The AWR League Cup 2014 - The Grand Finale

[James]

The AWR League Cup Finale is upon us. After seven hard-fought rounds, the final table ended with this:

	WINS	LOSSES
TAED	6	1
INK	4	3
KAEZ	4	3
JOR	4	3
DRAGON	3	4
INJIN	3	4
SILVER	2	5
REFFY	2	5

Congratulations to Taed, Kaez, Inkdrinker and Jordoom who have made their way through to the Grand Finale!

The Grand Finale is a new concept for AWR and hopefully one that will lead to some absolutely fantastic stories. One thing Zovo and I both noticed (and Taed said out loud) was that people were a little cramped. Their stories were compressed to either make them not too long or to be able to write them before the deadline arrived. The Grand Finale seeks to change that.

Simply put, the Grand Finale has three rounds but you only write one story.

In the first round, you write the beginning of your story.

In the second round, you write the middle.

In the last round, you write the ending.

By the end of it, you should have a perfectly crafted story that has room to breathe. There's no topic or prompt, this is a chance to write the story you want to write. It can be something new, something you've been planning for years, or maybe even a reworking of a story you've already written for the competition but want to do with more words and time.

Also, don't feel like you have to write a novella (though you're welcome to). The story can be as short or as long as you like, as long as you meet the deadlines. Have a 3,000 word story with each round only submitting around a 1,000 words. Have a 15,000 word novelette with each round submitting a large amount. It's up to you.

The only restriction upon you is knowing how a story is structured: what is a good beginning, where does the middle begin and end, how do you round off the perfect ending. As far as possible, we want the round divides to feel natural in the story.

So why three rounds? Why not just have one giant round and let you go nuts for a month? Because this is a vicious, knock-out final.

At the end of the first round, Zovo and I will judge the beginnings of the four finalists' stories. The weakest beginning will be eliminated and only three writers progress to the second round. We'll judge again and the strongest two stories progress to the final round.

The best story out of those two wins the AWR League Cup.

In the event that at the end of any round, we have a tie between the judges, it will go to a popular vote between the two stories who are tied.

Understood? No questions? Direct them to the main thread if you do.

In terms of deadline, we're going to give you six days to write for each round. However, considering that there may be delays, I'm not going to give all three deadlines in one go, but just give a deadline at the start of each round (saves me constantly editing a schedule). However, for this first round, I'll give you a planning day as well and also make it last a little longer to give Zovo time to come back from his holiday (I have no idea when he's back...).

So the deadline for the first round is: Monday, 17th August.

Write.

[Inkdrinker]

He conjured fire, his adversary deflected it with streams of water. He reached out with inky tendrils, his rival swallowed them in radiant light. Hellish aberrations clashed with loyal knights, far below the mages' duel. A whispered word and a flash of light: the world was gone. The Warlock peered curiously at his new surroundings, assessing the tactical advantages of the terrain. The midday sun burned bright above him, peeking through the jungle canopy. The air was heavy and wet. Where had the Thaumaturge brought him this time? The Warlock did not care for these constant shifts in arena, he thought his opponent a coward, running for new scenery whenever things started to get interesting. He sniffed the air, discontented.

***

Liam did his best not to fall asleep during his lessons, but mycology bored him and trying to learn mole-tongue left him endlessly frustrated. History was the only thing really worth learning about. The surface was his passion, anything he could learn of it, of life before the 'Great Exodus' as his teacher had so dramatically called it, Liam soaked up like a sponge. The most interesting thing to Liam was that nobody actually knew why it had happened.

Everyone had their own story: the church said it was the gods' punishment for the sins of the surface dwellers, while the fungal cults claimed there was only one god and it was a reward to be so close to him. All anyone really knew is that one day the air turned toxic and the sky rained fire. People fled downward and from chaos and darkness, society rebuilt itself in the Grand Cavern.

Liam shuffled lazily out of the schoolhouse, a drab little building carved out of the cavern wall, halfway up. He waved and muttered farewell to the people he didn't hate, then made his way to his usual spot. Liam sat on the bench, sprawling out with his legs crossed and putting his knapsack beside him. The air was a little less stale up here and Liam breathed it in liberally.

The meandering stone switchbacks were loathsome, but the view was worth it. You could see almost the entire city from up here: the mycofarms at the foot of the switchbacks; damp yet beautiful, the ramshackle housing beyond that; rustic in disgrace, the mineral marketplace; alight with commerce at all hours, the labyrinthine fungal gardens; hiding scandal and intrigue, the fantastical architecture of the cathedral; marble and shining gold, and the glittering crystalline spires of uptown; a dwelling more for mysteries than people.

It took only a scant few minutes for Izabel to show up. Liam had been whistling, but he stopped when she approached, moving his knapsack to his lap. She sat down next to him comfortably, leaning on his shoulder in a friendly manner.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” he said.

The pair erupted into laughter, such was ritual. Izabel adjusted her glasses and straightened her posture, admiring the vista in front of her for a moment before turning back to Liam. She giggled a little more.

“You really need a haircut, y'know.” She wasn't lying, it was sometimes difficult to see his face through the storm of dirty blond. “Can I do it again? I promise it'll be better than last time... I've been practicing! Really, I have,” she beamed. Liam chuckled at her, flashing a sheepish grin.

“To be fair, it would be challenging to be worse than last time,” he rebuked. Izabel feigned offense at his comment, punching him playfully in the stomach. “But alright, what the heck, I'll take the risk. Is tonight good? I could come over, ain't got much else to do anyway.”

“Yeah, sure,” she said, getting to her feet and dragging Liam up with her, “C'mon, let's go for a walk.”

The physical tedium of the switchbacks was made almost pleasurable, thanks to Izabel's company and they made it to the bottom in what seemed like practically no time at all. Izabel's house was still technically in the ramshackle slums, but it was certainly located in the nicest part of them. Colloquially, the neighborhood was called Flowertown, not because they had any actual flowers, but because most of the fake ones were made there.

Liam and Izabel glanced at each other as they passed Mr. Howell's soup stand, three quarters into their journey, silently agreeing to stop. There was only ever one thing on Mr. Howell's menu 'Soup of the day: Cream of None-of-your-business'. Liam and Izabel paid separately and ate together, while they walked.

Izabel chided him for slurping the beige concoction, which only made him louder, of course. He knocked it off when she delivered a literal knock to the side of his head. “Ow.”

“You had it coming.”

“Yeah.”

***

When the last lock of hair fell, Izabel retrieved a hand mirror and showed Liam her handiwork. “Wow,” he said, “you really have improved.” She had given him a short cut, but not too short, close in the back, up around his ears, with some bangs still intact in the front.

“I told you. You're practically handsome now, thanks to me.”

“Aye, devilish, ain't I?” They shared another laugh, as friends are wont to do when they are up late, chatting by candlelight. “I'm leaving tomorrow, you know. I've just decided.”

“Oh yeah?” she said, getting up to fetch a broom, “Where ya going?”

“Up. The surface,” he replied, gathering the fallen hair into a little pile for her. “I'll be back though, in a couple of days.”

Izabel paused, considering for a moment the completely insane thing he had just said. “The surface? You, a barely seventeen-year-old kid, is gonna go to the surface... by himself? Don't you know the kinds of things that live up there?”

“Roses.”

“Huh?”

“Roses live up there.”

Izabel nodded blankly. “Roses? Is this about that uptown girl you keep making puppy dog eyes at?”

Liam knew Izabel had only called Celia that to annoy him, so he didn't call her on it. “Mmhmm. I think they'll make a nice surprise, don't you?”

“So you're going to go get yourself killed chasing some imaginary flowers, because you want to get in some girl's pants? Fine, but I'm coming with you.”

[Deleted]

Ars Moriendi

They broke their fast on cactus pulp and scorpions, with the smoke of the night's fire rising in front of the kowa, and ascending in black-grey wisps to the stars. Growing up, Jefferson Corrigan had always loved to hear the buzzing of cicadas, but out here, there was only silence. Silence seemed to follow you everywhere, these days, and it was maddening.

Of course, silence also meant safety. Jefferson remembered the first time their silence was broken. The four of them had been walking. The other group had seemed safe enough... Yes, when the silence did break, it was a cause for concern because that meant you had run into other people, and other people, as many times as not, were dangerous.

But not her. She didn't have a bit of danger in her body, Jefferson had reasoned when he first laid eyes on her, walking alone on the old freeway like an idiot, or someone with a deathwish. She insisted she was neither, and so that, coupled with her calm, airy demeanor, convinced Jefferson to allow her to join him. Perhaps it was his sense of duty, or perhaps he only wanted to wait and see if she wasn’t as dark of heart as the rest. Annamaria believed it the former; she told him he was a 'knight,' a man duty-bound to protect women like her, but Jefferson could only shake his head at that. "Ain't no such thing as knights anymore, miss," he had told her, he remembered, chewing on a piece of dry straw. "Perhaps not," she had allowed, "but you and I both know there are dragons, so it seems clear there should be knights."

Annamaria always spoke so cryptically, he found. To be honest, it used to annoy the hell out of him, and he considered abandoning her more than once during the first week she joined him. But then he found, crackpot hippy bitch or not, it was nice to have a bit of conversation.

As Jefferson destroyed the kowa , scattering the brush and bramble as much as he could to hide their path, Annamaria gathered the cast iron pot and stainless steel wok, and smiled up at him. "Scorpions taste better with a bit of their own venom, don't they Mister Corrigan?"

He had thought she was crazy when she suggested eating the arachnids, but for three days they had dined, quite well, on what they had jokingly begun calling "desert lobster." Jefferson shrugged in surrender, "You were right, okay? Is that what you're tryin'a say?"

She continued to beam at him, her big brown eyes glistening in the starlight. "I want you to say it, sir. If you admit I am right on this, then perhaps you will be more amenable to admitting when I am correct on other, more pertinent matters." The cookware strung onto her small rucksack, she got to her feet, giving a little grunt at the effort. Jefferson stared at her belly. It seemed like it grew every day that they slept. Her hands naturally fell over it as he stared, but she said nothing.

"You're talkin' 'bout Eden," he grunted, beginning to walk in long strides. I'll let ya stay with me, share ma food. But I ain't stayin' with you, miss, he had said, that first day. And he hadn't. He wouldn't slow down his pace one bit. That could mean death. He was a man, not a group home.

She was puffing already as the walked, one hand on her belly, her pony-tail swishing from side to side with her steps. "Yes, I am talking about Eden. I think it would be a good place for us, a good place to rest, to have the baby. I can't birth it out here, and part of me wonders if you'd even stop and wait for me if I tried..."

Though he didn't bother to turn so she could witness his displeasure, Jefferson frowned. "I ain't gonna leave ya like that... I mean, yeah, you need to keep your ass in gear an' keep up, but Jesus, woman."

She smiled. "Yes," she said. "Yes, I know. Forgive me, but you are not a warm man, Jefferson, and so sometimes I wonder."

"Warm men get killed by cold ones these days. Thank your lucky stars I ain't a 'warm' man, Miss Annamaria."

"I am thankful for you every day, sir," she muttered solemnly.

They traveled at night, every night. The Sonoran sun was unbearable in the day, and the cover of night made them safer from raiders and bandits. Many of them weren't native to the area, Jefferson had reasoned, given that they seemed to like to rove in the day. But they were learning. Last night, he and Annamaria had hidden behind a granite boulder while a group of men had some sort of internal dispute not one hundred yards away. The shrieks as the one man was tortured by his former fellows still echoed in Jefferson's brain. He had sat, one arm wrapped tightly around Annamaria, who buried her face in his chest and plugged her ears, and the other holding his pistol. The young woman thought he had meant to fight them if need be, but Jefferson's pistol only presently held two bullets, and so his plan had been different... Thankfully, it had not come to that.

Hardly any progress was made that night; dawn was upon them when the men rode off down the old freeway, on horses and motorcycles. Jefferson fervently hoped that tonight would be different. He peered over at the freeway now, some 60 feet out. There wasn't a sign of life on it, but that could change quickly, especially if there were mounted raiders in these parts.

"How far along are ya, anyway?" Jefferson asked at last, a few hours into their trek.

Annamaria exhaled slowly, tiring from the effort to speak while keeping pace with the much taller man. "It will be five months in a few days."

Jefferson nodded, "So you're gonna get bigger, then?"

"That's the hope, anyway. At this stage, the fetus is barely 4 lbs. So, yes, I will get bigger. Bigger and slower," she sighed.

They continued in silence for another two hours, and the howling of coyotes could be heard in the distance. The first time the beasts had howled after she joined him, she had asked all sorts of interested questions. But now, even the coyotes had become boring. Jefferson thumbed the pommel of his knife, but other than that, did not react. Nor did Annamaria.

"I know of an herbal tea, I could probably find the stuff. We could... We could get rid of it, you know... Move faster."

Annamaria grabbed his shoulder, wrenched him around, and slapped him sternly across the face, a powerful blow for such a small, young girl. Jefferson's ears rang and his cheek burned, but he found himself stammering to respond.

"I will not do that, Mister Corrigan." Her face was neutral, but a fire seemed to burn in her eyes as she stared him down.

Throwing up his hands in exasperation, Jefferson screamed, "Ya bleedin' fuckin' idiot! LOOK! LOOK WHERE Y'ARE! You're in the middle of the fuckin' desert at the end of the world with the one dumbass willin' to watch your ass and keep ya fed! Ya got nothin', Annamaria! Nothin'! And you're gonna bring a fuckin' baby into... into THIS?!" He gestured around the expanse of the dark desert. Behind him, a band of pink had spread on the horizon, a harbinger of the sunset, and then the relentless sun. A giver of life every where, except in the desert.

She stared at him, and a tear ran down her cheek, but she did not move or respond. The stare was her response, and before too long, Jefferson broke away, looking at the ground guiltily.

"Look," he stammered, no longer yelling but his tone still stern. "Look, I get it. I do. I was a friggin' Republican for Christ's sake, I don't like it any more 'n you do, Annamaria! But we gotta think ahead. We gotta think of our lives. I'm sorry, but that's just how it is."

She wiped the one tear away, and then clutched his face where she hit him. Her hand was surprisingly cool, like the underside of a pillow. Once more, she stared deep into his eyes, though this time her long face was awkwardly close to his, and Jefferson didn't know if she was going to strike him or kiss him, and nor was he sure which one he’d prefer. At last, he squirmed uncomfortably, removing her hand from his bearded face.

Annamaria nodded. "You're right, Mister Corrigan. Let us dispose of the child. And then, if we meet any travelers, we should dispose of them, too. They could, after all, have food or water, maybe even weapons. We’ve got to survive this."

Jefferson shook his head, "That's not-"

"No," she replied, holding up a hand. "No, you're right. We should recruit the stronger ones, the men and boys, and kill the weak ones. Soon, we'd have our own band of not-so-merry men. We could be happy and fat, so long as we do not turn and look at the trail of death we leave behind us. No, you're right. Let's become villains, let's become dragons. We'll start by killing my child."

Jefferson looked at the ground, guiltily. "That's not... That's not fuckin' nice, Annamaria. I told you... I told you..."

She nodded. "I know. But that is how even those men started, Mister Corrigan. At one point, those men that hurt your family were no different than you or I. No one wakes up and decides to wreak evil, and most don't realize they are until it's too late, if ever. You have no ties to me or my son, and so I will not dream of holding it against you if you would like to part ways. I will understand. But if you begin down that path, if you surrender your knighthood, if you become the sort of man who climbs to the top on the backs of others, then it is I who will depart. Do you understand me?"

He nodded, kneeling down and beginning to unpack the campsite.

"Good. Besides, you need me with you." She jabbed her walking stick into the back of a scorpion, and smiled at him.

They awoke the next night, and once again packed the campsite in silence. That is, until Annamaria peered over at him before they begun the night's trek. "Jefferson is a weird name for an Irishman. Why Jefferson?"

Jefferson began walking, slowing his pace ever so slightly. "What makes ya think I'm an Irishman?"

She shoved his arm playfully, "Your surname is 'Corrigan' and you have bright red hair, a thicker and brighter red beard, and you're about as pale as parchment. You're Irish or I'll eat my hat." Her walking stick thunk-thunk-thunked, kicking up sand as she went, keeping pace beside him.

He found himself chuckling, for the first time in a while. "Ya caught me. Well, I'm Irish-American, of course. I ain't ever been to the motherland or whatever ya wanna call it."

Smiling sadly, she patted his back. "It's a shame, you know, to lose one's patrimony. Maybe someday you should return to that Emerald Isle, Mister Corrigan. You know, meet lots of other ginger folk named Corrigan." She nodded to herself, as if the decision was made.

Once more, a laugh escaped his lips, "Yeah, sure, I'll get right on that. Just lemme get ma phone out and book a flight."

It was her turn to laugh. "Still, it is a good name. Corrigan. Do you know what it means?"

He had to shake his head. “Can’t say I ever thought about it, to be totally honest.”

"It means 'spear,'" she replied. "'Spear.' A weapon capable of killing, most assuredly, but consider the dimensions of a spear. Less than ten percent of it is lethal, the point at the end. Beyond that, why, it's scarcely any less domesticated than a broomstick. A spear is a weapon, true, but more than that, it is a defense."

Jefferson listened, but knew better than to try and make sense the woman's ramblings.

She licked her lips, and continued. "I find it bodes well, then, that I have been sent a wayward Gaelic knight-errant by the name of Spear. You are not a killer by nature, Mister Corrigan, but you will when you must. You have a point - even if you still believe that life does not." She nodded her head vigorously, as if she knew she was on the right track. "I have to ask, then, that when the time comes, will you be my spear, Sir Spear? Will you keep the dark at bay?"

He couldn't say for sure why - perhaps it was merely to silence her - but he nodded. "I will."

"Good. I already know you will kill for me... but if the time comes, Sir Corrigan... Will you die for me?"

He chewed on that for a moment. And then he considered what little he had left, and he thought of them, screaming as he watched, helpless, wishing that one of the wicked men responsible for their pain would turn face at the last second, and do the right thing...

"Yes."

They continued on, making a steady pace. Once more, Jefferson put the old freeway to their right. It was folly to travel on the road, but it was harder to navigate the further you went from it, so Jefferson, since arriving in the desert after The End, had kept a steady compromise, which seemed to serve him just fine so far.

He patted his hunting knife and pistol, each hanging from his belt, each on a hip. Only two bullets remained in the six-shooter, which seemed hard to believe. He had begun his treck with twenty-four rounds: a full clip and a bag of eighteen bullets. He remembered each bullet perfectly. Eight had missed, a fact that haunted him most of his waking hours. The other fourteen had been used killing those who would kill him. Some of their deaths haunted him, mainly the younger ones, but he had managed to move on. It was the bullets not fired that ate at his soul every night.

