Smokestacks Like the Arms of Gods

by Ben Burgis

At the time, it was pretty exciting stuff. The flaming torches on the tunnel walls as me and half a dozen of my fellow inductees rushed to the ceremony. The older guys who’d known my Da all standing around and beaming down at me as I pricked the drop of blood from my fingertip and pledged eternal loyalty to my fellow workers. Then the singing of the Anthem of the Red Flag and my first taste of whiskey.

Raise the scarlet standard high,

Beneath its folds we’ll live and die…

I knew Guilds weren’t exactly legal, but everyone still seemed to be in one. I’d heard some talk of Guilds sabotaging machinery when conditions got really bad, even walking off the job. In the excitement of the induction ceremony, I didn’t realize just yet that Guilds didn’t do that sort of thing any more.

In our grandfathers’ era, they might have gone on strike. Now that the companies have smartened up and started using drinkers instead of regular humans for plant security, we pretty much drink whiskey and hold induction ceremonies and sing. Good jaunty song, though, real nice beat to it.

Let cowards flinch and traitors sneer,

We’ll keep the red flag flying here…

Love Among the Talus

by Elizabeth Bear

You cannot really keep a princess in a tower. Not if she has no brothers and must learn statecraft and dancing and riding and poisons and potions and the passage of arms, so that she may eventually rule.

But you can do the next best thing.

In the land of the shining empire, in a small province north of the city of Messaline and beyond the great salt desert, a princess with a tip-tilted nose lived with her mother, Hoelun Khatun, the Dowager Queen. The princess‚ whose name, it happens, was Nilufer‚ stood tall and straight as an ivory pole, and if her shoulders were broad out of fashion from the pull of her long oak-white bow, her dowry would no doubt compensate for any perceived lack of beauty. Her hair was straight and black, as smooth and cool as water, and even when she did not ride with her men-at-arms, she wore split, padded skirts and quilted, paneled robes of silk satin, all emerald and jade and black and crimson embroidered with gold and white chrysanthemums.

She needed no tower, for she was like unto a tower in her person, a fastness as sure as the mountains she bloomed beside, her cool reserve and mocking half-lidded glances the battlements of a glacial virginity.

Fulgurite

by Vylar Kaftan

“It has a horn,” I say, pushing my plate aside. “That makes it a unicorn.” I go to the window and stare at the sky. It smells like a storm. Clouds stack on top of each other in thick blankets. Lightning flashes in the west. It fires an electrical impulse into my body, and I push the window open. I’m on the fourth floor. “Hello!” I call out the window, leaning forward into the hundred-degree heat. The blast of hot air buoys me up like boiling water, burning me but supporting me, and I’m sure I can fly away if I just let go.

Maddoc hauls me back in the window. “Are you crazy? Get back in here. You’ll fall and kill yourself.” It’s like Maddoc, to make sure everyone and everything is safe.

Three Days and Nights In Lord Darkdrake’s Hall

by Leah Bobet

The sun slanted ever further in, pooling warm and uncomfortable at my feet as I noted the exits and matched walls to arms of the compass, itemized my situation neatly in my head.

They had taken my armor. Instead I wore a long dress of white linen, the kind of dress that would have been too simple in my previous life and was much too impractically frivolous now. They had taken my arms, my secondhand sword and the bow my lord uncle had given me, and the reason for that was obvious. He wanted vulnerability, not strength; he wanted me to look and feel and be vulnerable.

Somewhere beneath the coldness of my regard, I began to get angry. He was setting a stage. He was creating the battlefield. I could not buy into it.

I resolved to ask Captain Stoneburn, when next I saw him, what had transpired between him and Lord Darkdrake to provoke such a desire for vengeance.

When the light-dapples on the floor were long and tinged with sickly orange, a servant came in with bread and cheese and water. Peasant food: perhaps it was meant to be a slight. Mercenary food, Company food: perhaps it was meant to remind. I moved to take it, and remembered that my hands were bound fast.

Tio Gilberto and the Twenty-Seven Ghosts

by Ben Francisco

Before I can even ring, Uncle Gilberto opens the door and gives me a big hug and a kiss that smells of gin and menthol cigarettes.  His dog, Ganymede, barks and snuggles his head between my legs.  The cat eyes me suspiciously from the next room.  From behind me, someone helps me slip off my jacket.  I look over my shoulder, but nobody’s there.  “Who’s that?” I ask my uncle.

“That’s Daniel,” he says.

“Hey, Daniel,” I say.  “Been a while.”

Gilberto shakes a finger at the air behind me.  “No, you cannot also take his shirt!  I told you to behave.”  Uncle Gil throws both hands into the air.  “Dios mío, what have I done?  Bringing my innocent nephew into a house with twenty-seven horny ghosts. Qué barbaridad. You tell me right away if any of them try anything, me entiendes, James?”

Restless In My Hand

by Tim Pratt

“It is an axe, Mr. Selfry,” the man said. He produced a prybar — from where, Richard wasn’t sure — and, with a great squealing and popping of nails, pried the lid off the crate. Richard left the safety of the doorway and went out onto the porch just as the man set the lid aside. Peering into the crate, Richard saw only darkness, as if the box were full of ink, but then something glinted silver, and — as if his eyes were adjusting to a moonlit night, instead of midafternoon sun — he saw the great silver crescent of an axehead, nestled among styrofoam packing peanuts that were, inexplicably, black instead of white. It was a double-bladed axe, with a long three-sided pyramidal spike emerging from the top.

“Workmanship,” the man said approvingly. “Look at the blood-gutters on that spike. It’s not as if the spike was ever likely to be used for stabbing, but the smith allowed for the possibility. Truly, they were giants on the earth in those days.”

“I don’t understand,” Richard said. “This thing is a family heirloom? From Great Grandma Melody? It doesn’t even look old.”

The Petrified Girl

by Katherine Sparrow

Besides, Tucson was too hot in summer.

It was so hot, way up into the hundred and tens, that the only refuge was in Betty’s pool. We stayed out there the whole hot afternoon, and when the sun went down it didn’t even get all that much cooler. Neither of us had a stitch of clothes on as we lay submerged, lying on twin yellow plastic floatables. It was good to be naked with Betty, I could look over at her and see all the things a body could survive. She had that old desert skin that bore a million wrinkles and just hung off her. It made me feel like maybe I could survive in this world too. Betty kept our cups of Jim Beam and Mountain Dew full all afternoon and into the night, cause as she said it, it was too hot not to drink. On about midnight, the hot air was just starting to feel bareable again, but neither of us were keen on getting out.