The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Three

by Jonathan Strahan

  We sat side by side on golden cushions at the head of the long, low table. Guests great and good took their places, slipping off their Italian shoes, folding their legs and tucking up their expensive Delhi frocks as waiters brought vast thalis of festival food. In their balcony overlooking the Diwan, musicians struck up, a Rajput piece older than Jaipur itself. I clapped my hands. I had grown up to this tune. Salim leaned back on his bolster.

  "And look."

  Where he pointed, men were running up the great sun-bird-man kite of the Jodhras. As I watched, it skipped and dipped on the erratic winds in the court, then a stronger draught took it soaring up into the blue sky. The guests went oooh again.

  "You have made me the happiest man in the world," Salim said.

  I lifted my veil, bent to him, and kissed his lips. Every eye down the long table turned to me. Everyone smiled. Some clapped.

  Salim's eyes went wide. Tears suddenly streamed from them. He rubbed them away and when he put his hands down, his eyelids were two puffy, blistered boils of flesh, swollen shut. He tried to speak but his lips were bloated, cracked, seeping blood and pus. Salim tried to stand, push himself away from me. He could not see, could not speak, could not breathe. His hands fluttered at the collar of his gold-embroidered sherwani.

  "Salim!" I cried. Leel was already on yts feet, ahead of all the guest doctors and surgeons as they rose around the table. Salim let out a thin, high-pitched wail, the only scream that would form in his swollen throat. Then he went down onto the feast table.

  The pavilion was full of screaming guests and doctors shouting into palmers and security staff locking the area down. I stood useless as a butterfly in my makeup and wedding jewels and finery as doctors crowded around Salim. His face was like a cracked melon, a tight bulb of red flesh. I swatted away an intrusive hovercam. It was the best I could do. Then I remember Leel and the other nutes taking me out into the courtyard where a tilt-jet was settling, engines sending the rose petals up in a perfumed blizzard. Paramedics carried Salim out from the pavilion on a gurney. He wore an oxygen rebreather. There were tubes in his arms. Security guards in light-scatter armour pushed the great and the celebrated aside. I struggled with Leel as the medics slid Salim into the tilt-jet but yt held me with strange, withered strength.

  "Let me go, let me go, that's my husband—"

  "Padmini, Padmini, there is nothing you can do."

  "What do you mean?"

  "Padmini, he is dead. Salim your husband is dead."

  Yt might have said that the moon was a great mouse in the sky.

  "Anaphylactic shock. Do you know what that is?"

  "Dead?" I said simply, quietly. Then I was flying across the court towards the tilt-jet as it powered up. I wanted to dive under its engines. I wanted to be scattered like the rose petals. Security guards ran to cut me off but Leel caught me first and brought me down. I felt the nip of an efuser on my arm and everything went soft as the tranquilizer took me.

  After three weeks I called Heer to me. For the first week the security robots had kept me locked back in the zenana while the lawyers argued. I spent much of that time out of my head, part grief-stricken, part insane at what had happened. Just one kiss. A widow no sooner than I was wed. Leel tended to me; the lawyers and judges reached their legal conclusions. I was the sole and lawful heir of Azad–Jodhra Water. The second week I came to terms with my inheritance: the biggest water company in Rajputana, the third largest in the whole of India. There were contracts to be signed, managers and executives to meet, deals to be set up. I waved them away, for the third week was my week, the week in which I understood what I had lost. And I understood what I had done, and how, and what I was. Then I was ready to talk to Heer.

  We met in the Diwan, between the great silver jars that Salim, dedicated to his new tradition, had kept topped up with holy Ganga water. Guard-monkeys kept watch from the rooftops. My monkeys. My Diwan. My palace. My company, now. Heer's hands were folded in yts sleeves. Yts eyes were black marble. I wore widow's white—a widow, at age fifteen.

  "How long had you planned it?"

  "From before you were born. From before you were even conceived."

  "I was always to marry Salim Azad."

  "Yes."

  "And kill him."

  "You could not do anything but. You were designed that way."

