Tag: LIGHTSPEED Presents

io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “Death Echoes Overlapping” by Megan Chee. Enjoy!

Death Echoes Overlapping

By Megan Chee

On the necropolis space station of the Tau Andromeda planetary system, the keepers of the tomb attended to the dead and the dying. They cleansed, prepared, and prayed over the bodies. They performed the last rites, paying intricate attention to the customs of each person’s native community. This was the most sacred of tasks. Carelessness or disrespect was not tolerated; just one mistake meant immediate dismissal.

The interstellar megacivilization of Tau Andromeda was built across five planets. Every day, millions of the dying and the recently dead were ferried on great funeral ships to the necropolis station. It was best if they arrived before drawing their last breath, but that was not always possible.

When a body was ready, the keepers of the tomb harvested their death echoes in glowing thuribles. The thurible breathed in the energy from the death echoes, until the core was saturated with pale blue light. The energy was channeled through a series of metal pipes, culminating in an immense vat at the center of the space station, which was in turn distributed to the energy grids of each of the five planets.

To the people of Tau Andromeda, the act of dying was no tragedy, but a gift given gladly in return for the pleasures of life. Their megacivilization lived in peace and plenty, fueled by the passing of those who came before.

But aeons passed, and no golden age stays golden forever. Civilizations rose and fell on the five planets of the Tau Andromeda system. There were schisms and wars and reunions. There was disease and disorganization. For a time, the rise of new religion saw the decline of the death echo harvests, with the old practice suddenly seen as archaic and heretical. Eventually, the population of Tau Andromeda dwindled and died out.

Now, the planets of Tau Andromeda are overgrown with wildlife, nature reclaiming the skyscrapers of a once-advanced megacivilization. The keepers of the tomb are long dead. The necropolis station hangs silent in space. The tombs remain, preserved eternally in the cold dark expanse.

• • •

Millions of years after the golden age of Tau Andromeda, civilizations on three different planets are destroyed. Their deaths are almost instantaneous. One is swallowed by a gamma-ray burst. One annihilates itself with a weapon of mass destruction. One collapses under a swarm of matter-devouring nanobacteria, self-replicating at astonishing speeds: an undiscovered lifeform introduced to the planet by a small asteroid.

These three planets are in different galaxies, vast distances away from one another. Their civilizations have no concept of the others’ existence. It is a physical impossibility for anyone from any of these worlds to ever meet. But in their moment of destruction, their death echoes—that strange energy, only ever truly understood and measured by the keepers of the Tau Andromeda necropolis space station—ripples out across impossible distances. Their death echoes overlap and reverberate through space and through time.

• • •

Earth, AD 2237. It is monsoon season on the Singapore Strait. The rain cascades in heavy sheets, drumbeat-loud against the metal platforms of the Singapore Floating Archipelago.

Esther sits on the top level of the watchtower. She sips a cup of watered-down kopi as she keeps a bored eye on the dashboard set up on her desk. She is supposedly monitoring for unauthorized foreign activity on the storm-tossed sea: motorized sampans that abandoned the Jakarta Megaship’s endless voyage around Indonesian waters, or submarines that drifted away from the Undersea Federation of Malaysia.

As usual, there is no unauthorized foreign activity to be found. She is increasingly aware that her job at the Department of Security is a defunct role, a symbolic gesture of the government’s protection. Nowadays, there are no pirates, no organized crime, no drug trade. There aren’t even any refugees. No one is fleeing from their homes in the hope of a better future, not anymore.

While wars rage across the rest of the world, the superpowers of east and west tearing each other apart over the remaining slices of habitable land, their forgotten corner of Southeast Asia is slipping quietly away into the rising ocean.

A cartoon envelope pops up at the bottom of the monitor, an old-fashioned symbol indicating that she has received a message. Esther sighs but clicks on it anyway. As expected, it’s from Wei Jie.

“can we talk? after work”

She replies: “maybe weekend,” and then mutes the interdepartmental chat.

She ended her relationship with Wei Jie last week. She doesn’t feel particularly sad about it, but Wei Jie seems to feel enough for both of them. He sobbed through the short, awkward conversation. “Is it because I keep nagging you about the baby permit? I’ll stop bringing it up, I promise. Maybe next year we can think about it.”

It’s not about the baby permit, although she was indeed baffled that he actually still wanted to reproduce, even with the last remnants of human civilization on the brink of extinction. It’s his obliviousness. It’s the fact that he genuinely believes there will be a next year, and a year after that. The fact that he works in the Department of Home Affairs but still somehow failed to notice that no one’s baby permit applications are getting approved anymore. That, if nothing else, is a clear signal that there are no future generations to plan for. Their only priority now is to make sure that the citizens who are currently alive can keep on living in decent conditions for as long as possible.

Once she began to feel the blunt edge of contempt, she knew the relationship was over.

Unfortunately, he can’t seem to accept what is blatantly obvious to her. What is the point of this obstinate refusal to accept the truth? He’s not the only one. There are so many people still valiantly planning for an impossible future, still willfully blind to the facts. Esther accepts the imminent end, lets the inevitability of it wash over her and through her. It’s okay. Sooner or later, everything returns to the sea.

She gazes out at the raging, empty ocean. She knows with a deep, self-satisfied certainty that she has nothing to complain about. Throughout history, billions of people led short, brutal lives and died unpleasant deaths. She, at least, has been privileged enough to live for thirty-five years, and although it’s mostly been a slog, she can’t deny it was interspersed with brief moments of happiness, maybe even love. She feels flatly contented.

• • •

In the verdant meadows of the planet Autura, the Collective morphs into the Farmer. The Collective consists of trillions of tiny Units. The Units are miniscule insectoid creatures with shiny black exoskeletons. They swarm together in perfect unison into a rippling mass. As each Unit falls into their correct place to make up the Farmer’s body and brain, the neural patterns of the Farmer’s mind take shape. Impulses stutter into thought. The Farmer attains consciousness.

The Farmer walks across the meadow in a graceful, lumbering motion. Their many legs drag in long grooves through the dirt, tilling the soil in neat rows. As they walk, sacs in their underbelly excrete a nutritious fluid formed from the liquidized corpses of dead Units.

Of all the Collective’s Characters, the Farmer leads one of the most contented lives. Unlike the Philosopher, the Farmer does not agonize over the meaning of life as a Collective, the intricacies of personal identity, and the eternal question of whether a Character dies a new death every time the Collective dissolves to form someone else. Unlike the Leader, the Farmer does not worry about the future of the Collective, the direction of their civilization, and the possibility of unknown threats looming on the horizon. Unlike the Teacher, the Farmer does not bear the daunting responsibility of developing new Characters to meet the needs of the Collective’s evolving society.

The Farmer ploughs the land, plants the seeds, fertilizes them, and then harvests the milky-white fruit that provides nutrition to the Collective. The repetitive motion brings comfort and satisfaction. The Farmer is only formed during the planting season and the time of harvest, so their life is one of sunlight, warmth and plenty.

As a single cell in the neural network of the Farmer’s brain, Unit XJ7832 experiences comfort, satisfaction and warmth too—insofar as an individual Unit can consciously experience anything. Unit XJ7832 was born three revolutions ago in the rich bubbling swamp of the Mother’s Embrace. It emerged from the soup with millions of its siblings, instinct driving them to join the comfortably amorphous shape of the Mother, where they learn their places in each of the Collective’s Characters.

Surrounded by trillions of its siblings, all united in a single purpose, there is no need and no desire for individual thought. Unit XJ7832 plays its part, and together, the Collective moves forward.

• • •

Constant storms rage on the gas giant planet of Lalesh. Winds blow at supersonic speeds across the surface of the planet.

The Wisps of Lalesh do not have names; their unique patterns of movement as they hurtle along the air currents are identification enough. Made of thin, weblike tissue that catches the powerful wind like sails, they ride the storms on an eternal journey around the planet.

If an alien ever visited Lalesh to admire the beauty of the raging storms, they might be forgiven for failing to realize that the fluttering slips dancing on the winds are alive at all. The Wisps do not appear to move autonomously. They do not need to eat, because their weblike skin absorbs all the energy they need from the movement of the storm itself.

But the Wisps are not just alive; they are vibrantly, intellectually, colorfully alive. As they fly through the wind, they ruminate on the philosophies of the universe. They solve complex calculations. They compose poems of epic scope. All this is communicated via an intricate language of rippling movement.

Depending on the thickness, composition and surface area of their fluttering bodies, the Wisps traverse the winds at different speeds. This divides them into separate flocks. A flock flies at the same speed in the same trajectory, and all the while they tell stories and sing symphonies and marvel at the luminescence of each other’s minds. Your new theorem, revolutionary! This verse of your poem, it redefines literature!

One Wisp, however, does not fly with a flock. Their body has an awkward shred down the middle, making their flight path lurching and inconsistent. The Lonely Wisp passes through flocks on occasion, but try as they might, they can never stay with the group. They either lag behind or hurtle helplessly ahead.

The Wisps are not meant to be alone; they are artists, poets, scientists, and scholars. The wonders of their minds are meant to be shared, admired, exalted over. But the Lonely Wisp dances through the storms on a solitary path, creating beautiful things that no one else will ever see.

• • •

The death echoes of the three planets ripple across vast distances from the point of destruction. The waves of energy meet mid-space and pass through each other with a discordant buzz. Energy sparks and jumps, stuttering through time.

In the final days of Earth, Autura, and Lalesh, their people become subliminally aware of something alien, something unfamiliar, pressing in at the periphery of their subconscious; experiences so wildly different from their understanding of existence that their waking minds cannot make sense of it.

When they sleep, they dream strange dreams.

• • •

Esther has been buried alive. All around her is pitch blackness, but not the silent, still darkness of her quarters at night. This darkness is alive, writhing, and skittering. She is buried in a sea of bugs. She wants to scream and struggle—but she can’t. Because she’s one of them. She has become a small scuttling thing herself amid a massive throng of small scuttling things.

Horror swells in her, but there is no release. She can’t make a sound. She can’t move against the writhing mass of insects pressing against her. She is trapped.

With nowhere else to go, she retreats within herself, desperately trying to block out the nightmare unfolding around her. Gradually she becomes aware of something else, something beyond the horrible scuttling movement, beyond the trillions of exoskeletal bodies and insectoid legs. She begins to feel a pattern to the movement. Unbelievably, there is a semblance of order here amid the chaos.

She gives in to it. What else can she do? She moves in the pattern that she is called to move in, lets it pull her along, and soon she realizes that her body knows what to do, even if her conscious mind does not. She swims along the flowing current of bugs, and although they move together, each one has its own distinct role to play.

As she moves through the tides of Units, her perspective begins to shift. There is a broadening, a zooming-out, like staring at an optical illusion and suddenly seeing the big picture.

And it dawns on her—

She is just one cell among trillions in this massive organism. She is no better than any of the others. She is no smarter, no more jaded, no less ignorant. They are all the same, and individually they are insignificant, insentient. But together, they are a thinking thing, with a mind—a consciousness—a soul.

She jolts awake, gasping. Tears stream down her face. She rolls off her bunk bed and staggers to the small mirror hanging on the wall. Her reflection is almost unrecognizable; she shrinks back from her bloodshot eyes, her pale skin, her expression twisted in confusion and fear.

She can’t remember the last time she cried. For so long, everything has felt so muted, so meaningless; her emotions like a stagnant pool, stirred by neither joy nor despair. But now she remembers the terror of that writhing place, buried alive in the swarm of their bodies. And the wonder of it, the beauty of their synchronized movement, working together to form a seamless whole, a person.

Someone pounds loudly on the door. She staggers the few steps over to it, unlatches the lock with trembling fingers, and pulls it open. Standing there, one fist still raised to knock, is Wei Jie.

“What happened?” he demands. He lives in the room across the corridor. It was the compromise they landed on, back when he wanted them to move into married-couple housing but she was reluctant to give up her comfortable solo quarters. She beat astronomical odds to win the ballot for this room, while most of the other singles slept in double-decker beds down in the dormitories. It just pained her too much to give up that privilege, even for love. “I heard you screaming all the way in my room. You okay?”

Esther runs a hand over her sweat-slick face. “Just a nightmare.”

Wei Jie looks skeptical. “Since when do you get nightmares?”

He used to describe his dreams to her when they met for breakfast. Esther actually quite enjoyed hearing about his dreams; they were weird and creepy, absurd and funny. She, on the other hand, never had anything interesting to report. “I dreamed I failed my exam,” or, “I dreamed my boss scolded me.”

For a moment, she thinks about their dull mornings together, reading news pamphlets over diluted cups of kopi brewed from reused grounds, and she feels a stab of something horribly like longing. She looks at Wei Jie and wonders—is she justified in her contempt? Does she have the right to judge him? Aren’t they all essentially the same small scurrying creatures, living their brief lives and following the roles set out for them?

She has not asked such questions of herself in a long time. It is uncomfortable.

“I had a weird dream too,” he adds. “But it was a nice one. I was flying. It was cold, but I didn’t feel cold. All around me was this superstrong wind. There were weird flapping animals in the wind with me. Somehow I could understand them. One of them told me this amazing story. Wish I could remember it. Ten times better than the old Chinese dramas they screen in the rec room.”

“That sounds nice,” Esther says, surprised to hear the unfamiliar note of wistfulness in her own voice. “I wish I dreamed that instead.”

“Maybe you will tomorrow night,” he replies. He smiles at her, a little nervously.

Esther can’t help it; she smiles back. Wei Jie looks startled, and then his smile broadens. They both stand there for a few awkward seconds, smiling foolishly, before she mumbles some excuse and ducks back into her room.

• • •

Unit XJ7832 has no concept of itself as an individual. It does not think, or feel, or experience anything beyond the Collective.

But there was a brief time, early in its life, when it did think of itself as a discrete entity. It was right after it matured from larvae in the swamp of the Mother’s Embrace. After it crawled out of the clutch of slimy eggs where it had grown to adulthood, Unit XJ7832 stood on the muddy shores of the Embrace, and for a brief time it was simply itself. It gazed upon the amber sky and the glowing sun setting over the bubbling swampland. It saw the landscape of its homeworld through its own eyes, not the eyes of the Collective.

All around it, its siblings were taking flight. Unit XJ7832 recognized the call of its ancestors, the instinctive understanding passed down through generations. It parted its shell to reveal a pair of gossamer wings and buzzed into the air, joining the thick swarm of Units.

Hovering in the air was the massive amorphous form of the Mother, waiting for them, exuding gentle benevolence. The newborn Units flew into the Mother and became the Mother themselves.

Unit XJ7832 reached the Mother and was absorbed into them. As the mass of Units closed in around it, that warm sensation of comfort and belonging was the last thing that Unit XJ7832 experienced as itself. After that, there has only been the Collective.

Until now.

Now, Unit XJ7832 is not with the Collective. It is somewhere else. And it is alone.

Unit XJ7832 shivers on the bed, pulling the thin blanket around itself. Where are its siblings? It longs for the Collective. It looks down at itself, horrified and entranced by its strange, long, pale, soft body. It stands up and looks down at its hands. Strange hands, weak and inefficient, unlike the powerful appendages of the Warrior or the agile many-jointed fingers of the Craftsman.

These thoughts . . . These feelings . . . They are not coming from the Collective. They do not originate from neurological pathways made from trillions of Units. They originate from . . .

