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

by Various

  His voice, so calm and cool, did something to ease my fear somehow, and I managed to brace Mandy’s body with mine and stand, staggering. I’m stronger than humans, but not by much. I wouldn’t be able to hold her and run.

  “You won’t need to. Just give her to me; then be ready.”

  I wasn’t ready. Nowhere near… but it didn’t matter. Seconds later, both Mandy and I were airborne.

  Even while he was flying us through the tunnel, somehow cradling Mandy’s body in his arms, with me perched on his back, I still wasn’t ready.

  The rats were chasing us, but they couldn’t keep up with a flying vampire.

  “I cannot take you all the way home—I can travel in the light only in mist form, and I cannot fly you. But you have a car. I’ll make sure you’re not followed.”

  When he landed, I was hard pressed not to kiss the ground, nasty sewer and all.

  I glanced at the ladder leading out and then at Mandy. Hauling her up would be fun. Behind us, I heard snarling and hissing—the rats, already gaining on us.

  Thanks to the wonders of adrenaline, I got Mandy in a modified fireman’s hold and managed to get up the ladder.

  It wasn’t until I saw the brilliant orange glow of the setting sun that I realized I was going to live through this. And so was Mandy.

  “Of course you’ll live through it.”

  “Damn it,” I snapped, glancing down at him. “Would you stop that, already?” It was damned unnerving, being around somebody who could so easily peer inside your mind.

  He chuckled. Then he shot me an unreadable look. “We’ll meet again, little warrior.”

  Then he launched himself out of my line of sight, no doubt toward the oncoming furry tide.

  As screams of pain filled the air, I half carried, half dragged Mandy to my car.

  Somehow I’d lived through it. A stroke of dumb luck. But I was alive. Mandy was alive.

  Thank God.

  Then I glanced at the gaping pit in the ground. “Thank you, Jude.”

  Copyright © 2010 Shiloh Walker.

  Acquired and edited for Tor.com by Heather Osborn.

  Paranormal Romances by Shiloh Walker

  THE HUNTERS

  Declan and Tori

  Eli and Sarel

  Byron and Kit

  Jonathan and Lori

  Ben and Shadoe

  Rafe and Sheila

  I’ll Be Hunting You

  Heart and Soul

  Hunting the Hunter

  Hunter’s Salvation

  THE FIREWALKERS

  Dreamer

  Sage

  THE MYTHE SERIES

  Mythe & Magick

  Mythe: Vampire

  Back From Hell

  Belonging

  Djinn’s Wish

  The Dragon’s Warrior

  The Dragon’s Woman

  The Missing

  Nebulous

  Never As it Seems

  Once Upon a Midnight Blue

  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

  Lucy stood at the window and watched the sun set dull and red behind the clouds west of the city. Seven stories below, sweet smoke from burning garbage and cooking fires settled over the streets of Morningtown. The window glass had been broken out and traded away long ago and there was a cold, damp bite in the air, but Lucy didn’t close the shutters.

  She lifted Esther’s old coat from a hook and slipped it on. It was too big for her, the sleeves long enough to cover her hands, but the red wool was sturdy and warm. Lucy buttoned up the coat and wrapped a scarf around her neck. The scarf smelled like the city, bitter and stale, like old smoke and rotting wood.

  On the other side of the curtain, Olaf coughed, an ugly, wracking sound. “You still here?” he said. He stomped his feet in frustration. “You’re going to be late.”

  Metal clanged; he was knocking at the potbellied stove with the iron poker, trying to surprise another hour of embers from the coals. Esther was out, bartering a meal of leathery meat and tasteless roots from the family who lived on the roof, and Olaf had started grumbling the moment she left. There was no food in the apartment, no fuel except the smoking chunks in the stove. Lucy had spent the day scavenging for firewood, prying apart empty buildings like a filthy, fishbelly-pale picker, breaking through plaster to pull moldy studs from the walls.