  Always remember, my father had said, here among these cool, shady pillars, you are a weapon. A weapon deeper, subtler than I had ever imagined, deeper even than Dahin's medical machines could look. A weapon down in the DNA: designed from conception to cause a fatal allergic reaction in any member of the Azad family. An assassin in my every cell, in every pore and hair, in every fleck of dust shed from my deadly skin.

  I killed my beloved with a kiss.

  I felt a huge, shuddering sigh inside me, a sigh I could never, must never utter.

  "I called you a traitor when you said you had always been a loyal servant of the House of Jodhra."

  "I was, am, and will remain so, please God." Heer dipped yts hairless head in a shallow bow. Then yt said, "When you become one of us, when you Step Away, you step away from so much: from your own family, from the hope of ever having children . . . You are my family, my children. All of you, but most of all you, Padmini. I did what I had to for my family, and now you survive, now you have all that is yours by right. We don't live long, Padmini. Our lives are too intense, too bright, too brilliant. There's been too much done to us. We burn out early. I had to see my family safe, my daughter triumph."

  "Heer . . . "

  Yt held up a hand, glanced away, I thought I saw silver in the corners of those black eyes.

  "Take your palace, your company, it is all yours."

  That evening I slipped away from my staff and guards. I went up the marble stairs to the long corridor where my room had been before I became a woman, and a wife, and a widow, and the owner of a great company. The door unlocked to my thumbprint; I swung it open into dust-hazy golden sunlight. The bed was still made, mosquito nets neatly knotted up. I crossed to the balcony. I expected the vines and creepers to have grown to a jungle; with a start I realized it was just over a year since I had slept here. I could still pick out the handholds and footholds where I had followed the steel monkey up onto the roof. I had an easier way there now. A door at the end of the corridor, previously locked to me, now opened onto a staircase. Sentry robots immediately bounced up as I stepped out onto the roof, crests raised, dart-throwers armed. A mudra from my hand sent them back into watching mode.

  Once again I walked between the domes and turrets to the balcony at the very top of the palace façade. Again, Great Jaipur at my bare feet took my breath away. The pink city kindled and burned in the low evening light. The streets still roared with traffic; I could smell the hot oil and spices of the bazaar. I now knew how to find the domes of the Hijra Mahal among the confusion of streets and apartment buildings. The dials and half-domes and buttresses of the Jantar Mantar threw huge shadows over each other, a confusion of clocks. Then I turned towards the glass scimitar of the Azad Headquarters—my headquarters now, my palace as much as this dead old Rajput pile. I had brought that house crashing down, but not in any way I had imagined. I wanted to apologise to Salim as he had apologised to me, every night when he came to me in the zenana, for what his family had done. They always told me I was a weapon. I thought I must become one; I never thought they had made me into one.

  How easy to step out over the traffic, step away from it all. Let it all end, Azad and Jodhra. Cheat Heer of yts victory. Then I saw my toes with their rings curl over the edge and I knew I could not, must not. I looked up and there, at the edge of vision, along the bottom of the red horizon, was a line of dark. The monsoon, coming at last. My family had made me one kind of weapon, but my other family, the kind, mad, sad, talented family of the nutes, had taught me, in their various ways, to be another weapon. The streets were dry but the rains were coming. I had reservoirs and canals and pumps and pipes in my
power. I was Maharani of the Monsoon. Soon the people would need me. I took a deep breath and imagined I could smell the rain. Then I turned and walked back through the waiting robots to my kingdom.

  Virgin

  Holly Black

  Holly Black is the author of the bestselling "The Spiderwick Chronicles." Her first story appeared in 1997, but she first garnered attention with her debut novel, Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale. She has written six Spiderwick novels and two novels in her "Modern Faerie Tale" sequence, including Andre Norton Award winner Valiant: A Modern Tale of Faerie. Black's most recent book is the first in a second series of Spiderwick novels, The Nixie's Song. Upcoming is her first short story collection, The Poison Eaters and Other Stories.