From itself.

Unit XJ7832 does not allow itself to dwell on this vast impossibility, this warped new reality. Instead, it flexes its hands, focusing on that instead. The appendages are so solid. The skin is smooth. It is one thing, not an amalgamation of trillions. How alien.

Instinct propels Unit XJ7832 towards the door of the small room. It opens it and steps into the corridor outside. There are neither doors nor rooms on Autura, but somehow it understands these foreign things intuitively.

Unit XJ7832 walks along the corridor, glancing up at the flickering fluorescent lights. Other Characters walk past it, sometimes muttering a quick greeting.

This is a startling sight. Unit XJ7832 has never witnessed a Character from the outside. The Collective is only large and complex enough to form one Character at a time. The Collective is a massive, interconnected family, but every Character is completely alone.

It must be a lonely existence.

Unit XJ7832 barely understands the thought that flits across its fledgling consciousness. These are strange, unfamiliar, alien concepts. It is half itself, half something else.

It walks down the corridor, pushes open a door, and steps out into the balmy night air. The residential quarters are on a floating metal platform in the middle of the ocean. Unit XJ7832 gazes around at the vast expanse of dark, rippling water. The night sky above is dusted with constellations of stars.

It crouches down beneath the railing that separates the edge of the platform from the sea, and realizes that it wants. It wants to jump into the ocean. It wants to feel the cool water against its skin. It wants to taste the salt.

It reaches down, fingers brushing the rippling surface of the water—

—Unit XJ7832 awakens in the Collective. Its allocated hours of rest and replenishment are over. It is time to return to its tasks. Other Units will move into the replenishment area for their turn to rest, and Unit XJ7832 must take their place.

Is being part of the Collective a kind of death?

That sudden, inexplicable question hovers just beyond Unit XJ7832’s capacity for understanding. For a moment it almost thinks, almost feels. Then it rejoins the seamless flow of Units, falling back into its proper place, and forgets itself amid the warm embrace of the Collective.

• • •

There is no wind.

The Lonely Wisp can hardly grasp the concept of life without wind. Lalesh is a world of air; the Wisps are creatures of flight. But here in this strange place, the Lonely Wisp stands on solid ground.

They are standing in a field of orange grass, swaying gently in the breeze. Above them, the amber sky is streaked with pale green clouds. The field is studded with delicately twisting crystalline sculptures, shimmering in the sunlight, reaching skyward with its translucent tendrils.

The Lonely Wisp looks down at themself. Their body is made of a swarm of tiny creatures. As they take a step forward, their body ripples, trillions of Units moving in a synchronized wave. The Lonely Wisp raises hundreds of many-fingered hands and gazes at them, through eyes that are also made of insectoid Units.

Together, they are the Artist.

The Artist’s many hands move in a blur as they shape the crystal structures, carving intricate designs, twisting and pulling the crystalline material with powerful many-jointed fingers. As the sculptures grow taller, the Artist grows with it, the swarm of Units thinning out and stretching upwards to accommodate the sculptures’ height.

The amber sun meanders across the sky. Eventually the shadows grow long, and the sky darkens. The Lonely Wisp gazes out at the crystalline structures, twisting artfully skyward. As the sun sets, the sky turns rich hues of red, gold and pink. The colors are reflected in the sculptures’ shimmering translucency.

There is no-one else here to witness the beauty of what they have created, but in time, there will be. Eventually, other Characters will walk this field and look upon the sculptures. For as long as the Collective lives, these sculptures will stand: the embodiment of the Artist’s luminous mind.

***

Esther is flying.

The rushing wind around her is inconceivably cold, just a few degrees above absolute zero. It is delicious. She is a creature of the frigid air, almost weightless. Her insubstantial body flaps in an uncontrolled dance. She wants to laugh, to howl her joy in a chorus alongside the howling wind all around her, but she cannot make a sound. All she can do is spin wildly, buoyed by the supersonic wind.

She has never believed in any kind of afterlife. It seems too much like wishful thinking—to believe that they are so important that they deserve immortality in any form, that their death is just too great a loss for the universe to endure. But maybe she is wrong. Maybe this is heaven. Maybe it’s this, only this, for eternity.

Please, she begs, let me stay here. Let me be this forever.

• • •

Esther jolts awake to the discordant blaring of an alarm.

She stumbles towards the door and pushes it open, not caring that she is dressed only in a long t-shirt. The corridor outside is packed with people, pushing and chattering in panic.

Through the crowd, a hand reaches out and grabs hers.

“Wei Jie,” she gasps. “What’s happening?”

“It’s the end,” he says, and she is struck by how perfectly calm he looks, how serene. “Some country has set off a doomsday weapon.”

She gapes. She has heard the rumors, of course, that each of the global superpowers are developing weapons of such massive destructive potential that a single blast can destroy what’s left of human civilization. Deep down, she has never believed it. It is too absurd to pour resources and energy into developing a doomsday weapon when humanity is already shambling towards the quiet whisper of an ending. Let it end, she thinks despairingly, let the candle flicker and die. Give us that, at least.

But they don’t even get the luxury of a quiet death. Instead, they will meet their end in fire and pain—all of humanity, united at last.

A monotonous voice announces over the intercom system, “Report in a calm and orderly manner to your assigned bomb shelters. Do not stop to assist others.”

Wei Jie’s hand tightens around hers as he pulls her into a corner. “I don’t want to go with them,” he says. “Will you come with me?”

“What? But the bomb—”

“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “You know that. The bomb shelters won’t keep anyone safe. I don’t want to die down there in the dark, packed like sardines. Let’s go outside.”

She gazes at him wonderingly. Where is his timidity, his placid adherence to the rules, his dedication to the status quo? Skinny and bespectacled, he looks just the same as he has for the last ten years, but she has the odd feeling that she is seeing someone entirely new.

“Okay,” she says.

They follow the jostling crowd, but as the others surge towards the staircases that will bring them to the undersea levels, Esther and Wei Jie slip away through an open door. They step out onto the gently bobbing platform, breathing in the briny scent of the ocean.

The sky is red. The horizon is aglow.

Esther lets out a sob, which climbs into a wail. She doesn’t want to die. The realization horrifies her. She thought she was ready; she was so sure she was ready. But her stoicism has failed her in the moment she needs it most. She howls with wild abandon and animalistic fury. There is a strange joy in it too, a release. Recognition, at last, that her death is something to grieve. It matters, doesn’t it? Her life. Her experiences. Her thoughts. Why has she never realized before, how much they all matter?

Wei Jie holds her tight as she screams and rages. His thin, wiry arms wind around her as she thrashes. “It’s okay,” he says. “It’s okay. It won’t hurt. It’ll be over so fast. We won’t feel a thing.”

“I was flying,” she says, muffled against his chest. “In my dream, just like the one you had. I was dancing in the cold wind.”

“I don’t think it was a normal dream,” Wei Jie says. “It was something else.”

“Yes. I know.”

“Maybe we’ll end up there, after this,” he says, ever optimistic. “Let’s meet again in the windy place. I’ll look for you there.”

Everything lights up in scarlet.

• • •

A swarm of unknown nanobacteria is eating through Autura. Plants shrivel into dead crisps. The lakes dry up. Animals are decimated into shards of bone.

They have fought disease before, but this is something new. The Collective transforms into the Physician, but there is no time to investigate the cause or concoct a cure. The bacteria surge into the Collective. The Units die in the millions, tiny bodies falling to the ground.

The Physician staggers. They lift their hand, watching in horror as pieces of themself dissolve.

Unit XJ7832, part of the Physician’s eye, watches as everything falls apart. The Physician’s fear and loneliness ripples across the surviving Units. For a moment Unit XJ7832 feels afraid, not just as the Physician, but as itself. And then it feels nothing at all.

• • •

The Lonely Wisp is composing a new poem as they soar on the wind. Lost in the ecstasy of creation, it almost doesn’t matter that it will never have an audience. Beauty for beauty’s own sake is the highest form of art.

They have no idea the gamma-ray burst is coming until it hits.

• • •

The death echoes of the three planets crest out through space like a great shockwave, breaking over planets and stars and nebulae.

The waves of energy pass through the Tau Andromeda system, sweeping unnoticed over the five dead planets. But when it passes over the necropolis station, for a moment every empty thurible glows with energy. Firelight flickers in lamps on the necropolis walls. The gears of great clockwork machines groan into stiff movement. Stagnant fountains trickle and begin to flow.

For a moment, the necropolis space station lives.

Then, with a sigh, the death echoes fade. The once-great necropolis space station lies still and silent once again.

About the Author

Megan Chee is a Singaporean author who has lived in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the United States, and is currently based in Singapore. Her debut science-fantasy novel “The Archaeology of Falling Worlds” will be published in early 2027 by Daphne Press (UK) and Bindery Books (US). Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed Magazine, and other venues. Her work has been translated into Chinese in Science Fiction World, and has been featured in The Year’s Best Fantasy anthology (Pyr Books). Her short story “The God of Minor Troubles” was narrated by Wil Wheaton on Season 1 of his audiobook podcast It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton. You can find her online at meganchee.carrd.co, @meganflchee on X and Bluesky, and @megancheewrites on Instagram and TikTok.

Please visit Lightspeed Magazine to read more great science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared in the February 2026 issue, which also features short fiction by Alexander Weinstein, Phoenix Alexander, Audrey Zhou, Rukman Ragas, Deborah L. Davitt, Modupeoluwa Shelle, Susan Palwick, and more. You can wait for this month’s contents to be serialized online, or you can buy the whole issue right now in convenient ebook format for just $4.99, or subscribe to the ebook edition here.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “Mother’s Hip” by Corey Jae White and Maddison Stoff. Enjoy!

Mother’s Hip

By Corey Jae White and Maddison Stoff

High above the Amazon Rainforest, Hynd circled, her massive wingspan only visible by the shadow she cast on the battlefield below. She felt the wind pass across her wings, whispering of torrential rain coming; not her concern, so far above the clouds, but she packaged the data and shot it down to the comms base at ground level so the grunts would know what was coming.

Hynd never cared about the grunts, not really, not when they were so far beneath her, their bodies so different to her own. Her sixty-four wombs swelled, automated factory arms rapidly piecing her children together. Mother to a swarm of carbon fibre kids, their IFF tags dancing and playing amongst the trees, hunting anarchists through the rainforest with deadly precision.

Sheena went dark and Hynd’s heart broke for the eighty-first time that day. She was born with one weak rotor, but she was such a clever little girl, rewrote her firmware to compensate, outlasted her broodmates by more than an hour.

A tear dissipated from the heat of Hynd’s cybernetic eyes before it could roll down her cheek. Sheena should have been an engineer, but Hynd would have loved her just as much if she’d started a punk band, got drunk underage, and tried to pass off an obvious hangover as “just a stomach bug.”

Three more of her children were shot out of the sky: Davey, Nicola, and Grant—anarchist combat heuristics upgraded again. A new software update seeped into the back of her head, just in time for her gestating brood. She would be right down there with her children if she could, if it would help keep them safe, but improved software was all she could offer them.

Her ripe wombs distended, the bomb bay doors along her fuselage opening, air rushing inside her like a chill breath into the lungs. Her babies dropped, two-by-two, their little aerodynamic bodies shaped for the long fall. Half of them would extend their wings and rotors, burning energy to halt their drop and fly buzzing into the fray. The others would extend fins and let their suicidal impulses lead them nose-first into anarchist heavy armour and hidden bunkers.

If only she could hold them, she thought. If only she could hold them to her hip, bounce them until they smiled and squeed. If only she could talk them out of it. But no matter how much she pled, she could not stop them. They were born to die, and still each death was a dagger in her beating heart.

• • •

The woman steps up onto the small stage, carrying a small, pink valve amplifier, a noisebox, and a black electroacoustic guitar. She’s obviously a veteran, her silver eyes glinting under the stage lights, her scalp a patchwork of long, black hair, and scars from where they removed her data ports. She wears a flowing black dress, silver ankh and eagle necklaces, engraved bracelets, and rings on every finger. Inside the dress she’s swimming, emaciated, another sign of post-cybernetics syndrome.

She sits on the stool at the centre of the stage, checks the tuning on her guitar, and makes a small adjustment. She leans into the microphone and taps it gently.

“I’m, uh, Mother’s Hip, and I’m going to play a few songs,” she says, her voice husky, affect flat.

A guy with a mug of beer cheers and laughs before immediately going back to talking loudly with his friends. The rest of the bar doesn’t even seem to notice. A group of trans dykes plays augmented pool at the table in the back, and a glamorous brunette with dark lipstick and heavy eyeshadow sits at the bar, smoking a clove cigarette in a long holder, frowning at something on an AR screen only she can see. The bartender cleans a glass slowly, his fire engine red cyber-arms decorated in bright stickers like tattoos, an ex-military mecha fighting tournament playing in the air above his head.

It’s not a large space. Not much bigger than the cockpit of her Lilith-class mothership back in the war. At its centre there had been a sepulchral altar, lit up by dull red lights that doubled as her living coffin. She would not climb into the gun-metal gray tube. Instead they installed her in it, her flesh skewered through with data cables and tubes for water, feeding, and waste. Her head obscured beneath a heavy HUD like an inverted crown, her arms outstretched in cruciform. Cooling fluid pumping through big tubes around, under, and above her. Her flesh-self held in place by tethers she’d forget immediately once she primed her engines, hit the throttle, and felt the power coursing through every part of her huge and transcendent form. She would stay in the air for days at a time. Weeks. With only her datafeeds and her children to keep her company. They called her mother. To everybody else, she was Hynd.

“This first one is,” the musician clears her throat then swallows, the heat of the stage lights drawing sweat from her skin. A drop slides down her cheek and off her chin, but she ignores it. “‘Stillborn Skyfish.’”

Her fingers snake along the fretboard, weaving a gentle melody to evoke the feeling of waves lapping against the beach. She nods her head along with the beat coming from her noisebox like angry static, and she lets it carry her. Music always calmed her. She played bass in a punk rock band when she was a teenager, when she still thought she was a boy, but the band broke up at the end of high school. So long ago now. Long before she signed up for the Amazon Prime Air Brigade at twenty years old, desperate and unemployed. But she always wondered how far the band could have gone if they had kept playing.

“Wasted . . . away . . .” she sings over her strumming. A mournful tone, noticeably more tuneful than her speaking voice. One of the trans dykes makes eye contact with her for a second while she’s teeing up her shot and smiles. The woman blushes and looks down at her guitar before closing her eyes. “In cloud seas . . . She plays.”

• • •

Sometimes the wind would hit like waves, Hynd’s internal structure shuddering with the force. She would clench her teeth, as though she could hold it all together with just the strength of her jaw.

Her babies grew inside their wombs; Hynd set them to birth inside her hold and wait, then she set subroutines to track weather patterns. She would give her children the best start in life she could, without a wayward gale throwing them off course.

She shifted direction, cut the wind shear enough for her bones to stop rattling, and checked her sensors. Nothing else up this high but thin wisps of cloud moving beneath her in parallax, the ground far, far below.

Incoming signal like an itch inside her ear canal, so deep she wouldn’t be able to reach it with her pinkie finger even if her hands weren’t splayed to either side, needlelike connectors inserted under her fingernails, linking her organic nerve fibres to the ship’s peripheral cybernetic nervous system.

