The corpsemongers down on Echo are selling human teeth again, little pearls of calcium passed hand to palm like benediction, and that means the pilot has to go down and check for eyeteeth. He’ll spend a month’s pay if they let him, and he’ll be worse than useless if they don’t. He’s hunting ghosts, the captain says, so let him be. But reel him back when it doesn’t pan out, would you? They rotate the duty, distasteful as it is, and Widow knows she’s come due. So, Widow puts on her stomper boots and her cleanest jumpsuit, and she takes the pilot down to the station on Echo’s outer ring to hunt for his sister’s teeth.

The pilot’s name is Hector Muñoz the same way hers was Mirjana Babic once. Widow winds the black coils of her garrote around her armored gauntlet, stewing as the pilot taxies them into the docking bay. Strangers aren’t allowed to carry guns on Echo. Anyone caught breaking the rules is liable to lose an eye. The cost of civilization, the jackboots like to say. She leans back in her seat and watches the light from the control panels dance across Hector’s remaining eye as he pilots the shuttle down into this civilized place.

Hector cocks his head, focusing on the docking maneuvers, and doesn’t recoil from her scrutiny.

One day, Widow thinks, she’ll wrap the garrote around his skinny neck and finish what she started three years ago. One day, Widow thinks, she’ll teach Hector about resurrection.

For now, she gets the docking fee ready to go and watches Hector knuckle hard into his eyepatch as he powers the shuttle down. He named himself Wotan on jobs—Wotan, he said, like the wanderer, as if that’s supposed to mean something. Widow named herself in a pit, in the dark, where she killed more than herself. Hector’d been locked in a box for three days when they found him on that derelict after they finished killing the bounty hunters camped out in the hull and spared a thought for the cargo banging out a Morse code scream. He was more dead than not, blinking up at them with his one good eye, and Widow would have finished him off if she’d had her way. She would have done it gentle, as a kindness, but the captain held her back.

“No,” the captain murmured in that soft tone he took sometimes. “Let’s play this one out.”

Three years they’ve been playing it out now, almost to the day. Three years and Hector’s taken over their tug with his music going static-crackle through their comm system, three years of him passed out in the pilot’s chair or sprawled naked and useless across the captain’s floor; three years and he’s never once picked up a gun to protect the crew but still pulls full shares on every job they take—no matter that Widow’s had to save his stupid hide more than once, that she’s taken a knife through the shoulder for his junkie ass. And still she pulls babysitting shifts, guarding this man who hasn’t yet died like the rest of them, his half-resurrection a stain upon all their names.

One day he’ll slip, Widow thinks, or he’ll step up. Either way, she’ll see him all the way dead and greet whatever’s left with a new name. That, she’ll call Wotan.

“All set,” Hector says, knuckling at his eye again.

Widow curls her lip. “Keep up.”

Outside, the dock is a mess of sound and light, a thousand strangers darting through the noise. Ships come and go, groaning their way to their docking stations, and Widow stomps out and breathes the ugly, smoke-thick air as the shutter door clicks open. The jackboots are waiting with their tablets and shining oxygen masks when Widow and Hector disembark. They take their bribes silent and unsmiling even as Widow coos over the closest, a woman with honey-colored eyes and a scar over her brow. Their hands linger a touch longer as Widow passes the tablet back, her own smile crooked and wan.

“You should come find me,” she murmurs to the honey-eyed woman. “Let’s fall in love.”

The smoke hangs heavy in the air, the station’s air filters cycling strange, and the jackboots leave sweating and unsmiling once their payment clears. But the honey-eyed woman glances back over her shoulder, her gaze lingering. I’m already in love, Widow thinks, almost giddy with it. She thinks about how she’ll kiss the honey-eyed woman’s scar and then everything else; she thinks about telling the captain to fuck off and retiring to marry that woman and having a bunch of honey-eyed babies; oh, they could be something, Widow thinks. And she thinks that right up until Hector knuckles at his bad eye again and the sound of his work gloves scraping against the patch and the hollow space behind it makes Widow want to dash his skull against the ground until his teeth spill from his mouth like coins.

“Hey.” Hector cocks his head, still knuckling at his bad eye. “You okay, Widow?”