They had been four. Jefferson, his wife, and two kids. Six men had beset them, and Jefferson had had five bullets left. Three of them got bullets, one got the business end of his knife, his throat exploading into a burst of red-black colour, but the other two had managed to tackle him and restrain him. Jefferson, presently, clenched and unclenched his fist at the memory.

He peered over at Annamaria, sweat forming on her forhead and look of determination on her soft features. Where he was, as she had pointed out, fair and painfully obvious in his Celtic heritage, she was his mirror opposite. Wavy locks of black hair were pulled up into a thick, loose ponytail. Her eyes were a deep brown, and her skin was like creamed coffee. Given their location, Jefferson had ascertained that she was Latina, but he had no way to be completely sure. Whatever her heritage, she was a beauty, though probably twenty years his junior.

Be that as it may, Jefferson had a hard time imagining himself being intimate with her. The thought had crossed his mind a couple times, unbidden, especially upon first meeting her. But as they journeyed, and as he grew more attached to her, he found himself less attracted. Perhaps it was her pregnancy, or her innocence, or perhaps he had not finished mourning Linda. Whatever it was, it was palpably present, so he instead admired her beauty for what it was, and not what it could do for him.

After some time, he looked up, and saw that they were approaching a rock formation. They jutted up in the desert here and there, and often attracted bugs with their tepid pools of rainwater that collected at the juncture of the jutting stones. Dawn would soon be upon them, and it was as good a place as any to set camp. Jefferson was about to inform her that they'd break camp there, when Annamaria, as usual, broke the silence.

"So, if not Eden, Jefferson, then where? Where are we walking to? You always say keep moving, but to what end?"

He shrugged. He wished he knew, but truthfully, he was out of ideas. Sometimes, he imagined Eden was everything he had heard on the radio broadcasts, but he knew it couldn't be. That world was over. Humanity didn't cooperate like that anymore.

Or did it? He peered at Annamaria, and smiled. The two of them had cooperated, hadn't they? Shared food, shared quarters, even shared their stories and lives. Could it be that others were doing that? And that they had all come together at Eden?

She looked up at him, still expecting an answer, but his mind was in his reverie. "Jefferson?"

"We'll go to Eden," he responded. "We have to."

Annamaria smiled, "I knew you'd come around eventually, Mister Corrigan. To Eden, then!"

"To Eden," Jefferson responded, just before the gunshot went off.

The bullet took him square in the shoulder, spinning him around and knocking him to his face as a dozen voices screamed ululating cries into the night. Annamaria pulled him to his feet with a strength that belied her frame. Her eyes were wild with fire, and she brandished her walking stick like a staff, blowing a stray lock of hair out of her face from the side of her full lips.

Jefferson grunted, and felt the blood welling from his wound. Either his shooter was the worst shot in the Sonoran, or they were being toyed with. Jefferson feared it was the latter. He considered grabbing his pistol, but then thought better of it. Draw it now, and it might be all over...

About six men emerged from behid the black, jutting rock formation that only a few moments ago, Jefferson had expected to be their temporary home. Fate had a funny way like that.

"I command you to stay back!" Annamaria boomed, still holding her walking stick defensively in front of her. Her breathing was surprisingly calm and contained, but her eyes were full of fury.

One of the men laughed. "Ya hear that, boys? She commands us." More men emerged in the darkness. All of the men were in green military fatigues, though with heavy modifications. Here, a bandolier or two, there, a human skull dangling from a belt. Some had shaved heads, one dreadlocks, the other ponytails. A cigarette was in every other mouth. Jefferson found them reviling in their uniformity, like the worst of the SS mixed with the worst of downtown hipsters.

The man who had spoked, the man with dreadlocks, stepped forward. His hair was black, and his skin pale. He pulled out a flashlight, and shone it on the two of them, making silhouettes of himself as well as his companions. Jefferson half expected another gunshut, but none came. He clenched at his shoulder as he and Annamaria were sized up.

"Look, Zeke, the bitch is knocked up! He's been fucking her! Keepin' her all to himself!" The group laughed uproariously, and Zeke spun around to face them, his dreadlocks whirling.

"Shut your mouths, idiots. I wanna talk to them. I hear you motherfuckers enough." He lowered his flashlight, though didn't extinguish it, and slowly sauntered toward them. With the light lower, his features were made clearer. His face was heavily scarred, and black five-o-clock shadow was on his thick, square jaw and cheeks. "Is it true, guys? You two been knockin' boots all alone out here in the desert?"

Jefferson swallowed nervously, considering what to say. If he said yes, would they respect him, or would that make them want to kill him and take her more than they already did?

It was Annamaria who spoke, "He has not touched me. I am no man's to be touched, Ezekiel." She clenched her staff tighter and narrowed her eyes.

Laughing, Zeke slowly took another step. "That's fuckin' rich," he gestured at her stomach with a gloved finger. "That the Immaculate Conception or some shit, then?"

Annamaria rolled her eyes.

"Hey, Zeke, you mean the virgin birth," called one of his fellows, a blonde-bearded man with a bald head. He wore what looked to be like diving goggles over his eyes, and the sleeves of his army jacket were cut at the shoulders.

"The fuck you talkin' about, Marty?"

"You asked if her baby was the Immaculate Conception, but that don't refer to Jesus, that refers to Mary."

Zeke through his hands up exasperated. "Man, what the fuck do I care? Shut your god damn mouth."

Shrugging, Marty looked sheepish. "I just thought I would help you out. It's a common misconception." He laughed. "Haha, see what I did there, Zeke? Misconception."

"Ha ha," said Zeke flatly before drawing a revolver from one of the holsters on his belt and blowing Marty's brains out.

It was then that Jefferson made his move. He drew his own pistol, and fired a shot at Zeke, hitting him in the face. Zeke screamed and fell over, clutching at his face. Jefferson somersaulted along the ground as shots rang out around him. He fired the second and final shot from his own pistol, before grabbing both of Zeke's. He hoped Annamaria had used the opportunity to run, but he couldn't be sure. Bullets exploded in the sand around him, but Jefferson's shots were more lethal, and he watched four men die with their boss's lead in them.

A stray bullet hit Zeke in the leg, and he screamed out in the night; a sickening, gurgling noise.

"Hey, stop fuckin' shootin'! You hit Zeke!" someone called.

Jefferson grabbed at the bandit ring-leader, hoisting the injured man up onto his feet, and holding him in front of him. His left arm was wrapped around Zeke's throat, and his right arm was slung over Zeke's right shoulder; a human shield. Zeke was wimpering and gurgling, and his band were arguing about whether or not to risk his life by continuing to shoot. Run, Annamaria! he wanted to yell, but he dare not say it lest he draw attention to her if she already was. He didn't even dare turn around, he just had to trust that his distraction would be enough.

He thought back, as the bandits debated about whether or not to start shooting, about the first day he met her. He had sized her up for a long time with his binoculars. A young, attractive woman, walking alone on the old freeway. She had to have been bait, he had reasoned. He trailed her for three days before finally approaching her. She had brandished her staff then as she did this time. But you never needed to, I would have never hurt you. Never.

The bandits continued to yell into the night, and Jefferson felt the scene lighten, as the sun began to penetrate the darkness in the east. He hoped Annamaria had turned and ran, he prayed. Finally, he worked up the nerve, and turned to look; she was gone. He smiled to himself.

Will you die for me?

Yes.

Jefferson surged forward, still holding Zeke.

"SHIT! HOLY SHIT!" called the first man to notice, and it was then and only then that Jefferson opened fire, stricking the alarmed man in the chest. The others gave them his attention after that.

"DON' SOOT HIM!" Zeke roared in fear, but the bullets rang out anyway.

A sudden force on his right sent Jefferson, along with Zeke, flying into the dirt and sand. One of Zeke's boys had flanked him. Jefferson screamed with righteous fury, drawing his hunting knife, pinching off the remaining rounds in his pistol. He slashed, and heard someone curse, but then felt a blunt strike in his groin. His grip loosened enough to have the knife yanked from it, and a fist met his face. The two attackers scrambled to their feet, and Jefferson could hear the loading and cocking and whirring of guns.

"NO!" screamed a shrill voice. "NO! NO!" Jefferson wiped the dirt and blood from his face to see it was Zeke. For the first time, Jefferson saw the damage his shot had wrought. Evidently, the bullet had grazed Zeke's face, his chin and mouth more specifically. A fleshy hole sat at the corner of his mouth, and it tapered off into a long gash along his cheek that ran like the tail of a comet. When he smiled, almost all of his teeth were cracked and jagged. He spit a heap of blood on the ground as he squatted over Jefferson.

"Lithen," he lisped, his tongue evidentally having trouble adjusting to the nubs where his two front teeth once were. "We're gonna capthure him, and he ith gonna watch while we each take turnth raping hith little friend."

"Over my dead body!" Jefferson roared, headbutting Zeke, who fell back from his squatting position. Before Jefferson could do anything else, fists and feet pummeled him furiously, and it was all he could do to fold into the fetal position and suffer the blows from brass-knuckles and steel-toed combat boots.

"No," murmured Zeke when the beating was over, and his men hoisted Jefferson onto his feet. "No, I'm afraid I'm dead thet on you being the live audienthe." Zeke got to his feet "Tie him up, beat him if he doethn't cooperate. You heard them, boyth, they were on their way to Eden. Tho are we. Fan out, and letth find that bitch!"

[Kaez]

His footsteps pressed deep into the moist soil, grass compressing below the sole of his boot.

The sky faded into an array of indigo and purple as the sun slipped below the horizon. The last few rays of daylight danced over the tips of the canopy and dusk began to settle over the forest floor. The air was calm, the leaves motionless, even the finest blades of grass unwavering in the still dusk. The small ponds and puddles of the morning’s rain were shimmering, dark slates of reflective void.

The hairs on the back of the man’s neck stood straight in fine vibration. He stopped for a moment, drawing in a long breath of the cooling air, then pressed on again. His strides lengthened for a while, then shortened for a while longer. His pace quickened, but soon slowed. He scratched at his face, stretched his shoulders, cracked his knuckles. And it wasn’t long before he began to take note of a growing sense of restlessness inside him. A strange, building tension, like a cord pulled and struck.

He was deeply uneasy and had no idea why.

He treaded on, his thick, leather boots striding over the moist earth. His body was anxious and brimming with energy, but his mind was failing him. He felt a frustration and dissatisfaction knotting in the pit of his stomach. The sun was nearly set; the shadows cast by the trees had begun to fade into the general blackness of the coming night. He would need to make camp soon. In fact, he very likely should have already begun. He stopped and shook his head, raising his brow and blinking dramatically, trying to physically shake away the strange mental fog. Where had his mind been? He wondered. It felt as though the past hour, maybe two, had passed in a great haze. He was lost in thought, and his thoughts made no mark on his memory. Time seemed to have vanished.

He must have been tired. It had, after all, been a long day. He rubbed the heels of his hands against his eyes, then pulled his fingers across his temples, down his neck, and onto his shoulders, massaging them harshly. The indescribable sense of discontent was growing and a vague unease began to simmer in his gut like it had as a child the day before an illness overcame him. His willpower was drained, seeming to pour out of him with every motion, every subtle move of his arms. His eyes shut and even the closing of his eyelids was exhausting. Walking even one more step felt as though the grandest of endeavors, and a pointless one at that.

His will to go further collapsed. Now was as good of a time as any to stop and, after all, he had a long journey tomorrow and could use all the sleep he could get. Without so much as a single step further down the trail, he turned off the road and fell down to a knee, removing his backpack and beginning to unpack for the night. Though it had of course been a well-known rule of forest travel that it was safest to camp a ways off the road, the man hadn’t so much as seen a bird or a squirrel in these woods, let alone any predators or signs of bandits that might have stalked the trails in the twilight hours – and so he had no interest or will to move much farther off the trail and, just a meter or two from the path, he removed a canteen of water from his pack and took a long drink, hoping to settle himself.

It was then, in his silent kneeling, when the sound of his rhythmic steps ceased, that it became abruptly apparent to him. The utter quietness of the forest was astonishing. Not a single bird call. Not a single critter scurrying through the grass. Nothing. He glanced around, inspecting the forest from the floor to canopy and saw absolutely nothing. He heard not a single vibrato of a buzzing insect or a cry of a singing cicada. No birds, no rustling. His own breath suddenly rose to his attention, and soon his heartbeat. He knelt alone with the stone ruins, slowly being swallowed by the earth, and the wide, sprawling colony of – wait, ruins?

A few feet in front of him was a short wall of silvery-white stone, long since overgrown and deteriorated into a mess of crumbled rock. In the middle of the wilds, so far from anyone? What a puzzling sight, all the more baffling in that he could have sworn it was not there when he first stepped off the trail. He’d never heard any stories of ancient ruins in these woods – they had always been wildlands, hadn’t they? – and yet…
He fell onto his backside and crossed his legs. Perhaps he was coming down with a fever after all. Confusion fell all around him as all memory of daylight disappeared in just a few seconds. The perfect and still grass was a strange hue of blue in the rising moonlight and the silence seemed to ring a strange, inaudible note through the evening air. A chill ran up his spine, a sudden prickle of cold running down his limbs.

Depleted of energy though he was, he needed a fire for the night. Quiet or not, one didn’t camp this far into the woods without some semblance of a small fire through the night. Churning up all of the effort he could manage, he set off to collect dried logs or fallen branches: something just sufficient enough to hold through the night. “Come on,” he said aloud, sitting up again. “Enough of all this. Fire and camp. You need sleep.”

He set his mind with focus and determination. He had things to do, he needed sleep, and he had plenty enough of confusion and restlessness for one day. He put a hand on the small stone wall and hoisted himself onto wobbling knees. A deep breath. Focus. Focus.

He eyed the ground nearby for twigs or fallen wood but there was none close, so he ventured a few more feet from the trail, mustering all the energy he could, and… no twigs? No branches. Not even so much as a fallen leaf. And still no breeze. The forest was like a pristine painting, without any of those touches of imperfect reality. He reached a hand down, patting the grass, hoping the darkness deceived him and… felt nothing. Nothing at all.

Frustrated with everything about the strange woods, yet refusing to go the night without a fire. As much as he lacked the energy for it, he would need to cut away a few live branches for the night. He sighed and backpeddled, bent and reached into his pack, undid the latch and felt around inside for the hard, wooden handle of his axe. His eyes still searching the forest ravenously for any sign of movement or fallen wood, he turned in disappointment to a small, thin tree of white bark and golden leaves just a few feet to his left.

Gripping the axe with both hands, he rested the blade gently against the trunk and adjusted his stance. His arms, so tired, pulled back, his shoulders resisting the movement.

And he stood there, the axe dangling in his loose grip. His eyes were unblinking and unwavering. His gaze was trapped, then unfocused, hazy, as though he was pulled away from himself. He needed a fire. He needed the tree. He commanded himself of this, and yet his body utterly refused. His vision faded to black and, after one weak stumble, his knees buckled and he collapsed onto the ground, his axe falling a few inches away.
His eyes flickered, opening weakly, staring numbly at the white bark, speckled with browns of every shade. His gaze followed the stem down to its thick base where under the soil its roots would spread deep and wide. This is where he would rest tonight. It would be just fine. He didn’t need camp or fire. What was wrong with here? The tiredness was so overwhelming. Sleep was priority over everything and anything. Faint memories of a fear of a fever, of ruins, of missing memory, of confusion, drifted like clouds far out of the sky.

His head resting just inches away from the tree’s foundation, his mind just instants from sleep, his vision was suddenly, stunningly bright, as though the sun had rose again to its noon position for a second – a half a second – and all the grass and trees glowed with vibrant warmth and light. And the warmth faded to a comfortable restfulness, and soon sleep took him.

---

A sea of deep greens and bright golds, like waves on the ocean, rolled endlessly onward toward the horizon. The twin suns in the sky shone their pale-yellow light down upon the grasses, warming the verdant steppe and all that roamed within it basked in the glow. Atop the highest of the many subtle hills of the lowlands rested the ancient, weathered capital of Awria City. Having seen far many more days than any of its inhabitants, the infrastructure was old – but strong. Silvery-white stone walls, having survived the test of time, of conquest, of the hardships that any place might come to bear under the weight of the centuries, still stood strong in the City.

Behind its steep walls, behind the ancient buildings, past the houses and the shops, the taverns and the stables, was the great palace. Older than the buildings, joked by some to be older than the fields themselves, the colossal palace was a jewel and a wonder by any standard. The craftsmanship of the masons who built and designed it was of godlike artistry: the mortar was not rushed, the stones were chosen individually and meticulously. The Awrian Palace was carefully, deliberately orchestrated not as architecture, but as art.

At the heart of the palace was a courtyard, perfectly round and tilled to contain grass that perfectly mirrored the fields beyond, a small pond of exotic fish, two decorative aspens, and one large stone protruding from the ground at an odd diagonal. Though the stone was seen as somewhat unsightly by some, Scion Crivellaro actually rather enjoyed it and would often sit on it in meditation. The Scion, one of Awria’s three leaders, had a lanky, narrow build and a scraggly, brown beard. His long legs were folded beneath him, crossing one another just above the ankle, the bottoms of his bare feet facing upward. His hands were cupped one-in-the-other in his lap, their tendons and veins slightly protruded. Though his posture was relaxed, a vibrating tension built in his hands and climbed up his arms, his forearms and neck muscles twitching, his veins bulging. Soon his whole body, from his feet to his scalp, was constricted like a knot pulled until the strands began to split. His veins were brought so close to his skin that the Scion barely looked human… and yet his face was calm; relaxed and expressionless, eyes gently closed.

Abruptly, his mouth opened as wide as his jaw would allow, a gasp of air pouring into his lungs and his back straightening to its full extension. In a shift of balance, his whole body tumbled straight backwards, head-first off of the flat stone – and he was gone, leaving not a single trace behind. The courtyard sat in perfect silence, empty and still.

---

The Grove

Scion Crivellaro sat hunched in an elaborately decorated chair, caressing his temples with his thumb and middle finger. His eyes were locked tight, bags from sleepless nights dark beneath them. It had been a long, long week – but things were finally clearing up. He let his mind slip deep and away, plunging into solitude and contemplation. And then, faintly, James the Red’s voice arose in his mind. His eyes opened slowly, and where the table with its plates, half-eaten loaves of bread, old glasses of wine, pieces of cheese and apple, would have ordinarily been… was a great blank, white void.

“I must say, I simply do not like this,” spoke his fellow Scion in a regretful tone, scratching at his neck.

Crivellaro inspected their infinitely empty, perfectly white surroundings and felt a slight uneasiness of a total absence of direction or reference. “Better this than either of us making a four-day ride just to have a brief conversation, you know? Still, you’re… not wrong.” Glancing around, each direction was disorientingly identical to any other. “The Forbidden Zone has always been… odd.”

“Indeed,” James spoke quickly, “and importantly we really don’t have four days to spare. Things have finally cleared up here, yes, but this ordeal is far from over. I’m off to find Matteo. He’s… behind all this, somehow.”

Crivellaro sighed, pondering the situation. They had appointed Matteo as the first mortal Scion a few months ago and, hitherto, the mortal world had never beheld such a baffling event as they were dealing with now. Not that he regretted the appointment of Matteo. There was no better choice of a mortal to join their ranks – who else could have singlehandedly destroyed an entire army of Ice Trolls with a hand-made weapon, after all? When the day would come many centuries from now that they should leave this world, their replacement would need to wield that kind of power. But with power comes responsibility, and responsibility requires wisdom… a wisdom that he now doubted Matteo had.

“There’s no way to be entirely sure that he was behind this,” Crivellaro spoke quietly, clinging to a hope.

James choked a startled, “Hah!” He gave Crivellaro a long stare. “You really don’t think there’s any other possibility, do you? There are three beings in the mortal realm capable of fraying the fabric of causality in the way that it’s been frayed: yourself, myself, and Matteo. It certainly was neither of us, and if it was some deeper, primal magic at work… if this was something in the Server itself… let’s just say that I’m confident that it would have done more than just tear everyone’s memories apart. It would have been much worse.”

Crivellaro nodded instinctively. Whatever had caused this was surely of great power, of that there was no question. Most people had been left with truly shattered memories, left with knowledge of the barest tasks, perhaps some childhood recollections, the mere names and faces of their children and spouses. Laborers and craftsmen lost their skills; scholars were left lame and bewildered. Many precious memories were lost and, despite this obvious tragedy on the surface, there may have been some deeper problems that weren’t so immediately apparent.

“The full extent of the damage isn’t known yet, James. The seams of reality may be splitting further with each passing moment.” He hesitated for an instant, unsure of his next words, and spoke them with caution. “We could, of course, go into the Archive ourselves. See if the threads cannot be… manually repaired.”

“No,” James confidently replied. “Not yet. It’s only been a week since our own minds were meddled with. We cannot be so unskillful as to trust ourselves to get involved with such things yet. Our number one priority must be finding and speaking with Matteo. Even if he is not behind this – which I seriously, seriously doubt – he can be of great help to us. This is no time to be meddling in the Archive. You know that.”

Crivellaro instinctively attempted to gather up an argument against him, but found nothing to say. Going into the Archive was what his heart told him, not his mind, and Matteo did need to be found one way or the other. “Riding out in search of him soon, then?”

“Absolutely,” said James. “I’ll leave this afternoon and, with any luck, will speak to you within a fortnight. Until then… well, you do what you wish. But I would be in no hurry to dive into the Archive and tamper with the threads, were I you.”

Crivellaro smirked. “Sometimes Ithink it’s an exceedingly good thing that you aren’t.”

“Bah! You may call it cautiousness; I call it wise investigation,” James huffed self-assuredly.

“Of course, detective. I don’t question you in this matter, don’t concern yourself with that. I’ll do my best to figure things out from Awria City. Sepheron’s Road is a strange, long journey. Focus on finding Matteo.”

“And I will. But you’re right, the road is long. Hold the fort.”

“Godspeed, James.”

With a quick wave, James disappeared from the empty surroundings and Crivellaro’s mortal eyes opened wide, his deep black pupils readjusting to the light of the room. The man let out a long, slow exhale, his eyes tracing the bookshelves that lined the room. When he first arrived at the palace, they showed him five large rooms on the first floor, all of which were entirely his to do with whatever he wished. Considering he, unlike nearly all of its former inhabitants, had no children and no spouse, he filled them with books: thousands of them.

One room was for novels, another for political and historical accounts, yet another for magical tomes and scrolls, and a fourth for assorted memoirs and the like. Jon, his most loyal assistant, had always mocked him for making the one room in which he could fit a bed practically a fifth study in itself. The books in this room were those he most often read: Ad’Minian tomes and spiritual doctrines (things which he considered the most fascinating heights of mortal literature).

Somehow, his eyes overlooked the inquisitive stare that came to him from the center of the room. A black and grey mutt with bright silvery eyes stared at him with an inquisitive look, its head tilted to the side a few degrees. “What’re you looking at, pup?” The dog titled its head in the opposite direction and its brow seemed to stiffen. “Was I gone for very long, then?” Another tilt of the pup’s head. “Schrodinger, my friend, sometimes I fear you don’t have the slightest idea what I’m saying.” The dog let out one sharp, laconic bark and stood up, its unruly tail swinging back and forth in the air.

“Kidding, boy. Only kidding,” Crivellaro said with a smile as he stood, taking the few long strides across the room and out into the hallway, Schrodinger following closely behind. “Let’s get you some breakfast, eh?” He slid on a pair of flat black slippers at the top of the staircase and the two made their way down the stairs and into the main kitchen below.

A handful of people moved about the kitchen, some cooking, some grabbing a muffin or bit of salted meat and being on their way. The palace was often filled with a great deal of people: he had a few assistants, people to take care of the grounds and to prepare food, and a few scholars who specialized in various political or socioeconomic doctrines and helped him with the day-to-day running of Awria City.

“Looking charming, mate,” Jon quipped, looking over Crivellaro. The Scion wore an old, white robe atop his black slippers and quite a bit of stubble had built up over his cheeks. Jon, as usual, wore a tucked-in, collared shirt and crocodile-leather shoes so perfectly polished that they were blinding in the sunlight.

“Please, please,” Crivellaro smiled. “Don’t stare. I know… it can be hard to look away.”

“Your wit is so impressive. We’re all so very impressed,” said Jon dryly, following Crivellaro and Schrodinger into the kitchen. The dog rushed over to Chef Mena as she readied breakfast, its snout held high and inquisitive.

“Morning,” Crivellaro said, taking a seat on a tall stool at the counter. Jon sat next to him, pouring himself tea from the kettle.

“Oh!” the middle-aged woman chirped, a look of surprise plastered across her face. “Waking up with the rest of the world lately, are we?”

Crivellaro slid a mug towards Jon and the man poured a second cup. “James gets the sun before we do, of course. Had to speak with him this morning before he’s off to find Matteo.”

“Ah,” Jon said. “How are they doing with the side effects in the Banterlands?”

“About as well as we are, I think,” Crivellaro replied. “Most of the people are still struggling with memory for the most part, but after seven days… minds tend to get back on track, whether they’ve got memories or not. People figure out new solutions to things, sometimes better solutions to things.”

“A fresh start?” the chef inquired, laying out a plate of quail eggs atop toasted baguette.

“Mmm… I wouldn’t put it so optimistically,” replied the Scion. “A lot of marriages easily fell through. Some very important tasks underway came to a halt and won’t be picked up soon or easily. Just because the world will move on doesn’t mean it hasn’t been left permanently scarred. It doesn’t mean we’re in the clear just yet.”

Jon took a long gulp of tea. “It’s been eight days. We haven’t seen any further side-effects yet. It appears to be a one-time event.”

Crivellaro shrugged. “Anything appears that way the first time it happens.”

“Always the skeptic,” muttered Jon.

Crivellaro reached for a few eggs and set them on a small saucer in front of him. “Skepticism or not, the fact remains that we won’t know what’s going on for sure until James can speak with Matteo – and we actually take a look at the threads themselves.”

“Yes,” Jon spoke in abrupt, insincere agreement. “The world will be mended and you will be its champion just as soon as you go meddling in the metaphysics. Now, about the Blu trial, it seems that—”

Crivellaro and the chef grinned to each other. “Always with the local politics, Jon,” she jestingly remarked.

“Yes, the Folly was terrible,” Jon groaned. “It’s going to take months, if not years, to repair the damage its left us with. But in the end, the world is going on and there is business to be addressed. We mustn’t pretend that the entire world has halted.” Jon spoke clearly and quickly, as though reading from a script.

“Yes, yes,” Crivellaro said behind a mouthful of egg. “Go on.”

“Right, so, the… uhm.” Jon sat there for a moment, a dumbfounded look on his face.

“See? You don’t even know what you were going to say. Clearly it wasn’t so terribly impor—”

“The Blu trial!” Jon exclaimed loudly.

“Damn,” Mena snickered, setting out another plate of a sliced, sautéed venison and throwing a wide smile toward the Scion who shook his head, grinning.

“Blu’s trial has gathered two protests thusfar,” Jon continued. “And I imagine there’ll be a third. No one seems to recall what the man had actually done, and despite a significant amount of evidence suggesting his crimes were of an appalling and obscene nature, apparently nobody bothered to write down the specifics of the event save a single account – and many people expect that there was a forgery made after the Folly and that someone might be trying to frame him retrospectively.”

The Scion scoffed. “So after the whole ‘the world will move on’ rant of yours, the news… has to do with the Folly anyway.”

Jon pouted. “Well… yes.”

The chef had to hold back her snickers, her laughing face stuffed into her shoulder.

“I’m overqualified for this job, you know…” Jon muttered to himself. “I ran an entirely continent smoothly and efficiently! A continent covered in scorpions! And spiders! And..”

“Kangaroos.”

A loud huff escaped Jon’s mouth. “I am merely trying to hold the fort in the midst of the chaos.”

Crivellaro nodded, his smile fading to sincerity as he remembered James’ words. “I know you are, Jon. And I appreciate it. My mind is distracted, is all. Tell me about the trial.”

Crivellaro’s mind wandered to visions of threads and the Archive. He knew what he’d have to do, though he wasn’t sure how anyone else would react.

[Matteo ((Taed))]

Amanamwe woke slowly to buttery light and the smell of sizzling bacon.

As she drifted lazily between dream and awareness, a few sleepy neurons tried to connect these sensations, confusedly matching the colour of the dawn to the fatty golden aroma of God's own breakfast. She embraced this synaesthetic hodgepodge with gusto, tasting sunshine on her tongue, and feeling the flavour of crisp, salty bacon on her skin. She rode the pleasant edge of sleep like this for a while, tangled up in crisp white linen sheets, until the augments kicked in and started secreting her preferred morning wakeup mix. Mostly soft-edged eugeroics with a little spike of raw caffeine.

Energy coursed electric through her veins, and she bounced upright from the bed. Peppy and alert, she sauntered over to her apartment window to run through some coordination exercises. A company lease on top-grade muscle twitch and endocrine packages kept her strong and horse-healthy in homeostatic perpetuity, but didn't do much for balance and hand-eye. Without some pretty heavy-duty rewiring upstairs, you had to learn how to use those Superman muscles for yourself.

Sensing her approach, the floor-ceiling window tuned itself into a piezoelectric speaker, and began pumping out headbanging workout beats. Several nozzles arranged beside it let out puffy little coughs, and deposited some few billion nanites into the surrounding air.

The invisibly small robots bunched according to a randomized routine, and began to phosphoresce and move about, forming rapidly whizzing light globes that pushed back against a blow to provide the feeling of contact. Amanamwe settled into a springy readiness stance and began snapping these lights out of the air according to a colour chart that appeared superimposed on the window glass. The chart was periodically joined by callisthenic silhouettes that guided her through various martial postures and weight distributions.

She moved with speed and precision, and before long she'd batted the last of the targets into twinkly oblivion. The nozzles clicked into reverse with a slight sucking sound, and drew the concussed nanites drunkenly back into the fold. A few complimentary chirps marked the end of the workout, along with a ream of biometrics spat out across the glass.

Glancing at the data (not her best ever performance, but definitely in a top percentile), and waiting for her breathing to slow, she was interrupted by her Cortex announcing an incoming call. Trip Mestreyer's smugly fashionable good looks appeared frozen in grinning two-dimensionality across her field of view, and Amanamwe sighed as she accepted the voice-only connection.

"Ammy! Baby. Already up and ready to greet the new day, I see. Let me guess, bed down by nine with a warm glass of milk?"

Amanamwe smiled predatorily--a gesture that her Cortex would have read and transmitted to Trip if she didn't have her privacy screen set relatively tight.

"Actually it was drills at the shooting range, then clan matches till midnight. You should come out next time; Binary combat really clears your head, provided I let you keep it on your shoulders."

Trip's privacy was set as wide as it would go without putting him on remote access, and his emotions--amusement tinged with distaste and a hint of intimidation--were open to her like a book.

"Sorry. I try to keep my troglodytic bloodsport participation to a minimum. But bring me back a nice femur from your next game."

Trip and Amanamwe were both contracted by Bethlehem-Antares, a major insurance firm that dealt mostly with billion-plus corporates, creeds, and judicials. Amanamwe worked as a claims adjuster, and Trip was her immediate superior. However, she was actually senior to or better respected than him in several of the other circles in which they both ran, so in the ever-shifting, labyrinthine, informal dance of Subscription socio-economics, they were nominal equals. Theoretically the entire society was founded universally on such principles of equality and respect, although in practice the system made it clear that certain people could be trusted with responsibilities that others could not.

Trip continued speaking, seguing smoothly into business mode.

"I need you on site to work the Kalik'ak'kitanic thing today. It's all going delicately pear-shaped."

Amanamwe leaned her forehead against the window. "Gee Trip, that sure does sound like a problem for the team that's actually been briefed on the deal." She tapped her fingers on the glass as she looked out through it.

Her apartment was part of a neighbourhood of six-storey brownstones stuck incongruously on a ledge, halfway up a two-kilometre arcology. They clung like a little brick and mortar barnacle to the side of a smart material behemoth with half a million residents. Amanamwe had an out-facing window that gave her a view down the steep curving slope of the larger building, and out to the horizon-spanning city beyond.

"Not joking on this, Ammy. The Dolburn and Razchisle people are losing their minds over this one, and it's got upper management all riled up. Ops has red- and orange-flagged a half dozen security concerns just in the last day."

"Well then, again, I'd say you should probably let the people who know what they're doing handle it. Lammenwick and Brusco are good at what they do. I don't know the first thing about the Killack'ock-- ... the Klalak'ik-- ... I can't even pronounce the damn name!"

Trips emotional meta-data conveyed aggravation in the shaking of his head.

"Lammenwick and Brusco have only ever worked close to home. They're good, but they don't have your experience going Off-Map. I need reliable boots on the ground if this thing is going to go through with a happy ending.

Amanamwe pursed her lips and doodled with her fingertip on the glass. Some buried subprocess recognized the gesture for idle recreation, and began drawing in glowing lines automatically. She highlighted major landmarks in whorls of luminescent virtual fingerpaint.

Other towers like the one on which she was perched studded the landscape, along with blocks and domes of lesser height but similar bulk, all grown up amidst an undergrowth of more sedately sized skyscrapers, low-rises, and intermediate miscellanea. At this vantage point, smaller Gates were invisible, but the view through larger ones produced patchwork incongruities, orthogonal to the rest of the landscape. She could spot a dozen nighttime vistas in stark contrast to the local sunrise, and it looked like it was raining on the other side of the huge Park Central Gate; verdant conifer needles drooping beneath the grey downpour.

"Well, whatever you say boss man," she eventually replied. "But don't try to blame me if it all goes to hell."

Trip's tone dripped with sarcasm. "Thank you so much for agreeing to do your job, and for that ringing endorsement of confidence. I'll see you at the office, we'll get you all tooled up." He cut the connection.

Amanamwe turned away from the window and back to her apartment. It was smallish but open, with the sleeping and eating areas delineated from the living room proper only by a paper screen and marble countertop, respectively. The furnishings were simple, but a cut above Social Basic, at least, and she had even commissioned some gene art by the entryway: a line of silky, big-petalled flowers changed their colour based on the day of the week, and tracked movement to usher people into the home with rustling waves of their leaves.

She snapped up and wolfed down her breakfast from where it steamed cheerily beside the autocooker, taking only a moment to really savour the bacon, then moved into the bathroom for a quick shower. News blurbs scrolled ambiently across the mirror and the shower glass, and she plucked the more interesting ones into her Cortex, to play out in long form behind her eyes.

The smart fabric of her navy blue uniform was obviously in perfect condition, as it would remain until sometime slightly after the heat death of the universe. However, her undershirt had been made from more mundane fibres, and had frayed around the hem. She tossed it absently in the recycler and fabbed a replacement seconds later, in burgundy rather than grey this time.

The chunky sidearm she clipped to her hip was ceremonial, and would remain that way right up until it wasn't anymore. She checked herself in the mirror before leaving, then again from the back using the apartment's cameras streamed to her eyes. Both views were satisfactorily dashing and professional, and she was out the door a moment later.

The street outside her building was tree-lined and cherry-scented; pink blossoms blooming in perpetuity thanks to some clever gene work. To her left it ran away in a gentle curve, eventually crossing through the backing wall and into the arcology proper. To her right, it went a short distance before merging (almost) seamlessly into a seaside avenue lined with white plaster villas. The Gate spanned between two buildings and was enclosed on top by a shallow wrought-iron arch.

Amanamwe headed right, and crossed the roughly two hundred trillion kilometer distance between her and the seaside without breaking stride. The Gate matched for angular momentum, and the air pressure was very nearly equal by design. The marginal difference in gravity brought the usual stomach flutter, but Amanamwe had acclimated to that feeling before she could walk on her own.

There weren't especially many people on the street at this time of day, but there were certainly enough, many of whom actually looked to be on their way home to bed. In the enormous, anarchic, mongrel, meta-society of The Subscription, you could never rely on something as subjective as time to be agreed upon by the whole populace. Or even by a sizable majority.

Amanamwe worked out of Beth-Ant's main office in the Weskatanoh district: a low-slung commercial block with most of its physical real estate spread across the Eridani systems, but sharing elbow room with some patches of Albireo, Hyades, and Loliscombana. Walking, it was about ten minutes away through mostly homogenous geography, with only the seaside and a stretch of cottage-spotted meadowland differing far from the mould of a city street at around dawn.

The building looked like a metal and ceramic circus tent, all peaks and Gehry curves. The lobby was open and welcoming, but she knew for a fact that it had quietly tagged her ID and decided which areas the elevator would allow access to.