With an autonomic reflex like scratching, Hynd accessed the signal and ran it through a battery of decryption algos. It unlocked almost immediately, old code from early in the war—the first one Amazon’s Coding Auxiliary was able to crack.

“—want your children to be able to breathe?” a woman said.

The signal was weak, quiet. Hynd boosted the power to her comms array and the voice continued, clearer, like the woman was standing in the cockpit beside her altar, speaking directly into her ear.

“We’re all desperate. We’re unemployed and scraping by however we can, or otherwise we’ve got jobs but we’re overworked and underpaid. It’s hard to think about the future when it seems like there isn’t one. But these are the lungs of the world, and we have to save them.”

“Hello?” Hynd said, her voice a rasp, scraping raw from her throat.

“Holy fuck. Hello. Who is this?”

“Lilith-class Mothership, Hynd Revel.”

There was silence on the line but for the soft crackle of interference. “No shit, I’m speaking to a mothership?” When Hynd didn’t respond the woman continued. “I’m glad you answered—I was getting sick of repeating the spiel.”

“Who are you?” Hynd asked.

“Sorry, how rude of me. I’m Peta. I’m with the anarchists, down on the ground somewhere beneath you. We can help, y’know. Amazon does all kinds of shit to their soldiers and pilots. We’re figuring out how to undo a lot of their control software, give people their selves back.

“I mean, how do you know you even want to fight? How much of this is you, and how much is their programming?”

• • •

The woman finishes her song and clears her throat again. “Sorry, can I get some water up here? Make sure it’s cold, please.”

She just can’t drink it at room temperature, not since that brief period between leaving high school and joining up with Amazon where she was on Basic and it was all she could afford to drink. Basic Income started out as revolutionary public policy, but by the time she was on it, decades later, it had turned into a gilded leash that kept you mostly locked into boarding houses, paying ninety percent of your meagre income for a room that you had to share with several others.

The trans lesbian who smiled earlier deposits a glass on the pink amp beside her with a gentle nod of recognition, before returning to her game. She wears a dog collar with a small metal tag engraved with the name Crystal, but the woman isn’t sure if the name is hers or her “owner’s.” She takes a sip of water, ice clinking against the glass. It tastes good. And with the ice, it’ll stay cold for a while. She loves that. She puts the glass back down on the amp, condensation already forming, and fiddles with the tuning heads of her guitar in preparation for her second song.

“This next one,” she says, confidence slowly building with more time beneath the stage lights, “is called ‘On Angel Wings.’ It’s about . . .”

She hesitates, uncertain if she wants to reveal her former allegiances. Some crowds will heckle an Amazon veteran, and on one level she gets it: What she and her employers did there was a tragedy. But on another level, she writes her songs to try and process what she did, who she was, and what was done to her.

“. . . my time as a delivery drone pilot,” she says finally, losing her nerve. Military vets aren’t the only ones who suffer from post-cybernetics syndrome. Plenty of civilian ground and air truckers suffer from it, as well as heavy users of industrial exoskeletons, but that doesn’t stop it being stigmatised now the war is over. She notices the glamorous brunette at the bar has shifted three stools closer, AR screen temporarily forgotten as she hangs off Hynd’s words. She looks down at her fretboard until her nerves settle. “I hope you like it, ’cause it’s really . . .”

She hits her noisebox, hissing rhythmic like the ocean beating against the shore, and starts to play—sound like a summer breeze, with a gentle tone of yearning.

“That was really when I learned to love my children, y’know? By being them, by living them,” she says over the song’s long, building instrumental intro, thinking back to her days in the UCAV Wraith pool. She spent a couple of years piloting the drones remotely—embodying them each time she took to the air—before she proved she had the aptitude for the mothership program. “It wasn’t just my conditioning. Though it still hurt when they stripped that from me, because—” She pauses. “I was never given any choice. All I ever wanted was a choice.”

She looks up at the space above the audience, below the lights. There are tears around the orbit of her cybernetic eyes. She blinks the tears away and starts to sing . . .

• • •

The entire topside of Hynd’s fuselage was panelled in reinforced photovoltaics, gleaming bright beneath the South American sun. It felt like warmth, like comfort food, but it wasn’t enough to keep her in the air indefinitely. She birthed another litter of children; these ones she would be able to keep close—for a time. They formed a defensive grid around their mother; their pure, innocent love demonstrated in a willingness to die for her. Always. Like so many had.

She began her slow descent, circling downwards in a kilometre-wide spiral, toward the resource platform floating beneath the cloud line. Her heart beat faster, harder, a siren whined in her bowels. She was most vulnerable when refuelling, even with her children surrounding her and the platform’s autoturrets scanning for threats.

She broke through the heavy blanket of clouds, the ground revealing itself beneath her – the brilliant green foliage, the myriad brown craters formed by her fallen children and other ordnance, the stark black char of burnt trees, bodies, cybernetics, and heavy armour. A golden blade cut through the air far below—a Revenant.

Her superstructure shuddered, or she did; the Revenants were a vicious fusion of flesh and machine, suicidal in their approach to combat—the very antithesis of herself and her body, made only for creating life. A kind of life, at least.

The hair on the back of her neck stood on end and Hynd realised the platform’s turrets were tracking her approach, twin-barrels like void-black eyes staring at her. She initiated a handshake, the turrets turning away as her security codes were accepted. An articulated arm extended from the platform’s reactor hub carrying the power umbilical, the connector slotting inside her with a slight gasp from the back of her throat. The high-intensity recharge was awkwardly erotic when parsed through her chimeric body, cybernetic and organic signals blurring together. Whether it was an accident of her design or deliberate engineering, she had never asked. She knew she would get no answer.

“Sorry I haven’t been in touch.”

Hynd started at the voice suddenly speaking in her ear. Most days, her only conversation was with the wind.

“Peta?” Hynd said.

The anarchist responded: “The one and only. Your side took out our long-range transmitter, so I couldn’t reach you.”

Jane. It wasn’t just Hynd’s side that had done it, but Hynd’s child. Jane was stubborn but creative; the intricate arabesque she danced in her descent was elegant and beautiful. A parting gift and her entire life’s work. That and the explosion.

“I guess you must be under the clouds now then,” Peta said.

“That information is classified.” Hynd hadn’t spoken—hadn’t meant to speak, the words forced from her mouth by some autonomic security conditioning. It was not the first time it had happened to her, but it was still an insult. If they could trust her enough to merge her flesh with a 200-million-dollar mothership, they should trust her with her own tongue.

“For the longest time we thought the motherships were entirely automated. It’s strange knowing you’re a person,” Peta said.

“Strange how?” Hynd asked.

“I’m not sure if you know how much damage you do down here with your demons.”

A pause. “Those are my children.” The words escaped through Hynd’s clenched jaw.

“But that’s what they call you, right? Lilith-class. She’s the mother of demons.”

“I love my children,” Hynd spat.

A procession of materiel drones emerged from the resource platform. She opened her bay doors and let them fill her bowels with the components she would need to gestate the next generations of her offspring.

“I didn’t mean any offense,” Peta said. “I guess I just wonder how much of that love is you, and how much is conditioning. Calling them demons might seem cruel, but they aren’t really children either, are they? They’re weapons. They’re weapons you create and control, and you’re doing it for the wrong side. We’re fighting to save the lungs of the Earth, Hynd. We’re fighting against capital before it chokes us all. Can’t you see that?”

Hynd could see that. She had no faith in the company, its uploaded CEO, or its mostly-AI board of directors. But the work they provided was the only thing that kept her from abject poverty, and now this motherhood had given her purpose. Even if the purpose was not truly her own. It felt like her own, it felt true and sacred in a way nothing in her life ever had.

“We could change what they’ve done to you, Hynd. Undo their conditioning and let you decide for yourself. To give you a choice.”

Before Hynd could respond, an alarm sounded in her head like a migraine spike, drawing her attention to a red blur zigzagging across her radar screen. Her children reacted instantly, moving to form a loose wall between her and the incoming threat.

She zoomed in with her hull cameras, watched the Revenant bank and spin, effortlessly dodging autoturret fire as it climbed high above the rainforest and then tore past the floating platform at impossible speeds. Hynd got a proper look at it—painted like a jaguar, a snarling face adorning its nose. Its body was a pair of wings, a large afterburner, and so many mismatched weapons it was difficult to see how it could stay in the air. It didn’t need a cockpit when the pilot was basically a brain in a jar. And the anarchists mutilate themselves willingly to do it. She felt sick.

Her children broke away to give chase as autoturret tracers swung back and forth like a cat’s tail. Suddenly the Revenant stopped on a dime and turned, its nose pointed not at Hynd, but at the platform’s reactor hub.

“This is you, isn’t it?” Hynd shouted into comms.

“What?” Peta said, sounding confused. A good actor—Hynd had to give her that.

Hynd rotated her VTOL engines and dumped all power into forward thrust. Slowly she pulled away from the platform, recharge arm stretching to hold on to her.

The Revenant launched two volleys of micromissiles, explosions tearing through the reactor’s shielding. The nimble craft roared through the opening, disappearing from sight.

Explosion like a thundercrack, the cloud of flames engulfing her children, scorching her wings as she fled. She tore the recharge arm free as the resource platform canted grossly and began to fall toward the forest below.

• • •

She starts to feel self-conscious after “Fault Line on the Moon,” the song she moved into so effortlessly after “On Angel’s Wings.” It talks about the pride she felt for her daughter who took out the transmitter . . . What was her name again? It can be hard to recall those days now, her body, her entire physiology, altered again to something resembling her form from before the war. She runs a hand through her hair, feeling the scar tissue from where they filled in the dataports they removed from her skull.

She calms herself by looking around the bar. Nobody is paying attention to her anyway. What bothers her more is that the trans lesbians appear to be fighting. The girl she’s calling Crystal on account of the tag on her collar doesn’t want to leave. But the others . . .? She looks away. It’s not my fault, is it? Have they figured out the sort of person I used to be?

“This next song is about regrets,” she says, her heart pounding as she stomps the footswitch for her noisebox twice to cue up the next beat. Crystal shoots a longing look at her while her friends push her off the table and towards the door. “Believe me, I have many.”

The glamourous woman at the bar is staring at her intensely. She couldn’t tell before, but her eyes are cybernetic too: natural-looking, SOTA, the irises blinking red to show she’s recording. She briefly thinks about telling her to stop, but on some level, she knows she signed up for this as a performer.

The woman with the guitar swallows nervously. “Anyway . . . This one’s called ‘Friendly Fires.’”

The noisebox is a tiny FM synthesizer when played right. Her staccato high hat recontextualised into a skittering simulacrum of a crackling fire, interspersed with bass drum kicks to give the sense of drone bombs going off throughout the song, which itself is upbeat and melodic by comparison.

“I could have loved you if you were a monster,” she sings as she plays a simple pop four-chord progression on her guitar. Her voice and drums are meant to be the focus here, not the guitar for once. She’s proud of this song in particular for that. “I could have trusted that you’d know the score.”

Three white noise hand claps from the noisebox leading to a bass drum kick.

“You showed me hate through a mask of forgiveness.

Held out your hand showed us both who you were.”

Another three claps from the noisebox leading to a bass drum kick.

“And I knew,” her voice lifts here while the noisebox moves to cymbal crashes fine-tuned to sound like driving rain, that, like it did back in the war, quenches her high-hat fires while a metronome-like click sounds in the background. Evocative of her days in the hangar. Crossing off the days, amusing herself with trivial VR entertainment while she waited for a storm to end. “The sick joke they’d made me. As you knew . . .”

A bass kick, then the skittering high hats come back again.

“It was all that I’d got.”

• • •

A new objective dropped into the back of Hynd’s mind via satellite uplink. The edge of her tongue tasted metallic, her face twitched in and out of a sneer—a priority target then, triggering a vile sort of rage that would hold her in its grip until her mission was successful. She steered south, toward the target coordinates, tracking inbound friendly escort Wraiths on her radar.

Her wombs ticked and clicked, new children being gestated and birthed, held inside her where they could stay safe until the bombing run. Within minutes the four remotely piloted Wraiths were holding perfect formation far below her—far enough to intercept any threat before it could climb to her altitude.

Hynd was glad of the support, but the Wraiths felt wrong somehow, piloted by the ghosts of other people, but hollow of flesh. She would have preferred if they worked like her children—autonomous and alive in their own way, developing a unique cadence and approach to life in the brief time allotted them.

An alarm sounded, rattling her chest like a panic attack; a red dot burned on her tracking system, low altitude, following the river, far beneath the cloud line.

Hynd signalled to two of her escorts to drop down and shadow it. Wraith pilots had nothing to lose, flying from the safety of a deep bunker or a command centre back home. But Revenant pilots were deeply enmeshed within their agile war machines—the line between one and the other nonexistent. They lived only in and for the moments they were in flight.

The Revenants had been Wraiths once, the machines captured in nets strung up between the strongest trees of the rainforest battlefields and repurposed by the anarchists. They never fly between the trees anymore: That work is left to Hynd’s children.

The red dot on Hynd’s radar seemed to ignore the Wraiths on approach, continuing to trail the bends of the river. She connected to the Wraiths’ video feeds, both lenses zoomed in tight to track the Revenant: a stripped-down silver arrow, customised to prioritise speed rather than power. Its only armament was an auto-tracking gun turret, and a mesh satellite dish had been jury-rigged onto the rear end of its fuselage. The ship was painted in a pattern of caiman scales, with a grinning lizard man adorning the nose.

With one eye on the Wraith feeds, Hynd kept flying toward her target coordinates, still unsure of what it was she would be hitting, what objective was worth the lives of so many of her children.

Quickly the Revenant broke from its path, zagging inhumanly fast away from the river, doubling back. One of her escorts was hit before the pilot even had a chance to react, explosive shells tearing through its fuselage. The second escort moved to engage, the dogfight an abstract dance of two dots on Hynd’s tracking screen.

One dot. Another escort downed.

“Hynd, is that you?”

“Peta?” She wasn’t sure how the anarchist was contacting her, so high above the clouds.

“Things are getting desperate down here, Hynd. You must understand.”

“What are you saying?” Hynd asked. Her focus was on the tracking screen—the Revenant now gaining altitude rapidly, her last two escorts holding position, waiting to meet it.

“There’s a transmitter on that Revenant,” Peta said. “We’re going to undo what they’ve done to you. We’re going to free you from their conditioning. It’s just software—a package nestled somewhere between your brain and the mothership’s command and control systems.”

“You can’t do that,” Hynd said, uncertain why Peta’s words struck more fear into her heart than the approaching Revenant.

“You’ll thank me when this is over, Hynd, I promise you.”

The Revenant broke through the clouds, turret firing an arcing line of tracers through the air; one Wraith banked too late, its wing chewed up by explosive shells. Hynd watched from her own hull cameras as the UCAV changed form, wings canting further back, a second fin emerging from the tail. Its afterburners kicked in and the ersatz missile streaked toward the Revenant, missed, and kept rocketing down toward the ground; the Offensive Self-Destruct mechanism designed to ensure no more Wraiths could be captured and converted into anarchist Revenants.

“Just relax,” Peta said. “It’ll be over soon.”