She curls her lip. “We don’t have to talk.”

Hector just shrugs at her, pulling a cigarette out of his pocket and pressing it between his teeth. He offers her one—hand rolled, stained black with engine grease—and Widow bares her teeth. The honey-eyed woman would have been so sweet to her, Widow thinks, disgusted. The honey-eyed woman would have understood putting crazy, useless Hector out of his misery.

But of course, the captain only runs with people who owe him their lives. He covets them, hunting half-dead things down in the dark like Hector hunts his sister’s teeth.

Hector flicks the autolighter on his cigarette, steam hanging heavy in the air. The whole place smells like grease and ozone. Would the honey-eyed woman wear perfume to cover it? Widow winds her long hair into a knot at the base of her skull, puffing out a sigh as Hector blows a smoke ring and smiles at her. He didn’t bring a garrote, Widow knows, disgusted all over again. He probably doesn’t even have a knife on him. But she’ll bet her soul he’s got a stash of benzos rattling around his pockets. He’ll pop them like candy when this thing goes melancholy, predictable as clockwork.

“She was a pretty girl,” Hector adds, like she doesn’t dream of black wire going tight around his throat and killing him into a more useful shape. “The jackboot.”

If he were a woman, Widow thinks, she would have fucked her, that Hector-as-a-girl. Maybe then his weakness wouldn’t be so hateful. But she cannot, and so his life catches between her teeth like grit, like gunmetal fragments tearing into her gums; you gave yourself that name, she told him once, but you’re not one of us no matter how many times the captain fucks you. And Hector just smiled that stupid, placid smile of his and offered Widow a cigarette like what she hadn’t just said, in her heart of hearts, was: you’re not a monster.

He will be, eventually. Or she’ll follow through on her teeth-spilling dreams, play it out like the captain said, and name the corpse Wotan.

“You could’ve said where we’re going,” Hector sighs, drawing sweet smoke into his lungs. “But you could probably catch her, if you wanted.”

Widow snatches the cigarette out of his hand and takes a spiteful drag. She coughs at the burn and the skin around Hector’s good eye crinkles in amusement.

“Keep up,” Widow snaps, dropping the cigarette and stubbing it out under her heel. “We’re late.”

Hector just sighs and sticks his hands into his pockets, falling in line beside her. “You’d be a nice couple, I bet,” he says wistfully. “Go on dates and shit.”

“Jesus Christ, man.”

She’s watching their corners, the massing crowd of strangers and noise, miners getting ready to ship out with their gear and kids with bookbags coming off school, the Kindred sons and daughters in their starched collars handing out pamphlets and telling people about God; everyone looking onward, away from Echo, away from the grease clouds and rusting latticework of old railings crisscrossing the station, cutting the world into segments: then and now, on-shift and off-shift, stranger or local, except everyone here looks the same when you really get down to it. Everyone’s just meat and marrow in the end.

Widow thinks longingly of the honey-eyed woman, the brutal shine on her oxygen mask and her crooked, unkissed brow, but there’s no sign of the jackboots in the crowd. No hope of raising honey-eyed babies after all, Widow thinks. But the corpsemongers wait, and so she steers Hector through the crowd and the grease-slick air down two levels and across yet more walkways to the brothel designated as the meeting place.

Hector’s smoking again as they walk inside, holding the cigarette for long drags between his anxious, grinding teeth. He’ll spend a month’s pay on this nonsense, Widow knows, and more besides when it doesn’t pan out and all the pills that he’s been hoarding aren’t enough to kill the noise. He never cries, but his melancholy sulking afterward is almost worse. It hangs over the whole ship for days, a funeral shroud for a corpse he’s never going to find. And now he’s grinding his teeth and bleeding ashes onto Madame Mooney’s shining floors, starting the cycle all over again.

A bad start, Widow could have told him, but she’s not in the mood. She ducks around the bouncers and heads to the backrooms, past all the pretty, sweet things with Madame Mooney’s ink on their wrists and pearl-perfect smiles. Hector follows behind, knuckling at his bad eye all over again.

