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On Saturday morning, while sitting (slightly hunched) at her desk, Sharon suddenly became powerfully and immediately aware that the floor was lava.

It was a good thing she was slouched over with her feet propped up on the corner of her desk, or it could have been very ugly indeed.  As it was she just had enough time to smell the hairs on her dangling left arm burning before she had to yank it away from a surface that was now considerably hotter than even the stuffiest days of summer had ever rendered it. 

“Fuck,” she swore.  This would have been much easier if she’d been in her bedroom, or the kitchen.  Now she was surrounded by molten magma with nothing but a chair and a desk separating her from it.  Wonderful.  Just wonderful. 

The chair had wheels. 

It took Sharon five minutes of very patient pushing and prodding at the walls to get her into a position adjacent to the kitchen, whereupon her chair finally hit a ruck in the carpet and tipped over, forcing her to make a dive for safety atop the stove, which turned on.  After she’d extinguished the fire she used the fridge as a recon point to cautiously hop into the hallway and cling to the bookcase for dear life.  The laminated plywood creaked under her hands and the top shelf spilled its guts; an entire five years of National Geographic showered past her head and bobbed cheerily on top of molten rock; untouched by the sulphurous heat. 

Sharon’s obsessive-compulsive disorder tingled at her, unsatisfied and unfulfilled.  So she said “fuck,” instead, scrabbled over to the far side of the bookcase, and launched herself face-first into her bedroom, where she hit the bed with her face, rolled over six times, and wrapped herself up in her blankets. 

Far, far away she heard the faint sound of her cat bitching at her as he stood crabby-faced and entirely untouched in the midst of searing temperatures. 

“No,” she told him.  And then she went to bed at ten-thirty AM. 

***

On Sunday morning Sharon awoke with the cat’s anus four inches away from her face, as usual. 

She fed him.  It shut him up.  She drank coffee.  It shut the voices in her head up. 

Ah, normal. 

Almost normal. 

She frowned as wakefulness crept in from the periphery of her brain to colonize the cerebellum’s highlands.  Something was wrong.  Something wasn’t usual.  Something was different. 

No, the floor wasn’t lava anymore.  Good thing too, since she hadn’t checked until just now. 

No, the air wasn’t lava either. 

No, she’d just fed the cat. 

Oh right, she was out of milk. 

The people on the street knew something was wrong too.  Their eyes hunted Sharon, twitchy and nervous, fingers grasping at their coats and legs twitching to propel them that crucial extra ten inches away from her on the sidewalk.  She felt as if she’d been sprayed by a skunk, and checked her deodorant carefully. 

Nope, still there. 

Milk, more cereal, a bag of chips to kill herself slightly faster.  The cashier stood ramrod-stiff on her side of the counter, eyes wary. 

“Put it down,” she told Sharon, voice trying to find a place somewhere between wary and war-y. 

“Is a twenty too big to break now?”
“Put it down on the counter and step back.”
Sharon held out the bill and she shrank backwards.

Wait.  The crawling, icy feeling churning in her bones made sense.  Everything made sense.

“Oh,” she said.  “I’m It.”

The cashier said nothing, not even as Sharon leaned over very, very, very carefully and poked her arm with one finger.

“No tag-bags,” she said reflexively, and was rewarded with a surge of genuine hatred in the eyes of her customer service representative.  Shaken, she returned home and spent the day asleep in the rubble of a bag of chips. 

***

On Monday morning Sharon thought it was Sunday still or possibly Saturday and got up at eleven-thirty, had two cups of coffee, ignored the cat and fed him in that order, stared blankly into space, remembered that she probably should’ve made sure the floor wasn’t lava at some point, then also remembered it was her shift today. 

“Oh,” she said. 

Five minutes later, running down the road, she amended herself: “fuck.”

The bus wasn’t coming.  Half an hour late, no notice given, no bus.  Which would’ve been easy to see coming too, because there were no cars.  No bikes.  No pedestrians.  No traffic at all.

No ANYBODY at all.

So Sharon walked ten miles to work and arrived halfway through her shift, composing her resignation speech in her head.  She was trying to think of a good word to attach to “spittle” when she realized work was also empty.  The coffee machine was spotlessly unattended.  The barstools were cold and unwarmed by asses of any magnitude or insignificance.  The caffeinated had been left to go latte themselves. 

She signed in at seven AM because who the hell would know, got changed, and slouched at the counter for two hours before she started screaming obscenities nonstop at the top of her lungs. 

Ten minutes into THAT she stopped for breath, breathed, then heard someone else keep breathing when she was through. 

Five minutes after that she found where the sound was coming from; the balled-up, cramped, eyes-bugged, hands-clasped-over-mouth form of her manager, who’d somehow managed to cram herself into the scone cupboard.

It took her another two hours to find everyone else’s hiding spots for her shift – the broom cupboard; the out-of-service toilet; tucked into three separate parkas and wedged into the back of the freezer with an oxygen tank; hiding atop the shop’s marquee behind the logo; and at home under the bed – and by the time she was through her hours were up and frankly she would’ve preferred having to deal with customers.

She went home, thought about her pay, kicked off her shoes, and went to bed. 

Her cat bitched at her until he got within arm’s reach, where she cuddled him until he gave up. 

***

On Tuesday morning Sharon slept in. 

***

On Wednesday morning Sharon stayed at home. 

***

On Thursday morning she turned off her phone.

***

On Friday morning Sharon ignored the knocking until the door fell in. 

“C’mon,” the world told her.  “C’mooooon.”
She pulled the blankets over her head.

“C’moooooooooooon,” they said, tugging at the sheets.  “You PROMISED.  Today is I Spy.  You’ve gotta play it.”
“No.”
“You’ve GOTTA.”
“No.”
“C’mooooooooooooooon come plaaaaaay with usssssssssss,” the world said.  “C’mooooon.  Don’t be a party-pooper.  C’mooooon.”

“Fine,” said Sharon.  “I Spy something new.”

“Is it the ceiling?”
“No.”
“Is it the floor?”
“No.”

“Is it the walls?”
“No.”
“Is it the cat?”
“No.”
“Is it the bed?”
“No.”
“Is it you?”
Sharon didn’t say anything. 

“Is it you?”
Sharon didn’t say anything.

“You have to say if we got it right!”
Sharon didn’t say anything and the world pulled the sheets off the bed to find nothing there at all except a still-warm pillow, cooling rapidly in the breeze from the open window.

“Oh BEANS,” they said. 

At that moment the cat, wounded by their ignoring his bitching, clawed their leg open.   

***

Sharon was already halfway out of town by then, but the scream was plenty loud enough that there was no mistaking it. 

Still, she had a good head start.  And some motivation to make due on it. 

Ring

Ring

Ring

Click.

“Hi, you’ve reached Bob’s Big Guns and Bear Traps, where you come to get in touch with your wild side and blow it away.  I’m a little busy right now and can’t make it to the phone, so please leave a message on the machine after the tone and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.  Thanks for calling.”

Beeeep.

“Hi, Bob, this is Dr. Troyer; I’m just checking in on you this week since you haven’t submitted your scheduled activity logs.  If you’ve forgotten my email or need any assistance, please feel free to call this number and leave a message at any time.  Remember, your body needs time not only to heal but also to actually work: you’ve lost four fingers six toes and your entire nose.  This therapy is part of that work, and I want your recovery to be as smooth and painless as humanly possible.  Please contact me as soon as you can.”

***

Ring

Ring

Ring

Click.

“Hi, you’ve reached Bob’s Big Guns and Bear Traps, where you come to get in touch with your wild side and blow it away.  I’m working on something at the moment, so I might be away from the desk frequently.  Leave a message and I’ll return your call when possible.  Thanks for calling.”

Beeeep.

