ash

For a while we tried to pretend everything was . . . not normal, it could never be normal again, but at least that it was recoverable. We lost a city, and the world was spiraling into chaos, but surely, eventually, things would settle. The empire hadn't touched every corner of the continent, however hard they tried, and out here . . . maybe we could still find peace, out here. Then, that summer, ash began raining from the sky. We carried on, because what else could we do, but that's when everyone started to accept that whatever storm had been unleashed, there was no chance of it simply passing us by.

As the summer wore on, travelers trickled in with news of fire and flood, of the earth shaking itself apart and the mountains themselves exploding. People were fleeing, if they could, with neither plan nor preparation. And I, fool that I was, decided to head back to the source.

The fires had died down but the ash remained. On clear days the light seemed pale and wan, and when it rained the rain left streaks of soot everywhere it touched. To say nothing of the storms: fierce winds, torrential rain, clouds so thick I couldn't tell if it was night or day and lightning so bright and so frequent my eyes refused to adjust to the dark. It was comforting to imagine that all of this was just to keep me from reaching my goal, but I doubt the world cared that much about me. As I took shelter in the abandoned villages along the way, it was hard to think that it cared much about any of us.

I finally arrived at the dead city one clear bright sunny day, and for once the sunlight was clean and healthy--I'd almost forgotten what that looked like. There were no storms here, and the city--the bits that weren't under the ocean now, anyway--was almost untouched. My suspicions, it seemed, were correct.

I cleaned the ash from my face in the ocean and picked a building to take shelter in. I had nothing but time, now--time enough, I had to hope, to put the world to rights.

dragon

The story goes she encountered a dragon in the valley and awakened her powers there, which is of course nonsense. I heard she made a fool of herself trying to outsmart a swamp witch--she certainly came home seething, and when I asked what happened her face turned red and then when I asked why she was blushing she told me to fuck off. To be fair, she didn't start the rumor about the dragon. Every time she heard it she squirmed and blushed and tried to change the topic, but that wasn't enough to make it go away. She became kind of a legend after that, as if she wasn't enough of one already. A destined hero.

I went to the swamp to find out what actually happened down there, because stories about dragons don't just materialize, and I found the witch there, waiting for me. "You're late," she told me, and I told her that pretending to be all mysterious prescient wasn't going to impress me so she should drop the act.

She raised her hand and what I had taken to just be a fallen tree in the swampwater behind her shifted and splashed and there before me stood a dragon, all covered in moss and lichen and mushrooms, its eyes the color of algae, its scales the same brown as a decaying tree stump. "I summoned a dragon and it took you two months to come investigate," she told me. "You're late."

I shrugged an indifferent apology at her. "You should have sent a letter," I told her, and she didn't argue because she knew I had a point.

"So," I said. "You wanted me here. What did you want to tell me?"

"Your friend. She's waking things up. I don't think she knows it yet, but this fellow here," she indicated the dragon, "shouldn't be. Or rather, wouldn't be, if she hadn't paid us a visit."

I watched the dragon for a while. "Makes sense," I said. "Anything else?"

"You're very irritating," she told me. "Do you know that?"

I did know that.

I probably should have been worried about that, or wondered what it meant, but there's always a looming calamity somewhere, and the spirits can be very melodramatic about it all. Mostly I found it amusing that the story that made my friend into a legend was more or less the exact opposite of the truth. She had gone into the valley and awakened the dragon's power, and who knows what else besides.

The whole trip home I debated whether or not I should tell her. In the end I decided to, which in retrospect was probably a mistake, but I believe in letting people make their own decisions. Besides, she'd have found out eventually, and maybe things would have been much worse if she found out from someone besides me.

snow

I spent the winter in a remote mountain village, not entirely by choice--I'd hoped for a long autumn and a mild winter, and got neither. They were welcoming, if not entirely friendly, but I found ways to earn my keep. They knew turning me away was almost certainly a death sentence, and times weren't quite that tight.

The snows came early and they didn't let up. Within a few weeks it already felt like the snow had always been there and would be there long after I was gone. Sometimes, especially at night, I'd imagine that this thick blanket of frozen down would suffocate the entire world. It was an oddly peaceful thought, and every time I hated myself for thinking it.