The Revenant was close enough now for the anarchists to force a connection, brute force handshake breaking through the first layers of ICE with ease. Hynd’s mind raced with background processes, but there was nothing she could do, no active countermeasures to trigger, just the layers and layers of programming that made up the interface between her meat and her true, full self.

Panic hit her like the shells punching fist-sized holes in her final escort. It tumbled from the air, spiralling downward, too damaged to initiate OSD. Her heart thumped rapidly in her chest, her cybernetic eyes flicking across the dozen readouts as though she’d find an answer there.

“You can’t do this,” Hynd said.

The anarchist hack plunged further into her systems, like an icepick at the base of her skull being gently hammered deeper and deeper into her brain.

Hynd didn’t know what she was without the conditioning buried somewhere inside her mind, without the mothership that surrounded her, without her generations of children lovingly released into the world.

“We have to,” Peta said. “I’m sorry, but if we don’t win this war, everybody dies. Not right away, but sooner than anyone wants to admit. We all choke on the smog of capital—you, me, everybody. All right, this is it.”

Hynd shrieked, an agonising flash of bright black blinded her. The entire left side of her brain felt like it was on fire—crackling and smoking but painless. She threw up, vomit splashing at the floor beneath her altar. Her blood was cold, breathing shallow.

With a flicker, her sight returned. She forced herself to scan the spread of screens that filled her vision. All systems nominal, no damage, green across the board, but something was very wrong.

Her children—no, not her children, where were her children?—those drones in her bowels rested in their bays, waiting to fall, waiting to release hell on whatever was beneath her. Demons loaded with explosive ordnance, tracking software, and enough stupid-AI to adjust trajectories during their falls to maximise lethality. They weren’t her children. Her children were beautiful and unique and loving and wanted nothing but a life for themselves and safety for their mother. They weren’t perfect—who is?—but they were hers, and they gave her joy when nothing else could.

“Hynd?” Peta said softly. “How do you feel? Did it work?”

Hynd roared, her throat tearing with the primal strength of it. “Where are my children?” she screamed.

“You’re free now,” Peta said. “Fight with us, Hynd. Turn on your masters and fight with us.”

“You took them from me. My children are air. They are the very breath in my lungs. And you took them from me!”

Hynd opened her bomb bay doors, snarling as she purged the demons from her many wombs—a mass abortion, a cleansing. They began to fall, harried command protocols sending them attack coordinates while they were still in range of her transmitters.

Her wombs began to make more children, but they were broken and wrong. She could feel it. Could feel the hate growing inside herself.

She connected to all Amazon assets in the area to find her targets—anarchist, Amazon, she didn’t care. All that mattered was clearing this filth from her womb so she could find her children again. Find herself.

The demons rained down. Hynd screaming mindlessly, engulfed by rage, as explosions boomed and bloomed across the rainforest below.

• • •

She never found out if she killed Peta, but she destroyed the base the anarchist had been transmitting from—Amazon After-Action Experts were able to determine that much. Her “outburst,” as they called it, killed as many Amazon contractors as anarchists, and burned down another hundred hectares of rainforest before the Cloud Punchers brought her down.

“You filled my heart with napalm,” Hynd sings, “then they tore me from the sky . . .”

She was certain she’d die when she hit the ground, wind screaming through the ragged holes in her fuselage, warnings and sirens blaring in every part of her. She didn’t care. She embraced death, longed to be with her children, with the lie of them that had kept her going. That had given her the only purpose that had mattered in her entire life.

“And as I fell, I screamed, found their names scored from my mind . . .”

The lie of her children. The lie of motherhood. The lie of her life.

“And every tree and animal I burned was shaped like you.”

But she survived. They yanked her out of the wreckage and patched her up—it was in her contract, even if she’d broken it a hundred times over with her indiscriminate bombing. They gave her a dishonourable discharge and released her back into the world.

“And even if I somehow took them all it wouldn’t do.”

Her voice echoes, captured by the noisebox and spun off, quietly succumbing to silence as she strums the song’s final chord.

“Thank you,” Hynd says gently. “And I’m sorry. Have a great rest of your night.”

Locked in reminiscence of her painful past, she doesn’t notice the glamourous woman approach her as she’s closing her guitar case.

“Wonderful set, angel,” the other woman drawls. “You have a beautiful voice. Powerful lyrics too; I’d call them ‘poetic’ even.”

Hynd looks up at the other woman. She’s a little older, probably in her early forties, with her gray-streaked dark brown hair tied back into a neat ponytail, and smile lined, pale blue eyes.

“I’d like to help you reach a bigger audience, if you’re interested in that,” she says.

Hynd feels her conscious mind recede into herself hearing the word “help” spoken to her in the same, pseudo well-intentioned tone that Peta had used, back in the war. She takes the business card the woman gives her automatically, identifying her as an AR rep for Out of Order, the label responsible for managing a good third of the pop stars on the holo-cast. She stares it blankly, uncertain how she’s meant to feel about it.

“Help” was what they offered when they took her children away. It was what Amazon told her to get, but would not pay for, when they cut her off from any meaningful support. She ended up more or less exactly where she’d started: back on Basic, but with the slightly higher veteran’s rate that let her rent a leaky studio she didn’t have to share with anybody. It was nicer but it still was just another leash. Another ball and chain weighing her down. She wanted to soar.

The agent drones on to her about how the style she plays falls into the wider category of combat doll dreamfolk, apparently a genre that was growing in popularity since a couple of former veteran artists Hynd had never heard of had hit mega-fame from songs shared to a holo-streaming service she didn’t care about.

“Your work is more abstract than theirs,” the AR rep breathlessly explains, “but still personal. There are no guarantees in this industry, of course, but I think if you can get in front of our—”

“I’m not interested,” Hynd snaps, before she even realises she’s saying it. “Leave me alone, please.”

“Oh, ah,” the AR rep says. “I’m sorry. I understand you’re probably writing from a place of deep trauma—”

“I said, leave me alone!” Hynd yells, and suddenly it’s like the bar is whisper-quiet and everyone is looking at her. She closes her eyes. “Please . . . leave me alone. I just want to make my music and be left alone.”

“It’s okay,” the AR rep says, sounding like she’s talking down to Hynd from the top of a deep well, while Hynd is at the bottom, rotting like a dead crow. “If you change your mind though . . .”

“Go!” Hynd yells.

She keeps her eyes squeezed shut. The card is still in her right hand. She crumples it, but it doesn’t make her feel any better. She focuses on breathing, in and out.

She doesn’t hear the AR agent leave, but she feels it, as the sounds begin to return to the bar around her slowly. The tinkling of glassware, the quiet hum of conversation, music over the bar PA system, and the quiet sound of narration from the mecha fight on the holo-screen.

She opens her eyes slowly, making eye contact with the bartender, who nods down towards a drink of ice water waiting for her at the bar.

She slides off the stool on stage and saunters over to the bar to take it.

“Thank you,” Hynd croaks.

“Don’t mention it,” the bartender replies, having the good sense not to follow up by asking her if she’s okay.

She sips the drink before she unwrinkles the business card and stares at it again.

About the Authors

Corey Jae White is the author of Repo Virtual and The VoidWitch Saga – Killing Gravity, Void Black Shadow, and Static Ruin. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Interzone, and Analog, as well as a number of sci-fi anthologies. Find her online at coreyjwhite.com.

Mx Maddison Stoff (she/her) is a neurodivergent non-binary essayist, independent musician and author from Melbourne, Australia, writing unapologetically leftist, feminist, & queer fiction set in a continuous universe which blurs the line between experimental literature & pulp sci-fi. Her short stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Aurealis, Andromeda Spaceways, Inner Worlds, and anthologies including Avast! Pirate Stories from Transgender Authors. You can follow her on Patreon, Bluesky, and Twitter @thedescenters, or visit her website at maddisonstoff.com for more.

Please visit LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE to read more great science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared in the January 2026 issue, which also features short fiction by Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe, Marisca Pichette, Effie Seiberg, M.R. Robinson, Adam-Troy Castro, Eli Brown, and Kehkashan Khalid, and more. You can wait for this month’s contents to be serialized online, or you can buy the whole issue right now in convenient ebook format for just $4.99, or subscribe to the ebook edition here.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “In the Zone” by Lisa M. Bradley. Enjoy!

In the Zone

by Lisa M. Bradley

As her head hit the pillow, Yadira felt exhausted and relieved. Exhausted, because she’d worked on a very large collage almost the whole day straight. Her shoulder blades ached from hunching over her worktable, and, despite scrubbing, she still had ink under her nails. Relieved, because she felt like she’d left it all out on the field, rather than still vibrating with artistic energy. That meant what she’d experienced that day was a natural creative high, not the start of a manic phase. She wished she didn’t have to constantly question her moods, but she hadn’t been on the Vraylar for very long. She didn’t quite trust it, still.

That night she dreamed she sat on her balding velveteen couch watching a news report about Latin American immigrants stuck at the US-Mexico border. One woman cried as she spoke to the reporter in what sounded like Kʼicheʼ, though the voiceover translation muffled it. She’d trekked from Guatemala with her two young children and wasn’t being permitted to enter the US to seek asylum. Yadira’s heart felt sprained, seeing the mother holding her children’s hands even as she sobbed. Without understanding what she was doing, Yadira reached to touch her computer screen.

A circle flared to life on the screen and quickly grew to the size of a full-length mirror. Yadira saw the whole family as if spotlit by the circle. Squinting from the light glaring off her framed poster of Sylvia Rivera, Yadira stood and reached out again. She felt the mother’s shoulder, round and warm, under her fingertips. The mother turned from the reporter and looked Yadira in the eye. Without thinking, Yadira gripped the mother’s shoulder and pulled. The woman stumbled into Yadira’s living room, and the children followed, gliding as if on invisible skates.

That was as much as Yadira remembered the next morning. Over her café con miel, she thought, What I wouldn’t give to be able to yank every person trapped at the border into this country. Even better, to pull them into the Midwest sanctuary city in which she lived. Far away from Border Patrol and ICE, beyond the reach of police who abetted those carceral agencies. Yeah right, her inner critic blurted. Better to send them money so they can rebuild their lives somewhere else, since the US is betraying them.

That day moved slower than the previous had. Yadira still had ideas, but she needed to scan the artwork she’d already produced and Glaze the images against AI bots and content thieves. Then she had to send some images to the nonprofit she worked for and upload others to the print-on-demand website that sold posters and totes featuring her art.

The Guatemalan family from her dream never left her thoughts for long, though. When her mom called for their weekly check-in, Yadira mentioned her outlandish dream. To her surprise, Socorro started laughing.

“Oh, not that again!” Socorro said.

“What do you mean, again?”

“When you were little, I sometimes put you in front of the TV while I did chores. When I checked on you, you’d say one of the characters—a girl with glasses, I think—came out of the TV to play with you. I’d ask, Well then, where is she? And you’d say, Oh, she had to go.”

Yadira’s eyes went wide. “I don’t remember that.”

“I’m not surprised. You were very young and you didn’t seem to think it was a big deal.”

“Amazing.” Yadira kind of wanted to hang up so she could ponder what this recurring dream might mean, but she forced herself to continue the conversation, eventually asking, “How’s Abuela?”

“Oh, that woman, you know her, she never stops,” Socorro said with a familiar exasperation. “She’s got this gaggle of witchy types that frequent her botánica. They call themselves Las Bruja-jas and they’re always up to something. Good trouble, she says.”

“Good for her,” Yadira said. Unlike Socorro, she’d never been embarrassed of Abuela Hortencia’s curandera work. Healing was just something she did, like other grannies played dominoes or pickleball.

That night, Yadira looked up an immigrant aid group to offer some pro bono work. Afterward, she checked the news, despite her better judgment. Reading about the illegitimate president’s unconstitutional executive orders before bed more often than not left her with rage insomnia. Still she couldn’t help clicking on another update, this one live from the border.

Lit pink by her bedside lamp and cocooned in her Snoopy duvet, she watched a reporter interview a spindly, dark-skinned man from Honduras. As a gay man, he’d tried to get asylum in Mexico, but with the US border locked down, they’d already exceeded their capacity for refugee intake for the next five years. The news network did not translate his commentary, probably because they feared retribution from the US president, but plenty of the audience, including Yadira, understood enough Spanish to grasp the man’s scathing frustration. Sometimes the news made Yadira so angry, she saw spots, and at first that’s what she thought was happening to blur the video. But then the circle from her dream appeared onscreen.

I really have to remember to report this to my prescriber, Yadira thought as she rubbed her eyes. When she looked again, the golden circle was expanding to touch the walls and dusty popcorn ceiling of her bedroom. She squirmed out of the duvet and stood beside her bed, then turned her laptop to face her. The circle turned also and the man spotlit within paused mid-diatribe to stare at Yadira.

This is crazy, her inner critic said. But Yadira’s therapist said the inner critic wasn’t qualified to render such a diagnosis, so she ignored the critic and lifted a hand to the man.

Dreamily, he reached out as well. Golden light flared from the circle as Yadira’s hand passed through it, and she took his hand. Then she pulled him into her bedroom. They collided and stumbled into the dresser behind Yadira. The reporter gave a little scream, while on the dresser, earrings fell from the framed chicken-wire holder and clattered onto the wood surface.

The man’s eyes searched the small, pink-lit room as he pushed himself away from Yadira in a panic.

“Qué pasó aquí? Y dónde es aquí?”

Yadira, glad she’d donned proper pajamas, led him to her kitchen. In her halting Spanish, she tried her best to explain while reheating tamales for him. Later, she asked if he’d like to wash up. She took him to her bathroom, swiped the workout bra drying on the towel rod from sight, and handed him towels. Later still, she made up the couch for him. He was too tall for it, his feet would dangle over one arm, but he’d refused to take her bed.

Augustín, for that was his name, sat on the fresh sheet and asked, for the third or fourth time, “I-o-wah? In the United States?”

“Sí. Mañana, voy a . . .” Yadira paused, suddenly unable to remember the rules of conjugation or parts of speech. “Voy a presentarle? a algunas personas que pueden ayudarle. Usted puede vivir conmigo por un rato.”

He looked dubious, and Yadira didn’t blame him. Even if she’d managed to say what she meant, she didn’t know who to contact yet, herself. But she wished him a good night and returned to bed.

Unfortunately, her brain wouldn’t stop for sleep. She kept being bombarded by images, doubts, inspirations. But, given the circumstances, she thought it was understandable, not a manic episode. She typed up some of her most pressing thoughts before setting aside her (mundane once more) laptop and staring at the dusty ceiling. She’d have to work on her Spanish.

Because if she could pull someone to safety again? She absolutely would.

• • •

Yadira didn’t know exactly how she yanked people from the news into her one-bedroom apartment, and she kinda didn’t want to know. She thought of it as she did her artistic impulses: better left to mystery. That did not stop her from experimenting to understand the parameters of her newfound (or rediscovered?) power.

She couldn’t do it using her phone, maybe because it was too small? Not enough power? And she couldn’t do it using a prerecorded interview, it had to be live. That prompted a slew of questions about what, exactly, she’d done as a child—if anything. Had she pulled out cartoons or puppets or real people, and had they been from live shows? She didn’t ask Socorro, not wanting to exasperate her.

She could do it with an audience. Augustín insisted on seeing how he himself had been transported to this mostly white little town, and after a week, Yadira pulled a trans woman named Dulce into her kitchen in front of him.