“Bobby?  Are you there?  You haven’t talked to me since the attack, Bobby.  I’m worried about you, you know that, right?  Worried about you not SCARED of you, I’ll love you no matter if you have the right number of fingers and toes or an entire nose or not, you know that, right?  Right?”

“Please Bobby pick up the phone, I don’t know what you’re doing.  Are you doing your physiotherapy?  Because your doctor phoned me and told me to tell you that you should be doing that.  Dwelling on this won’t help!  Come on, phone me, I need to talk to you.  We can go out and visit that fry shack you love so much and you can order as many billberry tequilas as you’d like, just pick up the phone and talk to me!”

“Bobby?  Come on, can’t you hear m”

Beeeep.

***

Ring

Ring

Ring

Click.

“Hi, you’ve reached Bob’s Big Guns and Bear Traps, currently and temporarily closed while we sort out a few pest issues.  Nothing major, so don’t worry – we’ll soon be back in business of giving you the business you need to put wildlife where it belongs: six feet under or in a barbeque.  Leave a message after the tone or call back in, oh, about a week.”

Beeeep.

“Bob, this is Dr. Laurier.  You’ve persistently avoided talking to me ever since you were no longer confined to a hospital bed, and this is unacceptable.  You have a problem, Bob, on that we agree, but on the solution?  I completely dispute that you’re in fit condition mentally or physically to go hunt that bear, Bob, even if that was the sort of therapy I recommended.  Which it is not.  Leave it to the park rangers, Bob, and if you want to help?  Talk to them.  Don’t be an action hero.  Phone me.  Now.”

***

Ring

Ring

Ring

Click.

“Hi, you’ve reached the former location of Bob’s Big Guns and Bear Traps, which has been turned into a righteous tool for a righteous cause: vengeance.  Tonight I depart, and tomorrow I will return either with my shield or on it.  I look forward to your custom when the business reopens with my tormentor’s stuffed head mounted over the till.  Leave a message but do not expect it returned anytime soon: words mean nothing to me now, only the hunt.”

Beeeep.

“Hey Bob it’s Stan, let me get right to it: where the hell’s my giant novelty bear trap?  You said you’d just need it for one night and it’s been almost a week; what the hell man?  It’s not like I NEED the thing, since you only gave it to me as a gag gift in the first place, but it’s rude to just walk off with stuff without saying so.  Did you at least oil the springs?  I might not have told you that, but it needs those springs oiled or it sticks.  And it’s no fun trying to unstick that thing without losing your entire torso to it.  You’re down a lot of fingers, man, don’t go doing anything stupid.”

“Uh.  Bob?  You didn’t do anything stupid, ri”

Beeeep.

It’s a beautiful, beautiful day.

Big, too – the horizon has that extra width to it that can only come from last night’s storm clouds fading away on its edges, leaving the air dew-fresh and just a little thick.  The sun is strong, the breeze is gentle and insistent.  The bugs that are out are slow and unsteady, the ground is damp and the big puddles are still there and not yet starting to steam. 

On days like this, he feels good.  And when he feels good, he feels bold.  And when he feels bold, he gets himself an unusual breakfast. 

So he spreads his wings and leaves the shining shore behind and flies low, low over the perfect blue water and he keeps his bright little eyes focused on what was underneath it. 

He had always been eager for new things.  He was the first to snatch dinner from his mother’s beak; he was the first to try flapping; he was the first to topple pell-mell out of the nest altogether; the first to leave for good. 

And he’d been the first to wonder about the funny little wriggly things with no limbs but fins that muddled and fuddled their way beneath the lagoon’s surface, and the first to try to pounce at them – and then the first to discover, much to his delight, that pouncing with sufficient fierceness would carry you right through the calm flat blue and right into their soft and fine-scaled flesh, tooth and talon. 

The damp feathers afterwards were frustrating, but the meal was delicious.  And on a day like this the sun will steam him dry before he’s even finished eating. 

And that’s why he watches the water so hungrily as he goes now, beak clicking, teeth clacking.  Last night’s storm hadn’t been violent, but it had been insistent.  He’s behind on food – not by enough to hurt, but enough to vex.  And when he’s vexed he feels bolder.

The fish squirms, just at the edge of his eyes, and he thinks second and pounces first.

Water is a tricky thing.  It lets you breath, but not as well as air.  It can crush you or hold you up.  It can sweep you away or let you float. 

And it can play with light so that a big fish far away can be a little fish just below the surface, leaving him with a beakful of nothing and a sharp anger and a sudden, profound tug at one leg.

Then both legs. 

Then his body. 

Then his wings. 

Something much bigger than any fish is on him, a toothless, mouthless pull that drags him down.  He flaps and flaps and flaps like he hasn’t since he was in the nest and dreaming of the sky, but instead of too-thin air there’s the weight of the world around him, pressing on him, wearing at him, dragging him down. 

The fish was gone. 

He sank, and up around him came a blue so much more profound than the sky that his body shook with it. 

It was a beautiful, beautiful, day. 

That never matters, does it?

***

For Gunbod, the day was neither beautiful nor ugly, just long, which was why he almost put his pick right through the thing before he saw it.  The metal tip veered at the last moment, betrayed by tired and inflexible muscles, and it sank off-base.  Then he cursed, leaned close, pulled, and as his brow furrowed and his back ached he was eye to eye with something very very old. 

So he told the foreman. 

And the foreman told the quarry’s owner. 

And the quarry’s owner sent word to a good friend of his, Baron Menzen. 

Baron Menzen came late in the evening, by carriage, and peered at the rock under lantern-light and lens. 

“A bird,” he said.  “And a very beautiful one.  Look, you can even see the feathers… oh, this is wonderful.  I will pay for this.”

And the quarry’s owner was delighted for such an opportunity to further endear himself to his good friend, Baron Menzen, and so did not charge more than a nominal price, which was exactly the sort of thing Baron Menzen had long ago learned to smile at.  It made life easier for him. 

The bird did not. 

It was so beautiful that it was the work of many days to remove the stone around it a chip at a time, with each blow of hammer or chisel sweated over for fear it would send a crack through the leaf-delicate imprint of a ghostly feather.  Baron Menzen swore and sweated all day between meals, which were delivered to his study.  He slept in his chair fitfully, and awoke with hands already clutching at his tools. 

After six days of this his eyes were full of spots and his head was full of cobwebs and his hands were shaking and his nerves were cracking and he cleared his throat and called for his maid.

“Clean up in here,” he said.  “I’m going for a walk.  Don’t touch anything important.”

Or else, he didn’t say.  And she heard it quite clearly, especially when he slapped her rear on the way out the door.  She knew his moods. 

Her name was Grasell.  She had lived at the estate her entire life, and worked there for half of it – officially for half of it, after she’d helped her mother without pay for most of the first half. 

“Busy hands can wash dishes,” she’d been told.  “Wandering eyes can look for dust.  Itchy feet can run to the woodshed.”

So she’d washed and looked and run and then she’d been a maid and had to do all of that and also have her rear slapped, and she’d done all of those things quite well.  But what made her a good maid was none of that, it was that she could do all of those things without ever once revealing to anyone how badly she wanted to break everything around her into little tiny pieces. 

Even when she was by herself, with a fragile piece of stone that her master had paid more money for than she’d made in her life. 

The desk was cleaned of crumbs; the shelves were dusted; the floor was swept; the crumbled bits of limestone had been taken away.  Everything looked so very clean and sensible now, exactly as it ought to.  The bird lay frozen on its back in the stone, on the wood, and it was as if it could never have been anything else or anywhere else at all. 

Were those teeth?

Grasell had been a very bold child, and had run her mother ragged just coming up with chores for her.  She’d hoped that she’d done well enough work tempering her to keep her impulses in check, but it was and is and will be the fate of parents to never, ever be correct. 