  Lucy reached beneath the cot for her knife and tucked it in her sleeve. The walk from Morningtown to the station was a long one, and dangerous. The poachers usually left her alone on the way out, even in the dead zone past the fallen quarantine fences, but there might be someone willing to take the risk. The return trip was the greater danger, after she had made the trade and had the serum in hand. Lucy had been crossing the city from Morningtown to the station for fifteen years. She knew how to keep the serum safe.

  “You listening to me, girl?” Olaf cleared his throat and coughed again. “Pig was here earlier. She said Riverton’s runner took off, didn’t bring any serum back.” Pig ran the trade in Helterville, the neighborhood that bordered Morningtown to the west. She stopped by every few days to gossip with Olaf and share the news from across the city.

  Lucy pushed the curtain aside. Olaf had dropped the iron poker just out of reach; he was grasping for it, gnarled fingers scraping along the floorboards, his mouth twisted in a scowl. She nudged it away with the tip of her boot.

  “Did you hear me?” Olaf said. He sat back with a frustrated grunt. “You’re not a kid anymore. If you come back without—”

  “I know,” Lucy said.

  She didn’t snap, didn’t raise her voice. She was taller than Olaf now, stronger and quicker. He had been an imposing man once, but that was a long time ago, and Lucy wasn’t a starving new orphan anymore. Olaf’s hands shook so badly he couldn’t wash himself, and his legs were so weak he could barely stand. He smelled of sweat and vomit, and his white hair was yellow with grime. He had been blind for three years.

  “I’m not a drifter kid from Helterville,” Lucy said, her voice mild. “You don’t have to tell me what to do.”

  “Pig says the mud rats are angry,” Olaf said. He coughed into his fist. “Five days now and nobody’s got a drop.”

  “You shouldn’t believe everything Pig tells you,” Lucy said.

  The last feeble sunlight drained from the room. Lucy went to the shelf behind the stove, where Esther kept the papers for trade wrapped up in grubby lace and tucked into a tea tin. When Olaf’s eyes had turned milky white and his joints had stiffened, and word got around that he’d finally started using the serum, everybody in Morningtown had assumed there would be a new dealer stepping into his place. But Esther, quiet, unsmiling Esther with her round face and limp hair, she had poisoned three would-be usurpers in five days and handed their corpses off to the collectors without a word.

  Esther’s herbs and Lucy’s knife now did the work Olaf’s fists and reputation used to. The people of Morningtown didn’t like change. They lived high above the ground and raised chickens and sickly crops on rooftops. They poled rafts down the avenues when the floods came and collected rainwater in barrels. They traded moldy books for firewood when the peddlers from Lily City passed through. Morningtown liked to know where its serum was coming from.

  There were eighty-seven scraps of paper in Esther’s tin box. Esther had counted the night before, tapped them into a
stack, and tied them up with a string. “Most of these are no good,” she had said, her spine rod straight as they sat at the table. “Nonsense and waste.”

  When the traders had first crawled out of the sea, a dozen years ago, every memory had been vivid and strong, every page crammed edge to edge with smudged bold urgency. The traders had accepted the memories reverently, grasping the pages with their clumsy fronds twisted into a parody of human fingers, ink running and paper disintegrating to a wet mash in orifices that were not mouths, sending quivers of ecstasy through limbs that were not arms or legs. Lucy remembered the hours her father had spent hunched over stolen ledgers and notebooks, recording every year of his life with painstaking care. He had been one of Olaf’s enforcers, but after the serum stole his mind away and a few hours of bliss each day became a fugue from which he never woke, Olaf had looked to Lucy and said, “He’s as good as dead, girl, but we’ll keep you around if you make yourself useful.”

  The pages formed a fat, heavy lump in Lucy’s coat pocket. She never read them. She didn’t care to know what people traded away for their hours of peace.

  “You watch yourself,” Olaf said as Lucy opened the door to leave. “Don’t let the mud rats get what’s ours.”