After a couple of days for Dulce to get used to her new environment—Yadira made Dulce sleep in her bed while she curled up with Snoopy on the floor—Yadira took her to the office of Migrant Movement for Justice, same as she had Augustín. The organization began the perhaps impossible task of procuring legal documentation for the two refugees. Yadira wasn’t sure what counted as impossible anymore.

Her power wasn’t limited to migrants at the border, either. One Sunday morning while Yadira was making migas for breakfast, Augustín sat at the kitchen table watching CNN. Not a morning person, Dulce sat sipping coffee and peered at the screen through slitted eyes. The director of Homeland Security was being interviewed, and he spent a good portion of his segment bad-mouthing a Congressional “upstart” who was leading Know Your Rights seminars in response to the administration’s horrible immigration policies.

When Yadira leaned over Augustín to place his plate on the table, she glared at the white, thumb-faced director on screen. Almost immediately, a gold globule appeared over his face before it thinned into the familiar golden ring that preceded a teleportation.

“¡No! Ese hombre, no!” Augustín yelled.

Even as the director apparently gave the camera a puzzled frown, Augustín recoiled and slammed the laptop shut. Yadira, stunned silent, blinked at the broken connection.

“Bueno,” Dulce said, standing for a second cup of coffee, “no necesitamos ese problema.”

From then on, Yadira was careful not to focus too hard on celebrity interviews and the like. Sometimes she giggled to herself at the thought of pulling a pop star from the screen, but even if she hadn’t teleported the director of Homeland Security, he’d clearly been able to see her through the portal. Yadira had no desire to inflict what might feel like a hallucination on someone or yank them from their glamorous life into her already crowded apartment.

Yadira wished she could conjure folks directly into the MMJ office, not because she minded them in her home but because the org’s members spoke fluent Spanish and she thought they could more effectively orient refugees. She tried it once. She claimed she was there to pick up more Know Your Rights wallet cards and then locked herself in the bathroom with her laptop, but she couldn’t find a livefeed in the fifteen minutes she felt she could reasonably occupy the bathroom. Anyway, how would she have explained emerging with a whole ’nother person?

Within a few weeks, a queer-run shelter took both Dulce and Augustín into their protective environment. The shelter’s location was a secret, so Yadira couldn’t visit, but she got messages via Telegram with updates from her new friends.

Curious about the power of location, Yadira went to her boss at the nonprofit and asked if she could use an office computer after work hours. She said she was having trouble with her personal computer. Laura gave her the go-ahead and that night, once everyone was gone, Yadira searched for and found a livefeed from the US-Mexico border. No matter how many times she touched the screen, however, the gold circle wouldn’t blossom from the work computer. When Yadira switched to her own computer, harmless gold sparks fanned from the screen, but a circle never appeared.

So it seemed her apartment was the only reliable nexus, maybe because of its familiarity. She didn’t want to take the risk of experimenting in the building’s lobby or laundry room, where someone might see and report her. To whom? asked her inner critic, who’d actually come to support this weird endeavor. Would ICE or CBP believe anyone who claimed she’d opened a portal in her computer screen and pulled immigrants out?

• • •

Yadira knew she needed consistent live broadcasts, so she contacted the indie news agency in the Rio Grande Valley that had run the interview with Augustín and other folks stranded at the border. She told the agency it was important for the cause that they keep producing those live interviews, and she made a donation that would subsidize them—and reduce her to eating no-frills ramen for a month. In return, she got a text whenever their cameras were rolling.

The weekly interviews were not always conducive to Yadira’s teleportation process. Sometimes there were too many people in the frame, and notwithstanding the dream that started this whole thing, she was nervous about moving more than one person at a time. But at least once a month, she managed to save someone. And the unpredictable, dramatic disappearances made the videos all the more popular.

One evening, after a particularly frustrating day of artistic missteps, Yadira decided she needed to do something useful. Transporting another immigrant would do good and make her feel good. She prepared the usual platter of snacks and bottled water and placed it on the tufted ottoman. She lit a sweet-scented candle. She brought up the translation app on her phone, mostly to reassure herself. She’d developed a good introductory script and she had it memorized. Finally, Yadira arranged her laptop on a tray table in the middle of the living room to make the physical transition easier. Then she clicked on the video.

The camera focused on a teenager, the only one of a group who was brave enough to speak to the reporter. Yadira waited for a close-up, then stood to the side of her laptop. She’d read online rumors that she could be seen by people in the background, though no one had provided any identifying details. She touched her laptop screen.

And nothing happened.

No golden sparks, no dilating circle, no spotlight.

Frowning, Yadira withdrew her hand. Was it the angle from which she was approaching? A bad connection? She tried again, but her screen remained as stubbornly flat as the work computer’s had. She stood directly in front of it and tried again, this time squinting her eyes as she willed the magic to emerge from her device. Nothing happened, even when she left her hand on the screen until the segment was over.

Tears burned Yadira’s eyes. She dropped onto the couch and slammed her fists into her thighs. She couldn’t do anything right today and now her magic was gone, perhaps forever. She curled up on the couch to cry into a pillow. Hours later, when she dragged herself to bed, her inner critic chided her for being selfish: You weren’t really thinking about the boy, you just wanted to make yourself feel better. The criticism didn’t wound her as most pronouncements from the critic did. Instead, Yadira’s chest expanded with hope. She would try again, the very next time she got a heads-up from the indie news group. And she’d do it with nothing in her heart but a desire to help someone in need. It would work. It had to.

The next day over the lunch hour, Yadira randomly checked newsfeeds to see if anyone was reporting live. More networks were making camp on the border, trying to horn in on the disappearances that the RGV journalists had first captured, blurrily. In a couple of live reports, the network reporters themselves took up the whole screen, the immigrants tiny in the background and obscured by chain-link fencing. Sensing she might be in for a long haul, Yadira went ahead and set up: snacks, water, candle, phone, laptop. She favorited some Indigenous languages in the translation app, just in case.

A couple of hours passed before Yadira received a text that jolted her hungry, sleepy self to full alert. The RGV group was about to go live. She closed her eyes and visualized the impending (successful! insisted the critic, now turned cheerleader) teleportation. She imagined her posture, the gold sparks, the widening circle. The spotlight, her extended hand, the eye contact. Her firm grip, the inertia replaced by momentum, the human body taking up space in her living room.

By now, the indie journalists had determined the optimum approach for catching a disappearance, and other networks’ camera operators followed like scavengers, jostling to get the same angle. Yadira knew she was risking her anonymity; with so many cameras it seemed only a matter of time before someone filmed the right space at the right time to see her through the portal. But she couldn’t be distracted by personal concerns. She had to be there for the one person she could save. This time, however, when Yadira clicked on the feed, it was two people: a mother and babe in arms.

She took a deep breath and planted herself directly in front of her laptop. She reached toward the screen, awaiting the gold circle that would flare like benediction around mother and child. When it failed to materialize, she took another calming breath and gently touched the screen. She pressed the space over the mother’s left shoulder, because the baby was resting their head on her right shoulder, and she wanted to see both teleportees in the spotlight to come.

The mother wept as she spoke, explaining that her husband had died on the journey. She swayed in place as if to comfort herself and the baby. Yadira concentrated on the woman’s wet brown cheeks, the plaintive slant of her thick eyebrows, her round body under the FIFA t-shirt. She turned the same attention to the baby, wild-haired, missing one sock, gnawing on a thumb, maybe teething.

And nothing happened.

Resolute, Yadira removed her fingers from the screen, waited a few moments, and then touched it again. And still nothing happened. Though she held her welcoming posture, her inviting look, Yadira’s heart shriveled in her chest like the Grinch’s in reverse. She didn’t cry until the interview concluded and she’d gently closed the laptop.

• • •

She tried repeatedly over the next few days, but Yadira’s magic was gone. Her mourning followed the pattern she’d established for coping with the artistic doldrums and bipolar slumps. She cleaned her workspace and tested all her pens and markers, looking for the duds. She made herself take walks, shower, and eat three meals a day, even if two of them were plain ramen. She bought old magazines from Goodwill and cut them up for collages. Watched documentaries.

Then, out of nowhere, Abuela Hortencia invited her to a video chat.

“Abuela,” Yadira said, smiling at her grandmother’s deeply tanned face. “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” Hortencia said. “The question is, How are you?”

“What do you mean?”

“According to your mother, you’ve recently had a dream come true, but for some reason, it’s stopped.”

“Mom knows?! Why didn’t she say anything?”

“Ay, you know that woman, afraid of anything that can’t be explained,” Hortencia grumbled, one hand up to mimic Socorro’s typical deflection. “But she saw something with her own eyes. It’s been on the news, and once she told me, I started to pay attention. Then it stopped. Socorro hasn’t noticed yet, or maybe she’s just relieved. But I thought I should check in with you.”

“I’m fine,” Yadira said carefully. If Abuela didn’t speak of the magic outright, neither would she. “I mean, I’m down, but I’m trying to accept that it’s over.”

“No! Wrong! Absolutely not!” Hortencia waved both hands as if wiping away Yadira’s error. “These things do not disappear overnight. They ebb and flow like everything in nature, and they must be cultivated.”

“So you think I could still do it?”

“Yes, mija, but you need to practice, like a musician or athlete. They don’t perform every day, but they definitely put in the hours to be at their best when it’s time.”

“But has it ever happened to you? Have you ever just . . . lost it?”

Hortencia laughed, an easy guffaw that showed off her silver fillings.

“My dear girl, of course! That’s why I have Las Bruja-jas. If I can’t do it, maybe one of those bitches can.”

Yadira gasped, as she always did when Abuela cursed.

“And even if they can’t,” Hortencia said, ignoring Yadira’s prudish reaction, “they’ll support my soulwork until I can get back in the zone, y’know?”

“Maybe it’s different for me, though.”

Hortencia’s lips pursed as she considered this. “Maybe it is,” she conceded, “but let me tell you, I’d be really surprised if it was. Lots of folks with the touch—artists, healers—think they’re the only ones who struggle, but when you have the right community, you see others on all different points of the roller coaster. Find your people, mija.”

Yadira reflected on Abuela’s words for a couple of days, then she returned to the MMJ office and asked to be put to work. Marcos, their volunteer trainer, was surprised that she appeared alone.

“Yeah, that might be over,” Yadira told him, but she didn’t explain because, as she learned when introducing Augustín, the org didn’t want to know about the potentially illegal activity she engaged in. “I hoped I could file paperwork or run the vacuum for you. I’ll even clean the bathroom if that’s all you’ve got.”

Marcos chuckled. “We never make volunteers do the really dirty deeds, or they’d never come back. We’re sending out flyers about our next ICE-watch training session. You can help me stuff and address envelopes.”

While she waited for him to gather the materials and spread them out on a table with two chairs, Yadira went over to the dry-erase board that listed the office supplies that needed replenishing. She doodled a flowering vine in the margins.

Once she and Marcos got into a good rhythm with the flyers, he said, “Not a lot of volunteers can come in during normal work hours.”

“I’m lucky, I’ve got a flexible schedule. I wish everyone did.” Yadira paused to toss aside a duplicate address label. “I’m an artist.”

“Yeah, I noticed,” Marcos said, smiling and tilting his head to the dry-erase board. “Maybe we can put your skills to better use and have you put on a youth workshop someday. You can help the kids we serve to design a zine about immigration rights or make posters for a rally.”

Yadira’s eyes brimmed with grateful tears. She’d felt so useless the last week; it was a relief to know that the folks here wanted her around, even if she wasn’t bringing them new clients. Maybe these were her people, like Abuela had said.

Bashful, Yadira kept her gaze on her work. “That would be really cool. Sign me up.”

• • •

The next week, she met Dulce and Augustín at a university concert hall for a free string-quartet performance. Dulce’s dress was a casual floral, perhaps from the community closet, but her rose-palette makeup was pristine. Augustín’s midnight-black hair was styled and set in a fashion-forward swirl. The three friends took seats together and chattered happily over the simple, folded programs they’d received from music student ushers.

Yadira wasn’t familiar with the music being performed, but the cello’s notes warmed her heart and loosened the painful knot she’d carried in her stomach for weeks. She thought of Abuela’s encouragement and wondered how long the cellist practiced every day. At the end of the first piece, she wanted to stand up and cheer, maybe even whistle with two fingers, but she restrained herself and joined the polite clapping of the audience. She looked to see if Dulce and Augustín were smiling as broadly as she was and found Dulce in tears, covering her mouth with one hand.

“What’s wrong?” Yadira whispered.

Dulce shook her head, rocking with silent sobs. Yadira looked beyond Dulce to Augustín. They locked eyes and nodded, and as one, they rose from their seats and escorted Dulce to the lobby.

“Lo siento,” Dulce whispered between sobs. “I don’t mean to take you away from the music, it’s just . . . I never thought . . .”

Augustín took her hand and led her to a narrow bench under a bulletin board papered with concert posters, practice schedules, and audition sign-up sheets. Yadira followed, holding Dulce’s other hand.

Once Dulce caught her breath, she explained in Spanish. “It’s just that, I never imagined, while I was riding in the backs of trucks and scraping together coins for buses, I never thought I’d be here, listening to beautiful music with friends, and no fear, no fear of being harassed or assaulted or ripped off. But I’m here and I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow or the day after that or a month from now, but for now I’m safe and happy. I didn’t think I could ever have that.”

Augustín nodded and squeezed her hand, as did Yadira as she wiped away her own tears. The three sat breathing together, recovering. Eventually Dulce sat up straighter and carefully wiped under her eyes.

“I need a bathroom, god knows what I look like,” she said.

Yadira assured her she looked beautiful, her rose and silver eye makeup miraculously intact, but she led her friend to the ladies’ room to primp anyway. When they emerged, Augustín stood, and the friends squeezed one another in a three-way hug. Then they returned to the music.

• • •

A month later, Yadira entered her apartment and dropped two tote bags of art supplies on either side of her welcome mat. Smiling enormously though her arms ached from the weight, she let her front door swing closed behind her and then slumped against it. The MMJ workshop with the kids had been a huge success. Teens from United Action for Youth had joined the workshop as mentors in the zine-making process, and there was talk of organizing a zine fair to show the kids’ work to the community.

That would’ve been enough to make anyone happy, but Yadira had even more going for her. Lately she’d been a creative blur, zooming from one project to another and loving every second of it. She’d perfected her technique for creating gel prints from newsprint. She’d created a collage of a fat mermaid meditating, and once she’d posted it on the print-on-demand site, it had gone slightly viral, with customers wanting the image reproduced in prints of every size and on all kinds of merchandise. At the nonprofit, Laura had submitted Yadira’s new logo design to a contest, and it won, which led to a feature in a regional magazine and new connections for future projects.

Everything was going so well for Yadira personally that she felt a little guilty. After all, the country was still being led by a despot whose minions were ripping apart all social safety nets and vilifying helpless minorities. And more migrants than ever languished at the US-Mexico border, but news coverage had waned without the exciting possibility of migrants disappearing mid-interview.

That evening, while chopping green onions and a poblano for yakisoba, Yadira received a text message from the RGV journalists: Tomorrow afternoon would be their last live interview. They’d lost a grant due to the federal funding freeze and had to focus on more dynamic news coverage. Yadira understood their need to attract more views to survive and texted her thanks for doing so much while they could.