  Let me tell you something about unicorns—they're faeries and faeries aren't to be trusted. Read your storybooks. But maybe you can't get past the rainbows and pastels crap. That's your problem.

  Zachary told me once why the old stories say that mortals who eat faerie food can't leave Faerie. That's a bunch of rot too, but at least there's some truth in it. You see, they can leave—they just won't ever be able to find another food they'll want to eat. Normal food tastes like ashes, so they starve. Zachary should have listened to his own stories.

  I met him the summer I was squatting in an old building with my friend Tanya and her boyfriend. I'd run away from my last foster family, mostly because there didn't seem to be any point in staying. I was humoring myself into thinking I could live indefinitely like this.

  Tanya had one prosthetic leg made from this shiny pink plastic stuff, so she looked like she was part Barbie doll, part girl. She loved to wear short, tight skirts and platform shoes to show her leg off. She knew the name of every boy who hung out in LOVE park—so called for the sculpture of the word, but best known for all the skaters that hung around. It was Tanya who introduced us.

  My first impression of Zachary was that he was a beautiful junkie. He wasn't handsome; he was pretty, the kind of boy that girls draw obsessively in the corners of their notebooks. Tall, great cheekbones, and reddish black hair rolling down the sides of his face in fat curls. He was juggling a tennis ball, a fork, and three spoons. A cardboard sign next to his feet had "will juggle anything for food" written on it in an unsteady hand. Anything had been underlined shakily, twice. Junkie, I thought. I wondered if Tanya had ever slept with him. I wanted to ask her what it was like.

  After he was done and had collected a little cash in a paper cup, he walked around with us for a while, mostly listening to Tanya tell him about her band. He had a bag over his shoulder and walked solemnly, hands in the pockets of his black jeans. He didn't look at her, although sometimes he nodded along with what she was saying, and he didn't look at me. He bought us ginger beer with the coins people had thrown at him, and that's when I knew he wasn't a junkie, because no junkie who looked as hard up as he did would spend his last quarters on anything but getting what he needed.

  The next time I saw Zachary, it was at the public library. All us street kids would go there when we got cold. Sometimes I would go alone to read sections of The Two Towers, jotting down the page where I stopped on the inside hem of my jeans. I found him sitting on the floor between the mythology and psychiatry shelves. He looked up when I started walking down the aisle and we just stared at one another for a moment, like we'd been found doing something illicit. Then he grinned and I grinned. I sat down on the floor next to him.

  "Just looking," I said. "What are you reading?" I had just run half the way to the library and could feel the sweat on my scalp. I knew I looked really awful. He looked dry, even cold. His skin was pale, as if he had never spent a day in the park.

  He lifted up the book spread open across his lap: Faerie Folktales of Europe.

  I was used to people who wouldn't shut up. I wasn't used to making conversation.

  "You're Zachary, right?" I asked like an ass.

  He looked up again. "Mmhmm. You're Jen, Tanya's friend."

  "I didn't think you'd remember," I said, then felt stupid. He just smiled at me.

  "What are you reading?" I stumbled over the words, realizing halfway through the sentence I'd already asked that. "I mean, what part are you reading?"

  "I'm reading about unicorns," he said, "but there's not much here."

  "They like virgins," I volunteered.

  He sighed. "Yeah. They'd send out girls into the woods in front of the hunts to lure out the unicorn, get it to lie down, to sleep. Then they'd ride up and shoot it or stab it or slice off its horn. Can you imagine how that girl must have felt? The sharp horn pressing against her stomach, her ears straining to listen for the hounds."

  I shifted uncomfortably. I didn't know anyone who talked like that. "You looking for something else about them?"

  "I don't even know." He tucked some curls behind one ear. Then he grinned at me again.

  All that summer was a fever dream, restless and achy. He was a part of it, meeting me in the park or at the library. I told him about my last foster home and about the one before that, the one that had been really awful. I told him about the boys I met and where we went to drink—up on rooftops. We talked about where pigeons spent their winters and where we were going to spend ours. When it was his turn to talk, he told stories. He told me ones I knew and old-sounding ones I had never heard. It didn't matter that I spent the rest of the time begging for cigarettes and hanging with hoodlums. When I was with Zachary, everything seemed different.

