescuing,” he said, voice low. His eyes were still almost all pupil. Sudden tension, and the aftertaste of his blood in my mouth, made my breathing stutter and stop. When he spoke again, it was a whisper—“Honestly, I don’t think I can get up again, so if you want to do this you better lean down.”

  I held in a laugh and bent at the waist, balancing above his prone form with one hand beside his head. He waited until the last moment to close his eyes. I pressed the smallest of kisses to his mouth, a thank-you even if it never led to anything else, and rested my forehead against his for a split second. Dawn pushed heavy outside. I squeezed his shoulder and returned to my own bed, the safe darkness of my sleeping bag. I caught a last glance at him as I closed the zipper, our eyes meeting briefly. His held a hint of flame.

  Copyright © 2011 by Brit Mandelo

  Art copyright © 2011 by Dave Palumbo

  BRIT MANDELO

  The Finite Canvas

  illustration by

  RICK BERRY

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  Molly tapped the screen of her finicky tablet with one sweat-damp fingertip, leaving a shimmering smudge. The next page loaded with a slight delay. Rainwater pattered through the one-room clinic’s open windows onto the tile floor, but the baking summer heat remained untouched. Even with all the windows thrown open it was still at least forty-two degrees C inside, though once the temperature climbed above forty it was hard to judge.

  The slatted wood door swung wide and clattered in its frame. Startled, she slapped the tablet down on her desk harder than she would have liked and reflexively chided herself: you can’t afford another one, be careful. As she stood, the gauzy skirt she’d rolled up to her waist unfurled around her knees. The visitor closed the door with a more gentle hand. Molly noticed first the newcomer’s sheer size, and second the temperature-regulating clothing covering them head to toe. Her stomach clenched. She hadn’t, in all her years downside, ever seen someone who could afford that. The shirt alone would cost more than six years of her clinic’s “humanitarian aid” stipend, and that was if she bought no supplies.

  There was no such thing as a tourist from the stations. A fresh sweat prickled along Molly’s back. The military police wore uniforms. This person didn’t.

  “Did you need help?” she asked after the quiet dragged on a moment too long. “Directions?”

  The stranger pushed back the tan hood of the shirt, revealing a white-skinned face with a square jaw, thin lips, and brown eyes, set off by a frizzed halo of bleached hair with dark roots. The clothes had done their job—without them, that pale skin would have been blistered and raw from exposure.

  “You’re the doctor?”

  The newcomer’s voice was a melodious, rough-edged alto, like the women who smoked tobacco in old movies. It took Molly a moment to reconcile that voice with the thick, broad body. She saw the faintest hint of breasts under the tan shirt where she hadn’t noticed them before.

  “Yes,” she said, stepping around her desk. She passed the examining table and storage shelves in three strides. Her tank top slid wetly against her skin as she stuck her hand out in offering. “You are?”

  The woman paused, then took Molly’s hand. Her fingers were hot to the touch, red w
ith sunburn. She must not have worn gloves. “Jada.”

  Molly frowned. “What do you need?”

  “Right to the point,” she said. She tugged her hand away and in one smooth yank pulled her shirt over her head. Then she stood straight, shoulders back. Molly flinched but forced herself to look. Jada was heavily muscled, dense as a tree trunk and probably just as hard, but that wasn’t what was breathtaking. It was the scars.

  “You recognize these?” the woman asked.

  Designs snaked over her torso, down into the temp-reg pants, up to her neck. The left side of her rib cage was a silvery mass of letters and symbols, all jumbled; there was a stylized sun around her navel with waving lines of light. A crane, its legs hidden by the waistband of her pants, spread its wings over her right side and torso. There were smaller signs hidden around the larger; three simple slashes crossed the space between her collarbones. Her skin was as readable as a novel, her flesh a malleable masterpiece made with knives. Some of the scars were still pink, and a spiral design on her left breast was an angry, fresh red.

  Murder scars, Molly thought. Syndicate badge. The sheer number of them made her throat constrict. She took a step backward, as if one step would make any difference to a skilled killer.

  “I need a new set,” the woman said, sticking out her bare, untouched arm. “Here.”

  “You must have an artist—” Molly began.

  “Not down here,” the syndicate woman said. She turned her head, looking out the open window at the road. Her mouth formed a thin line as she paused. Molly saw that her ears were pierced with a multitude of silver hoops that hugged the curve of the cartilage. “I need the new marks done now. I can pay you more than enough to make it worth your time.”

  New marks for a new murder, and Molly immediately wondered where this woman had earned the right: on the stations, or locally? She unclenched her jaw. “Why?”

  There was no reason for any syndicate to set foot on old Earth, or what little of it was still habitable, beyond trading for young, desperate, attractive flesh to bring to the stations—unless they were running from the mil-police. Molly suspected that the only reason the station governments bothered to dispatch the police downside at all was to apprehend the occasional syndicate member; they certainly didn’t do much else.

  After a strained silence, Jada replied, “Does it matter?”

  “Money’s not enough,” she said. “Not for one of you.”

  Jada smiled with a cool edge. She wound her shirt around her fist and lifted her chin. Molly kept her eyes on the woman’s face instead of her bare torso, though the scars drew her gaze like the sucking gravity of a black hole. “I’ll bargain you the story. Or any story. I’ve got plenty.”

  “Who did you kill?” Molly ground out.

  “Oh, that,” Jada said. A look passed over her face like a flickering shadow, there and gone before Molly could grasp it. Her heart was suddenly pounding, her mouth dry as she waited for the answer. “No one you know.” She paused, then spoke again, bleak hurt punching through her prior composure. “My partner.”

  Molly hated that it melted her for a moment, and worse, that it pricked her curiosity.