She was also a little bit near-sighted.

So when Grasell leaned down and close enough for her breath to fog the cool surface of the stone bird’s body, and peered carefully at what were indeed little tiny but perfect teeth, it was as much fate as chance as anything at all when her nose brushed the surface of its beak. 

Oh. 

Grasell blinked and watched the world swim back into focus in front of her eyes.  She felt as if she’d come up for air for the first time in forever. 

Oh. 

Oh.  The poor thing.  All that blue, all around it.  Then the dark and the weight. 

Poor thing.  Poor little bird. 

Her ears still felt clogged, like she was stuck underwater.  She pawed at them.  No, still ringing. 

Oh.  That wasn’t her ears.  That was the baron, shouting at her.  She’d never heard his voice go quite that loud or high before; it was like a bat, or one of the big membrane-winged flying creatures that sometimes nested on the island in the late days of spring.  Their calls had been so sad, and she felt a bite of pity inside her that none of them were there anymore to herald the lengthening days. 

What was he mad about?  She was still touching the stone with her nose, that must be why.  It had been a long time ago that she’d done that.  A long, long time underwater.  Yes, she could straighten up now, she decided.  It had been long enough.

It was also something the baron approved of, because it put her face somewhere where it was safe for him to hit it.  Right on the cheek too, a proper place for a bruise.  And again.  And again.  She was going to be purple when this was over, if she were lucky. 

The baron grabbed at her, held her by the arms, bug-eyed and furious as angry little pants steamed from his beard.  She saw that his clothes were rumpling and how would she ever get them back into shape again, much less remove the stains?  Her mother would be aghast if she was still alive. 

His hand moved against her wrist, adjusting his hairy-knuckled grip. 

That was when Grasell knew something new: the bird’s wings had claws. 

And very, very quickly Baron Menzen knew that too. 

***

Grasell stepped outside through the servant’s door through the last time and thought about names.  She’d daydreamed a few times of them, but now she’d need to pick one for later, once her head start had worn off. 

It wasn’t going to be pretty.  But there were places she could go that weren’t here, especially with some of the shinier things that had been in the estate.  Maybe an ocean away.  Yes, an ocean away would be nice.  Put all that blue water between her and here. 

She would have to be careful.  Water was tricky like that.  But she could do it.  She knew she could.  Boldness had always suited them. 

And the sky was soft and only half-clouded.  No rain to be guessed at.  It was summer.

Yes, it was a beautiful day.  It was a beautiful day for sure. 

And this time they wouldn’t take it for granted. 

Once upon a very long time ago and far nearby, someone was on the beach. 

The air was still.  The sky was clear.  The sand hurt their feet.  The heat soaked through the skin and bone and straight into the soul. 

And they closed their eyes and said “that feels nice,” and that’s exactly where all the trouble began. 

***

As a result of this, Steve shouldn’t have been surprised when he was arrested. 

His neighbour was the snitch, they told him.  It didn’t need to be said but Steve wouldn’t be able to ruin her good name or anything where he was going, so why the hell shouldn’t he know about it. 

“Your neighbour was the snitch,” they told him. 

“Well, I won’t be able to ruin her good name or anything where I’m going,” he concluded. 

“Yes.”
So they took Steve out to the Everbeach, where the shore shone brighter and clearer than any of the others that blanketed the city, and they strapped him into the many beautiful and sparkling-clear mirrors, and they left him there at midnight, where he would have many hours yet to contemplate his impious lack of skin lesions and tumours before the holy orb cleared the lip of the horizon to sear away his sins.

It was a better fate than a suntan-lotion-smuggler deserved.

***

It was a big job to do, but it had to be done. 

The brightsiders had come up with it, from their holy jets that chased the golden glow, never letting the sun set on their brilliant brains. 

Impiety, it was clear, came from the shady.  Why, therefore, to suffer shade?

Yes yes yes it was a lot of labour and toil,  yes yes yes it was a project on a scale no human brain could admit, yes yes yes it had already claimed seven yillion lives and escalating. 

But wasn’t anything worth doing difficult?  The most sparkling achievements glittered in the sweat of the accomplished. 

This was a great comfort to Beatrice Hogg, as she lay entombed underneath the seventeen killion tons of concrete she’d helped use to fill up Mammoth Cave entirely.  At least her skeleton would clog the hole it was left in, so as to prevent an unsightly pocket of darkness. 

It was a pity she’d never have a chance to sip the sacred margarita again before she passed, mind you. 

***

The earth was undimmed; the people well-burned.  A brighter time had never existed. 

But did that mean it could not be imagined?
“NO!” shouted Her Sunniness, Brenda III.  “There can always be better, always warmer!  Shade has been driven out from underfoot, every crevice closed and yet it lurks among us even now!  Mountains!  Hills!  Riverbanks!  Everywhere the landscape bucks and rolls its shoulders, shadows form and mock our efforts.  The world must be made beachly, and no beach worth its salt possesses an unevenness – only the purity of flatness can save us now!  ROUND THE EARTH!”
The following heresy of the Sand Duners led to a great crusader, counter-crusader, counter-counter crusader, and ten thousand years of internecine strife before it ended in victory for the flatteners.  Then came the simple task of removing all shade from the earth’s surface. 

***

The last cloud died easily. 

The vapourpoon lodged in its flank, its thin and mild mildew of a body drained away readily, the venting-nozzle smoothly siphoned it up into the rarest of atmospheres where it could be trusted to escape into space and trouble the ground no more with its noxious looming over the very holy and very high-albedo and very sparkling world. 

The crew who killed it  – all veteran self-mummies, every one – were immediately given the glory of ascending to the sun on the True Beach, where many satellites diligent reflected light so that their ashes might never languish in that blackest crime: the night. 

No statues were ever commissioned.  Statues cast shade. 

But there were plans for the night.

***

It took a long time to find all the relics of the Old Wars and take them apart and put them back together and copy them and fail to set them off and succeed to set them off and make ninety dillion of them and ship them and aim them and do all the fiddly math and do it again and again and again to be sure and execute the project manager before she could sabotage it and get the word out. 

But it was all worth it for that glorious sixty seconds, where the missiles launched and soared and swooped around the planet into that eternal foe and vanquished it for, as far as the population of the earth was concerned, all time. 

They stood there on their beaches, sun behind them, sun in front of them.  The air was still.  The sky was clear.  The sand hurt their feet.  The heat soaked through the skin and bone and straight into the soul and out the other side and back again. 

And they closed their eyes and said “that feels nice,” and that’s exactly where all the trouble ended. 

It was not the finest city.  That was the Windmerre, where you could see through the translucent ice under your feet to the city’s twin underneath, a perfect mirror hanging underneath in the freezing sea and every bit as beautiful. 

It was not the grandest city. That was Arktar Tiir, atop the pole, thick-spired and aglow at all hours of dark and light. 

It was not the oldest city.  That was Riir, nestled in the heart of the big bay and shielded by craggy hills, like it was afraid to leave the grasp of the land too far behind. 

Dirredew was none of those cities.  It was barely a city at all. 

But it was the only city they had left. 

***

Several hundred years ago, someone had found a lovely wide crevasse in the ice.  Then they’d told their friends, who’d told their friends, who’d told their friends, and so on. 

Now instead of a lovely wide crevasse in the ice there was Dirredew, which was a lovely wide crevasse in the ice that was filled with pockets holding families, storage-halls, freezing-galleries, carverooms, meltchambers, and so on and so forth. 

It also held all that was left of them after the funny little warm people had come with their machines.  Machinery was not a common thing, since it needed walking on the land and ripping of the dirt and the stone.  But the funny little warm people had loved the land, and so had all kinds of ingenious machines like the little tubular ones that they would stick into you and warm you from the inside out until you collapsed into dead grey slush, or the huge war-radiators that would shred a city’s walls in a few days, or the cunning sorter-sluices that would sift through the melt and rubble for whatever it was they were killing everybody for. 