Deposited on her floor, Amanamwe moved down a breezy corridor towards her office, but, before she could make it halfway, the walls began to sprout branching hat-tree-like structures tipped with glowing arrows that shook and honked and cajoled her down a different route. Amanamwe rolled her eyes and followed their lead. Trip had admin access and was good with nanomech programming; he was always pulling such stunts with the building's systems.

The arrow trees led her through a meandering spread of open concept office space, growing grey and withered the closer she got to her destination, until the last one crumbled into geriatric cinders at Trip's feet.

They were standing in a large room with a Binary Gate at one end. Trip was surrounded by a haze of clock-ticking, wrist-tapping Cortex emotes that poofed up from beneath his tapping foot like smoke signals of petulant impatience.

"Zaglot's tits!" Amanamwe swore, borrowing a particularly blasphemous translated curse from the Kalik'ak'kitanic primer she had perused during the walk over. "Why don't I just give you clone rights if you're going to act all snitty? Next time you can just brew a few of me up fresh and I can stay home in bed."

"As if adding more of you to the universe is going to make things run smoother," Trip replied, banishing his emotes in a little cyclone of cache-purging. "Come on, walk and talk, the scape is coordinate-locked."

As the pair passed through the Gate, a curtain of picotech disassemblers took their atoms apart and read the resulting state vector. It transcribed them in real time across the boundary, leaving Trip and Amanamwe to be deposited with effortless and invisible continuity into the Binary: the digital twin to the Subscription's already prodigious material real estate.

The virtual landscape on this side of the Gate was as mundane as it was bucolic. A little path ran through old-growth woods, and every pebble, squirrel, and oak tree in sight was 100% reality-compliant. They broke none of the real world's laws, and so could manifest across the Gate boundary into full physicality as easily as the virtual bodies that Trip and Amanamwe now occupied.

They walked briskly along the path, discussing contract specifics and scrupulously ignoring the buried code sequences--visible to their Bethlehem-Antares-authorized eyes--that would flip this scape into a fully abstracted 4-dimensional murderdome with the press of a button.

All Gate routes that led Off-Map had to pass through a suitably defensible Binary scape that buffered the Subscription as a whole against the possibility of attack. Any Kalik'ak'kitanic that decided invasion might be fun to try would have to fight across a pocket universe that consciously wanted to kill them before they could make any headway on the other side.

As they reached the far end of the path, where it passed through another Gate into the saffron and fuchsia Kalik'ak'kitanic embassy, Trip tapped Amanamwe's shoulder and asked her to hold up.

"As you've been so eager to point out, you're not really holding all the cards when it comes to this particular mission. And as I've been trying to point out, conditions on the other side might be somewhat worse than the usual sunshine and rainbows. I figure we can at least do a little extra to stack the deck in your favour."

He held out one hand and passed a ring of glowing silver keys to Amanamwe. Her Binary inventory accepted the loot, which quickly unwrapped itself into the licenses for several very powerful and very expensive pieces of military augmentation ware. She flexed her muscles dramatically at the sudden influx of scary, weaponized IP.

"Much obliged, boss-man," she replied, and signed her name to the boilerplate terms-of-use contract that Beth-Ant would never let such an arsenal be deployed without. "Why didn't you lead with the fun stuff?"

Trip nodded happily, but his Cortex broadcast a twinge of uncharacteristically genuine worry.

"Be careful out there, Ammy. Here be dragons and all that, yeah?"

Amanamwe leant over and gave Trip a peck on the cheek, letting a fraction of her newfound firepower convey itself as a mild electric shock on his skin.

"No need to be scared for little ol' nuclear-powered me. Talk to you soon!"

She hopped across the Gate's plane, and an identical cloud of unseen picotechs wrote her into reality as fast as she could move through them. The new augments did an absolute renovation on her insides, but at least one very popular theory of mind insisted that she was still the same person after her jaunt through cyberspace.

Amanamwe came to a cheerful halt, straightened her uniform, bounced once on the plush purple carpet, and went catapulting through a wall as the Gate behind her exploded.

[James]

Note: This is a combined judgment by Zovo and myself.



Inkdrinker

Strangely, I liked it.

I say strangely because the concept didn't really jump out at me. Underground society of humans with teenage main characters? Meh. I wrote teenagers in Phantoms and obviously there's a host of YA novels, so I'm rather sick of the whole age group. Zovo felt the same way. He said while the writing seemed mature, the subject matter was quite juvenile.

I have to agree. Not the greatest plot, but you actually did a good job on delivering it.

I really enjoyed the initial description of the city; it was remarkably quick but also quite vivid, “the mycofarms at the foot of the switchbacks; damp yet beautiful, the ramshackle housing beyond that; rustic in disgrace” is just really cool scene-setting.

Also, I thought the reasoning for going to the surface was actually really good. There's no “you are the chosen one, you must go up to save us”. It's some lovestruck teenager trying to show off. It's said so casually, it really captures the carefree and total ignorance of the concept of consequences of a 17 year old. So yeah, actually a good job. A decent start.

However, I have a few concerns. Firstly, the first paragraph. Not really sure what exactly is going on there and I feel like prologues that don't make sense until the end of the book can come off as wanky, to use the technical term. I also feel like Liam and Izabel are two steps away from falling into a typical cliched, will they-won't they type situation. It really feeds back into what Zovo and I said at the start, we're not completely sold on the story, but the prose was decent.

Oh, also, excellent use of “beginning”. Yours definitely felt a very natural beginning with a very natural cut-off point. Nice work.

---

Jordoom

Two things I want to get out of the way quickly. You're overusing commas. Several times you had them where they really weren't necessary or serving some stylistic purpose. Just keep an eye on it. Secondly, for fuck sake stop using cap locks, man! Emphasise dialogue through your narrative and the dialogue, don't just resort to caps. It looks really messy.

Okay.

I'm really intrigued. I've read enough Terry Brooks that Annamaria is clearly a Knight of the Word. Seriously, though, I'm intrigued at what the deal is. There's clearly a deal. I also think Jefferson felt quite real; he was a bit of a stereotypical, gruff survivor, but he felt a real, alive survivor and not a cardboard cut out. Equally, the setting was well used. It felt arid and dry, the presence of scorpions setting the scene really quickly. Little things like skirting the freeway also really helped to give the story some dimension.

I had two main concerns, though. Firstly, the preaching. I actually really enjoyed Annamaria's logic about where do you draw the line. If you kill the baby, why not others and so on. That was a really nice way to prove your point. The whole slapping Jefferson and Jefferson's rant felt too much. Preach, feel free to preach, but understatement is a far better weapon than overstatement. Annamaria's little speech was pitch perfect and didn't draw me away from the story. The other parts felt over the top.

Similarly, the gang felt misplaced. Well, not the gang, but how you wrote them. The story had such a distinct tone to it (a really good tone as well) and then you had these almost comical gang members appear. The whole Immaculate Conception/Virgin Birth conversation? I didn't buy it. Didn't buy it at all. I suspect it may even be foreshadowing, but that didn't help the matter, because then it just felt really shoehorned. This was something that Zovo also picked up on. The subject matter seemed really mature, but at times the writing felt quite immature.

So there's a whole lot of good there, but also a few things to look at. I'm pretty keen to find out where this story is going, though.

---

Kaez

When you asked about reworking an old story, my thoughts were:

1. Autumn Came
2. The AWR Setting
3. Wolves in the Dark

So... I'm a little disappointed it wasn't Autumn Came. But I got over it. And who doesn't want to see more of James the Red, amirite? Though Zovo feels like you're cheating because he's been waiting for you to write this story for ages. So, there's that. Bastard.

One of the things that jumped out at me was how accessible the prose was. I don't remember the original attempt that well, I'm afraid, so I don't know if it was like that the first time around. Either way, after some heavy stuff scattered throughout the rounds, this felt quite breezy while also still having some beautiful lines. I feel like you struck a really nice balance.

Except from a missing paragraph space, the first section was an excellent start. My only issue was that unlike say, Inkdrinker, who really utilised the “beginning” sentiment, you seemed to had several beginnings, which may have twisted into middles. Maybe. It's hard to tell. But I'm not going to penalise you for it.

The dialogue was... odd. I'm not sure it knew what it wanted to be. At times, it felt really modern and realistic. Then it would seem a little more fantasy-like. It wasn't entirely consistent and that actually really stood out. At times, James and Crivellaro sounded like Gandalf and Saurman. Then, they morphed into Morecambe and Wise. The same thing happened later on in the story. I think that's the main thing I want you to keep an eye out on. The dialogue. What do you want it to be? Modern or fantastical.

But really, I remain impressed (was I impressed before? I think I was) at how well you've crafted an AWR historical moment into a believable fantasy story. The allusions to 'server' and 'threads' could seem tacky, but they really don't. They sound great.

Keep up the good work. 

---

Taed

I read this before bed and ended up dreaming something which was definitely inspired by the story... so well done?

As I've said before, you demand your reader's attention. While this wasn't complete techno-babble, I had to give the story my full focus. But that's not a bad thing. I don't think you tilted too far toward dragging the reader under a sea of gadgets and definitions. The one exception being names; it seemed to me there were a few too many names floating around.

I think the start worked quite well, though. There was a slight easing into the setting and I really liked the apartment set-up and the nanites work-out. It those types of thing that really gives a world a sense of being alive. To get them in early did a good job of grounding me within the setting. In fact, it was the scene setting and the world building that kept me interested in the story. The gene art, the road that turned seamlessly into a seaside row of villas, the meta society that can't fully agree on time. God I love those ideas. Really well done.

But...

I'm not sure you've drawn me into the stories. The characters are... just there. I don't know, they feel a little bereft of real personality. I think you have a character template you fall back on quite often: bold, confident, funny, charming. You use it a fair bit. It got a run out here, complete with planting a kiss on the cheek of her boss and a dashing uniform.

The plot, too, is a bit of a blur. If someone asks me to describe the other three's stories, I'm going to give a description of the plot and then maybe a bit of scene setting or characterisation. With yours, I'm going to rave about the setting and then go, “and, umm, there's some sort of deal... going south... maybe.” That may be intentional to leave both protagonist and reader going in blind. But coupled with the characterisation, it gives a distinct impression that you got drawn into explaining your world at the expense of other things.

Shit man, this is tough. I love the setting; the writing is strong, but... I'm not hooked with the plot yet. Do I care where this story is going as much as the others?

---

Decision

In my mind, there's very little between the four stories. They're all strong but with problems. However, I think Kaez and Jordoom have done enough to make it through to the next round.

Kaez's beginning is strong, a pleasant read and setting up an interesting story, though he needs to work on the dialogue.

Jordoom's beginning has some flaws that needs to be considered, but the story is set, there's some mysteries need to be solved, and I care about the characters.

On the flip side, Zovo puts Kaez and Taed as his definite two to go through, leaving a scrap between Ink and Jor.

So we have Ink, Jor and Taed fighting it out for that last spot. Kaez is safe.

I think there's one story that leans more toward being eliminated, though. Ink's story has a lot of potential, but may be a little too simple. Taed's story is the opposite. It's so magnificently rich, but I'm not captivated by the plot yet. Jor's story just feels a little bit inconsistent but has a pretty firm foundation.

Fuckity fuck.

Zovo and I decided on an unanimous decision.

ELIMINATED: INKDRINKER

Sorry, pal. You did great throughout this whole competition. You got some giant killing scalps by beating Kaez and Taed in the group stage. I hope you finish the story and keep on writing.

[James]

Congratulations Kaez, Jordoom and Taed. You progress to the Middle Round.

Write the middle of your story.

I'm going to extend the deadline out a day again to give Taed one day after he comes back from camping. So your deadline for Round 2 is:

Thursday, 28th August

[Deleted]

The china clinked softly, like a windchime caught in a summer wind, as he set the cups down onto the saucers, and handed one set to Annamaria.

Grimacing, the old man stepped the tea bag, his crooked nose wrinkling at the sight of it. “I am sorry, Annamaria,” he said, his words weazy and tinged with an erudite Received Pronunciation. He begrudgingly brought the cup to his lips, and slurped it a little. “I myself am accustomed to finer teas, but I am afraid we’ve gone through the good stuff, and now these dreadful little ‘bags’ are all I have on offer.”

Annamaria only smiled, taking a sip of her own. “It isn’t a problem at all, Stephen. I cannot fault you for drinking your finest first. Tomorrow is never a certainty in any age, but our fates are even more precarious in these trying times.” She leaned over and patted his veiny, spotted hand lovingly.

His grimace turned to a smile as well, and he nodded vigorously. “Yes, yes. You were saying that you believe these men to be on their way here? And to do us harm?”

Letting out a sigh, Annamaria nodded. “Yes, Stephen. I am afraid I’ve brought war to your Eden.” He rubbed her bulging stomach wistfully.

It was his turn to lean over and pat her hand. He noted how soft and cool it felt beneath his own. “Now, now, my child. You are merely an innocent young woman looking for refuge, as so many others who come here have. What these men do or do not do will ultimately be their choice, and their choice alone. Don’t fret. I simply won’t have it.” His head was balding, but a circular, thick, white tuft of hair ran like a horseshoe from temple to temple, around the back of his head, as if he had been tonsured by Mother Nature herself.

“You are correct, of course. Still, my heart aches. Tell me of your defenses, Stephen.” She set her cup and saucer down on the short, chipped table before them, and leaned back in the tattered, faided plaid recliner. A little yawn escaped from her lips, and her clenched fist arose to cover her mouth.

Steven set his cup down as well. “Well, we have very little in the way of weaponry. Ten automatic rifles, perhaps a dozen revolvers. Plenty of ammunition for each, I’ll grant you. We have ten men who we have entrusted with the guns. Good men. Godly. Hearty. Strong. They serve as whatever armed and police forces we need, though we need few. To be honest, most issues are solved in courts, not with weapons. Eden, true to her name, is a very harmonious settlement. Not like some of the others down south... Most here have had their full of violence and crime.”

Annamaria wiped a tear from her eye.

“I told you, it isn’t your fault if they come for us.”

The woman smiled, sniffling and knuckling another tear away. “I know, Stephen. I am just so very proud of all of you.”

***

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ, what did ya do to ‘im?” The guard peered from behind a thick, almost Cro-magnon brow at Jefferson Corrigan’s mangled, puffy face. It was all Jefferson could do to wheeze, sending little crimson blood bubbles gurgling forward.

Kraus and Beiers shoved Jefferson onward, past the ugly guardsman. “None o’ your business, Kravston,” growled Beiers as he brushed by.

“Feller bit Greg’s prick clean off,” Kraus responded, stifling a snorting laugh.

Kravston, the ugly guard, shared the laugh with him. “Well, did he shove it in his mouth?”

Zeke stepped forward, scowling. “Shut your fuckin’ trap, Kravthton, you thon of a whore. Open the fuckin’ door. Zeke licked his shattered teeth anxiously as Kravston obliged, sticking his key into the slot and activating the crude pulley mechanism. He cracked the winch and the door creaked and ricketed open, sliding upwards.

“Sam will wanna see ya, Zeke. You get to him ASAP, a’right?”

“Fuck yourthelf, Kravthton,” replied Zeke.

One eye swollen completely shut, Jefferson struggled to take notice of the encampment. He glanced around as much as his jailers would allow, but it was all so dim and blurry, and he soon lost track of all the winding turns they made, and had lost track of the number of men at twenty or so. It was a veritable metropolis of undesirables.

“Now, when we thee Tham, I want you to keep yer trap shut. Tham’th a important guy, he ain’t got time for your anticth.” Zeke peered at him as if to add “Understood?” Jefferson groaned in acquiesence.

They found Sam in a slim, long building. It might have been a bunkhouse or cabin at some point, but now seemed to serve as a command center. Maps and graphs were on the walls, lists and names, all heavily scrawled on with red and blue marker, and dotted with push-pins and thumbtacks.

At the front of the room, sat a handsome, young looking man. Sandy-brown hair and a blonde beard covered his face, and he wore leather chaps over faded blue jeans, with a military vest over a teal shirt. “Welcome back, Ezekiel.”

Recognition flashed as Sam spoke, and Jefferson broke free of Beiers and Klaus, sprinting at Sam and crashing into him. “You son of a bitch!” Jefferson roared through broken teeth and a swollen mouth. “You fucking sack of shit! You! You!”

Beiers and Klaus yanked him off, slamming him backward onto the floor, and releasing a salvo of blows into his stomach and chest. “You calm down now, Jeffy!”

Sam got to his feet, dusting himself off casually. “Hey now, boys. No harm, no foul. I’m fine. I said I am fine! Stop hittin’ him. Jesus, what did you to do the guy?” Sam stepped forward, his cowboy boots thumping softly on the wooden boards that creaked ever so slightly beneath his light step. He squatted down, and peered at Jefferson.

Who proceeded to spit a pinkish glob of spit and blood at him. Klaus backhanded his face, but once more, Sam shot him a wicked glare.

“What’s wrong with this guy? He come at all you like this? That’s why you beat him?” The bandit leader produced a kerchief from his shirt’s breast pocket, and began to dab at his face. Jefferson stared him down, one-eyed and seething.

It was Zeke who responded, “Pretty much. He bit Greg’th pecker off...”

Sam slowly cocked his head upwards, and peered at the dread-locked man. He opened his mouth to speak, and then just shook his head incredulously, and turned back to Jefferson.

“You don’t even remember me...” wheezed Jefferson, staring down the man.

A handsome smile flashed across Sam’s face. “I’m sorry, partner. I can’t say that I do. The condition of that mug of yours probably doesn’t help much, though. We’ve met, have we?”

Jefferson glared. “My life changed that day, and you don’t even remember. Don’t even fuckin’ remember.” Tears welled in his eyes, and began to slide down his face, leaving pale, snake-like streaks where the blood and grime was cleared, revealing his skin underneath.

Sam nodded. “Ah. I take your wife, did I? Sorry, man.”

“Yes. My Linda. And my daughter. My Ceilidh.” Finally, it could be held back no longer. How many days had it been? How many days since he had heard their screams, their cries, their begging... He had held it all in since then, and now it could no longer be contained. He slumped over onto his side, his face against the floorboards, and sobbed uncontrollably.

“I’m sorry... I’m sorry... I couldn’t save you... I’m sorry...”

After quite some time, Sam cleared his throat. “Leave us,” he commanded.

Ezekiel stammered a protest, but Sam slammed his fist down on the table. “I said leave us.”

Once they had all filed out, Sam kneeled down, and put a hand on Jefferson’s shoulder. “There, there. There ya go, buddy. Let it out, man. You do what you gotta do.”