  She was used to hurting. Downside, people lived their lives hurting, starving, scraping by. They wilted, underfed and wounded; tender, fleshy flowers exposed to the scouring radiation of the sun barely filtered through the damaged atmosphere. What she’d had in her pockets upon her deportation had made her the richest woman in the town—a tablet, a few hundred in station currency in her bank, and a medical degree. The money had run out fast on things like setting up a house, before she realized that she would never have it again, and the tablet was bound to die soon, and her degree had only gotten her clinic the monetary sympathy of one of the vast corporate aid–machines stationside, the kind that made people feel good about donating their pocket change to help the needy. The stipend went to the clinic, in any case, to her monthly restock orders brought by courier from the port-city thirty kilometers away and the occasional extra tool. That enviable wealth she’d brought with her could not put food on the table every night or clothes on her back. She hadn’t once in her life gone hungry until the first week on Earth.

  There was no such thing as a tourist, planetside.

  “Why here?” she finally asked.

  Jada cut her a sharp glance. “Because this is where I’ve washed up.”

  Molly smothered her questions—did you abandon your syndicate, are they hunting you, who are you, how did you end up here, are you stuck downside—and crossed the room again. She sat behind her desk, the wood chair digging into the backs of her thighs. Jada shook out her shirt and slipped it over her head again. The tan fabric hid the scars and the flush that had begun to redden her pale skin.

  “How much?” Molly asked.

  “I’ve got a few thousand in station currency stowed away,” she said as she walked up and planted her hands on the desk. “I want the whole arm. He deserves that much of me. Will you or won’t you?”

  Molly closed her eyes to avoid looking at the woman leaning on her desk, her curious desperation a palpable pressure. Still, she was aware of the shadow cast over her, the undeniable presence.

  She thought of the fibrous lump she’d felt with fear-stiffened fingers in her right breast almost a year ago, the phenomenal cost of importing a gene-therapy. She ground her teeth against the knowing, and the acceptance, wishing she didn’t need the money like she needed air.

  It hadn’t been anyone she knew. That was enough.

  “It will take a few days,” she said.

  Jada nodded, a short jerk of her chin. “When can you start?”

  “What’s your hurry?”

  “I’ll start the story when you start cutting,” Jada said.

  “All right, fine,” Molly replied, equally short with her.

  Another moment of silence stretched between the two women as Molly pushed her chair back and strode to the examining table. Another person might have spoken to fill it, but Jada wasn’t that person. She let it hang. Molly snagged a box of sanitation-wipes from the wire shelf in the corner and used two to wipe down the thinly padded table.

  “Let that dry while you tell me what you want done,” she said.

  “Start with flowers,” Jada said, still leaning against the desk behind her. “Then do whatever seems right, once you hear the story. That’s the point, memorializing it.”

  Molly nodded. Her pulse pounded out of control, adrenaline washing in a stinging-hot rush through her veins. She was glad to have her back to the room while she inspected her supplies. This was outside her realm of experience. When she cut someone, it was quick and for a reason, and they didn’t feel it. She didn’t peel their skin off while they watched. It was almost embarrassing that the thought of doing the scars made her more nauseated than working for a syndicate killer.

  “Do you have a preference in utensils?” she asked.

  Jada answered from right behind her, “Scalpel, if you have a small, sharp one.”

  Molly narrowly managed not to flinch at the touch of breath on the nape of her neck, cooling the dampness of sweat. Thousands, she reminded herself, but out loud she said, “One other thing,” as she found the right size of blade in her case. They weren’t intended for reuse, but there was no way to justify throwing away a perfectly good instrument. Instead, she kept everything well sanitized. “If the police show up at my door, what happens?”

  Jada pressed fingertips to the edge of her shoulder blade from behind, at the soft spot where muscle joined muscle. She stiffened. Jada pressed so gently that it didn’t hurt, but it was a hint.

  “I forced you,” she said quietly. “Just like this. No marks. But you were afraid. So you helped me, because you had to, right?”

  “Right,” Molly said, half-strangled.

  Jada’s touch slipped away and she moved to sit on the edge of the table. Molly glanced at her from the corner of her eye.

  “I’ve had—run-ins with them before
,” Molly admitted.

  Jada shook her head. “You think I didn’t guess you were from stationside the minute I stepped through the door? Your accent isn’t native. You shake hands.”

  “I see,” Molly said. Her face heated with a blush that would be nearly invisible beneath her brown skin, darkened further from years in the heavy-UV sunlight.

  That was one of the first things the locals had joked about when she’d come to start the clinic nearly a decade ago, having just received a license to do aid-work after her deportation—Westerner, even though there hadn’t been such a thing as a “west” for some time, just the stations far above. It stuck in the language all the same. She looked right, but spoke wrong.

  “No one comes here for pleasure, so I know you got sent.” Jada shrugged those wide shoulders, not smiling. “Syndicate pull some strings?”

  “You could say that,” Molly answered, not smiling either.

  “I don’t think it’ll be a problem,” she said. “You’re doing humanitarian work, being a good girl, and you’ve got an even bigger reason to be afraid of a syndicate worker. They’ll believe the story if you believe it.”

  Their eyes met. Molly nodded.

  “Off with the shirt,” she said. “You don’t want it getting bloodied.”

  “I don’t think it’ll matter,” Jada said.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  The other woman stared at her, eyes narrowed, and pulled the shirt over her head once more. The scarring was no less shocking the second time around but Molly made herself look. With ungloved hands she touched a few of them, palpating. The wounds were mostly surface damage but done wide enough that the skin wouldn’t knit quite right. The smaller patterns, like the spiral at the top of Jada’s left breast, were harder ridges. The scars went deeper.