I spent the mornings clearing out paths for the villagers and the evenings in the town hall, drilling their militia, hoping that they were only planning to defend themselves against bandits and invaders and weren't planning to become bandits or invaders themselves. And then, once the training was complete and everyone had retired for the night, I would eat a meal with my hosts--at first in silence, and then, as they warmed to my presence or grew tired of the isolation, in polite conversation.

On those rare days when I had nothing to do, I would walk. Ostensibly I was checking in on the more remote houses, ensuring that the paths were still usable, that everyone was in good health, but this was mostly an answer for when the locals got suspicious. Seeing my footsteps alone in the fresh snow, surrounded by that perfect stillness, I could finally feel free.

It wasn't to last, of course. I returned one evening to the smell of smoke, and found that my hosts' house had gone up in flames, and in the ensuing chaos of the town trying to stop the fire, someone had raided the storehouses. Most people had some supplies of their own tucked away, of course, but . . .

Suspicion fell on me at once. It didn't matter that I no longer had a place to stay, that the fire had destroyed most of my things as well as the food my hosts were using to feed me; I was an outsider, I knew the village, and they were certain they had been betrayed. I fled before they could decide that I needed to be brought to immediate justice--almost certain death was better than certain death.

An old villager I'd spoken to a few times on my walks stopped me when I passed by his cabin. "Leaving us, are we?"

"I don't fancy being killed for a crime I didn't commit." I put a hand on my sword. "Don't fancy killing anyone, either."

He held his hands up. "You're the only face I've seen in weeks, I've got no quarrel with you. Figured you might appreciate some supplies for the road, since it looks like you've lost yours."

I hesitated, then nodded. He beckoned me inside, and outfitted me with enough supplies for an extended foray into the winter wilds, and a map and compass to help me find my way to another town. Then he insisted on giving me a hot meal before I went, and offered me a space on the floor to stay the night. I declined.

It started snowing as I set out again, heavy enough that any tracks I left would be gone by the time the village tried to search for me. The journey to the next town would be a long one, but the world under the snow was so peaceful, I didn't really mind.

pattern

I started studying history in the hopes it would be useful. Whether the objective was to change the world or merely to rule competently, she would need guidance, perspective, someone who could look at the world and see the patterns. So I studied deep and broad, because when she had a question I was determined to have the answer. Even once I'd moved on to living a life of my own, and even once I realized that if it were possible to gain the powers of an oracle through nothing more than reading a great deal, everyone would be studying history with just as much enthusiasm as I was, I enjoyed delving. The world made more sense.

But sometimes there were patterns. Sometimes, watching events unfold, it all felt familiar, or at least expected. And towards the end, before the war, before everything fell apart, I tried to warn her. If anyone could prevent disaster, it would be her.

"I thought you, of all people, would understand," she told me. "Are you having second thoughts?"

How many times had a ruler stood at the precipice of disaster? How many times had they had a friend, a confidant, an adviser, try to warn them, only to have their advice discarded? My mistake, I realized later, was assuming that if I worked to help her achieve her goals, we could avoid catastrophe. Because she really did want to make the world a better place, and somehow I believed that meant she actually could, that despite her failings, she was our best chance.

 It's hard to see the pattern when you're part of it.

swing

The morning after I killed her would-be assassin, her father paid me a visit, not to thank me, not to apologize that I had to do what I had done, but to promise me that whoever was responsible for this would hang for it. I think I was supposed to be comforted by the idea, but it seemed so pointless. Her assailant was barely older than I was, and he bled out on the marble while the guards shouted and my friend cried and I wondered why I wasn't crying, wondered why no one would help him. Surely he was no longer a threat?

Over the following days they all treated me (and my sister, mostly because none of them could be bothered to distinguish between us) as if I had done something remarkable, as if I wanted more attention and more responsibility because my friend was in danger and I protected her without thinking, without planning, without--anything, really. I didn't cry then, either. None of it felt real. Part of me wondered if I was still there in the hallway, if this wasn't just some dream I'd had.