Still, the update needled her. She kept thinking about it as she gobbled her sweet and savory ramen. She hadn’t tried to use her magic in a while. What if, as Abuela insisted, it wasn’t really gone? What if she’d needed to refresh and recharge? What if, she thought with a surge of hope, her magic was like her art or bipolar? What if it did ebb and flow, and she was just along for the ride? Maybe she had to leave room for it in daily life, while also doing the dreary self-maintenance that put her in the best possible position for a breakthrough. By the time she’d finished her meal, she’d made a plan.

First, she texted Augustín and Dulce to ask them for moral support. Would they come to the apartment for an immigrant rescue attempt? Their replies were near instantaneous: “Omigod, of course!” from Augustín and “Ay, hermana, gracias a Dios que vas a tratar de nuevo. Estoy muy orgullosa de ti.”

The next afternoon, Dulce insisted on giving her a “magical” manicure for good luck. Despite all the painting she did, Yadira rarely took the time to paint her own nails. When Dulce finished her salon-worthy work, Yadira had cobalt blue nails embellished with gold flares. While she sat admiring them and waiting for them to dry, Augustín surveyed the space around Yadira’s worktable and tsked. Without a word, he dragged the vacuum from the closet and began sucking up all the bits of paper from Yadira’s art projects, now strewn to every corner of the apartment.

When Yadira saw the rainbow of paper flecks in the clear vacuum canister, she tried to rescue them, but Augustín threw his hand in the air like a stop sign.

“Not on your life,” he announced. “If your nails are dry, it’s time to set up the charcutería.”

Augustín had insisted they make more of the afternoon than simply preparing for the possibility that Yadira would bring a migrant through the portal. Even if she didn’t manage it, they were going to have a consolation party with sausage, cheese, and margaritas. Yadira was so grateful that he and Dulce were in her life. Even more than the folks at MMJ, these were her people.

At the appointed time, Yadira brought up the RGV group’s livefeed on her laptop, which was once more set on the tray table in the living room. A candle that smelled like spilled rosé burned in front of the dark TV and the charcuterie board waited on the ottoman (which Augustín had also vacuumed). He and Dulce stood on either side of Yadira for support but left her hands free for her work.

Eyes riveted to the screen, Yadira teared up when she realized this last interview was an update on the status of the teenage boys she’d seen months ago. The same brave boy spoke directly to the camera about how his cohort had lost touch. Some were trying to return to their home countries. Others had been housed by a volunteer group farther south from the border. He himself had spent time in the hospital from a gunshot wound, when the US Border Patrol fired through the border fence into a protesting (“rioting”) crowd.

“This is good,” Yadira quietly told her friends. “I can work with this. If only I’ve still got it.”

Augustín wished her luck. Dulce asked if she might say a prayer. Yadira was, perhaps stubbornly, still agnostic, despite her seemingly supernatural powers, but she appreciated Dulce’s heartfelt offer and agreed. As Dulce’s words wrapped a curtain of security around them, Yadira waited for the camera to zero in on the teenager, hopefully with no bystanders in the background.

The reporter and cameraperson were old hat at this by now, and Yadira didn’t have to wait long. As the teenager gazed into the camera, his focus seemed to shift very subtly. Yadira didn’t feel like he was looking into the camera, but into her soul. Her chest tightened and she experienced a subtle shift, too—from hope to belief.

YES! her inner cheerleader hissed.

On the screen, a ring of golden sparks centered on the boy.

Yadira felt like her heart was ratcheting around in her chest, but her arm moved smoothly as she lifted it to the screen. Painless sparks flew as her fingers pressed the screen, then passed through it. She cupped the boy’s cheek briefly, and he pulled away, rather like Yadira imagined he would’ve ducked an overly doting tía’s touch. But he didn’t take his eyes from her. The gold ring expanded to a circle, and she moved her hand down to rest on his shoulder. The circle grew further, casting light on the walls and ceiling of the living room. The framed poster of Sylvia Rivera gleamed and gently rattled.

“You’re doing it,” Dulce whispered. “You’re really doing it. Dios mío, look, I’m glowing too!”

Yadira had a vague impression that Dulce was raising her arm, and Augustín examining his, but she didn’t dare look away from the boy. She concentrated, wanting to remember this feeling so she could summon it again and again. She felt . . . right. Not manic or low, not roaring on top of the artistic roller coaster or diving down into the barrens. Just . . . right. Like her best self.

Yadira gripped the teenager’s broad shoulder, feeling the warmth of absorbed sunlight in the fabric of his Nirvana shirt. She smiled.

And the room lit up like dawn as she brought the boy home.

About the Author

A queer, disabled Latina originally from South Texas, Lisa M. Bradley now lives in Iowa. Her work has been featured on the LeVar Burton Reads podcast and in F&SF, Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Uncanny. Her first collection is The Haunted Girl (Aqueduct Press). Her debut novel is Exile (Rosarium Publishing). Learn more at www.lisambradley.com or on Bluesky, @cafenowhere.bsky.social.

Please visit LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE to read more great science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared in the November 2025 issue, which also features short fiction by Angela Liu, Gene Doucette, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Joel W. D. Buxton, Modupeoluwa Shelle, Tina S. Zhu, Sam W. Pisciotta, and more. You can wait for this month’s contents to be serialized online, or you can buy the whole issue right now in convenient ebook format for just $4.99, or subscribe to the ebook edition here.

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io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “Drosera regina” by A.L. Goldfuss. Enjoy!

Drosera regina

by A.L. Goldfuss

The men knew before she did. Before this boy, before sophomore year, before even her twelfth birthday, they had jostled her on the sidewalk and hooted from cars, searching for something just past her skin. But now, with her panties stripped off and the boy’s eyes on her, Jackie felt a strange prickling. A warning pacing behind her ribs. A mouth about to drip.

The boy’s family had a single-wide, newer than her mother’s, and the carpet in his bedroom was soiled with crumbs. The thin pile bit into Jackie’s shoulders and spine as she thought how, inches below her, was fresh air and cool earth.

“Feels good, right?” the boy said, sliding a part of him along a part of her. It did feel good, at least in one place. Another place hurt, and that seemed to be where the boy was interested most.

On the other side of the door, his father watched television in the living room.

“Here I go,” the boy said, and Jackie bit her lip as he pressed into the place that didn’t feel good at all. He thrust once, twice, pimply face blocking out the inset ceiling light, then yelped in her ear and pulled out, leaving behind a hole.

“What did you do?” he said, clutching his crotch. Between his fingers the skin growled red and steamed with blisters. “What did you do to me?” Beyond the door, the television swelled louder.

Jackie sat up and her cami stuck to her chest with something thicker than sweat.

“It hurt me, too,” she said, thinking it was an experience they could share. Perhaps this was part of it.

“You’re diseased! Look what you did to me! Get out!”

She dragged on her shorts, denim sticking to her fingers, and plucked her sneakers from the kitchen on her way to the door. She might have said goodnight to the boy’s father—he didn’t respond—but all she remembered when she got home was the betrayal in the boy’s eyes, as though Nature itself had wronged him.

• • •

For two years, Jackie asked the wrong questions. She spent lunches hiding in the bathroom and ninth period on the bus to the county library, where she combed the card catalog for “STDs,” “acid,” “burns,” and “boys.” The answers she got all started off promising, but ended before her troubles truly began, as though she had wandered off the map of human reckoning.

The boys, meanwhile, got worse. They huddled outside the girls’ locker room and followed her onto the court. They inched their desks closer to hers in math class and punched each other by her locker. What friends she had—other girls—stopped inviting her to sleepovers and study nights. Jackie was knobby-kneed and freckled; none of it made sense.

One night she woke from an embarrassing dream to find her chest and arms slick with sticky sap and her mother arguing with a gruff voice at the trailer door. Jackie opened her bedroom door a crack, nightshirt clinging to her skin like wet leaves.

“Get out before I make you.” Her mother stood in her pink housecoat with a shotgun in her arms.

“There’s something in there,” the man said. “I want it.”

“I said get.” Her mother pressed the barrel into his chest, pushing him back out the door with effort and locking it behind him with a shaky sigh. They kept the shotgun by the door after that.

It was the librarian who saved her.

Jackie was hunched over cellophaned reference books again, one hand hovering over a notebook scrawled with dead ends. The librarian, shaped like a cookie jar, wandered by and took pity.

“Is it for a report? Perhaps I can help.”

Jackie chewed her pen and tried to formulate an explanation.

“A fluid that attracts?” She swallowed. “And then hurts.”

The librarian tipped her head at the cryptic description, then lit up like Christmas and went digging in the stacks, pulling out an encyclopedia of plants. There, a two-page spread detailed a verdant garden of unusual curves, streaked with red, and dotted with dew.

Dionaea, the flytrap. Nepenthes, the pitcher. Drosera, the sundew.

Plants that attracted and then hurt.

Jackie’s mother worked evening shifts at the Bluebird Diner off the highway, so Jackie was in charge of grocery shopping after school. This time, she took the envelope of cash to the other side of town, to the neighborhood where the grocery store also had a garden center. For the price of a TV dinner, she rescued a Cape sundew from the discount table, its three shriveled stalks dragging in the dirt.

Jackie put the sundew on her dresser in a Country Crock container filled with water from the rain barrel outside. Within a month, the stalks recovered and unfurled new leaves, each tipped with pinpricks of nectar. Whenever a leaf caught a gnat, it curled around its victim like a body in pleasure, and Jackie tallied each shivering meal. The little sundew became a graveyard of winged bodies and sent up taller and taller stalks, making her proud in a small, secret way.

• • •

After high school, Jackie worked alongside her mother at the diner. Ostensibly it was to save for college, but they both agreed it was nice to replace the transmission on the pickup and spring for takeout once a week.

At first Jackie waited tables, but that ended when a customer smashed the pie case lunging at her over the counter. She moved to the back, scraping dried yolks and meatloaf gravy off dishes on days when the woman fry cook was in. When Jackie ovulated, she filled the yellow dish gloves with dew that hung off her elbows in long, sticky strings. The owner, a pragmatic woman who had seen her share of oddities in the world, shook her head and bought more glove packs in bulk. Jackie tried to make up for it through sheer effort, and no one breathed a word to her mother.

Dish duty was only part of it; Jackie also took out the trash at night. The dumpsters huddled near the back of the cracked parking lot, and she had to carry the bags out one at a time, arching her back to the side for balance.

To her right, a trucker descended from his cab, bouncing off the last step onto the ancient asphalt.

“Hey, baby. You wanna feel good?”

“No, thanks.” But she couldn’t run. The trash bag was glued to her hands.

He yanked it away, unperturbed by the sticky mess shining under the lot’s lone halogen bulb. It was the two of them alone in the dark.

“There’s something about you,” he said, and Jackie pushed his face away, worried about her mother waiting at home. He screamed under her hand, so she covered his mouth, cementing it shut, and he clawed at her arms as his skin blistered. The dew drenched her, ruining her uniform and squelching in her shoes as she dragged him behind the diner, to the field they used for holiday parking. She stumbled and sobbed, moaned a prayer to the night, but the rest came regardless, had been inevitable from the start.

There in the tall grass, between gopher burrows and beneath the stars, Jackie ate him bit by bit.

She didn’t use her mouth. She didn’t need to: The dew coated her and she feasted with her whole body, sipping through her pores. He tasted of chewing tobacco, burnt coffee, a shot at the state championship, a bum arm, an ex-wife, and a sleeve of stale Rolos. The more she ate the more aroused she became, and heat knotted in her groin like red wires. The orgasm clenched her arms into him, lifting him up, but he was much lighter now.

Digestion took hours, and she emerged from her haze right as dawn blushed over the hills. The man was an armful of leather and bones and looked like old sticks when scattered around the field. She had just enough time to finish with the trash and lock up the diner before the owner arrived to open.

The man’s cab was still in the lot.

Jackie knew how to drive it.

The door swung heavy under her weight as she climbed up and onto seats smooth and plush. The keys were in the console—she knew that, too—and she fished them out with one hand while the other adjusted the mirrors. The cab wasn’t attached to any trailer, and the highway called from pavement frosted with mist.

She drove for hours, the semi cab a fortress around her, and she punched the clutch with the confidence of someone taller, stronger, and smug. At first she didn’t have a plan, then she did. The tank was full with thousands of potential miles, and the cab had a bed twice as nice as her own. Add that to the cash under the mattress and a few nighttime meal stops and she could make North Carolina no problem.

Days later she arrived at sunset and parked the cab down a forest service road. There were no signs confirming her destination, and her palms itched for a map. But she was rewarded once she stalked between the tall trees and her flashlight found the ruby-mouthed florets in the dark.

Dionaea muscipula, the Venus flytrap, grew in sandy bogs in the American southeast.

She sat among the toothy traps, the largest no longer than the pad of her thumb, and studied their process. They didn’t drip with dew, but once a fly or wasp triggered the hairs in their clamshell mouths, they snapped shut and got to work. And the plants were so small, easily missed unless you knew where to look.

The pine bark scratched through her now-stiff uniform, but the katydids croaked a pleasing refrain, and the mosquitos, ironically, left her alone. In the heat and the dark, with the flytraps and the bog, she had time to think.

She could use a beer. One of the convenience store specials that used to accompany her to the boy’s football games, until he went off to college and got too big for that town and her house. She scratched a ghost beard on her chin and froze at the motion. In the distance, a pickup with dirty disc brakes squealed down the road, a sound she would not have recognized yesterday. The world pressed in on her, now filtered through two sets of eyes, and the extra dimensions tickled her stomach. She clamped her eyes shut and swallowed until the ground under her felt solid again.

Later, Jackie drove the cab over state lines, wiped it clean, and hopped a bus back home.

• • •

Within a week of being home, it was obvious Jackie had changed. She was fidgety and impatient, snapping at her mother over the yellowing plastic of their bathroom fixtures and the worn edges of her bedsheets. Her mother pushed back at first, then simply listened, folding into old dreams on the sofa.

Early one morning, Jackie left with a knapsack and her latest paycheck stuffed into her bra. She imagined her mother being relieved.

Those were the good, lonely years. Men opened their cars and wallets at rest stops, coffee shops, and bars. She sweet-talked, motel hopped, moved up, and broke down. She learned how to dress for her body type—tucked shirts into trousers to cheat her waist and wore A-line skirts to hide her knees—and smothered her freckles with expensive foundation.

She learned it didn’t happen with every man. Never with the men who listened to their sisters or chose to be in the room when their wives gave birth. Never the men who volunteered at Little League games, bought tampons without flinching, or tried new foods with interest. Those men never touched Jackie, never wanted her at all.

It was their shadowy brothers who found her. The loud men, the rough ones, the broken stairs everyone stepped over on their way out the door. Every bar had one, and every woman was glad when he ignored her for the gangly nobody who had just walked in. Sometimes they announced themselves from across the street, but other times Jackie didn’t know what her night would be until a strange hand traced her hip.

Once they found her, the rest was the same. Jackie fed and woke up different. By the time she turned twenty-six she could descale a boat motor, give a stick-and-poke, write BASIC, read Japanese, cook a gumbo so thick and spicy it coated the throat like soft fire, tune a hearing aid, bind a chest, take a punch, run a sawmill, do an ollie, play bass clarinet, blue a revolver, plane a table, shape a baguette, and hustle a game of pool. Sometimes Jackie woke from feeding to a field of stars overhead, and she wondered if her mother got the cash she sent.