Maybe it was people’s hearts.  The funny little warm people did like shiny things, or seemed to, as long as they weren’t made of ice.  Ice they didn’t like at all.

So now there they were, all of them that were left, waiting down in Dirredew’s depths.  Barricades over the causeways; camouflage over the barricades, quiet down in the arcades.  Everyone shushing each other, nobody breathing too loudly, not even one chisel ringing down in the carvehalls where otherwise new lives would be made every day. 

But there were hot shots from funny little warm people up above anyways, and then the low great grinding sounds of the machines being pulled up.  So everyone could relax and start talking again, because their doom had come. 

***

Their doom took some time to start up.  The funny little warm people’s machines didn’t like the cold much – maybe that was why they were so effective at ruining it – and they always took a good few hours of grumbling, rumbling, crumbling, and mumbling before they would really begin to steam and hiss and growl. 

So there was time to say goodbye and so on.  Final wishes, final kisses, final tears, final plans, all the things people did with each other. 

One of the final plans was a bit of a surprise, even to the person who had it.  But it was a big surprise, so other people noticed, and it surprised them too,, and so on and so forth until at last everyone had heard it and seized it and taken it up as something to do, which is always the best and most comforting thing you can have at times of incredible and inevitable doom. 

A plan to-do is a weight of eternal suffering, but a plan enacted is friendly and cheerful and one to treasure.  And since there was no more time left for to-do, all that was left was the happy ending. 

***

The little warm people broke through the last of the barricades some time later, melt-tubes in hand, violence ready.  Dirredew’s many winding ramps were well-built; ridged for a proper grip that let even the biggest of their war-radiators roll downhill without a single slip, and their travel through the city was headlong and ferocious, each street taken at textbook speed. 

The family-pockets were empty, and that made sense because the people liked to spend their final moments in as much company as possible.  The funny little warm people ignored them save for a few cursory scouts.

The storage-halls were empty, and that was a little odd because they were some of the biggest places for public assembly, if you liked that sort of thing.  Many of the funny little warm people stayed here to plunder the vaults for valuables anyways.  They did so love things that shone. 

The freezing-galleries were empty, and that was very very puzzling because they were large and spacious AND they were the last places that would boil and fry under the weight of even the mightiest war-radiators, so carefully sculpted for chill and cold they were.  The funny little warm people set up some of them to begin the process and shuddered at the chill and pressed onwards. 

The carverooms were empty.  Half-carved people sitting there, not yet alive, abandoned by their parents.  The funny little warm people stopped for a moment to torch some of the more complete ones, but none of them were finished enough to be alive and so it wasn’t satisfying at all. 

The meltchambers were last, and here the funny little warm people were at the apex of their confusion because everywhere the people could be hiding was empty.  Was the city abandoned? 

So since they were so confused they fell back on the textbook thing to do, which was open up the meltchambers so their warmth would help their machines melt the rest of the city, and that was when all the people came pouring out at once in a great flood. 

***

The little warm people made meltwater.  It was what they did.  It was what their machines did.  Nothing made a little warm person smile like seeing blue liquid lap where ice mountains had stood. 

But they didn’t swim in it.  They especially didn’t swim in it when they were weighted down with the little grey tubes and the armoured coats and the heavy boots that they wore to go out and melt the people. 

Then the flood of the people reached the war-radiators and turned red-hot, and it also became clear that the funny little warm people, for all their use and abuse of heat, didn’t like too much of that either.  The flood steamed and hissed and roared and some of the funny little warm people tried to run but the heat outran them, raced upwards, ate the ramps and the floors of Dirredew out front underneath their feet and left them with nothing to save them but empty damp air. 

If any of the people had still been there, they would have been greatly surprised to see the funny little warm people scream for cold, for cold, for cold.  A wish for ice of all things. 

But they wouldn’t have been surprised for long, for then the machine-scalded water bored through the bottom of Dirredew’s crevasse and the little warm people found something bigger and colder than they could’ve ever imagined, but they didn’t have to worry about that for very long. 

***

Time passed.  The other armies of the funny little warm people completed their missions and returned home.  Throngs welcomed them, children worshipped them, leaders adorned them with shiny things that they loved so very much. 

No more cold, no more cold, no more cold.

And at the ends of the world where there was no more cold or ice the ocean turned and turned upon itself and the currents changed, inch by inch. 

Snow fell in odd places the next year, which puzzled the funny little warm people. 

They would be very puzzled for a very long time. 

The machine was one of the very few things older than the lighthouse-keeper, formed of certain elemental substances that were designed less for durability and more for solidity, for an essential ignorance of the power of time.

It went ‘plip.’

That was interesting and new.  It had been a long time since anything had been interesting and new for the lighthouse-keeper.  They weren’t quite sure how to feel about that.

So they checked the other machines, the ones that would never go ‘plip,’ and they found a little spec with a little light drifting very nearby in the surrounding hundred million cubic miles, practically next-door. 

Well now!

Well.  Now. 

Now it was obvious what to do. 

***

It was a shockingly crude little thing, all hasty riveting and curdling metals on top of a fuming, spitting fusion drive.  The flare that had drawn the gaze of the lighthouse-keeper’s machine had been caused by a one-in-a-billion chance particle bouncing through its flimsy sides and setting off a near-cataclysmic chain failure of its internal systems. 

There was one occupant, who was dead.  Luckily this was a very new problem for them and the lighthouse-keeper possessed a very old solution, which they bolted onto the occupant’s chest with some care and no fumbling.  They’d never used this device, and certainly never on one so tiny, but there’d been time for practice to drive away any conceivable doubts. 

It took a little while.  The lighthouse-keeper prepared some hydration, then prepared some nourishment, then simply sat and stared at something they hadn’t stared at before.  It was very refreshing. 

The occupant’s wheezy breathing took on a harsh edge as muscles took over from machinery.  Their heart beat on its own.  Their eyelids flickered and flittered.  And finally they opened them. 

“Hello,” said the lighthouse-keeper.  “How are you?”
“Awful.  Am I dead?”
“Not anymore.  What’s your name?”
“Who are you?”
“I’m the lighthouse-keeper.  What’s your name?”

“Where am I?”
“The lighthouse.  What’s your name?”
“What’s the lighthouse?”
The lighthouse-keeper tried not saying anything, and that did the trick.  “Motte.  Major Motte.”
“Nice to meet you.  The lighthouse is an observation post.”
“For what?”
“You, I think.”
“You think?”
“It’s been a very long time.  I’ve forgotten details.”
Major Motte’s body language was somewhat stiff due to their death, but the movement of their facial features was wonderfully expressive.  The lighthouse-keeper was sure that if they were more familiar with their species, there would be no end of detail they could glean from it.

“What happened to me?”
“Your vehicle was struck by a small particle.  A very low chance of happening, but it wasn’t fit to withstand the force and lost functionality.  I retrieved it and repaired you.  Why were you in such a garbage heap?”
“A WHAT?”
“You made me ask my last question three times; this time please give me courtesy.  Why?  It’s not a very good vehicle.  It’s dangerous, and slipshod, and fragile, and you were all that was aboard.”
“I was a volunteer,” said Major Motte. 

Now it was the lighthouse-keeper’s turn to be surprised.  “Why?”
“I was the first.  The first out of our solar system, the first human traveller to visit – was going to visit – another star.  The first actual intelligence to transmit information home.”
“Why would you want to do that?” asked the lighthouse-keeper incredulously.  “There’s nothing out there.”
Major Motte’s face did the most interesting things yet.  “Nothing?  Nothing!?  What do you call this?  What do you call yourself?  I haven’t even made it to my destination yet and I was contacted by the first proof of extra-terrestrial life we’ve ever documented!  This is not NOTHING!  YOU are not nothing!”

“I seem to have upset you.  My apologies.  But I do mean this sincerely: there’s nothing out there.  That’s why this lighthouse was built.”
“Your turn to answer my question then,” shot back Major Motte, “what is the lighthouse?”

The lighthouse-keeper expanded laterally and contracted.  “A post to keep an eye on something.  It’s so scarce, you see.  Any trace of something should be looked at.  Some of the somethings helped us do this after we looked at them long enough.  It was a bit of a numbers game.”
“Then…then I’m trying to do the same thing!  You’re just me, but ahead of the curve!”
“Agreed,” said the lighthouse-keeper.

“Then why discourage us?  Discourage me?”
“There’s nothing out there.”
“If there was nothing but nothing, you wouldn’t be talking to me.”
The lighthouse-keeper expanded laterally and contracted.  “Functionally, I might as well have not done so.  Would you like some hydration and nutrition?”

“Please.”

***

They ate.  It was simpler than it seemed; apparently life on Major Motte’s planet was still basically carbon and some other bits.

“I would like to talk to your leadership,” Major Motte said at last, once they were finished ingesting their frankly absurd amount of hydration. 

“That is not possible.”
“Communication delays?  Or something else?”
“Both.  I haven’t heard from anyone else in seventeen million years.”
“You’re seventeen million years old?”
“Twenty.”
“Twenty million years?”

“No, twenty years.  A copy of my consciousness is recorded in the lighthouse and placed into a new body at the end of my natural lifespan.”
“That’s horrible.”
The lighthouse-keeper expanded laterally and contracted.  “It would seem so.”
“What happened to your people?”
“Who knows?  It could have been anything.  War between each other, a big rock in the wrong place at the wrong time, biosphere collapse, resource starvation, unilateral suicide.  Nobody sends everyone all the news all the time.  One little lapse at a wrong moment and everyone was quiet and I don’t know why.”

“There’s nobody left?”
“There might be other lighthouse-keepers.”
“There were many of you?  You found multiple other worlds bearing life?”
“Four.”
“How long did your people look for them?”
“One billion years.”

 Major Motte’s face didn’t do anything at all this time.

“I told you,” said the lighthouse-keeper.  “There is nothing out there.”

“What did the other four lighthouse-keepers find?”
“I’m not sure.  It’s been a while.  I think three of them suffered stellar collapse.  One of them produce ten sapient species.  One of those made contact with us.  I think they went extinct a hundred million years ago.”
“How?  Why?”
The lighthouse-keeper expanded laterally and contracted.  “I’m not sure.  History is like everything else, you know.  There’s nothing out there.  There is so much nothing out there and the something is so small that in the end – there is no end – nothing wraps around it entirely, no matter what.”

A little bit of Major Motte’s face moved, and once again the lighthouse-keeper felt a little regret that they had no idea what that meant, and likely never would. 

“I’ve got to leave,” said Major Motte.

“Where to?”
“Wherever your orders used to come from.  I was flying blind before, but now I might as well follow my leads.”
“There’s nothing there.”
“Nonetheless.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Nonetheless.”
“You are extremely pointless,” said the lighthouse-keeper, “but I will help you with this, since you want it.”
“Thank you.”

The lighthouse-keeper expanded laterally and contracted. 

“What is that?” asked Major Motte.
“What is what?”
“That thing you do where you expand laterally and contract.”
“I am filled with overwhelming sorrow.”
“Oh.  I thought maybe you were shrugging in ambivalence.”
“No.”

***

Major Motte’s vehicle departed not long thereafter, aimed for a different star. 

The lighthouse-keeper watched their trail go cold, and waited.

The machine did not go plip. 

But there was still time.  Plenty of time.  And plenty of nothing to fill it. 

The giant walked slowly, fingers half-clenched at his sides, arms swaying, and head always, always, always, always pointed at the ground. 

There was a lot down there, and it confused him.  And being confused made him nervous.  And being nervous made him frightened.  And being frightened was the worst thing in the universe. 

So he kept an eye on it, just in case.

Woosh and up came his foot, seven leagues in one long clumsy swing, woosh and THUMP and down again, carefully placed. 

Not sure what that thing to the left was, best avoid it.  Not sure what that thing to the right could be, better steer clear here.  What’s up ahead?  Might want to take this step short. 

Gullies.  Quarries.  Creeks.  Peaks.  So many things, so many little things that could creep up and stab a sole or twist an ankle. 

Eyes on the ground.  Always, always, always on the ground. 

But they were very very big eyes and the ground was so very very little, so now and then something would happen and go crunch and the giant would have to stop for a while until his nerves forgave him and his toes stopped hurting. 

***

Now and then was today. 

It hadn’t gone crunch though.  More of a squish. 

The giant lifted up his foot, fearing to see the red sticky smear that usually meant a very bad day indeed, but found only damp earth and mangled furniture. 

“Hello,” said his big toe. 

“Hello, toe,” said the giant to his big toe.  “Why are you talking to me now?”
“Up here,” said his big toe. 

The giant looked up there.  There was someone on his big toe.  That explained things completely.  “Hello, not my toe,” said the giant.  “What are you doing there?”
“A toe came through my house,” explained the someone on his big toe.  “I ended up on top of it, so no harm done.”
“Oh thank goodness,” said the giant.  “I was worried I stepped on someone again.”
“Does that happen a lot?”
“Twice.  But it’d happen more if I didn’t look out for it.”
“You keep an eye out, huh?”
“All the time.  There’s so much down there, and it’s all so small, and confusing, which makes me nervous, which makes me frightened, which is the worst thing in the universe.  So I have to watch my feet.”
“All the time?”
“All the time.”

“Watching my feet would get awfully tiresome after a few days,” mused the someone on the giant’s big toe.  “Don’t you get sick of it?”
“If I did, the worst thing in the universe would happen,” said the giant.  “So I can’t.”
“Huh.  Bit of a pity, that is.  I bet you have a great view from up there.”

“No, I have to squint a lot.”

“Not a great view of the ground.  A great view of the horizon.”
The giant scratched his head and dandruff fell like rain.  “The horizon?”
“Over there.  And there.  And there.  And there.  And there.”
“That’s a lot of horizon,” said the giant uneasily.  “How come I’ve never heard of it?”
“You’ve never looked for it.  It’s all around you.  Go on, take a peek.”
The giant pursed his lips.  “Promise to tell me if something gets under my feet?”
“Sure.  Go on, try it.”
So the giant raised his head for the first time in as long as he could remember and tried it. 

***

It made him dizzy. 

“Woah,” said the giant.  And even that sounded weird, with his neck all straightened out and his throat unclenched.  “Woah.  Woah woah woah.”

“ ,” said the someone on the giant’s big toe. 

The giant leaned back down again. 

“How was it?” they repeated. 

“Big,” said the giant.  “Really, really big.  I think it might be bigger than me.”
“Was it okay?”
The giant thought about it.  “It was alright.  Nice to see something new.  But I’m a little nervous I could step on something while I’m looking at it.  Or something might creep underneath my feet and get squashed.  Or-”

“Tell you what,” said the someone on the giant’s big toe, “why don’t you come back here later and take a look at the horizon again, and I can keep an eye out to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
This seemed fair and reasonable to the giant, so he agreed to it and walked off.  And his feet seemed a little less clumsy, and the ground seemed a little less confusing. 

***

“I saw things,” he told the someone on his big toe.  “Big fluffy things.  White and grey and blue and black.”

“Those are clouds,” they told him.

“I like them, I think,” he said.  And he walked off and took surer, straighter steps that weren’t quite as cut short.

***

“I saw things,” he told the someone on his right foot.  “Little flittery things that went up and down and up and down and up and down and honked.”
“Those are geese,” they told him.

“I think they’re funny, I think,” he said.  And he walked off and his back was a little straighter. 

***

“I saw something else,” he told the someone leaning against his right leg. “It was so blue it turned black with shine in it and the sun was white.”
“That was the night,” they told him. 

“I think I like it.  But how come I’ve never seen it before?”

“It’s over the horizon,” they said.  “You have to lean just right and look just so and then go farther.”

“Farther than what?” asked the giant. 

“Farther than you know.”
The giant itched his arm and thought about it.  “That confuses me,” he said.  “And what confuses me makes me nervous.  And what makes me nervous makes me frightened.  And being frightened is the worst thing in the universe.”

“But?” asked the someone leaning against his right leg.
“But I want to see it anyways,” said the giant.  And straightened up and looked.  And then looked farther.

And farther. 

And farther.

And farther.

And farther.

And farther up until there was nothing but everything there was. 

***

“Oh,” said the giant.  “Oh.”
“What did you see?” asked the someone standing beside them. 

“Everything,” said the giant, shaking his head.  “Absolutely everything.”
“There’s a lot of it,” they said. 

“Yes,” said the giant.  Creeks and peaks seemed very ordinary just now.  Very small, but close enough to touch.  “A lot of it everywhere.  I thi.  I thin.  I think.”
“Yes?” asked the someone standing beside them.

“I like it,” said the giant.  “I like it.  I’m going to go for a walk now.”
“Mind your step?”
“I don’t need to anymore,” said the giant.

And he went on his way, on his walk, with the world all around him. 

“C’mon.  Do it.”
“Uhhh…”
“What’s the matter, shy?”
“No.  No!”
“Oh, is it your first time?  That’s okay, you know.  Don’t worry about it.”
“It’s-”

“Don’t go lying to me right now.  Look, just do what comes naturally.  Bite me right about here, where my skin is ten times thicker than yours.”

The blue shark would’ve blushed if he were physically capable, but he wasn’t, so he didn’t.

He did, however, sink his teeth directly into the other blue shark’s side.

“Oww.  Oww.  Ouch.  Ouch ouch ouch.”
“Fowwy.”
“No ouch ouch that’s ow fine that’s ow how it’s ack meant to ow feel.  Argh.  I’m extremely turned on now ow ow ow this is actually very hotaaaaaaaaagh.”
“Fokay.”

There was a very prolonged pause filled with several awkward things.

“My cloaca’s farther down.”

“Fowwy.”
Goddamned virgins.  Ignorance was okay, but never asking questions?

***

“What light through yonder web breaks?”
Good, good.  He was getting her curious.

“It is the east, and you are the sun!”
Oh, now she saw where this was going.

“Impossibly huge and powerful, ravenously gorging yourself upon the universe!  I am a trapped gnat before you, humbly serving no purpose save to feed your divine flame!”

Okay that was enough.  “Come here you little dirty-talking slut,” she told him, and pounced.

“Thank you very much, my lady,” he said as she started working on his relatively tiny and feeble extremities.
“Less talk more action, loverboy,” she said, halfway through his first leg.  “I’m absolutely not slowing down after that intro.”

Tragically he only got to sixth base before she chewed through his abdomen.  Damn her weakness for smooth talkers; they never lived up to their own hype.

***

Solitary the Komodo dragon sat, ten feet long and hundreds of pounds, strong-tailed and scaly-backed. Her mouth was closed, her tens of serrated surfaces tucked away beneath bloody gums and firmed lips, backed by idle muscles that could tear flesh from bone and limb from life.

Stomach half-full of yesterday’s deer, body warmed by the afternoon’s heat, spine pleasantly supple with the relaxation of a day spent doing nothing in particular, there had been few more happy times in her life.

She stared at the sunset’s sea and thought about things that had nothing to do with life or death or self or other, and then something inside her ovaries went ‘plunk.’

“Aw fuck,” said the dragon.  “Not again.”

This was her THIRD YEAR IN A ROW undergoing parthenogenesis.  Damn her stupid biological clock.

At least maybe this time she wouldn’t eat all of them.

***

The flight was beautiful – loops, twirls, drunken corkscrews, spinning through a sky far above the ant colony.  The tunnels and the workers and her fat flightless mother all suddenly so far away that she could’ve blotted them out of her mind just like that – like THAT – they were so small and pointless.

This was what she wanted to do!  What she wanted to do was fly!

She also wanted to do someone, and so convenient it was that the air near her was thick with drones.  One of the tastier looking ones was looping around her right now, and the attraction was looking very much mutual.

A bit of petting in the air, but that was nothing at all – just a touch that made her want more.  She wanted to fly and fuck and nothing else, a little squeeze wasn’t going to cut it. 

So they went down to the rain-damp ground where there was more leverage and then it started and was immediately over.

“Well, bye,” said the drone, and took off again. 

“Excuse me?” she asked. 

“Job’s done.  Gonna go starve to death now,” his voice echoed faintly back at her. 

“Excuse ME?” she asked.

Then her wings fell off and landed in the mud.

At that moment she finally, completely, and fully understood why her mother had always seemed so crabby.

***

“New guy today.”
Lisa blinked.  “Huh?  Didn’t hear about that.”
“It was late last night; you were out swiping that hyena kill with Lottie.  He popped up early morning, swatted Leo stupid and sent him whining off.”
“Oh.”  Lisa rolled over and aimlessly pawed at the steaming savannah air, her fluffy tummy rippling in the breeze.  “Is he hot?”
“If you like older guys I guess?  Looks like someone ate his ear though.”
“Kinky.”
“Like, a crocodile.”
“Oh.  Less kinky.”

“Yeah, it’s not a clean bite.”
“Gross.”
“The ol’ twist-n-tear.”
“Gross gross.”
“Like, that thing where you’ve got a good grip on a gazelle’s leg and you just give it a turn and a YANK and-”

“Gross gross gross.  Hey, is that Lenore?”
“Aw fuck it is.  Don’t make eye contact.”
“Too late, here she comes.  What’s eating HER?”
“Not her, her cubs.  And it was new guy.”
“Oh right.”
“God, she will NOT shut up about it though.  You’d think she’d never had her offspring killed to stimulate her reproductive readiness before.”
“I know, right?  Queen, please.”
Lenore sat down right in front of them.

“All my cubs are dead,” she said. 

“Yeah, we heard.”
“Yeah, she told me.”
“He just offed ‘em!  The little shits had finally stopped nursing!”
“Uh-huh.”
“Yep.”
“And NOW I get to go through that ALL OVER AGAIN.  Teething and everything!”
“Sucks.”
“Ayuh.”
At least the sun wasn’t the most tedious part of midday anymore, Lisa guessed.

“Orders came through!” shouted the sergeant over the not-actually-distant thunder of artillery shells turning the ground into mud pies. “Seize the hill!”

“Aw hell,” said McClunksy, spitting theatrically.  “Why we gotta?”
“Do it or you’re a buttmunch.”
“You take that back you son of a bitch!”
“Seize the hill or you’re a buttmunch.  Buttmunch.  Butt.  Munch.  Butty butty buttmunche-”

McClunksy snarled in fathomless rage and hate, snatched up his rifle, and began eeling his way up the hill, choosing each tuft of grass and clod of earth with care to block the sight of his round little helmet advancing upwards, towards the enemy. 

“And that goes for the rest of you!” said the sergeant.  “Stop trying to sneak off when I’m not looking.  Peck!  Dobson!  Clarke!  Get your rears in gears and go kill those dumbasses.”
“My leg’s tired and I peed myself,” whined Clarke. 

“You can pee yourself when you’re dead!  Get up that hill, you dope!”
“I’m NOT a dope!”
“PROVE it!  Dobson, I just TOLD you to stop trying to sneak off when I’m not looking!  Just for that, you can go first!”
“McClunksy went first.”
“Then you’re second.  What are you, chicken?”
“I’m NOT chicken!”
“Prove it and get out there!”

And so, after much cajoling, threatening, taunting, and peer pressure, the squad started their journey into hell, because none of them wanted to be chicken, babies, or big fat losers. 

Worse had been done for less cause. 

***

“Throw the damned grenade, Peck!” roared the sergeant. 
“My arm hurts.”
“It can hurt when it’s dead!”
“You’re ALWAYS telling me to do things when I’m dead!” pouted Peck.  “I don’t wanna!  Why not make Clarke throw the grenade?”
“Clarke’s pinned down under enemy fire, you get to throw the grenade and by every devil and demon in hell you are going to do that right now damnit!”
“Don’t wannnaaaaaaa-”

“CORPORAL PECK IF YOU START A TANTRUM RIGHT NOW IN THE MIDDLE OF AN ASSAULT I WILL PUT YOUR ASS OVER MY KNEE DO YOU HEAR ME?”
Peck turned his back to the sergeant and kicked viciously at a rolling fragment of what had once been a man. 

“Look.  Throw the grenade, and when we get back, you can have an extra MRE.”

Silence. 

Then: “One of the beef ones?”
“Yes, one of the beef ones.”
“…okay.  But just this once.”
“Good.  Here’s the grenade.”
Peck wound up threw it and turned a gun emplacement and five men into a jumbled mess. 

“Fuck yeah!”
“Language!”

“Eat shit!”
“LANGUAGE OR NO MRE!”
“Dickhead!”
“Acceptable!”

***

They attained the summit at long last, delayed by a vicious fight between Clarke and McClunsky over whether or not Spider-man or batman would be a bigger help right now.

“We’re here.  Good job, men.”
“Uggh,” said Clarke, bellyflopping. 

“Tiiired,” whined Peck, sprawled out like a beached seal. 

“Are we done?” yawned McClunsky.  “I wanna go home now.”
“We have to hold it first.  C’mon.  Peck, you’re on sniper duty; McClunsky, unship the flamethrower.”

“Oh boy!”
Clarke frowned.  “McClunsky ALWAYS gets the flamethrower.  Why can’t I have the flamethrower?”
“Knock it off, Clarke – you know damned well the flamethrower’s McClunsky’s responsibility.”
“Why does HE get to be responsible!  I’m responsible!”
“Yeah you are.  You’re responsible for the first aid supplies.”
“Those are boring stuff for GIRLS,” said Clarke, stomping his feet.  “I want to use the flamethrower!  McClunsky never shares the flamethrower, and you said sharing is good!  He’s being a selfish asshole!”
“Language, Clarke!  Don’t you dare talk about your squadmate that way.  LOOK AT ME WHEN I’M TALKING TO YOU.  Thank you.  Now you stop giving me sass and you apologiz – look, never mind.  Just stop trying to take McClunsky’s stuff.  How would you feel if we took your stuff?”
“Good.  Bandaids are stupid.”
“They aren’t bandaids, Clarke.”

***

The counter-attack was fierce and furious. 

“Woooo!” shouted McClunsky cheerfully, piping molten death into the faces of his fellow humans.  “Eat it!  Hahahah!  Owned, bitches!  Owned!  Owned!  Owned!  Noobs!”
“Language, McClunsky,” said the sergeant.  “Peck, there’s one downslop-”

“I KNOW, okay?  Stop telling me what to do!”
“I’m just making sure you do it right.”
“You don’t trust me!  You never trust me!  You don’t trust anyone but McClunsky because he’s your favorite!”
“I don’t have favorites, I love you all equally.”
“You’re lying!”

There was a little ‘spang’ sound and a bullet smacked into the sergeant’s backpack. 

“Peck?  Do your chores.”
“Ugh.  Fine.  This is abuse.”

“All done!” shouted McClunsky brightly from downslope. 

Then a shell hit him and he went away. 

***

The lieutenant looked like a visitor from some strange other world, picking his way through the smoke and smouldering ashes and burnt metal.  A heron wading through the reeds. 

“Sergeant.  Well done.  Victory is ours, and your men deserve congratulations for their part in it.”

“Not all of them, sir.  McClunsky is gone.”
The lieutenant followed the sergeant’s pointing finger to the physical evidence that was all that remained of McClunsky’s mortal presence on this earth and threw up a little in his mouth.

“I can’t….I can’t believe he’s gone!” he gasped out, once the retching was done.  “He was going to go home, start a family-”

“Asked him yesterday, sir; he still thought kissing was gross.”

“-go home, rejoin his family.  And now he’s just been turned into a meat crater by some half-awake dork at a little console miles away.  What kind of death is that?”
The sergeant shook his grizzled, pube-chinned thirteen-year-old head.  “It’s the kind we’re given, sir.  War is a young man’s game.”

“So, how have you heard the song?”

Sixteen times I’d heard that question today.  I wanted to smack, punch, kick, and swear at the brightly cheerful face asking me the question six miles into a ten mile hike.  The bus driver wouldn’t take us to the Inglevale stop. 

That didn’t deter anyone else packed on there with me.  They’d all heard a song, you see, and what was a little walk compared to that?  And besides, it gave them a chance to compare notes.  Constantly. 

So I smiled and I lied and I spun my little story about how it had been.  Every bit of it was true, but not all the bits were from the same place.  God only knows we’d had enough choices back at the bureau.  Half the hitchhiking traffic in the country was Inglevale-bound. 

“Great!” said the cheerful idiot when I was done waxing earnest at her.  Her face was half freckles and half grin and all mad.  “Not far now!”

And it wasn’t.  Inglevale town limits were ahead, just on the lip of the hill. 

***

Up until six months ago, the most noteworthy thing Inglevale produced was dirt.  Gravel, to be specific.  Decent stone there for that, and not much else. 

Then the bottom of a gravel pit opened up and dropped a bulldozer down it, and the man inside – dragged out after six breathless hours of the first actual excitement the place had ever known – says he saw god. 

Fair enough, that happens sometimes. 

Then the whole town listened to him. 

That’s a little rarer. 

And now there’s whole busloads and roving vans and train cars packed full of pilgrims, all moving across the country in bands of one to forty, following the song that Bowser Fenton told them would come. 

That’s downright rare.  Who the fuck names their kid ‘Bowser’?

***

I’d expected a little less… purpose, I admit. 

Cults have enthusiasm.  They don’t necessary have know-how.  No matter how earnest and fervent the loonies are, once everyone’s busy diving the will of the universe they tend to let toilets clog and streets fill with trash. 

Inglevale was an anthill.  A proper, functioning anthill, not one overturned by a careless shoe.  The streets were full and they were churning; bodies going every which way, people hurrying eagerly from task to task, moving metal, moving timber, clearing away garbage, and laughing, talking, chattering constantly, always about that damned song. 

Was this a religion or a construction crew?

What were they building?

And what was the fastest way for me to answer those two questions, so that –

“So, how have you heard the song?”
– I would never have to hear that one again?

***

Work answered some of my problems.  I grabbed onto a repurposed dump truck laden with shiny new parts along with half the crowd around me, took it down to the construction site. 

It was by the lake.  Made sense, I suppose, since it’s the one thing Inglevale has that’s noteworthy.  Big ol’ gravel pit that flooded out and they just shrugged and put up some beaches. 

What made less sense was what they were building.  At first I thought it was obscured by a cloud of scaffolding; then we got closer and I realized it was nothing BUT scaffolding.  Some kind of lunatic antenna? 