The corpsemongers run tidy and timely. There’s already one waiting when Widow pushes the door open. Perfume coils heavy in the air and the walls shine with mirrors and black velvet curtains, drinks laid out on a silver tray at the bar where the old man lifts a glass of something dark and expensive in salute. He’s got a bone-button suit and a dark case sitting on the bar, ready for business. Widow shows him her teeth as she moves to the bar, and he does the thing men do when they’re working not to flinch: chin up, eyes narrowed to dark slits as he waits for this thing to play itself out.

You’re like me, Widow thinks, and she lets the coils of her garrote click, click, click against the bottle as she pours herself a drink. You know what you are.

Hector hangs back, shifting from foot to foot. The cigarette blooms red as he takes a drag, running a hand through his hair. It’s the third time Widow has stood witness for this game. The others take Hector out when their turn comes due, but no one talks about it afterward.

Second verse, same as the first, Widow thinks. What’s left to say? She sips her drink nice and slow as the old man tips his head back and opens the case. Click goes the lock to reveal a line of neat little pill bottles. The corpsemonger holds one out to Hector, a little amber bottle with two pale canines going pitter-patter inside.

Hector grinds his cigarette out on Madame Mooney’s lovely counter, like a heathen, and puts it behind his ear. Then he takes his gloves off—right, then left—and tucks them into his pocket while the corpsemonger watches him, hand outstretched and waiting. Only then does Hector take the bottle, cradling it in his bare hands and murmuring something under his breath like a name, or maybe a prayer, it’s too soft to catch.

His sister’s name is Luz, Widow knows. Sometimes, Hector talks to her when he’s high. He tells his baby sister about the ship, about the music he’s inflicting upon their comms, about shit that doesn’t matter. Sometimes, he says he’s sorry.

Hector clears his throat. “This one?” he asks, like they haven’t done this dance before.

The old man nods just once. “Your hand, sir.”

Hector clutches the bottle to his chest, head bowed low, and then he offers out his left hand. Dominant side, Widow knows. There’s a scar at the center of his palm from all the times he’s tried before. And like clockwork, the old man presses a thin pen-shaped device to Hector’s scar. It activates with a click. Hector blinks but doesn’t otherwise flinch as the old man takes the device back and a spot of blood beads on Hector’s palm. Old hat at this point, Widow thinks, and still Hector opens it up to bleed fresh like stigmata every time like it’s going to change things.

Hector flexes his hand, then backs away as the old man consults the device.

“Sixty seconds,” the corpsemonger reminds him.

Hector bobs his head, reaching up toward his bad eye like he’s going to fuck with it again, but he hesitates, changes his mind. Instead, he sets the pill bottle down on Madame Mooney’s granite shine counter and stares at it like the secrets of those two little teeth are going to kill the obligation of fuckup big brothers everywhere instead of waste another month’s pay on drowning the aftermath.

Widow doesn’t know or particularly care where Hector tells the corpsemongers to go hunting. He must know the old man’s digging up every poor dead girl who ever died unclaimed, moving on down a list of forgotten bones whenever he needs an influx of cash because Hector Muñoz, call sign Wotan, will always pay. And who’s going to mess with a sure thing in a world like this?

Sixty seconds, the corpsemonger said, and Widow sips her drink as the clock tracks down, T minus ten toward Hector’s latest drugged and drunken breakdown. Just admit it, she wants to tell him. Stop wasting your cash and my goddamn time. She will tell him this time, Widow thinks, because someone has to cut this bullshit off at the knees. If the captain won’t, she might as well step up and smack some sense into Hector’s sorry ass. She sets the glass down on the tray, about to do just that—

And the device beeps.

“Hmm,” says the corpsemonger. “Familial match.”

Hector blinks. “Oh,” he says, very softly.

The world goes blunted, quiet. Nothing is said for a long time.

Widow frowns, working her jaw. The gunmetal grit feeling worries at her gums. “How accurate is that thing?” she demands, when she can think to say anything.

“Very.” The old man tucks the device back into his pocket and shuts the case with a click. “You’re welcome to verify the match independently, of course. Your wire transfer already came through, sir. Please do let me know if I can be of further service.”

He stands, giving Hector an odd look. “My condolences,” he says, as if reading from a script. “I’m sure she was missed.”