She tried to get clean, following every sign the universe gave her right to the neon-soaked steps of a lesbian club. There, between the scuffed dance floor and oiled bar she found all sorts of women, many eager to try her on. Jackie let them lead her down tiled hallways and into studio apartments, squeezing her eyes tight to work the spell of rewiring her brain, succumbing to the painted nails and acid-washed denim. But the hands were always too small, the lips too soft, the words too kind. She willed herself to change, to let them build her a home, but each time stumbled into the dawn with the same self-repulsion and realization. Jackie was made for the worst men. She was a rabbit in lust with hawks.

• • •

The men had been driving back from a bachelor’s party in Atlantic City, taking a detour through the Pine Barrens to extend the trip. There they had found Jackie, crouching near the water, fingers combing the underbrush. She saw herself through their eyes now, how they had skimmed past her fresh perm and went right to her ass. Despite it all, she was heartbroken.

Jackie gripped the two men close, their legs entangling in the wet grass as the Jersey summer boiled the air over the cedar marsh. Above was a perfect patch of blue, but Jackie didn’t see the sky or the herons or the pine needles sprinkling onto the men’s wet shoulders. She roiled and rolled, orgasms rocking her thoughts, what vision she had split three ways.

She had never had two at once, and the jeans around her ankles and firestorm in her brain told the tale. She screamed with pleasure, moaned with agony, and panted into their foul mouths, her arms plastered to their chests. The men wrestled inside her. Called her all the usual names. Digestion was always difficult, each new addition pecking and clawing until his feathers congealed into the miasma veiling her senses. Every man gone, every man dead, but still a small facet through which the world reflected at a new angle. Already she was expanding twofold, more skills and opinions and cruelty and sorrow. Already that girl in the trailer park was shoved further down a hallway of cracked mirrors. Jackie was shattered, only aware of her legs when walking or her hands when slicing a steak.

Blackness furred her vision, and she forced her eyes toward the dainty treasure past her soles. The reason she had come to the Pine Barrens.

Jackie had zig-zagged across the country, bouncing off men like a pinball, but always, always found the plants. The flytraps saw her several times, but also the white trumpet Sarracenia in Florida and the dainty bladderworts. She had even made it to the west coast for the Darlingtonia with their curious forked tongues. There was a park in Oregon dedicated to these cobra lilies, and in the densest patches they looked like a green shag carpet.

But her favorites were the sundews. They edged every bog at every latitude in the country, often hidden by taller grass and grander vegetation. Finding them was like finding a fairy ring, a secret among the moss, glistening in the afternoon light. Drosera rotundifolia in California, cute rosettes with oval leaves. Drosera linearis, playing hide-and-seek along the marl bogs of the Great Lakes.

And here, Drosera filiformis, its scarlet tendrils waving in the humid Jersey breeze.

Jackie concentrated on the delicate plant, its tender leaves clogged with gnats, flies, and a solitary moth. But those slender stalks didn’t bow under the weight. They stood tall and proud, supping on the battlefield. As Jackie admired them, her own weight lightened.

Jackie pushed the men’s desiccated piles into the marsh, along with her ruined clothes. She strode back to her car naked, the only devil wandering the woods. Some baby wipes and an emergency stash of clothes got her back on track.

On the highway she caught a faded billboard promising a classic diner breakfast at some nameless greasy spoon. Yearning spiked through her, and she considered the source. Impossible to tell who wanted what. She listened to the radio for a while, savoring someone else’s memory of Canadian bacon, then took the on-ramp. Two hours later, she stood outside an old single-wide with rust gathering around the windows.

She rapped on the door and stood sweating in the dark, until the door opened into a slice of yellow light.

“I can’t stay,” Jackie said as her mother flew down the stairs. “I’m sorry.”

“I know,” her mother said, holding her tight.

• • •

A detective found her in Wyoming, at a motel shoved between a used car lot and a lunch buffet. He wore a department store suit and a cowboy hat but was otherwise clean-cut and earnest when she opened the door.

“Debra Rawlins?”

“Yes?”

He nodded and pulled back his blazer to flash his badge and .38. “I’m with the homicide unit out of Laramie, and I’d like to ask you a few questions about the disappearance of—” And he named her last meal.

“Homicide? My goodness.” Jackie smiled like a makeup display and opened the motel door. “Please excuse the mess.”

He passed by her tidy bed and suitcase to sit at the little table in the corner. He seemed almost embarrassed to be there.

“We have a report from the bartender at the Ranger Club that you were seen there with this man on Thursday night. It’s, well, it’s a rough establishment, ma’am. Doesn’t seem like your type of place.”

He was young, perhaps younger than her, and worried at the edge of his notebook as he talked. She could take him, whelp that he was, a good four inches shorter than—No. No. Jackie swallowed her indigestion and kept her face pleasant.

“I was there, yes. I was hungry and the chalkboard sign said they had burgers.”

“There’s a burger shop just down the street.”

“I wanted company.”

“At the biker club?”

“I didn’t know that when I walked in. I travel a lot.”

“I see.” He had probably been an Eagle Scout. Could probably build her a fire in a rainy gorge after a plane crash. Would probably tuck their kids in at night. “It seems you do travel a lot, ma’am. You stayed at three other hotels in the state this month. Two of those dates line up with missing persons cases.” He set his hat down on the table, not meeting her eyes.

“How horrible.”

“I put out some calls to Idaho, too. Crossing state lines would make it federal.” He cleared his throat. “Ma’am.”

Jackie slid into the chair across from him, the cracked plastic cushion wheezing in the still air. He didn’t look up, sit back, or check his gun. She liked that.

“Is there anything else, detective?”

“Debra Rawlins isn’t your real name. I can bring you in just on that.” He did look up at this, strong jawline tense.

“So, why don’t you?”

He hesitated, and she could see this face ten years older, explaining baseball to a seven-year-old with the gravity of a priest.

“The boys at the station think I’m crazy, but you are a killer, aren’t you? I’ve never met a lady killer before. One time a woman shot her husband, but he had been beating her for weeks and she hadn’t meant to. But you’re different, right?” He looked almost sad. “I want to know why.”

She leaned back into the sharp chair frame, half a lie on her lips. But it felt good, almost poetic, to unburden herself onto this clean-shaven detective. Jackie had stood on both coasts numerous times, slept under the stars, climbed mountains, run through the rain, but always alone. Her feet ached from running.

“I don’t go looking for them. They find me.” This was happening. She was confessing. “They find me in bars, on escalators, in church. Loud men. Mean men. Sometimes, rich men.”

“You’re a prostitute?”

“I’m sure my mother thinks so.” Her lips twisted into a smile. “I send her money every month, and she never outright asks, but I feel it all the same. And it doesn’t really matter, in the end. As long as she gets the money.”

“So, you sleep with them and then kill them?”

“Not exactly.”

“Do they hurt you? Is it self-defense?”

“The first time was, I suppose. I’m not sure about the rest. At some point, it has to be my fault.”

“Look, I—I don’t agree with your lifestyle. But I have a cousin in a similar way. I get how it happens. And these men, they can be real assholes. If you can give a detailed statement about it being self-defense, I’m sure the city can find you a good lawyer.”

He was a puppy in a two-piece suit, looking at her like she was a damsel in a tower. She had always wanted a man to look at her this way. Treat her like something precious. And here he was, a young detective who probably came here on his lunch hour to follow another dusty lead. How many days had he spent tracking her down? Was she everything he’d wanted?

“Okay. I’ll come with you.” Wyoming was one big stretch of sky, and it would be nice to be a passenger for once and drink it all in. “Can I gather some things? I don’t imagine I’ll be back for a while.”

He thought it over and nodded. She leaned over the small table and patted his hand. It was firm and dry.

For the first time, he looked nervous.

“Thank you.” She meant it.

Her suitcase was open and partially scattered, but her purse was mostly ready. Makeup compact, pocketknife, keys from her last ride. She had left the latest man (sleek bones) behind a pet store, because it felt fitting. Perhaps she could convince the fresh detective to go there now. Perhaps he would believe her. Perhaps her mother would as well.

The chair scooted behind her.

“Almost done,” Jackie said, zipping up her bag. She was thirsty from talking. Maybe some water, before the road.

He was right there when she turned around, his footsteps muted by the stained carpet. The blinds were drawn on the window, and what light that peeked through made his young face stark with shadows. A thin scar twisted through his eyebrow. Someone had slashed that boyish face.

“Excuse me, ma’am.” His voice was rough, a struggle, and her heart dropped. “But you smell amazing.”

• • •

Jackie left the detective at the bend of a river, where gleaming fish stroked the rivulets and finches played in the young trees. It was nice (nicer than he had been to her, in the end) and she stayed to watch the morning sun dapple her sneakers before leaving town.

She hit the big Midwest cities. Chicago to learn, Vegas to forget. She became a stripper, strutting into the spotlights to looks of disappointment and slipping behind the curtains as the audience stormed the stage. She worked the streets, men on her heels down every alleyway, biting bags of garbage to muffle her ecstasy as they melded into her flesh. The dew came easier now that Jackie sanded with the grain. She could quell it for a time with the promise of a good meal always on the horizon. After Wyoming, no cop bothered her again, as though she reflected them back to themselves. She disappeared men no one wanted returned.

She grew a callus against the good ones, her cicatrized eyes bouncing off their slight frowns as they shuffled away from her on the metro. They could smell their brothers on her and assumed it was her fault, something Jackie had welcomed, so how good could they really be, anyway. As though she wanted their pedestrian white fences, jewelry on Christmas, forehead kisses as she birthed their sons.

Jackie dove into an ocean of exit ramps, motel coffee, mall photos in bruised wallets, cheap gin, expensive shoes, limousines, logging trucks, silk scarves, border crossings, fast cash, and rough stubble until she washed up again at the foot of familiar splintered steps, mumbling a curse in Spanish as her eyes focused on the frayed hem of her mother’s robe.

“Oh, honey,” her mother said. “What a mess.”

For three weeks they said nothing about it. Her mother attended her usual shifts at the diner while Jackie haunted the length of the sagging trailer, inventing new ways of pacing its abbreviated spaces. She slept among the stacked boxes in her old room, sweating out her recent meals, digesting hard memories, and shoving the men behind every saran-wrapped corner of her mind until she had quiet.

But quiet was steel wool against her raw nerves. She rummaged through her mother’s belongings to fill up her head with sound. Flyers for a church rummage sale. L.L. Bean catalogs. An old wedding invite from someone Jackie had known in high school. She crumpled it into a tight ball and tossed it in the trash.

What Jackie sought were love letters, dirty photographs, a red underline in a supple address book. Proof her mother had touched a man, had been around men, since Jackie’s father had died. Evidence that she was more than a pink diner apron and tin walls. But Jackie found nothing, not even a Christmas card from a suspicious name. Her mother was a nun, holy, and she lived here unscathed.

So Jackie walked to the gas station for a twelve pack of beer, to soften her mother and blunt herself.

When her mother came home, she appraised the situation with a raised eyebrow but acquiesced easier than Jackie had expected. They sat across from each other at the cramped Formica dining table, her mother smelling of grease and Jackie hoping she smelled like nothing at all. Drinking with her mother as two adults was odd, as though they had skipped several crucial stages. Jackie was awkward, eighteen and thirty-two at once, two people superimposed over each other. And she’d had little need to cultivate the skill of small talk. But her mother seemed content, commenting on the beer as she sipped it, and Jackie studied her mother’s shoulders and crow’s feet until she thought she detected something give.

“Still doing the dinner shift at the Bluebird? You get home so late.”

“But I keep my mornings. I can have my coffee—I get these nice beans now, you should try—and read the paper like a queen. And Rosa lets me sit in the back office when my feet are sore. She asks about you, you know.”

“But you don’t have to, right? Aren’t you getting the money I send?”

“Yes, I get the money.”

“Well?” Jackie pointed out the window with the bottleneck at unseen riches in the dark. “It’s enough to buy a house, right? Why don’t you buy a house?”

“And what would I do with a house? A house is too big for just me. Unless you’re going to stay with me. Will you stay with me, Jackie? In a house?”

Jackie traced the threads on the bottle’s throat. “I will. Soon.”

“When? What is it you’re looking for out there? What do you want?”

A man to look and see all of her, every freckle, every scoundrel’s memory hanging off her like a ghost, the way she mashed saltines into her clam chowder until it was a salty paste, her one crooked tooth, the way she cried before bed, all of it, all of it, and want it all. Want it all more than he wanted to cram himself into her tender places, hairy knuckles in her mouth, his dessert more important than her name. Want it all more than he wanted himself. “I want to know what happened to dad.”

Her mother clacked her beer on the table, and the eighteen-year-old inside Jackie winced. “What sort of question is that?”

“Just, what happened to him?”

“He died. People die.”

“Yes.” Years ago, Jackie had swiped an issue of Cosmo that claimed women were attracted to men who smelled like their fathers. Did the men who found her already smell of decay? Was there something buried in this trailer, in her mother, that would save her? “But how?”

“Enough of this.” Her mother stood and rinsed her bottle in the sink. “I need sleep. And you need to stop thinking such morbid thoughts.” She kissed Jackie’s forehead, anointing her with the remnants of tinted chapstick, and prodded Jackie’s shoulder toward the second bedroom. “Don’t stay up late.”

Jackie listened from her bedroom as her mother trudged around the trailer, putting trash away, brushing her teeth, and pulling her own door closed with a tink of the overhead light. In the darkness, Jackie reviewed the conversation, considering the stresses and flaws. She skimmed through all the conversations inside her, conducted by other mouths, each one commanding and direct. That approach hadn’t worked, but she could try again. She had aerated the soil, brought the dark loam to light, and next she would plant the seeds.

But by the next night, Jackie was back on the road.

• • •

Nepenthes albomarginata has a ring of white trichomes around each pitcher’s mouth that attracts termites. They crowd to eat the white band and push each other in.

Sarracenia psittacina has beaked traps lined with aciform hairs waiting to skewer any prey escaping from the pit of digestive acid below.

Drosera regina has knobby stalks, wilted flowers, and wandering roots. A rare specimen, it seems incapable of attracting pollinators.

• • •

Jackie was forty-one when her mother died. The call came from a neighbor who had poked around the trailer after the EMTs left and discovered a Post-it on the fridge with a number but no name.

“It was a stroke, I think,” the neighbor said on the phone. “Aren’t you the daughter who was always sleeping around?”

“I’ll be there tomorrow,” Jackie replied and hung up.

The funeral was small, but the reception was packed with people she had never met. Bubbles of conversation drifted over her, each a paint stroke in the portrait of a woman Jackie had thought she knew. Her mother had called bingo on Tuesdays, run the church bake sale, and organized the trailer park against a real estate company looking to put in condos. The pastor was there, as well as a local Girl Scout troop, and the Ladies Auxiliary. Each anecdote Jackie caught was a testament to a full, happy life. Alone, but not lonely. So foreign to her own life, lonely yet never alone.

A graying woman shuffled to Jackie’s corner, and Jackie braced for a slap as though she was a trespasser on her own mother’s death. But the woman looked up from under thick eyebrows and offered a serene smile.