  Then one day, when it was kind of rainy and cold and we were scrounging in our pockets for money for hot tea, I asked him where he slept.

  "Outside the city, near the zoo."

  "It must stink." I found another sticky dime in the folds of my backpack and put it on the concrete ledge with our other change.

  "Not so much. When the wind's right."

  "So how come you live all the way out there? Do you live with someone?" It felt strange that I didn't know.

  He put some lint-encrusted pennies down and looked at me hard. His mouth parted a little and he looked so intent that for a moment, I thought he was going to kiss me.

  Instead he said, "Can I tell you something crazy? I mean totally insane."

  "Sure. I've told you weird stuff before."

  "Not like this. Really not like this."

  "OK," I said.

  And that's when he told me about her—a unicorn. His unicorn, whom he lived with in a forest between two highways just outside the city, who waited for him at night, and who ran free, hanging out with the forest animals or doing whatever it is unicorns do all day long, while Zachary told me stories and scrounged for tea money.

  "My mother . . . she was pretty screwed up. She sold drugs for some guys and then she sold information on those guys to the cops. So one day when this car pulled up and told us to get in, I guess I wasn't all that surprised. Her friend, Gina, was already sitting in the back and she looked like she'd been crying. The car smelled bad, like old frying oil.

  "Mom kept begging them to drop me off and they kept silent, just driving. I don't think I was really scared until we got on the highway.

  "They made us get out of the car near some woods and then walk for a really long time. The forest was huge. We were lost. I was tired. My mother dragged me along by my hand. I kept falling over branches. Thorns wiped along my face.

  "Then there was a loud pop and I started screaming from the sound even before my mother fell. Gina puked."

  I didn't know what to do, so I put my hand on his shoulder. His body was warm underneath his thin T-shirt. He didn't even look at me as he talked.

  "There isn't much more. They left me alone there with my dead mom in the dark. Her eyes glistened in the moonlight. I wailed. You can imagine. It was awful. I guess I remember a lot, really. I mean, it's vivid but trivial.

  "After a long time, I saw this light coming through the trees. At first I thought it was the men coming back. Then I saw the horn—like bleached bone. Amazing, Jen. So amazing. I lifted up my hand t
o pet her side and blood spread across her flank. I forgot everything but that moment, everything but the white pelt, for a long, long while. It was like the whole world went white."

  His face was flushed. We bought one big cup of tea with tons of honey and walked in the rain, passing the cup between us. He moved more restlessly than usual, but was quieter too.

  "Tell me some more, Zachary," I said.

  "I shouldn't have said what I did."

  We walked silently for a while 'til the rain got too hard and we had to duck into the foyer of a church to wait it out.

  "I believe you," I said.

  He frowned. "What's wrong with you? What kind of idiot believes a story like that?"

  I hadn't really considered whether I believed him or not. Sometimes people just tell you things and you have to accept that they believe them. It doesn't always matter if the stories are true.

  I turned away and lit a cigarette. "So you lied?"

  "No, of course not. Can we just talk about something else for a while?" he asked.

  "Sure," I said, searching for something good. "I've been thinking about going home."

  "To your jerk of a foster father and your slutty foster sisters?"

  "The very ones. Where am I going to stay come winter otherwise?"

  He mulled that over for a few minutes, watching the rain pound some illegally parked cars.

  "How 'bout you squat libraries?" he said, grinning.

  I grinned back. "I could find an elderly, distinguished, gentlemanly professor and totally throw myself at him. Offer to be his Lolita."

  We stood awhile more before I said, "Maybe you should hang with people, even if they're assholes. You could stay with me tonight."

  He shook his head, looking at the concrete.

  And that was that.

  I told Tanya about Zachary and the unicorn that night while we waited for Bobby Diablo to come over. Telling it, the story became a lot funnier than it had been with Zachary's somber black eyes on mine. Tanya and I laughed so hard that I started to choke.