Hector’s throat works. He takes the bottle again, holding it in his two hands like an egg—like something that might break itself apart if he isn’t careful. Blood smears across the bottle. Hector doesn’t seem to notice. The teeth click as he rocks, head bowed, curling in on himself, but he doesn’t cry or say a word.

“Ma’am,” the corpsemonger murmurs, and turns to leave.

“Wait—” Hector tightens his grip on the bottle, blinking several times. “Where did you … ?”

“A derelict in low orbit around Meridian.” The corpsemonger tucks the case under his arm. “A Kindred waystation, I believe. They’d been incinerating bodies. But the teeth are hard to burn, as you know.”

The old man tips his head to Widow. “Ma’am,” he says again, and then he’s gone from Madame Mooney’s backroom like he was never there at all.

“Shit,” Widow murmurs, wind all out of her proverbial sails, and she can’t think of a damn thing to do when Hector sits down heavy at the bar except pour him a drink. “C’mon, motherfucker. Bottoms up.”

Hector just rocks, eyes on nothing, the bottle of eyeteeth rattling in his hands. Nothing but ghosts in his head now. Widow almost slaps him, almost takes him by the hair and slams his head into Madame Mooney’s pretty granite bar. I didn’t ask for this shit, she wants to snap at him. What’d you fucking expect?

“I’ll buy you a man,” she says instead. “We’re already here. Get fucked up if you want.”

Hector holds the bottle to his heart and just tips forward until his forehead is pressed flush to the bar. His shoulders quake.

Widow twitches, her hand hovering over his back. She could hurt him like this. Body the consequences later.

She touches her hand to his shoulder briefly, just long enough to feel him flinch—all boney angles and shivering grief—and she just cannot with this shit. She cannot. She about-faces and goes for the door with a coward’s precision as Hector sweeps the glasses to the ground and starts to cry.

There are no honey-eyed women working the floor at Madame Mooney’s today, but Widow buys herself a wife anyway. “You love me,” she tells the stranger. “This is our anniversary. We’ve been together three years.”

“Get me a drink, wife,” the stranger murmurs, and her hips are velvet-soft against Widow’s ugly soldier hands. Widow gets her a champagne flute and her new wife kisses her on the cheek and forgives all her sins as they sit on the edge of a bed made up with cool, sleek sheets. Widow’s ready to forget as they drink, to fall into those velvet-soft hips, but—

She sighs and rests her head on her wife’s shoulder.

“What is it?” the stranger murmurs.

“Guy on my crew.” Widow closes her eyes. “Get a man to fuck him, would you?”

“Sure, baby,” her wife agrees, reaching discreetly to tap her earpiece. “We’ll take care of your friend.”

“Okay,” Widow sighs, and her wife runs soft hands through Widow’s hair, working it down from the untidy knot with such care that Widow doesn’t correct her about Hector, who is certainly not a friend. “Make sure they’re nice.”

Her wife hums, playing with a strand of Widow’s hair and winding it ‘round her ring finger. “You want me to be nice, baby?”

“No.” Widow smiles into her shoulder. “I want you to love me.”

The glasses tumble to the floor. They fuck like monsters on the marital bed, her wife’s hand coiled tight in Widow’s hair, her teeth biting into Widow’s tit; she takes her wife by the hips and the throat, holds her close like they really could make a baby. Widow eats her wife out until she screams and then they break for more champagne. Later, Widow plays her fingers into her wife’s cunt while her wife hisses and writhes and clings to her. Widow leans in to kiss her and her wife spits in her mouth. They might as well be immortal, gleaming bright like stars in their marriage bed; they are so full of love for each other that they collapse tender and sore from it afterward as her wife pours champagne across Widow’s aching tits and calls her a slut.

Bodies die, Widow thinks distantly, but love is forever. They tangle themselves among the filthy sheets and Widow closes her eyes to sleep. She doesn’t dream but she clings and clings and then she wakes up cold, her arms wrapped tight around an expensive pillow.

Her wife sits on the corner of the bed, pulling her bra back on and adjusting her earpiece. “You want breakfast, baby?”

Widow curls tighter around the pillow, tucking it under her chin. “No.”

“It’s extra if you wanna stay,” her wife says, not unkindly. “But we know you’re good for it. The girls talk.”