  Lucy let the door bang shut behind her. The hallway smelled of spiced meat and smoke, damp wood and mold. Voices echoed in the stairwell: Esther, several floors above, haggling with a woman who lived upstairs over the price of a chicken. The woman kept a garden on the roof, and her husband was a picker who spent his days scouring the mud plains between the city and the sea for fish and crabs stranded by the tides.

  At ground level the neighborhood was dark already. From Morningtown to Lily City, east at the sinkhole that had once been a park and onto the Avenue, Lucy walked quickly and quietly as the fog grew thicker, the darkness heavier, obscuring the sky and the buildings above their third or fourth floors. Throughout Lily City and the Avenue the buildings had high paths connecting them, hanging bridges draped with laundry and swaying, lit by torches that glowed yellow through the fog.

  The Avenue ended at the concrete trough of the river, then it was twelve blocks to the first quarantine fence, now no more than a trampled, twisted remnant of chain-link and barbed wire tangled with garbage. Lucy felt eyes watching her, saw drifters lurking in shattered shop fronts, but they sunk into the shadows as she passed.

  There was a church seven blocks east of Quarantine Lane. The bells chimed as Lucy approached, as they did every night after twilight. Some nights, if she had time, Lucy stopped to say hello to the priest who cared for orphans and addicts in the church’s echoing nave. Father Antonio had been a young man when the epidemic began, and healthy, and he could have left before the quarantine, found a place on one of the trains heading to the bay and the waiting ships. Lucy had asked him once why he had stayed, and he had said, “What lies across the land and over the sea is no different from what we have here.” Since that day Lucy had been waiting for him to scribble his own memories on a scrap of paper and pass them to her. Sooner or later, everyone did.

  A pair of collectors followed Lucy for two blocks as she neared the station: a man and a woman, long haired and sickly gray, their eyes bulging and serum white, their damp skin glistening. With bony fingers like claws, they clung to their capes of woven kelp and steered their overladen cart along the road. Radios with broken wires and crooked antennae, a length of iron railing, shoes tied up in a massive bundle, the frame of a bicycle, dripping clumps of muddy clothing, there was no pattern or meaning to what the collectors took. They were only drifters who never died, addicts who sucked down the serum and shed their memories until there was nothing left in their veins but milky waste, nothing in their minds but a compulsion to strip the city bare and leave empty shells behind.

  When Lucy faced them, the collectors ducked their heads and mumbled in their wet, gargling voices, that made-up language that sounded nothing like the traders they mimicked.

  Lucy turned away and kept walking. The train station emerged from the fog; it was a low rectangular building on a sinking plain of empty city blocks. Collectors had stolen the sign long ago, but Lucy remembered the bold black words on a white board, the call of a train’s whistle and the sun on her face, the hazy warmth of a distant summer morning.

  The broken turnstile shrieked as Lucy pushed the bar down and forced her way through. Her coat caught on the ragged insides of the eviscerated ticket-taker, and she tugged free to examine the damage: a tear, no more than an inch long, red-and-white threads erupting like lashes around a hollow eye. She walked along the platform, her boots crunching on crushed tiles, and startled rats raced away and vanished into the walls. Fog engulfed the tracks at either end of the station, heavy with the salty, rotten scent of the sea. In the distance a signal light shone red, when there was daylight enough to feed it, a single bulb above the one remaining arm of what had once been a black-and-white X. Water shimmered in puddles at its base. There were a few signs hanging above the platform, some attached now by only one strained hook, most of the scrolling destination names unreadable beneath grime and rust. Lucy remembered the faint flutter of noise the signs had made as the destinations changed, and she shivered.

  She touched the packet of memories in her pocket with one hand, the hilt of her knife with the other. She thought of what Olaf had said. The trades weren’t coming through. Riverton had no serum. She paced beneath the sign announcing a northbound train for Jubilee Bay in faded letters webbed with black mold, and she listened for the quiet splash that would announce the traders’ arrival. They could not move silently along the tracks; they weren’t suited to moving on land at all.