Jefferson wiped his face, and looked up at the man. “Is that what you did? When you... When you ... When you raped them, in front of me? In front of each other? When you gave ‘em to your men? ‘Doin’ what you had to do?’”

Sam nodded. “Yup. You’ve spent a few days with those boys. Only one language they speak, unfortunately. The language of the jungle. Survival of the fittest. All that jazz. I’m sorry about your family, I am. But you and I both know, if it wasn’t me, it would have been someone else. But I promise you, I didn’t do it for no reason. In fact, you might say I did it for the best possible reason.” He smiled, and crow’s feet flanked his bright blue eyes.

Slumping down onto his butt to sit, cross-legged, in front of Jefferson, Sam went on. “The way I see it, this ain’t the end. I know that’s what they call it, in the towns and settlements that sprung up. ‘The End.’ That’s bullshit and you know it too. They tell me you bit a feller’s pecker off, and Zeke sure as hell wasn’t that ugly when I sent him out. So why would you fight, if it was ‘The End.’”

He let that sink in. Either because of exhaustian or inertia, Jefferson only stared.

“Way I see it, ‘The End’ was merely a setback. Like the Black Death. The Toba eruption. The Deluge. I’m sure lots of fools was runnin’ around after those, too, goin’ on about how ‘it’s all over!’” He scratched his thick beard. “Bullshit. Absolutely bullshit. But I’ll tell you what will be The End. If humanity doesn’t unite, if we don’t come together... It will be the End.”

Jefferson groaned. “You call what you do ‘coming together?’” He shook his head, flatly chuckling in disbelief.

Sam nodded. “Matter of fact, yeah. I do. You think the desert is bad, partner? You think me and my boys are as bad as it gets? You’re more of a fuckin’ fool than you know, if that’s what you think. Let me guess, you were in suburbia when it all went down. Right? Right?”

Jefferson shook his head, “Camping... We were camping in the desert... Was teachin’ my daughter...” Tears welled in his eyes.

Once more, Sam nodded, though this was a slower, knowing nod. “Ah, see. I was in LA when it went down. ‘City of Angels.’ Looked more like Sodom then, or worse. People there were goin’ straight tribal. First it was the looting, and then the killin’. Then came the cannibalism... Then, y’know, shit kinda died down and wasn’t too bad... But then came the orgies, the sacrifices, the altars n’ shit. There’s darkness out there, buddy. We don’t wrestle against flesh ‘n’ blood. No sir. We wrestle against principalities.”

Jefferson shook his head. “You’re fuckin’ unbelievable. You and your sadistic little clowns.”

“Zeke and his boys are a bunch of jokers, I’ll give ya that. Greg and Marty were the worst, can’t say I’m sad they didn’t come back.” He chuckled, shaking his head. “But, what makes you say that?”

“You raped and killed my family, and you’re telling me it was for a good cause? A good reason? What sort of reason is that?”

“Civilization. Most men aren’t like us. Most are like Zeke and his boys. Take away their Xboxes and frozen dinners, and they become worse than animals. They need to be lead, they need to have their animalistic urges channeled. The raping will stop, I promise you. Sooner than later, I hope. But for now, if I wanna lead the beasts, I gotta be just beastly enough.”

He nodded to himself. “Yep, but over time, they will be civilized again. Get a code of laws, hell maybe a religion or somethin’, and before you know it , we’ll be farming again. Then buildin’. Only took us, what, 5000 years to go from domesticated crops to space-flight? I reckon we can do it in a quarter of the time on this go-around. And, so, yeah, I’ll sacrifice a few people to do that. You’re damned right I will.”

Jefferson laughed. First it was another low, flat chuckle, but then he laughed even harder. Breathlessly, he gasped, “You’re a coward! You’re a coward. Look at Eden! I never heard of no one from Eden ever raping or killing. You’re vile, but you can’t even admit it. You’re pathetic. A pathetic cowa-“

The other man’s fist struck him in the mouth. “I ain’t a coward, and Eden is a fuckin’ myth. Do you honestly think there is anywhere out there that is safe and peaceful? Look at what I have had to give just to eke out this little kingdom! Look what I had to take. You don’t think if there was another way, I would have taken it? It has been two years since the End, man! I tried it the good way. I tried it, and it failed, and I had enough. I will build a city, then a kingdom, then an empire, and then a civilization. I’ll save our race, while you sit back and dream of Eden.” He stood up with finality, and walked toward the door.

“Zeke thinks its real. My... my friend... She’s heading there. We both were, until your hyenas got to us. And as soon as you send him out into that field, he’s gonna go right there.”

Sam smiled. “You don’t think I’ve sent men out looking for it? There ain’t no such thing.” His tone seemed to imply the discussion was over. A flicker of hope burned in Jefferson’s belly. Perhaps
Annamaria would be safe, even if Zeke looked for her? The only dread was if Sam was right, and it was a lie...

The door creaked open, and Klaus and Beiers entered the room. “No more hittin’ him, no more beatin’ on him. He’s had enough. Next one that hits him gets ten from me. Bind his hands, though, because I know he don’t like you guys, and lock him up. But bring him whatever he needs and asks for, within reason. Get him some ice for that mug of his, too.” Sam smiled at Jefferson, helping him to his feet and cuffing him with cold, steel handcuffs. “You’re a good man, uh—“

“Jefferson. Jefferson Corrigan.”

“You’re a good man. You let me know if there’s anything you need. I’ll need men like you moving forward.”

Jefferson shook his head. “I will never help you.”

“Never say never, son. Never say never.

***

Annamaria watched as the hatch was open, and light flooded in. The light was the light of the desert sun at noon, and it created wonderful dancing sunbeams within the dimly lit tunnels. “We think our light is bright enough, but look how it is washed out by the Sun.” She smiled, raising her dark hand into the light, twisting her wrist elegantly and slowly as the heat caressed her skin.

Stephen and his two men, Rich and George, merely glanced at one another. Finally, Stephen cleared his throat. “Yes, my dear. Well, we should close the hatch. We normally only open it at night, with the torches dimmed. The sun can catch on the metal of the interior part of the hatch, and make for quite a spectacle."

Annamaria nodded knowingly as Rich pulled the hatch shut. It closed with a loud thud, and the two men spun the wheel-lock into place, the veins in their thick arms popping with the effort. Stephen offered Annamaria his arm, and she took it as the four of them turned and descended back down the long tunnel. They were flanked on either side by dim, encased lightbulbs, all the way back to the main doors.

“How far was I, Stephen? When you and your men found me the other day?”

“You were about thirty yards away from the door, my child. We saw you on one of the surveillance cameras, lying there. I didn’t want to open the gate, I am ashamed to say. But then Rich here spoke up. ‘Why are we here, then? If we aren’t going to be a refuge, a haven, an Eden, then we should leave. Leave now and give this place to people who deserve it, because if we leave her out there, we don’t.”

Rich, squat but muscled man with a round face and small nose, blushed bright red. Stephen smiled, “And of course, he was right. And it was at that moment, too, that I noticed your stomach. I must confess, Annamaria, I was nauseated that I had considered leaving you there. Can you forgive me?”

She touched his arm tenderly. “You only had the safety of your people in mind. Forgive you? Sir, I commend you. But I also commend you, Richard. A home without charity is not a true home, in my opinion. If Eden loses that love, I fear it would no longer be Eden, and that would be a greater tragedy than all our deaths, I think. Better to die with a fire in your heart than live an eternity as a frigid soul. Or so that’s what I think, I understand if you don’t agree.”

George shook his head. “No, you’re right. The world needs us, as us.”

“Excellently put, my friend,” Annamaria smiled. At last, they were at the end of the tunnel. The gatekeeper opened the doors, and let them in. Annamaria turned to face down the tunnel once more. “Hidden beneath the sand, beneath US Government titanium doors... This place is truly impregnable, isn’t it, Stephen?”

“Yes, my dear. Yes, I would say that it is.”

Annamaria nodded, and turned once more to face him. She stepped forward, took his bald, spotted head in both of her hands, and gently pulled it forward. Planting a kiss on it, she beamed. “Well then, it seems that I must depart.”

The three men, and the gatekeeper, gaped at her. Rich cleared his throat. “But... but we took you in. You’re safe, you don’t need to go back out there.”

Annamaria smiled sadly at them. “I wish you were correct. I would love to drink bad tea with Stephen, braid your daughters’ hair, watch your sons fall in love and marry. I would love to eat and drink and dance with you all, for all eternity. I would love nothing more than to watch my son grow big and strong in here, to die before him at an old age, to see him raise beautiful baby boys and girls of his own. O, men! If only you could feel how hard my heart beats in my breast for these things. But I cannot. I have a soul to save. A dear friend, who I shall not abandon.”

“Stay here, and let us get him!” demanded George.

Rich was in agreement. “You tell us where he is, and we’ll go get him.”

She shook her head. “I do not know where he is, and I would not send you if I did. While I hate to use such cliche phrasing... This is something I must do, alone.” She winked at them playfully. “I will require water, rations, a knife, and anything else you can spare. Don’t give me a gun, I shan’t keep it if you do.”

Stephen looked as if he would weep. “Annamaria, I can’t let-“

“You will bring these items to me before sunset. You will not tell anyone else I am leaving until I am gone.” Her face was stern and austere, but serene. Her voice was steady, but there was no anger in it. Nor did she leave any possible sign of fear or weakness with her timbre.

“You’re pregnant,” cried Stephen desperately.

Annamaria nodded. “Yes. Now go.”

So Stephen went.

[Matteo ((Taed))]

A calm, cool voice was speaking.

"Do not attempt to move your head," it said.

This was an easy command to follow.

"Explosive injury sustained. Local brisance measured at 9,213 meters per second; moderate spallation. Additional beta cascade measured at 2,900 roentgens. Detecting severe exsanguinatory trauma (ongoing). Detecting soft tissue burns, second-degree, 42% coverage (static; radiological contaminated; erythema onset predicted). Detecting pressure shock ruptures to major organ groups. Confirm repair priority order: respiratory, circulatory, gastroenterological, sensory, radiological, y/n?"

This was ... less easy.

A phosphor-green icon appeared floating in the dark, cotton-filled space that Amanamwe occupied. She blinked blearily at it (or would have done, if she had eyes). The voice seemed to know what it was doing, so she focused mentally on the YES option.

"Confirmed. Commencing active alveolus reconstruction. Attempting transfer to epidermal osmosis respiration. Failed; tissue scarring prevent adequate gas diffusion. Switching to internal O2 reserve supply. Attempting reroute to undamaged cardiovascular circuit. Warning: optimal survivability route compromises blood-brain delivery by 63%. Long-term damage manageable; short-term damage guaranteed. Authorize, y/n?"

The icon appeared once more, floating alone in the infinite void like the first Word of creation. Violate CP-symmetry, y/n? Satisfy anthropic principle y/n? Let there be light, y/n?

Amanamwe dragged her thoughts grudgingly into alignment in order to process the question. Having gone to so much effort ordering them, she then decided she would like to keep them that way. She focused on the NO option, and the icon vanished from her mental non-vision.

"Confirmed. Prioritizing neural integrity. Computing alternate recovery plan."

Amanamwe wasn't sure, but she thought she could detect a hint of accusation in the voice's tone. A sort of 'you never make anything easy, do you?' inflection.

"Alert. External movement detected. Possible hostile contact. Visual input required. Bypassing ocular reconstruction; commencing photoreceptor backup. Accelerating cognitive response."

Lightning arced within the dark space, and Amanamwe felt herself jolted into clarity. She remembered walking with Trip Mestreyer and kissing him goodbye. She remembered arriving on an alien planet through the Binary Gate. She remembered (in slow-mo-assisted reconstruction) the sudden explosion tossing her heavily augmented and militarized body through several layers of high-strength building material. She became aware of her body again, relatively intact, albeit lumpier and leakier than she remembered, and with every one of its pain receptors firmly disabled.

The explosion's shockwave had left her eyes resembling the remains of popped red party balloons, but as pigments in her skin refined themselves into primitive phototransducers, her face itself became a sort of crude camera. A flat, unfocused cousin of binocular vision came swimmingly into being, just in time for Amanamwe to see herself rolled over, and brought face to face with a mandibled cotton-candy jellyfish.

The Kalik'ak'kitanik were not an attractive people by human standards, or, indeed, by the standards of almost any intelligent species one chose to name. They had been described in the past as something like a pink beetle, left to soak until its shell had softened like conchiglie pasta. This one was about two meters in length, and dodecapodal, although Amanamwe understood that they actually displayed a surprisingly broad variation in morphology.

The Kalik's many-segmented mouthparts were moving in a way that was no doubt intended to produce their signature, consonant-heavy speech. However, Amanamwe's inner-ears were currently oozing out of their respective canals, and all she could hear was the cool voice asking if it should deploy cannibalizing nano-flechettes against the alien, y/n?

Amanamwe declared a resounding NO against that question, reasoning that if this Kalik had been involved with the explosion, it probably would have attacked her already, and that even if it was, the only thing less attractive than a healthy Kalik would be one with its face half-melted by hungry, microscopic robots.

A familiar arm appeared (every arm is familiar when compared against the jointed talon of a pink plasticine crustacean) and was joined shortly by an even more familiar face, pushing the Kalik out of view. Daria Lammenwick loomed over Amanamwe; the poor resolution of the latter's vision limned the former in flickering, tilt-shifted backlight, giving her the appearance of a cardboard-cutout Valkyrie. Daria was attempting to speak as well, but she seemed to catch on to the dribbly cochlea problem more quickly than the Kalik had.

She looked off to one side and gestured quite emphatically, and Amanamwe felt herself picked gently up in four spiny arms. The ersatz sense of body-awareness she had been granted in place of actual touch or pain conveyed that the skin on her back was crinkling rather more than would have been preferable.

"Alert, unable to compensate for decreased vascular pressure. Attempt emergency consciousness sustention, y/n?"

The icon appeared in Amanamwe's field of view, but before she could reply, it rasterized away into watery pointillism along with everything else.

*****

"So," she said, lifting a jiggling spoonful of creamy, syrup-laden confection to her mouth. "It would appear that things are not going especially well."

Amanamwe was sitting in bed in a lilac and eggshell hospital ward, an improbably large and sugary desert balanced on the small table across her lap. Eyes and ears had grown back in nicely over the last few hours, and the more damaged internal organs had frothed away to be replaced by fresh versions of themselves. It turned out that her biomedical augments were very, very good once freed from the tedious obligation of having to ask permission on which body parts could be scrapped, recycled, and stripped for parts. They were, however, also running her metabolism like a blast furnace, and she had never been hungrier in her life.

Daria Lammenwick shifted uncomfortably on a small chair at the foot of the bed. Peitr Brusco sat beside her.

"Yes, well," Daria replied. "The locals have been somewhat less than cooperative."

"One might even go so far as to say antagonistic," Brusco added. He was currently hazed in a cloud of Cortex graphics displaying after-action damage reports and casualty assessments.

"Why don't you walk me through it from the start? Who do we think bombed the Gate? More importantly, how do we think they bombed the Gate? Last time I checked the old universal technology chart, the Kaliks were only a tier seven, while we were, what? Nine? Nine and a half?"

"No, some committee changed the scale," said Daria. "We're a twelve now, I think."

"Then where are the Kaliks?"

Daria shrugged.

"They're a level we-could-easily-crush-their-whole-backwards-civilization-beneath-our-pretty-boot-heel-if-we-weren't-far-too-civilized-to-even-consider-such-a-beastly-and-uncouth-course-of-action," offered Brusco. "And a half."

"Which still begs the question of how they managed to cut us off from the whole Map, and why I'm sitting here with my backside toasted by beta rays."

Daria called a small dossier of files into being above the bed.

"The most likely suspects for the bombing are a terror cell called, tellingly, The Illuminated Brotherhood of the Divine Intellect's Singular Purification. That's only a rough translation, but I assure you it is entirely without irony. Fundamentalist whackjobs, every one."

She flicked through the dossier, displaying a sample of colourfully animated pamphlets, posters, and other rhetorical literature. The Kalik'ak'kitanik eye could view the polarization of light, and many of the images were annotated with the spectra associated with blood.

"They're against the upload exchange based on some religious or ideological principle about the sanctity of a naturally-evolved Kalik brain."

"Has it been explained to them that the upload vectors aren't sapient, and that the template personalities are all volunteers anyway?" Amanamwe asked.

"It has. They don't care. Apparently, all minds belong to God--specifically, to Ankanthke'klilaz, the Enlightened God Who Swims in the Depths of the Unconscious--not to the individual."

Amanamwe squeezed her eyes shut and pinched the bridge of her nose.

"Why are we interested in these people again?"

"Oh come on," said Brusco. "Big squishy space lobsters? I hear they invented jet engines and body modification before they invented fire; when they were still aquatic they'd do surgery on one another to turn their abdomens into big outboard motors. They have to be at least a little interesting."

The Subscription has been compared to a black hole in more ways than one. Socially and technologically, it has undergone several developmental singularities, meaning events beyond which the outcome is impossible to predict. Spatially, the event horizon of a Gate bears many mathematical similarities to its naturally-occurring cousin. Informationally, the Binary network uses faster-than-light technology to pack an obscene amount of computation into an improbably small space, and, indeed, its deepest and most abstracted levels are rumoured to display causality-bending weirdness, with the more mundane servers orbiting somewhere above this dense, pointlike data core.

Mostly, though, people like to think of the Subscription as a black hole because of its insatiable appetite. It amasses creativity the way a stellar nucleus amasses hydrogen, and it never seems to get full. Art, science, culture, history; they all tumble in to feed the idea forges of two trillion citizens. And while a great deal of creativity is produced from within, the society's economy recognizes that novelty is the only real measure of wealth between equally-matched, post-scarcity parties, so it has become accepted business practice to go looking for new worldviews from outside the civilization itself.

The cultural exchange with the Kalik'ak'kitanik was a fairly standard example of such a deal. The Kaliks would be paid handsomely, and would provide halted state vectors from a broad selection of their citizens; perfect, frozen snapshots of an individual's mind, showing the precise location and direction of their thoughts. The implicit agreement was that these static minds would never be fed into a system that could run them like a real brain, and would therefore never be truly alive. But by studying the information in the abstract, the Subscription would be able to perfectly predict how those minds would respond to any situation, thereby broadening their understanding of the Kalik people, and of the universe in general.

Amanamwe let her spoon drop to the bottom of the bowl with a clatter, then proceeded to lick frosted sugar off her fingers.

"So that gives us some insight on the who. Any word on the how?"