“Oh,” Widow says, and closes her eyes. She doesn’t ask what they say about a lonely thing like her.

“Your friend’s being weird,” her wife adds, tapping the earpiece. “Just so you know.”

“Weird?” she murmurs, nosing against the pillow. Her wife’s perfume clings faintly to it, sweet like jasmine.

“He was crying. Said he wanted it rough, but not like you,” her wife explains. “He didn’t actually mean it, you know? One of the guys held him until he passed out. That gonna be a problem?”

You could hold me, Widow thinks. You could hold me and stroke my hair and I’d never leave if you only asked me.

“Baby?”

She grinds her face into the pillow. “I’ll deal with it,” Widow murmurs.

Love tastes like ash in her throat and an ache in her cunt; love is a stranger pressing a kiss to her brow and nothing more. Widow tattooed all the women she’s ever loved onto her wrist in cursive script, all of them baby and all of them will leave her or were never hers outside of her maybe-dreams. Love is her wife trailing her fingers along Widow’s bare back and nothing more, the creak of the mattress as she walks away, bare feet padding across Madame Mooney’s shining floors and out of that promised dream. Love is ghosts and ash and the sour echo of champagne as a stranger closes the door and leaves her alone all over again.

Widow showers alone, the water drumming against her skull. Silently, Widow counts all the scars she can remember. Gunshot, a cigarette pressed flush to trembling skin, a knife to her back, another gunshot. She’s carried them all for years. The bruises, by contrast, will fade in a matter of days.

She drinks champagne in the shower, Madame Mooney’s shampoo stinging her eyes, and then she gets dressed and pins her hair up and goes to find wherever Hector’s gotten to.

Not far, it turns out. He’s still in that same backroom with the granite bar and the glass shards scattered across the floor like dying stars. Widow steps through the mess, glass crunching under her stomper boots. Hector doesn’t look up from where he’s sitting hunched over behind the bar, the pill bottle clasped loosely in his hands. He’s half-naked, the jumpsuit tied off around his skinny hips. He’s barefoot too, boots kicked off to the corner, and there’s a purpling bruise spreading angry across his cheek like someone bent him over the bar and fucked him hard—at least until it got weird, and they stopped, because Madame Mooney sells to corpsemongers and killers just fine, but they like to think they’re civilized.

Widow puffs out a breath and puts her hands on her aching hips. “You didn’t swallow those teeth or anything, did you?”

Hector’s gaze flicks to her. His remaining pupil is blown wide, but he’s not nearly as high as she thought he’d be.

“Lady said you made it weird,” Widow points out. She means it to come out sharp, cut him down to size out of habit, but she’s tired and so it bleeds quiet. “People do all sorts of nasty shit back here, so don’t look at me like I’m the one who’s fucked.”

Hector just shakes his head.

“Okay.” Widow eyes him, then puffs out another sigh and sits her ass down next to him. “Shit, I paid good money getting you that dick. Least you could do is say thanks, motherfucker.”

Hector pulls his knees up to his chest, hugging them tight. The pill bottle rattles in his hand. Not swallowed after all.

Thank fuck, Widow thinks, because she doesn’t know what she’d do with Hector if he’d pulled some truly messed up shit like that.

“We were Kindred,” Hector says, very softly. He doesn’t look at her.

Widow thumps her head back against the bar. Of all the things she’d guessed about Hector, ex-cultist never quite made the list. Explains why he ended up in that box all those years ago, though. Widow knows a thing or two about places that hunt their stragglers down.

“Thought the Kindred didn’t do blood family,” Widow says finally. “You’re all brothers under a benevolent God or whatever.”

“We’re not supposed to,” Hector agrees softly. “But, you know.”

“Not really.”

Hector closes his good eye. “Who was your wife?”

“Never been married,” she tells him softly. “You leave her behind when you ran?”

Hector just rattles the pill bottle against his bad eye, which is answer enough. You don’t quit people like that, Widow knows. People like that set the dogs on dissenters, and then they end the bystanders too for good measure.

“You thought she made it out,” Widow realizes. “Like you.”

Hector shakes his head. “Hoped,” he murmurs. “But …”

Yeah, Widow thinks. Part of him knew. You don’t go hunting for teeth if you think there’s a whole girl out there. “Why’d you run?”