It was when they found some friend of the attacker's who, they said, was in on the plan, when they had us go out to the gallows to watch him die, that I finally cried. He had the same dazed look in his eyes I'd seen in the mirror ever since, that sense that none of it was real, because accepting that this was reality now was unthinkable.

There was no fear, no protest, as they put the hood over his face, or the rope around his neck. Even when they dropped the world out from under him, he didn't struggle. He kicked once or twice, as if trying to find land, then went absolutely still, except for a very slight swing back and forth, as the crowd jeered.

frail

The first time someone tried to assassinate me, I became obsessed with the fundamental frailty of the world--not just my mortality, though that was certainly a significant aspect of it, but everything. I imagined how, had my friend arrived a moment later, I might have died, or been taken, or been injured, but she would not have been forced to kill a man; and how perhaps my death would have lead to the deaths of other members of a conspiracy, instead of leaving us with only a corpse and no real answers.  All it would take is a brief moment, a tiny shift in the position of a blade, and the whole world would shift.

It was somehow comforting to think that if I had died, the ripples would change the face of the world forever, but it became difficult to ignore those morbid thoughts. I could suppress them, but in the evenings they took up the entirety of my attention. Over time I learned to focus less on death, but I never quite stopped the peculiar obsession with how a single, minuscule action could forever alter the course of history.

I was already predisposed to thinking and rethinking every little action, but now it seemed to take on this monumental importance. I consulted seers and oracles, some real, some fraudulent; I called on my friends and counselors to give me advice, then demanded that they justify that advice; I stayed up late into the night studying and strategizing and doing anything I could to ensure that every decision I made was the correct one. If my health and friendships suffered for it, so be it. I had a great burden to bear, a bright future to lead us towards. I had the power, the knowledge, and the will. 

Everything fell apart so suddenly, and yet, looking back on it with eyes trained by these years of obsession, it seemed so obvious. How many paths were open to me which avoided the calamity that followed? I could see them all now that there was no choice but to push through.

enchanted

When you travel far enough from the empire's reach, to the places where they never built their little temples and monasteries, you start seeing little charms and trinkets to make life easier: a charm for mild winters, a charm for health, a charm for a good harvest. And so on, and so on. Officially, of course, they are dangerous and unreliable, as are all enchantments performed without the carefully calculated geomancy that keeps the empire stable. Unofficially . . .

I asked once how they are enchanted, these charms and trinkets, and at first they laughed at me. Another city girl asking foolish questions. But I pressed, and finally one of the locals humored me. They had me help them split firewood, and at the end of the day cooked me a hot meal and gave me a scrap of parchment which said that they owed the bearer a favor.

"How did I enchant this?" they asked me.

"You didn't."

"But you know I'll honor it, right? Even if you traded it off?"

I nodded.

"But probably not if it was stolen, and definitely not if whoever tried to turn it in had offended me in some way." They tossed a wooden charm on the table. "This is a promise. That's all. A useful promise, one people would be willing to trade a lot for--but there isn't really a how to it. A promise was made, a promise will be honored."

Their hand hesitated. "That's a charm to help those who are seeking something lost. If you want it . . ."

I handed the parchment back without thinking and fastened the charm around my neck. It certainly couldn't hurt.

sword

Stealing today's prompt from the year of our lord two thousand seventeen because the word "husky" isn't giving me any good ideas.

It's still dark when I'm finally prepared to leave--early enough, I had hoped, to leave under cover of darkness, but my teacher sleeps light these days. So many of us do. "You're leaving us, then?" she says, and I stop. Her tone is sharp, alert--she's been up. She's been waiting for me.

"I--"

"You have many talents. Subtlety isn't one of them." In the light I can't see her face, but there's a warmth to her words. Very slowly, she rises to her feet. I drop my bags and run to her side--I've seen how it hurts her to walk, since the injury. I don't want that on my conscience. Not now.

Her smile is more than half a wince as she hands me a parcel wrapped in fabric. "My old sword," she says.