Daria flicked to a new tab showing a complex heuristic information map, nodes of fact linked by axons of rumour and correlation, thickness varying according to veracity and relevance.

"Intelligence analysis suggests that the Brotherhood may be supported by elements inside the Kalik government. Specifically a few politicians with orthodox religious leanings, and military hardliners with an allergy to information-sharing. They in turn are probably getting help from a more advanced civ--obviously one that doesn't like us very much--which is how they managed to bomb the Gate through as-yet undetermined means."

"Well that certainly paints a pretty little fucked up picture of mays and probablies and shadowy conspiring against our vaunted selves." Amanamwe pushed the empty bowl aside with a last nostalgic dip of her finger in the melted creamery at its bottom.

"Alright here's the plan. I get out of this bed, and we go full fascist dictatorship over this whole affair. Lock everything down, and if someone tries to stop us I put my petite foot up their behind with the force of a pneumatic drill. Remind everyone what Beth-Antares is all about."

Lammenwick and Brusco nodded with undisguised relish. The Subscription did not have a military, seeing as how it did not really have a government. The role was filled by the various security and insurance firms, who underwrote the safety of their clients with iron-clad contracts and plasma-tipped missiles.

"First, however, I have one more matter to attend to," Amanamwe said, and pressed the button to summon another dessert.

*****

The rest of the day was spent putting out fires, and convening with the various officials on both sides of the negotiating table. The Subscription was represented by Dolburn and Razchisle polities, who in turn represented the roughly eight billion subscribers that comprised their electorate, and who had contracted Bethlehem-Antares in the first place. There were still a number of details to be hammered out in the deal between these groups and the Kalik'ak'kitanik, and Amanamwe spread her meagre security force thin securing the talks.

Lammenwick and Brusco had returned to the embassy to oversee repairs on the Gate. Thankfully, only the negative-mass expander machinery had been destroyed in the bombing. The wormhole mouth itself--an aperture in spacetime several orders of magnitude smaller than an atomic nucleus--had been saved and carefully bottled until it could be enlarged once more.

The Kalik capital city was a brass and sandstone sweep of sinusoidal peaks and valleys. Fluted and terraced buildings climbed their way up rounded slopes, then plunged downwards into warm tidal pools. The amphibious Kaliks mainly navigated this landscape through an intricate network of trolley cars on raised tracks that clattered through the air as easily as they dipped below the waterline. Amanamwe found her body more than capable of handling the switch from air to water breathing, making it far easier for her than most aliens to get around.

Riding one of these trolleys back from a meeting with various nonspecific ministers and military officers (any one of whom, she grimly considered, could have had a hand in the bombing itself), she leaned her head wearily against a gleaming copper pole and watched a slew of open-air terraces sweep by. Eventually, the train arrived at the embassy station with a clatter, and she disembarked.

Strips of emergency tape marked in alternating horizontal- and vertical-polarized red stripes (just a solid red line to human eyes) still fluttered about the entrance to the place, but the Kalik policemen on duty stepped lively (on six to fourteen legs, no less) to let her by.

Entering the embassy, Amanamwe was greeted by a swarm of lesser functionaries who disgorged a glittering chaff of Cortex graphics into her local processing volume. With the Gate destroyed, they were cut off from the Subscription's larger data network, but the fifty-odd humans and humanoids currently on the planet were enthusiastically generating a busy little internet all their own.

She met with Daria in the shattered refuse of the former entry hall. Bodies had all been cleared by now, but scorched detritus was still heaped in thoroughly pulverized dunes. Kalik maintenance staff were doing their best to clear this rubble at one end of the hall, and a clutch of Beth-Ant technicians were muscling the wormhole's chrome containment bottle into a more stable unit at the other.

As they talked, Daria handed over a packet of files detailing the repair estimates. Gates were difficult to build, but the polity officials had been here for some time, and had brought an almost-industrial-grade fabricator with them. Working on nothing else, it would be able to manufacture all of the components in a little more than a day.

"It's a damn good thing the Gate's failsafes were so quick," she was saying. "If the wormhole got lost in the general foam we never would have found it again. Nearest ship is six weeks out, I hear. Not exactly my idea of a holiday."

"I don't know," Amanamwe replied. "The weather's nice. They sell some kind of curd-fried arachnid that's surprisingly tasty."

"Can we expect you to talk about anything other than food in the near future?"

"I don't know. I'd imagine I'd talk less if you found me some food. Full mouth and all that."

"Oh good, well I'll get right on that. You've checked off the fat, salt, and sugar food groups nicely already, would you like me to find you something of the alcohol and carbohydrate varie--?"

"Get down!" Amanamwe shouted, even as her hardwired reflexes were pulling Daria into a protective hold.

Invisible laser light scored roughly across her back, as the Kalik work crew turned and opened fire with the weapons they had been concealing. Amanamwe dove forward with Daria in her arms, trailing a comet tail of smoke and embers. She rolled smoothly and came up in the hollow of a collapsed pillar, safe from the burning fusillade.

Unfortunately, the same could not be said for the Subscription staff working on the Gate's wreckage, who crumpled into smouldering heaps beneath the sudden assault. The Kaliks surged forward with blurring speed, armour plates and hydraulic lines unfolding from beneath their clothes to enclose them in a powered grip. They pinned Amanamwe down beneath further sputtering gouts of laser fire, allowing them to secure the wormhole canister and flee from the room in a matter of seconds.

Amanamwe unfolded from a shell-shocked Daria, confirming that she was unharmed with a glance. She drew her sidearm from its rarely-opened holster.

"Stay here," she commanded, already loping across the room at speed. She thudded through the doors with one shoulder lowered like a battering ram, and accelerated down the hallway beyond. Casualties--human and Kalik civilians both--became evident as she moved on, and Amanamwe shed a few thumb-sized trauma drones behind to deal with them. She almost stopped when she saw Brusco slumped in a doorway, cradling a severed hand, but forced herself instead to tag him for the medics and move on.

She entered the rail station just as the Kalik terrorists were boarding. The fully-deployed armour made them hard-edged and gleaming, suddenly far more alien insect than dopey jellyfish. The Kaliks didn't have her reflexes, but the automated weapon packages adhered to their plated abdomens did, and Amanamwe was forced to cartwheel through a spray of various creative munitions. Her onboard e-warfare suite played merry hell with the weapons' targeting software, but it was still a near miss, with walls and floor around her being chewed into grey dust.

Amanamwe fired her weapon with two whispered pops, and one of the Kaliks went instantly rigid. The multi-virus payload locked up the armour's computers as easily as it did the wearer's nervous system. The trolley was already pulling away with the other terrorists onboard, however, and Amanamwe had to perform a thirty-foot standing leap to catch it.

She landed roughly, and caught herself from falling with one hand. Dangling behind the last car, she fired up the line of open-walled trolleys with the gun in her other hand, and dropped another Kalik into paralysis. Someone had overridden the train's controls, and it was accelerating far more than should have been possible.

Clinging to the roof of a green and brass locomotive above a city of alien sandcastles, Amanamwe moved grimly towards the front, trading fire with metal-jacketed terrorists. Kinetic impactors and lasers in a variety of wavelengths thudded periodically into her chest, but her skin had laced itself with fullerenes and mirrored pigments, and she advanced with sullen implacability.

One of the Kaliks popped into view with a shoulder-mounted rocket already ratcheted into position, and Amanamwe swung automatically into the car's interior. Tatters of metal and fire shrieked overhead, and the train's rear half tore away behind her with a rush. Another Kalik burst into view at the car's front, spraying the seats with explosive rounds. Amanamwe ducked and rolled, and found herself knocked through a hole in the cab's side by percussive shockwaves.

She dangled again, holding on with one hand. The Kalik scuttled forward with its oversized weapon raised on some sort of articulated armature. It braced itself against the metal railing to get an angle on her. Without thinking Amanamwe reached out with her free hand to scrape her fingers against the superconducting track. Electricity flowed through her body, directed by superconducting channels all her own, and passed by her other hand into the trolley's frame. The Kalik smoked and sparked in palsied rigour before tumbling back into a heap.

Amanamwe hoisted herself back into the cab just as the train's nose pierced the surface of the pool below it. She braced herself against the wall of water, and saw millions of tiny white bubbles glow with the light of lasers directed against her.

The train surged around the perimeter of a residential bay, where houses glowed in ephemeral bioluminescence, and Kaliks swam freely between the concentric levels. Amanamwe dragged herself up the cab between the rows of seats, where little streamers of acceleration bubbles flowed from every corner.

The train erupted back into open air in a tremendous plume of spray, and water gurgled steadily out through runnels in the floor. Amanamwe's slow-motion slog became and run, and she raced up the length of the train even as a matte black military flyer angled in from above a cluster of spiralling cupolas nearby. It matched the train's speed and dropped a ramp, and the Kalik terrorists began boarding en masse, the Gate wormhole canister in tow.

One Kalik turned to fire high-impact round at Amanamwe, several of which slammed into her chest. The shuddering blows shook droplets of water from her clothes in staccato sprays, and forced her to take cover as modified survival instincts warned her that she couldn't take much more.

The last Kalik boarded the flyer as she slumped behind a seatback only five rows away. The flyer started to break away, then, almost as an afterthought, pivoted and fired a missile into the track some distance ahead. The train sped on towards the now gaping hole.

"This is getting ridiculous," Amanamwe said, before the ramshackle remains of the train sailed off into the air and slammed through a wall some distance below.

[James]

Reviews are coming, but to get this show on the road.

Jordoom and Taed are through to the Final Round! Write the endings to your story.

Deadline: Saturday, 13th August

[ASGetty ((Zovo))]

Sept 7, 2014 4:39:09 GMT -5 James said:

Reviews are coming, but to get this show on the road.

Jordoom and Taed are through to the Final Round! Write the endings to your story.

Deadline: Saturday, 13th August

And by August he means September.

[James]

Sept 7, 2014 12:08:05 GMT -5 ASGetty ((Zovo)) said:

Sept 7, 2014 4:39:09 GMT -5 James said:

Reviews are coming, but to get this show on the road.

Jordoom and Taed are through to the Final Round! Write the endings to your story.

Deadline: Saturday, 13th August

And by August he means September.

... yep.

[Deleted]

Dreamscapes. Visions. Tableux vivants. The images flashed before his eyes, half-remembered reveries from before The End. Ceilidh as an infant, covered in afterbirth and crying out into the Universe, Linda smiling breathlessly up at him. Ceilidh at three, on her tricycle. Blond hair pulled back in two pigtails, blowing in the wind. And then, almost the exact same vision, only she was larger, her hair longer, and in a ponytail this time. The tricycle had become a bicycle, and the bicycle had shread its training wheels. She was going fast. So fast. Jefferson stepped forward to go after her, to stop her. In his dream, now as it was then, Linda grabbed his arm. “No, hun. Let her go. Look, she’s fine.”

Then they were in the living room, and Ceilidh was no longer a little girl, but a young woman. The Harrison boy from down the road stood beside her, sweating bullets. Good, Jefferson had thought back then. He should be scared. But the young man had promised to have her back by midnight, and had done so. That won Jefferson over pretty quickly, he’d admitted back then, the next morning, over breakfast. They were in the kitchen. “Better the devil you know, and whose voice cracks everytime he speaks to you.” “Be nice, Daddy!” she had laughed in response, but he could see how happy she was that he had approved of the boy.

Another flash, and another dream, another tableu. “Daddy! Daddy, no! Help me!” Linda was wailing, her face bleeding from being struck. Jefferson roared on the ground, as five men held him down, hand-cuffing him holding him. The sixth lay on the ground, shrieking as loud as Linda, with his eyes pushed into his cranium.

“Let her go!” he had roared so loud he thought his throat would tear. “Let her go!” But the only thing that tore was her shirt as the bandit frantically tore it off of her. “She’s just a girl, you fucking let her go!”

“Daddy, help me!”

A new dream. The young man had been left behind by his group, his leg injured. Jefferson found him sitting on the side of the freeway, his hair has been ginger, like Jefferson’s. He was covered in freckles, and so young. Maybe a year or two older than Ceilidh. “Oh, thank God,” he had said as Jefferson loomed over him, the sun casting a massive shadow of a man over the injured boy. “Do you have any water.”

But then Jefferson had leaned in, and the boy saw his face more clearly. He reached for his pistol. Too slow. For four days, Jefferson had held the boy in the old, dusty cabin. Every day, the boy begged. “Please... Please... No more... Just kill me. Oh, Christ, please, please, just killed me.” And every day, Jefferson denied him. Not after what you did. Never. A funnel with bleach. Removing fingernails with pliers. Jefferson had seen it all in the Middle East, and applied it all to the boy.

When the boy finally died, Jefferson dragged the corpse outside. Removed the genitals at the stem, stuffed them in the mouth. Impaled him, anus to neck, on a sharpened spike. Sliced him, groin to chest, and popped open the rib cage. “RAPIST. MURDERER.” So read the crudely made sign, spray paint and a floorboard ripped up from inside, and hung over his neck with a chain. He had still had his ID and wallet from before the Fall. Jefferson never forgot the name or the face. Len Gamble, eighteen. Rot in Hell, Len.

But even that hadn’t stifled their screams. “Daddy, help me!”

Jefferson woke up, inhaling sharply and drenched in sweat. He was shaking, and his face was dripping sweat and tears. He was half-naked and emaciated, and the track-marks and bruises covered his right arm. He had swore and cursed when the men had come in and injected him, but now every time they brought him food, he threw it away and begged for more of the drug. It had kept his dreams at bay, at least for a time. But now, they were coming back, clearer and more vivid.

“Please,” he called, his voice wispy and his throat as dry as the Sonoran. “Please, one more hit. Somebody. I need it. Her voice. Make it stop. One more hit. Please. Please!”

The two men outside of his room just peeked in, and shook their heads. Sam had made sure that no one who interacted with Jefferson was of the original group who had brought him in, and so Jefferson didn’t know their names, and didn’t care to ask. They were just goons, thugs. Monsters, like Len. Part of him wanted to kill them all, but part of him was just sick to death of it all, and wanted them to end him. He moaned once more, begging them for the heroin, but they just ignored him.

He got to his feet, and started pounding on the door. “Sam, then! Bring me Sam! Please! Let me talk to Sam! He’ll tell you. I can have it. He said. Whatever I need, he said! Please. Please! I can’t go back to sleep, I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.” He slumped down against the door, face in his hand, and sobbed.

“Daddy! Daddy help me!” she cried out once more.

“I can’t, baby,” he whispered, snot bubbling in his nose. “I can’t.”

****

She couldn’t say how long she had been walking, but she knew she must find one of them, sooner or later. Annamaria’s baby moved within her, kicking and punching at her as if to spurn her on. She smiled down at him, brushing a lock of brown hair out of her eye. “I know, little one. We’ll find him, though. I have faith.” Still, the baby within didn’t relent.

The man that had tried to capture them, Ezekiel, was an exceptionally lost soul. Full of anger and hate, and lusting even after her, with her broad belly. Her heart ached for him and she silently hoped that it was not too late for him. But, despite her concern for the dreadlocked man, her real mission was not him. “No,” she said aloud, to no one in particular. “No, I have to save Jefferson. He is the one.”

Annamaria smiled wistfully as she thought about him. She wished she had met him before The Fall. Deep within his eyes, behind the corpse-like deadness and the anger and hate and guilt, there was glistening in those azure pools great love, and courage, and mirth. She imagined him as a man with great belly-laughs, a warm smile, and strong hands. Hands that would bring about so much love and goodness for those around him.

Her thoughts returned, unbidden, to Ezekiel, and the other men with him. Most of them so young. Some even young enough to be Jefferson’s children. She wished that it were so. The man only had one daughter, and while Annamaria was sure he loved her very much, she thought it a shame that Jefferson had never been given sons. “What fine sons you would raise.” She touched her belly, and thought of her husband, smiling. That is why she had become so found of her Celtic knight, she realized. He reminded her so much of her husband.

She pressed on with that thought, along with her son’s ferocity, as her engine.

It was sun-down when Ezekiel and his men found her. “Put down your weapons, bitch!” She obliged, dropping her knife in the dirt and raising her hands in the air. Then, she waved at him.

“Hello, Ezekiel. I see you’ve become better at speaking with your injured mouth. I am sorry about that. Gentlemen.” They approached her cautiously, no doubt wondering why she was coming to them so openly, so easily. Indeed, she almost wondered it herself. Jefferson had wanted to save her, and she had earnestly believed that that was her mission, to allow him to do so. But she knew now that that impulse had been wrong.

By now, her pursuers regained their courage. Two men moved swiftly behind her, hand-cuffing her with police cuffs.

The air was as pregnant as she was, though with silence and humidity instead of a little fetus. Then, when Ezekiel was certain that it wasn’t a trap or that she wasn’t a walking IED, he approached her. His hand, gloved with a fingerless glove, touched her face. His finger nails where dirty and his hand caked with dried dust and dirt, but she merely stared into his eyes.

“I told you if I found you, I was going to rape you,” he stated matter of factly, as if he was asking her if she’d like another cup of tea. His eyes were full of malice, she noted to her chagrin.

Frowning at him, she nodded. “I had hoped fervently that you changed your mind. Yet, I knew that I must return and find Jefferson. I will not shirk from my duty because of your threats. I would be grateful if you didn’t, as it would be most unpleasant... But of course, I suppose that is sort of the point, isn’t it? To be unpleasant for me.”

He peered at her suspiciously. “I don’t get it... Are you trying to fuck with me?”

She sighed. “I am trying to dissuade you. For your sake as much as mine. Your mother would be very disappointed in you if you follow through with your threat. I think it would be best if you just delivered me to Jefferson Corrigan.”

The men peered at Ezekiel, but his face had softened for an instant. Then, he narrowed his brows. “What the fuck do you know about my mother?”

“I know she loved you dearly. I know that she was your father as well as your mother. I know that she never had much money, but that you always went to bed with a full stomach, clean clothes, and a roof over your head. I know you were best friends. I know the first time you robbed someone, it was because she had lost her job, and you two would have lost your home. I know that her dying wish was for you to move to Missouri with her sister and your uncle. They were good people, stuffy churchgoers, but she thought that would be good for you. After all, you were falling in with a tough crowd. You didn’t go, though.”

Ezekiel’s face blanched, and he reached for his pistol, aiming it at her head. He stepped forward, and pressed the barrel against her forehead. It was cold against her skin, but she didn’t blink. “What the hell are you?” His voice was shaking.

