In time, the entire shift’s 138 Express inbound transfers are processed, and I’m free to service passengers from other lines. These transfers are unremarkable. These passengers aren’t refugees.
I killed four hundred soldier bots all vying for the same thing before I realized there was no such thing as anti-war if our invention was the solution.
iii.
There are no protocols for plotting to kill the King, so Alise talks about killing the King, whispers her plan in the Queen’s ear while they lie tangled in the Queen’s marital bed, Alise’s fingers tracing bruises that should not be there.
We'd only lived in Arizona four years—it was our retirement place. But I'd died there, and she'd dumped my ashes out in the desert without fanfare, without any poem or prayer, unless you considered, “Jesus, Marty, don't leave me. Why'd you leave me, you old bastard" to be an elegy.
I had a daughter and then I didn’t.
I woke in the cradle of midnight, shivering from a supernatural cold. I thought at first that she was crying, that she had woken me, like so many midnights before. But there was silence all around me. I sat up on one arm and peered into her crib. She was gone. In her place was wrapped a sallow, horned little boy. His eyes blinked open. I look at him. He looked at me. Changeling, I thought.
Then he started to scream.
“Why weren’t the windows lined with salt?” The first cop at my apartment couldn’t keep his voice to a whisper, despite the changeling slumbering in my arms.
Given Rebecca’s hunger for blood, our hopes being complimentary seemed unlikely, yet Auntie Regina’s blessing poured over us both from head to toe. Never before had I felt closer to my sister. The warmth penetrated deeper into our skin, past the second layer into the third. We were burning.