She doesn't say anything as I unsheathe it and hold it in my hands. It feels good, even if the blade has seen better days. There's an intensity to her expression that is only amplified by the starlight, and I can't stop feeling like she's waiting for a reaction. "Thank you," I tell her.

She makes a noise of disapproval. "It's not a favor," she says. "But you're determined to be a hero. And who knows? Maybe you'll save us all." She sinks back to her seat, more quickly than I think she meant to. "I hope you will. But I need you to understand, before you leave, that carrying it will cost you."

I try to meet her eye, but I can't. I sheathe the sword, look away, and nod. "I understand," I tell her. "Thank you."

The sword is an awkward weight on my hip as I leave town, constantly reminding me of its presence no matter how I shift it.

build

A,

I hope this letter finds you well. Actually, I hope it finds you at all--if you knew the trouble I went through to find a messenger who seemed like they might be able to find you... anyway, I do hope you're well.

I know we didn't exactly part on good terms, but . . . I'm trying to build something here and it wouldn't be the same without you. Any time we tried something crazy, knowing you had our backs made it feel possible. And right now I need someone to convince me this is possible. We're trying to build a new community out here, somewhere out of reach of the dying empire and all the petty warlords and their dreams of conquest, somewhere built with love and the desire to create instead of claimed with swords and strategies.

There aren't a lot of us, and it's hard work, but everyone is happy to be a part of something. Even me--I can't remember the last time I was able to sit down at the end of the day and look at something and say "I helped build that. That was mine." You and I watched a city drown, survived countless battles, and for how many years now have we been wandering, convinced that war is all we're good for, looking for answers we'll never find? It doesn't have to be that way.

The messenger knows where to find me. I hope to see you soon--and if not, I hope you find what you're looking for. But so long as this village stands, there will be a place for you here. That's a promise.

Yours,
D

freeze

The first hard freeze came too early--one night it was clear and bright and the next morning a thick fog had crept in and coated everything with ice, making the world at once impossibly beautiful and impossibly cold. I was already ill-prepared for the autumn--as I woke shivering in my tent I wasn't sure I'd survive to see nightfall. All the firewood I'd spent most of yesterday gathering was coated in ice, and my tent was frozen stiff as well. No fire, no tent, and all I had left of food was some mushrooms and wild berries I'd gathered on the way in. So I dressed myself as warmly as I could--which was not warm enough--and I left my tent and I walked and promised myself not to stop for anything.

At first the dull monotony of the journey helped keep my mind from focusing on the cold, but then the forest thinned and a bitter wind began to blow and the only thing I could think about was how much it hurt. And then my mind pulled away, and I was somewhere far above, watching this poor miserable creature trudge her way across the icy roads. Her pain was palpable even from my remote vantage, but it was no longer my own. Her fate was no longer mine. I watched her stumble her way into a village, and finally collapse within view of an inn. Perhaps she cried out, or perhaps someone saw her--someone ran out to drag her inside, the poor thing. And then everything went black.

I was more or less myself again when the world returned, wrapped in blankets. Someone had put me in a change of clothes--nothing I owned was this warm--and tucked in some hot water bottles. And someone--a young woman--was watching me. When she was satisfied that I was well enough, she led me to the common room and introduced me to "the regulars." We spent the night just chatting and for once it felt like home.

I shouldn't have stayed. Trouble always found me sooner or later, and I'd rather it happen around strangers than friends. But I tried saying I'd leave, when everyone had gone home and it was just me and her, cleaning up and finishing off a mug of hot cider together, and she wouldn't hear it.

"The roads aren't going to get better from here," she said. "We've got room to spare and could use an extra set of hands around the place. It's going to be a hard winter. Please stay?"

"Until spring," I told her. It's so much easier to stay if you really believe it's only temporary.

bait

After the dust had settled, when the chaos of the collapse had calmed into something more stable, a steady slog of survival, I started getting dreams--dreams where all of us were back together again, where instead of fighting just to survive we were fighting to fix the world. Yes, we'd failed, but in the dreams there was still time to be heroes. The dreams were so clear and so vivid it was hard to imagine they were just the product of my sleeping mind--these were visions. Someone wanted me to go back.