“The song swells!” called down a worker, sweaty and smiling and forty feet in the air. 

“So it does!” chorused the truckers. 

Work wasn’t too bad.  People did what they were comfortable with; welding, hauling, assembly.  I’d seen worse safety setups on certified and monitored construction sites, frankly, which was all the more impressive given there didn’t seem to be any foremen.  Nobody giving any instruction at all, actually.  Made finding out what I was meant to be doing all the more troublesome; people just went were they were needed which – against all reason – always seemed to be the right place.  I felt like a blind cat in a rocking chair factory, only all the chairs were full of other perfectly happy blind cats that wouldn’t stop yowling encouragement at me.

And asking me about the damned song. 

Rest for the night was surprisingly comfy.  The out-of-towners were being put up across town in a patchwork of spare rooms, Inglevale’s singular hotel, and the many motels scattered along the fringe of its desolate highway – I scored an empty room in the latter, where I spent the night making notes and trying to ignore someone noisily having bad but enthusiastic sex next door. 

I must have looked bad in the morning; I stumbled outside into a parking lot that had been turned into an emergency breakfast buffet, and by the time I made it out the other side I’d had four brownies and a waffle stuffed into my arms.

The waffle was buttered.  Wonder if the song told them to do that. 

***

The report was due in three days and I still wasn’t learning anything new besides how to be a perfectly adequate and safe high-rise worker. 

Well, that wasn’t entirely true.  I’d gotten several more unanswered questions. 

How the hell did the town get swept up in this so…fully?  Everyone was in on it.  EVERYONE.  No cult’s that good.  No sign of expulsion of the unbelievers or mass graves in the woods.

What was the thing we were building?  Progress was lightning-fast, but the structure itself still looked like a pylon and a radio tower fucked and had one hell of an ugly baby. 

Who was in charge?  Bowser Fenton, maybe – still hadn’t tracked him down – but he wasn’t giving orders.  Nobody was giving orders. 

How did that even WORK?  How was anything working?  There was no chaos, or if there was it was the purposeful and planned kind.  Everyone knew exactly what they were doing.

Well, except me.  But I was good at improv, and a convincing liar.  All I had to do was follow a line. 

Which everyone refused to feed me.  Just the song.  The song, the song, the song. 

I’d shared my fictional account of the song a hundred times.  Never once seen a hint of disbelief.  These people were infants.  Naïve, born-again-yesterday hopefuls, thinking they were truly in at the ground floor of the Most Important Thing Ever. 

That was pretty much the only thing about them that made any sense at all. 

“The song swells!” sang the woman next to me. 

“The song swells,” I replied, but she wasn’t listening.  Instead, she was clambering down the side of the antenna, leaving only a trail of liquid from the open, pulsating glands dotting her exposed and muscled forearms. 

Suddenly, I had another question. 

***

I had no idea how I’d missed them until then.  They were EVERYWHERE. 

Old men with soft hands, glistening with eternal dew. 

Construction crew that were covered with more than just heavy perspiration. 

One of the guys serving lunch had a blue throat.  Just the throat.  Whenever he laughed – which he did often, they all did so damned often – it pulsed and jiggled. 

It was odourless, which didn’t surprise me but did unsettle me. 

I wasn’t a doctor, but I hadn’t heard of anything like this.  Some kind of mass poisoning?  I felt like an idiot for eating the food without even a cursory inspection, but I stayed up all night running basic checks on a smuggled dinner roll and found nothing.  No radiation, no obvious additives.  Whatever was doing this, either it was something really unusual or it wasn’t in the food.  Or both. 

Still stayed up too late worrying about it, which meant I was really in need of the breakfast I didn’t get when I opened my door and found about twenty happy faces waiting for me. 

“Hello, Agent Tabitha!” said Bowser Fenton.  “We’re just finishing up!  Want to see?”

***

He looked just like the photos, besides the blue, glandular skin.  Big shaggy beard, intense eyes hidden under massive eyebushes.  He looked a lot happier now, though.  The lines on his face weren’t built for the cheery grin he sported; the wrinkles made him look older. 

“We thought you would appreciate a familiar face for this,” he explained.  “Just understand, I’m not in charge around here.  None of us are.”
I had a good poker face. 

“Not like THAT, Tabitha,” he said, pulling a face.  “I assure you, someone is in charge.  Just not one of us.  Don’t you wonder how we found you out?”
“I fucked up.”
“No, no, goodness no.  But you haven’t heard the song.”
“I-”

“Please, no need to repeat yourself.  We know you hate it.  And don’t feel so guilty about feeling so relieved.  It sours the song, you know?”
“No.”
“Right, sorry.  I’m very clumsy with my words; most of our important work nowadays doesn’t use them.  Which is what I’m here to explain to you – our work, that is – and why you need to listen carefully, despite my muddling.  There needs to be a message, you see, and since you aren’t one of us you’re the ideal messenger.  A sort of unprophet.”

“Of what?  The song?”
“Oh no.  The song just told us how to do this.  Which we’re getting to.  Here we are!  Thank you for helping build it, by the way.”
The antenna had acquired a pronounced tilt in the past two days, like a skeletal Tower of Pisa.  Overnight a large and complicated cross between a clock and a radar dish had been attached to the pinnacle. 

“What does it do?”
“This,” said Bowser.  “The song swells!” he and everyone else cheered, and then there was a teething-achingly enormous SNAP and the entire thing toppled over into the lake with that particularly slow motion giant disasters have.

“There,” said Bowser.  “All done.”
I laughed, I admit.  Against all self-control and reason, I laughed.  I laughed despite my best efforts and Bowser and the others laughed too and that was when I felt it tunnel up from the dirt, through the soil, through the water, up to the top of my head and escape into the broader atmosphere. 

I didn’t scream, but it took effort. 

“I did warn you,” said Bowser sympathetically. 

“Is that the song?” I wrenched out.  It felt like my body was being used as a bass string. 

“No,” he said.  “Not quite.  Or at least, not the one we’ve been hearing.  This is a little bit bigger, and it’s not instructions.  Our song was to tell us how to make this.”
“What is it?”
“Orders.  To tell the world to be mended.  Breath, Tabitha.”
I breathed.  The air hissed in my lungs like angry cockroaches. 

“Can you feel it?  It’s changing.”  Bowser was watching me carefully, and for the very first time he wasn’t smiling.  He looked like the old man he was, probably in the middle of telling me some bad news about my fuse box.  “It’s all changing now.  It tried to warn us, but nobody was able to hear it until I fell.  And by then it was too late.  We’d already made quite a mess of the atmosphere.  But this?  There’s still time for this.  Tabitha, LISTEN.  Go to them.  Tell them not to touch this.  Tell them not to touch us.  We’ll do what we can to protect this while it’s working, but it’d be easier if we can expect nobody to try and wreck it in the first place.  Easier still if they can help.  Are you listening, Tabitha?  Tell them that.”
I nodded. 

“Tell them that.  You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” he said, and his face slid back into a sort of smile, but a distant one.  “Now you can go.  Louise’ll drive you out to where the bus usually stops.  Take some butter tarts.  And no, there’s nothing in them.  This-” and he rubbed his fingers over the soft, slipper surface of his face – “just happens when you work a bit too close and long with the stuff we put in the receiver.  It’s why we never put you too high up it, if that makes sense.”

The next bus rolled in an hour after Louise dropped me off. 

“I haven’t heard the song,” I told the head of the procession as we passed each other by.
“Yeah,” she said.  “We knew.”

***

I told them everything.  I’m not sure if we’re sending messages or missiles.  I’m not sure if the missiles will work.  I’m not sure what happens if they work. 

I’m not sure what Bowser Fenton found under the gravel pit. 

I’m not sure if it’ll make things better or worse.