“You should have went, Ezekiel. You would have met your wife there. Her name was Courtney. She was a beautiful girl, slender but well muscled from years of farm work. She had helped her grandfather on his dairy farm ever since she was a little girl. Her hair was long and auburn and thick, and she had the most beautiful green eyes. She got Lymphoma, it would have been only eight years into your marriage. You and your children would have mourned her greatly, and it would have been quite the burden to bear, but knowing her and, yes, losing her, would have made you a better man. You’d never be here, now, talking to me like you are. Oh, my sweet boy. My poor, poor child. How I wish you went.”

His finger twitched on the trigger, and his hand was shaking like a leaf. For a heartbeat, she thought he was going to pull the trigger. It frightened her, but not for her sake, so she urged him again, “Put the gun down. Or kill me. But I think, for once in your life, you should do the right thing. Take me to Jefferson. Do what your mother begged you to do. Jefferson, Missouri, where your aunt and uncle lived, is awfully far away... but believe me when I say, he was put here for a reason.” And as she spoke the words, Annamaria felt in her soul that it was true. Such a queer name, especially for an Irishman. “Go to Jefferson, like your mother begged you to with her final breath.”

He looked at her as if he were about to cry. Then, he cleared his throat, and lowered his gun.

“Jesus, you can’t be fuckin’ serious, Zeke...” stammered one of the men. Ezekiel shot him an angry glance.

“S-Sam will want to see her anyway...” he murmured as he took Annamaria by her handcuffs behind her back, and pressed her forward, back towards the way they came.
***

Jefferson groaned himself awake. It was a low, guttural sound, and it was a sound that made him feel more beast than man. Perhaps that was what he was now. Her voice had never died, but a man could only take so much. He still heard his daughter crying out for him to save her, but now it was nothing but ambiance, like cicadas in summer. “Daddy!” she screamed over and over, as sure and as steady as the erratic pounding of his heart.

The voices outside of his room were low and hushed, as if there was an argument going on. Jefferson rolled over on his dingy mattress on the floor and attemped to listen, but found he couldn’t. A map of the state was on the wall, and Jefferson stared up at it, imagining that the cracks in the floorboards were the pathways and highways on the map as he ran his fingers across them while staring up at the cartography. If only he could travel as swiftly as his fingers did.

Finally, the door creaked open. Sam and Zeke. “Get up, Jeff. We got work for you to do. You’ll get a hit once you do it, bud. Alright?”

The promise of more sleep and solace was more than Jefferson could handle, and he shot up out of bed, stepping into his pants and hiking them up over his sweat-stained underwear. He followed Sam and Zeke down the hall, and out toward the courtyard of the camp. It had been a summer camp once, or one of those desert survival camps for teens and corporate parties. The flagpole hung naked, begging for anything to adorn her; be it the stars and bars or maypole streamers. Sam turned to Jefferson, “We found your friend, Annamaria. She was separated from her group. She was with a raiding party, from Eden.”

Jefferson felt his heart leap in his chest. “Annamaria? I need to see her! Please!”

Sam nodded solemnly. “You will. The three of us are going to have a chat with her. We’ve got interrogate her, get their numbers. Jeff... It might get messy, pal.” He stopped and clasped a hand on Jefferson’s shoulder. “I need to know you’re with me on this, alright? You’re with me?”

She had been his only friend after they had died. In truth, he had died with them, or at least with Len Gamble, but her friendship and her love had, for a time, made some sort of revenant of him. She had even made him smile those last few times.

But Jefferson couldn’t go back. He couldn’t dream once more of what he had seen, what had been done to them. He couldn’t bare to see what he had done, to Len and then the others, to almost all of Sam’s boys who had come and tore apart his family like wild desert jackals. No, he had to have the heroin. He had to. It wasn’t an option.

“I’m with you, Sam. Shit, I’m with you.” Jefferson felt his heart in his throat, but he nodded once more. “Yep, I’m with you.”

Zeke glanced over at him, and Jefferson thought for a brief moment that he saw pity in the man’s eyes. Sam only smiled, slapping him firmly on the shoulder. “Good. Shoot, maybe she’ll talk without us havin’ to turn the screws. Here’s hopin’.” They paused before a small cabin, what might have once been a groundskeeper’s shed, and opened the door.

Annamaria sat, heavy with child, on a small wooden schoolchair, with chains binding her and it to the floor. Apart from her captivity, and her obvious exhaustion from her trek, she looked unharmed. Jefferson stared immediately at the floor, as Sam approached her.

“Alright, Annamaria. This don’t gotta be hard. We know Eden are comin’ for us, comin’ to take the camp. You just tell us about their numbers, and we’ll get you some food and water, alright?” Jefferson stared at his shoes while Sam grabbed a pair of pliars from a corkboard hanger.

Annamaria’s voice was soft. “I have told you, I came alone. I do not care for your camp, I came to take Jefferson Corrigan, and any others you have captive here, back to Eden. I am but a young pregnant woman, poor and alone, and yet you bind me like I am the one who rapes and kills women and little girls.”

Sam’s boots thumped against the creaky wood floor as he stalked closer to her, opening and closing the pliars. “See, you’re wrong. Jefferson ain’t a captive. He’s a solid friend, which is why you’re in chains, and he’s not.”

“Some chains are invisible and intangible, Sam,” Annamaria retorted. “Like the one around your neck. However, I see more than most, and I see your chain, and name it ‘Fear.’” Her voice took on a stern timber, and she shuffled impotently in her chains.

The big man only laughed, kneeling down before her. He took the pliar to her finger nail, “How many men?”

Annamaria ignored him. “Jefferson, look at me. Jefferson. You couldn’t save them, I know. I am so sorry. I wish I could have done something, but I could not. But you can save me, Jefferson. Jefferson, please. My knight. Please.”

Sam laughed, “You ain’t got a friend in the world you little bitch.”

And then, Ezekiel swung a right haymaker, and sent Sam sprawling out cold onto the floor. Jefferson finally looked up, and saw the look in Annamaria’s eyes. They were swelling with pride, like a mother watching her son throw his first pitch. Unfortunately, that gaze was not directed at him.

Ezekiel had fallen to his knees, and stared blankly at her. His voice was stammering, “Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. No. No. I can’t believe.... Everything I...”

Annamaria stood up and the chains fell onto the floor. “Do not despair, my son. All is forgiven.” Her hand fell to her stomach, and she stepped forward, curtseying delicately and kissing Ezekiel on the forehead.

She turned and looked at Jefferson, pacing slowly toward him. She rested her mocha hand in his fiery beard, and her thumb brushed the tears that were forming at the corner of his eye. “All is forgiven,” she repeated, smiling sadly at him.

Sam groaned on the floor, and Ezekiel got to his feet. “Alright, we’ve gotta go. We gotta go now. Sam will have the whole camp upon us before too long.”

Annamaria nodded, “Quite right, Ezekiel. You set out today searching for Eden, and so, God willing, you shall find it. That is where I mean to take us. You get us out of the camp, and I’ll get us to Eden.”

Jefferson brushed past her, and walked toward Sam, his fists clenching and unclenching. He straddled the man, and screamed. “You! You raped them and killed them right in front of me! And then you turned me into this! I was going to hurt her! I was going to become what you are! You’ve taken everything from me! My family! My life! My virtue!”

Sam made a noise, a laugh and a groan.

“Come on, Jefferson. Nothing can be done for him at this juncture, but we must leave.” The sound of Annamaria’s voice only filled him with more rage.

“I was going to hurt someone like her for someone like you! You bastard. You rotten bastard.”

“Oh yes,” murmured Sam, blinking the stars from his eyes. “You jammed that needle in your arm mighty quick, partner. I expected to take much longer to convince you to do that... and how eager you were to hurt her, only for your next fix... Fuckin’ junkie. You’re just like every one of us, you know, only we got the stones to admit it.”

Jefferson punched him in the mouth.

“Jefferson,” called Annamaria, an edge of warning on her tongue.

“Come on, man,” muttered Ezekiel, “We can’t... She’s... Just listen to her... You don’t know... You...”

But Jefferson Corrigan only had eyes for Sam. He swung at him again, and the man’s head bounced off of his fist and onto the floor, but he only laughed. “Zeke will make a run on ya, too. Mark my words. He’s shit. It’s all shit. Don’t you see? We’re all shit. You saw how fast we turned on each other after The End. And I saw what you did to my men, out there in the desert. Your little scare crows. Couple of those boys never even fucked your wife or daughter, you know? They were just there, but you tore ‘em up anyway. There’s a beast brimmin’ below our surfaces, Jeff. Go on, and let yours out.” He spit blood up at his face.

Jefferson stood up, breathing heavily. Annamaria sighed, “Good, now let’s get- Jefferson?” He paced over to where the tools were hanging, and grabbed a hefty claw hammer. Returning to his squatting position over Sam, Jefferson brandished the weapon.

“Daddy, please! Stop them! Help me! Help me!!” He lifted the hammer high in the air. Sam only smiled up at him, “Told ya so. I fuckin’ told ya so.”

Seething, Jefferson tightened his grip on the hammer.

Ezekiel buried his head in his hands and started to weep. “You don’t know what you’re doing...”

Jefferson glowered at Sam, “I am going to make this slow, I am going to make you beg like they did...”

Annamaria stomped one foot, and Jefferson hesitated. “Jefferson Corrigan. I once asked you if you would die for me.”

He felt his heart sink. He had promised her so much, and had betrayed her. “I will, them,” he murmured. “As soon as I give him what he deserves. I will.”

Annamaria walked over to him, and knelt down beside him, wrapping her arms around him from the side. “No. Die now. Die and put it away. Your hate and your guilt. Die and put it away...”

Jefferson began to sob heavily, slumping off of Sam and onto the floor. He curled up into a ball, and shook. Annamaria only crawled over beside him, and lay her head in her lap. She felt her baby move within, his little hands pushing up and out at Jefferson’s face.

“He can’t keep doing what he is doing,” Jefferson cried. “I can’t let him get other people... I can’t.”

Annamaria shushed him gently. “Shhhh. There, there. I know. I know. Someone will punish him, but believe me when I say, it can’t be you. I need you to die for me, Sir Corrigan. I need you to. You need you to. But trust me when I say, there are no more women in this desert that he can harm. I promise you. And he is not long for this world, anyway.” She spared Sam a parting glimpse. The big man only lay on the floor, eyes wide open, staring up at the ceiling.

Jefferson fought to catch his breath, fighting back hyperventilation. He was crying like no man could, like only a child could. A child at the end of the world. “I let you down so much... I let my family down... I tried to be a good man, a good person... but the things I’ve done, the thoughts I’ve had...”

The baby stirred fitfully, and now it was his head, and not his hands, that was pressed firmly against Jefferson’s face, with only her flesh and blood between them. Annamaria smiled, “There is nothing that cannot be forgiven. Now, rise, my son. This is not a time for tears. Not truly.”

She helped him to his feet, and smiled at Ezekiel. “Thank you, my son,” she said, kissing his cheeks. “I believed this was his story, but it seems it is yours, as well. Forgive me for overlooking that.”

He shook his head. “No. No. Me forgive you? I could never. Please, don’t say such a thing... I-I...”

“You are a good and faithful servant who has persevered to the end. Now, let us leave this place. Do you think the men will do us any harm? Can you get us out of here without them asking too many questions?”

Ezekiel nodded, “I think so.”

---

It had been forty days since they arrived at Eden when she finally asked to see him again. Jefferson found himself, for some reason, walking from compartment to compartment in the massive bomb shelter network, haranguing all the men for pieces of clothing. A tie here, knicked shoes there. He surveyed himself in the mirror, and found that he looked more presentable than he had originally hoped. He wondered why he had felt he must looked presentable.

Ezekiel had spent most of his time with her, but she had not seen Jefferson in quite some time. He didn’t realize, truthfully, that it had been so long. He was always busy around Eden, usually teaching the children, or teaching survival and defense to the women and some of the men. Then, in the evening, it was drinks and dancing, story-telling and singing. He would often glimpse Annamaria from afar, becoming impossibly larger in the stomach, but always smiling. Children giggled at her feet, or pressed themselves up to her belly, shrieking with shrill joyfulness at the movements within.

He arrived at her quarters, and knocked. She beckoned him in.

It was sparse, and there seemed to not even be a bed to sleep on. No trunks or dressers, or anything. He only stared at her, not knowing what to say. Or rather, knowing thousands of things to say, but not knowing which was the most appropriate. Mercifully, she was the one to break the silence.

“I am leaving, Jefferson Corrigan,” she said with a hint of excitement.

He nodded, gesturing at her room. “You seem to be all packed up.”
“Well, I do travel lightly, as you will probably recall after spending so long in the deserts with me.” She chuckled, and he found himself mirroring it awkwardly.

He bounced once or twice on his heels, and then sat down on a creaky rocking chair, perhaps the only furniture in the tiny bomb shelter room. He stared at her incredulously. “I don’t even know what to make of it all...”

She smiled, “What do you mean?”

“The way you speak, Annamaria. I always felt you and I met for a reason...”

Once more, her beautiful, knowing, coy smile. “Yes. And go on.”

He shook his head, “It’s dumb.”

“Please.”

“I imagined saving you in some grand, epic battle. I imagined being a hero, a knight like you said. After losing Ceilidh and Linda, after all that I had seen and done... I don’t know, part of me had this child-like longing for something beautiful.” He stared down at the floor, at the soft red carpet, at his knicked shoes that he had only moments before thought looked good and now looked hopelessly pathetic.

“You wanted to be a hero. You wanted to be my saviour.” She nodded. “That is good, and beautiful in and of itself. The desire, I mean, even if it is never realized. I have good news and bad news. The bad news is you are not my saviour, and the good news is, you don’t have to be.” Her hand fell to her belly, and carressed it lovingly.

Jefferson stood up, “And see, that’s just it. I am grateful for everything. For Eden, for my sobriety. For cold beers and happy children, and for you. But I feel like I lost. I sold my soul to the Devil, I set out to harm you. I failed in every possible and conceivable way. Annamaria, I still feel lost. Not in the same way as I did... before... all of this. But, still. It doesn’t seem right. I let you down.”

She nodded, “You did. You were not the first, nor the last. But you returned, and that is worth more than anything. Look to our friend Ezekiel. You didn’t lose, Jefferson. You won. You win every day you wake up and thank God for Eden. You win every time those children learn from you, every time the learn to believe in love and goodness and truth at your feet. You win every time you kiss Mrs. Corbin on her soft, weathered cheeks. You won when you let go of your hatred, and put down that hammer. You won the first time you went to sleep and dreamed beautiful dreams of your daughter and wife. You won when you hugged Ezekiel when we found this place. You won when you trusted in me and my son. You won when you promised me you would die for me, and you won when you did, and you will have many victories again, and they will be sweet, and sometimes you will fail, but in the end, you win.”

He smiled at her, nodding. “Fair enough. One more question.”

“Hm?”

“Ezekiel. Where did he go? Why was he so weird around you?”

She laughed, “That’s two questions. Ezekiel went home, to answer the first one. He is with his mother and his wife, Courtney. He acted differently around me because he came to know, as I feel you are, who I really am.”

And there it was. Jefferson nodded, “And who is that?”

She kissed him on the cheek, and pointed toward the door. “A third question?  Perhaps you aren't as valiant as I thought, to lie to me so."  Her smile faded, but her eyes were still kind.  "You know, Jefferson, you’ve always known.”

Jefferson smiled, but he could not earnestly say that he agreed with her. As he left her room, and began the trek back to his, he felt strange. He felt as though he should be crying. He knew he would miss the young woman, after all, but for some reason, that didn’t disturb him. Instead, he felt a sense of peace that he hadn’t felt before in his lifetime, neither After The End nor Before. He returned to his room, locked the door behind him, and lay down on his bed. He leaned over, and pulled open the drawer of his nightstand table.  Within, was his old wallet.  He took out the photograph, and saw them all smiling at him. Ceilidh, dressed up for junior prom with that boy by her side, that goofy but good little boy who was slowly becoming man and who had won her precious heart. Linda was next to her, smiling. And then, behind the three of them, within the photograph that hung on the wall, there was another picture, hanging on the wall of their living room. A woman in white and lily-blue held a holy infant on her lap.

Jefferson smiled at her, “Goodnight, Annamaria,” he whispered. “Keep ‘em safe ‘til I get home.”

[Matteo ((Taed))]

"Do not attempt to move your head," a calm, cool voice was saying.

"Oh balls, not again!" Amanamwe spat back.

Her words returned to her immediately, bouncing from the fractured masonry six inches in front of her face. She was entombed amidst various geometries of rubble, propped and buttressed against one another. Fluids were leaking from her body, but the various bio hacks she was endowed with seemed to have rendered said fluids not so much "vital" as merely "appreciated."

There was light filtering in from several directions; daylight above, and firelight everywhere else. Most of it was the orange flicker of traditional combustion, but from somewhere below her came the stark vibrato gleam of a chemical fire. Worrying Cortex tags rose on the updraft of this blaze like embers, warning of lead-melting temperatures and climbing levels of platinum hexafluoride gas.

With weary disregard for her medical system's protests, Amanamwe thrust her hand into the debris and began to drag herself upward like a zombie emerging from the grave. She rose in a cloud of stonedust, little waterfalls of pulverized silt falling from between her fingers as she crushed brick into powder. She wormed her way up a seam of twisted train metal, then punched her fist through a final slab and pulled herself into the open air.

She surfaced near the centre of a long slope of wreckage. Kalik emergency workers dotted the crumbling face, wearing stiff plasticized clothing in fluorescent colours that clashed atrociously with the mottled, salmon-to-aubergine tones of their skin. One such emergency worker was nearby and scurried up to her, its antennae and delicate forelimbs moving in an expression of anxious concern.

"Please to still being! Injuries of having be most terrible."

Amanamwe frowned and pulled up her Cortex readout. The Kalik was speaking in dialect that she didn't have a solid translation package for. She'd have to see about grabbing a patch from one of the Subscription humans who'd been here longer than her. Especially now that they'd be extending their stay.

Amanamwe put her hands over her eyes and flopped back onto the rocks, much to the concern of the emergency worker. What a God-awful mess this was. The deal falling apart, people blown to pieces (people with their minds backed up and replacement bodies on file, but still), and now the wormhole stolen as well. Nearest ship six weeks away, Daria had said, and that was assuming they could get it to change course immediately; Amanamwe had never met a ship that didn't dither over scheduling for anything less than total war.

She sat back up. There was no way the Kaliks would wait six weeks when there might be other interested parties willing to pay for their exclusive rights today. The Djerzamon Remainders, the Illuminated Parliament, the Free AI Incorporation; any one of them would love to get their hands on some new intellectual property, and they all had the know-how to have orchestrated the Gate bombing, and no love lost for the Subscription besides.