It was, of course, a trap. How could it be anything else? How could anyone imagine that this world could be fixed, after everything we let happen to it? Whatever had sent these visions, it did not have my best interests at heart--the hope it offered was false hope, and whatever fate awaited me if I heeded them was not, I was certain, a happy one.

And yet. The others were still out there somewhere, lost in the chaos, and I had no doubt they had received the visions as well. What if some of them decided to follow, to head back to that dead city? Could we avoid the worst of it if we returned knowing that we were walking into a trap? Was it worth risking everything for a chance to see some of them again, to maybe save them from whatever horrible fate awaited us?

If I was the most sensible of us, and I was considering heeding the visions despite knowing they were a trap, certainly some of the others wouldn't even hesitate. I settled my affairs in town and hit the road once more. No one here would miss me.

mindless

I always thought that what she needed most was loyalty. She had enough enemies and critics to go around--if she wanted me to question every effort she would have asked. So I did what I could to make sure that, whatever goal she set, someone would be there to help achieve it.

I told myself it didn't bother me that in public she met my loyalty with indifference, that she couldn't afford to reveal how much she relied on me. I pretended to understand. And I had almost convinced myself that it didn't hurt every time I found that she had kept some pointless secret from me or hadn't sought help I could easily have provided.

Then she disappeared one summer, without a word. I considered spending the time moping, and discarded the idea as a waste of time--if nothing else, she wouldn't get anything out of it. Carrying on as if everything was normal was, of course, impossible, since "normal" required her presence, so I resolved to find a new normal. I made friends, I fell briefly in love, I took time to myself. The midsummer festival came and, drunk on summer wine and freedom, I talked about her for the first time--about us, really, but it seemed already like I wasn't talking about myself anymore.

When she returned with the first chill of autumn at first I worried my new self would disappear, but when she smiled at me--in private, of course--my will no longer abandoned me. I could look her in the eye, and smile back, and my mind, at last, was my own.

ring

I didn't have many friends, growing up. Plenty of people who admired me, plenty more who wanted to be on my good side, but a true friend, someone I could trust and confide in--those were vanishingly rare. It was a lonely life--but admitting that to anyone, even those few friends I had, could have been catastrophic. I needed to project perfect confidence at all times.

Sometimes it was easy. Other times, not so much. One one of those occasions, one of those friends--my oldest, truest friend, the one I knew would stay with me through any danger, whose loyalty was absolute--gave me a little ring. She had carved it out of pinewood, given it a simple floral pattern, and on the band carved our initials. "So whenever you feel like you're alone in this world," she said, "you can remember that you have me." I was wealthy enough that I tended not to care much about my possessions, especially when I was so young, but when I promised I would treasure that ring forever I meant it. I kept it on a silver chain around my neck and wore it everywhere.

A few years before . . . everything else happened, I was traveling far from home, traveling with only two guards as an escort--a mistake, in retrospect, but back then I felt so invulnerable. There were problems in the world, of course, but nothing could stop me. The future was so bright. We were robbed on the road, and no matter how I pleaded they wouldn't let me keep that ring. They took it along with everything else of value that we carried.

Having something stolen from you, something you care about, is a jarring experience. The world suddenly seems sharper, everything you thought was a soft surface or rounded edge suddenly becomes suspect, and you feel like somehow you are diminished by the experience. My friend consoled me as well as she could, but I had invested so much hope in that little ring. Somehow without it I knew that bright future I was so certain of before would be forever out of reach now.

Part of me knows that's nonsense, of course. That everything that happened after wasn't because some thieves saw an easy target, that when she finally betrayed me, along with everyone else, it had nothing to do with losing that little ring that bound us together. But I can't help but wonder if things could have been different.

unlikely

We used to believe, the two of us, in that perfect star-crossed connection, some unlikely story bringing us together with our respective loves--it didn't have to be a big thing, of course, but something cute you could tell your friends. We took the same bus every Thursday and then we saw each other at a bar on the completely other end of town and we hit it off. We ran into each other at a concert and there was a spark there, but she disappeared while I was at the coat check, but then I saw the same band at the same venue five years later and there she was, smiling. And so on. The little things that tell the world: this was fate.