Hector’s shoulders jerk and he bows forward, hunched into himself as he shakes—he’s laughing, Widow realizes, but no sound comes out. He laughs, open-mouthed and trembling, and just shakes his head. “You don’t care,” he murmurs when he can manage words again. “What’s it matter?”

Widow looks away, her gaze drifting to the splinters of glass and Hector’s abandoned boots in the corner. She wonders what happened to his cigarettes and their sweet, heavy smoke. “You looked for her, though,” she says, very softly. “So, that’s something.”

No one ever looked for her all those years ago, when she was Mirjana, when she was still a girl and not the thing that crawled out of a girl’s grave. Maybe they wouldn’t have found more than teeth, but—

There could have been a gravestone, Widow thinks, a shroud placed over the girl she’d been before the wicked thing she is rose in its place. There could have been a reckoning.

“They took my eye when I left,” Hector says. He hugs his knees tight to his chest, shivering with that quiet laughter of his. The pill bottle rattles. “Said they’d give me a head start for it. And then they said I could buy her if I gave them the other one.”

Oh, Widow thinks, and she can’t think of a damn thing to say to that.

“I should’ve,” Hector murmurs. “But, you know.”

“Yeah,” Widow agrees, because she’s a coward too.

The silence stretches out between them. Hector lifts his head and breathes out slow. Then he pops the cap and slides the teeth ever so tenderly into his palm. His sister’s name was Luz, Widow thinks. She must have been loved if someone touched the last shards of her with such care.

“She was just a kid,” Hector explains. This time, he meets Widow’s eyes. There’s an awful sort of sincerity in his face then, even as he quakes with quiet laughter. “She could’ve been anything.”

Widow rests her head back against the bar. “You should bury her.”

Hector closes his fist around the teeth, taking a shuddering breath. He fumbles for one of his pockets, trying to grab the cigarettes, but his hands are shaking too hard and the case drops. Widow retrieves it without a word, pulling out a cigarette, grease stains and all, and flicking the autolighter. She presses it between her teeth and takes a long drag. Sweet smoke fills her lungs and her eyes water from the burn. She exhales in an unruly cloud, then holds the cigarette out to Hector, call sign Wotan, the wanderer witnessing horrors.

“You should bury her,” Widow repeats. “You should lie down in a grave with her, and then …”

The words trail off. She shakes her head, rubbing her thumb along the cool line of her garrote.

Hector presses the cigarette between his teeth, dragging deep. “And then?” he echoes.

Widow shakes herself. “And then we’ll see.”

If the resurrection bleeds true. If he comes back as something stranger, or if he gets to rest with his ghosts. Widow presses her thumb to the pulse point in her wrist and the name of all her maybe-wives, baby printed in sweet cursive across her skin. It’s hidden beneath the garrote and the weight of her work gloves, but she remembers the press of needles, the promise of them. She was never married but there was a beginning; there was a dead girl, too, and a grave.

Distantly, Widow wonders what became of her first love’s eyeteeth.

Hector rubs his thumb along the cigarette, watching as ash shivers down. He gestures to the garrote wound ever so sweetly around her wrist. “Will you show me how to use that thing?”

Widow grinds her head back against the bar. “Why?” she asks, even though she’s already unspooling the wire and feeling it coil in her gloved hands. The weight of it in her hands is her very best friend, faithful as a lover, beloved as all the wives she’s almost had. She holds it out and Hector lifts his left hand, the same one he’s scarred so many times before, and Widow winds the garrote around his wrist.

This, too, she thinks, is resurrection. This, too, is a grave.

Hector tips his head back, good eye half-lidded and ringed in exhausted shadow. For a moment, they both hold there: two cowards huddled in the dark, halfway ghosts themselves. Then Hector blows a delicate smoke ring into the still air, and they watch it spiral and grow: delicately, almost gently. They watch it fade and Hector lowers the cigarette. The cherry blooms red like a promise.

“Okay,” Wotan says, very softly. He presses his closed fist and the rattling teeth to his heart. “Then we’ll see.”

“Then we’ll see,” Widow echoes, and their ghosts sigh through the spiraling smoke.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Hebe Stanton

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors