The remaining slavers stare at their fallen leader in shock. Then, before their leader even gasps his last, they flee. I watch them run for a moment, considering letting them go. Then I think of the dead refugee and his daughter, and my woman and the boy.
“No,” I growl through clenched teeth.
I stretch my arms out to either side, the fingers splayed. Rigid threads of nanomechs shoot from them. The thin wires slash through the air, cutting flesh and into bone. Some slavers trigger their camouflage mechanisms, but no matter. I wave my hands like an impassioned conductor directing his masterpiece. My hands rise and fall, chopping through the air, and the threads cut down my enemies.
The enhancer floods my bloodstream with adrenaline, dopamine, and endorphins. “More, more, more,” the enhancer tells me. As if on their own volition, my hands move faster. Men die, flesh in tatters.
I laugh. Shame burns through me as I laugh, but I can’t help it; my body rides high on endorphins and dopamine. There is no truer form of guilty pleasure than this. I want to scream.
Finally, with no targets left, I allow my arms to rest. I reel in my tendrils, pulling the nanomechs back into the main body of the suit. The nanomechs that failed during the battle return to the nodes for repairs. My suit tells me I have no injuries, but my blood pressure and heart rate are high. It issues serotonin to calm me.
I trigger my infrared vision, noting those still alive. I approach each one and kill him quickly, a mercy. Some suit-bearers draw out the end, prolonging the enhancer’s pleasure. I never have. I hated inflicting pain even before escaping the Wahren.
Then I see the last slaver. He’s whimpering on the ground curled into a ball. He can’t hear my footsteps, not with my suit activated, but he looks up. Perhaps he felt death coming. I squat on my haunches, studying the man.
His eyes widen in terror. One eye is milky white, a scar splitting his face.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” I say, my voice quiet. “You’ve been watching us this whole time, scouting targets for your crew and keeping tabs until your crew was ready.”
The man’s larynx bobs as he swallows.
“You took them,” I hiss.
The man stares at me blankly, eyes ringed with terror. He doesn’t recognize me since he can’t see my face. He doesn’t know who I’m talking about, and he doesn’t care.
I clench my fists. Gods, I want to peel his skin away with my tendrils. A part of my mind urges me to do it. “More, more, more,” it whispers. I lift a hand in front of the slaver’s face and open my fingers slowly. Black tendrils lengthen from my fingers. They surround the scar-faced man, prepared to trace mazes into his flesh.
He stares at them, his whole body trembling. He can’t look away.
“You are human,” the woman’s voice echoes in my mind.
I bow my shoulders, closing my eyes so I don’t see when the tendrils lop off his head. It is a much kinder death than he deserves.
I leave the bodies where they lie, unwilling to touch them again.
I find the slavers’ water barrels and try to wash away the blood coating my combat suit. Technically, the nanomechs return to the nodes for cleaning and repair when I disengage the suit, so I don’t need to wash, but I shudder at the thought of allowing the slavers’ blood to enter my body through the nodes. I scrub so hard that the joints of my fingers and wrists ache.
Serotonin trickles into my bloodstream, attempting to balance my mood, but I disengage my suit, cutting off the supply. The nanomechs skitter back into the little holes that punctuate my body. My skin tingles, and my body trembles from exertion and shock. I feel a headache blooming behind my eyes, the first sign of an enhancer hangover.
There was a time I could use the suit for weeks, but not now, not in this condition. The Wahren meant the suit to be used by someone in peak physical condition, not a half-starved clinker like me. But at least the suit didn’t suck me dry. Cursed way to die.
After washing away as much blood as possible from my clothes, I surreptitiously check on the boy and his sister. The boy is searching the trucks and crates while his sister waits in the back of an auto, her hands still shackled to the floor. I pray the night hides the bloodstains on my clothes, grab the woman’s shawl from where I stashed it, and jog toward the boy.
“What happened?” I ask, gasping. “I went by the camp—found boot prints and this.” I wave the shawl at him. Then, I look at a body and feign alarm. “Is that guy dead?”
The boy crossly ignores me, continuing to search the stacked crates and barrels, probably for something to free his sister.
“Here, let me help.” I find a crowbar in another truck and use it to pry the chain from the floor. Meanwhile, the boy finds the keys on the leader’s body and jingles them in my face. He has no scruples with patting down the bodies. I snatch them from his fingers. He laughs and runs off.
I release the woman from the manacles and help her down from the auto.
“You came,” she murmurs, as if to herself. She looks over the carnage and shudders, rubbing her bare shoulders briskly. I wrap her shawl around her. She doesn’t seem to notice. “Where’s Mikael?”
I shrug. “I’ll find him.”
She nods tiredly. Worry pinches her face.
The woman rinses her chafed wrists while I search for the boy. If I wasn’t certain I killed every shattering slaver, I’d be worried. I find him standing over the scar-faced slaver’s body. He spits on the corpse. The woman comes up behind us, sees the corpse, and tows her brother away.
I lead the woman and boy back to camp. The boy practically sleeps on his feet, so I carry him. By the time we arrive, the red moon has set, and I barely distinguish the horizon from the night sky. It’s chilly despite the walking so I build a fire. The woman gasps at the bloodstains on my shirt. I pull it over my head and throw it in the fire. She makes no comment, but she watches me, not the burning shirt.
The boy sleeps in his sister’s arms. I try to reassure her—coax her to sleep—by promising to watch over them. But it’s a lie. They don’t need me. At this point, the longer I stay, the more danger I draw to them. Best I leave by daybreak.
My lie doesn’t deceive her. She watches as I move the abandoned stack of wood to her pile. A question lies beneath her expression that I don’t answer, and she won’t ask. I believe she understands what happened to the slavers, and I believe she understands what I must do now.
I turn away from her so I don’t have to look into her eyes, but I still feel them.
I walked through the back door and into the living room, leaving a trail of boot prints on the dust-covered floor. After nearly a decade away, I returned home, somehow expecting things to be different from what they were, despite the intervening years.
I trailed my hand along the tops of the couches, sending an avalanche of dust into their seats. In my room, dust covered my bed and caked toy soldiers and plastic dinosaurs. I pulled my old school bag from my closet, shaking the dust from it, and took my Da’s pocketknife from my dresser. I found my stuffed toy elephant still tangled in my bed sheets and clutched it to my chest like a frightened child.
All silence.
All emptiness.
No redemption.
No forgiveness.
I found my mother’s pendant on her dresser, the overlapping moons also dust covered. I put it around my neck and stared into her blemished mirror. In the speckled image, I saw a soul as empty and ruined as my home. With an unarmored fist, I shattered it, gouging my knuckles and leaving bloody streaks on the glass.
Then, I dumped my home’s guts into the yard, and I burned it all. I burned the trash, the couches, the sheets, the pillows, the books, the souvenirs and keepsakes, the gifts, the pictures, the frames, the toy soldiers, and the plastic dinosaurs. I built a bonfire of a lifetime, a pyre for my soul, and filled the wasted land with the stench of melted plastic and ash
en memories.
And, when I left, I left the back door swinging.
The woman falls into a fitful sleep. The gentle rise and fall of her chest matches the rhythm of the swaying trees. It reminds me of my mother holding me in her arms and rocking me, singing a song in a voice as thin and clear as dragonbug wings. I leave the stuffed elephant near the woman’s bed, a gift for her brother, just as my brothers left gifts for me, and lift my satchel onto my shoulder. I leave my full canteen near the woman’s woodpile. I think I can do without it. If I can’t, well, that’s one less demon in the world. Then I turn toward the mountains.
“Who are you?” the woman whispers.
Her voice startles me. I spin, staring at her still form. Her eyes are closed. Sweat polishes her furrowed brow. She murmurs unintelligible words, talking in her sleep.
I sigh in relief, but her question still unsettles me. Watching her, I can’t help feeling I owe her something, some part of myself. She has given me so much, her past, her future, her dreams, her company, her trust.… I don’t have much to give, but the truth is something.
“Leiden Talson,” I tell her.
“Leiden,” she whispers. Her voice carries the hint of a smile.
That smile—it’s as if I face my mother’s mirror again. With that single honest answer, the glass breaks, and my wall of silence ruptures. I’m bleeding words—the words I would have said during these many weeks with the woman. They’re pouring from my soul. Now, when I won’t have another chance. Now, when it doesn’t matter what I say because she can’t hear me.
I laugh softly at the irony and emerge from the shadows to sit on a fallen tree by the dying fire. I rest my satchel behind me. The sound of my name from her lips eases me into my past, like slipping into a warm bath. It soaks away my careful reserve. I try to think of the last time someone called me by my name. I rub dust between my fingers as I think. Dust, the only constant in my life.
“My mum,” I say quietly. “I haven’t heard my name since that time. I had kissed her cheek good night after another silent evening. After years of just the two of us, we didn’t have much to say. I told her I loved her, but her mind was already somewhere else. She never said ‘I love you’ back. I don’t hold that against her though. She didn’t know slavers would drag me away that night and sell me to the Wahren. She didn’t know she would wake alone.” I bow my head and run my fingers over my scalp. The thin layer of hair feels like velvet. “So, that was the end of her and that was the end of Leiden.”
I scrub my burning eyes with the heels of my hands, then I tilt my head back and stare at the stars. I pick out Stonehenge and the Great Wall from the constellations. The blue moon sits on the western horizon, a frown stitched into the tapestry of constellations with silver thread. In a week, it will disappear beneath the horizon. If I’m lucky, I’ll see it again when it rises in a half-year, when the growing season begins. If I’m not lucky, well …
“I went back,” I confess. “The house was still there, but empty—emptier than emptiness explains. Less than the absence of its parts. That’s how I knew she’d left. For the afterlife or somewhere else, I don’t know.” I sigh. “The truth is she’d been gone a long time. When my brothers left, and Da, she just …”
I let the sentence fade, my throat tight. I turn my gaze to my clasped hands. They’re shaking. “You know, every one of those schists left the back door swinging, knowing somebody else would close it. I did it. I shut and latched the door after every shattering one of them.”
My hands clench and in that moment, I realize I hate my Da and brothers for leaving. I hate them as much as I love them.
“Is there longing in you for this home?” The woman’s voice reaches out from the darkness and pulls my mind back to the present.
I flinch away from her, my body tense and ready to flee, but I hold back. I focus on her silhouette outlined in dull firelight and a distant dawn. She sits up, the boy still asleep beside her.
“How long have you been awake?” I ask quietly.
“Leiden is what you are called?” she asks, softly. Her voice drifts to me in the silence like a dry, brittle leaf.
“How long have you been awake?” I repeat.
“You are alone? You are meeting no one?”
“How long have you been awake?” I ask again, my voice growing stony.
“You are leaving us. You want aloneness?”
“Yes, I’m leaving,” I state firmly, not sure if I am answering her question or trying to sound like I am.
“Thank you,” she whispers quietly, slowly pronouncing the words.
“For what?” I ask in surprise.
“For saving us. For being part of us. For bringing happiness in my heart for a short time.”
She’s not stopping me, I realize. There is freedom in that, and also pain—more pain than I expect. Mum never stopped any of them from leaving either.
I can’t think of what to say. When my brothers left they never had anything to say and neither do I. The ache in my chest roars in my ears. I glance at the sleeping boy, wondering if he truly sleeps or if he waits to fold into his sister’s arms after I turn my back on him.
I am still, but it is the stillness of a coming storm.
The first smudges of purple light touch the horizon. Nothing stirs but lightning in the far distance as the night transitions to day. I see the contours of the woman’s pale face, the glimmering whites of her eyes, and her smooth bare shoulders in the soft pale glow of dawn.
“Please, don’t leave,” she says.
“How can you say that?” I ask harshly. She knows, but she must not understand. I shake my head, knowing I cannot describe to her what I am.…
I cannot describe to her what I am, but I can show her. In silence, I trigger the mechanism. Sitting on the log with my elbows propped on my knees and my hands supporting my chin, the nanomechs close over me. I watch, expecting her expression to change from sadness to terror as I transform—as I confirm that I am responsible for the slavers’ bloody corpses. I show her what I am and I know she will despise me.
She draws in a sharp breath; I hear it as clearly as if she sits beside me.
I smile acerbically. “This is what I am, a perfect killing tool in human form. A demon.”
“Tyfel spreken vahrhite unt angel leeghen,” she recites in a whisper, like a prayer. “We are all likt unt shaden and we are all mensklik.”
“Human,” I scoff. “I don’t think so. Look at me! You saw those corpses.” My lips curl into a bitter smile. “The worst part is that I enjoyed it! Human? I’m a monster, ein tyfel—a demon.” I disengage the Koganzug. The nanomechs skitter back into their nodes, retracting like liquid sucked down a drain. I study my hands, too ashamed to look at her.
“You are human,” she states firmly, each word enunciated with precision.
“You’ve seen what I am,” I argue.
“Yes, I see what you are,” she replies fiercely. “You long for your home—for family. You work hard. You watch over us. You saved us! You are patient. You are kind. You are ashamed. And, ya, you are broken. Likt unt shaden. You are human and ein gooter mann—a good man.”
My heart clings to every word. Why? “The things I’ve done,” I whisper.
“There is things past for each of us,” she says passionately. “That is all past is, that thing behind us that brings us to this place we are at. Das ist alles—that is all! What you choose now, das ist vas du bist—that is what you are.”
“It’s not that simple,” I reply softly. “They’re going to come for me.”
She doesn’t ask who. She simply holds my gaze, her expression intent, while she speaks. “But they do not come yet.”
Her words shock me into silence.
“Please, stay,” she says.
The words she speaks are the words my mother could never bring herself to say. They cut th
rough me like blades, excising the past I felt bound by. I see the stuffed toy elephant sitting in the dirt. I see the toys my brothers gave me melting into puddles of slag. I see my father’s pocketknife atop a pile of castoff possessions like the dregs of a discarded life. I see my mother’s dusty pendant and her empty house—an empty house in an empty land with an open door slamming in the breeze because there is no one left to close it.
I realize, suddenly, that I’ve been trying to leave behind the wrong things.
“Can I stay?” I whisper. The morning breeze snatches the words from my lips.
The Year in the Contests
Last Year’s Anthology
Each year we as judges and administrators strive to bring together an anthology that is of the highest quality that we can create, mixing articles and stories from judges, fantastic new illustrations from great new artists, and of course the stories that come from the best new writers that we can glean from around the world. So we hope each year that our efforts are well received, and last year we got some great reviews.
First of all, the anthology met with critical success, eliciting praise from Library Journal, Publisher’s Weekly, and this nice review from Omni Magazine: “Outside of easily being the best gateway competition for new and upcoming genre fiction writers, WotF also puts together a fantastic anthology book every year containing high-caliber stories that longtime fans and newcomers will enjoy.… The artwork is top-notch.”
Just as importantly, last year’s anthology, Writers of the Future Volume 33, hit #1 on the bestseller list for science fiction on Amazon, hit #1 on Barnes and Noble, hit #6 on the UK’s Daily News, and hit in the top ten on sixty-eight other bestseller lists.
Contest Growth
The L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers and Illustrators of the Future Contests are some of the largest and longest-running contests in the world—and they are still growing by leaps and bounds.