And I know a part of both of us still wants that world to exist, of course, but just as obviously the world can't work like that. It's too dark out there for whimsy, even if the nights are perfect at this time of year, when the heat of the summer starts to fade and those first chills of autumn creep in and the stars are so bright and clear.

We both had a few relationships like that in our time, where everything seemed so unlikely and perfect right up until everyone involved realized that coincidence is a flimsy foundation on which to build anything, even if at the time it feels so important.

Maybe it is important. Maybe it's us who have gotten too grim for this world, too serious, too afraid to leap into the unknown based on nothing but that overwhelming feeling that this is too unlikely to ignore. I've been wrong before.

What I know is this: we've spent the evening wistfully lamenting our naivety over some cheap beer left over from someone else's party. How foolish we were back then, and how fortunate to be so foolish. If only we could go back to do it all over again, would we? And if we did, would we make different choices, or relive them all over again? If we were fools then, were we still fools now?

When we were younger it would have been wine or coffee or something we thought was romantic or at least poetic, and we would have thought there were answers to these questions. Of this much, at least, I am certain: the world will never provide answers.

As we stood on the porch, we brushed against each other several times, each one of us daring the other to make a move after so many years of searching for magic elsewhere--but perhaps there's still some of that youthful idealism left in us. We're not nearly unlikely enough.

scenes from a dying empire

She is pacing again, anxious again, frustrated again--I feel trapped is what she told me, and I wanted to tell her I understood but I'm not sure I do. I wanted to tell her I could help but I can't. All I can do is watch, and listen. I'd offer a shoulder to cry on but she doesn't like being touched. She is my friend and she is suffering and there is nothing I can do about it.

(She has told me so many times you are helping just by being there and it is sweet of her to think of my feelings even at a time like this. It breaks my heart, but it's sweet.)

We used to come up here sometimes, when the days were getting long and the nights were just warm enough, to get away from it all, to leave behind who we were by day and just be us, whoever we were. I'm not sure either of us knew. It was a place of comfort then; now we mostly come up here when the world is too much. A place to worry. I hate that I'm starting to dread coming up here. I think she is, too, which doesn't help. This was our place.

She stops pacing, looks at me, and sort of freezes. Like she wants to say something, or scream, or keep pacing, but she can't. Her hands clench and twitch and finally she turns away and says it's too much. It's too big.

And at first I don't understand but--of course. I've been feeling it too, I think. Once, a long time ago, there were places where it wasn't encroaching. It being--hmm. The death throes of a dying empire? But there is so much else. It's not just overwhelming because of how vast it is, but because of how minuscule, how trivial. Even the trivial has been devoured by this creeping sense of--

--of being trapped.

She sees the understanding in my face, smiles a bittersweet smile, and tells me I don't know how much longer I can do this. My breath catches, but you're here. That's enough.

At least at night everything is peaceful. The city is asleep, the stars are shining, and if we must be prisoners here, at least we are here together.

golden

The trails were oddly empty this weekend, when we got up early--as early as we could, eager to beat the holiday weekend crowds. We hiked the first part of the trail in darkness, and at first we were certain that it was empty because, somehow, we were the first ones to arrive. But there was no one, just a few people returning from their own trips. No new day hikers or backpackers. Just us and the mountains and the woods. The weather was magnificent, the mountains were beautiful; it seemed nothing short of a miracle how perfect the trip was, how alone we were out here. Such a marked contrast to the constant noise and static of the city.

It wasn't until we tried to return home that we understood: we were alone because we were the last ones to leave. The city fell silent after we left, and the suburbs and small towns followed shortly after. No one online knew what caused it, before online fell silent, too. So we turned around and headed back.

We can't survive out here forever. Even if we can find enough forage to live on, the winter will come and we aren't prepared. But it was beautiful, and if the silence takes us here, at least it will be someplace too beautiful to be believed.

a diptych of poems

ELEGY FOR A SUNKEN CITY
The city seemed so empty
when you weren't here.
I promised I'd return, didn't I?
Didn't I promise I'd rescue you?
But I fought my way back
to our city,
our home,
and there was nothing left but silence.