  At the sudden clatter of shifting gravel, Lucy froze and slid her knife into her hand. The noise came from the rubble across the tracks, beyond the broken pillars and fallen roof.

  “I know you’re there,” said Lucy.

  Footsteps scraped and the shadows took shape: a dark-haired child, about ten years old, small and thin and barefoot, dressed in a jacket and trousers and a too-long scarf that dragged in the water.

  “They aren’t coming,” the child said.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Lucy adjusted her grip on the knife and looked around; the child could be a distraction sent by poachers to catch her off guard.

  The kid scowled and tugged the scarf down, revealing a round brown face and two skinny braids curling like snakes under her chin. “Could ask you the same thing, lady,” she said. Her voice was high and light, her accent from somewhere in the city’s muddy northern flats.

  “This is Morningtown’s night,” Lucy said. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  The girl put both hands on the edge of the platform and hopped up, sat with her legs dangling over the edge. “It doesn’t matter whose night it is,” she said. She slipped a hand into her pocket and brought out a stack of ragged papers. “They aren’t coming.”

  “How long have you been waiting?”

  “Five nights.”

  Lucy’s heart skipped. “Five?”

  “There’s a lot of rats,” the girl said with a shrug. “They’re fat and stupid and nobody hunts them here.”

  Five nights ago would have been Riverton’s night. Pig hadn’t been lying after all. Ugly Sal was the dealer in Riverton; that explained why the child would eat rats for five cold nights rather than return empty-handed. Lucy could make out the shadow of a bruise beneath the girl’s left eye, a healing cut at the corner of her mouth. She was too skinny, even for a Riverton mud rat, shaky and frail like one breath would topple her.

  “They never miss a meeting,” Lucy said. She tightened her grip on her knife. “They’ve never missed before.”

  “Now they’ve missed two,” the girl said. “First time for everything.” But there was worry threading through her voice. She craned her head to look up at Lucy and said, “Not even once?”

  “Not once.”

  Lucy would have heard. She was sure of it. The city survived, in its own way
. Neighborhoods fought and buildings crumbled, floods swept in and roads collapsed, collectors lurked and children starved. But beneath it all, the serum was the only thing that mattered, and it had been since the traders had first crept out of the sea. They had arrived after the quarantine had shackled the city, dripping and bold as though they could taste the despair bleeding from the streets and sewers into the sea, as though they had been waiting in cool green darkness all along.

  Lucy had survived as a runner longer than anybody, and she had never once heard of the traders missing a meeting.

  She took a slow breath to steady herself, and asked, “What’s your name?”

  “None of your business.”

  “I’m Lucy. Morningtown.” She didn’t hide the fact that she was still looking around, even though she suspected the kid was alone. “You’re new, aren’t you? What happened to Benj?”

  “Drifter knifed him,” the girl said, her lips twisting. “He tried to steal her pages.”

  “What a shame,” Lucy said.

  “I’m Belle. Riverton.” The girl’s flicker of a smile vanished, and she straightened her shoulders, tried to make herself taller. “Why didn’t they show?”

  Lucy stood beneath the sign for Jubilee Bay and looked northward along the tracks. Some days, when the fog was light and the sun shone weak and sickly over the city, Lucy climbed to the roof of the highest building in Morningtown and tried to see the ocean through the garden of hollow-eyed skyscrapers. The pickers said the sea crept closer every day, sometimes swallowing yards of land overnight, the corpses of abandoned neighborhoods disintegrating with every hungry gulp.

  “I don’t know,” Lucy said. She spoke quietly and hated that it was the truth. There had been nights, long ago, when she had imagined attacking the traders when they came, slashing at their stringy, fibrous bodies with her knife just to see if they could bleed, chasing them down the tracks and throwing their vials of serum after them. She didn’t know how they would react or what they would do to defend themselves, and she didn’t know what it would take to anger the traders so much that they turned their backs on the city and returned to the sea. But she had considered it, trembling with guilt and fear though she never spoke her thoughts aloud, and she had wondered.