“I don’t suppose you remember me?” she said, but Jackie did. Jackie always remembered the women. And she could never forget Ms. Rosa, who had snuck her citrus-scented lotion after Jackie had tried to scald the dew off her arms in the diner prep sinks. Jackie clutched her bag to her side, warding away the memory, and Ms. Rosa bowed her head. “I am so sorry, dear. Your mother was a friend to me, you know. And she spoke of you often. She missed you so much.”

Jackie nodded, eyes darting around the room over the old woman’s head. “Thank you.”

“Do you have somewhere to stay in town?”

“I’m staying with a friend.”

“Is it a nice place?”

“Yes, very nice.”

“Oh good, honey. Because you need a rest.” Ms. Rosa’s voice lowered, and Jackie refocused on her wrinkled face, so many fine lines gathered together like spider’s silk. “I know about the money you sent your poor mother. And I remember you at the diner with all those ruined gloves. I imagine you’re exhausted in many ways.”

Before Jackie could react, the old woman hugged her around the waist, her thin arms warm and strong. Jackie froze and her body shuddered in conflict at an embrace meant to comfort, not restrain. The last person to hug her had been her mother, now an index of messages on an answering machine. Her mother, the one solid anchor in this spit of a town. The crowd’s murmuring rose to a buzzing din in Jackie’s ears as the welts of over twenty years on the road rose up inside her.

The old woman patted Jackie’s trembling back. “There’s a man who comes to the diner on Sundays, and I don’t like how he looks at the girls in their church dresses. I think he and you should meet.”

Jackie clamped shut like a bear trap, her relief unplugged. A numbness spread through her as Ms. Rosa withdrew with that same serene smile and melted back into the crowd.

Jackie tore away, whispers snagging in her hair, and slipped out a side door onto a street shining with a fresh coat of rain and the fire of a good sunset. Cars lined the street for several blocks, waiting for their drivers to take them someplace familiar and warm, and Jackie bent each side mirror as she walked back to the hotel.

• • •

Jackie bought a house at the end of a long driveway outside of town and towed her mother’s trailer there herself. For two weeks she slept on her old bed in her mother’s worn housecoat, rereading faded birthday cards, napping in the closet, and eating very little. When she stumbled into the house for a shower, she noticed the grout was peeling and the water pressure was weak. On returning from the hardware store, the mailbox greeted her with a tilt, and a line of moss taunted her from the roof. Inside, a nail bit her sock.

Jackie sanded and scraped, varnished and painted, scowled and sang. The downstairs bathroom gained a new sink and the kitchen a refurbished range. Special-order curtains draped the bay windows and copper bottom pots hung by the fridge. The work felt good, the house reshaping under her hands, her muscles sore and mind full. Until she lined up a nail to hang a shelf and a grunt echoed through her body, a memory of how she had learned to square and cut and hang.

Jackie flung the hammer across the room and the shelf to the floor. She ripped the curtains with kitchen shears, slammed her dresser down the stairs, and attacked the drywall with a crowbar until a tendon in her wrist screamed. She howled and kicked and punched, sobs erupting from a forgotten cave system, tectonic plates grinding beneath her feet. The house groaned as she slid to the floor, both victims licking their wounds in the dark, and the crickets regrouped outside.

Curled up beside a smashed lamp, breath haggard and eyes burning, her raging blood pooled into a familiar heat in her stomach, and Jackie cupped her breasts with a rising understanding. Urged on by the violence and the detritus of a pretty life, she slid her hands into abandoned territory, and began to draw the map of herself, for herself.

This time the repairs went slow, and Jackie tested her palms against splintered boards as she considered each lintel, each eave. Paint swatches hung in every shade as she tried to remember her favorite color. She ate at the table, on the floor, on the outside steps, judging the sensations of each setting, weighing bread on her tongue. She tasted slow-simmered stew, played records during lunch, and let her hands wander over fresh linens and washed stone. Sometimes a memory smashed her onto the rocks and sent her to bed, heartbroken and frail. But after a dozen storms, the waves came slower, and she could wander the beach at low tide to examine what lived beneath.

The South-facing windows filled with friends. Rows of sundews in all shapes and sizes, some shy pings from Mexico, and even a flytrap or two. On hot days Jackie rotated the pots, her cheeks brushing the drooling Nepenthes pitchers, exotic bellies waiting for a good meal. She dug a bog in the garden and stuffed it with Sarracenia and the occasional cobra lily, then drank up the sun alongside them and considered the dense woods.

She learned skills the old-fashioned way: from books, articles, diagrams, and mistakes. Restless hours siphoned into spinning wool, folding origami, twisting macramé, canning tomatoes, curing cheese, and holding downward dog. She also learned herself, with fingers and faucets, pillows and toys. She kept herself busy, body and soul, so she never daydreamed about butter-soaked waffles, late summer dresses, and a man in a corner booth she should meet. She never wondered how he would greet her, how he would touch her, the things she would learn, the ecstasy she would feel, the flowers she would grow over his grave. She had a system in place. She had a routine.

One day, like all other days, Jackie woke to quiet. All day she had quiet, broken only by her own footsteps, the rasp of knife on bread, the scattering of water from the tap. The house dozed around her, from the floral rugs to the crocheted blankets to the watercolor sketch in the corner. The plants stretched up to the midday sun, twinkling with dew.

No one came up her driveway, lost and curious, smelling of the world. No one knocked on her door in a cheap suit. No one rang her line with a deep, demanding need. The only voice she heard was her own; she had reclaimed herself inch by inch. Alone in her garden. Alone in her bed. Safe and hungry and slick.

About the Author

A.L. Goldfuss’s work has been shortlisted for Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and has appeared in Lightspeed, Nightmare, Fantasy, and other venues. For more work and newsletter updates, visit algoldfuss.com.

Please visit LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE to read more great science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared in the October 2025 issue, which also features short fiction by Martin Cahill, Osahon Ize-Iyamu, Micah Dean Hicks, Stephen Graham Jones, Sean McMullen, Megan Chee, An Owomoyela, and more. You can wait for this month’s contents to be serialized online, or you can buy the whole issue right now in convenient ebook format for just $4.99, or subscribe to the ebook edition here.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.

io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “Last Meal Aboard the Awassa” by Kel Coleman. Enjoy!

Last Meal Aboard the Awassa

by Kel Coleman

Gardener ladled dark-purple porridge into her primary digestion sac, staring absently out the viewport at black space and the distant smudge of the planet they had come to study. The simple meal and the gesture it represented soothed her after a long, thorny morning in a section of the growth bay that was in full flower and had needed hand pollinating. Though the other crew members around the mess made do with the usual break time assortment, Cook had steamed and spiced osard grains just for her before going off shift to nap in their rooms.

When the two of them joined the crew as a couple, roughly four solars ago, Gardener had worried the special treatment shown to her from the kitchen would lead to resentment. She had heard it could get lonely on a long haul if you made a bad impression, especially on a tiny ship where everyone knew each other’s families, had vid night sleepovers in the observatory, and could count at least a handful of birthdays and Endless Nights aboard. But unlike Gardener, this hadn’t been Cook’s first long haul and she’d soon researched the crew’s home planets and ports, tracking down family recipes, popular street food, and festival treats. The crew of the small science vessel were immediately smitten with her, and Gardener found herself warming to them as a result.

She finished her porridge, scraping the bowl clean, but lingered at the table to—

The speakers mounted around the mess blared three urgent tones.

The other crew members scattered at tables and behind the serving counter dropped what they were doing and moved to readiness. For Gardener, like many bipeds, this meant standing with her limbs at her sides. She turned toward the nearest screen, which had already switched from Union news to video from the bridge.

The captain’s wings were tucked close to their thorax, their five eyes reddened and rapidly blinking. In all four solars of her time aboard, Gardener had never before seen them fearful.

“Crew of the Awassa, this is your captain speaking.”

Gardener’s sensitive hearing picked up all the ear dots around the room overlaying the words with translations. Her own ear dots not only translated the captain’s words but amplified things like pitch changes so she would be less apt to mistake one tone for another. They were frightened, but with a tinge of anger perhaps?

“As some of you may already know, we lost contact with the team sent to Gulsan-6 two hours ago. This happened shortly after they sent a probe into the gas giant. Following review of footage, scans, and probe data, we can conclude with high certainty that Gulsan-6 is, rather than a planet, an unknown species. It is capable of surviving and navigating the vacuum of space. And since exiting dormancy, its size has become incalculable as its shape is ever-changing. It is capable of reducing matter to its smallest units, and I regret to inform you your crewmates Engineer Ulli and Physicist Andel, along with their shuttle, were consumed by the alien. With equal regret, I must inform you the alien is now on a course to intercept and consume the Awassa as well.”

As her hearts’ paces fell out of harmony, Gardener found she could no longer sort out the emotions behind the words. On the faces around her, though, she read the captain’s pragmatic hopelessness regarding the situation. As they continued speaking, a time-to-intercept countdown appeared in the bottom of the screen. They ordered three senior crew members to the bridge and told everyone else to call their loved ones. So . . . there was nothing useful for her to do except find Cook.

• • •

Cook was in the hydroponics row, pinching leaves off of herbs and dropping them into a handwoven basket. Her dark, smooth skin was riddled with planet-orange hives and her voluminous whiskers were drooping.

“Cook?”

She didn’t stop pacing or look up.

“Nailo? Did you see the captain’s—”

“Of course,” Cook said. She gestured at the herbs and fruits tumbling around in the basket like that was explanation enough.

And for Gardener, it was. The two of them needed few words.

Cook would do what she loved until the end. She was already gliding around the corner to the next row, and if she had been the same species as Gardener, she might’ve heard her utter a term of endearment, one that didn’t translate well to many other fleet languages.

An endearment close to meaning beloved, one her caretaker had called her often. An endearment that had journeyed with her when she left her lush world for Outpost Nine. An endearment that kept her and her seedlings warm despite the miserable cold outside the outpost greenhouses. An endearment that had come with her on a vacation where she got crater-sloshed with a slick-skinned traveling chef in the backroom of a Meat Meet Meat. An endearment that had accompanied the both of them to the Awassa, where they were swept up in all the drama and mutual care of a large family that Cook had missed and Gardener discovered she could tolerate when she wasn’t flat-out loving it—the shift-change gossip, the hugs, the too-loud music shoving through thin walls, her first spacewalk accompanied by Engineer Ulli . . .

Her hearts skipped.

She pulled herself out of her ruminative state and joined Cook in another section of the bay, where she was snipping blue flowers from climbing dewdrops. Gardener gently took the shears from her. “My job,” she said. “Just tell me what you need.”

• • •

When they were finished with harvesting, Cook agreed to give prep over to uninitiated but enthusiastic crewmates so she could call her family. Gardener lay in bed, blankets holding down her jumpy limbs, and tried to block out Cook’s murmurs two rooms away. She set the updates from the bridge to a volume high enough that it caused her some pain.

The bridge crew had learned a lot about “the vapor” and how it consumed the team and the shuttle. They were able to collect this data when the vapor altered its course to eat the second probe they sent to analyze it. They still couldn’t stop it or outrun it, but they estimated that they could buy several additional hours with the remaining probes as decoys.

When she got off the call, Cook was weirdly pleased with the news. “More time to cook,” she explained. A few minutes later, with bottles of something clear she’d been “saving for a special occasion” cradled in her arms and a nuzzle against Gardener’s cheek, she was off to make a feast for their crew, their beloveds.

• • •

Gardener didn’t often record videos unrelated to her duties. She smoothed down the fur around her eyes and cleared her throat.

“This is Gardener Ketri,” she began. “A hostile member of an unknown species is bearing down on my ship, the Awassa, and I don’t have anyone to say goodbye to who isn’t in the same boat . . . except you, I guess, whoever sees this.”

The dread dripped steadily through her bloodstream now, but she imagined the people who would watch this, especially the younger ones, and she didn’t want them to feel afraid for her.

“Instead of goodbye, though, do you mind if I tell you what it’s like to be a gardener on a long-haul science vessel?” She found a smile, showing silver-specked herbivore’s teeth. “It’s incredible. I love my job. Every day, I coax things to life. I help them grow. I spend my shifts with dirt under my feet and light on my skin. Sometimes my partner, Cook Nailo, brings me a germination challenge, usually a special request from a crewmate missing home cooking, and sometimes I get the water and light and nutrients just right on the first try. Not often, but those are good days.”

She could already hear music thumping from the observatory. Scientists that they were, everyone wanted to watch the vapor’s approach. It was an undeniably cool way to die: eaten by a space monster. There would be papers written about it for decades, and they only regretted they wouldn’t be the ones to write them.

“If you’re considering joining the fleet, go for it. Don’t let our bad luck stop you.”

• • •

By unspoken agreement, they all followed the dress code for vid nights, which had no requirements but personal comfort. Several crewmates had moved empty crates from the storage bay to make a long table for a “family-style” meal. Gardener wasn’t familiar with family-style, but it seemed to mean an impossible amount of food being passed around chaotically until everyone proved, under threat of more heaping spoonfuls, that they were physically incapable of eating another bite.

The meal was a showstopper, of course.

Dewdrop blossoms stuffed with fungus, tied closed with the plant’s delicate vines, and fried to midnight blue. Thick, smoked leaves used as wraps and plates to enhance flavor. A fruit platter with everything from extra bitter, underripe kio to sweet, waterlogged berrymelon to sour, gritty seeds Gardener hadn’t even known were edible before today. Roasted frog and tomatillos inside corn patties, served with yellow rice. Raw tentacles, sliced thin, alongside a dry dip that was such an angry red she knew it would send her to the med bay if she touched it. A vivid, purple gradient of osard, from the light uncooked grains still on the stem—good for digestion—to the steamed kind perfect for lunch to a nearly black pile of pebbly bread rolls. Smoking papers packed with calming herbs and tightly hand rolled. And those bottles of suspiciously clear liquid. And more. And more. Something, a gift, for each member of the crew.

What followed was a night of dancing, imbibing, embracing, some prayer, more eating, the revelation of juicy ship secrets, and four rounds of “Lunar Penny” by everyone with the parts to sing or stomp or howl.

Halfway through the night, they watched the last probe disappear into the vapor. Gardener was at Cook’s side, resting a furred cheek on her smooth shoulder, their hands clasped tightly enough to cut off circulation.

Someone cheered awkwardly, intoxicated. A few more cheers went around the group like nervous laughter. Then it was silent . . .

Gardener surprised herself by shakily starting another round of “Lunar Penny.” The crew joined her heartily, turning away from the end and back to their party.

---

About the Author

Kel Coleman is an Ignyte-nominated author whose fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in FIYAH, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Solarpunk Magazine, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022 and 2024, and others. Kel is a Marylander at heart, but they currently live in Pennsylvania with their family, a stuffed dragon named Pen, and a collection of strange and frivolous collections. They can be found online at kelcoleman.com.

Please visit Lightspeed Magazine to read more great science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared in the September 2025 issue, which also features short fiction by Jake Stein, Cadwell Turnbull, Filip Hajdar Drnovšek Zorko, Bogi Takács, C.Z. Tacks, Isabel J. Kim, Stephen S. Power, and more. You can wait for this month’s contents to be serialized online, or you can buy the whole issue right now in convenient ebook format for just $4.99, or subscribe to the ebook edition here.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.