Of course I drowned it.
Of course I shattered the floodbanks--
they are,
after all,
my floodbanks, because this city
is mine,
and there is nothing here
worth saving
without you.
They said you'd left
so I did what I had to.
I let the ocean
reclaim her own.

Perhaps they'll remember me as a hero:
perhaps, as the waves crash through the marble streets,
they'll tell themselves stories
of how I sacrificed my city to save the world.
But I didn't. I sacrificed it because
I hoped I'd drown with it.

The waves are calm now,
the screams of my city finally silenced.
It's oddly peaceful,
here alone with the gulls
and my thoughts
in the dead city beneath the sea.
I hope you'll come back home.



ANOTHER CASTLE
You promised me, when you fled,
you'd come back and rescue me.
I never promised I'd wait.
Did you think I would?

I have no time for you to lead your armies
to glorious victory, nor to
defeat my captors in single combat.
I know this prison better than
I know myself.
Did you think it would
hold me?
Did you hope it would?

Life, I'm afraid, is not so glamorous:
no one will thank you for your conquests.
No one will sing your triumphs.
I never asked for war in my name,
for blood to be spilt on my behalf.
I was never going to stay
and you,
my love,
were never a hero.

scenes from a cyberpunk road story, pt. ii

It's just cold by the time we get to New York, the kind of cold where the air burns your lungs even as the sun shines down on you with false promises of warmth. This is the kind of cold that kills.

I do not own a heavy enough jacket for this.

Still, even though Morgan says her sister has taken care of the surveillance to make sure nobody notices that we're here, it's a good opportunity to slip into town unnoticed. There are ways to identify someone who's bundled up for winter, but they don't use that sort of tech for casual surveillance, and I don't think anyone's looking for us here just yet.

Morgan's driving, because this is her town, even if she hates it. But she navigates like she knows it, and pulls into the parking lot of some building I instinctively think is too nice. These places aren't for people like us--well, people like me.

The woman waiting for us looks like Morgan if she were a little taller and a little thinner and a lot more interested in fashion. Morgan's parka is a dingy black thing, warm and functional and street-stylish. This woman's navy blue coat dress is the sort of designer brand that only even sells to corporate royalty. Somehow simultaneously understated and ostentatious.

"I like your jacket," she tells me. "I'm Elizabeth. I'm sorry that my sister has forgotten her manners."

"Nora," I say. "Thank you." Then, because I feel like she's expecting something more, "It's not the best jacket for winter. It doesn't get that cold where I grew up."

"I'll find something for you," she says cheerfully. "You two are popular right now, did you know?"

***

We've been reported as missing, as it turns out, which only means someone wants to find us and doesn't want to have to deal with cops. But whoever put out the bulletin had enough influence to make sure our faces were on every news report in the New England Commerce Zone and a good number of them in New York, which was . . . troublesome.

"It would be much easier to make that disappear if it were an arrest warrant," Elizabeth tells us as she pours us wine that costs more than I spend on food in a month. "Bribes are easy. Making this disappear is going to be hard."

"There's contact info, right?" asks Morgan. "I assume that's a dead end?"

Elizabeth nods her head. "They covered their tracks well."

"But you have a plan."

"But I have a plan." She claps her hands--an affectation, I imagine, both to draw attention to her state-of-the-art cyberhands and to disguise that she is simply sending a command to the drone that walks in, holding aloft a sleeveless dress in black and white. "There's no shortage of high society functions in winter--all the better to stave off madness, I imagine. Stay here for a while, make some appearances. Make it look like you're here to stay. Whoever's looking for you will know you're here, but Morgan the scruffy drifter is a much easier target than Morgan the corporate heiress. If they do make their move, we'll be ready."

I can tell Morgan doesn't like this plan, but I can also tell she's going to say yes. But I'm not sure how I fit in yet. "What about me?"