She stood up. Amanamwe wasn't having any of it. Trip had been right, she was just going to have to get the wormhole back and sort this whole mess out herself. And if there were too many fires to put out all on her own, well, modern technology had the answer to that problem well in hand.

*****

βamanamwe stepped out of the fabricator in the Beth-Ant local HQ, atom-scale courier machines stitching her molecules together faster than the eye could follow. Manifold arrangements of half-built Gate components surrounded her, laid out in Penrose tilings that would cascade towards a completed product.

There were many flavours of multiplicity contained within The Subscription's admittedly lenient attitude towards a theory of mind. The most common was a simple clone-loan: identical sets of memories forked down different paths, with their deltas recombined at a later date. Here, Amanamwe was demonstrating a somewhat more advanced technique: converting herself into a group mind comprising two separate but linked instances of her self.

While βamanamwe was gingerly tiptoeing over heaps of delicate machinery, αmanamwe was across the city, steaming into a conference hall filled with high-level delegates. A clutch of Kalik officials stood apart from the Subscription negotiators, with dry tension arcing the air between them. Both groups turned as one when αmanamwe entered.

"You're looking surprisingly mortal," Daria remarked as βamanamwe approached her. The license agreement for her military augments only covered a single client, so the beta clone was wearing human basic, and to Daria's Cortex the difference was obvious.

"I'm duplexing," βamanamwe replied. "We've been too conservative out here; too hung up on non-interference malarkey. It's time to start acting like a proper technological superpower. I want replicating nano-mesh in all the data and utility lines, and start seeding an interference swarm in the middle stratosphere. If a photon rubs up against an atom anywhere on this rock, I want to know about it, and don't let any piddling little government encryption keep you out."

"Prime Minister Shiraz, so pleased to finally meet you," αmanamwe was saying, extending a hand.

The Kalik leader took the proffered gesture in one maniple pincer, and inclined his bulbous head.

"Unfortunate that it should be under such regrettable circumstances, my dear. Let me extend my most heartfelt embarrassment and apologies for any discomfort these malcontents may have caused you. My shame is only bearable because I am sure that their annoyance hardly registers to such vaunted and illustrious persons as yourselves."

"And start data mining the PM right away," βamanamwe said. "I'm pinging all sorts of weird biometrics off him."

Daria brought up an interface and began punching in commands to the Beth-Ant security apparatus even as αmanamwe delivered a perfunctory and sanitized summary of recent events to the grumbling politicals.

"What exactly is your firm planning to do about this mess?" asked Corbym Strine, the chief representative for Dolburn polity. "Insuring against these sorts of problems is your entire reason for being here!"

"Representative, I can assure you that we're doing everything in our power to bring the current crisis to a speedy resolution," Amanamwe replied, keeping a careful watch on the Prime Minister as she said so. "In fact, we already have several leads on who's really to blame for the whole affair."

Shiraz' antennae twitched animatedly.

"You mean that you suspect an involved party beyond the Brotherhood themselves?" he asked, in a tone that Amanamwe's Cortex translated as surprise.

She nodded curtly. "Another high-level power is most likely involved. Tell me sir, do your people have associations with any groups that would fit that description? Aside from us, of course."

"Look at those hydroxyl-ethyl-benzene groups fly!" βamanamwe said aloud. "Something's got him worked up."

"To be fair," said Daria. "I'd be a little flushed too if I was being interrogated by a walking tank."

The Prime Minister made a clattering sound with his mouth that Amanamwe's translator hedged with a few tentative suggestions. (Nervous? Evasive? Hungry?)

"One of our first extrasolar colonies had contact with a high-functioning von Neumann swarm of unknown providence, calling themselves the Computronium Roadshow. But that was almost a century ago; our other dealings have only been with rude primitives like ourselves."

"Forget what I said. He's lying," said Daria. "The bit about meeting the Roadshow is true--"

"Wish I'd been there," interjected βamanamwe. "Man those von Neumanns are a fun bunch of guys."

"--But he's leaving out the part where the Roadshow sold them a working AI Finance Core. Dig deep enough and its fingerprints are all over their economy. The industrial boom they've had going for the last ten decades is all attributable to a genie in a bottle."

βamanamwe shook her head.

"A genie that's looking to get paid at some point. What do you want to bet that it didn't find its way into the Roadshow by accident? My God, some AI think tank has turned the whole Kalik civilization into a hedge fund in their investment portfolio! Spend a little propping up their economy, then reap the intellectual benefits of a hundred-year renaissance."

αmanamwe narrowed her eyes and turned to one of the Kalik military officials present.

"General, were you able to track the thieves' aircraft after it left the city? Our own local systems are too underdeveloped to detect them at range."

"Or were, anyway," βamanamwe muttered, casting an appraising eye over the status of several quadrillion tiny aerostats that were already spreading like an invisible stain through the atmosphere.

The General, wearing a ribbed and ruffled lime green uniform anointed with various animated medallions, rasped his thorax in a gesture that meant no.

"The terrorists employed comprehensive stealth technology to avoid our sense grid. There's no sign of them."

"Accurate," said Daria. The aerostats' interferometric instruments were lensing data from the surface at terabits per second. "We can see their leftover emissions for a little ways, but then they go all wobbly. Even the van Eck is scrambled out of readability."

"Stealth technology of that calibre would have to be military grade, wouldn't it sir?" asked αmanamwe.

"Hello again, hydroxyl-ethyl-benzene pals," βamanamwe declared. "May I introduce you to my friend epinephrine? You two have a lot in common."

"Your people should know better than anyone that modern manufacturing technology makes sensitive materiel difficult to control," the General replied, far more smoothly than his neurochemistry would suggest.

"Yeah, well, we also know a thing or two about the difference between piracy and private licensing," said Daria. "No way the Brotherhood knocked up the specs for that plane themselves. I've got nothing in the digital record, but there are references to hard files. Want me to print out some infiltrator drones?"

"I've got a better idea," said βamanamwe. "Hack the fabricators at the most likely army bases, and patch them with an upgrade for full bio synthesis."

Daria grinned, catching on to the plan immediately. While αmanamwe spent a few minutes interrogating and being interrogated by an incensed Corbym Strine, and an evasive Kalik parliament, she smoothly infiltrated and reprogrammed a dozen secure fabricators across the planet. They were crude at first, but had all the tools to make themselves substantially less so with the right instructions.

A dozen innocuous Kalik soldiers soon stepped out of the fabricators, bearing the minds of Amanamwes γ through ξ. They spread out through their respective targets, loaded with suites of intrusion software and disarming good looks (for a Kalik), and before long ηamanamwe and κamanamwe were holding the crisp manila documents they sought.

The copies returned to their places of birth and recycled themselves into free radical goop, even as the Amanamwe hive mind returned to its binary configuration of ten minutes before.

αmanamwe broke off mid-sentence and strode quickly toward the conference hall's exit.

"I say, where are you running off to?" Corbym called after her. "My polity is paying for your attention."

"That attention had been somewhat divided, I confess," αmanamwe hollered over her shoulder. "But I promise you still got your money's worth. I'm off to arrest some terrorists. The guilty parties in this room should enjoy their freedom until I get back.

*****

What followed was an almost laughably successful assault on the literal cave that The Illuminated Brotherhood of the Divine Intellect's Singular Purification had holed up in. Amanamwe briefly relished the idea of whipping up a few hundred of herself to storm the place by brute force, but eventually decided that wading through a slurry of her own unaugmented corpses on the way out would be a tad depressing.

Instead they sent in assault worms from Bethlehem-Antares' extensive cyberwarfare library, beamed to earth by their new stratospheric sensor net, reconfigured as a parabolic antenna. A single crowd-control drone followed the poisonous ones and zeroes in, and subdued the defenseless terrorists in short order.

The wormhole canister was intact and occupied, and without the constant interruption of building new bodies and sensors and drones, the Beth-Ant fabricator was able to carry on the business of constructing a replacement Gate.

The Prime Minister was not arrested himself; Amanamewe had no actual authority in the Kalik legal system, and her evidence surrounding his personal involvement was circumstantial at best, and illegally obtained at worst. A number of military and legislative toadies did take the fall, however, and the cultural exchange deal closed on very favourable terms for The Subscription as a result.

Amanamwe reclined in a chair in the Beth-Ant dormitory. The building was a soap bubble of diamond grown on the side of one of the Kalik's fairy-tale-castle skyscrapers, and the view through the transparent walls was suitably breathtaking. Daria lounged nearby, as did Brusco, sporting a newly regrown hand.

"I can't wait to see Trip's face during the debrief," Brusco was saying. "His 'I'm mad at you' face and his 'I just made a lot of money' face should look very interesting on top of one another."

"Why don't we wait another day before switching the Gate back on?" Amanamwe asked. "Sweating over us a little more will be good for him. And besides, now that I know I won't be stuck here for weeks, it actually looks like a pretty nice vacation spot. The whole damn city's a beach!"

"Speak for yourself," said Daria. "Brusco and I have already been here for ages. I promise that another day is all it will take to start finding sand in your cooch."

"Besides, you'd have to go through that Strine guy if you wanted the Gate to stay off," Brusco said from under a straw hat that he had fabbed specifically to cover his eyes. "Never seen a guy so anxious to get his cargo back on time."

Amanamwe opened one eye, some deeply buried instinct twitching in concern. "Anxious how?" she asked.

Brusco waved a hand dismissively. "Oh you know the type. Just kind of squirrelly is all. He booted the Razchisle techs off the upload procedure; said they were taking too long. You think he asked the Kalik volunteers to say see cheese and smile for the brain camera?"

Amanamwe sat up straight and Daria looked at her with concern.

"Dolburn brokered the original deal, right? They brought Razchisle in to pay off some debt or other?"

Daria nodded slowly. "Dolburn owed them big for sharing some proprietary mindsculpting software that got them out of a big jam. I remember it was actually a bit of a scandal at the time. Dolburn lost a bunch of subscribers who defected after Razchisle pulled their asses out of the fire."

She frowned. "This whole deal was supposed to let them bury the hatchet."

"Son of a bitch," Amanamwe swore.

Brusco finally twigged that something was happening, and he raised the hat's brim with one finger.

"Wassat? What's going on?"

"What about the Prime Minister and his goons actually makes you think they were up to pulling off a stunt like all of this? Even assuming their AI genie gave them the tech to plan the Gate bombing, why didn't it help them at all after that? We took out their whole operation with some malware and pepper spray."

"You think they were being played?" Daria asked.

"I think I can't imagine a better patsy than a society with valuable IP and ties to a shady AI financial advisor. Show me transcripts from the upload files."

Brusco conjured some data off his personal cloud and tossed it Amanamwe's way. She used her augments to clock her brain speed up, and put all her survival instincts on a hair trigger. Hard machine code flowed past her eyes in fast motion until a pattern recognition process caught sight of a sudden threat. The modified danger instinct made the virus sitting in front of her stand out like a hunting tiger would to her distant ancestors.

"Dolburn hid a damn Trojan in the upload brains," she said, returning to normal speed. "Razchisle will bring it in right past their firewalls and it'll fry them. Call security at the embassy."

"They have to bleed entropy off the singularity before they can reexpand it," Daria said. "The whole building's swamped in junk data."

Amanamwe was already heading for the door. The Subscription didn't bother itself too much with easily reversible crimes like murder and vandalism, but corporate espionage was serious business.

The tram from their building to the embassy ran every ten minutes, and took another six to complete the trip. Amanamwe chose to bypass this delay, and seconds later the diamond bubble of their dormitory shimmered as it extruded a knife-edged jet at high speed. The aircraft tore across the sky at just below the sound barrier, and seconds later it evaporated and dropped Amanamwe towards the embassy below. Local flight controllers would long debate whether the short-lived ghost plane that flashed across their radar had been real or not.

She landed on the building's roof at speeds that should have been fatal, then dangled off a precarious drop at heights that should have been bladder-voiding. She slid and leapt down a series of balconies and balustrades, maneuvering herself eventually to a ground-level courtyard.

When she arrived in the rebuilt entry hall, the Gate was just purring to relativistic life, and the pastoral exclusion zone of the Binary scape was visible beyond it. The various Subscription and Kalik authorities were arrayed in front of it, bowing and exchanging farewells, along with a leather briefcase that held the high density hard drives containing the upload minds.

Amanamwe threw up an accusing finger at Strine even as he ceremonially accepted the case.

"Corbym! Drop it!" she shouted.

He took one look at her and whipped out a tiny firearm that discharged bright cerulean bolts. This was no popgun like the one the Kalik terrorists had used, and Amanamwe felt a sharp sting of compromised functionality as the first shot tore her side.

She closed the distance between them in an eyeblink, but Strine must have been running some illicit augments of his own, because he blocked a blow that should have taken his arm off. The pair grappled in superhuman fast-motion, and tumbled halfway into the mouth of the Gate. Tiny robots flipped confusedly between assembler and disassembler modes, as Strine and Amanamwe surged back and forth across the barrier between Binary and reality.

Amanamwe felt a foot hook between her legs and she fell, head protruding on the Kalik side of the Gate. Strine loomed on top of her, pinning her down and maneuvering for a killing angle. His head was positioned directly on the Gate border, and from Amanamwe's perspective there was a refractory line of hazy nothingness between his furious eyes and gritted teeth.

Amanamwe struck feebly at him a few times, but didn't have the leverage to move him. She felt danger warnings flare as he crushed vital systems. In a surge of desperation, she thrust her arm out into the metal frame of the Gate, and swirled it through the delicate components she found within.

The last thing she saw was Strine's bisected face widen in surprise before brilliant light and a wave of pressure robbed her of awareness.

*****

Amanamwe came back to the world in a haze. There were figures around her, but it was a while before the shapes and colours resolved into faces she knew. She wasn't deaf this time, but it was a while before the pitches and tones became words she could understand.

Daria was looming over her in a reprise of her Valkyrie impression from before. Brusco stood just behind, looking very much like he was trying not to laugh.

"Ammy, can you hear me?" Daria was saying. "Are you all there?" Brusco snorted and Daria shushed him.

"Mmm. I think so," Amanamwe replied. "My head's killing me."

Brusco turned away with a strangled sound and Daria put a hand over her mouth.

"What? What is it? What happened to Strine? He didn't make it back to the Map, did he?"

"No, no, you got him," Daria said. She helped Amanamwe roll over, and she saw the top half of a familiar head sitting some distance away, along with a triangular slice of briefcase.

"The rest of him will be buffered in the Binary server; we'll keep him on ice until he's ready to stand trial."

Amanamwe breathed a sigh of relief, but something about the gesture felt off. Like she couldn't fill her lungs all the way. There was a brief, awkward intermission while she tallied this with other details of her situation, and came to an unavoidable conclusion.

"Oh no. Don't tell me ..."

Daria picked Amanamwe gently up, making it abundantly clear that her body was missing entirely from the neck down.

"Do not attempt to move your head," a calm, cool voice belatedly began.

"Oh, shut up."

[James]

JORDOOM

In the end, both Zovo and I feel this story never got off the ground. It kept threatening to lift off and would then stall. It was always gathering momentum and never quite delivering on it. I think that was partly to do without how much it jumped around. It just felt a little too all over the place. When it was working best, it was staying in one time frame, in one place, with one point of view.

I said to Zovo after the second round, I was worried how you were to bring it all together for the finale and, well, I’m not sure you quite did. Eden felt underused after being framed as the main plot point in the beginning. You wrapped up all the loose ends, but they felt so perfectly wrapped up that nothing felt exactly right. It was signposted too well; Annamaria and the discussion about the Immaculate Conception, Jefferson and his moment of looking like he went over the cliff, but obviously the reader knew he was going to come good. We walked down a straight road and at no point were the readers forced to stop and think about where they were going.

However, it wasn’t all bad. There were still moments where the writing shone, for instance when Annamaria confronted Zeke and told him what should have happened to him. That was a really nice bit of writing. And I stick my initial comments that the start was strong and the relationship between Jefferson and Annamaria worked, and that was pretty vital to the story as a whole. But once they got separated, Jefferson’s descent felt over the top and gratuitous and Annamaria’s storyline felt flimsy. Basically, Jefferson kept the Annamaria’s storyline grounded and Annamaria kept Jefferson feeling like a real person instead of a plot device. Actually, that’s true vice versa as well.

The one other thing, which seemed particularly a problem for Zovo but was also a concern for me, was it still seemed preachy. I stick by my original comments (not sure if Zovo agrees). You can preach, but you need to learn how to do it in a manner that is way more subtle.

Basically, this seems like a really harsh review. And it is, because this is the final. But it was still an okay story, it just didn’t fire on all cylinders.

And I hope you keep writing, sir, because you made it to the final two writers and you earnt it.

---

TAED

That was a mess.

It was all over the show, shambolic and kept threatening to collapse in on itself.

But... it didn’t.

You managed to bring the plot to a resolution that felt workable and the consistent tone and style kept the story just about in one piece. When I look at each individual segment, they were strongly written and entertaining. Reading them together, they wobble a bit and I’m not sure you had everything planned before you started writing. In many ways, it was a poorly constructed desert. I loved the individual pieces, but not sure it came together since when it arrived at the table, everything collapsed on the plate. I don’t know if you outline and plan or if you’re firmly in the ‘no outline’ camp, but when you write longer stuff, I’d like to see you make some sort of plan just to keep yourself on track. Reign in a few excesses.

The ideas continued to shine through and will be things that stick in the memory: the nano-workout, the cloning, the medical voice, all great bits within the story. The starting setting and the building up of alien culture was also nicely done. I think the middle portion was probably the strongest part of the plot, where it felt as if it wasn’t being rushed (the end) or left neglected (the beginning).

My one main complaint is about the characters. There really was no depth and the antagonist felt a bit like a Doctor Who villain in an episode where people review it with phrases like “but this wasn’t really about the Cybermen, it was about the Doctor and his companions”. Which is all well and good, but you still need some sort of antagonist with just a little bit of presence in a story of this kind, purely from a plot point if nothing else. The assortment of supporting characters was nice when they turned up, and the conversations helped make the protagonist a little more interesting. But yeah, it was a little lacklustre in that department, though, I do accept sci-fi does sometimes tend to have lacklustre characters in favour of ideas.

In the end, the story was ambitious, loud and bold. I really loved the opening setting and I’d like to see more of it. Maybe in a story slightly less rushed. But, on the whole, it didn’t quite work. However, it had a lot of good things going on for it.

And that was just enough.