"What about you? We take your measurements, get you a wardrobe. So long as it's clear you're with us, no one will dare question whether you belong." And then she smiles brightly. "It'll be fun, I promise. And you'll be out of here before you know it and back to your glamorous vagabond lifestyle or whatever it is you two are doing." Her smile takes on a slight edge. "Which M will have to tell me about sometime."

Morgan sighs. "Yeah. Soon, I promise. Not yet." A long pause. "All right. I know you're only doing this because you miss having a tag team partner at these insufferable parties, but all right. But if we're staying still for a week you're doing more than helping us find dresses."

"Of course. And Nora?"

I shrug. "If Morgan's in, I'm in."

"Excellent." She beams at me. "I promise you will not be disappointed."

Maybe we've been on the road too long, maybe Elizabeth's enthusiasm is infectious, but for now, at least, I'm starting to feel pretty good.

scenes from a cyberpunk road story, pt. i

In no order.

It's harder than I thought it would be, leaving New York behind again. It's so easy to feel like home is this awful place when you're not there, to say you hate who you were there, you hate all your friends there. But I miss it. I miss when El and I were an unstoppable team.

Which means she was right, of course. She's always fucking right. I miss that, too.

Nora's driving again, because she likes it and she's better at it, but she keeps glancing at me. There's a question there, an unspoken "Are you okay?"--unspoken because Nora never says anything when she doesn't have to, and she knows I know.

"Home is like a glimpse into another timeline. A life where I never . . ." Here I sort of gesture with my cybernetic hand, because in many ways when I lost that I lost everything. "I spend so much time convincing myself I'm happier where life ended up taking me, but that's a fucking lie. You know? I loved it. And not just because my sister's still there."

She nods. "Would you go back, if you could?"

I hesitate, partly because I'm not sure I know the answer, partly because of the other reason leaving is so hard: because that's not such a hypothetical now. "Only if you can come with me," I tell her, and I'm not sure if it's just idle flattery or if I really mean it.

She nods again. Maybe she's not sure, either. Or maybe she's just processing. Either way, we ride together in silence for a while before she says, "You hungry?"

***

The food at these roadside diners is starting to taste like home, and I'm starting to realize that home is complicated. Home is the shitty apartment in Boston we abandoned when we skipped town just after Christmas. Home is scheming with El at New York high society functions, rubbing elbows with some of the worst people imaginable. And now, maybe, it's the road, all the greasy food and the shitty small towns and all the small town people sneering at the two girls from out of town.

Maybe home is just what happens when you finally get used to not fitting in.

"It's funny," I say, while Nora picks away at what's left of her fries. "When we got to New York I was sick to death of diner food. We spend a few days eating, you know, real food, objectively good food, rich people food, and after that suddenly this is fucking amazing."

"It tastes like adventure," she says. She sounds thoughtful. "Back when--when I was young, and we'd go on these long trips to nowhere because the eastern CCZ is nothing but nowhere, miles and miles and miles of it. We'd stop in at the truck stop outside town or some other diner or burger place and drink too much coffee and eat too many fries and then just drive, and it was wonderful. It was the only good thing about that place, and I miss it so much." She offers me something of a sheepish smile, then falls back to her customary silence.

"You can never quite leave home behind," I say. "No matter where you go it will follow you there."

She nods again.

"So. Do we keep driving or try to find a place here?"

what a fucking year

What a fucking year.

There wasn't a lot of room 2018 for hope or optimism or on some days enough energy to do anything besides get out of bed and go to work. But we made it. The calendar changed a digit, and people complain about how insignificant that is, but it's not. Every time you live to see that digit change it means you've lived another year, no matter how hard it gets. And sometimes that's something to be proud of.

I can't say with conviction that 2019 is going to be any better. But for me, at least, the new year has always been a time to regroup, to gather my strength, because whether you're ready or not, another year is coming. Sometimes you have to fight to stay afloat, and other times everything seems so perfect you wonder if you're dreaming.

I hope 2019 is the latter for you, but if not, just remember: none of us are alone out here, even if it feels like it. And remember that it's okay to be tired and it's okay to feel like it's hopeless. Just hang in there and we'll survive this together.